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Roddenberry Adventures Join Today!
Upcoming Past Logs/Photos
Trashy Divers George & Gracie Blogapher Contest
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Roddenberry Adventures Roddenberry Entertainment Mission Log
Roddenberry Adventures – Where Exploration Begins
Roddenberry Adventures is an exploration-based organization committed to discovery, education, and preservation of our environment.
What Is Roddenberry Adventures?
Roddenberry Adventures provides unique opportunities, both big and small, for members to walk out their front door and experience the world. From local hikes to scuba dives, from camping adventures to exotic travel, we offer global adventures to fit a variety of people with a variety of interests.
Members can take part in monthly activities and events, which may include local, camping adventures, local hikes, movie screenings, behind-the-scenes tours of aquariums, museums and facilities, outdoor recreation and scuba diving trade shows, science-fiction conventions, beach and underwater cleanups, educational seminars and domestic and exotic scuba diving trips.
Members will have the opportunity to experience unique adventures to "boldly go where no one has gone before," to win prizes, receive discounts and attend special functions. Many of these events will include explorers, science and conservation experts and special guests from science and science fiction backgrounds.
Roddenberry Adventures Leaders
Eugene "Rod" Roddenberry
Eugene Wesley Roddenberry, Jr., is the guardian of the Roddenberry legacy and champions its timeless and universal ideals to new generations through creative and inspiring science fiction productions, merchandise, publishing, philanthropy and real-life adventures.
As the son of legendary science fiction producer, Gene Roddenberry,whose Star Trek series changed the face of television and continues to inspire today, Rod has followed in his father's footsteps to be a catalyst in the creation of a world where humanity works together for the greater good to realize it's potential.
Rod became chief executive officer in 2001 of Roddenberry Entertainment, a science fiction leader with a tradition of groundbreaking entertainment. Roddenberry Entertainment builds on the best of Gene Roddenberry's work and continues to pioneer the development of a multi-media portfolio of smart and provocative science fiction that incorporates graphic novels, comics, television and film projects, including the critically acclaimed Trek Nation, which debuted in 2011.
Trek Nation is the documentation of Rod's 10-year journey to explore his father's life. The undertaking inspired him to fully embrace the vision Gene had for the world and invest himself in its future. One expression of this was the founding of The Roddenberry Foundation in 2010. The Roddenberry Foundation funds paradigm-changing solutions to critical global issues in science and technology, the environment, education and humanitarian advances. Having originally aimed for the stars, the Roddenberry legacy lives on in Roddenberry Adventures (formerly Roddenberry Dive Team). In the spirit of Star Trek, through which Gene sought to explore the human condition, Roddenberry Adventures was founded by Rod with the goal of promoting exploration through unique, perspective-shifting experiences. He leads the adventure-based team in its exploration of strange, new worlds, revealing the beauty and diversity that surrounds us and unites all species on Earth.
Jennifer Black
Jennifer Black grew up in the West Texas desert, an unlikely place to begin life for an avid Scuba diver and ocean conservation professional. Her love of adventure and passion for the ocean started at an early age during summer vacations to Florida beaches, but it was a family trip to Alaska during high school, which changed her life forever. An afternoon spent watching a Humpback Whale teach her calf to surface and breathe shaped a path to a career in ocean conservation and environmental preservation.
Jennifer has been protecting our marine and coastal resources for more than 15 years. She has managed and directed environmental education programs, marine policy efforts, promoted critical ocean conservation issues with local and national environmental non-profits and provided opportunities for divers to become better stewards of our environment.
Jennifer is the Vice President of Roddenberry Adventures (formerly the Roddenberry Dive Team) and will continue manage organization operations, coordinate and lead our adventures and work to inspire adventurers to become better stewards of our planet. Before joining the Roddenberry team, Jennifer was the Education & Marketing Director for San Diego Coastkeeper where she managed an environmental science program that reached more than 50,000 students annually. She has served as Outreach Coordinator for the National Marine Sanctuary Foundation in Washington, DC where she raised awareness about protecting and preserving our 13 national marine sanctuaries and worked to create new marine protected areas, including the protection of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. Jennifer served as Communications Manager for the 18 member Pew Oceans Commission, communicating the commission's findings and recommendations to members of Congress and Administration officials to help shape federal ocean policies.
Jennifer enjoys embarking on new and exciting adventures above and below the water, close to home and in far away places. She is a Divemaster and has been scuba diving for more than 25 years. Jennifer received her Bachelor of Arts degree in Psychology from the University of Texas at Austin.
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Home Education Law Missouri Grandview
Grandview, Missouri Education Lawyers
Michael S. Dodig
Lee's Summit, MO Education Law Attorney with 26 years experience
(816) 554-1599	200 NE Missouri Road, Suite 200
Education, Business, Construction and Employment
Brian James Mayer
Kansas City, MO Education Law Attorney with 12 years experience
(816) 360-3500	4050 Pennsylvania
University of Missouri - Kansas City
Joanna Trachtenberg
Columbia, MO Education Law Attorney with 13 years experience
(573) 256-2850	913 E. Ash St.
Free ConsultationEducation, Civil Rights and Employment
Joanna's practice focuses on employment law, civil rights, and education law consultations and cases, including Title IX cases. Joanna has over ten years of experience as both a plaintiff's lawyer and a defense attorney. She has tried cases in state and federal court.
Dan Pingelton
Columbia, MO Education Law Lawyer with 35 years experience
(573) 449-5091	28 N 8th St
Free ConsultationEducation, Criminal Defense, Divorce and Family
University of Colorado - Boulder
Thomas Mickes
St. Louis, MO Education Law Attorney with 41 years experience
(314) 878-5600	555 Maryville University Dr.
Saint Louis University School of Law
Thomas A. Mickes has practiced law for more than 35 years and serves as a firm managing member and chairperson of Mickes Goldman O'Toole's School Law practice group. As one of the leading education law attorneys in the United States, he represents more than 300 school districts, private schools, charter schools, colleges and universities in a variety of school-related legal matters. Tom is also lead counsel for Mickes Goldman O'Toole's representation of a self-insured pool of 470 school districts in litigation of employment, civil rights and constitutional claims.Tom has been recognized by attorneys of Missouri and Kansas as the best...
Kenneth C. McManaman Esq.
Cape Girardeau, MO Education Law Lawyer with 45 years experience
(573) 335-8522	1028 N Kingshighway
Suite One, Blattner Bldg.
Cape Girardeau, MO 63701
Education, Business, Criminal Defense and DUI & DWI
England, Air University, University of Virginia School of Law, Naval War College, University of Missouri - Kansas City School of Law and Naval War College
Heather B. Navarro
Saint Louis, MO Education Law Attorney with 11 years experience
(314) 872-9041	230 S. Bemiston Ave., Ste. 800
Education and Civil Rights
Education Attorneys in Nearby Cities
Education Attorneys in Nearby Counties
The Oyez Lawyer Directory contains lawyers who have claimed their profiles and are actively seeking clients. Find more Grandview, Missouri Education Lawyers in the Justia Legal Services and Lawyers Directory which includes profiles of more than one million lawyers licensed to practice in the United States, in addition to profiles of legal aid, pro bono and legal service organizations.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Taking A Trip Got You Frazzled? Attempt These Tips!
water after you get through the checkpoint. It likewise never injures to pack granola bars, banana chips, or anything else to snack on in between flights.Take time every day to ease stress while traveling or vacationing and you will thank yourself for it when you return home. With all the turmoil, jet-lag, partying and other excitement of travel comes a great deal of stress on your body and mind. By the time most getaways are over, another one is needed to recuperate so taking a few minutes each day to invigorate will make it much easier for you to resume your normal life when it's all over.You should now feel great about taking a journey. You will have the ability to maximize your experience on any journey. The preparation and understanding you bring with you to go a long way toward having a fantastic trip.


Emirate NBD Trust Company (Jersey) Limited provides bespoke trust and company administration solutions for our Middle Eastern clients. We have strong links to Emirates NBD, London Branch who can assist with financing solutions on residential and commercial property transactions. Where necessary we can provide Shariah compliant planning to assist clients on succession issues that may arise. In Jersey we provide a managed solution through the Fairway Group, with dedicated personnel assisting our clients on a day to day basis.


In this review, we check out two new tonal percussion libraries libraries by Soundiron: Noah Bells and Alto Glockenspiel. Previously, we reviewed the incredible Soundiron Symphony Series Brass and Symphony Series Woodwinds. As with most Soundiron libraries, these were recorded in the same large cathedral so that they all sit beautifully together in the mix. Noah Bells and Alto Glockenspiel are small libraries that can be bought very inexpensively. They are not limited, however, as you can extend them with tons of sound design capabilities that Soundiron packs into most of their instruments. They are MUCH more than their name implies, thanks to the extensive tweaking and exotic patches included in these libraries.
We have included video reviews, a custom demo piece using only these two libraries, and lots of tech and articulation info for both of these libraries in this article. We also conducted a video interview with Soundiorn Co-Founder Mike Peaslee, which you can check out here.
This piece only uses the Alto Glockenspiel and Noah Bells. I used the different mallet types for each instrument as it's own part, so I was able to get more depth out of two instruments than one would expect. Orchestration-wise, I basically wrote for them like three marimbas. The exception is the light rhythmic percussion which is pitch-shifted swipes in the Noah Bells, creating some counter rhythms in the background. I used both close and far mics on the glock, and just the close mics on the bells. There is no external processing at all.
Pros: The high-quality you would expect from Soundiron, with lots and lots of presets. Very reasonably priced and with great core sounds and fantastic sound design capabilities as well!
Noah Bells – Unique library, with the Khadki bells having a very interesting tone and range in size from tiny to huge.
Alto Glockenspiel – Very pure sound; one of my favorite Glockenspiel libraries. Great glisses and FX patches perfect for a wide range of uses from children's music to horror games. Comes with a toy version as well!
Noah Bells – the Khadki bells have a slightly detuned quality, making them very interesting sounding, but not a "pure and clean" sound like Tibetan Singing Bowls. I find that they are not perfect for meditation tracks, but they are great for adding unique sounds to any ethnic music.
The Alto Glockenspiel is a tuned percussion library of a compact 25-key alto glockenspiel. This instrument is typically used in student orchestras and has a natural range from A4 – A6, but Soundiron has pitch-shifted its playable range from A-1 to G8 to allow extreme high and low notes. It is recorded with 3 different articulations: hard mallet, soft mallet and choked. There is a bonus hidden inside as well: a classic little children's toy glockenspiel library!
Each articulation has multiple dynamic layers and lots of round-robin variation to create a very dynamic and naturally playable virtual instrument. The Alto Glockenspiel was captured in a close, dry stereo position and a far, wide position out in the same cathedral where the Soundiron Symphony Series is recorded.
This 2.45 GB library includes 1,772 samples and 10 nki presets with a custom user interface for the full version of Kontakt 5.5 and later (OSX 10.8 or later / Windows 7 or later required).
The Noah Bells tuned percussion library is a collection of 21 authentic Indian Khadki bells in a ascending range of sizes and pitches, from resonant deep notes to brittle high notes. These hand-crafted bells are smelted from simple mixtures of copper and other metals, producing a golden or bronze hue. They range in size from over two feet to less than an inch in diameter, with carved wooden clappers. They have a dark, raspy tone with heavy low and mid-range body, variable sustain and complex overtones and undertones.
Each bell is recorded in multiple velocities with plenty of round-robin variation to create a naturally dynamic and truly playable virtual instrument. They were captured up close and dry in wide stereo and from afar in a large open cathedral sanctuary to give you very distinct tonal and atmospheric flavors to blend and choose from.
This 3 GB library includes 1,733 samples and 19 nki presets with a custom user interface for the full version of Kontakt 5.5 and later.
Soundiron continually releases smaller libraries throughout the year as they work on the larger Symphony Series and other big libraries. These are very nicely priced and full of capabilities, not only the core sounds but the rather infinite tweak abilities built with the engine. With these highly playable and extremely useful libraries, one would expect to pay much more for such functionality and originality. I personally would purchase these libraries for easily 3x the price! A lot of props to Soundiron for creating these incredible libraries that are available to everyone.


Spider just realized - it's Halloween!
Happy Halloween from Sun In Eye Productions!
Turku Animation Seminar will take place in 30.-31.10.
Many greats speakers and discussions to come, including Metsämarja; she will speak on Thursday at 4pm on the topic: "Scriptwriting non-dialogue animated series - how to create wise and funny stories for kids".
The seminar will be held at Logomo. For more information check out Turk Animation Seminar's webpage and their facebook-page!
Pikkuli had a super funny meeting with his game team. New version of "Pikkuli saving Hazelgrouse chicks" has lots of surprises.


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Toddler died after choking on slice of banana in freak bedtime accident
Dylan John James Greig, two, choked on a piece of banana in a freak accident. (Wales News)
A two-year old died tragically when he choked on a piece of banana in a freak accident just before bedtime.
Dylan John James Greig's mum gave him the piece of sliced banana instead of a bedtime bottle, an inquest heard.
Danielle Butterly, 30, left the room for "no more than 30 seconds" but returned to find her son lying on his back after the piece got stuck.
The family rang 999 for help and Butterly's own brother-in-law rushed to the scene, not realising it was his nephew who was choking.
Dylan was rushed to hospital but died later that evening.
Dylan's family tried to save him but he died later in hospital. (Wales News)
Butterly told an inquest in Ruthin, North Wales, that she had given Dylan a the piece of banana just before bedtime instead of his bottle at their home in St Asaph, North Wales, in July this year.
After briefly leaving the room, she returned to find him choking, the inquest heard.
Read more: Four children left dead after blaze rips through south London home
"I quickly realised something was wrong. He was flapping his arms around and I could see he was choking," she said in a statement.
"I was trying anything. I can't describe the sound that came from him."
Danielle Butterly tried to save son Dylan but the banana was stuck in his throat. (Wales News)
She called 999 and was given advice by ambulance control on how to help Dylan, the inquest heard.
Butterly said she found a piece of banana in her son's throat "completely stuck fast and wasn't moving".
Police officers were called with paramedics - but it was only when PC Brian Williams arrived at the house that he realised the child was his nephew.
Williams, whose wife is Butterly's sister, said he was "incredibly shocked" on entering the house to find his sister-in-law "carrying out chest compressions on my two-year-old nephew".
He took his sister-in-law out of the room while paramedics tried to resuscitate Dylan, who was taken to Ysbyty Glan Clwyd hospital in Bodelwyddan but died later that evening.
"I will never be able to forget that night," PC Williams added.
Senior coroner John Gittins recorded a conclusion of accidental death caused by hypoxic cardiac arrest due to choking on a banana at the Ruthin inquest.
He said the banana had been given to Dylan in an "entirely appropriate" and normal way and after reading Butterly's statement, told her: "I can't imagine for one second how difficult that must have been for you."
He added: "This was a tragic set of events that ultimately led to the loss of this two-year-old."
Watch: How the world could be better after COVID
Outdoor adventure education standard of practices in Singapore to be reviewed
Changes are afoot for outdoor adventure education in Singapore, with a review of its standard of practices and accreditation framework among the suggested enhancements.
Over a dozen dead as coalition bombs Yemen after UAE attack
The Saudi-led coalition killed 14 people in air strikes on Yemen's rebel-held capital, a medical source said, after an attack by Huthi insurgents on the United Arab Emirates sent regional tensions soaring. Sanaa residents were combing the rubble for survivors of the strikes that levelled two houses, hours after the Huthis had killed three people Monday in a drone and missile attack on the UAE capital Abu Dhabi.
UK jobs picture robust as Omicron struck
Britain's unemployment rate dropped and payrolls recovered further at the end of last year despite the onset of the Omicron variant, official data showed Tuesday.


EPIC Tribe proudly presents the "BELANTARA – Psychedelic Music & Arts Gathering".
We are happy to invite you to this special 3 days & 2 night open-air gathering nestled in a hidden magical forest located just outside the city of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
This 2nd edition of the Belantara Gathering will again feature some of the best Music & Art from the global Goa/Psychedelic scene, surrounded by lush tropical rainforests.
Join us for this magical journey, come and experience BELANTARA!


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Bumble Releases Open-Source Version of Private Detector A.I. Feature to Help Tech Community Combat Cyberflashing
At Bumble, safety has always been at the heart of our mission. Since 2018, we've worked to help pass legislation in both the U.S. and U.K. to combat the sending of unsolicited nudes online, known as cyberflashing. In 2019, we harnessed technology to better shield our community from unwanted lewd images, launching our Private Detector™ A.I. feature in the Bumble app.
Private Detector™ works by automatically blurring a potential nude image shared within a chat on Bumble. You'll be notified, and it's up to you to decide whether to view or block the image. (You can also easily report it to Bumble. We don't tolerate any bad behavior at all on our app.)
Now, Bumble's Data Science team has written a white paper explaining the technology of Private Detector™ and has made an open-source version of it available on GitHub. It's our hope that the feature will be adopted by the wider tech community as we work in tandem to make the internet a safer place.
For more on Bumble's legislative work, see here.
At Bumble Inc., the parent company of Bumble, Badoo, and Fruitz, safety has been a central part of our mission and a core value that informs the company's product innovations and roadmap. We've leveraged the latest advancement in technology and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to help provide our community of users with the tools and resources they need to have a safe experience on our platforms. In 2019 we launched Private Detector™ across Bumble and Badoo app, an AI-powered feature that detects and blurs lewd images and a warning is sent to users about the photo before they open it.
As just one of many players in the world of dating apps and social media at large, we also recognize that there's a need to address this issue beyond Bumble's product ecosystem and engage in a larger conversation about how to address the issue of unsolicited lewd photos – also known as cyberflashing – to make the internet a safer and kinder place for everyone.
In an effort to help address this larger issue of cyberflashing, Bumble teamed up with legislators from across the aisle in 2019 in Texas to pass a bill that effectively made sending unsolicited lewd photos a punishable offense. Since the passing of HB 2789 in Texas in 2019, Bumble has continued to successfully advocate for similar laws across the United States and globally.
In 2022, Bumble reached another milestone in public policy by helping to pass SB 493 in Virginia and most recently SB 53 in California, adding another layer of online safety in one of the most populous states in the United States.
These new laws are the first step to creating accountability and consequences for this everyday form of harassment that causes victims—predominantly women—to feel distressed, violated, and vulnerable online.
As Bumble continues to help curb cyberflashing through legislative efforts and provide safety tools such as Private Detector™ to help keep our community safe from unsolicited nudes within our apps, we hope to make a ripple effect of change across the internet and social media at large. This is why today we are extremely proud to release a version of the Private Detector™ to the wider tech community with the hope of democratizing access to our technology and to help scientists and engineers experiencing the same challenges around the world to improve their approach to online safety.
Since the early days of Badoo, we have always been pioneers in leveraging technology and advanced procedures to improve both our match-making experience and our integrity and safety capabilities. Behind the scenes, we started designing and implementing machine learning solutions for lewd image detection for almost a decade, trying to leverage both our best-in-class knowledge in the tech space and the insights collected by our apps, thanks to our dominant position in the dating industry.
Machine learning (ML) is a field devoted to understanding and building methods that learn (or better, mimic) how to reach human-level performances on specific tasks, leveraging data to improve their accuracy. The development cycle requires you to carefully design and develop a neural network's architecture and to provide it iteratively with a curated set of samples (dataset) from the problem – in our case, detecting if a picture contains lewd content or not.
Even though the number of users sending lewd images on our apps is luckily a negligible minority – just 0.1% – our scale allows us to collect a best-in-the-industry dataset of both lewd and non-lewd images, tailored to achieve the best possible performances on the task. Our Private Detector™ is trained using very high volume data sets, with the negative samples (the ones not containing any lewd content) carefully selected in order to better reflect edge cases and other parts of the human body (eg. legs, arms) in order not to flag them as abusive. Iteratively adding samples to the training dataset to reflect actual users' behavior or test misclassification, proved to be a successful exercise that we applied during the years in all our machine learning endeavors. Even if the downstream task is framed as a binary classification problem (as in our case!) nothing prevents data scientists from possibly defining more concepts (or labels), to possibly merge them back right before the actual training epochs.
Traversing the trade-offs between state-of-the-art performance and the ability to serve our user base at scale, we implemented (in its latest iteration) an EfficientNetv2-based binary classifier: a convolutional network that has faster training speed and overall better parameters efficiency. It uses a combination of better designed architecture and scaling, with layers like MBConv (that utilizes 1×1 convolutions to wide up the space and depth-wise convolutions for reducing the number of overall parameters) and FusedMBConv (that merges some steps of the vanilla MBConv above for faster execution), to jointly optimize training speed and parameter efficiency. The model has been trained leveraging our GPU powered data centers in a continuous exercise of dataset, network and hyperparameters (the settings used to speed up or improve the training performance) optimization.
When analyzing its performance in different conditions (both offline and online) we are proud to state that it achieves world class performance (>98% accuracy, both in upsampled and production-like settings, with no clear tradeoffs between precision and recall).
What are we releasing today?
Concomitantly with this White Paper, we are releasing on Github.com the source code we used to train the machine learning engine powering the Private Detector™, together with a ready-to-use SavedModel to deploy the model as it is (using TensorFlow Serving) and a checkpoint for possibly finetune it with additional images, improving its performance on samples that are important for specific use cases. In both scenarios, the repository comes with extensive documentation and a guide on how to perform those actions, in order to make the experience as smooth as possible for all the scientists, engineers or product folks around the world.
This version of the Private Detector™ is released under the Apache License, so that it is available for everyone to implement it as the standard for blurring lewd images as it is, or after fine tuning it with additional training samples. Improvements to the architecture or to the overall code quality and structure are welcome.
Check out bumble-tech for any other exciting projects happening at Bumble.
Bumble Partners With the National Domestic Violence Hotline to Launch Employee-Centered Volunteer Program
Bumble Teams Up With "Ted Lasso" to Bring Bantr to Life
Bumble-Backed Anti-Cyberflashing Bill Passes in California
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Top 10 Filter Songs
Photo: Rock Cousteau, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Our Top 10 Filter Songs presents an American band known for their magnificent contribution to industrial rock. Singer and guitarist Richard Patrick would join hands with Brian Liesegang to form Filter after leaving his former band Nine Inch Nails. While most bands begin their journey slow and pick up momentum as they release albums, Filter defied the odds by striking success with their debut album, Short Bus. Specifically, the controversial song "Hey Man Nice Shot" awarded the band much-needed critical acclaim. Critics were quick to point out that the song "Hey Man Nice Shot" capitalized on the public suicide of politician Budd Dwyer. The band also had difficulty fighting the rumors that musician Kurt Cobain's suicide inspired the song. This didn't stop the song from awarding the band commercial success in the soundtrack for the 1995 movie Takes from the Crypt: Demon Knight.
Filter had a couple of problems, including Patrick's heavy alcohol and drug abuse, which led to a hiatus. Founders Richard Patrick and Brian Liesegang would initially part owing to their creative differences. While Liesegang wished to explore more electronic sounds, Patrick opted for heavy guitar-oriented sounds. Despite all the differences and multiple issues amongst different Filter band members, Richard Patrick remained true to his vision sticking to the band all through and helping revive it after hiatus. Here are the top 10 Filter songs that convey the best of the band's composition and performances in its majorly industrial rock acts.
#10 – Jurassitol
We open the top 10 Filter songs with the hit song "Jurassitol," which received critical acclaim at its release. "Jurassitol" showcases the rawness and true industrial heaviness of this iconic band. However, the power and emotion exhibited by Richard Patrick make this ballad a masterpiece. Filter recorded and filmed a video for this song for use in the soundtrack for The Crow: City of Angels. In some way, the song touches on how the older generation lives out their lives while holding no concern for the younger generation to follow.
#9 – Happy Together
Featured on their 2009 album, The Stepfather is a cover song, "Happy Together," originally done by The Turtles. While the song possesses the title "Happy Together," you might be quick to think that it is about a couple in love. Songwriter Gary Bonner revealed that the song was more about unrequited love. It all starts with the desperate guy trying to have the lady imagine what they would become. However, when he realizes that they will never be more than passing acquaintances, he resorts to small talk to avoid shedding tears of disappointment.
#8 – What Do You Say
"What Do You Say" is an awe-inspiring song from the band's 2013 album The Sun Comes Out Tonight. Written by Richard Patrick alongside Jon Radtke and Bob Marlette, the song would be inspired by listening to Kasabian, a British rock band. Patrick revealed that "What Do You Say" is a take on the constant noise level in the current society. Lyrics to the song were centered around the conversation that guitarist Jon and producer Bob had regarding global warming.
#7 – No Love
Filter's 2010 album, The Trouble With Angels, had quite some hit songs, among them "No Love." The band can get great with words and expressions, with songs alluding to temptations and seduction. Rather than a celebratory tale, the song "No Love" suggests a cautionary tale about the dangers of lust, anger, and resentment. The lyrics later point at how all these can lead to the dark side of power and eroticism.
#6 – One
Featured on the band's album, Title of Record, is a cover of "One" by the American singer and songwriter Harry Nilsson. While tons of artists have done covers to the song, Three Dog Night's version trended at number five on the Billboard Hot 100. Filter tried to match up to the other acts of the song for the 1998 film The X-Files: Fight the Future.
#5 – Welcome to the Flood
There are two words that can describe the ballad "Welcome to the Flood," which is melodic and heavy! You can't help but love their heavy instrumental vibe that brings the best out of Richard Patrick's love for industrial rock. His vocals are so strong, showcasing his shift from his famous screams or growls to some smooth singing sound. The guitar riffs give "Welcome to the Flood" the true rock vibe making it one of Filter's best songs.
#4 – The Best Things
Next in the top 10 Filter songs is "The Best Things" from the band's album, Title of Record. As evidenced by this song, the theme of spotlights serves as a metaphor for getting nowhere in life. This means achieving none of your great dreams. And true it sometimes that life or rather success seems to be down the road. Unfortunately, however, our cars are just stalled, so we can't get there—quite sad facts on a song that was a hit in its time.
#3 – Where Do We Go From Here
"Where Do We Go From Here" was one of the band's best releases, having peaked at the number 11 and 12 in the Hot Modern Rock Tracks and Hot Mainstream Rock Tracks Charts. Featured on the band's album, The Amalgamut, the song is a mournful cry reflecting on young people's confusion at paths they ought to take and choices they need to make. In a society that makes those seeking to find glory in their destiny, scraped and bruised, the solution to the hardships is neither stopping nor committing suicide.
#2 – Take a Picture
Featured on the band's album Title of Record, "Take a Picture" is by far the most memorable song by Filters on this album release. Richard Patrick revealed that the song was about him getting messy while on a flight after consuming booze. Under the influence of alcohol, Richard took off all his clothes and even fought the flight attendants as they strained to subdue him. Later on, the band would temporarily halt their career following Richard's alcohol and drug abuse.
#1 – Hey Man Nice Shot
Our number one in the top 10 Filter song is "Hey Man Nice Shot" from the band's 1995 debut album, Short Bus. The song is about Budd Dwyer, who was tried and found guilty of conspiracy, taking bribes, and fraud. As a result, he would call a press conference where he took his gun and committed suicide. Richard said in an interview that the "Hey Man Nice Shot" was a strange but unique way to talk about suicide. While the song received both negative and positive reception, it remains the best release by the band.
Top 10 Filter Songs article published on Classic RockHistory.com© 2021
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The Mobile device and solutions showcase will be held on Wednesday 15 August 2018 at Eltham College.
Solution providers will present their applications/systems.
Each vendor will exhibit in the showcase area throughout the day and will have 15 minutes to address the group – for details, please refer to the full agenda.
As in previous years, there will be drinks and nibbles at the Principal's residence at the conclusion of the program. Dinner at Swipers Gully Restaurant will follow drinks.
This is a free event to all VINE subscribers and member of the Ning site. Registration is via this web site.
Come along to the 2018 Mobile Device and Solution showcase and support vendors who cover the cost of catering throughout the day and ensure there isn't a fee to attend.


The Mid-Autumn Festival (zhōng qiū jié 中秋節), also known as the Moon Festival, is a popular harvest festival celebrated by Chinese people and Vietnamese (yuè nán rén 越南人) people (even though they celebrate it differently), dating back over 3,000 years to moon worship in China's Shang Dynasty (shāng cháo 商朝).It was first called Zhongqiu Jie in Zhou Dynasty (zhōy cháo 周朝). In Malaysia (mǎ lái xī yà 馬來西亞) and Singapore (xīn jiā pō 新加坡), it is also sometimes referred to as the Lantern Festival or Mooncake Festival.
It is said that the earth once had ten suns circling over it, each taking turn to illuminate the earth. One day, however, all ten suns appeared Chang'e together, scorching the earth with their heat. Houyi (hòu yì 後羿), a strong and tyrannical archer, saved the earth by shooting down nine of the suns. He eventually became King, but grew to become a despot (bào jūn 暴君).
One day, Houyi stole the elixir (xiān dān 仙丹) from a goddess. However, his beautiful wife, Chang'e (cháng é 嫦娥), drank it so as to save the people from her husband's tyrannical rule. After drinking it, she found herself floating, and flew to the moon. Houyi loved his divinely beautiful wife so much, he did not shoot down the moon. Chang'e flew to the moon grabbing a rabbit to keep her company. So the Chinese say that if you look up at the moon to this day you can sometimes see a rabbit making moon cakes.
The Mid-Autumn Festival is held on the 15th day of the eighth month in the Chinese calendar, which is usually around mid or late September in the Gregorian calendar. It is a date that parallels the autumn and spring equinoxes (chūn fēn 春分) of the solar calendar, when the moon is supposedly at its fullest and roundest. The traditional food of this festival is the mooncake, of which there are many different varieties.
The Mid-Autumn Festival is one of the two most important holidays in Chinese calendar, the other being the Chinese New Year, and is a legal holiday in several countries. Farmers celebrate the end of the summer harvest season on this day.
Traditionally, on Mid-Autumn Day, Chinese family members and friends will get together to admire the bright mid-autumn harvest moon, and eat moon cakes (yuè bǐng 月餅) and pomeloes (yòu zi 柚子) together. Accompanying the celebration, there are additional cultural or regional customs, such as eating moon cakes outside under the moon, carrying brightly lit lanterns, lighting lanterns on towers, floating sky lanterns, burning incense (fén xiāng 焚香) in reverence to deities including Chang'e, planting Mid-Autumn trees (shù zhōng qiū 樹中秋), collecting dandelion leaves and distributing them evenly among family members and Fire Dragon Dances (wǔ huǒ lóng 舞火龍).


Many opportunities exist in Central Montana for hunting elk. Elk can be found in prairie regions and foothills of mountain ranges, as well as in the mountains themselves.
The range for elk in Central Montana extends from the Missouri River Breaks on the north (both public and private lands) to the many mountain ranges in the central and south central portions of Montana.
Archery opens in early September and continues until mid-October. There is a week hiatus of closed season before the rifle season opens in later October. Crossbows are not allowed during archery season, but one can hunt elk during rifle season with archery equipment, including crossbows.
Access is available via large tracts of public land, including the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge. Getting a chance at a Breaks elk requires a lot of scouting and hiking, but that's all part of hunting this rugged country.
When archery elk hunters think about making their "dream hunt", most often the Missouri River Breaks is included. Nationally renowned for its trophy bull elk, the Breaks hunting is just a little over an hour north of Lewistown. Regulations that apply to hunting in the Breaks make it important that hunters obtain and read the appropriate materials.
In addition to the Breaks elk hunting, the healthy Central Montana elk herd also offers archers opportunities in the Snowies, Belts, Judiths and Moccasin Mountains.
Except for the Little Belt Mountains, which has easy and multiple access points to its national forest lands, access to hunting in these small mountain ranges is fairly limited, so the visiting hunter needs to do his homework to find a place to hunt before getting here.
Throughout Central Montana the elk population is plentiful, with numerous public land access points. Most all of the elk hunting is by permit only.
Because elk herd numbers are above or at management plan objectives, the Montana FWP has instituted a number of special hunts to try and control the population. Many of these hunts are available in Central Montana, and hunters interested in these hunts should review the regulations.
Applications for permits usually have a March deadline, and the number of permits given, particularly for bull elk, is very limited in some hunting districts in Central Montana.
Sportsman looking to harvest an elk, whether a trophy or one for the freezer, can choose from a variety of promising options when it comes to Central Montana. There are also several guides and outfitters operating in the area that provide access to elk hunting on private land.


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Petroliam Nasional Berhad (PETRONAS)
Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur,
Tan Sri Dato' Mohd Hassan Marican, Group CEO
Petrochemical manufacturing
51.0 billion USD (2007)
33,944 worldwide
www.petronas.com.my
Petronas, short for Petroliam Nasional Berhad[1], is a Malaysian owned oil and gas company that was founded on August 17 1974. Wholly owned by the Government, the corporation is vested with the entire oil and gas resources in Malaysia and is entrusted with the responsibility of developing and adding value to these resources. Petronas is ranked among Fortune Global 500's largest corporations in the world.
Since its incorporation Petronas has grown to be an integrated international oil and gas company with business interests in 31 countries. As of the end of March 2005, the Petronas Group comprised 103 wholly owned subsidiaries, 19 partly-owned outfits and 57 associated companies. Together, these companies make the Petronas Group, which is involved in various oil and gas based activities. On 11 March 2007, the Financial Times identified Petronas as one of the "new seven sisters": the most influential and mainly state-owned national oil and gas companies from countries outside the OECD.
The Group is engaged in a wide spectrum of petroleum activities, including upstream exploration and production of oil and gas to downstream oil refining; marketing and distribution of petroleum products; trading; gas processing and liquefaction; gas transmission pipeline network operations; marketing of liquefied natural gas; petrochemical manufacturing and marketing; shipping; automotive engineering; and property investment.
Petronas built the Petronas Twin Towers (opened 1998), the tallest twin towers and once the world's tallest buildings, as its headquarters.
Essential Laboratory Skills Guide
1.1 Setting Up a State Company: 1970s
1.2 Developing Natural Gas: Late 1970s to the Mid-1980s
1.3 Battling Oil Depletion: Late 1980s
1.4 Expanding Globally: 1990s and Beyond
2 Subsidiaries
2.1 Petronas Dagangan Berhad
2.2 Petronas Gas Berhad
2.3 MISC Berhad
2.4 Other Principle Subsidiaries
3 Motorsport
Petronas was not the first company to extract oil or gas in Malaysia. Oil was first found in what is now Malaysia at the end of the 19th century, and in 1910 Royal Dutch/ Shell, then as now one of the majors--the small group of leading private oil companies--first drilled for oil in Sarawak, then a British colony. It was still the only oil company in the area in 1963, when the Federation of Malaya, having achieved independence from Britain six years before, absorbed Sarawak and Sabah, both on the island of Borneo, and became Malaysia. The authorities in the two new states retained their links with Royal Dutch Shell, which brought Malaysia's first offshore oil field onstream in 1968.
Meanwhile the federal government turned to Esso, Continental Oil, and Mobil, licensing exploration off the state of Terengganu, in the Malay Peninsula, the most populous region and the focus of federal power. By 1974, however, only Esso was still in the area. It made its first discoveries of natural gas in that year and then rapidly made Terengganu a bigger producer of oil than either Sarawak or Sabah. By 1974, Malaysia's output of crude oil stood at about 81,000 barrels per day.
Setting Up a State Company: 1970s
Several factors converged in the early 1970s to prompt the Malaysian government into setting up a state oil and gas company, as first proposed in its Five Year Plan published in 1971. These were years in which power in the world oil industry began to shift away from the majors, which then controlled more than 90 percent of the oil trade, toward the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), as well as a proliferation of new private and state companies joining in the search for reserves. By 1985, the majors, reduced in number from seven to five, were producing less than 20 percent of the world total. It seemed that Malaysia would either have to join the trend or continue to leave its oil and gas entirely to Royal Dutch/Shell and Esso, multinational corporations necessarily attuned to the requirements of their directors and shareholders, rather than to the priorities the government of a developing country might seek to realize.
Further, an agreement between Malaysia and Indonesia, signed in 1969, had settled doubts and disputes about each country's claims over territorial waters and offshore resources at a time when both were heavily indebted to Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) governments and banks as well as to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. Setting up a state oil and gas company, through which the government could get international capital but avoid tangling with foreign oil companies or governments, had worked for Indonesia: why not for Malaysia as well? The oil crisis of 1973-74 made the government even more aware of Malaysia's dependence on foreign oil and foreign capital in general.
Another factor in the decision was that the technology had recently been developed for extensive exploration and drilling offshore. The local geography included a combination of broad basins of sedimentary rock with calm and shallow waters around the Sunda Shelf, making exploration for gas and oil relatively easier and more successful than in most areas of the world. Malaysian crude turned out to be mostly high quality with low sulfur content.
A final and crucial factor in the creation of Petronas, and its continuation in much the same form since, has been the political stability of Malaysia. Since the restoration of parliament in 1971, the country has been ruled by the National Front (Barisan Nasional), the heirs to the Alliance Party which had been dominant from 1957 to 1969 and the originators in 1971 of the New Economic Policy, which was designed to improve the economic position of Bumiputras--native Malays--relative to Chinese and Indian Malaysians and to foreign corporations. The difficulties this policy has caused for foreign companies and investors are outweighed by the benefits they believe they gain from Malaysia's political stability.
The Malaysian government chose to create a state company, rather than using taxes, production limits, leasing, or other familiar instruments of supervision. The government wanted, and needed, the cooperation of the majors but also sought to assert national rights over the use of the country's resources. A state company, having both supervisory powers over the majors and production activities of its own, was a workable compromise between allowing the majors full rein and excluding them, along with their capital and expertise, altogether.
Petronas was established in August 1974 and operates under the terms of the Petroleum Development Act passed in October 1974. It was modeled on PERTAMINA, the Indonesian state oil and gas company founded in 1971 in succession to PERMINA, which had been set up in 1958. According to the 1971 plan, Petronas's goals would be to safeguard national sovereignty over oil and gas reserves, to plan for both present and future national need for oil and gas, to take part in distributing and marketing petroleum and petrochemical products at reasonable prices, to encourage provision of plant, equipment, and services by Malaysian companies, to produce nitrogenous fertilizers, and to spread the benefits of the petroleum industry throughout the nation.
Having created Petronas, the government had to choose what forms its dealings with private oil companies would take. Starting with its legal monopoly on oil and gas activities and resources, it had several options: it could simply award concessions without taking part in production, management, or profits; it could try offering services at the supply end; or it could make contracts to cover profit-sharing, production-sharing, joint ventures--sharing both profits and costs--or all stages of the process, under "carried-interest" contracts. Petronas's first move was to negotiate the replacement of the leases granted to Royal Dutch/Shell on Borneo and to Esso in the Peninsula with production-sharing contracts, which have been the favored instrument, alongside joint ventures, ever since. These first contracts came into effect in 1976. Allowing for royalties to both federal and state governments, and for cost recovery arrangements, they laid down that the remainder would go 70 percent to Petronas and 30 percent to the foreign company. Esso began oil production in two offshore fields in 1978, exporting its share of the supply, unlike Petronas, whose share was consumed within the country.
Petronas went downstream for the first time in 1976, when it was chosen by the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) to begin construction on the second ASEAN joint industrial project, a urea plant. The subsidiary, Asean Bintulu Fertilizer (ABF), is based in Sarawak and now exports ammonia and urea all over the world.
Also in 1976, Malaysia became a net exporter of oil, but exports were at such a low level as to make the country ineligible to join OPEC. This situation benefited Malaysia, and Petronas, by allowing the company a degree of commercial and political flexibility and reinforcing Petronas's chief purpose, Malaysian self-reliance.
Petronas supervised its foreign partners' oil activities, taking no direct role in production until 1978, when the government saw to the creation of a subsidiary for oil exploration and production, Petronas Carigali. It began its work in an oil field off the Peninsula. Petronas retained its supervisory powers over all oil and gas ventures, particularly on issues of health and safety and environmental control.
Developing Natural Gas: Late 1970s to the Mid-1980s
The government was determined to develop Malaysia's natural gas as well as its oil. In 1974, it saw to the ordering of five tankers for liquefied natural gas (LNG) by the Malaysian International Shipping Company (MISC), of which it owned 61 percent. These were to take LNG exports out of Malaysia, save the cost of hiring foreign tankers, and expand the country's fleet under its own control--in contrast to cargo shipping, which was controlled by international conferences. Shell BV, the Royal Dutch/Shell subsidiary that was building the LNG plant off Sarawak with Japanese and Asian Development Bank aid, accepted production sharing with Petronas but baulked at sharing equity, transport management, or refining. Negotiations went on, pushing commencement further and further back, until 1977, when Petronas and the government, faced with the costs of maintaining the tankers between delivery and first use, surrendered management rights--leading to a repeal of part of the Petroleum Development Act--and settled for Petronas's taking 60 percent of equity in the new company Malaysia LNG. The Sarawak state government took 5 percent, and the other 35 percent was divided equally between Shell BV and the Mitsubishi Corporation. Production of LNG in Sarawak at last began in 1983.
After negotiations lasting from 1977 to 1982, Petronas had concluded contracts with Tokyo Electric Power and Tokyo Gas for the sale and delivery of LNG through to the year 2003. Malaysia LNG was to send almost the entire output of its Bintulu gas fields to Japan, under these contracts and another one, signed in 1990, to supply Saibu Gas of Fukuoka, in southwestern Japan, for 20 years from 1993.
When in 1982 Petronas Carigali formed an exploration and production company with Société National Elf Aquitaine of France, it allowed Elf better terms for recovering costs than it had offered in earlier ventures. This development came against the background of the government's imposition of a depletion policy on Petronas, Royal Dutch Shell, and Esso in an attempt to postpone the exhaustion of oil reserves. These were then estimated to be about 2.84 billion barrels, and it was officially predicted that by the late 1980s Malaysia would be a net oil importer once again. By 1980, oil and gas already represented 24 percent of Malaysian exports, and the government decided to impose a tax on these exports at a 25 percent rate. The new policy and the new tax combined to cause Malaysia's output and exports of crude oil to fall in 1981 for the first time since Petronas was established. Output rose again, beyond its 1980 level, in the following year, but exports took until 1984 to surpass their 1980 level.
However, the depletion policy was being undermined by external circumstances. Through the early 1980s, a worldwide oil glut, which OPEC proved unable to control, forced the Malaysian government to increase production to offset deterioration in its balance of increased payments to a deficit of $1 billion. It became clear that this could only be sustained by relaxing the conditions for joint ventures between Petronas and the major oil companies. In 1982, the Petronas-government share, which had risen to 80 percent, was cut to 70 percent, and taxes on company income were also cut.
Petronas went into refining and distribution in 1983. It initiated the construction of refineries at Malacca and at Kerteh in order to reduce its dependence on Royal Dutch/Shell's two refineries at Port Dickson and Esso's refinery in Sarawak. These two majors, and other foreign companies, already covered much of the domestic retail market, but the new subsidiary Petronas Dagangan was given the initial advantage of preference in the location of its stations. By 1990, 252 service stations carried the Petronas brand, all but 20 on a franchise basis, and another 50 were planned. Some were set up on grounds of social benefit rather than of strict commercial calculation.
As production from Royal Dutch/Shell and Esso's existing fields moved nearer depletion, the companies sought new fields and new contracts. In 1985, the government and Petronas revised the standard production-sharing contract, increasing the rate of recovery of capital costs from 30 percent to 50 percent of gross production in the case of oil and from 35 percent to 60 percent in the case of natural gas, abolishing signature, discovery, and production bonus payments and increasing the foreign partners' share of the profits. At first the drastic fall in oil prices during 1986, which cut Malaysia's income from exported oil by more than a third even though the volume of exports rose by 16 percent, discouraged interest in the new arrangements, but by 1989 Petronas had signed 22 new contracts with 31 companies from 11 countries. However, the contract period was still restricted to five years--compared, for example, with the 35-year contracts available in neighboring Singapore--and there was still a 25 percent levy on exported crude oil, a measure that was intended to promote the domestic refining industry. These conditions, cited as disincentives to foreign investment, were eventually relaxed over the next several years.
The government and Petronas aimed to encourage the replacement of fast-depleting oil within Malaysia itself and simultaneously to foster heavy industries which could help reduce the country's overwhelming dependence on exporting its natural resources. In 1980, petroleum products accounted for 88 percent of the country's commercial consumption of energy, the rest being provided from hydroelectric plants in Sarawak, too far away from the main population centers to become a major alternative. Five years later, gas accounted for 17 percent, hydroelectricity for 19 percent, coal for 2 percent, and petroleum products for 62 percent of such consumption, and about half of each year's gas output was being consumed in Malaysia.
The Petronas venture responsible for this shift in fuel use, and--along with Malaysia LNG--for Malaysia's becoming the third largest producer of LNG in the world, was the Peninsular Gas Utilization Project (Projek Pennggunaan Gas Semenanjung), the aim of which was to supply gas to every part of the Peninsula. Its first stage was completed in 1985, following the success of smaller gasification projects in the states of Sarawak and Sabah, and involved the extraction of gas from three fields in the Natuna Sea, between the Peninsula and the island of Borneo; its processing in a plant at Kertih on the Peninsula's east coast; and its distribution to the state of Terengganu by pipeline and abroad via an export terminal.
Petronas's least happy venture was its ownership of the Bank Bumiputra, the second-largest, but least-profitable, of the commercial banks incorporated in Malaysia. Petronas spent more than M$3.5 billion over five years trying to rescue the bank from the impact of the bad loans it had made, starting with its support of the Carrian property group of Hong Kong, which collapsed in 1985, taking the bank's share capital down with it. In 1991, Petronas sold the bank back to another state company, Minister of Finance Inc., and announced its intention to concentrate on oil, gas, and associated activities in future.
Just as Petronas was disposing of this liability, the crisis caused by the Iraqi regime's invasion of Kuwait culminated in military action against Iraq on behalf of the United Nations. Petronas had already raised Malaysia's oil production rate from 605,000 to 650,000 barrels per day in late 1990 as the crisis unfolded. This move only reinforced the company's awareness of the need to vary its policies, since, with known reserves of 2.94 billion barrels, and assuming no new major finds of oil, Malaysia risked seeing output decline to 350,000 barrels per day in 2000 and running down to depletion within another five years. This was exacerbated by the possibility that Southeast Asia in general would enjoy rapid economic growth in the 1990s, so that demand for oil there would rise twice as fast as demand in the relatively more sluggish, more mature economies of North America and Europe. The Malaysian government, and its state oil and gas company, was forced to decide what mixture of policies to adopt in response.
Battling Oil Depletion: Late 1980s
Fortunately for Malaysia, exploration was by no means at an end and could yet produce more reserves. The Seligi field, which came onstream at the end of 1988 and was developed by Esso Production Malaysia, was one of the richest oilfields so far found in Malaysian waters, and further concessions to the majors would encourage exploration of the deeper waters around Malaysia, where unknown reserves could be discovered. Meanwhile, computerized seismography made it both feasible and commercially justifiable to re-explore fields which had been abandoned, or were assumed to be unproductive, over the past century. In 1990, Petronas invited foreign companies to re-explore parts of the sea off Sabah and Sarawak on the basis of new surveys using up-to-date techniques.
Another way to postpone depletion was to develop sources of oil, and of its substitute, natural gas, outside Malaysia. Late in 1989, the governments of Vietnam and Myanmar (Burma) invited Petronas Carigali to take part in joint ventures to explore for oil in their coastal waters. In 1990, a new unit, Petronas Carigali Overseas Sdn Bhd, was created to take up a 15 percent interest in a field in Myanmarese waters being explored by Idemitsu Myanmar Oil Exploration Co. Ltd., a subsidiary of the Japanese firm Idemitsu Oil Development Co. Ltd., in a production sharing arrangement with Myanmar Oil and Gas Enterprise. Thus began Petronas's first oil exploration outside Malaysia. In May 1990, the governments of Malaysia and Thailand settled a long-running dispute over their respective rights to an area of 7,300 square kilometers in the Gulf of Thailand by setting up a joint administrative authority for the area and encouraging a joint oil exploration project by Petronas, the Petroleum Authority of Thailand, and the U.S. company Triton Oil. In a separate deal, in October 1990, the Petroleum Authority of Thailand arranged with Petronas to study the feasibility of transferring natural gas from this jointly administered area, through Malaysia to Thailand, by way of an extension of the pipelines laid for the third stage of the Peninsular Gas Utilization Project.
That project was on course to becoming a major element in the postponement of oil depletion. Contracts for line pipes for the second stage of the project were signed in 1989 with two consortia of Malaysian, Japanese, and Brazilian companies. This stage, completed in 1991, included the laying of 730 kilometers of pipeline through to the tip of the Peninsula, from where gas could be sold to Singapore and Thailand; the conversion of two power stations--Port Dickson and Pasir Gudang--from oil to gas; and the expansion of Petronas's output of methyl tertiary butyl ether (MTBE), propylene, and polypropylene, which were already being produced in joint ventures with Idemitsu Petrochemical Co. of Japan and Neste Oy of Finland. The third and final stage of the project was to lay pipelines along the northwest and northeast coastlines of the Peninsula and was completed in 1997.
Another new venture in 1990 was in ship-owning, since Petronas's existing arrangements with MISC and with Nigeria's state oil company would be inadequate to transport the additional exports of LNG due to start in 1994, under the contract with Saibu Gas. Petronas did not lose sight of the government's commitment to Malaysian self-reliance, and the company's second refinery at Malacca, completed in 1994, with a capacity of 100,000 barrels per day, promoted the same policy. The fact that it was built in a joint venture with Samsung of Korea, the Chinese Petroleum Corporation of Taiwan, and Caltex of the United States did not negate the policy, for the subsidiary company Petronas Penapisan (Melaka) had a decisive 45 percent of equity while sharing the enormous costs of and gaining advanced technology for the project. More to the point, a side effect of the refinery's completion was that Petronas was able to refine all of the crude oil it produced, instead of being partially dependent on refining facilities in Singapore.
Petronas, with its policies of promoting self-reliance, helping to develop associated industries, and varying the sources and uses of oil and gas, played an important role in the Malaysian economy as a whole. Under governments which--by current, if not historical, Western standards--were strongly interventionist, the contribution of oil taxes to the federal government's revenue hovered at around 12 percent to 16 percent until 1980, when it showed a marked increase to 23 percent, followed by another leap to 32 percent in 1981. From then until 1988 the proportion fluctuated between 29 percent and 36 percent. Petronas was not just another big oil company: it controlled a crucial sector of the economy and remained, for better or worse, an indispensable instrument of the state.
Expanding Globally: 1990s and Beyond
During the mid- to late 1990s, international exploration, development, and production remained key components in Petronas's strategy along with diversification. A key discovery was made in the Ruby field in Vietnam in 1994. That year, the firm also saw its first overseas production from the Dai Hung field in Vietnam and established its first retail station outside of Malaysia in Cambodia. In 1995, a subsidiary was created to import, store, and distribute liquefied petroleum gas (LPG). In addition, the company's polyethylene plant in Kerteh began operations. Petronas marked a significant milestone during this time period--two of its subsidiaries, Petronas Dagangan Bhd and Petronas Gas Bhd, went public on the Kuala Lumpur Stock Exchange.
In 1996, Petronas entered the aromatics market by way of a joint venture that created Aromatics Malaysia Sdn Bhd. It also formed a contract with China National Offshore Oil Corporation and Chevron Overseas Petroleum Ltd. to begin exploration of block 02/31 of the Liaodong Bay area in China. While the Asian economy as a whole suffered from an economic crisis during 1997 and 1998, Malaysia was quick to bounce back due to successful government reforms. From its new headquarters in the world's tallest buildings, the Petronas Twin Towers, the state-owned concern continued its development in the oil and gas industry.
During 1997, Petronas heightened its diversification efforts. The firm set plans in motion to build three petrochemical plants in Kuantan as well as an acetic facility in Kerteh. Its first LPG joint venture in China was launched that year and the company acquired a 29.3 percent interest in Malaysia International Shipping Corporation Berhad (MISC). In 1998, Petronas's tanker-related subsidiary merged with MISC, increasing Petronas's stake in MISC to 62 percent. That year, Petronas introduced the Petronas E01, the country's first commercial prototype engine. The company also signed a total of five new production sharing contracts (PSCs) in 1998 and 1999, and began oil production in the Sirri field in Iran.
Petronas entered the new century determined to expand its international efforts. The company forged deals for two new exploration plots in Pakistan and began construction on the Chad-Cameroon Integrated Oil Development and Pipeline Project. By 2002, Petronas had signed seven new PSCs and secured stakes in eight exploration blocks in eight countries, including Gabon, Cameroon, Niger, Egypt, Yemen, Indonesia, and Vietnam. The firm also made considerable progress in its petrochemicals strategy, opening new gas-based petrochemical facilities in Kerteh and Gebeng.
By 2003, Malaysia was set to usurp Algeria as the world's second-largest producer of LNG with the completion of the Malaysia LNG Tiga Plant. Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad commented on the achievement in a May 2003 Bernama News Agency article, claiming that "the Petronas LNG complex now serves as another shining example of a vision realized of a national aspiration, transformed into reality by the same belief among Malaysians that 'we can do it.'" Indeed, Petronas had transformed itself into a global oil company over the previous decade, becoming a national symbol for success. The company realized, however, that it would have to continue its aggressive growth strategy in order to insure its survival in the years to come.
In 2004, Minister in the Prime Minister's Department, Datuk Mustapa Mohamed, stated that Petronas contributed RM 25 Billion to the country's treasury accounting for 25 percent of revenue collected via dividends and other revenues.
Petronas has more than 100 subsidiries and around 40 Joint Venture companies in which Petronas has at least 50% stake in the company. Furthermore, Petronas has listed at least 3 of its subsidiaries in the Bursa Malaysia:
Petronas Dagangan Berhad
Involved in the distribution and sale of finished petroleum products and operations of service stations in Malaysia only. Has over 800 petrol stations around Malaysia as of July 2007 [2].
Petronas Gas Berhad
Involved in the provision of gas processing and transmission services to Petronas and its customers as a throughput company. Owns and operates the Peninsular Gas Pipeline which is 1420 kilometers in length and runs from Kerteh in Terengganu to Johor Bahru in the South and Kangar in the North of Peninsular Malaysia.
MISC Berhad
Main article: MISC Bhd
Involved in ship-owning, ship-operating and other logistics and maritime transportation services and activities. Currently has the largest fleet of LNG transport vessels
Other Principle Subsidiaries
Petronas Carigali Sdn Bhd; Petronas Carigali Overseas Sdn Bhd; Petronas Assets Sdn Bhd; Petronas Maritime Services Sdn Bhd; Petronas Trading Corp. Sdn Bhd; Petronas Argentina S.A.; Petronas Australia Pty Ltd.; Petronas Thailand Co. Ltd.; Petronas Philippines Inc.; Petronas Cambodia Co. Ltd.; Petronas Technical Services Sdn Bhd; Petronas South Africa Pty Ltd.; Petronas India Holdings Company Pte Ltd.; Petronas China Company Ltd.; Petronas International Corp. Ltd.; Petronas Marketing Thailand Co. Ltd.; Myanmar Petronas Trading Co. Ltd.
Petronas was one of the main sponsors of the Sauber Formula One team, and it supplies lubricants and fuel to the team. It also owned 40 percent of Sauber Petronas Engineering, the company that builds chassis which formerly utilized Ferrari designed engines used by the Sauber team, until being bought out by German motor company BMW. Petronas is also the main sponsor for Malaysian Grand Prix and co-sponsors the Chinese Grand Prix. For the 2006 Formula One season, Petronas is the exclusive premium partner of the newly-formed BMW Sauber F1 Team. BMW has acquired the controlling stake of the former Sauber Petronas Engineering. Petronas also sponsors the Malaysian Cub Prix races.
It also sponsors many other sporting events and teams, mostly motorsports. Some of these sponsorships includes the PERT (Petronas EON Rally Team), the now defunct Foggy Petronas Superbike team (in which Petronas debutes their own superbike, the FP1), and also the Petronas Adventure Team, a 4X4 adventure team.
In terms of further Formula One involvement, every year Petronas takes the BMW-Sauber teams to various parts of Malaysia for F1 demos so the public who are unable to go to the track itself get to experience a little bit of what F1 offers. Other promotional events are held in the run up to the race and the drivers play an integral part in this so much so that Nick Heidfeld concedes that there are more fans for BMW-Sauber in Malaysia in than most other countries.
As part of its corporate social responsibility programme, Petronas also brings underprivileged kids to watch the race.
Petronas awards education sponsorships in the form of convertible loans to Malaysian and international students to further their studies at local or foreign universities. The Petronas unit that is responsible for handling education matters is called the Education Sponsorship Unit (ESU). These sponsorships are awarded based on academic results, co-curricular activities, family background as well as an assessment of student personality (which is conducted throughout a program called EduCamp, which all prospective Petronas students are required to undergo). Students who are absorbed by Petronas at the end of their tertiary studies have their convertible loans converted into full scholarships. These students are under contract agreement to work for the company for two years for every one year they are sponsored.
Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS
List of Gas and Petroleum Companies in Malaysia
BMW Sauber Formula One Team
Foggy Petronas Racing Team
Petronas 4x4 Adventure Team
^ Petronas Malaysia: Corporate News 2005 About PETRONAS
^ Petronas Dagangan capex at RM500mil
Category: Automotive fuel brands
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Petronas". A list of authors is available in Wikipedia.
https://www.chemeurope.com/en/encyclopedia/Petronas.html


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Archive for Presidential Election
A New President
Posted in Biographical, Politics with tags Donald Trump, Jo Jorgensen, Joe Biden, Pennsylvania, Presidential Election on November 7, 2020 by telescoper
Well it took a while to get there, but less than an hour ago all the major media networks in the USA "called" the result of the 2020 Presidential Election. It looks as if they were all waiting for Joe Biden's lead in Pennsylvania to exceed the 0.5% threshold needed to rule out a mandatory recount. Once that happened, they all (CNN, CBS, Associated Press, et al – even Fox News) projected that Joe Biden had won. It had been looking that way for some time, but the press agencies wanted to be sure of their ground. Moments after the Pennsylvania result, AP and others also called Nevada in favour of Biden. The remaining tight race, in Georgia, can still go either way, but Biden now has enough electoral votes to be President Elect.
I've never felt happier to have lost a bet.
Congratulations to Joe Biden, and to everyone who helped his campaign. A special vote of thanks is due to Jo Jorgensen, the "Libertarian" candidate who polled considerably more votes in the key Swing States than Biden's margin of victory…
The result is, among many other things, very good news for Ireland. Joe Biden is an Irish-American and we can be confident that he will not allow the Belfast Agreement to be sabotaged by Johnson & Gove. It's not so good news for Boris Johnson but at least we'll have the pleasure of seeing him twist in the wind until he resigns in a few months' time.
Nobody expects Donald Trump to go quietly, however, and there's no sign that he is going to concede. I think he'd be quite happy to watch his country burn rather than admit being a loser. Some patriot. I think the USA is now entering a very dangerous period in its history. It's really a question of whether Trump's entourage can persuade him to accept reality. I'm not sure they will be able to do that. Instead there's a real possibility that Trump will try to encourage his followers to violent protest. At the very least we can expect him to issue a string of executive orders intend the sabotage the new President. I hope I'm wrong, but I'm more anxious about the next few weeks than I was about the election.
PS Can this evening's TV schedule on RTÉ 2 really be a coincidence?
PPS. I watched "The Death of Stalin" last night and thought it was very good!
Uachtarán na hÉireann
Posted in Uncategorized with tags Michael D Higgins, President of Ireland, Presidential Election on October 29, 2018 by telescoper
To nobody's great surprise, Saturday's count saw Michael D Higgins reelected as President of Ireland by a considerable margin. His acceptance speech on Saturday night was very eloquent and statesmanlike: you can listen to it here.
The Presidency of Ireland is a ceremonial rather than an executive office, and it has little actual power associated with it. It is nevertheless important in that the President is the guardian of the Constitution as well as representing the Irish Nation as a kind of ambassador and as patron of many good causes.
The way the election worked is that voters rank all six candidates. In the first round of counting, first preference votes are totted up and if one candidate has more than 50% he/she is elected. If not an Instant Runoff method is used, with votes of lower-ranked being reallocated until there's a winner (ie until one candidate gains a majority).
On Saturday, Michael D Higgins gained 56% on the first round so no further counting was necessary. The turnout was very low at 44%. I think this was mainly down to the enormous lead for the incumbent in opinion polls in advance of the voting, but the decision to hold the election on the Friday of a Bank Holiday weekend may have contributed.
The candidate in second place, Peter Casey, had 23% of the first-preference votes. This is worryingly high for a man so clearly unsuited to the role of President. Casey cynically played the populist game, particularly with his incendiary remarks about Travellers. All five other candidates condemned his obvious racism, and the Taioseach urged people not to vote for him. That identified Casey as the anti-establishment 'protest' vote and his vote share surged.
Now 23% of a 44% turnout is less than 10% of the electorate, but there's no room for complacency with gobshites like Peter Casey. In the UK the ghastly Nigel Farage was treated as a joke for decades by many establishment figures, but he nevertheless managed to attract sufficient support to cause irrevocable damage to the UK.
Anyway, that concern aside, sincere congratulations to Michael D Higgins on his reelection. He is a worthy winner and I for one am proud to have him as my President.
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(H5) Distinctive dark wine red foliage, especially on new leaves and on their undersides which are displayed when ruffled by the wind. Bright pink flowers, fading to pale pink, in an open-topped truss. Very free flowering in April. Height 100-125cm in 10 years.


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Think Like a Man: Men and Women Behaving Bedly
A fine cast lends charm to this romantic comedy with a schematic plot but an easy attitude
By Richard Corliss April 19, 2012
Alan Markfield / Screen Gems
Gabrielle Union and Jerry Ferrara
Think Like a Man
Studio: Screen Gems
Actors: Chris Brown, Gabrielle Union, Kevin Hart
It was said that the key to the political success of the 19th century statesman Benjamin Disraeli, the first and only Prime Minister of the United Kingdom born to a Jewish family, was that he followed the motto "Speak British, think Yiddish." With rather more meager credentials, the comedian Steve Harvey published a book of romantic advice for women called Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man: What Men Really Think About Love, Intimacy, and Commitment. The book offered such secrets of the male psyche as "Boys shack; men build homes" and "Don't hate the player; change the game" — wisdom Harvey presumably gleaned from his three marriages (two divorces) and from hosting the latest edition of Family Feud. Women made the book a No. 1 best-seller in 2009, perhaps because they were amused by a man, and a stand-up comic at that, trying to practice vajournalism.
Other movies made from advice books have sprouted songs, as in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, or subverted the very notion of erotic self-help: Woody Allen's Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask). For their screenplay of Think Like a Man, Keith Merryman and David A. Newman took a more modest approach, creating characters with different humors to embody Harvey's homiletics. The result isn't exactly Restoration comedy in full flower; but, as directed by Tim Story (Barbershop), it's an ensemble piece that packs more easy enjoyment than I was expecting or, even now, care to admit to.
(READ: Belinda Luscombe's Q&A with Steve Harvey)
Six guys meet regularly to play basketball: the placidly married token Anglo guy (Gary Owen), the Italian Jeremy (Jerry Ferrara, who was Turtle on Entourage) and four blacks. Dominic (Michael Ealy from Barbershop), who dreams of being a chef, hooks up with the status-conscious, Fortune-500 COO Lauren (Benjamin Button's Taraji P. Henson). Zeke (Romany Malko) is a player who can't get the vulnerable Mya (Meagan Good) on the fast track to the bedroom. The mama's boy Michael (Terence J) takes flack from mom (Jenifer Lewis) when he hooks up with single mother Candace (Regina Hall). The recently divorced Cedric (Kevin Hart) boasts of his freedom, but his loneliness and panic are as evident as his flop sweat. And Jeremy's realtor girlfriend Kristen (Gabrielle Union of Deliver Us from Eva) is impatient for him to take time from his video games to, in two words, grow up.
The women have been using the Harvey tome to gain the advantages in love that they have earned in their careers. They feel empowered being reminded that, in the banquet of sex, they "control the cookie." The men are domesticated enough to bide their time. Zeke is frustrated that his five-date maximum for bedding a woman has been superseded by Mya's "90-Day Rule" — "I'm a Negro gigolo," he complains to his pals, "the original nigolo" — but he acquiesces because love makes sex worth waiting for.
(READ: What Makes a Bad Boyfriend?)
Halfway through the film, they discover the women's playbook and, by furtively consulting it, are able to anticipate all feminine strategies; one says, "It was like takin' a test you already had the answers to." But in an entertainment scrupulously devised for date nights, maturing means that the men must be feminized. When Jeremy finally pops the question to Candace, he blurts out, "I want to be your wife."
That the movie's writers are white, and Harvey and most of the actors African-American, is just one reason for homogenized tone of the piece. Merryman and Newman also wrote last year's Friends With Benefits, a romantic comedy that knowingly parodied and exploited the conventions of the genre. Similarly, Think Like a Man both mocks and genuflects before the ensemble romances that came before it.
(READ: Mary Pols' review of Friends With Benefits)
Besides being a two-hour infomercial for the book, the movie isn't far from Tyler Perry's relationship dramedies (Ealy, Union and Lewis have all been in Perry films), but with a higher brow, a brisker pace and gentler mood swings. At other times the PG-13 movie seems tiptoeing toward the chattier parts of Zane's Sex Chronicles on late-night Cinemax. It talks endlessly about sex, and features some major sloppy kisses, but only on the way to enough public declarations of love to fill an Oprah hugathon. The film embraces emotion without quite degenerating into crynography, that wretched excess of sentiment; it wants audiences to leave with a smile, not wracking sobs all the way home.
Schematic and borderline dogmatic, Think Like a Man still gives welcome space for its charming cast to behave and misbehave becomingly. It's a treat to see Henson, Oscar-nominated as Benjamin Button's saintly adoptive mother, strut a modern-day sexual confidence, even if her Lauren has to suffer a comeuppance. (The movie, like Soul Food and many a Perry parable, is more class-conscious than race-conscious.) Most of the other characters escape stern judgment. These 30-something folks, comfortable in their circumstances and their skins, are allowed to be smart of heart if baffled by the 21st-century courtship game.
(READ: Steve Harvey's Men-Only Mentoring Weekend)
There's nothing profound going on here; the truisms don't blossom into life-enriching truths. It's more like the person you meet at a bar who, on second glance, is surprisingly attractive. Call Think Like a Man a perfectly satisfactory one-night stand at the movies.


text:
Posted on March 30, 2015 March 30, 2015 by Ed McNulty
The Last Butterfly (1991)
Review of: The Last Butterfly (1991)
Karel Kachyna
Last modified:March 30, 2015
During the Nazi era a Parisian mime who includes a mockery of their salute is sent to a camp to direct a children's play for the benefit of a Red Cross inspection team & turns it into an act of defiance & unmasking of evil.
(Poslední motýl)
Our content ratings (1-10): Violence 5; Language 5; Sex/Nudity 2.
Good Friday and Easter are almost here, so I want to share this beautiful film (available on DVD) that embodies both of these events so sacred to Christians. It also is a good film for Holocaust Memorial Day: for an annotated list of many other such films check out the soon to be posted April 2014 issue of Visual Parables.
Then the righteous will answer him, 'Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?' 40 And the king will answer them, 'Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.'
During the German occupation of Paris even the Nazis laugh at mime Antoine Moreau's mocking their stiff-armed salute. (c) 1991 Arrow
Czech director Karel Kachyna's film is not a "religious" film, but it definitely is a Good Friday and Easter one that fits well with Jesus' parable of the sheep and the goats in Matthew's gospel. During the Nazi era hundreds of thousands of children were among the victims of Hitler's Holocaust. In the film Tom Courtney plays Antoine Moreau, an apolitical French pantomime artist working in Paris during the Nazi occupation. Once very successful, he has allowed his act to grow stale so that now he is relegated to burlesque theaters and small clubs.
Almost by accident he develops the signature ending of his jumping dog act—his arm rises up seemingly by itself to perform the stiff-armed Nazi salute. He struggles with his other hand to bring it down, but it will not stay lowered, seeming to possess a will of its own. The theater manager is terrified when Moreau first performs the stunt because in the audience are many Nazi officers. However they laugh along with the French customers, but out of ignorance. They think it is just a funny visual joke, whereas the French interpret it as a bold act of resistance, a display of how silly the salute is.
Moreau regains a measure of his popularity throughout the city, but his fame does not protect him when his lover is shot while fleeing from the Gestapo. Unknown to him, she was a member of the underground, but, of course, the Nazis do not believe him. He is given a choice: prison or follow our instructions. He is to go with a group of children to the city of Theresienstadt and stage a play there. Dubbed "The City of the Jews," this is a model village set up by the Nazis as part of their PR attempt to convince the world that the stories about their mistreatment of the Jews is false Allied propaganda. The play is for the benefit of the International Red Cross inspection team scheduled to tour the village. He is promised a handsome fee and a return ticket, as well as dropped charges.
Reluctantly agreeing, Moreau at first wants just to do his job and return to Paris, but his aloof heart is won over by the children. He also becomes close to Vera (Brigitte Fossey), who is in charge of the children. She wipes away any delusion he might have had about the fate of the residents. Trains leave periodically from the town, their cargo the Jews marked for extermination. The children that he chooses for the production will be spared, at least for a while. Thus, like Oskar Schindler, Moreau selects as many children as he can justify for the production.
He also changes the production, making it a version of "Hansel and Gretel." When the Red Cross team arrives, there will be no mistaking the symbolism of the witch pushing children wearing bands with the Star of David on their arms being pushed into the oven. Afterward Moreau, in solidarity with the little ones he has come to love, makes a decision similar to that of the famed Dr. Janusz Korczak, the Warsaw Ghetto child expert who, when the Jewish children in his orphanage were being loaded onto a train bound for an extermination cam did some brave and compassionate—and in the eyes of the Germans, foolish. Only, unlike the good doctor, Moreau adds a touch of defiance as his arm once gain raises up, his mock "Heil Hitler" salute bringing one last round of giggles and laughter to the children.
Most of the film is Good Friday—the arrogant Germans viciously subjecting Jews to humiliation, pain, and death—and Moreau himself, self-indulgent and failing at his art at the beginning of the film. Indeed, the film is also a character transformation film, Moreau slowly moving off the island of himself to embrace the innocent under his charge. With Vera and the children he becomes part of a caring community the mission of which is to expose the lies and cruelty of their Nazi captors. He becomes such a part of that community that he is willing to share its fate, so that the last portion of the film is an Easter moment witnessing against the evil of their cruel captors. We see no evidence that Moreau is a card-carrying believer, but I believe that the mime, standing in that line before the throne of God, would be one of the surprised ones.
The review with a set of discussion questions will be in the April 2014 Visual Parables.
CategoriesMovie Reviews TagsGerman occupied, Holocaust, Jews, mime, Nazi, Nazi salute, Paris
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It is typical for March to be thought of as kite flying month. With the approach of Easter, the lovely weather, and fresh breeze, why not? March has optimal kite flying weather to satisfy the desires of little boys and girls who want nothing more than to raise their kites everyday. The kite flying experience boosts our culture as well as our nostalgia. I didn't grow up as an enthusiastic kite flyer myself but I was always excited to see the little children in my neighborhood pull out their intricately designed kites and take them to the heights of the sky.
So far in 2017, I have seen maybe 10 kites being flown, and I feel even that is a stretch. I am certain that I am not the only one who has missed the sight of beautiful handmade kites filling the blue Easter skies. I cannot be the only one who wishes that that part of our culture would grow year by year rather than lessen.
Are our children becoming more consumed in indoor activities that require little to no physical input? Are they becoming too dependent on technology? Are we neglecting to share our culture with our little ones?
The kite flying tradition and festival date back as far as 1975 and possibly even earlier. Unfortunately, support has dwindled over the years. There have been several initiatives by businesses and individuals teaming up in an effort to preserve the activity that has ever been a part of our culture. Kite flying has been passed from generation to generation, and it would only be in our culture's best interest to save the tradition. The preservation of the activity has taken on many faces. Kite flying doesn't only serve as entertainment, it also brings family, friends, and neighbors together; from conceptualizing the designs, purchasing materials, making them, to walking to the nearest park to put the kites to the test of the wind, kite flying used to be vividly Belizean.
The Bowen and Bowen and Benny's companies partnered up in 2012 to encourage kite flying in the country while celebrating homemade kites. The Hopkins community holds annual kite workshops/festivals and boasts to have the favorite place to fly a kite, alongside breathtaking scenery. By 2015, they had already held 11 annual kite festivals. The two initiatives also held competitions where prizes were gifted based on kite making and flying abilities in both junior and senior categories. In 2012, the Embassy of the Republic of China (Taiwan) offered a grant to the National Institute of Culture and History (NICH) to hold a Kite Making Training-the-Trainer workshop. The initiative was of the RESTORE Belize Programme, a crime prevention initiative, which operates directly out of the Office of the Prime Minister. The mission was "to make Belize a safe, vibrant home for residents through inclusive, multi-sectoral, and citizen-centered action." To capture the interest of the youth and give them constructive activities that were fun and taught team building skills were the hope of the program.
Kites were usually homemade and assembled using natural and man-made materials. Typically, parts of a coconut tree leaf were used to create the structure of the kite and decorated with plastic or even tissue paper, adhesives, and any other decorative elements, especially as it comes to making the tail of the kite.
Given all the programs that have aided in keeping the tradition alive, there is more we can do as a people. There can be all the workshops in the world but if the people are not willing to participate, they are in vain. One very important thing to consider is that children most likely won't be interested in the activity unless they are made to understand the importance it plays to both our culture and a family activity that ties several generations together.
My hope for near years is that we submerge ourselves in our culture, that we not be ashamed, that we appreciate all that our ancestors have made for us. In all honesty, we have, for a long time, lived in the shadows of more powerful countries. At times, many have thought it better to adopt their culture, ways, and lifestyle while casting off our own. We however, must learn to be proud of our identity and take pride in the unique position our country holds in Central America and the Caribbean. It is not the culture that makes a people, it is the pride of the people and appreciation of common history that makes a vibrant culture. It is a people satisfied in their own uniqueness that makes a nation, and sometimes it starts with something simple as flying a kite on a windy day.


text:
Viola Poley, nach Heirat Viola Kowalschek, (* 13. April 1955 in Berlin) ist eine ehemalige  Ruderin aus der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik, die Olympiasiegerin und Weltmeisterin im Doppelvierer war.

Poley begann als Wanderruderin und schloss sich dann der BSG Empor Brandenburger Tor an. Nachdem ihr Talent erkannt worden war, wurde sie zum SC Berlin-Grünau delegiert. 1974 belegte sie mit dem Doppelvierer den zweiten Platz bei der DDR-Meisterschaft, 1975 wurde sie erneut Zweite, diesmal zusammen mit Sybille Tietze im Doppelzweier. 1976 rückte sie vor den Olympischen Spielen in Montreal in den Doppelvierer auf und ersetzte die zweifache Weltmeisterin Ursula Unger. Zusammen mit Anke Borchmann, Jutta Lau, Roswietha Zobelt und Steuerfrau Liane Weigelt siegte sie in Montreal vor den Booten aus der UdSSR und aus Rumänien. Für diesen Sieg wurde sie mit dem Vaterländischen Verdienstorden in Silber ausgezeichnet.

Nach ihrer Heirat mit dem Ruderer Günter Kowalschek gewann sie 1977 ihren einzigen DDR-Meistertitel. Zur Weltmeisterschaft rückte gegenüber der DDR-Meisterschaft noch Sybille Tietze ins Boot. In der Aufstellung Sabine Gust, Petra Boesler, Viola Kowalschek, Sybille Tietze und Steuerfrau Elke Rost gewann der Doppelvierer den Weltmeistertitel vor den Booten aus Rumänien und Bulgarien. Danach beendete sie ihre Karriere.

Nach einer abgeschlossenen Sachbearbeiter-Ausbildung studierte sie Ingenieurökonomie des Bauwesens. Bis zur Wende war sie beim Rat des Stadtbezirks Köpenick angestellt, später wechselte sie zu einer Autoversicherung.

Literatur
 Volker Kluge: Lexikon Sportler in der DDR. Neues Leben, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-355-01759-6.

Weblinks

 Deutsche Erfolge bei Weltmeisterschaften

Einzelnachweise

Ruderer (DDR)
Olympiasieger (Rudern)
Weltmeister (Rudern)
Olympiateilnehmer (DDR)
DDR-Meister (Rudern)
Träger des Vaterländischen Verdienstordens in Silber
Teilnehmer der Olympischen Sommerspiele 1976
DDR-Bürger
Deutscher
Geboren 1955
Frau

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