text:
Q: POST JSON data to file return 501 Unsupported I'm following along the ReactJS tutorial for creating a Comments section (found here).
Everything seems to be working fine except for creating new comments. When I send the POST request  by submitting the new comment, the server (Python's SimpleHTTPServer) returns 501: Unsupported method ('POST')
Here is the ajax call:
handleCommentSubmit: function(comment) {
  $.ajax({
    url: this.props.url,
    dataType: 'json',
    type: 'POST',
    data: JSON.stringify(comment),
    success: function(data) {
      console.log("Successful POST to" + this.props.url);
      this.setState({data: data});
    }.bind(this),
    error: function(xhr, status, err) {
      console.error(this.props.url, status, err.toString());
    }.bind(this)
  });
}

I've been debugging the app for a while and I know the handler is getting called. Firefox's console prints the error message and I've stepped through it with the debugger.


In 2015, Dolphin Scuba was looking to update their existing website. As an integral part of their business, both for selling online and attracting customers to their bricks-and-mortar store, Dolphin Scuba decided it was time to update their online presence with a revamped image. Wanting to incorporate elements of current flat user interface design trends, while retaining a distinctly unique look and feel to the site, they hired me to provide them with a brand new, fully responsive website design.


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AccuWeather acquires air pollution startup Plume Labs
Romain Dillet @romaindillet / 1 year
Weather forecast company AccuWeather is acquiring French startup Plume Labs — terms of the deal are undisclosed. Originally founded in 2014, Plume Labs has gradually expanded its product offering to offer three different products focused on air pollution data.
First, the startup launched a mobile app for iOS and Android that gives you information about air quality. At first, it was a simple city-level air pollution forecasting app. The company would aggregate data from different sources to predict how pollution would evolve over time.
Over time, Plume Labs improved its forecasting abilities, as it can now predict air quality for the next few days. Plume Labs uses some machine learning models for its predictions. It now also offers detailed maps with street-by-street information. This way, if you're commuting to work on a bike or a moped, you know that you should avoid a busy street in particular.
Plume Labs then wanted to empower its users by making air quality tracking visual and actionable. That's why it designed its own air quality tracker that connects to your smartphone using Bluetooth Low Energy.
The second-generation device can track particulate matter (PM1, PM2.5 and PM10) as well as polluting gases (nitrogen dioxide and volatile organic compounds). It's been relatively successful, as there are currently more Plume Labs devices being used than government-supported monitoring stations.
Plume Labs' Flow is an air quality tracker to avoid pollution
Finally, Plume Labs started offering air pollution data as an API. The company has aggregated thousands of environmental monitoring stations around the world and applied its machine learning model on this data. This way, Plume Labs customers get a head start if they want to integrate air quality data in their products. They don't have to deal with different data sources and unify these data sets into a single set. Similarly, they don't have to allocate resources on machine learning applied to air pollution.
In January 2020, AccuWeather integrated Plume Labs' data in its weather forecasting products. The weather forecasting company used that opportunity to acquire a stake in Plume Labs. And now, AccuWeather is going one step further and acquiring the rest of the company.
"Air quality plays an intrinsic role in AccuWeather's mission of saving lives and helping people prosper, and this acquisition will help us provide users and customers with an even more personalized experience as well as a 360-degree understanding of the impact of weather on their wellness," AccuWeather president Steven R. Smith said in a statement. "Our exclusive alliance delivered on the promise to help put our users in greater control of their health, and we are committed to that goal even more firmly with this new strategic direction."
Plume Labs will become the center for climate and environmental data for AccuWeather. This acquisition proves that air pollution is becoming a key metric for many industries.
"Seven years ago, David Lissmyr and I launched Plume Labs to make air quality information accessible to everyone," Plume Labs co-founder and CEO Romain Lacombe said in a statement. "Since then, our work has helped galvanize the fight for clean air by making the health impact of climate change personal. Joining forces with AccuWeather now is an extraordinary opportunity to amplify our impact at planetary scale and help 1.5 billion people avoid air pollution around the world."
Up next, the Plume Labs team and technology will continue to operate and expand its work to other environmental risks, such as wildfires. Climate risk forecasting is still in its early days, but today's acquisition confirms that it is going to become more important over time.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Best time to visit Gainesville, FL, USA?
The best time to travel to Gainesville is in April when temperatures are still warm but hotels are more affordable. During this period, an accommodation for 2 costs around $165/night. That's $25 saved per day compared to what you would have paid in March. Temperatures hover in the high 70s, a few degrees warmer than the average 75°F you would experience during peak season.
Most people travel to Gainesville during the early spring. This is peak season so expect to pay more for your hotel room. The Holiday week (December 31st to January 6th), the Easter 2018 week (March 24th to April 8th) as well as the Coke Zero 400 week (June 30th to July 8th) are also very popular periods, so expect the highest room rates of the year.
It rains most days during the summer, so make sure to bring your umbrella if you visit Gainesville during this period.
The best time to avoid the crowd in Gainesville, FL, USA is September.
The cheapest time to travel to Gainesville, FL, USA is September.
In Gainesville, FL, USA, July is the sunniest month and July the warmest.


text:
The 1994 World Rowing Championships were World Rowing Championships that were held from 11 to 18 September 1994 at Eagle Creek Park, Indianapolis, United States.

Medal summary

Men's events

Women's events

Medal table

References

World Rowing Championships
Rowing Championships
Rowing competitions in the United States
1994 in American sports
1994 in sports in Indiana
1994 in rowing
Sports competitions in Indianapolis
1990s in Indianapolis
September 1994 sports events in the United States

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


text:
Q: Dynamic TreeView of a directory in React I want to display inside a material TreeView the content of a directory while parsing it.
Here's what I have for now:
const getElement = (path: string) => {
  fs.readdir(path, (_: any, elements: any) => {
    elements.forEach((element: string) => {
    let elementPath: string = libpath.join(path, element)
    if(fs.lstatSync(elementPath).isFile()) {
      return (
        <TreeItem nodeId="" label={element}/> //I'll take care of nodeId later
      )
    } else {
      return (
        <TreeItem nodeId="" label={element}>
          {getElement(elementPath)}
        </TreeItem>
      )
    }
  })
})}

export default class DataTreeView extends React.Component {
  render() {
    return (
      <TreeView
        defaultCollapseIcon={<ExpandMoreIcon />}
        defaultExpandIcon={<ChevronRightIcon />}
      >
        {getElement(window.process.env.HOME)} //return $HOME env var, will get this value from props later
      </TreeView>
    );
  }
}

It feels like I'm almost there but I keep getting this error "Type 'void' is not assignable to type 'ReactNode'." for the getElement function which I don't understand because it return a ReactNode in every case. Is the asynchronous part of fs.readdir is the problem here ?
Thanks for your help

A: Firstly you forgot to return your created nodes this is why you found the void problem, secondly, you have to use a synchronous version of readdir.
  const getElement = (path: string) => {
  const elements = fs.readdirSync(path)
  return elements.map((element: string) => {
    let elementPath: string = libpath.join(path, element)
    if (fs.lstatSync(elementPath).isFile()) {
      return (
        <TreeItem nodeId="" label={element} /> //I'll take care of nodeId later
      )
    } else {
      return (
        <TreeItem nodeId="" label={element}>
          {getElement(elementPath)}
        </TreeItem>
      )
    }
  })
}

export default class DataTreeView extends React.Component {
  render() {
    return (
      <TreeView
        defaultCollapseIcon={<ExpandMoreIcon />}
        defaultExpandIcon={<ChevronRightIcon />}
      >
        {getElement(window.process.env.HOME)} //return $HOME env var, will get
        this value from props later
      </TreeView>
    )
  }
}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


text:
Las Brisas de Santa Fe
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Take a step back in time to gracious old Santa Fe at Las Brisas de Santa Fe. Here, you'll find narrow streets lined with distinctive buildings of Spanish influence, offering shops, boutiques, restaurants, and night spots. From late November through early April, skiing is available 16 miles from the resort at Santa Fe Ski Basin, which has a vertical drop of 1,650 feet. Be sure to take some time to explore the city. Guided tours that highlight museums, historic churches, and government buildings are available.
COVID-19 Alert: Resort and region may have limited services and amenities, and may require face coverings, social distancing and temperature checks.
COVID-19 Alert: All air passengers entering or returning to the USA from international destinations are required to get a viral test within the three days before their flight to the US departs, and provide written documentation of their laboratory test result (paper or electronic copy) to the airline or provide documentation of having recovered from COVID-19. Further information can be found on the official CDC website.
COVID-19 Alert: A 14-day quarantine is be required for travelers entering the state of New Mexico. See the most recent travel advisory here.
On-Site Features & Amenities
Shared Laundry Facilities
Casino (8 miles)
Children's Pool (1 mile)
Conference Facilities (1 mile)
Cross-Country Skiing (13 miles)
Downhill Skiing (16 miles)
Fishing (25 miles)
Fitness Center (205 miles)
Game Room (5 miles)
Golf (3 miles)
Grocery Store (1 mile)
Horseback Riding (5 miles)
Lake (25 miles)
Live Entertainment (1 mile)
Medical Facilities (3 miles)
Sauna (4 miles)
Ski School (16 miles)
Spa Services (4 miles)
Tennis (1 mile)
Whirlpool/Hot Tub (206 miles)
Stayed at Las Brisas de Santa Fe recently? Let us know of resort details we should update.
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By stanleyf5
Visited here June 2007. It is a condo complex, not a resort. No pool, no internet service, no scheduled activities. Howver, if you want a...
As a new owner of Las Brisas, we were very pleased to find the one bedroom unit in exceptional condition with new furniture, carpet and...
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624 Galisteo St.
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text:
PUBLIC NOTICE: Municipal District of Bighorn development permit – Oct. 27, 2022
RMO Staff Oct 27, 2022 11:58 AM
More Public Notices
PUBLIC NOTICE: Town of Canmore development permits – January 26, 2023
PUBLIC NOTICE: Town of Canmore notice pursuant to Section 534 of the Municipal Government Act – January 26, 2023
PUBLIC NOTICE: Town of Canmore notice of new bylaw to allow electronic sending of documents – January 19, 2023


text:
Issue: Volume 6 Issue 24 > Articles
Reforming pedagogy in remote Indigenous contexts
Robyn Jorgensen
This article has been prepared by Robyn Zevenbergen (GIER, Griffith University), Peter Sullivan (Monash University), Steve Lerman (London South Bank University), Jo Boaler (Sussex University), Peter Grootenboer (GIER, Griffith University) and Richard Niesche (GIER, Griffith University). For further information, please contact Robyn Zevenbergen: r.zevenbergen@griffith.edu.au
The performance of Indigenous students in Australia is a serious educational and social concern. Indigenous students in remote areas are at particular risk of performing poorly, a problem which is exacerbated by the tyranny of distance and geographical isolation. National testing has shown that the poor performance of this target group has been consistent and enduring (MCEETYA, 2006). There is an urgent need for reforms to promote academic success for Indigenous students.
One such attempt is a new, four-year project to improve mathematical learning by Indigenous students in Western Australia's east Kimberley region. The project involves six schools, ranging in size from 30 to 250 students, all based in self-governing Indigenous communities. The schools are working with a team of academics led by researchers from Griffith University. The industry partner is the Association of Independent Schools of Western Australia, and researchers from Monash University, London South Bank University and Sussex University will also participate. The project is funded through the Australian Research Council's Linkage Scheme.
The project has three key features:
the implementation of a reform pedagogy that has been informed strongly by national and international research
the implementation of an assessment-for-learning strategy, in which teachers identify what students know and then build curriculum interventions from this point
the development in remote areas of sustainable educational communities, in which teachers can access resources and support despite their isolation, as a means to end the high turnover of teachers in these traditionally hard-to-staff areas of Australia.
In this paper, we discuss the reform pedagogy that is central to the approach of the project.
Reform pedagogy: an inclusive approach to teaching
The project applies the reform pedagogy known as Complex Instruction, which was developed, implemented and evaluated by Stanford University. The approach was also documented in Boaler's studies of 'Railside' school in California (Boaler 2008; Boaler & Staples, forthcoming). This school, Boaler noted, went from being the poorest performing in the state to achieving results above the state average in approximately four years. Complex Instruction draws on key research around learning and pedagogy. The current project integrates this research literature with literature on Indigenous learning preferences (Christie 1985; Christie, Harris & McClay 1987; Eckermann 1988, 1994; Harris & Malin 1994), incorporating aspects of Indigenous learning and pedagogy within its reform approach.
The project also draws on the elements of Productive Pedagogies (QSRLS 2001) to inform and evaluate our position on quality learning environments. However, we recognise that the Productive Pedagogies strategy has some limitations in relation to mathematics. As such, we have extended the Productive Pedagogies framework to include the explicit features of the reform pedagogy upon which the project draws (Zevenbergen, Niesche, Grootenboer & Boaler 2008).
The resulting pedagogy has a number of features. Here we outline a few of its key elements.
Working as a mathematician
Fundamental to our approach is the principle that high levels of challenge in mathematics learning are critical in fostering students' intellectual development. We draw extensively on the work of Burton (2004) who studied research mathematicians to uncover their ways of working. These ways of learning are quite different from the practices found in traditional school mathematics, and Burton strongly advocated that schools shift towards the practices of mathematicians in order to create better learning opportunities for students. Often the curriculum delivered to students from disadvantaged backgrounds is impoverished and informed by incorrect or deficient models of learning. The approach we advocate recognises the limiting effects of low expectations on learners, and aims to foster rich mathematical understandings in a group that is often underestimated.
Boaler's studies on Railside, noted above, showed the value of structured group work in which students took assigned roles that were integral to the progression of the whole group. It is the group's responsibility to ensure that all members understand the mathematical ideas before summoning the teacher to demonstrate their knowledge.
Use of home language
Students in our six participating schools are encouraged to use their home language to negotiate mathematical meanings and understandings. Often the cognitive load created through working in a second language limits the potential to develop new meanings. The work coming from the South African context, where students work in multilingual contexts, has shown that enabling learners to negotiate understandings in familial languages is enabling. Similarly, in Boaler's Railside study, it was found that students could engage more actively in developing conceptual understandings when they were able to code switch between their home language and mathematical language (Boaler, Lerman & Zevenbergen, forthcoming).
A key feature of the project is the reporting back stage of the lesson. In this phase, students report back on their group activity. This approach is aligned with the literature on Indigenous ways of working where there is a greater sense of community and not of individual achievements. Further, the reporting back phase encourages the explicit language associated with mathematical concepts and processes so that students are encouraged to speak and represent mathematical ideas in Standard Australian English (SAE). This process is designed to create strong learning opportunities for the development of a meta-language in relation to mathematics.
Drawing on the notion of multiple intelligences, the Complex Instruction approach recognises that students learn and think in a range of different ways. Similarly, the research on Indigenous ways of knowing suggests that Indigenous students may learn and represent their thinking in ways that are distinct from those valued in standard school practices. As such, the approach we are using encourages teachers to adopt practices that will allow students to represent their ways of thinking and knowing in forms that are appropriate for them. At this stage, we expect that the project will reveal ways of knowing specific for Indigenous students that are not part of Western traditions.
The project is in its first year. We are currently working with teachers to adapt the reform pedagogy to the needs of remote Indigenous students. During the development process and in subsequent years we will continue to monitor and change the reform pedagogy to identify the features that contribute most to a successful approach to mathematics for Indigenous students.
Boaler, J 2008, 'Promoting "relational equity" and high mathematics achievement through an innovative mixed-ability approach', British Educational Research Journal, 34 (2), 167–194.
Boaler, J and Staples, M (forthcoming), 'Creating mathematical futures through an equitable teaching approach: the case of Railside school', Teachers College Record.
Burton, Leonie L 2004, Mathematicians as Enquirers: Learning about Learning Mathematics, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Boston.
Christie, MJ 1985, Aboriginal Perspectives on Experience and Learning: The Role of Language in Aboriginal Education, Deakin University Press, Geelong, Vic.
Christie, M, Harris, S & McClay, D 1987, Teaching Aboriginal Children: Milingimbi and Beyond, Western Australian College of Advanced Education, Mt Lawley, WA.
Eckermann, A 1988, 'Learning styles, classroom management, teacher characteristics and rural-urban Aboriginal people: some thoughts', Aboriginal Child at School, 1, pp 3–19.
Eckermann, A 1994, One Classroom, Many Cultures: Teaching Strategies for Culturally Different Children, Allen & Unwin, St Leonards, NSW.
Guild, P 1994, 'The culture/learning style connection', Educational Leadership, 51 (8), pp 16–22.
Harris, S & Malin, M 1994, Aboriginal Kids in Urban Classrooms Social Science Press, Wentworth Falls, NSW.
Ministerial Council on Education, Employment, Training and Youth Affairs (MCEETYA) 2006. National Report on Schooling in Australia: Preliminary Paper 2006. National Benchmark Results Reading, Writing and Numeracy Years 3, 5 and 7.
Queensland School Reform Longitudinal Study (QSRLS) 2001, submitted to Education Queensland by the School of Education, University of Queensland, State of Queensland (Department of Education), Brisbane.
Mathematics teaching
Social life and customs


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Planned Parenthood Opens New Facility in Milwaukee In the Face of National Attacks Against Women's Reproductive Health
f t # e
Milwaukee, WI, October 13, 2017 | comments
Women across the ideological spectrum are rightfully disgusted by the ongoing efforts of those who seek to control our reproductive freedom. Fortunately, organizations like Planned Parenthood continue to demonstrate their willingness to be there for members of our community, regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, or socioeconomic status.
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Milwaukee, Wisconsin – In response to the opening of Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin's new Water St. Center facility in Milwaukee, Congresswoman Gwen Moore (WI-04) released the following statement:
"For decades, Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin has played a pivotal role in my district, serving women, men, and those who too often have nowhere to turn for their health care needs. The opening of Planned Parenthood's new Water St. Center facility in Milwaukee not only represents the welcomed addition of another trusted health care provider in our community, but also underscores Planned Parenthood's ongoing and unwavering commitment to the well-being of my constituents. In the face of intentional, targeted attacks on our reproductive rights, Milwaukee is fortunate that Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin and its supporters have once again rallied together to provide essential health services.
"The opening of Planned Parenthood's new facility is especially significant as women across the country continue to have their reproductive rights targeted by the White House and the GOP. In what can only be described as another callous attempt to undermine women, House Republicans recently passed a bill that would ban abortion after 20 weeks. Days later, the White House announced they would allow employers to discriminate against women by denying insurance coverage for birth control. And just yesterday, President Trump issued an Executive Order endangering women by jeopardizing basic health coverage such as maternity, newborn, and preventative care, and announced his intent to end the Affordable Care Act's cost-sharing reductions that make health care accessible for millions of Americans.
"Women across the ideological spectrum are rightfully disgusted by the ongoing efforts of those who seek to control our reproductive freedom. Fortunately, organizations like Planned Parenthood continue to demonstrate their willingness to be there for members of our community, regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, or socioeconomic status. Not only will their new facility serve as a place for patients to receive family planning services, wellness screenings, and sex education, but it also serves as symbol of resilience. I'd like to extend my deepest gratitude to Planned Parenthood for their work to enhance access to critical health care in Milwaukee and I welcome their new clinic to our neighborhood."
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Congresswoman Gwen Moore's Reaction to the 5th Circuit Hearing on the ACA
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Moore, Dingell Question Sale of Location Data to Exploit Domestic Violence
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Congresswoman Gwen Moore Introduces Legislation to Expand Education Training for Doulas and Midwifery
Reps. Moore and Sensenbrenner Reintroduce Bipartisan Bill to Help Advance Gastrointestinal Research
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Matt Holliday is having a down season. Allen Craig was so bad that the Cardinals eventually traded him to Boston. Yadier Molina wasn't hitting like he normally does before he went on the disabled list in early July with a bad thumb.
The Cardinals aren't hitting home runs and they're making due with a couple of rookies - second baseman Kolten Wong and right fielder Oscar Taveras - who are learning on the job. And it's not always pretty.
But St. Louis is just 1.5 games behind the Milwaukee Brewers in the National League Central. The Cardinals just completed a 6-1 homestand before heading out on the road to Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. They're in possession of the No. 1 wild card playoff spot and have been looking crisp of late.
5) Matt Adams, first base - Frankly, I thought Adams would hit more home runs. He has 12. But he has provided a productive bat and he's been anchored in the clean-up spot for most of the season. His .309 average is fourth best in the National League and he has driven in 55 runs. In a season in which the Cardinals have struggled to score runs, Adams has been reliable. And this season, that's saying something.
4) Matt Carpenter, third base - Carpenter was a hitting machine in 2013. He's still the best offensive weapon the Cardinals have, although his numbers have fallen off. Still, Carpenter is valuable at the top of the order for St. Louis with one of the best on-base percentages in the National League. He's a tough out and a heady and scrappy player. The Cardinals offense, flighty as it has been, would be even more sketchy without Carpenter (.283, .377, .400).
3) Lance Lynn, starting pitcher - I'm going to shamefully admit something here. There were times during the 2012 and 2013 seasons when I wished the Cardinals would have traded Lynn. He produced, but he always slowed down after fast starts. And his behavior on the mound irritated me. When something went wrong, Lynn would wear it on his face. He lacked composure. His emotions too often got the best of him. This season, though, the 27-year-old Lynn has matured into one of the best and most dependable starters in the National League. After pitching seven shutout innings in a win over Cincinnati on Wednesday night, Lynn is 14-8 with a 2.78 ERA. He's tied for fourth in the league in wins and ranks No. 8 in ERA. Lynn is a horse and has settled in behind Adam Wainwright for an outstanding 1-2 punch in the rotation.
2) Pat Neshek, reliever pitcher - Pat who? You might remember Neshek as the guy who allowed three hits and a couple of runs in the All-Star game this season and was the losing pitcher for the NL. The fact he was in the All-Star game, though, is testament to how good this guy has been. A journeyman 33-year-old, Neshek was picked off the scrap heap by Cardinals general manager John Mozielak during the offseason after pitching for Oakland in 2013. For the A's, he was just OK. With St. Louis, he's been the best set-up relief pitcher in the National League. In 57 appearances covering 53.1 innings, Neshek has allowed only 25 hits and six walks while striking out 58. He's been a great story and a great pitcher, the All-Star game notwithstanding.
1) Adam Wainwright, starting pitcher - As usual, Wainwright has been one of the best pitchers in the National League. He's 15-7 with a 2.40 ERA and is third in the league in innings pitched. Since missing the 2011 championship season after undergoing Tommy John surgery, Wainwright has returned to pitch a ton of innings for St. Louis, including 241.2 during the 2013 regular season, with 35 more in the postseason. His durability is incredible and he's the top-of-the-rotation ace that every contending team needs.


HC-TV has provided live coverage of the Board of Selectmen and Town Meeting since 1984. In addition, we cover many other boards and committees when they are dealing with issues of town-wide interest.
School Committee meetings are televised on the Education Station, Pirate TV. After decades of taped replay, the School Committee is now telecast live.
Hull TV covers many community events, including the annual Drowned Hogs Swim in February; the Nantasket Beach Car Show in June; the Endless Summer Festival in September and numerous other fundraisers for community groups. Special Events are our specialty.
Hull has a rich and varied history dating back to its days as a Native American community. Thanks to the Hull Lifesaving Museum and the Friends of the Hull Public Library, we have scores of lectures by local authors and historians on a wide range of interesting local and regional topics.
History is made every day. With a programming library dating back to our inception in 1984, HC-TV has a sound and video record of many of the major events that have taken place in Hull during the last thirty years.
Music is an important part of life in Hull and HC-TV has recorded a wide and varied collection of local and regional musicians at festivals and fundraising events over the years. In addition to live performances, the Cinzi Lavin Show, hosted by the talented musician and composer of the same name, features interviews with and performances by a wide range of gifted performers.
Exploring another popular form of entertainment, HC-TV's answer to Wayne's World, Beer Styles, educates the audience about the responsible enjoyment of one of the world's oldest beverages.
A recent addition to our line-up, Lori Tobin's Cooking with Kids, offers step by step cooking tips to help provide healthy meals for busy families.
The Hull TV sports reporting team is one of the best on the South Shore. We provide extensive coverage of a wide variety of Hull sports including Hull High football; Girls & Boys Soccer; Lacrosse; Field Hockey; Girls & Boys Basketball; Hockey; Baseball; Softball and track. In addition to school sports, we televise the entire season of Hull Youth Football. Sports reporters Steve Vieira and Alan McCall enhance our coverage with their skilled play-by-play and expert color commentary.


You are currently browsing the daily archive for December 20, 2010.
5 more nights till the big guy comes!
I have to admit.. I'm not really the holiday type of girl! Yes. I love all the beautiful colors this time of the year, between colorful gift wrap and all the christmas decorations.. most of the time there isn't an inch untouched. I love getting together with friends. I love cookie baking marathons. I love hanging with the family! I don't love the Christmas debt, the long lines, the stubbornness of some to get the 'perfect' gift, the rudeness people posses (which happens to come out bright and clear during the holidays!) and the Christmas drinking and eating. I'm one who lacks self-control. If there is something in front of me. I WILL be eating it! Therefore, I like to try to control my enviroment, however that proves to be very difficult this time of year! I also don't like the frenzy and the drive to have everything done by the deadline… DECEMBER 25th. We have enough deadlines in our lives.. why create one more? What about the rest of the year? I think we have lost the true meaning of Christmas. With that being stated.. I will be climbing down from the high horse and getting back to reality. When gets done by the 25th.. gets done! What doesn't get done.. will wait! Ahh. Feels good to write that loud and clear!
Just a few photos from the last few days!
Planning for the 2011 Trade Shows… now where, o where will we end up? NY, VA, AZ, TN.. LONDON… Who knows?!?!
Remi and Shay! ❤ This past weekend Remi and I headed down to NJ to visit Dan, Sam and Shay! And yes.. they are patiently waiting for a treat!
I finally cleaned my car out and found all these water bottles!
A) I drink a lot of water during the week B) They have been there for months C) Both A and B D) Regardless of where the water bottles are.. I MUST start drinking more!
I'm going with a D on this one!
I love this poster! Just hung it up last night, but every time I walk by I feel a calm sense come over me. Call me crazy!
And my down-sized Christmas Tree this year! Fits me perfectly!


text:
We Wear the Mask
The writer on coming of age in dichotomous Baltimore and being warned against writing about race.
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Image by Sarah Shatz
"Don't write that book. It's not worth the controversy." This was the advice the critically-acclaimed short story writer Jess Row received as he began exploring the idea of writing a novel about race. A white man trying to tackle issues of race, he was told, would be like touching the third rail.
But Row persisted with his manuscript, and the resulting work, Your Face in Mine, was published in August 2014 by Riverhead. Row's debut novel considers race from various angles: as a construct, as a form of self-abnegation, as a means of addressing an existential crisis, and even as a desirable plastic surgery procedure.
Your Face in Mine introduces the reader to thirtysomething Kelly Thorndike, who moves back home to Baltimore soon after his wife and child are killed in a car accident. There, Kelly encounters a familiar man who turns out to be Martin Wilkinson (formerly Martin Lipkin), Kelly's best friend from high school. Martin, previously white, has undergone racial reassignment surgery to become black. Now a successful entrepreneur keen to promote the surgery, Martin convinces Kelly to write about Martin's life and the procedure that transformed it. In the process, Kelly grapples with his past in Baltimore, his feelings of alienation after the tragic loss of his family, and his own feelings about race and identity.
The novel, with its understated prose, highly original premise, and underlying political themes, is one of the boldest and most powerful debuts of the year. As the New York Times's Dwight Garner writes, "This novel more than fulfills the promise of those [previous] books. It puts [Row] on another level as an artist." But Your Face in Mine has received pointed criticism as well. An NPR writer, for instance, accused the book of belittling transgender experience in "portraying the white need to appropriate black culture as an equivalent to the danger and difficulty of living with gender dysphoria."
This hasn't surprised Row. "I wanted it to be a polarizing book," he says in the interview that follows. "I wanted it to have a feeling of a radical experience, an experience that was really challenging to the reader and challenging to our conventional literary categories." As fraught as the subjects of racial identity, racial dysphoria, and racial masking may be for some readers, Row hopes that the book will be a breath of fresh air for those who want to "break out of the polite discourse around literary novels."
Questions around race and culture figure into Row's previous work as well. In 2007, he drew inspiration from his tenure as a teacher in Hong Kong for the poignant short story collection The Train To Lo Wu (Dial Press), which explores the worlds of Asian, white, and black characters adrift in China. Row's precision as a writer comes through in the contours of these characters' emotional states. For his stories, Row has received the Whiting Writers' Award, two Pushcart Prizes, a PEN/O. Henry Award, and an NEA fellowship in fiction. He was also named among Granta's Best of Young American Novelists in 2007.
I met with Row at New York City's Housing Works Bookstore Cafe, where we talked about his upbringing in racially dichotomous Baltimore, the infusion of politics in his fiction, and the surprisingly real phenomenon of racial reassignment surgery. As much as I prodded him, and as is the nature of many of his characters, he flinched at nothing.
—Grace Bello for Guernica
Guernica: In your essay "Native Sons," published in this magazine in August 2014, you suggest that writers of color are seen as 'of color' first and 'writers' second." As a white writer, have you felt pressure to not write about race?
Jess Row: When I was seventeen years old, I took my very first writing workshop. The teacher, who was well respected and had been teaching for a long time, told the class the story of William Styron and his novel The Confessions of Nat Turner. The teacher made it clear that this was a white writer who had taken some risks to write this grand, American epic about race. But Styron got thoroughly trashed for it; it stalled Styron's career for a while. My teacher's point was, "Don't write about race. It's not worth it. It's the third rail." I was so young, I was so enthralled with this teacher. I took every word out of his mouth as gospel.
His message was to have a very narrow focus as a writer and to do that one thing very, very well. So that became my aesthetic—a very Chekhovian, American realist aesthetic in the tradition of Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, and Tobias Wolff. The perfectible, realist story that had these somewhat articulate characters, a lot of silence, a lot of obscured suffering, a lot of manliness, a lot of drinking, a lot of divorces. As my writing went on, I shed a lot of those elements.
I went to Hong Kong in the '90s to teach in the Yale-China program. I wrote a collection of short stories about China, The Train To Lo Wu. One story in that book had a black protagonist. But it was always a false assumption that white American writers cannot write novels about race unless they're approaching it from a very oblique angle.
When I came up with the idea for Your Face in Mine, one of the literary people who was advising me said, "Don't write that book. It's not worth the controversy." And that sort of dismayed me for a while. Then I got a new agent, Denise Shannon, who said, "You must write this book right now." It was then that I had the momentum to embark on writing the book. I had the feeling that I could do this, I could write this. From that point on, it was like, "Fuck it. I'll just finish the book, and then prepare myself for what's going to happen next."
Black culture is very difficult to explain to people who don't have any direct contact with it.
Guernica: In the Guernica essay I just mentioned, you quote James Baldwin talking about how his time in Paris informed how he saw the US. He said, "I began to see this country for the first time. If I hadn't gone away, I would never have been able to see it; and if I was unable to see it, I would never have been able to forgive it." Did you have a similar experience living in Hong Kong and then returning to the US?
Jess Row: In terms of seeing America, yes—but of course, I had nothing to forgive. Quite the opposite. It was an experience of really having a new perspective on Americanness. Only when you leave do you appreciate what binds American people and our cultural experience together.
One thing that really struck me about living in Hong Kong and teaching American history to college students there is that black culture is very difficult to explain to people who don't have any direct contact with it. The impact of black music and black art forms on American culture is really difficult to appreciate in that context; either students have stereotypes of the culture or they're skeptical of how important it is.
It's only when an American steps outside of their own culture that you see how integral it is. For example, most Americans have a sense of what the blues is. But in Hong Kong, they have no sense of the blues.
Guernica: You've written two short story collections, The Train To Lo Wu (2005) and Nobody Ever Gets Lost (2011), and now you've written a novel. What kind of a shift did you have to make in order to write a longer work?
Jess Row: I wrote another novel before Your Face in Mine. When I sold my first book of stories, it was a two-book contract that included a novel. But I wrote that novel, and it was a total mess. The contract fell apart. It was one of those terrible learning experiences. [laughs] I learned what not to do.
When I wrote Your Face in Mine, I wanted to write something that was fast-moving, mostly chronological, very plot-driven, and immediately engaging in a way that didn't demand tons and tons of research. And something that was perhaps more openly autobiographical and not so dependent on reconstructing the historical.
So the challenge wasn't so much about short stories versus novels, the challenge was avoiding certain pitfalls. I never really had novel-writing instruction like people do in MFA programs, so I was at sea during the process. At the same time, I had a lot of expectations placed on me because I was already having some success with my short stories. That was not a good situation to be in. That by itself took a long time to overcome.
Guernica: I'm curious about the genesis of Your Face in Mine. The idea of racial reassignment surgery—where did that come from?
Jess Row: It came from a book called Creating Beauty to Cure the Soul, which is a history of plastic surgery that I picked up one day in a bookstore. The idea just sort of came to me as I read that book: What if there was something called racial reassignment surgery? Not unlike gender reassignment surgery, someone determines that they are of a different race on the inside and they wish to surgically correct that.
The idea was a bolt from the blue. It didn't take me too long to interweave that idea with experiences I had in high school. A few friends of mine were these white kids who were obsessed with hip-hop culture and who were practicing a sort of racial masking. They weren't passing, but masking. They were creating a sort of self-camouflage without articulating it as racial. It was very clearly a form of escape, a form of self-abnegation.
So the novel started as a theory that then connected with something from my own experience that I'd always wanted to write about but for which I'd never found the correct frame.
Guernica: Were you anxious about how the book would be received?
Jess Row: You know, I wanted it to be a polarizing book. I wanted it to break out of the polite discourse around literary novels. I wanted it to have a feeling of a radical experience, an experience that was really challenging to the reader and challenging to our conventional literary categories. What counts as art, and what counts as autobiography? I wanted it to be a discomfiting experience, and it has been, for some readers.
Guernica: The novel takes place in Baltimore. Can you talk a little bit about your experience of that city and how you wanted to convey that on the page?
Jess Row: I lived there for four years while I was attending high school. It was a very rough period for Baltimore. It was the middle years of the crack epidemic. It was a time when there were a lot of carjackings and the murder rate had risen. It was very dangerous, very violent—even more than it is today.
Yet my parents didn't really restrict my movement, so I got involved in the underground music scene and the activism scene; I was doing some volunteering in food relief. I spent a lot of time throughout the city in poor areas, even though my family lived in a wealthy area.
The sense that I got of Baltimore was one of radical contradictions that couldn't be resolved and one of radical racial disjunction that nobody was even trying to resolve. People lived in parallel worlds.
There was the isolation of an impoverished class of people, the sort of physical and spatial isolation that was at once a source of great pain and poverty and depression. But there was also this sense that Baltimore had been abandoned by industry, abandoned due to white flight, abandoned by the government. There existed all these crazy possibilities in a place that had been abandoned by everybody.
So what rises from the ruins of a post-industrial city? That conversation is happening about Detroit now. That conversation is more advanced now than it was in the early 1990s. But we still don't have any good answers to those questions.
Guernica: You've said that it was through music that you began to explore race.
Jess Row: I was relatively isolated from people of color. My parents are too old to be Baby Boomers; they had me later in life. So we didn't listen to any black music at all in the house, not even Ben E. King [who co-wrote "Stand By Me"]. My parents listened to none of that. I was raised with opera and very white-bread folk music like The Kingston Trio. That was about as daring as it got. So when I discovered hip-hop as a teenager, at first it made no sense to me at all.
Later, it made an enormous amount of sense. I listened to Run DMC when they first came out. The hip-hop that I really connected with was Public Enemy, KRS-One, Ice Cube, and N.W.A. That late '80s and early '90s era. The beginning of gangster rap and the beginning of politically conscious rap. I had a very immature, adolescent feeling of, "Wow, I can really connect with these people through the stories they're telling in this music."
I realized over time that it was much more complicated than that, but I never lost that empathic connection through music. It was almost too strong, like I was over-reading the content of the music. Now, hip-hop is mostly what I listen to, other than jazz. I've given up on pop music and indie rock. Hip-hop, I listen to all the time. It never left me.
The gestures and the swagger and the attitude of black men is imitated everywhere in American culture, but people still find black men intolerable.
Guernica: Earlier, you talked about wanting to avoid too much research, but I know you did do some research for Your Face in Mine.
Jess Row: The research that I did almost entirely focused on the medical and scientific elements that I needed in order to describe racial reassignment surgery. I wanted to infuse the story with enough facts that the reader would believe it. I spoke with several plastic surgeons here and in Thailand.
The most interesting responses I got were from the plastic surgeons in Thailand who, when I explained to them what my novel was about, said, "Racial assignment surgery already exists." People are coming to them and looking for these types of procedures all the time. And because of all the cosmetic services like skin whitening and hair bleaching, there is a lot that people can do to change their appearance without having actual surgery. It's quite common in Thailand and Korea and Japan.
Guernica: Martin undergoes racial assignment surgery to change his race from white to black. To what extent do you see this novel as an exploration of race and masculinity?
Jess Row: Definitely, if we're talking about an American context, there's an enormous difference between normative white masculinity and normative black masculinity. Part of what Martin describes when he says he doesn't know who he is, he isn't comfortable in his own skin—even though he doesn't say it outright, it's a crisis of masculinity. And when he becomes a black man, his masculinity is much more stereotypical and clearly defined. He's much more of an alpha male as a black man than he was as a white adolescent. You could say a lot of interesting things about that [laughs].
I wanted Martin to be someone who stepped out of an uncomfortable past and emerged as a fully realized, powerful self. He's the one who really sees the future and has a plan. He's a Gatsby figure. That absolutely is about a shift in masculinity.
After Ferguson, there's been a lot of talk about black men and the presence and absence of black men in positions of power in American culture. I remember someone saying something like, "The influence of black men is everywhere," but in many communities their physical presence is intolerable. In other words, the gestures and the swagger and the attitude of black men is imitated everywhere in American culture, but people still find black men intolerable.
I really think there's something to that theory. You think about every piece of idiomatic speech adopted by white men over the past ten or twenty years; virtually all of it comes from hip-hop. "Giving props," for instance—it all comes from hip-hop. And there's a reason for that. There's a sort of conscious or subconscious masking going on there.
Guernica: Martin does have this swagger. I was so dazzled by and charmed by him.
Jess Row: So is Kelly.
Guernica: It takes some time to see that Martin is not who he appears to be, so to speak. Can you talk about how you approached that character?
Jess Row: I wanted Martin to be so forceful and charismatic that, at first, the reader would immediately buy into him as a fully functioning human being in his new role as a black man. You would never question that he achieved this "passing"—if you want to call it that.
But on the other hand, his story is never meant to be fully convincing. Ultimately, you realize that Martin is just barely keeping the whole thing together. By the end of the novel, things unravel. But we also see Martin as the consummate survivor, picking up and going to the next investor. We see the man behind the curtain, and he's really a more naked version of the same person he's always been. He has thoroughly invented himself once—maybe multiple times—and will probably keep doing so over and over.
Guernica: In the book, Martin says of Obama, "He wears that mask. He has that look all the time, a kind of noble dread. He's a sacrificial king, the still center of the churning world. Call him whatever you want, but he's older than old school. He's the most primal president we've had in my lifetime." Who or what brought about those ideas?
Jess Row: For a long time, I thought that I wouldn't say anything about Obama in the book. It just seemed like the low-hanging fruit. But at a certain point, I realized the characters would say something about Obama. The novel takes place in 2012, deep into the Obama presidency. And I wanted them to mention it as sort of a tangent and then engage further with it.
In terms of the cultural critics whom I read, I have not read anyone who says what Martin says. I suppose there have been people who have compared Obama to Lincoln. But the connection to Joseph Campbell and the mythopoetic idea—that was my invention. It's a pretty radical way of approaching Obama. But as soon as I wrote it, I thought, "Yeah, that sounds pretty credible." It was one of those moments where I thought, "Wow, that made a lot more sense than I thought it would."
But there is something very quiet and reserved and pessimistic about Obama's temperament that is deeply un-American. There are those people who claim, "Oh, he wasn't born here"—all that is nonsense. But there is a kind of skepticism and reserve about him that is really very unusual for an American politician. There's nobody quite like Obama. It's very haunting.
Guernica: To me, the novel is as much about grief as it is about race. How did you approach the character of Kelly, the narrator who has just lost his wife and daughter?
Jess Row: When I first started writing Kelly's character, I imagined him still having his family intact in Baltimore. And it became clear to me immediately that I couldn't balance his relationship with his family and his friendship with Martin. I had to make Kelly a much more solitary character and a character in a more extreme position. That's when his backstory appeared to me.
In the beginning of the novel, he has lost his family and then loses everything else: his job, the radio station, what's left of his career. I wanted him to be somebody who was experiencing, in a really self-conscious way, an existential crisis. I wanted him to be stripped of all his other options and looking for a way to redefine himself. But I wanted to articulate that crisis as a crisis of race. It's something he might never have thought about in that way without Martin's urging.
Guernica: Kelly likens racial reassignment surgery to gender reassignment surgery: "Inside you always felt black." Did you do research on the transgender experience and community?
Jess Row: I did. I read this great anthology that Jonathan Ames edited called Sexual Metamorphosis, which is an anthology of transgender memoirs. That book was so informative to me—even though "transgender" and "transracial" mean very, very different things.
It was especially helpful to read about Christine Jorgensen, who underwent one of the first male-to-female gender reassignment surgeries back in the 1950s. She was the first celebrity transgender woman in the US. She was front-page news.
That history of gender reassignment was something I knew nothing about. And I immediately realized that that's what Martin wants—to be one of the first to undergo racial reassignment surgery and then to position himself for that firestorm of publicity. And to reap a profit by selling the procedure.
This book is not meant to rub everybody the right way.
Guernica: There was a review of your novel on NPR that took issue with your comparison of racial reassignment surgery to gender reassignment surgery. How do you respond to that?
Jess Row: I'm not surprised by that review. The first line of it was, "Trans men and women face many problems," without claiming that a similar dilemma can be found with regard to race. That statement is true; the politics of transgender identity are really complicated. And the debate over how much of gender is biological and how much of it is socially constructed is a very complex debate. I definitely never wanted the book to intrude upon conversations about transgender identity.
I was trying to raise an analogy in theory that has already been demonstrated in practice. I had observed people whose identity crises around race seemed analogous to other people's identity crises around gender.
That's probably the most heated review I've gotten. I'm perfectly okay with that. This book is not meant to rub everybody the right way.
Guernica: I'm wondering about the overtly political conversations that take place in the book. For instance, there's a contentious discussion between Kelly and a white female friend who defends white flight. How did you come to these moments?
Jess Row: I honestly thought of it as a matter of consistent characterization. The people in the story would be having those kinds of conversations. Some readers might call that didactic or see it as an authorial intrusion. But for me, it was a reflection of the intelligence and complexity of these characters. To me, it was not a matter of intruding on the text so much as bringing out an aspect of the text that some fiction writers avoid. Those heated, wide-ranging conversations—if we have those conversations in life, those conversations should also be brought to the page.
One of the first writers I read who illustrated this was Grace Paley. In many of her stories, people have these conceptual conversations. They talk about ideas. They talk about history. "The Immigrant Story" begins in the middle of one such conversation. When I first read it in grad school, I had this feeling of, "That's not enough to make a story." Gradually, I began to appreciate that, with Paley, that's just the texture of the people she grew up with.
She grew up in a Russian Jewish, leftist, communist household. She was a very political person. She was an activist all her life, and her stories reflected her own life. The people whom she knew lived out their lives through ideas.
Julian Barnes once said that he wanted to write his fiction essayistically and his essays fictionally. I like that quality, too.
Guernica: I know you practice Buddhism, and your faith comes up in The Train To Lo Wu. Did your Buddhism influence Your Face in Mine at all?
Jess Row: Yeah, absolutely. It influences everything I write. It colors how I see the world. Which doesn't mean that it's a conscious part of my writing process. I like to keep those worlds mostly separate, except for some places, like The Train To Lo Wu.
For me, there's a very clear parallel between the practice of insight in Buddhism and what's called prajna—the insight that arrives through meditation. It's not zoning out—it's not samādhi—prajna is insight into the world. And a lot of that insight has to do with karma and the way karma affects our lives.
Narrative stories are nothing but models of karma and causality—how one thing leads to another. And a lot of narrative fiction is about causality that we don't immediately understand.
Guernica: Was there anything about writing this novel that was uncomfortable for you?
Jess Row: There were certainly a lot of moments of discomfort. Definitely the most difficult part was the scene in which Kelly is in the doctor's office preparing to have the racial reassignment surgery done to him.
It was very difficult to write and very painful to imagine. Even getting to the point of realizing that I wanted Kelly to go through with the racial reassignment procedure—that took a long time. It took a while for me to realize that that was how the book was going to end, and that's the way the book had to end. It wasn't going to be satisfying otherwise.
He's looking at his own body in this giant television screen, and the doctor is manipulating his image in front of him. Kelly feels that what he's doing is so wrong that it's almost like incest. In transforming himself, he's breaking a taboo.
Guernica: I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you about the protests in Hong Kong. As someone who previously lived and taught there, what do you think of the current situation?
Jess Row: At the time I'm writing this, it's not at all clear what will happen in Hong Kong. As someone who is not in close proximity to the protests, it's very difficult for me to comment on the course of ongoing events.
Speaking generally, though, it seems to me that what's happening now is the natural outgrowth of decades of advocacy and coalition-building in the movement for democracy in Hong Kong. When the handover occurred, in 1997, there was this assumption—both inside and outside Hong Kong—that the city would eventually "integrate" into China, culturally, linguistically, and politically.
Just the opposite has happened. Hong Kong has been the place where the memory of Tiananmen Square lives on; Hong Kong people have become more and more committed in their resistance to authoritarian government, and also, not surprisingly, committed to safeguarding their culture and heritage as something distinct and worth preserving. One of the signature chants of this 2014 Occupy Central movement has been, in Cantonese, "Hong Kong people! Hong Kong people!" To me that's a way of saying, "We exist, we are distinct, we are different, we are ourselves, we are not 'Chinese.'"
I teach in the City University of Hong Kong MFA program in creative writing, and one of our graduates is the poet Nicholas Wong, who wrote a beautiful text, on September 29th, from the front lines of the protest, called "Before enduring it we will not endure it."
I believe what Nicholas says: the Hong Kong protestors are insisting on their particular democratic rights in their particular political situation. But they are also, in the manner of all Occupy movements, using their bodies to be the archive of the world. They are giving voice to a global desire for a new politics and a new sense of community.
To contact Guernica or Grace Bello, please write here.
Imperfect Tools
Adrian Tomine: Drawing From Life and Death
Jess Row: Native Sons


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Words for Words
by Cole Konopka, Colorado Review Editorial Assistant
In one of the many warnings I received as an undergraduate writer, a poet and teacher once broke down the hourly wage of writing (and editing) a poem for eventual publication. The $50 payment spread itself over many hours, until minimum wage seemed idealistic to hope for. Somehow that has not deterred me, and I'm now interning with the Center for Literary Publishing. Interning.
What brings me to do it? I believe in the writing-publishing world as a community, one that necessitates individual support. This support runs both ways, though often the payment is less tangible or spendable than $50. When Yusef Komunyakaa published his first two chapbooks with Lynx House, he received fifty copies as payment. "The only thing received from the small press is inspiration," Komunyakaa said in a 1985 interview with Rudolph Lewis. "No dollars and cents." But he added, "It encouraged me to continue to write."
It seems impossible that anyone could make a living from magazine submissions, and perhaps for good reason. We spend/donate a few dollars here and there to submit work, not only to support journals and presses we love, but also because we want to see literature happen in the most active sense we cannot yet imagine. Arguably it happens most frequently in small presses and journals, because the scale of monetary influence is low. Perhaps they wouldn't be the small press work we love if it paid enough. These journals and presses are where literature crosses boundaries, physical and aesthetic alike. As Komunyakaa said, "The small press is the mainstay of contemporary literature. It probably has always been so."
Lately, as I've been looking at chapbook contests, I am happy to see small presses offering a subscription to their journal or a free chapbook in return for the contest's reading fee. There is a powerful message in this. To me the small press or journal shouts every poem or story to a good home. On my side it means buying literary magazines and small press books, reading them, getting inspired, and submitting poems of my own. Publishing can be cyclical this way, and in this way we know it is natural, and in this way we know it is good.


LAS VEGAS, APRIL 5, 2018 - Wisycom, designer and builder of the most sophisticated RF solutions for broadcast, film and live production, premieres its LFA Ultra-Wideband Active Antenna (LFA) and BFA-B/BFA-N Ultra-Wideband Booster (BFA) at this year's NAB Show (Booth C856). The new antenna hosts tunable filter technology and a remote controllable booster, which is designed to supply optimal range and control through wide reception bands and high dynamic range RF gain, resulting in maximum coverage area for its users.
120-degrees horizontal and 90-degrees vertical. It integrates a new and unique bank of tunable filters for the ultimate RF system protection, along with a remotely adjustable low noise amplifier with an RF level range from -12db up to +27db gain (1db step selection). The LFA antenna features three filters including high and low band pass, tunable and fixed bands. Filters/gain can be easily setup through four key navigation buttons and a TFT display. The LFA and BFA can also be controlled and setup remotely through the MAT288 and 244 allowing operators to make changes at the receive location. Operators can also remotely manage all antenna systems from the company's Wisycom Manager 2.0 software. The antenna is equipped with a compact, rugged form factor to reduce wind resistance.
"NAB is an essential opportunity for us to showcase our latest technology and demonstrate why we are one of the most sought-after companies for production wireless audio equipment in the broadcast market," says Jim Dugan, president, Wisycom USA. "Our new wideband antenna and tunable filters allow users to build flexible and remote-controllable antenna systems in order to achieve maximum RF coverage."
Wisycom is a designer and builder of the most sophisticated RF solutions for broadcast, film and live production, renowned for their durability, flexibility, reliability, practicality and cost-effective price points. Wisycom's design process is driven by attention to detail, customer feedback and ultimate quality, from the selection of components to the manufacturing process, which takes place at the company's Italian plants. The company prides itself on serving as a technical advisor and partner to every customer. From custom design to evaluation and dimensioning of systems, the Wisycom team stands by its customers through every step of the process. For more information, please visit www.wisycom.com and/or www.wisycomusa.com for those customers in North America.


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Turkey seeks Ukraine-Russia de-escalation, opposes sanctions on Moscow
Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu has said that Turkey is in contact with Ukraine and Russia to ease tensions. "We are in contact with both sides and we are advising them both to remain calm and ease tensions," he said.
Wednesday December 01 2021 12:40 pm
A militant of the Donetsk People's Republic (DNR) watches from a frontline position on the line of separation from the Ukrainian armed forces outside of the rebel-controlled city of Donetsk, Ukraine November 19, 2021.
Duvar English - Reuters
Turkey is in contact with Ukraine and Russia to ease tensions, Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu said on Dec. 1, adding that sanctions on Moscow will not solve the crisis.
Ukrainian and Western officials say Moscow has massed forces on the border with Ukraine, which is battling Russia-backed separatists who control part of its territory to the east, and Kyiv on Dec. 1 urged NATO to prepare sanctions on Russia.
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said this week NATO member Turkey was ready to mediate between Ukraine and Russia, and Çavuşoğlu said he would hold talks with his Ukrainian and Russian counterparts on Dec. 2.
"We are in contact with both sides and we are advising them both to remain calm and ease tensions," Çavuşoğlu said, adding that Erdoğan and Russian President Vladimir Putin would discuss the matter by phone on Dec. 3.
"We don't believe sanctions will solve the issue," Çavuşoğlu said. "As Turkey, what we believe in is a right balance between deterrence and dialogue. Nobody can help Ukraine or another country through sanctions alone."
Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova dismissed Erdoğan's mediation offer, saying it did not refer to the conflict in Donbass between Ukrainian government forces and Russia-backed separatists, but Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Erdoğan and Putin would discuss the issue.
Turkey has good ties with both Kyiv and Moscow, but opposes Russian policies in Syria and Libya, as well as its annexation of the Crimean peninsula in 2014. While forging cooperation with Russia on defence and energy, Ankara has also sold sophisticated Turkish drones to Ukraine, angering Moscow.
Erdoğan says Turkey ready to mediate between Ukraine and RussiaDiplomacy
Russia's Altai should be marked as center of Turkic world on Erdoğan's map: KremlinDiplomacy
Turkey, Russia agreed not to disclose info on joint S-400 production: ErdoğanDiplomacy
Ukrainian president says ties to Turkey making army strongerDiplomacy
Topics Turkey Russia Ukraine Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu President Erdoğan


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Enterprising thinking on the future of HE
19 Nov 2019 | Andy Penaluna Andy Penaluna is Professor Emeritus at University of Wales Trinity Saint David. He has been contributing to Advance HE's work on Enterprise, Entrepreneurship and Employability for over 12 years and has a few insights to share.
Over the past few years the topic of future proofing higher education has had much to do with graduate success and what we can offer them, which we are often reminded will be determined within unpredictably complex and ever-changing scenarios. I firmly believe that enterprise education has a significant role to play, so the new Advance HE Enterprise and Entrepreneurship Education Framework deserves a few more thoughts on the topic. What's behind it and why is it so important?
Seeing beyond the obvious – the enterprising employee
After five years of use, the QAA Guidance on Enterprise and Entrepreneurship was refreshed in 2018 to reflect the views of those who had been using it. Working collaboratively with Advance HE we took a deeper look at what an entrepreneurial employee might look like and cast our thinking nets out to the type of graduate that would be employable in a micro or small business where entrepreneurialism would need support. Having read the recent report from Charlie Ball at Prospects, it is clear that this is an area that needs further attention, if only because entrepreneurial forms of education tend to be seen as a response to the need for more entrepreneurs, but not the people who might be able to work with them and support them. In my view, this has to change, but there are a few barriers to consider.
Research and Enterprise and Entrepreneurship Education
In terms of educational research, in my experience a lot of UK business researchers tend to look to the US for insights. However, as leading thinkers Heidi Neck and Andrew Corbett from Babson College point out when setting the scene for a new journal for the development of more scholarly thinking, they consider that Entrepreneurship Education is about entrepreneurs, and that new venture creation must be the context. They even suggest that taking it outside of the business education domain may be 'misguided'. Perhaps interestingly, they also suggest that the majority of entrepreneurship educators in the US are not trained educators, which in turn indicates that any educational argument within this type of research is going to be based on limited insights, especially when compared to the UK goals and approaches.
Keep education at the core?
So, if this type of research informs UK research, what do we need to do to illuminate this shortfall? Of course, as many readers will know, the QAA's split definition of enterprise and entrepreneurship helps, and has been extremely well received by those who do the face to face teaching. It remains a central tenet of the new Framework, and with good reason. What is perhaps less well known is that the definitional split was supported by research that started the other way around from the US perspective.
As educators trained in education, my team and I examined all of the QAA's Subject Benchmark Statement and drew out aspects that to us sounded entrepreneurial. I would suggest that, for example, work on creativity could be more advanced in art and design than in a business school, or that work on persuasion could be the domain of the performing arts, where ultimately actors and scenarios convince you that they are real, thus suspending prior beliefs. When it comes to decision-making in situations of ambiguity, risk and perhaps stress, medical education provides many insights, and working with incomplete evidence is common in anything remotely historical, even Greek and the Classics. The list goes on, and the business education has much to offer and add to the mix, but my point is that the UK way of doing things has started with best educational practice, not responded to the demands for business start-ups.
I recently saw a series of presentations that focussed entirely on the enterprise aspects of creativity, innovation, flexibility and adaptability, the competencies that underpin entrepreneurship and potentially at least, could enhance provision that is well matched to the needs of microbusinesses and entrepreneurs who wish to employ kindred spirits. I was rather impressed, and not a mention of business start-up. The EntreComp competencies can really help to draw these out, and now features as a central evaluative aspect of teacher training and research degrees in Wales.
Taking a view
So, what do the people who are really enterprising think about all of this? 'Too few get access to Enterprise Education' is the view of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Entrepreneurship, who also say that the government should ensure it doesn't incentivise start-ups and entrepreneurship to the detriment of broader enterprise education approaches. They also openly applaud the QAA's work saying that it punches above its weight and cite the very successful ICURe 'PhD to Entrepreneur' team's view that its introduction was a seminal moment in UK higher education. It is no surprise to find that the SFEDI and IOEE concur - likewise EEUK and ISBE, all of who have helped to develop this new work in partnership with Advance HE.
What next? What can I do?
So, what can we learn from this? Well, once you've looked at the Enterprise and Entrepreneurship Education Framework, perhaps you could revisit your own best practices in more detail? Draw out the great educational approaches that help us on our journey, ones that ensure our graduates have a great future, then share them with others such as EEUK and/or ISBE.
Way back in 2009 the former chair of the then Higher Education Academy, Paul Ramsden, thought that any successes in innovative education of the future would come from interdisciplinarity, and research into successful businesses confirm this. So, when did you last look into learning teaching and assessment strategies that are beyond your department's walls? What could be different, and what could you learn? To my mind, these are the first steps to becoming an entrepreneurial educator and the Framework is an ideal mechanism for supporting this.
Andy Penaluna has contributed to over 50 countries' initiatives in entrepreneurial education. His clients include the UN, EU Joint Research centre and the OECD. He helped to develop the EntreComp Framework and is the Chair of QAA's Enterprise and Entrepreneurship Group and also helped to write the new Quality Code.
APPG for Entrepreneurship (2018) Enterprise Education, Westminster: APPG Entrepreneurship
Neck, H and Corbett, A (2018) The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship Education and Pedagogy, Vol 1. Pp
Find out more about the Enterprise and Entrepreneurship Education Framework, which is aligned to the Employability Framework, part of the Advance HE Student Success Frameworks.
Andy Penaluna
Enterprise and Entrepreneurship Education


Two types of conventional loans exist, and they are conforming and non-conforming.
All conforming loans have conditions and terms that follow the guidelines set forth by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac purchase loans complying with the guidelines from mortgage lending institutions, then they package the mortgages into securities and sell the securities to investors.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, like Ginnie Mae, provide a continuous stream of affordable funds for home financing resulting in the availability of mortgage credit for Americans.
Limits for Alaska, Guam, Hawaii, U.S. Virgin Islands are 50% higher.
Prior to 1984, second mortgage limits were the same as first mortgage limits. Subsequent legislation reduced the limits to 50% of first mortgage limits. No second mortgage program existed before 1982.
With passage of the economic stimulus package, Fannie Mae may temporarily purchase loans beyond the company's prevailing conventional loan limit in designated high-cost areas. The company may purchase loans with a maximum original principal obligation of up to 125 percent of the area median home price in high cost areas, not to exceed $729,750 except in Alaska, Guam, Hawaii, U.S. Virgin Islands where higher limits may apply.


Design Army's "District of Joy" campaign won an Emmy® in the Commercial–Single Spot category at the 60th Annual National Capital Emmy® awards, held June 23 at the Bethesda North Marriott Hotel and Conference Center.
According to The Washington Post, filming of the spot took place "in the early morning hours of a blustery October weekend. "We started at 4 a.m.," says (Design Army's Pum) Lefebure. "It was freezing cold, but we wanted to shoot before the leaves were off the trees. The finale was so windy for the dancers — they were such troopers." You can check out The Washington Post's story here.
Below is the team that worked on the campaign.
In addition, Design Army's "The (very) Political Collection" campaign won a gold National Addy Award ® in the Packaging Campaign category at the 2018 American Advertising Awards.
Design Army collaborated with Harper Macaw to design a limited edition series of chocolate bars to pay homage to the agency and the client's D.C. roots during the election year. The packaging in red,white and blue with bold graphics and customized illustrations were designed to be provocative with each chocolate bar representing a political party, issue or phrase, from Left Wing to Tea Party to Filibuster.
According to Design Army, "Touching every part of the project, design and copywriting to product creation, Design Army and Harper Macaw's collaboration resulted in flavors based on "characters" for each bar – from Red State with its mix of red berries and chocolate to Left Wing, which was full of "nuts" .


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Michaela Gläßer (* 8. Januar 1983 in Rodewisch) ist eine deutsch-tschechische Skeletonpilotin.

Michaela Gläßer begann 2001 mit dem Skeletonsport. Die Athletin, die in Nová Ves nad Nisou und Horgen lebt und zeitweise für den BSC München, heute für den WSV Königssee am Start war, tritt international für Tschechien an. Dem tschechischen Nationalkader gehört sie seit 2007 an. Trainiert wird sie von Pavel Lubas.

2001 wurde Gläßer erstmals Dritte bei deutschen Jugendmeisterschaften und Elfte bei den Deutschen Meisterschaften. Ein Jahr später wurde sie in denselben Wettbewerben Siebte und 12, 2004 Vierte und Neunte, 2005 Sechste und 13. Ihr internationales Debüt gab Gläßer erst nach ihrem Wechsel in den Nationalkader Tschechiens im November 2007 im Rahmen des Skeleton-Europacups als 14. in Igls. Schon im zweiten Rennen kam sie als Fünftplatzierte in Königssee unter die besten zehn. Daneben startete sie in Rennen im Rahmen des Skeleton-Interkontinantalcups und des Skeleton-America's-Cups. In fünf internationalen Rennen der Saison 2007/08 belegte Gläßer Top-Ten-Platzierungen. In der Gesamtwertung des Europacups kam sie auf den siebten Platz. Höhepunkt der Saison wurde die erstmalige Teilnahme an den Skeleton-Weltmeisterschaften in Altenberg, wo Gläßer 23. wurde. In der Saison 2008/09 nahm Gläßer an der Intercontinentalcup-Serie komplett teil und erreicht dort in Königssee mit dem 11. Platz ihr bestes Saisonresultat. In der Gesamtwertung des ICC wurde sie 13. Bei der anschließenden Weltmeisterschaft in Lake Placid belegte sie den 24. Rang.

Weblinks
 Homepage
   (englisch)

Frau
Geboren 1983
Skeletonfahrer (Deutschland)
Deutscher
DDR-Bürger
Skeletonfahrer (Tschechien)
Sportler (Rodewisch)
Tscheche


Shipping is fundamental to your customer experience and can make or break an online business in multiple ways. Not only are shipping and packaging necessary distribution functions, but they are also an important element of your marketing strategy. Your website may represent the connection between your company and your customers, but the shipping process connects your products directly to your customers.
Packaging must be the first consideration. Safe transport, weight, size, expense, and image are all factors involved in the choice of packaging materials, and the many options available on the market today do not make these decisions easy.
The next consideration is customer shipping payment options. In a 2015 survey done by UPS, 45% of shoppers abandoned their cart when the order did not qualify for free shipping. The survey also found that 85% of respondents were willing to accept a five-day delivery timeframe in order to get the free shipping. As a retailer, your choices in terms of providing "free shipping" are to increase product prices to cover shipping costs, cover the shipping costs out of your profit margins, or combine strategies by increasing prices slightly and cutting profit slightly. If you are charging shipping, another strategy is to charge what you get charged. Having a real-time shipping cost calculator on your website can win a lot of trust from customers. This is an especially good option if you are selling heavy or oversized products that absolutely cannot ship free. The final option is to offer flat rate shipping. You can offer a flat rate for all sales or calculate flat rates for particular weight ranges. This alternative works best if you have a limited selection of products.
Both online and catalogue merchants should also think about shipping as a marketing tactic. You want to encourage orders that will reduce shipping costs in conjunction with boosting the average dollar value of the sale. The Amazon.com offer of free shipping for orders of $49 and up is the prime example of this strategy. Subscription offers are another good way to increase sales volume while decreasing shipping costs. Once the first subscription product has been shipped to quickly satisfy the customer, the products necessary to fulfill the remainder of the subscription can be scheduled to ship on time via the least expensive method.
One of the most important secrets to successful ecommerce is to conquer the challenge of shipping profitably. As your business grows, shipping from nearby warehouses and trucking packages to shipping points near the customer are alternatives that can reduce costs. Fulfillment warehouses may be the best solution. Extra expenses may be eclipsed by shipping costs that are far lower than anything a small business could negotiate. If you are doing your own shipping, consider arranging to directly pay for your inbound traffic. This tactic could greatly increase your volume with a shipper and result in lower negotiated rates for your outbound traffic. Consider the alternatives carefully, experiment with different tactics, and be sure to re-evaluate on a regular basis.
Cindy Unger is a business advisor for the Wyoming Small Business Development Center based in Casper. Cindy specializes in business planning, marketing strategies, and market research. She has a Bachelor's Degree from Miami University in Retail Marketing, and a Master's Degree from the University of Colorado in Anthropology and is the author of a number of technical publications. You can reach her by phone at 307-234-6683 or by email at cindyu@uwyo.edu.


Why Yankton? So Many Reasons!
Four year degree in an engineering or quality field with four years relevant work experience in a management/supervisor environment. •	Must have a strong understanding and proficiency in engineering drawing interpretation to include GD&T requirements •	Individual must be able to work with little to no supervision after initial training period, showing a high degree of initiative and self-motivation. Must demonstrate consistently being a good example of providing informal leadership and excellent work ethic. •	Experience with manufacturing systems, quality/continuous improvement initiatives, manufacturing safety practices is preferred. •	Must possess excellent organizational skills, and problem solving/analysis abilities •	The ability to teach and train others in a coach or mentor role as needed •	Must be able to maintain confidentiality of customer and company information •	Must possess strong computer skills including Microsoft Office Suite Work Conditions: The work environment characteristics described herein are representative of those an employee encounters while performing the essential functions of this position. While performing the duties of this position, the employee will work in an office environment as well as the manufacturing floor. The employee occasionally works near moving mechanical parts and in precarious places. This position is occasionally exposed to wet and/or humid conditions, fumes, or airborne particles, toxic or caustic chemicals, risk of electrical shock and vibration. The noise level in the work environment is usually quiet to moderate. This position may require travel with overnight stays. Physical Requirements: While performing the duties of this job, the employee is occasionally required to sit, stand, walk, use hands to finger, handle, feel or operate objects, tools or controls; the employee is occasionally required reach with hands and arms. This position requires the ability to occasionally lift up to 30 pounds.
Summary/Objective: The Quality Manager is part of the manufacturing support team; this position oversees quality systems/operations and must be able to maximize machine and labor utilization while meeting goals for safety, quality, delivery, and profitability. The Quality Manager ensures the quality team works together cohesively with all departments and is responsible for leading and directing the work of assigned reports as well as resource planning, implementing lean practices, and achieving operational excellence. Duties and Responsibilities: •	Responsible for providing leadership, communicating the plan, providing feedback, identifying/assisting in solving issues, and creating organizational structure. •	Supports company policies, procedures, goals, objectives, and good manufacturing practices. •	Manages production activities related to the quality departments which includes establishing priorities, scheduling, continuous improvement, and production flow inhibitors •	Manages the department staffing requirements; this includes scheduling, cross training, interviewing, hiring, discipline and performance evaluations. •	Create and achieve department measurables that effectively support meeting or exceeding overall company objectives and goals. •	Maintains a professional and technical knowledge by participating in education workshops, reviewing professional publications, and implementing cost effective and profitable ways to increase company effectiveness. •	Assist in developing equipment, and operations for best utilization of resources. •	Responsible for managing, monitoring, and auditing ISO/AS, NADCAP, and customer certifications •	Identify – Research – Implement new process technology, and methods that will improve process flow, increase capacity, and improve quality. •	Manage quality training procedures to insure repeatable processes. •	Assists in the coordination and launch of new/revised products and processes. •	Ensure all department policies and procedures are maintained and followed at all times. •	Ensure a high level of internal and external customer service. Assists in investigating and correcting customer issues and complaints related to quality along with implementing and sustaining customer requirements and flow downs. •	Responsible for maintaining quality documentation and engineering change order controls •	Promotes 6S within the company and plays and active role in managing 6S in areas of responsibility •	Manages and recognizes risk; proactively drives results. •	Oversees the creation of accurate and clear work instructions to insure repeatable inspection processes. •	Works with all departments to create/negotiate an effective plan; follows up with necessary adjustments to support both internal and external requirements •	Drives and implements continuous improvements through lean tools, researching new technology, statistical data, developing people and processes. •	Applies the cost vs. benefit concept when making decisions on how resources are being allocated and / or consumed. •	Analyzes, designs, and implements lean manufacturing systems to remove and manage the 8 wastes •	Support other Duties as assigned. Supervisory Responsibility: This position manages employees in the quality departments and is responsible for performance management and hiring of those employees.


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Pale Horseman – 'The Fourth Seal' 3 comments
Welcome to sludge doom metal band Pale Horseman's forthcoming release, 'The Fourth Seal'. A self release, recorded, mixed and mastered at Comatose Studio, in Bradley, Illinois, USA, by Dennis Pleckham, of Bongripper. The band feel that since new drummer Jason Shryver joined the line-up, the overall sound, quality and production of their work has improved immeasurably. It's this positive influence to which they attribute increased pride and confidence in their music, in particular, this release.
Pale Horseman hail from Chicago, utilising twin guitar and vocals and a pounding drum section. With acclaimed live performances, their studio albums are produced by some of their own favoured influences, for instance, Dennis Pleckham, Noah Landis of Neurosis and Justin Broadrick of Godflesh.
Final War – Instant impacting, attention grabbing, heavy riff intro. The sludge comes into play immediately, with obvious elements of death and doom metal, vocally audible. Whilst it's not what you could call exciting, it's not too downbeat to listen to either. Slightly samey, for most of the track, but there's enough melodic and rhythmic alternation, to make it an okay listen.
Witches Will Gather – Again, fairly riff focused, with a large sludge/doom aspect. TBF, nothing from this genre is likely to win prizes for upbeat sounds, but that's not it's aim. Having said that, there is definite catch in this track and its hooks, from the mid-section on, are undeniable. Slowing the pace down, increasingly, from there, it fades out on a reverb sound. Passable.
Aokigahara – Classic doom/sludge intro, with some more deathy stuff included, it's just more of a standard filler, than being inspiring in any way. However, there's also variation in sound, style and technique, after the mid-point. It seems it's a trend, with Pale Horseman, to incorporate the changes and diversity from the central point of tracks. Still, there's not much change, after that. Slight ominous sense to the outro, but given it's a sludge/doom album, that's to be expected.
Bereavement – Slowing and seemingly toning things down even further now. Interestingly, early Sabbath-esque. Deeply ominous now, exuding sinister force. Gaining in strength, there's a wilful energy infecting this track here. Blatantly battle-esque and severe, in tone, till the merest chink of light manifests, in the slightest loosening of the instrumentals, through which, that minimally higher key is performed. By the closing section, you're aware of the impressive aural portrayal of 'bereavement', itself.
Gnashing Of Teeth – Alarmingly affecting, physically palpable intro. Enough in itself, to distract you, with its sudden, unexpected impact. Much like how you might imagine being slammed and sandwiched between two cars and then thrown from bumper-to-bumper incessantly. P.H. are certainly skilled at immortalising the sense of physicality, inherent within their track titles.
Forlorn Extinction – Coming into the intro, in a manner so smooth, it better befits a mid-way point, like one long, continuous stream of consciousness. A noticeably more aggressive edge to the lyrics, creeping into the accompaniments, till it becomes the song's general essence. Unusual choice of sentiment for this particular title, but well delivered.
Pale Rider – Lots of slide in the opening riffs and not discounting that now ubiquitous darkness, embodying and enshrouding the vocals. A bit morose, but it is doom/sludge, after all. Just a concerted doom fest. An overshadowing sense of encroaching, impending doom, expected of a track so entitled. In that respect, it does its job well.
Tyrant – Livening things up now, with a marked uplift in pitch and a breathier rhythm, it exudes a powerful angry force. Becoming angrier, in deference to the title, it's just a forceful energy, overpowering, in its strength.
Phantasmal Voice – Highly catchy drum rhythm intro, that's the prime focus now, with the prideful, tribal vocals, primal in their delivery. Some snazzier, jazzier riffs and a more concentrated rhythm. Very classic heavy Dio-esque vocal section in there; fans of the Dio, Iommi, Sazzo version of 'God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen' won't forget this closing section). Clever way to end, on a sound resembling such a memorable version of such a well-known carol).
Overall – On the whole, a passable background filler, but with enough experimental variation and clear emotional energy to make it memorable. So it's never gonna win any prizes for its uplifting quality, but no one expects that in sludge/doom productions anyway. Not unless you happen to be Down. Or Electric Wizard. Or Kyuss. You get the gist. Anyway, a largely reasonable listen, with a few hints of intrigue thrown in.
7/10 *******
Self-Released 24th November 2017.
For fans of generic doom, sludge and early Sabbath.
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