The pressure is mounting with Stamp Out Poverty taking a lead with organizations from around the world in advocating for a Currency Transaction Levy (CTL) for Health, which when applied to the four major currencies (US dollar, Yen, Euro and British pound) could potentially raise up to USD 33 billion a year. This will raise sufficient finances to meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) for health, namely to reduce child mortality, improve maternal health and combat the major diseases by 2015 (MDG numbers 4, 5 and 6).
Stamp Out Poverty is a network made up of more than 40 UK charities, trade unions and faith groups that has been working on measures to help fund the finance gap required to pay for the Millennium Development Goals and is increasingly concerned with how the substantial costs of climate change are going to be met. Its flagship campaign is for a Currency Transaction Tax (CTL), where it has lead the way in commissioning work to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposal when applied at a very low rate for the purpose of raising additional revenue for the alleviation of poverty.
In the run-up to the Group of Twenty countries (G-20) meeting later this month, the campaign is seeking endorsements from organizations in support of the Declaration of the Global Campaign for a Currency Transaction Levy for Health. This initiative is geared to push governments to take the necessary steps to introduce such a CTL levy, and make sure the benefits are dedicated to reach the health MDGs.
The Campaign acknowledges that neither allocated nor committed levels of Official Development Assistance (ODA) and domestic financing are sufficient to meet these MDG targets related to health, a situation compounded by the global financial crisis, which is severely affecting the poorest countries in the world.
The campaign call upon donors to keep their commitments to allocate 0.7% of their national budgets to ODA and that African countries, similarly, honour their Abuja Declaration pledge to commit at least 15% of their national budgets to health.
The campaign is committed to locating and harnessing additional, new and predictable income streams that are capable of meeting funding shortfalls. A Currency Transaction Levy (CTL) has the potential to raise revenue of at least USD 33 billion a year on a sustainable, predictable and on-going basis from the foreign exchange (fx) market, that has not been privy to levies or taxation to date.
The CTL is technically simple to implement: the foreign exchange market is fully electronic, revenue collection would be automatic, with no scope for avoidance.
At the proposed low rate of 0.005%, the foreign exchange market would not be adversely affected whilst at the same time significant income would be generated.
The CTL would be applied to the wholesale foreign exchange market only, and not affect the retail market nor have an impact on migrant remittances.
The proceeds of the CTL should benefit the health MDGs, most notably MDGs 4 and 5 on maternal and child health, which are seriously under-resourced, and Universal Access to HIV, TB and malaria prevention, treatment, care and support. The international community currently has the mechanisms in place to channel the funds and rapidly scale up interventions, (e.g., through the GAVI Alliance, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria (GFATM) and UNITAID).
The campaign is so far supported by the Africa Japan Forum, Japan; PLUS Coalition, France; Health GAP, USA; Family Care International, USA; International HIV/AIDS Alliance, UK; International Civil Society Support, Netherlands; Partners in Health, USA; Physicians for Human Rights, USA; RESULTS, USA; Stamp Out Poverty, UK; Stop AIDS Campaign, UK; Treatment Action Group, USA among others.


One of the best parts of The Cranwell weddings is the awesome backdrops everywhere!
Patrick and Stefanie had looked at rings together. He picked up Sefanie's ring up on a Wednesday and proposed that very day at her old apartment because he didn't want to wait to propose! The 'I love Ralph' button was tribute to Stefanie's late father.
We always love seeing flowers from Crocus Hale at our Lenox weddings.
The " Entering Lenox" sign was a theme they used for welcome bags, Save the Dates and our table signs. They wanted to celebrate the Berkshires since it was one of the first things they connected over and a place they both love!
Thank you both so much for allowing us to capture and share your Cranwell wedding photos from Lenox!


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Home News and Blog CAN Mezzanine, Old Street welcomes growing start-up Fundraising Regulator
CAN Mezzanine, Old Street welcomes growing start-up Fundraising Regulator
The Fundraising Regulator move into CAN Mezzanine, Old Street.
The Fundraising Regulator's (FR) mission is to set and maintain the standards for charitable fundraising in the UK. It has taken over ownership of the Code of Fundraising Practise from the Institute of Fundraising and will work on developing it in consultation with other key fundraising institutions.
The FR have experienced rapid growth since its official launch in early July. Having launched with only three staff members, the organisation now has 14, with the aim of increasing to 19 in due course. CAN Mezzanine in Old Street was chosen by the FR to accommodate its expanding employee base.
"It's the ideal space on the second floor for us with lots of other like-minded organisations. There are other regulators in the building so it's got a good atmosphere about it."
"CAN's business team were very helpful with booking rooms for meetings that we had immediately after moving in. Signing the license, moving in, sorting out the broadband and the phone wiring – it's all been really easy."
"It's good to get all your services provided through one desk fee and you know it's all going to an organisation that itself exists to support charities." – Gerald Oppenheim, Head of Policy
One of the ways that the FR is working to restore public trust in charitable fundraising is by setting up the Fundraising Preference Service (FPS) to give the public more control over the communication that they receive from charities.
"We deal with issues that people raise surrounding the common feeling that they are under pressure to donate. The FPS will give someone a chance to opt out of all communications from charities, however, it's also about recognising that if charities don't have the ability to raise money from the public, they can't do things for the beneficiaries of the charities. We want to reinforce that there shouldn't be competition between the people who donate, the people who deliver and the people who receive services – one can't work without the other."
The FPS will be developed for launch next year.
Charities and fundraising organisations will soon be invited to register with the Fundraising Regulator to demonstrate their support for the Code of Fundraising Practice and effective regulation. For more information about the FR, please visit its website.
Find out more about moving into CAN Mezzanine.
Category: Mezzanine

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


for some things to arrive, it calms me down to be creative in my room. Actually, I should be getting my stuff together to pack away, but the moving company called today and said that the earliest they could deliver the cartons is now Friday instead of tomorrow. Oh well, am I starting to get used to all the set backs in this move.... it is frustrating though. So this afternoon I made a layout, probably my last one now in this room. I will be making some more during the Crop at the Rhine River and those 4 days of Scrapping will be a nice "get-away-from-all-the-moving-hustle". The photo in this layout was taken by my cousin Nancy.
Während wir heute auf eine Ikea Lieferung gewartet haben und ich wieder mal mit Migräne kämpfte, habe ich ein layout gemacht. Wahrscheinlich das letzte layout in diesem Zimmer da ich jetzt wirklich langsam an das Packen meiner vielen Sachen denken muss. Leicht macht es mir die Umzugsfirma aber nicht, denn die Kartons werden nun erst Freitag anstatt morgen geliefert. So werde ich wohl meinen Scrapkoffer für das Car Wochenende packen und Fotos für die workshops aussuchen. Das Foto im layout hat übrigens meine Cousine Nancy während des letzten East Coast Sturms gemacht.
I also updated my "Project Moving" albums and started 2013 which has only one entry so far, but I am sure will be filled as progress is being made.
Meine "Umzugs Alben" habe ich auch fertig gestellt bis auf den heutigen Stand. 2013 wird bestimmt genauso voll mit Fotos wie 2012. Hier zeige ich zum ersten Mal unser erstes fast fertiges Zimmer, die Küche.
Saturday we went to dinner at Mr. Sandman with Anni and Maria. Detlef and I had spare ribs and Maria and Anni ate steak. And we all had a huge dessert with waffles and ice cream, so much that Detlef had to take left-overs from us three gals.
Am Samstag waren wir zum Abendessen in Mr. Sandman mit Maria und Anni. Detlef und ich hatten die spare ribs und Maria und Anni Steaks. Und natürlich durfte die leckere Nachspeise von Waffeln mit Eis nicht fehlen. Wir waren so voll, dass Detlef von uns drei Frauen die Reste essen musste.


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Your Gift Can Last Forever
The Power of an Endowed Gift on CHOC
View and download your FREE copy of Endowments: A Gift That Lasts Forever.
An endowment gift to CHOC today provides a brighter picture for our future. When you make a donation to our endowment, you give a gift with both immediate and long-term benefits.
Endowment donations are invested. A portion of the annual income from the investment is used to address immediate needs at CHOC. The remaining funds are reinvested to ensure indefinite support.
An Example of How It Works
Longtime supporters Susan and Charlie have two goals: First, they want to make sure CHOC continues to receive support after they're gone. Second, they want to memorialize Charlie's parents, Mr. and Mrs. Jones.
Susan and Charlie make a $25,000 donation to CHOC, which we invest, and each year, a portion of the income from the invested money will be used to support our mission in honor of the Joneses. Plus, Susan and Charlie qualify for a federal income tax charitable deduction on their taxes.
Contact Denise Ogawa, CSPG, Director, Planned Giving, at 714-509-3589 or dogawa@choc.org to discuss endowed gifts.


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Interop: The Book
John Palfrey and Urs Gasser are giving a book talk at Harvard about their new book, Interop. (It's really good. Broad, thoughtful, engaging. Not at all focused on geeky tech issues.) NOTE: Posted without re-reading
[The next day: Nathan Matias has posted a far better live-blog post of this event.)
JP says the topic of interop seems on the face of it like it should be "very geeky and very dull." He says the book started out fairly confined, about the effect of interop on innovation. But as they worked on it, it got broader. E.g., the Facebook IPO has been spun about the stock price's ups and downs. But from an interop perspective, the story is about why FB was worth $100B or more when its revenues don't indicate any such thing. It's because FB's interop in our lives make it hard to extract. But from this also come problems, which is why the subtitle of the book Interop talks about its peril.
Likewise, the Flame virus shows that viral outbreaks cannot be isolated easily. We need fire breaks to prevent malware from spreading.
In the book, JP and Urs look at how railroad systems became interoperable. Currency is like that, too: currencies vary but we are able to trade across borders. This has been great for the global economy, but it make problems. E.g., the Greek economic meltdown shows the interdependencies of economies.
The book gives a concise def of interop: "The ability to transfer and render userul data and other information across systems (including organizations), applications or components." But that is insufficient. The book sees interop more broadly as "The art and science of working together." The book talks about interop in terms of four levels: data, tech, humans, and institutions.
They view the book as an inquiry, some of which is expressed in a series of case studies and papers.
Urs takes the floor. He's going to talk about a few case studies.
First, how can we make our cities smarter using tech? (Urs shows an IBM video that illustrates how dependent we are on sharing information.) He draws some observations:
Solutions to big societal problems increasingly depend on interoperability — from health care to climate change.
Interop is not black or white. Many degrees. E.g., power plugs are not interoperable around the world, but there are converters. Or, international air travel requires a lot of interop among the airlines.
Interop is a design challenge. In fact, once you've messed up with interop, it's hard to make it right. E.g., it took a long time to fix air traffic control systems because there was a strongly embedded legacy system.
There are important benefits, including systems efficiency, user choice, and economic growth.
Urs points to their four-layer model. To make a smart city, the tech the firefighters and police use need to interop, as do their data. But at the human layer, the language used to vary among branches; e.g., "333" might code one thing for EMTs and another for the police. At the institutional layer, the laws for privacy might not be interoperable, making it hard for businesses to work globally.
Second example: When Facebook opened its APIs so that other apps could communicate with FB, there was a spike in innovation; 4k apps were made by non-FB devs that plug into FB. FB's decision to become more interoperable led to innovation. Likewise for Twitter. "Much of the story behind Twitter is an interop question."
Likewise for Ushahidi; after the Haitian earthquake, it made a powerful platform that enabled people to share and accumulate info, mapping it, across apps and devices. This involved all layers of the interop stack, from data to institutions such as the UN pitching in. (Urs also points to safe2pee.org :)
There's a cycle of interop, competition, and innovation.
There are theories of innovation, including generativity (Zittrain), user-driven innovation (Von Hippel) and small-step innocations (Christensen).
Caveat: More interop isn't always good. A highly interop business can take over the market, creating a de facto monopoly, and suppressing innovation.
Interop also can help diffuse adoption. E.g., the transition to high def tv: it only took off once the tvs were were able to interoperate between analog and digital signals.
Example 3: Credit cards are highly interoperable: whatever your buying opportunity is, you can use a selection of cards that work with just about any bank. Very convenient.
this level of interop comes with costs and risks: identity thefts, security problems, etc.
The benefits outweigh the risks
This is a design problem
More interop creates more problems because it means there are more connection points.
Example 4: Cell phone chargers. Traditionally phones had their own chargers. Why? Europe addressed this by the "Sword of Damocles" approach that said that if the phone makers didn't get their act together, the EC would regulate them into it. The micro-USB charger is now standard in Europe.
It can take a long time, because of the many actors, legacy problems, and complexity.
It's useful to think about these issues in terms of a 2×2 of regulation/non-regulation, and collaborative-unilateral.
JP back up. He is going to talk about libraries and the preservation of knowledge as interop problems. Think about this as an issue of maintaining interop over time. E.g., try loading up one of your floppy disks. The printed version is much more useful over the long term. Libraries find themselves in a perverse situation: If you provide digital copies of books, you can provide much less than physical books. Five of the 6 major publishers won't let libraries lend e versions. It'd make sense to have new books provided on an upon standard format. So, even if libraries could lend the books, people might not have the interoperable tech required to play it. Yet libraries are spending more on e-books, and less on physical. If libraries have digital copies and not physical copies, they are are vulnerable to tech changes. How do we insure that we can continuously update? The book makes a fairly detailed suggestion. But as it stands, as we switch from one format to another over time, we're in worse shape than if we had physical books. We need to address this. "When it comes to climate change, or electronic health records, or preservation of knowledge, interop matters, both as a theory and as a practice." We need to do this by design up front, deciding what the optimal interop is in each case.
Q: [doc searls] Are there any places where you think we should just give up?
A: [jp] I'm a cockeyed optimist. We thought that electronic health records in the US is the hardest case we came across.
Q: How does the govt conduct consultations with experts from across the US. What would it take to create a network of experts?
A: [urs] Lots of expert networks that have emerged, enabled by tech that fosters from the bottom up human interoperability.
A: [jp] It's not clear to me that we want that level of consultation. I don't know that we could manage direct democracy enabled in that way.
Q: What are the limits you'd like to see emerge on interop. I.e., I'm thinking of problems of hyper-coherence in bio: a single species of rice or corn that may be more efficient can turn out to be with one blight to have been a big mistake. How do you build in systems of self-limit?
[urs] We try to address this somewhat in a chapter on diversity, which begins with biodiversity. When we talk about interop, we do not suggest merging or unifying systems. To the contrary, interop is a way to preserve diversity, and prevent fragmentation within diversity. It's extremely difficult to find the optimums, which varies from case to case, and to decide on which speed bumps to put in place.
[jp] You've gone to the core of what we're thinking about.
Q: Human autonomy, efficiency, and economic growth are three of the benefits you mention, but they can be in conflict with one another. How important are decentralized systems?
[urs] We're not arguing in favor of a single system, e.g., that we have only one type of cell phone. That's exactly not what we're arguing for. You want to work toward the sweet spot of interop.
[jp] They are in tension, but there are some highly complex systems where they coexist. E.g., the Web.
Q: Yes, having a single cell phone charger is convenient. But there may be a performance tradeoff, where you can't choose the optimum voltage if you standard on 5V. And an innovation deficit: you won't get magnetic plugs, etc.
[urs] Yes. This is one of the potential downsides of interop. It may lock you in. When you get interop by choosing a standard, you freeze the standard for the future. So one of the additional challenge is: how can we incorporate mechanisms of learning into standards-setting?
Cell phone chargers don't have a lot of layers on top of them, so the standardization doesn't have quite the ripples through generativity. And that's what the discussion should be about.
Categories: liveblog Tagged with: berkman • interop • jpalfrey • standards • urs gasser Date: May 30th, 2012 dw
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The virtue of self-restraint
Last night was the annual Berkman dinner. Lovely. It inevitably turned into a John Palfrey love fest, since he is leaving Harvard very soon, and he is much beloved.
People stood and spoke beautifully and insightfully about what John has meant to them. (Jonathan Zittrain and Ethan Zuckerman in addition were predictably hilarious.) But Terry Fisher gave us an insight that was so apt about John and so widely relevant that I'll share it.
Terry listed some qualities of John's. The last he talked about started out as John's very occasional sarcasm; he can be bitingly perceptive about people, but always in private. So, said Terry, JP's remarked-upon and remarkable niceness and kindness are not due to naivete. Rather, they arise in part from another of John's virtues: self-restraint. And, from that, said Terry, comes much of the kindness that generally characterizes the Berkman Center.
That struck me not only as true of John, but as such an important quality for civic discourse. Self-restraint is an enabling virtue: its exercise results in a further qualities that make life on a crowded planet more fruitful and enjoyable.
Categories: berkman, culture Tagged with: berkman • civic virtue • civility • john palfrey • terry fisher Date: May 30th, 2012 dw
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Neelie Kroes: So close on Net Neutrality
Neelie Kroes, VP of the European Commission, has issued her statement on Net Neutrality. In my view, she correctly assesses the importance of Net Neutrality, but wrongly gauges the ability of a free market to deliver it. As a result, her policy is (in my view) seriously misguided. But so close!
Neelie writes:
When it comes to the issue of "net neutrality" I want to ensure that Internet users can always choose full Internet access – that is, access to a robust, best-efforts Internet with all the applications you wish.
I would have preferred a phrase about all apps and data delivered free of discrimination by the carriers. In any case, based on a new study by BEREC (European regulators' body), she feels that now enough of the market has a choice of carriers that regulation is not needed.
As my friend JC de Martin wrote on a mailing list [slightly edited]:
I am afraid that this is a bad decision on at least four counts:
1. it overestimates the ability of the average consumers not only to obtain the relevant information, but also
to fully understand its implications;
2. it underestimates the very substantial pain of switching ISPs;
3. in rural areas, or smaller cities, the ISP offer is quite limited;
4. ISPs are not all equal: very soon European consumers will have to face a choice between a fast ISP with "limited Internet" and a slower ISP with "full Internet": which one will they choose?
If access to an open Net is as important as Neelie believes it is, then it ought not be left up to the vagaries of the market to deliver it, and we ought not be complacent about a situation in which some people cannot afford access to it.
So close :(
Categories: misc Tagged with: neelie kroes • net neutrality Date: May 30th, 2012 dw
[berkman] Dries Buytaert: Drupal and sustaining collaborative efforts
Dries Buytaert [twitter:Dries] , the founder of Drupal and co-founder of Acquia, is giving a Berkman lunch talk about building and sustaining online collaborations.
Drupal is an open source content manager, Dries says. In the past twelve years, Drupal has "grown significantly": 71 of the top 100 universities use it, 120 nations use it, the White House uses it, 2 of of the 3 top music companies use it, the King of Belgium uses it. [Dries is Belgian :) ] The NY Stock Exchange is converting from a proprietary Java solution to Drupal. Five of the 6 top media companies use it. One out of 50 wesbites run on Drupal. Drupal has 10,000+ modules, 300,000 downloads a month, 1.5M unique visitors a month at drupal. org. And it's free as in beer.
Today he's going to talk about: history, open source, community, the evolution of software, and how to grow and sustain it.
Dries began writing Drupal in his dorm room, more or less by accident. He wrote a message board for the Linux project, in part to learn PHP and MySQL. About a year later he released Drupal 1.0 as open source, as "a full-featured content management/discussion engine…suitable to setup a news-driven comunity or portal site similar to kuro5hin.org and slashdot.org" (as it said in the original annoucement). "It took me about 30 seconds to come up with the name Drupal, a terrible name."
Three years later (v.4.1) he says it still looked "pretty crappy." Two years laer,in 2005, 30 develoeprs showed up for the first DrupalCon, in Antwerp. There are now several year. By 2011, it was looking quite good, and 3,200+ developers showed up at DrupalCon. There are now weekly meetings around the world.
There were growing pains, he says. He tells us about The Big Server Meltdown. In 2004, the servers failed. Dries put up a blank page with a PayPal button to raise $3,000 for a server. Within 24 hours, they'd raised $10,000. One of the CTOs of Sun shipped him a $8,000 machine. Then Open Source Labs in Portland OR offered to house the servers. "That's just one anecdote. In the history of Drupal, it feels like we've had hundreds of these." (There are currently 8 staff members. They organize conferences and keep the servers up. )
But, Dries says, this shows a weakness in open source: you suddenly have to raise $3,000 and may not be able to do so. That's a reason he started Acquia, which provides support for Drupal.
Drupal is open source: It's gratis, anyone can look at the source code, they can modify the code, and they can share it. The fact that it's free sometimes let's them win bids, but open source "is not just a software license. It's a collaboration model." "Open source leads to community." And "ultimately, that leads to innovation."
Dries shows photos of the community's embrace of Drupal (and its logo). "Drupal is successful today because of the community."
Q: How do we know there will be enthusiastic support a few years down the road? How do we know it won't have a Y2K problem?
A: There isn't an easy answer. Things can go wrong. We try to keep it relevant. We have a good track record of innovation and keeping the right trends. And a lot of it comes down to keeping the community engaged. We have a large ecosystem. They volunteer their time, but the are all making money; they have an economic interest in keeping Drupal relevant.
"Drupal doesn't win just because it's cheaper. It wins because it's better." It is technically superior because it has thousands of developers.
Evolution of software
Dries points to a common pattern: From innovation to bespoke systems to products to commoditization. In each step, the reach becomes wider. Proprietary software tends to stop at the products stage; it's hard to become a commodity because proprietary software is too expensive. This is an important opportunity for open source.
Growing large projects
Is Drupal's growth sustainable? That's a reason Dries founded the Drupal Association, a non-profit, in 2006. It helps maintain drupal.org, organizes events, etc. But Drupal also needs companies like Acquia to get it into new areas. It needs support. It needs people who can talk to CIOs in large companies.
Open source Joomla recently hired some developers to work on their core software, which has led some of the contributors to back off. Why should they contribute their time if Joomla is paying some folks? [Joomla's experience illustrates the truth of the Wealth of Networks: Putting money into collab can harm the collab.] Drupal is not going to do that. (Acquia develops some non-open source Drupal tools.)
IBM and RedHat are the top contributors to Linux. What companies might make that sort of strategic investment in Drupal? Instead of one or two, how about hundreds? So Dries created "Large Scale Drupal," a membership org to jointly fund developments. It's new. They contribute money and get a say in where it's spent. The members are users of Drupal. E.g., Warner Music. Module developers can get funded from LSD. Two people run it, paid by Acquia. There has not been any pushback from the dev community because there's no special backdoor by which these projects get added to the Drupal core. In fact, the money is then spent to fund developers. Dries sets the technical roadmap by listening to the community; neither the Drupal Association or LSD influences that.
Of these collaborative projects often start as small, volunteer-driven projects. But then they become institutionalized when they grow. Trade routes are like that: they were originally worn into the ground, but then become driven by commercial organizations, and finally are governed by the government. Many others exhibit the same pattern. Can open source avoid it?
If you're thinking of starting an open source commercial company, you could do dual licensing, but Drupal has not made that choice.
Q: How much does Drupal contribute to the PHP community?
A: A little. There are tribes: some are active in the PHP tribe, others in the Drupal tribe. It's unfortunate that there isn't more interaction. Dries says he'd love to grow Acquia enough so that it can put a couple of people on PHP, because if PHP isn't successful, neither is Drupal.
Q: Governance?
A: We don't have a lot of decision-making structure. I've always been opposed to formal voting. We work through discussion. We debate what should be in the core. Whoever wants to participates in the debate. Ultimately we're structured like Linux: there are two people who are committing changes to a core version of Drupal. For every major version I pick someone to work alongside me. When we release the version, he or she becomes the maintainer of it. I move on to the next version and select someone to be my co-maintainer. The 15,000 modules are maintained by the community.
Q: Do your biggest contributors agree to programming standards?
A: We are strict about our coding and documentation standards. I make the final decisions about whether to accept a patch. Patches go through a workflow before they reaches me.
Q: What advice would you give to someone trying to attract people to a project?
A: If people can make money through your project, it will grow faster. We built a community on trust and respect; we make decisions on technical merit, not dollars. We have a darwinian model for ideas; bad ideas just die. See what rises to the top. Include it in the next version. Then put it into the core, if it's worth it. The down side is that it's very wasteful. I could tell people "If you do x, it will get in," but I try to get out of the way. People have taken Drupal in sorts of directions, e.g., political campaigns, elearning platforms, etc.
Q: [me] How important are you to Drupal these days?
A: I think I'm more important as the face of Drupal than I used to be. In the governance sense I'm less important. I was the lead developer, the admin for the servers, etc., at the beginning. The "hit by a bus factor" was very risky. Nowadays, I don't write code; I just review code. I still have a lot of work, but it's much more focused on reviewing other people's work and enabling them to make progress. If I were to die, most things would continue to operate. The biggest pain would be in the marketing . There are a lot of leaders in Drupal. One or two people would emerge or be elected to replace what I do.
Q: What's hard for Drupal?
A: One of our biggest risks is to keep nimble and lean. It takes longer to make decisions. We need to continue to evolve the governance model to encourage us to accelerate decision making. Also, we have some real technical issues we need to address, and they're huge projects. Volunteers can only accomplish so much. LSD is perfectly positioned to tackle the hardest problems. If we did it at the pace of the volunteers, it would take years.
Categories: culture, open access Tagged with: berkman • collaboration • drupal • liveblog Date: May 29th, 2012 dw
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[2b2k] Attribution isn't just about credit. It's about networking knowledge.
David Kay pointed out to me a piece by Arthur Brisbane, the NY Times Public Editor. In it Arthur deals with a criticism of a NYT article that failed to acknowledge the work of prior journalists and investigators ("uncredited foundational reporting") that led to the NYT story. For example, Hella Winston at The Jewish Week told Arthur:
The lack of credit stings. "You get so much flak — these are difficult stories," Ms. Winston told me, "People come down on you." The Times couldn't have found all its sources among victims and advocates by itself, she added: "You wouldn't have known they existed, you wouldn't have been able to talk to them, if we hadn't written about them for years."
But, as David Kay points out, this is not just about giving credit. As the piece says about the Poynter Institute's Kelly McBride:
[McBride] struck another theme, echoed by other ethics experts: that providing such credit would have enabled readers to find other sources of information on the subject, especially through online links.
Right. It's about making the place smarter by leaving traceable tracks of the ideas one's post brings together. It's about building networks of knowledge.
Categories: journalism, too big to know Tagged with: 2b2k • attribution • journalism • nyt Date: May 28th, 2012 dw
[2b2k][mesh] Setting the record straight: Overall, the networking of knowledge is awesome
Christine Dobby posted at the Financial Post about my session at the Mesh conference on Thursday in Toronto. She accurately captured two ideas, but missed the bigger point I was trying to make, which — given how well she captured the portion of my comments she blogs about — was undoubtedly my fault. Worse, the post gives incredibly short shrift to two powerful and important sessions that morning by Rebecca MacKinnon and Michael Geist about the threats to Internet freedom…way more important (in my view, natch) than what the FP post leads with.
To judge for yourself, you might want to check the live blogging I did of the sessions by Rebecca and Michael. These were great sessions by leaders in their fields, people who are full-time working on keeping the Internet free and open. They are fighting for us and our Internet. (Likewise true of Andy Carvin, of course, who gave an awesome afternoon session.) What they said seems to me clearly to be so much more important than my recapitulation of a decade-old argument that I think is valid but is not even half the story.
On to moi moi moi.
Christine does a nice job summarizing my summary of the echo chamber argument, and I'm pleased that she followed that up with my use of Reddit as an example of how an echo chamber — a group that shares a set of beliefs, values, and norms — can enable a sympathetic yet critical encounter with those who hold radically different views. But, here are the first two paragraphs of Christine's post about the morning at Mesh:
With the vast sprawl of the web — and in spite of its power to fact check information — stupidity abounds, says David Weinberger.
"One of the bad things we get from networked knowledge is it's easier than ever to be stupid because you can find other people who can reinforce your beliefs," the U.S. academic, Internet commentator and author of the recent Too Big to Know told a Toronto audience Thursday.
True, and I did indeed say that. But I don't want to leave the impression that I'm going around to conferences bashing the Net as a stupidity enabler. In fact, I spent the first half hour at Mesh being interviewed by the inestimable Mathew Ingram about the rise of networked knowledge, about which I am overall quite enthusiastic. The networking of knowledge is enabling knowledge to scale far beyond the limits within which it's operated since it was born 2,500 years ago. It's enabling knowledge to shed some of the blinkered limitations that it had embraced as a virtue. Overall, it's an awesomely good thing, although I did try to point out some of the risks and dangers.
So, it's weird for me to read in the FP that the take-away is that the Net is creating echo chambers that are making us stupider. Indeed, as my remarks on Reddit were intended to indicate, the echo chamber argument can lead us to underestimate the positive importance of groups sharing views and values: conversation and understanding itself require a huge amount of agreement to be productive. As I wrote not too long ago, culture is an echo chamber.
So, put Christine's post together with the post you're currently reading and you'll get a more accurate representation of what I intended to say and certainly what I believe. Sort of like how networked knowledge works, come to think of it :)
More important, go read what Rebecca, Michael, and Andy had to say. (And I also really liked Michael O'Connor Clarke's session, but couldn't live blog it.)
Categories: echo chambers, too big to know Tagged with: 2b2k • echo chamber • mesh Date: May 26th, 2012 dw
[mesh] Michael O'Connor Clarke
Yesterday at the Mesh conference I caught the second half of Michael O'Connor Clarke's presentation, to a packed house, about how not to use social media for marketing. I've known Michael since the Cluetrain days, and it was great to warch him argue against viewing social media as a messaging vehicle.
Michael has long championed understanding the Net as, well, a conversation that needs to be respected. Keeping that conversation as open and vibrant as possible is more important than your business's tawdry ambitions, he says. (I am not just paraphrasing here, but entirely putting words in his mouth.) If your business wants to engage with it — and not every business has to, he says — then it should be engaged with by actual people, with actual names, actual interests, and actual personalities. Completely transparently, of course.
Great teaching, great examples, plus Michael's hilarious. [Michael on twitter]
Categories: cluetrain, marketing, social media Tagged with: cluetrain • marketing • michaelocc • pr • social media Date: May 25th, 2012 dw
Marketing music: Amanda Palmer shows you how it's done.
A few days ago I pointed to Elizabeth 's thread at Reddit where she engaged with the public in a way that everyone who manages customer support, PR, or marketing ought to learn from.
Today, Amanda Palmer posted about her current Kickstarter project, which has raised $855,000 with eight days yet to run. Her goal was $100,000…except in her post she responds with complete frankness (she's AFP, after all) about what her real expectations were. The post is both an explanation and a demonstration of how musicians and theandir audiences can love and support each other.
Categories: business, culture, marketing Tagged with: afp • business • fans • kickstarter • marketing • music • pr • social media Date: May 25th, 2012 dw
[2b2k][mesh] Andy Carvin
Andy Carvin (@acarvin) is being interviewed by Mathew Ingram at Mesh.
He's cut back to hundreds of tweets now, rather than the 1,400 he did at the height of the Arab Spring. He says Twitter shut him down for a bit on Feb. 2 on the day of the Battle of the Camel in Egypt because his volume was so high that he looked like a spammer. He contacted Twitter and they turned him back on in 15 minutes.
He went to NPR at 2006 as "senior strategist," an intentionally vague title. He says his real role is Guinea Pig in Residence. He gets to tinker with tools and methodologies. In Dec. 2010 he began to see tweets from Tunisia from people he knew, about the protest self-immolation of a street vendor. He had a loose network of bloggers he knew over the years, in part from participating in Global Voices. "When something important happens, the network comes back to life." He had an intuition that the protests might expand into a genuine revolution. None of the mainstream media were covering it. [PS: Here's a very cool and useful interactive timeline of Arab Spring, from The Guardian.]
Mathew: The role of social media? Andy: Each country has been very different. "I don't call this the Twitter Revolution or a Social Media Revolution, because I couldn't then look in the eye of someone who lost a family member" engaged in the protests. Facebook was a way to get word out to lots of people. A researcher recently has said that simple information exchange at a place like Facebook was a public act, broadcasting to people, a declaration, helping to nudge the revolution forward. "Because it was not anonymous," notes Andy.
Expats curated news and footage and spread it. "In the last couple of days of the Tunisian revolution, people were using Facebook and Twitter to identify sniper nests." People would say don't go to a particular intersection because of the snipers. It spread from country to country. He says that Libyans were tweeting about the day the revolution should begin. "It was literally like they were using Outlook appointments."
How did he curate the twitterers? He kept lists in each country. It's probably about 500 people. But a total of about 2,000 people are in a loose network of folks who will respond to his questions and requests (e.g., for translations).
Mathew: You weren't just retweeting. Andy: Yes. I didn't know anyone in Libya. I didn't know who to trust. I started asking around if anyone knows Libyan expats. I picked up the phone/skype. I got leads. At the beginning I was following maybe 10 people. And then it scaled up. When the videos came out the mainstream media wouldn't run them because they weren't sure they were from Libya. But Andy tweeted them, noting that there's uncertainty, and asking for help. A Libyan would tweet back that they recognize the east Libyan accent, or someone recognized a Libyan court house which Google images then confirmed.
Mathew: Were you inherently skeptical? Andy: I was inherently curious. I compiled source lists, seeing who's following people I trusted, seeing how many followers and how long they've tweeted, and how they are talking to one another. Eventually I'd see that some are married, or are related. Their relationships made it more likely they were real.
Mathew: You were posting faster than news media do. They do more verification. Andy: Which is why I get uncomfortable when people prefer my twitter feed as a newswire. It's not a newswire. It's a newsroom. It's where I'm trying to separate fact from fiction, interacting with people. That's a newsroom.
Mathew: You were doing what I was talking with David W [that's me!] about: using a network of knowledge. Andy: A NYT reporter tweeted that he was trying to figure out what a piece of ordinance was. Andy tweeted it and one of his followers identified it precisely. It took 45 mins. The guy who figured it out was a 15 year old kid in Georgia who likes watching the Military channel.
Sometimes Andy gives his followers exercises. E.g., his followers picked apart a photo that was clearly photoshopped. What else did they find in it? They found all sorts of errors, including that the president of Yemen had two ears on one side. It becomes an ad hoc world wide social experiment in Internet literacy. It's network journalism, collaborative journalism, process journalism. Andy says he doesn't like the term "curator," but there are times when that's what he's doing. There are other times when he's focused on realtime verification. He likes the term "dj" better. He's getting samples from all over, and his challenge is to "spin it out there in a way that makes people want to dance."
[It opens up to audience questions]
Q: Are people more comfortable talking to you as a foreign journalist?
Yes. Early on, people vouched for me. But once I hit my stride, people knew me before their revolution began and I'd be in touch with them. It's a mutually beneficial relationship.
Q: How should journalists use Twitter?
They have to carve out time to do it. It helps to be ADHD. And when you're on Twitter, you are who you are. When I'm on Twitter, I'm the guy who has a family and works in his yard. And you have to be prepared to be accountable in real time. When I screw up, my followers tell me. E.g., in Libya there was a video of an injured girl being prepared for surgery. I wrote that and tweeted it. Within 30 seconds a number of people tweeted back to me that she was dead and was being prepared for burial. Andy retweeted what he had been told.
Q [me]: How do we scale you so that there are more of you? And tweeting 1400 times a day isn't sustainable, so is there a way to scale in that direction as well?
Andy: Every time I felt "Poor me" I remembered that I was sitting on a nice NPR roof deck, tweeting. And when I go home, at 6pm I am offline. I fix dinner, I give the kids a bath, I read to them. If it's a busy time, I'll go back online for an hour.
He would tweet when he went offline for bits during Arab Spring, and would explain why, in part so people would understand that he's not in the Middle East and not in danger.
About scaling: A lot of what I do is teachable. The divide between those in journalism who use social media and those who don't is about how comfortable they are being transparent. Also, if you're responsible for a beat, it's understandable why you haven't tried it. Editors should think about giving journalists 20% time to cultivate their sources online, building their network, etc. You get it into people's job descriptions. You figure it out.
Q: [mathew] On the busy days, you needed someone to curate you.
That began to happen when I brought on a well-known Saudi Blogger [couldn't get his name]. He was curating user-generated content from Syria. He was curating me, but his sources were better than mine, so I began retweeting him.
Q: How do you address the potential for traumatic stress, which you can suffer from even if you're not in the field?
Andy: In Feb. I learned the term "vicarious PTSD." The signs were beginning. The first videos from Libya and Bahrain were very graphic. But I have a strong support network on line and with my family. I feel it's important to talk about this on Twitter. If I see a video of a dead child, I'll vent about, sometimes in ways that as a journalist are not appropriate, but are appropriate as a human. If I ever become like a TV detective who can look at a body on the ground and crack jokes, then I shouldn't be in this business.
Andy: I do retweet disturbing stuff. The old media were brought into homes, families. So they had to be child-friendly. But with social media, the readers has to decide to be on Twitter and then to follow me. I'll sometimes retweet something and say that people shouldn't open it, but it needs to be out there. There have been some videos I haven't shared: sexual assaults, executions, things involving kids. I draw the line.
[Loved it loved it loved it. Andy perfectly modeled a committed journalist who remains personal, situated, transparent, and himself.]
Categories: culture, journalism, liveblog Tagged with: 2b2k • acarvin • citizen journalism • twitter Date: May 24th, 2012 dw
[mesh] Michael Geist on the emergence of the Internet constituency
Michael Geist (@mgeist), a Canadian hero, is giving at talk at Mesh.
When SOPA was introduced, it seemed likely to pass. Bipartistan love fest. But then the Internet fought back, from the Free Bieber campaign to online petitions. The number one source of info about SOPA was not the NYT or the Washington Post but a TechDirt blog post. (As an aside, someone launched a take down notice of this blog post, so it didn't even appear in he Google search engine for a month.) The Reddit community was very active. E.g., when GoDaddy was listed as a supporter of SOPA, Reddit started a campaign to transfer domains from there. GoDaddy changed its mind. The big moment was when Wikipedia blacked out its English-language home page. That page was accessed 162M times that day — a striking ability to raise awareness. Other sites blacked out as well. The effect was dramatic: Within a day Congressional support swung.
For months people have been trying to figure out the "SOPA Story." How did the number one legislative effort from the number one lobby go down in flames?
In Canada we can go back to Sam Bulte. The rise of groups lobbying for rights. The rise of social networks. The use of social media by rights-favoring politicians. So, in a sense, SOPA is nothing new here in Canada.
Blackouts aren't new either: 1996 "computer decency act" protest. NewZealand's protest. Italian-language Wikipedia blacked out last year.
So, in some ways the SOPA Story was nothing new. What's new is what's happening after SOPA…the enabling coming to people who think they now can truly affect what happens online. E.g., ACTA protests in Europe. Polish MPs donning Guy Fawkes masks. The dominoes have started to fall against ACTA. Now Neelie Kroes has said that ACTA is all but dead.
Likewise, the Research Works Act tried to scale back access to publicly-funded research. The Net fought back, withdrawing support from Elsevier, the key lobbyist for the RWA. Elsevier has withdrawn support for RWA and there is a petition now to go the other way. [SIGN THE PETITION]
In Canada, Proecting Children from Internet Predators Act — a 100-age bill that contains the word "children" only in its title. The Internet fought back. E.g., TellVic. It has been withdrawn, although temporarily.
The Net is spreading word. E.g., Kony 2012 spread around the world. There's debate about whether it has had any effect, but the UN from people on the ground is that it has made a difference. Likewise, Trayvon Martin's story was told through social media. Or, now, the Quebec student initiatives that started with just a few people but has grown because of social media.
LEssons: Don't underestimate the power of social media to bring prople together to have a voice on issues. Second, SOPA happened only 18 months. We're seeing a dramatic shift. The full consequences have not yet played out.
The third lesson is pessimistic. If this is the year that the Internet fought back, the battle may have been won but the fight continues. E.g., CETA, Trans Pacific Partnership (copyright tyranny), etc. There are reasons for optimism, but we have a long struggle ahead.
Q: How long are we going to have to keep fighting our governments? When do we stop having to argue that social interests take priority over business interests?
A: E.g., this week public pressure worked on an act that had been given to the telcos for prior consultation. E.g., look at how the copyright bill has changed: changes to fair dealing, cap on statutory damages, consumer exceptions, etc. None of that was there originally. More politicians get it. But the content industries are powerful. The Internet is becoming an increasingly powerful voice.
Q: ICANN works on a multistakeholder model and has a limited mandate about setting policy. Some want to relegate that authority to the UN that runs it as a think tank. Which way is better?
A: The ITU has been pushing for governance space for then years. At ICANN some stakeholders count more than others. If the UN does it, repressive countries get the keys to the Net. I don't see the ITU play happening.
Q: With SOPA there was a lot of groupthink. It lacked subtlety and nuance.
A: We've had 30 years of lobbying by rights holders with a total lack of nuance: "It's theft. It's piracy. Shut it down." Not reflective of what's actually happening. So, yes, some are slackivists just clicking on a Like button. But they are more informed than the general populace on these issues. I did a talk for 8th grade students, and almost all of them had heard of SOPA and Kony, and most knew more about Kony than they knew before March of this year.
Categories: censorship, copyright, liveblog, net neutrality, policy Tagged with: canada • copyleft • copyright • mesh • sopa Date: May 24th, 2012 dw


Google researchers developed a psychedelic sticker that, when placed in an unrelated image, tricks deep learning systems into classifying the image as a toaster. According to a recently submitted research paper about the attack, this adversarial patch is "scene-independent," meaning someone could deploy it "without prior knowledge of the lighting conditions, camera angle, type of classifier being attacked, or even the other items within the scene." It's also easily accessible, given it can be shared and printed from the internet.
A YouTube video uploaded by Tom Brown—a team member on Google Brain, the company's deep learning research team—shows how the adversarial patch works using a banana. An image of a banana on a table is correctly classified by the VGG16 neural network as a banana, but when the psychedelic toaster sticker is placed next to it, the network classifies the image as a toaster.
While there are a number of ways researchers have suckered machine learning algorithms into seeing something that is not in fact there, this method is particularly consequential given how easy it is to carry out, and how inconspicuous it is. "Even if humans are able to notice these patches, they may not understand the intent of the patch and instead view it as a form of art," the researchers wrote.
Currently, tricking a machine into thinking a banana is a toaster isn't exactly a menace to society. But as our world begins to increasingly lean on image recognition technology to operate, these types of easily executable methods can wreak havoc. Most notably, with the roll-out of self-driving cars. These machines rely on image recognition software to understand and interact with their surroundings. Things could get dangerous if thousands of pounds of metal rolling down the highway can only see toasters.


> and jigdp-lite2win. I am using Win98.
> "Aaargh - not all files could be downloaded. This should not happen!
> Depending on the problem, it may help to restart the download."
> are downloaded over and over (eg: policy.pdf.gz).
> 83 files are still missing.
> 22rev5-i386-binary-1_NONUS.iso" and burn the cd? Would that work?
You could rename and burn it, and the resulting CD would be readable.


text:
There Are Just 4 Ways to Earn Startup Funding in 2016
Adam Rowe July 17th 2016 10:33 am
At TechCrunch, Shabih Rizvi and Muzzammil Zaveri of KPCB have recently taken a look at the universe of early-stage startups, all of which want one big thing: Money.
Getting startup funding as a tiny or even barely existent business is a massive chore, but in the tech community of 2016, it can be broken down into just four different methods. And the one that everyone thinks of first — knocking on the door of your friendly neighborhood venture capitalist — is actually the last option you should try.
1: Bootstrapping
Pros: You retain maximum ownership. Cons: It's likely unsustainable due to your eventual growth.
2: Incubators & Accelerators
Depending on your (lack of) experience or opportunities, joining one of these might be the right decision. You'll have more support, along with the accountability to prove you've got a viable business.
3: Online Platforms
Products that need feedback or might have a strong demand will do well to find an online fund-raising platform. The crowdfunding model will draw in both regular joes and international angel investors.
4: Venture Capitalists
Try this one last: If you've succeeded at any of the first three ways to snag startup funding, VCs will actually trust you to know what you're doing. The grassroots approach can be hit or miss, but the VC approach is even tougher.
Other tidbits of advice from the article: "Don't worry too much about today's macro environment," "stay focused on customers and users," and "know that VCs invest in people, not pitch decks." Good luck.
Adam Rowe
@AdamRRowe
Adam is a writer at Tech.co and has worked as a tech writer, blogger and copy editor for more than a decade. He's also a Forbes Contributor on the publishing industry, for which he was named a Digital Book World 2018 award finalist. His work has appeared in publications including Popular Mechanics and IDG Connect, and he has an art history book on 1970s sci-fi coming out from Abrams Books in 2022. In the meantime, he's hunting own the latest news on VPNs, POS systems, and the future of tech.


text:
The Godfathers new album and UK tour!
Legendary British rock n' roll band The Godfathers explode into action in 2013 with the much-anticipated release of a brand new album entitled, Jukebox Fury, their first full-length studio release since 1995 – and a 23 date March UK tour with punk icons, The Stranglers. Jukebox Fury will be released on the band's own Godfathers' record label distributed by Cargo Records on 25th March 2013.
The Godfathers were formed in 1985 by brothers Peter Coyne (vocals) & Chris Coyne (bass) from the ashes of their previous band, The Sid Presley Experience. They toured extensively and earned a reputation for their electrifying brand of primal rock n' roll and incendiary live shows around the world. The Godfathers unleashed the storming rocker 'Birth School Work Death' as their debut single on Epic Records in late 1987 and scored a US Billboard top 40 hit. The classic Birth School Work Death album released in 1988 followed and was celebrated with extensive tours of the UK, Europe & USA.The Godfathers reformed in 2008 to promote the re-issue of their seminal debut albumHit By Hit with live shows around the world, and celebrated their 25th anniversary in 2010 with a live CD/DVD compilation entitled, Shot Live At The 100 Club. The Godfathers' influence has grown steadily in recent years with American stadium rockers Local H and Spoon releasing cover versions of their classics and The Mars Volta citing the band's trademark primal rock n' roll sound as a major influence on their recently released Noctourniquet album.
The Godfathers will be releasing a digital single, 'I Can't Sleep Tonight' on 12thFebruary 2013. The single is The Godfathers' tribute to The Ramones. As Peter Coyne explains, "They were a massive influence on myself & brother Chris in our teenage years & The Godfathers would not have been the kind of group we became without their guiding light. The Godfathers supported The Ramones on a 3 week tour of Europe back in the day & Joey used to come & see us every time we played NYC, so 'I Can't Sleep Tonight' really does come from our hearts."
The Stranglers & The Godfathers 'Feel It Live' tour dates:
Friday 1st March – Edinburgh, Picture House
Saturday 2nd March – Glasgow, Academy
Monday 4th March – Aberdeen, Garage
Tuesday 5th March – Dundee, Fat Sams
Thursday 7th March – Liverpool, O2 Academy
Friday 8th March – Lincoln, Engine Shed
Saturday 9th March – Leeds, O2 Academy
Monday 11th March – Leamington Spa, Assembly
Tuesday 12th March – Guildford, G Live
Thursday 14th March – Brighton, Dome
Friday 15th March – London, Roundhouse
Saturday 16th March – Birmingham, O2Academy
Monday 18th March – Oxford, O2 Academy
Tuesday 19th March – Nottingham, Rock City
Thursday 21st March – Folkestone, Leas Cliff Hall
Friday 22nd March – Cambridge, Corn Exchange
Saturday 23rd March – Bristol, O2 Academy
Monday 25th March – Norwich, UEA
Tuesday 26th March – Carlisle, Sands Centre
Friday 29th March – Newcastle, O2 Academy
Saturday 30th March – Manchester, Academy
Sunday 31st March – Croydon – Fairfield Halls


With the January transfer set to open for business, managers are getting ready to strengthen their squads ahead of the second half of the season, so we'll bring you all the latest news and gossip. Today, Arsenal are linked with Moussa Sissoko….
Arsene Wenger is eyeing a move for €20m-rated French international midfielder Moussa Sissoko but Newcastle United are expected to reject our opening offer, according to reports.
Our season has once again been blighted by a lengthy injury list and our options in the middle of the park are thin on the ground with Jack Wilshere out until March with an ankle ligament injury, while Mikel Arteta and Aaron Ramsey are also on the sidelines.
Many fans are hoping that Wenger will bring in a defensive-minded midfielder this winter to act as a long-term replacement for Arteta after he failed to land any of his reported targets in the summer, but it appears the boss may instead look to sign a dynamic all-round midfielder who could fill several roles.
Sissoko has emerged as a key target in recent weeks and French-based newspaper, L'Equipe, are reporting today that Wenger is keen to bring the 25-year-old to the Emirates as he looks to add some muscle to his midfield in January.
However, the news comes as the Independent newspaper claims that Newcastle United are set to reject Arsenal's opening £9m (€11.5m) offer.
The Magpies are under no pressure to sell the French international as he's contracted at St James' Park until 2019, and it's understood it would take a bid in the region of €20m (£15.5m) in order for them to contemplate cashing in.
It remains to be seen whether Wenger will be willing to go that high but Sissoko is likely to be open to the move if he does after recently admitting that he wants to play in the Champions League, while he also revealed that he supported Arsenal as a child.
Sissoko would be a useful addition to the squad and his versatility would come in handy considering how many injuries we seem to suffer. However, I'd personally prefer to see the money spent on a specialist defensive midfielder as I think it would make a huge difference to the team if we had an established holding player to protect the back-four.


Murray is a fourth generation descendent from David Bishell and father of Scott and Simon. He has endured both the good and the tough times on the land that seem to be an indelible part of agricultural business. During this time Murray has built up a wealth of knowledge – gained in more than 50 years' experience of working the land.
Murray is a pioneer and an innovator. In partnership with his late wife Diana, they seized the opportunity in the 1980's to diversify Caythorpe into cherries and viticulture alongside sheep, process cropping and cereal production. Today Murray keeps a keen eye over the farm and his knowledge and past experience prove invaluable to both Scott and Simon.
Murray still lives on Caythorpe – a unique situation where all direct family members reside on the farm.
Scott is a fifth generation descendant from David Bishell and is proud to continue the tradition of mixed cropping at Caythorpe. Upon completing tertiary studies in commerce, Scott travelled overseas and worked on a number of intensive cropping farms, broadening his knowledge base before returning to manage the crop and stock operation at Caythorpe.
Scott is proficient at introducing new technology and farming techniques, but still respects the traditional values that has seen Caythorpe prosper for more than 130 years. Scott has gained a reputation for being a renowned producer of lucerne and meadow hay. Once a common sight throughout the region, lucerne is now only grown on a handful of local properties and his expertise in this area has resulted in Caythorpe lucerne being a preferred product for many buyers. He is also experienced in all aspects of viticulture and assists in management of the vineyards.
Scott, wife Rachel and their young son live on the Caythorpe property.
Simon is a fifth generation descendant from David Bishell and is the Caythorpe viticulturist. He has overall responsibility for management, growing and supply of fruit for the Caythorpe brand and several other prominent Marlborough wineries. After completing tertiary studies in viticulture, oenology and commerce, Simon was awarded the title of both Marlborough and NZ Young Viticulturist of the Year in 2008. He is a current board member of Marlborough Winegrowers Association, director of Wine Marlborough and sits on the Viticulture Industry Partnership Advisory Group of the NZ Primary ITO.
Simon also oversees cherry production at Caythorpe. From a young age he was always willing to lend a hand - especially during harvest - and now utilises 20+ years' experience he has gained to operate and manage the orchard and packhouse facilities. He is proud to be one of the few remaining orchardists in Marlborough.
Simon and wife Sara live in the distinctive Caythorpe homestead that has been the family home to three generations preceding them.
Jeremy is a man of many talents. A nationally recognised multisport athlete, adventure racer and part owner of Adam & Eve cider, Jeremy is also a renown winemaker and is responsible for the Caythorpe portfolio of wines. He began his association with the Bishell family 15 years ago and has since worked for several iconic Marlborough wineries that have sourced grapes from Caythorpe.
Jeremy has intimate knowledge of the vineyard, and his ability to produce fruit driven wines of exceptional quality has resulted in many accolades throughout his career - including the prestigious award of Champion Wine of Show at the 2017 Air New Zealand Wine Awards. We feel very fortunate to have a winemaker of such ability part of the Caythorpe team.


The Threat Modeling Tool is a core element of the Microsoft Security Development Lifecycle (SDL). It allows software architects to identify and mitigate potential security issues early, when they are relatively easy and cost-effective to resolve. As a result, it greatly reduces the total cost of development. Also, we designed the tool with non-security experts in mind, making threat modeling easier for all developers by providing clear guidance on creating and analyzing threat models.
Visit the Threat Modeling Tool to get started today!
To better help you formulate these kinds of pointed questions, Microsoft uses the STRIDE model, which categorizes different types of threats and simplifies the overall security conversations.
Proceed to Threat Modeling Tool Mitigations to learn the different ways you can mitigate these threats with Azure.


text:
Q: Highlight cells in one column based on date in adjacent column How do I change the cell fill color of the cells in a certain column when it is 16 days past the dates in the adjacent column?
The cell should only change color if the cell does not have any text in it.
eg. Cell E1 should change to blue fill if today's date is 16 days past the date in cell D1 AND cell E1 is blank (there is no text entered in this cell).
In the image, cell E1 needs to be highlighted blue as there is no text in it and it is beyond 16 days past the date in cell D1.

A: *

*How to change the cell fill color of the cells in a certain column when it is 16 days past the dates in the adjacent column. The cell should only change color if the cell does not have any text in it. eg. Cell E1 should change to Blue fill if today's date is 16 days past the date in cell D1.

with this one, you can try to use =now() in one cell once done,  subtract that to your your cell e1, you can use conditional formatting tool on the top side of your menubar in excel. (home > Style) go to conditional formatting> highlight cell > more rule > use formula.

A: here's the sample one.
on your cell a1 , add this formula =e1-(date(year(now()),month(now()),day(now()))
once done, use the  conditional formatting to hightlight the cell e1 when value of  a1 =>16 days.
go to conditional formatting> highlight cell > greater than option, a new field will show, highlight the cell a1 then add > 16.
make sure that you are on cell e1 when doing the conditional formatting.
dont forget to tag this up if this helps you :)

A: I used =AND((TODAY()-(INDIRECT("RC[-1]",0))>16), ($E1="")) in the conditional formatting menu and then used the drag option. It works!

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


Doggy paddle is a must at this popular event.
Well this could be your pooch's perfect day. Dogs are being welcomed back for the annual Sandford Parks Lido Dog Swim this year.
After a successful event last year the event is back for 2017.
Four-legged friends are welcome at the pool in October as the season comes to an end.
Humans, as well as animals, will be allowed to swim on the day which will mark the closure of the lido for the winter.
People can swim during the open session between 2pm and 3.30pm on Sunday, October 15.
However, from 3.30pm until 4.30pm the rules against 'heavy petting' go out the window as the dogs take over.


Ayurveda is an ancient Indian healing art, which is one of the oldest systems of medicine! In Sanskrit it means "The Science of Life." Ultimately, it is centred on the idea that our bodies, minds and souls have to be in harmony for us to be healthy. We are born with a unique 'constitution' of energy and the idea is to keep this balanced. Ayurveda works out how to do this, based on our unique mix of the five basic elements, and how these combine to make up our 'life force' energy – called a dosha. The underlying belief is that our doshas have to be in balance for us to stay healthy, and this is achieved through ensuring balance in life, via our diets, lifestyle and use of herbs and essential oils. Ultimately, it is a holistic approach, similarly to Aromatherapy. Given the similarities, the two modalities go hand-in-hand. So, what better way to stay balanced than to combine the two? Essential oils are often used in Ayurveda, so we thought it would be nice to share a little bit about which essential oils can help harmonise each dosha!
According to this science, we are all a unique balance of the elements – Space, Air, Water, Fire and Earth. Ayurveda says that these elements have to stay in harmony for us to stay healthy, and that a lack or an excess in any one (or more) can cause imbalance and dis-ease. These elements are defined in three energy styles – and these are called 'doshas'.
Whilst our constitution can lean towards one more than another, we do have elements of all three within us. The cause of disease, according to this system of medicine, is when there is a strong excess or deficiency of one of these, which is different to our innate constitution. The whole aim of Ayurveda is to balance doshas to rebalance health.
Whilst we are a combination of all three doshas, there is usually a tendency toward one or two. Here are some descriptions of each type below, so you can try and see which you resonate with most! If you want to get more of a breakdown, look online as there are some fun online quizzes you can do, to find your unique mix!
Vata's attributes are dry, light, cold, rough, subtle, mobile, and clear.
A person who is predominantly Vata is generally quick, flexible and creative, and often slim build. Mentally, they are excitable and emotional. They hate routine, don't like planning and can be forgetful (think air and space elements!), though are usually alert and active! They can feel ungrounded, and lack confidence, and in an imbalanced state can become fearful and anxious.
Vata controls basic body functions. Physically, they like astringent foods (e.g. salad and raw foods), but are balanced by warm, cooked, sweet, sour and salty foods. Vata are susceptible to 'air' element illnesses, such as pneumonia, as well as arthritis, skin problems, headaches and constipation. They sleep very lightly, and things like travel, noise, drugs, sugar and alcohol can imbalance them.
They are balanced by water and heat - steam baths and massages are helpful, aromatherapy wise! Also, keeping warm, calm, having routine, getting rest and avoiding cold foods can help balance Vata.
Pitta attributes are oily, hot, light, mobile, and liquid.
A Pitta person is generally warm, sharp and penetrating! Pitta's nature is fiery. They are alert, intelligent, and always very driven and purposeful, but when imbalanced, they can become angry, aggressive and lose their temper. They are often leaders, and planners and are very strong-minded.
Physically, they are average height and build, often quite muscular, with soft, copper skin and freckles. They have good digestion and appetite, having a preference for hot, spicy food, but they are balanced by sweet, bitter and astringent tastes. They sleep well and are generally warm! They do have a low tolerance for hard physical work, sunlight and heat. Imbalances they often suffer include fevers, inflammation and irritation, for example heart-burn, prickly heat, sunburn.
Pitta are balanced by coolness and should avoid heavy oils, choosing lighter, sweeter oils, such as Coconut oil. They are also balanced by avoiding excessive heat, limiting salt and eating cooling, non-spicy foods and exercising during the cooler part of the day.
Kapha's attributes are heavy, slow, cold, oily, slimy (smooth), dense, soft, stable, cloudy, sticky.
A Kapha type is strong, with endurance. They are very loving, sweet, stable and grounded, calm, tolerant and forgiving. They might be slow to understand things, but they have excellent memory. In their imbalanced state they can become possessive and attached. They hate stress, love routine and make great team players.
Physically, they have large eyes, thick skin and well-developed, heavy-set bodies, with a slow metabolism, and they shun exercise. They sleep well, and deeply, and can be seen as lethargic or lazy in their imbalanced state! They love sweet, salty and oily foods, but do better with bitter, astringent and pungent foods. Imbalances they suffer with include watery issues like sinusitis, mucous issues, water retention, headaches, excess weight and flu and immune system challenges.
Kaphas are balanced by stimulating oils, as well as exercise, avoiding naps, and eating light, dry food.
Which essential oils suit your dosha?
Given the descriptions, we can now have a little look at the types of essential oils that might support each dosha! Then, you can get blending using our suggestions. Remember, you always generally need to pick the balancing options for your dosha type – i.e. if you are a hot Pitta, you need cooling to balance yourself!
It's also worth noting that each dosha is associated with a season - Vata with Autumn and Winter, Kapha with Spring and Pitta with Summer - so you can also choose blends that will restore overall balance in each of the three seasons.
Carrier oils that are good for Vata include rich, warming oils like Avocado oil or – as they do well with seeds – Sesame oil! Remember that Vata are better for steam, too!
Add a beautiful blend to a warming bath and enjoy some relaxation time – mix 2 drops Bergamot, 2 drops Geranium and 2 drops Patchouli in 15ml Bath Oil and add to your bath water. Breathe in the beautiful aromas and allow yourself some calmness to ground you.
Diffuse a nice, grounding meditative blend of 3 drops Neroli, 2 drops Frankincense and 1 drop Myrrh in an aromatherapy diffuser or candle burner, and make some space to sit in the stillness.
Try a grounding self-massage, with a beautiful blend of 3 drops Rose, 2 drops Clary Sage and 1 drop Ylang Ylang mixed in 5ml of Avocado oil and 10ml Sesame oil. Spend some time getting back in touch with your body, massaging the oil into your skin gently in the direction towards your heart.
Grounding on the go – why not make a pulse-point rollette to carry with you for when you need balancing? Mix 5ml Avocado oil and 5ml Sesame oil with 2 drops Sandalwood and 1 drop Lavender oil.
Carrier oils that are good for Pitta include light, cooling base oils like Coconut oil or Olive oil!
Feeling a Pitta imbalance? Diffuse a cooling blend of 2 drops Chamomile, 2 drops Rose and 2 drops Lemongrass for up to 10 minutes at a time.
Need to cool down post-exercise? Mix up a massage blend with 3 drops Peppermint, 2 drops Lavender and 1 drop Yarrow in 15ml of melted Extra Virgin Coconut Butter and rub into your whole body as a post-exercise cooling ritual. You might also like to consider a cold stone therapy massage!
Try a cooling spritz – mix 15 drops Spearmint, 10 drops Lemon and 5 drop Rose in a spray bottle with 100ml of either water or Orange Flower Hydrolat. Spritz over yourself as necessary to help keep cool! If you're using water as your spritz base you can use our new Polysorbate 20 to solubilise the essential oils.
Carrier oils that are good for Kapha include 'Tri-Doshic' (all dosha) suitable oils like Coconut oil or Shea Butter.
A great way to stimulate Kapha is with a nice massage! Add 3 drops Grapefruit, 2 drops Juniperberry and 1 drop Bitter Orange to 15ml melted Extra Virgin Coconut Butter and massage firmly and quickly into your skin to stimulate lymph.
A lovely immunity-boosting diffuser blend to warm and stimulate Kapha is 3 drops Bitter Orange, 2 drops Cinnamon, and 1 drop Ginger.
Pulse points – try an 'on the go' pulse point rollette to keep you motivated during the day! Add 1 drop Bergamot and 1 drop Grapefruit to 10ml Olive oil and apply to pulse points as needed!
Overall, when you're blending, remember that this ancient healing paradigm is something that can help you to get creative in choosing different essential oils. If you are drawn to a particular oil, it can be because you are imbalanced and you crave more of your dosha style – e.g. Pitta might crave heat but be better from cool - so just be aware that it may even be the opposite that you need! Of course, that's not to say don't follow your intuition on prescribing yourself oils – I'm a big believer that the body knows what it wants!
Now you know more about Ayurveda, some different oils might come up in your thinking - and hopefully the information here will help you 'think outside the box' when selecting your essential oils.
Why not try our oils and give our Ayurvedic Aromatherapy a go? Here's to happy, healthy blending!


This tutorial explains how to take and restore the incremental backup in Linux with practical examples. Learn what the incremental backup is and how to create it in the Linux with the tar command.
Incremental backup is the advanced type of backup. In it, only the data that is created or modified since the last backup has taken, is backed up. It not only save disk space but also reduce the time taken in backup process. Let's take an example.
A disk, that contains 60 GB data, is backed up daily. Suppose data writing speed in backup process is 1 GB per minute and 1 GB data is modified daily. If we take the full backup, total 375 GB data will be written in total 375 minutes. But if we take the incremental backup, only 65 GB data will be written in 65 minutes.
How to take the incremental backup in Linux?
In Linux, several utilities exist to take the incremental backup. Among those, the command line utility tar stands at the top place. It functions as a standalone utility for creating and restoring the backups. In this tutorial, we will use this utility to create and restore the incremental backup.
For this tutorial, I assume that you know what the tar command is and how it works in Linux. To learn the tar command from scratch, you can use this tutorial.
It explains how to use the tar command in the Linux with practical examples.
Access a root shell and create a directory named practicelab. In this directory create two another directories named; backup and restore. In the directory backup, create few files and a sub-directory with a file.
Following figure illustrates this setup.
An incremental backup always starts with a full backup. Once the full backup is created, it is used in all incremental backups to compare and detect the changes.
Technically while creating the full backup; the tar creates a snapshot file which contains a list of all files and directories that have been written to the backup. Next time, it checks this file to find out what files and directories have been changed since the last backup, and writes only those changed files and directories.
tar: - This is the main command.
-czvg: - These are the options. These options are used to create backup, compress backup with the gzip utility, display progress of backup process and use the snapshot file to identify the modified files respectively.
snapshot-file: - Name and location of the file that stores the list of files and directories which are added in the archive. You can use any descriptive name for this file. To store this file in other directory except the current directory, specify its full path. For example, to use the file name backup-list and store this file in /root directory, specify name and location as /root/backup-list.
-f: - This is also an option. It specifies the name and location of the backup file. Backup file is also known as archive or tarball. An archive or a tarball is the collection of multiple files and directories that are grouped together as a single file in backup process.
backup.tar.gz: - This is the name of archive or tarball file. Just like the snapshot file, you can use any name or location to store this file.
backup: - This is the name of directory which files and directories we want to add in archive. You can specify single file, multiple files, single directory or multiple directories here. If a directory is specified, all of its files and sub-directories will be added in archive.
Once full backup is created, you can verify the backup file with following command.
This command lists the files and directories stored in the archive file backup.tar.gz.
To create incremental backup, same command and options are used. While creating the backup, the snapshot file is used to determine whether it's a full backup or an incremental backup. If the snapshot file exists, it's an incremental backup otherwise it's a full backup.
While creating incremental backups, same snapshot file and different backup file are used each time.
Since a snapshot file is used to identify what is changed, same snapshot file must be used each time.
Since what is changed is stored in backup file, different backup file must be used each time.
To understand it practically, let's create a new file in the directory backup and run following command.
Notice, this is the same command which we used to create the full backup except the name of backup file. This command uses the snapshot-file to determine what have been already backed up from the directory backup. If it finds any new file or directory, it adds that file or directory in the backup file 1-backup.tar.gz.
Let's modify a file from the directory backup and run above command again. Use new backup file to store the change.
Same as above command, this command also uses the snapshot file to find the new or modified files. If it detects any new or modified file, write that file in the backup file 2-backup.tar.gz.
To view what have been stored in both backup files, you can use following commands.
Following figure illustrates above exercise.
Incremental backups are restored in the same order in which they were created. The full backup file is restored at the first place. After it, all sequential files are restored till the last backup file.
To restore the backup file, use the options -xvf. For example, to restore the backup files created in preceding example, use following commands.
By default, tar command restores the backup in the directory from which it is executed. For example, if we execute above commands from the directory /home/test, backup will be restored in the directory /home/test. Or if we run the above commands from the directory /root/practicelab/restore, backup will be restored in the directory /root/practicelab/restore.
In order to restore the backup in the correct directory, we must have to be in the correct directory before executing the tar command. For example, if we want to restore the backup in directory /var, we have to change current directory to /var before executing the tar command.
Alternatively, we can specify the restore location with the option -C. For example, following commands restore backup in the directory /root/practicelab/restore in preceding example.
Since above commands use absolute path to specify the both source (location where the backup file is stored) and destination (location where you want to restore the backup), you can run these commands from any directory.


text:
package org.finra.herd.service.systemjobs;

import java.util.List;

import org.quartz.DisallowConcurrentExecution;
import org.quartz.JobDataMap;
import org.quartz.JobExecutionContext;
import org.quartz.JobExecutionException;
import org.slf4j.Logger;
import org.slf4j.LoggerFactory;
import org.springframework.beans.factory.annotation.Autowired;
import org.springframework.stereotype.Component;
import org.springframework.util.Assert;
import org.springframework.util.CollectionUtils;

import org.finra.herd.model.api.xml.Parameter;
import org.finra.herd.model.dto.ConfigurationValue;
import org.finra.herd.service.NotificationMessagePublishingService;

/**
 * The notification message publishing job.
 */
@Component(JmsPublishingJob.JOB_NAME)
@DisallowConcurrentExecution
public class JmsPublishingJob extends AbstractSystemJob
{
    public static final String JOB_NAME = "jmsPublishing";

    private static final Logger LOGGER = LoggerFactory.getLogger(JmsPublishingJob.class);

    @Autowired
    private NotificationMessagePublishingService notificationMessagePublishingService;

    @Override
    public String getCronExpression()
    {
        return configurationHelper.getProperty(ConfigurationValue.JMS_PUBLISHING_JOB_CRON_EXPRESSION);
    }

    @Override
    public JobDataMap getJobDataMap()
    {
        return getJobDataMapWithoutParameters();
    }

    @Override
    public void validateParameters(List<Parameter> parameters)
    {
        // This system job accepts no parameters.
        Assert.isTrue(CollectionUtils.isEmpty(parameters), String.format("\"%s\" system job does not except parameters.", JOB_NAME));
    }

    @Override
    protected void executeInternal(JobExecutionContext context) throws JobExecutionException
    {
        // Log that the system job is started.
        LOGGER.info("Started system job. systemJobName=\"{}\"", JOB_NAME);

        // Publish all notification messages stored in the database queue.
        int count = 0;
        try
        {
            while (notificationMessagePublishingService.publishOldestNotificationMessageFromDatabaseQueue())
            {
                count++;
            }
        }
        catch (Exception e)
        {
            // Log the exception.
            LOGGER.error("Failed to publish a notification message. systemJobName=\"{}\"", JOB_NAME, e);
        }

        // Log the number of notification messages successfully published.
        LOGGER.info("Published {} notification messages. systemJobName=\"{}\"", Integer.toString(count), JOB_NAME);

        // Log that the system job is ended.
        LOGGER.info("Completed system job. systemJobName=\"{}\"", JOB_NAME);
    }
}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


Begin the Cashel Walk opposite the Zetland Hotel, passing the community centre and hand-ball alley on your left. The rhododendrons dotted here among the hawthorns, willows and holly are evidence of a nearby 'big house'. Rhododendrons were widely planted in the gardens of such houses in the last century and now they are self-seeding into the surrounding countryside and becoming a problematic weed. Both of the nearby hotels had their origin as big houses in the last century.
Note the first turn on the left at about 500m – this is where our walk will turn upon returning from the shore. Beyond these hedgerows the road comes onto open grazed rocky heath land typical of many parts of Connemara. Dwarf gorse, which flowers in August, is common on the drier rocky areas. The larger European Gorse, part of the hedgerows and strewn haphazardly about the place, flowers yellow from May onwards.
Áird on the far side of the bay.
After absorbing sufficient sea views and air, retrace your steps to the turn mentioned above. Our route turns right here, along the old bog track amid the bogs and boulders and solitude, across to link up with the Carna-Cashel road. Turn left here through this vast spectacular expanse of blanket bog and granite outcrops. After half a mile we turn left once again towards Cashel and our starting point.
Alternative starting points along Cashel Bay will lengthen this walk. If you start from the Post Office the journey will be 11 kilometres and will take a little over 2 hours to complete.