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Dresden city council has overturned proposed funding cuts for the Dresden Philharmonic. The council originally announced in November that Dresden Philharmonic's budget would be reduced by €250,000 for the 2017-18 season.
However, it remains unclear whether the reversal will alter principal conductor Michael Sanderling's decision to not renew his contract. After the original cuts were announced Sanderling wrote to Dresden mayor name Annekatrin Klepsch to say he would no longer be willing to renew his contract, which runs out in the 2019.
Dresden Philharmonic's home Kulturpalast is currently being refurbished, and will reopen in March 2017.


text:
« 2014 OBCA ALL-STAR WEEKEND
OKLAHOMA COACHES ASSOCIATION ALL STATE TEAMS »
THE 49th ANNUAL OKLAHOMA vs TEXAS FAITH SEVEN GAME
Texas All-Stars 116 Oklahoma All-Stars 112 OT
By Scott Wright-The Oklahoman
SHAWNEE — In its previous 48 years, the Faith 7 Basketball Bowl has seen its share of big stars.
Most recently, NBA names like Blake Griffin and Andre Roberson stand out. And Saturday night's game had its share, too, with a handful of players destined for major colleges.
But might it have also had the next Ron Baker, the Wichita State sophomore who made an immediate impact and helped put the mid-major program among the elite the last two seasons?
Tulsa Washington guard Kevin Sims scored 27 points for the Oklahoma All-Stars in a 116-112 overtime loss to Texas in the 49th annual Faith 7 game. Putnam City West's Omega Harris added 21 points, while Del City's Brett Cannon had 18 points and seven rebounds for Oklahoma.
Sims was named Oklahoma's MVP, while Oklahoma Christian signee Jordan Box earned the Texas award with 29 points and six rebounds, hitting 13 of 22 field goals.
While Sims is heading the junior-college route, Harris and Cannon are bound for blossoming programs, hoping to help them take the next step in their growth.
Harris signed with UTEP, coached by Tim Floyd, who is having success at yet another stop along his career journey. Cannon is heading to Arkansas-Fort Smith, which only recently made the transition from junior college to four-year school and is quickly making an impact in NCAA Division II.
"The expectations are growing higher and higher," Cannon said of UAFS. "We've won two conference championships in a row, went to the national tournament this year.
"Growing up, I was taught to fear no man. You just want your opportunity. I'm really excited to get out there and get started."
The Oklahoma team had a couple of big men headed for big schools — 6-foot-9 Oklahoma State signee Mitchell Solomon of Bixby and Comanche's Jacob Hammond, a 6-10 Nebraska signee.
On the other side, Texas' Jamuni McNeace of Allen High School flashed the athleticism he'll be bringing to OU, and the Texans had others who have signed with Texas Tech, Notre Dame and Miami, Fla.
But Oklahoma got contributions from the likes of Harrah's Collin Jennings, who has signed with Missouri-Kansas City, and Santa Clara signee Stephen Edwards of Putnam City West.
In all, the Oklahoma team had five Division I signees on the roster, heading to colleges hoping to get to work on the next phase of their careers. They were part of a deep senior class, even if it wasn't loaded with the elite stars.
"You see what programs like Wichita State did, and it's exciting," Jennings said. "Maybe you'll get some playing time as a freshman and get to make an impact.
"It gives you a chance to make a name for yourself and your team."
This entry was posted on June 9, 2014 at 2:49 pm and is filed under COACHES CORNER, NEWS, OBCA ALL STAR GAME.	You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
Good Calls for AD&D
Here's the last of my debriefing notes from the session running AD&D Module S1 3 weeks back now. I hope I can make sense out of this, let's see:
Good Calls On My Part
(1) Using weapon speed factors/casting times just for initiative ties. That added a nice a little occasional spice in the round of actions. Not much logistical overhead, but kind of surprising, and a nice little detail for those who chose light weapons or low-level spells. (I would also have used weapon-vs-AC adjustments if they'd fought NPCs in armor, but that didn't happen. I think that would be okay occasionally, with the AC adjustments printed on my screen.)
(2) Occasionally using a battlemap and miniatures. I had considered making up preprinted maps for the whole dungeon in advance, but that would have been overkill (and taken away attention from the published illustrations). Using the miniatures for standard marching order was actually a big help and very intuitive.
(3) Not making pregenerated characters and using DMG Appendix P instead. At first my players were surprised by this (I think one sort of gasped and said "What, no pregens?"). Appendix P was very nice and quick, since most stuff (including magic items) is determined by pure die rolls, players didn't get bogged down in analyzing options. We rolled for level as suggested, d4+10 for S1. I let all spellcasters have complete free reign in spell selection (ignoring any chance-to-know-spell percentages). We had a completed level 11-14 party in about 1 hour.
(Truth is, S1 includes a list a pregens, but they'd need to be transcribed to character sheets, they don't have hit points, there's a complicated recommendation for number-of-players-determines-which-PCs-to-use (which I couldn't know in advance), and I ran out of time the prior week to deal with it.)
(4) Ignoring the thief's "Remove Traps" ability. This was an unexpected thing that occurred spontaneously -- there's almost no reason to use a "Remove Traps" die roll. When you're dealing with the environment very concretely, it becomes obvious whether a found trap can be bypassed or not. Poisoned button? Tap it with a sword or pole. Pit trap? Hold it shut with a driven spike. Collapsing ceiling? No way to hold it up -- maybe just trigger it from afar with a rope. That was all very satisfying. It avoids eye-rolling arguments I've seen in the past about "I missed my roll but I can't just smash the poison lock off with a mace?" and stuff like that.
(It's ironic that the OD&D appearance of the thief had a "remove traps" ability but no "find traps" -- that got added later with AD&D. After this session I'm convinced I'd rather just ditch the former and use only the latter.)
(5) Correctly calling that thieves can't find magic traps. (That's confirmed by DMG p. 19). This also ties into the previous point -- a thief can only deal with a trap that you have some concrete way to describe the physical interaction. You don't get caught in the 3E-ism of a thief removing a magic trap and having to come up with some wild, abstracted explanation for how they can detect & disarm it (with no guidance from the rulebook).
(6) Ignoring the level-limit table's ability score notes. PHB p. 14 has a table of class level level limitations for demihumans (which I'm perfectly fine with as a balancing technique). But the real drag is the big list of notes under it that modify all the numbers downwards for changes in ability scores. Ugh. So I decided to ignore those notes and just use the number directly in the table (giving a little boost to any potential demihuman PCs). That's a nice streamlining, I think.
(7) Using rulebooks on a laptop. This worked a bit better than I might have guessed. It certainly cut down on the bulk of books I used to carry to game sessions (I still brought one PHB to hand over to the players). Searching for monsters & magic items became a snap (they usually have unique names in AD&D). Searching for spells worked significantly less well (they usually have generic names; try searching for "heal" and you'll run into it dozens of times in the text before hitting the spell of that name).
(8) Ignoring weapon proficiency specifications. That seems to add no real benefit to the game, and I'm glad to streamline them out.
(9) Disallowing regaining spells during the session. I picked this up from someone online who'd also run S1. If you try to rest anywhere during the session, demonic nightmares haunt you and can't regain spells. This surprised the heck out of my players, but it really made things run more crisply. They had to budget their spells and dig down into lower-level resources they might not have otherwise used. I'd really like to use this in almost any limited-time session of AD&D from now on. (I assume this is how AD&D tournaments were always run. Anyone know if there was an official ruling on this, or was it just an unstated shared assumption by everyone involved?)
(10) Suggesting that the party pick a leader. That's mostly out-of-favor in modern gaming, but my players instantly picked up on it and were pretty happy with it. My explanation was that this wasn't to be lorded over anyone, but that if things started to lag indecisively, I'd go to the leader to make a call about where to go next. That worked out well (even though it was rarely used).
(11) Making sure to ask for items-in-hand as the party entered a particular area.
(12) Calling 1E magic-users "wizards". Nobody minded using that term in the 1E context. Frankly, that's what Gygax should have called them originally. I even had extra cover here because in this case all the magic-users were name level, and hence officially "wizards".
(13) My general 1E rule fix-ups (house rules) for movement, encumbrance, initiative, surprise, attacks, saving throws, and ability checks. We were all really happy with these minimally streamlined mechanics. If you like, you can download this document I use: www.superdan.net/download/ADDFixUp.doc
(1) AD&D is very tangible, concrete, and tactile. The equipment, gear, tactics, and situations in AD&D seem very familiar and easy to describe and use in a shared fantasy. For example, the extra statistics for weapons include length, weight, speed, and space required. That's a lot more reality-based than 3E abstracted type, crit range, and crit multiplier, say. It's easy to know what a lantern, rations, or a 10' pole are (texture, size, smell, etc.). Increasing fantasy elements makes it increasingly harder to communicate between players (like 3E's tindertwig, thunderstone, tanglefoot bags, or 4E magic food something-or-other). The same can be said for traps, spells, combat maneuvers, etc. I like that.
(2) Some good ideas in AD&D are listed above (weapon speed factors, AC adjustments, thieves blocked from magical traps, using a party leader, etc.) Bad ideas would include -- limited weapon proficiency specifications, the class level limitations being minutely modified by ability scores, weapon damage by size of target, etc. The "chance to know spells" rule is really a holdover from OD&D Supplement I, and doesn't totally make sense anymore in the context of AD&D where you start with a very small spellbook and add to it over time. Those are all examples of complications that don't adequately payoff in the game, and could be easily streamlined out of consideration.
(3) One thing that frustrates me a bit is that the old classic AD&D modules, although originally used for tournaments & conventions, definitely don't fit into standard 4-hour convention time slots. It would nice if they did, to work with more mature players getting together less frequently. Presumably they must have bulked up the original versions for campaign play (which can be seen explicitly in the A-series modules but not most of the others). In this last session, it took us 7 hours to get through 12 encounter areas (1.7 areas/hour, or about 7 encounters in the course of a standard 4-hour slot).
(4) Most folks think of AD&D as having broken multiclassing, and that everyone should always multiclass. But the interesting thing with the high-level game is that all of my players specifically avoided multiclassing so as to avoid the class level limitations. Every character was single classed. Almost all were human, except for one elven thief (the only class with no level cap for demihumans).
(5) I was perusing the DMG when I ran into some text on detect evil. Sometimes you see these arguments about "Does detect evil detect standard character alignment, or only intense focused evil (possibly supernatural) intent?" I'd been involved in debates like this where I'd taken the position that the former was true in all original editions of the game, that the latter was a complication only initiated with 2E.
Well, lo-and-behold, there actually is text asserting something like the latter position in 1E DMG p. 60. If you go back and dig through the history, there's kind of a constant cycling on the issue. OD&D says it can "detect evil thought or intent". 1E PHB reads like it detects any evil-aligned creature. 1E DMG says it's "important to make a distinction between character alignment and some powerful force of evil". 2E goes back to focused intent. 3E goes back to any creature alignment. It's wacky, I tell you.
(6) Finally, I have to salute 3E for one thing. It made me finally comfortable with asserting house rules, massaging the core mechanics, and creating high-level PCs for an appropriate game. I have just enough touch of OCD that when I was younger that I gave the rulebooks near-religious consideration, and felt that I had to incorporate all the rules exactly as written, and spend a lot of time ironing out any contradictions or gaps. 3E was really nice for flagging rules as explicitly optional or "variants" (something 1E books didn't do, even though Gygax would categorize a lot of stuff later as optional). This finally gave me the freedom to streamline AD&D and be comfortable in tinkering around with it. Although obvious to some, that's a big benefit to me. Hooray!
Multiclass Hit Points
You know, it turns out that I always did multiclass hit points in AD&D incorrectly.
If you look at AD&D PHB p. 19, there's a procedure for multiclass hit points laid out. It says, in summary, to (1) "Roll the hit die (or dice) appropriate to each class the character is professing", (2) "Total the sum of all dice so rolled, and adjust for constitution", (3) Divide by the number of classes, and (4) Add that many hit points to the character's total.
Let's take an example. You've got a 1st-level Clr/Ftr who goes up a level in Cleric (assume no Con bonus). I always thought, by this plan, that you'd roll (d8+d10)/2 and add that to hit points, and do the same thing over again when he goes up a level in Fighter. Note that over the course of that you've effectively gotten the full hit dice for each class level, it's just smoothed out over each level increase. So effectively my multiclass characters all had hit points equal to the sum of all class levels they had, and had enormous hit points compared to their fellow characters.
Here's the glitch. I'm pretty sure now that you should only roll the hit die for the single class being increased at any step (and still divide by the number of classes). Now, maybe I misread step #1. Or maybe that paragraph was written thinking that a step up in level always occured simultaneously in all of the classes (which isn't the case because you've got different XP charts for each class). Either way you slice that, you should really be getting effectively the average of all their class levels, which is a lot more reasonable, and not totally outstrip single-class characters with the same total XP.
Here's what clinched it for me when I realized this possible discrepency. I actually went and made a spreadsheet, entered the data for every single pregenerated multiclass PC in any AD&D adventure module, plus the 100 multiclass characters appearing in the Rogues' Gallery. I computed the expected HP value for each character under each interpretation, and calculated the total sum-squared-errors for each option. Result: My old interpretation was way off compared to what appears on average in the books. Sum-squared errors for the module PCs was 8,690 vs. 668; for the Rogues Gallery characters it was 8,884 vs. 363. Clearly the second "averaging" interpretation was much closer to the mark.
If you like you can download the analysis spreadsheet here: www.superdan.net/download/MulticlassHitPoints.xls
(P.S. I'd also entertain a "maximum" operation for hit points where you roll hit points for each class separately and take whichever is currently highest. Pros: (1) Consistent with all other "max" operations for attacks, saves, proficiencies, etc.; (2) Would allow multiclassers to catch up a bit in HP compared to higher-level single-classers. Cons: (1) You'd have to track & record multiple class HP rolls, and (2) That one's clearly not supported by the rules-as-written.)
S1 Postmortem & Errors
Here's a secret I've never told anyone. When I get done DM'ing a game session, I walk away with my mind running over everything I screwed up. I think that's healthy -- I'm trying to find areas I can improve on.
The other thing is that I do think it's important to keep the gaming session at a lively pace. If we're uncertain about a rule, I absolutely think it's better to for the DM to make some decision -- almost any decision -- and move on, rather than flipping through a rulebook. I'm hugely grateful that the players in my 1E Tomb of Horrors game really cooperated and trusted me on this score. At least once they did hit on something I had wrong, and were willing to let it slide and have the game proceed anyway. (And I try to do the same when I'm a player. In the past I've had players who wouldn't be able to play this way. I suppose it helped a bit that most folks aren't that familiar with 1E rules in the first place. I wish I'd had more time to brush up on the rules myself, but other work took priority the week before.)
So for the first time ever, here's a public airing of my dirty laundry as a DM. The following is stuff that I just screwed up or remembered wrong on the fly. Some is minor; I don't think anything was a real game-breaker. Not included here are intentional house-rule changes, interpretations, or adjudications that I knew I was bending for the sake of saving time or game flavor. (A future blog might discuss those separately, and how they worked out.)
(1) I allowed the elven thief to take a bow, when that's actually prohibited to thieves in 1E. (They can only use slings for missile weapons -- you need to be a fighter to use a bow.) I don't think missile combat ever happened, so this had no actual effect.
(2) The fighter wanted to take an exotic pole arm as a weapon (very much in the EGG 1E spirit; specifically, a "glaive-guisarme"). I forgot to adjust his AC when he did that, giving him full benefit of a +2 large shield throughout the adventure. (DM shakes fist!)
(3) I forgot about the encumbrance benefit of magical armor. Depending on where you read it, magic armor should be half-weight or totally weightless. I overlooked any version of the rule and added the whole normal weight in anyway.
(4) I failed to get some bonuses to saving throws added in, as from Wisdom or rings of protection. I put the extra bonuses on the character sheets but forgot to tell the players that they had to add those in a separate step. (I was rushing and didn't take time to add them in advance.)
(5) I forgot about high-level fighter multiple attacks. Everyone was making just 1 attack/round, when the fighters should have been making 3/2 or 2. Actually, it took me almost an hour after the game to locate the damn table in the PHB, so it was really good that I didn't waste time mid-game looking for the same thing.
(6) I forgot that all the magic blades in 1E (magic swords & daggers) cast dim light all the time.
(7) Infravision is only ruined by heat, not magic light (DMG p. 59). I was nixing the elf's infravision in the area of a continual light spell, and I guess I shouldn't have. Also, I was asserting that it takes 1 turn (10 minutes) to switch back-and-forth, and I see now the rules say it's just 2 segments (about 12 seconds)! The wizard player caught me on this one, and he was right.
(8) I was overly strict about actions within a round. I was calling an end to a whole round if someone switched weapons, or pulled out a scroll, etc. Truthfully, that doesn't entirely make sense with rounds that are so long (1 minute, or even 30 seconds as I play it). This was one area where if I'd had more time to brush up on 1E I might have corrected myself. I was recollecting an example of melee where actions are enforced like that (DMG p. 71). The problem is, the examples occur in short surprise rounds that only last 1 segment (6 seconds), and so are necessarily a lot more restrictive. There's a section immediately before it that's counting parts of an action in segments, and clearly allows throwing oil, grabbing a potion from a pack, and then drinking it, all in one round. So although my ruling kept rounds snapping by quickly, I guess I should try being more liberal in any future 1E game.
Mea culpa!
Tomb of Horrors!
So this past weekend my friends and had a sometimes-annual gaming retreat in New England. As part of the festivities, I ran a "Gygax Memorial Gaming Session" wherein I ran the infamous AD&D Module S1: Tomb of Horrors using 1E rules. This was the first time I'd run a 1E session in about 16 years by my count. It was the first time ever I'd gotten to DM Tomb of Horrors, so it basically fulfilled a something I'd been dreaming of since I was at least in high school.
I was actually a little bit worried about the game going in -- in fact, I brought Gary's "Land Beyond the Magic Mirror" module and sort of recommended that instead, but popular opinion was for S1 instead. I was worried that the buzz-saw series of deathtraps would be a bit of a bummer (and that I might not DM it right, having DM'd no game whatsoever in a few years now). But actually, we had an enormous blast! We made characters on the fly using DMG Appendix P, even rolling randomly for level (d4+10). Everyone really got into the right mind frame, accepting the challenge with gusto, and it really exceeded my highest expectations.
I think the main thing is that I had players who really played at a high level of skill. In the time we had, they got about 1/2 way through the tomb (just to the entrance to area #14 for DMs that know what that is). They were using thief skills, ropes, spikes, and multiple 10' poles to the utmost. There were challenges that I really didn't expect anyone to puzzle out, that they totally keyed into, which was absolutely thrilling to me on my side of the screen (like the critical hidden door, or the series of nonstop magic missile-like rooms). Here's some of the highlights (and you MUST read the last one):
SCENE: ENTRYWAY. There's a red tile path snaking left and right down the hallway. Players start to debate about whether they should proceed on the path, or off. Tamsina the elven thief announces "I completely ignore the red path, and give it no regard one way or the other. Searching for traps..." At which point I think, wow! That's exactly the right mindset, they definitely have a chance!
SCENE: ENTRY HALL. Wizard announces he's very carefully looking for patterns all the way down the hall on the painted walls and ceilings. He finds no detectable pattern. (DM thought: Damn! So close! If he'd just said "...and floor" he'd have a giant payoff!)
SCENE: DEVIL FACE. They first prod it with a 10' pole, thereby avoiding losing anyone to that particular challenge. There's an archway there, and the thief decides to search the bare wall opposite the archway. (DM thought: Awesome. Nothing here, but there's another place later on where that's exactly what they have to do.)
SCENE: COMPLEX OF PORTALS. The party is getting shot at incessantly, every round, by unstoppable magic bolts as Grant the fighter tries to push, pull, slide, unhinge a series of stone portals. They've figured out that bunching together reduces the number of separate shots. They're rolling scores of saving throws and damage rolls (I'm counting off 5 at a time and have everyone save one time.) They get in a rhythm and hit the last door -- dammit, this one is different, it has a whole row of buttons to press! The fighter starts pressing sequences of buttons. Someone says "Try pushing all of them." DM asks, "Raise your hand if you're helping press all the buttons at once." Everyone raises their hand and shouts in unison "I am!!". Door swings open, and they spill into the next room. (DM thought: I seriously expected that would be the most aggravating unplayable encounter ever. Somehow it turned into this exciting, yell-out-loud team exercise. Amazing!)
SCENE: TINY CRAWLWAY (or, "THE PERFECT STORM, 1E STYLE"). They get past the second great hall by detecting the hidden crawlspace. (DM thought: Didn't realize in advance how unnerving it would be that it looks just like a sphere of annihilation.) Everyone squeezes into the tiny winding tunnel, fighters in plate armor with shields on their back barely able to wiggle through. They crawl, twisting and turning, for over an hour. The tunnel dead-ends in a blank stone wall. Thief in lead fails to find any secret door. Now what? (So we're laughing at this scene of the party stuck face-to-feet in the tiny crawlspace, unable to move. What if a monster came up behind them, like perhaps a "gelatinous tube"? Don't want to hear from the back: "Uh, guys, I can't feel me feet anymore...")
Remember, we made up characters from DMG Appendix P. The party got to pick a number of miscellaneous magic items from a list when they started. One of the items that they picked was -- yep, a wand of wonder. Having depleted quite a few spells, and with the wizard out of position to cast at the dead-end, the party hits upon trying this wand at the face of the wall. Thief pulls it out, points at the wall, and says the command word. I have the player roll percentile dice. Result: 56%. Darkness falls over the entire party, extinguishing all their lights, leaving them sightless in a pitch-black stone tube deep in the Tomb of Horrors. (A lot more laughter around the table. Now they can't see anything, and are just faceless voices debating what to do next. How could it get worse?) Well, they decide to use the wand of wonder again. Maybe it can reverse the prior effect? In any case, out it comes. Player rolls again. Result: 76%.
So you see, that's a fireball that goes off against the stone wall inches from the face of the lead character. And if you recall, one of the most infamous things about the entire 1E spell system is that fireballs they take the shape of whatever space they're in, up to a fairly sizable volume. And the players have managed to wedge themselves into the very smallest area they could possibly fit their bodies! (Very brief flash of intense light. The entire crawlspace roars with flame, spitting back out into the main hallway hundreds of feet back.) Some make their saves, others have lots of hit points. But recall again that 1E fireballs do affect all their material items. All their clothes and capes get burned to cinders. The map gets incinerated! (I gleefully yank it from the player.) The bag of holding has to save or lose everything within it (it succeeds.)
Massive gales of laughter all around the table. at 2AM, after about 6 hours of play, we're laughing so hard we're almost crying. We can't continue for about 15 minutes or so, play-acting the yelping voices of what the players have managed to do to themselves. They're playing 1E AD&D -- in the Tomb of Horrors -- using a wand of wonder -- and hit themselves with a fireball in the smallest space humanly possible. What could be more perfect? It could only happen in this particular game, with those particular die-rolls that probably no one has ever recreated. In 30 years of playing D&D, I've never seen anything so perfectly, hilariously catastrophic in my gaming life. (Somewhere Acererak looks down and says, "Wow, that's really good! Why'd I never think of that?")
Having just barely survived, the party does manage to crawl backwards into the last hallway over the course of another 2 hours or so in-game. They try to secure a resting space and conjure a demon instead. At the end of a long night, they desperately leap through an archway that yanks all their gear to the lich's crypt, and leaves them stark naked back at the entryway. Thankful to be alive at least, they turn and face the task of fighting bare-fisted through a hundred leagues of evil tropical swamp back to civilization. The sun sets and the credits roll.
Thanks, Gary! You were the best!
[Photo by tj.blackwell under CC2.]


Prompt natural cement can be used to reconstitute damaged natural stone, either in a Prompt natural cement mortar or in a mix with lime, depending on the hardness of the stone. The repair mortar must have mechanical strength and permeance that is comparable to the stone itself, as well as good chemical compatibility.
Prompt natural cement, either as a mortar (with the Tempo additive) or mixed with lime, is used for wet sculpted decorations.
Finition work on facades, with mortars or decorative concrete... With its clear ocre color, and its fineness, natural prompt cement used in finition work enables to get a nice mat finish, similar to some natural stones or moulding of the 19th and 20th centuries.


text:
Forget Fundamentals When Buying Stocks in China, Just Follow the Algorithm
Posted on May 13, 2015 by Michael Covel
Great article titled "Forget fundamentals when buying stocks in China, just follow the algorithm":
If you are afraid, you've already lost. That's George's takeaway from the recent rally in Chinese stocks. For nearly two decades he invested on fundamentals. He never put money in a stock without first ploughing through its financial statements and those of its peers as well. "I give in," said George. From this year, he has left his investment decisions entirely to his computer. The machine calculates various momentum-related factors to pick stocks and he plays along.
Earlier, he used to split his portfolio between his picks and those of the computer. The reason for his new strategy: his picks have lost catastrophically to those of the machine, or in his words, to the might of insider information and policy changes in China.
George is not blind to the country's political reality. That's why he has spent more than two years building a computer model that will spot momentum, or in layman's language, the way the wind blows for a company. "Trades in mainland Chinese companies are affected by insider information more than anything else," he said. "As outsiders, we are almost helpless. The hope is to ride on those who have inside dope." Yet deep down, he was a diehard believer in fundamentals. So in September, when the computer came up with the names of four mainland Chinese banks, he hesitated. Not without reason. Both the balance sheets of the banks and the economy were pointing towards further deterioration. He read up more on them and decided to ignore the computer.
He was not alone. Various hedge funds have been shorting Chinese financial stocks. Their prices hit a three-month low by the end of September. They couldn't have been more wrong.
In October, the People's Bank of China started injecting liquidity into the economy. A two-year long mortgage cap was also removed to boost the property market. By late November, the central bank was cutting rates.
The stock market went crazy, thanks in large measure to effective cheerleading by the state media. Chinese banks would soon embark on a non-stop six month rally from October. George and his ilk were in deep funk. He would be sitting on a 50 to 100 per cent profit had he listened to the computer. No, he had to think!
Likewise, if you had told anyone that China CNR would rise 133 per cent in October, he would take that as a joke. Yet, only five months after all the effort and money put in to get it listed in Hong Kong, the central government decided to merge the rolling stock maker with its only competitor. The rest is history. "Fundamental analysis is not for China," George concluded.
That's no news. For decades, Beijing has been dictating policy, corporate moves, market movements and even the bottom lines in the case of state firms.
When the country has enough cash to move the markets, normal market rules get thrown out. Time and effort spent in understanding an industry and picking the winner becomes futile. No wonder an increasing number of fund managers have swallowed their ego, switching from human intelligence to the artificial one.
Like George, Alice now trusts her algo more than her brain. "Computers have no fear," she said, referring to her successful investment in Hanergy Thin Film Power Group. Almost every major international and domestic financial media outlet has questioned the veracity of this company's profit declarations and the soundness of its finances given the size of connected transactions and receivables. The company has denied all the allegations.
Against all odds, the solar power firm's share price has climbed more than three times in the past six months, making its controlling shareholder Li Hejun the wealthiest man in Asia. Journalists have pointed to the 3.5 billion yuan in trust products the company has issued and have wondered if that money has any link to the stellar price performance.
In short, this is a stock that most fund managers would avoid. Not the computer. It told Alice to get in when the momentum was good, and out when not. It is "company-blind". Alice made double-digit returns in less than three months.
Welcome to the brave new world.
Trend following = answer.
The core TREND FOLLOWING principles and how to compound those for a lifetime–starts with my FREE training SIGN UP.


SPY SHOTS: Check out Husqvarna's 801 Classic Adventure (Scrambler) that we've caught out in secret tests!
Husqvarna is working on a scrambler motorcycle with funky styling that echoes some of the major cosmetic touches of the Svartpilen and Vitpilen roadster models.
Spy Shots! Here's KTM's 790 Duke in FINAL bodywork and styling! The 2018 bike caught out in final phase of testing.


Front loading critical keywords is definitely a best practice. But sometimes you can use the visible limit for SERPS to your advantage. I am thinking of cases where a competitor's brand is a keyword. Imagine that people began using the name "Kindles" to denote ALL e-readers. So if you were Sony, or the I-Pad store, you might want to include "Kindles" in your title tag but keep it on the "down low" for marketing reasons. This actual happens a lot in local settings.


text:
Q: Technical Analysis of C# Math.Round Over the last 2 days I have been doing a LOT of reading about decimal vs. double about rounding.
What I would like to know is does anyone know how the Math.Round actually works under the covers? Like does it do a conversion to bits then do rounding on those bits or does it round first etc? Does it import or execute any native code that does the rounding ? etc
If anyone has any technical whitepapers or links, that would be awesome!

A: Taken from mscorlib.dll using a decompiler. Note there are a number of other calls that are important. I suggest getting a decompiler and stepping through it yourself. Cheers
[__DynamicallyInvokable]
[SecuritySafeCritical]
public static extern double Round(double a);

[__DynamicallyInvokable]
public static double Round(double value, int digits)
{
    if (digits < 0 || digits > 15)
    {
        throw new ArgumentOutOfRangeException("digits", Environment.GetResourceString("ArgumentOutOfRange_RoundingDigits"));
    }
    return Math.InternalRound(value, digits, MidpointRounding.ToEven);
}

[SecuritySafeCritical]
private static double InternalRound(double value, int digits, MidpointRounding mode)
{
    unsafe
    {
        if (Math.Abs(value) < Math.doubleRoundLimit)
        {
            double num = Math.roundPower10Double[digits];
            value = value * num;
            if (mode != MidpointRounding.AwayFromZero)
            {
                value = Math.Round(value);
            }
            else
            {
                double num1 = Math.SplitFractionDouble(ref value);
                if (Math.Abs(num1) >= 0.5)
                {
                    value = value + (double)Math.Sign(num1);
                }
            }
            value = value / num;
        }
        return value;
    }
}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


Company members who want to support the museum can join the business club.
The business club is a separate forum of the 'Friends of the KMSKA'. A forum with specific returns. Not only will you be the first to be informed about all the museum's activities, you will also be closely involved. As a member you can participate exclusively in numerous initiatives such as previews, tours, dinners, day trips and art trips.


text:
Q: Only one simultaneous connection per user? I'm currently experiencing some trouble, seemingly because my application refuses to connect to the database if there is already another connection open from the same user (but in a separate process).
Based on my observations, it doesn't seem to matter how many or few other users are connected, and @@MAX_CONNECTIONS is set to 0 (unlimited).
Is there any way such a connections-per-user limitation may have been defined on the database, and if so, how can I turn it off?
Here is my connection string:
[db]
sql=MS SQL
provider=SQLOLEDB.1
data source=foo\bar
connection=Integrated Security=SSPI;Persist Security Info=False;Initial Catalog=foobar

As you might be able to discern from the above, we are connecting to the database using Microsoft OLE ADO. The application is an old VB6 legacy program.
By "refuses to connect" I mean that the method Open on the ADODB.Connection object fails.
Sadly, there is currently no log of the error output from this method in the production environment. I'm currently waiting for a patch to the application to be applied, to see if I can get extended information here.

A: I think you may be able to turn MARS off to resolve this.  I had the same scenario with an application, and turning MARS off disallowed starting a new query before finishing the old one.
Try Adding this to your ConnString and resetting the connection:
MultipleActiveResultSets=false

Data Source=MSSQL; Initial Catalog=AdventureWorks; Integrated Security=SSPI; MultipleActiveResultSets=false

Link to article on MARS

A:
Is there any way such a connections-per-user limitation may have been defined on the database, and if so, how can I turn it off?

You are using Microsoft SQL-Server. You can limit the Resources with the Resource Governor. Have a look at the Microsoft Documents. There you can see which options might be set and you should check. If there is a limitation, you may find it there.
Documentation: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/relational-databases/resource-governor/resource-governor


text:
Q: Zend Paginate - find a specific record within the result I appreciate that this may not be possible, but is there a way to make Zend Paginate go to a specific item (record)?
The result I would like would allow me to seek a specific record in a tabled list of results, and display the appropriate page (within all available pages) combined with a name anchor tag to display the specific record.
To clarify: If I had the results as a Zend_Db_Table_Rowset_Abstract I would use the seek() method in a similar fashion to $rowset->seek(8); Although I don't believe the result returned by the DbSelect adapter is a SeekableIterator?
The code within my Mapper (using the Table Data Gateway pattern):
public function paginate($where = array(), $order = null)
{

    $select = $this->getDbTable()->select()->from($this->getTableName(), $this->getTableFields());

    foreach ($where as $key => $value) {
            $select->where($key, $value);
    }

    $select->order($order);

    $adapter = new Zend_Paginator_Adapter_DbSelect($select);
    $paginator = new Zend_Paginator($adapter);

    return $paginator;
}

Within my controller:
    $cache_id = sha1('list');
    $mapper = new Application_Model_Galleries_Mapper();

    if(!($data = Zend_Registry::get('cache')->load($cache_id))) {

        $data = $mapper->paginate(array(), $sort);
        Zend_Registry::get('cache')->save($data, $cache_id, array('list'), 7200);
    }

    $data->setCurrentPageNumber($this->_getParam('page'));
    $data->setItemCountPerPage(30);

    $this->view->paginator = $data;

A: To return a Zend_Paginator with a seekable iterator (Zend_Db_Table_Rowset) use the Zend_Paginator_Adapter_DbTableSelect() as it returns a rowset object, as opposed to Zend_Paginator_Adaoter_DbSelect() which returns an array().
Zend_Paginator


text:
← I have nothing to add…
Wood and heart →
Always crashing in the same car
Posted on March 12, 2011 by BrownhillsBob
Walsall Council, despite it's patchy areas, does a few things really, really well. One of those things in recent times has been social media. Dan and the people in the press office may occasionally appear to be running a West Midlands version of Pravda, but the willingness to engage with the public, journalists and obstreperous bloggers like me shines like a beacon. Many posts on this blog have been enabled, enhanced or created because of the free and willing engagement of the press team at Walsall Council, mainly on the Twitter social network. I think this is a brilliant and I support it totally.
One of the reasons that I like the Walsall approach to new media, is that it communicates the breadth and scale of work undertaken by the council. I understand the value of decent Local Authority provision; education, social services, neighbourhood cleansing, social housing, culture and democracy. I fear for the future of the collective vision that created our civic society against the acidic corrosion currently being visited upon it – not, as posited, for the reasons of fiscal prudence, but vain political ideology. When faced with intellectual giants like Eric Pickles, The Taxpayer's Alliance and tabloid media, the best weapons are accuracy, probity and engagement. Authorities need to counteract the propaganda, engage with the public and show them what is under threat. Try to get their taxpayers to appreciate the potential loss, if you will.
I was therefore really impressed to see the #Walsall24 project. This initiative aimed to tweet the activities of the council for a complete day, and on the whole, was very successful. From 6:00AM on Thursday, March 3rd 2011, employees of the council tweeted about things they were involved in, right up until 6:00AM the morning after. This gave rise to some really interesting stuff, and rightly attracted much attention.
The concept of the 24-hour tweet marathon isn't new, despite the subsequent press release claims: first time around, Greater Manchester Police undertook such a project to demonstrate, amongst other things, that they were mostly engaged in social work rather than criminal investigation. The GMP experiment was incredibly brave, and very honest; an almost unedited stream of information issued forth from the force as they dealt with potential suicide attempts, robberies and domestic incidents. One of the things that sticks with those who followed the stream was the rawness. It burned.
How big's your cockerel?
Walsall, however, were more reserved. Tweeting a constant message of happiness and community cohesion, sometimes that Pravda 'We are all having a glorious time, da!' ethic came through a bit strongly for my tastes, but considering some of the personalities at the council and their antipathy to technological engagement, this was a step in the right direction. Throughout the day, we learned of noisy cockerels, pothole reports, bin crew progress and other daily clicks within the occasionally off-kilter machinations of our civic hivemind.
The online community around Walsall were quite engaged with the project, and various discourses were generated, but the thing that really propelled it was the Social Media geeks. All over twitter, people who'd only peripherally heard of Walsall were suddenly hailing a new media dawn, the majority of whom had no idea about the town or it's problems. For two days or more, evangelist spoke unto evangelist; people blindly and gleefully retweeted the activities of street cleaners, crossing wardens and social workers., then endlessly reflogged every drop out of newspaper comment tweets, blog posts and media references.There was quite a feeding frenzy – mostly explaining that Walsall was not dead to people who never knew it was alive in the first place. People who would generally rather scrub their genitalia down with a wire brush than contemplate visiting a post industrial part of the Black Country hinterland.
Then came the press release. Rightly pleased at their success, the press office at Walsall issued a statement that contained the following, remarkable statistic.
Twitter breaks barriers for Walsall Council
Date Published : 04 March 2011
A historic 24-hour Twitter event has been hailed a success after it drew an audience of more than 100,000.
More than a hundred thousand? What? The release goes on to qualify this, apparently in the words of Mike 'Blofeld' Bird:
It really does show that it's something that works to get a message out and I'm delighted that something we've done has broken the six figure barrier. To get an audience of 116,273 is amazing and officers have worked very hard on this.
Let's consider this for a moment. The population of Walsall was, according to the Office for National Statistics, 253,499 in 2001. Are we really to go away with the impression that nearly half of the borough's population was online and engaged with this project? Surely not. However, the figures were not corroborated or qualified anywhere in the release. I looked at the number of followers that Walsall Council had on Twitter. Across the multiple accounts, their followers were well under 4,000. If one were to be generous, it could be assumed that 75% of those followers were unique (I for instance, follow most of the civic twitter accounts), and 25% of those will be unused, spammers or people outside the borough. There aren't nearly 10,000 people there, let alone 100,000. I asked where the figures came from.
Dan in the press office told me that they used Tweetreach, an online service which gives a figure they call 'reach' based upon how many followers you have, how many times you're retweeted (that's when a message is rebroadcast by someone else) and how many followers the retweeters have. In short, it appears to count how many people could possibly have seen your output. Given the social media orgasm collectively generated by #Walsall24, it's not hard to see that this figure was massive. Massive, but meaningless.
Most of the people blindly re-tweeting Walsall's output, or references to it, weren't from Walsall. They don't live here or have any connection with the borough; they just rightly, liked the project. Individual private accounts blindly rebroadcast the main streams. This skews the reach massively. Last week, I had a Tweetreach over over 7,500. Just now, I have one of 1,233. I have more followers now, than last week, which are currently hovering between 600-700. This figure is clearly rubbish.
Furthermore, Tweetreach is opaque. The formula it uses is not given, and for social media types who love the concept of opendata – this seems contrary to group thinking. All I can ascertain about the analytical tool is that it is 'respected' – by whom, and why, is not clear. It just appears to enumerate the unquantifiable; publicity types love figures and this gives them some. Impressive ones. With eye-candy piecharts, to boot. Just right for impressing luddites like Mike Bird.
Follow you, follow me
#Walsall24 was a great project, pulled off by extraordinary people who do hard jobs. I have a lot of respect for the public servants who work in any local authority – it's no fun juggling shit and the public can be unfeeling and harsh. I just don't understand the need for such ridiculous hyperbole. A better way to measure impact would be in the number of people helped. What matters to people like me – council tax payers and service users – is how well we're dealt with, not how many Facebook friends the council has. We want social media and web services – they cost little and give the authority a human face. We loved the twenty four hour tweet thing – but this is only Walsall, and it's a small pond. Making mathematically ridiculous claims just cheapens a very good initiative and leaves Walsall open to attack by the media and certain pressure groups.
The problem is, Walsall's press office – and the social media community in general – have form for this. Not content that they're visibly and wonderfully changing perceptions, they have to bang immense numbers on to the thing, like teenagers boasting of a half-imagined hot date. It's tawdry, daft and unnecessary. The Plastic Hippo recently summed up his thoughts about #Walsall24, and there's much to agree with in a thoughtful, well considered piece.
I really liked what was done with #Walsall24. It's nice to have something genuinely cutting edge going down in a town not noted for it's technological prowess. But I'd like to make a plea: next time, let's have a bit more honesty. We can handle bad news. We're grown ups – tell us when the shit is hitting the fan. This isn't pleasant valley, it's an urban conurbation facing a whole bunch of challenges. Tell us about cuts, tell us about shortfalls. Make it burn. And please, stop with the silly figures, it only makes the geeks look like Adrian Mole.
I've always loved David Bowie's 'Low' album. I never knew what he meant when he sang 'Always Crashing in the Same Car' – I do now. Let's hope the Thin White Duke never takes a spin past the council house…
This entry was posted in Bad Science, Events, Fun stuff to see and do, It makes me mad!, Just plain daft, Local Blogs, Local media, Local politics, Social Media, Spotted whilst browsing the web, Walsall community, Walsall Council and tagged Cheap tat, Facebook, GMP, Greater manchester Police, local blogs, Local politics, Mike Bird, Politics, Silly, Social Services, The Plastic Hippo, Tweetreach, Twitter, Walsall, Walsall Council, Walsall Council press office, Walsall politics, Walsall24. Bookmark the permalink.
4 Responses to Always crashing in the same car
Dan and his chums were never going to report/tweet/post bad news were they?
Can you imagine a tweet saying 'one of our schools has just had a shite ofsted inspection'? or 'Ooops, we've cocked up someone's care plan here'? No, of course not.
Against a background of threatened cuts, rising public dissatisfaction and so on, this was only ever going to be a bit of fun and frippery and it was never goin to be a forum for deep and meaningful discussion.
It also set a lot of cogs whirring and it may be a step towards getting some of the more reluctant councillors to join the 20th century (can't be too ambitious…)
As for calculating the reach, you might as well think of a number, mutiply by your birthday, and add 908 because that's the bus that goes from Essington to Pelsall.
The point is that's the system in use at the moment and that's the number it generates, so that's the number that gets used for the time being, and castigating the hapless Dan for using what is, in effect, the industry norm is a tad churlish I think.
If you think that's daft, try ploughing through RAJAR reach statistics for local radio – that really is bollocks, and real money changes hands on the back of that crap.
BrownhillsBob says:
I can't see why a bit less happy valley and more reality would be a bad thing. Other organisations manage it, a folk seem to appreciate the honesty. After all, this is a press office which has to report crap OFSTED's, accountancy cockups, youth justice failures and so on… it only has to cross the medium a bit.
I repeatedly said in the post that I supported #Walsall24 – but I doubt it's swayed a single councillor to start tweeting.
As for RAJAR and reach, just because one industry is crafting golden bullshit on Satan's anvil, doesn't mean we have to copy them. Is it the industry norm? See no evidence for that, either.
I certainly don't hold Dan resposible for it – it must have been a communal decision to enumerate in such a bizarre way.
Trouble is, there seems to be a belief that the 116K figure is significant. It isn't. The 4K followers is, but that doesn't sound so important in media reports.
If you preach opendata and transparency, expect to be called on it.
Twiiter and social media has been an excellent tool for Walsall Council and I myself, have found it wonderful – as have hundreds of others. Exaggerating the benefit just endangers it.
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I've got a bearish Aussie bias and I'm still a bit bummed out that I wasn't able to catch more pips on my earlier short AUD/JPY play.
However, I'm seeing another potential channel setup on AUD/CHF and it's looking pretty neat with plenty of resistance levels lining up. Price is currently testing the 50% Fib, which coincides with the .7300 major psychological level and a former support zone. This is around the channel resistance, too!
At the same time, stochastic is already hovering around the overbought zone, which signals that Aussie bears are ready to get back in the game.
However, I'm hesitating to hop in at market because Australia just printed a stronger than expected Q1 GDP reading of 0.3% versus the 0.2% consensus. This follows a relatively confident RBA statement in which policymakers shrugged off recent signs of a slowdown.
Iron ore prices have also popped higher at the start of the week, which has also been bullish for the positively-correlated Aussie. This has been due mostly to restocking activity, though, so I'm thinking the business slowdown in China could still weigh on commodity demand and prices down the line.
There has also been talk of potential SNB intervention, but it looks like those speculations have subsided after the Swiss foreign currency reserves report actually printed a decline instead of a buildup.
Besides, it looks like the franc could retake its spot as the safe-haven of choice in Europe with the U.K. elections doing a number on GBP and a potentially downbeat ECB statement dragging the shared currency down.
Short AUD/CHF at .7275, stop loss at .7425, initial profit target at .7075. I'll be ready to move my stop to entry once price tests the previous lows at .7150.


Storage Bench with Cushion Upholstered Shoe Organizer Seat Entryway Bedroom Hall. Create a cozy, inviting atmosphere with the Home Styles Distressed Upholstered Storage Bench. This storage bench features sanded worn edges and your choice of distressed finish for that casual elegance that works in any home. It's well-built of poplar solids, and the multi-step finishing process results in a stylish, weathered look.
Features include a handy drop-down cabinet with two storage bins, a removable and reversible ultra-suede cushion with microfiber cover, and antiqued brushed nickel hardware. Dimensions: 47.25L x 18W x 21H in.
Drop-down cabinet with 2 storage bins. Your choice of sanded and distressed finish.
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text:
Better Jobs, Better Wa…Wait, What Did Trump Just Tweet?
Today's Campaign Update
(Because The Campaign Never Ends)
On Monday, the Democrats rolled out their new Papa Johns-plagiarized slogan: "A Better Deal: Better Jobs, Better Wages, Better Future." The slogan was so silly, so hokey, so obviously not having to do with anything today's Democrat Party is all about that even the Democrat operatives at MSNBC mocked it mercilessly (though CNN dutifully played along). The Party's strategy, of course, was to yet again attempt to fool the American people that it had a focus on jobs and helping the average American have a better life. The truth, of course, is that the Party and its agenda were long ago co-opted by Social Justice Warriors and Enviro-Nazis, which is the fundamental reason why the Republican Party holds every lever of power in the nation's capital today.
But Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi and the lunatics who are in charge of the DNC know they can't actually change their focus to things that actually make a difference in Americans' daily lives, so instead they paid some consultant millions of dollars to paraphrase a slogan off a Papa John's pizza box. Now, they thought, we can focus on our nifty new slogan, and pretend we care about the middle class! It'll be awesome! High fives were flying at DNC Headquarters. But then, on Wednesday, the President started tweeting….
…and part of his daily tweet storm that day was a two-tweet announcement that the U.S. military would no longer accept trans-gender applicants and force the U.S. middle class taxpayers to foot the bill for their trans-gender surgeries while they served. In response, the Democrats and their agents who make up 98% of the nation's news media went stark raving mad. The Party's focus was right back in the hands of the SJWs, the efforts to change the subject instantly forgotten.
Slogan? What slogan?
Tired of winning yet? – The Taiwanese company FoxConn announced it is investing more than $10 billion in a new manufacturing plant in Wisconsin, a move that will create 13,000 American jobs. President Trump wisely held a joint announcement in the White House with the company's CEO. Immediately after, heads could be heard exploding all over CNN headquarters in Atlanta.
Tired of winning yet, Part II? – On Wednesday, the Dow, the NASDAQ and the S&P 500 indices all reached all-time highs. The fake news media – except for Fox News – were all too busy screaming about presidential tweets to notice.
The NYPost reports that Dancing With The Stars is currently in negotiations with…wait for it….wait for it…SEAN SPICER! That. Is. Awesome. Go for it, big guy.
Kid Rock, who is running for the U.S. Senate in Michigan against the execrable Debbie Stabenow, announced on his website that he will be registering people to vote…at his performances! Those loud noises you heard yesterday were heads exploding at DNC Headquarters. Yeah, they were exploding over the President's tweets, but they would have exploded over this, too, had they had the chance.
After 9 Republican senators voted against the initial Obamacare repeal and replace bill on Tuesday evening, 7 GOP senators compounded the Party's mendacity by joining all Democrats in voting down a repeal-only bill on Wednesday. Five of those seven had voted for the exact same bill in the past when they knew Barack Obama would veto it: Lisa Murkowski, John McCain, Rob Portman, Shelly Capito, and Lamar Alexander. Dean Heller of Nevada wasn't around in the Obama years, so he gets a pass on the hypocrisy, and, as I mentioned yesterday, Susan Collins has never in the past voted in favor of Obamacare repeal, consistently siding with her soulmates in the Democrat Party. Hopefully, all seven will receive strong primary challengers. They deserve them.
Just another day in Democrat heads exploding and fake Republican mendacity America.
democratsdonald trumpdow jonesKid Rockmilitarynasdaqobamaobamacarestock markettrans-genderwinning
What A Difference A Presidential Tweetstorm Makes
John McCain Sends A Final "F You" To The American People


Billy Ocean is set to return on April 29th with 'Here You Are: The Best Of'. The album is a 2CD unique collection celebrating his long and illustrious career, which has seen him become a Grammy award winner with worldwide sales of over 30 million. In the 70s and 80s he hit number one spots across three continents, counting no fewer than six UK top 10 singles. Disc one of 'Here You Are' features a personally curated selection of tracks covered by the man himself, chosen for their influence on him both musically and in his personal life.
Billy lends his soulful voice to such classics such as 'No Woman No Cry', 'A Change is Gonna Come' and 'High Tide Low Tide' among many other exemplary interpretations. The package also includes a special best of bonus disc, encompassing a collection of Billy Ocean's biggest genre-defining tracks such as the timeless 'Caribbean Queen', 'When The Going Gets Tough', 'Get Outta My Dreams' and the beautiful 'Suddenly'.


Brock & Kiraz English care, necessity.
How to cite this entry? Bar Bahlul, Bar Bahlul ܐܟܦܐ [from sedra.bethmardutho.org, accessed on Apr. 26, 2019].
How to cite this entry? Sebastian P. Brock & George A. Kiraz, Gorgias Concise Syriac-English, English-Syriac Dictionary (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2015) ܐܟܦܐ [from sedra.bethmardutho.org, accessed on Apr. 26, 2019].
How to cite this entry? Robert Payne Smith, Thesaurus Syriacus (Oxford: The Calerndon Press, 1879) Vol 1, p. 95 [from sedra.bethmardutho.org, tagged by Jillian Marcantonio, accessed on Apr. 26, 2019].
How to cite this entry? J. Payne Smith (Mrs. Margoliouth), A Compendious Syriac Dictionary (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1903) p. 17 [from sedra.bethmardutho.org, tagged by Jeff Haines, accessed on Apr. 26, 2019].
How to cite this entry? J. Payne Smith (Mrs. Margoliouth), Supplement to the Thesaurus Syriacus of R. Payne Smith (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1927) p. 19 [from sedra.bethmardutho.org, tagged by Sebastian Kenoro Kiraz, accessed on Apr. 26, 2019].


You've come to the right place for The Lalit coupons, printables, coupon codes, deals, and more! Last updated October 3, 2018.
Take 50% off your purchase at The Lalit! Find printable coupons, coupon codes, promos, and other deals here. Updated October 2018.


[toc]Depression creates a feeling of unhappiness, helpless, loneliness and isolation accompanied by negative thoughts and lack of trust and hope in anything. It also makes us feel that things would never change. The most common symptoms of depression are sadness, mood swings, pessimistic thinking, lack of interest in day to day activities, sudden anger or emotional outburst, reckless behavior, problem in focusing, etc.
It is true that we all go through phases of depression which may be very mild or severe. Mild depression is very common and occurs due to events and incidents that are not very serious or at least we do not take them too seriously. On the other hand, when an incident or an event affects our body and mind so deeply that we are not in a position to move on and think rationally, in a positive manner, we are likely to fall into depression.
The reasons for depression can be either medical conditions, psychological or social factors or a combination of one or more of these. The symptoms and causes varies from person to person. However, there are some common do's and don'ts which can be extremely helpful for every person, irrespective of the type of depression and its severity.
The age old saying that an idle mind is a devil's workshop is very true. Lack of physical or mental engagement gives us enough time to get into flashbacks, unnecessary interpretations and avoidable negative thoughts. In other words, we give ourselves the scope to get anxious and depressed to a large extent.
Therefore, the key to happiness lies in staying engrossed. Concentrating in your work, playing with children, socializing with people, pursuing hobbies and interests, etc are excellent ways to get away from depression.
The inflow and outflow of negative thoughts are very normal. Estranged relationships, repeated failures, prolonged illness, death or a major loss, inability to fulfill a strong desire or aspiration may leave us devastated and depressed.
This depression and negative mindset may sometimes overtake our normal thought process and mental strength and even induces us to imagine the worst possible outcome, which may sound quite ridiculous and irrational to others.However, it possible to reverse this negative though process, which requires strong determination and urge to move on. It is best to look into things with logic and new perspective.
It is also important not to take things too personally and give it a generalized look. For example, if the depression is due to the death of someone near and dear, we must accept that no one is immortal and we all must die someday. Doing this may be initially difficult, but not impossible. If necessary, take the help of someone who can help you come out of the situation.
Exercise has the ability to stimulate and boost endorphins, which is a chemical that enhances feel-good spirit. It makes us strong and healthy from inside and at the same time, positively charges our brain.
Staying fit also makes us feel confident and gives us the courage to face things with courage and hope. You may opt for an exercise of your choice like swimming, cycling, playing out door games, aerobics, jogging, etc. Even a simple walk can be extremely beneficial in keeping our body and mind healthy. Moreover, it also keeps us engaged.
Pumpkins and flax seeds are extremely beneficial in overcoming depression. They are a rich source of amino acids, omega 3 fatty acids, carbohydrates, unsaturated fatty acids, multi-vitamins, calcium, potassium and a host of other vital nutrients.
These seeds are normally eaten in roasted form as a snack and added in dishes and salads which gives them a nutty effect. However, they start losing their goodness when they are heated. Therefore, it is always good to eat them raw.
A proper diet is very essential for any disorder or health condition, including depression. The incorporation of Omega 3 fatty acids in your diet will keep the brain cells active and improve its performance and behavioral functions.
It is found in abundance in sea foods like tuna, salmon, mackerel, oysters, etc.The vegetarians can get their Omega 3 intake from green leafy vegetables, flax seeds, mustard greens, kiwi, black raspberry, etc. Vitamin B6 and Vitamin C also helps in warding off depression.
They are mainly found in strawberries, bananas, broccoli, oranges, red peppers, etc. Depression may sometimes be triggered by hormonal disorders. A healthy diet of proteins and iron can help in getting rid of depression.


Well, I took option (b) and read until 4 AM and now I'm getting up and getting started with my day. My eyes feel a bit sand-papery, and I must admit that I am now a little tired, but it is way beyond any chance of me getting any more decent sleep. Perhaps I'll sleep better tonight.
Right now, I'm looking forward to a few bowls of Wheaties, some toast, a banana and some milk and orange juice!


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Sammy Angott (* 16. Januar 1915 in Washington (Pennsylvania) als Samuel Engotti; † 22. Oktober 1980) war ein US-amerikanischer Leichtgewichts-Boxer, der seinen wichtigsten Titel gegen Lew Jenkins errang (Weltmeister im Leichtgewicht).

Angott begann im Jahr 1935 zu boxen und gewann unter anderem Kämpfe gegen Davey Day, Lenny Mancini, Allie Stolz und Ike Williams und verlor unter anderem gegen Fritzie Zivic und Sugar Ray Robinson, bis er im August 1950 mit 99 Siegen, 28 Niederlagen und 8 Unentschieden seine Karriere beendete und 1998 in die International Boxing Hall of Fame aufgenommen wurde.

Boxer (Vereinigte Staaten)
Pseudonym
US-Amerikaner
Geboren 1915
Gestorben 1980
Mann

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


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Charter Communications
Which smartphone can be trusted to send the most important messages?
The iPhone 7 has the most powerful processor in a smartphone, but the company's next-gen flagship phone could have a serious problem in delivering on that promise.
The company's latest iPhone 7 Plus and its successor, the iPhone 7S Plus, have both been praised for the new hardware, but critics have said that the phone's camera is not up to snuff.
This is because Apple is relying on a new, higher-resolution sensor, which is capable of delivering more information per pixel.
If Apple's camera can't handle more pixels per second, it will have a tough time getting users to use its new features.
"The fact that Apple is using a higher resolution camera means that the new iPhone 7 and the new iPhones 7 Plus will be more susceptible to pixel quality problems, because it will need to make more pixels to get the same quality as the old iPhone 7," says John L. Sullivan, a professor of communications and information science at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
While the iPhone 5S and iPhone 6S could both deliver better pictures, the differences between the two phones are not as big as those between the 5 and 6.
The iPhone 5 and iPhone 5C both used the same camera sensor as the iPhone 6.
Both the iPhone 4S and the iPhone 3G used a 5MP sensor.
However, the camera on the iPhone XS Max is actually 4MP, not 5MP.
The 5MP camera on a smartphone is an improvement over the 3MP camera used on the 5S, but it still has a few drawbacks.
"It's an improvement, but not as much as the camera technology has come to," Sullivan says.
The higher resolution makes the iPhone cameras more sensitive to light, which can make them more susceptible, as well as slower to get an image to the sensor.
And because the sensor is more sensitive, the sensor also has a shorter battery life compared to the larger sensor on a 4-inch smartphone.
That's not good for the user, and Apple is hoping that the improved resolution will make it easier to use the iPhone.
In addition, the new camera will allow for more real-time, immersive video.
"If you have an iPhone 6, for example, you're going to have to shoot it in 5MP," Sullivan notes.
"But the 5MP is going to be good for a lot of things, so you're not going to need to worry about that.
The only time you're probably going to miss that is if you're shooting a video of yourself, because you're trying to do the same thing over and over again."
The higher-res iPhone 7 will be the first iPhone that can use the new, high-resolution iPhone 7Plus camera, which features a 12MP sensor and a 4.5-inch screen.
This will be a big upgrade over the 6 Plus, which only had a 4MP sensor on the screen.
The new iPhone is designed to be smaller and lighter than the 6S and 6S Plus.
This means that it won't be able to fit in the palm of a hand, but will fit in a pocket or purse.
In order to do this, the smartphone will need the new larger-pixel, high resolution iPhone 7 sensor.
The phone will also have a much higher-capacity battery than the iPhone 9.
In other words, it'll be more difficult to charge a battery that is not able to use up its full capacity.
That means that you'll need to charge the iPhone regularly, or you might need to get a third-party charger to help you get the most out of it.
The more powerful, higher resolution iPhone will be an important factor in Apple's marketing of the new smartphone, which has focused on its image quality.
"They've tried to sell the iPhone as a device that's going to go beyond the basics and deliver something that people are going to really be happy with," Sullivan explains.
"I think it's important to make that clear.
The most important thing is that they don't just sell it as a smartphone for a niche market.
The people who will buy it for a broader audience are going be the people who are going the extra mile."
Apple will continue to sell both iPhones at a premium, with the iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus both starting at $1,999 and $1.1,499, respectively.
The premium pricing does make sense for the iPhone, which was initially only available at the highest-end model.
For more information about Apple's next flagship smartphone, watch this space.
Posted in LifestyleTagged communication solutions, process communication model, star communications
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Cycling and mountain biking
Active and adventure activities
Nature and animals
Our favourite days out
Cycling and bike friendly
Availability & Book
Cottage location
The cottage is in the quiet village of Llanarmon Dyffryn Ceiriog. We are ideally placed for all the attractions North Wales has to offer. We are approximately 9 miles from Llangollen, 25 miles from Bala, 20 miles from Lake Vyrnwy and 35 miles from Betws-y-Coed.
The cottage is in the Berwyn Range which provides lots of opportunities for walks, biking and outdoor activities. If you head west you arrive in the Snowdonia National Park. Further north takes you into the Clwydian Range. A short drive across the hill takes you to the popular town of Llangollen with its cafes, restaurants, delis and independent shops.
The nearest train station is Chirk which is approximately 11 miles away. There is limited public transport to the village and really a car or a bike (if you are on a cycling holiday) is essential.
Cycling and MTB
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The Encinitas Current
Cranes for Dummies
Posted on April 20, 2019 April 30, 2019 by Staff
by Robert Hemphill
Sandhill Crane, courtesy Smithsonian.com
Why, one might reasonably ask, would an otherwise normal person leave a lovely beach house in San Diego, where the March temperature averages 68 degrees F, the rain is essentially non-existent, and the winds moderate when they blow at all, only to venture into the middle of Nebraska where the temperature averages below freezing, there is lots of wind, and lots of rain, and many of the rivers are frozen? To add to the attractiveness there are large, unsightly globs and piles of dirty brown snow on the ground, bordering all the sidewalks and streets.
Why indeed? Because said normal person, in his general reading, stumbled across a Smithsonian magazine article detailing a huge gathering of large birds who are in the middle of a seven-thousand-mile migration from their winter homes in northern Mexico to their summer nesting places near the arctic circle. They take a six-week break along the Sandhill and Platte rivers, centering on Kearney, Nebraska. They are thus called "Sandhill cranes", or Antigone canadensis, although one supposes that they might as well be called Northern Mexico Cranes or Arctic Circle Cranes. I guess we got there first and claimed naming rights. The intriguing thing about this particular bird and this trip is that there are 600,000 to 800,000 cranes who pass through central Nebraska in early spring, and this said to be the largest migration of any animal on the North American continent.
After I read the article I immediately called up my cousin Jim, one of my four Nebraska cousins. Two of them live in Lincoln, a mere 120 miles from Kearney along I-80. "You ever hear of the Sandhill cranes migration? It's supposed to be quite spectacular."
"Oh sure," he said, "It's over in Kearney in the spring sometime."
"Jim, I have been coming to Lincoln every Fourth of July for the family reunion, and no one has ever mentioned this to me."
"Well, we did take you to see the state capital downtown that one time," he acknowledged. "It's pretty neat, the tallest building in Lincoln."
We left it at that.
And thus we departed balmy southern California, heavily loaded down with warm ski wear. All the books said "bring really warm clothes, really"—and so we did. We landed in Omaha, picked up a rental car, and drove west to Lincoln to see my 95-year-old aunt, now living in the Pine Manor Retirement Home, which has no pines around it. At lunch, she asked why we were visiting. "I've lived here 95 years," she noted, "and I've never been over to Kearney to see those birds. I guess they're pretty big?"
"We'll see, I hope so, or else we will just have to make do with the wonders of Kearney," we said.
"I don't think you'll be that impressed, so I hope your birds show up," she concluded helpfully.
She was right about Kearney. Population of 33 thousand, in a state that only has 1.8 million residents, it's the fifth largest city. It has an arch crossing over the interstate but just barely as it is more flat than arch-like, kind of a bridge from one side of the interstate to the other, except that there is nothing on either side except corn fields. And you can't drive a tractor over the 'arch' so the point eludes me. There is a small downtown that is the site of Fort Kearny. This fort, a small building and a modest stockade, was named after Gen. Stephen Kearny, a Mexican war hero and capturer of California. It opened in 1848 and helped protect travelers on the Oregon Trail.
We arrived late in the day and immediately after went over to the 1,900-acre Rowe Audubon Sanctuary just south of the river. After an introductory briefing, a group of us who had previously signed up for this "viewing" tramped out into the mud and cold to get to the viewing blinds. These fronted and paralleled the river and resembled individual rail cars, but longer and thinner. The northern side was pierced by a number of one-foot square openings for viewing ports looking out on the river, but the blinds were otherwise enclosed. This was a good thing as it was very cold and unheated. This added to the experience.
We looked out the ports. We looked out the ports with our binoculars. We looked through the ports using the telescopic sights of our cameras. We saw patches of ice on the river, a small bit of river gurgling along quite near us. We saw lots of birds in the sky. They were in "V" formations, they were in single file, they were in flocks and gaggles and whirls, they were in maelstroms, they were in agglutinations and aggregations. What they were not was close and on the ground. And because flying entails a certain amount of velocity, they were tough to keep your camera or your binoculars focused on. And the light in the grey and cloudy sky was fading. We were quiet inside the blind because we had been lectured not to make any noise as this could spook the birds. And why had the Audubon people chosen this time for us to stand around shivering in a dark blind in the vanishing light?
How this works in interesting. From what one can gather without calling on the resources of the ornithology department at Cornell (the best bird source of knowledge in the US, maybe the world), the cranes spend the winter months in northern Mexico, generally. Then at some point in time in February or early March, something tells them to fly the 1200 miles to the Sand Hill and Platte River Valley, which parallel each other and together are more of a flat plain—the descriptive material calls the Sandhill a "braided stream" with many sand bars and islands. The early settlers classically described it as "a mile wide and an inch deep." It is all very, very flat. Hence the spread out nature of the water course.
Once the birds arrive, they find to their delight that the farming in the area, and there is nothing but corn farming in the area, has left a lot of corn on the ground. When you think about mechanical harvesting of a whole corn field, it's not like getting an ear at the local market and then carefully peeling off the husk, and so on. It's a lot more banging and pulling and cutting and depositing stuff on conveyors and then shooting the ears into large rolling bins to take the corn back to the silo. Hence the fact that some ears escape the process, and that some ears have some kernels knocked off onto the ground by the process, is not surprising. The cranes are the beneficiaries of this, along with a lot of snow geese and Canada geese, who are making a similar but less arduous migratory trip. The cranes are basically gleaners.
They stand around in the open fields all day eating corn. Then as evening falls, they retreat to islands in the river, as this is a safer place, much more difficult for predators to sneak up on them. Besides, the coyotes and foxes, etc. would get wet. In the morning, the whole thing reverses—the birds wake up and then fly off to the corn fields.
The cranes stand about four feet tall, with 5-foot wingspans, and weigh only six to ten pounds. During their three week or so stay, they add 20% to their body weight. They eventually fly off to their summer preference, somewhere in the northern part of Canada, near the arctic circle. This area makes up 69% of Canada and has 2% of the population. And it's a balmy 45 degrees in the summer. They (the cranes, not the people) build nests, they hatch eggs and fledge chicks and eventually fly back to Mexico. For reasons not obvious in the literature, they don't do the same feeding stopover when heading south. The cranes can fly as fast as 30 mph and when migrating fly at 3000 to 5000 feet. This keeps them above the range of small arms, as anyone who has flown a helicopter in combat will know. They are legal to shoot in most states but not Nebraska. And the clever cranes only hang out in rural Mexico and very rural Canada, with the brief stopover around Kearney and Grand Island. This whole arrangement keeps them out of the way of people, which is clearly fine for them.
The cranes are said to be one of the longest surviving species on the planet, with some fossils clearly identified from 2.5 million years ago. We could not find anything conclusive on the baseline population of cranes while the Plains Indians were still in charge, although one source guessed at 100,000. So now why the expanding population?
Pre-settler, there were no dams on the Sandhill or its tributaries, and about half of Nebraska was either "wet meadow" or river. The cranes were then confined to eating "seeds, berries, tubers, insects, worms, mice, snakes and frogs" but not fish. Not sure there was a heck of a lot of fish to eat in the shallow river and creeks. The settlers and the Bureau of Reclamation created the corn fields. If I were a crane, I would sure rather just look down in the middle of a field and find lots of corn, than root around looking for snakes and insects. We speculated that unlike most human/wild animal contacts, humans did the cranes a favor and made their feeding stopover easier and better. It probably wasn't anyone's plan, but so it goes.
You can go out into the farming areas and drive along the dirt roads and see cranes feeding in the fields, and we did that, but the farmers don't think you to drive through their fields, and the local gendarmes are not happy with tourists arbitrarily blocking the narrow roads while photographing the cranes. And the cranes keep a wary distance.
So that leaves us back at the blinds in the cold darkling evening. About 45 minutes after we get into the blind—which by the way feels longer since all you can see is the vegetation on the bank across the river and the white expanse of flat island with ice on it between you and the wintry trees—one notices that some geese have landed on the island, maybe 50 feet away. But, honestly, I can see Canada geese pretty much anywhere, they're kind of a pest. We persevere and the light continues to dim—it's pretty grey out to begin with.
And then someone whispers, "We've got cranes dropping!" It is a perfect description. Nobody said that these were the most graceful birds in the aviary. They don't crash but they do come in at a very steep glide, big wings flexed to slow them, and they look like they're hitting a bit hard but they don't fall down. And when one starts, suddenly everybody gets the message. It's raining cranes, all along the snow covered island, in rows and volumes and bunches and gaggles. It happens in minutes and it is beautiful. Damn, there are really a lot of them when they hit the ground and walk around making the loud gravelly cluck cluck that is their signature sound. And then more land, and then more after that until it seems that there's no more room, but somehow there is. It is impressive and even wondrous. All these cranes coming to a 60 mile stretch of a cold shallow river in Nebraska in the same six week period.
Video from 2019 Sandhill Crane Watch
It was about eight-thirty when we left the Sanctuary center, and we were elated but tired and hungry. Bad news—Kearney may be the crane capital of the world, but you cannot find an open restaurant after nine. Believe me. We drove up and down the main street. Red Lobster, closed. Copper Skillet, closed. Charlie's Tacos, closed. Thunderhead Brewery, closed. McCue's Taphouse, closed. We were staying in a high-end Hampton Inn, even with a pool, but no food service or restaurant. We did find an open liquor store, so we bought an acceptable bottle of Pinot Noir and some potato chips, but it was not what we were looking for, really.
We got out the next morning at five thirty, drove to the Audubon center, it's still cold, it's still dark, it's still a long muddy slippery hike out to the blind. When you get there and look out at first you can't see anything. Philosophical questions begin to plague one, like "Why am I doing this, and paying for it, without even a doughnut (shop closed) or a cup of coffee (no Starbucks in sight)." Then through the icy gloom you begin to make out many, many cranes, even closer and more numerous than the night before although it is difficult to count. As the light grows the individuals become more distinct and the clucking grows louder and the extent of the cranes that you can see up and down the river grows. Then just before there is enough light for really decent pictures, somebody (some bird?) gives a signal and they all lift off. Not all immediately together, but in waves like fighters coming off an aircraft carrier, and in minutes the cranes and the geese are all circling around in vortices, gaining altitude, then dispersing in all kinds of directions. I hate people who use the word "magical" as an all-purpose descriptor, but the lift-off is pretty close to that.
In ten minutes the birds are all gone. We hike back to the center, get some coffee, and buy a crane t-shirt. I mean, we are Americans, after all.
The next day we had planned on going out to the fields again, but the morning dawned rainy and very foggy. The forecast was for more of the same, weather in which you really had no chance of seeing anything except maybe a little bit ahead on the highway. We weighed our chances, looked at the TV images of the Denver airport totally shut down by a storm coming our way, and decided to depart. A week later the eastern half of Nebraska was flooded and I-80, the way we had taken into and out of Kearney, was closed. I imagine the cranes were still out in the fields eating, and avoiding the flooded parts.
Final avian facts: The cranes are in the top ten, but at 800,000 are not the most numerous birds in America. Top billing goes to mourning doves (475 million) followed by 300 million robins, 190 million red wing blackbirds, 70 million house sparrows and 24 million crows. See, isn't that interesting?
Cranes mate for life, which for these guys is around 25 years. According to a brochure we picked up at the Rowe center, "Mated pairs will celebrate their union with head pumping, wing-flapping, bowing, leaping and tossing sticks, vegetation and clumps of soil into the air." Better than many weddings I have been to.
More from The Smithsonian here.
Sunset photo at top, courtesy Kearney, NE Visitors Bureau.
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2019 The Encinitas Current


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Proposed Legislation Would Amend Fair Housing Act
Last week, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) introduced a bill to outlaw discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered (LGBT) Americans in the housing and credit markets. The bill also would ban housing discrimination based on marital status and source of income. Rep. Jerrold Nadler introduced the companion legislation in the House of Representatives.
The Housing Opportunities Made Equal (HOME) Act would amend the Fair Housing Act (FHA) to prohibit housing discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, or source of income. It would also amend the Equal Opportunity Credit Act to prohibit LGBT discrimination in credit decisions.
"It's hard to believe that in 2011, any law-abiding, tax-paying American who can pay the rent can't live somewhere just because of who they are," Sen. Kerry said in a statement. "Housing discrimination against LGBT Americans is wrong, but today in most states there isn't a thing you can do about it. This legislation would end discrimination that continues to hurt people."
"Despite a great deal of progress, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people continue to experience discrimination in all aspects of their lives, including one of the most basic--finding a home for themselves and their families," added Human Rights Campaign President Joe Solmonese. "We thank Senator Kerry for continuing his leadership toward full legal equality for LGBT Americans by introducing legislation, the first of its kind in the Senate, that would outlaw housing and credit discrimination."
The HOME Act would:
• Amend the Fair Housing Act to prohibit housing discrimination and intimidation on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, or source of income;
• Amend the Equal Credit Opportunity Act to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity in access to credit;
• Outlaw housing discrimination both before and after a housing unit is acquired;
• Strengthen antidiscrimination protections for handicapped individuals and LGBT parents with custody of a child; and
• Provide the Attorney General with appropriate pre-litigation investigative power to enforce the law.
Source: Sen. Kerry's Office