Dry January, is it healthy?
So once again January presents another opportunity for you to test your resolve and give the booze a rest for a whole month!! As an addiction specialist, I'm in 2 minds about this. One side of me supports the idea that you get involved in something that gives your body and mind a chance to clean up, detoxify and have a break from a substance so toxic that it requires its very own set of enzymes to break it down and rid it from your body! Imagine that.
So yes a break from that in itself has to be good. However, the other side of the coin is that it can lull you into a false sense of security about the dependency you may well be developing on alcohol. Going alcohol free for 31 days can and does give people the green light to carry on drinking at sometimes problem levels for the rest of the year.
The story goes like this "Oh no, there's nothing wrong with my drinking, I stopped for a whole month in January". This gives people the wrong impression that alcohol or any other addictive substance for that matter is only a problem for you if you need it daily or, are unable to stop for a period of time. Not true. In truth, the fact that many of you will white knuckle it through the whole of January, counting down the days until the 1st of February rolls around tells me that you are already on the problem drinking continuum. And yes, I hear you, that's a good majority of the UK population!
I was taught many many years ago during my clinical training that those who don't have a problem with alcohol don't know and don't care when they last drank alcohol. If that's not you then in terms of dependency you are without a doubt somewhere on the continuum. What you want to do about that, if anything, is entirely up to you. If you're happy with the way things are and see no reason whatsoever to change, then don't. If on the other hand you would like to reclaim some choice, reclaim your health and become free from your reliance on alcohol to relax, deal with stress, socialise, sleep, change the way you feel, numb out feelings, forget pain or just because you got the taste for it and do it too much, Freedom Therapy can help you readjust your drinking sails and help you achieve a more balanced approach to life.


The D695E variant in the POLG gene has not been reported previously as a pathogenic variant, nor as a benign variant, to our knowledge. The D695E variant was not observed in approximately 6500 individuals of European and African American ancestry in the NHLBI Exome Sequencing Project, indicating it is not a common benign variant in these populations. The D695E variant is a conservative amino acid substitution, which occurs at a position that is not conserved. In silico analysis is inconsistent in its predictions as to whether or not the variant is damaging to the protein structure/function. Therefore, we interpret D695E as a variant of uncertain significance.


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Dynamic Soil Structure Interaction Analyses of North Shore Pump Station
Located near Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco, North Shore Pump Station is a part of the North Point Wet-Weather Facility (NPF), which provides primary treatment for disinfection of wastewater. The facility is a two-story building that is completely embedded in soil, and the subsurface conditions include potentially liquefiable sand layers and soft Bay Mud deposits sitting on bedrock sloping toward the east side waterfront. The building is supported by piers extending all the way into the Franciscan Complex bedrock.
Analysis of MSE Retaining Wall
FLAC3D 6.0 Easily Add Structural Support
FLAC3D 6.0 Built-in Model Generation Tools and Workflow
Use of 3DEC to Study Spalling and Deformation associated with Tunnelling at Depth
A Calibrated Predictive Geochemical Model of Leaching and Attenuation Reactions in a Mine Pit Lake
Use of a Finite Element Code to Model Complex Mine Water Problems
Sacha Emam
Geomechanics & Software Engineer, PFC Product Manager
Mr. Emam has developed numerical models to investigate the relationship between the packing history of granular systems, their geometry and micro-mechanical parameters, and their large-scale mechanical properties (elastic moduli, friction angle, dilatancy, etc.).
Learning - Itasca Educational Partnership
Charles Fairhurst, Professor Emeritus of the University of Minnesota and a co-founder of Itasca, has more than 60 years of experience in mining rock mechanics and has consulted on rock stability problems for tunnels, dams, mines and excavations throughout the world. He remains active in consulting, and has been elected to the U.S. National Academy of Engineers and the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences. In 2013, he was inducted into the Légion 'd Honneur of France, with the rank of Officer.
This page will host assorted papers, articles and thoughts from Professor Fairhurst that are relevant to today's geomechanics industry.
Some Challenges of Deep Mining, 2017. Fairhurst, C., Engineering, Volume 3, Issue 4, Pages 527-537, ISSN 2095-8099, https://doi.org/10.1016/J.ENG.2017.04.017.
Subsurface Engineering — More than Rocket Science, 2017. Fairhurst, C., Hydraulic Fracturing Journal, Volume 4 - Number 1, January 2017 (Invited Contribution), page 8.
Subsurface Engineering — A Path Forward, 2017. Fairhurst, C., Hydraulic Fracturing Journal, Volume 4 - Number 2, March 2017, pages 6 - 11.
The Observational Approach in Rock Engineering, 2017. Fairhurst, C., Hydraulic Fracturing Journal, Volume 4 - Number 1, January 2017 (Invited Contribution), pages 36 - 41.
Rapid Excavation and Tunneling Techniques, 2017. S. Dehkhoda and C. Fairhurst, Hydraulic Fracturing Journal, Volume 4 - Number 1, January 2017 (Invited Contribution), pages 101 - 102.
Newton in the Underworld, 2017. Fairhurst, C., Hydraulic Fracturing Journal, Volume 4 - Number 1, January 2017 (Invited Contribution), pages 18 - 31.
Grand Challenges in Earth Resources Engineering, 2017. Fairhurst, C., Hydraulic Fracturing Journal, Volume 4 - Number 1, January 2017 (Invited Contribution), pages 32 - 35.
Earth Resources Engineering, 2017. Fairhurst, C., Hydraulic Fracturing Journal, Volume 4 - Number 1, January 2017 (Invited Contribution), pages 9 - 16.
Mechanics and Rock, 2016.
Thinking Deeper, ARMA e-Newsletter, Fall 2014.
Emerging Issues in Earth Resources Engineering, The Bridge, Spring 2014.
Fairhurst, 2009. What is the Strength of a Rock Mass? Originally published at 5th Colloquium on 'Rock Mechanics –Theory and Practice', Ōsterreichische Gesellschaft für Geomechanik. November 26th and 27th, 2009, Vienna.
Scale Effects in Rock Failure, Charles Fairhurst, Emmanuel M. Detournay, and Joseph F. Labuz, October 2009, National Science Foundation (NSF) proposal, University of Minnesota, 17 pages.
Cundall, P. (2008) "An approach to rock mass modelling". Originally presented at the SHIRMS Workshop: FROM ROCK MASS TO ROCK MODEL WORKSHOP, 15 September 2008, 59 pages.
Cundall, P., M.E. Pierce, and D. Mas Ivars (2008) "Quantifying the Size Effect of Rock Mass Strength". Originally presented at the First Southern Hemisphere International Rock Mechanics Symposium – SHIRMS 2008, September 16, 36 pages.
"Deep Science – A Deep Underground Science and Engineering Initiative", 12 October 2006 (48 pages).
"Technical Report: Geo-Science and Geo-Engineering Research at DUSEL", D. Elsworth and C. Fairhurst. Based on materials supplied by Coordinators, Working Groups 7, 8, 9: L. Costin, F. Heuze, B.J. McPherson, J.-C. Roegiers, E. Sonnenthal, R.P. Young, 9 October 2006 (59 pages).
Fundamental Considerations Relating To The Strength of Rock. Originally presented at the Colloquium on Rock Fracture, Ruhr University, Bochum, Germany, April 1971. Revised and published in Report of the Workshop on Extreme Ground Motions at Yucca Mountain, August 23-25, 2004, U.S. Geological Survey, USGS Open-File Report 2006-1277. T. C. Hanks et al., Eds. Reston, Virginia: USGS, 2006.
Rock Mechanics and Radioactive Waste Isolation. "One small step for geology, one giant leap for rock mechanics". Originally presented at the Tenth Congress of the International Society for Rock Mechanics, Sandton, South Africa, September 8-12, 2003.
Closing the Circle: Some comments on design procedures for tunnel supports in rock. Originally published in Proceedings, University of Minnesota 50th Annual Geotechnical Conference (February 2002), pp. 21-84. J. F. Labuz and J. G. Bentler, Eds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.
Hard Rock Blasting Developments and Possibilities. Originally published in Proc. Atlas Copco Bench Drilling Days, Symp. Stockholm, Sweden, July 1975.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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Church and Geopolitics: The Battle Over Ukrainian Autocephaly
Pepm570_Kulyk_Jan2019.pdf
Володымыр Кулык
(PONARS Policy Memo) The solemn presentation by Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople of the so-called tomos, or a decree of autocephaly, for the Ukrainian Orthodox Church to newly elected Ukrainian primate Metropolitan Epiphanius in Istanbul on January 7, 2019, marked the break of yet another link between Ukraine and Russia. This important ecclesiastical and geopolitical goal was achieved in spite of fierce resistance from Russia's Orthodox Church and state authorities. It was widely regarded as an impressive victory for Kyiv in its ongoing confrontation with Moscow that began in earnest five years ago with Russia's military intervention in Crimea and the Donbas. In a desperate attempt to stop the emancipation of Ukrainian Orthodoxy from its centuries-long subordination to Moscow, the Russian Orthodox Church broke communion with Constantinople, thus exacerbating the global conflict in Orthodoxy as well as Russia's alienation from the West. While his obvious role in this important achievement is likely to increase President Petro Poroshenko's chances of having his leadership mandate renewed in the upcoming March 2019 Ukrainian elections, it may also add to the Russian leadership's willingness to exert more resolute measures against Ukraine.
The idea of getting autocephaly has been cherished by many Ukrainian clergymen, intellectuals, and politicians since the early years of Ukraine's independence as an important attribute of nationhood. Just two months after the proclamation of Ukraine's independence in 1991, a congress of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC), an autonomous part of the Russian Orthodox Church, appealed to the mother church to grant it full autocephaly. However, Moscow postponed a decision on the matter and several months later orchestrated the removal of the main driving force behind the campaign, Metropolitan of Kyiv Filaret. In response, Filaret, with support of then-president Leonid Kravchuk, founded in June 1992 a new religious institution, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church–Kyiv Patriarchate (UOCKP), which united the autocephaly-oriented clergy of the UOC and part of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church (UAOC), which had been established earlier as a "national" alternative to the Moscow-controlled UOC. While quickly establishing a strong presence in the west and center, UOCKP failed to win nationwide primacy, first and foremost due to its continued marginalization in the east and south with its Russia-friendly populations. No less importantly, it failed to achieve recognition as a "canonical" autocephalous church by other Orthodox churches around the world, a crucial barrier to its embrace by the majority of truly religious people in Ukraine. Two decades after its establishment, UOCKP remained twice as weak as the UOC in terms of number of parishes: 4,455 versus 12,230, according to the 2012 data of the State Department for Nationalities and Religions. Even weaker, with 1,208 parishes as of 2012, was the part of the UAOC that rejected a merger with UOCKP but then experienced internal rivalry and further splits.
The Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) resulted from the December 2018 merger of the:
Ukrainian Orthodox Church-Kyiv Patriarchate (UOCKP)
Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church (UAOC)
Segments of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC), which is subordinated to the Moscow Patriarchate (often referred to as the Ukrainian Orthodox Church-Moscow Patriarchate or UOCMP)
The three churches' standing and popularity varied by region and changed with time in accordance with the preferences of successive presidents, parliamentary majorities, and local councils. Largely in tune with local preferences, the local authorities in the west and center favored UOCKP (in Galicia, however, it was overshadowed by the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church subordinated to the Vatican), while in the east and south they primarily supported UOC. At the national level, the nationalist-leaning presidents Leonid Kravchuk and Viktor Yushchenko clearly preferred UOCKP while the more Russia-friendly presidents Leonid Kuchma and Viktor Yanukovych leaned toward UOC.
However, at no time was a certain denomination prevalent enough to marginalize the other churches—a degree of pluralism that scholars considered to be an important factor contributing to the viability of Ukrainian democracy, in clear contrast to Russia and Belarus where the hegemonic Orthodox church became a tool of the authoritarian regimes. At the same time, the popular support for the churches perceived as truly national--particularly the stronger and more visible of them, the UOCKP--gradually grew well above the level warranted by their service capacity, while for the Moscow-controlled UOC the relation was the opposite. For example, 31 percent of respondents in a 2011 survey reported belonging to the former denomination and 26 percent to the latter, an obvious discrepancy with the above-mentioned number of parishes, which the researchers explained as reflecting people's subjective identification rather than actual church attendance.
This subjective identification further strengthened after the Euromaidan revolution and Russian military aggression, which also brought about a marked increase in other dimensions of Ukrainian national identity such as the self-designation as Ukrainian and positive attitudes toward the Ukrainian nationalist guerillas who fought against the Soviets in the aftermath of World War II.[1] As survey data demonstrates, support for the Ukrainian Orthodoxy's continued attachment to the Russian Church dropped from 19 percent in 2010 to 9 percent in 2018. The Ukrainian Orthodox people's consolidation around UOCKP became much more popular (27 percent), as well as their unification in one church that would seek independence (23 percent).
In view of UOC's involvement in the separatist activities in the Donbas in 2014 and its failure to express a clear pro-Ukrainian stance at a time of war with Russia, many people called in online discussions for its outright ban. While such a radical move was not an option for the country's rather moderate leadership, growing support for an independent Orthodox church certainly encouraged them to make a resolute effort to achieve autocephaly. For Poroshenko, this was not only an important dimension of Ukraine's emancipation from Russia but also a key element of his strategy to win the patriotic electorate in the presidential election of March 2019 and, thus, reverse the steady decline of his popularity.
The Wooing of Patriarch Bartholomew
At the same time, the government's desire to achieve autocephaly and the support of the population for it were far from sufficient to make it happen. When Yushchenko pursued this goal a decade ago, it was not only the ambivalence of public opinion and the inability of Orthodox denominations to overcome their divides that precluded a favorable decision by Patriarch Bartholomew. While confirming Ukraine as part of Constantinople's—not Moscow's—canonical territory, he was at that time ready to offer to Ukrainian Orthodox believers only limited autonomy rather than complete autocephaly, an offer that UOCKP reportedly declined. Although Bartholomew's rhetoric refuted the claim by the Moscow Patriarchy of having Ukraine kept within its sphere of influence, he did not, in fact, want to antagonize the Russian Church, which he preferred to have as a partner in ecumenical matters.
Last year, Bartholomew showed better dispositions to Ukrainian calls for autocephaly. Observers argued this may have been partly due to the Moscow Patriarchate's refusal to participate in the 2016 Ecumenical Orthodox Council, the organizing of which was considered as one of the most important achievements of Bartholomew's career. Apart from his personal resentment against Russian clerical leaders, Bartholomew's current support for Ukrainian autocephaly was likely driven by his wish to use the Constantinople-friendly Ukrainian Church as an ally in competition with Moscow for the primary role in global Orthodoxy. Moreover, he was arguably less constrained than earlier by the Turkish authorities under whose jurisdiction his institution functions in Istanbul, as the alienation between Turkey and Russia made the former unwilling to use its leverage for helping the latter.
In any event, after his meeting with Patriarch Bartholomew in April 2018, Poroshenko summoned the heads of the parliamentary factions to tell them that Ukraine was "as close as ever" to obtaining autocephaly but they needed to help achieve that goal by urging their colleagues to support an official appeal to Constantinople. Despite a protest from some Moscow-friendly opposition deputies, a solid majority of MPs promptly supported the appeal. Backed by a similar appeal from the leadership of UOCKP and UAOC, the parliamentary vote allowed Bartholomew to treat the plea for autocephaly as reflecting the will of the Ukrainian Orthodox people and, therefore, to start the process leading to the emergence of a fully independent Ukrainian Orthodox Church. It was announced that the process was to involve the creation of a new unified church consisting of clergy from the two heretofore-unrecognized denominations and those in the UOC willing to join them, after which Constantinople would recognize the new church as equal to the world's fourteen other independent Orthodox churches.
Perceiving Ukrainian autocephaly as dangerous to Moscow's role in the world and its influence on Ukraine in particular, the Russian Church and state authorities tried to prevent it from materializing. As Bartholomew's emissaries paid visits to leaders of the Orthodox churches in order to win their support for the recognition of the Ukrainian aspiration, high-ranking Russian clerics and government officials traveled to the same destinations with the opposite goal. Moreover, a group of UOC dignitaries visited Istanbul to talk Bartholomew into reconsidering his intention, while in Ukraine the UOC clergy distributed among their parishioners an appeal to the Constantinople Patriarchate protesting against the "legalization of the schism." For their part, the leadership of the UOCKP sought to persuade Orthodox leaders in other countries that the Ukrainian people supported autocephaly, and their effort was backed by Ukrainian officials and diplomats. Although there were few public statements on the matter, observers believed that most of the Orthodox churches refused to ally with Moscow against Constantinople, preferring to wait until the decision was announced. At least in one case, the pressure backfired as traditionally Russia-friendly Greece accused Moscow of interference in its internal affairs over this and other issues and went as far as expelling several of its diplomats and denying visas to a number of clerics.
Bartholomew withstood all pressures, including from Moscow Patriarch Kirill who paid him a visit-of-last-hope in late August 2018. The plans for Ukrainian Orthodox autocephaly could now not be reversed. Crucial steps were taken in October 2018 when the Constantinople Patriarchate revoked its decree of 1686 that led to the Ukrainian church's subordination to Moscow and restored the clerical prerogatives of the bishops and priests of the two churches that Moscow had declared schismatic. Although the Moscow Patriarchate responded with a drastic decision to break communion with Constantinople, these steps paved the way for the convention on December 15 of a constituent council of clergy and layity, which proclaimed the establishment of the new unified Ukrainian Church and elected its primate who was to receive the certificate of autocephaly from Bartholomew's hands.
No Domino Effect
Constantinople reportedly insisted that the primates of UOCKP and UAOC renounce their claims to the leadership of the new church, but Filaret managed to arrange for his protégé, Metropolitan Epiphanius, to win, and thus he retained considerable control over the new Church's affairs. For their part, UOC leaders and their patrons in Kyiv and Moscow succeeded in preventing all but two of that denomination's bishops from attending the constituent council, which undermined the unifying ambitions of the autocephaly champions and impeded the transfers of UOC parishes to the newly created Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OUC).
Although such transfers were reported from the very first days after the constituent council, they were too few to produce a domino effect leading to a significant reduction of the Moscow-loyal denomination. Even the completion of the autocephaly process in early January 2019, when the certificate was presented to the new Church's leader, did not visibly facilitate transfers, with less than 200 parishes switching sides by the end of January, a tiny fraction of the UOC's total of more than 12,000 parishes. The main reasons for this apparent stagnation of process are believed to be pressures on hesitant priests from the UOC leadership and their influential supporters and the lack of a clear legal mechanism that would allow parishioners to make a transfer on their own initiative.
Unless a drastic change in the sociopolitical context of Ukraine accelerates (or stops) the process, it is likely to take years, during which time the independent Church will coexist with the one subordinated to Moscow. While this prospect disappoints many Ukrainian patriotic believers (and even patriotic non-believers), the important fact of the matter is that the new autocephalous church was accomplished without violence, which would have been used by Russian propaganda against Ukraine and undermine the Ukrainian government's reputation in the West. Still, it cannot be excluded that Russia might provoke violence in order to destabilize Ukraine and discredit Poroshenko as the elections approach.
Volodymyr Kulyk is Head Research Fellow at the Institute of Political and Ethnic Studies at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.
Homepage image (credit): Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew handing the tomos of autocephaly to Ukrainian Orthodox Church Metropolitan Epiphanius.
[1] For more, see: Volodymyr Kulyk, "National Identity in Ukraine: Impact of Euromaidan and the War," Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 68, No. 4, 2016, pp. 588-608; Volodymyr Kulyk, "Shedding Russianness, Recasting Ukrainianness: The Post-Euromaidan Dynamics of Ethnonational Identifications in Ukraine," Post-Soviet Affairs, Vol. 34, No. 2-3, 2018, pp. 119-138.
Volodymyr Kulyk
Head Research Fellow, Kuras Institute of Political and Ethnic Studies
National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine
View all Policy Memos by Volodymyr Kulyk


Light, Tasty 100 Percent Homemade Whole Wheat Bread? Yes, You Can!
If you're tired of making brick-like whole wheat loaves of bread, I have good news for you! Here is a recipe and a method which will give you the light, tasty, whole wheat loaf you've been dreaming about.
With this recipe, you can use any type of 100 percent whole wheat flour (I prefer organic) or even grind your own flour from wheat berries. In my next blog I'll talk about how to use sprouted wheat flour and berries and the benefits of the sprouted wheat.
If you're already using sprouted wheat or sprouted wheat berries, those products work just fine with this recipe.
If you don't have a bread machine, you can still make this bread. However, the rise of the loaf and the texture of the bread is likely to be heavier than if you use a bread machine for the mixing and kneading. If mixing and kneading by hand, be sure to do so very thoroughly. For making the bread without a machine, see the instructions for the final rise.
If necessary (typically during the winter months), use hot tap water to heat your 2-cup measuring utensil and bread machine pan before preparing your bread dough. This usually takes 4-5 minutes once the hot water is placed in the utensil. Once the measuring cup and pan have been warmed, pour the water out.
Place 1-1/4 cups of hot tap water in 2-cup measuring utensil. Use a digital thermometer to test the water's temperature. If it's too cold, it can be heated to the proper temperature. If it's too warm, allow it to sit at room temperature until it reaches the 105-109 degree temperature range.
If you're using refrigerated syrup or honey, check the water's temperature again before adding yeast to the water. If it's too cold, heat it to the appropriate temperature (105-109 degrees); if too hot, allow it to cool for a few minutes.
Once the water temperature is in the appropriate range, dissolve the yeast (by stirring) in the water. Allow the yeast mixture to rest for 5-7 minutes. It will form a "head" to indicate that the yeast is activated.
In large mixing bowl, measure flour, gluten and salt. Sift all the ingredients together using a whisk or a fork.
If using butter, melt it just till it's soft enough to easily blend into the bread dough.
If you're using a bread machine, pour out the warm water used to heat the bread machine pan. Carefully pour the yeast mixture into the pan. Slowly add the flour mixture. Pour the oil or melted butter on top of the flour. Select your machine settings and start the mixing/kneading process (See instructions below if mixing by hand).
Once the second kneading cycle is done, gently place the dough into a coated bread pan, cover it and place it in a warm area (I use my oven, which I heat to 100 degrees) for 30-45 minutes as the dough raises.
Once the dough is raised, remove it from the oven. Leave the cover on the bread dough. Heat the oven to 350 degrees. Once the oven is ready, remove the cover from the bread dough and place it in the 350-degree oven. Bake it for 30-45 minutes until the crust is nicely browned. Remove from the oven and place on a cooling rack. Try to give it some time to cool before you cut any slices!
Store the bread in a plastic bag. In summer, homemade bread quickly spoils and should be refrigerated once it's cooled.
Once the dough has doubled in size, gently press the air out of it and knead again for 10-15 minutes. Place the kneaded dough into a coated bread pan, cover the dough and set the pan in a warm area (I use my oven heated to 100 degrees) and allow the bread to raise for 30-45 minutes. Once the dough has raised, heat your oven to 350 degrees. Remove the covering from the pan and place the bread dough into the oven, baking it for 30-45 minutes, until the crust is nicely browned.
After removing it from the oven, place the baked dough on a cooling rack. Allow it to cool at least 15 minutes before slicing. Store the bread in a plastic bag. In summer, home-made bread quickly spoils and should be refrigerated once it's cooled.
If you're mixing this dough by hand, slowly add the yeast mixture to the flour, stirring as you go until all the yeast mixture is added.
Add the butter or oil and mix.
Knead the dough 10-15 minutes. Place in a coated bowl/pan in a warm location (85-100 degrees) for the first rise.
This recipe is awsome. I grind our own flour from an organic heirloom variety of wheat & finding a recipe that doesn't use s whole wheat / white flour blend has been difficult. This produced a loaf with good crumb & texture. I do add not only the sugar but also add a little honey as well as a little molasses. This is my new standby.


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What is Sky Q?
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Google TV news
Google Chromecast (2015) official release date, price and everything you need to know
Elyse Betters, US News Editor · 29 September 2015
- New Chromecast - two years after the original debuted
- Features improved Wi-Fi, content feeds, and more
- Available from Google Store now
(Pocket-lint) - After two years of the original Chromecast, Google has announced an updated device that looks a bit different, but works on the same premise.
Chromecast plugs into any TV with HDMI and USB ports (or requires separate power if not) and can be controlled from a phone, tablet, or computer. From there, you can "cast" content displayed on your device's screen to your TV.
Many popular apps already have a Google Cast button built directly into their apps, thanks to the popularity of the first device. Google's own apps, for instance, such as YouTube, offer Cast support, enabling you to send YouTube clips to your TV with a simple tap of a button.
But the new Chromecast also offers much more, so here's everything you need to know about the new Google Chromecast (2015).
Chromecast (2015) release date and pricing
The new Chromecast is available now from the Google Store in 17 countries, including the US and UK. It comes in three different colours and costs the same as the original version. It's $35 in the US, £30 in the UK.
The new Chromecast: Design and hardware
The new Chromecast is a round device with a HDMI cable hanging out of one end. It also comes in three different colours: black, lemonade and coral (yeah, that's yellow and red for the rest of us).
It is 51.9 x 51.9 x 13.9mm, while an included power cable is 1.75m in length.
Chromecast 2: Specs and features
Improved Wi-Fi, content feeds, and Fast Play
The second-generation Chromecast comes with a number of new features, including improved Wi-Fi (802.11ac - dual-band), support for content feeds, and something called "Fast Play", which should simplify the process of connecting Chromecast to other devices by preloading content.
Support for Spotify
As well as announce a dedicated Chromecast Audio device, Google revealed that Spotify is finally coming to the new Chromecast too. And owners of the older Chromecast will also be able to use Spotify on their devices from today.
Updated Chromecast app
Google is also updating the Chromecast companion app, turning it into a place to go for when you want to find things to watch. Prviously, the app just let you set up and manage the dongle.
The updated companion app though includes new features. The headline one is the ability for the app to see what else you have installed on your device that is Chromecast enabled so you can jump straight to content within.
Like all other streaming devices of late, there is heightened focus on gaming for the new Chromecast. During the unveiling event, Google showed how a game of Angry Birds Go - the karting game - can be played on a big screen through the Chromecast using an Android handset. Other games are expected to follow too.
Chromecast 2: Chromecast Audio
Google has also announced an entirely separate Chromecast that's designed to stream music and other audio. It's called Chromecast Audio and is different from the other new Chromecast detailed above.
READ: Chromecast Audio explained: What is the new Chromecast with Spotify?
This other dongle is able to hook up to Wi-Fi-enabled speakers through a standard 3.5mm headphone cable. You can also hook up multiple dongles to speakers throughout your home to have them all stream music in sync.
So, with Spotify on-board as one of Google's partners (explained above), Chromecast Audio is shaping up to be a compelling offering for those looking to stream "high-quality sound" to any or all the speakers in their home.
Stay tuned to our Chromecast hub for all the latest news about the device and constant updates.
Writing by Elyse Betters.
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I'll be interested to see what Griffey can do with an opportunity. He's quick, fairly tall, and can play STs - he did well in that role here at UofA.
It's not like we can't find receivers.
We probably already found his replacement in our UDFA haul or can get better after cuts.
I agree, we shouldn't cling to familiar mediocrity if we can improve.
Wonder if there'd be any interest here?
And, of course, we have 20 of them.
Instant upgrade over Malik Golden, Dangerfield.
6'4 225? I wanted him a couple years ago when he was about to be a FA before Cinci resigned him. Can play the SS/ILB hybrid position better than anyone else currently on their roster.
I thought he was a terror against us last year, glad he's gone.
He's an upgrade over Morgan Burnett and the current version of Edmunds, even.
Here's the thing about being a writer on the interwebz: We make is sound like we know everything, even firing arrogant responses on social media when someone challenges us. Let me provide a behind the scenes window on this: No one knows everything, including reporters, analysts, bloggers, or nighttime writers who drunkenly complain about a starter suddenly being released and look at ownership possibly bungling another move.
Reports suggested production was an issue, with subtle offseason hints about the team's view at safety after chatting with Eric Reid and Kurt Coleman, and eventually drafting Jessie Bates. A handful of reports cite "financial" reasons. Some of us believe the reason could have been his activity in discussing social issues on social media, and an ol' bird like Mike Brown, who is facing a complaint from Reid after Bengals ownership asked his intentions regarding the anthem protest, not liking that.
Responses on Twitter and comments on this site provide some, many of which are good, logical thoughts. Before we continue, keep in mind that these theories are inter-connected weaves of the same pattern.
I just think what Iloka brings to the table isn't what Teryl Austin wants. Iloka wasn't the same after Reggie Nelson left. Replacing RN w/ Williams put Iloka in a spot that should be ball hawking & that isn't his strength. Williams/Bates makes more sense complimenting each other.
This became a popular theory — one that makes you think... this explains a lot. It doesn't require an argument against production (rather a different kind of production). Simply put, Austin wants a free flowing center fielder who has stronger instincts against the pass.
2) It's the new helmet rule!
A fellow Bengal fan complained to me about Iloka's playing style. Always trying to land a huge hit rather than playing the ball - Kevin.Evans.77377.
Let's just say that the new rule has caused anger and alarm among defensive players.
One player this could impact is Iloka, a hard-hitting safety who looks for the next big shot. In a way, this also relates to the point that defensive coordinator Teryl Austin wants a safety who is more wide-ranging, looking to react to a pass rather than plow a ball-carrier.
Since Reggie Nelson left the Bengals have been playing with two strong safeties. Neither Iloka or Williams plays like a free safety. - Rob Lewis.
Since Reggie Nelson left for Oakland (well, wasn't re-signed and thus left for Oakland), the Bengals moved Iloka into his free safety role. The problem is that Iloka's style is more geared toward that of an enforcer, rather than a centerfielder. Essentially the Bengals tried placing a square box into a circular hole.
When Iloka took over as the center fielder in 2016, he allowed quarterbacks to complete 64.2 percent of their passes, with a passer rating of 85.3 and 68.4 in 2016 and 2017 respectively. Last year, Iloka only intercepted one pass (only one defensive player had more than one interception), but Cincinnati was obviously disappointed in his (lack of) production.
Was the lack of production because he was out of place once Nelson left? Same say yes.
And if we are looking to play more DB's as a remedy or bandaid for lack of ILB talent, then you can add Iloka to the mix of big DB's in the dime and dime+penny packages.
Add George Iioka to that mix....6'-4", 225.
And the bonus would be, i am sure this deep into pre-season, with 2 weeks to live bullets and 8 weeks to a Cincy game, I am sure Coach Tomlin could extract alot of information on the inner working of the Cincy offense as well as how they view and plan to attack the Steelers offense.
I've read the Raiders are front runners after they've had injuries to their starting safety. Also Dallas has had some injuries to their safety position that was already thin depth wise. Read this is a classic financial move from the bengals going forward. Can play both safety spots.
Signed a one-year deal with the Vikes. Good lord, like they need him.
steelers will be wise to look out when cuts come.
My guess is Newman (39 yrs old) and Sendejo will be the ones let go.
Sendejo is not getting cut. Newman is more likely.


text:
Police Justify Tinubu Rally's Disruption in Niger
SFTAS: Sokoto Receives 3 Awards of Excellence from World Bank
The Sokoto State government has bagged three Awards of Excellence from the World Bank sequel to the diligent implementation of World Bank-assisted States Fiscal Transparency, Accountability and Sustainability Project (SFTAS).
The acting Commissioner for Finance in the state, Dr Mohammed Inname, disclosed this to newsmen on Thursday in Abuja.
Inname said that SFTAS was being run by the World Bank for the past four to five years in the 36 States and the FCT.
He said: "It is aimed at strengthening the financial and accountability systems in the states and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT).
"The project ends by the end of this year and the states that have performed well were rewarded with awards."
Inname said that the 2022 edition of the awards was held on Monday, Nov. 14, at the Transcript Hilton, Abuja.
According to Inname, who is also the State Commissioner for Health, the state was able to perform wonderfully in all the three categories.
"The Bank has been rigorously assessing the states on some key Direct Link Indicators (DLIs).
"They are indicators that have been identified and assessed from time to time," he said.
Inname added that one of the awards was on domestic resource mobilisation or domestic revenues mobilisation.
He said, "we have rebranded and restructured the state Internal Revenue Board Service.
"The board has been appointed, with an Executive Chairman and they were given full autonomy to mobilise and generate revenues.
"We have been doing excellently well from as low as N200million monthly and we have consistently increamentally improved on month- month and yearly bases."
Inname said that the second award was Debt Sustainability, adding, "we have performed very well in this direction.
"That means we are managing our debts in the state. You know you cannot run a government or any organisation without having to borrow.
"But the ability to manage and appropriately utilise the debts is what matters.
"That means that you are able to pay your obligations monthly or on whatever terms that have been agreed upon," the commissioner said.
Inname said the third award was on the overall SFTAs on all the Direct Link Indicators (All DLIs).
He said that the indicators were parameters that were being tracked and assessed, saying, they include debt management and ensuring a level of transparency.
Inname added that the budget of the state has been online and people can access it globally.
"Similarly, all the expenditures of the state were on the website of the ministry on 'sokotostate.gov.ng'; they are open for the world to see.
Inname, among other impacts of the awards said that it was the strengthening of the financial systems in the state.
He said "we have put up structures in the ministry and the BIR to be able to financially sustain the state and make it very healthy to develop."
Inname congratulated Gov. Aminu Tambuwal and appreciated his unrelenting support to the ministry for it to achieve the enviable feat.
He also lauded his team in the ministry for their sustained support and cooperation and dedicated the awards to them."
Inname also commended the World Bank for the innovations that were always needed to make the systems very strong.
This, he said, has made the states to grow, especially Sokoto that has very meager resources.
"But, we have been able to achieve a lot," he said.
He also reiterated the commitment of the state government to continue to tread the path it had been following that earned the state the awards.
"We will sustain and consolidate on the tangible gains we have achieved,'' Inname promised. (NAN)


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text:
Government intervention needed to shape markets for clean energy innovation
A new report launched at COP26 as part of the EEIST* project shows that to drive the rapid change necessary to meet international climate targets, governments must intervene to shape markets for new clean energy technologies.
'New Economics of Innovation and Transition: Evaluating Opportunities and Risks' shows how targeted policy support and investment has led to dramatic cost reductions and huge market growth in wind and solar power and LED lighting, and calls on governments to adopt the same approach to accelerate new low-carbon industries, such as electric vehicles and steelmaking. Market-shaping policies can play a key role in supporting global ambitions to accelerate new clean energy technologies, encouraging international collaboration to drive rapid innovation and scale this decade - a central pillar of the COP26 conference.
The report illustrates how the greatest successes in the clean energy transition so far have come from government policies to shape markets - often through policies that the economic analysis at the time generally did not recommend:
Since 2010, wind energy has grown from supplying less than 1% to 10% of electricity in Brazil, 15% in Europe, and 24% in the UK. Costs have plummeted; onshore wind is now less expensive than fossil fuels and offshore wind - once seen as impossibly complex and expensive - is increasingly competitive with fossil fuel alternatives.
Solar PV - described as "the most expensive way of reducing carbon emissions" as recently as 2014 - has expanded to similar levels globally as costs have plummeted by 85% over the past decade, to become competitive with fossil fuel alternatives. In China alone, solar has grown from just 0.3 gigawatts of generation in 2008 to 253 gigawatts in 2020.
Low energy LED lighting in India has seen prices fall more than 90% since 2010, moving from the most expensive to the cheapest technology on offer.
These historic transitions were driven by a strategic mix of policies that shaped new markets and led to rapid cost declines and accelerated deployment. They are now among the cheapest ways to generate electricity, and light, across much of the world. Almost two-thirds of wind and solar projects built globally last year will generate cheaper electricity than even the world's cheapest new coal plants.
Delivering the Paris climate targets now requires unprecedented, policy-led transformations in multiple technologies and sectors. Focus on immediate costs and benefits used by many analysts around the world to assess policy interventions can create a bias towards inaction. This is because they cannot predict with confidence the benefits of low-carbon innovation, and may therefore underestimate or even exclude them, and fail to capture the positive impact that market shaping policies can have. In contrast, risk opportunity analysis can lead to better decision making when dealing with transformational change, by considering how policy affects processes of innovation and transformation.
*The Economics of Energy Innovation and System Transition (EEIST) Project, a partnership between world-leading research institutions in the UK, EU, Brazil, China, and India, including the Post-Carbon Transition programme at the Oxford Martin School, is funded by the UK Government and the Children's Investment Fund Foundation. EEIST is a three-year project using new economic approaches to support better decision making on policy relevant to low carbon transitions in high emission, fast growing emerging economies, with a focus on China, India and Brazil, which are home to more than half of the world's population.
> Read the full report
> Read the related article in The Guardian


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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


This magnificent mansion on the English Embankment has an impressive history. The original stone house dates to the 1740s and was built for Grand Duke Mikhail Golitsyn. In 1802, the house was acquired by Nikolay Rumyantsev, son of Ekaterina Golitsyna and was reconstructed. The architect, Vasily Glinka retained the proportions of the original building, but completely changed the appearance of the facade, which was decorated with a massive 12-column portico with an elaborate pediment with an alto-relievo of Apollo on Parnassus and other figures. The interior spaces housing the vast art collection of the Rumyantsev family, becoming, in 1831, a museum, open to the public. In 1861 the whole collection was moved to Moscow and the mansion changed hands several times, in the course of which, was altered by the architect Alexander Stepanov. At the beginning of the 20th century, the mansion passed into the hands of Prince Lev Kotchubey, son-in-law of the Duke of Leuchtenberg, who became the last owner of the mansion. It is from this time that the photographs were taken. In 1916 the mansion was again sold and was almost certain to be demolished. The 1917 Revolution stopped this from occurring.
«Мы оглядываемся назад и смотрим на свершения пращуров. Они делали это не для себя, а ради светлого будущего потомков, ради своей страны. Каждый из нас должен и себе задавать вопрос, что я сделал, чтобы меня помнили через 150 лет. Изучайте языки, путешествуйте, чтобы иметь возможность прославить свой родной край и его великих людей», — заявил Алекс Кочубей.


Today was really a family day. Tara had the day off work and, well, so do I, so we got to spend an extra day as a family.
It started with swimming, and this time Tara got to be there to watch. She loved how he was floating on his back in the life vest, and how vocal he was at the fun he was having. He's easily the loudest and happiest kid there. Always splashing and loving the water.
Next was home and a little down time. I think the little guy is coming down with something, as his nose has been running pretty solid all day. So he slept for a few hours and it gave Tara and I a little us time.
We then headed down town to meet up with friends at the Works. It's the best damn burger joint in, well, Ottawa. I had a new one with bacon, peanut butter and banana. There wasn't a lot of banana, so you really couldn't taste it. But the PB made up for it. It was good to catch up with old friends that we just don't get to see very often. I regaled them with my Jury Duty adventures, and being sent back to the office.
Then home. Since lunch was so late we really didn't know what to do with dinner, so we mostly skipped it. Liam was starting to get tired, so it was bath and bed for him. Again, I think the cold is getting to him. So some extra vicks was thrown in for good measure.
All in all, a great way to spend a day.


text:
Who Invented the Shopping Mall?
November 9, 2015 Uncle John's Bathroom Reader	2 comments
The following is an article from Uncle John's Bathroom Reader
Modern shopping malls are so common that we forget they've only been around for about a half century. Here's the story of how they came to be…and the story of the man who invented them, Victor Gruen—the most famous architect you've never heard of.
FATEFUL LAYOVER
In the winter of 1948, an architect named Victor Gruen got stranded in Detroit, Michigan, after his flight was cancelled due to a storm. Gruen made his living designing department stores, and rather than sit in the airport or in a hotel room, he paid a visit to Detroit's landmark Hudson's department store and asked the store's architect to show him around. The Hudson's building was nice enough; the company prided itself on being one of the finest department stores in the entire Midwest. But downtown Detroit itself was pretty run-down, which was not unusual for an American city in that era. World War I (1914–18), followed by the Great Depression and then World War II (1939–45), had disrupted the economic life of the country, and decades of neglect of downtown areas had taken their toll.
STRIP JOINTS
The suburbs were even shabbier, as Gruen saw when he took a ride in the country and drove past ugly retail and commercial developments that seemed to blight every town.
The combination of dirt-cheap land, lax zoning laws, and rampant real estate speculation had spawned an era of unregulated and shoddy commercial development in the suburbs. Speculators threw up cheap, (supposedly) temporary buildings derisively known as "taxpayers" because the crummy eyesores barely rented for enough money to cover the property taxes on the lot. That was their purpose: Land speculators were only interested in covering their costs until the property rose in value and could be unloaded for a profit. Then the new owner could tear down the taxpayer and build something more substantial on the lot. But if the proliferation of crumbling storefronts, gas stations, diners, and fleabag hotels were any guide, few taxpayers were ever torn down.
The unchecked growth in the suburbs was a problem for downtown department stores like Hudson's, because their customers were moving there, too. Buying a house in suburbia was cheaper than renting an apartment downtown, and thanks to the G.I. Bill, World War II veterans could buy them with no money down.
Once these folks moved out to the suburbs, few of them wanted to return to the city to do their shopping. The smaller stores in suburban retail strips left a lot to be desired, but they were closer to home and parking was much easier than downtown, where a shopper might circle the block for a half hour or more before a parking space on the street finally opened up.
Stores like Hudson's had made the situation worse by using their substantial political clout to block other department stores from building downtown. Newcomers such as Sears and J. C. Penney had been forced to build their stores in less desirable locations outside the city, but this disadvantage turned into an advantage when the migration to the suburbs began.
As he drove through the suburbs, Gruen envisioned a day when suburban retailers would completely surround the downtown department stores and drive them out of business.
SHOPPING AROUND
When Gruen returned home to New York City, he wrote a letter to the president of Hudson's explaining that if the customers were moving out to the suburbs, Hudson's should as well. For years Hudson's had resisted opening branch stores outside the city. It had an image of exclusivity to protect, and opening stores in seedy commercial strips was no way to do that. But it was clear that something had to be done, and as Hudson's president, Oscar Webber, read Gruen's letter, he realized that here was a man who might be able to help. He offered Gruen a job as a real estate consultant, and soon Gruen was back driving around Detroit suburbs looking for a commercial strip worthy of the Hudson's name.
The only problem: There weren't any. Every retail development Gruen looked at was flawed in one way or another. Either it was too tacky even to be considered, or it was too close to downtown and risked stealing sales from the flagship store. Gruen recommended that the company develop a commercial property of its own. Doing so, he argued, offered a lot of advantages: Hudson's wouldn't have to rely on a disinterested landlord to maintain the property in keeping with Hudson's image. And because Gruen proposed building an entire shopping center, one that would include other tenants, Hudson's would be able to pick and choose which businesses moved in nearby.
Furthermore, by building a shopping center, Hudson's would diversify its business beyond retailing into real estate development and commercial property management. And there was a bonus, Gruen argued: By concentrating a large number of stores in a single development, the shopping center would prevent ugly suburban sprawl. The competition that a well-designed, well-run shopping center presented, he reasoned, would discourage other businesses from locating nearby, helping to preserve open spaces in the process.
Oscar Webber was impressed enough with Gruen's proposal that he hired the architect to create a 20-year plan for the company's growth. Gruen spent the next three weeks sneaking around the Detroit suburbs collecting data for his plan. Then he used the information to write up a proposal that called for developing not one but four shopping centers, to be named Northland, Eastland, Southland, and Westland Centers, each in a different suburb of Detroit. Gruen recommended that the company locate its shopping centers on the outer fringes of existing suburbs, where the land was cheapest and the potential for growth was greatest as the suburbs continued to expand out from downtown Detroit.
Hudson's approved the plans and quietly began buying up land for the shopping centers. It hired Gruen to design them, even though he'd only designed two shopping centers before and neither was actually built. On June 4, 1950, Hudson's announced its plan to build Eastland Center, the first of the four projects scheduled for development.
Three weeks later, on June 25, 1950, the North Korean People's Army rolled across the 38th parallel that served as the border between North and South Korea. The Korean War had begun.
WORST-LAID PLANS
Though Victor Gruen is credited with being the "father of the mall," he owes a lot to the North Korean Communists for helping him get his temples of consumerism off the ground. He owes the Commies (and so do you, if you like going to the mall) because as Gruen himself would later admit, his earliest design for the proposed Eastland Center was terrible. Had the Korean War not put the brakes on all nonessential construction projects, Eastland might have been built as Gruen originally designed it, before he could develop his ideas further.
Those early plans called for a jumble of nine detached buildings organized around a big oval parking lot. The parking lot was split in two by a sunken four-lane roadway, and if pedestrians wanted to cross from one half of the shopping center to the other, the only way to get over the moat-like roadway was by means of a scrawny footbridge that was 300 feet long. How many shoppers would even have bothered to cross over to the other side?
Had Eastland Center been built according to Gruen's early plans, it almost certainly would have been a financial disaster. Even if it didn't bankrupt Hudson's, it probably would have forced the company to scrap its plans for Northland, Westland, and Southland Centers. Other developers would have taken note, and the shopping mall as we know it might never have come to be.
Shopping centers of the size of Eastland Center were such a new concept that no architect had figured out how to build them well. Until now, most shopping centers consisted of a small number of stores in a single strip facing the street, set back far enough to allow room for parking spaces in front of the stores. Some larger developments had two parallel strips of stores, with the storefronts facing inward toward each other across an area of landscaped grass called a "mall." That's how shopping malls got their name.
There had been a few attempts to build even larger shopping centers, but nearly all had lost money. In 1951 a development called Shoppers' World opened outside of Boston. It had more than 40 stores on two levels and was anchored by a department store at the south end of the mall. But the smaller stores had struggled from the day the shopping center opened, and when they failed they took the entire shopping center (and the developer, who filed for bankruptcy) down with them.
Gruen needed more time to think through his ideas, and when the Korean War pushed the Eastland project off into the indefinite future, he got it. Hudson's eventually decided to build Northland first, and by the time Gruen started working on those plans in 1951, his thoughts on what a shopping center should look like had changed completely. The question of where to put all the parking spaces (Northland would have more than 8,000) was one problem. Gruen eventually decided that it made more sense to put the parking spaces around the shopping center, instead of putting the shopping center around the parking spaces, as his original plans for Eastland Center had called for.
Gruen then put the Hudson's department store right in the middle of the development, surrounded on three sides by the smaller stores that made up the rest of the shopping center. Out beyond these smaller stores was the parking lot, which meant that the only way to get from the parking lot to Hudson's—the shopping center's biggest draw—was by walking past the smaller shops.
This may not sound like a very important detail, but it turned out to be key to the mall's success. Forcing all that foot traffic past the smaller shops—increasing their business in the process—was the thing that made the small stores financially viable. Northland Center was going to have nearly 100 small stores; they all needed to be successful for the shopping center itself to succeed.
SUBURBAN OUTFITTER
Northland was an outdoor shopping center, with nearly everything a modern enclosed mall has…except the roof. Another feature that set it apart from other shopping centers of the era, besides its layout, its massive scale, and the large number of stores in the development, were the bustling public spaces between the rows of stores. In the past developers who had incorporated grassy malls into their shopping centers did so with the intention of giving the projects a rural, almost sleepy feel, similar to a village green.
Gruen, a native of Vienna, Austria, thought just the opposite was needed. He wanted his public spaces to blend with the shops to create a lively (and admittedly idealized) urban feel, just like he remembered from downtown Vienna, with its busy outdoor cafés and shops. He divided the spaces between Hudson's and the other stores into separate and very distinct areas, giving them names like Peacock Terrace, Great Lakes Court, and Community Lane. He filled them with landscaping, fountains, artwork, covered walkways, and plenty of park benches to encourage people to put the spaces to use.
NOVELTY STORES
If Northland Center were to open its doors today, it would be remarkably unremarkable. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of similarly-sized malls all over the United States. But when Northland opened in the spring of 1954, it was one-of-a-kind, easily the largest shopping center on Earth, both in terms of square footage and the number of stores in the facility. The Wall Street Journal dispatched a reporter to cover the grand opening. So did Time and Newsweek, and many other newspapers and magazines. In the first weeks that the Northland Center was open, an estimated 40,000-50,000 people passed through its doors each day.
It was an impressive start, but Hudson's executives still worried. Did all these people really come to shop, or just look around? Would they ever be back? No one knew for sure if the public would even feel comfortable in such a huge facility. People were used to shopping in one store, not having to choose from nearly 100. And there was a very real fear that for many shoppers, finding their way back to their car in the largest parking lot they had ever parked in would be too great a strain and they'd never come back. Even worse, what if Northland Center was too good? What if the public enjoyed the public spaces so much that they never bothered to go inside the stores? With a price tag of nearly $25 million, the equivalent of more than $200 million today, Northland Center was one of the most expensive retail developments in history, and nobody even knew if it would work.
CHA-CHING!
Whatever fears the Hudson's executives had about making back their $25 million investment evaporated when their own store's sales exceeded forecasts by 30 percent. The numbers for the smaller stores were good, too, and they stayed good month after month. In its first year in business Northland Center grossed $88 million, making it one of the most profitable shopping centers in the United States. And all of the press coverage generated by the construction of Northland Center made Gruen's reputation. Before the center was even finished, he received the commission of a lifetime: Dayton's department store hired him to design not just the world's first enclosed shopping mall but an entire planned community around it, on a giant 463-acre plot in a suburb of Minneapolis.
Southdale Center, the mall that Victor Gruen designed for Dayton's department store in the town of Edina, Minnesota, outside of Minneapolis, was only his second shopping center. But it was the very first fully enclosed, climate-controlled shopping mall in history, and it had many of the features that are still found in modern malls today.
It was "anchored" by two major department stores, Dayton's and Donaldson's, which were located at opposite ends of the mall in order to generate foot traffic past the smaller shops in between. Southdale also had a giant interior atrium called the "Garden Court of Perpetual Spring" in the center of the mall. The atrium was as long as a city block and had a soaring ceiling that was five stories tall at its highest point.
Just as he had with the public spaces at Northland, Gruen intended the garden court to be a bustling space with an idealized downtown feel. He filled it with sculptures, murals, a newsstand, a tobacconist, and a Woolworth's "sidewalk" café. Skylights in the ceiling of the atrium flooded the garden court with natural light; crisscrossing escalators and second story skybridges helped create an atmosphere of continuous movement while also attracting shoppers' attention to the stores on the second level.
The mall was climate controlled to keep it at a constant spring-like temperature (hence the "perpetual spring" theme) that would keep people shopping all year round. In the past shopping had always been a seasonal activity in harsh climates like Minnesota's, where frigid winters could keep shoppers away from stores for months. Not so at Southdale, and Gruen emphasized the point by filling the garden court with orchids and other tropical plants, a 42-foot-tall eucalyptus tree, a goldfish pond, and a giant aviary filled with exotic birds. Such things were rare sights indeed in icy Minnesota, and they gave people one more reason to go to the mall.
With 10 acres of shopping surrounded by 70 acres of parking, Southdale was a huge development in its day. Even so, it was intended as merely a retail hub for a much larger planned community, spread out over the 463-acre plot acquired by Dayton's. Just as the Dayton's and Donaldson's department stores served as anchors for the Southdale mall, the mall itself would one day serve as the retail anchor for this much larger development, which as Gruen designed it, would include apartment buildings, single-family homes, schools, office buildings, a hospital, landscaped parks with walking paths, and a lake.
The development was Victor Gruen's response to the ugly, chaotic suburban sprawl that he had detested since his first visit to Michigan back in 1948. He intended it as a brand-new downtown for the suburb, carefully designed to eliminate sprawl while also solving the problems that poor or nonexistent planning had brought to traditional urban centers like Minneapolis. Such places had evolved gradually and haphazardly over many generations instead of following a single, carefully thought-out master plan.
The idea was to build the Southdale Center mall first. Then, if it was a success, Dayton's would use the profits to develop the rest of the 463 acres in accordance with Gruen's plan. And Southdale was a success: Though Dayton's downtown flagship store did lose some business to the mall when it opened in the fall of 1956, the company's overall sales rose 60 percent, and the other stores in the mall also flourished.
But the profits generated by the mall were never used to bring the rest of Gruen's plan to fruition. Ironically, it was the very success of the mall that doomed the rest of the plan.
Back before the first malls had been built, Gruen and others had assumed that they would cause surrounding land values to drop, or at least not rise very much, on the theory that commercial developers would shy away from building other stores close to such a formidable competitor as a thriving shopping mall. The economic might of the mall, they reasoned, would help to preserve nearby open spaces by making them unsuitable for further commercial development.
But the opposite turned out to be the case. Because shopping malls attracted so much traffic, it soon became clear that it made sense to build other developments nearby. Result: The once dirt-cheap real estate around Southdale began to climb rapidly in value. As it did, Dayton's executives realized they could make a lot of money selling off their remaining parcels of land—much more quickly, with much less risk—than they could by gradually implementing Gruen's master plan over many years.
From the beginning Gruen had seen the mall as a solution to sprawl, something that would preserve open spaces, not destroy them. But his "solution" had only made the problem worse—malls turned out to be sprawl magnets, not sprawl killers. Any remaining doubts Gruen had were dispelled in the mid-1960s when he made his first visit to Northland Center since its opening a decade earlier. He was stunned by the number of seedy strip malls and other commercial developments that had grown up right around it.
REVERSAL OF FORTUNE
Victor Gruen, the father of the shopping mall, became one of its most outspoken critics. He tried to remake himself as an urban planner, marketing his services to American cities that wanted to make their downtown areas more mall-like, in order to recapture some of the business lost to malls. He drew up massive, ambitious, and very costly plans for remaking Fort Worth, Rochester, Manhattan, Kalamazoo, and even the Iranian capital city of Tehran. Most of his plans called for banning cars from city centers, confining them to ring roads and giant parking structures circling downtown. Unused roadways and parking spaces in the center would then be redeveloped into parks, walkways, outdoor cafés, and other uses. It's doubtful that any of these pie-in-the-sky projects were ever really politically or financially viable, and none of them made it off the drawing board.
In 1968 Gruen closed his architectural practice and moved back to Vienna…where he discovered that the once thriving downtown shops and cafés, which had inspired him to invent the shopping mall in the first place, were now themselves threatened by a new shopping mall that had opened outside the city.
He spent the remaining years of his life writing articles and giving speeches condemning shopping malls as "gigantic shopping machines" and ugly "land-wasting seas of parking." He attacked developers for shrinking the public, non-profit-generating spaces to a bare minimum. "I refuse to pay alimony for these bastard developments," Gruen told a London audience in 1978, in a speech titled "The Sad Story of Shopping Centers."
Gruen called on the public to oppose the construction of new malls in their communities, but his efforts were largely in vain. At the time of his death in 1980, the United States was in the middle of a 20-year building boom that would see more than 1,000 shopping malls added to the American landscape. And were they ever popular: According to a survey by U.S. News and World Report, by the early 1970s, Americans spent more time at the mall than anyplace else except for home and work.
VICTOR WHO?
Today Victor Gruen is largely a forgotten man, known primarily to architectural historians. That may not be such a bad thing, considering how much he came to despise the creation that gives him his claim to fame.
Gruen does live on, however, in the term "Gruen transfer," which mall designers use to refer to the moment of disorientation that shoppers who have come to the mall to buy a particular item can experience upon entering the building—the moment in which they are distracted into forgetting their errand and instead begin wandering the mall with glazed eyes and a slowed, almost shuffling gait, impulsively buying any merchandise that strikes their fancy.
Victor Gruen may well be considered the "father of the mall," but he didn't remain a doting dad for long. Southdale Center, the world's first enclosed shopping mall, opened its doors in the fall of 1956, and by 1968 Gruen had turned publicly and vehemently against his creation.
So it would fall to other early mall builders, people such as A. Alfred Taubman, Melvin Simon, and Edward J. DeBartolo Sr., to give the shopping mall its modern, standardized form, by taking what they understood about human nature and applying it to Gruen's original concept. In the process, they fine-tuned the mall into the highly effective, super-efficient "shopping machines" that have dominated American retailing for nearly half a century.
These developers saw shopping malls the same way that Gruen did, as idealized versions of downtown shopping districts. Working from that starting point, they set about systematically removing all distractions, annoyances, and other barriers to consumption. Your local mall may not contain all of the following features, but there should be much here that looks familiar:
It's a truism among mall developers that most shoppers will only walk about three city blocks—about 1,000 feet—before they begin to feel a need to head back to where they'd started. So 1,000 feet became a standard length for malls.
Most of the stairs, escalators, and elevators are located at the ends of the mall, not in the center. This is done to encourage shoppers to walk past all the stores on the level they're on before visiting shops on another level.
Malls are usually built with shops on two levels, not one or three. This way, if a shopper walks the length of the mall on one level to get to the escalator, then walks the length of the mall on the second level to return to where they started, they've walked past every store in the mall and are back where they parked their car. (If there was a third level of shops, a shopper who walked all three levels would finish up at the opposite end of the mall, three city blocks away from where they parked.)
Another truism among mall developers is that people, like water, tend to flow down more easily than they flow up. Because of this, many malls are designed to encourage people to park and enter the mall on the upper level, not the lower level, on the theory they are more likely to travel down to visit stores on a lower level than travel up to visit stores on a higher level.
THE VISION THING
Great big openings are designed into the floor that separates the upper level of shops from the lower level. That allows shoppers to see stores on both levels from wherever they happen to be in the mall. The handrails that protect shoppers from falling into the openings are made of glass or otherwise designed so that they don't obstruct the sight lines to those stores.
Does your mall's decor seem dull to you? That's no accident—the interior of the mall is designed to be aesthetically pleasing but not particularly interesting, so as not to distract shoppers from looking at the merchandise, which is much more important.
Skylights flood the interiors of malls with natural light, but these skylights are invariably recessed in deep wells to keep direct sunlight from reflecting off of storefront glass, which would create glare and distract shoppers from looking at the merchandise. The wells also contain artificial lighting that comes on late in the day when the natural light begins to fade, to prevent shoppers from receiving a visual cue that it's time to go home.
A NEIGHBORLY APPROACH
Great attention is paid to the placement of stores within the mall, something that mall managers refer to as "adjacencies." The price of merchandise, as well as the type, factors into this equation: There's not much point in placing a store that sells $200 silk ties next to one that sells $99 men's suits.
Likewise, any stores that give off strong smells, like restaurants and hair salons, are kept away from jewelry and other high-end stores. (Would you want to smell cheeseburgers or fried fish while you and your fiancé are picking out your wedding rings?)
Have you ever bought milk, raw meat, or a gallon of ice cream at the mall? Probably not, and there's a good reason for it: Malls generally do not lease space to stores that sell perishable goods, because once you buy them you have to take them right home, instead of spending more time shopping at the mall.
Consumer tastes change over time, and mall operators worry about falling out of fashion with shoppers. Because of this, they keep a close watch on individual store sales. Even if a store in the mall is profitable, if it falls below its "tenant profile," or average sales per square foot of other stores in the same retail category, the mall operator may refuse to renew its lease. Tenant turnover at a well-managed mall can run as high as 10 percent a year.
HERE, THERE, EVERYWHERE
Malls have been a part of the American landscape for so long now that a little "mall fatigue" is certainly understandable. But like so much of American culture, the concept has been exported to foreign countries, and malls remain very popular around the world, where they are built not just in the suburbs but in urban centers as well. They have achieved the sort of iconic status once reserved for airports, skyscrapers, and large government buildings. They are the kind of buildings created by emerging societies to communicate to the rest of the world, "We have arrived." If you climb into a taxicab in almost any major city in the world, be it Moscow, Kuala Lumpur, Dubai, or Shanghai, and tell the driver, "Take me to the mall," he'll know where to go.
KILL 'EM MALL
America's love-hate relationship with shopping malls is now more than half a century old, and for as long as it has been fashionable to see malls as unfashionable, people have been predicting their demise. In the 1970s, "category killers" were seen as a threat. Stand-alone stores like Toys "R" Us focused on a single category of goods, offering a greater selection at a lower price than even the biggest stores in the mall couldn't match. They were soon followed by "power centers," strip malls anchored by "big box" stores like Walmart, and discount warehouse stores like Costco and Sam's Club. In the early 1990s, TV shopping posed a threat, only to fizzle out…and be replaced by even stronger competition posed by Internet retailers like Amazon.
By the early 1990s, construction of new malls in the United States had slowed to a crawl, but this had as much to do with rising real estate prices (land in the suburbs wasn't dirt cheap anymore), the savings and loan crisis (which made construction financing harder to come by), and the fact that most communities that wanted a mall already had one…or two…or more.
Increasing competition from other retailers and bad economic times in recent years have also taken their toll, resulting in declining sales per square foot and rising vacancy rates in malls all over the country. In 2009 General Growth Properties, the nation's second-largest mall operator, filed for bankruptcy; it was the largest real estate bankruptcy in American history.
But mall builders and operators keep fighting back, continually reinventing themselves as they try to keep pace with the times. Open-air malls are remade into enclosed malls, and enclosed malls are opened to the fresh air. One strategy tried in Kansas, Georgia, and other areas is to incorporate shopping centers into larger mixed-use developments that include rental apartments, condominiums, office buildings, and other offerings. Legacy Town Center, a 150-acre development in the middle of a 2,700-acre business park north of Dallas, for example, includes 80 outdoor shops and restaurants, 1,500 apartments and townhouses, two office towers, a Marriott Hotel, a landscaped park with hiking trails, and a lake. (Sound familiar?)
In other words, developers are trying to save the mall by finally building them just the way that Victor Gruen wanted to in the first place.
This article is reprinted with permission from Uncle John's Heavy Duty Bathroom Reader. The big brains at the Bathroom Readers' Institute have come up with 544 all-new pages full of incredible facts, hilarious articles, and a whole bunch of other ways to, er, pass the time. With topics ranging from history and science to pop culture, wordplay, and modern mythology, Heavy Duty is sure to amaze and entertain the loyal legions of throne sitters.
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Gruen was not the father of the shopping center, but got the idea of a large scale regional centre from John Graham. If you're interested, see my article on the Northgate Shopping Centre, which opened in 1950, in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, May 1984. Easily available on JSTORS or I can send you a pdf.
Sharon Nasella
September 10, 2017	12:18 pm
I think Temple Hoyne Buell should be in the running as the father of the outdoor shopping mall. His creation, the Cherry Creek Mall in Denver, upscale and still going strong.


Riesling in its various incarnations is to many connoisseurs the indisputable King of Wines. And where can it be found at its peak but in its cradle – Germany – where it is thought to have descended from the original vine of the forests, vitis silvestris.
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It is worth noting that German wine labels are nowhere near as hard to decipher as all those long and unpenetrable words may suggest. Right at the top comes the name of one of the country's thirteen designated wine regions. Below the picture appear the town and vineyard where the grapes are grown, followed by the grape variety and quality level.
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Is wonderfully fragrant, with citrus fruits mingling with linden flowers plus a typical whiff of petrol on the nose and with an elegant, full and round palate.
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From this boutique family winery, it displays a fine bouquet with a harmonious, complex taste and lovely zesty finish. Good aging potential!
This pale sample with a typical mineral nose along with hints of boiled sweets is crisp, pleasantly drinkable and food-friendly.
Available from: Vinotéka Modrý domeček, Vítova 8, Dobřichovice.
This one comes from the Saar valley and is pale with lush apple (Granny Smith) and citrus fruit with a hint of petrol developing, oily, slatey and very crisp and light.


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