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Genealogy Resources and Research Tips
17th Century Virginia Settlers
By Carol on November 5, 2020 • ( 2 Comments )
When one expands a family tree to the 17th century, a new world emerges. A distinctive society develops upon the pages of long ago equipped with unfamiliar customs, culture and standard daily living. Strange writing phrases and patterns are quickly noticeable by examining the time period materials and documents. Researching the 17th century is different from future centuries but very entertaining and intriguing. This fascinating time period quickly becomes a new learning curve for the majority involved with genealogy research. You can accomplish the task by broadening your horizons and allowing the flow of this century to drive you forward with your family genealogy. A positive realm embellished with patience is a perfect attitude to have when digging through these records.
Grave Markers Under an Oak Tree located in Accomack County, Virginia-Pictured in the background is the Ralph T. Whitelaw house. The right wing was built circa 1673 (Courtesy of The Library of Congress)
Finding bountiful documents takes a specific approach and may stay mysterious until you become more familiar with the record keeping process. The storage arrangements for much of this material will differ greatly from region to region. Digging into this unknown evidence allows new development from the family historian which makes the personal experience of 17th century exploration so satisfying. This blog will take you on a journey to various early surnames arriving to Virginia during the years of 1634 and 1635. You will discover the highlights of an initial stage probe attempt on actual persons from this time period. Always prepare yourself for research by setting guidelines and rules to follow. The stage probe mentioned encompasses this technique with a positive attitude, patience for the materials to appear and a method of analyzing the results correctly. The actual probe process developed over the years by researching and digging into the records. The inquiry will study the lives of these individuals with a specific approach by sharing the knowledge on hand and tracking their footprints one step at a time. Are you ready to begin? Moving on to the next segment where the evidence comes to life from the 17th century. The good stuff.
The early surnames mentioned below acquired land in the amount of 50 acres Applications submitted for these grants often provide additional details about the individuals. The identity of the person is confirmed by requiring the first and last name as well as the name of the individual who was responsible for transporting the applicant to Virginia. The dates associated with the land grant is the date of the processed application. Please note, dates of initial arrival are perhaps years before the date of the completed land grant. This procedure enhances importation grants which is one of the key factors of establishing settlement and becoming a landowner during the 17th century.
Land Grant for John Lacy dated 1667 (courtesy of the Library of Virginia Archives)
This probe will begin with Richard Lacy receiving 50 acres of land on July 2, 1635, in Virginia. This information is documented with the book entitled, "Virginia County Records" by William Crozier, page 22. Richard received his sponsorship for transportation from Samuel Weaver. The Lacy surname appeared frequently in Virginia throughout the 17th century as the following evidence will show. First, apply the research on the focused area. In this case, the information gives us the area of Virginia and by concentrating on this we begin to collect records immediately. An encouraging discovery of a later land grant issued on March 28, 1667, is shown for John Lacy. This particular parcel consisting of 370 acres is located in Rappahannock County. Could he be related to Richard? Also, the discovery of a will dated August 5, 1700, in the name of Peter Lacy brings additional questions. This individual apparently died at a young age as the will mentions his uncle, Thomas Connaway. Could this person be related to Richard Lacy of 1635? Now the original path we began with suddenly becomes wider and filled with possibilities of new probes and discoveries. A further probe into a possible link from Richard Lacy to John Lacy in the Rappahannock County area would be the first step in moving forward.
Map of Virginia by Christopher Browne circa 1685 (courtesy of Library of Congress)
The next probe will embark on an adventure with Robert Greenfield who received his land grant on July 9th, 1635. Robert arrives to Virginia due to the sponsorship of Thomas Phillips. The sponsor in this case may lead to a more direct location as discoveries of land abstracts plainly show Thomas Phillips owning 300 acres in James City. His home is located on the south side of Chickahominy River, and he receives an additional 150 acres for transporting not only Robert Greenfield, but also Robert Mason and Solomon Davillos. Your primary focus now becomes the region of Chickahominy River in James City, Virginia.
A brief listing of various surnames ranging from 1634 to 1635 are listed in this paragraph. Virginia quickly established the coastal areas during the 17th century and rapid growth occurred with new settlements advancing inward to the central portions of the colony. The additional surnames located for these years are; Baldwin, Pursen, Hardwood, Hasley, Griffin, Cowes, Baker, Powell, Eastwood, Dyer, Walton, Archer, Parker, Jones, Pattison, Edwards, Owles, Howard, Hill, Grimes, Manning, Foster, Bolton, Chant, Peale, Yates, Atkins, Hickman, Cripps and Crouch. These and many more can be found among the state records of Virginia.
As you can see from this brief example, the 17th century records are available for research. The most difficult thing with this type of research is locating exactly what you are looking for. Take in all the clues and hints. Each one of these will guide you on a remarkable journey to the past. Along the way, you will embark on adventures that you never thought of and all the while preserving the history of your family during the process. I wish you all tremendous success with your personal journeys and discoveries into the 17th century of colonial Virginia.
Abstracts of Virginia Land Patents published by The Virginia Magazine of History & Biography 1895
Early Virginia Immigrants by George Greer published 1912
John E. Manahan. "New Light on Old Charles City County." The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, vol. 64, no. 4, 1956, pp. 458–473. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4246251. Accessed 15, Oct. 2020.
QUISENBERRY, A. C. "THE FIRST PIONEER FAMILIES OF VIRGINIA." Register of Kentucky State Historical Society, vol. 11, no. 32, 1913, pp. 55–77. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23367151. Accessed 5 Nov. 2020.
Library of Virginia Online Database
Virginia County Records by William Crozier published 1905 pp. 21-26
Virginia Museum of History & Culture
Categories: Genealogy Resources and Research Tips, North Carolina, Virginia
Tagged as: 17th Century, Chickahominy, early setters, Importation grants, Rappahannock County, Research Tips, sponsorship immigration, Virginia
The 1716 Expedition-The Knights of The Golden Horseshoe
Genealogy & The Common Surname
Barbara Neal says:
Thank you so much for this useful post! I haven't gotten this far back on my Southern lines yet. When I do, I will have a path (or trail) to follow. Yeehaw!
I love reading post that have history in them. Thanks for sharing this info.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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The Adventure of Reason: Interplay Between Philosophy of Mathematics and Mathematical Logic, 1900-1940
Paolo Mancosu
Academic, Professional and General > Science > Mathematics > Mathematics
Paolo Mancosu presents a series of innovative studies in the history and the philosophy of logic and mathematics in the first half of the twentieth century. The Adventure of Reason is divided into five main sections: history of logic (from Russell to Tarski); foundational issues (Hilbert's program, constructivity, Wittgenstein, Godel); mathematics and phenomenology (Weyl, Becker, Mahnke); nominalism (Quine, Tarski); semantics (Tarski, Carnap, Neurath). Mancosu exploits extensive untapped archival sources to make available a wealth of new material that deepens in significant ways our understanding of these fascinating areas of modern intellectual history. At the same time, the book is a contribution to recent philosophical debates, in particular on the prospects for a successful nominalist reconstruction of mathematics, the nature of finitist intuition, the viability of alternative definitions of logical consequence, and the extent to which phenomenology can hope to account for the exact sciences.
PART 1: HISTORY OF LOGIC
1. The Development of Mathematical Logic from Russell to Tarski, 1900-1935
OART 2: FOUNDATIONS OF MATHEMATICS
2. Hilbert and Bernays on Metamathematics
3. Between Russell and Hilbert: Behmann on the foundations of mathematics
4. The Russellian influence on Hilbert and his school
5. On the constructivity of proofs
6. Wittgenstein's constructivization of Euler's proof of the infinitude of primes
7. Between Vienna and Berlin: The immediate reception of Godel's incompleteness theorems
8. Essay Review of Godel's Collected Works (volumes IV and V)
PART 3: PHENOMENOLOGY AND MATHEMATICS
9. Hermann Weyl: Predicativity and an intuitionistic excursion
10. Mathematics and Phenomenology: the correspondence between O. Becker and H. Weyl
11. Geometry, Physics and Phenomenology: Four letters of O. Becker to H. Weyl
12. Das Abenteuer der Vernunft: O. Becker and D. Mahnke on the phenomenological foundation of the exact sciences
PART 4: NOMINALISM
13. Harvard 1940-1941: Tarski, Carnap and Quine on a finitist language of mathematics for science
14. Quine and Tarski on nominalism
PART 5: THE EMERGENCE OF SEMANTICS: TRUTH AND LOGICAL CONSEQUENCE
15. Neurath and Kokoszynska on the semantic conception of truth
16. Tarski on models and logical consequence
17. Tarski on Categoricity and Completeness: an unpublished lecture from 1940
18. Archival Appendix. "On the completeness and categoricity of deductive theories" (1940), By Alfred Tarski.
Paolo Mancosu is Professor of Philosophy at University of California Berkeley. His main interests are in logic, history and philosophy of mathematics, and history and philosophy of logic.
The Oxford Handbook of the History of Mathematics
Hilbert's Programs and Beyond
The 9 Pitfalls of Data Science
How to Study as a Mathematics Major
How to Study for a Mathematics Degree
The Foundations of Mathematics (2nd edition)
Einstein's Heroes: Imagining the World Through the Language of Mathematics
Cows in the Maze: And Other Mathematical Explorations
Roger Penrose: Collected Works: Volume 5: 1990-1996
Spectral Theory and Differential Operators (2nd edition)


Government of Gujarat repealed Gujarat Agricultural University act 1969(Gujarat Act.No.13 of 1969)and promulgated Gujarat Agricultural Universities Act,2004(Guj.Act No.5 of 2004). Accordingly four Agricultural Universities have been carved out from erstwhile Gujarat Agricultural University with effect from 1st May 2004 SDAU. The Sardarkrushinagar Dantiwada Agricultural University is devoted for location specific agricultural research. As such the mandate of the SDAU , Sardarkrushinagar is confined to six districts viz., Gandhinagar, Mehsana, Patan, Sabarkantha, Banaskantha and Kutch of North Gujarat predominantly encompassing arid and semi arid climate. The University is located at Sardarkrushinagar, the main Campus of Sardarkrushinagar Dantiwada Agricultural University. Sardarkrushinagar campus is located 27 kms away from Palanpur. Palanpur is the district headquarters of Banaskantha and a broad gauge railway junction on Ahmedabad-Abu road- Delhi railway tract. It is also well connected through state transport bus services. Transport facility from Palanpur to Sardarkrushinagar is provided through a fleet of University buses. The district of Banaskantha is having natural combination of Agricultural land, hills, forests and dry sandy pastures. The fascinating view of the mountain ranges of Ambaji Hills and its surrounding forest adds to its scenic beauty and charm.Sardarkrushinagar Dantiwada Agricultural University results are available on Indiaresults.com as well.


In November, industrial production expanded a working-day adjusted 2.3% over the same month the previous year, which contrasted a 1.9% contraction in October and belied market expectations of a 3.4% decline. The November expansion was driven by a 2.5% year-on-year increase in manufacturing output, which contrasted the 4.6% drop in October. Moreover, the electricity, gas, steam and air conditioning sector continued to grow (+6.4% yoy), whereas mining dropped (-5.7% yoy). On a use-based classification, rising output of intermediate goods and energy were the main drivers behind the November expansion. Durable consumer goods production was the only sub-sector that contracted over the same month last year. The trend continues to improve, with the annual average variation in industrial production jumping from 0.1% in October to 0.8% in November, which marks the second positive reading since April 2008.
Looking for forecasts related to Industry in Spain? Download a sample report now.


Home » Blog » Cloud Video Conferencing and Telehealth; The Future of Healthcare?
A decades ago we were still in the infancy stages of telehealth. Technology, and particularly mobile and fixed line broadband, were at a level that could just about support the passage of high quality video content in a real-time flow. Now in 2014 the Internet has got to a level of development that means healthcare organisations and people in their homes can communicate seamlessly, in person, without having to do any travelling.
There are a hundreds of telehealth initiatives that have been run throughout the world. Most of them have one characteristic in common: they are trying to save time and money by connecting patients and healthcare practitioners through cloud-based video conferencing systems.
It is a fact that in many places around the world doctors are in short supply, the cost of care is increasing, and whole communities are unable to gain access to a decent quality of care.
So how far as the technology come? Is there an argument for widespread incorporation of telehealth solutions in the community? Can technology help to take the pressure off the stretched resources in A&E departments?
Let's take a look at some of the current and future implementations of cloud-based video conferencing around the world.
A classic example of the use of cloud-based video conferencing in healthcare situation is that of Royal Belfast hospital. The Clark Clinic consults with parents of children with heart conditions over a wide distance. Prior to implementing video conferencing solutions the logistics of getting face time for parents and their children with specialists was a real problem.
Dr Casey, consultant paediatric cardiologist, explains that the costs of buying the equipment required for video conferencing have been far outweighed by the cost savings it has provided. He went on to say that being able to share expertise with colleagues and patients outside the hospital, offering quality support, offers incalculable value.
The Haiti Medical Education Projects began in 2010, as a response to the destruction of the 4 main teaching hospitals in high tea, and the loss of many medical practitioners due to the earthquakes that wreaked havoc in the country. Lacking medical practitioners, and the facilities to teach, Haiti turned to video conferencing solutions.
Implementation of video conferencing in the high tea environment has not been without challenges. Bandwidth and internet stability in the country are notoriously poor. However, the use of video conferencing is has dramatically improved the country's ability to train medical staff and gets Haitian doctors treating Haitian patients.
From 2006 to 2010 Videonations facilitated national meetings for the North West ambulance service. In a bid to reduce escalating travel costs, and lost man-hours, meetings were organised over our cloud-based video conferencing solution.
The implementation of this new way of doing things saved both time and money, whilst facilitating rich, productive multi-collaborator meetings.
An ambitious project over in Third World Nigeria has been seeking to implement a video conferencing system to overcome the many healthcare challenges in the country. video conferencing will be used to connect up professionals in teaching hospitals with more remote medical centres, where medical expertise is less available. In addition, experts and consultants around the world will consult with less experienced professionals in Nigeria to advise on rare conditions.
The unique thing about Alesam in Nigeria is that physiological readings are also being passed from patients to medical practitioners at the same time as the video conference occurs. The physiological measures are used to do an ABC diagnosis.
The system also collects medical information for National statistics, health data and resource planning. At this stage Alesam are consulting with the Ministry of Health on the project. If it moves forwards it will be perhaps the most all-encompassing implementation of video conferencing and telehealth in the world, and could be a model for the future in other Third World and developed countries.
The Future: A Healthcare Revolution?
It is clear from these and the many other case studies in the UK, and around the world, that video conferencing has a key role to play now and in the future. With smart phones and tablets arriving in a timely fashion onto the market, and gaining popularity, much of the infrastructure required for cloud-based video conferencing is already owned by medical establishments and patients alike.
How far video conferencing will become integrated with the healthcare system is yet to be seen. It is clear, however, that there are financial and treatment benefits to using this technology. The Nigerian case study is perhaps the most ambitious to date. All-encompassing telehealth solutions, with real-time data and interconnection of medical colleagues and patients looks to be the future. Perhaps the biggest challenge to the implementation of telehealth is the current infrastructure. In the UK, for example, we can't just throw everything away and start again. The GP consortia will each look at their own solutions. Likewise hospitals will go their own way with technology.
The reality is that the cost of implementing video conferencing solutions, and sending triage and other data over the Internet, are not that great. The technology is largely in place. As medical practitioners and the general public become more technology savvy it seems only a matter of time before the training and transition costs of implementing remote solutions are so low that a revolution in health care will be inevitable.


The tower of power pumping through a stack of 10-inchers is the legendary bass tone for players who enjoy being heard. From chunky funk with the ubiquitous flip top, to the higher gain growl of indie rock. Still need more? Lean on the Character control for the fat distortion of Crimson and Kings X. It all sounds massive DI. Clean SVT thump to dirty earthquaking rump, you dial it in.
This is Version 2 which features a speaker sim defeat switch.
The Character Series pedals take their mojo from the most respected amp tones on both sides of the Atlantic. These pedals dont just have a single character, they have the whole cast, plot, and curtain call.
The Level and Drive controls work like a traditional, well-equipped amp. Low, Mid and High, however, are active, providing a wider array of tonal possibilities. Then theres the Character knob, which is something quite unique. This continuously-variable control moves seamlessly between different model voicings, covering vintage, high-gain, and face-melting lead tones. The Character and Mid controls, and the speaker emulations, are all engineered to personify the specific amplifier traits and speakers associated with each amplifier type. Put simply, Tech 21 has crammed the entire lineage of each amp style into a funky little box.
Lets me play direct into the PA.


As you've probably heard, it's quite cold in the Midwest today. Presently, it's sunny in Chicago, and a balmy -11 degrees that feels like -35 with windchill. That means I'm relegated to my apartment for the day, and the landlord (who controls the heat) has cranked all of the building's heaters up to the max, so I'm currently in only my shorts, and still quite warm.
Today's sitting and breathing session was the first one in Week 3, which is largely focused on emotions. Today's practice – titled Meditation on Emotions – involved sitting and focusing on my breath, and just sort of letting emotions happen. When they happened, I was to note them with a descriptor, and let them along by refocusing my attention on my breath.
I was particularly restless today. I have things on my to-do list that took up a lot of my attention largely because I'm excited about doing them. Also, I was sweating from man-made inferno of a space that is my bedroom right now. I felt it collecting on my palms, and along my brow; not enough to drip, but enough to be noteworthy. It made me want to move around more than usual while simultaneously lulling me to sleep while sitting up.
All of that said, I felt like I had the easiest time yet focusing on my breath today. It was very easy to fall into and continuously return to my breath throughout today's session. Largely, I was in a very neutral emotional state throughout my practice. I was able to note when I was hit by infatuation when an object of affection popped into my mind, anxiousness and anticipation when I thought about the alarm going off to indicate the end of my sitting, or restlessness for any of the reasons I mentioned before.
At one point about fifteen minutes in, I almost nodded off, then jerked awake with a deep inhale. More deep, rapid breaths followed, as did an overwhelming anger that quickly morphed into panic. The panic gave way to sadness almost as fast, and I felt my face contort. I didn't exactly hold back tears, but I didn't exactly let myself get to tears, either. I mentally gave myself permission to cry if necessary, but my body didn't seem to want to.
I let the emotion hang out for a minute while I investigated its physicality. After taking note of the welling in my chest, the light-headed feeling, and the increased heart rate, I brought my attention back to my breathing. It slowed, and I felt each of the muscles in my face relax again. I'm not sure what brought on that little moment, but I'm excited to learn more about it.
I also noticed that even with every other muscle in my body completely relaxed (except for the ones keeping my in the sitting position, I guess), I'll unwittingly hold my tongue against the roof of my mouth. It seems to be a way for me to hold tension without anyone else seeing it, and I wonder if the literal holding of my tongue is a manifestation of a more metaphorical tongue-holding.
What is it that I'm not saying? Is that self-imposed silence causing the inexplicable tension or is it a byproduct? Moreover, was the rapid succession of emotions I felt an unearthing of sorts? Is there a sadness underlying the anger, frustration, and anxiety I experience more regularly?
Luckily, I'll be spending quite a bit of time this week focusing on my emotions in my meditations. Hopefully some attentiveness will shed some light on some of the answers to those questions, if not this week, then eventually. Ya know, whenevs, no pressure.


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Scotland Travel Guide |
Home Airfare to Scotland Accommodation Information Things to do in Scotland Travel Guide
Walking the West Highland Way
There are four recognized long-distance walking trails in Scotland, and they criss-cross the country pretty evenly, allowing access to Scottish wilderness for those of us who prefer our transportation without wheels. Stretching 95 miles from outside of Glasgow to Fort Williams, the West Highland Way (WHW) is perhaps the most picturesque of the big four trails, and provides the unique opportunity to literally walk your way into the Highlands.
Travelers do the length of the path in anything from 6 to 10 days, depending on the desired speed and fitness level. I've worked out a 7-day itinerary that I think is fast enough to be challenging, but slow enough to allow you to take in the sights and enjoy everything along the way. There are a lot of options for places to stay along the route, so I have listed a recommendation for each overnight stop.
Map of the West Highland Way Route
My 7-day itinerary for the West Highland Way is shown here. Each stop marked with a red star. See the full itinerary below the map for details on each leg of the trip.
Day 1: Milngavie to Drymen
(12 miles / 19.2 km)
Get started early with a train ride from Glasgow to the northwestern suburb of Milngavie, the head of the trail. The Way starts out flat and easy, with no major climbs in the first day. About halfway through you'll find the town of Carbeth, which can be an emergency stop if you have any early problems. Just after Carbeth, you will pass a set of prehistoric standing stones, remnants of the first inhabitants of Scotland. If you have time, it's worth a stop at Glengoyne Distillery, for a dram of whisky before you continue on to Drymen. Other attractions on your first day include passes by two small lochs (Carbeth and Craigallian).
Recommended Lodging in Drymen: The Cottage at Drymen (Official site)
Day 2: Drymen to Rowardennan
(15 miles / 24 km)
After leaving Drymen, you immediately enter Garadhban Forest, and then there are two possible routes, one over the top of Conic Hill, the Way's first real hill climb, and the other taking a lowland route around it. For those of you hiking with dogs, there are restrictions for part of this leg of the route during the lambing season. Besides, the views of Loch Lomond are pretty spectacular. After the hill, you will reach the mid-day stopping point town of Balmaha. The rest of the day is spent walking along the shore of Loch Lomond, until you reach Rowardennan.
Recommended Lodging in Rowardennan: The Rowardennan Hotel (Book now)
Day 3: Rowardennan to Inverarnan
(14 miles / 22.5km)
The Way divides again just after leaving Rowardennan, but this time, it's the lower of the two routes that is the more interesting one. Taking that one, you pass by Rob Roy's Prison, a cave where the famous Scot reputedly once held a prisoner during his conflicts with the Duke of Montrose. Birdwatchers should take a short side trip to the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds reserve. Make sure you leave plenty of time for the remaining hike though, because after the midway point at Inversnaid comes one of the rougher parts of the trail, but also one of the prettiest. Before reaching Inverarnan, you get a great view of three mountains, Ben Lui, Ben Oss and Ben Dubhcraig.
Recommended Lodging in Inverarnan: The Drovers Inn (Official Site)
Day 4: Inverarnan to Bridge of Orchy
On this itinerary, this is the longest day, and you will want to make sure to leave Inverarnan early. Early in the day, you will pass two waterfalls, the Gray Mare's Tail and the Falls of Falloch. Pass through the town of Crianlarich and over the Kirkton Bridge to reach the 14th century chapel at St. Fillans. Tyndrum is the most natural mid-day stopping point, and after that, it is about 7 miles of lovely mountain views (but pretty flat walking) to Bridge of Orchy.
Recommended Lodging in Bridge of Orchy: Bridge of Orchy Hotel (Book now)
Day 5: Bridge of Orchy to Kingshouse
Just after the start of your day, you will want to take a short detour to climb a small hill just off of the trail, which gives great views of the surrounding wilderness. It is not a terribly difficult day of walking, but it is exposed, with very little tree cover, so it can be a slow one in bad weather. The Rannoch Moor is one of Britain's wildest areas, and photographic opportunities abound. Be aware that if you wander far from the trail here, you could find yourself half-sunk in a peat bog.
Recommended Lodging in Kingshouse (Glencoe): Kings House Hotel (Book now)
Day 6: Kingshouse to Kinlochleven
(9 miles / 14.4 km)
This stage of the Way is short, but can be difficult, especially in bad weather. The highest point on the Way, called The Devil's Staircase, is achieved early in the day. Like any high point on the trail, the views can be stunning. The trail then descends into Kinlochleven.
Recommended Lodging in Kinlochleven: Edencoille Bed and Breakfast (Official site)
Day 7: Kinlochleven to Fort William
The final day of the trail starts with a steep climb out of Kinlochleven. You spend the day surrounded by amazing mountain views, passing no fewer than 11 Munros (mountains of at least 3,000 ft.) Last but certainly not least among these is Ben Nevis, Britain's highest mountain, which you pass right by on a somewhat rough patch of trail before heading into Fort William for the official endpoint of the Way.
Recommended Lodging in Fort William: Ashburn House (Book now)
Tips for the Trail
Leave on a weekday, if at all possible. Most of the traffic on the trail starts and ends on a weekend, and unless you want to travel in a crowd, mid-week is best.
Prepare for bad weather, no matter what time of year you walk the Way.
In the summer, there will be midges, especially around wetter areas, so bring insect repellant.
Some parts of the trail are quite remote, so bring a first aid kit along just in case.
Don't you dare forget the camera!
Photo credit: The Road is Long by atomicjeep on Flickr


Following revelations of American spying on German government officials, including Chancellor Angela Merkel, Germany turns to Blackberry for a little security.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel checks her mobile phone during a session of the Bundestag on November 30, 2012 in Berlin, Germany. Credit: Getty Images.
Finally, Blackberry has a purpose again. Mobile security for Germany has become a big issue since the Edward Snowden leaks revealed that the NSA had tapped German Chancellor Angela Merkel's cellphone. Hoping to prevent things like this from happening again, Germany has turned to Blackberry (formerly Research in Motion), once the rules the cellphone market. The country's federal authority for information security checked several different smartphones and the only one to be approved was Blackberry.
Blackberry always prided itself on security (it's what President Obama used before taking office). And the company recently bought SecuSmart, a German security company designed to prevent phone tapping. On top of this, the smartphone company has launched secure BBM, making each message encrypted on both ends to make hacking as difficult as possible. Blackberry is currently making more than 3000 phones including this technology specifically for the German Federal Ministry of the Interior.
Blackberry's recent rebranding and late-to-the-party premium smartphones made to compete with Apple and Samsung could not save the company. But just maybe Edward Snowden will.


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Cloak and Data: The Real Story Behind Cambridge Analytica's Rise and Fall
The secretive data firm said it could move the minds of American voters. That wasn't its real victory.
Andy KrollMay/June 2018 Issue
Doug Chayka
1. "I can't stand lying to you every day"
In the late summer of 2015, Chris Wilson, the director of research, analytics, and digital strategy for Sen. Ted Cruz's presidential campaign, had a conversation with a contractor that left him furious. A widely respected pollster who had taken leave from his firm to work full time for Cruz, Wilson oversaw a team of more than 40 data scientists, developers, and digital marketers, one of the largest departments inside Cruz's Houston-based operation. The Iowa caucuses were fast approaching, and the Cruz campaign had poured nearly $13 million into winning the opening contest of the primary season.
RELATED: Undercover Video Captures Trump Campaign's Data Firm Discussing Entrapping Politicians With Sex
As the campaign laid the groundwork for Iowa, a sizable chunk of its spending—$4.4 million and counting—flowed to a secretive company with British roots named Cambridge Analytica. A relative newcomer to American politics, the firm sold itself as the latest, greatest entrant into the burgeoning field of political technology. It claimed to possess detailed profiles on 230 million American voters based on up to 5,000 data points, everything from where you live to whether you own a car, your shopping habits and voting record, the medications you take, your religious affiliation, and the TV shows you watch. This data is available to anyone with deep pockets. But Cambridge professed to bring a unique approach to the microtargeting techniques that have become de rigueur in politics. It promised to couple consumer information with psychological data, harvested from social-media platforms and its own in-house survey research, to group voters by personality type, pegging them as agreeable or neurotic, confrontational or conciliatory, leaders or followers. It would then target these groups with specially tailored images and messages, delivered via Facebook ads, glossy mailers, or in-person interactions. The company's CEO, a polo-playing Eton graduate named Alexander Nix, called it "our secret sauce."
As a rule, Nix said his firm generally steered clear of working in British politics to avoid controversy in its own backyard. But it had no qualms applying its mind-bending techniques to a foreign electorate. "It's someone else's political system," explains one former Cambridge employee, a British citizen. "It's not ours. None of us would ever consider doing what we were doing here."
"They're just full of shit, right?" Paul Manafort asked. "I don't want 'em anywhere near the campaign."
Brought to Cruz by two of the campaign's biggest backers, hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah, Cambridge Analytica was put in charge of the entire data and digital operation, embedding 12 of its employees in Houston. The company, largely owned by Robert Mercer, said it had something special for Cruz. According to marketing materials obtained by Mother Jones, it pitched a "revolutionary" piece of software called Ripon, an all-in-one tool that let a campaign manage its voter database, microtargeting efforts, door-to-door canvassing, low-dollar fundraising, and surveys. Ripon, Cambridge vowed, was "the future of campaigning." (The name is a clever bit of marketing: Ripon is the small town in Wisconsin where the Republican Party was born.)
The Cruz campaign believed Ripon might give it an edge in a crowded field of Republican hopefuls. But the software wasn't ready right away. According to former Cruz staffers, Wilson inquired about Ripon's status daily. It was almost finished, he was repeatedly told. Weeks passed, then months. Finally, in August 2015, one of the Cambridge consultants in Houston came clean. Ripon "doesn't exist," he told Wilson, according to several former Cruz staffers. "It'll never exist. I've just resigned because I can't stand lying to you every day anymore." The campaign had hired Cambridge in the belief it could use Ripon to help win Cruz the nomination; instead, it was paying millions of dollars to build the Ripon technology. "It was like an internal Ponzi scheme," a former Cruz campaign official told me.
The Cruz campaign couldn't fire Cambridge outright. The Mercers wouldn't be happy, and the campaign was too far along to ax a significant part of its digital staff. Still, Cruz officials steadily reduced Cambridge's role. Even though the campaign used Cambridge's psychological data in Iowa, Cruz's victory there in February 2016 did nothing to quell the growing distrust campaign officials felt toward the company.
The Cruz team wasn't alone in its doubts about the firm. Cambridge was also working, albeit in a more limited role, for rival Ben Carson's campaign, whose experience with the company was similarly frustrating. Cambridge, for instance, sold itself as an expert in TV advertising yet failed to grasp basic facts about buying ads. Carson staffers came away feeling like Cambridge was at best in over its head and at worst a sham.
After Carson and Cruz dropped out and Trump all but clinched the nomination, Doug Watts, a senior staffer on the Carson campaign, got a call from Paul Manafort, Trump's campaign chairman. "What do you know about Cambridge Analytica?" Manafort asked.
Watts replied that he didn't think much of the firm. "They're just full of shit, right?" Manafort said, according to Watts. "I don't want 'em anywhere near the campaign."
A few months later, on September 19, 2016, Alexander Nix strode onstage at the Concordia Annual Summit in Manhattan, a highbrow TED-meets-Davos confab. He was a featured speaker alongside Madeleine Albright, Warren Buffett, David Petraeus, and New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand. Wired magazine had recently named him one of its "25 Geniuses Who Are Creating the Future of Business."
In a dark tailored suit and designer glasses, wearing a signet ring on his left pinkie, Nix regaled the audience with the story of how Cambridge Analytica had turned Ted Cruz from an obscure and reviled US senator into "the only credible threat to the phenomenon Donald Trump." Using Cambridge's methods, the Cruz campaign had sliced and diced Iowa caucus-goers into hyperspecific groups based on their personality traits and the issues they cared about, such as the Second Amendment. As Nix clicked through his slides, he showed how it was possible to use so-called psychographics—a fancy term for measuring attitudes and interests of individuals—to narrow the universe of Iowans from the tens of thousands down to a single persuadable voter. In this case, Nix's slide listed a man named Jeffrey Jay Ruest, a registered Republican born in 1963. He was "very low in neuroticism, quite low in openness, and slightly conscientious"—and would likely be receptive to a gun rights message.
"Clearly the Cruz campaign is over now," he said as he finished his presentation, "but what I can tell you is that of the two candidates left in this election, one of them is using these technologies, and it's going to be very interesting to see how they impact the next seven weeks."
That candidate was Donald Trump. After Cruz dropped out in May 2016, the Mercers had quickly shifted their alliance to Trump, and his campaign hired their data firm over Manafort's apparent objections. "Obviously he didn't bargain for Rebekah Mercer being their big advocate," Watts says. "So I presume he just capitulated." Soon Trump jettisoned Manafort and installed in his place the Mercers' political Svengali, Steve Bannon, who was also a board member, vice president, and part-owner of Cambridge Analytica.
"Nix the salesman is an artist, to be honest," one colleague says. Another says, "He'll always be like, 'Can I give it a go? Can I sell this to you and work out the details afterward?'"
Come November 9, 2016, Cambridge wasted no time touting itself as a visionary that had seen Trump's path to the White House when no one else did. Nix took an international victory lap to drum up new political business in Australia, India, Brazil, and Germany. Another Cambridge director gushed that the firm was receiving so much client interest that "it's like drinking from a fire hose."
Actually, the 2016 election was the high-water mark for Cambridge Analytica. Since then, the firm has all but vanished from the US political scene. According to Nix, this was by design. Late last year, he said his company had ceased pursuing new US political business. But recently, an extraordinary series of developments unfolded that led to Nix's suspension as CEO and left the company's future uncertain. A whistleblower went public with allegations, since cited in a class-action lawsuit, that the company had used unethical methods to obtain a massive trove of Facebook data to fuel its psychographic tactics.
"We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people's profiles. And built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons," Chris Wylie, who helped launch the company, told the British Observer. "That was the basis the entire company was built on." Next came the release of an undercover investigation by the United Kingdom's Channel 4, which captured video of Nix and other Cambridge executives explaining how they could covertly inject propaganda "into the bloodstream to the internet." They also described how their services could include bribing a politician and recording undercover video or sending "very beautiful" Ukrainian "girls" to entrap a candidate.
The fallout was swift. Facebook, already under fire for facilitating the spread of disinformation, suspended Cambridge from its platform. British officials sought a warrant to search the company's office. Lawmakers on both sides of the Atlantic demanded answers. "They should be barred from any US election or government work until a full investigation can be conducted," Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas), a member of the House Intelligence Committee, tweeted.
The story of Cambridge Analytica's rise—and its rapid fall—in some ways parallels the ascendance of the candidate it claims it helped elevate to the presidency. It reached the apex of American politics through a mix of bluffing, luck, failing upward, and—yes—psychological manipulation. Sound familiar?
Like Trump, Nix was a master of hype who peddled a story that people wanted to believe. Take Jeffrey Ruest, the voter Nix identified at the Concordia Summit, down to the latitude and longitude of his home, to illustrate the firm's psychographic prowess in Iowa. The message was that Cambridge had the ability to peer into the minds of—and to persuade—voters on the most granular level. Ruest wouldn't have been useful to Cruz or any of his GOP rivals in Iowa, though. He lives a thousand miles away in North Carolina. But why let inconvenient details interfere with the perfect pitch?
2. "We called him Mr. Bond"
"We use the same techniques as Aristotle and Hitler," the consultant said. "We appeal to people on an emotional level to get them to agree on a functional level."
The year was 1992. The consultant was Nigel Oakes, a former Monte Carlo TV producer and ad man for Saatchi & Saatchi, and he was speaking to the trade magazine Marketing. Oakes was then running the Behavioural Dynamics Institute, a "research facility for understanding group behaviour" and for harnessing the power of psychology to craft messages that change hearts and minds. But in reality, Oakes' institute was a stalking horse for the company he would launch the year after the interview.
Strategic Communication Laboratories, the public affairs company that would later spawn Cambridge Analytica, began small, applying its behavioral-science-minded approach to public influence campaigns in the United Kingdom, including one that, it boasts, rescued Lloyd's of London by convincing Britons to invest another $1.5 billion in the ailing insurance market. But SCL soon branched into politics. Oakes says he advised Nelson Mandela's African National Congress on how to prevent violence during the 1994 elections, as well as politicians in Asia, South America, and Europe. In 2000, the government of Indonesian President Abdurrahman Wahid, who was struggling to contain the violence and upheaval in his country, hired Oakes to burnish his image, which involved building an elaborate media command center in Jakarta for monitoring and shaping public sentiment. "We called him Mr. Bond because he is English," one of Oakes' Indonesian employees told the Independent, "and because he is such a mystery."
Data expert Alexander Nix, CEO of Cambridge Analytica
Mother Jones illustration
In 2005, SCL expanded into military and defense, pitching the use of "psychological operations" and "soft power" in the war on terror. The firm began picking up major clients, including the Pentagon and the UK Ministry of Defense, advising them on which Afghan leaders to target with counterinsurgency messages or how to dissuade teenage boys from joining Al Qaeda.
The company had meanwhile hired Nix, a former financial analyst, to grow its nondefense business. Former colleagues say he was just the man for the job. "Nix the salesman is an artist, to be honest," one told me. Another referred to him as a "chancer," the British term for a consummate opportunist. "He'll always be like, 'Can I give it a go?'" the colleague said. "'Can I sell this to you and work out the details afterward?'"
Nix had an eye on the United States, where the courts were stripping away restrictions on political spending and empowering a new class of individual megadonors. He traveled here in 2010 to get the lay of the land but came away discouraged. Political consultants picked sides in America, he learned. A British outfit that worked with both left- and right-of-center clients might struggle to break into the market.
Then, on Election Day in November 2012, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney watched as his campaign's voter-turnout app, code-named Project Orca, crashed. It was humiliating but indicative of a larger dynamic: Democrats, powered by President Barack Obama's 2008 and 2012 runs, had gained a huge advantage over their Republican counterparts in the realms of data and technology. The GOP's 2012 postmortem report called for a cultural shift inside the party to embrace new tools and methodologies to win. "We have to be the Party that is open and ready to rebuild our entire playbook," it read, "and we must take advice from outside our comfort zone."
Nix saw his opening. SCL had recently rebranded itself as an expert in data analytics, the sifting and distilling of vast amounts of information from different sources into actionable outcomes. That skill set, combined with SCL's previous work in microtargeting and psy-ops, made it an ideal candidate to find an audience in the world of Republican politics. "The Republicans had been left behind," Nix later said. "By the time Romney lost in 2012, there was a vacuum. And so that was the commercial opportunity."
Nix was soon introduced to Chris Wylie, then a twentysomething Canadian technologist. Wylie had worked under Obama's director of targeting and consulted for Canada's Liberal Party. Nix hired him and put him to work building a company that could attract clients in the hypercompetitive US political market. Wylie, for his part, had an idea about how his new employer, SCL, might gain an edge.
In 2007, David Stillwell, then a Ph.D. student in psychology, stumbled onto a digital gold mine. He'd always wondered about his personality and how he would score in the five-factor model, a personality test that measures openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Known as Ocean, this model is widely used by psychologists. But one challenge they encountered when applying it to different areas—marketing, relationships, politics—was gathering sufficient data. People naturally hesitate to give personal information about their fears, desires, and motivations.
Stillwell knew a little code, so he pulled certain Big Five questionnaires off the internet, stuck them in a quiz format, and uploaded an app to Facebook called myPersonality. It quickly went viral. Millions of people took the quiz, and with their permission, Stillwell went on to accumulate data on personality traits and Facebook habits for 4 million of them.
Using this data, Stillwell, now working at the University of Cambridge's Psychometrics Centre, and two other researchers published a paper in 2013 in which they showed how you could predict an individual's skin color or sexuality based on her Facebook "likes." They found a correlation between high intelligence and likes of "thunderstorms," "The Colbert Report," and "curly fries," while users who liked the Hello Kitty brand tended to be high on openness and lower on conscientiousness, agreeableness, and emotional stability.
Stillwell told me that as an afterthought, he and his co-authors threw in some language at the end about the commercial possibilities of their findings. The paper attracted the attention of companies looking to leverage Facebook and other social-media data for their own purposes. One person who took a keen interest was SCL's Chris Wylie.
According to emails obtained by Mother Jones, Wylie approached Stillwell and a colleague via a fellow faculty member, a young Russian American professor named Aleksandr Kogan, hoping to cut a deal in which the firm would get access to Stillwell's data.
Stillwell hadn't heard of SCL. But he agreed to a meeting. When dates were circulated between the Cambridge academics and the SCL representatives, the title wasn't subtle: "Panopticon meeting." (Panopticon refers to a prison or building constructed so that all parts of it are visible by a single watchman but the surveilled can't see who's viewing them.) In the end, Stillwell decided not to partner with SCL.
Undeterred, SCL instead hired Kogan, who went on to create his own Facebook app, "thisisyourdigitallife." As detailed in a class-action suit against Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, the app—which purported to be for academic research—not only collected personality data on the 270,000 people who took the quiz but also let Kogan vacuum up Facebook user data on all their friends. The Washington Post reported in late March that Facebook separately provided Kogan with data on 57 billion friendships as part of his work with two of the company's data scientists between 2013 and 2015. Around the same time he was mining Facebook data, Kogan also forged a relationship with Saint Petersburg University, which hired him as an associate professor and provided him with research funding. He denies this research had any connection to his work for SCL.
According to Wylie, Kogan acquired more than 50 million profiles. He says Kogan then passed that data to SCL—in apparent violation of Facebook's terms of use—in order to build its psychographic profiling methods. "Everyone knew we were wading into a gray area," Wylie later said. "It was an instance of if you don't ask questions, you won't get an answer you don't like." (Kogan denies any wrongdoing: "My view is that I'm being basically used as a scapegoat.")
Nix now had his calling card. SCL would break into the $10 billion American political market by pitching itself as a "cutting-edge" consultancy using "behavioral microtargeting"—that is, influencing voters based not on their demographics but on their personalities—and sophisticated data modeling to win elections. His timing couldn't have been better.
3. "Marketing materials aren't given under oath."
One day in 2013, a knockabout Republican political consultant named Mark Block and his colleague boarded a flight from Los Angeles to New York. As the plane took off, they got to talking with the man seated next to them, an ex-military officer who mentioned he worked as a subcontractor for a company seeking US political clients. "They do cyberwarfare for elections," the subcontractor said. Block dozed off as his colleague and her seatmate continued to chat. When they landed, his colleague told him excitedly that they needed to talk to a guy named Alexander Nix.
Not long after, they met with Nix in a conference room in the Willard InterContinental hotel, a stone's throw from the White House. The meeting lasted more than six hours, Block recalls, as Nix described how they could use personality data and psychographics in American campaigns. "By the time he was done, I'm going like, 'Holy shit,'" Block told me. "I had been aware of what Obama had done…But this seemed to be light-years ahead."
At a subsequent meeting Block attended, Nix was introduced to Rebekah Mercer, who was quickly becoming one of the biggest donors in Republican politics. Bekah, as she's known to friends, is the middle daughter of Robert Mercer, a billionaire computer scientist who pioneered the use of algorithms in investing at the Long Island-based hedge fund Renaissance Technologies. Bekah is the political animal of the Mercer family, and in the late 2000s and early 2010s she plowed $35 million from her family foundation into conservative groups such as the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, and the Heartland Institute. The Mercers also invested a reported $10 million in Breitbart News in 2011. They've donated millions to Republican candidates and super-PACs, from Mitt Romney and Herman Cain to a congressional candidate in Oregon named Arthur Robinson, who caught Robert Mercer's attention with a pseudoscientific newsletter in which he argued that small amounts of nuclear radiation have health benefits.
Quid Pro Mercer
How the megadonors have leveraged their political spending into profits for their data firm
The Mercers had attended the semiannual donor retreats organized by Charles and David Koch and had, according to a source familiar with their political work, invested in the Kochs' data venture, Themis (named for the Greek goddess of wisdom and order), which was supposed to close the gap with Democrats in the data arms race. But after Romney's loss in 2012, the Mercers were fed up. Bekah Mercer turned heads at a 2012 postmortem event at the University Club in Manhattan when she excoriated the Romney campaign for its lackluster data operation. According to people familiar with the Mercers' thinking, Bekah and her father set out to find their own data geniuses.
Over lunch in Manhattan, Bekah listened intently as Nix gave his pitch. When he finished, she said, "I really want you to tell this to my dad." She gave him an address with instructions to meet later that day. At the appointed time, Nix and Block arrived at a grungy sports bar on the Hudson River, north of the city. "We're going like, 'What the fuck?'" Block says. Bekah texted to say she and her father would soon arrive. Moments later, Sea Owl, the Mercer family's 203-foot superyacht, pulled up to the dock behind the sports bar.
Aboard the yacht, Nix took a seat next to Robert Mercer, opened his Mac, and launched into his spiel again. Bekah sat next to her father on the couch. Behind them stood Steve Bannon, the investment banker turned Hollywood producer and conservative activist who took over Breitbart News after the death of Andrew Breitbart. Whatever Nix told the Mercers that day in 2013, it worked: They agreed to invest a reported $15 million in a new company that would be the face of SCL's American political work. Bannon was given a seat on the board and a stake in the new company to help, as Nix later said, the firm navigate the US political scene. Nix installed himself in Mercerworld, presenting himself as Bekah Mercer's political guru and taking meetings at the Breitbart Embassy, the Capitol Hill row house that served as the conservative website's offices and Bannon's crash pad. The company was incorporated in Delaware on December 31, 2013. The name was a mix of old and new: Cambridge Analytica.
But if the Mercers had paid closer attention to a test run of Nix's venture in the 2013 Virginia governor's race, they might have reconsidered going into business with SCL. A PAC, the Middle Resolution, had paid Nix's company several hundred thousand dollars that year for a list of persuadable voters to help elect Republican Ken Cuccinelli, who was running for governor. Months passed, and the list never arrived. When the group's founder, Bob Bailie, demanded the list, Nix asked for more money and Bailie cut bait. Another Virginia-based group, Americans for Limited Government, then paid SCL $100,000 to create a list of suburban female voters who traditionally supported Democrats but might be swayed to vote for Cuccinelli if shown the right message. Late in the race, the group's canvassers took Nix's list into the field and returned with a perplexing result: The people on it were already Cuccinelli supporters. The higher-ups at Americans for Limited Government asked another firm to analyze the list. It turned out SCL had handed them a roster of die-hard Republicans.
Despite these early missteps, Cambridge Analytica quickly signed on a host of new clients thanks to the Mercers, who leveraged their position as megadonors to effectively strong-arm politicians into using their new firm. "It was the Mercers that made people work with us," an early Cambridge employee told me. Cambridge boasted eight clients at the federal level in 2013 and 2014, and members of the Mercer family have supplied financial backing to each of them, including to five during that election cycle. One was former Ambassador John Bolton's super-PAC, a potential vehicle for a presidential run. During the 2014 midterms, Robert Mercer gave $1 million to the group, which soon paid Cambridge more than $340,000 to develop Cambridge's personality-based targeting on the issue of national security. It was an odd arrangement: Recipients of Mercer money would turn around and pay a vendor partly owned by the Mercers. (Rebekah Mercer did not respond to requests for comment.)
"Maybe [hacked information] was actually given to a campaign to help with the microtargeting. That's why I think the role of Cambridge Analytica…needs to be looked at very carefully."
Cambridge Analytica's work in the 2014 midterms received mixed reviews. A consultant for Thom Tillis' US Senate race in North Carolina singled out for praise a Cambridge contractor who had embedded with the campaign. But in other instances, the firm's seemingly weak grasp of American politics turned off operatives. Once, a Cambridge employee appeared unaware what a precinct was. In another case, according to a prominent Republican consultant, Cambridge proposed influencing Republican voters living overseas by creating a model that targeted all absentee voters, suggesting that the firm didn't realize that people who live in the United States can also vote absentee.
The most common criticism I heard about Nix was that he habitually overpromised and underdelivered. According to a person who worked with him, Nix had a saying: "Marketing materials aren't given under oath." (Nix, Cambridge, and SCL did not respond to a detailed list of questions for this story.)
But Nix and his company used their work helping to elect Tillis and another Mercer-backed candidate, Tom Cotton of Arkansas, as a steppingstone. Cambridge explored new corporate clients, pitching the Colorado-based DISH Network. ("DISH does not have, nor has it ever had, a business relationship with Cambridge Analytica," a spokesman said.)
Perhaps inspired by Bannon, whom Wylie described to the Washington Post as "Nix's boss," the company began testing messages designed to tap into immigration fears, anti-government sentiment, and an affinity for strongmen—"build the wall," "drain the swamp," "race realism" (a euphemism for rolling back civil rights protections). It also surveyed opinions about Russian President Vladimir Putin. It seemed as if they were getting ready for a presidential campaign—but which one?
4. "They've gotten the wool pulled over their eyes"
At 8:05 p.m. on March 22, 2015, Ted Cruz's personal Twitter account posted a message: "Tonight around midnight there will be some news you won't want to miss. Stay tuned…" There wasn't much suspense—Cruz had effectively launched his presidential bid the day he arrived in the Senate two years earlier, but now he would make it official.
At midnight, the senator's team in Houston would turn on the campaign website built by Cambridge Analytica. Then, at 12:01 a.m.…nothing. "We couldn't even get the website up," one former Cruz staffer told me. Eight excruciating minutes passed before Cruz simply sent another tweet: "I'm running for President and I hope to earn your support!"
It was a harbinger of things to come. Interviews with eight people who worked on the Cruz campaign reveal a litany of disputes with Nix. As the campaign's frustrations mounted, it winnowed the number of Cambridge staffers in Houston from 12 to 3.
Cruz's campaign did, however, employ Cambridge's psychographic models, especially in the run-up to Iowa. According to internal Cambridge memos, the firm devised four personality types of possible Cruz voters—"timid traditionalists," "stoic traditionalists," "temperamental" people, and "relaxed leaders." The memos laid out how the campaign should talk to each group about Cruz's marquee issues, such as abolishing the IRS or stopping the Iran nuclear deal. A timid traditionalist, the memo said, was someone who was "highly emotional" but valued "order and structure in their lives." For this kind of person, an "Abolish the IRS" message should be presented as something that "will bring more/restore order to the system." Recommended images included "a family having a nice moment together, with a smaller image representing Washington off to the side—representing that a small state makes for better private moments." But for a temperamental type, the suggested image was a "young man tossing away a tax return and taking the key of his motorbike to head out for a ride."
Almost two months before the Iowa caucus, the Guardian reported that Cambridge and the Cruz campaign were using unauthorized Facebook data—an early indication of what Chris Wylie would later reveal in full. In response, Facebook told Cambridge to delete any Facebook data it held. Wylie says that while he deleted the data in his possession, he merely filled out a form and sent it back to Facebook certifying that he'd deleted the information. Facebook, he adds, never verified whether he actually had. A former Cruz staffer told me that well after the Guardian report, he could still use Cambridge's Facebook data to build voter models.
The Cruz campaign eked out a victory in Iowa, and Nix was quick to take credit during an interview on Fox News. Whether Cambridge's psychographics played any part in Cruz's win is debatable: When the firm began using these techniques on December 1, two months before the caucus, Cruz was polling at 28 percentage points in Iowa. From there to caucus day, his numbers fluctuated in the range between 23 and 32 percent. Contrary to Nix's claim that Cruz was languishing in the single digits until Cambridge came along, the candidate was already well on his way to winning when Cambridge's secret sauce kicked in. "If we weren't using the personality stuff until that point in time," a former Cruz official says, "then Nix can't credibly make the argument that it mattered, right?"
Adding to suspicions about whether Cambridge's personality profiling worked as claimed was the fact that the company refused to share any of its underlying models. Cambridge advised the campaign on how best to deliver Cruz's message to "stoic traditionalists" and "relaxed leaders," but it wouldn't divulge how it came up with those personality types in the first place. "They're the least transparent company in the business," a former Cruz staffer told me. Nor did Cambridge seem to understand the fundamentals of how a presidential campaign operated: Two weeks out from the South Carolina primary, Cruz's data team discovered that the company hadn't updated the voter database feeding its models in seven months. The result: In a primary where the victory margin could be in the low thousands, there were 70,000 people Cruz wasn't targeting because his data was stale. "How fucked up is that?" the former Cruz staffer told me. "That's political malpractice." Cruz finished third in South Carolina. After the opening four states, he stopped using Cambridge's personality-profiling models.
The company's lackluster performance on the Cruz campaign didn't stop Nix from walking onstage at the Concordia Summit and taking credit for Cruz's second-place finish in the nomination fight. Word of his speech spread in Cruz circles, and campaign alums watched the video of Nix and scoffed. "Most of that's bullshit or things we designed on the campaign," one senior Cruz staffer told me. "Everybody has respect for the Mercers. But they've gotten the wool pulled over their eyes."
5. "The phenomenon Donald Trump"
The Cruz campaign was still in the process of unwinding when Cambridge, following the lead of its investors, the Mercers, offered its services to the Trump campaign. Cambridge had previously reached out to Trump's team, but his advisers didn't want to hire the firm if it was also working for his rivals. Now, this was no longer an issue. Nix sent three employees to Texas to meet with Brad Parscale, Trump's head of digital operations, who had no political experience and had gotten to know the Trump family while building websites for their company. (Parscale was recently named Trump's 2020 campaign manager.)
As Nix courted the Trump campaign, he came up with an idea to boost the GOP nominee-in-waiting—one that was more in line with the political dirty tricks he and his colleagues would later discuss with Channel 4's undercover reporter. WikiLeaks' Julian Assange had recently told a British TV station that he had come into possession of internal emails belonging to senior Clinton campaign officials—the result of a cyberattack later revealed to be the work of Russian hackers. Nix reached out to Assange via his speaking agency, seeking a meeting. Nix reportedly hoped to get access to the emails and help Assange share them with the public—that is, he wanted to weaponize the information. According to both Nix and Assange, the WikiLeaks founder passed on his offer.
RELATED: A Groundbreaking Case May Force Controversial Data Firm Cambridge Analytica to Reveal Trump Secrets
Nevertheless, by late June Nix had landed a contract with the Trump team. At first, a handful of Cambridge employees set up shop in San Antonio, where Parscale was running Trump's digital operation out of his marketing firm's offices. But Matt Oczkowski, Cambridge's head of product, was eventually put in charge of the San Antonio office after Parscale relocated to campaign headquarters in Trump Tower.
What exactly Cambridge Analytica did for Trump remains murky, though in the days after the election, Nix's firm blasted out one press release after another touting the "integral" and "pivotal" role it played in Trump's shocking upset. Nix later told Channel 4's undercover reporter that Cambridge deserved much of the credit for Trump's win. "We did all the research, all the data, all the analytics, all the targeting. We ran all the digital campaign, the television campaign, and our data informed all the strategy," he said. Another Cambridge executive suggested the firm had delivered Trump victories in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—states crucial to his ultimate win. "When you think about the fact that Donald Trump lost the popular vote by 3 million votes but won the Electoral College vote, that's down to the data and the research."
Cambridge helped run an anti-Hillary Clinton online ad campaign for a Mercer-funded super-PAC that paid the company $1.2 million. The ads stated that Clinton "might be the first president to go to jail" and echoed conspiracy theories about her health. But according to multiple Republican sources familiar with Cambridge's work for Trump, the firm played at best a minor role in Trump's victory. Parscale has said that $5 million of the $5.9 million the Trump campaign paid Cambridge was for a large TV ad buy. When Cambridge bungled that—some of the ads wound up running in the District of Columbia, a total waste of money—the firm was not used for future ad buys. During an interview with 60 Minutes last fall, Parscale dismissed the company's psychographic methods: "I just don't think it works." Trump's secret strategy, he said, wasn't secret at all: The campaign went all-in on Facebook, making full use of the platform's advertising tools. "Donald Trump won," Parscale said, "but I think Facebook was the method."
Nix, however, seemed determined to capitalize on Trump's victory. Cambridge opened a new office a few blocks from the White House, where Bannon would soon take on his new role as Trump's chief political strategist. (Bannon retained his stake in the firm, valued between $1 million and $5 million, until April 2017, months after Trump took office.) SCL, its UK-based affiliate, eventually relocated its global headquarters from London to Arlington, Virginia, and began chasing government work, quickly landing a $500,000 State Department contract to monitor the impact of foreign propaganda. SCL briefly signed on Lt. General Michael Flynn as an adviser and later hired a former Flynn associate to run its DC office.
"Alexander was always entertaining," a former colleague says. "In the end, he will always hang himself."
But even as Nix jetted around the globe and Cambridge opened new offices in Brazil and Malaysia, the company found itself with few allies in the United States. Trump campaign alums and Republican Party staffers distanced themselves from the company—especially after news broke last October that Nix had communicated with Assange. "We were proud to have worked with the RNC and its data experts and relied on them as our main source for data analytics," Michael Glassner, the Trump campaign's executive director, said in a statement released in response to these reports. "Any claims that voter data from any other source played a key role in the victory are false."
By late 2017, after giving every indication that Cambridge Analytica intended to be a major player in American politics, Nix told Forbes the firm was no longer "chasing any US political business," a decision he framed as a strategic move. "There's going to be literally dozens and dozens of political firms [working in 2018], and we thought that's a lot of mouths to feed and very little food on the table." This seemed dubious—working on a winning presidential race is a golden ticket that most consultants would dine out on for years. In reality, Cambridge Analytica's reputation for spotty work had circulated widely among Democratic and Republican operatives, who were also put off by Nix's grandstanding and self-promotion. Mark Jablonowski, a partner at the firm DSPolitical, told me that there was "basically a de facto blacklist" of the firm and "a consensus Cambridge Analytica had overhyped their supposed accomplishments." Perhaps even worse for a company that had relied on its billionaire patrons to open doors to new clients, the Mercers ceased "flogging for" Cambridge, according to Doug Watts, the former Ben Carson staffer.
For any upstart company, this would have constituted a crisis. But being shunned from the American political scene, it turned out, was just the start of Cambridge's problems.
6. "I am aware how this looks"
Nix was near his London office when a Channel 4 correspondent confronted him. "Have you ever used entrapment in the past?" the reporter asked, thrusting a microphone in Nix's face. "Is it time for you to abandon your political work?"
Captured on tape musing about entrapment and spreading untraceable propaganda, accused of misappropriating Facebook data to meddle with the minds of American voters—by March 20, scandal had reached Nix's doorstep. He brushed past the reporter and into his building.
"I am aware how this looks," Nix said in a statement. He explained that the explosive comments he and his colleagues had made to an undercover reporter were untrue. They were just "playing along" with "ludicrous hypothetical scenarios" proposed by a prospective client. His company, meanwhile, claimed that it did not "use or hold data from Facebook profiles." By the end of the day, Cambridge Analytica had suspended Nix pending an investigation, and he had offered to resign if it would spare the company. "Alexander was always entertaining," a former colleague told me. "In the end, he will always hang himself."
The revelations about Cambridge Analytica's alleged political tricks and shady data mining added to a growing list of problems the company was already facing. A few months earlier, in December, Nix had appeared before the House Intelligence Committee—though not in person. The panel's Republicans, who ran the committee's Russia probe with an eye toward minimizing any political damage to the president, arranged for Nix to beam in by video link. One topic of discussion was Nix's outreach to WikiLeaks. His testimony remains secret, though he subsequently acknowledged approaching Assange in an effort to get his hands on "information that could be incredibly relevant to the outcome of the US election." (In the Channel 4 undercover footage, Nix mocked the Intelligence Committee and said the Republican members asked him only three questions. "Five minutes—done," he said, adding, "They're politicians; they're not technical. They don't understand how it works.")
From left: Rebekah Mercer, Christopher Wylie and Steve Bannon
The committee's Democrats had taken a keen interest in Trump's data operation and Cambridge Analytica's role in particular. Michael Bahar, a former general counsel on the committee who worked on the investigation before entering private practice, told me that one line of inquiry explored whether Cambridge Analytica had deployed its targeting tactics to more effectively spread Russian disinformation, and whether it had been enlisted to use data and analytics stolen from the Democratic National Committee by Russian-directed hackers. "Maybe [hacked information] was actually given to a campaign to help with the microtargeting," Bahar says. "That's why I think the role of Cambridge Analytica…needs to be looked at very carefully."
Scrutiny will likely intensify given revelations that Cambridge's Russian connections predated the 2016 election. Wylie, the former Cambridge employee, provided documents to the Observer revealing that the firm briefed Lukoil, the Russian oil company, on its behavioral microtargeting strategies. In a recent interview with CNN, Wylie drew a startling connection between the firm's work and the Russian cyberattacks during the election. "I am concerned that we made Russia aware of the programs that we were working on," he said, "and that might have sparked an idea that eventually led to some of the disinformation programs that we have seen."
In addition to Nix, Democrats, according to a House Intelligence Committee memo, had hoped to call as witnesses Alex Tayler, Cambridge Analytica's chief data officer; Julian Wheatland, the chairman of SCL; and Rebekah Mercer. Instead, in early March, committee Republicans hastily shut down the probe, though Democrats have vowed to continue investigating on their own, although without subpoena power. On March 21, the committee's ranking member, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), wrote to Aleksandr Kogan seeking an interview and requesting documents about his interactions with SCL and Cambridge Analytica. Chris Wylie has agreed to meet with committee Democrats.
The firm also remains a subject of interest to special counsel Robert Mueller's team. According to the Wall Street Journal, Mueller last fall requested the emails of any Cambridge employee who worked on the Trump campaign. Nix's unguarded comments to Channel 4 may be of interest. He said the firm relied on an encrypted email system that deleted messages two hours after they were read. "So then there's no evidence, there's no paper trail, there's nothing."
Yet another avenue of interest for investigators is Cambridge's possible role in a second 2016 election that featured covert Russian meddling—the British referendum to leave the European Union, known as Brexit. In 2016, Cambridge seemed to break its informal rule of forgoing UK political work when it unveiled a partnership with Leave.EU, the more extreme of the pro-Brexit campaigns, only to backtrack and deny any involvement in Brexit.
In February, as part of a broader inquiry into fake news, members of the British Parliament's Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee grilled Nix for more than two hours. He unconvincingly blamed the announcement of the Leave.EU partnership on "a slightly overzealous PR consultant." He claimed that he and his staff had "never worked with a Russian organization in Russia or any other country." And he denied that his firm used Facebook data. After the latest round of revelations, Damian Collins, a conservative member of Parliament who chairs the committee, said Nix had "deliberately misled" his panel "by giving false statements" and vowed to further investigate.
The blowback from the Cambridge Analytica scandals also hit Facebook, which faced a torrent of criticism for its lax handling of users' data. The company's stock price tumbled by 7 percent, losing more than $50 billion in value, and the Federal Trade Commission reportedly launched an investigation into its data practices. The hashtag #DeleteFacebook trended on Twitter. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg finally broke his silence, issuing a statement admitting to a "breach of trust" between Facebook and its users.
Yet, critics wondered, just how many times had their trust been breached? Cambridge Analytica was hardly alone in hoovering up user data. And how exactly were Cambridge Analytica's psychographic techniques different from Facebook's core business model—tapping into the vast amounts of data it collects on its users to guide hypertargeted advertising, be it for shoe companies or political campaigns or dubious fake news sites.
By most accounts, Cambridge Analytica's main feat of political persuasion was convincing a group of Republican donors, candidates, and organizations to hand over millions of dollars. (A company called Emerdata that lists Nix as a director recently added Rebekah Mercer and another Mercer daughter to its board, suggesting that Nix hasn't fallen out with all his GOP patrons.) But Cambridge's controversial foray into US politics spawned larger questions about how our social-media habits can be turned against us, and how companies such as Facebook hold more power over our lives—the ability to shape public conversation, even political outcomes—than many people are comfortable with. Whether or not Cambridge Analytica survives, data about our personality types, our predilections, our hopes and fears—information we unwittingly divulge via status updates, tweets, likes, and photos—will increasingly be used to target us as voters and consumers, for good and ill, and often without our knowledge. These tactics will facilitate the spread of fake news and disinformation and make it easier for foreign interests to intervene in our elections—whether they are Russian trolls or British chancers.
Image credits: Tillis: US Senate; Cotton: US Senate; Robinson: US House of Representatives; Bolton: Gage Skidmore/Wikimedia; Cruz: US Senate; Trump: White House; Mercer: Patrick McMullan/Getty; Wylie: Jack Taylor/Getty; Bannon: Jeff Malet/Newscom/ZUMA; Nix: Christian Charisius/DPA/ZUMA
Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix Was Just Suspended
House Democrats Demand Answers From the Trump Campaign's Data Firms
The Crazy Last Days of Rudy Giuliani and Steve Bannon
Dan Friedman and David Corn


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Performers, DS9 performers, VOY performers
Revision as of 18:13, 7 June 2006 by W-Excelsior (talk | contribs)
File:TemoZuma.jpg
Marshall Teague as Temo'Zuma.
... as Haluk.
Marshall Teague is the actor who played Temo'Zuma in the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "Hippocratic Oath". He later played Haluk in the Star Trek: Voyager episode "Distant Origin".
He has also guest-starred on a number of other science fiction television series, including Quantum Leap (with Scott Bakula and Dean Stockwell), Babylon 5 (with Andreas Katsulas, Bill Mumy, Mary Kay Adams, Robin Sachs, Patricia Tallman, and John Vickery), Sliders, and Stargate SG-1. He also made apeparances on The A-Team (with Dwight Schultz), MacGyver, and Walker, Texas Ranger (with Noble Willingham), and had a recurring role as Marine Colonel Douglas Drayton on Pensacola: Wings of Gold.
He also appeared in the blockbuster Michael Bay films The Rock (1996, with Tony Todd and Tom Towles) and Armageddon (1998, with Lawrence Tierney). His other film credits include Road House (1989, with Anthony De Longis, Kevin Tighe, and Tiny Ron) and Crime and Punishment in Suburbia (2000, with Brad Greenquist). He has also appeared in a number of made-for-TV movies, including Starflight: The Plane That Couldn't Land (1983, with Gail Strickland and Ellen Bry), Elvis and Me (1988, with Anne Haney), Rough Riders (1997, with Brian Keith and Mark Moses), Crossfire Trail (2001, with Virginia Madsen and Patrick Kilpatrick), and Monte Walsh (2003, with Wallace Shawn).
Marshall R. Teague at Wikipedia
Template:IMDb-link
Retrieved from "https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Marshall_Teague?oldid=357458"
Memory Alpha pages with broken file links
DS9 performers
VOY performers


What Happens if Your Silicone Breast Implants Rupture?
This is a 55-year-old female who presented for revisional breast surgery. She underwent bilateral silicone breast implants in 1975. She developed bilateral ruptures of both implants and severe capsular contractures. She underwent removal of silicone material with subpectoral placement of 300 cc, Mentor silicone- gel breast implants. Her procedure was performed at Marin Cosmetic Surgery Center in Marin County, California.
When breast implants are placed in the body, a fibrous capsule will form around the implant. If a rupture should occur, the silicone will most likely be contained in the capsule; and it is possible that it may not be painful or be noticeable. This is referred to as a "silent rupture." If a silent rupture is suspected, your plastic surgeon will most likely recommend an MRI to confirm.
However, sometimes a ruptured implant may cause pain; swelling and the breast may change shape, and size. You may experience lumps and the affected breast may feel hard. It is not believed that silicone implants can cause breast cancer or reproductive problems. It is also not proven that implants will cause a connective tissue disease as once thought.
Women who suspect that their implant(s) has ruptured or if their implants have formed a capsular contracture are advised to seek a consultation with a Board Certified Plastic Surgeon who will be able to explain what options are available to them.
With a "silent rupture," some women may choose not to have them removed unless they have a complication. However, some women will want their implants removed. If the implants are to be removed, new ones can be replaced at the same time, or some women may not want implants anymore and opt for a breast lift, or perhaps fat transfers instead of implants.
The FDA recommends that women have an MRI 3 years after their original breast augmentation surgery, and then every two years thereafter. However, this is a recommendation, not a requirement. Your surgeon will be able to advise you best .
Dr. Miguel Delgado, M.D. has been performing breast revision surgery since 1989 and has helped hundreds of women make educated choices. Call now (415) 898-4161 for your breast revision concerns.
This entry was posted in Breast implants, Breast lift, Breast revision surgery and tagged breast augmentation, breast implant exchange, breast implants, breast lift, capsular contracture on January 18, 2017 by admin.


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