text:
'Big Brother' Is Already Watching
From catching crooks to tagging friends, facial recognition software is watching you.
By Michael FitzgeraldNovember 26, 2015 3:30 AM
The NYPD posts signs when an entire area is under video surveillance, such as the base of the Brooklyn Bridge. | Yana Paskova
It was Just after midnight in New York when police chased down and arrested
the suspect wanted in a potential hate crime. A gay man had been shot and killed with a silver revolver. The suspect was cooperative to a point. He gave them the silver revolver in his holster. He also gave them an ID.
Then he clammed up. When they brought him to the precinct to book him, the ID turned out to be fake. He wouldn't tell them his real name. They couldn't take his fingerprints.
By this time, it was just after 7 a.m. The officers called Edwin Coello, the sergeant who has led the New York Police Department's Facial Identification Section since it was formed in late 2011. It was a Saturday, and Coello was still in his robe at home, but he pulled up a scan of the ID on his laptop and started working.
A guy cracking a case in his bathrobe sounds like something out of a cop show. On TV, police officers use technology as a kind of magic detective's aid, pumping out important clues on demand. In the office, on a normal day, watching actual police detectives use actual technology on actual cases presents a more complicated picture. "It's far from The Bourne Supremacy," Coello says.
In the unit's office on the ninth floor of One Police Plaza, a Brutalist monolith in south Manhattan, banks of 55-inch LED monitors hang from the wall, an ever-changing art gallery of cases. But most of the work happens in the detectives' cubicles, clustered in the middle of the room.
Each has three monitors. A detective uses a mouse to rotate a face on her screen to the same full-frontal angle as a mug shot. The photo is distorted, taken from a security camera with a fish-eye lens. She'll try it this way against the arrest database, but if she gets no matches, she will begin to adjust the fish-eye ratios so the person's face will have normal proportions, hoping for clues to an identity. Another detective captures a frame from a cell phone video from a crime scene. He'll also run that through the mug shot database. One screen shows a wire-frame rendering of a face in 3-D; that detective is working to build out a full facial image based on a profile view.
What's in a Face?
With most facial recognition technology, faces don't look like faces at all. Instead, streams of numbers represent hairlines, eyebrows, nose structure, jaw lines, ears, scars or moles, as well as the head's pitch, yaw and roll (head angle, whether the chin is up or down, and how far off-center the face is). The NYPD's software accounts for more than two dozen factors in all. Algorithms, or recipes for how computers solve a problem, use the numbers to try to determine whose face it is. A simple change of expression can throw off the numbers in ways that create real problems for an algorithm.
It can take hours or even days to prepare a photo for comparison against a database. But on that Saturday morning working from home, Coello had a straight-on photo with a neutral expression in poor lighting. "I had to enhance it because the image was a little blotchy," he says.
After a couple of minutes, Coello asked the investigator, "Can you just take a look at him and tell me: Does he have a scar or mark on his face?" There were no marks on the face in the ID, but there was a scar on one of several hundred faces the database offered as a match. The investigator said the suspect has a scar. Coello told the detectives that a possible match is Elliot Morales, who had been arrested six times, once on suspicion of attempted murder. The work took about an hour, and Coello was back to hanging out with his kids on a Saturday.
More and more, we're seeing facial recognition technology emerge as part of crime-fighting, as police departments hear about successes like those in New York. Outside of New York, such as Pinellas County, Fla., where the software has been used for 14 years, it's helped capture criminals with outstanding warrants during routine traffic stops.
The NYPD has used facial recognition technology in more than 8,000 cases, and it found 2,000 possible matches in its arrest database. Of those, more than 1,000 led to arrests. One notable case in 2012 involved a shooting at a barbershop, where a man fired a shotgun at an acquaintance getting a haircut. The victim and other witnesses knew the man only as "Armani," but one of them had Armani's picture on his Facebook page. Police used that photo to look for a match in their database, found one, and made the arrest.
Facial recognition software is becoming common in motor vehicle registries, too, as more than three dozen states use the technology to look for fake driver's licenses and identify people during investigations.
At the federal level, the Diplomatic Security Service, a unit of the State Department, used a newly installed facial recognition system in 2014 to find Neil Stammer, who skipped bail in 2000 on charges including sex with a male minor. The agency was testing the system by running it against the latest FBI wanted posters; by happenstance, Stammer's mug appeared on one of them. He'd been living under an assumed name in Nepal, where he left a trail by regularly renewing his tourist visa.
In September 2014, the FBI unveiled Next Generation Identification, a database expected to have 52 million records in it, created by merging multiple criminal and civil photo and fingerprint databases from the U.S. and abroad, all in the name of fighting crime and terrorism.
Big Brother, and Siblings
All this facial recognition technology in the hands of government raises unavoidable questions about Big Brother-like powers. Only it could be even more pervasive than Orwell imagined. There are surveillance cameras all over the place in major cities. "The risk is that the government can track people as they move from place to place," says Jennifer Lynch, senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. It hasn't happened yet as far as civil liberties advocates can determine from public legal records, but there are no specific rules or regulations against it, she says.
And Big Brother might have siblings. Retailers are already using facial recognition systems to target shoplifters if they hit a store, or chain of stores, more than once. That's similar to how casinos use the technology to identify known card counters, whom security guards can then remove. Some bars used a mobile phone app (before the developer went out of business) that scanned people's faces as they entered. The app determined if bar-goers were male or female, their relative age, and reported the ratio to app users deciding where to head out for the night.
The NYPD cites, repeatedly and without irony, concern for civil liberties as a reason why it only uses the mug shots in its arrest database to look for suspects. But some law enforcement agencies also link to driver's license databases in their states, and the FBI's new database is open to state and local law enforcement.
There has not yet been a prominent case of misidentification, or false positive, using a facial recognition system. But give it time; issues still occur with fingerprinting, a much older and generally more accurate form of identification than facial recognition, which is sometimes called "faceprinting." After the 2004 Madrid train bombings, the FBI linked Brandon Mayfield, an American attorney, to the bombings through a fingerprint match that proved inaccurate. He spent two weeks in prison and later won a $2 million court settlement and a formal apology from the FBI.
Detectives at work in the NYPD's facial recognition unit in Manhattan. The software allows detectives to enhance poorer-quality photos grabbed from security cameras or videos. | Yana Paskova
Coello stresses that New York police do not use facial recognition matches as conclusive evidence to arrest someone. "It's only a lead for detectives," he says. "We point them in the right direction." The people who work in facial recognition are all detectives, and they do legwork beyond the photos, conducting detailed searches of a possible suspect's background, like their address, to aid the investigation. "No one is going to go four towns over to hold up a liquor store," Coello says.
Even with clear matches, though, the facial recognition team says the person is only a possible suspect. The department says it has misidentified someone via the technology just five times, most recently in March 2012.
"It's just a tool. It's not DNA, and it's not fingerprints," says Stephen Capasso, the former commanding officer of New York City's Real Time Crime Center, which includes the facial recognition unit. Still, "I think our usage of facial recognition is going to be increasing."
Most of us encounter facial recognition in perfectly law-abiding modes, like photo tags on Facebook and on photo apps like Google Photos, where software algorithms parse our pictures and suggest names for the people in them. Facebook launched its photo-tagging tool in late 2010, and it's become a routine feature for many users. This is certainly the first mass consumer use of facial recognition. It likely won't be the last.
How We Got Here
Travelers, for instance, might encounter facial recognition algorithms at airports. In Australia at the end of 2013, P. Jonathon Phillips walked through SmartGate, an automated border control system being used in Australia's eight major international airports to speed customs processing for people from eight countries, including the U.S.
Phillips put his passport in the kiosk and looked at a camera, which automatically matched his face with the image on the passport. He was through SmartGate in five minutes. He knew about the system, but still, "I was amazed when I saw this!" he says. "I've been in the facial recognition field for 23 years. We started out with 'can you recognize?' algorithms. When you go someplace and it actually happens …"
Phillips is arguably the most influential scientist in facial recognition. He started his work in 1993, launching the FERET (Face Recognition Technology) program for the Army Research Laboratory, the first such program. Back then, they were testing algorithms against a database of about 1,200 faces, mostly college student volunteers from George Mason University. He's now an electronic engineer at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and he manages NIST's facial recognition challenges.
When he started, verifying passport photos presented a difficult problem. Now, many facial recognition algorithms are better than humans when it comes to recognizing a person looking straight ahead under good lighting conditions.
Facial recognition algorithms don't "see" anything, of course. Faces and their features are broken down into strings of numbers representing individual pixels, their colors and their place on what will mathematically correspond to a face. Algorithms must first find a face, and then find the eyes and other features that human brains take in at once. One early technique came via a linear algebra representation called eigenvectors, which let researchers compare similar objects as long as they are precisely aligned. Think driver's license and passport photos, or mug shots, which feature a face looking straight ahead. Researchers used these techniques to create eigenfaces, which to human eyes look ghostlike, but they give algorithms a reference representation of a face to compare with a new face.
It helps the technology that faces are relatively straightforward to analyze. Eyes and mouths are in the same places consistently, and face shapes don't vary much — you'll never find someone with a face shaped like a square, star or a hexagon. By the mid-1990s, facial recognition was a hot technology, and several startups formed to commercialize it.
"That was just fun, the first stage of a new technology sprouting up," says Brian Martin, senior director of research and technology at MorphoTrust, the dominant provider of facial recognition software to government and law enforcement. In 1998, he received a Ph.D. in condensed matter physics from the University of Pittsburgh. A year earlier, he started working at Visionics, an early facial recognition startup. Its first product? A biometric screen saver that used your face as your computer password. Martin says it had two big selling points: You didn't have to remember your password, and it would take pictures of anyone who tried to break into your computer. But that day's low-resolution cameras meant the technology was especially prone to issues with image quality.
Martin says accuracy improved when researchers started to use what's called local feature, in which algorithms don't just use the whole face, but also patches of it, like the shape of eyebrows and the width of the nose. That makes the software less prone to stumbling over expression changes. Around 2005, researchers began applying machine learning techniques to their algorithms, to train them to learn how to match sets of features more and more accurately.
Today the big push is in "deep learning" — building artificial intelligence algorithms inspired by the brain's neural connections. Our neurons connect to each other through trillions of synapses, which are like nodes on a computer network. These form individual connections influenced by the number of times each neuron communicates with another neuron. Neural networks also consist of connections adjusted by exposure, in effect learning from developing patterns. In facial recognition, these patterns emerge after being "shown" thousands upon thousands of photos. The algorithms mathematically recognize when a face shares enough characteristics to likely be the same as a face in different lighting or with a different expression. Neural network theory isn't much different than it was in the 1990s, but this century's explosion in cheap computing power and availability of data lets researchers take full advantage of the theories.
Once they've trained their algorithms, researchers often test them against publicly available benchmarks. The most popular is a database of images gathered by Erik Learned-Miller, a computer scientist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and his colleagues. In 2003, Learned-Miller was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, working with a database called Faces in the Wild, developed by David Forsyth, Tamara Berg and others. They pulled tens of thousands of different faces from Web-based news sites ("the wild") to train a facial recognition algorithm they were working on.
The goal was to train the algorithm to automatically label the people in the photos. After a paper on the algorithm was published in 2004, Learned-Miller began getting requests from facial recognition researchers who wanted access to the database for their own work. In 2007, he and a colleague cleaned up the database, getting rid of duplicates and miscaptioned photos, and released it as "Labeled Faces in the Wild," with 13,233 different photos of 5,749 people. The timing was excellent — facial recognition algorithms were getting good at identifying faces in controlled environments, such as passport photos. Researchers wanted something more challenging, and this database fit the bill.
It has since been cited in more than 1,100 papers. In the past eight years, more than 60 research groups have sent the results of their algorithms against the benchmark for Learned-Miller to post on the Labeled Faces site. Facebook's DeepFace algorithm had the best performance for a brief period last year, only to be passed by a Chinese company, Megvii, whose Face++ algorithm hit 99.5 percent accuracy.
Facing the Future
Those kinds of numbers suggest Labeled Faces in the Wild has been tamed. Learned-Miller says it's time for facial recognition researchers to move on to new problems. There are still plenty of those. Computers have a hard time recognizing faces in less-than-ideal lighting conditions, or when analyzing faces at more than a 40-degree angle from straight on.
Failure rates can run as high as 2 in 10 for everyday "point and shoot" photos, according to Phillips, compared with 1 in 1,000 for mug shots. NIST's current facial recognition project, dubbed Point-and-Shoot Face Recognition Challenge (PaSC), involves a dataset of 9,376 still images and 2,802 videos. Labeled Faces in the Wild uses photos of well-known people taken by professional photographers. The PaSC, launched in October 2013, focuses on the rest of the world's photos: those taken on cell phones or simple digital cameras. These can be poorly staged and blurry.
At its core, facial recognition is an artificial intelligence challenge, albeit one that is becoming less challenging. Phillips says knowing how humans recognize faces in these conditions will help develop the algorithms. Most algorithms focus on the center of the face where humans use lots of different cues about a person, like the part of their hair. We are better — after spending a morning with someone, most of us will recognize that person's face consistently, in most lighting conditions, at most angles. The algorithms need intensive training, the deep learning that takes advantage of computational speed and pattern-matching.
Some researchers, like Learned-Miller, have tried very different approaches. When I visited his lab at UMass Amherst, his current tool was, oddly, an old-fashioned world globe. The globe was not quirk, but work — it was a stand-in for a human head. He was working on an algorithm that could recognize the rotation and position of the globe. This could help make algorithms better at recognizing the pose of a head, for example: Is it straight on, or in profile? His approach would be called unsupervised learning. (Feeding the algorithm many pictures of faces in different poses would be called supervised learning.)
On the day of my visit, Learned-Miller and then-grad student Cheni Chadowitz looked through data generated by the algorithm, written in the computer program MATLAB. Chadowitz had adapted an earlier algorithm written by Learned-Miller that only recognized faces in images that showed them straight on. Learned-Miller stared at a scatter plot, which showed the improved algorithm was having some success at taking different images of a geographic feature, like the Horn of Africa, and putting it at the correct latitude and longitude.
The globe project was temporarily put on hold after Chadowitz graduated, but Learned-Miller says he's waiting for the right student to continue working on it. For now, Learned-Miller is focusing on solving the problem of making facial representations that don't take up a huge amount of memory. He's working on an algorithm that combines many images into a "mental model" that captures all the information about a face that a video might, but is much smaller.
While Learned-Miller's basic research may not impact the market for 10 years or more, other researchers work on a shorter timeline. "A lot of people in computer vision are really excited about building things that work, and it's difficult to build things that work well," he says. "Often we'll build something that works 90 percent of the time, but if you put it out in the world and it fails one out of 10 times, in the consumer world, that's unacceptable."
Putting on Their Work Face
While facial recognition companies have emerged in the past, only to fail or struggle, the time seems ripe for commercialization. It's a nearly $3 billion business, led by companies like MorphoTrust, NEC and Cognitec, which see their biggest sales from government and corporate security. But the market is expected to double by 2020.
Some of that growth will come from expansion in traditional markets as more law enforcement agencies adopt the technology. New kinds of consumer applications are also emerging. Facial recognition software can be used for other things besides identifying people. It's also used to search for images of people with certain features or to track head movement and facial expression. Megvii's Face++ is being used in China by dating services and even for playing video games. Companies are using a facial recognition programming interface from Kairos, a Miami-based provider of a facial recognition interface, for things like time management software, health care management and in amusement parks that want to sell photos to visitors.
Computer scientist Erik Learned-Miller of the University of Massachusetts Amherst used a globe to work on an algorithm that could recognize its rotation and position. | Michael Fitzgerald
There is also a move to blend facial recognition with a technology called facial analysis, which uses a person's facial expression to predict mood and even diagnose certain illnesses.
Such applications raise substantial privacy concerns: Imagine insurers setting rates based on what your photo suggests about your health. The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Lynch, pointing to people suspected of shoplifting, says no rules exist to prevent companies from sharing information. "If you shoplift and you're caught by security guards, the store has the right to exclude you," she notes. "But there is the potential for this to trail you from store to store." That already happens in the casino business.
Our privacy laws are also built around our own efforts at self-protection. The Do Not Call Registry, for instance, kicks in only if you register your number in an official database. Facial recognition is different — cameras, often installed by police departments, constantly record us just for walking down a public street.
"Real taxpayer money is being spent to allow law enforcement to point a camera at protesters and be able to identify them by name," says Alvaro Bedoya, executive director of Georgetown Law's Center on Privacy and Technology. "We need to think about whether that's a world we want."
The flip side of this comes from Sgt. Coello of the NYPD. He says facial recognition is terrifically helpful, in practical ways. Detectives used to have to go door to door with an image trying to find out if someone knew the person in the photo. "We don't need to do that now," he says. "You get us the photo, we'll do the rest [in the database]."
Bedoya acknowledges there are specific ways in which the technology could benefit the public. But he worries that it might inhibit public demonstrations, or let strangers and companies snap a photo of us and learn our names, occupations and addresses. An app called NameTag can already do some of this. Its maker, Las Vegas software developer FacialNetwork.com, last year launched an app called CreepShield tied to databases containing photos of half a million registered sex offenders. In June, Bedoya and eight other consumer advocates walked out of discussions on privacy guidelines led by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, part of the Department of Commerce, citing lack of incentive for businesses to give people the right to consent to having their faces recognized.
There have been no court cases involving the civil liberties impact of facial recognition, partly because we don't yet have evidence that the government or companies are misusing the technology. Texas and Illinois are the only states that have passed laws regulating commercial use of facial recognition. Facebook was sued in April for violating privacy restrictions in Illinois' law; if that case makes it to trial, it will set a precedent.
Technologies are famously neutral; it's people who decide whether to use them for good or ill. With facial recognition poised to become a far more widespread tool, we have a choice to make about how and when to blindfold it.
[This article originally appeared in print as, "Face Time."]


text:
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}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


text:
Gender Equality & Social Inclusion Specialist- South Sudan Health Pooled Fund
Country: South Sudan
Organization: Montrose
MONTROSE is an international development project management and consultancy company providing support to clients operating in the developing world. Specialised in the sectors of health, education, rural livelihoods and private sector development, our clients include bilateral and multilateral development agencies, the private sector, Non-Governmental Organisations and other development stakeholders.
The Health Pooled Fund began its third phase (HPF3) in July 2018 and is supported to run until 2023 by the British Government's Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), the Government of Canada, the Swedish International Development and Cooperation Agency (SIDA), United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the European Union (EU). A consortium led by Crown Agents and including Montrose is responsible for managing and implementing HPF3.
HPF3 merges two previous health programmes - Health Pooled Fund 2 (HPF2), which provides healthcare at health facility level, and the Integrated Community Case Management 2 (ICCM2) programme, which provides healthcare to children under five within more remote communities. HPF3 supports delivery of community level essential primary health care, secondary health care and referral health services, stabilisation of local health systems, and procurement and supply chain management of essential medical commodities.
HPF supports services in eight states of South Sudan: Eastern Equatoria, Central Equatoria, Western Equatoria, Northern Bahr el Ghazal, Western Bahr el Ghazal, Warrap, Unity, and Lakes.
The programme impact will improve the health and wellbeing of the population through increased coverage, access and utilisation of quality lifesaving health, sexual and reproductive health and nutrition services under the following five outputs:
Output 1: Delivery and increased availability/readiness of quality health services at facilities.
Output 2: Community level interventions that increase awareness, prevention and treatment of common conditions.
Output 3: Availability of safe, effective and quality essential medicines and supplies.
Output 4: Stable health systems that enhance accountability and responsive to the needs of the people.
Output 5: Funds and processes that are efficient, effective, inclusive and offer value for money.
To attain these outcomes, the HPF3 team is responsible for:
Effective programme management, including robust risk management
Ensuring continuity of and support to service delivery, with a focus on improving quality
Specialist technical assistance covering health service delivery, community engagement, nutrition, health planning, information and HRH
Procurement and supply chain management of essential medical commodities
Management of the implementing partner fund
Management of fiduciary risk associated with use of donor funds
The Gender Equality and Social Inclusion (GESI) Specialist will lead specific actions across all counties in eight states to integrate gender equality and social inclusion (mental health and disability) throughout both service delivery and in communities – focusing on institutional change and whole community transformation. The GESI Specialist will also support the institutionalisation of GESI into relevant Ministry of Health (MoH) planning and operations.
Specific roles and responsibilities
Programme planning & implementation
Ensure development and regular review of the GESI strategy and plan for HPF3 that maps out areas of intervention in the eight states and builds on the achievements from HPF2. This includes mainstreaming of mental health and disability interventions.
Oversee implementation gender and social inclusion (mental health and disability) interventions as laid out in the GESI strategy.
Engage with key stakeholders especially MoH, Ministry of Gender and Social Welfare and UNFPA to identify gaps and develop relevant materials for addressing gender-based violence (GBV) and GESI issues in the health sector.
Engage with MoH and health cluster on mainstreaming of activities pertaining to mental health and disability.
Engage with MoH and other stakeholders through the technical working groups to ensure key policy frameworks and strategies take into account the needs of the women, girls, people living with mental health and disability, and excluded groups.
Identify areas for STTA, draft Terms of Reference for the STTAs, support and monitor the STTA activities throughout the duration of the engagement of the STTA.
Support and champion GESI integration in the Health Pooled Fund generally.
Provide timely GESI updates for inclusion in HPF reports, including but not limited to the monthly/quarterly/annual reports and provide responses to questions from stakeholders in a timely manner.
Provide technical support and guidance to the implementing partners (IPs) to carry out GESI (including mental health and disability) interventions as per their work plans and budgets.
Capacity building of implementing partners through trainings and mentorship.
Develop tools including job aids, information and education communication materials, handbooks for the IPs to support in implementing GESI interventions (including mental health and disability).
Conduct field visits to the counties to provide technical support to the GESI interventions on ground.
Support integration of GESI in other programme areas such as human resources for health, maternal, newborn and child health (MNCH), the Expanded Programme on Immunisation, family planning, nutrition, infection prevention and control/water, sanitation and hygiene (IPC/WASH), and community engagement health services.
Coordinate with county health departments to ensure that IP community interventions reach out to women, girls, and other excluded groups.
Monitoring & evaluation (M&E)
Work with M&E team to develop/review/update GESI indicators (including mental health and disability).
Regularly review achievements of GESI indicators against log-frame targets and present the findings to the HPF team and during meetings with stakeholders.
Develop M&E tools for the IPs to support in monitoring GESI interventions.
Work with M&E team to build capacity of IPs in collection and reporting of quantitative and qualitative GESI indicators.
Conduct field visits to the states to monitor the GESI interventions.
Work with the HPF M&E team and contracts team to support IPs in effectively monitoring and reporting and spending on GESI interventions. This includes both quantitative and qualitative data generation.
Review and provide feedback in the IP quarterly progress reports.
Work with M&E team and Operational Research Manager to identify subject areas in GESI for further study and analysis.
Advise on best practices to improve the quality of GESI services, capture stories, document and share lessons learned.
Any other tasks or responsibilities based on organisational or programming needs as assigned by the line manager.
Essential skills and qualifications
Master's degree in gender, human rights, disability, mental health, protection or related studies.
At least 10 years' experience in gender equality and social inclusion.
High standard of technical writing with experience of drafting reports, technical bulletins, policy briefs.
Good knowledge management experience.
Knowledge of the development sector is essential, and knowledge of the health sector is advantageous.
Proven experience of working with the donors that fund HPF, specifically FCDO, Sweden, Canada or USAID.
Familiar with implementation of activities and its challenges in the context of South Sudan.
Strong communication skills and cultural awareness.
Interested candidates preferably based in South Sudan.
If you meet the above qualifications and are interested in this opportunity, please submit your application Here before 16 October 2020.
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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Form: This book is tiny! At 8" by 5" the artist had a very small area to work with in rendering his subjects, yet each image is extremely detailed and realistic. The figures clothing, postures, and environments such as landscapes and homes were extreemly carefully and accurately rendered. Nevertheless, the artists who painted these did not bother with the strict conventions of linear perspective that we see in Italian art from the same period.The space is constructed using a combination of intuitive perspective, some linear and vertical perspective. Atmospheric perspective is out of the question.
devotional book widely popular in the later Middle Ages. The book of hours began to appear in the 13th century, containing prayers to be said at the canonical hours in honour of the Virgin Mary. The growing demand for smaller such books for family and individual use created a prayerbook style enormously popular among the wealthy. The demand for the books was crucial to the development of Gothic illumination. These lavishly decorated texts, of small dimensions, varied in content according to their patrons' desires.One of the most splendid examples, the Trés Riches Heures of the Duc de Berry, was created in northern France and the Low Countries during the 14th and 15th centuries. Now held in Chantilly at the Musée Condé, it is an excellent pictorial record of the duke's spectacular residences, with magnificent calendar pages illuminated by the Pol de Limbourg and his brothers (c. 1414-18), as well as many biblical scenes and illustrations of the lives of the saints.
Limburg also spelled LIMBOURG (all b. after 1385, Nijmegen, Brabant [now in The Netherlands]--d. by 1416), three Flemish brothers who were the most famous of all late Gothic illuminators. They synthesized the achievements of contemporary illuminators into a style characterized by subtlety of line, painstaking technique, and minute rendering of detail. The sons of a sculptor, Arnold van Limburg, they were also the nephews of Jean Malouel, court painter to the Duke of Burgundy, and are sometimes known by the name "Malouel." The brothers worked together, and although the most celebrated appears to have been the eldest brother, Pol, it is difficult to distinguish their individual styles.About 1400 the brothers were apprenticed to a goldsmith in Paris, and between 1402 and 1404 Pol and Jehanequin were working for the Duke of Burgundy in Paris, possibly on the illustration of a Bible moralisée now in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris. Some time after Burgundy's death in 1404, they entered the service of his brother, the Duke de Berry, and it was for him that their most lavishly illustrated books of hours (the popular form of private prayer book of the period) were produced. The Belles Heures (or Les Heures d'Ailly; now in The Cloisters, New York) show the influence of the Italianate elements of the contemporary French artist Jacquemart de Hesdin's illuminations. The Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry (Musée Condé, Chantilly, Fr.), considered their greatest work, is one of the landmarks of the art of book illumination and ranks among the supreme examples of the International Gothic style. It is essentially a court style, elegant and sophisticated, combining naturalism of detail with overall decorative effect. An awareness of the most progressive international currents of the time, particularly those deriving from Italy, suggests that at least one of the brothers visited there. The Très Riches Heures was left unfinished in 1416 but was completed about 1485 by Jean Colombe.


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1919 was a year of travelling revolutions across the Middle East and North Africa. The uprisings were triggered by the efforts (sometimes secret, sometimes not) of Britain, France, Italy and Spain to colonise the Middle East and to divvy up its territories at the end of the First World War. As their intentions became apparent – after both Britain and France had repeatedly promised otherwise – thousands of men and, for the first time, women took to the streets in protest.
Hussein A.H. Omar teaches modern global history at University College Dublin. His monograph The Rule of Strangers: Empire, Islam and the Invention of 'Politics' in Egypt 1867-1922 is forthcoming.


Making the world more fun one RC helicopter pilot at a time.
Howdy! My name is John Salt - the funny face behind this website.
Yep, that's me kite skiing. I find kiting an equally fun backup activity when it's just too darn blustery to get an RC helicopter airborne.
I've always had a healthy interest in anything that flies, but helicopters, both full size and RC top the list.
I didn't think I needed an "about me" page, but perhaps you want to know if "is this guy for real or what?!"
To say I'm passionate about all helicopters would be an understatement.
For as long as I can remember, I've been fascinated by them.
I'm intrigued by how and why they can fly, I love how they sound, I'm amazed at what they can do. Helicopters are mechanically marvelous.
I so wanted to become a full size helicopter pilot and did briefly pursue that ambition in my early 20's. I reluctantly realized however after completing ground school; to get to the point where I would be certified on turbine to land a job afterward, it was just not financially feasible to carry on. Moreover, there were very few job prospects even if I had the money to continue on with the training.
It goes without saying, I was quite depressed after giving up on my dream career. I then looked into becoming a helicopter technician as it would be a way I could still be surrounded by daily awesomeness; but again, job prospects were few & far which lead me to the automotive technician trade. Still a rewarding career for someone who enjoys mechanics and electronics, but cars don't fly (at least by choice).
I naturally still love flying in full size helicopters and do so every single chance I get. Who wouldn't!
The better half, myself, and a cute Bell 206 after a recent flight to celebrate our anniversary.
So, what's a helicopter passionate person to do when they can't fly or work on full size? That's easy, you do the next best thing - take up the hobby of RC helicopters!
I quickly found out after taking up the hobby in 1989 and talking to other RC helicopter pilots while instructing up to 2004, most of us all have that same fascination with helicopters.
Many also had similar ambitions of flying or wrenching on full size; but realized it was an out of reach or impractical career path, and took up the vastly more affordable RC heli hobby to fill the void just as I had.
Others actually did fly or wrench on helicopters while in the military, and then got into the RC variety once they left or retired.
I've been at this hobby now for 30 years and I keep hearing amazing stories like this over and over. Seems we are all very like-minded with this fundamental interest in flying egg beaters.
Life Can Throw Us Many Curves; Not Limited To Pitch & Throttle Unfortunately.
Flying RC helis and introducing newcomers to the hobby most weekends, while work at the automotive dealership during the week. I was in my prime and reaching the zenith of my chosen career path.
All that changed after being hit with a career ending heath issue. I was devastated! Next to my wife and family, the main thing that kept me going through this rough period of uncertainty was still being able to get out to fly my RC helicopters. Helis helped immensely push the worry and fear to the back burner, while providing much needed focus and stress relief.
It's too dramatic to say "RC helicopters saved me", but boy did they help! As it turned out, they also gave me a fun and exciting new path to follow.
My wife and I had to make some big lifestyle changes, which included moving from the busy city to a very quiet small town. That is when I decided to start this website back in 2008; with the mission to share my passion, knowledge, and experience with RC helicopters.
This site has provided a platform for me to continue helping people just like you, from all over the world successfully get into the hobby to fulfill a bit of that full size helicopter flying dream too, albeit with smaller machines.
"Making the world more fun one RC heli pilot at a time" is not just a cheesy title at the top of this page, it's what really happens here every day at RC Helicopter Fun.com, and has been happening for the past 11 years now.
The hundreds of gracious and inspiring testimonials I've received over the years such as the one below are affirmation of that.
"Hello John - I don't normally do this but I just had to write and compliment you. I was about to give up on learning to fly r/c helis when I recently discovered your website.
Over the past couple of years I've purchased and destroyed 2 Helimax Novus CP's and a Blade SR (each one not a particularly expensive bird, but...) while trying to learn how to fly. I've spent around $1000 on these birds between the original purchases and subsequent fixes. Talk about a false economy!
I was at the end of my tether and about to give up when I discovered your web site. I read your articles, and then purchased most of your ebooks; the smartest thing I ever did! Your 3 step recipe to success (buy a 450, get a computerized radio, tame down the settings) is golden.
I subsequently purchased the Align 450 Plus RTF, tamed it down per your e-book, and I haven't looked back since. Even though this bird cost over twice the price of one of my previous ones, it would have saved me half had I been aware of your advice from the get go.
I'm now having a lot of fun flying it and can't wait to get home from work each day so I can fly it some more!
Thanks again, Martin Blackburn - United States"
RC forums, websites, blogs, and flying clubs worldwide have linked to my site and many of the pages. Wikipedia has also referenced several of my pages in their Radio Controlled Helicopter article.
This is my idea of a perfect day. No explanation needed.
My views on starting into the hobby may be different from what you'll likely first see and hear in the marketing noise of today's instant gratification fix & disposable society.
They are however exactly in-line with what you will see & hear if you ever went to an RC helicopter flying club, fun-fly, or talked to an experienced RC heli pilot or instructor to learn more about the hobby.
For instance, I firmly believe if you are truly interested in getting into this hobby; like most things in life, you will get as much out of it, as you put into it.
This generally means first spending some time researching the subject so you at least have a moderate understanding of what you are about to get yourself into. That's the first step in your RC heli journey I hope my little RC heli site can help you with.
Next comes investing into the hobby by getting decent quality equipment (name brand hobby grade) to start with and then grow with it. No, you certainly don't need to spend a fortune on top of the line gear, but it shouldn't be low quality junk either.
I also believe people can start into the hobby out of the gate with collective pitch if they do their home work and know exactly what they are getting themselves into (yep, more research on this site).
Right or wrong (and it won't be right for everyone), that is exactly how I approached the hobby myself all those years back. I was totally infected by the "RC heli bug" the very first day out, and quickly became obsessed! Luckily, I had decent equipment there after to fuel my growing obsession.
I talk about my first RC helicopter and the story behind it on my RC Helicopter History page.
A lot of advertisements & recommendations I see today given by so called experts (marketing experts perhaps), are focused around cheap low quality RC helicopters that you will out grow quickly or end up spending a small fortune on in upgrades - if they even fly at all.
I want to put an end to that; or at least show you what other possible options are out there that are much better suited to your long term goals, along with the complexities involved in some of this stuff.
You may for example find out after spending some time on this site, that "RC helicopters are not the hobby I'm looking for". Better to find that out now early in the game, then after dumping a large sum of money on an incompatible pastime.
Working on an RC helicopter is half the fun! If you don't feel the same way however, this hobby might not be a good fit.
The other largely popular belief I hear about this hobby and one I strongly disagree with is, "crashing & the ongoing expense involved in crashing is just part of the hobby"; not true!
Yes, it certainly can be like that if you constantly fly beyond your skill level, don't understand some heli basics, don't follow some sort of lesson plan, your equipment is not well cared for, or you simply think that you must crash to have any fun. The simple truth is crashing does not have to be a part of the hobby if you don't want it to be.
I so rarely crash, even when I was a self-learning newbie beginner. I had no interest in pushing my limits when I first started (still don't) and that is why I and others who have this same cautious approach to piloting an RC helicopter rarely crash.
I also hear the statement all the time "if you are not crashing, you are not learning". Well, the hobby to me is about the fun and the journey; not about trying to pull off an aerobatic 3D maneuver that is well beyond my comfort or skill level.
If I crashed nearly every time I went flying in hopes of mastering a new aerobatic maneuver, I would have given up on this hobby years ago. I could not afford it financially, nor the time involved with the ongoing repairs.
I also don't like feeling scared the whole time I fly. I want to relax while flying my eggbeaters and only get an adrenaline rush at the time of my choosing.
Again, these are just my view points and we are all very different in what keeps us motivated. If pushing the boundaries to get that adrenaline fix is what floats your boat and keeps you focused and interested in the hobby, go for it.
I only wanted to make mention of this "crash topic" for those of you that have always wanted to get into the hobby, but were put off by the "crashing is part of the hobby" nonsense.
Crashes will still happen from time to time however even if you are a cautious flier like me due to mechanical/electrical faults, disorientation, & pilot error; but they can be rare occurrences.
My Last Respectable Crash Now Over 5 Years Ago!
Long before I was dreaming of becoming a full size helicopter pilot, I was an RC junkie from the age of ten or so. I started with RC cars and then got into RC planes when I was fourteen – bless my dad for driving me to local RC flying field almost every weekend.
My father was in the Canadian Air Force and then became an aircraft instrumentation technician. Obviously his passion for aviation, aircraft, mechanics, and electronics wore off on me. I was always getting into his test equipment and tools in the workshop.
I honestly don't know how he put up with me as I was a curious, and at times destructive little bugger. I often took things apart to see how they worked (still do), from my toys up to much more interesting things around the house such as the washing machine and the TV. I specifically recall those two because of the punishment that was rightfully earned afterward.
My parents said my first word was "wire" so it's no wonder I was such a little hellion around all that cool and interesting equipment. Looking back, dad went out of his way keeping himself sane and me safe; while teaching me basic electronics and mechanics while he made me help put all the stuff I took apart, back together.
I personally feel to really enjoy this hobby and get the most out of it; you have to have at least a basic interest in some, if not all of those aforementioned fields.
By "basic interest", I mean you either know some of the very simple basics already, or are willing to put a bit of time into learning some of it.
At any rate, I can't thank my dad enough for the help, support, and wisdom in those early years when I thought I knew everything, but now realize I knew nothing. Dunning Kruger effect in full force I'm ashamed to admit. Thank goodness I outgrew that ignorant, childish mindset.
If there is one thing this hobby teaches us, it's humility!
An RC helicopter at the flying field - I was hooked!
I saw my first RC helicopter that one of the members brought out to the flying field. I could not believe my eyes and was in a state of awe. After several more years of flying RC planes I finally got my first RC helicopter, and 30 years later... guess what? I'm still in awe of this hobby!
I still dabble in RC planes & cars but they just don't come close to the passion I have for RC helicopters. The challenge of building and flying a heli, learning about how & why they can even fly at all, the physics, the maintenance, and the many forms of flying styles, simply makes this hobby the most rewarding and fun I find. Crazy maybe, engaging - no question.
I suppose the other thing I really like with RC helicopters is we can fly them outside year round.
Living in Canada where we have 6 months of winter and 6 months of poor skiing; this is something I can't do with planes because the take off field is covered in several feet of snow during the darker cold days of winter.
With an RC helicopter, all you need is a small packed or snow cleared area to take off/land, and the sky is your oyster. In short, I don't let my helicopters collect dust after a little snow falls on the ground like their wing bearing brethren do. As long as it's -5C or warmer, sunny, and the wind is not blowing like hell; you can often find this obsessive RC helicopter nut outside flying 12 months of the year.
I've been so fortunate to witness first hand the evolution of this hobby for decades now.
Starting with nitro power, wooden blades and mechanical tail gyros. Then came carbon fiber rotor blades and helicopter parts followed by inexpensive micro electronics & processors/micro controllers. Allowing the first PCM radios followed by programmable computerized radios; which changed the hobby forever with programmable pitch and throttle curves along with electronic CCPM swash mixing .
With better low cost electronics, MEMS tail gyro technology sprouted, and then full on 3 axis flybarless stabilization. This allowed the development of low cost micro sized collective pitch RC helicopters that fit in the palm of your hand. Even more amazing is that they actually fly well!
LiPo battery technology is another big one! Not only has it made micro helicopters possible, LiPo's are giving us more power to weight ratios than ever thought possible on our big birds.
With all that advancement however - the same exact principles and physics of RC helicopter flight remain, and are just as important to appreciate and understand today as they were 30 years ago.
I am by no means a 3D hotshot RC heli pilot. I am more of a sport flier and enjoy simple F3C aerobatics.
My main interest & passion however in this hobby is scale.
I have also gotten into turbine power which has been so rewarding and a long time dream come true.
That said, I still enjoy a relaxing flight or two indoors every now & then with a micro RC heli - yup I'm hooked for life!
I can never see getting tired of this hobby – there is simply too much I still want to learn and do.
Helping others successfully get into the hobby, has certainly forced me to go back through the years of my own learning curves, experiences, and frustrations; while also learning about new aspects of this wonderful & always advancing hobby.
Writing several eBooks has also really helped me hone my understanding of the hobby better. As the familiar adage goes... "The best way to understand a concept is to explain it to someone else." We learn as we teach.
What a great experience it is, and I hope you get as much enjoyment out of this site as I have.
This message of appreciation for you and your exceptional site is long overdue. I'm sorry that I didn't send it years ago.
Because of you and your instructional videos, I now enjoy - immensely - flying RC helicopters and planes. I can't describe how I've felt watching the helicopters and planes that I'm flying in the air. Five minutes of freedom. Like you, I have loved aviation since for as long as I can remember. Planes, helicopters, gliders. Any time I see them flying overhead, I stop to watch.
I started glider pilot training while in university, but wasn't able to afford completing it. I'm 55 now and still dream of getting a full-scale license.
A number of years ago, I was buying a toy helicopter for my young second cousin. On a whim, I got one for myself. After flying it, I knew that I wanted to explore more realistic and challenging models. So I went to my local RC hobby shop and they helped me pick out a Blade MCPx. Then I went online, looking for help to learn how to fly it.
When I found your site and instructional videos, it was exactly what I needed. Your methodology is well thought out and explained. The progression is sensible and the videos are clear and concise. As a post-secondary teacher, I appreciated and admired your approach. I taught myself to fly a CP helicopter by following your instructional videos. To help with the nose-in stage, I got the Real-flight simulator and discovered planes while using it.
After that, my involvement in RC helicopters and planes really took off (pun intended). I fly planes more than helis now, as planes were my first love. But I still enjoy both, so much.
Until last fall, I always flew alone at 'bootleg' sites (as the staff at my local hobby shop jokingly said). They kept encouraging me to join the local RC club, which I eventually did last fall. Just yesterday, I was telling one of the members how I got started in RC helicopters and planes. I told him that without your site and instructional videos, I wouldn't have stayed in the hobby. And I wouldn't have had the enjoyment that I've experienced.
So, although this acknowledgement is quite a few years late, thank you very much for what you have given me.


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Montgomery County shifts focus to 'overdose crisis' | The Daily Gazette
Montgomery County shifts focus to 'overdose crisis'
County has highest opioid prescription rate in state
Zachary Matson
@zacharydmatson
Lt. Gov. Kathy Hochul speaks at a Heroin and Opioid Abuse Task Force session at Proctors' GE Theater in 2016.
Photographer: Marc Schultz/Gazette File Photo
As the opioid crisis devastated communities across the country in the late 2000s, there were enough prescription pain pills dispensed in Montgomery County for every resident to get 38 of them each year between 2006 and 2012, according to a new Washington Post database.
During that six-year period, over 13 million pain pills flowed into Montgomery County. And the high level of legal opioid distribution in the county continued to persist: between 2015 and 2017, the residents of Montgomery County had just over 800 opioid prescriptions for every 1,000 residents, the highest opioid prescription rate in the state, according to the state Department of Health.
As Montgomery County this summer launches a new task force aimed at wrestling with the opioid problems, however, Sara Boerenko, the county's public health director, said they are setting their sights even broader.
"We are shifting from an opioid problem to an overdose problem," Boerenko said Monday. "When we are talking about the issue in general, it's about overdose and addiction. It's not necessarily about the specific drug, it's to prevent a death."
The county has held two meetings of its new overdose task force, supported by state funding targeting communities struggling with opioid problems, and outlined tasks for different participants to work on.
The task force consists of representatives from the Sheriff's Department and Amsterdam police, Saint Mary's Hospital, Catholic Charities, the social services commissioner, probation office, the Office of the Aging and others. In its first two meetings, Boerenko said, the task force discussed addiction issues in the community and came up with the decision to focus on overdoses more broadly than with just an opioid lens.
Different members of the task force are working on initiatives to develop needle-exchange programs, train people in recovery from addiction to work with people currently suffering from addiction, and expand trainings to use Narcan, a substance used to respond to overdose.
As more attention is paid to opioids and medical professionals continue to constrain proscribing practices, it's possible addiction and overdose problems shift to other drugs and drug combinations, Boerenko said.
Boerenko said that she and others working on drug and addiction issues in Montgomery County have seen upticks in drugs other than opioids. She said cocaine is on the rise, tranquilizers like benzodiasepeine are becoming more of a problem and that even alcohol abuse seems to be climbing.
"By taking even the words opiate and heroin out, we are looking at what this is," she said. "It's an overdose crisis."
A look at other counties
The Washington Post analysis based on federal DEA records recently released in ongoing litigation offers insight into just how many pain pills found their way to communities all across the country.
In counties worst hit, parts of a West Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee, more than 150 pills per person were distributed each year. One country topped 200 pain pills per person per year, according to the Post.
In New York, Sullivan County marked the highest density of pain pills between 2006 and 2012, with the country average 50 pain pills per resident distributed each year during that time period.
In the Capital Region, Fulton and Scoharie counties both averaged distribution of 32 pain pills per resident each year; Saratoga County averaged distribution of 27 pills per person each year; Schenectady County averaged 25 pills per person; and Albany county averaged 24 pills per person.
The database also includes a breakdown of where the opioid pills were distributed and from what manufacturer they originated.
Delgado talks minimum wage, other issues at town hall event
Wave of ODs, some fentanyl-related, strikes Schenectady
Former Montgomery County sheriff's candidate credited with attempt to save drowning father in New Jersey
DeStefano selected by Montgomery County Conservative Party for coroner ballot slot


text:
Former Dojo Pizza owner gets 65 years on child porn charges
Loren Copp
ST. LOUIS (AP) – The former owner of a St. Louis pizzeria has been sentenced to 65 years in prison for producing and possessing child pornography and coercing a minor into sexual activity.
Loren Copp was convicted last year of eight counts of child sexual exploitation and enticement involving four victims. He was sentenced Friday in U.S. District Court.
Federal prosecutors say Copp groomed and sexually abused two minor females who had been in his custody over the course of several years and recorded sex acts with a cell phone or video recorder. Prosecutors say Copp also convinced others to send him explicit photos.
In addition to operating the pizza restaurant, Copp is a former pastor and karate instructor.


The Healthcare Management degree prepares students for a variety of administrative opportunities in the healthcare industry. This major is ideal for part-time students or those who cannot travel to the Southeast campus to take courses since it provides a flexible delivery method (online courses). It is targeted towards practitioners who desire to move up in clinical management or out of direct patient care into a support role. For practitioners with an existing associate's degree, the BS in Healthcare Management can be earned in approximately 72 hours.
Informatics - focused on the gathering and reporting of medical information to providers, insurers and accreditation agencies. Please know this program is not AHIMA accredited, and will not lead to RHIT/RHIA certification.


Let me start with what I think Ann Larson and I both agree about, at least as she discusses it in her post "Rhetoric and Composition's Dead." I think collective bargaining/unionization for academics is a good thing: faculty, lecturers, part-timers, and grad students ought to all organize, along with other units on campus. I've been in an academic union my entire life on the tenure-track, and while the union is far from perfect, I'd rather have and be in a union than not have and be in a union. I think that's especially true at places like EMU.
But I disagree with pretty much everything else she says in this post, including her characterization of what I wrote here a while back. More after the break.
Larson's post with the catchy title (as someone on Facebook noted, it could be a possessive s, as in "the dead of Rhetoric and Composition," or it could be an apostrophe s, as in "Rhetoric and Composition is dead;" maybe both) is a sort of rambling complaint against much of what is wrong with academia and somehow connecting it back to Composition studies– specifically, first year writing and WPA work. Someone on Facebook called this a "concern troll," so it probably doesn't need too much more attention. But I can't resist responding, especially since she mentions me specifically.
But before I get to responding to Larson directly, I am beginning to wonder about the frequently cited "fact" that about 70-75% of all faculty teaching in higher education right now are teaching part-time and that this alarming number represents a historical crisis. At the risk of opening the Latourian black box of assumptions here, what is this based on? I'm not saying it's not true; I'm just wondering about why we assume this. I'm wondering how we can parse this out a bit more, and I'm wondering the extent to which this represents an actual decrease in the number of tenure-track positions in higher education, and how that (presumed) increase in part-time faculty is being distributed across academia.
About 40-45 years ago, the Department of English Language and Literature at EMU had about 50 faculty members, plus or minus a couple. Right now, the department has about 50 faculty members, plus or minus a couple. There has been a shift in what folks do (there are a lot more comp/rhet specialists than there were 30 or 40 years ago), but the number of faculty has remained relatively steady. I suspect though– I don't know this for sure, this is just an educated guess– that we have increased the number of part-time/full-time but not on the tenure-track faculty dramatically.
As far as I can tell and as long as I've had any involvement in higher education, first year writing has always been taught mostly by non-tenure-track faculty. Obviously, I didn't pay much attention to this as an undergraduate in the mid-1980s, but I think everyone teaching freshman comp at the University of Iowa back then were graduate students. I can speak with some certainty that very few (if any) sections of fycomp were taught by faculty at VCU or BGSU, and about 90% of the sections of first year writing at EMU are taught by part-timers, lecturers, and GAs. This situation might be different at smaller/more liberal arts-oriented colleges, but maybe not. My first job was at Southern Oregon University, a regional university of about 6,500-7,000 students with an English department of fewer than a dozen faculty and not a ton of majors, and the gen-ed class that faculty taught was generally an intro to lit of some sort. Certainly not fycomp.
And so on. Like I said, I'm mostly being honest when I say I have questions about the accuracy of the adjunct crisis in higher education. But I also, obviously, am trying to point out that this "crisis"– specifically as it relates to teaching first year composition– has been in place for a long long time.
I have to wonder what it was they thought they were getting themselves into when they started down the PhD in literature path in the first place. …. I think a lot of their anger – and Schuman is angry, no doubt about it – comes from this realization that they didn't beat the odds, that they fooled themselves (and/or allowed themselves to be fooled) into believing that they were somehow immune from the job market laws of supply and demand.
I'm not a "Composition" specialist in the sense that Larson seems to be describing it. Early in her post, Larson describes Composition as a "sub-field of English." This would certainly not be how I and many of my colleagues would describe the field, especially those who teach in and/or have degrees from comp/rhet programs not in English departments. And even though I have a PhD in English specializing in comp/rhet (though BGSU's program is in "Rhetoric and Writing"), I certainly never thought of it as being "beneath" or "sub" any other degree in the department– like Literature, for example.
Comp/rhet as a field goes far beyond first year writing and WPA work. It includes rhetorical theory, technical writing, computers and writing, media studies (of a sort, at least), visual rhetoric, etc., etc. I don't know anyone in the field who is exclusively invested in first year writing, and that includes the "boss compositionists" Larson critiques. A simple look at the MLA JIL illustrates this.
It is a "'completely different animal' than the market in literature" because it's a different discipline/specialization. Simple as that. Committees doing a search in literature would probably not consider a candidate with a PhD in composition and rhetoric; committees doing a search in comp/rhet are probably not going to consider a candidate with a PhD in literature. I don't understand why this is complicated or controversial.
I don't think I was saying "if English graduate students expected to get jobs, they should have studied Composition like he did." But if folks are expecting to get jobs in Composition and Rhetoric, then yes, getting a PhD in Comp/Rhet instead of Literature or some other related field would have been a good idea.
The reference to Mina Shaughnessy is interesting because she entered the field of Composition and Rhetoric in the 1960s before it was possible to get a PhD specifically in the field. That was also an era when it was much MUCH easier to get a tenure-track job in literature, too. Anyway, I believe Shaughnessy studied 17th century literature; if she were to apply for a tenure-track job in Comp/Rhet at a place like EMU nowadays, she wouldn't be considered. But that has nothing to do with "disciplinary discrimination" or "prejudice" or "anti-politics" or whatever; this is all about the way the field has matured and moved away from literary studies.
See above regarding the questions I am raising earlier here about the "adjunct crisis," and yes, I think folks who decided to earn PhDs in unemployable disciplines (and we're talking about fields of study that have been relatively unemployable for decades) and who paid no attention to the supply and demand of the marketplace have done this to themselves. It certainly wasn't the fault of people in my field. So yes, folks who get a PhD in something like (for example) Shakespeare studies only to learn afterwards that a) there are few jobs in the field and b) they aren't qualified for a job in Comp/Rhet should take some personal responsibility and not instead blame the Composition Elite/Neoliberal Complex. That's just silly.
So, what can disenfranchised folks like Larson do? The options are obviously limited. On an individual level, I think the best option is to do what Larson has apparently done, which is to find work outside of academia. I realize that's not the dream/ideal, but it is what it is. On a more global level (and I said already), I think that part-timers/non-tenure-track faculty ought to do whatever they can to unionize. It definitely helps.
Thank you, Steve, for this excellent, apt response.
None of which means, of course, that the adjunct crisis isn't a crisis– it is, a moral and practical one, and we need to respond by pushing for adjunct unions and working in solidarity with them.
Other than that, I'm not really sure how to respond to a list of anecdotes.
That is, indeed, the key point. The growing use of full-time but non-tenure-track instructors (who are nearly always paid far less than tenure-track faculty of similar rank and experience, and who, of course, have less job security, and therefore less power, and less comfort in exercising their academic freedom) is also part of the story — one which often receives less attention than the use of part-time contingents (what many people mean when they say "adjuncts," though the word is used in various ways), because the conditions aren't quite as shockingly exploitative, but it's still a significant part of the picture (and possibly a greater threat to faculty governance, and the traditional tenure system).
Steve, here's the Chronicle salary survey data for your institution: https://chronicle.com/article/aaup-survey-data-2013/138309#id=169798 . It's showing that 60% of the teaching force is "full-time staff whose primary role is instruction" (this includes people who are non-tenure-track as well as tenure-track), which suggests that 40% are adjuncts (adjunct data is much harder to come by). I'm not sure whether they're counting by individual staff members or by FTEs (possibly the former), but it sounds like you're in the ballpark for matching the national picture (especially when one takes into account that community colleges generally use more part-timers than universities, so you could be on the high side in use of full-timers and still confirm the larger picture).
It looks like instructors (probably the main category into which full-time non-tenure-track folks fall, though some of us carry assistant and even associate or full professor titles) are unusually well paid (which could be affected by a number of things, including the availability of potential instructors in the area, the disciplines in which they cluster, etc., etc.). The adjunct pay data (which is self-reported, so scanty) is here: http://adjunct.chronicle.com/entity/?entity=college&id=1797 .
Our community college has moved over 30 years from 16 FT tenure/ 2PT to 8FT /more PT than I know how to count. At the same time, the number of students doubled.
I'm the guy who characterized the original post as concern trolling. Most crisis rhetoric is just a way to generate heat, and the best way to reveal the pyrrhic nature of crisis pieces is to do what you did. Break it down. I don't agree with everything you write here, but I agree with a lot of it. Thanks for taking the time to create a civil dialogue.
Thanks for that link, Freddie. I think that is interesting.
And Ann, if I am not mistaken about that MLA report (I don't have time to read it now), it is suggesting that the "replacement" of faculty has not continued in a one-to-one fashion like it used to: that is, a Miltonist retires and the department hires another Miltonist, even though the previously retired Milton expert was only teaching one seminar in his area of expertise every other year. That doesn't mean that the institution didn't hire someone else– someone in another discipline in English (again, my department is about the same size as its been for decades; the difference is we're not all a bunch of literature scholars anymore) or even in another department entirely. So that's why these numbers are very hard to nail down: they go far beyond the specialized scope of the MLA.
Perhaps this is just obvious, but I support all of the calls for more TT faculty for all of the reasons various folks have mentioned, and I think it's a mistake for all kinds of different reasons for institutions to try to "make due" with part-timers. So I want to emphasize here in raising questions about "what do these numbers mean?" that I'm don't think they're true; I'm just trying to open the block box a bit and figure out more what they're based on.
* I suspect that if we did a "head count" of TT faculty in 1975 versus now (with stops in-between, of course), at most universities, the number of faculty would probably be about the same. The thing that's changed is really the number of students and thus the number of part-timers, so the ratio/percentage of folks teaching in college is tilted in that direction. It's not so much that faculty have been "replaced" with part-timers (though see my next point on that); rather, it is that the growth in the TT ranks have not kept up with enrollment. But this is just an educated guess, frankly. Maybe I'm totally wrong on that one.
* One thing I've seen very clearly in my time in the tenure track over the last 17 or so years is a fairly significant increase in "administrative creep" for all kinds of largely bad reasons. I think the result is a lot of faculty (including me!) are doing some quasi-administrative work and getting some reassignment from teaching, which means that even with roughly the same number of faculty, we're teaching a lower percentage of the classes. I've seen this quite a bit at EMU, which is hit with the double-whammy of being pressured to not hire more administrators. While I generally agree with that– we have enough suits as it is around here– it does mean that administrators get faculty to do this work instead, and that means they are teaching less and less.
* Finally, I think my argument about fycomp stands in that we're just not teaching a whole lot more sections with part-timers now than we did 10 or 20 or even 40 years ago. So, where has there been a bigger increase in the use of part-timers to teach? What other fields, for example? I honestly don't know.
Also — although I'm a literature Ph.D. with 20+ years experience teaching comp (a generation younger than Mina Shaughnessy, but in some ways in the same position in terms of developing on-the-job comp/rhet expertise, and an interest in publishing in the field, despite a lit Ph.D.) — I can see the argument for separating out rhet and comp entirely (though that's not how it's done at my institution, which does offer a rhet/comp. Ph.D., or at any other institution where I've taught). However, I'd only be in favor of that if the rhet/comp. program is truly freestanding: not drawing at all for teaching staff on M.A., M.F.A. or Ph. D. candidates or degree-holders from English (or any other department/field). At my institution (and most others, I'm pretty sure), the whole enterprise would fall apart pretty quickly under those conditions, and the Rhet/comp department/program would soon be reduced to desperately recruiting hordes of Ph.D. candidates, while knowing that most of those people, once they received the degree, would be needed to fill the part- and full-time non-tenure-track jobs on which the tenure-track jobs in rhet/comp. rely. As I think I commented on another post of yours, rhet/comp has a ratio problem: because, as you point out, most tenure-track jobs in rhet/comp are at least partly administrative, the tenure-track faculty need someone to administer. The administrees may well increasingly be rhet/comp. Ph.D.s (or M.A.s or A.B.D.s) rather than lit. ones, but I'm not sure that's exactly an argument in favor of expanding the discipline (in fact, from my point of view, it's a reason to warn potential grad students away from rhet./comp., since there's every indication that past success in job placement will not predict similar future success).
Cassandra, can you explain what you mean by "because, as you point out, most tenure-track jobs in rhet/comp are at least partly administrative, the tenure-track faculty need someone to administer"?
I see this as backwards. Most TT jobs in rhet/comp require administrative work because comp programs are large and require administrative work on a level that other, smaller departments do not. TT folks are not trying to create a labor force so as to have someone to manage; that labor force exists because the courses exist. Now, some folks think the existence of FYC (and other comp courses) is a problem, but that's a different argument.
First off, I think Sarah is right: I think you have the relationship/role of administrative work for comp/rhet scholars pretty much backwards. WPA work is an important emphasis in the field, it's definitely a specialization worthy of study, and I took some coursework in it way back when. I've even had some mostly interim work as a WPA. But there is much much more to the field than WPA work. At EMU, we have a small but viable undergrad major and MA program, and most of the 9 (or so) faculty in our program are teaching advanced writing classes to support this major and some other programs. Two out of these nine folks are directly connected to the first year writing program; the rest of us are interested in first year writing of course but not doing that work.
And by the way, there are plenty of free-standing comp/rhet programs that are getting along just fine right now.
Second, I'm not really advocating/pointing out an expansion of comp/rhet as a discipline per se– that is, I don't think we need more PhD programs or more PhD students, at least not any more than are working their ways through the pipelines now. But what is pretty clear though is the career outlook for those who earn PhDs in comp/rhet is considerably brighter than those who earn PhDs in literature.
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#Revolution: Why Che Guevara needed Twitter
Ryan Cordell
Evolutionary Libraries
Interview: Declan Bennett
Francesca Peak
Arts, Interviews
Football: Here Cometh the Toon Army
Kobina Monney
Fanboy Culture in London
Science Fiction has a massive influence on today's pop culture.
Within the past decade I think we have all noticed the steady increase in popularity of 'Fanboy' or 'Geek' culture. I think most would agree that a prominent example of Fanboy culture's rise in contemporary Pop Culture began with the release of CBS The Big Bang Theory back in 2007. The Big Bang Theory explores many aspects of geek culture: Graphic Novels, Gaming, Cult Television and Comic Conventions.
The high profile promotion of the 'geek' world has definitely transformed public opinion on interests that were previously isolated and in some ways alienated. For example, before geek culture became popular and an individual had an interest in Comic Books, they instantly became associated with the stereotype of an introvert who preferred the company of fictional characters. However, through the development of social media, those who were isolated have been able to share interests such as Gaming or Cosplay and gradually those interests have become, in my opinion, a main part of today's Pop Culture.
…encapsulate every mode of the Sci-Fi genre…
There are countless events throughout London every year which encapsulate every mode of the Sci-Fi genre. Firstly, there are the Comic Conventions: Kapow, London Film and Comic Convention, MCM Expo and London Super Comic Con. These conventions not only allow comic book fans to deify their favourite artists and writers, they have also more recently made a habit of adding 'A-list' celebrities to their guest lists. Gaming conventions are another example of the rise of 'cult' interest for example the London Gaming Con held annually in London.
Conventions are not the only way in which interests such as gaming and comics have been promoted, these interests are also presented through film and television. The Super Heroes of Marvel and DCs graphic novels have soared to fame with the release of several blockbuster films including: The Avengers, Batman Begins (plus Dark Knight and rises), Thor and The Amazing Spiderman. Film and television adaptations of the fictional Comic Book world have previously been depicted, an example being The Incredible Hulk (1978) television series and also the original Batman (1989) movie franchise.
…oversimplified and regurgitated to cater for a wider audience…
Even though this 'geek' culture has previously been presented by different forms of media, the impact has not been on the same scale. Everywhere I go I seem to encounter at least several 'I heart Geeks' t-shirts and different forms of 'fanboy' merchandise, and it seems as though this sub-culture has not only become socially acceptable but also the prevalent mode of hobbies and interests. There are those who believe that the world of Sci-fi and 'geeks' has been oversimplified and regurgitated to cater for a wider audience, I would agree to a certain extent however it's not necessarily a negative change. The growth in popularity of the comics, games and movies of Science Fiction has made an intricate genre more accessible.
BatmanComic ConventionsCult TelevisionFanboyGamingGeekGraphic novelsKapowLondon Film and Comic ConventionLondon Gaming ConLondon Super Comic ConMCM ExpoThe Amazing SpidermanThe AvengersThe Big Bang TheoryThe Incredible HulkThor
London through a Tourist Lens
6 ways to limit Mouth Cancer
I'm currently at Royal Holloway University of London and am completing a BA in English Literature. I enjoy theatre, gigs in and around London and have recently taken an interest in comic conventions. I have always had an interest in writing whether it be poetry or short stories.
Preview: Star Wars: The Old Republic
National: Are You Not Entertained?
Bryn Glover
This week I briefly hosted an American friend...


Why use Valley View, OH Property Management company?
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Valley View is village in Cuyahoga County, Ohio. As of 2012, the estimated population is 2,020. The population density is 373.9/sq mi. Valley View has a land mass of 5.44 sq mi and a water mass of 0.13 sq mi. Valley View has only one zip code: 44125. It also has only one area code: 216.


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Gareth, Dance Teacher and Choreographer
Ready to work under the contract
Type of training individual
Kinds of sports Dancesport
Facilities: YOUNG STARS
Creative director & choreographer Gareth has made his mark in the world of dance. He is most known for his work for LOCOG on the 2012 closing ceremony for the London Olympics and Paralympics where he was the Associate Director and also directed and choreographed the sell out Steps tour. Gareth has used his experience and years of studying to develop his distinctive style, and experiment with a variety of genres. Trained in musical theatre as an actor, singer & dancer, it soon became apparent that dance was to become his passion, he graduated from the London Studio Centre where with distinction.
Gareth began his professional career when he was cast in the original West End cast of Saturday Night Fever, playing and understudying all of the lead roles. After two years in the West End, Gareth started traveling Europe on tour as a backing dancer for chart-topping acts including Pink, Take That, Emma Bunton and Will Young. He performed at some of the countries most prestigious events such as Royal Variety Show, and appeared on TV programmes SMTV, CD:UK, Stars In Their Eyes & Top Of the Pops.
Gareth's experience led to him becoming one of the UK's top choreographers. His path started when he was invited to assist Kim Gavin on "Take That's "The Ultimate Tour", "Beautiful World" and the "Circus" Tours. From there he was in huge demand and went on to choreograph countless shows including The Brit Awards, Toyota's World Trade Shows, Trevor Sorbie, and L'Oreal's 50thAnniversary Celebrations. He was requested to choreograph many artist's tours including as both Anastacia and The Nolan's UK & European tours. Gareth's success and reputation keeps growing as does the demand for him. He shows directed Mika's stadium tour and in 2009 he directed and choreographed the sell out "Here Come The Girls" starring Lulu, Anastacia and Chaka Khan. Other Here Come The Girls tours followed featuring the above artists as well as Gloria Gaynor and Heather Small.
Gareth's choreography has since been seen on the majority of dance performances on major UK TV shows, including: "So You Think You Can Dance" (BBC1), "Don't Stop Believing" (Channel 5), "The Royal Variety Show" (BBC1), Take That's Brit Award performance 2011, "Sing If You Can" (ITV), "The National Television Awards" and many more. Gareth was also the Creative Director and Choreographer for Cyprus's Junior Eurovision Song Contest entry in Malta in 2016 for Young Stars student George Michaelides.
THE ART OF DANCE STUDIO
HALLMARK DANCING CENTER
Swing latino
SERRANO DANCE SCHOOL
Dance studio5
LONDON SCHOOL OF BALLET
OLGA DANCE ACADEMY IN CYPRUS
Dance Academy Cyprus
MOVIMIENTO DANCE COMPANY Limassol
Koula, Dance and Fitness Instructor
Rena, Dance Teacher
Tatiana, dance and fitness instructor
Rodoula, Dance and fitness instructor
Ryan, Dance Teacher and Choreographer
Christina, Dance Teacher in Nicosia
Eleni, Dance and Fitness Instructor
Maria, Dance and Fitness Instructor
Rube, Choreographer
Daniel, Dance Teacher


On Saturday my mum and I went off for a girls afternoon to Cowbridge. We both love it there and have been going at least once a year (usually for the food festival in October) for years, it's our mother-daughter tradition. I had been to Cowbridge a few weeks back and discovered Happy Days Vintage Homestore for the first time, I knew I'd have to take my mum there.
After a wonderful lunch at Bar 44 off we went around the corner of the Duke of Wellington Pub to have a look around. Happy Days sells vintage and handmade items and has a little cafe tucked away on one side of the building.
They have a great selection of bone china tea sets, I pretty much wanted all of them.
There is a small selection of vintage clothing and accessories.
The vintage toy/collectable section is really great, it's like trying to play spot the toy you had as a kid.
After there we had a bit of a wander around the village, I was happy to see that High Rise Bookshop was open so in we went for a browse.
We found some old Bibles with notes written in them.
All in all it was a really great afternoon spent with my mum, I'll be back soon Cowbridge!


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Hannah Bailey
A Land For Everyone
A land in skateboarding, is to do a trick successfully, and this land, Scotland, is for everyone. An all women-identifying team combine our experience, knowledge and love of the Scotland and the Highlands with our passion for skateboarding, adventure, photography, film and nature to create a feature, photographs and a film - inspiring from an environmental and human point of view.Only just outside the cities, you can find remote unspoiled nature, winding roads for miles and coastal paths with the most astounding views. More commonly these areas are explored by people in their cars, cyclists on road bikes and hikers on foot, but we want to explore it differently - on skateboards. By skaters lesser seen. As women who grew up in Scotland (rural and urban), our teenage selves would never have imagined that a career in skateboarding would be possible for us, yet here we are. This adventure is a nod to our childhood and the journeys we have been on since. As we revisit and reclaim the highlands and lowlands of our youth, our goal is spread the message that skateboarding is for everyone who wants it, proving that you don't have to fit the stereotypical narrative for what a skater looks like or acts like, to embrace everything that skateboarding has to offer. This is a bid to invite more people into skateboarding, and inspire people to see and use it as a vehicle for exploration and adventure.
Film by Rachel Sarah.
Produced by Hannah Bailey.
Skated by Lyndsay McLaren.
Supported by MPB.
Photo above shot by Rachel Sarah.


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Home Sports Football Broncos Promote Nathaniel Hackett's Clock Management Strategist As Interim Head Coach
Broncos Promote Nathaniel Hackett's Clock Management Strategist As Interim Head Coach
In a long-overdue move, the Denver Broncos fired head coach Nathanial Hackett Monday, making him only the fifth head coach in NFL history to be canned before finishing a single season.
Perhaps the biggest downfall of Hackett's tenure was his clock management skills (or lack there of), which forced him midseason after heavy criticism to hire an assistant coach whose sole duties were to help him with keeping track of the clock and timeouts during games.
After Hackett was fired, the team offered the interim gig to defensive coordinator Ejiro Evero, but after he turned it down, Jerry Rosburg, the game clock manager, was promoted to head coach for the final two games of the season.
Sources: Broncos players were just informed that senior assistant coach Jerry Rosburg, whom Nathaniel Hackett hired during the season to aid him in clock management strategy, is now taking over as the Broncos' interim head coach, effective immediately. pic.twitter.com/WJ8BFXlg3k
— Adam Schefter (@AdamSchefter) December 26, 2022
The move was of course met with jokes about the team tanking the rest of the season for a better draft pick.
Rosburg, 67, formerly worked as an assistant head coach/special teams coach for the Baltimore Ravens before being brought on in Denver.
At least we know clock management won't be of issue for the rest of the year…


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Camaridium aurantiacum är en orkidéart som först beskrevs av Rudolf Schlechter, och fick sitt nu gällande namn av Mario Alberto Blanco. Camaridium aurantiacum ingår i släktet Camaridium och familjen orkidéer. Inga underarter finns listade i Catalogue of Life.

Bildgalleri

Källor

Externa länkar

Orkidéer
aurantiacum

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


JACKSONVILLE, Fla. - A box of Peanut M&Ms was a key piece of evidence that led to the arrests of two sisters in a holdup Wednesday night at an apartment complex on Jacksonville's Southside, authorities said.
Anna Murtha, 21, and Victoria Murtha, 24, are both charged with armed robbery.
According to an arrest report, an 18-year-old woman drove Wednesday evening to the complex where the sisters live to meet Anna to smoke marijuana. As they sat in the car, police said, Victoria came up to the driver's side, opened the door and pulled up her shirt, revealing what the victim believed was a handgun.
The victim told police that Victoria grabbed her bag and shut the door but then reopened the door and grabbed a box of M&Ms that had been underneath her bag.
According to the arrest report, sisters returned to their apartment. The victim called police then found the sisters' mother and told her what had happened. The mother went into the apartment and came back out with her bag, but $300 in cash was missing, police said.
According to the report, police questioned the sisters, who both said they had no idea how the victim's bag got into their apartment. But then officers said they found the box of M&Ms, hidden under clothes in a closet.
No gun was found, police noted in the report.
Anna and Victoria were booked early Thursday morning into the Duval County jail, where they are each being held on $75,000 bond, online jail records show.


Forbidden Arms is a side-scrolling combat game that recounts the tale of 2 blacksmiths in ancient Japan. The story is one of revenge, confrontation, malediction and betrayal. Our character must select his best sword and use all of his samurai techniques to overcome countless enemies. Play as Ichirou, a warrior in possession of the legendary sword, fight in spectacular settings and feed your blade with the blood of your enemies to restore its full power.