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The Standing Committee has given us permission to hold services in the courtyard.
Join us on Sunday at 11 am.
You will need to call 702-370-5143 to make a reservation.
Please remember to bring a mask and wear it!
First time visitor? .... Find out how, where and when we worship. We hope to see you soon!!
RECTOR'S FORUM
Topics that relate faith and life
Make a joyful noise!
Seeking and serving the least and the lost
Welcome to Christ Church Episcopal
The open church - open hearts, open minds, open arms.
We extend a special welcome to those who are single, married, divorced, widowed, partnered, straight, gay, confused, well-heeled or down-at-heel. Especially welcome are wailing babies and excited toddlers. We welcome you whether you can sing like Pavarotti or just growl quietly to yourself. You're welcome here if you're just browsing, just woken up or just got out of prison. We don't care if you're more Christian than the Archbishop of Canterbury or haven't been to church since Christmas 10 years ago. We extend a special welcome to those who are over 60, but not grown up yet, and to teenagers who are growing up too fast.
We welcome keep-fit moms, football dads, starving artists, tree huggers, latte sippers, vegetarians, junk food eaters. We welcome those who are in recovery or still addicted. We welcome you if you're having problems, are down in the dumps or don't like organized religion (we're not that keen on it either). We offer welcome to those who think the Earth is flat, work too hard, don't work, can't spell or are here because Granny is visiting and wanted to go to church. We welcome those who are inked, pierced, both or neither.
We offer a special welcome to those who could use a prayer right now, had religion shoved down their throats as kids or got lost on the way to the buffet and wound up here by mistake.
We welcome pilgrims, tourists, conventioneers, seekers, doubters and YOU.
Events & Sermons
Upcoming Events View Calendar
Misa en espanol
Weekly staff meeting
Latest Sermons View sermons
Guile - Steven Kalas - Jan. 17, 2021
MaddoxMedia
Order of service for Sunday, Jan. 17, 2021
Link to Evening Prayer - Jan. 13, 2021
What a friend we have in Jesus - J. Barry Vaughn - Evening Prayer - Aelred of Rievaulx - Jan. 13, 2021
Our outreach program provides food to thousands of people every year. We also welcome homeless families in collaboration with Family Promise.
Epicenter on the Parkway
The Christ Church Choir


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Investment Management Update
A round-up of recent legal and regulatory developments of interest to the investment management sector.
This issue includes:
FCA filings from 9 September 2019 – Directory, AIFMs using NPPR and SM&CR firms
Fight against fraud: FCA speech
Reasonable steps to ensure the authenticity of electronic instructions: IA's updated guide
Certification regime regulatory references: final BSB statement of good practice
Preparing for Brexit in financial services and the state of play: FCA speech
Polling and MAR: FCA's new webpage
Guidelines on liquidity stress testing in UCITS and AIFs: ESMA final report
FCA filings from 9 September 2019
Directory, AIFMs using NPPR and SM&CR firms
A number of Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) filings have become available to firms or been updated from 9 September 2019. The FCA has:
published a webpage and a user guide on the Directory, which is the new public register for checking the details of key individuals working in financial services. From 9 September 2019, the FCA began the staged process for firms to submit their data for the Directory using the Directory Persons Connect form. Banks, building societies, credit unions and insurance companies must submit their data between 9 September 2019 and 9 March 2020. All other firms must submit their data between 9 December 2019 and 9 December 2020;
updated its webpage on the national private placement regime (NPPR) announcing changes to the submission of notifications to market and material change by alternative investment fund managers (AIFMs) marketing AIFs under regulations 57, 58 and 59 of the Alternative Investment Fund Managers Regulations 2013. From 9 September 2019, AIFMs marketing funds under regulations 58, 59 and, for UK AIFMs only, regulation 57, will return to submitting notifications via Connect. Full scope EEA AIFMs marketing AIFs under regulation 57 will be required to submit notifications using new forms; and
updated its webpage on the Senior Managers and Certification Regime (SM&CR) to notify that Form K (which firms must submit to the FCA to notify which approved persons should be converted to a senior manager function) is available on Connect from 9 September 2019. The Form K must be submitted by 24 November 2019.
The FCA has published a speech by Charles Randell, Chair of the FCA, in relation to the fight against fraud. Mr Randell explains that financial crime, specifically fraud against individuals, has reached epidemic proportions where people are scammed out of their savings.
Key points from the speech include:
confusion on what is and is not regulated and protected: Mr Randell believes that the financial promotions regime is "ripe for re-examination". The rubric which appears on financial promotions, such as "capital at risk", does not help investors distinguish between a low cost, lower risk diversified listed equity fund and a high cost, much higher risk minibond. A well-functioning financial promotions regime would label a high-risk unquoted and unregulated investment as exactly that and state clearly that it is not the right investment for an individual's life savings. Unless the issue or approval of financial promotions is made a regulated activity, with only appropriately qualified and governed authorised firms permitted to do this, the FCA is not confident that the financial promotions regime can provide much better protection than it does at present (which Mr Randell believes is not enough);
making the corporate enablers play their part: in many instances, fraud is not possible without the data breaches and other actions by firms outside the financial sector, for example large corporate organisations allowing personal data to be stolen or promoting advertisements for scams on the internet. The FCA expects such companies, especially the big-tech ones, to use their large resources to work with law enforcement and regulators to develop algorithms and machine learning tools to identify fraudulent content and take it down immediately when requested by authorities;
the role of policymakers: policymakers, including the FCA, need to embed risk of fraud into the savings and investment policies they make; and
what the FCA is doing:
taking action against the sale of specific types of high risk investment to retail investors such as the proposed changes for peer-to-peer lending, ban on high risk bets on investments and the ban in relation to bets on cryptocurrencies;
intensifying its strategic coordination with the Financial Ombudsman Services, the Financial Services Compensation Scheme and the Money Pensions Service;
investing further in intelligence and data analytics, increasing the number of people tackling investment fraud and continuing to raise public awareness of scams;
proposing to ban contingent charging for pension transfer advice from 2020; and
supervising authorised firms' regulated activities and taking enforcement action in cases of serious misconduct.
The Investment Association (IA) has published an updated version of its guide on assisting fund managers determine the reasonable steps they should take in ensuring the authenticity of electronic instructions. The guidance recommends control mechanisms that firms who are responsible for the unit register should employ in order to be satisfied that an authority has been given by the incumbent holder of the units or someone who has been properly appointed to act on their behalf. The objective ultimately is to permit more automated and efficient processing for investors while providing adequate protection to the firm and to investors against fraud.
The Banking Standards Board (BSB) has published its finalised statement of good practice (SGP) in relation to implementing the regulatory reference requirement of the SM&CR effectively to candidates for certification functions. The SGP is targeted at banks but will also be of interest to solo-regulated firms that will be coming into the regime as they prepare for implementation on 9 December 2019.
The purpose of a regulatory reference is to provide firms recruiting people into certified roles with information relevant to the assessment of that person's fitness and propriety that they may not gain through other information supplied to them during the recruitment process. The SGP states that when providing, revising or using regulatory references, firms should take into account the principles of fairness, proportionality and consistency. The SGP covers:
good practice in providing regulatory references, including two of the most important questions to ask - "who is the request from?" and "what is being requested?". Firms need to ensure that managers understand what a regulatory reference is and how the firm deals with it;
good practice in obtaining a regulatory reference and the steps firms can take to alleviate difficulties in obtaining references in a timely manner; and
the type of information to include in a reference, particularly in less straightforward situations where more judgement may be required, for example references containing adverse information about an individual or disciplinary procedures that are incomplete when the reference is requested.
The FCA has published a speech by Andrew Bailey, Chief Executive of the FCA, in relation to preparing for Brexit in financial services and the current state of play. Mr Bailey referred to progress made so far including:
over 50 statutory instruments to ensure EU financial services legislation is effectively on-shored by exit day. In the absence of a transition period, the FCA intends to provide a transitional relief period up to the end of next year using its Temporary Transitional Power;
new cooperation agreements with the EU markets, insurance and banking authorities which will take effect in a no-deal scenario; and
the FCA taking on several functions in respect of the UK which are currently performed by the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) at EU level, notably the regulation of Credit Rating Agencies and Trade Repositories.
Mr Bailey addressed the following issues requiring further action:
share trading obligation (STO): the EU STO will prevent EU investors from accessing liquidity in EU shares listed in London. The UK has on-shored the STO under the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018. The UK framework will be the most equivalent in the world to the EU's. An equivalence agreement would resolve the liquidity issue but the EU has refused an equivalence framework to this date. Mr Bailey has emphasised that the FCA stands ready to enter into dialogue with its European counterparts before finalising its approach;
derivatives trading obligation (DTO): unless the UK and the EU find each other's regulatory regimes as equivalent, EU firms will not be able to meet the EU's DTO by using UK trading venues to trade in-scope derivatives and vice versa. Currently all over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives subject to the EU DTO have their main pool of liquidity on a UK venue. Without action, EU firms may lose access to UK liquidity pools and liquidity would be fragmented, harming both markets. Mr Bailey again notes that the best solution is to have an equivalence agreement between the UK and the EU;
clearing: EU authorities have taken steps to allow for the temporary recognition of UK central counterparty clearing (CCP) however the recognition expires in March 2020. In the absence of clarity on the regulatory status of UK CCPs after this date, the contracts that EU members clear with UK CCPs will be closed out or transferred by then. This would impose significant costs on EU firms as well as potentially straining market capacity. Mr Bailey emphasises that the best solution is for the EU to grant permanent recognition to UK CCPs;
uncleared derivatives: through the Temporary Permissions Regime and the Financial Services Contracts Regime, the UK has taken measures to allow firms to service existing uncleared derivatives between UK and EU counterparties. However, the EU has not taken reciprocal action. Member states have implemented measures to address the risk but there is uncertainty about the scope of the legislation in some jurisdictions;
data exchange: the UK government has legislated to allow the free flow of personal data from the UK to the EU in a no-deal scenario but without action by EU authorities, EU rules would limit the flow of personal data from the EU to the UK. This could restrict EU households and businesses accessing financial services from, and continuing contracts with, UK financial service providers;
contract repapering: progress on repapering has been gradual. Member states have legislated to allow UK firms to continue temporarily to provide certain services in their jurisdiction following a no-deal Brexit but these access provisions are not EU-wide. There are also variations in the activities covered and their durations. This has created uncertainty around how some of these provisions will be applied (the uncertainty will not exist in the UK because of the temporary transitional arrangements); and
retail financial services: the majority of UK firms have confirmed that they plan to maintain existing products and services to their customers resident in the EU. However, there is a risk that a lack of legal certainty in some jurisdictions (in the transitional regimes offered by member states) will create adverse outcomes for customers.
The FCA has published a webpage on how it expects firms and individuals to handle any information that has the potential to be inside information, including information obtained as a result of polling. The FCA makes clear that if an established polling firm is due to publish polling results and on publication the results are likely to affect the price of government bonds traded on regulated trading venues (and meets the other criteria to be classified as inside information), then it could be an offence under the Market Abuse Regulation (MAR) to share that information prior to publication other than where necessary "in the normal exercise of employment, a profession or duties".
The FCA emphasises that whether or not information is inside information would need to be judged on a case-by-case basis. Where the definition of inside information is not met, MAR does not impose a restriction on those collecting or receiving polling information relevant to financial market prices even while polls are open.
ESMA has published a final report in relation to guidelines on liquidity stress testing (LST) in UCITS and AIFS. The guidelines apply to managers, depositaries and NCAs. The purpose is to increase the standard, consistency and, in some cases, frequency of LST already undertaken and promote convergent supervision of LST by national competent authorities. The guidelines will apply from 30 September 2020.
Among other things, the guidelines state that:
in building LST models, managers should determine: the risk factors that may impact the fund's liquidity; the types of scenarios to use and their severity; different outputs and indicators to be monitored based on the results of the LST; the reporting of LST results, outputs and indicators to management; and how the results of the LST are used by risk management, portfolio management and by senior management;
a manager should have a strong understanding of the liquidity risks arising from the assets and liabilities of the fund's balance sheet, and its overall liquidity profile, in order to employ LST that is appropriate for the fund it manages;
LST should be carried out at least annually and, where appropriate, employed at all stages in a fund's lifecycle;
LST should be properly integrated and embedded into the fund's risk management framework supporting liquidity management. It should be subject to appropriate governance and oversight, including appropriate reporting and escalation procedures;
LST should assist a manager in preparing a fund for a crisis, and in its broader contingency planning; and
a depositary should set up appropriate verification procedures to check that the manager of a fund has in place documented procedures for its LST programme.
Lora Froud Partner
Alexandra Green Partner
Rachel Serene Senior Associate

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


There's no shortage of great golf courses in Northern Michigan competing for your golf dollar. With three championship courses on property, The Bear, The Wolverine and Spruce Run, Grand Traverse Resort & Spa is an easy first choice for a golf getaway.
The newest course of the trio, The Wolverine, is the only Gary Player-designed course in the state of Michigan. Appropriately named for the cunning Michigan forest-dweller, Gary Player's signature course, The Wolverine, offers a true north woods golfing experience where each nine presents its own challenges. The course winds through water and wetlands on the front nine, and highland terrain with hardwoods and views of Grand Traverse Bay on the back nine.
Thanks to the versatility and playability of the track coupled with four sets of tees on each hole, more players can enjoy golfing this certified member of the Turfgrass Environmental Stewardship Program.
After playing The Wolverine, the helpful attendants will store your clubs overnight so you can tackle the famously tough Jack Nicklaus' Bear course the next day.
The first hole on The Bear, a 364 yard par 4, is an easy par if you stay out of the moguls but after that, pars are hard to come by. Visually intimidating forced carries and water hazards on 14 of 18 holes make this course a challenge. The beautiful finishing hole plays downhill back to the clubhouse with another carry over water to a large green.
Even if you're leaving the next day, the golf staff will store the clubs overnight so you can take off and grab a swim before dinner. The Grand Traverse Resort also offers a fast,free shuttle service to their private beach club on Lake Michigan, just minutes down the road.
The perfect antidote to a grueling workout on The Bear is the popular 100-minute Grand Traverse Body Renewal massage/exfoliation combo that starts with a gentle exfoliating scrub followed by a Vichy warm water shower. Next comes a relaxing massage, that combines hot stones with a signature massage oil, infused with the calming benefits of wild birch and wintergreen grown in Northern Michigan. As you drift away in a warm linen wrap, the therapist provides a soothing neck, scalp and face massage.
The third course on site is Spruce Run, designed by Bill Newcome and named for the many spruce trees lining its long fairways. The par 70 course, renowned as a Michigan Open tour venue from the early 1980s, plays 6304 yards from the blues with a slope rating of 134. All three courses are meticulously maintained and the Player Assistants keep the groups moving smoothly.
Grand Traverse Resort and Spa Packages and twilight rates offer exceptional value while themed golf events throughout the year add to the enjoyment of the rounds.
If you're looking for a break from golf, downtown Traverse City is well worth a visit for good local dining, craft beers and shopping for local goodies. Further afield, check out the clear waters, high sand dunes and beautiful walking trails of Sleeping Bear National Park on Lake Michigan. If you're a U.S. citizen over 62, pick up a lifetime US National Parks pass for $10.00.
Wow. I'd love to try that hot stone massage with wild birch and wintergreen grown in Northern Michigan.


After removing beef from pan, scrape all brown particles from pan, and pour particles and drippings into bowl or glass measuring cup. Skim 2 tablespoons fat from top of drippings; add fat to 1-quart saucepan. Discard any remaining fat; reserve remaining drippings. Stir flour into fat in saucepan.
Prepare gravy using any boneless beef pot roast, such as a rump, bottom round, shoulder or arm roast.
To prevent lumps in the gravy, make sure the flour is completely blended into the fat in the saucepan. Use a wire whisk or fork to blend well.


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Trump's top advisers confused about whether vague travel ban affects green card holders
White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus contradicted himself when asked whether the travel ban would affect green card holders. (JIM LO SCALZO/EPA)
Even President Trump's top advisers don't appear to understand the controversial executive orders issued by their boss.
White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus maintained Sunday that the orders — which brought a 120-day suspension to America's refugee program, an indefinite end to its intake of Syrian refugees and blocked all people from seven Muslim-majority nations from entering the U.S. — didn't affect holders of green cards, despite several reports indicating that it had.
"We didn't overrule the Department of Homeland Security, as far as green card holders moving forward, it doesn't affect them," Priebus said on NBC's "Meet The Press."
But when pressed by host Chuck Todd on the matter, Priebus immediately contradicted himself.
"Well, of course it does," he said, after Todd asked whether order does not impact green card holders from seven nations. "If you're traveling back and forth, you're going to be subjected to further screening."
President Donald Trump's vague executive orders on Friday brought a 120-day suspension to America's refugee program, and an indefinite end to its intake of Syrian refugees. (Evan Vucci/AP)
Trump's vague executive orders on Friday blocked all people from Syria, Iraq, Iran, Sudan, Somalia, Libya, and Yemen — including green card residents — from entering the U.S. for 90 days.
According to multiple reports, the Department of Homeland Security interpreted the orders as not applying to people with passports from those seven countries who nevertheless had lawful permanent resident in the U.S. — a status also known as being a holder of a green card.
DHS Secretary John Kelly said immigrants with green cards traveling from the banned countries on Trump's list are allowed into the U.S.
"In applying the provisions of the president's executive order, I hereby deem the entry of lawful permanent residents to be in the national interest," Kelly said in a statement released Sunday.
muslim ban
Protests at JFK and airports around the country following Muslim travel ban
House Homeland Security Chairman Michael McCaul (R-Tex.) echoed Kelly's statement.
"We should not simply turn away individuals who already have lawful U.S. visas or green cards—like those who have risked their lives serving alongside our forces overseas or who call America their home," he said.
While the executive order caused confusion amongst the agencies, the primary focus should be to enforce "tougher screening measures" to protect the nation, McCaul said.
He also noted that it's "deeply irresponsible" to call Trump's order a "Muslim ban."
Thousands of protesters block the street at JFK to protest Trump's travel ban. (Kevin C Downs/For New York Daily News)
"The order puts a pause on refugee admissions and temporarily halts immigration from seven countries, each of which was already designated by the Obama Administration as an area of terror concern," he said.
Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani said in an interview with Fox News's Jeanine Piro on Saturday that Trump came to him for guidance on implementing the controversial ban.
CNN reported, however, that the White House overruled that interpretation Saturday morning, mandating that the DHS could allow or not allow green card holders to enter the U.S., on a case-by-case basis.
A senior Trump administration official, meanwhile, said green card holders from the nations of Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen would need a waiver to return to the U.S. and that green card holders in the U.S. would need to meet with a consular official before leaving the country.
Since the orders were signed, multiple green card holders have since been detained at airports across the U.S., including several at JFK International Airport.
Judges in at least four states have since signed orders halting parts of Trump's executive orders, including a temporary restraining from a Virginia judge ordering a stop to the removal of green card holders detained at Dulles International Airport for seven days.
With ELIZABETH ELIZALDE
reince priebus
donald trump first 100 days


I am so sad. I am so so sad. And really angry. Just a flood of emotion. To me she relates to Regina in greatness. Not the way she lived her life of course, but her music was fresh, unique and wonderful. I am just so pissed off about this loss. For way too short a time the world had a real treasure in art with her. Damn it!
I wasn't a huge fan of hers but she was very talented. It's a shame she couldn't get her life together. Hopefully, others will learn from her mistakes and not follow into the destructive force of alcohol abuse and drugs like so many other talented musicians we've lost.
Love her music so much. Such a huge shame.
You know, whenever this happens, and unfortunately it does all too often, I always think, why didn't someone take that person and hold on to them and prevent them from destroying them self. Then I realize, you can't help someone that doesn't want help. If a person is not open to receiving help you are just spinning your wheels.
It's obvious that her parents have been trying for quite a while. If you don't respond to your parents efforts then I don't think there's much hope of getting past whatever demons haunt you.
Another terrible and tragic loss. A talented and valuable life snuffed out much too early...very sad.


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Les circonscriptions électorales de l'Estonie sont les divisions du territoire estonien effectuées dans le cadre des élections en Estonie.

Élections européennes
Lors des élections européennes, le territoire de l'Estonie est une circonscription unique.

Élections législatives
Lors des élections législatives, le territoire de l'Estonie est divisé en douze circonscriptions électorales. Les limites des circonscriptions correspondent aux limites des quinze comtés estoniens. Une circonscription peut cependant inclure plusieurs comtés. La ville de Tallinn est divisée en trois circonscriptions.

Élections municipales
Lors des élections municipales, chaque commune, à l'exception de la capitale Tallinn, constitue une circonscription électorale. A Tallinn, les huit arrondissements municipaux représentent chacun une circonscription électorale.

Références

Circonscription

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


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#### Published in
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### Remarks
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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


As a reader of the Buy and Hedge blog, you know that managing the cost of hedges is just as important as understanding your risk. This weekly update is not meant to give advise on timing, but to give an understanding or the relative cost of hedges and to try to explain some of the dynamics that drive its change.
This week, hedging costs returned to lower levels with short-term rates at 0.97 daily bps and mid-term costs at 1.25 daily bps. You can see all the historical data on our Resources Page.
Last week's update, Update 9-26, we talked about Spain's troubles reared their ugly head and causing the markets to jump in volatility. That update reminded us that it was not too late to hedge as costs, while off their lows, were still affordable. It also reminded us that when volatility jumps, selling calls generated a higher premium and to take advantage of that.
This week, the cost of hedging pulled back to some lower levels despite some down market days. The negative of this environment is that it is getting harder and harder to generate income off selling options. Whether you're putting on a spread or collar, the upside options for October just don't have the juice to generate premiums. By the way, November options seem to have a little extra premium in them, but we believe that is attributable to the election.
When a situation like October's low option prices occurs, don't force it. You can wait or if put protection is cheap enough, just use the protective side for the hedge. In other words, it's not always necessary to sell calls. Sometimes just holding the puts (i.e. married put) can work. This tactic does have the advantage of not limiting your upside and still providing downside protection. Most of the time it is too expensive to put on just a long put (greater than 3% on an annualized rate), but watch for it to happen. Right now this is not the case for the SPX, but it may be for some ETFs or individual stocks.
An example of this would be Johnson and Johnson (JNJ). Currently at $69.25 a 10% downside hedge would put us roughtly at the 62.5 strike. The April 62.5 puts, 198 days away, trade at 0.80. There's a few ways to calculate this annualized cost, but the easiest way is to simply divide .80 by 69.25 (to get 1.15%) then annualize it by (365/198 * 1.15%) to come up with an hedging cost of 2.12%.
Add to the equation that JNJ has a dividend yield of 3.52% and you've got a position with unlimited upside and downside protection of 10% that is more than paid for by the dividend with money left over to spare. In this situation, there is no reason to sell calls as a means of offsetting hedging costs.
This was not always the case for JNJ. Look back to this day last year when JNJ was trading at $62. The April 55 puts (11% downside for 200 days out) were trading at $2.70. This is a 7.95% annualized cost to hedge and is way to expensive to endure without an offset. Of course in this situation, we would want to sell calls to offset that married put cost.
JNJ is obviously a stock with low volatility, which makes hedging more affordable. The point of this post is not to go buy JNJ, but get you familiar with understanding the importance of managing your hedging cost and watching for the right environment to put it on. We still are of the opinion that these are relatively low costs and have been taking advantage of it.


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Nokia, Xiaomi sign multifaceted licensing deal
Jul 5, 2017 12:28pm
Nokia and Xiaomi will explore a range of potential initiatives under terms of the deal.
Nokia and Xiaomi inked a cross-licensing pact that will also see the companies collaborate on a variety of initiatives.
Xiaomi will acquire patent assets from Nokia under terms of the multiyear deal, which also includes a cross-license to each company's cellular standard essential patents. Nokia will provide network infrastructure equipment designed to meet high-capacity, low-power requirements by web providers and datacenter operators, and the companies will work together on optical transport solutions for datacenter interconnect, IP routing and a data center fabric offering.
Nokia and Xiaomi also said they'll explore other areas of potential collaboration including the IoT, augmented and virtual reality, and artificial intelligence.
"Xiaomi is one of the world's leading smartphone manufacturers and we are delighted to have reached an agreement with them," Nokia CEO Rajeev Suri said in a press release. "In addition to welcoming such a prominent global technology company to our family of patent licensees, we look forward to working together on a wide range of strategic projects."
While the agreement is clearly wide-ranging, whether it could provide a lift to both companies' struggling handset businesses is unclear. Nokia was a dominant smartphone vendor before being toppled by Apple and Android-powered handsets, of course, and it hopes to stage a comeback in the U.S. with the release later this month of the Nokia 6. Xiaomi, meanwhile, has struggled with the rise of several fellow Chinese smartphone vendors and has yet to make a dent in the U.S., although it may be inching closer to elbowing its way into the American market.
"As a company seeking to deliver more exciting technological innovations to the world, we are excited at the opportunity to work more closely with Nokia in the future," Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun said in the announcement. "Xiaomi is committed to building sustainable, long-term partnerships with global technology leaders. Our collaboration with Nokia will enable us to tap on its leadership in building large, high-performance networks and formidable strength in software and services, as we week to create even more remarkable products and services that deliver the best user experience to our Mi fans worldwide."
smartphones data centers augmented reality (AR) virtual reality IoT artificial intelligence (AI) Nokia Xiaomi


A coffee morning to raise funds to help our friends in Ballykajoni (Malawi), to buy food and other much needed supplies.
The people of this village in Northern Malawi are very close to our hearts having visited several times, we are also planning to go back out later this year.
Please come along, support us to help our friends in need and please spread the word, everyone will be very welcome.
As the church we are made up of all ages, shapes and sizes with different gifts and abilities - in short we're an Odd Bod family. But even though we are many we are one body.
At this in-house weekend we are hoping to have events for all ages so that everybody and come together and take part.
More info will come as the different events come together so stay tuned to facebook for opportunities where you can get to know the rest of the family a bit better.
Magherafelt Manor PNH Befriending Ministry team warmly invite you to come and bring your family and friends to a special Hymn-singing morning. Light refreshments will be served after the service.
The Minister's Room from .
This will be the last meeting until 4th September 2017.
at the Manse, 46 King Street.
A Church Family Barbeque is being arranged by Sunday School and Bible Class. All are welcome but to help with planning please let one of the Sundays school teachers know if you are planning to attend.
Donations of tray bakes will be greatly received.


With A Yacht Charter Italy. With us!
First, take into consideration the number of persons sailing with you, when choosing a right charter catamaran. Second, the sailing performance of catamarans is very important - they do not rock about in the water, and there is no fear of getting seasick because they rarely heel more than 5 degrees. Another thing to consider when choosing a right catamaran is your budget - the price of chartering a catamaran depends upon extra amenities and activities you will choose. Do not forget the provisioning and food that should be included in your sailing cost. If you charter a crewed catamaran, you need to pay for each member of the crew and provide for their meals.
Lagoon - French company. The most popular charter models range from 38'-45' feet in length (up to 67'). Lagoon catamarans are more designed for the charter business, where they can fit 4 cabins onboard for 4 couples.
Fountaine Pajot - a French company offering a size range from 36'-65' feet in length.
Nautitech - Fast, elegant easy to navigate, the catamarans vary from 36'-49' feet in length. Wonderful panoramic views from the cockpit.
Read more on catamaran sailing yachts on our specialized page Sailing Catamaran Yachts, where you will find additional information on why catamarans are great for a sailing vacation, how to select the catamaran to best suit your needs, what types and designs of catamarans are available to you, how to sail and where to charter a catamaran yacht. Make an informed decision for the best charter vacation ever!


We provide a vast array of services for residential and commercial clients throughout Bergen County. All things garden related and professional service with a smile!
Please enter desired services and details of your request here.
Thank you for contacting us! All requests are responded to within 24 hours. If you need to contact us directly, please call 877-933-GROW.
Cutback and removal of spent perennials.
Redefining garden bed edges and blowing out beds Fall/Winter debris.
Weekly or Biweekly leaf cleanups.
Leaves left curbside for municipal, or removed upon request.
Removal incurs an additional fee.
Mulch bed areas for maximum weed control.
Mulch Types: Red, Black, Brown, Triple Shredded hardwood, Pine chips or Hemlock.
Corrective pruning of shrubs & small trees.
Restorative pruning of shrubs & small trees.


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Scott Michael July 10, 2012 FAMOUS SINGERS, LEARN, REALITY TV 3 Comments on Learn to become a singer that does not scare Britney Spears off the X-Factor
Learn to become a singer that doesn't scare Britney Spears. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Holding a tune and keeping it in tune is not difficult when you learn to sing the right way whether live with a teacher or even following simple online lessons. But here's a prime example of someone that has tried to by pass the whole process and still needs to learn to become a singer in front of Britney Spears.
The auditions for the new X-Factor in the US are under way with some surprising auditions with one in particular that made Britney Spears walk off set in disgust according to omg at yahoo.
Note to future X Factor hopefuls: Don't cover Britney Spears' greatest hits, or risk not making it to the next round!
During The X Factor auditions in Greensboro, North Carolina July 9, Spears was at a loss for words when a contestant dressed in drag performed a cover of her 1999 smash, "(You Drive Me) Crazy."
Spears, 30, looked visibly bothered as the male contestant, dressed partially as a woman in cat glasses and a bedazzled jean jacket, struggled to sing her pop classic. The Grammy winner eventually left the judges' table and joined her fiance, Jason Trawick, 40, in the production pit; Demi Lovato, 19, and L.A. Reid, 56, followed Spears off stage, though Simon Cowell, 52, stayed behind to critique the aspiring singer.
Learn to become a singer that doesn't scare her away
"I don't think she quite understood your tribute," Cowell told the X Factor hopeful. "You've got to be able to sing in tune. There wasn't a note in tune."
There's a saying that any spectacular success is preceded by over 10,000 hours of preparation. And I guess in the episode the preparation comes from the right singing exercises, the right lessons and the right level of practice. Lets hope that others have taken the steps to learn to become a singer that does not scare Britney off. But on the other hand it probably makes for good TV.
become a singer like Britney SpearsBritney Spearsbritney spears x factor judgeBritney Spears x factor usalearn to become a singerX-factor Britney Spears
Scott Michael is a professional performer, actor and singer who has appeared on stage all across Europe and Australasia. He started his performing and singing training at the age of 7 and is a firm believer in practice and continutal development. He continues to take singing, voice and performing lessons on a weekly basis, just as a professional golfer or footballer never stops refining their craft.
Willie Jones, 17, gives "Nobody Knows" another go for Lovato to decide
Tears in the Tate Stevens vs Willie Jones sing off – X Factor USA bootcamp
15 year old Dinah Jane Hansen takes Beyonce to X Factor USA audition (VIDEO)


Debbie has spent eighteen years living abroad. The places she's called home include Japan, Australia, Singapore, Thailand, and China. Although living abroad isn't easy, Debbie is grateful for the friends she's made and the lessons they've taught her. She is now freelance writer who enjoys nothing more than a mug of hot chocolate and a movie after a long day of traveling.


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Reps. accuses INTELS of shortchanging Nigerians
The House of Representatives Ad-hoc Committee investigating the termination of contract between the Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA) and the Integrated Logistics Services (INTELS) Limited on…
Wed, 21 Feb 2018 20:24:40 WAT
The House of Representatives Ad-hoc Committee investigating the termination of contract between the Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA) and the Integrated Logistics Services (INTELS) Limited on Wednesday accused INTELS of short changing Nigerians.
Chairman of the House ad hoc committee, Rep. Pally Iriase, who made the accusation at a public hearing on the probe, alleged that INTELS had been short changing the government in its remittance of revenue.
The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the management of INTELS did not turn up for the public hearing, except for its legal supervisor, Mr Irabor Kenneth.
Iriase, who is the Deputy Whip of the House, expressed concern that officials of INTELS failed to attend the hearing.
He described the action of INTELS management as an affront on the National Assembly.
According to him, this is an indication that the company, based on evidence before the House committee has been exploiting loopholes in the existing contract with the NPA to deny the government legitimate revenue.
"With what we are hearing, it is very clear that INTELS is very comfortable with what they are doing by short changing Nigeria.
"By the time we are through, they will know not to treat the National Assembly with levity and disdain,'' he said.
The lawmaker said that the committee would visit the Onne Port in Port-Harcourt, Rivers State to ensure that INTELS was not flouting the contractual agreement in terms of revenue generation because of the face-off with the NPA.
However, an attempt by Kenneth, INTELS legal supervisor to represent the company's management was rebuffed.
The committee said that it would rely on the written memorandum submitted by INTELS to make its recommendations to the House.
In her presentation, the Managing Director of NPA, Mrs Hadiza Usman, disclosed that INTELS owed the government 19.9 million dollars as outstanding revenue collected out of an initial amount of 48 million dollars.
The NPA chief executive said that the 48 million dollars was the amount INTELS ought to have remitted to the government between November 2016 to Dec. 2017.
She added that INTELS had paid 28.1million dollars out of the original debt, while another payment of 14.5 million dollars was awaiting official confirmation.
According to Usman, disagreement with INTELS stemmed from the company's refusal to comply with the Treasury Single Account (TSA) mandate of the Federal Government.
Usman added that after the threat to terminate the contract based on advice from the minister of justice, the company apologised and had since 2017 commenced payment of all monies collected as revenue into government's coffers. (NAN)
House of Reps INTELS Nigerians


Last week I mentioned that standard scores have several advantages for the decisionmaker. The first is that they literally allow you to compare apples with oranges.
For example, let's suppose that you are evaluating employees with three measures: sales, customer approval ratings, and supervisors' ratings. Sales are calculated in dollars, customer approval ratings have a maximum of 10, and supervisors' ratings have a maximum of 40. If you don't convert these ratings to standard scores, you are pretty well restricted to combining these measures by comparing each employee's rank on them. That is too crude a comparison, because ranks vary in significance according to how close an employee's performance is to the average.
In a normal distribution (which is the type of distribution you're usually dealing with) differences in ranks near the average represent less of a difference in ability than differences at the extremes of the distribution. In a group of 100 people, for example, the difference between the first and the fifth-ranked people is usually greater than the difference between the fifty-first and fifty-fifth ranked.
The fairest way to combine these measures involves converting them to standard scores before combining them. Let's suppose the mean score on the customer rating was 6, and that the standard deviation was 1.5 (you can calculate these figures easily with spreadsheet software and database software; statistical software will calculate the standard scores themselves). To convert a customer rating to a standard score, you first subtract the mean score from it. So if an employee's customer rating is 9 you subtract 6 from it to get a remainder of 3. You then divide this remainder by the standard deviation, which is 1.5. Three divided by 1.5 is 2, which is the standard score, also known as the z-score. A z-score of 2 simply means that the employee finished two standard deviations above the mean. A z-score of –2.0 means that he or she finished 2.0 standard deviations below the mean, and so on.
After converting these measures to z-scores you then add them up and you have a fair rating for each employee. The rating assumes that all three measures are of equal importance. People often weight different parts of a rating system — that is, assign different numbers of points to each section, the more important sections getting the most points — but I advise you not to do this. The problem is that the ratings tend to reflect the higher-weighted sections but not the lower-rated ones. This is explained in more detail in a post on this site's blog. If you want different criteria to have different degrees of importance, you can apply the criteria in stages — for example, you could select employees who score well on the most important section and then rate them by their performance on less important sections. We'll have a further look at accidental weighting next week and get a broader view of how standardization can eliminate it.
For an example of how transformation to standard scores can make data comparable, click here.


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Carver Corporation Announces the Resignation of Three Directors
Stereophile Staff | Feb 1, 1998
On January 28, Carver Corporation announced the resignations, effective January 21, 1998, of Mr. Thomas C. Graham and Mr. John F. Vynne as directors of the company so each can devote more time to his respective business. Carver Corp. also announced the resignation of Mr. Stephen M. Williams as a director of the company effective January 27, 1998. Mr. Williams is pursuing other business opportunities that preclude his continued service as a director of Carver Corp.
Carver Corp. also announced that it has been notified by the Nasdaq Stock Market that the company's common stock will be delisted at the opening of business on March 27, 1998. Nasdaq's delisting notification is based on its review of the price data covering the 10 consecutive trade dates prior to December 22, 1997, and its determination that Carver Corp.'s common stock has failed to maintain a closing bid price greater than or equal to $1. For continued listing on the Nasdaq National Market, the common stock must maintain a minimum bid price of $1 or, as an alternative if the bid price is less than $1, maintain net tangible assets of $4 million and a market value of the public float of at least $3 million. Based on the shares outstanding of its Common Stock, the market value of Carver Corp.'s public float on January 27, 1998 was less than $3 million. Following delisting, the company expects its common stock to trade in the over-the-counter market on the electronic bulletin board of the National Association of Securities Dealers, Inc.
For the past 20 years, Carver has been designing, developing, manufacturing, and marketing audio and home-theater products to the mid- to high-end audio entertainment systems market.
In L.A.: The North American Debut of the DeVore O/Reference Loudspeaker System
An Audio/Video Event in Silverdale, Washington
The July Issue is Here
Santa Monica's Definition AV hosts Cambridge Audio, B&W
Graham Audio Launches the LS5/9f at Gig Harbor Audio
US Debut of AMG Viella Forte turntable
Luxman Open House at Audio by Mark Jones
Peter McGrath at The Audio Salon in Santa Monica Saturday
In Case You Missed It: The May Issue Is Here
ListenUp's Music Matters in Denver Wednesday & Thursday
Superb Sound at Definitive's Music Matters 14
It's April & Recommended Components
Dealer Events in Pasadena, Virginia, Chicago Friday & Saturday
Stereophile: the Next Generation


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Q: How to read characters from a text file, then store them into a hash in Ruby I am working on an assignment, and can't figure it out. We have to first parse a text file, and then feed the results into a hash.  I have done this:
    code = File.open(WORKING_DIR + '/code.txt','r')
    char_count = {'a' => 0,'b' => 0,'c' => 0,'d' => 0,'e' => 0,'f' => 0,'g' => 0,'h' => 0,'i' => 0,
                   'j' => 0,'k' => 0,'l' => 0,'m' => 0,'n' => 0,'o' => 0,'p' => 0,'q' => 0,'r' => 0,
                   's' => 0,'t' => 0,'u' => 0,'v' => 0,'w' => 0,'x' => 0,'y' => 0,'z' => 0
                   }
# Step through each line in the file.
code.readlines.each do |line|

    # Print each character of this particular line.
    line.split('').each do
        |ch|
            char_count.has_key?('ch')
                char_count['ch'] +=1
           end

My line of thinking: open the file to a variable named code
read the individual lines
break the lines into each character.
I know this works, I can puts out the characters to screen.
Now I need to feed the characters into the hash, and it isn't working.  I am struggling with the syntax (at least) and basic concepts (at most). I only want the alphabet characters, not the punctuation, etc. from the file.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks.

A: I would directly do :
File.open(WORKING_DIR + '/code.txt','r') do |f|
   char_count = Hash.new(0) # create a hash where 0 is the default value
   f.each_char do |c| # iterate on each character
      ... # some filter on the character you want to reject.
      char_count[c] +=1
   end
end

PS : you wrote 'ch' the string instead of ch the variable name
EDIT : the filter could be
f.each_char do |c| # iterate on each character
   next if c ~= \/W\ # exclude with a regexp non word character
   ....

A: Try this, using Enumerable class methods:
    open("file").each_char.grep(/\w/).group_by { |char|
        char
    }.each { |char,num|
        p [char, num.count]
    }

(The grep method filter is using regex "\w" (any character, digit ou underscore); you can change to [A-Za-z] for filter only alphabets.)

A: I think the problem is here:
char_count.has_key?('ch')
  char_count['ch'] +=1
end

You're not using the variable but a string 'ch', change that in both places for ch.
Also the hash could be created using range, for example:
char_count = {}
('a'..'z').each{|l| char_count[l] = 0}

or:
char_count = ('a'..'z').inject({}){|hash,l| hash[l] = 0 ; hash}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


I saw it Saturday 12-10 with several friends. i became the only Brokie. Actually I was already a Brokie by the time it was released on 12-9. I had never read the story, but I do recall a display of Annie Proulx books, probably Close Range in the late 90's at my local Borders. I remember because Proulx is such a distinctive name, but at the time I wasn't interested in western literature so I passed. I think it was in 2004 reports of "a gay cowboy" movie being filmed with JG and HL began to appear in the various entertainment rags. I really wasn't familiar with either of them, I don't think I'd seen a single film of theirs. I vaguely remember Heath being promoted as the Hot new Aussie hunk in the early 2000's. I recall the report of Heath nearly breaking Jakes nose during a take of the reunion kiss. Of course a report like that really put the movie on my radar, and so I started following any reports on the progress of it's filming I could find. Still, I did not read the SS. finally in september 05 it debuted at the Venice Film Festival and I started assiduously checking IMDB for comments and reviews. Then the Toronto film festival happened and around that time I read the SS, repeatedly. Damn, I had to wait 'til December to see it. I started googling it and discovered the message board that later evolved into the Dave Cullen site. Later came Bettermost. So Saturday the 10th rolled around and I was almost sick with anticipation, but had to play it cool with my friends. I just didn't want to let on how obsessed I already was. The movie did not disappoint, far from it. I had never been affected by a film like that before. Today, 4 years later, I still think about it. I'm still here.
On a date I can't remember in October, I went to work and opened yahoo. In the news section was a headline that caught my eye.
"Gay Cowboy Movie Wins Golden Lion Award".
I read the story, with quotes from Ang Lee (who I knew) and Heath and Jake (who I didn't). The online article ended with a link to the trailer, which I sat at my desk and watched.
I was immediately hooked, and I made note of the release date of 12/9. It was at that moment I decided to dress as a cowboy for Halloween that year.
I learned that the movie was "limited release" at first, with no Jersey dates. I only live about 45 mintues from the city, but couldn't justify spending $10.00 on tolls, $20.00 for parking, movie ticket prices, and whatever food or drink I got. So I decided to wait.
That year, Christmas fell on a Sunday. That meant my job was closed on Monday. I also found that Brokeback was now playing in Montclair, a 10 minute ride from my house, with much cheaper parking. My friends were all working, so I intended on going along. Mom decided to join me the last minute.
We got there for the 1:00 showing, a half hour early, thinking that would be plenty of time. There was a line outside the theater. When we walked in, they were announcing the only seats available for the 1:00 showing was front row. The 3:45 and the 6:30 showings were already sold out. Mom and I grabbed those front row seats, and we ran in and sat down, and slid down in the seats.
That was the first of many showings of BBM for me.
For me it'll be 2½ effin' years the 7th of January 2010.
When the movie was released in Sweden some time during spring of 2006 I read a very positve review, and thought to myself that it seemed to be an interesting film, and that I'd like to see it. I had never heard of HL or JG, but the way the review was written appealed to me.
Then time went by, I never got to see it and forgot about it. 1½ years later I saw the name Brokeback Mountain again, in a list of films on the website of an online DVD subscription site I was a member of. "Oh yeah, it's that film I wanted to see" I thought and ticked it off. Some time later it arrived in my letter box, and on the 7/7 -07 I, totally unprepared, put it in my DVD player and sat down to watch it alone at home.
January 2006, a small theatre in a small town in northern Sweden. I don't know why I went. I drove 26 km from my home to the town, went alone. I never asked anyone to come.
I remember when I came out on the street after the film. I was numb. I couldn't figure out what had hit me.
I always have to go back and look in my journal to be sure, but I am pretty sure it was Friday, the 6th of January, 2006. I had been following the progress of the movie since first hearing about it in September 2005 when it was at the Toronto Film Festival and was reported on by NPR.
The week before I bought a copy of the the Roanoke Times and checked the movie section, knowing if it was in Roanoke it would be at the art house cinema, The Grandin.
It opened there that afternoon at a matinee, we made the 7pm show and it was a crowd of people there. The movie was being shown in the largest theater of the 5 or so they have, it was full. A lot of gay men were there, a lot of straight couples and old women too, and when Jack Twist told L.D. Newsome to sit down, we all applauded.
I will probably have a toast in recognition of the day, I think about the story and film and its impact on my life everyday. I am glad I don't cry like I once did.
I was early January, in Dundee. I must go find my ticket stub for the actual date. But the next day, I went and bought the soundtrack and joined IMDB message boards.
And th rest, as they say is history!
A Sunday in January 2006. Other people have mentioned seeing it on the fateful date of Jan. 22. That may have been it for me, too, but I'm thinking it was more likely Jan. 15.
I decided to go to a movie, and it was between Brokeback Mountain, Munich and The New World. I'd noticed that BBM was getting good reviews, and was mildly interested in seeing it, although having read the story I thought I kind of knew about what to expect and wasn't super excited about it. Not that I didn't like the SS, just that I basically got the message and felt the movie would be preaching to the choir. I chose it more for the way the movie schedule worked into my time frame than anything else.
I never did see Munich or The New World. I didn't see any other movie at all for months afterward.
I saw BBM a few days after XMAS, 2005. I don't remember the exact day, but I suspect it was Dec. 28th. My daughter asked me to take her to see it, as she waited for the movie to be released for over a year. I had every intention of seeing Brokeback, and we saw it for the first time at the AMC complex in Emeryville, CA. I knew nothing about the short story, or anything else about Brokeback. After the movie ended I couldn't account for my feelings. I rushed home and read every review I could find and became a regular poster over at IMDB. I was hooked! I saw the movie 15 more times in 06 at 3 or 4 different theaters in The Bay Area. I don't know how I'll celebrate. My daughter wanted to watch it on Bravo yesterday, but I didn't feel up to it. Once the movie starts, I can't take my eyes of of it. I may take out one of my copies of the DVD (I have 3 for some reason) and have a private showing, just my daughter and I. 4 years is not such a long time, IMHO. I plan to be a Brokie forever.
I used to play the movie and book games on IMDb, and had favorite players whose posting history I would check, as a quick way to find the best games in play.
One was DryToast. I started noticing that he had dozens (and eventually hundreds) of posts in the IMDb forum for a movie with a weird name, "Brokeback Mountain." I took a look, and then read more and more of the posts in the forum. I can't say what got me sucked in, but I was. That was in October 2005.
I read all the posts, I downloaded the short story to my Palm and read it over and over. I watched YouTube videos people had made from the Logo documentary about BBM. And then, the day BBM was supposed to open here in Seattle, Dec 16, 2005, I flew across the country to be with my family for the holidays. The day it opened there, I flew back to Seattle. I finally, finally saw it, by myself, on December 31st. I saw it a bunch of times in the theater, and several (though not a bunch of) times on my DVDs. Now I mostly just watch it when I'm with other Brokies, or in an organized chat to watch it. Like many of you, I can play it in my head if I want to watch it.
I don't know how I plan to celebrate - I guess I see my anniversary as mostly in October, when I first discovered it. Sometimes to honor BBM, I wear blue and brown together (something I had never done before), or talk in Brokieisms.
I saw Brokeback Mountain on Jan. 1, 2006 - it made such an impression on me that I kept the ticket stub. I remember I had heard a discussion about it on Good Morning America, and it sounded so intriguing to me. I love Wyoming as well - then I heard the author's name and I realized I had a copy of Wyoming Stories that we bought, but I hadn't had time to read. I read the short story and it brought me to tears, especially the part where Ennis still dreamt of Jack - so I fell hook, line and sinker for the entire thing. My husband read it too. We were not disappointed when we saw it either - everything, from the soundtrack to the cinematography, to the magnificent performances of Heath and Jake, to the beauty of their intimacy. Just amazing. I've seen it countless times, I even enjoyed it on Bravo last night, even though I own 3 copies of the DVD - the first one, the Collector's edition, and then one on Blu-Ray, and if a deleted scenes/anniversary edition comes out, you bet I'll get that too. I have the soundtrack as well. We both just sat there as the credits rolled, stunned - couldn't cry, couldn't even move. Looking around, I did see that it affected everyone in some way - some couples touching each other affectionately, some softly crying. In subsequent viewings I have cried buckets too. I guess you could say it made an impression on me - and it is one of my very favorite films, ever. Just a haunting and affecting film.
How will I celebrate four years later? I'd love to see it on the big screen again, somewhere. I have only seen it on the big screen once.


text:
HomeVolume 6Issue 3How To Be Gay with Locative Media: The Rhetorical Work of Grindr as a Platform
How To Be Gay with Locative Media: The Rhetorical Work of Grindr as a Platform
By Michael J. Faris Issue 3, Volume 6 0 Comments
In 2015, the mobile gay male dating and hookup app Grindr began a shift in its marketing, technological infrastructure, and interface: While the app remained a "gay dating app" in much of its marketing and uses, it also become a "platform" in an attempt to generate revenue through advertisers and partnerships and to broaden the app's usefulness for users. Since its launch in 2009, Grindr's goal had been to help men find other men for sex, dates, or chatting nearby. Using geolocation, profiles are mapped onto a cascading grid so that a user can see and message the 100 profiles closest to him (or 600 profiles, if a user subscribes to the premium version, Grindr XTRA). Grindr thus acts as locative media (also called location-based technologies or geospatial media) that draws on the GPS capabilities of mobile devices in ways that allow users to interact with (and thus change their experiences of) their physical environments. As Adriana de Souza e Silva argues, locative media create hybrid spaces where physical and digital spaces are merged or blurred, allowing for "new way[s] of moving through a city and interacting with other users" (262; see also de Souza e Silva and Sutko; de Souza e Silva and Frith; Farman). In effect, Grindr remaps everyday heterosexual spaces into queer spaces, "cultivating innovative, non-normative intimate cultures through which gay men experience feelings of community and belonging, in the form of friendships, sexual liaisons or romantic relationships" (Batiste 114). However, Grindr's transformation in its infrastructure, marketing, and interface has led to changes in the mobile app, transforming it from simply a dating or hookup app into a platform that also helps to construct users' identities. In a 2015 Daily Beast interview about Grindr's attempt to become "more than a dating app," Grindr founder and CEO Joel Simkhai explained that the initial goal of Grindr had been "to solve gay men's problems" by helping them find "Who's around me," but now Grindr was developing new, broader goals: By becoming a platform, Grindr sought to become, in the words of reporter Ben Collins, more of "a much larger lifestyle brand" (Collins).
Figure 1. A screenshot of Grindr's cascading grid of profiles ("Press Kit"), used under fair use, critical commentary.
Grindr's shift to a "platform" is important both materially and discursively in its reconstitution. I understand platform as material "digital infrastructure that enable two or more groups to interact" (Srnicek 43) and as a discursive concept used to shape rhetoric about digital spaces and to shape practices in those spaces. In my understanding of how platforms shape experiences online, I follow Tarleton Gillespie, who in "The Politics of 'Platforms'" explains how YouTube articulates itself as a platform so that the site can appeal to advertisers, professional content producers, policymakers, and users alike. Through its platform rhetoric, YouTube draws on disparate and potentially conflicting meanings of the concept—a computational platform that can be built upon, a political platform to speak from, an architectural platform to build on, and so forth (349-352)—to then promote itself as "a progressive and egalitarian" site for self-expression (350) and court advertisers and media producers (355). Gillespie argues that through this platform rhetoric, YouTube helps to "[shape] the contours of public discourse online" (358). This shaping is accomplished in part through eliding the tensions among the various meanings of platform. For example, YouTube can tout itself as an egalitarian political platform where users can express themselves while also indexing content in ways that make some videos (like those deemed sexually suggestive) more difficult to find and providing access to media conglomerates to take down content they see as violating copyright (357-359).
In this article, I build on Gillespie's argument that platform rhetoric shapes public discourse by showing how it also shapes identity: The term "platform" helps to reconstitute Grindr's marketing and infrastructure in ways that contribute to the reconstitution of users and to resituate the app within a homonormative affective economy. By homonormative I draw on the work of queer theorists like Lisa Duggan and Jasbir Puar who have critiqued normalizing sexual politics and rhetoric. As Duggan explains, homonormativity "is a politics that does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions, but upholds and sustains them, while promising the possibility of a demobilized gay constituency and a privatized, depoliticized gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption" (50). Homonormativity works through logics that privatizes citizenship as homo eoconomicus, integrates white gays and lesbians into nationalism, and constructs urban, white gay sensibilities as modern through pathologizing racial, rural, and lower-class others (Halberstam 36-37; Puar).
As Anne Frances Wysocki and Julia Jasken explain, interface design is "also the design of users," and although that design of users is not totalizing or deterministic—in part "because the contexts in which we use software are so large and unfixed"—interfaces do help to shape subjectivity, identity, and social practices (35). Rhetoric scholars like Wysocki and Jasken, Ian Bogost, and Collin Gifford Brooke encourage scholars to not simply attend to the visual aspects of interfaces, but also to the software and code that creates those visual interfaces (Bogost 24-28; Brooke 48; Wysocki and Jaskin 45). Thus, I attend to both Grindr's discursive construction as a platform and its computational infrastructure as a platform. Following Anne Helmond, platforms as computational infrastructure do work (2), changing the architecture of sites and apps so that they have two interfaces: "a user interface for human consumption . . . and a software interface for machine consumption," through Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) (4). Importantly for my brief analysis here, Grindr's redesign and rhetoric of "platform" do affective work to help to constitute and reaffirm certain types of gay identity. Through both the rhetorical and architectural shifts Grindr deploys, it allows the app to move from a site that "connects men, haphazardly, deliriously" (Corey and Nakayama 21) to one that more closely aligns with homonormative discourses and the so-called pink market.
In order to explore the rhetoric of platforms as it plays out with Grindr, I draw loosely on the heuristic Brooke develops in Lingua Fracta: Toward a Rhetoric of New Media. Brooke proposes that, rather than analyze "(textual) objects" in digital environments, we instead think "more in terms of (medial) ecologies" and interfaces (23). He proposes a "light structure" (52) for analyzing new media that attends to ecologies of code, practice, and culture (47). I use Brooke's heuristic to organize my argument: I attend first to Grindr's platform code, explaining infrastructural changes in the app as it transitioned to a platform. I then turn to practices made possible by these changes in code on Grindr. In particular, I focus on how changes in infrastructure allow for changes in practices regarding advertisements that help to develop and reinforce what Katherine Sender identifies as a "gay sensibility" ("Gay Readers" 75). These advertisements—in conjunction with rhetorics of equality and inclusion promoted by the platform that are in tension with the platform's laissez faire attitude toward exclusionary profile language—reinforce a normative gay sensibility that idealizes toned, white, youthful, and masculine bodies. Much like the tensions elided in YouTube's platform rhetoric that Gillespie critiques, Grindr's platform rhetoric elides a tension between its explicitly progressive political rhetoric and the practices on the app that can make it unwelcoming to nonnormative users and that privilege normative beauty standards. In the conclusion, I discuss the homonormative culture that Grindr participates in with its platform rhetoric, situating the app within larger cultural forces of homonormative gay sensibilities. In effect, Grindr's platform rhetoric helps it to participate in a broader cultural pedagogy of "how to be gay," to draw on the title of David Halperin's well-known book on gay aesthetics and subjectivity.
Grindr's New Platform Infrastructure
Since its launch in the Apple App Store in 2009, Grindr has been a huge success: As of mid-2017, it boasts 3 million daily active users worldwide who average 54 minutes on the app daily and send a collective 228 million messages and 20 million photos to each other daily ("Fact Sheet"). However, Grindr's efficiency as an app and development as a company was limited by the programming infrastructure that had been developed over the years. The app had been written on Ruby on Rails, its geolocation algorithms were locally developed, and the chat feature was built in-house using Jabber, the open source extensible messaging and presence protocol. In effect, Grindr was an assemblage of a "bunch of different custom technologies that the team built from scratch" (Jackson). The result of all of this local coding was that developers were constantly re-writing code (at large costs), the app was difficult to scale for a growing user base, the company couldn't update the app regularly, and users would experience outages during moments of high-volume traffic. Thus, the company saw a need to turn to a platform mentality and infrastructure. In 2015, the company partnered with a variety of services to create a "stack," or a collection of programming elements, comprised of third-party services like Amazon Web Services and Erlang Solutions' MongooseIM (an instant messaging platform). The effect of this change was the move from an app programmed in an expensive and ad hoc manner to a platform programmed for efficiency, scalability, and flexibility (Jackson; "What Is GrindrLabs?").
With this new platform mentality, GrindrLabs (Grindr's agile coding shop) redesigned the infrastructure to work with a variety of already-existing cloud computing and caching services. While these changes were likely not observed by a typical Grindr user (except that Grindr had fewer outages and released a new interface design in 2016, pictured in figure 1 above), this infrastructural change would allow Grindr to scale up from simply a dating app to a platform that assists in the shaping of users' identities. In effect, Grindr joined the many other tech companies that base their business model on platforms (see Srnicek). As Brooke observes, discursive practices in an interface depend on an ecology of code, or "all those resources for the production of interfaces more broadly construed, including visual, aural, spatial, and textual elements, as well as programming codes" (48). Thus, Grindr's discursive platform rhetoric is dependent upon its platform code: a computational platform or infrastructure "that bring[s] together different users, customers, advertisers, and even physical objects" (Srnicek 43; see also Gillespie 349). Grindr's shift to a platform ecology allows it to bring together users and advertisers in different ways than it had before this infrastructural change.
Practices on Grindr: Advertisements, Politics, and Exclusions
Before Grindr's rollout of their new interface in 2016, advertisements were minimally invasive. Most were located on a small bar at the bottom of the screen and seemed to be relatively undirected: a random ad for a game, TurboTax, or an underwear website. As a user, I only tapped on these ads accidentally, when my thumb would inadvertently hit the ad as I fumbled with my iPhone. But with the new chat infrastructure in place, Grindr's new design allowed for visual ads to be sent from "Grindr Deals" through chat messages, such as the three ads pictured below.
These ads are more clearly geared toward a normative gay male market than the small, non-intrusive ads that had populated previous iterations of the app. And because they are delivered through the chat interface, I speculate that they are much more likely to be clicked on and viewed than previous, less intrusive ads. (I have clicked on every advertisement delivered through Grindr Deals, just to keep my chat cleared, and have purchased a few of the advertised products as well, whereas I had never purchased something advertised on Grindr before the introduction of Grindr Deals.) Whereas ads for video or mobile games are not necessarily a part of a gay economy, fashion underwear, laser liposuction, and fiber pills marketed explicitly for gay men circulate within a gay market. These commodities depend on and help construct a market of gay consumerism, which Sender identifies as establishing a "gay sensibility" ("Gay Readers" 75) that focuses on consumerism at the expense of politics and typically promotes the ideals of a toned, white, youthful, and masculine body (93-95). And clearly, these ads are marketed toward the fairly affluent: laser liposuction is costly, gay-marketed underwear like C-IN2 is more costly than a 3-pack of Hanes, and Pure fiber pills (advertised to keep one's gastrointestinal tract ready for anal sex) are more expensive than ones purchased at a pharmacy. As Sender argues, the gay market helps to construct gay identities, which are formed in part through being addressed (Business 5). Sender argues further that the gay market produces a difference: gays and lesbians are constructed as different from heterosexual consumers. But this is a still a very limited difference, as gay marketing "promotes particular kinds of distinctions . . . marked by privilege and good taste" (Business 236). Particularly, this gay sensibility is racialized, gendered, and classed, as gay marketing tends to homogenize gay identities, ignoring racial, gender, and class differences and focusing on thin and/or muscular, affluent white gay men (154-163).
Figure 2. Screenshots of three advertisements from "Grindr Deals" delivered through the chat interface.
The three ads shown above are not alone in idealizing thin, masculine, white gay physiques. Of the dozens of advertisements I took screenshots of for this project, nearly each one that featured images of men included an attractive young man. (One exception featured a drag queen advertising Pure fiber pills for Valentines Day. Another ad for laser liposuction featured a man in his 40s or 50s with graying hair and a beard; the accompanying copy read, "Daddy wanting to look a little less 'Daddy'?") All these men appeared to be white or could pass as white, and if the image included their torsos, they were generally shirtless with well-defined pecs and abs. These ads—whether for fiber pills, fashion underwear, liposuction, home-STI testing, clothing, or wine—encourage users to identify with and idealize white, able-bodied, toned men, promoting an affluent, white, masculine ideal. Many of these ads seem to function in ways similar to the Abercrombie & Fitch marketing and advertising that Dwight McBride critiques for "celebrat[ing] whiteness—a particular privileged and leisure-class whiteness" (66)
As a user and critic of Grindr, I can't be certain how many users see these kinds of ads (which I monitored and took screenshots of during the first half of 2017). While Grindr's practices for targeting ads is somewhat opaque, the company and their third-party partners (like Google Analytics) do collect data on geolocation, device type, profile information, demographic information, and information from third-party platforms like Facebook or Twitter that users might connect to their Grindr profile ("Grindr Privacy Policy"). Grindr has made a concerted effort to increase ad revenue: Whereas 75 percent of the company's income in 2012 was based on users' subscriptions to Grindr Xtra, which offers more advanced features like push notifications and unlimited blocks (Hall), Grindr began a campaign in 2014 to bring in more ad revenue as "a potentially lucrative future data business" (O'Reilly). This campaign resulted in a reported 65 percent increase in ad revenue in 2015 (Johnson) by targeting ads using data from users and promoting those users as affluent, ideal consumers. Grindr's 2014 media kit promoted their "highly engaged audience" of "gay affluent, tech-savvy men," noting that gay men in the United States typically earn more income than the average American and spend more money "on products and services than their straight counterparts" ("Grindr Advertising" 1). In one successful ad campaign, the gym chain Crunch Fitness targeted ads on Grindr to men located in New York who frequented gyms, seeing a successful promotion of their trial membership that led to plans to expand advertisements to other cities (Johnson).
What distinguishes Grindr's gay marketing from most of the examples Sender discusses in Business, Not Politics is that Grindr's platform rhetoric is explicitly political. Sender explains that many companies justify their gay market advertisements by arguing that it is good business, not a political statement (2). However, Grindr has developed explicitly political rhetoric in conjunction with its platform rhetoric. Intermixed with advertisements from Grindr Deals are promotions for its "Grindr for Equality" campaign, which attempts to "mobilize, inform, and empower . . . users" in campaigns "to promote justice, health, safety, and more for LGBTQ individuals" ("Grindr 4 Equality"). These messages have promoted voter initiatives, education about refugees, HIV testing, information about violence against gays in Chechnya, and petitions to support net neutrality or oppose anti-queer or anti-trans legislation or presidential policy.
However, Grindr's focus on political equality comes into tension with its laissez faire approach to user practices. While Grindr's "Profile Guidelines" tell users to not post racist or bigoted material "that might offend our community" ("Profile Guidelines"), the term offend is of course subjective, and many users post racial and sexual preferences in their profiles that are exclusionary. This practice, commonly known as the "No Fats, No Femmes, No Asians" phenomenon, is ubiquitous: Users state in their profiles that they aren't interested in a variety of other types of bodies: fat bodies, Black bodies, feminine bodies, Asian bodies, and so forth (see Miller; Pritchard 192-193; Raj; Riggs). This practice is so common and understood among users that sites like Douchebags of Grindr (http://www.douchebagsofgrindr.com/) share and comment on profiles that include such discriminatory language. This language, I argue, helps to shape the public of Grindr into a space less welcoming—even hostile—to bodies that don't meet white, masculine ideals, performing the sort of violent "literacy normativity" that Eric Darnell Pritchard describes and critiques in Fashioning Lives: Black Queers and the Politics of Literacy. As Pritchard explains, while we shouldn't police sexual desires, we do need to "identify and deal substantively with the ways that some of these proclivities emerge from or reinforce various forms of oppression and domination, including stating that some people have no value because they are of color, or too big, or too small, or too effeminate, or too old, or transgender, or gender-nonconforming" (198). Grindr has encouraged users to not post this exclusionary language but doesn't remove profiles that include this language. In effect, Grindr's platform rhetoric produces a tension: Grindr markets itself as a progressive company that seeks social justice through its Grindr for Equality campaign, but advertises to (and thus helps construct) its users as a certain type of affluent gay and has a laissez faire approach to discriminatory profile language that makes the public of Grindr less inclusive.
Conclusion: Grindr's Participation in Homonormative Culture
Grindr's platform rhetoric thus enabled the company to materially construct a platform at the level of code, creating a more dynamic computational infrastructure that allows the company to target ads through the app's chat feature. These ads, as I've briefly argued, promote an affluent, white, masculine ideal. Additionally, while Grindr promotes progressive political positions through Grindr for Equality, the progressive stance of Grindr is undercut by its laissez faire attitude toward user practices that can make the app an exclusionary or unwelcome space for bodies that are nonwhite, gender-nonconforming, disabled, fat, or otherwise nonnormative.
Many have celebrated the potential for Grindr to eschew institutions and allow for what Samuel Delany calls contact: cross-cultural and cross-class encounters that allow for surprise and new relationalities (123-125). Frederick Corey and Thomas Nakayama suggest this potential in Grindr: "With little attention to social categories, Grindr has the potential to disrupt social institutions such as marriages, gay or straight, but offers no institution in its place other than free flowing desire" (21; see also Batiste). Elsewhere, I too have also made similar arguments, that Grindr allows for new and surprising intimacies with strangers (Faris).
I don't believe that Grindr's technological and rhetorical shifts to a platform negate or destroy these opportunities for new intimacies with strangers, but I do believe they contribute to a privatization of a public space and the potential closeting of queer subjectivity—one that could be open to new desires, intimacies, possibilities—through the construction of homonormative identities and practices. My contention here is that Grindr's shift from merely an "app" to a "platform" allows it to participate in a homonormative affective economy. As Duggan explains, homonormativity seeks "a privatized, depoliticized gay culture" (50). The potentially open and accessible interface of Grindr—all one needs to use Grindr is a smart phone—becomes less inclusive, less open to difference. Sexual desires are privatized—a user's statement that he's not into Blacks is merely a personal preference and not seen as language that affects the inclusivity of the public—and users are encouraged to identify with products marketed toward affluent gays. The effect of this technological and discursive platform rhetoric is to make the public space of Grindr more normative, to assist in the construction of a certain type of ideal gay: affluent, able-bodied, masculine, toned, and likely white, "marked by privilege and good taste" (Sender, Business 236).
As Michael Warner has observed, queers have not had access to the same sort of institutions for culture-building that other marginalized groups have had access to, like families and churches. Instead, queer "institutions of culture building have been market-mediated: bars, discos, special services, newspapers, magazines, phone lines, resorts, urban commercial districts" ("Introduction" xvi-xvii). Grindr has the potentiality of being such a market-mediated counterpublic, where queers can meet in virtual space, encountering difference and developing new intimacies with each other, ones that play out both through the app and in physical space. As locative media, Grindr not only affords the possibility of intimate contact online, but also of remapping spaces as queer spaces where new contacts and intimacy can happen nearly anywhere. My concern in this article is that the tensions in Grindr's platform rhetoric—between an explicitly progressive political rhetoric and a hands-off approach to users' exclusionary language practices—and Grindr's increased use of ads that reinforce and reproduce normative ideals of whiteness, youth, and masculinity, encourage queer men to, in Warner's words, "increasingly understand themselves as belonging to a market niche rather than to a counterpublic" (The Trouble 147). While Grindr's redesign and recent platform rhetoric doesn't negate the possibility for allowing for surprise and new contacts, it does seem to help constitute more predictable, consumer-driven, normative gay identities. We might wonder how platforms could be designed—especially as their goal is to typically make money off of data—in ways that imagine and promote more ways of being (or being gay) in the world.
I would like to thank Dustin Edwards, Bridget Gelms, and the three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions on previous drafts of this article.
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Cover Image Credit: George, Terry. "EDITE67A3591." Flickr, 10 Apr. 2015, https://flic.kr/p/rwPoAw
Composing Artificial Intelligence: Performing Whiteness and Masculinity
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What Counts as Inclusive?: Articulating Writing Program Stances on Divisive Student Writing
Michael J. Faris is an assistant professor in technical communication and rhetoric in the English Department at Texas Tech University. His research interests include new media rhetorics, digital literacy practices, and the intersections of queer theory and rhetorical theory. He published "An Annotated Bibliography of LGBTQ Rhetorics" with Matthew B. Cox in Present Tense (4.2, 2015) and has previously published in the Journal of Business and Technical Communication, Composition Forum, Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, and Communication Design Quarterly.


Bell Aura is a serene and secluded Bed & Breakfast in the beautiful town of Carman, Manitoba. Situated in a historic church, we have accommodations for up to 25. Our host, Barbara Alarie, welcomes you with genuine kindness and promises a wonderful stay.


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Capitol Complex - One of the most visited places in Chandigarh; the Capitol Complex is situated in Sector-1. It comprises of the Secretariat, the Assembly and the High Court. The geometrical concrete buildings of the complex, emerging elegantly out of the ground, comprise of the headquarters of the Government of Punjab as well as Haryana.
The Open Hand - 'The Open Hand' is one of the most impressive monuments in Chandigarh. Situated in the Capitol Complex, it comprise of a giant hand, rising 85 feet high from a hollow trench. Made of metal sheets, the hand is capable of rotating and delivers the message that the city gladly receives all, without any distinction.
Sector 17 - The most popular hangout of youngsters, Sector 17 houses the most upscale shopping market of Chandigarh. Apart from the market, the sector also prides itself on being dotted with fountains, sculptures and groves of trees. In short, it is completely a shopper's as well as a pedestrian's paradise!
Sukhna Lake - The nature lovers will find the Sukhna Lake of Chandigarh perfect for them. Situated in Sector 1, the lake was created by building an artificial dam on a seasonal stream. Go for boating, relax in the restaurant situated there or just sit on the 2-km-long promenade and take in the beauty of nature.
Rock Garden - Rock Garden is perhaps the most frequented tourist attraction in the city. Being the unique garden that it is, the popularity is perfectly understandable. Situated near the Capitol Complex, it is spread over an area of around 12 acres. Built by Nek Chand, the garden comprises of art objects that have been made from urban waste material.
Leisure Valley - Leisure Valley is for those who love soaking in the green surroundings. The valley basically comprises of a number of beautiful gardens, which adorn the city from its one end to the other. The popular Rose Garden of Chandigarh, the largest garden of Asia, is a part of the Leisure valley only. The popular gardens of the city are Garden of Tranquillity, Garden of Rare Plants, Garden of Annuals, Bougainvillea Garden, Botanical Garden and Garden of Aromatic Plants.
International Dolls Museum - International Dolls Museum, situated in Sector 23 of Chandigarh, has a vast collection of dolls and puppets from all over the world. It is open throughout the week, except Sunday.
Golden Temple - It is one of the most sacred pilgrimage spots for Sikhs. The temple derives its name from its fully golden dome. The temple is built over marble and is two storied high structure. Guru Ram Das, the fourth Guru of Sikhs had initially built a pool here which currently houses the Temple. It is the epicenter of Sikhism.
Wagah Border - Wagah is the only road border crossing between Pakistan and India between Aritsar and Lahore cities.Wagah also termed as "Wagha" in Pakistan.The international border between India and Pakistan is located at a distance of 28 km from Amritsar. The ceremonial display of the Beating Retreat and Change of Guard makes it an extraordinary spectacle. The soldiers from both countries demonstrate great enthusiasm and spirit as nationalistic fervor rises amidst roaring applause.
Jallianwala Bagh - In 1919, the British under the command of General Dyer fired randomly on a peaceful gathering of people in demand of freedom, resulting in hundreds of men, women and children killed on the spot. The bullet marks on the boundary walls bring alive the agonizing tale of cruelty of the British rule. This event was one of the major incidents of India's freedom struggle. The memorial well is also present here in which some people jumped to escape the firing. The story of the massacre is told in the Martyr's Gallery at the site.
Check out from the hotel and transfer to Manali. Evening arrive in Manali. Check in hotel. Overnight at Manali.
After breakfast sightseeing of places in and around Manali, Like Hadimba temple, Manu temple, Vashisht Bath, Van Vihar and evening shopping at the local market. Overnight at Manali.
Morning after breakfast trek to Anjali Mahadev 2 km from resort after come back to visit godola ride and 10 min paragliding from the top the mountain fly with well educated instructor and some more activities of adventure evening back to resort. Over night in resort.
Kullu, the headquarters of the district, is situated at an altitude of 1200 mt on the confluence of Savory rivulet and Beas river. Though it is somewhat warm during June and early July, but for the rest of the year provides a delightful and healthy climate. the annual rainfall is about 40", of which a little less than a half occurs during the winter months from October to March. There is not much snowfall during the winters but the snow clad peaks look very beautiful. Kullu town has made its name on the international tourist map for its famous Dussehra festival. Town is a seat of the chief deity of the valley i.e. Raghunathjee. During Dussehra the visiting deities from all over the district first pay their obeisance by visiting abode of Raghunathjee at Sultanpur. The town of Kullu can accommodate large number of visitors with all facilities of boarding and lodging required by them.
Government Service Tax (GST) will be extra only.


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