text:
Program Home
ABC Radio National
Audio Player failed to load.
Try to Download directly (18.42 MB)
MacGregor and Gordon/Photonica
A literacy deficit
By Sarah Dingle, on Background Briefing
Download A literacy deficit (18.42 MB)
Download 18.42 MB
Half of all adults in Tasmania cannot read or write properly, and many of their children are following in their footsteps as badly needed school reforms are frustrated. Sarah Dingle investigates.
In Sorell, east of Hobart, 49-year-old Don McKenzie has gone back to school.
The 49 year old has been illiterate for most of his life after he dropped out in Year 8.
'My reading and writing before I came to these classes was totally crap,' says Mr McKenzie.
'Maths, well I knew the basics but I still need a hell of a lot of work to do on that and that's why I'm here.'
This article represents part of a larger Background Briefing investigation. Listen to Sarah Dingle's full report on Sunday at 8.05 am or use the podcast links above after broadcast.
A report by the Australian Bureau of Statistics for 2011-2012 shows half of all Tasmanians aged 15 to 74 are functionally illiterate, and more than half are functionally innumerate—meaning they don't have the skills needed to get by in the modern world, like filling out forms, or reading the instructions on their prescription.
Mr McKenzie has never been formally employed, and is currently on a disability pension for arthritis and depression.
Before attending adult classes, Mr McKenzie would rarely go out, hardly spoke to anyone, and became anxious over everyday tasks.
'I used to lock myself up a fair bit inside and I never used to go shopping or anything like that with my partner,' he explains.
'What I was afraid of was going into the shop and...then I can't understand what the labels are and I'd get the wrong thing. I'd think, well I'm not [going to] do that just in case I get the wrong thing and end up poisoning someone.'
Learn About Tableau
There's a strong correlation between low literacy, poor health, and low socio economic status, with more than a third of Tasmanians living on welfare. Unemployment in the state is the nation's highest, at 8.6 per cent.
Bank of America and Merrill Lynch chief economist Saul Eslake says poor educational outcomes play a major role in Tasmania's long running recession.
'I think the low level of educational attainment of Tasmanian workers is probably the single most important reason why productivity in Tasmania is significantly below levels on the mainland,' says Mr Eslake.
'I think, although this is harder to prove, that Tasmania's lower level of educational attainment is also a contributor to the fact that fewer Tasmanians work at all than is the case on the mainland.'
Surprisingly, Tasmania spends a greater proportion of its budget on its schools than any other jurisdiction.
Dr Ben Jensen is director of the School Education program at The Grattan Institute. He says the situation has reached a point where there should be a specialist literacy and numeracy teacher in every school in Tasmania.
'If you close a few small schools that are incredibly expensive you enable money to be spent on literacy and numeracy specialists in schools across the state,' says Dr Jensen.
In Tasmania, high schools only teach students to Year 10, with years 11 and 12 offered in city-based colleges.
The state has the lowest level of Year 12 achievement of all the states and territories, and the highest rate of students who leave school in Year 10.
Dr Jensen says the problem is cultural—for many Tasmanians there's an assumption that finishing high school means finishing Year 10.
'If you look at the history of Tasmanian education it's a history of low expectations,' says Dr Jensen.
That means illiteracy is an intergenerational problem.
Anne Harrison is the head of a community centre at Risdon Vale, one of the most disadvantaged suburbs in Hobart.
'I have a young boy here. He's 16...he came in to me and he said "I've just had a baby and I'm now a dad", and I went "Congratulations, that's great", but he said, "I now need to learn to read and write",' says Ms Harrison.
Don McKenzie has 12 children aged 13 to 30, some of whom also have low literacy. He's now working hard to break the cycle.
'I've got one that's really high needs, she's a 13-year-old. I said "I'm going back to school now and learning how to read and write, how about you come back and sit down next to me and read a book with me?" and now she loves it,' says Mr McKenzie.
'I've noticed a lot of improvement in her reading [and] she can actually write her name now where she never used to, so I'm really happy.'
Don McKenzie is now trying to convince his 27-year-old son to come to adult literacy classes with him.
Duration: 40min 14sec
Broadcast: Sun 22 Sep 2013, 8:05am
plusminus
Sarah Dingle: There are many things we do every day without thinking, like reading a road sign or the mail, or checking prices at the shops. But for some, these simple acts are terrifyingly difficult.
Don McKenzie: What I was afraid of was going into the shop, saying I'm going to go and get something, and then I can't understand what the labels are and stuff like that and I'd get the wrong thing and stuff, and I'd think well I'm not going to do that just in case I'm getting the wrong thing and I could end up poisoning someone.
Sarah Dingle: Australia has a surprising number of adults with low literacy and numeracy skills.
Nationwide, more than 40% of adults have inadequate skills, below the level considered necessary for normal day to day activities. But there is one state that stands out. Half of all Tasmanians aged 15 to 74 are, for practical purposes, innumerate and illiterate.
Brian Charity: I couldn't tell you what the alphabet is now. And unfortunately, as bizarre and almost as terrible as it sounds, coming up now 40 years that I've been married and I still don't necessarily spell my wife's name right.
Sarah Dingle: Together with Australia's highest rates of illiteracy and innumeracy, Tasmania has by far the highest unemployment rate in the country. And the state's education system is failing students, says leading economist, Saul Eslake.
Saul Eslake: The sad thing is that Tasmanian students appear to fall further behind their mainland counterparts the longer they remain in the education system, at least up to year 9, and then sadly far too many of them drop out at year 10.
Sarah Dingle: Half a century of poor adult literacy has created an intergenerational problem.
Head of the Tasmanian State School Parents and Friends Organisation, Jen Eddington.
Jenny Eddington: We're quite aware that for a number of our parents their literacy levels are not such that they can read and understand their students' school reports, that they can participate and engage as parents.
Sarah Dingle: It's a cycle that's extremely hard to break, says community worker Anne Harrison.
Anne Harrison: I have had a young boy here and he's 16, and he has come in to me and he said, 'I've just had a baby and I'm now a dad', and I went, 'Oh right, congratulations, that's great,' but he said, 'I now need to learn to read and write.'
Sarah Dingle: Generations of people have learned to live with their low literacy skills, and some have even managed to forge successful careers despite this disadvantage.
Hello I'm Sarah Dingle, and today on Background Briefing, the secret lives of people who've grown up without being able to read or write, and the outdated education system which is still letting many students slip through the cracks.
[Audio: Adult literacy class]
Sarah Dingle: In the seaside hamlet of Sorell, east of Hobart, Don McKenzie is getting back to basics.
Don McKenzie: My reading and writing before I came to these classes was totally crap. I never used to be able to pronounce real long words. When I used to write, it just looked like a scribble to me.
Sarah Dingle: And your maths?
Don McKenzie: Maths, well, I knew the basics of maths but I still need a hell of a lot of work to do on that and that's why I'm here, to try and get that help off the tutors and stuff, which is good because maths is really important these days I think.
Sarah Dingle: 49-year-old Don McKenzie grew up in Hobart. He left school for good when he was in year 8. It was very easy for Don McKenzie to drop out of the entire education system.
Don McKenzie: I just said I'm leaving school, I don't like school. They didn't even bother saying why don't you stay at school and stuff like that, they just let you go. It just seemed to me back them days they weren't really interested in education wise, only the ones they really wanted to, sort of thing.
Sarah Dingle: Until eight months ago, Don McKenzie was functionally illiterate, and that had a devastating impact on his everyday life.
Don McKenzie: I never used to hardly speak to anyone, I never used to look at anything or anything like that, just in case I did the wrong thing. I used to lock myself up a fair bit inside and I never used to hardly go shopping or anything like that with my partner. When we used to go shopping I used to just sit in the car.
Sarah Dingle: In Australia, literacy and numeracy are defined by five levels of skill. Level three is deemed the minimum necessary for getting by in the modern world. For example, as Don's literacy tutor Chris Oriel explains, being able to read the paper.
Chris Oriel: And not just to read the newspaper but understand the context of the newspaper and understand the difference between the editorial and also the advertisements and the classifieds and the reason that they're there. Simple things such as being able to go along to a chemist and get a script and be able to read and understand what the script is.
Sarah Dingle: For years the state's poor education outcomes have held back half its adult population, and its economy.
Saul Eslake: I think the low level of educational attainment of Tasmanian workers is probably the single most important reason why productivity in Tasmania is significantly below levels on the mainland.
Sarah Dingle: Tasmanian-born Bank of America Merrill Lynch chief economist, Saul Eslake.
Saul Eslake: I think, although this is harder to prove, that Tasmanians' lower level of educational attainment is also a contributor to the fact that fewer Tasmanians work at all than is the case on the mainland.
Sarah Dingle: The Tasmanian government is seriously worried about the situation. Late last year it launched a major program to dramatically boost adult literacy and numeracy. Free classes are being conducted by hundreds of volunteer tutors around the state. Tutor Chris Oriel is a schoolteacher by trade, which can be off-putting for some of his clients.
Chris Oriel: Certainly I've got some clients who take a bit of a step backwards when they know I'm a schoolteacher because of how they feel about how their schooling was. People have what I would see as misplaced feelings of shame and embarrassment about their literacy levels. If the school or the way that we're taught doesn't engage them or doesn't catch them, they can become isolated and this notion of 'I'm silly' can actually be a self-fulfilling prophecy in their mind.
Sarah Dingle: A high proportion of Tasmanians live in rural areas or small towns. Given many literacy clients want to keep their classes a secret, it can be very hard to find a tutor who's not also their neighbour.
Chris Oriel: Certainly in this region we have some tutors and students who travel 40-50 kilometres to meet each other and do tutoring, which I think is pretty special.
Sarah Dingle: Traditionally, Tasmania's main employers have been from the labour-intensive agriculture and resource industries, where in the past illiteracy hasn't been a barrier to getting a job. That's been the experience of Kaye Fox, who's also in the Sorell literacy class. Kaye is 69.
Kaye Fox: I left school in grade 9. I did apple packing, I did scallop splitting, and then I went cleaning at the school for I think 20 years. I clean at the Tasman Districts High School.
Sarah Dingle: Kaye started literacy classes about four months ago, after she met tutor Chris at her local civic centre.
Kaye Fox: So I went up and saw him and asked would he like to teach me how to spell.
Sarah Dingle: What made you take that step?
Kaye Fox: Well, I've been a bad speller all my life just about.
Sarah Dingle: Despite this, for the last 25 years Kaye Fox has been volunteering with the state's ambulance service, going out on call with paramedics.
Kaye Fox: If I'm in the back of an ambulance with a paramedic and you've got to write something down, that's where I find it a bit hard. I just write it down how I think and hope for the best. And then I just say to the paramedic, well, if you can understand it, good, if you can't you'd better ask me. It's a lot of medical words and things like that. And words…if you get sick, there's words for it, and that's where I foul up.
Sarah Dingle: Has anyone at HQ ever come back to you with a form and said, 'What does this mean, what happened to this person?'
Kaye Fox: No, they haven't. [laughs]
Sarah Dingle: On the other side of Hobart, in a buzzing Kingston cafe, Background Briefing met a man who has gone to extraordinary lengths to hide the fact he can't read or write.
Brian Charity: I'm 60 now. Only a couple of years ago there would have been half a dozen people in the world that knew, that was it.
Sarah Dingle: Brian Charity is a successful businessman. For more than four and a half decades of his life, he was also a great pretender.
Brian Charity: It's not really the right word, but you become a very good conperson in the right sense, not conning people for anything but conning them into a belief that you know what you're doing.
Sarah Dingle: Brian left school at 14, when his parents and the headmaster decided education wasn't for him. He went straight into a job at a tile company, and then moved to a cement works.
Brian Charity: I basically couldn't read or write really. If anyone had ever asked me to write something down, I'd make a quick exit to the toilet or wherever and spend some time until it passed on. It was awkward in that respect.
Sarah Dingle: Despite low literacy skills, Brian had the drive to rise through the ranks of the company, coming up with ever more elaborate fixes to make sure no one ever guessed his secret.
Brian Charity: We used to have a lot of problems throughout Malaysia and Indonesia ordering equipment. So I ended up setting up a system where I faxed over photographs of everything, everything that I ever needed to buy I had a photograph of, which took all that away immediately and we always got what we wanted, which everyone thought was very clever but of course it was my way of doing it because I didn't know how to write the paperwork out, so I just sent photographs and said, 'Two of these, one of those.'
Sarah Dingle: Brian moved on to another company, which specialised in oil refineries. Soon he was travelling for them throughout Asia and the Middle East.
Brian Charity: Some of these places, the refineries and what have you are actually owned by princes, and these are the people you're going into a meeting with. And what I did right from the start was I got myself a little recorder. And I'd sit my official briefcase up on the table like I knew what I was doing, leave it a little bit ajar and record it. Then what I'd do when I got back to my hotel at night, I'd play it back, and then ring them in the States or whatever and say this is what happened. And that's how it would go on.
Sarah Dingle: So you were like a spy?
Brian Charity: Well, yeah [laughs]. I suppose it's the sort of thing that probably shouldn't have been done, but it was the only way I could cope.
Sarah Dingle: Did you get really stressed about hiding this?
Brian Charity: I was fine with it until things like that would happen, and that was very, very stressful, to the extent that I don't mind admitting that the night before I might've shed the odd tear thinking here I am in a foreign country, completely on my own, and I'm going to meet all these multimillionaires and what have you that are going want to know about things.
Sarah Dingle: Poor literacy is not just a problem for the older generations. Right now, Tasmania has the lowest rate of year 12 completion of all the states and territories. Government high schools only go to year 10. After that, colleges offer year 11 and 12. There are just eight state colleges, and they're all in the main centres.
25-year-old Cameron Munro grew up in the Huon Valley. He finished year 12 at Hobart College, but just three years later was told his literacy and numeracy skills were well below year 12 levels.
Cameron Munro: When you go to write stuff down, what it should be, it was scrappy and couldn't read it, and me maths was dodge because of the education that I had, the levels, it was so down. I was told from a case manager that my spelling and stuff was probably around a grade four level instead of being probably at a grade 10 level or something, so without it I was pretty well in the lower jobs.
Sarah Dingle: Cameron began to realise the importance of literacy and numeracy in the workplace, and he wasn't alone.
Cameron Munro: I was going to Kyle's Gardening, which is cucumbers and tomatoes, and you've got to work out your maths for that, work out how many bundles you need or how many containers of tomatoes would fill a truck. Yes, there was a team of four, so if you couldn't work it out you'd ask the next team member and if they couldn't' work it out they asked the next one
Sarah Dingle: Was that pretty common?
Cameron Munro: Yeah.
Sarah Dingle: Once labour-intensive industries are changing, requiring their workers to have more training and qualifications. Cameron went back to school, spending two years in adult literacy classes in between jobs.
Cameron Munro: Skills are going good. They're back to normal, what they was, say, six years ago. Now they're back up to that good education standard.
Sarah Dingle: But he wants to keep learning because there's room for improvement.
Cameron Munro: I need improvement in spelling because I can't spell most words or difficult pronouncing of words. I can't spell properly. I've sort of got a bit of a problem with me times tables in the higher end, and divides are useless.
Sarah Dingle: Cameron's just started his own gardening and maintenance business. Six years after finishing school, he has split from most of his old mates.
Cameron Munro: What they do is basically sit on the streets seven days a week and do nothing. So they sit on Centrelink, get the $540 a fortnight, go to the bottle shop, buy bottles of scotch, or go down to the local dealers and get the good stuff.
Sarah Dingle: Cameron doesn't feel he has much in common with them anymore, and they lack his motivation.
Cameron Munro: And it's hard. It's like you talk to them every now and then. They ring you up and they say, 'What's going on,' and you know they're under the influence because their speech is slurred and stuff, and they tell you F-that and F-this and you're an idiot doing that, and stay away from the workforce and come back and join us. You get up to a certain level in life and then they want to pull it away from underneath you.
Sarah Dingle: More than a third of all Tasmanians live on welfare payments. The state has by far the nation's worst unemployment rate, of 8.6%.
Saul Eslake: And that's not accounting for the fact that Tasmania's participation rate is significantly lower than that of the mainland states, that is there's a much higher incidence of hidden unemployment in Tasmania than in other parts of the country.
Sarah Dingle: There's no official definition of what constitutes a recession at a state level, but to Bank of America Merrill Lynch chief economist Saul Eslake, there's no other word for what's going on in Tasmania.
Saul Eslake: Tasmania has just experienced its seventh consecutive quarter of contracting final state demand. That's the sum of spending by governments, businesses and households within the state of Tasmania. That's the longest run of consecutive contractions in that measure of total spending since this series began in the mid 1980s. In other words, it's worse than during the recession of the early 1990s.
Sarah Dingle: In terms of government spending, Tasmania spends a greater proportion of its budget on its schools than any other state. But although the government is spending more, it's receiving less in return in terms of educational outcomes.
Five years ago all Australian students began sitting standardised tests under the National Assessment Program for Literacy and Numeracy, or NAPLAN. Saul Eslake says Tasmania's NAPLAN scores paint a dismal picture.
Saul Eslake: Indeed the sad thing is that Tasmanian students appear to fall further behind their mainland counterparts the longer they remain in the education system. At least up to year 9 and then sadly far too many of them drop out at year 10.
Sarah Dingle: So where is the money going? Dr Ben Jensen has spent years analysing education policy internationally with the OECD. He's now director of the School Education program at think-tank The Grattan Institute.
Ben Jensen: When you look at figures around where do we spend the most per student in school education across the country, we're not spending the most on disadvantaged students or with some disabilities, what we're spending the most on is students in small schools, because they are totally inefficient.
Sarah Dingle: Figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics show that nationally the average government school has around 350 students. In Tasmania, the average government school has less than 290.
Dr Jensen says smaller schools still have to employ the same range of teaching and non-teaching staff, and that money could be better spent.
Ben Jensen: If we were to close down these smaller schools, move the students into better, larger schools, then you could start to afford having specialist literacy and numeracy teachers that would benefit all students in Tasmania.
Sarah Dingle: Dr Jensen argues the situation has reached the point where there should be specialist literacy and numeracy teachers in every single school in Tasmania. But shutting schools, even to fund others, is tantamount to political suicide.
Tightly-knit communities in both urban and rural areas are closely attached to their small local schools and defend them fiercely.
Two years ago, Tasmania's Labor-Greens state government announced that 20 state schools had been earmarked for closure, with the students to be incorporated into bigger facilities. The response was uproar.
ABC news [archival]:
Protester: Read that sign, that says Glenora District High School, it's a high school! If you close that, that sign has to change, kids' uniforms have to change…
Nick McKim: I mean, I could decide to close no schools in Tasmania…
Protester: That'd be the best option.
Protester: Yes, good. Be creative.
Sarah Dingle: The resistance was so strong the Education Minister Nick McKim dropped the idea of shutting schools down and instead gave individual communities the opportunity to decide for themselves.
Nick McKim: So we've actually put some money and resources on the table as an opportunity if school communities voluntarily decide they can change the way they provide education in their community through an amalgamation or a closure or a merge with another school.
Sarah Dingle: So far half the schools on the list have taken up the offer, but the rest have refused. None illustrate the standoff so well as Geilston Bay High School, in Hobart.
When it first opened, Geilston Bay catered for 700 students from years 7 to 10, but in recent decades it's declined to around 300. Last year the official enrolment was 159 students. The head of the school's association, Les Burbury, says the community didn't want the school to close.
Les Burbury: We still have a very strong community that wants to remain there and that would be disadvantaged if they were obliged to move to another school. A lot of them wouldn't move.
Sarah Dingle: So they just wouldn't go to school?
Les Burbury: No, they'd just disconnect.
Sarah Dingle: Now the school's population is closer to about 115 students. Geilston Bay's pupils are some of the most well funded in Australia, receiving almost $20,000 from a state and federal governments per student in 2011, which is almost twice the national average.
The students attract more funding partly because the school's population is mostly drawn from the neighbouring suburb of Risdon Vale, which is one of the most disadvantaged suburbs in Hobart.
Anne Harrison from the Risdon Vale community centre:
Anne Harrison: Risdon Vale was built back in the early '60s as a housing department area so it's a low socio-economic area and the people here have got it pretty hard. You know, you can buy a house in Risdon Vale for under $200,000, which is cheap housing. So the community's always stayed as a disadvantaged area and we have quite a large unemployment component of the community.
Sarah Dingle: Geilston Bay had 16 options on the table, including merging with a much bigger high school just five minutes' drive down the road, which parents rejected. Other merger and co-location options were knocked back by the other schools, who weren't keen on aligning themselves with Geilston Bay, says Les Burbury.
Les Burbury: We think there is an underlying feeling of that , that people think we're bogans, if you like, to use the word straight. We don't know how strong that is and it's very hard to measure and it's very hard to fight against it.
Sarah Dingle: Geilston Bay caters largely for disadvantaged students, and the school has struggled to serve those students well.
Three years ago, Tate Westbury started year 7 at Geilston Bay.
Tate Westbury: You had the teachers that helped you, and then you had the teachers that, like, wouldn't help you at all. Like, if I got in trouble they wouldn't try and help, they would just send me straight out.
Sarah Dingle: Did you spend a lot of the time out of the classroom for being sent out?
Tate Westbury: Yeah.
Sarah Dingle: Tate's mother Natalie was worried that he was spending more time out of the classroom than in it, which eventually led to Tate roaming the streets.
Natalie Westbury: Well I was getting phone calls from the school all the time and I'd go in and say, 'Why can't you put him into a room on his own and do one-on-one work?' And they said that they didn't have time to do that, they've got other kids to teach as well.
Sarah Dingle: Tate's behaviour was at least partly influenced by what was going on at home. Natalie was going through a rough patch, battling depression.
Natalie Westbury: We had the loss of my son, a nine-month-old little brother. We lost him through SIDS and I sort of went downhill from there. And he's seen a lot, seen me go through a fair bit and that put him under a lot of stress as well.
Sarah Dingle: A couple of years ago, Anne Harrison noticed that a lot of Geilston Bay students who were enrolled had actually dropped out. Some were on the streets, but others like Tate were hanging out at the Risdon Vale community centre, using the internet and occasionally getting a free meal.
Anne Harrison: When we first got Tate he had some attitude, had a chip on his shoulder, knew better than everyone else, didn't think he needed to learn about reading and writing, so he used to come and we started off doing some creative things with him.
Sarah Dingle: Anne Harrison convinced Geilston Bay to send a teacher to her centre one day a week to teach literacy through activities like cooking. It got to the point where a significant proportion of the school's small student body were actually being taught literacy and numeracy at the neighbourhood centre.
Anne Harrison: We'd have, say, 32 come in during the day. Majority of them were students at Geilston Bay High School. They wouldn't be able to spell. They'd struggle putting a sentence together.
Sarah Dingle: When Geilston Bay High said it could no longer afford to send the teacher out, most of the group were reabsorbed into classes, thanks to Anne Harrison's efforts.
Tate declined to go back. Through the neighbourhood centre he's completed a number of training qualifications, and at 15 he's well on track to gain an apprenticeship. Natalie says instead of Tate being in trouble with the police, she now gets complimented on her son.
Natalie Westbury: A lot of people have come up to me and said how proud, I ought to be proud of him, he's come a long way. And that's what I am, I'm proud.
Sarah Dingle: But Geilston Bay High struggles on. Saul Eslake says the school is the perfect example of what Tasmania should not do.
Saul Eslake: The idea that Tasmanian taxpayers should be paying substantially more to keep a school of barely more than 100 students open at high school really illustrates what's wrong with the structure and funding of the Tasmanian education system.
Sarah Dingle: Wary of community outrage, both the state government and the opposition have pledged to keep the school open.
At the annual conference of the Tasmanian State School Parents and Friends Association in Devonport, questioner Nigel Jones from the Geilston Bay High Association told the group the school was dying a slow death.
Nigel Jones: Geilston Bay High's enrolments for next year will be approximately around 118, from the meeting I attended on Friday. There is no more extra resources for children who may need extra help, and also there is no extra resources if we have children running amok through the school at Geilston Bay High. The principal's leaving, all the senior teachers have announced that they're leaving as well. We have a major dilemma…
Sarah Dingle: The questioner asked education Minister Nick McKim what he was going to do about it.
Nigel Jones: The question is, will you intervene, because we have a major dilemma here which is getting very ugly.
Nick McKim: By 'intervene' do you mean force the school to close, Nigel? Because the answer is no, I won't. The school had a choice. Now the school's writing to me or the school association asking for a whole lot more resources. Okay, no. I'm not going to take resources off every other school in Tasmania to support a choice that the Geilston Bay school community made.
Sarah Dingle: Without the political will from either side to make the tough decisions, Saul Eslake says the Tasmanian school system will remain stuck in the past.
Saul Eslake: The structure of the Tasmanian school system hasn't really changed all that much from, if I can put it this way, the horse and buggy era, when it was much more difficult for children to travel long distances to attend school, so there tended to be a lot more smaller schools. In Tasmania people seemed to think that there's some kind of constitutional right for every small town in the state to have its own primary school and that there's something wrong with children having to travel more than about five or ten minutes to school.
Sarah Dingle: Instead of closing schools, the state opposition wants to expand them.
Local high schools in Tasmania only go to year 10. Those who want to go on to year 11 and 12 have to go to college in the main city centres, with the result that going to college plus travel for some rural students means a ten-hour day.
Excerpt from 1200 Hours: For us Valley kids who want to go to college, there are still at least 1200 hours of travelling to school and back each year, and that's a lot of early mornings.
Sarah Dingle: 1200 Hours is a short film made by two high school students in the Huon Valley about the barriers they face in physically attending year 11 and 12. Only 15% of all Huon Valley students go on to university. The filmmakers interview their friends, teachers, and even their dads.
Excerpt from 1200 Hours: It would be such an advantage to have year 11 and 12 here to break that economic cycle of poverty, you know, the fact that it's an economically depressed area or it can be, for a lot of people it can be anyway.
Sarah Dingle: The state government has taken some steps towards introducing a few year 11 and 12 subjects into regional areas, many with a focus on trades. The state opposition says given less than half of Tasmania's students finish year 12, that's nowhere near good enough.
Tasmania is set to go to the polls by March. Shadow education spokesman, Michael Ferguson:
Michael Ferguson: Our policy is to extend all Tasmanian high schools to year 12 over a decade because we recognise that's a fairly major reform for the Tasmanian community. We will focus our efforts entirely on rural and regional areas of Tasmania where the disadvantage is the greatest, and that's obvious because they're the farthest away from the city based senior secondary colleges. It is a vote winner, but more importantly we think it's the right thing to do for Tasmania. It's not new anywhere else in the country, it's normal.
Sarah Dingle: Background Briefing put this idea to the Education Minister, Nick McKim.
Why not just make all high schools offer year 11 and 12 to ensure that children don't fall through the gaps?
Nick McKim: Well, doing that would mean destroying our college system, and I'm a product of the public education system…
Sarah Dingle: Surely you could just shift some of that knowledge though, you wouldn't have to lose the teachers or the expertise?
Nick McKim: No, but you would lose the economies of scale our college system gives.
Sarah Dingle: The politics of reforming Tasmania's education system are fraught, but the Grattan Institute's Ben Jensen agrees extending secondary schools to year 11 and 12 would increase numbers of ongoing students simply by shifting attitudes.
Ben Jensen: As it stands at the moment you have students who finish at year 10, they're given a graduation party and a graduation ceremony as though they've somehow finished their school education. Clearly in Tasmania that environment pushes…or at least if it doesn't push then it's definitely a lot more encouraging than other areas of students dropping out of school. Expectations are seen from an individual level, a school level and in some cases a system level as being very deterministic in terms of outcomes. It's definitely not in all schools, but if you look at the history of Tasmanian education, it is a history of low expectations.
Jess: High school…I started working in grade 9. So in grade 10 I slipped in my grades in grade 10. I only just graduated high school and that was through working, taking care of Nan, plus school, all at the same time. So then when it got to college I then realised what type of work college was, I was like, no sorry, I can't come here any more. And they were okay with that, they said that's fine, as long as you're working.
Sarah Dingle: In northern Hobart, I meet 21-year-old Jess. Starting from when she was in year 9, Jess worked for almost three years at Woolworths, until she had to leave there too.
Jess: Both my nans got real ill, that's when I left and said I can't do it anymore. And now it's all just based on the family.
Sarah Dingle: Since then, Jess has been on a pension.
Jess: I'm on a disability because of anxiety, depression and everything like that. So I'm not allowed to work.
Sarah Dingle: Jess says her time is now taken up with caring for various members of her family, which is how we've met this morning. We're at a playgroup at Windermere Primary School, a free government program called Launching into Learning, which is run in primary schools across the state. Jess is here with her three-year-old sister Leah.
Jess: There's nine of us all up, so five girls four boys. I'm the third eldest, Leah is the youngest. We brought her here for the simple fact being that there was no one at home around her age for her to hang out with or play with or anything.
Sarah Dingle: Launching into Learning is for children up to the age of four. The program aims to model learning activities for parents, and also to get parents and children into a school community from the start.
The principal of Windermere Primary School, Jenny Leppard, says it's already making a huge difference.
Jenny Leppard: And they cover things like pre-literacy skills, pre-numeracy skills, social skills, growth and fine motor development, so all those early skills that are really important for students' learning when they're beginning school basically.
Sarah Dingle: The program has been running since 2007. When children enter kindergarten, they're assessed against the Kindergarten Development Outcomes, or KDC.
Jenny Leppard: The year before we received the Launching into Learning funding, we had only 37.5% of our kinder students achieving the outcomes for the KDC, which is really poor, so that means there were 62.5% of students at risk. That was, as I say, of huge concern for us. Then you can see the next year in 2007 that we then had 81.1% of students achieve, with only 18.2% at risk.
Sarah Dingle: Jess has been bringing Leah every Friday for six weeks, and it's already paying off.
Jess: Since she's been coming here she's learned her colours, learned how to count from 1 to 20. She goes home and cuts shapes out, goes through her colours at home, has made a lot of friends, which she never used to do, always wants to hang out with them, you take her home from here and she cries. She does have a bit of trouble with talking still, like getting sentences, but she'll just put her hand on her forehead and start over and take a deep breath.
Sarah Dingle: Jess says the learning play at school and at home has made Leah calmer and more focused.
Around the state, Launching into Learning is delivering results, and it's not just the children who are benefiting. Jenny Leppard says Windermere Primary is based in a poor area, with a high-needs community.
Jenny Leppard: And so it's about setting up those experiences, and demonstrating for parents and modelling and connecting with parents.
Sarah Dingle: Do you find with Launching into Learning there are any parents who come along with their kids who themselves are reconnecting with education through this program?
Jenny Leppard: Yes, they've built their own confidence and are now able to support their own children's learning much better. For some I do know of cases where they have gone on and then pursued their own education and taken on further study and courses.
Sarah Dingle: At a playgroup session, Jess realised her little sister was learning skills she herself didn't have.
Jess: That class there that day made me realise that with Leah running around talking to everyone I couldn't do that off the bat. I had a lot of problems with self-confidence and everything like that and self-independence because I have lived with the family and been a family orientated person for so long.
Sarah Dingle: At 21, Jess is going to move away from her family and into a share house for the first time. She's hopeful her depression will lift and she'll be reassessed as fit to work.
For adults struggling with low literacy, children are a powerful incentive to do something about it.
In Risdon Vale, Anne Harrison says it's near impossible to get teenagers to admit they can't read or write, unless they have to think about someone other than themselves.
Anne Harrison: Because I have a young boy here he's 16 and his girlfriend's 16, they've just had a young baby, he has big literacy and numeracy problems. He come in to me and he said, 'I've just had a baby and I'm now a dad,' and I went, 'Oh right, congratulations, that's great,' but he said, 'I now need to learn to read and write,' because he's a dad now so he needs to be able to teach his child about reading and writing.
Sarah Dingle: Back in Sorell, just outside Hobart, Don McKenzie says the best part about taking adult literacy classes is being able to help his kids. He has 12 children who range in age from 13 to 30, some of whom also have literacy problems.
Don McKenzie: I've got one that's really high-needs, she's a 13-year-old. She never used to like reading books and stuff, and I said, 'I'm going back to school now and I'm learning how to read and write, how about you come and sit down next to me and read a book with me and have a go with me?' She said, 'Yeah, that'll be good Dad.' And now she loves it, she loves all the time we spend together, we grab a book and read it together. So it's really happy, it's helping her and it's also helping me.
Sarah Dingle: Have you noticed an improvement in her skills as well as yours?
Don McKenzie: Oh yeah, I've noticed a real lot of improvement in her reading, it's excellent. Even with her writing, she can actually write her name now where she never used to. So yeah, I'm really happy that I can do that.
Sarah Dingle: Don McKenzie says as well as helping his 13 year old daughter, it's also helped his 16-year-old son re-focus on his year 10 schoolwork, and Don's trying to get one of his adult sons to come to literacy classes with him.
Don McKenzie: I've got a 27-year-old, he's got the sort of same situation I'm going through and I'm encouraging him to come and do this too with us. He's got a few things he's got to sort out in himself first. And he's said yeah, he's prepared to give it a go.
Sarah Dingle: For Don himself, the future is looking up. He's on a disability pension for depression and arthritis, but he says getting on top of reading and writing has alleviated a major part of the depression at least. And while he used to lock himself up inside and not even use the phone, now he has the confidence to get out of the car.
Sarah Dingle: So we're in a shopping mall heading towards Woollies.
Don has come shopping with his wife Julie.
Don McKenzie: Yeah, I never used to come in here because I used to get paranoid and stuff like that, but now I feel real good about it, I can read what I want.
Sarah Dingle: What are you planning for tea tonight?
Julie McKenzie: It's chicken…what's it called?
Don McKenzie: Mongolian.
Julie McKenzie: Chicken Mongolian, it's Chinese.
Don McKenzie: Baby corn?
Julie McKenzie: It's $1.29 a tin, it's in a black tin.
Don McKenzie: Black tin. Yep. See, 'baby corn', see I never used to be able to read that.
Sarah Dingle: In a beachside town south of Hobart, businessman Brian Charity has in recent years turned his hand to running cafes. His eateries have won awards. But Brian does wonder what he could have achieved if he was literate.
Brian Charity: It made me feel a lot happier and comfortable in myself. It's only been the reading and writing that has set me back at any stage whatsoever, so I can't begin to imagine life if I'd been able to do all those things.
Sarah Dingle: Brian Charity also attended adult literacy classes, but he says they didn't help his skills. He doesn't think he'll ever learn to read and write.
Brian Charity: Because I don't retain it. Why that is I don't know. So I don't think it'll ever change for me, this is the way it is.
Sarah Dingle: At a personal level though, Brian Charity says the classes were of huge benefit.
Brian Charity: It made me feel a lot happier and comfortable in myself. It was like coming out if you were gay or something, it's a coming out to find all these people in the same boat.
Sarah Dingle: Background Briefing's coordinating producer is Linda McGinness, research by Anna Whitfeld, technical production by Andrei Shabunov, the executive producer is Chris Bullock, and I'm Sarah Dingle.
Reporter Sarah Dingle
Researcher Anna Whitfeld
Supervising Producer Linda McGinness
Sound Engineer Andrei Shabunov
Executive Producer Chris Bullock
Geilston Bay High School stats
Windermere Primary School Facts
external link Tasmania's Adult Literacy Campaign 26ten
external link MySchool website
external link NAPLAN summary report Sept 2013
external link 1200 hours documentary
external link Geilston Bay High School website
external link Windermere Primary School website
external link PIAAC 2011-2012 Preliminary Tables
external link PIAAC definitions of literacy
external link Launching into Learning Progam
Background Briefing 22 September 2013
40mins 14secs A literacy deficit
Show more segments
Radio National
link About Us
link Programs
link Station Schedule
link Contact Us
link Transcripts
external link Listening FAQ
Talkback: 1300 22 55 76 (cost of a local call)
SMS: 0418 226 576 (rates apply)
Radio National: (02) 8333 2821
General ABC enquiries: 13 9994
Online or On Air
on the ABC listen app
via DAB+ Digital Radio
on channel 26 on your TV
ask your smart speaker to "play ABC Radio National"


text:
Angel of the West is an outdoor sculpture in Jupiter, Florida, United States. The sculpture was made in 2008 by German sculptor Julian Voss-Andreae. Referencing British sculptor Antony Gormley's monumental 1998 piece Angel of the North it was created based on an antibody structure published by E. Padlan for the Florida campus of the Scripps Research Institute. The antibody is placed into a ring referencing Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man highlighting the similar proportions of the antibody and the human body.

See also
 Angel of the North
 White Horse at Ebbsfleet, sometimes called "The Angel of The South".

References

External links
Oregon Art Beat: Quantum Sculptures with Julian Voss-Andreae Oregon Public Broadcasting TV piece about the creation of Angel of the West (December 2008)
Protein Data Bank newsletter Interview: Julian Voss-Andreae, Protein Sculptor (pp. 9–11, January 2007)

2008 sculptures
Buildings and structures in Palm Beach County, Florida
Jupiter, Florida
Outdoor sculptures in Florida
Scripps Research
Stainless steel sculptures in the United States
Steel sculptures in Florida

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


AMHERST - Off-campus student parties where alcohol is served can get out of control and disturb entire neighborhoods in Amherst and Hadley.
While police in both towns can issue noise bylaw tickets and impose monetary fines for unregistered kegs, the ability to really attack the problem remains limited.
Now, the Campus and Community Coalition to Reduce High-Risking Drinking, a partnership between the University of Massachusetts and officials in Amherst and Hadley, is seeking to add one more means of solving the issue. The coalition would like Amherst and Hadley, perhaps as early as this spring's Town Meetings, to adopt the proposed "Social Host and Party House Nuisance Bylaw."
"This is working to give an additional and more pointed and potent tool for repeated party hosts," said Martha Nelson Patrick, coalition co-chairwoman.
Nelson Patrick said such a nuisance bylaw, which would likely levy fines against tenants living at these nuisance houses, has two purposes. First, it is a way to address parties where underage people are being served and sold alcohol. Second, it would quell neighborhood disturbances and address safety issues caused by them, such as crowds overflowing into the street and public intoxication.
The bylaw would supplement keg registration and open container bylaws in place in both communities. Nelson Patrick said it is also about getting students to understand community norms and expectations and dealing with what has been a long-standing issue for the towns.
"The two towns, through the coalition, are working together to send a consistent message," Nelson Patrick said.
Nelson Patrick said that attorneys are reviewing the proposed bylaw to determine whether only tenants would be fined, or whether landlords could also be held responsible for some of their tenants' behavior.
Last summer, Hadley began examining a similar bylaw, based on one in Narragansett, R.I., that would give town officials and police the ability to mandate that posters be put up at homes found in violation of the town's noise, open container and keg bylaws. These posters would have to remain up for 60 days at homes that have been the site of a police response. That nuisance bylaw would contain fines of $250 for the first offense, $350 for the second and $500 for the third and subsequent offenses.
Nelson Patrick said the bylaw that the coalition has drafted is based on about 50 similar bylaws that exist in Connecticut.
At a meeting earlier this month, Amherst Select Board member Rob Kusner said a draft of the proposed policy should be brought forward as soon as possible so there can be community discussion before it is put on the warrant for Town Meeting.
Kusner said he wants to make sure the nuisance house bylaw strikes a balance between the civil rights of the students and keeping the community a pleasant place for long-term residents.
Nelson Patrick said the university has implemented a number of policy changes in recent years to address excessive drinking, including more limits on the amount of alcohol those 21 and older can have on campus, parental notification and requiring an online alcohol education program for all freshmen.
Sally Linowski, the other co-chairwoman of the coalition, told the Select Board at a meeting this month that in 2003 the university began a public health approach to combat underage drinking. Statistics show that UMass has a high binge-drinking rate and many high-density, large volume drinking parties.
To fight this, the university has started the BASICS program, which stands for Brief Alcohol Screening and Intervention for College Students, and attempted to set the tone by not condoning high-risk drinking.
"We are now holding students accountable and getting them the help they need," Linowski said.
Already, Linowski said, there has been a 26 percent reduction in the binge-drinking rate.
But Nelson Patrick said it is the enforcement, even more than the education, that can really create an impact.
Police, of course, can already arrest people responsible for making excessive noise, for being minors in possession of alcohol and for having open containers of alcohol on public ways.


Few things in life are more frustrating than calling for customer service after a major purchase and finding out the company is no longer in business. If you are considering vinyl windows for your home, you can count on Simonton Windows to be there when you need them. Simonton Windows has been around since 1946 when they were founded in West Virginia.
Originally an aluminum window company, Simonton realized the superior qualities of vinyl as a window material and converted its window lines to all vinyl during the early 1980s. Today Simonton Vinyl Windows is a leader in the window industry and is constantly working to develop improvements in the windows they provide to their customers.
Simonton Windows has three main categories for their window products: windows for new homes, replacement windows, and windows for coastal areas. Their replacement windows are designed for window contractor use and homeowners desiring to install a window that can improve the quality of their home. Simonton Windows realizes that climate varies across the country, so their window lines can be purchased based on where you plan to use the windows.
These are a few of the many window styles Simonton Vinyl Windows manufactures, and most are available in many sizes and configurations.
Forget what you've heard about vinyl windows being available in any color you want as long as it's white; Simonton Vinyl Windows has many frame colors to choose from for your home.
Simonton Windows is partnered with Energy Star and offers many energy saving options for its windows such as Low-E glass, Argon gas between panes, and even triple paned windows.
If you are considering replacement windows for your home, it might be difficult to find windows with higher quality and more options than Simonton Windows.


text:
Padanda är ett släkte av insekter. Padanda ingår i familjen Dictyopharidae.

Kladogram enligt Catalogue of Life:

Källor

Halvvingar
Padanda


text:
Home / Job Interview Past Questions
AB InBev Aptitude test Past Questions and Answers PDF Download 2021
Get the latest version of the ABInBev Past Questions and Answers here in a PDF format. Did you apply for a job at AB InBev? Do you need the AB InBev job interview questions? If yes, the solution to your search is here. We have compiled the most recent version of the ABInBev Job Interview Past Questions with detailed solutions for you consumption.
Category: Job Interview Past Questions
Tags: ab inbev aptitude test, ab inbev assessment day, ab inbev interview questions, ab inbev online assessment test answers, ab inbev placement, ab inbev recruitment process, abinbev tests, gamified assessment abinbev
AB InBev Aptitude test Past Questions and Answers PDF Download 2021 quantity
Get the latest version of the ABInBev Past Questions and Answers here in a PDF format. Did you apply for a job at AB InBev? Do you need the AB InBev job interview questions? If yes, the solution to your search is here. We have compiled the most recent version of the ABInBev Job Interview Past Questions with detailed solutions for you consumption. All you need to do is, follow the easy steps on this page to grab your material. Download Also Abbey Mortgage Bank Interview Past Questions and Answers
1 About Anheuser-Busch InBev
2 AB InBev Online Assessment Test Answers
3 How to Get the ABInBev Aptitude Tests Study Pack
About Anheuser-Busch InBev
Anheuser-Busch InBev SA/NV, commonly known as AB InBev, is a Leuven, Belgium-based multinational drink and brewing company. In New York City, AB InBev has a worldwide functional management office and regional offices in São Paulo, London, St. Louis, Mexico City, Bremen, Johannesburg, etc. In 150 countries, it has approximately 630 beer brands.
AB InBev was founded by purchasing Anheuser-Busch from the United States via InBev (itself a merger between Interbrew from Belgium and AmBev from Brazil).
A competitive all-cash bid to acquire British multinational rival SABMiller was announced by Anheuser-Busch InBev in October 2015; the merger was completed in October 2016. Also prior to SABMiller's takeover, it was the world's largest brewer and is considered one of the world's largest fast-moving consumer goods firms. The company's annual revenues in 2019 were US$52.3 billion; in 2016, ABInBev had realized US$45.5 billion in revenue prior to the merger. According to Euromonitor International, the firm is expected to have a 28 percent market share of global beer volume sales in 2017.
AB InBev Online Assessment Test Answers
The ABInBev Past Questions and answers is available here as said earlier. The material is not free of charge. We have made the price very affordable. It is highly important that all individuals who applied for a job at AB InBev get the ab inbev aptitude test aptitude test past questions as these will expose you to the nature on how AB InBev set their interview questions. The study pack you are about to purchase contains: Problem solving, numerical literacy, sentence correction, Vocabulary, Spelling, Clerical Accuracy, Executive code instructions. Follow the steps below to grab your copy.
How to Get the ABInBev Aptitude Tests Study Pack
In order to get the most recent version of the AB InBev Job Interview Past Question, click on the GET PAST QUESTION NOW button to proceed to our payment option page. The material will be sent to your email address after payment.
Be the first to review "AB InBev Aptitude test Past Questions and Answers PDF Download 2021" Cancel reply
Pedabo Past Questions and Answers PDF Download 2021

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
<?php
/**
 * @package    Internals
 * @since      1.8.0
 * @version    1.8.0
 */

// Avoid direct calls to this file
if ( ! class_exists( 'WPSEO_Video_Sitemap' ) ) {
	header( 'Status: 403 Forbidden' );
	header( 'HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden' );
	exit();
}

/*******************************************************************
 * Revision3 Video SEO Details
 *
 * @internal [JRF] We can get much better information (duration, thumbnail, content_loc from the author RSS feeds,
 * but then we'd need to know the author in advance and the individual item rss address which I currently
 * haven't been able to figure out.
 * Even if we just had the author and episode nr, we'd be better off as we could construct the thumbnail and
 * content_loc, unfortunately, we normally won't have those.
 *
 * For future reference:
 * Content_loc: http://videos.revision3.com/revision3/web/[author handle]/[Episodenr - 4 digits]/[author handle]--[Episodenr]--[Episode title]--large.h264.mp4
 * Thumbnail_loc: http://videos.revision3.com/revision3/images/shows/[author handle]/[Episodenr - 4 digits]/[author handle]--[Episodenr]--[Episode title]--large.thumb.jpg
 *
 * @see http://revision3.com/anyhoo/feed/mp4-large For an example of an author RSS feed (not individual video)
 *
 *
 * JSON response format [2014/7/22]:
 * {
 *    "version":"1.0",
 *    "type":"video",
 *    "width":555,
 *    "height":337,
 *    "title":"How Much Can Humans Remember",
 *    "author_name":"Anyhoo",
 *    "author_url":"http://revision3.com/anyhoo/",
 *    "provider_name":"Revision3",
 *    "provider_url":"http://revision3.com",
 *    "cache_age":900,
 *    "html":"<iframe src=\"http://embed.revision3.com/player/embed?videoId=37621&external=true&width=555&height=337\" width=\"555\" height=\"337\" frameborder=\"0\" allowFullScreen mozAllowFullscreen webkitAllowFullScreen oallowfullscreen msallowfullscreen></iframe>"
 * }
 *******************************************************************/
if ( ! class_exists( 'WPSEO_Video_Details_Revision3' ) ) {

	/**
	 * Class WPSEO_Video_Details_Revision3
	 */
	class WPSEO_Video_Details_Revision3 extends WPSEO_Video_Details_Oembed {

		/**
		 * @var	string	Regular expression to retrieve a video id from a known video url
		 */
		//protected $id_regex = '``i';

		/**
		 * @var	string	Sprintf template to create a url from an id
		 * @internal Set to embed as it gives better retrieval results compared to video!
		 */
		//protected $url_template = '';

		/**
		 * @var	array	Information on the remote url to use for retrieving the video details
		 */
		protected $remote_url = array(
			'pattern'       => 'http://revision3.com/api/oembed/?url=%s',
			'replace_key'   => 'url',
			'response_type' => 'json',
		);

		/**
		 * Set the video id
		 */
		protected function set_id() {
			if ( ! empty( $this->decoded_response->html ) && preg_match( '`[&\?]videoId=([0-9]+)`', $this->decoded_response->html, $match ) ) {
				$this->vid['id'] = $match[1];
			}
		}

		/**
		 * Set the player location
		 */
		protected function set_player_loc() {
			if ( ! empty( $this->vid['id'] ) ) {
				$this->vid['player_loc'] = 'http://embed.revision3.com/player/embed?videoId=' . urlencode( $this->vid['id'] ) . '&external=true';
			}
		}

	} /* End of class */

} /* End of class-exists wrapper */

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


Several organizations have emerged to try to address this issue. Threat lists containing destination IPs, URLs, and domain names of interest are not new. For a long time, there hasn't been a standard way to store, distribute and categorize data. There are some newer standards getting built such as TAXII and STIX, but the adoption rate is not as rapid as it could be.
Splunk is a fantastic tool for making sense of your operations and security data. There have been threat intelligence apps published by others in the past, but many of them required proprietary add-ons such as appliances, API keys or subscriptions. Others are excellent, but require complicated tuning or even database configuration, adding to the time and cost to implement. None of the free apps were hitting the mark, so I decided to write one.
The goal of the app is to provide accessible threat intelligence in a curated setting, with little to no need for configuration or search language knowledge. In five minutes or less, one can download and install the free app and start collecting and correlating actionable threat intelligence with their organization's machine data.
Starting at the main screen, we see a summary of the threat intelligence that has been gathered automatically for the day, and how it compares to yesterday.
In this case, we find some activity from a source on our threat list also connecting to our honeypot.
Lastly, we can visualize on a globe where the bulk of attacks tend to originate from.
Optiv Threat Intel is a new Splunk app, available for free download at https://splunkbase.splunk.com/app/2837/.
With a few mouse clicks, we can start correlating our organization's machine data with many open threat lists.
Derek Arnold has spent the last 12 years securing large retail, medical device, and insurance companies. He has worked on large, diverse enterprises in the Fortune 500. His key specialties include security operations, threat intelligence, physical security and SIEM. As a principal consultant for Optiv, he helps organizations solve their unique security challenges using Splunk Enterprise.


Tidied the local source folder on the E drive for the blog. One location now... Images that were only here: moved to F drive. Duplicates: deleted. No surprises. I.e. didn't find anything that had not been used or referenced or posted. Save one overlooked post with a photo of the C8, for the cat page!


Now you wouldn't believe it, but this beautiful feline specimen has been part of the Wellstead family for 17 years, a period of time spanning (almost) three nations and an innumerable collection of houses – and she's accompanied us throughout. This ball of cuddles has traveled more than many people I know, and it's time that I give the old girl some credit.
And after all that, she still curls on our laps and sings to us.
At one point in time, my family and I questioned the ethics of putting such a tiny, fragile creature through so much stress, even contemplating the unbearable – leaving her behind; and it's not just the emotional burden that had us thinking but also the sheer cost of immigrating with an animal. Did you know that a one way plane ticket for a small cat cost us roughly £1,000? Youch! Nevertheless, Katie is part of the family and we did not intend on parting ways so easily. So with us, the little cat came.
We took a big gamble. An expensive and potentially dangerous gamble. Luckily for us, we had a resilient and feisty feline who was willing to fight for us and adapt to an unfamiliar culture as much as we were. Another cat may not have taken things so lightly. It was a tough decision to make, but I couldn't imagine it ending any other way.
This is the story of Katie – the immigrant kitty, the well traveled cat and my loyal and loving best friend.
Tagged Immigration, Personal. Bookmark the permalink.


Once we've received your request to go to court, we will send the following documents to you.
Court Attendance Notice (CAN) The CAN tells you the place, time and date of the hearing which will be at the court closest to where the offence was committed. If this is not convenient, you can apply to the selected court to have the hearing moved to another court location. Visit the Local Courts website for a list of locations.
Written Notice of Pleading You will be asked to plead either 'guilty' or 'not guilty'. You can complete and send this notice to the court before your hearing or you can enter your plea at the hearing. If you're not sure what to do, we suggest you seek legal advice.
If you choose to plead not guilty, you will be given an additional hearing date.
You'll need to present your case at the hearing.
The authority that issued your fine will present their case too and may call on witnesses and produce other evidence.
Once a Court Attendance Notice (CAN) has been issued, this replaces your penalty notice and you can't stop the court process.
The CAN is sometimes issued within 24 hours of the court application and we aim to process all applications within 21 days.
If you have received a CAN and don't want to proceed with your court challenge, please contact the court listed on the CAN and ask them about your options.
The court will decide your case in one of three ways.
You will need to pay a penalty, which the court will set. You will have to pay court costs and will lose any applicable demerit points.
Guilty, no conviction recorded The court may find you guilty but not make you pay a fine. You will have to pay court costs. The offence will appear on your driving record but you won't lose any applicable demerit points.
Not guilty You won't need to pay a fine or lose demerit points, nor will you have to pay costs.
It can take up to six weeks to assess your application to go to court. We'll let you know the outcome in writing.
If your application to go to court is successful, we'll take the following steps.
Conduct a further review We'll conduct a review using our review guidelines if your application supports your claim.
Apply for a court date If the review shows there is no reason to cancel the penalty, we'll ask the court to set a date and contact you in writing with the details.
Refund money to you If you've already paid a fine, we'll refund the money to you and/or reverse any demerit points applied to your driver licence.
Go to court If you're successful you won't have to pay a fine or other costs. If you're unsuccessful, the court will tell you what you owe, how to pay and your appeal options.


text:
Vol. VI Number 1, Winter 2005/06 Original Intent and the American Soul
Vol. VI Number 1, Winter 2005/06
Original Intent and the American Soul
Harry V. Jaffa and Ralph A. Rossum on original intent jurisprudence.
by Harry V. Jaffa
While quibbling over Harriet Miers's ill-fated nomination to the Supreme Court, conservatives overlooked the more serious flaw in President Bush's claim that he would appoint justices to the Court in the mold of Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. Although Scalia and Thomas may both be regarded as conservative "originalist" judges, their views of the Constitution are fundamentally different. Positivists like Justice Scalia who look only to the "text and tradition" of the Constitution, but not to its moral principles, are ultimately no match for the liberal critics of original intent jurisprudence.
Even Ralph Rossum, an admirer of Justice Scalia, concedes in the pages of the Claremont Review of Books that Scalia's "understanding of democracy" is essentially "'vulgar majoritarianism.'" ("Correspondence," Fall 2005). Scalia does not recognize that a majority, in the absence of minority rights, is not a democratic majority. Rossum goes on, however, to minimize the "practical consequences of Scalia's positivist assumptions." "If Scalia were a framer," he writes, "they would be significant—and harmful. But Scalia is simply a justice on the Supreme Court." Yet justices of the Supreme Court are in a peculiar sense trustees of the work of the framers. The framers' Constitution cannot survive if those entrusted with its preservation are alienated from its principles.
Rossum depreciates the importance of Scalia's philosophical differences with Justice Thomas by pointing out that "through the end of the Court's 2004-2005 term" the two agreed in 87.3% of all the cases they heard together. This statistic can be misleading. Scalia and Thomas, together with the late Chief Justice Rehnquist, formed a block that was often at war with the liberal majority. It was often in their interest to suppress their philosophical differences for the sake of tactical advantages. But tactical harmony must not be mistaken for common conviction.
The struggle for control of the Supreme Court is a profound political struggle, going to the heart of the meaning of our existence as a free people. For more than a half century, liberal judicial activism has been riding roughshod over the Constitution bequeathed to us by the founders. The origins of the "living Constitution" may be traced back to the Progressive Movement that flourished at the turn of the 20th century. For the Progressives it was settled "fact" (which was wholly untrue) that "history," especially in the form of Darwinian evolution, had replaced "nature" as the moral foundation of constitutionalism. Because men evolved, they could be made good—or at least good progressives—obviating any need for constitutional precautions on behalf of individual rights. In short, the original majoritarian process within the Constitution, subject as it was to checks and balances, became an obstacle to the unfettered rule of the progressive majority. From Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., to William Brennan, progressive liberals began to look to the judiciary as a means of circumventing the Constitution. The Court came to be looked upon as the spokesman of the authentic majority, in the same way that the Communist Party's Central Committee claimed to be the authentic spokesman for the proletariat.
In 1987 Justice Thurgood Marshall refused to celebrate the bicentennial of the Constitution because, he said, it was a racist document that enshrined slavery. Quoting Chief Justice Taney in Dred Scott v. Sanford (1857), he said that the original Constitution regarded black people "as so far inferior that they had no rights that white people were bound to respect." It is this view of the Constitution that has justified liberals, in their own minds, in rewriting the Constitution to conform to their own opinions of what it ought to be. Justice Scalia's recourse to "text and tradition" wilts in the face of this challenge.
The original Constitution, and hence original intent jurisprudence, can only be defended if one distinguishes the principles of the Constitution from the compromises of the Constitution. The framers made concessions to slavery because they believed that the Constitution would not be ratified without them. Had the Constitution not been ratified, slavery would have been in a far stronger position. Instead, the new Constitution created a government strong enough to deal with slavery when the crisis finally came. Moreover, the future of the Union as a guardian of the cause of human freedom throughout the world depended upon this distinction between the Constitution's principles and its compromises. But the Constitution itself does not make this distinction. Although it guarantees to every state of the Union a republican form of government, it does not say what the principles of this form are. These principles are spelled out in the Declaration of Independence, which the United States Code lists as the first of the Organic Laws of the United States. Yet Justice Scalia (and many other so-called originalists) finds no role whatever for the Declaration in constitutional jurisprudence, dismissing it as "fluff."
Professor Rossum believes that the character of the American people themselves is of far more consequence than the reasons any justice gives for his rulings on their laws. He quotes James Wilson, as a spokesman for the founders and framers, that "for a people wanting to themselves, there is no remedy." Yet the debate over whether the Constitution is to be interpreted in the light of an evolving and ever-changing morality, or in the light of the eternal truths of a Creator, who endowed us with unalienable rights, is a struggle for the soul of the American people. How that struggle is resolved will determine the place of the judiciary, and much else besides, within our system of government. In that struggle, the best that one can say of Justice Scalia is that he is sadly wanting.
A More Dependable Approach
by Ralph A. Rossum
What separates Professor Jaffa and me is what separated Justices Samuel Chase and James Iredell in the 1798 case ofCalder v. Bull. Justice Chase insisted that "an act of the Legislature contrary to the great first principles of the social compact cannot be considered a rightful exercise of legislative authority." Justice Iredell responded: "The Court cannot pronounce [such an act] to be void, merely because it is, in their judgment, contrary to the principles of natural justice. The ideas of natural justice are regulated by no fixed standard; the ablest and the purest of men have differed upon the subject."
I'll take my chances with Iredell, especially in an age when those who teach in our premier law schools and publish in the leading law reviews (and who therefore fundamentally shape the minds of future Supreme Court justices) are not necessarily the "ablest and the purest of men" when it comes to questions of natural justice.
For every Supreme Court justice who agrees with Harry Jaffa's understanding of the principles of natural rights and their relation to the American Constitution (and I can only think of one: Clarence Thomas), there are several more (William Brennan, Thurgood Marshall, Stephen Breyer, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg all come to mind) who have drawn their understanding of these same principles from the writings of Ronald Dworkin, Bruce Ackerman, Owen Fiss, Michael Perry, and others. By basing their opinions on these flawed writings, these justices have subverted the very Constitution Jaffa fervently wishes to secure.
In our law schools today, there is at work a version of Gresham's Law: bad natural rights teachings have all but forced out good natural rights teachings. Given such corruption, I am inclined to rely on Justice Scalia's lower but more dependable (and more easily emulated) "text and tradition" approach to constitutional interpretation, especially since Scalia and Thomas have reached the same conclusion concerning that most important implication of the Declaration of Independence—the principle of racial equality.
In Rutan v. Republican Party of Illinois (1990), Justice Scalia made it clear that there was no need for him to accept the traditional understanding that the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Clause tolerates racial segregation as it prevailed prior to Brown v. Board of Education. "I argue for the role of tradition in giving content only to ambiguous constitutional text; no tradition can supersede the Constitution." He continued, "[i]n my view the Fourteenth Amendment's requirement of 'equal protection of the laws,' combined with the Thirteenth Amendment's abolition of the institution of black slavery, leaves no room for doubt that laws treating people differently because of their race are invalid." Acknowledging that the 14th Amendment is not necessarily "crystal clear on this point," he nonetheless insisted that "a tradition of unchallengedvalidity did not exist with respect to the [segregationist practices challenged] in Brown." And he emphasized that the tradition that accepted "in the 19th century the principle of 'separate-but-equal' had been vigorously opposed on constitutional grounds, litigated up to this Court, and upheld only over the dissent of one of our historically most respected Justices. See Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) (Harlan, J., dissenting)."
Scalia associated himself with Justice Harlan's argument in Plessy that the Constitution is "color-blind"—a contention Scalia had embraced expressly the year before in City of Richmond v. Croson. In Rutan, he also invoked the 13th Amendment, which helped to make "crystal clear" for him the meaning of the Equal Protection Clause. And by invoking both Harlan and the 13th Amendment, he thereby associated himself with Harlan's argument in Plessy that the amendment bans all "badges of slavery." As a logical positivist, Scalia cannot invoke the principles of the Declaration of Independence and conclude, as did Justice Thomas in Adarand Constructors v. Pena (1995), that, since "all men are created equal," racial discrimination of any kind is unconstitutional because contrary to the principles on which the Constitution is based. As a textualist, however, Scalia is able to reach the same conclusion by reading the 13th and 14th Amendments together and declaring invalid on that basis "laws treating people differently because of their race."
A Rebuttal
Ralph Rossum writes,
What separates Professor Jaffa and me is what separated Justices Samuel Chase and James Iredell in the 1798 case of Calder v. Bull. Justice Chase insisted that 'an act of the Legislature contrary to the great first principles of the social compact cannot be considered a rightful exercise of legislative authority.' Justice Iredell responded: 'The Court cannot pronounce [such an act] to be void, merely because it is, in their judgment, contrary to the principles of natural justice. The ideas of natural justice are regulated by no fixed standard; the ablest and purest of men have differed upon the subject.'
Here is what Chase considered acts "contrary to the great first principles of the social compact":
A law that punished a citizen for an innocent action or, in other words, for an act, which, when done, was in violation of no existing law; a law that destroyed, or impaired the lawful private contracts of citizens; a law that makes a man a judge in his own cause; or a law that takes property from A and gives it to B: It is against all reason and justice for a people to entrust a legislature with such powers; and, therefore, it cannot be presumed that they have done it.
I don't believe that Justice Iredell anymore than Justice Chase believed that the foregoing powers of government would not be by their nature tyrannical. It is therefore difficult to imagine anyone, not a tyrant, wishing to legitimate any of them. There is therefore in fact no difference between Chase and Iredell concerning the acts that Chase considered contrary to the principles of natural justice.
Calder v. Bull involved an act by the Connecticut legislature reversing the decision of a Connecticut probate court. The question arose whether the legislature had violated the prohibition of ex post facto laws in the U.S. Constitution. The Court decided that it had not done so, because the prohibition applied only to criminal cases, not to civil cases, and this was a civil case. The decision of the Court was unanimous. Justice Chase, who had signed the Declaration of Independence, proceeded however to deliver a lecture on the principles of the Declaration, by saying in effect that powers that clearly were tyrannical could never be legitimate powers of government. Iredell responded by agreeing with this, but adding the following clarification.
According to Iredell, it had been the policy of the American states, since the Revolution,
to define with precision the objects of the legislative power, and to restrain its exercise within marked and settled boundaries. If any act of Congress, or of the Legislature of a state, violates those constitutional provisions, it is unquestionably void…. If on the other hand the Legislature of the Union, or the Legislature of any member of the Union, shall pass a law, within the general scope of their constitutional power, the Court cannot pronounce it to be void merely because it is, in their judgment, contrary to the principles of natural justice.
We see that Iredell, no less than Chase, required that the legislature operate "within the general scope of their constitutional power." But Iredell denies that the Court has any reason to apply an additional test of whether a just and reasonable power of government has been used in what the Court considers the most just and reasonable way. Judgments of this kind are best made within the political process.
Chase and Iredell agreed that the power to pass ex post facto laws in criminal cases could never be the means to good ends, and therefore ought never to exist in any government. Iredell's last word on this, is that "Providence never can intend to promote the prosperity of any country by bad means." If this does not make him a natural law jurist, what could?
Professor Rossum further defends Justice Scalia's flawed constitutionalism on the ground that the state of constitutional scholarship is so bad that any attempt to improve it would probably make it worse. He speaks, apparently approvingly, of "Harry Jaffa's understanding of the principles of natural rights and their relation to the American Constitution." But he dismisses the aforesaid understanding, presumably because it is no more than a flyspeck on today's juridical landscape. But whatever authority such scholarship may claim is not personal, but represents the constitutionalism of Abraham Lincoln, who ought to have standing against the gabbling geese of law school professors. But Scalia, I have reason to believe, has no more regard for Lincoln's constitutionalism than for that of any of the gabbling geese. Meanwhile, the divorce between constitutional law and the Constitution grows apace.
Professor Rossum praises Justice Scalia for reaching the same conclusion as Justice Thomas in Rutan v. Republican Party of Illinois. He remarks however that "as a logical positivist Scalia cannot invoke the principles of the Declaration of Independence…as did Justice Thomas." Why not? The Declaration is not a private preserve. It is open to Scalia no less than to Thomas (as it was to Chase and Iredell) or to anyone else. It also happens to be the first of the four Organic Laws of the United States, according to the United States Code, adopted by the Congress. As such it is, as Lincoln maintained, the first of the laws of the United States and by the strictest construction of positive law, the controlling legal authority as to the meaning of the principles of the Constitution.
That Justice Scalia sometimes reaches right conclusions from wrong premises is not, as Professor Rossum seems to suggest, a justification of wrong premises. We need to reclaim our great heritage, not lament the fate that brought us to our present crisis.
Harry V. Jaffa (1918-2015) was a Distinguished Fellow of the Claremont Institute, and the author of numerous articles and books, including his widely acclaimed study of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, Crisis of the House Divided: An... read more
The Logic of the Peace Process
by Angelo M. Codevilla
We keep hoping they'll come up with a Gerry Adams.


I was out the other day and today also as a guide of sorts for my daughter's class and my son's field trip. It was a very nice opportunity to be with the kids and take some photos of the city laden in blue sky. I was able to take some shots that I can make into postcards.
As I mentioned a few posts back, I've been looking for able printers to have my portrait shots printed. Also, I've always considered postcard printing using my own photos. It has been a project that I had wanted to do thinking of my dad but it never came to fruition immediately. My dad used to send me postcards and photos of the places he had been to and it has piqued my interest about geography. I wanted to return the favor by sending him my photo postcards this time.
Then, I slowly started the project sometime in 2009 with the photos I have by editing them. If you click my postcard badge you'll be directed to a meme that I host entitled Postcard Perfect. That's where I keep edited photos all ready for printing. I could certainly make use of some shots I made around the city and other cities we've visited. What do you think? Will the photo above pass as postcard perfect?
It does look like a postcard. Fantastic image!
Hey, just stopping by to answer your question on my blog – yes, that's my little girl. My husband is Japanese, so both my last name and my daughter look Japanese, haha.
yes it will perfectly pass and that's a good idea too. My friend and I wanted to have our photos be in postcard format too and send it to national bookstore and other bookstore but we just don't know where we can have it printed.


This Mystery is a DOWNLOAD!
Yesterday marked the tenth anniversary of the signing of the armistice that ended the War to end all Wars. The European economy is today, though, in another war - one of survival. It is in shambles, and many factions struggle for power with promises of better times to come. Last night, however, at a secluded spot in Florida known as Sandy Ring Island, a celebration had occurred. For comrades in arms, wounded in the service of their nations during that Great War, toasted their reunion.
All three had been sent to the same French military hospital to recuperate. There, they had become staunch friends. When the peace treaty was signed, they vowed to be together again a decade after the end of the conflict. At a rustic lodge on the Gulf of Mexico called Sea Breeze they had kept their word.
But, this morning, a pall was thrown over last night's festivities, for a body was discovered face down on the beach behind Sea Breeze. It was the Russian writer, Gregor Manov, another guest at the inn. His skull had been crushed with a large piece of driftwood. Judging from the footprints left in the sand, the deed had been perpetrated from behind while Manov was returning to the lodge from a late night walk.
Manov had supported the Bolsheviks during their revolution against the Czarist regime. His works had gained world notoriety as he championed the cause of the common man both in his nation and around the world. He was in the United States by permission of the Soviet authorities to conduct a speaking tour about the advantages of communism.
His reasons for stopping at Sea Breeze were unclear. His schedule had been tight, but he broke from its routine three days ago, finding his way to this secluded spot.
The reunited friends were an American captain, an English colonel, and a former French officer, now a Brussels businessman. They were joined by two other guests - a flamboyant French woman, and a mysterious man who claimed Polish ancestry.
The owner of Sea Breeze was a middle-aged woman of Ukrainian origin. The maid spoke little of her background, but appeared by manner and breeding to be an American. These seven were declared to be the prime suspects. Only through careful questioning and precise logic would motive and murderer emerge.
The maid at Sea Breeze. She was recently hired as a domestic. She lives in a small house that is remote from the main building.
The resort owner. She returned from Europe to run Sea Breeze after the death of her father. Her activities while overseas have never been fully revealed.
A mysterious guest who claims Polish ancestry. He keeps to himself and associates very little with the other guests.
A captain in the United States Army. He was an aviator in the World War and is at Sea Breeze to be reunited with his comrades.
A British intelligence officer. He is currently stationed in Alabama on "special assignment." He arranged the reunion.
A Belgian businessman. He was an officer during the War and has since become wealthy through investments in various ventures.
A French woman who seemed to know the comrades. She speaks little of her background and profession. Her flamboyance seems out of place in the rustic surroundings.
You'll get everything you need, including . . .
Complete instructions on how to conduct the investigation of Gregor Manov's death.
Roles for all suspects that include family backgrounds and recollections of events surrounding the murder.
Instructions for the chief facilitator.
A letter from the explaining the investigation.
A series of written clues that can be exchanged or revealed.
Key supporting information such as maps of the inn and the surrounding area.
"The Denouement" that is revealed at the end of the investigation and ties the event together. Remember: MOTIVE, MEANS and OPPORTUNITY will point to the guilty party.
Thought you'd like evidence of how much fun we had! Thanks for your help in planning this . . . it was great.


text:
4. Eurovision Şarkı Yarışması Türkiye Finali
ARTIST: Ajda Pekkan
Ajda Pekkan was internally selected to represent Turkey at Eurovision 1980.
The song that Ajda performed at Eurovision was selected through 4. Eurovision Şarkı Yarışması Türkiye Finali with three songs.
Location TRT Studios
Host Bülend Özveren
Voting 100% jury
Titles of songs have included Boom Bang-a-bang (UK, 1969), A-Ba-Ni-Ba (Israel, 1978), Bana Bana (Turkey, 1989) and Bourn Badaboru (Monaco, 1967)
Israel is the only winning country that didn't participate the following year – They won in 1979 but didn't participate in 1980 due to Israeli Memorial Day, Yom Hazikaron
The 60th Eurovision Song Contest in 2015 had a record number of countries in the Grand Final: 27
Eurovision Song Contest is broadcast across five continents


text:
Q: check number that are non-negative integer and not alphabet i want to continue the loop for asking input(), i use "type(p) is not int" to check the alphabet number, but i get UnboundLocalError when i use "type(p) is not int"
def check(p):
    """
>>> get the value which is non-negative integer and not alphabet
    Checking if the input is negative or not.
    or repeat asking for input
    loop will terminate until positive integer
    """
    while p < 0 or type(p) is not int:
        p = float(input("Invaild response, please try again:"))
    return p

check("4")
check(4)

i want to continue the loop for asking input(), i use "type(p) is not int" to check the alphabet number, but i get UnboundLocalError when i use "type(p) is not int"

A: def check(num):
    while type(num) is not int or num < 0:
        try:
            num = int(input("Invaild response, please try again:"))
        except ValueError:
            pass
    return num

check("4")

Outputs:
print(check(-4))

#Output: Invaild response, please try again:

print(check(4.2))

#Output: Invaild response, please try again:

print(check("4"))

#Output: Invaild response, please try again:

print(check(4))

#Output: 4

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


Plasma cutting machines are used to cut steel or any other material. In this method, an inert gas is blown from a nozzle at a great speed. Some of the gas is turned into plasma by the electric arc that is formed from the gas through the nozzle, to the surface that is cut. This is used to cut metals. The plasma is superheated and energy is provided to the arc that melts and blows away the metal. The plasma cutting machine can be used to cut any type of steel like, stainless steel, aluminum and steel. It is faster to cut mild steel that alloys with this method.
While deciding on the plasma cutting machine, be sure to know your needs. Decide the thickness of the metal that you will frequently cut. Plasma cutting machines are rated according to their cutting function and amperage. A one fourth inch machine will have 25 amps output, a half inch machine will have 50 to 60 amps output and a three fourth inch machine will have 80 amps output.
The plasma cutting machine should have cutting speeds that will be suitable for different thickness of materials and is measured by inches per minute (IPM). It would be best to choose a machine that is able to handle twice the thickness that you want to generally cut, so that all the work can be done well.
The duty cycle of the machine is also an important aspect in factories where the cutting is generally long and time consuming or is automated. The duty cycle is the time at which you can cut, before the machine gets overheated and needs cooling. If the duty cycle is high, you can use it for a longer period of time.
Generally, the plasma cutter has a pilot arc that uses high frequency to conduct high frequency through the air. This interferes with the computers and other office equipments in the factory. The lift arc method is the alternative that can be used. It has a DC+ nozzle with a DC- electrode inside and touching it. On pressing the trigger, the current passes between the electrode and the nozzle. Then the electrode pulls away from the nozzle and the pilot arc is made. The pilot arc is brought close to the material to be cut and cutting takes place.
When buying a plasma cutting machine, you should buy one that has less consumable parts. This means that there will be lesser parts to replace and thus will be cost effective. The same data should be compared with different manufacturers. Some will rate consumables with the number of cuts and other with the starts as the standard for measurement.
The plasma cutting machine should have a tight focused arc. Check the quality of the machine by cutting a material of same thickness and the same rate of speed, with machines of different manufacturers to get the best quality machine. You can check the quality of the machine by moving the machine to a certain distance and seeing from how far away you can maintain an arc. If the arc is longer it means that it has more volts and it can cut a thicker material quicker.
The transfer from the pilot to the cut and the cut to the pilot should be taken into account. The plasma cutting machine should be able to make a fast positive transfer from pilot to cut at a larger transfer height. This can be checked by cutting expanded material.
You should have a smaller torch with an extended nozzle, so that you will be able to see clearly what you are cutting. The plasma cutter should be lightweight and portable as it has to suit all kinds of applications. The machine should be rugged and should have the necessary protective coverings. It should have a control panel with instructions for easy operation, start up and troubleshooting. The plasma cutter should have all the necessary safety features, especially with the nozzle, when the arc is initiated.
The travel speed of the machine should be just right. If it is too fast or too slow, it will not give the desired results. The current should be set at the maximum at the beginning and then reduced as necessary.
Plasma cutting machines are used in many fields. They are used by auto manufacturer, construction industries, locksmiths etc. So, choose the one suited to your needs, after doing a thorough research on the different types of plasma cutters available in the market.


text:
$LOAD_PATH.unshift(File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__), "..", "lib"))

require 'has_editable_password.rb'
require 'active_model'
require 'bcrypt'

# Mock an ActiveRecord-like class.
# Not using ActiveRecord because we want this to be ORM-agnostic
class User
  extend ActiveModel::Callbacks
  define_model_callbacks :initialize, :find, :touch, :only => :after
  define_model_callbacks :save, :create, :update, :destroy

  include ActiveModel::Validations
  include ActiveModel::Validations::HelperMethods
  include HasEditablePassword

  # we expect the user to define the password_digest field
  attr_accessor :password_digest
  attr_accessor :password_recovery_token
  attr_accessor :password_recovery_token_creation
  attr_accessor :previous_password_digest
  attr_accessor :password_digest_updated

  def initialize(hash = {})
    hash.each do |k, v|
      send("#{k}=", v)
    end
  end

  def password_digest_changed?
    false
  end

  def save
    valid?
  end
end


From the High North: Something to put it in.
Something to put it in.
As a knitter I sometimes feel surounded by yarn. Plastic bags from the yarn store is the most convinient way to store it, but it's not good looking! I made a few baskets to store my knitting and yarn. In addition to looing good these bags have no hard parts where the yarn can get stuck while knitting! I sell some of them in my Etsy shop.
The baskets are reversible, and one side is oilcloth. It's easy to clean them, and yyou can even use them as a fruit basket by folding it down half way! There are no end to the possible use for these versatile things. Best of all - you can fold it flat when you don't use it.
What a handy and useful object, and it would even look great instead of like clutter.
So useful, and really cute!
they are so cute and useful!!!
That is a super cute idea the bags are adoarble!!!!!
those are great! I must say you knit beautifully!
I like those baskets! I'm still using bags or boxes but I dont knit to much so my yarn doesnt come out the bottom of my cupboard that often!
I don't knit but these are truly versatile!


text:
<!DOCTYPE html>

    <meta charset="UTF-8"/>
    <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge"/>
    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"/>
    <title>jojotime</title>

    <link rel="stylesheet" href="//maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/3.2.0/css/bootstrap.min.css"/>
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="//maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/3.2.0/css/bootstrap-theme.min.css"/>

    <link rel="stylesheet" href="//getbootstrap.com/assets/css/docs.min.css"/>

    <link rel="stylesheet" href="../../stylesheets/style.css" th:href="@{/stylesheets/style.css}"/>

Skip to main content

            <button class="navbar-toggle" type="button" data-toggle="collapse" data-target=".bs-navbar-collapse">
                Toggle navigation

            </button>
            Jojotime

                        name

logout

<form th:if="${profile}" id="hidden" action="/connect/twitter" method="POST">
    <input type="hidden" name="_method" value="DELETE" />
</form>

        J

            ジョジョまであと

        <form th:action="${profile}? 'tweet' : 'connect/twitter'" method="POST">

                <input type="submit"
                       value="Tweet" th:value="${profile}? 'Tweet' : 'Sign in with Twitter'"
                       class="btn btn-outline-inverse btn-lg"/>

        </form>

Made by
            @garbagetown.

Originally designed by
            @mdo and
            @fat at
            Bootstrap.