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Category Archives: Costumes
Time to Clean Out Your Closets & Garages!
By Louise Coffey-Webb in Costumes June 1, 2010 0 Comment
by Louise Coffey-Webb, Costume Committee Chair
Summer is upon us and I, for one, am trying to clean out the quantities of "stuff" that seem to multiply mysteriously over the years in my garage. I unpack my summer clothes and look at them once more.
Do they still fit? Are they representative of who I am this year? Even though that garment used to be my absolute favorite – isn't it a bit shabby after all these years?
All this evaluating got me thinking about the readers of this column and what you may have in your garage.
Might There Be Some MGM Auction Items Around?
Although I moved here from England over three decades ago, I was not here for the legendary MGM auction. I have worked at various museums where donors have come in from time to time with items they purchased at the auction saying "it seemed like a good idea at the time!"
And actually it was, because now those objects have been saved from obscurity (as well as Halloween and the grand kids dress-up!), and will be catalogued, researched and preserved for current and future generations to enjoy.
So I am wondering if any of you have items in your garage that may be of interest to the Culver City Historical Society? We are particularly interested in costumes that were acquired at the MGM auction, or other costumes that you may have held onto, because you mother or grandmother worked in the industry, or perhaps you yourself were an actor and held onto a favorite character you played.
CCHS ARC Donation Policy
The policy of the Culver City Historical Society Archives and Resource Center (ARC) states that it "will gratefully accept donations that relate to local history." However, "the Society reserves the right to decline donations deemed inappropriate to the enhancement of the collection."
Each donor will receive an official letter of acknowledgement stating the CCHS is a charitable non-profit 501(c)3 organization, with our tax identification number listed along with an inventory or description of the donation.
As it is considered a conflict of interest for the CCHS to appraise your donation, please speak with your accountant about valuing your donation. The IRS often changes such details and sums under which donations need not have an official appraisal, which is why I advise professional advice in such situations.
Here is a photo of a costume that was donated by Ann Bein to the Woodbury Fashion Study Collection, from the MGM auction. It is from the 1962 musical The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm starring Laurence Harvey & an all-star cast, and it won a costume Oscar for Mary Wills.
Again, be reminded that costumes and other film artifacts should be pertinent to the local history of Culver City as well as having connections to our three majors and the minor studios which make us the "Heart of Screenland."
Now, I wonder what you will discover in your "summer" cleaning…
Costumes Spring 2010
By Louise Coffey-Webb in Articles, Costumes April 1, 2010 0 Comment
MGM COSTUMES ARCHIVED!
March 6th was a red-letter day for the costume collection at the Archives & Research Center (ARC), because it was the day that we finally completed the re-boxing of all 70-odd costumes from the famous MGM studio auction in 1970!
Why was re-boxing so significant? Well, it has been an ongoing project for the past couple of years, ever since we ordered special archival boxes of sufficient size and sturdiness not to crush some of the voluminous skirts and petticoats evident in mid-20th Century film costumes, often depicting silhouettes of bygone eras.
Metal-edged and acidic tags (sometimes original from the auction) were removed and replaced with archival tags, in keeping with current museum standards. Descriptions and condition reports were made and photographs taken – all of which information was then entered into our database system.
The old, decrepit acidic boxes, going back to the 1980s, were unceremoniously placed in the building's dumpster, and a great relief was felt by all!
THANK YOU KARLA & ASHLEY!
This feat was accomplished with the seasoned help of two Woodbury University Fashion Design graduates, Karla Contreras and Ashley Evans. While each has worked with cataloguing costume collections before, both commented on the extraordinary workmanship of these MGM costumes, the likes of which they had never seen before.
COSTUMES REPRESENT FILM HISTORY
In our ongoing effort to make available to the public as many of these costumes as possible, we rotate our mannequin displays so that you can enjoy them and learn a little film history while doing so.
Earlier this year, we mounted a gorgeous green and silver charmeuse (a high-quality satin silk originally from France) gown, in the early 19th Century style, worn by actress Jennifer Jones as Emma Bovary in MGM's 1949 film, Madame Bovary, co-starring Charles Boyer.
Ms. Jones, who passed away on December 17th, 2009 at the age of 90, was acknowledged at this year's Academy Awards. She was born Phylis Lee Isley in Tulsa, OK, and had a film career that spanned almost four decades, earning her five Oscar© nominations and winning for Best Actress in 1944 for The Song of Bernadette, at the age of 25. Many of her films have become classics, including Duel in the Sun, Love is a Many-Splendored Thing and Portrait of Jennie.
The costume on display was designed by Walter Plunkett, famous for designing the costumes for Gone With The Wind.
Our second mannequin case features an elaborate, colorful and be-tassled dancer's costume worn by actress Sono Osato as Bianca in MGM's The Kissing Bandit, also from 1949. This musical starred Frank Sinatra and Kathryn Grayson (who passed away on February 17, 2010, at the age of 88).
This film also depicted the early 19th Century, and its costumes too were designed by Walter Plunkett. It represented the clothing of the Californios, the early residents of New Spain before it (California) became part of the United States. Plunkett researched the period from surviving garments in rare collections at the Los Angeles County Museum of History, Science and Art, now known as the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.
We hope you will find time to visit these costumes (as well as many other historical delights on display) on the first and third Saturday afternoons of each month.
Costumes Winter 2010
By Louise Coffey-Webb in Articles, Costumes December 21, 2009 0 Comment
A BUSY & PRODUCTIVE 2009!
This has been a busy, full and very productive year for the ARC and the costume collections we have been able to display for the public.
We began the year with a display of the "candy cane" jacket that the great Gene Kelly wore in the musical, Take Me Out to the Ball Game, directed by Busby Berkeley in 1949. It was designed by Valles (full name: J. Arlington Valles, who worked for MGM for two decades). It brought back lots of happy memories for many locals!
In March, before I had the incredible opportunity to take a trip to China (made possible by the Maxine Frankel Foundation) I had just enough time to change out a costume display to highlight the 70th celebration of what many consider to be the greatest year in all filmdom: 1939. Though we do not yet have a costume from the classic Gone With The Wind, we were able to find a gown (c. 1860 and the Civil War) from the wonderful film, The Pirate, starring Judy Garland and Gene Kelly.
The trip to China included visits to Chinese Vogue, Image consultants, couture designers and the Beijing Institute of Fashion Technology. It is an extraordinary time for Chinese fashion right now – they are integrating their incredible history with their enormous appetite for new fashions and styles, resulting in a unique sensibility.
This Fall, and continuing into 2010, we will continue the dedicated work to finish cataloguing the MGM Costume Collection at the ARC. The final step in this process is to convert all the information onto our new computer database system – and our new VP, Museum/Archives Winston Gieseke, who is a computer wizard, will make it happen!
AVERY CLAYTON 1947-2009
Avery Clayton, who headed the Mayme A. Clayton Library and Museum located in Culver City, died on Thanksgiving Day at the age of 62.
His mother, Mayme A. Clayton, had spent a lifetime assembling a major collection of African-American artifacts – gathering a treasure trove of rare books, manuscripts, photographs, feature films and other ephemera. Several scholars have called the collection one of the most important of its kind in the country.
After his mother's passing in 2006 at 83, Avery took over the mantel to create an appropriate source to house and display his mother's extraordinary collection. "Her part was to assemble the collection," Clayton often said. "I really believe my part is to bring it to the world."
The CCHS sends its condolences to the Clayton family and friends, and its best wishes to Cynthia Hudley, a UC Santa Barbara education professor, who has been named interim executive director of the Mayme A. Clayton Library and Museum. We look forward to continuing our friendship as sister Culver City historical organizations.
I wish you all a wonderful 2010!
FIESTA TIME AGAIN!
By Louise Coffey-Webb in Articles, Costumes October 1, 2009 0 Comment
NEWS FROM THE COSTUME CHAIR…
If you have been by the ARC (Archive Resource Center) lately, you will have noticed a new mannequin in the central display area. She is wearing another of our "Princess" costumes from the Fiesta La Ballona, circa 1951.
The label inside states "Rosalie Utterback Original." Rosalie was former Chair of the Fashion Design Department at Woodbury University (where I now am.) She was at Woodbury for 30 years, from 1966 through 1996. Before that, she had her own dressmaking business, and this costume is obviously from that period.
If any of you readers have photographs of Fiesta costumes from the 1950s, it would be great fun to see if they feature one of Rosalie's dresses! Our dress features a pretty fitted lace bodice, with an attached four-tiered floor-length skirt in faille.
In front of the mannequin is a trophy which was given to Elsie Mohler in 1962. The engraving reads "Fiesta La Ballona, Culver City Chamber of Commerce, The Chamber of President's Award."
This Fall, work will continue on finishing up the cataloguing of the MGM Costume Collection at the ARC. The final step in this process is converting all the information onto our new computer database system.
My hope is that visitors will be able to sit at a computer in the Center and view the inventory on a monitor, complete with photos – thus making the entire collection available, rather than waiting for each costume to be individually displayed.
Stay tuned for a progress report!
WONDERFUL TRAVELS TO CHINA!
By Louise Coffey-Webb in Articles, Costumes July 1, 2009 0 Comment
NEWS FROM THE COSTUME CHAIR . . .
Summer is a time when many people travel abroad. For me, it's time for a "Staycation" because, luckily, I have been traveling a lot this year – beginning with spending the new year in Brazil with my extended family.
In March, thanks to the Maxine Frankel Foundation, I traveled to Beijing and Shanghai, China, with two students and another professor from Woodbury University, where I am Chair of the Fashion Design Department.
It was a thrilling trip over Spring Break, first visiting the cultural highlights to understand some of the very long history of Chinese culture, followed by fashion-focused visits to Chinese Vogue, Image consultants, couture designers, the Beijing Institute of Fashion Technology and tea with the first lady to bring western-style fashion shows to Beijing in 1980.
Overall it was enormously stimulating. It is an extraordinary time for Chinese fashion right now, as they integrate their incredible history with their enormous appetite for new fashions and styles, resulting in a unique sensibility.
A STUDY IN PEACOCKS…..
At the end of May, I was invited to give a lecture on peacocks in fashion and costume at the annual Costume Society of America Symposium, this year in Phoenix, Arizona. The Costume Society of America*, founded in 1973, is devoted to the encouragement and support of the study of dress.
Interestingly, Cecil B. De Mille's inspiration for the extravagant peacock cape worn by Hedy Lamarr in Samson and Delilah (Paramount Pictures,1949), came from the gown worn by the Indian Vicereine, Lady Curzon, to the Dunbar Ball in 1903. The ball celebrated King Edward VII as Emperor of India, and the gown was entirely embroidered to create golden peacock feathers and each "eye" was created with the wing of a scarab beetle.
According to Edith Head, the peacock feathers used for Hedy Lamarr's gown as Delilah, were gathered from the Demille's estate. Samson and Delilah won the Costume Oscar© for all six of its costume designers: Edith Head, Dorothy Jeakins, Elois Jenssen, Gile Steele and Gwen Wakeling.
Now, back to the Culver City Historical Society and the wonderful MGM costume collection! The Society will be working with the city on plans for the future which may include a costume exhibition on Woodbury University's Campus, in conjunction with the Second Annual International Burbank Film Festival in March of 2010. Stay tuned – and have a wonderful summer!
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Archives and Resource Center (ARC) hours
Located in the Veterans Memorial Building at 4117 Overland Avenue, the Culver City Historical Society Archives & Resource Center (ARC) is open the 1st and 3rd Sundays of every month from 1:00p to 3:00p and by appointment. Please enter through the parking lot at the rear of the building.


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Q: Mysql select complex query I am sorry for the vague title but I really cannot make this any more specific with my English.
I have this table called posts__tags that I use to associate post ids and tag ids with the following columns
record_id, post_id and tag_id. Here is an example sample
record_id | post_id | tag_id
1         |    1    |   1
2         |    1    |   2
3         |    1    |   3
4         |    2    |   2
5         |    3    |   1
6         |    3    |   3
7         |    4    |   2
8         |    4    |   3
9         |    4    |   4

I have a php function that has an array of tag_ids as a parameter. Lets say for example that my parameter is the array(2,3). I need to select all the post_id's that are associated with tag_id = 2 AND tag_id = 3.
In the above example I should get the 1 and 4 post_id's since only those are associated with both 2 and 3 tag_id 's.
What is the best way to achieve that with a MySQL query?
Thanks in advance

A: Try this
select distinct post_id from table_name where tag_id in (2,3)

A: select post_id from posts__tags where tag_id in (1,2) group by post_id having count(*)=2

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


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Someone great once wrote the lyrics to the song, Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans, an anthem to a city that is quite difficult to leave.
Unless you are born there, you arrive with every intention of passing through, but New Orleans' magic enchants you and it gets under your skin, but eventually you do move on—bitterly questioning why at every step—and sooner than you ever thought possible, you find yourself missing it with such intensity that you get it. You get the spirit of the song.
Seven years is not enough to learn every corner of a city. There's plenty I have yet to see. Maybe I will never see those fabled places of that fairytale city, but of what I did see of New Orleans, here are the things I miss the most.
Even when there really shouldn't be a reason—such as after a hurricane destroys the city or a historic building is torn down—New Orleans is always down to party. I have been to a few other cities in the United States, and while these have been fun, nothing has ever compared to New Orleans. It's not just during Carnival season. It's not only in Bourbon Street. It's everywhere, all of the time. I've been to parades held solely because it's Sunday. Even in the sadness of death, there will often be a joyous Second Line. The people have a joie de vivre that the French cultivated—and as an ancient French colony—New Orleans inherited and has perfected.
Mardi Gras may come and go, but the beads will still be there. The beads will be bright and cheery at first, and then slowly wilt in color and shape like fake, plastic leaves trees shed during the fall. Then Mardi Gras comes again, or St. Patrick's Day, or the Saints win the Super Bowl—or any other event where there will inevitably be parades and beads thrown—and the city is once again adorned in it's signature decoration: colorful plastic beads.
The famous Mardi Gras tree at Tulane University.
Like a moth to a flame, I am attracted to lights. Lighted buildings, neon lights, Christmas lights, LED decorations in parades—the list is endless—and New Orleans has it all.
It may be sacrilegious to write about great things in New Orleans and not mention the food. Yes, the food is amazing. New Orleans is brimming with delicious restaurants that have fed me well for the past seven years. I do not cook. I partially blame New Orleans for that. I especially blame the large Vietnamese population that settled in the city and opened restaurants whose existence my friends and I probably sustained.
But the one single, local food—other than King Cake—that I miss the most is crawfish. It's delicious, sometimes painful to eat—such as when your fingers are filling up with tiny cuts from cracking the crawfish's shells and their spiciness burns—but you keep on eating, pound after pound. There are Crawfish Festivals where people get together to eat, literally, tons of crawfish. It's a social activity, and of course, yet another reason to get together and have a party. I don't know how nature sustains this insatiable feasting—but I'm sure we are all glad nature pulls through.
Frenchmen Street is probably the single place in the city where I've had the most fun. New Orleans is packed with all kinds of venues, but the truth is, the best parties are usually outside. On the street, under stars, on Halloween, by the river, in the early morning sun—New Orleans has abundant occasions to enjoy hanging out in the middle of blocked off streets bursting with people and the sound of beating drums, trumpets and saxophones—undoubtedly made possible by the fact that drinking outside is not only allowed, but encouraged.
San Fermin Running of the Bulls Festival. New Orleans is obviously not Spain, but we celebrate as if we were.
The greatest gift New Orleans has given me is the countless opportunities to see live music and more than a hundred concerts. I know this, because I've kept track. New Orleans is renown for its live music scene—and with good reason. The local artists are amazing musicians and vibrant characters. Their passion for music is tangible, intoxicating and no concert I've been to in any other city has recreated quite the same atmosphere.
Debauche at One Eyed Jacks – The cello player is actually standing on his instrument and playing at the same time. It is epic.
Aside from the local artists, New Orleans hosts Jazz Fest and Voodoo Fest and a plethora of other festivals featuring big and small musical acts. There's a freedom and a unity coursing through big open fields filled with crowds of people dancing and indulging in the beat.
Not too long ago, I was lamenting missing New Orleans to a friend of mine over G-chat. I was sitting in an Indonesian high school in the middle of the day, and she was sitting in a downtown hotel in the middle of the night listening to jazz musicians play. I was seething with jealousy, but then she spoke these important words: New Orleans will always be here.
I hope so New Orleans. I can't wait to see you again.
Tags: billie holiday, bourbon street, carnival season, christmas at the oaks, city park, Crawfish, deadmau5, debauche, do you know what it means to miss new orleans, foster the people, french colony, frenchmen street, grand palace hotel, jazz fest, joie de vivre, louis armstrong, Louisiana, Mardi Gras, muses parade, New Orleans, One Eyed Jacks, party, plastic beads, travel, vacation, voodoo fest. Bookmark the permalink.


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An 18-Month-Old Child Suffering From Achalasia Cardia Successfully Treated With Pneumatic Dilation : JPGN Reports
An 18-Month-Old Child Suffering From Achalasia Cardia Successfully Treated With Pneumatic Dilation
Rashid, Rafia FCPS*; Arfin, Md. Samsul FCPS†; Alam, Muhammad Baharul MD†
From the *Department of Pediatrics, Dr. MR Khan Shishu Hospital and Institute of Child Health, Dhaka, Bangladesh
†Bangladesh Specialized Hospital, Dhaka, Bangladesh.
Received August 8, 2022;accepted August 12, 2022.
Parents and guardians of the studied child were informed about this case study, and written consent was obtained.
Correspondence: Rafia Rashid, Department of Pediatrics, Dr. MR Khan Shishu Hospital and Institute of Child Health, 5 Lake Circus, Dhaka 1205, Bangladesh. E-mail: [email protected]
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives License 4.0 (CCBY-NC-ND), where it is permissible to download and share the work provided it is properly cited. The work cannot be changed in any way or used commercially without permission from the journal.
Achalasia cardia is an idiopathic esophageal motility disorder. It is rare in children and infrequent in below school-going age groups. The "bird's beak" appearance of the lower esophagus on the esophagogram (barium swallow) is a classical radiological finding in the cases of esophageal Achalasia. The goals of achalasia therapy are symptom relief and improvement of esophageal emptying to prevent megaesophagus. The most effective treatment options are pneumatic dilation and surgical myotomy (Heller's myotomy). Pneumatic dilation is the initial treatment of choice and does not preclude myotomy. Here, we present our experience with a young child with achalasia cardia that was successfully treated with pneumatic dilation.
Achalasia cardia is an idiopathic esophageal motility disorder characterized by failure of the lower esophageal sphincter (LES) to relax during the deglutition (1,2). It is a chronic but benign disease of an unknown etiology and is a common cause of dysphagia (3). The most common symptoms of Achalasia are regurgitation, vomiting, dysphagia, cough, recurrent pneumonia, and poor weight gain or weight loss (1,2,4). The "bird's beak" appearance of the lower esophagus on the esophagogram (barium swallow) is a classical radiological finding in the cases of esophageal Achalasia (1,2,4). Achalasia is rare in children, with an estimated annual incidence of only 0.02–0.11 cases per 100 000 children, and it is more infrequent in the below 5-year age group (1,2,4). The goal of treating achalasia cardia is the relief of the functional obstruction at the level of the gastroesophageal junction (3).
An 18-month-old female child was admitted with the complaints of regurgitation of feed, nonprojectile vomiting, repeated fever, and cough with occasional breathlessness for last 1 year. The girl regurgitated every feed effortlessly immediately after feeding. Her mother also complained that the baby was not growing well like her peers. The child was delivered by normal vaginal delivery at term at a hospital with average birth weight without any postnatal complications. She was exclusively breastfed up to 6 months of her age. Then weaning was started with suji (a kind of semolina porridge) and khichuri (a South-Asian dish made of rice and lentils). Since then, the child started regurgitation and vomiting following every feed. She had no history of prolonged fever and contact with tubercular patients.
On physical examination, the child was malnourished with loss of subcutaneous fat. Her weight was 5.5 kg, height was 69 cm, and Mid-Upper Arm Circumference was 95 mm. She was severely wasted and stunted. Her Weight-for-Age Z-score was –5.8, Height-for-Age Z-score was –11, and Weight-for-Height Z-score was –6.2. She was mildly pale and anicteric with normal vitals. The other systemic examinations were unremarkable.
On investigation, a complete hemogram revealed anemia (Hemoglobin 7.9 gm%) with normal white blood cell count and platelet count. Serum total protein was 3.3 g/dL, with serum albumin of 1.9 g/dL. Blood glucose, urea, creatinine levels, and the levels of liver enzymes were within the normal limits. The chest x-ray and ultrasonography of the whole abdomen were unremarkable. Then a Barium swallow examination was performed, which showed the typical "bird's beak" appearance of the lower end of the esophagus (Fig. 1).
The barium swallow showed the "bird's beak" appearance of the lower end of the esophagus. LT, Left (Left Oblique Position).
Upper gastrointestinal endoscopy revealed the esophagus was hugely dilated and full of fluid. LES was 20 cm from the incisor teeth, tighter than usual, and almost occluded. However, a 5.5 mm scope could be passed with extra efforts, suggestive of achalasia cardia. The mucosa of the cardia, fundus, body, and antrum appeared normal. The bulb, post-bulbar area, and second part of the duodenum appeared normal (Fig. 2).
Fluoroscopic images of esophageal dilatation of the patient.
After nutritional rehabilitation and correction of anemia, the baby underwent esophageal dilatation using a 10 mm Controlled radial expansion balloon dilator (Fig. 3). The procedure was uneventful.
Different stages of the endoscopic procedure of the patient.
The baby was well immediately after the procedure, and her symptom was relieved afterward. In a telephonic follow-up after 3 months of the procedure, the mother informed that her general condition was improved, and she had gained weight satisfactorily. Due to the COVID-19 outbreak, the patient did not come to the hospital for a physical follow-up.
Achalasia is a primary esophageal motor disorder characterized by loss of LES relaxation leading to functional obstruction of the distal esophagus. Possible etiologies are degenerative, autoimmune, and infectious. In rare cases, Achalasia is familial or part of the triple A syndrome (Achalasia, alacrimia, adrenal insufficiency) (5). The pathological basis of Achalasia is selective loss of postganglionic inhibitory neurons, which leads to sphincter relaxation. Hence, postganglionic cholinergic neurons remain unopposed (5). Therefore high basal LES pressure is produced, and insufficient LES relaxation occurs (5).
Achalasia manifests with regurgitation and dysphagia for solids and liquids and may be accompanied by undernutrition or chronic cough (5). Our case was also presented with dysphagia and failure to thrive. It is uncommon for school-aged children (5), but the presenting case was only 18 months old. The loss of primary peristalsis in the distal esophagus with retained food and poor emptying is often present (5). In Achalasia patients, barium fluoroscopy reveals a smooth tapering of the lower esophagus resembling a bird's beak. Our patient also had a fluoroscopic feature of distal narrowing of the esophagus with proximal dilatation.
Endoscopy can be a diagnostic tool for Achalasia and helps characterize esophageal disease (ie, distinguishing between Gastroesophageal reflux disease and eosinophilic esophagitis) (6). In Achalasia, esophageal dilatation and food stasis are frequent findings at endoscopy, but it is not uncommon to be normal (6). However, in our case, we found that the LES is tighter than usual, and the lower part of the esophagus was almost occluded, suggestive of achalasia cardia. Manometry is the most sensitive diagnostic test and helps differentiate types of Achalasia (5). Unfortunately, manometry is unavailable in our country (Bangladesh).
The goals of achalasia treatment are relief of symptoms, improvement of esophageal emptying, and preventing megaesophagus. The most effective treatment options are pneumatic dilation (PD) and surgical myotomy (Heller's myotomy) (5). PD produces a controlled tear of the LES, resulting in relief of the distal esophageal obstruction and clinical improvement (6). Although laparoscopic myotomy is an effective procedure for young adults, peroral endoscopic myotomy remains a more attractive alternative (5).
Treatment options depend on patient's willingness to undergo an invasive procedure and their physical ability to endure it (7). The medical treatment includes calcium channel blockers, which inhibit the transmembrane influx of calcium in cardiac and smooth muscle; used primarily in adults (7). However, its use in children is not well studied. Other medical treatment options include endoscopic injection of Botox into the LES (7). It acts on the terminal nerve endings and prevents the release of acetylcholine (7). Nevertheless, its optimal dose and frequency are not determined in children. Eventually, most of the cases require either dilation or surgery (5).
We successfully treated our patient with PD using a 10 mm Controlled radial expansion balloon dilator. Careful preparation for this procedure is important to reduce the risk of esophageal perforation and aspiration (6). Pre-procedure preparation includes a clear liquid diet for a few days and a 12-hour fast before the procedure (6).
The results of PD in children with Achalasia are variable and difficult to compare because of variations in the techniques used (6). The most common complication of PD is the risk of esophageal perforation, which ranges from 0.5% to 6% of PD procedures for Achalasia, with a mortality rate of less than 1% (8–10). Our patient experienced no such complication after the procedure.
Although Achalasia in children is significantly rare, we suggest keeping it in the differential diagnosis of patients with a history of regurgitation of food and dysphagia. There are multiple treatment options available, including both invasive and noninvasive options. However, the choice depends mainly on the availability of that treatment and the patient's willingness.
We want to thank the parents of our patient who were very cooperative throughout the study period.
1. Tovar JA. Disorders of esophageal function. In: Coran AG, Adzick NS, Krummel TM, eds. Pediatric Surgery. 7th ed. Philadelphia, PA: Elsevier Saunders; 2012:936–946.
2. Franklin AL, Petrosyan M, Kane TD. Childhood achalasia: a comprehensive review of disease, diagnosis and therapeutic management. World J Gastrointest Endosc. 2014;6:105–111.
3. Chatterjee S, Gajbhiye V, De A, et al. Achalasia cardia in infants: report of two cases. J IMA. 2012;44:44–41.
4. Wakhlu A, Kureel S, Singh S, et al. Retrospective analysis of paediatric achalasia in India: single centre experience. Afr J Paediatr Surg. 2012;9:117–21.
5. Khan S, Matta SKR. Upper esophageal and upper esophageal sphincter dysmotility (striated muscle). In: Kliegman RM, St Geme III JW, Blum NJ, et al, eds. Nelson Textbook of Pediatrics. 21st ed. Philadelphia, PA: Elsevier; 2020;117–121.
6. Gold BD. Other esophageal neuromuscular disorders. In: Kleinman RE, Goulet OJ, Mieli-Vergani G, et al, eds. Walker's Pediatric Gastrointestinal Disease. 6th ed. Raleigh, NC: PMPH-USA; 2018:325–391.
7. Khan N, Liebenberg C, Suleman F. Achalasia cardia in children: a report of two cases. SAJCH. 2015;9:65–66.
8. Katsinelos P, Kountouras J, Paroutoglou G, et al. Long-term results of pneumatic dilation for achalasia: a 15 years' experience. World J Gastroenterol. 2005;11:5701–5705.
9. Khan AA, Shah SW, Alam A, et al. Sixteen years follow up of achalasia: a prospective study of graded dilatation using Rigiflex balloon. Dis Esophagus. 2005;18:41–45.
10. Kim H. Gastroplasty for esophageal perforation after endoscopic balloon dilatation for achalasia: two cases. J Korean Med Sci. 2014;29:739–742.
achalasia cardia; dysphagia; motility disorder; pneumatic dilation
motility disorder
pneumatic dilation
achalasia cardia\r, dysphagia\r, motility disorder\r, pneumatic dilation
Articles in PubMed by Rafia Rashid, FCPS
Articles in Google Scholar by Rafia Rashid, FCPS
Other articles in this journal by Rafia Rashid, FCPS

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– เนื้อที่โครงการ : 2 ไร่ 29.5 ตร.ว.
6. Central แจ้งวัฒนะ 3 กม.
ถนนเกษตร-นวมินทร์ ตัดใหม่ (ประเสริฐมนูญกิจ) เขตบึงกุ่ม กทม.
R1066 Condo for sale in the agricultural area - Nawamin.
- 8 storey building with 6 floors.
- Walkway can be used as a treadmill.
- Key card to add parking lot 2.
TypeA Room Size 32.47-33.02 sqm.
TypeC Room Size 38.68 sqm.
TypeE Room size 32.47 sqm.
- No down payment required.
- do not have to spend money for yourself.
You can see the actual room before.
ที่ตั้ง	ซอยพหลโยธิน 52 ถนนพหลโยธิน แขวงอนุสาวรีย์ เขตบางเขน กทม.
-เซ็นทรัล ปิ่นเกล้า : 1.9 กม.
-เมเจอร์ ปิ่นเกล้า : 1.9 กม.
-พาต้า ปิ่นเกล้า : 3.9 กม.
Size: aprrox 65 sqm. Floor: 23 Facing: Northwest City & canal views, Corner room. Convenient to all amenities.
Type: 2 bedrooms 2 bathrooms, Fully furnished with electric appliances. Refrigerator, TV's, Washing machine, Home theatre system, Water heater, Microwave, Hood hob.


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Country's Oldest Craft Brewery Goes Union
Sahid Fawaz March 14, 2019 0 Comments
Workers at a 123 year old craft beer brewery have voted yes to a union.
The San Francisco Chronicle reports:
"Workers at Anchor Brewing Co. voted to unionize Wednesday.
Employees at the production facility at 1705 Mariposa St. voted 31-16 to organize with the International Longshore and Warehouse Union. Workers across the street at Anchor Public Taps, an affiliated restaurant, will vote on Friday.
The unionization efforts became public last month after more than a year of organizing at the 123-year-old brewery often credited with America's original craft beer.
"I'm extremely excited, I've been working with (the ILWU), and my phone's been going off nonstop," said Patrick Machel, a part-time worker at Anchor Taps who was in class at San Francisco State University when the result were announced.
Machel, 28, was one of two workers in February who said they were taken aside by management and told to take off yellow pins with the phrase "Union Strong." That led to the ILWU filing a complaint with the federal National Labor Relations Board last month.
Workers are asking for better hours and benefits. Machel said management has scheduled him and others at 29 hours of work a week, preventing him from acquiring full-time status. Workers are also dealing with shorter lunch breaks, reduced sick days and costlier health benefits, he said. The union effort highlights the tensions service workers face trying to get by in San Francisco on low-paying jobs.
In 2017, Anchor Brewing was bought by Sapporo for $85 million, raising concerns among workers about the impact of overseas ownership.
That prompted the workers to start meeting, and the ILWU began to work with them last April, said Agustin Ramirez, lead organizer for the union in Northern California.
"Anchor will become one of the first beer companies in the country to have a unionized workforce," Ramirez said.
For the rest of the story, visit the San Francisco Chronicle here.
Trump Labor Agency Pick Is On Rampage Against Unions, Looking For Pro-Union Cases To Overturn


The airbox arrived today. It fouls the two brake fluid reservoirs, so I've drained all the brake fluid tonight using the vacuum pump, and removed both the reservoirs. I'll move them over to where the windscreen wiper motor used to sit, over the next couple of days. The Lifeline extinguisher was refilled today, so that is now sat back in the car, with an expiry date of 2010. I've also replaced the battery (PP3) in the control unit, as that was also flat. Thats the trouble with having a layoff for a year. Everything needs renewing.
The UK was hit by a huge earthquake this morning, at 00:55am. It woke me and the missus up, and for around 30seconds, the whole house wobbled from side to side, at around 1 to 2Hz, with the most amazing boom-boom-boom coming up from the ground. It was quite scary, but I'm pleased to say that there was no damage to the house/garage.
Well, whilst going over everything I need to have ready for Croft, I remembered that the extinguisher was probably out of date, and sure enough, it expired in 2006. So I'll pop over to Lifeline in Coventry to get the AFFF renewed. That would have been a bit embarrasing at scrutineering wouldn't it?
Bought a Pipercross 600 air box, from Demon Tweeks today. It is the Left Hand version, in 75mm, and comes with ducting hose and air filter. I hope the modified inlet manifold angles the Jenvey's up far enough to give me clearance to fit the box, as the car is crying out for some fresh cold air. Now, do I fit the filter inplace of the Near Side headlamp? That'd be the best place for it, and as I'm running fake headlamps anyway, it should be a straight forward modification.
I removed the cam cover from engine #2, to see what condition the cams were in, and everything is spotless, so nothing to worry about there. Next job is to remove the cylinder head, so I can send it off for CNC machining. I've sold the fuel rail, regulator, and injectors that came with the engine, so thats £25 clawed back already.
My entry for the Croft Sprint on Easter Monday has been accepted. And the 2.0 Zetec engine arrived this morning, on a pallet. Two hours later I'd removed all the components, which meant it was then light enough for me to manouvre. It was advertised as a bare engine, but it was complete. So if you need any of the following, let me know.
I went over to Altiss on Friday, and Nigel is going to cut the manifold back by an inch, and weld the DCOE flange back on again, which should angle the throttle bodies up far enough to let me run an air box. I've to wait 2 weeks, but in the mean time I can get some other work done on the car. The 2.0 Zetec I bought off Ebay arrives on Monday, so I can also start work stripping it down in preparation for the rebuild.
I've posted cheques off for four events so far. I'd like to do the Croft sprint on Easter Monday, but may have left it too late, as they are giving preference to British Sprint Championship contenders and the event is only 4 weeks away. I've also entered Harewood Spring National (April 13th), an event at MIRA (May 24th), and the Shelsley Walsh hillclimb (July 5th). In June I'm planning on entering the Epynt Hillclimb.
Before the Croft Sprint, I just need to refit the throttle bodies, fit the heated windscreen, and check the suspension for wear and tear. I'll be using the Michelin tyres for another season as they're still very soft, and should survive another years abuse.
Check out the Zetec engine below: Q) Have you spotted whats wrong with the picture?
And finally, I can now supply CNC machined alternator brackets, the same as the one I'm using. Drop me a line for a price. These are made from 10mm thick aluminium and allow you to fit an alternator to the front of the engine, below the water pump, and must be used in conjunction with the Fiesta Zetec engine mount bracket.
Took the wheels off the car tonight, and it is now sat on axle stands. This allows me to check out the suspension for signs of wear and tear. I've also taken off the fuel rail, and both Jenvey throttle bodies, so I can guage what to do with the inlet manifold. I wanted to angle the Jenveys up to at least match the angle of the runners which feed in to the cylinder head. Currently the Jenveys are horizontal to the head, and the runners point down at around 30 degrees. So I can either cut the inlet manifold, to remove some metal, and have the DCOE flanges welded back on again, or I could really go to town and have a downdraught setup, with a hole in the bonnet and an air scoop. Now that would look cool. The aim is to move the throttle bodies back far enough from the bulkead to allow enough space for an air box, and some longer trumpets. I'll go over to Altiss Engineering on Friday afternoon for a chat as they're only just up the road from where I live, and they have a good track record for custom fabrications.
My Scanguage II arrived from the States today. I've already fitted it to the Mondeo for a road test tomorrow. Its a device which allows you to see all the ECU data via the ODBII connector. You can monitor things like manifold pressure, air temperature, engine rpm, water temps, all kinds of things.
I went to Church Stretton on Sunday to collect the MCR bodykit, which was in great condition. I took the same route I'd normally use to get to Loton Park, which reminds me that its about time I took the Fiesta there for another crack at the hill. I'll have to pencil it in to this years calendar. Also this year, theres the second running of the hillclimb at Epynt, which will be running in June. Its a 1.6km hill, which may also be worth a visit. Unfortunately, the Harewood BBQ hillclimb this year has been cancelled, which is a real shame as thats another unmissable event.
I've been toying with the idea of dry sumping the new Zetec engine, but there's simply no way of mounting nor driving a pump, so I'll have to go for billet gears in the oil pump, and maybe add an accusump device to protect against oil surge.
I've bought a Series II 2.0 Zetec off of Ebay this week, delivery is next week some time. Its done 71K miles, and will be the basis of the new engine. The parts I ordered from the States are now on their way to the UK. And I've also bought a complete MCR Rally Arch kit, including front spoiler and side skirts, from ebay also. I'll be picking those up tomorrow. They'll be the spares in case I prang the Fiesta, as MCR are no longer in business, so its nigh on impossible to buy the kit anymore.
I've also taken the Fiesta off the trailer this morning, and the trailer is now parked on my driveway, firmly clamped. I can now start work on preparing the XR2 for the new season.
I replaced one of the wing mirrors on the Audi A6 today. Neither mirror has ever heated up on cold mornings, and I bought a new mirror on ebay, and swapped it over on Saturday lunch time. This was far easier to do than I anticipated. There's a plastic cover on the underside of the door mirror, which you simply remove two self tapping screws from and the cover pulls off. The mirror is then released by unclipping it from its mounting. Access to the clips which hold the mirror in place, are through the panel you removed. Once the mirror is free, remove the two wires which provide the current to the heater element in the mirror glass. Refitting is simply the reverse of the above. Whilst the engine is running, the heater is permanently on, the current is supplied by the power fed to the electric motor within the door mirror. I'll replace the passenger side next.
I also used WD40 on the Window seals on the Audi. The windows get little use since the air-con was fixed last year, and WD40 is ideal for this purpose. Simply spray it in to the window strips, and the windows now glide up and down far more easily.
No sign of my engine bits from the States yet. Rang the suppliers, but they hadn't received the rods and pistons to dispatch. Should be this week. In the mean time, I need to find a Series II Silver Top 2.0 Zetec. If you have one, and want to part with it, please get in touch, so I can start the engine build for this season. I've registered with the Midland Speed Championship for 2008, and fully intend to get out one some of my favourite events. I'll have to start with the existing 2.0 engine, and transplant the 2.1 when its built up and run in.
I'm going to make some copies of the Brise alternator bracket which I'm using to hold my Brise 49A alternator in place. Brise stopped making this particular bracket a few years ago, and so I've had a CAD drawing produced, so I can get some machined from 10mm aluminium. If you need one for your Zetec conversion, please get in touch, and I'll get you a price.


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Amber Heard Nude
Guys, you're in for a real treat today! Amber Heard is the kind of a hottie that will leave you speechless. While she's definitely a talented actress, it's those striking looks on this dazzling blonde that made her popular worldwide. After all, she has almost four million followers on Instagram who regularly come to admire that slender body with perky tits, her firm ass, and those luscious lips on a charming face.
Amber Heard Nude Photos : Page 18
"The best part of being Mera is meeting everyone she inspires."
Who Is Amber Heard?
Have you got the clue that Amber Laura Heard is 35? We all know her as an American film and television actress. Her first starring role was in the horror film All the Boys Love Mandy Lane (2006). She was married to actor Johnny Depp from 2015 to 2017. After divorce, Heard dated tech entrepreneur Elon Musk for a year.
Has Amber Heard Ever Been Naked?
One of the best things about Amber Heard is that she loves to be naked in front of the camera. She stripped on multiple occasions. There are even scenes where this blonde has been completely naked. Whether you're into accidental nipple slips or tastefully done nudes where she shows those incredible breasts, she has it all.
Why is Amber Heard famous?
I picked up she first gained mainstream recognition for supporting roles in the action film Never Back Down (2008) and the comedy Pineapple Express (2008). Do you also think that she a genuine beauty? She is famous for her court case against Johnny Depp. Amber was one of the victims of the iCloud leaks of celebrity photos.
Amber Heard scandals?
There were false rumors that Amber won't reprise her role in the forthcoming Aquaman 2. Depp's fans have rallied behind the actor, even going as far as to launch a petition on Change.org titled Remove Amber Heard from Aquaman 2. But I realize that Amber Heard will play Mera in the sequel. That's what the movie company says.
Amber Heard maybe has leaked videos too.


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Acclaimed and Beloved Scottish Author
https://barclayagency.com/speakers/alexander-mccall-smith
Alexander McCall Smith has written and contributed to more than 100 books, including specialist academic titles, short story collections, and a number of immensely popular children's books. He is best known for his internationally acclaimed and bestselling No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series, which has been translated into 46 languages and become bestsellers throughout the world. A film adaptation, directed by Anthony Minghella, premiered on HBO in March 2009. The newest book in the series is How to Raise an Elephant (Penguin Random House, November 24, 2020).
Another series, beginning with The Sunday Philosophy Club, about an intriguing woman named Isabel Dalhousie, appeared in 2004 and immediately leapt onto national bestseller lists, as did its sequels, the thirteenth of which, The Geometry of Holding Hands, was recently published. McCall Smith's serial novel, 44 Scotland Street, was published in book form to great acclaim in 2005; the most recent book in the series is The Peppermint Tea Chronicles, the fourteenth book is A Promise of Ankles (Anchor, December 8, 2020). Corduroy Mansions, a series depicting the lives of the inhabitants of a large Pimlico house, was printed and podcast by the UK's Daily Telegraph, and is now published in three volumes. His Professor Dr von Igelfeld series began with Portuguese Irregular Verbs, and will continue with a fifth book, Your Inner Hedgehog (Penguin Random House, February 2, 2021). The Paul Stuart series began with My Italian Bulldozer and continues with The Second Worst Restaurant in France. The Detective Varg series set in Sweden started with The Department of Sensitive Crimes, and the third book will be The Man with the Silver Saab (Pantheon, July 20, 2021). He is currently working on two short story collections, Pianos and Flowers: Brief Encounters of the Romantic Kind (Penguin Random House, January 19, 2021), and Tiny Tales: Stories of Romance, Ambition, Kindness, and Happiness (Penguin Random House, May 4, 2021). A collection of McCall Smith's poems, entitled In A Time of Distance, will also be published in 2021.
McCall Smith is the author of the short story collection Chance Developments. His modern retelling of Jane Austen's Emma was published in 2015. He has written several solo novels, La's Orchestra Saves the World, Trains and Lovers, The Forever Girl, Fatty O'Leary's Dinner Party, and most recently, The Good Pilot Peter Woodhouse: A Wartime Romance. Pantheon has also published Alexander McCall Smith's collection of African folktales, The Girl Who Married a Lion. His non-fiction book about W. H. Auden is titled What W. H. Auden Can Do for You. He has also written children's books, including the series The School Ship Tobermory, a mystery series about Precious Ramotswe as a young girl, the Akimbo series, the Harriet Bean series, the Max & Maddy series, and The Perfect Hamburger and other Delicious Stories. In addition to his novels, he has written a libretto for the opera The Okavango Macbeth – the tragedy as played out by a troop of baboons. In 2019 he released an album celebrating the presence of the sea in Scottish life, past and present titled These Are The Hands, with words by Alexander McCall Smith and music composed by James Ross.
McCall Smith was born in what is now Zimbabwe and was educated there and in Scotland. He became a law professor in Scotland, and it was in this role that he first returned to Africa to work in Botswana, where he helped to set up a new law school at the University of Botswana. For many years he was Professor of Medical Law at the University of Edinburgh, and has been a visiting professor at a number of other universities elsewhere, including ones in Italy and the United States. He is now a Professor Emeritus at the University of Edinburgh.
In addition to his university work, McCall Smith was for four years the vice-chairman of the Human Genetics Commission of the UK, the chairman of the British Medical Journal Ethics Committee, and a member of the International Bioethics Commission of UNESCO. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including The Crime Writers' Association's Dagger in the Library Award, the United Kingdom's Author of The Year Award in 2004, the Saga Award for Wit, Sweden's Martin Beck Award, and the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction 2015 (for Fatty O'Leary's Dinner Party). In 2007 he was made a CBE for his services to literature in the Queen's New Year's Honor List. He holds honorary doctorates from 12 universities, most recently from Southern Methodist University, Dallas. In 2010 McCall Smith was awarded the Presidential Order of Merit by the President of Botswana. In 2020, in recognition of his writing success, legal career, and work within academia, he received the prestigious Edinburgh Award.
Alexander McCall Smith currently lives in Edinburgh with his wife Elizabeth (an Edinburgh doctor). His hobbies include sailing and playing wind instruments, and he is the co-founder of an amateur orchestra called "The Really Terrible Orchestra" in which he plays the bassoon and his wife plays the horn.
Alexander McCall Smith's official website
Alexander McCall Smith's Twitter page
How to Raise an Elephant
(LDA #21)
Tiny Tales: Stories of Romance, Ambition, Kindness, and Happiness
The Geometry of Holding Hands (IDN#13)
A Promise Of Ankles (44SS#14)
Your Inner Hedgehog (PDIE#5)
The Man with the Silver Saab (DV #3)
The Talented Mr. Varg (DV #2)
The No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency (LDA #1)
To the Land of Long Lost Friends (LDA #20)
The Sunday Philosophy Club (IDN#1)
44 Scotland Street (44SS#1)
The Peppermint Tea Chronicles (44SS #13)
The Department of Sensitive Crimes: A Detective Varg Novel (DV #1)
My Italian Bulldozer (PS#1)
The Second-Worst Restaurant in France (PS#2)
Corduroy Mansions (CM#1)
A Conspiracy of Friends (CM#3)
Portuguese Irregular Verbs (PDIE#1)
What W. H. Auden Can Do for You
The Wheeler Centre
National Book Festival
Alexander McCall Smith on Emma
Edinburgh Walking Tour
In Conversation with Seamus O'Regan
In Botswana
BBC: Author Alexander McCall Smith to receive Edinburgh Award (2020)
Kirkus: The Geometry of Holding Hands [starred review] (2020)
Los Angeles Times: What Alexander McCall Smith is reading, hearing and watching in quarantine (2020)
Columbus Dispatch: Q&A with Alexander McCall Smith: 'No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency' shows other side of Africa (2018)
The Saint: An interview with Alexander 'Sandy' McCall Smith (2018)
Scotsman: Book review: The House Of Unexpected Sisters by Alexander McCall Smith (2017)
New York Journal of Books: A Distant View of Everything: An Isabel Dalhousie Novel (2017)
NHPR: Writers On A New England Stage: Alexander McCall Smith (2016) [audio]
Lateline: Interview: Alexander McCall Smith, author (2016) [video]
WAMC: 'Emma: A Modern Retelling' (2015) [audio]
Lancaster Online: Readers Recommend: Alexander McCall Smith's Portuguese Irregular Verbs series (2014)
Request Fees and Availability for Alexander McCall Smith
Email info about Alexander McCall Smith
Photo Kirsty Anderson


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Home Money, Politics and Power Conversations with My Mother
Conversations with My Mother
Crossing the political divide within the family unit.
by Steve Erickson
Last week I had lunch with my mother. At 86 going on 66 she's remarkable, alert and energetic, in generally high spirits; in the last decade she's found the church, which I figure is fair enough for anyone who knows they must be somewhere near the end. Now this enters her conversation more, which I accept as well as someone can who has a higher opinion of God than of religion. Mom and I used to talk about politics a lot, something that always unnerved my wife, who didn't understand how our contentiousness could be so good natured. But starting with the Iraq War, which made me madder than anything in my political life (including the Vietnam War, when I was a potential draftee), and moving into the Age of Obama, we've tiptoed around the subject of politics, for reasons that became clear at last week's lunch when we skirted the subjects of Fox commentator Bill O'Reilly's Super Bowl interview with the president, health-care reform, and the weather. Mom is an O'Reilly fan; she requested a signed book of his for Christmas which I dutifully got for her, and the truth is there are lots of people I find more noxious than the voluble O'Reilly who, unless he's reneged on it, scored some credibility points with me a year or two back when he told his listeners to get over the fact that the president is indeed an American and not a Kenyan.
Mom was my first political mentor, beginning around the time I was 12 when she took me to hear Barry Goldwater speak in Downtown Los Angeles. But right there in that fact lies the difficulty of our relationship as it currently has to do with politics, because many of the positions that Goldwater held firm for years, having to do with the draft, voting rights, women's rights, abortion rights, gay rights, American Indian rights, the environment, and marijuana legalization just to cite a few, were well to the left of where the Republican Party is now, in the same way that even Ronald Reagan's politics were. That shift notwithstanding, the real problem for Mom and me, as I think is true for many Americans these days, and maybe many sons and daughters and their parents, is that we don't even agree anymore on the cardinal north/south/east/west of a common political compass. It's not that we don't talk the same language; we're not living in the same world, or maybe I mean universe. The matter of climate change is the most dramatic example. Not since acceptance of the earth being round and circling the sun has the science on something been so universal, but as the weather becomes more freakish, which by the lights of Fox News only disproves global warming-because, you know, it's really cold-my Mom rolls her eyes at the liberal conspiracy of it all.
A couple months ago, at the time of the health-care reform rollout, I got a phone call from her. "Boy, your president really has screwed things up," she said, then expressing motherly alarm that my family's coverage might be dropped, something she asked about again at lunch last week when she reiterated festering concerns that in the ongoing bolshevik takeover she'll lose her Medicare, which half a century ago she decried as socialized medicine. Suppressing the snappish retort that Barack Obama is her president as well as mine, I was at a bit of a loss on the occasion of that original phone call, wanting to be sure of the facts that I now tried to present over our chicken pot pies, that my wife and our family aren't losing our coverage and-echoing my attempts to offer many such assurances over the past five years-that Mom isn't losing her Medicare either, and that people are being dropped from policies not by the government but by insurance companies who don't want to update those particular policies to meet the same sort of regulations that the chicken pot pie in front of her has to meet before the restaurant can serve it to her, because those policies only are profitable for the insurance companies if they never pay out, as they're precisely designed to never do.
At such junctures, however, our conversations become not just futile but as loony as all the other discussions these days of so-called Obamacare. They're loony because they're about a law that's already passed and whose success or failure is already underway and will eventually speak for itself in defiance of any effort now to try and interpret that success or failure beforehand, and maybe even in spite of the concerted efforts of Republican governors to sabotage it. All of which is to say that, because Mom gets all her "information" within the bubble of Fox Nation, she missed the recent spectacle occasioned by a Congressional Budget Office report on Obamacare and jobs when the news story became not the report itself but rather the right's interpretation of it, concluding that the report said what in fact it didn't (which is that Obamacare would kill jobs rather than offer more senior workers, for example, the opportunity to leave the job force if they want, since they no longer have to keep a job simply for the health-care benefits). Politics always is about perception to some extent but Obamacare's outcome is beyond the politics of perception, something the right can't accept because it's too vested in a failure that, whatever you might think of the original policy, would be catastrophic, since even most of the right now begrudgingly acknowledges-as heard in the Republican responses to the State of the Union-that the earlier status quo no longer is tenable as it had to do with a health-care system that was on its way to consuming a quarter of the national economy.
Though I didn't have the intellectual honesty to admit this to my mother, in fairness it should be pointed out that the right isn't singularly guilty of such perverse investments. Progressives were similarly vested in the failure of the 2007 Iraq surge championed by Senator John McCain that more dispassionate observers later conceded had some success. But at the least in that instance some consensus existed on what the metrics of success might be-which was stabilization of the Iraqi situation-not to mention the terminology by which success might be defined. In the same way that my mother and I aren't even talking about the same Obamacare when we talk about Obamacare, we're not talking about the same Barack Obama when we talk about Obama. Mom remarked at lunch on how combative and aggressive the president was in his discussion with O'Reilly, that paragon of supernaturally even temperament, even as some of us have been waiting five years for the president's body heat to finally rise within 10 degrees of losing his cool: Get mad for once, why don't you? we wonder while Fox breathlessly monitors every incendiary outburst by the Hothead-in-Chief. I honestly don't know whether this applies to my Mom or not, but the mere fact of Obama-not what he says or does but the sheer existence of his presidency-remains more than much of the country has been able to wrap its head around. Obama's historicity has rendered our current politics one loose screw short of national insanity, of which there may be no more compelling evidence, even setting aside the nitwitted characterization of Obama as the most radical president ever (in which case you might want to acquire some passing familiarity with the administrations of Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, either Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and Lyndon Johnson), than that Mitt Romney clearly is running for president again. Let me repeat this for those still earthbound enough to find such a revelation nearly impossible to absorb. Former governor Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, the worst presidential nominee by either party since anti-woman, anti-black, losing-in-a-landslide-even-after-the-Republican-Teapot-Dome-scandal 1924 Democratic nominee John W. Davis, has surveyed the collapse of New Jersey governor Chris Christie and the viability-challenged prospects of Jeb Bush and concluded, correctly and notwithstanding the torrent of demurrals he offered on Meet the Press this past Sunday, that there isn't a single other living Republican hinged enough to win the White House.
Now that I think about it, with the perspective of only a single week, I don't remember what Mom and I talked about at what I do otherwise remember to have been our very pleasant lunch. I seem to recall some comment about how good our government-regulated chicken pot pies were, how my work was going, my ups and downs in parenting her 16-year-old grandson and eight-year-old granddaughter-the stuff that maybe moms and their grown sons should talk about. And then, having flirted with danger at some barely stable nexus of our two parallel political universes, we retreated to other, much simpler matters, like God.
Blog: Vox Pop Politics The Obama Administration Conservatism
Steve Erickson
Steve Erickson has contributed to The New York Times, Esquire, Rolling Stone and Los Angeles.
Read more by Steve Erickson


4k00:20NEW YORK - MAY 30, 2015: New Yorkers and tourists, people watching basketball game at famous West 4th Street court, slow motion 4K, NYC. West Village is a neighborhood in Downtown Manhattan, USA.
hd00:11UDAIPUR, INDIA - July 14: A Sculpture Artist on Work in a Indian Temple on July 14, 2013 in Udaipur India.


Competition does amazing things. Not only do the manufacturers try to get one up on each other by making a better product, but the us consumers get a load of options to choose as well before we put our hard earned money down. Now the Q3 was Audi's entry level SUV offering which proved to be an extremely able product and made sure Audi racks up those massive sales numbers.
The Q3 follows the unmistakable Q design language and even though its been around for a while, it still looks quite fresh. Audi has added a few subtle touches to update the car and while as a whole one can't really make out the differences, but then its the details where one can notice the changes.
At the front, the Q3 gets the new family grille with chrome slats with the skid plates getting chrome treatment as well. The new wedge-shaped headlights come with Xenon Plus units along with with LED daytime running lights.
Then there are the new 17-inch alloy wheels, the design of which i found too flowery but then looks are always subjective. Moving to the back, the Q3 Dynamic also gets new clear lens LED tail lights which look brilliant. While the new car isn't an all-new design the new details have indeed freshened up the looks. The Q3 was always a good looking SUV and that remains so even now.
Stepping inside the Q3, you immediately notice the premium interiors. While the dashboard and interior colours differ depending on the kind of customization one chooses. We got one in an all black trim that we thought looked fab and a black beige combo for those who prefer some contrast. The dashboard features a single wooden insert with plenty of aluminium bits thrown around which makes it quite sporty.
The driving seat offers a typical high perched driving position which SUV's are known for and offers a pretty commanding view of the road. There is plenty of kit like the really cool fold-out 6.5 inch monitor, Driver information system, Audi system, voice dialogue system and then some.
There is even a panoramic sunroof should your co-passenger decide to pop his/her head out and check the temperature up there.
Moving to the back bench, the Q3 is quite a wide car, all of 1831 mm which means its a proper 3 seater and there is plenty of legroom too. An SUV needs proper luggage space as well, and the Q3 has no qualms swallowing up your weekend luggage with ease. 460 litres of easy loading luggage area! Quality, space and features, the Q3's got the interiors covered well.
The Q3 gets the smallest engines in the Q range of vehicles. There is the 30TDI with the 2.0 litre diesel unit with a 6-speed manual transmission pushing out 140 PS powering the front wheels and a 35TDI which is again the same 2.0 litre unit but in a more powerful state of tune pushing out 178 PS and powering all four wheels thanks to the quattro system and a 7-speed S tronic dual clutch automatic gearbox.
We got behind the wheel of the latter and immediately getting off the block tells us that its a brilliant engine. Refined and with adequate drive, the Q3 potters around in traffic with ease.
Slot that lovely aluminium gear lever in tip-tronic mode and you can choose what gear you want to be in. The new Dynamic variant however has an ace up its sleeve and not to mention a very important button on the dashboard. The Drive Select button lets you choose between three different modes, Comfort, Dynamic and Auto just like in the higher Audi models. But how much of a difference does that button make? To find out we put the Q3 through some hard to believe obstacles that it cleared with ease and then straight on to a race track which highlighted the Q3's dual character.
Beginning with the offroad track the Q3 had to manage a tough trail of tall climbs, tricky descents and some unbelievable articulation angles as you can see in the pictures. And the Q3 passed all these obstacles with flying colours with nary a wheelspin. While the difference is dynamic and comfort wasn't that apparent on the offroad trail, it definitely made its presence felt on the right corners of the Kari racetrack.
Not only did we do three hot laps around the track but also did some slalom runs and hard braking maneuvers that highlighted the tenacious grip offered by the famed quattro system. On the track, the difference between the comfort and dynamic settings were immediately apparent. The body roll was much higher in the Comfort mode, but switching to Dynamic made it stiffer and increased response time as well. Driving the Q3 in manual mode was an absolute blast and putting down all of the 380 Nm exiting a corner was no problem at all. Plenty of grip and impressive dynamics made the Q3 almost as nimble and quick as some sporty sedans available out there. Off-road or on road, the Q3 proved to be home on both surfaces.
Lets take a look at the other models in the Q3 line-up. There is the manual S Edition which is priced brilliantly at Rs. 25.49 lakh, then you have the 35TDI quattro Premium which is priced at Rs. 32.54 lakh and the 35TDI quattro Premium+ which retails at Rs. 36.80 lakh. The 35TDI quattro Dynamic stands at the top of the heap and is priced at Rs. 38.40 lakh (all prices ex-showroom Mumbai). While those on a budget looking for a Q3 will stick to the S Edition or at most upgrade to the Premium variant, but for those looking for their Q3 with all the bells and whistles, the new Dynamic offers a lot more value than the Premium+ variant. Not only do you get the new design updates, but also get a Q3 which can change its character at the press of a button. While one really needs to take the Q3 Dynamic in testing environments to to see how much of a difference that little button makes, the important question is whether the Dynamic is worth the extra cash or not and the answer to that is a resounding yes!


Triangle is the largest and longest serving, VMware Partner in Ireland. In 2002 Triangle Computer Services (Ireland) Ltd formally became the first VMware partner in Ireland. Having originally built a strong business as an IBM Premier Partner, Triangle successfully added the VMware specialisation to our capabilities.
Our skills and expertise in this technology area were immediately recognised and Triangle became the first and only VMware Authorized Consultant (VAC) in Ireland. The VAC Program was designed by VMware to share services methodology and intellectual property to partners, deliver advanced trainings and develop solutions with its partner community. As a member of the VAC Program, Triangle had access to proven virtualization methodology and consulting materials that enabled us to develop and extend our expertise and solutions on VMware technology. Triangle currently hold 121 VMware Certifications.
In 2016, Triangle won the "Partner Professional Service Program Partner of the Year" for the European region as part of VMware's Partner Innovation Awards.
In 2015 Triangle became one of only 8 Partners globally to be invited into the VMware Practice Builder Program. Practice Builder is an intensive partner enablement program that accelerates partners' transformation toward a services-led approach.
One of our specialisations is Cloud Management Automation. Our skills and experience allow us to look at the processes and supporting technologies that help successfully implement an Automation solution to accelerate IT services and Applications in a virtualized public or private cloud environment. Some of our projects are now public references for VMWare to showcase the valuable outcomes enjoyed by our clients.
In 2015 Triangle became the first Irish Partner to be accepted into the Partner Professional Services Program. The program recognizes and rewards partners who sell and deliver their own consulting services engagements, with an emphasis on moving customers to the Software-Defined Enterprise.
In 2014, Triangle achieved VMware Service Provider status. This allows us to deliver VMware's cloud and "as-a-service" software offerings.
In 2013, Triangle become the only Irish Partner to be enrolled in VMware's End User Computing Strategic program. This program was by invitation only and has just twelve members in Britain and Ireland.
"Triangle and VMware have established a long working relationship driving innovative virtualization into projects in Ireland and Europe. Triangle Professional Services are unique in their ability to deliver automation and Orchestration solutions with vRealize Suite by driving Software-Defined- Data-Center to customers who desperately need it. The cost savings from moving to a completely virtual infrastructure of Software Defined Storage, Software-Defined Networking and wrapping it up with a nice automation engine can be transformative for our customers. Triangle can help take customers there.
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"The team at Triangle has demonstrated an ability to deliver SDDC to VMware customers in the region – so much so, that VMware Professional Services often brings them in to help delivery capacity. If it's leveraging vRealize Automation, or vRealize Orchestrator (formerly VCO), these guys can do it. Their references speak for themselves, top companies, top projects, strategic efforts or a POC, Triangle can do it.
"In everything from Software-Defined- Data-Center to End-User- Computing and all things in between, Triangle Consulting is a premiere partner with VMware. We together can deliver great solutions for our customers in Ireland and Europe.


text:
Could there be an afterlife after all?
Patricia Pearson talks about her experiences with the unknown, and her journey to understand more about what happens to us when we die
My father died unexpectedly of cardiac arrest in his bed in the spring of 2008. He was 80. The next day, we all got the phone call. But my sister Katharine, 100 miles away in Montreal, Canada, received her message differently. "It was about 4:30am," she said at his funeral, "and I couldn't sleep, as usual, when all of a sudden I began having this amazing experience. For the next two hours I felt nothing but joy and healing."
She sensed a presence in her bedroom. "I felt hands on my head, and experienced vision after vision of a happy future." Unaware that our father had died the night before, she described her experience to her elder son the next morning, and wrote about it in her diary.
We were in shock. Had Katharine had a vision? My sister wasn't prone to spiritual experiences. Stress she was familiar with, as the mother of two teenagers. Laughter she loved. Fitness of any kind. Fantastic intellect, fluent in three languages. But she hadn't been paying much attention, in essence, to God.
"That autumn and summer, people came out of the woodwork to tell me their tales"
Later, I would learn that this sort of experience when someone has died is startlingly common. Families shelter their knowledge like a delicate heirloom. At the time, I only understood what a gift this was for Katharine, who was about to face her own death, from breast cancer.
Just two months after Dad died, Katharine was moved to a hospice. In her final ten days, she spoke little, yet seemed profoundly content.
"Wow, that was strange," she remarked once upon waking up, her expression one of smiling delight. "I dreamed I was being smooshed in flowers." She looked gorgeous, as if she were lit from within. Sometimes she would have happy whispered conversations with a person I couldn't see. At other times, she would stare at the ceiling as a full panoply of expressions played across her face—puzzled, amused, sceptical, surprised, calmed—like a spectator in a planetarium.
The sister with whom I'd shared every secret couldn't translate this for me.
"It's so interesting," she began one morning, and then couldn't find the language. Forty-eight hours before she died, she told us, "I am leaving." She left in silence and candlelight, while I lay with my cheek on her chest and my hand on her heart.
Why had my sister had a powerful spiritual experience in the hour of my father's unexpected death? Why did she become increasingly joyful in her dying experience? What would she have told me if she could?
That summer and autumn, people came out of the woodwork to tell me their tales. Some were friends and colleagues, others were strangers sitting beside me on a flight. If I told them about my father and sister, they reciprocated. Almost invariably, they prefaced their remarks by saying, "I've never told anyone this, but…" or, "We've only ever discussed this in our family..." Then they offered extraordinary stories—deathbed visions, sensed presences, near-death experiences, sudden intimations of a loved one in danger.
"Often we are held back from embracing the comfort and reassurance of spirits"
A friend, the director of a large music company, told me that, as a boy, he had come down to breakfast and seen his father, as always, at the kitchen table. Then his mother broke the news that his father had died in the night. He briefly wondered if she'd gone insane. "He's sitting right there," he told her. It was the most baffling and unsettling moment of his life.
I had no idea there was this kept-hidden world all around me. I wanted to understand what we knew about these mysterious modes of awareness. For four years, as a journalist, I pursued the questions.
A 2014 study by The Palliative Care Institute and Hospice Buffalo in upstate New York found that 60 per cent of their dying patients, over an 18-month period, had comforting visions and dreams of living or deceased family members in the lead-up to their own deaths.
There is pain in loss, and then there is further pain in the silence borne by fear of being dismissed. Tell someone about it and the explanations come: Hallucination. Wishful thinking. Coincidence.
I attended a Christmas party with old university friends, and caught up with a man who works for a bank. I told him some of what had transpired with Katharine. He said gently: "I don't mean to be unkind, but it's very likely that she was imagining these things." Why did he feel he could speak with authority about what the dying see?
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Spirituality used to be considered an ordinary part of the human experience, but now it qualifies as an extraordinary state requiring extraordinary evidence. Why should this be? It has to do with the rise of scientism, a school of thought that believes anything that eludes scientific measurement cannot exist.
For my Irish and Scottish Highland ancestors, an extraordinary way of knowing things was always embedded comfortably within their culture. One summer afternoon, my elder aunts and cousins, women in their eighties and nineties, all gathered around the dining table at our summer cabin on Ontario Canada's Stoney Lake.
Here, my grandmother had painted a saying on the wall: "Fra ghosties and ghoulies and long-leggedy beasties, and things that go bump in the night: the guid lord deliver us." A playful nod to our witchy Celtic ancestresses. But now we had come to talk of such things seriously for the first time over our lunch.
We spoke of how great-grandmother Maude had absolute confidence in her way of knowing things; how, when my grandfather telephoned his mother to report her husband's fatal heart attack on his sailboat, Maude replied disconsolately: "I know."
My Aunt Bea recalled, "Granny would be in the living room reading a book, and she'd suddenly slam it down and mutter, 'Damn! So-and-so is coming and I don't want to see them.' Sure enough," Aunt Bea said, "so-and-so would show up ten minutes later." The Norwegians have a word for this uncanny anticipation of visitors: vardoger.
Our Highland ancestors called the perception of a person's double "second sight." Cousin Marion offered that she had been working at a resort in Banff, Alberta, as a teenager when the hotel caught fire, prompting her mother in Montreal to wake in distress and call her. And my mother, the uber-rationalist, conceded she awoke suddenly one morning in her university dorm and phoned my grandmother, whom she somehow knew to be in crisis. Granny was; her dearest friend had died that night.
Each experience was different, but all were ways of knowing, and they tilted the world on its axis for a moment. Why hadn't we talked of them before?
Cambridge physicist and Nobel Prize winner Brian D Josephson told the New York Times in 2003: "There's really strong pressure not to allow these things to be talked about in a positive way."
Harold Puthoff, a physicist at the Stanford Research Institute appointed to oversee the CIA's remote viewing (or clairvoyant) experiments in the 1970s and 1980s, described this pressure in conversations with psychoanalyst Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer, as reported in her book Extraordinary Knowing, published in 2007. "The evidence we had (on clairvoyance) was rock hard," he wrote. "I saw that. But I was having terrible trouble giving up my beliefs about how the world worked, even in the face of evidence that said my beliefs were wrong."
"60 per cent of dying patients had comforting visions and dreams"
The prejudice in the Western world is beginning to change, particularly in the area of grief therapy, as counsellors take note of other cultural approaches. One influential study of Japanese widows found that their continuing bond with the presence of their deceased spouses—setting up altars in the home, leaving food, incense—made them much more psychologically resilient than their British counterparts.
Neuropsychiatrist Dr. Peter Fenwick of King's College, London, has commented on the "sensed presence" experience. "Often its emotional impact is so great that it remains a lasting source of comfort to the recipient and often has the power to alter their own perception of what death means. For them, whether it's dismissed by others as 'simply coincidence' is irrelevant. The simple fact that it's happened is usually enough."
But often we are held back from embracing the comfort and reassurance of spirits by a society that belittles the experience: "I don't mean to be unkind, but your sister was clearly imagining things."
One Autumn, with my sister Anne and her husband, Mark, we spent the afternoon tucking the cottage up for winter. Much of what we do confounds the squirrels, who appear to have spent most of their autumn hiding acorns. Each time we strip a bed, acorns tumble out. Anne and I keep laughing.
As I shutter the windows, I wonder what will have happened when they are next thrown open to soft spring light. What will have transpired in my life, in ours, in the history of the world? Who else will have died?
But the grace I see now comes from the comfort I draw from this tribe, with my cousins and aunts and uncles and friends. The extended family has drawn ever closer. It's like a footprint in the sand that needs to be filled in. Where the water rushes in, where love rushes in.


text:
$1 billion Gaza investment fund unveiled
Muhammad Mustafa, the Palestine Investment Fund president, announced Thursday the establishment of a $1 billion investment fund for the reconstruction of Gaza.
The rumored top candidate for the role of prime minister in the new technocrat government arrived in Gaza on Wednesday, to coordinate reconstruction efforts and meet with prominent contractors and businesspeople.
During the announcement he said priority projects at the outset would be for reconstruction of the devastated coastal enclave, explaining that projects would get off the ground as soon as details of the May 4 unity agreement had been ironed out.
Mustafa said the parameters of the fund had been arranged with Gaza business owners, and final plans had been agreed Wednesday when he arrived with a delegation.
The official was accompanied by Azzam Ash-Shawwa, Al-Quds bank manager in Ramallah, and Abdullah Al-Efranji, member of the Fatah central committee.
Cash for the project came from around the globe, the official said, with the first $200 million from Palestinian investors, and the rest matched by Middle East and international donors.
"The goal is to start building Gaza's economy as part of a state economy based on self-reliance," he said.
"Palestinian strength depends on the unity of its people, an asset more valuable than investment capital," he concluded, thanking partners in Gaza for "working, not just talking" and making the fund a reality.
Mustafa is rumored to be a top candidate for the premiership of the new technocrat government being discussed in Cairo in the wake of the May 4 deal.
One of the roles of the new government, which is being hammered out in Cairo by delegates from former rival parties Hamas and Fatah, will be to oversee the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip, devastated by Israel's 2008-9 offensive and seven years of siege and restrictions.
It is the official's first visit to Gaza in four years.
"I hope we can make some genuine partnerships between investors and companies in Gaza," he told Ma'an.
Mustafa brushed off rumors that he was currently the top candidate for the job of premier in the coming technocrat government, saying "I've not been officially informed."


And some say that all this Web 2.0 business is a useless waste of time. How else would I even know that it's the International Talk Like a Pirate Day if it weren't for Facebook, who added a new translation (English (Pirate)) to their Translations application, or FriendFeed, which has turned into an eye-patched FrrrriendFeed for the time being?
Hell, even Google is going with the flow, and thankfully this time they don't have another horrid makeover of their logo. Found any other site that talks like a pirate? Let us know in the comments!


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text:
Conventional layered lithium and transition metal cathode material (top) and the new disordered material studied by researchers at MIT (bottom) as seen through a scanning transmission electron microscope. Inset images show diagrams of the different structures in these materials. (In the disordered material, the blue lines show the pathways that allow lithium ions to traverse the material.)
Image courtesy of the researchers
Disordered materials hold promise for better batteries
MIT researchers find that contrary to conventional wisdom, cathodes made of disordered lithium compounds can perform better than perfectly ordered ones.
David L. Chandler, MIT News Office
Lithium batteries, with their exceptional ability to store power per a given weight, have been a major focus of research to enable use in everything from portable electronics to electric cars. Now researchers at MIT and Brookhaven National Laboratory have found a whole new avenue for such research: the use of disordered materials, which had generally been considered unsuitable for batteries.
In a rechargeable lithium-based battery, lithium ions — atoms that have given up an electron, and thus carry a net charge — are pulled out of the battery's cathode during the charging process, and returned to the cathode as power is drained. But these repeated round-trips can cause the electrode material to shrink and expand, leading to cracks and degrading performance over time.
In today's lithium batteries, those cathodes are usually made of an orderly crystalline material, sometimes in a layered structure. When slight deviations from that perfect order are introduced, the battery's efficiency generally goes down — so disordered materials have mostly been ignored in the search for improved battery materials.
But it turns out this correlation is far from universal: Certain kinds of disorder can provide a significant boost in cathode performance, the researchers have found through a combination of computer modeling and laboratory experiments. These surprising findings are reported this week in the journal Science, in a paper by MIT graduate student Jinhyuk Lee, professor of materials science and engineering Gerbrand Ceder, and four others.
Ceder describes the materials that can release and then reabsorb the lithium ions as a kind of "reversible sponge." In today's batteries, the cathodes are striated materials, made up of lithium layers alternating with oxides of transition metals. Scientists had thought the layering was necessary to provide a pathway for lithium to pass in and out of the cathodes without bumping into the transition metal oxide layer — "a channel with nothing in the way," as Ceder says.
Moreover, disorder "usually significantly reduces the lithium ion mobility," Ceder says — and high mobility is essential for an efficient rechargeable battery.
But it turns out that a significant excess of lithium in the material changes things dramatically. In the traditional ordered structure, there is an exact balance between the number of lithium and metal atoms. "But if you get enough of a lithium excess," Ceder says, "you get new channels, and they can take over from the channels you close off."
While the disordered material with excess lithium produces irregular pathways, it turns out that these nevertheless can still act as efficient channels for the lithium ions. But such a material offers an extra bonus: While the irregular channels let lithium pass just as easily as it does in a layered material, in the disordered material the lithium ions don't push the layers out of shape.
The new material — in these experiments, lithium molybdenum chromium oxide — "has a very high dimensional stability," Ceder says. In most other lithium cathode materials, "as you pull the lithium in and out, it changes dimension, swelling or contracting." This swelling and contracting "causes all sorts of problems," including fatigue that can lead to cracking, he says.
While the dimensional changes in layered materials can be as much as 5 to 10 percent, he says, in the new disordered material it is only about 0.1 percent — "virtually zero."
Ceder stresses that his group's analysis of this specific compound "shows a new direction that we can take" in searching for even better materials, opening a whole new category of possibilities that had previously been ignored. While lithium molybdenum chromium oxide can hold and release significantly more lithium than existing materials, it produces a lower voltage — meaning its overall performance is about the same as that of existing materials, he says.
Many new materials take decades to move from the laboratory to useful applications, but "we're hopeful we can do this in one or two years, to discover something better," Ceder says — most likely by using computational tools such as the Materials Project, which he co-founded.
Jeff Dahn, a professor of physics and atmospheric science at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia who was not involved in this work, says, "These experimental results are very surprising." While it remains to be seen "whether this finding can be translated in similar experimental results in more practical materials," he says, this research "is a nice combination of experiment and theory."
The research also involved postdocs Alexander Urban, Xin Li, and Geoffroy Hautier at MIT and researcher Dong Su at Brookhaven National Laboratory. It was funded by the Robert Bosch Corporation, Unicore Specialty Optics and Chemicals, Samsung, and the U.S. Department of Energy.
Topics: Batteries, Lithium-ion, Materials Science and Engineering, Energy
donald stevenson
How does this work relate to the technology being developed by Nexion in the UK?
Jeffrey Long
Readers of this work may also be interested in the recent review article by Hahn et al. in "Accounts of Chemical Research" describing the functionality of cation vacancies for charge storage in metal oxides.
See http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10...
Gerbrand Ceder
Materials Project
A systematic way to find battery materials
Need a new material? New tool can help


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text:
require 'tc_helper.rb'

class TestView3D < Test::Unit::TestCase
  def setup
    @view  = Axlsx::View3D.new
  end

  def teardown
  end

  def test_options
    v = Axlsx::View3D.new :rot_x => 10, :rot_y => 5, :h_percent => "30%", :depth_percent => "45%", :r_ang_ax => false, :perspective => 10
    assert_equal(v.rot_x, 10)
    assert_equal(v.rot_y, 5)
    assert_equal(v.h_percent, "30%")
    assert_equal(v.depth_percent, "45%")
    assert_equal(v.r_ang_ax, false)
    assert_equal(v.perspective, 10)
  end

  def test_rot_x
    assert_raise(ArgumentError) {@view.rot_x = "bob"}
    assert_nothing_raised {@view.rot_x = -90}
  end

  def test_rot_y
    assert_raise(ArgumentError) {@view.rot_y = "bob"}
    assert_nothing_raised {@view.rot_y = 90}
  end

  def test_h_percent
    assert_raise(ArgumentError) {@view.h_percent = "bob"}
    assert_nothing_raised {@view.h_percent = "500%"}
  end

  def test_depth_percent
    assert_raise(ArgumentError) {@view.depth_percent = "bob"}
    assert_nothing_raised {@view.depth_percent = "20%"}
  end

  def test_rAngAx
    assert_raise(ArgumentError) {@view.rAngAx = "bob"}
    assert_nothing_raised {@view.rAngAx = true}
  end

  def test_perspective
    assert_raise(ArgumentError) {@view.perspective = "bob"}
    assert_nothing_raised {@view.perspective = 30}
  end

end

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


Discussion in 'iMac' started by MrGimper, Dec 23, 2014.
I have an iMac Retina 5K i7 with 1TB flash. I also have a 13" 2014 Retina MBP i5 2.8 with 1TB flash.
Both machines are fitted with the APPLE SSD SM1024F.
Why the big difference in speeds?
The RiMac is only 2 PCI lanes for the SSD, your rMBPro might be 4 lanes (as is the SSD part). They apparently didn't have enough PCI lanes for the iMac to do it right without dropping something else.
The iMac only has 2 PCIe lanes for the SSD, while the rMBP has 4 PCIe lanes available.
The reason is because the iMac has an extra two USB ports plus an RJ-45 Ethernet port, and these two have taken up two PCIe lanes on its own. So there's only two lanes remaining for the SSD.
Personally, I wouldn't mind a small sacrifice in speed in return for two more USB ports and the RJ-45 Ethernet port.
Thanks for the replies. At least I know there isn't an issue.


text:
Ted Beard Net Worth 2018: What is this baseball player worth?
Ted Beard was a pro baseball player who played Outfielder. Beard was born on January 7, 1921, in Woodsboro, Maryland. Beard died on December 30, 2011, in Fishers, Indiana. This page will take a closer look at Ted Beard's net worth.
Ted Beard Career, Earnings
Beard batted Left and threw Left. Beard debuted in the MLB on September 5, Baseball year1948 for the Pittsburgh Pirates. In all, Beard played for the Pittsburgh Pirates, and Chicago White Sox. Beard's career ended with the Chicago White Sox in Baseball year
Some of Beard's most prominent statistics in the MLB included a Batting average stat of .198, a Home runs stat of 6, and a Run batted in stat of 35.
Ted Beard Net Worth 2018
Player earnings can range widely. In the MLB, the average player earns approximately $3 million every year. Top pro baseball players can make $25 million or more per annum, and less successful players bring in $1 million or less. Outside the MLB, most contracts pay less than $10,000 a year.
Ted Beard net worth: baseball salary distribution
So what was baseball player Ted Beard's net worth at the time of death? Our estimate for Ted Beard's net worth at death is:
Want to see some related net worth articles? Check out these: Greg Minton, Leo Gómez, Shirley Kleinhans, Tyson Brummett, Tony Peña, Hick Cady, Bob Horner, Jake Powell, Eduardo Rodríguez, Tony Cuccinello, and Eric O'Flaherty.