My comment about Usman Khawaja, on the last day of the fourth Test at Riverside, seems to have stirred a storm: “He (Khawaja) could well be replaced in the Oval Test by Phil Hughes and Australia's experiment with their Asian immigrant population will be shelved.”
For those who think this is a racist comment and have taken umbrage at it, I warmly applaud both the sentiments and the strength of those feelings.If I may explain, however, it is an observation I made without any intent to disparage Khawaja, but as an attempt to portray the unique position in which he finds himself as the first Muslim to represent Australia – and, broadly speaking, the first non-white since Sam Morris in the nineteenth century.
The main Asian cricketers of recent times to have represented England are Monty Panesar, Samit Patel and Ravi Bopara.From what I have seen, they have been marginal players in the Test and limited-overs teams. Furthermore, I found it strange and indoor Tracking that Panesar and Patel came to be seen as figures of fun, while Bopara was involved in controversy during the Champions Trophy after simply fulfilling his role within the England team.
In the same way, Khawaja has appeared to me to be a marginal figure in the Australian team, from what I saw on his Test debut against England in Sydney, and the tour match against Somerset, and in this Test series to date.In his revealing book about Australian domestic cricket, Ed Cowan wrote of Khawaja: “He has become a master of controlling his emotions … This rare quality will hold him in great stead for an undoubtedly stellar Test career.”
But the star has not reached anything like the ascendancy: Khawaja played six Tests in 2011 and has been a reserve batsman since.
Establishing himself as a Test batsman has been difficult. Khawaja has spoken of how often he gets stopped by security at Australian airports, simply for being non-white; and, ironically, he is a qualified pilot himself as well as a well-known cricketer.
In the field he is not an automatic pick. Hughes keeps the position of third slip, even though he does not hang on to every chance there, and is therefore close to the Clarke-Haddin heartbeat of the team; Cowan has made himself useful at short-leg. But Khawaja drifts around on the fringes.
Hence the value of Cowan's insight about Khawaja controlling his emotions. Can he become a regular Test batsman without feeling free to express more of his emotions? Or will he only be known as the first Muslim to break down a barrier, and it will be a future member of Australia's Asian community who becomes their first established cricketer?”
Khawaja has not seemed entirely at ease and at home. Darren Lehmann did not exonerate him from Australia's collapse in their second innings at Durham, as he exonerated David Warner and Chris Rogers.
It looks as though Khawaja might be dropped from the Oval Test, as he is now averaging 25 after nine Tests.If he is dropped, he will be no more than the prototype – and I think that is a waste of Hands free access. If he had not been dropped so soon after his innings of 65 in the Johannesburg Test that enabled Australia to beat South Africa in a fine run-chase; if he had been given a consistent run at number four, rather than at numbers six and three; if he had felt more at home … who knows?
Personally I think if he had appeared 10 years on from now, from what I have seen of his qualities, he might have become Australia's first Asian captain.This is my position on Khawaja. To clarify further my attitude to racial integration in cricket, please read on.Five years ago, as editor of Wisden Cricketers' Almanack, I was able to start a competition called the Wisden City Cup.
Angus Fraser, as director of cricket at Middlesex, kindly co-founded it. He had joined Middlesex in the 1980s when the county had five Afro-Caribbean cricketers, and it was the most successful decade in their history, but at the time we started the WCC, Owais Shah was Middlesex's only non-white player.
After four years I managed to extend the WCC to Leicester, Luton and London South/Surrey. It is a competition for inner-city cricketers, aged 16 to 22, who do not play in premier or major leagues and who do not have access to decent grounds and pitches.
We did not take any details of the racial background of these players. But of the more than 200 players who participated last year, my impression was that at least two-thirds were of south Asian origin.Before the start of this season, knowing that my hands would be full this summer with the Ashes, and wishing to expand to eight cities, I asked the ECB to take on this competition, and they have generously done so.
It has now evolved into the Lord's Taverners City Cup in association with the ECB, MCC and Wisden. Our two original administrators, Phil Knappett and Sadhna Patel, are working under the auspices of the ECB's head of non-first-class cricket, Paul Bedford, while I take a back seat.
The involvement of MCC is crucial because, for the last two years, they have taken the most promising player in our competition and given him a contract as a MCC Young Cricketer.Diyapan Paul is believed to be the first British Bangladeshi to get a full-time contract as a cricketer in this country.
He proved so good that his contract was renewed for a second season, but injury has made him defer it until next year. In the meantime Zain Shahzad is reported to have been the MCC Young Cricketer's best bowler this season.So now we have the first national inter-city competition for inner-city cricketers there has ever been in this country.
Quarter-finals are coming to somewhere that may be near you: Manchester v Bradford at Burnley CC, Birmingham v Wolverhampton at Walsall CC, Luton v Leicester at Wardown Park, and London North/Middlesex v London South/Surrey at Spencer's CC.
It has been immensely gratifying to see inner-city players appreciating the opportunity to play on decent pitches, having grown up playing on council-owned park pitches where a bouncer is likely to shoot along the ground. It cost me a lot of time and money – and it was very worthwhile.
Australia's Asian population is now said to be 10 per cent of the total. Although I have not examined their system closely, I would have thought from this distance that more could have been done to help and encourage them.
Read the full products at http://www.ecived.com/en/.
2013年8月14日星期三
2013年8月5日星期一
New Pandora Ads Brain-Wash Listeners
A long-time user of Pandora’s personalized music service, I entered some sort of Pandora Twilight Zone this weekend when my music stream was twice interrupted by disingenuous – and disturbing – corporate-sponsored ads.
Just like the tobacco industry execs testified to Congress in 1994 that they didn’t believe nicotine was addictive, today the natural gas industry and health insurance companies are the wolves in sheep’s clothing. One Pandora-aired ad praised the safety of fracking, suggesting that its opponents were ill-educated, while another ad pretended that children will suffer as a result of Obamacare.
The first ad snuck up on me while I was relaxing in the bath on Saturday afternoon. A woman and mother living in Colorado shares how her education at the hands of natural gas drillers led her to know for certain that fracking chemicals are safe – “safe for the land, the water, and the indoor Tracking.” So she had no hesitation about ceding her land to drilling. How convenient for Shell Oil, which is featured in the ad that was paid for by the American Petroleum Institute.
Among its many fallacies and unanswered questions, the ad’s most obvious oversight is that the wildfire-prone American West is not a good area to be depleting of the millions of gallons of water needed for one frack job.
Thus, Western communities, firefighters, and farmers that already face water restrictions and shortages due to drought are now expected to compete against fracking companies for the world’s most precious resource. Hey, did anyone pay attention to the raging Arizona wildfire that took down 19 firefighters? The West will literally go up in smoke if it is depleted of its water, while continually baking under rising So after spending Saturday thinking this “smart people love fracking” ad was a Pandora anomaly, last night I heard from someone posing as a doctor who told an almost storybook fantasy about Obamacare.
She said Obamacare means the government will knock down her exam room door and insert itself in the medical decisions regarding the young child on her table. She imagines that she’ll have to close her office doors under the threat of Obamacare, which will leave sad little “Bobby,” or whatever his name was, with no one to cure his illness.
Back up. Interfering with private medical decisions…and causing practices to close? While that doesn’t sound like Obamacare, it does sound a lot like what’s happening on the anti-abortion front, with its mandatory vaginal probes and closing of clinics in places like North Carolina.
The commercial is a laughably thin veil for the motives of insurance companies, which aren’t happy with health care regulations that require them to offer “Bobby” and his family free preventative health services, and his mom free birth control – or a free breastpump if she chooses to have another child. If someone in his family has diabetes, they’ll get free blood sugar testing equipment as well.
Not to mention Bobby and his family can’t be denied coverage because of a pre-existing condition – or because a catastrophic illness or injury causes them to reach an annual or real time Location system. (It wasn’t too long ago that an insurance company could say: “Sorry, that’s too expensive, while there might be something to save you, we have decided it’s time for you to die.”temperatures.
Fracking also releases gases that contribute to climate change. Not to mention the more than 2,000 leaks and spills that happened at fracking operations in just Colorado in only five years. Perhaps none of this speaks to the dangers of drilling rock for gas more than knowing that doctors are required to sign a “confidentiality pledge” called “Form 35” in Colorado before they can access information about fracking chemicals that could be responsible for their patients’ health conditions.
In the vein of hidden dangers, drilling companies have had court records sealed in cases where they settled with people who fell ill as a result of fracking chemical exposure.Not that the tech industry hasn’t tried. Indeed, since at least the release of WebTV some 17 years ago, the tech industry has attempted to revolutionize television.
Yet, despite the efforts of heavyweights like Microsoft, Google, Apple and Netflix — as well as numerous startups and smaller companies such as TiVo and Sling — the vast majority of TV viewing is still done the same way it was 15 or 20 years ago — by tuning in to a traditional channel on a pay-television service and watching a broadcast in real time.“It’s not obvious that most consumers want the main job of the TV set to be changed,” said Dan Cryan, research director for digital media at the research firm IHS. “The TV experience isn’t really that broken.”
Silicon Valley isn’t giving up. Google’s new $35 device, the Chromecast, promises to allow consumers to easily and cheaply view on their big-screen TVs some of the videos they watch on their smartphones and tablets.
Meanwhile, Intel is developing a box that could replace consumers’ pay-TV services and Internet-connected living-room devices by offering access to both live broadcasts and Internet content. And Apple reportedly has been working for years on a device that the late Steve Jobs himself promised would radically change the way we watch television.
For its part, Google may have a hit on its hands. On Thursday, just one day after announcing the Chromecast, the company canceled a promotional offer that included three months of free access to Netflix’s streaming service, citing “overwhelming demand.”
Read the full products at http://www.ecived.com/en/.
Just like the tobacco industry execs testified to Congress in 1994 that they didn’t believe nicotine was addictive, today the natural gas industry and health insurance companies are the wolves in sheep’s clothing. One Pandora-aired ad praised the safety of fracking, suggesting that its opponents were ill-educated, while another ad pretended that children will suffer as a result of Obamacare.
The first ad snuck up on me while I was relaxing in the bath on Saturday afternoon. A woman and mother living in Colorado shares how her education at the hands of natural gas drillers led her to know for certain that fracking chemicals are safe – “safe for the land, the water, and the indoor Tracking.” So she had no hesitation about ceding her land to drilling. How convenient for Shell Oil, which is featured in the ad that was paid for by the American Petroleum Institute.
Among its many fallacies and unanswered questions, the ad’s most obvious oversight is that the wildfire-prone American West is not a good area to be depleting of the millions of gallons of water needed for one frack job.
Thus, Western communities, firefighters, and farmers that already face water restrictions and shortages due to drought are now expected to compete against fracking companies for the world’s most precious resource. Hey, did anyone pay attention to the raging Arizona wildfire that took down 19 firefighters? The West will literally go up in smoke if it is depleted of its water, while continually baking under rising So after spending Saturday thinking this “smart people love fracking” ad was a Pandora anomaly, last night I heard from someone posing as a doctor who told an almost storybook fantasy about Obamacare.
She said Obamacare means the government will knock down her exam room door and insert itself in the medical decisions regarding the young child on her table. She imagines that she’ll have to close her office doors under the threat of Obamacare, which will leave sad little “Bobby,” or whatever his name was, with no one to cure his illness.
Back up. Interfering with private medical decisions…and causing practices to close? While that doesn’t sound like Obamacare, it does sound a lot like what’s happening on the anti-abortion front, with its mandatory vaginal probes and closing of clinics in places like North Carolina.
The commercial is a laughably thin veil for the motives of insurance companies, which aren’t happy with health care regulations that require them to offer “Bobby” and his family free preventative health services, and his mom free birth control – or a free breastpump if she chooses to have another child. If someone in his family has diabetes, they’ll get free blood sugar testing equipment as well.
Not to mention Bobby and his family can’t be denied coverage because of a pre-existing condition – or because a catastrophic illness or injury causes them to reach an annual or real time Location system. (It wasn’t too long ago that an insurance company could say: “Sorry, that’s too expensive, while there might be something to save you, we have decided it’s time for you to die.”temperatures.
Fracking also releases gases that contribute to climate change. Not to mention the more than 2,000 leaks and spills that happened at fracking operations in just Colorado in only five years. Perhaps none of this speaks to the dangers of drilling rock for gas more than knowing that doctors are required to sign a “confidentiality pledge” called “Form 35” in Colorado before they can access information about fracking chemicals that could be responsible for their patients’ health conditions.
In the vein of hidden dangers, drilling companies have had court records sealed in cases where they settled with people who fell ill as a result of fracking chemical exposure.Not that the tech industry hasn’t tried. Indeed, since at least the release of WebTV some 17 years ago, the tech industry has attempted to revolutionize television.
Yet, despite the efforts of heavyweights like Microsoft, Google, Apple and Netflix — as well as numerous startups and smaller companies such as TiVo and Sling — the vast majority of TV viewing is still done the same way it was 15 or 20 years ago — by tuning in to a traditional channel on a pay-television service and watching a broadcast in real time.“It’s not obvious that most consumers want the main job of the TV set to be changed,” said Dan Cryan, research director for digital media at the research firm IHS. “The TV experience isn’t really that broken.”
Silicon Valley isn’t giving up. Google’s new $35 device, the Chromecast, promises to allow consumers to easily and cheaply view on their big-screen TVs some of the videos they watch on their smartphones and tablets.
Meanwhile, Intel is developing a box that could replace consumers’ pay-TV services and Internet-connected living-room devices by offering access to both live broadcasts and Internet content. And Apple reportedly has been working for years on a device that the late Steve Jobs himself promised would radically change the way we watch television.
For its part, Google may have a hit on its hands. On Thursday, just one day after announcing the Chromecast, the company canceled a promotional offer that included three months of free access to Netflix’s streaming service, citing “overwhelming demand.”
Read the full products at http://www.ecived.com/en/.
2013年7月22日星期一
SEC Tries Last Ditch Move
In the end, billionaire Steven Cohen, one of the most successful hedge-fund managers of his generation, could end up getting banned from the business he dominated for an error of omission, not commission.
In an administrative action that constitutes its first formal salvo against Cohen, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission alleged he failed to supervise two wayward portfolio managers and ignored “red flags.” The agency stops short of accusing the owner of SAC Capital Advisors LP of insider trading. While the proceeding may result in his being barred from managing other people’s money, it won’t carry the potential penalties available if the SEC had sued him. It also pales in comparison to a grand jury indictment for securities fraud, and the 20 year prison term a conviction could bring.
Instead, the SEC claim that Cohen should have known two of his subordinates were using material, non-public information to rack up hundreds of millions of dollars in trading profits will be easier to prove. The regulator will have a lesser burden of proof and won’t have to deal with all of the protections afforded a defendant in a lawsuit, real time Location system.
“They are using an Al Capone-style tactic,” said John Coffee of Columbia Law School, referring to the prosecution of the Chicago gangster in 1931 on charges of tax evasion. “The SEC is aiming at his kneecaps, not his jugular,” he said. “This is a little like catching John Dillinger entering a bank with a submachine gun and charging him with double parking.”
The SEC, which seeks to ban Cohen from the financial industry for life in the non-court action, alleged he received “highly suspicious” information that should have caused any reasonable hedge-fund manager to investigate the basis for trades by subordinates Mathew Martoma and Michael Steinberg.
Cohen may find some guidance in how to respond to the agency from Rajat Gupta, the former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. director charged in the Galleon Group LLC insider trading probe.
Gupta sued the SEC after it filed an administrative action against him, saying he wanted the SEC to sue him so he could fairly defend himself. After both sides dropped their actions, agreeing any SEC matter would be in a federal court, Gupta was indicted by a federal grand jury. The SEC sued him, too.An SEC administrative proceeding is held before an administrative law judge, not a U.S. district judge or federal jury. The administrative law judge, in Washington, will hear testimony and issue a determination, without a jury present, said Tom Gorman, a former lawyer with the SEC’s Enforcement Division who is now in private practice.
After the administrative judge issues a ruling, the SEC makes the final determination, evaluating the facts supporting the allegations. Cohen may appeal to the federal appeals court in Washington, which handles such regulatory matters.But unlike if he were sued by the agency, Cohen won’t be entitled to evidence collected by the government, a distinct advantage if its only goal is to put him out of business.
SAC spokesman Jonathan Gasthalter has said the agency’s action against Cohen “has no merit.” Kevin Callahan, a spokesman for the SEC, didn’t return calls seeking comment. The administrative law judge will rule “no later than 300 days” from the date which the order was served, the agency said.SAC oversees $15 billion, about 60 percent of which is money from Cohen and rtls. Cohen, whose net worth is estimated at about $9 billion by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, has returned 25 percent a year in his funds since founding his firm in 1992, after taking half of the profits in fees, a record unsurpassed by other equity hedge-fund managers.
Both men, who were also sued by the SEC for insider trading, have pleaded not guilty in the criminal cases brought by Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, and are scheduled to go to trial separately in November.
Regulators alleged Cohen, 57, ignored the suspicious actions of his subordinates and signs that pointed to malfeasance, in a failure to properly supervise that allowed the alleged illegal trades to take place.
In the administrative action, the agency for the first time described Cohen’s alleged personal involvement in trading activities with the two subordinates, including a claim that Cohen sold off hundreds of thousands of shares of Dell in August 2008. The SEC said the sale came after Steinberg sent Cohen an e-mail that the U.S. alleged included nonpublic information about the company’s disappointing earnings set to be reported days later.
The agency doesn’t allege that Cohen knew that the information was illegal, a prerequisite to any prosecution of Cohen for insider trading. Instead, the SEC said he failed to supervise the men after receiving information that should have caused a “reasonable” hedge fund manager to investigate the basis for the trades.
The nature of the agency’s action against Cohen, in effect a disciplinary action that occurs internally, caught many by surprise, since it comes after years of scrutiny by federal authorities, both civil and criminal.
The government’s six-year insider-trading crackdown on fund managers, analysts and insiders at technology companies has resulted in charges against more than 80 people and convictions against 73 people.Prior to last week’s filing, the government’s major actions against alleged inside traders and their associates have largely been tandem federal enforcement efforts -- pairing simultaneous charges by Bharara’s office with a lawsuit by the SEC.
Earlier this month, the Wall Street Journal, citing unidentified sources, claimed federal prosecutors had concluded they didn’t have enough evidence to charge Cohen by the end of this month for crimes related to Martoma’s tips.
“This matter has been investigated for months,” said Tom Gorman, a former lawyer with the SEC’s enforcement division, now a partner at Dorsey & Whitney LLP in Washington. “Clearly the SEC does not have the facts to bring an insider trading case or they would have brought it.”Gorman said the SEC’s action was based on two criminal insider-trading cases that have yet to go to trial. Should either Martoma or Steinberg be acquitted, it could damage the SEC’s proceeding, he said.
While he wouldn’t address the Cohen case specifically, Bharara took the unusual step in a speech last week of pointing out that prosecutors have other statutes, including conspiracy, that can push back any statute of limitations deadlines.
In an administrative action that constitutes its first formal salvo against Cohen, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission alleged he failed to supervise two wayward portfolio managers and ignored “red flags.” The agency stops short of accusing the owner of SAC Capital Advisors LP of insider trading. While the proceeding may result in his being barred from managing other people’s money, it won’t carry the potential penalties available if the SEC had sued him. It also pales in comparison to a grand jury indictment for securities fraud, and the 20 year prison term a conviction could bring.
Instead, the SEC claim that Cohen should have known two of his subordinates were using material, non-public information to rack up hundreds of millions of dollars in trading profits will be easier to prove. The regulator will have a lesser burden of proof and won’t have to deal with all of the protections afforded a defendant in a lawsuit, real time Location system.
“They are using an Al Capone-style tactic,” said John Coffee of Columbia Law School, referring to the prosecution of the Chicago gangster in 1931 on charges of tax evasion. “The SEC is aiming at his kneecaps, not his jugular,” he said. “This is a little like catching John Dillinger entering a bank with a submachine gun and charging him with double parking.”
The SEC, which seeks to ban Cohen from the financial industry for life in the non-court action, alleged he received “highly suspicious” information that should have caused any reasonable hedge-fund manager to investigate the basis for trades by subordinates Mathew Martoma and Michael Steinberg.
Cohen may find some guidance in how to respond to the agency from Rajat Gupta, the former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. director charged in the Galleon Group LLC insider trading probe.
Gupta sued the SEC after it filed an administrative action against him, saying he wanted the SEC to sue him so he could fairly defend himself. After both sides dropped their actions, agreeing any SEC matter would be in a federal court, Gupta was indicted by a federal grand jury. The SEC sued him, too.An SEC administrative proceeding is held before an administrative law judge, not a U.S. district judge or federal jury. The administrative law judge, in Washington, will hear testimony and issue a determination, without a jury present, said Tom Gorman, a former lawyer with the SEC’s Enforcement Division who is now in private practice.
After the administrative judge issues a ruling, the SEC makes the final determination, evaluating the facts supporting the allegations. Cohen may appeal to the federal appeals court in Washington, which handles such regulatory matters.But unlike if he were sued by the agency, Cohen won’t be entitled to evidence collected by the government, a distinct advantage if its only goal is to put him out of business.
SAC spokesman Jonathan Gasthalter has said the agency’s action against Cohen “has no merit.” Kevin Callahan, a spokesman for the SEC, didn’t return calls seeking comment. The administrative law judge will rule “no later than 300 days” from the date which the order was served, the agency said.SAC oversees $15 billion, about 60 percent of which is money from Cohen and rtls. Cohen, whose net worth is estimated at about $9 billion by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, has returned 25 percent a year in his funds since founding his firm in 1992, after taking half of the profits in fees, a record unsurpassed by other equity hedge-fund managers.
Both men, who were also sued by the SEC for insider trading, have pleaded not guilty in the criminal cases brought by Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, and are scheduled to go to trial separately in November.
Regulators alleged Cohen, 57, ignored the suspicious actions of his subordinates and signs that pointed to malfeasance, in a failure to properly supervise that allowed the alleged illegal trades to take place.
In the administrative action, the agency for the first time described Cohen’s alleged personal involvement in trading activities with the two subordinates, including a claim that Cohen sold off hundreds of thousands of shares of Dell in August 2008. The SEC said the sale came after Steinberg sent Cohen an e-mail that the U.S. alleged included nonpublic information about the company’s disappointing earnings set to be reported days later.
The agency doesn’t allege that Cohen knew that the information was illegal, a prerequisite to any prosecution of Cohen for insider trading. Instead, the SEC said he failed to supervise the men after receiving information that should have caused a “reasonable” hedge fund manager to investigate the basis for the trades.
The nature of the agency’s action against Cohen, in effect a disciplinary action that occurs internally, caught many by surprise, since it comes after years of scrutiny by federal authorities, both civil and criminal.
The government’s six-year insider-trading crackdown on fund managers, analysts and insiders at technology companies has resulted in charges against more than 80 people and convictions against 73 people.Prior to last week’s filing, the government’s major actions against alleged inside traders and their associates have largely been tandem federal enforcement efforts -- pairing simultaneous charges by Bharara’s office with a lawsuit by the SEC.
Earlier this month, the Wall Street Journal, citing unidentified sources, claimed federal prosecutors had concluded they didn’t have enough evidence to charge Cohen by the end of this month for crimes related to Martoma’s tips.
“This matter has been investigated for months,” said Tom Gorman, a former lawyer with the SEC’s enforcement division, now a partner at Dorsey & Whitney LLP in Washington. “Clearly the SEC does not have the facts to bring an insider trading case or they would have brought it.”Gorman said the SEC’s action was based on two criminal insider-trading cases that have yet to go to trial. Should either Martoma or Steinberg be acquitted, it could damage the SEC’s proceeding, he said.
While he wouldn’t address the Cohen case specifically, Bharara took the unusual step in a speech last week of pointing out that prosecutors have other statutes, including conspiracy, that can push back any statute of limitations deadlines.
2013年7月7日星期日
Thousands line Arizona roads in procession for 19 fallen firefighters
Firefighters began a 125-mile procession to bring the bodies of 19 colleagues who died in a wildfire a week ago from Phoenix to the mountain community where they lived.Nineteen hearses departed from the medical examiner’s office in Phoenix, rolled past a collection of firefighters outside the Arizona statehouse complex and will pass through the community of Yarnell where the 19 died.
Firefighters and police officers held hands over their hearts or saluted as the motorcycle-led escort slowly drove by and a quartet of bag pipers played a mournful song to a marching cadence. The firefighters’ names were posted on a side window of each hearse.The procession included several firefighting vehicles, including a truck that bore the name of the elite crew to which the 19 firefighters who died on June 30 belonged.
Lon Reiman of Scottsdale carried two small American flags as he waited for the procession to begin. Reiman said he has several relatives who are firefighters and thought of them once he heard the news of the deaths“When you think about their wives, their families and their kids, it just brings tears to your eyes,” Reiman said.
It’s unclear how long the procession will last.Since their fellow firefighters arrived at the scene where they were killed, the fallen firefighters have not been alone, a tradition among those in the profession in the U.S.“Since they were discovered, they have never been out of the presence of a brother firefighter,” said Paul Bourgeois, a Phoenix-area fire chief who is acting as a spokesman in Prescott for the firefighters’ families. “From the time they were taken to the medical examiner in Phoenix, while they’re at the medical examiner’s office, when they are received in a funeral home — there will always be a brother firefighter on site with them until they are interred.
“That’s something people don’t realize. We never leave your side,” he said of the tradition. “It’s a comfort to the survivors, whether they’re families or fellow firefighters.”The firefighters were killed a week ago in the Yarnell Hill fire, sparked by lightning on June 28. Crews were closing in on full containment after the fire destroyed more than 100 homes in Yarnell and burned about 13 square miles. The town remained evacuated.
The crew of Hotshots was working to build a fire line between the blaze and Yarnell when erratic winds suddenly shifted the fire’s real time Location system, causing it to hook around the firefighters and cut off access to a ranch that was to be their safety zone.The highly trained men were in the prime of their lives, and many left behind wives — some pregnant — and small children.
Earlier that week the Sunday Independent reported that Gwede Mantashe inexplicably appeared to be trying to pin the blame for the mayhem in Marikana on a Swede. (That’s what people from Sweden are called. They are ‘Swedes’ and not ‘Swiss’. You follow?). The Swede in question was activist Liv Shange, a Democratic Socialist Movement (DSM) and Workers and Socialist Party (Wasp) leader. Mantashe’s assertions that Shange had been trying to destabilise the country by stirring up unrest amongst miners was widely met with ridicule, and read as another bizarre attempt to shift responsibility for South Africa’s very real problems, from the ruling party to mythically demonised foreign forces of evil. Sadly, these two almost laughable incidents will be the sum total of what most South African media followers have heard about the country of Sweden of late. That’s a real pity, because this little-known-about country for South Africans, has a lot more to offer.
Last month I was invited to travel to Stockholm, as part of a group of African representatives for a series of meetings with media regulators, journalists and a journalist union, media producers and the Swedish foreign ministry. Not being able to help myself, the more I learnt about Sweden, the more I began a mental comparative analysis with South Africa – what follows here is just some of that comparison and how we measure up to what is widely regarded as one of the most free, open, transparent and least corrupt of societies on the planet.
What first pricked my interest in Stockholm was something called the Freedom of the Press Act. Despite its name, this piece of legislation safeguards the freedom of expression rights of all citizens, not just the press. More than that, it means that any individual can contact any public authority and request access to any official document without having to provide their motivation for doing so and without having to identify themselves. With regard to the notion of open and free access to information, that sounded too good to be true. So I asked a few questions about how effectively this law works in practice.
Sven Bergman, an investigative journalist, at first lamented the corrupt nature of governments in general, and recounted a few stories of corruption in the Swedish government which had been uncovered by journalists in recent years, the most significant ironically being the sale of military goods to South Africa during the Arms Deal. So, I asked him, what about this Freedom of the Press Act? How well does it work in Sweden? He replied instantly, “It’s very good. Very good”. According to Bergman, the law works in practice precisely in the way that it is put on paper: a journalist can enter a government department at any time, request a particular document and wait while an official collects it and hands it over. The official has to hand it over, and they do. “Sometimes you to have a wait a few hours, but it never really takes longer than that. At some of these places you learn that if you talk nicely to the elderly ladies at the desk, and give them some cakes, then the documents come faster,” says Bergman, smiling.
In South Africa the law that is supposed to enable open access to government information is called the Promotion of Access to Information Act (PAIA). But often PAIA fails in implementation, acting as a hindrance to accessing to government information rather than promoting it. The process is burdensome: it requires having to complete a near unfathomable form, and officials at many government bodies do not understand the law themselves, which means that just tracking down the appropriate person to whom one must submit the form, can sometimes be time consuming. Once the PAIA application is submitted, the public body has 30 days in which to respond. Applications are often turned down, in which case one can appeal, but then you have to wait another 30 days to get an answer. So, it’s not a case of, ‘Wait here while I fetch that for you’. By comparison, PAIA is tedious, cumbersome and bureaucratic enough to, contrary to what its name suggests, act more as a discouragement to anyone looking for public information. From a media angle having to wait for 30, sometimes 60 days for information that rightly should be open to the public, when chasing a deadline, is ludicrous and impractical.
But all the legal stuff aside, there’s also the matter of pure principle. It’s the principle of Sweden’s Freedom of the Press Act, and the seemingly widely held respect for that principle within that country, that makes it work. What is that principle? It is that information held by PUBLIC institutions belongs to the PUBLIC. To see what I mean, try applying the same principle in South Africa. Imagine strolling into the Department of Public Works back in September 2012, and saying to a secretary that you would like to see the official records of all state funds spent on the president’s private home at Nkandla. Imagine he/she answers, “Sure! No problem. Just wait here while I fetch it for you.”
On Friday, 5 July 2013, the Mail & Guardian reported on a gargantuan pile of documents which they had finally secured from the Department of Public Works detailing some of the behind-the-scenes history to the Nkandla project. Three things are relevant in this case. First, the information released by the Mail & Guardian is damning, to the president as well as a chain of others involved in the project – which just illustrates the value of open access to public information in securing accountability in government. Second, the Mail & Guardian was at pains to point out, more than once, that the more than 12,000 pages worth of documentation which they now have in their possession thanks to a successful PAIA application contains significant gaps of information. The next question is, where is that information? Why wasn’t it handed over to the Mail & Guardian after the PAIA application, which by law, it should have been? Third, the Nkandlagate scandal broke for the first time in a City Press exposé last year in September. Yet, 10 months later, this is the first time a media outlet in South Africa has had access to official information held by a public institution on the matter. The fact that it has taken our public officials so long to release this information, especially with regard to the level of public interest, should have them hanging their heads in shame. (And yes, SABC head-honchos, I use the term ‘Nkandlagate’ deliberately, even though you’d like to have it censored).
The principle that information held by public institutions belongs to the public, were it respected in South Africa, could have saved the Mail & Guardian tons of legal fees and years of slogging through the courts for access to the Zimbabwe election report of 2002. And never mind the newspapers. This principle, were it respected, would have spared countless activists and community organisations around the country from a constant and exhausting struggle with officials to have access to information which should quite rightly be in the public domain for the purpose of improving people’s lives. It would have meant that the Right2Know Campaign could have simply walked into the front office of the Department of State Security and been handed the full list of national key points within a matter of minutes. Instead, Right2Know had to submit a PAIA application (which failed even on appeal) and the campaign then took to the streets in Johannesburg on World Press Freedom day out of protest. But in South Africa, we still don’t know what all of our own national key points are.
Click on their website http://www.ecived.com/en/.
Firefighters and police officers held hands over their hearts or saluted as the motorcycle-led escort slowly drove by and a quartet of bag pipers played a mournful song to a marching cadence. The firefighters’ names were posted on a side window of each hearse.The procession included several firefighting vehicles, including a truck that bore the name of the elite crew to which the 19 firefighters who died on June 30 belonged.
Lon Reiman of Scottsdale carried two small American flags as he waited for the procession to begin. Reiman said he has several relatives who are firefighters and thought of them once he heard the news of the deaths“When you think about their wives, their families and their kids, it just brings tears to your eyes,” Reiman said.
It’s unclear how long the procession will last.Since their fellow firefighters arrived at the scene where they were killed, the fallen firefighters have not been alone, a tradition among those in the profession in the U.S.“Since they were discovered, they have never been out of the presence of a brother firefighter,” said Paul Bourgeois, a Phoenix-area fire chief who is acting as a spokesman in Prescott for the firefighters’ families. “From the time they were taken to the medical examiner in Phoenix, while they’re at the medical examiner’s office, when they are received in a funeral home — there will always be a brother firefighter on site with them until they are interred.
“That’s something people don’t realize. We never leave your side,” he said of the tradition. “It’s a comfort to the survivors, whether they’re families or fellow firefighters.”The firefighters were killed a week ago in the Yarnell Hill fire, sparked by lightning on June 28. Crews were closing in on full containment after the fire destroyed more than 100 homes in Yarnell and burned about 13 square miles. The town remained evacuated.
The crew of Hotshots was working to build a fire line between the blaze and Yarnell when erratic winds suddenly shifted the fire’s real time Location system, causing it to hook around the firefighters and cut off access to a ranch that was to be their safety zone.The highly trained men were in the prime of their lives, and many left behind wives — some pregnant — and small children.
Earlier that week the Sunday Independent reported that Gwede Mantashe inexplicably appeared to be trying to pin the blame for the mayhem in Marikana on a Swede. (That’s what people from Sweden are called. They are ‘Swedes’ and not ‘Swiss’. You follow?). The Swede in question was activist Liv Shange, a Democratic Socialist Movement (DSM) and Workers and Socialist Party (Wasp) leader. Mantashe’s assertions that Shange had been trying to destabilise the country by stirring up unrest amongst miners was widely met with ridicule, and read as another bizarre attempt to shift responsibility for South Africa’s very real problems, from the ruling party to mythically demonised foreign forces of evil. Sadly, these two almost laughable incidents will be the sum total of what most South African media followers have heard about the country of Sweden of late. That’s a real pity, because this little-known-about country for South Africans, has a lot more to offer.
Last month I was invited to travel to Stockholm, as part of a group of African representatives for a series of meetings with media regulators, journalists and a journalist union, media producers and the Swedish foreign ministry. Not being able to help myself, the more I learnt about Sweden, the more I began a mental comparative analysis with South Africa – what follows here is just some of that comparison and how we measure up to what is widely regarded as one of the most free, open, transparent and least corrupt of societies on the planet.
What first pricked my interest in Stockholm was something called the Freedom of the Press Act. Despite its name, this piece of legislation safeguards the freedom of expression rights of all citizens, not just the press. More than that, it means that any individual can contact any public authority and request access to any official document without having to provide their motivation for doing so and without having to identify themselves. With regard to the notion of open and free access to information, that sounded too good to be true. So I asked a few questions about how effectively this law works in practice.
Sven Bergman, an investigative journalist, at first lamented the corrupt nature of governments in general, and recounted a few stories of corruption in the Swedish government which had been uncovered by journalists in recent years, the most significant ironically being the sale of military goods to South Africa during the Arms Deal. So, I asked him, what about this Freedom of the Press Act? How well does it work in Sweden? He replied instantly, “It’s very good. Very good”. According to Bergman, the law works in practice precisely in the way that it is put on paper: a journalist can enter a government department at any time, request a particular document and wait while an official collects it and hands it over. The official has to hand it over, and they do. “Sometimes you to have a wait a few hours, but it never really takes longer than that. At some of these places you learn that if you talk nicely to the elderly ladies at the desk, and give them some cakes, then the documents come faster,” says Bergman, smiling.
In South Africa the law that is supposed to enable open access to government information is called the Promotion of Access to Information Act (PAIA). But often PAIA fails in implementation, acting as a hindrance to accessing to government information rather than promoting it. The process is burdensome: it requires having to complete a near unfathomable form, and officials at many government bodies do not understand the law themselves, which means that just tracking down the appropriate person to whom one must submit the form, can sometimes be time consuming. Once the PAIA application is submitted, the public body has 30 days in which to respond. Applications are often turned down, in which case one can appeal, but then you have to wait another 30 days to get an answer. So, it’s not a case of, ‘Wait here while I fetch that for you’. By comparison, PAIA is tedious, cumbersome and bureaucratic enough to, contrary to what its name suggests, act more as a discouragement to anyone looking for public information. From a media angle having to wait for 30, sometimes 60 days for information that rightly should be open to the public, when chasing a deadline, is ludicrous and impractical.
But all the legal stuff aside, there’s also the matter of pure principle. It’s the principle of Sweden’s Freedom of the Press Act, and the seemingly widely held respect for that principle within that country, that makes it work. What is that principle? It is that information held by PUBLIC institutions belongs to the PUBLIC. To see what I mean, try applying the same principle in South Africa. Imagine strolling into the Department of Public Works back in September 2012, and saying to a secretary that you would like to see the official records of all state funds spent on the president’s private home at Nkandla. Imagine he/she answers, “Sure! No problem. Just wait here while I fetch it for you.”
On Friday, 5 July 2013, the Mail & Guardian reported on a gargantuan pile of documents which they had finally secured from the Department of Public Works detailing some of the behind-the-scenes history to the Nkandla project. Three things are relevant in this case. First, the information released by the Mail & Guardian is damning, to the president as well as a chain of others involved in the project – which just illustrates the value of open access to public information in securing accountability in government. Second, the Mail & Guardian was at pains to point out, more than once, that the more than 12,000 pages worth of documentation which they now have in their possession thanks to a successful PAIA application contains significant gaps of information. The next question is, where is that information? Why wasn’t it handed over to the Mail & Guardian after the PAIA application, which by law, it should have been? Third, the Nkandlagate scandal broke for the first time in a City Press exposé last year in September. Yet, 10 months later, this is the first time a media outlet in South Africa has had access to official information held by a public institution on the matter. The fact that it has taken our public officials so long to release this information, especially with regard to the level of public interest, should have them hanging their heads in shame. (And yes, SABC head-honchos, I use the term ‘Nkandlagate’ deliberately, even though you’d like to have it censored).
The principle that information held by public institutions belongs to the public, were it respected in South Africa, could have saved the Mail & Guardian tons of legal fees and years of slogging through the courts for access to the Zimbabwe election report of 2002. And never mind the newspapers. This principle, were it respected, would have spared countless activists and community organisations around the country from a constant and exhausting struggle with officials to have access to information which should quite rightly be in the public domain for the purpose of improving people’s lives. It would have meant that the Right2Know Campaign could have simply walked into the front office of the Department of State Security and been handed the full list of national key points within a matter of minutes. Instead, Right2Know had to submit a PAIA application (which failed even on appeal) and the campaign then took to the streets in Johannesburg on World Press Freedom day out of protest. But in South Africa, we still don’t know what all of our own national key points are.
Click on their website http://www.ecived.com/en/.
2013年7月4日星期四
Everglades Island home a nod to Venice
Sharon and Jim Mattei’s Venetian-style home on the east side of Everglades Island, presented some out-of-the-box challenges to its designer, Michael Perry of MP Design and Architecture in Palm Beach.Perry readily recalls the role that the site played in the genesis of the architecture in 2005, when the Matteis found a waterfront property they loved at 650 Island Drive.
“And since it was on Lake Worth, they thought a Venetian-style home would be fitting, and they wanted to maximize the lake views to the east and southeast. They also wanted the indoor and outdoor spaces to serve each other directly.”To optimize the vistas, Perry created a distinctive floor plan that relied on a series of step-backs from the lakefront.
“I brought the north portion of the house — the family room — out closest to the lake, and stepped the other sections of the house back, so that all the rooms on the lakeside would have east and south views.”That plan also complemented the landscape design, which was executed by Mario Nievera and Keith Williams, whose firm today is known as Nievera Williams Design. Rather than positioning the pool directly behind the real time Location system, the landscape designers placed it on the south end of the yard.
“The Matteis wanted to maintain the lawn directly east of the loggia, and they did not want the pool to overtake the views of the lake,” Perry explains.In all, the house ended up with 7,814square feet of living space, inside and out, with five bedrooms, five bathrooms and two half-baths.
Jim Mattei — an investor and real estate developer who co-founded and later sold the Checkers fast-food chain — and his wife are selling Villa Isola. It recently re-entered the market at $13.8 million, offered for sale by Sharon Mattei’s mother, Sotheby’s International Realty agent Mary Boykin. Last year, Boykin also represented a limited liability company associated with Jim Mattei when it sold a vacant lot across the street, at 657 Island Drive, for a recorded $5 million to a trust.
In the south block, stepped back again, are the library and guest bedroom suite. Upstairs, the north block houses the master bathroom, closets and a guest bedroom suite. In the center portion are the master terrace facing the lake, the master bedroom and the second floor gallery. In the south block are two guest bedroom suites. The upstairs rooms have coffered or tray ceilings, and some doors open to “Juliet”-style balconies.
Once the floor plan was finalized, Perry turned his attention to the architectural style, making use of repeated Venetian design motifs on the exterior. Adorning the front door, for instance, are a stone surround and a tracery arch.
The exterior cornice features trefoil stone-arched details and, on the back of the house, there’s a second-floor window with a quatrefoil detail. Some windows are shaded by awnings held by Venetian-style wrought-iron supports.In the interior, the foyer plays up the Venetian theme, with details on the column capitals and the staircase balusters. The stone surround on the fireplace in the living room mixes gothic and Venetian details. The gallery is crowned with groin vaults.
Pecky cypress is found on the loggia’s ceiling. In the family room, there are pecky cypress beams, while the breakfast room has panels of the same wood.“In the pine-paneled library, the cornice has Venetian arch details, and it has a beamed-and-coffered pine ceiling. On either side of the TV cabinet, you’ll see trefoil arch details,” Perry says.
Other architectural features include rooms for red- and white-wine storage incorporated into the dining area and hinged doors in the dining room and master bedroom that recess against the wall to create the look of a paneled vestibule.Amenities include stone floors, an elevator, a dock with a boat lift, a whole-house generator and a Lutron touch-panel system to control lighting, air-conditioning, audio-visual equipment, and security alarms and cameras.
“We did obtain the views, and we were able to have the rooms relate to each other without having to go through a number of hallways,” Perry says. “The circulation is very easy, and rooms are accessible to each other. The Matteis have the outdoor pergola outside the family room to enjoy dining, and the family room, kitchen and living room are accessible to the lake loggia. Even in inclement weather, they can still move easily from room to room.”
In charging Manning with “aiding the enemy” under Article 104 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the US government is equating the publication of classified information about its secret and illegal activities with espionage, treason and aiding terrorists. It is doing so on the spurious grounds that such information can end up in the hands of forces considered by the government to be hostile.
In fact, as the Obama administration and the military well know, Manning released the information to inform the American people of war crimes being carried out by the US government in Iraq and Afghanistan and diplomatic intrigues targeting many other countries.
The clear implication of the government’s case is the position that any publication or organization that publishes leaked classified information or defends whistleblowers such as Manning is itself engaging in criminal and treasonous acts. The prosecution acknowledged as much in January when it argued that its case against Manning, which implicates WikiLeaks in treasonous and pro-terrorist activities, would apply equally if the Army private had passed his information to the New York Times .
This sweeping attack on First Amendment guarantees of freedom of speech and the press occurs in the context of threats to prosecute journalists such as the Guardian ’s Glenn Greenwald for publishing former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden’s exposures of US government spying, and revelations that the government seized the phone records of Associated Press reporters and tapped into the email of Fox News’ James Rosen, who was named a co-conspirator by the Justice Department in relation to State Department leaks.
Read the full story at http://www.ecived.com/en/!
“And since it was on Lake Worth, they thought a Venetian-style home would be fitting, and they wanted to maximize the lake views to the east and southeast. They also wanted the indoor and outdoor spaces to serve each other directly.”To optimize the vistas, Perry created a distinctive floor plan that relied on a series of step-backs from the lakefront.
“I brought the north portion of the house — the family room — out closest to the lake, and stepped the other sections of the house back, so that all the rooms on the lakeside would have east and south views.”That plan also complemented the landscape design, which was executed by Mario Nievera and Keith Williams, whose firm today is known as Nievera Williams Design. Rather than positioning the pool directly behind the real time Location system, the landscape designers placed it on the south end of the yard.
“The Matteis wanted to maintain the lawn directly east of the loggia, and they did not want the pool to overtake the views of the lake,” Perry explains.In all, the house ended up with 7,814square feet of living space, inside and out, with five bedrooms, five bathrooms and two half-baths.
Jim Mattei — an investor and real estate developer who co-founded and later sold the Checkers fast-food chain — and his wife are selling Villa Isola. It recently re-entered the market at $13.8 million, offered for sale by Sharon Mattei’s mother, Sotheby’s International Realty agent Mary Boykin. Last year, Boykin also represented a limited liability company associated with Jim Mattei when it sold a vacant lot across the street, at 657 Island Drive, for a recorded $5 million to a trust.
In the south block, stepped back again, are the library and guest bedroom suite. Upstairs, the north block houses the master bathroom, closets and a guest bedroom suite. In the center portion are the master terrace facing the lake, the master bedroom and the second floor gallery. In the south block are two guest bedroom suites. The upstairs rooms have coffered or tray ceilings, and some doors open to “Juliet”-style balconies.
Once the floor plan was finalized, Perry turned his attention to the architectural style, making use of repeated Venetian design motifs on the exterior. Adorning the front door, for instance, are a stone surround and a tracery arch.
The exterior cornice features trefoil stone-arched details and, on the back of the house, there’s a second-floor window with a quatrefoil detail. Some windows are shaded by awnings held by Venetian-style wrought-iron supports.In the interior, the foyer plays up the Venetian theme, with details on the column capitals and the staircase balusters. The stone surround on the fireplace in the living room mixes gothic and Venetian details. The gallery is crowned with groin vaults.
Pecky cypress is found on the loggia’s ceiling. In the family room, there are pecky cypress beams, while the breakfast room has panels of the same wood.“In the pine-paneled library, the cornice has Venetian arch details, and it has a beamed-and-coffered pine ceiling. On either side of the TV cabinet, you’ll see trefoil arch details,” Perry says.
Other architectural features include rooms for red- and white-wine storage incorporated into the dining area and hinged doors in the dining room and master bedroom that recess against the wall to create the look of a paneled vestibule.Amenities include stone floors, an elevator, a dock with a boat lift, a whole-house generator and a Lutron touch-panel system to control lighting, air-conditioning, audio-visual equipment, and security alarms and cameras.
“We did obtain the views, and we were able to have the rooms relate to each other without having to go through a number of hallways,” Perry says. “The circulation is very easy, and rooms are accessible to each other. The Matteis have the outdoor pergola outside the family room to enjoy dining, and the family room, kitchen and living room are accessible to the lake loggia. Even in inclement weather, they can still move easily from room to room.”
In charging Manning with “aiding the enemy” under Article 104 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the US government is equating the publication of classified information about its secret and illegal activities with espionage, treason and aiding terrorists. It is doing so on the spurious grounds that such information can end up in the hands of forces considered by the government to be hostile.
In fact, as the Obama administration and the military well know, Manning released the information to inform the American people of war crimes being carried out by the US government in Iraq and Afghanistan and diplomatic intrigues targeting many other countries.
The clear implication of the government’s case is the position that any publication or organization that publishes leaked classified information or defends whistleblowers such as Manning is itself engaging in criminal and treasonous acts. The prosecution acknowledged as much in January when it argued that its case against Manning, which implicates WikiLeaks in treasonous and pro-terrorist activities, would apply equally if the Army private had passed his information to the New York Times .
This sweeping attack on First Amendment guarantees of freedom of speech and the press occurs in the context of threats to prosecute journalists such as the Guardian ’s Glenn Greenwald for publishing former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden’s exposures of US government spying, and revelations that the government seized the phone records of Associated Press reporters and tapped into the email of Fox News’ James Rosen, who was named a co-conspirator by the Justice Department in relation to State Department leaks.
Read the full story at http://www.ecived.com/en/!
2013年6月30日星期日
The car that parks itself
CARS that need no driver are just around the corner according to Google, which has been testing vehicles bristling with aerials and cameras on public roads in America. But Google does not make cars (yet), so it will be up to firms that do to bring the technology to market. And carmakers are a conservative bunch. Still, slowly and steadily the autonomous car will arrive, with the help of an increasing number of automated driving aids. Volvo recently demonstrated one such feature: a car that really does park itself.
Some cars already have systems that assist with parking, but these are not completely autonomous. They can identify an empty parallel-parking space and steer into it while the driver uses the brake. The Volvo system, however, lets the driver get out and use a smartphone application to instruct the vehicle to park. The car then trundles off, manoeuvres into a parking place and sends a message to the driver to inform him where it is. The driver can collect the car in person or use his phone to call it back to where he dropped it off. Autonomous parking could thus be provided at places like shopping centres and airports, which are controlled areas in which automated vehicles can be managed more easily than on open highways.
In the past, designs for doing this have relied on car parks being fitted with buried guide wires that a vehicle can follow to an empty bay. That, though, creates a chicken-and-egg problem: car-park operators will not invest in such infrastructure until there is a sufficient number of suitably equipped cars on the road. Drivers, conversely, will not want to buy self-parking cars if there is nowhere to use them.
This means, as Mikael Thor, a Volvo safety engineer working on the project, observes, that for autonomous parking to work most of the technology will have to be in the car itself. The Volvo test car, which looks like a normal car, therefore uses on-board GPS mapping, cameras with image-recognition software, and radar sensors to find its own way around a car park and avoid pedestrians and non-autonomous vehicles. Mr Thor says the system is five to ten years from commercial deployment. If it proves a success then infrastructure might adapt to it, for instance by packing cars into tighter spaces (with no one in them there is no need to make room for their doors to open), but would not need to anticipate it.
Driverless cars would also need to communicate with one another, to enhance safety. That, too, is coming. A number of carmakers are developing wireless networking systems through which vehicles can exchange data, such as their speed, their steering angle and even their real time Location system, to forewarn anti-collision systems and safety devices if an accident looks likely.
Ford, for example, recently tested a brake light that can provide an early warning to other motorists. If the brakes are applied hard in an emergency, a signal is broadcast. This illuminates a warning light in the dashboard of suitably equipped following vehicles, even if they are out of sight around a bend or not immediately behind the vehicle doing the braking.
Ford has been testing this system as part of a collaborative research project with several European carmakers. They have put a fleet of 150 experimental vehicles on the roads. When it tested a group of these, Ford found the technology let drivers brake much earlier, helping avoid collisions. A driverless car would be able to react even faster.
Another member of the research group, BMW, has been testing driverless cars on roads around Munich—including belting down some of Germany’s high-speed autobahns. The ordinary-looking BMW 5-series models use a variety of self-contained guidance systems. These include cameras mounted on the upper windscreen, which can identify road markings, signs and various obstacles likely to be encountered on roads.
The BMWs also use a radar, to gauge how far the vehicle is from other cars and potential obstacles, and a lidar, which works like a radar but at optical frequencies. The lidar employs laser beams to scan the road ahead and builds up from the reflections a three-dimensional image of what this looks like. The image is processed by a computer in the vehicle, which also collects and compares data from a high-accuracy GPS unit. A series of ultrasonic sonars similar to those used in vehicles to provide parking assistance are placed around the car to add to the virtual picture. And just to make sure, a set of accelerometers provide an inertial navigation system that double-checks the vehicle’s position on the road.
Although these cars can be switched to an autonomous driving mode, like Google’s vehicles they are still required to have someone in the driving seat who can take over in the event of any difficulty. The BMWs can steer themselves, slow down, brake and accelerate, even changing lanes to overtake slower vehicles. BMW, though, does not yet talk of when it might offer fully autonomous cars to customers; rather it says that it expects to see “highly automated” driving functions available in its models from around 2020.
The metric they are chasing is 40 HPV — hours per vehicle — by 2015. At the moment, the plant produces at 52.8 HPV, a 30% improvement on five years ago. Getting to 40 will take a massive effort.Next year, the W205 factory will move into continuous production using three eight-hour shifts. This will require an even higher level of consistency as there will be no down time which can be used to make up for slow production.
Mr van der Merwe is acutely aware that the South African operation faces growing global competition. The W205 will be produced in South Africa, the US, Germany and China.
"China is a fierce competitor. South Africa's future does not lie in competing on labour cost. It's much more important to develop the skills base."South Africa's advantage lies in the "tenacity" of its workforce and what he describes as "the general culture in the workplace".
It is a culture that must be built, and prospective employees attend intensive training sessions that plug the gaps in the education system and incubate a mindset of high productivity."You cannot just inform somebody about such a system. You have to learn it, you have to live in it, you have to believe in it," says Mr Zimmerman.
Exiting the plant onto East London's Settlers Way, you drive about 100m before turning left into an industrial area where Mercedes is preparing the new intake of workers for next year's new production line.
In a converted warehouse, human resources manager Stephen Goold presides over the training of 800 potential new recruits in the plant's Shop Floor Skills Centre. They are all school-leavers and about 600 of them will find jobs on the new production line.
Then comes a statistic that brings home the Eastern Cape's dire employment crisis: the 800 trainee workers were chosen from more than 23,000 applicants. If there is an invisible fuel powering their learning, it is hope. They may be entry-level factory workers, but in this blighted region, they are an elite, the few who have obtained a foothold in a precarious regional economy.
On the day I visit, trainees are testing their ability to follow complex sequences of mechanical instructions. In one corner, a team is taking apart and reassembling the doors of a C Class saloon, in another, they are undoing fastenings they cannot see behind a screen.
In yet another, students write notes furiously as a lecturer brings them up to speed before a whiteboard. Whittling the 23,000 down to 800 gives Mercedes the opportunity to select the very brightest.
"The assessment process means good quality in, good quality out," says Mr Goold.Further down the road is the East London Industrial Development Zone, where most of the plant's component suppliers are based.From its factories come seats, roof trim, door panels, bearings, exhaust systems, key chassis components, fuel tanks and the pressed "aluminium skin panels" that will be welded together into the body.
Between 45% and 50% of the new C Class will be local, but this includes parts supplied by local component manufacturers, who import some of their parts. The true figure is closer to 25%.Again, the competition is fierce. Mr Zimmerman points out that South African leather components used to be exported to other Mercedes plants, but more efficient Eastern European competitors have begun to take over.
Click on their website www.ecived.com/en/ for more information.
Some cars already have systems that assist with parking, but these are not completely autonomous. They can identify an empty parallel-parking space and steer into it while the driver uses the brake. The Volvo system, however, lets the driver get out and use a smartphone application to instruct the vehicle to park. The car then trundles off, manoeuvres into a parking place and sends a message to the driver to inform him where it is. The driver can collect the car in person or use his phone to call it back to where he dropped it off. Autonomous parking could thus be provided at places like shopping centres and airports, which are controlled areas in which automated vehicles can be managed more easily than on open highways.
In the past, designs for doing this have relied on car parks being fitted with buried guide wires that a vehicle can follow to an empty bay. That, though, creates a chicken-and-egg problem: car-park operators will not invest in such infrastructure until there is a sufficient number of suitably equipped cars on the road. Drivers, conversely, will not want to buy self-parking cars if there is nowhere to use them.
This means, as Mikael Thor, a Volvo safety engineer working on the project, observes, that for autonomous parking to work most of the technology will have to be in the car itself. The Volvo test car, which looks like a normal car, therefore uses on-board GPS mapping, cameras with image-recognition software, and radar sensors to find its own way around a car park and avoid pedestrians and non-autonomous vehicles. Mr Thor says the system is five to ten years from commercial deployment. If it proves a success then infrastructure might adapt to it, for instance by packing cars into tighter spaces (with no one in them there is no need to make room for their doors to open), but would not need to anticipate it.
Driverless cars would also need to communicate with one another, to enhance safety. That, too, is coming. A number of carmakers are developing wireless networking systems through which vehicles can exchange data, such as their speed, their steering angle and even their real time Location system, to forewarn anti-collision systems and safety devices if an accident looks likely.
Ford, for example, recently tested a brake light that can provide an early warning to other motorists. If the brakes are applied hard in an emergency, a signal is broadcast. This illuminates a warning light in the dashboard of suitably equipped following vehicles, even if they are out of sight around a bend or not immediately behind the vehicle doing the braking.
Ford has been testing this system as part of a collaborative research project with several European carmakers. They have put a fleet of 150 experimental vehicles on the roads. When it tested a group of these, Ford found the technology let drivers brake much earlier, helping avoid collisions. A driverless car would be able to react even faster.
Another member of the research group, BMW, has been testing driverless cars on roads around Munich—including belting down some of Germany’s high-speed autobahns. The ordinary-looking BMW 5-series models use a variety of self-contained guidance systems. These include cameras mounted on the upper windscreen, which can identify road markings, signs and various obstacles likely to be encountered on roads.
The BMWs also use a radar, to gauge how far the vehicle is from other cars and potential obstacles, and a lidar, which works like a radar but at optical frequencies. The lidar employs laser beams to scan the road ahead and builds up from the reflections a three-dimensional image of what this looks like. The image is processed by a computer in the vehicle, which also collects and compares data from a high-accuracy GPS unit. A series of ultrasonic sonars similar to those used in vehicles to provide parking assistance are placed around the car to add to the virtual picture. And just to make sure, a set of accelerometers provide an inertial navigation system that double-checks the vehicle’s position on the road.
Although these cars can be switched to an autonomous driving mode, like Google’s vehicles they are still required to have someone in the driving seat who can take over in the event of any difficulty. The BMWs can steer themselves, slow down, brake and accelerate, even changing lanes to overtake slower vehicles. BMW, though, does not yet talk of when it might offer fully autonomous cars to customers; rather it says that it expects to see “highly automated” driving functions available in its models from around 2020.
The metric they are chasing is 40 HPV — hours per vehicle — by 2015. At the moment, the plant produces at 52.8 HPV, a 30% improvement on five years ago. Getting to 40 will take a massive effort.Next year, the W205 factory will move into continuous production using three eight-hour shifts. This will require an even higher level of consistency as there will be no down time which can be used to make up for slow production.
Mr van der Merwe is acutely aware that the South African operation faces growing global competition. The W205 will be produced in South Africa, the US, Germany and China.
"China is a fierce competitor. South Africa's future does not lie in competing on labour cost. It's much more important to develop the skills base."South Africa's advantage lies in the "tenacity" of its workforce and what he describes as "the general culture in the workplace".
It is a culture that must be built, and prospective employees attend intensive training sessions that plug the gaps in the education system and incubate a mindset of high productivity."You cannot just inform somebody about such a system. You have to learn it, you have to live in it, you have to believe in it," says Mr Zimmerman.
Exiting the plant onto East London's Settlers Way, you drive about 100m before turning left into an industrial area where Mercedes is preparing the new intake of workers for next year's new production line.
In a converted warehouse, human resources manager Stephen Goold presides over the training of 800 potential new recruits in the plant's Shop Floor Skills Centre. They are all school-leavers and about 600 of them will find jobs on the new production line.
Then comes a statistic that brings home the Eastern Cape's dire employment crisis: the 800 trainee workers were chosen from more than 23,000 applicants. If there is an invisible fuel powering their learning, it is hope. They may be entry-level factory workers, but in this blighted region, they are an elite, the few who have obtained a foothold in a precarious regional economy.
On the day I visit, trainees are testing their ability to follow complex sequences of mechanical instructions. In one corner, a team is taking apart and reassembling the doors of a C Class saloon, in another, they are undoing fastenings they cannot see behind a screen.
In yet another, students write notes furiously as a lecturer brings them up to speed before a whiteboard. Whittling the 23,000 down to 800 gives Mercedes the opportunity to select the very brightest.
"The assessment process means good quality in, good quality out," says Mr Goold.Further down the road is the East London Industrial Development Zone, where most of the plant's component suppliers are based.From its factories come seats, roof trim, door panels, bearings, exhaust systems, key chassis components, fuel tanks and the pressed "aluminium skin panels" that will be welded together into the body.
Between 45% and 50% of the new C Class will be local, but this includes parts supplied by local component manufacturers, who import some of their parts. The true figure is closer to 25%.Again, the competition is fierce. Mr Zimmerman points out that South African leather components used to be exported to other Mercedes plants, but more efficient Eastern European competitors have begun to take over.
Click on their website www.ecived.com/en/ for more information.
2013年6月4日星期二
Merchants continue to resist migration
Although networks, issuers, and acquirers are making strides in the switch to EMV, a significant number of retailers are resistant to making the required upgrades to their point-of-sale hardware. During a recent RAMP Mobile Retail Services conference, a panel of major retailers, a processor acquirer, and a merchant association executive collectively criticized EMV mandates.
Visa, MasterCard, American Express, and Discover Financial Services continue to hold fast to the October 2015 deadline for merchants to have the technology in place to handle EMV payments (fuel merchants have an additional two years). Failure to upgrade their hardware will result in an increased fraud liability burden for merchants.
Although it’s well known that the U.S. EMV migration is coming about much later than other countries, many do not see this as a negative. In fact, they see it as quite the opposite, as it allows us in the U.S. to learn from the experiences of other countries, potentially easing the transition here.
One of the biggest complaints merchants make is in regard to the technology itself. Many are concerned that by the time they complete the switch to EMV, a new upgrade will be required, leaving them constantly behind the curve.
For example, Murphy Oil has 16,000 gas pumps to convert for EMV compliance. An upgrade of that magnitude is anticipated to cost the company millions of dollars. That, combined with the potential risk of the technology becoming obsolete by the time the switch is completed, has led Murphy Oil to indicate they may not make the switch to EMV at all.
According to the panel, another merchant concern centers on the ongoing chip-and-PIN vs. chip-and-signature debate. With a number of card issuers choosing not to require the use of a PIN to add security to EMV-chip card payments, some merchants are concerned about the level of fraud protection the switch will actually offer. There is also some merchant unease about EMV’s failure to address the shift in fraud to card-not-present transactions.
Also discussed at the conference is the general lack of awareness about EMV among smaller merchants and the potential challenges this will pose to the success of the U.S. migration. The panel also broached the subject of EMV terminals and security. The group agreed that a security standard must be established for the entire merchant community, not only for card networks and financial institutions.
Members of the panel conceded that although a number of merchants are unlikely to fully adopt EMV until the last minute, many merchants are taking the necessary steps toward meeting the requirements.
Last fall, a crowd of reporters gathered at the Tim Hortons at Bay and Wellesley to watch the Olympic triathlete Simon Whitfield buy a cup of coffee with his BlackBerry. He tapped his phone against a payment terminal, and commerce occurred invisibly. “Mobile payments have arrived!” declared a VP from Rogers. The company had orchestrated the event to unveil Suretap, a service that, in partnership with CIBC, allows customers to use phones to wirelessly pay for stuff.
Suretap was then just a pilot project, with a somewhat limited scope—only for CIBC account holders, only for people with Rogers wireless service, only compatible with BlackBerry phones and restricted to transactions of $50 or less. By the spring, fewer than 10,000 Canadians had given it a try. But leaders in telecommunications anticipate a rapid, widescale embrace of wireless payments, resulting in phones that act as full-service digital wallets that store everything—credit cards, debit cards, TTC passes, government-issued ID, gift cards and library cards. In a recent survey of bankers and retailers, 80 per cent said they expect the digital wallet to go mainstream in the next few years.
At a daylong financial technology conference at the Toronto Board of Trade in late March, representatives from Samsung, Visa, Rogers and Interac gathered to map out this bold new future, salivating over its possibilities. One Telus executive on a panel at the conference called it the Holy Grail of 21st-century commerce. Bell, Telus and Rogers are so optimistic about this business that they have put aside their differences and teamed up to form EnStream, a system that will enable banks to issue virtual credit cards onto our smartphones.
Pawel Chrobok, EnStream’s director of business development, predicts that with a single tap at checkout, all transactions will occur simultaneously: the customer will make a purchase that will be charged to a credit card or direct to a bank account, be credited the value of digital coupons or gift cards stored on the phone, earn Air Miles and receive a digital receipt. The prospect delights retailers because lines in stores will move quicker and more people will buy more things. The banks will be happy because they’ll issue tons of new cards, all at a fee. The phone companies love that they’ll get to charge banks for access to the phone owner’s SIM card.
CIBC has spent roughly $25 million supporting the development of a technology called Near Field Communication. It’s a chip that now comes with new models of BlackBerry and Android phones, and it lets the user make secure transactions when placed within a few centimetres of an NFC-compatible terminal, thousands of which have been installed in Canadian stores—at great expense to card companies, banks and merchants. Any machine that accepts a tap payment from a credit card will also take NFC transactions from a smartphone. (Rumour has it the iPhone 6 series, expected out in 2014, will include an NFC chip, lending hope to frustrated Apple fans who dubbed the technology “Never Fucking Coming.”)
Our infrastructure for smartphone payment has quickly become so robust that an international study conducted by Master-Card ranked Canada the number two most “mobile-payment ready” nation in the world, just behind Singapore and just ahead of the United States. The technology is here, lying dormant. Do we have the will to use it? A recent financial industry research paper applauded Canada’s technological readiness for mobile payments, but added this caveat: “For Canadians, the benefits are not fully understood.”Click on their website www.ecived.com/en for more information.
Visa, MasterCard, American Express, and Discover Financial Services continue to hold fast to the October 2015 deadline for merchants to have the technology in place to handle EMV payments (fuel merchants have an additional two years). Failure to upgrade their hardware will result in an increased fraud liability burden for merchants.
Although it’s well known that the U.S. EMV migration is coming about much later than other countries, many do not see this as a negative. In fact, they see it as quite the opposite, as it allows us in the U.S. to learn from the experiences of other countries, potentially easing the transition here.
One of the biggest complaints merchants make is in regard to the technology itself. Many are concerned that by the time they complete the switch to EMV, a new upgrade will be required, leaving them constantly behind the curve.
For example, Murphy Oil has 16,000 gas pumps to convert for EMV compliance. An upgrade of that magnitude is anticipated to cost the company millions of dollars. That, combined with the potential risk of the technology becoming obsolete by the time the switch is completed, has led Murphy Oil to indicate they may not make the switch to EMV at all.
According to the panel, another merchant concern centers on the ongoing chip-and-PIN vs. chip-and-signature debate. With a number of card issuers choosing not to require the use of a PIN to add security to EMV-chip card payments, some merchants are concerned about the level of fraud protection the switch will actually offer. There is also some merchant unease about EMV’s failure to address the shift in fraud to card-not-present transactions.
Also discussed at the conference is the general lack of awareness about EMV among smaller merchants and the potential challenges this will pose to the success of the U.S. migration. The panel also broached the subject of EMV terminals and security. The group agreed that a security standard must be established for the entire merchant community, not only for card networks and financial institutions.
Members of the panel conceded that although a number of merchants are unlikely to fully adopt EMV until the last minute, many merchants are taking the necessary steps toward meeting the requirements.
Last fall, a crowd of reporters gathered at the Tim Hortons at Bay and Wellesley to watch the Olympic triathlete Simon Whitfield buy a cup of coffee with his BlackBerry. He tapped his phone against a payment terminal, and commerce occurred invisibly. “Mobile payments have arrived!” declared a VP from Rogers. The company had orchestrated the event to unveil Suretap, a service that, in partnership with CIBC, allows customers to use phones to wirelessly pay for stuff.
Suretap was then just a pilot project, with a somewhat limited scope—only for CIBC account holders, only for people with Rogers wireless service, only compatible with BlackBerry phones and restricted to transactions of $50 or less. By the spring, fewer than 10,000 Canadians had given it a try. But leaders in telecommunications anticipate a rapid, widescale embrace of wireless payments, resulting in phones that act as full-service digital wallets that store everything—credit cards, debit cards, TTC passes, government-issued ID, gift cards and library cards. In a recent survey of bankers and retailers, 80 per cent said they expect the digital wallet to go mainstream in the next few years.
At a daylong financial technology conference at the Toronto Board of Trade in late March, representatives from Samsung, Visa, Rogers and Interac gathered to map out this bold new future, salivating over its possibilities. One Telus executive on a panel at the conference called it the Holy Grail of 21st-century commerce. Bell, Telus and Rogers are so optimistic about this business that they have put aside their differences and teamed up to form EnStream, a system that will enable banks to issue virtual credit cards onto our smartphones.
Pawel Chrobok, EnStream’s director of business development, predicts that with a single tap at checkout, all transactions will occur simultaneously: the customer will make a purchase that will be charged to a credit card or direct to a bank account, be credited the value of digital coupons or gift cards stored on the phone, earn Air Miles and receive a digital receipt. The prospect delights retailers because lines in stores will move quicker and more people will buy more things. The banks will be happy because they’ll issue tons of new cards, all at a fee. The phone companies love that they’ll get to charge banks for access to the phone owner’s SIM card.
CIBC has spent roughly $25 million supporting the development of a technology called Near Field Communication. It’s a chip that now comes with new models of BlackBerry and Android phones, and it lets the user make secure transactions when placed within a few centimetres of an NFC-compatible terminal, thousands of which have been installed in Canadian stores—at great expense to card companies, banks and merchants. Any machine that accepts a tap payment from a credit card will also take NFC transactions from a smartphone. (Rumour has it the iPhone 6 series, expected out in 2014, will include an NFC chip, lending hope to frustrated Apple fans who dubbed the technology “Never Fucking Coming.”)
Our infrastructure for smartphone payment has quickly become so robust that an international study conducted by Master-Card ranked Canada the number two most “mobile-payment ready” nation in the world, just behind Singapore and just ahead of the United States. The technology is here, lying dormant. Do we have the will to use it? A recent financial industry research paper applauded Canada’s technological readiness for mobile payments, but added this caveat: “For Canadians, the benefits are not fully understood.”Click on their website www.ecived.com/en for more information.
2013年4月26日星期五
US chip card debate heats up
Moves by the card schemes to shift liability for fraudulent card fraud payments to US merchants take effect in October 2015, providing a strong incentive for retailers to re-eqip their POS networks to accept EMV chip cards.
But at a payments conference organised by automated clearing house Nacha in San Diego this week, three of the nation's largest retailers hit back, arguing that the move to EMV will impose huge costs for a minimal reduction in fraud rates.
For retailers such as hamburger chain Wendy's - which already accepts PIN debit at the checkout - the fraud rate is so small "it's hardly worth mentioning," said Gavin Waugh, Wendy's vice president and assistant treasurer. "Even if we pay the fraud liability, it's a whole lot cheaper than putting in (new EMV) terminals."
Others were concerned that the introduction of EMV at the check-out would simply shift the attak vectors to weaker alternative channels, such as card-not-present and ACH fraud.
Equally, the failure to enforce a shift to PIN at the point-of-sale - with issuers prepared to still accept signature authorisation - remains indoor Tracking, notes Kansas City Fed economist Richard Sullivan in a just-published paper.
While chip-based cards will counteract the threat from counterfeit copies, he notes, "fraudsters may put more effort into stealing computer-chip payment cards, knowing that they may be able to commit a few fraudulent transactions using a forged signature before issuers cut off use of the card".
And in the absence of a commitment by issuers and card schemes to move to 3D-secure or chip card authentication at the PC, fraud in online channels can also be expected to increase, says Sullivan,
A bigger cause for concern, however, is that the US does not yet have a comprehensive system for collecting and reporting statistics on payment fraud, which would allow the industry to respond swiftly and effectively to new attacks.
Sullivan argues that the UK system for capturing and monitoring such information was a critical asset enabling the payment card industry to respond to the new trends in fraud that emerged during the transition to chip-and-PIN cards.
"In the absence of critical information on the sources and types of card payment fraud, efforts aimed at limiting fraud may be misdirected and wasteful," states Sullivan. "Both regulators and the card payment industry could benefit from mechanisms to measure the levels and sources of fraud and to identify who pays the price-and how much is paid-for the nation's losses from payment card fraud."
Senior journalists flew around the world on the same plane with prime ministers such as Whitlam, Fraser, Hawke, Keating and, for a time, Howard, and as the hours went by, the leaders tended to wander to the media cabin for long chats.
Their thoughts and fears and boasts found their way into reports and feature articles and informed the prognostications of columnists and commentators. It humanised those politicians, and in turn, the public was informed at a deeper level than is possible now the leaders rarely grant more than a carefully controlled doorstop or speak through their advisors.
If Paul Keating, for instance, had pulled off the sort of coup that Gillard achieved in China a few weeks ago, securing a joint currency deal and annual leader-to-leader meetings, you could be sure that by the time his plane had arrived in Australia, he would have sold it in detail as an accomplishment worthy of weeks of scrutiny and celebration.
Ms Gillard hardly managed to sell for a day her execution of an agreement for which most Western world leaders would have given their eye teeth. Having explained it in no more than a press conference and a media release before boarding her media-free plane home, the matter faded from media and public conscientiousness with astonishing swiftness.
The big old VIP planes were pensioned off under Howard and replaced with jets too small to accommodate the media (who, by the way, had to pay fares much higher than if they had travelled by commercial aircraft, which today they have to do).
Former prime ministers had other ways, too, to reveal themselves to communicators. The media found themselves invited from time to time around to the Lodge for a fireside chat. The prime minister of the time might serve up a roast, stir the fire in the grate and both offer his thoughts and mine the views of his guests. It was rarely too cosy - neither leader nor journalist would let down their guard too far - but it was a form of communication now all but lost.
But at a payments conference organised by automated clearing house Nacha in San Diego this week, three of the nation's largest retailers hit back, arguing that the move to EMV will impose huge costs for a minimal reduction in fraud rates.
For retailers such as hamburger chain Wendy's - which already accepts PIN debit at the checkout - the fraud rate is so small "it's hardly worth mentioning," said Gavin Waugh, Wendy's vice president and assistant treasurer. "Even if we pay the fraud liability, it's a whole lot cheaper than putting in (new EMV) terminals."
Others were concerned that the introduction of EMV at the check-out would simply shift the attak vectors to weaker alternative channels, such as card-not-present and ACH fraud.
Equally, the failure to enforce a shift to PIN at the point-of-sale - with issuers prepared to still accept signature authorisation - remains indoor Tracking, notes Kansas City Fed economist Richard Sullivan in a just-published paper.
While chip-based cards will counteract the threat from counterfeit copies, he notes, "fraudsters may put more effort into stealing computer-chip payment cards, knowing that they may be able to commit a few fraudulent transactions using a forged signature before issuers cut off use of the card".
And in the absence of a commitment by issuers and card schemes to move to 3D-secure or chip card authentication at the PC, fraud in online channels can also be expected to increase, says Sullivan,
A bigger cause for concern, however, is that the US does not yet have a comprehensive system for collecting and reporting statistics on payment fraud, which would allow the industry to respond swiftly and effectively to new attacks.
Sullivan argues that the UK system for capturing and monitoring such information was a critical asset enabling the payment card industry to respond to the new trends in fraud that emerged during the transition to chip-and-PIN cards.
"In the absence of critical information on the sources and types of card payment fraud, efforts aimed at limiting fraud may be misdirected and wasteful," states Sullivan. "Both regulators and the card payment industry could benefit from mechanisms to measure the levels and sources of fraud and to identify who pays the price-and how much is paid-for the nation's losses from payment card fraud."
Senior journalists flew around the world on the same plane with prime ministers such as Whitlam, Fraser, Hawke, Keating and, for a time, Howard, and as the hours went by, the leaders tended to wander to the media cabin for long chats.
Their thoughts and fears and boasts found their way into reports and feature articles and informed the prognostications of columnists and commentators. It humanised those politicians, and in turn, the public was informed at a deeper level than is possible now the leaders rarely grant more than a carefully controlled doorstop or speak through their advisors.
If Paul Keating, for instance, had pulled off the sort of coup that Gillard achieved in China a few weeks ago, securing a joint currency deal and annual leader-to-leader meetings, you could be sure that by the time his plane had arrived in Australia, he would have sold it in detail as an accomplishment worthy of weeks of scrutiny and celebration.
Ms Gillard hardly managed to sell for a day her execution of an agreement for which most Western world leaders would have given their eye teeth. Having explained it in no more than a press conference and a media release before boarding her media-free plane home, the matter faded from media and public conscientiousness with astonishing swiftness.
The big old VIP planes were pensioned off under Howard and replaced with jets too small to accommodate the media (who, by the way, had to pay fares much higher than if they had travelled by commercial aircraft, which today they have to do).
Former prime ministers had other ways, too, to reveal themselves to communicators. The media found themselves invited from time to time around to the Lodge for a fireside chat. The prime minister of the time might serve up a roast, stir the fire in the grate and both offer his thoughts and mine the views of his guests. It was rarely too cosy - neither leader nor journalist would let down their guard too far - but it was a form of communication now all but lost.
2013年4月10日星期三
Are package rates a solution to arbitrary claims settlement?
Mediclaim policyholders with cashless or reimbursement claim get a rude shock when the insurance company/third party administrator (TPA) approves partial amount for payment. In the cashless mode, you may have time to raise concerns and get higher amount approved before your procedure is done. In reimbursement mode, you have already left the hospital after the procedure and the only option is to continue your fight with the insurance company or give up.
In most cases, the insurance company will turn a deaf ear and show the “take it or leave it” attitude. So, you end up accepting the offer and keep quiet or get dragged for a long battle at the insurance ombudsman or consumer court. Are pre-declared package rates in a policy document a solution to arbitrary claims settlement? You will know what is paid by the insurer for the 42 standard procedures before you step inside the hospital.
Technically, if there is a proper contract between the hospital and insurer/TPA, cashless treatment should not have issues of partial amount approval. This is because the insurance company/TPA has already negotiated the rates with the hospital and hence ambiguity should not arise. But, there are numerous cases of cashless approval wherein the TPA may approve an amount lower than the hospital rate. Even with no fault of your own, you may have to face the brunt of under-approval by the TPA or over-charging by the hospital.
To add to the woes, government insurers stopped offering the cashless facility to the consumer since July 2010 in many of the leading hospitals. This impasse is primarily due to the inability of the insurers and medical fraternity to agree on package rates for the cashless facility. This has caused immense physical and mental hardships and financial strain to the consumer for almost three years now.
If cashless claim is out of question for the policyholder, reimbursement is a drawback for the policyholder as it means paying the hospital first and then receiving reimbursement from the insurance company. Many policies have room-rent and other restrictions, but even policies with no such restriction may not get the full amount approved simply because the hospital charges more than “reasonable and customary”. The insurer knows what it should pay for a specific procedure done in a particular type of hospital. It will also consider the room type where the insured stayed and city where hospital is located. The policyholder has no idea about what will be paid by the insurer and there starts the trouble for the insured.
If the package rate is known in advance, consumers can search for a facility which fits their budget and may even be able to negotiate with the doctors. There is a real need for it as Association of Hospitals and Bombay Nursing Homes Association submitted to the Bombay High Court that it cannot give fixed package rates and it is better for insurers to pre-declare package rates in their policy documents. AMC (Association of Medical Consultants) submitted to the Bombay High Court a document outlining its bracket rates stating that the rates are not meant to be a cap or limit to the fee of a professional and that the doctor’s professional charges if higher may have to be borne by the patient himself or herself. Considering these facts, it makes sense if the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority (IRDA) asks insurance companies to pre-declare the rates for the 42 standard procedures in the insurance policy document.
Here is an example that works on similar lines: CGHS (Central Government Health Scheme) provides retired government employees fixed package amounts for standard ailments, as fixed by the government, by taking into consideration various factors like cost of treatment, doctor’s fees, etc. These retired employees can take treatment from any hospital of their liking (outside the government network). They know in advance how much minimum amount they will get, giving further transparency and uniform applicability in the interest of justice.
On a Saturday night during the hectic swell of New York fashion week, the founders of Made fashion week, the presentation-and-party platform that twice a year becomes a crackling nexus of downtown fashion, are happily installed at their favorite hangout, the Standard Grill. It's that rare calm in the storm of New York's show season when the three of them can sit down together and drink tequila.
As they do, Mazdack Rassi, Jenné Lombardo, and Keith Baptista slip into familiar roles. Rassi, a born host, does the ordering. Baptista, exhausted but composed, sinks into his seat—he just produced Altuzarra, his third major show in three days. Lombardo, meanwhile, keeps a restless eye on the table next to us, where a group of vanilla-looking young ladies are eating fondue and giggling as they sip from a communal punch bowl. Lombardo tries valiantly not to comment, but holding back is simply not her style. "Missionary sex," she snipes. "All year long."
Mogul talk it isn't. Lombardo's knack for trash talk is matched by her late-night stamina, and Rassi, too, seems to come alive when those around him are throwing back shots and clapping shoulders. (Baptista keeps more conventional hours, not to mention a lower profile. "I'm the safe one," he told me.) But their festive lifestyle takes nothing away from the fact that Made has become a serious enterprise, and one that's growing fast. Since 2009, when Made launched with MAC cosmetics as a sponsored initiative that provided 27 emerging New York designers with presentations at Rassi's Milk Studios free of charge, the program's profile and reach have skyrocketed. The party spirit isn't beside the point. It may be a major part of it.
On one level, the flag that Made has planted is about brick-and-mortar. There's been a perceptible geographic shift of New York fashion week in recent seasons, away from the carpeted, trade-show atmosphere of Lincoln Center and toward downtown. This shift comes to a head at Milk Studios, the Made headquarters. Made, its founders want to make clear, isn't Milk. Milk hosts it, and Milk also exists outside of it: as a year-round photo studio, gallery, and general crossroads of everything from music to the skater scene. Milk is a venue. Made is a "culture," an "ecosystem." You might invoke the all-powerful B-word: It's a brand.
Unlike venues, cultures and brands can travel, and a pair of ambitious recent efforts to export Made outside the downtown environment aim to help it do just that. One was the transfer of the trio's sponsored-hub model to Paris, the other the debut of their first collection, Made4Impulse, for the fashion-forward Macy's line. It begs the question: Does everyone want a piece of Made? On the retail side, the answer isn't yet clear. But on the sponsorship side, interest is high: Though MAC remains an important partner for Made, there's now a flow of inquiries so steady that a major agency, CAA, has been brought on to help sift through them.
Whatever else the trio's intentions may be, kicking up dust is key among them. "Disruptive" is how Rassi describes their approach, with boyish enthusiasm. "People say we're breaking the rules," Lombardo says. "I think we just saw the necessity for change."
It all began with a photo studio. Rassi, then working in real estate, opened Milk in the nineties. Calvin Klein showed there starting in 1998, and Rassi would let unknown designers piggyback on those shows with presentations of their own. The up-and-comers paid what they could for the privilege—until 2009, when the economy was in the tank and they couldn't pay at all. Rassi discussed the situation with Lombardo, who at that time worked for MAC. She convinced her bosses there to bankroll designer presentations and events at Milk—in exchange, Rassi said with offhand canniness, for "a little R&D."
Rassi remembers the early days fondly. "The energy was unbelievable. Kids running through the hallways, high-fiving each other—it was true collaboration, true New York." Realizing they needed production know-how, he and Lombardo brought in their friend Baptista, a highly respected event and show producer.
In most cases, the insurance company will turn a deaf ear and show the “take it or leave it” attitude. So, you end up accepting the offer and keep quiet or get dragged for a long battle at the insurance ombudsman or consumer court. Are pre-declared package rates in a policy document a solution to arbitrary claims settlement? You will know what is paid by the insurer for the 42 standard procedures before you step inside the hospital.
Technically, if there is a proper contract between the hospital and insurer/TPA, cashless treatment should not have issues of partial amount approval. This is because the insurance company/TPA has already negotiated the rates with the hospital and hence ambiguity should not arise. But, there are numerous cases of cashless approval wherein the TPA may approve an amount lower than the hospital rate. Even with no fault of your own, you may have to face the brunt of under-approval by the TPA or over-charging by the hospital.
To add to the woes, government insurers stopped offering the cashless facility to the consumer since July 2010 in many of the leading hospitals. This impasse is primarily due to the inability of the insurers and medical fraternity to agree on package rates for the cashless facility. This has caused immense physical and mental hardships and financial strain to the consumer for almost three years now.
If cashless claim is out of question for the policyholder, reimbursement is a drawback for the policyholder as it means paying the hospital first and then receiving reimbursement from the insurance company. Many policies have room-rent and other restrictions, but even policies with no such restriction may not get the full amount approved simply because the hospital charges more than “reasonable and customary”. The insurer knows what it should pay for a specific procedure done in a particular type of hospital. It will also consider the room type where the insured stayed and city where hospital is located. The policyholder has no idea about what will be paid by the insurer and there starts the trouble for the insured.
If the package rate is known in advance, consumers can search for a facility which fits their budget and may even be able to negotiate with the doctors. There is a real need for it as Association of Hospitals and Bombay Nursing Homes Association submitted to the Bombay High Court that it cannot give fixed package rates and it is better for insurers to pre-declare package rates in their policy documents. AMC (Association of Medical Consultants) submitted to the Bombay High Court a document outlining its bracket rates stating that the rates are not meant to be a cap or limit to the fee of a professional and that the doctor’s professional charges if higher may have to be borne by the patient himself or herself. Considering these facts, it makes sense if the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority (IRDA) asks insurance companies to pre-declare the rates for the 42 standard procedures in the insurance policy document.
Here is an example that works on similar lines: CGHS (Central Government Health Scheme) provides retired government employees fixed package amounts for standard ailments, as fixed by the government, by taking into consideration various factors like cost of treatment, doctor’s fees, etc. These retired employees can take treatment from any hospital of their liking (outside the government network). They know in advance how much minimum amount they will get, giving further transparency and uniform applicability in the interest of justice.
On a Saturday night during the hectic swell of New York fashion week, the founders of Made fashion week, the presentation-and-party platform that twice a year becomes a crackling nexus of downtown fashion, are happily installed at their favorite hangout, the Standard Grill. It's that rare calm in the storm of New York's show season when the three of them can sit down together and drink tequila.
As they do, Mazdack Rassi, Jenné Lombardo, and Keith Baptista slip into familiar roles. Rassi, a born host, does the ordering. Baptista, exhausted but composed, sinks into his seat—he just produced Altuzarra, his third major show in three days. Lombardo, meanwhile, keeps a restless eye on the table next to us, where a group of vanilla-looking young ladies are eating fondue and giggling as they sip from a communal punch bowl. Lombardo tries valiantly not to comment, but holding back is simply not her style. "Missionary sex," she snipes. "All year long."
Mogul talk it isn't. Lombardo's knack for trash talk is matched by her late-night stamina, and Rassi, too, seems to come alive when those around him are throwing back shots and clapping shoulders. (Baptista keeps more conventional hours, not to mention a lower profile. "I'm the safe one," he told me.) But their festive lifestyle takes nothing away from the fact that Made has become a serious enterprise, and one that's growing fast. Since 2009, when Made launched with MAC cosmetics as a sponsored initiative that provided 27 emerging New York designers with presentations at Rassi's Milk Studios free of charge, the program's profile and reach have skyrocketed. The party spirit isn't beside the point. It may be a major part of it.
On one level, the flag that Made has planted is about brick-and-mortar. There's been a perceptible geographic shift of New York fashion week in recent seasons, away from the carpeted, trade-show atmosphere of Lincoln Center and toward downtown. This shift comes to a head at Milk Studios, the Made headquarters. Made, its founders want to make clear, isn't Milk. Milk hosts it, and Milk also exists outside of it: as a year-round photo studio, gallery, and general crossroads of everything from music to the skater scene. Milk is a venue. Made is a "culture," an "ecosystem." You might invoke the all-powerful B-word: It's a brand.
Unlike venues, cultures and brands can travel, and a pair of ambitious recent efforts to export Made outside the downtown environment aim to help it do just that. One was the transfer of the trio's sponsored-hub model to Paris, the other the debut of their first collection, Made4Impulse, for the fashion-forward Macy's line. It begs the question: Does everyone want a piece of Made? On the retail side, the answer isn't yet clear. But on the sponsorship side, interest is high: Though MAC remains an important partner for Made, there's now a flow of inquiries so steady that a major agency, CAA, has been brought on to help sift through them.
Whatever else the trio's intentions may be, kicking up dust is key among them. "Disruptive" is how Rassi describes their approach, with boyish enthusiasm. "People say we're breaking the rules," Lombardo says. "I think we just saw the necessity for change."
It all began with a photo studio. Rassi, then working in real estate, opened Milk in the nineties. Calvin Klein showed there starting in 1998, and Rassi would let unknown designers piggyback on those shows with presentations of their own. The up-and-comers paid what they could for the privilege—until 2009, when the economy was in the tank and they couldn't pay at all. Rassi discussed the situation with Lombardo, who at that time worked for MAC. She convinced her bosses there to bankroll designer presentations and events at Milk—in exchange, Rassi said with offhand canniness, for "a little R&D."
Rassi remembers the early days fondly. "The energy was unbelievable. Kids running through the hallways, high-fiving each other—it was true collaboration, true New York." Realizing they needed production know-how, he and Lombardo brought in their friend Baptista, a highly respected event and show producer.
2013年4月1日星期一
Rickshaws, Helicopters, Submarines, You Name It
I still haven't watched last week's episode, which aired while I was on vacation, so I have no idea what it was about. Smart money's on "ridiculous rich people doing rich-people things," which is also what we're presented with as this week's episode opens. Kim and Kourtney climb aboard personal watercraft for some of the least-needed R&R in history, except someone's tied some complicated-ass knots in the ropes securing the personal watercraft to the boat they're moored to. Scott remarks on this repeatedly. Like, seriously, who tied up these personal watercraft with these goofy knots? You crazy for this one, knot-tiers! It's not the greatest cold open. Eventually the knots are undone, and off Kim and Kourtney go, across the water and out of sight, and for a moment we all get to imagine what it would be like if they never came back, but they do. They always do.
Nighttime, Kim and Scott, in the black Rolls, Scott at the wheel. "I swear there must be something in our food," Kim says. "Why do so many women my age have fertility problems?" Scott asks Kim if, in the event that she did become pregnant, she'd absolutely keep it; Kim says she can't imagine doing otherwise. She says, "I feel like that would be a little selfish, to me," so I guess she's against it because only being a little selfish is not the Kardashian way? There is discussion of whether Kris Jenner would be an egg donor for Kim if push came to creepy gross insect-queen-hive birthing-matrix shove; Scott suggests that Kris, preferring to do things "the old-fashioned way," would say, "Tell Kanye to come on over!" instead. Kim calls Kris, who tells her, "I haven't had an egg since 1998," and we're spared further nightmare-fuel.
Another day, another car, an SUV, Scott in the back on his way to the airport for a personal appearance in Vegas, Miami blowing past through purplish polarized windows. Scott takes a call from his friend Benny, says, "Are you in Vegas yet?" and immediately touches his balls. I'm pretty sure that's what happened. I ran it back a couple of times. This is my job. Anyway: He's going to Vegas, bros in tow, and he's bringing his testicles, is the point of this scene. Scott makes another call: "Feinstein, what are you doing, you sick fuck?" (Michael? Dianne?)
Brandon and Leah Jenner drop by the Miami house for a visit on their way to play their music on a cruise ship. Great art finds its level. Khloe talks about her fertility struggles and how she doesn't ovulate and how her "uterus lining" isn't thick enough. Kourtney tells the talking-head camera that Khloe's situation makes her sad. Meanwhile in Vegas — where sadness goes to drown itself in watered well-booze and wakes up face-down in a half-eaten room-service quesadilla — Scott's at a club inside the Paris Las Vegas hotel/casino's Eiffel Tower simulacrum, doing whatever it is people pay him to show up and do. Sometimes that means dressing even more like Patrick Bateman than usual and throwing money at people, but tonight it just means getting wasted — or at least, since there's a cut here from Scott sipping a Bud Light bottle to him yelling "I love my Armenian friend!" and "Let's get in this [bleeping] 1997 Town Car!" while presumably after-party bound, that's the conclusion I'm drawing.
Back in Miami, Kim and Kourtney are still looking for a place to locate the new Dash store. The search for the new pope didn't take as long as it's taking Kim and Kourtney to settle on a new Dash store. It's almost as if they have nothing else to do. Anyway, they seem to have found a place. It's a store. Problem solved, maybe, which means Kim and Kourtney can go back to talking about Khloe's uterus. Dash Director of Stores Slash Buyer Slash Long-Sufferer of All This Bullshit Roya Bahrami suggests that Kourtney could be Khloe's surrogate, and somewhere in the control room at E! some producer blows the special reggaeton air horn they keep around for moments like this, when a B-plot presents itself, or "presents itself." There is talk about how weird it would be for Kourtney to carry a baby the size of Lamar Odom inside her body, because that is how pregnancy works.
Scott comes home from Miami real faded and turns down dinner with Kourtney in favor of Gatorade and the returning of obviously phantom business calls. Kim and Khloe wrap themselves in cozy throws and talk a bunch of shit about Scott's "double life." Quick flashbacks: Scott getting handsy with Khloe/Scott falling in Chapman Ducote's pool. Kim says maybe she should hire Jake, the private investigator from a few episodes ago, to follow Scott around and see what he's up to. Khloe says this is probably a bad idea, and Kim says, "Yeah, you're right," and that's the end of that. April Fool's! What she actually says is, "We need to find out the truth. It's our duty to, like, step in," unable to suppress that smile that always creeps across her face when she's about to chuck a grenade up into the tank-turret of somebody's personal life. Kim just wants to watch the world burn, is the truth. "Nothing good could come out of Jake," Khloe says, to nobody.
Khloe and the talking cow skulls in her dry-gulch Wild West ghost town of a uterus play hide-and-seek with Mason, spurring Kourtney to float the surrogacy idea past Scott, who's not into it: "You don't just go puttin' babies in other sisters because you can!" The important thing about this scene is that Kourtney's wearing some absurd neon-pink sweatsuit that says K-DOLL on the front; she identifies it as being from the Dash collection, because apparently it's Flog the Brand Like a Recalcitrant Plow Horse Week this week.
Kim meets Jake the private eye at an Alaska Coffee Roasting. Jake (whose beard still looks like something you'd purchase at a Halloween store to complete your racist Ming the Merciless costume) tells her the teen runaway they went looking for a few weeks ago is "still out there." Yeah, yeah, whatever — on to the meddling. Kim explains the situation, such as it is, and Jake says he'll need her to provide Scott's phone records and his credit card, and that he'll need to know which car Scott drives the most so he can put a tracking device on it. Jake also warns her that things will never be the same if she goes down this road, but presumably this last part sounds like mere notes on a muted trumpet by the time it reaches Kim's ears, because in the next scene there she is, opening the garage door so Jake can stick a transponder on Lord Disick's Rolls.
Kourtney takes a call from a surrogacy specialist named Dr. Boostanfar, who talks to her about how easy being a gestational carrier is. Kim goes out to dinner with Jonathan Cheban at a restaurant where the waitress asks Cheban, "You love soul food, right?" Cheban says, "Who doesn't, right?" and then Kim says, "I love me some ribs," and at this point I black out for a few seconds. Kim tells Cheban that Kourtney's going to be a surrogate for Khloe — presenting the news as if the decision's already been made — and Cheban says he wants to cry at this news, and then Kim says she's just kidding, but wouldn't that be great? Then she laughs so hard she accidentally spits in her own hair. "You bring out emotion in me, and this is what I get back?" Cheban says. They have the OMG-imagine-Kourtney-pregnant-with-a-giant-freakish-Lamar-sized-baby conversation again.
Kim hangs out in the kitchen shooting the breeze with Scott like she's not about to jump in a car with a private investigator and follow him around the minute he leaves the house, which is exactly what she does. Scott drives around for a while, then pulls up to "this really random home" and goes inside. Kim says that if Scott is going to do "something crazy" it's her job to "put a stop to it," as if there's a possibility Scott's double life involves plotting to assassinate a visiting head of state and plunge America into war rather than, like, handjobs.
Nighttime, Kim and Scott, in the black Rolls, Scott at the wheel. "I swear there must be something in our food," Kim says. "Why do so many women my age have fertility problems?" Scott asks Kim if, in the event that she did become pregnant, she'd absolutely keep it; Kim says she can't imagine doing otherwise. She says, "I feel like that would be a little selfish, to me," so I guess she's against it because only being a little selfish is not the Kardashian way? There is discussion of whether Kris Jenner would be an egg donor for Kim if push came to creepy gross insect-queen-hive birthing-matrix shove; Scott suggests that Kris, preferring to do things "the old-fashioned way," would say, "Tell Kanye to come on over!" instead. Kim calls Kris, who tells her, "I haven't had an egg since 1998," and we're spared further nightmare-fuel.
Another day, another car, an SUV, Scott in the back on his way to the airport for a personal appearance in Vegas, Miami blowing past through purplish polarized windows. Scott takes a call from his friend Benny, says, "Are you in Vegas yet?" and immediately touches his balls. I'm pretty sure that's what happened. I ran it back a couple of times. This is my job. Anyway: He's going to Vegas, bros in tow, and he's bringing his testicles, is the point of this scene. Scott makes another call: "Feinstein, what are you doing, you sick fuck?" (Michael? Dianne?)
Brandon and Leah Jenner drop by the Miami house for a visit on their way to play their music on a cruise ship. Great art finds its level. Khloe talks about her fertility struggles and how she doesn't ovulate and how her "uterus lining" isn't thick enough. Kourtney tells the talking-head camera that Khloe's situation makes her sad. Meanwhile in Vegas — where sadness goes to drown itself in watered well-booze and wakes up face-down in a half-eaten room-service quesadilla — Scott's at a club inside the Paris Las Vegas hotel/casino's Eiffel Tower simulacrum, doing whatever it is people pay him to show up and do. Sometimes that means dressing even more like Patrick Bateman than usual and throwing money at people, but tonight it just means getting wasted — or at least, since there's a cut here from Scott sipping a Bud Light bottle to him yelling "I love my Armenian friend!" and "Let's get in this [bleeping] 1997 Town Car!" while presumably after-party bound, that's the conclusion I'm drawing.
Back in Miami, Kim and Kourtney are still looking for a place to locate the new Dash store. The search for the new pope didn't take as long as it's taking Kim and Kourtney to settle on a new Dash store. It's almost as if they have nothing else to do. Anyway, they seem to have found a place. It's a store. Problem solved, maybe, which means Kim and Kourtney can go back to talking about Khloe's uterus. Dash Director of Stores Slash Buyer Slash Long-Sufferer of All This Bullshit Roya Bahrami suggests that Kourtney could be Khloe's surrogate, and somewhere in the control room at E! some producer blows the special reggaeton air horn they keep around for moments like this, when a B-plot presents itself, or "presents itself." There is talk about how weird it would be for Kourtney to carry a baby the size of Lamar Odom inside her body, because that is how pregnancy works.
Scott comes home from Miami real faded and turns down dinner with Kourtney in favor of Gatorade and the returning of obviously phantom business calls. Kim and Khloe wrap themselves in cozy throws and talk a bunch of shit about Scott's "double life." Quick flashbacks: Scott getting handsy with Khloe/Scott falling in Chapman Ducote's pool. Kim says maybe she should hire Jake, the private investigator from a few episodes ago, to follow Scott around and see what he's up to. Khloe says this is probably a bad idea, and Kim says, "Yeah, you're right," and that's the end of that. April Fool's! What she actually says is, "We need to find out the truth. It's our duty to, like, step in," unable to suppress that smile that always creeps across her face when she's about to chuck a grenade up into the tank-turret of somebody's personal life. Kim just wants to watch the world burn, is the truth. "Nothing good could come out of Jake," Khloe says, to nobody.
Khloe and the talking cow skulls in her dry-gulch Wild West ghost town of a uterus play hide-and-seek with Mason, spurring Kourtney to float the surrogacy idea past Scott, who's not into it: "You don't just go puttin' babies in other sisters because you can!" The important thing about this scene is that Kourtney's wearing some absurd neon-pink sweatsuit that says K-DOLL on the front; she identifies it as being from the Dash collection, because apparently it's Flog the Brand Like a Recalcitrant Plow Horse Week this week.
Kim meets Jake the private eye at an Alaska Coffee Roasting. Jake (whose beard still looks like something you'd purchase at a Halloween store to complete your racist Ming the Merciless costume) tells her the teen runaway they went looking for a few weeks ago is "still out there." Yeah, yeah, whatever — on to the meddling. Kim explains the situation, such as it is, and Jake says he'll need her to provide Scott's phone records and his credit card, and that he'll need to know which car Scott drives the most so he can put a tracking device on it. Jake also warns her that things will never be the same if she goes down this road, but presumably this last part sounds like mere notes on a muted trumpet by the time it reaches Kim's ears, because in the next scene there she is, opening the garage door so Jake can stick a transponder on Lord Disick's Rolls.
Kourtney takes a call from a surrogacy specialist named Dr. Boostanfar, who talks to her about how easy being a gestational carrier is. Kim goes out to dinner with Jonathan Cheban at a restaurant where the waitress asks Cheban, "You love soul food, right?" Cheban says, "Who doesn't, right?" and then Kim says, "I love me some ribs," and at this point I black out for a few seconds. Kim tells Cheban that Kourtney's going to be a surrogate for Khloe — presenting the news as if the decision's already been made — and Cheban says he wants to cry at this news, and then Kim says she's just kidding, but wouldn't that be great? Then she laughs so hard she accidentally spits in her own hair. "You bring out emotion in me, and this is what I get back?" Cheban says. They have the OMG-imagine-Kourtney-pregnant-with-a-giant-freakish-Lamar-sized-baby conversation again.
Kim hangs out in the kitchen shooting the breeze with Scott like she's not about to jump in a car with a private investigator and follow him around the minute he leaves the house, which is exactly what she does. Scott drives around for a while, then pulls up to "this really random home" and goes inside. Kim says that if Scott is going to do "something crazy" it's her job to "put a stop to it," as if there's a possibility Scott's double life involves plotting to assassinate a visiting head of state and plunge America into war rather than, like, handjobs.
2013年3月27日星期三
Young violinist gets standing ovation in Virac
Catanduanes – a Bicol island just two hours and a half away from Tabaco, Albay – had its taste of live violin music after 12 years with a well-received concert of violinist Christian Tan and pianist Mary Anne Espina who opened the 2013 Catanduanes Summer Music Festival last March 16 at the Kemji Resort in the capital town of Virac.
Tan, a prizewinner of the National Music Competition for Young Artists and the youngest to join the Asian Youth Orchestra, captivated an audience led by Congressman Cesar V. Sarmiento who noted that music unites people from even from opposing political factions.
Tan and Espina received a rousing standing ovation after the rendition of Velez’s “Sa Kabukiran” and gave the artists another round of ovation after “Sarung Banggi.”
From 1984 to 2011, Tresvalles -- who became a modern Sisa in the island after a case of family betrayal compounded by unrequited love -- roamed the streets of Virac and Bato towns, lived in church belfries, town squares, by the lake and found short-lived menial jobs in parish convents in smart card for food and accommodation.
In the 1992 Summer Music Festival, Tresvalles -- in her summer rag-tag attire and with some wild flowers on her hair – attended the Bato town concert of soprano Luz Morete with pianist Najib Ismail on the piano. She entered the hall just in time when the soprano was singing Sisa’s aria (from Felipe Padilla de Leon’s Noli Me Tangere. In the post-concert reception in the church convent, the visiting artists noticed Tresvalles spoke perfect British English. From the way her life unraveled now, her story is the stuff of prime time telenovelas. Congressman Sarmiento – in his welcome remarks –acknowledged the presence of Tresvalles.
Thus far, the violinists hard in the island were Gilopez Kabayao in the 60s, Joseph Esmilla and Donnie Fernandez in the 90s and Romanian violin superstar Alexandru Tomescu who performed in the provincial capitol in April 2000.
An independent province since October 24, 1945, Catanduanes has heard only five violin recitals in its 68 years of existence. Alexander Comoda, a Manila-based piano technician, flew to the island to repair and tune a Yamaha upright piano which has seen better years.
The next festival concert is on April 27 in also at Kemji Resort featuring baritone Noel Azcona, flutist John Raymund Sarreal and pianist Najib Ismail.
With the successful festival opening, a suggestion has cropped that classical music be made a regular attraction in the island to lure more tourists. The island musicians think that classical music will bring in grade A tourists to the island which can be reached by bus in 12 hours.
From the air if you take the Cebu Pacific plane that reach the island in an hour, the entire island is still green but the forest cover is thin, almost totally bald in most chip card.
The jeepney accommodates passengers huddled against each other cheek-by-jowl but more humans are on the roof along with the assorted luggage. They are asked to get down before the vehicle reach the police-manned check-point and go back to the mini-roof deck under the high bright sun.
The capital town of Virac has a land area of 18,778.4 hectares with some 49 per cent of it still forestland. It was lush and forested when Bornean datus settled in it in the thirteenth century. With its new landmarks (Jollibee food chain, Center Mall, Mercury Drug) and with the new hotels and resorts sprouting all over the towns, you can see that big commerce has invaded the island with sari-sari stores slowly fading out.
Whether music can contribute to the island’s growing per capita income is debatable but it sure can do something about the quality of life among islanders. In the 60s, the islanders had piano and violin lessons enough to make a living for a violin-maker named Fructuoso Borja whose old violin collections are now housed in Museu de Catanduanes.
By and large, the music festival is probably the beginning of what islander Ariston “Titong” Sarmiento calls the auspicious beginning of people appreciating “the finer things in life.”
The original Mini, designed by Sir Alec Issigonis in the late 1950s, was a cleverly packaged, mass-market people’s car that pioneered many of the innovations we now take for granted. It became Britain’s most successful car, with some 5.3-million cars sold.
The modern-day Mini is an altogether different machine. It’s now a much bigger, highly sophisticated, upmarket compact, with a price tag to match. Right now, the most advanced, and most exclusive Mini of all is the limited-edition Mini John Cooper Works GP. Would Sir Alec have approved?
I think not. The focus of Sir Alec’s ground-breaking design was simplicity and innovation. The focus of the Mini JCW GP is on pure-bred, adrenalin-rush performance. Issigonis created the Mini to make motoring affordable and accessible. The GP is hardly cheap – and since it’s a limited-edition model, it’s also in extremely short supply.
But the late John Cooper would almost certainly have approved. A close friend of Issigonis, Cooper is considered the father of the modern single seater racing car, after his rear-engined Cooper racing cars revolutionised race car design on both sides of the Atlantic.
John Cooper’s work wasn’t limited to racing cars only, though: his performance-tuned versions of the Mini were renowned in rally circles, and in fact won the Monte Carlo Rally three times during the mid1960s.
The Cooper connection was recognised by BMW when it bought the brand, and almost all modern-era Minis produced under the German automaker’s stewardship incorporate the Cooper moniker.
But it’s the John Cooper Works badge that is of particular note here: the JCW badge is reserved for Mini’s hard-core performance machinery only. The GP takes the uncompromising performance approach of the JCW models another step further.
Using the Mini Cooper JCW Hatch as a starting point, the GP is the result of much fettling under the bonnet, together with a more aggressive exterior persona, and a cabin adapted to express its spirited intentions.
Tan, a prizewinner of the National Music Competition for Young Artists and the youngest to join the Asian Youth Orchestra, captivated an audience led by Congressman Cesar V. Sarmiento who noted that music unites people from even from opposing political factions.
Tan and Espina received a rousing standing ovation after the rendition of Velez’s “Sa Kabukiran” and gave the artists another round of ovation after “Sarung Banggi.”
From 1984 to 2011, Tresvalles -- who became a modern Sisa in the island after a case of family betrayal compounded by unrequited love -- roamed the streets of Virac and Bato towns, lived in church belfries, town squares, by the lake and found short-lived menial jobs in parish convents in smart card for food and accommodation.
In the 1992 Summer Music Festival, Tresvalles -- in her summer rag-tag attire and with some wild flowers on her hair – attended the Bato town concert of soprano Luz Morete with pianist Najib Ismail on the piano. She entered the hall just in time when the soprano was singing Sisa’s aria (from Felipe Padilla de Leon’s Noli Me Tangere. In the post-concert reception in the church convent, the visiting artists noticed Tresvalles spoke perfect British English. From the way her life unraveled now, her story is the stuff of prime time telenovelas. Congressman Sarmiento – in his welcome remarks –acknowledged the presence of Tresvalles.
Thus far, the violinists hard in the island were Gilopez Kabayao in the 60s, Joseph Esmilla and Donnie Fernandez in the 90s and Romanian violin superstar Alexandru Tomescu who performed in the provincial capitol in April 2000.
An independent province since October 24, 1945, Catanduanes has heard only five violin recitals in its 68 years of existence. Alexander Comoda, a Manila-based piano technician, flew to the island to repair and tune a Yamaha upright piano which has seen better years.
The next festival concert is on April 27 in also at Kemji Resort featuring baritone Noel Azcona, flutist John Raymund Sarreal and pianist Najib Ismail.
With the successful festival opening, a suggestion has cropped that classical music be made a regular attraction in the island to lure more tourists. The island musicians think that classical music will bring in grade A tourists to the island which can be reached by bus in 12 hours.
From the air if you take the Cebu Pacific plane that reach the island in an hour, the entire island is still green but the forest cover is thin, almost totally bald in most chip card.
The jeepney accommodates passengers huddled against each other cheek-by-jowl but more humans are on the roof along with the assorted luggage. They are asked to get down before the vehicle reach the police-manned check-point and go back to the mini-roof deck under the high bright sun.
The capital town of Virac has a land area of 18,778.4 hectares with some 49 per cent of it still forestland. It was lush and forested when Bornean datus settled in it in the thirteenth century. With its new landmarks (Jollibee food chain, Center Mall, Mercury Drug) and with the new hotels and resorts sprouting all over the towns, you can see that big commerce has invaded the island with sari-sari stores slowly fading out.
Whether music can contribute to the island’s growing per capita income is debatable but it sure can do something about the quality of life among islanders. In the 60s, the islanders had piano and violin lessons enough to make a living for a violin-maker named Fructuoso Borja whose old violin collections are now housed in Museu de Catanduanes.
By and large, the music festival is probably the beginning of what islander Ariston “Titong” Sarmiento calls the auspicious beginning of people appreciating “the finer things in life.”
The original Mini, designed by Sir Alec Issigonis in the late 1950s, was a cleverly packaged, mass-market people’s car that pioneered many of the innovations we now take for granted. It became Britain’s most successful car, with some 5.3-million cars sold.
The modern-day Mini is an altogether different machine. It’s now a much bigger, highly sophisticated, upmarket compact, with a price tag to match. Right now, the most advanced, and most exclusive Mini of all is the limited-edition Mini John Cooper Works GP. Would Sir Alec have approved?
I think not. The focus of Sir Alec’s ground-breaking design was simplicity and innovation. The focus of the Mini JCW GP is on pure-bred, adrenalin-rush performance. Issigonis created the Mini to make motoring affordable and accessible. The GP is hardly cheap – and since it’s a limited-edition model, it’s also in extremely short supply.
But the late John Cooper would almost certainly have approved. A close friend of Issigonis, Cooper is considered the father of the modern single seater racing car, after his rear-engined Cooper racing cars revolutionised race car design on both sides of the Atlantic.
John Cooper’s work wasn’t limited to racing cars only, though: his performance-tuned versions of the Mini were renowned in rally circles, and in fact won the Monte Carlo Rally three times during the mid1960s.
The Cooper connection was recognised by BMW when it bought the brand, and almost all modern-era Minis produced under the German automaker’s stewardship incorporate the Cooper moniker.
But it’s the John Cooper Works badge that is of particular note here: the JCW badge is reserved for Mini’s hard-core performance machinery only. The GP takes the uncompromising performance approach of the JCW models another step further.
Using the Mini Cooper JCW Hatch as a starting point, the GP is the result of much fettling under the bonnet, together with a more aggressive exterior persona, and a cabin adapted to express its spirited intentions.
2013年3月20日星期三
US debit networks back Discover application for common chip spec
Discover beat out competition from MasterCard and Visa to win the mandate following an evaluation from a working group convened under the auspices of the Secure Remote Payment Council (SRPC).
Diane Offereins, president of payment services at Discover, says: "Discover has deployed D-PAS for the past four years and already has millions of cards in market among international issuers. We are confident it is the right path forward for US debit networks."
The SRPC - a cross-industry trade association formed in 2010 - says the decision is the culmination of months of evaluation of different proposals. It has called on Visa, MasterCard and outlying debit networks to get behind the initiative and take steps to commercialise it.
The group says it will also evaluate the use of one-time card number technology developed by First Data/Star as a further protection layer against skimming and data breach frauds.
Randy Vanderhoof, executive director of the Smart Card Alliance, welcomed the move as a significant breakthrough in the debit routing issue: "The limits that put the Visa and MasterCard option at a disadvantage for the regional debit networks, namely support for contactless, limits over cardholder verification choices, and switching concerns have been addressed by using DPAS. Discover is offering up its significant investment and intellectual property to the regional debit networks in exchange for having a chance at having its Pulse debit card being one of two application choices on a chip card. That puts them in a stronger position with issuers choosing to use them as their second debit option under Durbin."
US regulations passed last year on debit card interchange fees and routing require that issuers support at least two unaffiliated brands on debit cards in order to provide merchant routing choice - a requirement that will need to be accommodated within chip technology in the future.
"Deployment of a single interoperable chip and PIN solution for PIN debit should put in place one of the biggest remaining puzzle pieces to spur the US payment industry toward adoption of chip technology."
Forgive John Calipari if he wants to put this whole mess behind him and talk about next season. To say this season, which started with his Kentucky basketball team ranked No. 3 in the nation, did not go according to plan would be quite an understatement.
Calipari lost 12 this season, his fourth with Kentucky. He lost 14 games combined in his first three seasons coaching the Wildcats. He lost 14 combined in his final four seasons at Memphis.
Calipari had been to the Sweet 16 or beyond in each of the previous seven seasons – the Elite Eight six times, the Final Four three. He won a national title last year.
Tuesday night, Kentucky ended its season with a stunning loss at Robert Morris in a first-round National Invitation Tournament game played in a 3,000-seat gym with roll-away wooden bleachers. It marked the first time a Calipari team hadn't either made the NCAA Tournament or won three-plus games in the NIT since his Massachusetts squad did so in 1990 – his second season as a head coach.
"Nobody thought the season would be like this," UK freshman forward Alex Poythress said. "This is very surprising. Last year's team was just so good, they made it look so easy. In reality, it's not."
Calipari called it humbling. He said he learned some valuable lessons. But then he basically said: Look out, world.
"They'll say, 'Well, maybe you can't do it with young guys.' And I come back to: We did it last year, won a national title with young players. But that'll be out there. So we'll have something to prove," Calipari said. "If there's any doubters, have at it. You can doubt all you want. This program's in great shape."
Calipari is bringing in the nation's No. 1 recruiting class. Yawn. That's his fifth in a row. But this one is different. With an unprecedented six McDonald's All-Americans in the group, including Julius Randle, the nation's No. 2 prospect who picked the Wildcats on Wednesday, many recruiting gurus are calling it the best class ever assembled.
Add to that the big news out of Kentucky's somber postgame locker room Tuesday night. Freshmen Archie Goodwin, Willie Cauley-Stein and Poythress all said they're unprepared for the NBA and don't plan on being one-and-dones like so many Calipari players before them. Goodwin and Poythress sounded certain about coming back – "I don't think I'm ready," Poythress said – while Cauley-Stein hedged a bit.
There was no word from star Nerlens Noel, who missed the final nine games because of a torn anterior cruciate ligament. He is still considered a top-five NBA pick and is expected to leave. But if the others come back, along Kyle Wiltjer and Ryan Harrow as juniors, Kentucky could have a super team on its hands.
"It's no reason why I think any of our guys should really leave," Goodwin said. "We should come back next year … and just try to do better than what we did this year. Because the expectations we had for ourselves this year, we didn't meet them at all. We didn't come close."
Goodwin said Kentucky will have a hungry group of returning players to drive the newcomers – as it did last season when Doron Lamb, Terrence Jones and Darius Miller formed a veteran core that helped guide the Wildcats to the program's eighth NCAA title.
Diane Offereins, president of payment services at Discover, says: "Discover has deployed D-PAS for the past four years and already has millions of cards in market among international issuers. We are confident it is the right path forward for US debit networks."
The SRPC - a cross-industry trade association formed in 2010 - says the decision is the culmination of months of evaluation of different proposals. It has called on Visa, MasterCard and outlying debit networks to get behind the initiative and take steps to commercialise it.
The group says it will also evaluate the use of one-time card number technology developed by First Data/Star as a further protection layer against skimming and data breach frauds.
Randy Vanderhoof, executive director of the Smart Card Alliance, welcomed the move as a significant breakthrough in the debit routing issue: "The limits that put the Visa and MasterCard option at a disadvantage for the regional debit networks, namely support for contactless, limits over cardholder verification choices, and switching concerns have been addressed by using DPAS. Discover is offering up its significant investment and intellectual property to the regional debit networks in exchange for having a chance at having its Pulse debit card being one of two application choices on a chip card. That puts them in a stronger position with issuers choosing to use them as their second debit option under Durbin."
US regulations passed last year on debit card interchange fees and routing require that issuers support at least two unaffiliated brands on debit cards in order to provide merchant routing choice - a requirement that will need to be accommodated within chip technology in the future.
"Deployment of a single interoperable chip and PIN solution for PIN debit should put in place one of the biggest remaining puzzle pieces to spur the US payment industry toward adoption of chip technology."
Forgive John Calipari if he wants to put this whole mess behind him and talk about next season. To say this season, which started with his Kentucky basketball team ranked No. 3 in the nation, did not go according to plan would be quite an understatement.
Calipari lost 12 this season, his fourth with Kentucky. He lost 14 games combined in his first three seasons coaching the Wildcats. He lost 14 combined in his final four seasons at Memphis.
Calipari had been to the Sweet 16 or beyond in each of the previous seven seasons – the Elite Eight six times, the Final Four three. He won a national title last year.
Tuesday night, Kentucky ended its season with a stunning loss at Robert Morris in a first-round National Invitation Tournament game played in a 3,000-seat gym with roll-away wooden bleachers. It marked the first time a Calipari team hadn't either made the NCAA Tournament or won three-plus games in the NIT since his Massachusetts squad did so in 1990 – his second season as a head coach.
"Nobody thought the season would be like this," UK freshman forward Alex Poythress said. "This is very surprising. Last year's team was just so good, they made it look so easy. In reality, it's not."
Calipari called it humbling. He said he learned some valuable lessons. But then he basically said: Look out, world.
"They'll say, 'Well, maybe you can't do it with young guys.' And I come back to: We did it last year, won a national title with young players. But that'll be out there. So we'll have something to prove," Calipari said. "If there's any doubters, have at it. You can doubt all you want. This program's in great shape."
Calipari is bringing in the nation's No. 1 recruiting class. Yawn. That's his fifth in a row. But this one is different. With an unprecedented six McDonald's All-Americans in the group, including Julius Randle, the nation's No. 2 prospect who picked the Wildcats on Wednesday, many recruiting gurus are calling it the best class ever assembled.
Add to that the big news out of Kentucky's somber postgame locker room Tuesday night. Freshmen Archie Goodwin, Willie Cauley-Stein and Poythress all said they're unprepared for the NBA and don't plan on being one-and-dones like so many Calipari players before them. Goodwin and Poythress sounded certain about coming back – "I don't think I'm ready," Poythress said – while Cauley-Stein hedged a bit.
There was no word from star Nerlens Noel, who missed the final nine games because of a torn anterior cruciate ligament. He is still considered a top-five NBA pick and is expected to leave. But if the others come back, along Kyle Wiltjer and Ryan Harrow as juniors, Kentucky could have a super team on its hands.
"It's no reason why I think any of our guys should really leave," Goodwin said. "We should come back next year … and just try to do better than what we did this year. Because the expectations we had for ourselves this year, we didn't meet them at all. We didn't come close."
Goodwin said Kentucky will have a hungry group of returning players to drive the newcomers – as it did last season when Doron Lamb, Terrence Jones and Darius Miller formed a veteran core that helped guide the Wildcats to the program's eighth NCAA title.
2013年3月7日星期四
Everson Post Office hours stay same for now
The fate of the Everson post office has still not been decided, but until that decision is made, the hours of operation will remain the same.
Everson Borough Councilman Mike Banaszak told the other members of council recently he had been in contact with a representative from the postal service.
“I was told that one of two things are going to happen,” he said. “Either the interior of the post office will be remodeled so that everyone has a box and there will be no general delivery, or they will have home delivery for everyone and the post office boxes will not be used.”
He added that until a decision is made and everything comes together, the current hours of operation will not change.
Mayor Ruth Shannon along with Councilman George Sherbondy prepared a letter to send to Senator Pat Toomey and Congressman Bill Shuster expressing the borough's concerns about the status of their post office.
“For awhile there was total upheaval at the post office,” Banaszak said. “People were getting the wrong mail and there was mail that was just sitting around and not getting delivered, but they seem to have a system going now and things are starting to settle down.”
In other borough business, Banaszak said the expansion of the police department offices is nearly complete.
“They're laying the tile in the front room and once that's done (Chief) Kevin (Grippo) can arrange everything the way he wants it,” he said.
Banaszak said the project began after Grippo asked to expand the small offices.
The entire police office was stuffed into one 12 by 15-foot room and things were overly crowded.
“The second room contained jail cells that were illegal for about two years, so they were just being used for storage of evidence,” Banaszak said. “The space was underused and when (Grippo) took over he asked for permission to expand.”
The jail cells have since been removed, the walls were painted and a new floor was laid in that room.
Chuck Leighty, councilman and chief of the Everson Volunteer Fire Department, announced that they purchased and received the portable air packs and a generator that was purchased with part of a $162,000 federal grant the department received.
Akash Singh , PhD, performs his scientific research in the area of computer-assisted surgery. He designed the system to improve visualization in brain surgery by offering real-time instrument tracking in relation to 3D anatomical models built from pre-operative MRI and CT scans. Furthermore, his research provides electromagnetic navigation modality, which enables more precise tracking of the tip of a non-rigid surgical instrument, such as an ablation needle, and allows real-time, 3D visualization of a surgical instrument's location in the context of intra-operative MRI imaging, the standard imaging modality used in brain surgery today.
Dr. Singh's research capabilities help physicians with the most detailed and accurate anatomical information possible at the point of therapeutic delivery.
"Dr. Singh's continued research hope is to eventually be able to perform this analysis during surgery to help guide brain surgeons so that the borders of tumors can be identified and the cancer status of a site can be established before any tissue is removed." A paper detailing the results is published in International Journal of Engineering Research and Applications.
Prof. Ajjai Alva of University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center said the findings showed the analysis method's potential and achieved an important step in the path to assessing its value in improving patient care.
"This approach lead into real-time, image-guided surgery without interference with surgical care and without the administration of labeling agents," said Prof. Atique U of University of Chicago, Neuro-Oncology Research Labs. "Such extensive and detailed information about the tissue was previously unavailable to surgeons and could lead to more precise tumor removal. In addition, it helps the oncologist more efficiently design the course of adjuvant therapy."
The startup, for those unfamiliar, is aimed at helping users find nearby businesses and events – somewhat similar in spirit to Foursquare’s Radar, Google Places, or Yelp, perhaps, but entirely different in terms of execution. The company has built up its own database of places, focused primarily on popular categories like food & drink, nightlife, shopping, and deals & recommendations. That database is created on top of Twitter and Facebook – to be included, businesses just have to make posts on these social platforms.
The way Spindle recommends businesses to users is different, as well. The app considers signals which other local discovery applications may not, including things like time of day, and most importantly, terms and phrases businesses are using in their tweets and Facebook updates. Spindle’s emphasis on social is its standout feature, in fact, and the key way it differentiates itself from the competition. Instead of relying on check-in data (as Foursquare does – and still needs, apparently), Spindle uses these social updates to figure out what’s trending right now.
With today’s update, Spindle introduces a more traditional tool for finding businesses with keyword-based search, but the more interesting new feature is the introduction of “Search Alerts.” This allows you to specify custom topics you want to track, like for example, “kids eat free,” “live music,” or “open position.” Once configured, Spindle will track your location via GPS and when you’re near a business sharing updates that match your terms, you’ll get the pop-up notification. It’s an almost Google Now-ish-like way to discover things around you, as the alerts pop up proactively and automatically. These alerts are based on your pre-configured interests, so there’s a bit of initial data input involved, but they’re something which would have required much more manual efforts on an end user’s part to surface before.
Everson Borough Councilman Mike Banaszak told the other members of council recently he had been in contact with a representative from the postal service.
“I was told that one of two things are going to happen,” he said. “Either the interior of the post office will be remodeled so that everyone has a box and there will be no general delivery, or they will have home delivery for everyone and the post office boxes will not be used.”
He added that until a decision is made and everything comes together, the current hours of operation will not change.
Mayor Ruth Shannon along with Councilman George Sherbondy prepared a letter to send to Senator Pat Toomey and Congressman Bill Shuster expressing the borough's concerns about the status of their post office.
“For awhile there was total upheaval at the post office,” Banaszak said. “People were getting the wrong mail and there was mail that was just sitting around and not getting delivered, but they seem to have a system going now and things are starting to settle down.”
In other borough business, Banaszak said the expansion of the police department offices is nearly complete.
“They're laying the tile in the front room and once that's done (Chief) Kevin (Grippo) can arrange everything the way he wants it,” he said.
Banaszak said the project began after Grippo asked to expand the small offices.
The entire police office was stuffed into one 12 by 15-foot room and things were overly crowded.
“The second room contained jail cells that were illegal for about two years, so they were just being used for storage of evidence,” Banaszak said. “The space was underused and when (Grippo) took over he asked for permission to expand.”
The jail cells have since been removed, the walls were painted and a new floor was laid in that room.
Chuck Leighty, councilman and chief of the Everson Volunteer Fire Department, announced that they purchased and received the portable air packs and a generator that was purchased with part of a $162,000 federal grant the department received.
Akash Singh , PhD, performs his scientific research in the area of computer-assisted surgery. He designed the system to improve visualization in brain surgery by offering real-time instrument tracking in relation to 3D anatomical models built from pre-operative MRI and CT scans. Furthermore, his research provides electromagnetic navigation modality, which enables more precise tracking of the tip of a non-rigid surgical instrument, such as an ablation needle, and allows real-time, 3D visualization of a surgical instrument's location in the context of intra-operative MRI imaging, the standard imaging modality used in brain surgery today.
Dr. Singh's research capabilities help physicians with the most detailed and accurate anatomical information possible at the point of therapeutic delivery.
"Dr. Singh's continued research hope is to eventually be able to perform this analysis during surgery to help guide brain surgeons so that the borders of tumors can be identified and the cancer status of a site can be established before any tissue is removed." A paper detailing the results is published in International Journal of Engineering Research and Applications.
Prof. Ajjai Alva of University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center said the findings showed the analysis method's potential and achieved an important step in the path to assessing its value in improving patient care.
"This approach lead into real-time, image-guided surgery without interference with surgical care and without the administration of labeling agents," said Prof. Atique U of University of Chicago, Neuro-Oncology Research Labs. "Such extensive and detailed information about the tissue was previously unavailable to surgeons and could lead to more precise tumor removal. In addition, it helps the oncologist more efficiently design the course of adjuvant therapy."
The startup, for those unfamiliar, is aimed at helping users find nearby businesses and events – somewhat similar in spirit to Foursquare’s Radar, Google Places, or Yelp, perhaps, but entirely different in terms of execution. The company has built up its own database of places, focused primarily on popular categories like food & drink, nightlife, shopping, and deals & recommendations. That database is created on top of Twitter and Facebook – to be included, businesses just have to make posts on these social platforms.
The way Spindle recommends businesses to users is different, as well. The app considers signals which other local discovery applications may not, including things like time of day, and most importantly, terms and phrases businesses are using in their tweets and Facebook updates. Spindle’s emphasis on social is its standout feature, in fact, and the key way it differentiates itself from the competition. Instead of relying on check-in data (as Foursquare does – and still needs, apparently), Spindle uses these social updates to figure out what’s trending right now.
With today’s update, Spindle introduces a more traditional tool for finding businesses with keyword-based search, but the more interesting new feature is the introduction of “Search Alerts.” This allows you to specify custom topics you want to track, like for example, “kids eat free,” “live music,” or “open position.” Once configured, Spindle will track your location via GPS and when you’re near a business sharing updates that match your terms, you’ll get the pop-up notification. It’s an almost Google Now-ish-like way to discover things around you, as the alerts pop up proactively and automatically. These alerts are based on your pre-configured interests, so there’s a bit of initial data input involved, but they’re something which would have required much more manual efforts on an end user’s part to surface before.
2013年3月5日星期二
Stalin's influence lingers in Putin's Russia
The church was heavily persecuted by the Soviet dictator, who died 60 years ago on Tuesday after a three-decade rule in which he is widely held responsible for the deaths of millions of innocent people, many in the Gulag network of labor camps.
But there is still a place for Stalin in President Vladimir Putin's Russia, and there was plenty of praise for him at a discussion under paintings of cherubs at a church hotel adorned with icons and a portrait of Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill.
One speaker said Stalin restored national pride, another said he laid the groundwork for a great Russian future, and a third said the nation must be grateful to Stalin for the "sacred victory" over Nazi Germany in World War Two.
"Stalin was no saint, but he was not a monster," said Russian Orthodox priest Alexander Shumsky, accusing Stalin's critics of exaggerating the scale of his crimes.
He described assertions that Stalin had been in complete control a myth created by liberals and said the former leader had wanted to stop the process of repression.
Six decades on, Stalin's legacy remains the subject of bitter debate and broad interpretation in Russia, where many still believe he did some good for the country.
"Putin ... has deliberately manipulated the dictator's image to reinforce his effort to build a 'power vertical' in Russia," the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace think tank said in a report, referring to Putin's domination of Russia under a system that concentrates power in the hands of the president.
Support for Stalin has risen in Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 gutted the social safety net, damaged national pride and left many Russians longing for the perceived order and stability of the Communist era.
But Lev Gudkov, director of independent Levada Center polling group, said the biggest shift occurred after Putin came to power in 2000 and "launched a comprehensive program to ideologically reeducate society".
"Putin's spin doctors did not deny that Stalin's regime had conducted mass arrests and executions but tried to minimize these events ... while emphasizing as far as possible the merits of Stalin as a military commander and statesman who had modernized the country and turned it into one of the world's two superpowers," Gudkov wrote.
But he has made a comeback of sorts under Putin, who has centralized control in the Kremlin and drawn from the paternalistic playbook of tsars and Soviet leaders, including Stalin, during his 13 years in power.
In the same poll, 47 percent of respondents said Stalin was "a wise leader who brought the Soviet Union to might and prosperity". And in a Levada poll last month, 49 percent said Stalin played a positive role, while 32 percent said it was negative - roughly the opposite of a 1994 Survey.
As the Soviet Union unraveled in the late 1980s when Mikhail Gorbachev loosened the government's grip and oil money dried up, Russians rode the subways reading revelations about Stalin's crimes in newspapers and journals.
Nowadays, efforts to debunk the criticism and clean up Stalin's image are a fixture of bookshop shelves, and school notebooks decorated with Stalin's photo went on sale last year - something unthinkable at that time.
In Volgograd, the city where Putin celebrated the 70th anniversary of the 1943 Battle of Stalingrad last month, local authorities now allow the city to be referred to by its old name at annual anniversary events and on five other days every year.
Calls to change Volgograd's name back to Stalingrad seem unlikely to succeed, and a campaign to return a giant statue of Stalin to a Moscow metro station fell flat in 2010 - though former Soviet anthem lyrics praising him were put up.
Putin does not go around praising Stalin. He would never, for instance, join the ranks of Communists and other nostalgic Russians who lined up on Tuesday to place flowers at Stalin's grave by the Kremlin wall on Red Square.
But while he paid tribute to victims of Stalin at the site of a mass grave in 2007 and said the tragedy must never be repeated, he said earlier the same year that Russia should not be made to feel guilty about the Great Terror of 1937, the height of Stalin's purges.
In a 2009 speech, Medvedev said the millions of deaths and "maimed destinies" caused by the Soviet government could not be justified, and in 2010 he said Stalin "committed many crimes against his people".
For Putin, such words could undermine the power structure built by a longtime Soviet KGB officer who has brought many former colleagues from security and intelligence into prominent positions and used their successor agencies to quash dissent.
Historians and activists who seek to document the Soviet government's crimes against its own people are dismayed by Stalin's staying power. They say Russia will not thrive until it comes to terms with Stalin's crimes, but Putin's critics say he has resisted efforts to make that happen.
While a big new Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center opened last year in the Russian capital, with Putin's support, there is still no national memorial to the victims of Stalin's rule.
But there is still a place for Stalin in President Vladimir Putin's Russia, and there was plenty of praise for him at a discussion under paintings of cherubs at a church hotel adorned with icons and a portrait of Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill.
One speaker said Stalin restored national pride, another said he laid the groundwork for a great Russian future, and a third said the nation must be grateful to Stalin for the "sacred victory" over Nazi Germany in World War Two.
"Stalin was no saint, but he was not a monster," said Russian Orthodox priest Alexander Shumsky, accusing Stalin's critics of exaggerating the scale of his crimes.
He described assertions that Stalin had been in complete control a myth created by liberals and said the former leader had wanted to stop the process of repression.
Six decades on, Stalin's legacy remains the subject of bitter debate and broad interpretation in Russia, where many still believe he did some good for the country.
"Putin ... has deliberately manipulated the dictator's image to reinforce his effort to build a 'power vertical' in Russia," the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace think tank said in a report, referring to Putin's domination of Russia under a system that concentrates power in the hands of the president.
Support for Stalin has risen in Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 gutted the social safety net, damaged national pride and left many Russians longing for the perceived order and stability of the Communist era.
But Lev Gudkov, director of independent Levada Center polling group, said the biggest shift occurred after Putin came to power in 2000 and "launched a comprehensive program to ideologically reeducate society".
"Putin's spin doctors did not deny that Stalin's regime had conducted mass arrests and executions but tried to minimize these events ... while emphasizing as far as possible the merits of Stalin as a military commander and statesman who had modernized the country and turned it into one of the world's two superpowers," Gudkov wrote.
But he has made a comeback of sorts under Putin, who has centralized control in the Kremlin and drawn from the paternalistic playbook of tsars and Soviet leaders, including Stalin, during his 13 years in power.
In the same poll, 47 percent of respondents said Stalin was "a wise leader who brought the Soviet Union to might and prosperity". And in a Levada poll last month, 49 percent said Stalin played a positive role, while 32 percent said it was negative - roughly the opposite of a 1994 Survey.
As the Soviet Union unraveled in the late 1980s when Mikhail Gorbachev loosened the government's grip and oil money dried up, Russians rode the subways reading revelations about Stalin's crimes in newspapers and journals.
Nowadays, efforts to debunk the criticism and clean up Stalin's image are a fixture of bookshop shelves, and school notebooks decorated with Stalin's photo went on sale last year - something unthinkable at that time.
In Volgograd, the city where Putin celebrated the 70th anniversary of the 1943 Battle of Stalingrad last month, local authorities now allow the city to be referred to by its old name at annual anniversary events and on five other days every year.
Calls to change Volgograd's name back to Stalingrad seem unlikely to succeed, and a campaign to return a giant statue of Stalin to a Moscow metro station fell flat in 2010 - though former Soviet anthem lyrics praising him were put up.
Putin does not go around praising Stalin. He would never, for instance, join the ranks of Communists and other nostalgic Russians who lined up on Tuesday to place flowers at Stalin's grave by the Kremlin wall on Red Square.
But while he paid tribute to victims of Stalin at the site of a mass grave in 2007 and said the tragedy must never be repeated, he said earlier the same year that Russia should not be made to feel guilty about the Great Terror of 1937, the height of Stalin's purges.
In a 2009 speech, Medvedev said the millions of deaths and "maimed destinies" caused by the Soviet government could not be justified, and in 2010 he said Stalin "committed many crimes against his people".
For Putin, such words could undermine the power structure built by a longtime Soviet KGB officer who has brought many former colleagues from security and intelligence into prominent positions and used their successor agencies to quash dissent.
Historians and activists who seek to document the Soviet government's crimes against its own people are dismayed by Stalin's staying power. They say Russia will not thrive until it comes to terms with Stalin's crimes, but Putin's critics say he has resisted efforts to make that happen.
While a big new Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center opened last year in the Russian capital, with Putin's support, there is still no national memorial to the victims of Stalin's rule.
2013年2月28日星期四
Auxiliary Sends Out SOS for Storm-Damaged VFW Post
It wasn’t only homes and businesses that suffered a blow from Sandy – VFW Post 3729 on East 79th Street in Beach Haven Crest was among the buildings hardest hit, its members and auxilians soon found out. The community center/headquarters for the organization that helps veterans all year long is in need of help to be restored.
“The damages exceed $100,000, with little more than a homeowner’s policy to cover them,” said Ladies Auxiliary President Sandy Dueben, in making an appeal to the community. “The VFW was not able to carry any sort of flood insurance due to damage history of that area of the Island and that building as well.”
The ocean inundated the lower level, and even crept to the second floor.
“One entire floor containing the beautiful mahogany bar, two large screen TV sets, a pool table, three high tables each with four matching chairs, and beautiful ceramic tile – all less than three years old – all gone,” Dueben said.
“As though the first floor was not enough for the ocean to claim, the second floor had over a foot of water, so we lost an entire commercial kitchen with two big stoves, two large refrigerators, an ice maker and all of our beautiful new cabinets, including an island with butcher block tops. Both of our newly decorated rest rooms are gone. It just makes us heartsick to see all of the damage.
“We can only put it back together as the money becomes available,” the auxiliary president said.
VFW members are still meeting in the building, but access is limited. The third floor holds only about 10 people, and some of the men can’t navigate the stairs, she added.
The post held a doo-wop dance and dinner fundraiser Feb. 10 at the Manahawkin Elks Lodge, and that support is much appreciated, but so much more is needed.
Maritime activities have played such a big role in Hong Kong's history that it seemed a pity the only museum dedicated to this was hidden away in Stanley. On Monday, the Hong Kong Maritime Museum finally took its rightful place - right smack in Victoria Harbour, the heart of the territory's maritime history.
Tung Chee-chen, chairman of the Hong Kong Maritime Museum Trust, said: "Shipping has always been a part of Hong Kong - from a fishing village to an international maritime center, from a simple port of call to one of the world's largest and most efficient container gateway port for not only the Pearl River Delta, but points inland."
Website optimization specialist, SeeVolution Inc., announces their recent increase in their website’s usability and navigation, which provides customers with a quicker, more advanced experience. The Manhattan Beach startup quickly made a name for themselves and their service—which provides webmasters with a site’s real-time analytics, and website heatmaps that show visuals of a site’s user behaviors—with notable accolades from industry trusted blogs like Mashable and Apptiva.
Offering webmasters a covert glance into the minds of their visitors, SeeVolution’s simple, real-time analytics show insights that range from how many people are currently on the site, to stats of the site’s conversion and bounce rate over the last week. These useful analytics are available through the company’s signature toolbar that, once installed, overlays on the current site. This gives busy webmasters one less thing to worry about and login to. Once the code snippet is installed, the tool will start tracking the site’s real-time happenings.
In addition to seeing how many people are on a certain page and where they navigated from, SeeVolution also wants to show webmasters actual images of a visitor’s on-site interactions and navigation behavior. Through a suite of website heatmaps that the toolbar provides access to, mapped out images of high-activity areas are recorded and transparently overlaid atop that specific site. A webmaster then can see how their visitors are interacting with their site using a click heatmap, mouse movement heatmap or a scroll heatmap.
Click maps show where visitors are clicking regardless of what that may be. By showing a webmaster how visitors are navigating through their site, they can customize their experience to create the optimal one for their unique visitors.
Highlighting the mouse movements of a visitor using eye tracking technology, mouse movement heatmaps allow a webmaster to see what their visitors are actual focusing on. Perfect for a blog owner, this heatmaps helps specify key interests of visitors, which can bring an influx of content ideas and featured topics.
Rounding off the collection, scroll heatmaps are an ecommerce business owner’s best friend. These heatmaps identify where the “fold”—the first notable drop off in views—in a website lies. Once that is found, a seller can optimize the location of their purchase buttons to ensure that they are getting seen and not glazed over.
These simple analytics are easy enough for the first time online business owner, and provide the accurate, straightforward results that seasoned webmasters are always looking to use.
Visitor engagement and conversion can increase with even the slightest change. SeeVolution provides results a webmaster can see with a tool that seamlessly integrates into their website. The startup is currently working on a more advance version of the same great tool that should launch in the coming months.
“The damages exceed $100,000, with little more than a homeowner’s policy to cover them,” said Ladies Auxiliary President Sandy Dueben, in making an appeal to the community. “The VFW was not able to carry any sort of flood insurance due to damage history of that area of the Island and that building as well.”
The ocean inundated the lower level, and even crept to the second floor.
“One entire floor containing the beautiful mahogany bar, two large screen TV sets, a pool table, three high tables each with four matching chairs, and beautiful ceramic tile – all less than three years old – all gone,” Dueben said.
“As though the first floor was not enough for the ocean to claim, the second floor had over a foot of water, so we lost an entire commercial kitchen with two big stoves, two large refrigerators, an ice maker and all of our beautiful new cabinets, including an island with butcher block tops. Both of our newly decorated rest rooms are gone. It just makes us heartsick to see all of the damage.
“We can only put it back together as the money becomes available,” the auxiliary president said.
VFW members are still meeting in the building, but access is limited. The third floor holds only about 10 people, and some of the men can’t navigate the stairs, she added.
The post held a doo-wop dance and dinner fundraiser Feb. 10 at the Manahawkin Elks Lodge, and that support is much appreciated, but so much more is needed.
Maritime activities have played such a big role in Hong Kong's history that it seemed a pity the only museum dedicated to this was hidden away in Stanley. On Monday, the Hong Kong Maritime Museum finally took its rightful place - right smack in Victoria Harbour, the heart of the territory's maritime history.
Tung Chee-chen, chairman of the Hong Kong Maritime Museum Trust, said: "Shipping has always been a part of Hong Kong - from a fishing village to an international maritime center, from a simple port of call to one of the world's largest and most efficient container gateway port for not only the Pearl River Delta, but points inland."
Website optimization specialist, SeeVolution Inc., announces their recent increase in their website’s usability and navigation, which provides customers with a quicker, more advanced experience. The Manhattan Beach startup quickly made a name for themselves and their service—which provides webmasters with a site’s real-time analytics, and website heatmaps that show visuals of a site’s user behaviors—with notable accolades from industry trusted blogs like Mashable and Apptiva.
Offering webmasters a covert glance into the minds of their visitors, SeeVolution’s simple, real-time analytics show insights that range from how many people are currently on the site, to stats of the site’s conversion and bounce rate over the last week. These useful analytics are available through the company’s signature toolbar that, once installed, overlays on the current site. This gives busy webmasters one less thing to worry about and login to. Once the code snippet is installed, the tool will start tracking the site’s real-time happenings.
In addition to seeing how many people are on a certain page and where they navigated from, SeeVolution also wants to show webmasters actual images of a visitor’s on-site interactions and navigation behavior. Through a suite of website heatmaps that the toolbar provides access to, mapped out images of high-activity areas are recorded and transparently overlaid atop that specific site. A webmaster then can see how their visitors are interacting with their site using a click heatmap, mouse movement heatmap or a scroll heatmap.
Click maps show where visitors are clicking regardless of what that may be. By showing a webmaster how visitors are navigating through their site, they can customize their experience to create the optimal one for their unique visitors.
Highlighting the mouse movements of a visitor using eye tracking technology, mouse movement heatmaps allow a webmaster to see what their visitors are actual focusing on. Perfect for a blog owner, this heatmaps helps specify key interests of visitors, which can bring an influx of content ideas and featured topics.
Rounding off the collection, scroll heatmaps are an ecommerce business owner’s best friend. These heatmaps identify where the “fold”—the first notable drop off in views—in a website lies. Once that is found, a seller can optimize the location of their purchase buttons to ensure that they are getting seen and not glazed over.
These simple analytics are easy enough for the first time online business owner, and provide the accurate, straightforward results that seasoned webmasters are always looking to use.
Visitor engagement and conversion can increase with even the slightest change. SeeVolution provides results a webmaster can see with a tool that seamlessly integrates into their website. The startup is currently working on a more advance version of the same great tool that should launch in the coming months.
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