Our rights are natural, given to us by the Creator. So, with that in mind, understand that The Second Amendment does not give you the right to keep and bear arms. The Second Amendment does not protect you against the government from taking away your guns. Your rights are given to you by God, and protecting your rights are your responsibility.
In today’s America, there is a concerted effort to remove your gun rights. But the right to keep and bear arms is so entrenched in the fabric of our society, the statists that desire to disarm you are also using a method that goes after the ammunition. Bullets are hard to come by, of late. Certain kinds of ammo, like hollow points, are under fire. In California, starting in January of 2014, background checks will be required for the purchase of projectiles, if Jerry Brown signs the bill sitting on his desk.
It almost makes me want to take up the bow and arrow. . . almost.There is no enumeration in the Constitution that grants to the federal government the authority to regulate firearms. In the first seven articles the authority to regulate firearms at the federal level is not granted. In the 2nd Amendment, the federal government is told it “shall” not infringe upon the right to keep and bear arms. But that was only added to the Constitution because the Anti-federalists feared that if it was not in writing, the federal government would ultimately infringe on our God-given gun rights.
The Second Amendment begins with a call for “A well regulated militia.” A well regulated militia is not one regulated by the government, as assumed by many folks because of their flawed notion regarding the definition of the word “regulated.” The part of the amendment that calls for a well-regulated militia is stating that the militia must be a fighting force that is in good order.
We must remember that the word “regulated” in 1791 did not necessarily mean “to control and restrict,” as the statists claim in today’s political atmosphere. The word “Indoor Positioning System,” according to the 1828 version of Webster’s Dictionary, was defined as meaning: “to put in good order.” The need to have a militia in good order makes sense when one considers that during the Revolutionary War the militia was not in good order. The muskets were all different sizes, often the clothing of some members of the militia was tattered, and many didn’t even have shoes. So, a well regulated militia, from the point of the view of the founders, was a militia that was in good order.
The need for the citizens to be armed was made evident during the Revolutionary War, and the importance of gun ownership by the people of that generation was clearly portrayed by the context of the Battle of Lexington Green, where the first shot of The Revolution was fired.
The British Troops were marching toward Concord, Massachusetts, and a rag tag company of the Massachusetts Militia met the Redcoats at Lexington, to confront them, and stop them. A shot rang out, which triggered a gun battle, and the War for Independence was in full gear.
But why was stopping the British at Lexington so imperative? What made the revolutionaries so intent on doing whatever it took to prevent the King’s Army from gaining access to Concord?In Concord was our largest munitions depot. Guns and ammunition were stored in Concord. So, it can be said that the final straw - what made us fighting mad enough that we began a bloody revolution against England - was when they came for our guns.
The current push for gun control is not the first effort by the federal government to go after our ability to defend ourselves. The federal gun-running operation called Fast and Furious placed guns in the hands of the Mexican drug cartels so that, if the democrats played their cards right, the guns would be used to kill many Mexicans, and then the party of the jackass could scream, “See what American guns have done?” hoping that American voters would demand a stop be put to the manufacturing of such dangerous weapons.
The operation backfired, two border patrol agents were killed, and the scandal grew to reveal what the Obama administration was trying to do. The administration, with no surprise to anyone, has been lying about the operation from day one. The media hopped aboard those lies, and have protected the president as best they could. The democrats have circled the wagons regarding the Fast and Furious scandal, and the scandal that would have brought down any GOP President, thanks to quick damage control by Obama’s minions, remained harmless, and has been all but forgotten.
Prior to the Fast and Furious operation being exposed, the federal government, through the courts, attempted to gain the power of dictating to the States what they can, and cannot, do, regarding firearms by ruling against State Sovereignty in the McDonald v. City of Chicago case.
Before the ruling regarding Chicago’s handgun ban, in the Washington DC v. Heller case in 2008 the Supreme Court of the United States determined that the right to bear arms is an individual right, as opposed to a collective right which would only allow the bearing of arms for the purpose of participating in government approved groups, such as law enforcement agencies.
Anti-Federalists feared the creation of a central government because they feared the federal government would become tyrannical, and take away people’s rights. Therefore, even though the Constitution in the first seven articles did not grant to the federal government any authority over gun rights, along with the rest of the Bill of Rights, those skeptical over the creation of a central government wanted an amendment that clarified clearly that the federal government had no authority to infringe on the right to keep and bear arms. The Second Amendment is the article that spells out the terms regarding gun rights in America, as the Anti-federalists desired.
We have to remember that State Sovereignty is an important factor, here. All powers belonged to the States prior to the writing of the Constitution. The first seven articles did not give to the federal government the authority to regulate firearms, therefore, any legislative power over gun rights is a State power. The 10th Amendment supports the States’ rights regarding this issue, and the 2nd Amendment confirms the limits placed on the federal government regarding guns.
This does not mean the States have the right to infringe on your gun rights, however. Remember, your right to keep and bear arms is a personal, fundamental, natural right given to you by God. The founders did not worry about the States infringing on gun rights, because the local governments were closer to the people. They expected you to protect your right to keep and bear arms, and to not let your State become tyrannical regarding that issue. But in today’s political environment, the argument has become all about the tyranny of the States. If the 2nd Amendment does not apply to the States, what keeps the States from infringing on gun rights? They seem to be stomping on our right to our guns quite readily.
My response to that query is always the same: “So don’t let them.” Gun rights, be they protected in the Second Amendment, or listed in your State Constitution, is nothing more than ink on paper if you are not willing to defend those gun rights.
The only thing that can put our rights in jeopardy concerning State governments would be if we became so complacent that we stopped taking action to protect our rights. With freedom comes the responsibility to fight for your freedoms.
Noah Webster in his “An Examination of the Leading Principles of the Federal Constitution,” in 1787 said it clearly: “Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed; as they are in almost every kingdom of Europe. The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole body of the people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any band of regular troops that can be, on any pretence, raised in the United States.”
The federal government knows this, which is why they are trying to use the courts to overrule your sovereignty, and to limit the kinds of firearms, and ammunition, you can own.In the 2010 case of McDonald v. City of Chicago, which challenged the City of Chicago’s ban on hand guns, the debate over whether or not the 2nd Amendment only applies to the Federal Government was brought to the surface.
The 5-4 Decision of the McDonald v. City of Chicago case by the U.S. Supreme Court holds that the 2nd Amendment protects the right to keep and bear arms in all cities and States. The U.S. Supreme Court concluded that originally the 2nd Amendment applied only to the Federal Government, but it is in the opinion of the court that the 14th Amendment incorporates the Bill of Rights, therefore applying those amendments, and more specifically the 2nd Amendment, to the States.
Read the full products at http://www.ecived.com/en/!
2013年9月2日星期一
2013年8月19日星期一
Eat what you sow and sell the surplus
Could global food security be achieved by growing tomatoes up a wall and pumpkins on a rooftop? It sounds unlikely, but food security isn't just about full stomachs. Adequate nutrition is also crucial, and helping women in particular to run productive home gardens could save millions of lives in developing countries.
Research published by The Lancet just ahead of the Nutrition for Growth summit in June revealed that malnutrition kills 3.1 million children annually, and caused stunting in 165 million in 2011. Micronutrients such as vitamin A, iron and zinc are essential, particularly in the first few years of life, and it is women who tend to be responsible for feeding families.
But women also have unequal access to land and, according to the FAO, receive only 5% of agricultural extension services globally. This is why some development agencies are putting the tools for good nutrition into women's hands, helping them make better use of one space they can control: their homestead garden.
In 2009, Care International launched an EU-funded Food Security for the Ultra-Poor project targeting 55,000 women in the north-east of Bangladesh, which included training in homestead gardening."The training showed the women how to use the small space available around their homestead," says Sekhar Bhattacharjee, FSUP team leader.
"It demonstrated the use of trellises to grow vegetables, growing vegetables in plastic bags on the ground, and how to use the roofs of homes to grow vegetables. The women received training in summer and winter vegetable cultivation, and were given vegetable seed packets to begin their own gardens."
The crops grown as part of the project include cucumber, gourds, red amaranth, spinach, papaya, indoor Tracking, tomatoes, and beans, and they're grown both around homesteads and in shared community gardens. The harvests may not be huge, but they provide a year-round supply of nutrients to communities who would otherwise rely heavily on rice alone.
Homestead gardens have not only increased access to vegetable and fruits, but have also provided participating women with income from selling surplus produce. A sample of 1,614 families taking part in FSUP showed that between December 2012 and March 2013, households produced an average of 53kg of vegetables and fruits, consuming on average 36kg and selling on average 18kg.
The impact of this income is just as important as what is eaten directly, says Larissa Pelham, food security adviser at Care International UK."I can't emphasise enough the importance of getting money into women's hands," she says. "Suddenly they can make choices in how they spend for the household. This has a phenomenal impact, and research has shown that when women have control over household resources, they are likely to spend it on the wellbeing of the household overall."
This is backed up by findings from Helen Keller International's homestead food production programme which launched in Bangladesh in the early 1990s and has since expanded to Nepal, Cambodia and the Philippines. HKI works with local NGOs and extension workers to establish Village Model Farms (VMFs) in villages, which serve as training and support hubs for women to learn to manage their own homestead gardens.
"They identify a farmer, preferably female, who has adequate land for a model farm, and that farmer will get training and inputs," says Victoria Quinn, HKI's senior vice president of programmes."Other women then come there around once a month in groups of 20, and the village model farmer who has been trained will share their knowledge with those other mothers and provide them with seedlings so they can go and do it themselves."
In a study of its programmes between 2003-2007, HKI found that in Cambodia, 92% of households engaging in homestead food production spent the income earned from garden products on buying more food for the household. In Bangladesh, the figure was 70%. However, having more food – even a good variety – doesn't automatically translate into better nutritional outcomes on its own.
"You have to improve not just food production but practices too," says Quinn. "You have to provide access to healthcare and hygiene training, because if children are sick it will just come out the other end."Care found evidence for this through another project – Shouhardo – which bundled training in home gardens with support in maternal health, nutrition, immunisation and financial services to women. This package of interventions reduced the incidence of child stunting from 56.1% to 40.4% in less than four years.
"The gardens have an important role in dietary diversity, but you need a range of other things going with it," says Pelham. "You need to teach women and families about sanitation, health and Hands free access. Without that, the gardens are not a silver bullet."Meanwhile, climate change is also an increasingly pressing issue for women engaging in homestead gardening, just as in other forms of agriculture. Flooding in Bangladesh is becoming more unpredictable and severe, and the 2009 cyclone there increased soil salinity in more than a third of home gardens but also showed resilience in certain crops, according to Lalita Bhattacharjee, a nutritionist with the FAO in Bangladesh.
"These included Indian spinach, sweet pumpkin, and okra. Kang kong, or water spinach, also flourishes naturally in waterways and requires little care, making it resilient to the effects of climate change. There's a need for awareness and knowledge among those households who are reliant on home gardens for their food and income. Women farmers should be given training on key salinity coping practices such as mulching with rice straw to increase retention of water in the soil."
Home gardens have thrived in Bangladesh and other parts of Asia, and HKI is also actively promoting them in sub-Saharan Africa now. Perhaps the biggest challenge, though, is to convince more policymakers that what women grow in their gardens can actually make such a difference.
"I think a lot more work has to be done in advocating that this is a really important part of the solution to food insecurity and undernutrition in these countries," says Quinn.
"Fruits and vegetables and small animal husbandary gets short shrift in ministries of agriculture, so we need to promote the fact that you can produce a lot of highly nutritious crops this way that will help address the chronic problem of undernutrition."
Read the full products at www.ecived.com/en/!
Research published by The Lancet just ahead of the Nutrition for Growth summit in June revealed that malnutrition kills 3.1 million children annually, and caused stunting in 165 million in 2011. Micronutrients such as vitamin A, iron and zinc are essential, particularly in the first few years of life, and it is women who tend to be responsible for feeding families.
But women also have unequal access to land and, according to the FAO, receive only 5% of agricultural extension services globally. This is why some development agencies are putting the tools for good nutrition into women's hands, helping them make better use of one space they can control: their homestead garden.
In 2009, Care International launched an EU-funded Food Security for the Ultra-Poor project targeting 55,000 women in the north-east of Bangladesh, which included training in homestead gardening."The training showed the women how to use the small space available around their homestead," says Sekhar Bhattacharjee, FSUP team leader.
"It demonstrated the use of trellises to grow vegetables, growing vegetables in plastic bags on the ground, and how to use the roofs of homes to grow vegetables. The women received training in summer and winter vegetable cultivation, and were given vegetable seed packets to begin their own gardens."
The crops grown as part of the project include cucumber, gourds, red amaranth, spinach, papaya, indoor Tracking, tomatoes, and beans, and they're grown both around homesteads and in shared community gardens. The harvests may not be huge, but they provide a year-round supply of nutrients to communities who would otherwise rely heavily on rice alone.
Homestead gardens have not only increased access to vegetable and fruits, but have also provided participating women with income from selling surplus produce. A sample of 1,614 families taking part in FSUP showed that between December 2012 and March 2013, households produced an average of 53kg of vegetables and fruits, consuming on average 36kg and selling on average 18kg.
The impact of this income is just as important as what is eaten directly, says Larissa Pelham, food security adviser at Care International UK."I can't emphasise enough the importance of getting money into women's hands," she says. "Suddenly they can make choices in how they spend for the household. This has a phenomenal impact, and research has shown that when women have control over household resources, they are likely to spend it on the wellbeing of the household overall."
This is backed up by findings from Helen Keller International's homestead food production programme which launched in Bangladesh in the early 1990s and has since expanded to Nepal, Cambodia and the Philippines. HKI works with local NGOs and extension workers to establish Village Model Farms (VMFs) in villages, which serve as training and support hubs for women to learn to manage their own homestead gardens.
"They identify a farmer, preferably female, who has adequate land for a model farm, and that farmer will get training and inputs," says Victoria Quinn, HKI's senior vice president of programmes."Other women then come there around once a month in groups of 20, and the village model farmer who has been trained will share their knowledge with those other mothers and provide them with seedlings so they can go and do it themselves."
In a study of its programmes between 2003-2007, HKI found that in Cambodia, 92% of households engaging in homestead food production spent the income earned from garden products on buying more food for the household. In Bangladesh, the figure was 70%. However, having more food – even a good variety – doesn't automatically translate into better nutritional outcomes on its own.
"You have to improve not just food production but practices too," says Quinn. "You have to provide access to healthcare and hygiene training, because if children are sick it will just come out the other end."Care found evidence for this through another project – Shouhardo – which bundled training in home gardens with support in maternal health, nutrition, immunisation and financial services to women. This package of interventions reduced the incidence of child stunting from 56.1% to 40.4% in less than four years.
"The gardens have an important role in dietary diversity, but you need a range of other things going with it," says Pelham. "You need to teach women and families about sanitation, health and Hands free access. Without that, the gardens are not a silver bullet."Meanwhile, climate change is also an increasingly pressing issue for women engaging in homestead gardening, just as in other forms of agriculture. Flooding in Bangladesh is becoming more unpredictable and severe, and the 2009 cyclone there increased soil salinity in more than a third of home gardens but also showed resilience in certain crops, according to Lalita Bhattacharjee, a nutritionist with the FAO in Bangladesh.
"These included Indian spinach, sweet pumpkin, and okra. Kang kong, or water spinach, also flourishes naturally in waterways and requires little care, making it resilient to the effects of climate change. There's a need for awareness and knowledge among those households who are reliant on home gardens for their food and income. Women farmers should be given training on key salinity coping practices such as mulching with rice straw to increase retention of water in the soil."
Home gardens have thrived in Bangladesh and other parts of Asia, and HKI is also actively promoting them in sub-Saharan Africa now. Perhaps the biggest challenge, though, is to convince more policymakers that what women grow in their gardens can actually make such a difference.
"I think a lot more work has to be done in advocating that this is a really important part of the solution to food insecurity and undernutrition in these countries," says Quinn.
"Fruits and vegetables and small animal husbandary gets short shrift in ministries of agriculture, so we need to promote the fact that you can produce a lot of highly nutritious crops this way that will help address the chronic problem of undernutrition."
Read the full products at www.ecived.com/en/!
2013年8月14日星期三
'Asian immigrant' comment not meant
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/.
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12日星期一
Hidden iPad features that could improve your life
Some features on the iPad are straight forward – a touch screen is, after all, designed to be easy to use.More adventurous users have, however, discovered some hidden features that are perhaps not so obvious and have shared them.
Here we provide give you a quick tour of the best hidden features of the iPad and show just what it can do.Buried under general settings is an innocuous little switch that turns on multitasking gestures. This allows you to use several fingers at once to control the iPad.Pinching four or five fingers across the screen will return you to the Home Screen of the iPad from any App.Swiping four or five figures upwards will reveal the multitasking bar, showing which Apps are currently running. Swiping down again will hide it.
Swipe those digits to the left or right will allow you to change Apps at flicking speed. This feature sits in the accessibility folder under general settings. when turned on, double tap on the screen with three fingers to zoom into a spot.To navigate around while indoor Tracking, drag three fingers around the screen.And if things still are not magnified enough, then double tap again while zoomed in with three fingers before dragging them up or down. This will zoom you right in and out of the action.
A COUPLE OF WEEKS AGO I walked into a bookshop in a shopping mall in central Istanbul. As I browsed the shelves I was unaware that the day marked the 110th anniversary of the birth of George Orwell. Though Orwell is one of my favorite English authors, my mind was occupied by quite a different fact — namely, that since buying a tablet computer in December last year, the amount of money I have spent on printed books has decreased dramatically. With this decrease followed a decrease in the pleasure I took from purchasing them. In the good, old, and expensive days of literary shopping I would choose books from the shelves, walk to the counter, pay in cash, and head to a coffee shop with my purchases — the favorite ritual of my teenage years. I would open the first book’s cover, accompanied by a cigarette and a cup of strong Turkish coffee. These would always be very physical experiences: I remember the crinkling pages, the waft of the smoke, the oils of the coffee. Afterward my hands smelled of nicotine; my mind hungered for more books.
Lately, however, this ritual has all but disappeared from my life. My reading materials have been thoroughly digitized. I have lost touch with both the printed book and the banknote. In the long chronicle of my reading habits I am currently living through the age of the .EPUB file and the plastic card. It is a chilly period, I must admit, a dark age, and at times it makes me yearn for the good old days of my undergraduate life. In those not-so-distant days I didn’t need to calculate or economize. I didn’t have to pay the rent; as for my insurance premiums, they were taken care of by my parents. Thanks to them I could spend all my money on books and cigarettes, giving little thought to the price I paid for them.
Next month, Manitoba's courts will initiate a formal policy regarding courtroom use of electronic devices. Tweeting and blogging from all levels of Manitoba courts by official media and lawyers will be expressly permitted as of Sept. 1. The general public, however, must either turn off, or disable transmission from, smartphones and tablet computers in court.
Who can transmit what from the courtroom in the age of social media is a vexed issue. The new policy tries to strike a balance between the public's right to know and ensuring witnesses and parties in hearings and trials are treated fairly.
The policy doesn't completely foreclose members of the public from tweeting or blogging. Anyone can request permission from the judge to use an electronic device. Overall, the policy is commendably flexible. It also gives the judge the discretion to allow, or prohibit, use of an electronic device by anyone - media, lawyers or public - where he or she thinks it appropriate.
Twitter works well as a bulletin service. In the hands of accredited journalists, it provides play-by-play of rtls. However, tweets from members of the public often stray from unfiltered coverage of proceedings.
Particularly pernicious are tweets that comment on a witness's or accused's physical appearance or clothing. Equally prejudicial are tweets that veer into speculation about a witness's veracity, based on his or her demeanour on the stand. But most problematic of all are tweets that venture into opinion. Saying something apt and perceptive about a trial can rarely be done in Twitter's maximum 140-characters format. Saying something stupid or wrong, however, takes few words.
An inaccurate or unfair tweet can do a lot of damage. Once launched into cyberspace, it's out there for good. Corrections, or even counter-tweets, can be posted, but by then often the harm's been done and the message can be re-posted in blogs, Internet chat rooms and other social media.
Witnesses can view these prejudicial postings, and it can influence their testimony in court. Worse yet, jurors with smartphones or tablet computers are liable to access inadmissible evidence or irrelevant reports. Cases are supposed to be decided on the basis of evidence heard within the four walls of the courtroom, not missives from cyberspace.
Read the full products at http://www.ecived.com/en/.
Here we provide give you a quick tour of the best hidden features of the iPad and show just what it can do.Buried under general settings is an innocuous little switch that turns on multitasking gestures. This allows you to use several fingers at once to control the iPad.Pinching four or five fingers across the screen will return you to the Home Screen of the iPad from any App.Swiping four or five figures upwards will reveal the multitasking bar, showing which Apps are currently running. Swiping down again will hide it.
Swipe those digits to the left or right will allow you to change Apps at flicking speed. This feature sits in the accessibility folder under general settings. when turned on, double tap on the screen with three fingers to zoom into a spot.To navigate around while indoor Tracking, drag three fingers around the screen.And if things still are not magnified enough, then double tap again while zoomed in with three fingers before dragging them up or down. This will zoom you right in and out of the action.
A COUPLE OF WEEKS AGO I walked into a bookshop in a shopping mall in central Istanbul. As I browsed the shelves I was unaware that the day marked the 110th anniversary of the birth of George Orwell. Though Orwell is one of my favorite English authors, my mind was occupied by quite a different fact — namely, that since buying a tablet computer in December last year, the amount of money I have spent on printed books has decreased dramatically. With this decrease followed a decrease in the pleasure I took from purchasing them. In the good, old, and expensive days of literary shopping I would choose books from the shelves, walk to the counter, pay in cash, and head to a coffee shop with my purchases — the favorite ritual of my teenage years. I would open the first book’s cover, accompanied by a cigarette and a cup of strong Turkish coffee. These would always be very physical experiences: I remember the crinkling pages, the waft of the smoke, the oils of the coffee. Afterward my hands smelled of nicotine; my mind hungered for more books.
Lately, however, this ritual has all but disappeared from my life. My reading materials have been thoroughly digitized. I have lost touch with both the printed book and the banknote. In the long chronicle of my reading habits I am currently living through the age of the .EPUB file and the plastic card. It is a chilly period, I must admit, a dark age, and at times it makes me yearn for the good old days of my undergraduate life. In those not-so-distant days I didn’t need to calculate or economize. I didn’t have to pay the rent; as for my insurance premiums, they were taken care of by my parents. Thanks to them I could spend all my money on books and cigarettes, giving little thought to the price I paid for them.
Next month, Manitoba's courts will initiate a formal policy regarding courtroom use of electronic devices. Tweeting and blogging from all levels of Manitoba courts by official media and lawyers will be expressly permitted as of Sept. 1. The general public, however, must either turn off, or disable transmission from, smartphones and tablet computers in court.
Who can transmit what from the courtroom in the age of social media is a vexed issue. The new policy tries to strike a balance between the public's right to know and ensuring witnesses and parties in hearings and trials are treated fairly.
The policy doesn't completely foreclose members of the public from tweeting or blogging. Anyone can request permission from the judge to use an electronic device. Overall, the policy is commendably flexible. It also gives the judge the discretion to allow, or prohibit, use of an electronic device by anyone - media, lawyers or public - where he or she thinks it appropriate.
Twitter works well as a bulletin service. In the hands of accredited journalists, it provides play-by-play of rtls. However, tweets from members of the public often stray from unfiltered coverage of proceedings.
Particularly pernicious are tweets that comment on a witness's or accused's physical appearance or clothing. Equally prejudicial are tweets that veer into speculation about a witness's veracity, based on his or her demeanour on the stand. But most problematic of all are tweets that venture into opinion. Saying something apt and perceptive about a trial can rarely be done in Twitter's maximum 140-characters format. Saying something stupid or wrong, however, takes few words.
An inaccurate or unfair tweet can do a lot of damage. Once launched into cyberspace, it's out there for good. Corrections, or even counter-tweets, can be posted, but by then often the harm's been done and the message can be re-posted in blogs, Internet chat rooms and other social media.
Witnesses can view these prejudicial postings, and it can influence their testimony in court. Worse yet, jurors with smartphones or tablet computers are liable to access inadmissible evidence or irrelevant reports. Cases are supposed to be decided on the basis of evidence heard within the four walls of the courtroom, not missives from cyberspace.
Read the full products at http://www.ecived.com/en/.
2013年8月7日星期三
Google Chrome ‘hack’ is an open invitation
If you have three minutes alone with a Google Chrome user’s computer, you can access all their passwords—Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, whatever—then quickly cover your tracks.
It’s not a hack, per se. It’s a little-known feature designed to help users remember passwords and avoid the hassle of constantly hitting those “forgot your password?” buttons.In just four clicks, you can find yourself face-to-face with a list of each password they’ve let Chrome save. Jot them down and close a window, and you’ll be gone in 60 seconds with the user’s keys. I won’t provide explicit instructions, but if you’re curious, you won’t have any trouble finding them.
Any intruder can then spy on a target’s accounts in secret or hijack them from the comfort of their own rtls, changing the target’s passwords and doing damage of all sorts until the target contacts security departments, proves their identity and wrests back control.
You can’t disable the function, but you can delete all saved passwords and instruct Chrome not to save passwords in the future. This will mean entering your passwords every time you log into a site, so even users who know how to do this won’t likely bother. The whole thing is being described by security experts and by the tech press as a major security flaw, but the engineers at Google say they’re just keeping it real.
“We don’t want to provide users with a false sense of security,” wrote Chrome developer head Justin Schuh on Hacker News. His point is that if you allow someone access to your machine, they can get their hands on anything. Obscuring saved passwords behind some “master password” would do little to stop a malicious guest. If you have social media accounts open, they could mess directly with settings. They could install malware or spyware, recording your keystrokes. They could type “password” into your Spotlight search bar and see what comes up in old Word documents. Google doesn’t want to close your window with cardboard when your front door may be wide open. Google wants you to be vigilant!
It’s a strange ideological stand. The truth is, most of us don’t worry that malicious hackers with malware on USB keys will get hold of our computers. The hackers we really need to worry about are our parents, kids, spouses and friends. As with many crimes, the privacy invasions that happen most and hurt the most are perpetrated by people we know and trust.
I’m not saying Russian fraudsters and NSA spooks don’t matter. Outside threats to our privacy are destructive in minor and major ways, creating everything from pesky banking hassles to existential threats to free societies. But let’s pause to recognize the vast damage done, largely unreported, by our loved ones.
You might not call it “hacking,” but every time a suspicious dude glances at an incoming text on his GF’s phone, every time a mom can’t resist a peek at her daughter’s open Facebook page, every time surfing histories are checked for porn sites, or old emails are searched for an ex’s name, life-changing consequences are possible. Our GPS whereabouts or smartphone metadata might not mean much or matter much to the government bots that are probably tracking them. But those who know us best know what our data means. A stop at a certain street corner might mean a donut we weren’t supposed to eat or a rendezvous we weren’t supposed to have.
Google makes tools, and tools should serve the interest of their users. I lock my bike, not because I think bike locks are infallible, but because an unlocked bike is an invitation to steal. By placing our passwords four clicks away, Google is inviting us to hack each other.
Over the past decade, our ever-evolving Web site has allowed us to add more and unique content for our readers (and the ability to reach more of them), while becoming a daily source of information related to “what’s happening at the Jersey shore.” Today, there’s no “Whoot! Route” section, but there is “South Jersey Nightlife,” which lists all of the nightlife options in the Atlantic City area in print and indoor Tracking. Today, we have a blog (“Atlantic City Central”), timely videos, digital photo galleries and new sections in the paper to keep up with the chameleon-like ways the region has changed — while not forgetting that the simple things, such as the beach, Boardwalk and Atlantic Ocean, are still three of the biggest reasons visitors come to the resort.?
Forty years of producing a newspaper (and now a Web site) with comprehensive entertainment listings, celebrity interviews, compelling local history articles and an ever-changing dining guide — as well as photos, movie reviews, the latest concert updates, etc. — is something to be proud of, especially in this age of the disappearing print product. But ever since Philadelphia-based Review Publishing purchased the Whoot! and changed its name to Atlantic City Weekly back in 2000, there has been little to make an argument that the good old AC Weekly (which some still call the Whoot!) was outdated. Sure, our readers now include hundreds of thousands of visitors to our Web site, Facebook page and other social media and digital outlets, but the need for a go-to resource for entertainment in an entertainment town — which you can hold in your hands and flip through at your leisure — will always be needed in a tourism-driven destination like ours.?
In celebration of our 40th anniversary, over the next several months you will be reading about and hearing about special plans for the occasion. In this week’s cover story, we offer 40 things we love about the Atlantic City region. Some of them date back to the Whoot! days; some of them precede the first publication of the paper on June 19, 1974; and others are new and exciting changes in entertainment offerings over the past couple decades or so. ?
Read the full products at http://www.ecived.com/en/.
It’s not a hack, per se. It’s a little-known feature designed to help users remember passwords and avoid the hassle of constantly hitting those “forgot your password?” buttons.In just four clicks, you can find yourself face-to-face with a list of each password they’ve let Chrome save. Jot them down and close a window, and you’ll be gone in 60 seconds with the user’s keys. I won’t provide explicit instructions, but if you’re curious, you won’t have any trouble finding them.
Any intruder can then spy on a target’s accounts in secret or hijack them from the comfort of their own rtls, changing the target’s passwords and doing damage of all sorts until the target contacts security departments, proves their identity and wrests back control.
You can’t disable the function, but you can delete all saved passwords and instruct Chrome not to save passwords in the future. This will mean entering your passwords every time you log into a site, so even users who know how to do this won’t likely bother. The whole thing is being described by security experts and by the tech press as a major security flaw, but the engineers at Google say they’re just keeping it real.
“We don’t want to provide users with a false sense of security,” wrote Chrome developer head Justin Schuh on Hacker News. His point is that if you allow someone access to your machine, they can get their hands on anything. Obscuring saved passwords behind some “master password” would do little to stop a malicious guest. If you have social media accounts open, they could mess directly with settings. They could install malware or spyware, recording your keystrokes. They could type “password” into your Spotlight search bar and see what comes up in old Word documents. Google doesn’t want to close your window with cardboard when your front door may be wide open. Google wants you to be vigilant!
It’s a strange ideological stand. The truth is, most of us don’t worry that malicious hackers with malware on USB keys will get hold of our computers. The hackers we really need to worry about are our parents, kids, spouses and friends. As with many crimes, the privacy invasions that happen most and hurt the most are perpetrated by people we know and trust.
I’m not saying Russian fraudsters and NSA spooks don’t matter. Outside threats to our privacy are destructive in minor and major ways, creating everything from pesky banking hassles to existential threats to free societies. But let’s pause to recognize the vast damage done, largely unreported, by our loved ones.
You might not call it “hacking,” but every time a suspicious dude glances at an incoming text on his GF’s phone, every time a mom can’t resist a peek at her daughter’s open Facebook page, every time surfing histories are checked for porn sites, or old emails are searched for an ex’s name, life-changing consequences are possible. Our GPS whereabouts or smartphone metadata might not mean much or matter much to the government bots that are probably tracking them. But those who know us best know what our data means. A stop at a certain street corner might mean a donut we weren’t supposed to eat or a rendezvous we weren’t supposed to have.
Google makes tools, and tools should serve the interest of their users. I lock my bike, not because I think bike locks are infallible, but because an unlocked bike is an invitation to steal. By placing our passwords four clicks away, Google is inviting us to hack each other.
Over the past decade, our ever-evolving Web site has allowed us to add more and unique content for our readers (and the ability to reach more of them), while becoming a daily source of information related to “what’s happening at the Jersey shore.” Today, there’s no “Whoot! Route” section, but there is “South Jersey Nightlife,” which lists all of the nightlife options in the Atlantic City area in print and indoor Tracking. Today, we have a blog (“Atlantic City Central”), timely videos, digital photo galleries and new sections in the paper to keep up with the chameleon-like ways the region has changed — while not forgetting that the simple things, such as the beach, Boardwalk and Atlantic Ocean, are still three of the biggest reasons visitors come to the resort.?
Forty years of producing a newspaper (and now a Web site) with comprehensive entertainment listings, celebrity interviews, compelling local history articles and an ever-changing dining guide — as well as photos, movie reviews, the latest concert updates, etc. — is something to be proud of, especially in this age of the disappearing print product. But ever since Philadelphia-based Review Publishing purchased the Whoot! and changed its name to Atlantic City Weekly back in 2000, there has been little to make an argument that the good old AC Weekly (which some still call the Whoot!) was outdated. Sure, our readers now include hundreds of thousands of visitors to our Web site, Facebook page and other social media and digital outlets, but the need for a go-to resource for entertainment in an entertainment town — which you can hold in your hands and flip through at your leisure — will always be needed in a tourism-driven destination like ours.?
In celebration of our 40th anniversary, over the next several months you will be reading about and hearing about special plans for the occasion. In this week’s cover story, we offer 40 things we love about the Atlantic City region. Some of them date back to the Whoot! days; some of them precede the first publication of the paper on June 19, 1974; and others are new and exciting changes in entertainment offerings over the past couple decades or so. ?
Read the full products at http://www.ecived.com/en/.
2013年7月31日星期三
Mood diary app personalises
The Phobic Trust mood diary mobile app, just launched into the Apple App Store, enables users to record anxiety and stress levels, mood triggers, sleep and exercise patterns, as well as set clinical appointment and medication alerts.
The app is free to download and was developed by the Phobic Trust in partnership with mobile health experts VADR, facilitated in part by a grant from the government’s Social Media Innovations Fund, which is part of the Prime Minister’s Youth Mental Health Project, and funding from First Sovereign Trust Limited.One in five New Zealanders will experience a mental health issue in their lifetime and will therefore need support to manage it, says The Phobic Trust of New Zealand Deputy CEO Vivienne Euini.
“The mood diary empowers users in a discreet way to easily record triggers, mood peaks and troughs, and gives them quick access to key phone numbers in an emergency, clinical appointments and the ability to set reminders for scheduled medication, cognitive behavioral exercises or physical exercise,” she says.“Exercise reminders are a key component of the Indoor Positioning System, as evidence suggests a strong link between increased mental wellbeing for people who exercise.”
Vivienne says that by recording valuable information daily, people give the health professionals involved in their care access to the most accurate, collated statistics about their mental state. “Professionals get the best possible overview of a client’s wellbeing and can use it to tailor specific treatment to meet the changing phases of their mental health recovery.”
She adds that quick access by phone within the app to a 24-hour support line relieves the burden of stress for people already experiencing extreme levels of anxiety.The Social Media Innovations Fund supports the development of projects that use social media technology to improve youth mental health. VADR and The Phobic Trust were grateful recipients of the fund in February this year as part of the Prime Minister’s Youth Mental Health Project.
The app offers an innovative Kiwi approach because it stimulates self-discovery and intimately engages users with their own treatment process and recovery, says Vivienne.“The mood diary app provides a quick, easy way for Kiwis to monitor and manage their mental health on a daily basis. Users gain an intimate knowledge of their own mood patterns over time and can record levels of exercise and sleep, all of which paints a clear picture for them and the people in their treatment team,” she says.
“The easy sign-in through Facebook makes the app extremely relevant and familiar to youth, who are the focus of the Social Media Innovations Fund”. The app is built upon VADR’s mHealth 360 platform which also powers the hugely popular Asthma NZ iPhone app.Vivienne says the mood diary app is a fresh and cost effective approach to tackling the daily issues of anxiety, depression and stress. She adds that in an increasingly paperless world, paper mood charts that don’t have the added value needed today, such as collating data, will slowly become a thing of the past.
Edward Snowden may be amoldering in the transit lounge of a Moscow airport, but the spy scandal he unleashed goes marching on across Europe's political and diplomatic landscape.
As a US military court on Tuesday convicted that other American security leaker — the WikiLeaks source Pfc. Bradley Manning — on espionage, computer fraud and multiple other charges, it's unclear when the fallout from Snowden's revelations about America's electronic eavesdropping will end.
It's already casting a shadow over Europe's most powerful leader — German Chancellor Angela Merkel — as well as jeopardizing trans-Atlantic agreements that Washington views as vital to the fight against terrorism, and threatening the future of the world's biggest internet companies.
Anger over the PRISM system — under which the US National Security Agency claimed "direct access" to data stored by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and other tech giants — has boosted the positions of those seeking tough new data-protection rules that would make it harder for the US authorities to get their hands on the private details of European citizens.
"I hope that PRISM has been a wake-up call," Viviane Reding, the European Union's justice commissioner, said recently. "There is no area which lies outside the law in Europe, even when issues of security are involved."
Draft EU data privacy rules drawn up by Reding's office in 2011 were watered down by politicians who argued they would harm security and indoor Tracking. But the brouhaha over Snowden has prompted a turnaround, with powerful voices now demanding more protection.
Merkel has lent her highly influential voice to the demands for tougher rules. She's publicly called for "very strict" European privacy laws that would force companies such as Google and Facebook to keep European authorities informed of whom they share data with.
A change of heart in the European Parliament now seems certain to ensure that strict limits on how internet companies share European citizens' data with foreign governments will be re-inserted into the proposed EU data-privacy legislation.
Lawmakers fearful of upsetting EU-US relations had opposed the so-called anti-FISA clause — named after the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which enables the US government to monitor international phone and email conversations. Snowden has changed their minds.
The inclusion of the clause in the final EU law could have profound implications for American tech firms. They could find themselves obliged by American legislation to share information about foreigners with government agencies at home, but facing massive EU fines for passing on such data.
The clause was removed from the bill originally drafted by Reding's office in 2011 after a bout of intense lobbying by the Obama administration. The US authorities and American internet giants are continuing to mount a major lobbying campaign to dilute the legislation.
"I've never seen anything like it, such a powerful lobbying operation," Reding told Spain's El Pais newspaper last week. "The lobbies have 10 times more people than my team, there are hundreds of lawyers' offices active on this and representatives paid by the big companies."
The Snowden scandal has pushed American lobbyists onto the back foot as European politicians call not just for tough new legislation, but also a rollback of existing rules that allow the sharing of information such as airline passenger data or bank account details.
The app is free to download and was developed by the Phobic Trust in partnership with mobile health experts VADR, facilitated in part by a grant from the government’s Social Media Innovations Fund, which is part of the Prime Minister’s Youth Mental Health Project, and funding from First Sovereign Trust Limited.One in five New Zealanders will experience a mental health issue in their lifetime and will therefore need support to manage it, says The Phobic Trust of New Zealand Deputy CEO Vivienne Euini.
“The mood diary empowers users in a discreet way to easily record triggers, mood peaks and troughs, and gives them quick access to key phone numbers in an emergency, clinical appointments and the ability to set reminders for scheduled medication, cognitive behavioral exercises or physical exercise,” she says.“Exercise reminders are a key component of the Indoor Positioning System, as evidence suggests a strong link between increased mental wellbeing for people who exercise.”
Vivienne says that by recording valuable information daily, people give the health professionals involved in their care access to the most accurate, collated statistics about their mental state. “Professionals get the best possible overview of a client’s wellbeing and can use it to tailor specific treatment to meet the changing phases of their mental health recovery.”
She adds that quick access by phone within the app to a 24-hour support line relieves the burden of stress for people already experiencing extreme levels of anxiety.The Social Media Innovations Fund supports the development of projects that use social media technology to improve youth mental health. VADR and The Phobic Trust were grateful recipients of the fund in February this year as part of the Prime Minister’s Youth Mental Health Project.
The app offers an innovative Kiwi approach because it stimulates self-discovery and intimately engages users with their own treatment process and recovery, says Vivienne.“The mood diary app provides a quick, easy way for Kiwis to monitor and manage their mental health on a daily basis. Users gain an intimate knowledge of their own mood patterns over time and can record levels of exercise and sleep, all of which paints a clear picture for them and the people in their treatment team,” she says.
“The easy sign-in through Facebook makes the app extremely relevant and familiar to youth, who are the focus of the Social Media Innovations Fund”. The app is built upon VADR’s mHealth 360 platform which also powers the hugely popular Asthma NZ iPhone app.Vivienne says the mood diary app is a fresh and cost effective approach to tackling the daily issues of anxiety, depression and stress. She adds that in an increasingly paperless world, paper mood charts that don’t have the added value needed today, such as collating data, will slowly become a thing of the past.
Edward Snowden may be amoldering in the transit lounge of a Moscow airport, but the spy scandal he unleashed goes marching on across Europe's political and diplomatic landscape.
As a US military court on Tuesday convicted that other American security leaker — the WikiLeaks source Pfc. Bradley Manning — on espionage, computer fraud and multiple other charges, it's unclear when the fallout from Snowden's revelations about America's electronic eavesdropping will end.
It's already casting a shadow over Europe's most powerful leader — German Chancellor Angela Merkel — as well as jeopardizing trans-Atlantic agreements that Washington views as vital to the fight against terrorism, and threatening the future of the world's biggest internet companies.
Anger over the PRISM system — under which the US National Security Agency claimed "direct access" to data stored by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and other tech giants — has boosted the positions of those seeking tough new data-protection rules that would make it harder for the US authorities to get their hands on the private details of European citizens.
"I hope that PRISM has been a wake-up call," Viviane Reding, the European Union's justice commissioner, said recently. "There is no area which lies outside the law in Europe, even when issues of security are involved."
Draft EU data privacy rules drawn up by Reding's office in 2011 were watered down by politicians who argued they would harm security and indoor Tracking. But the brouhaha over Snowden has prompted a turnaround, with powerful voices now demanding more protection.
Merkel has lent her highly influential voice to the demands for tougher rules. She's publicly called for "very strict" European privacy laws that would force companies such as Google and Facebook to keep European authorities informed of whom they share data with.
A change of heart in the European Parliament now seems certain to ensure that strict limits on how internet companies share European citizens' data with foreign governments will be re-inserted into the proposed EU data-privacy legislation.
Lawmakers fearful of upsetting EU-US relations had opposed the so-called anti-FISA clause — named after the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which enables the US government to monitor international phone and email conversations. Snowden has changed their minds.
The inclusion of the clause in the final EU law could have profound implications for American tech firms. They could find themselves obliged by American legislation to share information about foreigners with government agencies at home, but facing massive EU fines for passing on such data.
The clause was removed from the bill originally drafted by Reding's office in 2011 after a bout of intense lobbying by the Obama administration. The US authorities and American internet giants are continuing to mount a major lobbying campaign to dilute the legislation.
"I've never seen anything like it, such a powerful lobbying operation," Reding told Spain's El Pais newspaper last week. "The lobbies have 10 times more people than my team, there are hundreds of lawyers' offices active on this and representatives paid by the big companies."
The Snowden scandal has pushed American lobbyists onto the back foot as European politicians call not just for tough new legislation, but also a rollback of existing rules that allow the sharing of information such as airline passenger data or bank account details.
2013年5月7日星期二
Soccer land swap could solve problems for DC and United
City officials are currently talking with DC United and developer Akridge about swapping some empty parcels of land at Buzzard Point for government-owned properties around the city, like the Reeves Center near 14th & U streets. In return, Akridge would build a new public safety campus elsewhere in the city and DC United would get the land at Buzzard Point for a stadium.
While other uses have been considered for Buzzard Point in the past, putting a new DC United stadium there would be the best use of that land, while opening up other properties around the city that are better suited for housing or commercial activities.
The current Metropolitan Police Department headquarters at Judiciary Square is outdated and needs to be replaced. It's in such poor shape that MPD employees would have to move somewhere else if the building were renovated.
Meanwhile, the Department of Fire and Emergency Medical Services and the Department of Corrections are temporarily moving from their obsolete facilities on Vermont Avenue to the Reeves Center. All three government agencies are in need of new permanent headquarters, but the catch is that there are currently no funds allocated to building them.
Slate business and economics correspondent Matt Yglesias recently argued that this site should be used for affordable housing indoor Tracking. While he's right that DC needs more housing, the Buzzard Point site doesn't make sense for housing under current market conditions. Akridge bought the land that currently sits idle as a parking lot in 2005. They hoped to build an office building but the GSA refused to lease space there, saying the 15-minute walk from the Navy Yard Metro was too far.
There was a residential construction boom when Akridge bought the land in 2005, and there's one happening now due to limited supply and high rents. If they thought that they could sell or rent new homes there, they would have already done so. The Buzzard Point site is a vacant parking lot because there simply isn't enough economic incentive to build there.
If DC United moved to Buzzard Point, the land would become more valuable, much like the Capitol Riverfront after Nationals Park opened. The District could gain tax revenue from surrounding vacant properties as they were developed. Now in private hands, the highly valuable properties at Judiciary Square and 14th and U could also raise tax revenue for the city.
This gives DC more funds that could be used for affordable housing programs. Meanwhile, the market rate housing supply would increase due to new residential buildings at 14th and U and Buzzard Point.
The increase in housing supply would help stabilize rents. Individual buildings may not do much to stabilize rising rents, since they are only a small part of the new supply needed to meet demand. However, every little bit counts.
While the District of Columbia needs more market rate and affordable housing, it can accomplish those goals without throwing around money to induce development where there's no demand for it. Perhaps that was the only option available to our forebears in the second half of the 20th century, but the present situation is different with a growing, desirable city and private investors like Akridge and DC United falling all over themselves to invest in the District of Columbia.
It appears that the District government understands the present circumstances and is negotiating to indirectly use this private investment to improve city services, increase its tax base, and increase its housing supply without having to issue debt that would affect its bond rating. That's exactly how a growing city should operate.
Still, despite those guffaws, Dickinson made his mark in more productive ways. He was first elected to a three-year term as selectmen in 1970, serving with Chet Lucy and Fran Deasy.
During his years in the House, he took leadership in crafting legislation on current-use assessment, the right to bear arms, and on protecting ski areas from unwarranted lawsuits regarding skier safety.
Asked what legislation he was most proud of, Dickinson said, "First and foremost, our Current Use Assessment Law (RSA 79-A), which is recognized as the best in the nation," he said. "Also there is our Right to Bear Arms Constitutional Amendment which I first introduced at the 1974 Constitutional Convention and states that 'all persons have the right to keep and bear arms in defense of themselves, their families, their property and the state.'
"I also drafted the skier liability policy with Stan Judge (then of Wildcat) and Phil Gravnik (then of Loon, later of Cannon and Attitash) in 1979, which is now used by ski resorts across America," Dickinson continued. "One other accomplishment that comes to mind is the Shoreline Protection Act in 1991 which protects the shores of our lakes and rivers from ill-considered and poorly planned development."
While other uses have been considered for Buzzard Point in the past, putting a new DC United stadium there would be the best use of that land, while opening up other properties around the city that are better suited for housing or commercial activities.
The current Metropolitan Police Department headquarters at Judiciary Square is outdated and needs to be replaced. It's in such poor shape that MPD employees would have to move somewhere else if the building were renovated.
Meanwhile, the Department of Fire and Emergency Medical Services and the Department of Corrections are temporarily moving from their obsolete facilities on Vermont Avenue to the Reeves Center. All three government agencies are in need of new permanent headquarters, but the catch is that there are currently no funds allocated to building them.
Slate business and economics correspondent Matt Yglesias recently argued that this site should be used for affordable housing indoor Tracking. While he's right that DC needs more housing, the Buzzard Point site doesn't make sense for housing under current market conditions. Akridge bought the land that currently sits idle as a parking lot in 2005. They hoped to build an office building but the GSA refused to lease space there, saying the 15-minute walk from the Navy Yard Metro was too far.
There was a residential construction boom when Akridge bought the land in 2005, and there's one happening now due to limited supply and high rents. If they thought that they could sell or rent new homes there, they would have already done so. The Buzzard Point site is a vacant parking lot because there simply isn't enough economic incentive to build there.
If DC United moved to Buzzard Point, the land would become more valuable, much like the Capitol Riverfront after Nationals Park opened. The District could gain tax revenue from surrounding vacant properties as they were developed. Now in private hands, the highly valuable properties at Judiciary Square and 14th and U could also raise tax revenue for the city.
This gives DC more funds that could be used for affordable housing programs. Meanwhile, the market rate housing supply would increase due to new residential buildings at 14th and U and Buzzard Point.
The increase in housing supply would help stabilize rents. Individual buildings may not do much to stabilize rising rents, since they are only a small part of the new supply needed to meet demand. However, every little bit counts.
While the District of Columbia needs more market rate and affordable housing, it can accomplish those goals without throwing around money to induce development where there's no demand for it. Perhaps that was the only option available to our forebears in the second half of the 20th century, but the present situation is different with a growing, desirable city and private investors like Akridge and DC United falling all over themselves to invest in the District of Columbia.
It appears that the District government understands the present circumstances and is negotiating to indirectly use this private investment to improve city services, increase its tax base, and increase its housing supply without having to issue debt that would affect its bond rating. That's exactly how a growing city should operate.
Still, despite those guffaws, Dickinson made his mark in more productive ways. He was first elected to a three-year term as selectmen in 1970, serving with Chet Lucy and Fran Deasy.
During his years in the House, he took leadership in crafting legislation on current-use assessment, the right to bear arms, and on protecting ski areas from unwarranted lawsuits regarding skier safety.
Asked what legislation he was most proud of, Dickinson said, "First and foremost, our Current Use Assessment Law (RSA 79-A), which is recognized as the best in the nation," he said. "Also there is our Right to Bear Arms Constitutional Amendment which I first introduced at the 1974 Constitutional Convention and states that 'all persons have the right to keep and bear arms in defense of themselves, their families, their property and the state.'
"I also drafted the skier liability policy with Stan Judge (then of Wildcat) and Phil Gravnik (then of Loon, later of Cannon and Attitash) in 1979, which is now used by ski resorts across America," Dickinson continued. "One other accomplishment that comes to mind is the Shoreline Protection Act in 1991 which protects the shores of our lakes and rivers from ill-considered and poorly planned development."
2013年5月5日星期日
Who gives a four-year-old a gun?
That line, from an Associated Press story, captures the horror a young mother in Kentucky will live with forever, the moment her 5-year-old son accidentally shot her 2-year-old daughter with a .22 caliber rifle. The boy had been playing with the gun — his own weapon, unbelievably — which had a shell in it. He killed his sister with one shot to her chest.
Yet there’s more to this horrible incident than some irreconcilable difference between rural and city attitudes toward guns. The boy’s weapon was sold by a company that markets the product under the slogan "My first rifle." They make a blue one for boys and a pink one for girls. Who says the arms industry is cynical?
I don’t care where you’re from or what "culture" you purport to be a part of: You don’t "play" with guns. And if a child is too young to understand that fact, to respect weaponry, adults shouldn’t be giving them guns as gifts. And companies have no business marketing to indoor Tracking.
This little girl’s death has seized the public’s attention, and, in the wake of the failed gun reform legislation in Congress, it offers some slim hope that Americans might come to their senses about responsible gun laws and ownership.
Some observers, of course, dismiss any notion that this death has anything to do with the thousands of other gun fatalities that happen in America each year. But that isn’t entirely accurate.
While violent crime rates in general are dropping, accidental gun deaths are holding steady; at about 500 to 600 per year. (Suicides make up nearly two-thirds of the approximate 32,000 U.S. gun deaths annually.) More than 14,000 people are injured every year by accidental gunfire.
News stories are filed daily of such accidental shootings, across race and class barriers, in rural communities and in cities. Near the neighborhood where I grew up, the body of an African American 14-year-old boy was recently found by police, his hand sticking out of a pile of dirt. After investigating, it was found that his 12-year-old brother had accidentally shot him with a neighbour’s gun — and another teen buried the body afterward in panic.
Second Amendment zealots like to talk about "law-abiding" gun owners, and about how their ownership of firearms should not be regulated in any way. But law-abiding doesn’t mean responsible. It’s time that gun owners, manufacturers and sellers were held accountable for gun safety.
For its part, the gun industry just wants more guns in the hands of more Americans, period. So its line on this tragedy is: "Accidents happen."
This has nothing to do with criticizing hunters, or rural family life. It’s about at least trying to temper the gun industry’s efforts to market a product to younger and younger audiences, unabated by respect for the lethal nature of guns.
My maternal grandfather was an excellent shot. Like most Kansas farmers, he relied on his shotgun for hunting, for protecting the chicken coops from coyotes, and on one sad afternoon to kill his favorite dog. Old Foxie had gone rabid and was running in a circle in the field.
A lot of farmers kept their shotguns loaded and at the ready in that Depression era. Grandfather never did. He had a house full of children, and he knew that children are curious.
New medicines are a central component of modern medical care, treating illness effectively, providing more comfortable treatment regimes, extending life and reducing disability, and sometimes offering new treatment options where none previously existed. These benefits, however, come with the potential for harm, which is why governments around the world regulate access to new medicines.
Unfortunately for Canadians, the federal government takes an approach that is slower than others, unnecessarily costly for taxpayers, and is ultimately of questionable benefit to Canadians. Canadian approvals for market access to new drugs take longer than similar approvals in both Europe (under the European Medicines Agency) and the U.S. (under the FDA). Specifically, the median approval time was longer in Canada than in the other jurisdictions in four of the past five years, with median approval times differing by an average of 63 days and 49 days respectively over that period.
In fact, this is likely an underestimate of the drug approval lag Canadians endure. Drugs may not be submitted to Health Canada for approval at the same time as they are submitted to regulatory agencies in Europe and the U.S., or even in the same year. A recent study of access to new cancer drugs found that drugs were submitted to Canadian regulators for approval much later than they were submitted to U.S. or European regulators. The data used in that study show a median difference of 119 and 96 days respectively and with approximately one quarter of submissions in both cases coming more than six months later.
Numerous studies show that pharmaceutical spending and use of pharmaceuticals generally are related to reduced mortality, increased longevity, and decreased disability, none of which should be surprising to survivors of critical illness or those whose chronic or potentially fatal condition is being controlled through prescriptions.
Prof. Frank Lichtenberg of Columbia University took this one step further and found that using newer drugs rather than older ones increased prescription costs by $18 per patient in the U.S. but reduced non-drug health spending (primarily hospital and physician spending) by $129. Put differently, the benefits of new drugs come at increased cost but ultimately may be a more cost effective approach than sticking with older (and less expensive) drugs.
For example, there can be little doubt that later approvals in Canada afford regulators the time to observe post-market experiences in other nations before Canadians are permitted access to new drugs. This may allow regulators to deny market access to those drugs that are found to be associated with serious negative events.
Good drug policy is all about balance. In this case, balancing the rights of Canadians to access (and benefit) from new medicines against the potential for harm associated with them. There is a straightforward solution Canada might pursue that will strike a better balance between these competing factors than the one we have today.
Yet there’s more to this horrible incident than some irreconcilable difference between rural and city attitudes toward guns. The boy’s weapon was sold by a company that markets the product under the slogan "My first rifle." They make a blue one for boys and a pink one for girls. Who says the arms industry is cynical?
I don’t care where you’re from or what "culture" you purport to be a part of: You don’t "play" with guns. And if a child is too young to understand that fact, to respect weaponry, adults shouldn’t be giving them guns as gifts. And companies have no business marketing to indoor Tracking.
This little girl’s death has seized the public’s attention, and, in the wake of the failed gun reform legislation in Congress, it offers some slim hope that Americans might come to their senses about responsible gun laws and ownership.
Some observers, of course, dismiss any notion that this death has anything to do with the thousands of other gun fatalities that happen in America each year. But that isn’t entirely accurate.
While violent crime rates in general are dropping, accidental gun deaths are holding steady; at about 500 to 600 per year. (Suicides make up nearly two-thirds of the approximate 32,000 U.S. gun deaths annually.) More than 14,000 people are injured every year by accidental gunfire.
News stories are filed daily of such accidental shootings, across race and class barriers, in rural communities and in cities. Near the neighborhood where I grew up, the body of an African American 14-year-old boy was recently found by police, his hand sticking out of a pile of dirt. After investigating, it was found that his 12-year-old brother had accidentally shot him with a neighbour’s gun — and another teen buried the body afterward in panic.
Second Amendment zealots like to talk about "law-abiding" gun owners, and about how their ownership of firearms should not be regulated in any way. But law-abiding doesn’t mean responsible. It’s time that gun owners, manufacturers and sellers were held accountable for gun safety.
For its part, the gun industry just wants more guns in the hands of more Americans, period. So its line on this tragedy is: "Accidents happen."
This has nothing to do with criticizing hunters, or rural family life. It’s about at least trying to temper the gun industry’s efforts to market a product to younger and younger audiences, unabated by respect for the lethal nature of guns.
My maternal grandfather was an excellent shot. Like most Kansas farmers, he relied on his shotgun for hunting, for protecting the chicken coops from coyotes, and on one sad afternoon to kill his favorite dog. Old Foxie had gone rabid and was running in a circle in the field.
A lot of farmers kept their shotguns loaded and at the ready in that Depression era. Grandfather never did. He had a house full of children, and he knew that children are curious.
New medicines are a central component of modern medical care, treating illness effectively, providing more comfortable treatment regimes, extending life and reducing disability, and sometimes offering new treatment options where none previously existed. These benefits, however, come with the potential for harm, which is why governments around the world regulate access to new medicines.
Unfortunately for Canadians, the federal government takes an approach that is slower than others, unnecessarily costly for taxpayers, and is ultimately of questionable benefit to Canadians. Canadian approvals for market access to new drugs take longer than similar approvals in both Europe (under the European Medicines Agency) and the U.S. (under the FDA). Specifically, the median approval time was longer in Canada than in the other jurisdictions in four of the past five years, with median approval times differing by an average of 63 days and 49 days respectively over that period.
In fact, this is likely an underestimate of the drug approval lag Canadians endure. Drugs may not be submitted to Health Canada for approval at the same time as they are submitted to regulatory agencies in Europe and the U.S., or even in the same year. A recent study of access to new cancer drugs found that drugs were submitted to Canadian regulators for approval much later than they were submitted to U.S. or European regulators. The data used in that study show a median difference of 119 and 96 days respectively and with approximately one quarter of submissions in both cases coming more than six months later.
Numerous studies show that pharmaceutical spending and use of pharmaceuticals generally are related to reduced mortality, increased longevity, and decreased disability, none of which should be surprising to survivors of critical illness or those whose chronic or potentially fatal condition is being controlled through prescriptions.
Prof. Frank Lichtenberg of Columbia University took this one step further and found that using newer drugs rather than older ones increased prescription costs by $18 per patient in the U.S. but reduced non-drug health spending (primarily hospital and physician spending) by $129. Put differently, the benefits of new drugs come at increased cost but ultimately may be a more cost effective approach than sticking with older (and less expensive) drugs.
For example, there can be little doubt that later approvals in Canada afford regulators the time to observe post-market experiences in other nations before Canadians are permitted access to new drugs. This may allow regulators to deny market access to those drugs that are found to be associated with serious negative events.
Good drug policy is all about balance. In this case, balancing the rights of Canadians to access (and benefit) from new medicines against the potential for harm associated with them. There is a straightforward solution Canada might pursue that will strike a better balance between these competing factors than the one we have today.
2013年2月16日星期六
Housing that fits in
"Infill housing" is one of those phrases that planning geeks love, shorthand for any residential development that doesn't include cul de sacs on land where crops were farmed last year.
But all it takes to grasp the inadequacy of the term is to visit two recent additions to the San Francisco landscape. One is an eight-story stack of 14 condominiums slid into a narrow lot across from the Giants' ballpark. The other fills two blocks along a streetcar line in a sleepy commercial district, with a grocery store as well as 173 apartments.
They have absolutely nothing in common - except the understanding that infill works best when it's in synch with neighborhood needs, not some formula imposed from above.
The more ambitious of the pair is dubbed Avalon Ocean Avenue: Two long structures of four and five stories stand along a streetcar line on Ocean at Brighton Avenue. It's next to the main campus of City College of San Francisco, at the edge of a retail strip that has struggled for years.
This is a part of the city that few outsiders visit, even though it is well-served by Muni and a short walk from the Balboa Park BART Station. The potential for additional density in 2002 caught the eye of city planners who identified an auto parts store there as the ideal spot for something that would "add to the creation of a cohesive streetwall" and "contribute substantially to the revitalization of this area."
In other words, it would need to fit in but also provide a jolt. And that's what we now have, courtesy of an energetic design by Oakland's Pyatok Architects for AvalonBay Communities, a large national developer.
Capitalizing on scale
There's no effort to hide what exists, two stocky blocks shaped to fit within a 55-foot height limit. Instead, the architects take advantage of the scale by treating each structure as a long cube with moving rectangular parts.
The eastern building, for instance, starts with white stucco as the skin for the basic box. But a two-story portion clad in blue cement board juts out 4 feet, while a three-story section close by wears brick-red tile and is recessed 4 feet from the white frame. Vertical bays are slit by deep windows. The base is a generous 20 feet to make room for Whole Foods, and has a skin of wooden slats to catch the eye.
The colorful collage serves as a transition from the bulk of City College to such offhand wonders as the jaunty neon Beep's Burgers sign across the way. "It's about movement along the street, not a single design," said Pyatok's Marcial Chao. "We wanted to introduce a sense of rhythm without repeating things over and over."
A much different task faced the firm Gould Evans, architects of the condo building at 750 Second St. developed by Manchester Capital.
The 50-foot-wide site is at the edge of the South End Historic District, an area defined by early 20th century industrial structures, some of brick and some of concrete. The south-facing property line is shared with the one-story building that houses Momo's restaurant, which means wide-open views of AT&T Park and the bay, but also an exposed structural wall.
The architects accepted that their building would be part of a larger tapestry where the main threads already exist. Gould Evans responded with a sophisticated extension of the underlying patterns. The structural wall that faces the ballpark wears a rain-screen of red ceramic tiles, while its counterpart to the north is covered by aluminum panels that update the three-story concrete structure next door. Facing the street, the masonry weaves past large metal windows divided by small panes of glass, modern details with a blue-collar spin.
The case could be made that these projects are exercises in urbanism more than architecture, but such a distinction would be unfair.
Here's why: when new buildings are added to a settled city, smarts often count for more than style. Avalon Ocean Avenue is intended as a catalyst, where enticing large-scale design moves signal the addition of residents and retail to an area that can benefit from each. At 750 Second, the transformation has already occurred; this is one more piece in the puzzle, with a level of quality that ups the ante for what comes next.
For all the planning virtues of infill housing, the real-life result is mixed. Look around the Bay Area and you see too many "transit villages" that are business deals wrapped in period dress. The trick is to grow our communities in a way that makes them more enticing. Each of these projects pulls off that deceptively difficult feat.
Set on 5.15 wooded and open acres provides a backdrop for this meticulously maintained custom Colonial in the township. Offering approximately 3,500 square feet of living space, the open 11-room layout provides four bedrooms and two-and-one-half baths. Bob and Pamela Beatty of Weichert Realtors in Clinton are marketing it at $575,000.
Highlights of the floor plan include custom paint colors, generously-dimensioned rooms, gleaming hardwood floors, high ceilings and neutral décor. Recent updates such as a newly paved driveway, a newer gourmet kitchen, new wall-to-wall carpeting on the second story and new recessed lighting show pride of ownership. The scenic acreage presents a large multi-level paverstone patio in the private rear yard, paverstone front walkways, professionally landscaped grounds, colorful perennials and a storage shed.
The home was extensively renovated in 2010 and is in move-in condition. Sunlight streams into the two-story entrance foyer from a large sunburst window set high above the front door. The foyer features lustrous hardwood flooring set on the diagonal, elegant picture frame moldings and a turned staircase with a railed overlook from the second floor. The oversized dining room, has hardwood floors with ornamental inlays, wainscoting, crown moldings and a large bow window. Across the foyer, the private study features crown moldings, hardwood floors and recessed lights.
The great room, kitchen and dining area combine as a very large gathering area at the rear of the home. The focal point in the great room is a floor-to-ceiling raised-hearth brick fireplace, flanked by tall circle-top windows. The recently updated breakfast room and kitchen have contains a center island with a breakfast bar, custom cherry cabinets with some glass-door upper cabinets, Corian counters, a tile backsplash, plus pendant and recessed lights. Stainless-steel appliances include a five-burner Bosch cooktop, double wall ovens, a built-in wine cooler and a bottom-drawer refrigerator/freezer. The 300 square-foot breakfast room has sliding French doors to the rear paver patio. Completing the main floor is a laundry room, an updated powder room and access to the oversized three-car garage with automatic openers.
But all it takes to grasp the inadequacy of the term is to visit two recent additions to the San Francisco landscape. One is an eight-story stack of 14 condominiums slid into a narrow lot across from the Giants' ballpark. The other fills two blocks along a streetcar line in a sleepy commercial district, with a grocery store as well as 173 apartments.
They have absolutely nothing in common - except the understanding that infill works best when it's in synch with neighborhood needs, not some formula imposed from above.
The more ambitious of the pair is dubbed Avalon Ocean Avenue: Two long structures of four and five stories stand along a streetcar line on Ocean at Brighton Avenue. It's next to the main campus of City College of San Francisco, at the edge of a retail strip that has struggled for years.
This is a part of the city that few outsiders visit, even though it is well-served by Muni and a short walk from the Balboa Park BART Station. The potential for additional density in 2002 caught the eye of city planners who identified an auto parts store there as the ideal spot for something that would "add to the creation of a cohesive streetwall" and "contribute substantially to the revitalization of this area."
In other words, it would need to fit in but also provide a jolt. And that's what we now have, courtesy of an energetic design by Oakland's Pyatok Architects for AvalonBay Communities, a large national developer.
Capitalizing on scale
There's no effort to hide what exists, two stocky blocks shaped to fit within a 55-foot height limit. Instead, the architects take advantage of the scale by treating each structure as a long cube with moving rectangular parts.
The eastern building, for instance, starts with white stucco as the skin for the basic box. But a two-story portion clad in blue cement board juts out 4 feet, while a three-story section close by wears brick-red tile and is recessed 4 feet from the white frame. Vertical bays are slit by deep windows. The base is a generous 20 feet to make room for Whole Foods, and has a skin of wooden slats to catch the eye.
The colorful collage serves as a transition from the bulk of City College to such offhand wonders as the jaunty neon Beep's Burgers sign across the way. "It's about movement along the street, not a single design," said Pyatok's Marcial Chao. "We wanted to introduce a sense of rhythm without repeating things over and over."
A much different task faced the firm Gould Evans, architects of the condo building at 750 Second St. developed by Manchester Capital.
The 50-foot-wide site is at the edge of the South End Historic District, an area defined by early 20th century industrial structures, some of brick and some of concrete. The south-facing property line is shared with the one-story building that houses Momo's restaurant, which means wide-open views of AT&T Park and the bay, but also an exposed structural wall.
The architects accepted that their building would be part of a larger tapestry where the main threads already exist. Gould Evans responded with a sophisticated extension of the underlying patterns. The structural wall that faces the ballpark wears a rain-screen of red ceramic tiles, while its counterpart to the north is covered by aluminum panels that update the three-story concrete structure next door. Facing the street, the masonry weaves past large metal windows divided by small panes of glass, modern details with a blue-collar spin.
The case could be made that these projects are exercises in urbanism more than architecture, but such a distinction would be unfair.
Here's why: when new buildings are added to a settled city, smarts often count for more than style. Avalon Ocean Avenue is intended as a catalyst, where enticing large-scale design moves signal the addition of residents and retail to an area that can benefit from each. At 750 Second, the transformation has already occurred; this is one more piece in the puzzle, with a level of quality that ups the ante for what comes next.
For all the planning virtues of infill housing, the real-life result is mixed. Look around the Bay Area and you see too many "transit villages" that are business deals wrapped in period dress. The trick is to grow our communities in a way that makes them more enticing. Each of these projects pulls off that deceptively difficult feat.
Set on 5.15 wooded and open acres provides a backdrop for this meticulously maintained custom Colonial in the township. Offering approximately 3,500 square feet of living space, the open 11-room layout provides four bedrooms and two-and-one-half baths. Bob and Pamela Beatty of Weichert Realtors in Clinton are marketing it at $575,000.
Highlights of the floor plan include custom paint colors, generously-dimensioned rooms, gleaming hardwood floors, high ceilings and neutral décor. Recent updates such as a newly paved driveway, a newer gourmet kitchen, new wall-to-wall carpeting on the second story and new recessed lighting show pride of ownership. The scenic acreage presents a large multi-level paverstone patio in the private rear yard, paverstone front walkways, professionally landscaped grounds, colorful perennials and a storage shed.
The home was extensively renovated in 2010 and is in move-in condition. Sunlight streams into the two-story entrance foyer from a large sunburst window set high above the front door. The foyer features lustrous hardwood flooring set on the diagonal, elegant picture frame moldings and a turned staircase with a railed overlook from the second floor. The oversized dining room, has hardwood floors with ornamental inlays, wainscoting, crown moldings and a large bow window. Across the foyer, the private study features crown moldings, hardwood floors and recessed lights.
The great room, kitchen and dining area combine as a very large gathering area at the rear of the home. The focal point in the great room is a floor-to-ceiling raised-hearth brick fireplace, flanked by tall circle-top windows. The recently updated breakfast room and kitchen have contains a center island with a breakfast bar, custom cherry cabinets with some glass-door upper cabinets, Corian counters, a tile backsplash, plus pendant and recessed lights. Stainless-steel appliances include a five-burner Bosch cooktop, double wall ovens, a built-in wine cooler and a bottom-drawer refrigerator/freezer. The 300 square-foot breakfast room has sliding French doors to the rear paver patio. Completing the main floor is a laundry room, an updated powder room and access to the oversized three-car garage with automatic openers.
2013年2月3日星期日
Pay Taxes On Your Super Bowl XLVII Winnings?
It comes as no surprise to anyone (except maybe eternal optimist Jeff Lurie) that the Eagles aren’t in the Super Bowl this year. And my other “go to” teams didn’t make it either. As a result, I have no real allegiance to either of the teams in the Super Bowl this year, though I do have a favorite: I’m in the 49ers camp because of an odd allegiance for Pennsylvania native Joe Montana.
My kids, however, are rooting for the Ravens. That has everything to do with the fact that they love Harry Potter and were, until somewhat recently, fairly convinced that the team was called the Voldemort Ravens.
It’s slated to be a record-breaking day in Vegas. More than $90 million will be legally gambled away on the game in Sin City. Many more million will be wagered in garages, office pools and bars across the country. This year, you can bet on everything from the winning team to who will score first and which Harbaugh brother – or both – will sport a cap during the game.
What does all of this mean come tax time? The law requires you to report your gambling winnings no matter what the amount – or whether it’s a legal bet. There’s no exception for illegal wagers: income is income so far as the Internal Revenue Service is concerned. Casual gamblers – that means most taxpayers – must report their winnings on line 21 (other income) of a federal form 1040; the form 1040-EZ isn’t equipped to handle gambling winnings or the forms W-2G.
But what if you lose? Unfortunately, while you must claim all gambling winnings on your return, you can only deduct your losses if you itemize your deductions on a Schedule A. If you do not file a Schedule A, you cannot deduct your gambling losses, no matter how much you lose. Thankfully, losses are considered a miscellaneous deduction and not subject to the 2% limit.
If you do itemize your deductions, you must be able to document your losses. You need to substantiate the amount of the loss, the date of the loss and the name and location of the gambling establishment. Be smart and keep a journal of your gambling wins and losses: chances are, your buddies at the office aren’t going to be in the mood to issue you a form 1099-G. Ditto for your extra large bookie in the bar corner.
What if you lose more than you win? Sadly, you’re out of luck. Not only does it stink to keep losing, you cannot deduct more in losses than you report in winnings. If this happens more than you care to admit, consider getting some help. You can start by calling 1800-GAMBLER.
Assuming that you just do it occasionally, playing the odds whether at the casino or as part of the office pool can be fun. Don’t be fooled, however: there are also real tax and financial consequences (and depending on the nature of the bets, also legal) to making wagers. Make sure you understand how bets, no matter how big or small, may affect you. If you can’t stand the heat, just hang out by the chip bowl.
Outgoing Defense Secretary Leon Panetta today became the highest-ranking Obama administration official to admit that the U.S. used torture to help find Osama Bin Laden.
Panetta was responding to a question on the movie “Zero Dark Thirty,” which depicts prisoners being waterboarded by the US in an effort to find out where bin Laden’s is hiding.
“The movie seems to say, to indicate that enhanced interrogation techniques or torture was used to get information to get Bin Laden. Is that true?” asked NBC’s Chuck Todd on “Meet the Press.”
“Yes, some of it came from some of the tactics that were used at that time, interrogation tactics that were used,” Panetta responded.
“The real story was that in order to put the puzzle of intelligence together that led us to Bin Laden, there were a lot of pieces out there that were a part of that puzzle,” Panetta added.
But the former CIA Director dismissed the tactics as playing a key role as the movie depicts in the location of Bin Laden, who was shot and killed in May 2011 by Navy SEALS while he was hiding in a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
“The fact is we put together most of that intelligence without having to resort to that,” Panetta said. “I think we would’ve gotten Bin Laden without that.”
Panetta’s stance is different from that of Bush administration officials, who have called the “enhanced interrogation” methods that were used under them critical to the operation.
Meanwhile, Panetta blamed the nation’s intelligence community for the failure to get the military to Benghazi on Sept. 11 after the consulate was attacked.
My kids, however, are rooting for the Ravens. That has everything to do with the fact that they love Harry Potter and were, until somewhat recently, fairly convinced that the team was called the Voldemort Ravens.
It’s slated to be a record-breaking day in Vegas. More than $90 million will be legally gambled away on the game in Sin City. Many more million will be wagered in garages, office pools and bars across the country. This year, you can bet on everything from the winning team to who will score first and which Harbaugh brother – or both – will sport a cap during the game.
What does all of this mean come tax time? The law requires you to report your gambling winnings no matter what the amount – or whether it’s a legal bet. There’s no exception for illegal wagers: income is income so far as the Internal Revenue Service is concerned. Casual gamblers – that means most taxpayers – must report their winnings on line 21 (other income) of a federal form 1040; the form 1040-EZ isn’t equipped to handle gambling winnings or the forms W-2G.
But what if you lose? Unfortunately, while you must claim all gambling winnings on your return, you can only deduct your losses if you itemize your deductions on a Schedule A. If you do not file a Schedule A, you cannot deduct your gambling losses, no matter how much you lose. Thankfully, losses are considered a miscellaneous deduction and not subject to the 2% limit.
If you do itemize your deductions, you must be able to document your losses. You need to substantiate the amount of the loss, the date of the loss and the name and location of the gambling establishment. Be smart and keep a journal of your gambling wins and losses: chances are, your buddies at the office aren’t going to be in the mood to issue you a form 1099-G. Ditto for your extra large bookie in the bar corner.
What if you lose more than you win? Sadly, you’re out of luck. Not only does it stink to keep losing, you cannot deduct more in losses than you report in winnings. If this happens more than you care to admit, consider getting some help. You can start by calling 1800-GAMBLER.
Assuming that you just do it occasionally, playing the odds whether at the casino or as part of the office pool can be fun. Don’t be fooled, however: there are also real tax and financial consequences (and depending on the nature of the bets, also legal) to making wagers. Make sure you understand how bets, no matter how big or small, may affect you. If you can’t stand the heat, just hang out by the chip bowl.
Outgoing Defense Secretary Leon Panetta today became the highest-ranking Obama administration official to admit that the U.S. used torture to help find Osama Bin Laden.
Panetta was responding to a question on the movie “Zero Dark Thirty,” which depicts prisoners being waterboarded by the US in an effort to find out where bin Laden’s is hiding.
“The movie seems to say, to indicate that enhanced interrogation techniques or torture was used to get information to get Bin Laden. Is that true?” asked NBC’s Chuck Todd on “Meet the Press.”
“Yes, some of it came from some of the tactics that were used at that time, interrogation tactics that were used,” Panetta responded.
“The real story was that in order to put the puzzle of intelligence together that led us to Bin Laden, there were a lot of pieces out there that were a part of that puzzle,” Panetta added.
But the former CIA Director dismissed the tactics as playing a key role as the movie depicts in the location of Bin Laden, who was shot and killed in May 2011 by Navy SEALS while he was hiding in a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
“The fact is we put together most of that intelligence without having to resort to that,” Panetta said. “I think we would’ve gotten Bin Laden without that.”
Panetta’s stance is different from that of Bush administration officials, who have called the “enhanced interrogation” methods that were used under them critical to the operation.
Meanwhile, Panetta blamed the nation’s intelligence community for the failure to get the military to Benghazi on Sept. 11 after the consulate was attacked.
2013年1月15日星期二
Kenya’s new kid steals show in Spanish race
Reigning 3,000metres SC world junior champion, Conseslus Kipruto and Ethiopia’s Gelete Burka stole limelight with victories at the 70th Cross International Juan Muguerza in Elgoibar on Sunday.
Competing under tough weather, the winners’ task included braving heavy rainfall during the second half of the men’s race on ground that had absorbed relentless rain the previous night.
The men’s 10.8km tussle had been billed as a thrilling encounter among four top Kenyans in the guise of the three-time winner Leonard Komon, last year’s 10,000m world leader Emmanuel Bett, 2011 World cross-country bronze medalist Vincent Chepkok and Conseslus Kipruto.
Kipruto was an impressive winner of the IAAF World Junior Championships in Barcelona last year with a championship record of 8:06.10 in the 3,000m SC.
With fears of the course being muddy, the race didn’t begin particularly fast with Italy’s Andrea Sanguinetti and Spain’s 2008 World indoor 1500m bronze medalist Juan Carlos Higuero setting the early pace.
At the third kilometer covered in 9:15, eight men still remained in the leading group, among them four Kenyans, led by the current 10 miles World record holder Leonard Komon and another group commanded by four Spaniards, who included former European cross-country silver medalist Ayad Lamdassem, Higuero, European Cross eighth-place finisher Javier Guerra and Iván Fernández.
Afterwards, Kipruto took command of the pace for the first time but he was soon relegated to second position as the 2008 World Cross silver medalist Komon regained the leadership.
As a result of his relentless pace, Guerra and Higuero lost ground and the slim chance of victory halfway while Lamdassem struggled at the back of the pack.
The penultimate 2100m loop didn’t produce any major changes as Kipruto and Komon took turns at the front with Bett and Chepkok positioning themselves just behind them with ferocious rain beginning to fall.
By the bell Komon, Bett and Kipruto ran in a single file to build a 30-metre margin on Chepkok and Lamdassem.
Kipruto, 18-years old, regained the lead with 1200m remaining and opened up a sizeable gap on Bett within the space of 200m while Komon was alone in third.
Conditions became more grueling as the downpour intensified and a spot of drama took place when the eventual winner Kipruto fell into the mud just 400m from the finish line.
Early in the morning, not long after the sun rises above the Zambian plains, they map out their plan of attack. A detailed strategy is needed. After all, they are on the trail of a killer.
Dressed in orange t-shirts, riding on bicycles, motorcycles, in cars, trucks and occasionally in ox carts, they fan out across their target or ‘catchment’ areas. They travel along paved roads, dirt tracks, through fields and villages, and eventually go door-to-door on the hunt for Plasmodium falciparum – the mosquito-borne parasite that kills hundreds of thousands of people every year in sub-Saharan Africa, most of them children under five. A child dies from malaria every 30 seconds, according to the United Nations children's agency, UNICEF.
"What's the alternative?" to elimination, asks Duncan Earle, director of MACEPA. "There are those who think we can tread water, but it's an unending investment, because if you don't eliminate it then you have to continue preventing, controlling and treating. So we have to go for it. We have done it in 111 countries around the world, why not another 90?"
The World Health Organisation (WHO) in December said in its World Malaria Report 2012 that a "concerted effort by endemic countries, donors and global malaria partners" had led to strengthened malaria control around the world.
While this strategy now includes testing and treatment in certain areas as transmission drops, its primary tools have been the distribution of insecticide-treated bed nets and indoor residual spraying of insecticide. As a result of all these efforts, malaria transmission rates have dropped to near zero in some parts of Zambia. Large-scale distribution of free bed nets has had a particularly significant impact.
"The campaign for the past five to eight years has been trying to get bed nets out and get a high level of usage of those bed nets to understand what that single intervention could do in terms of a key health outcome, which is childhood deaths", explains MACEPA's veteran malariologist Carlos (Kent) Campbell. "To our tremendous amazement, the impact has been even greater than we could have imagined."
Campbell says there was a 29% reduction in all childhood deaths within the first two years. "To put that in perspective: there's nothing matching that, which is reflective of how much death malaria caused in Zambia and how powerful bed nets are to decrease transmission.”
Since 2000, childhood deaths from malaria have dropped by 20% in other African nations using the SUFI approach, according to MACEPA. An estimated 300,000 children were saved from dying from malaria in 2010 alone, it said.
The latest step in Zambia's programme includes the Test and Treat campaign that began in December 2011 in certain districts of the country. Malaria trackers visit communities in those districts three times a year to conduct malaria tests, collect information, administer medication and deliver bed nets.
But the trackers are up against major challenges, including transportation. "Some of these areas are pretty rural, and even if you try to look for vehicles locally it is very difficult", says Kafula Silumbe, monitoring and evaluation officer with MACEPA/PATH in Zambia. "You find they have ox carts and things like that, and even when you get a vehicle sometimes it is not a vehicle that can go to some of these terrains...and you either have to walk or use a bicycle."
And once the malaria trackers do reach a community, finding the people they need to test or treat for the infection can be difficult as well.
"This is an area that has polygamous marriages, and household size can be anything from three people to 35 people", says Silumbe. "So you get to the household, you have to test each and every one of them. You may find that a quarter of them are positive for malaria. So you have to make sure that you just treat everyone."
But, he says, sometimes many of the people aren't home. The children could be at school and the parents might be out in the fields. In that case, the malaria trackers will have to return at a different time when more people are likely to be home.
Competing under tough weather, the winners’ task included braving heavy rainfall during the second half of the men’s race on ground that had absorbed relentless rain the previous night.
The men’s 10.8km tussle had been billed as a thrilling encounter among four top Kenyans in the guise of the three-time winner Leonard Komon, last year’s 10,000m world leader Emmanuel Bett, 2011 World cross-country bronze medalist Vincent Chepkok and Conseslus Kipruto.
Kipruto was an impressive winner of the IAAF World Junior Championships in Barcelona last year with a championship record of 8:06.10 in the 3,000m SC.
With fears of the course being muddy, the race didn’t begin particularly fast with Italy’s Andrea Sanguinetti and Spain’s 2008 World indoor 1500m bronze medalist Juan Carlos Higuero setting the early pace.
At the third kilometer covered in 9:15, eight men still remained in the leading group, among them four Kenyans, led by the current 10 miles World record holder Leonard Komon and another group commanded by four Spaniards, who included former European cross-country silver medalist Ayad Lamdassem, Higuero, European Cross eighth-place finisher Javier Guerra and Iván Fernández.
Afterwards, Kipruto took command of the pace for the first time but he was soon relegated to second position as the 2008 World Cross silver medalist Komon regained the leadership.
As a result of his relentless pace, Guerra and Higuero lost ground and the slim chance of victory halfway while Lamdassem struggled at the back of the pack.
The penultimate 2100m loop didn’t produce any major changes as Kipruto and Komon took turns at the front with Bett and Chepkok positioning themselves just behind them with ferocious rain beginning to fall.
By the bell Komon, Bett and Kipruto ran in a single file to build a 30-metre margin on Chepkok and Lamdassem.
Kipruto, 18-years old, regained the lead with 1200m remaining and opened up a sizeable gap on Bett within the space of 200m while Komon was alone in third.
Conditions became more grueling as the downpour intensified and a spot of drama took place when the eventual winner Kipruto fell into the mud just 400m from the finish line.
Early in the morning, not long after the sun rises above the Zambian plains, they map out their plan of attack. A detailed strategy is needed. After all, they are on the trail of a killer.
Dressed in orange t-shirts, riding on bicycles, motorcycles, in cars, trucks and occasionally in ox carts, they fan out across their target or ‘catchment’ areas. They travel along paved roads, dirt tracks, through fields and villages, and eventually go door-to-door on the hunt for Plasmodium falciparum – the mosquito-borne parasite that kills hundreds of thousands of people every year in sub-Saharan Africa, most of them children under five. A child dies from malaria every 30 seconds, according to the United Nations children's agency, UNICEF.
"What's the alternative?" to elimination, asks Duncan Earle, director of MACEPA. "There are those who think we can tread water, but it's an unending investment, because if you don't eliminate it then you have to continue preventing, controlling and treating. So we have to go for it. We have done it in 111 countries around the world, why not another 90?"
The World Health Organisation (WHO) in December said in its World Malaria Report 2012 that a "concerted effort by endemic countries, donors and global malaria partners" had led to strengthened malaria control around the world.
While this strategy now includes testing and treatment in certain areas as transmission drops, its primary tools have been the distribution of insecticide-treated bed nets and indoor residual spraying of insecticide. As a result of all these efforts, malaria transmission rates have dropped to near zero in some parts of Zambia. Large-scale distribution of free bed nets has had a particularly significant impact.
"The campaign for the past five to eight years has been trying to get bed nets out and get a high level of usage of those bed nets to understand what that single intervention could do in terms of a key health outcome, which is childhood deaths", explains MACEPA's veteran malariologist Carlos (Kent) Campbell. "To our tremendous amazement, the impact has been even greater than we could have imagined."
Campbell says there was a 29% reduction in all childhood deaths within the first two years. "To put that in perspective: there's nothing matching that, which is reflective of how much death malaria caused in Zambia and how powerful bed nets are to decrease transmission.”
Since 2000, childhood deaths from malaria have dropped by 20% in other African nations using the SUFI approach, according to MACEPA. An estimated 300,000 children were saved from dying from malaria in 2010 alone, it said.
The latest step in Zambia's programme includes the Test and Treat campaign that began in December 2011 in certain districts of the country. Malaria trackers visit communities in those districts three times a year to conduct malaria tests, collect information, administer medication and deliver bed nets.
But the trackers are up against major challenges, including transportation. "Some of these areas are pretty rural, and even if you try to look for vehicles locally it is very difficult", says Kafula Silumbe, monitoring and evaluation officer with MACEPA/PATH in Zambia. "You find they have ox carts and things like that, and even when you get a vehicle sometimes it is not a vehicle that can go to some of these terrains...and you either have to walk or use a bicycle."
And once the malaria trackers do reach a community, finding the people they need to test or treat for the infection can be difficult as well.
"This is an area that has polygamous marriages, and household size can be anything from three people to 35 people", says Silumbe. "So you get to the household, you have to test each and every one of them. You may find that a quarter of them are positive for malaria. So you have to make sure that you just treat everyone."
But, he says, sometimes many of the people aren't home. The children could be at school and the parents might be out in the fields. In that case, the malaria trackers will have to return at a different time when more people are likely to be home.
2013年1月6日星期日
The crafty and the curious
Outside the Piecemakers Country Store in Costa Mesa Saturday, Diane Calderwood was surrounded by gourds — cat gourds, sun gourds, tassel gourds.
She'd made them herself — painting some to resemble felines or flattening and carving others to look like celestial bodies.
"It's more of a utilitarian plant like cotton would be," she said. "They do eat it but it's very bitter. Most of the time in history it's been used for instruments and dishes and all kinds of artwork and things like that."
About 30 teachers exhibited their crafts and offered signups for classes taught at the store throughout the year.
The location on Adams Avenue in Mesa Verde is home to the Piecemakers, a group of Christians who live communally at the store where they sell homemade wares. They also invite teachers outside their community to exhibit and lead classes.
"Piecemakers has always been preserving the hand crafts from generations ago," said Piecemaker Jean Moller, an organizer of the event.
For more than 20 years, the annual open house has given customers a chance to peek into what skills they can learn at the Piecemakers' store, ranging from quilting to dollmaking, sewing, jewelry design and more, Moller said.
In a tent outside the store, Jen Kosman's edible offerings were far from the gourds' bitterness.
Open house attendees signed up for her baking and cooking classes, whether they wanted to learn pizza from scratch, cinnamon rolls or the comprehensive brunch class that includes quiches and a loaf of bread stuffed with eggs.
ne afternoon last fall, Armand Neukermans, a tall engineer with a sweep of silver bangs, flipped on a noisy pump in the back corner of a Sunnyvale lab. Within moments, a fine mist emerged from a tiny nozzle, a haze of salt water under high pressure and heat.
It didn't look like much. But this seemingly simple vapor carries a lot of hope - and inspires a lot of fear. If Neukermans' team of researchers can fine-tune the mechanism to spray just the right size and quantity of salt particles into the sky, scientists might be able to make coastal clouds more reflective.
The hope is that by doing so, humankind could send more heat and light back into space, wielding clouds as shields against climate change.
The fear, at least the one cited most often, is that altering the atmosphere this way could also unleash dangerous side effects.
"Ten years ago, people would have said this is totally wacky," Neukermans said. "But it could give us some time if global warming really becomes catastrophic."
It's now beyond debate that the globe is getting hotter. The ice caps are melting, sea levels are rising, and extreme weather events like droughts, floods and hurricanes are increasing.
Even if public policymakers manage to significantly curtail future fossil-fuel emissions - the carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that the vast majority of climate scientists blame for climate change - the hundreds of gigatons we've already pumped into the atmosphere have probably locked in a series of life-altering consequences.
Neukermans and his colleagues are among an unofficial cadre of Bay Area scientists, technologists, designers and engineers who have begun the hard work of preparing for a warmer world. They're exploring unconventional concepts that might help us live with the consequences - or prevent them from spinning out of control.
It's not clear yet if any will work, or find the support to move off the drawing board. All are sure to be costly and controversial.
But as the threat of global warming rises, it and other "geoengineering" strategies have shifted from the scientific fringes into mainstream debate. Geoengineering is a broad category for techniques that could remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere or reflect away more heat, including things as innocuous as painting roofs white and as controversial as spraying sulfate particles into the stratosphere.
The basic idea behind cloud brightening is to equip ships with mechanisms like the ones Neukermans' team is designing and aim them at the relatively low-lying clouds that hug the western coasts of continents. It would probably require hundreds - if not thousands - of vessels (see related story).
Few are eager to tweak a system as complicated, sensitive and interconnected as the climate. But many scientists worry that nations simply won't cut fossil-fuel emissions enough to prevent rising temperatures from unleashing humanitarian and ecological calamities.
"If we have to intervene, we should be doing the research now, because these ideas are extremely complicated and extremely risky," said Jane Long, a former associate director at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. "I hope we never have to do it, but I think it's irresponsible not to understand as much as we possibly can in case we need it."
Critics, however, argue that scientists are talking about tinkering with a system they don't fully understand. Altering the clouds could affect rainfall patterns, with potentially devastating consequences, they say.
I heard three interesting comments during the past couple of weeks. One was from a former Adelaidian who has made a fortune in London. He has a fine house in fashionable Holland Park and a 200-year-old country house in Wiltshire. So he's done OK, to say the least.
He made a simple point: "South Australia has fantastic potential. What a shame you don't develop it."
On a walk with someone from Sydney, we travelled the 4km from the north beach at Carrickalinga to the Normanville Beach Cafe. After we had been raving about the beauty of the beach, the pretty view of Rapid Head and the idyllic weather, she turned to me and said: "You know, the trouble with South Australia is it isn't fashionable. It just doesn't have a good name."
Later the same day, someone told me she had mentioned to some Melburnians she was going to Adelaide for a beach holiday. "A beach holiday in Adelaide!" they laughed. "There aren't beaches in Adelaide, are there?"
These are just anecdotes, of course, not a scientific survey.
But it says something about how we've been doing at promoting our state in the past decade or so. We have sensational natural beauty but we don't make the most of it.
I'm lucky enough to have seen some beautiful holiday resorts: Bali, the Cote d'Azur, Copacabana Beach in Rio, the Greek islands, Dubai and so on. Call me biased, but it's hard to find anywhere that beats the Fleurieu Peninsula in summer.
The golden beaches, the blue sea, the gently rolling hills, the vineyards, the charming little townships, the excellent weather (usually) - and all this just an hour or so's drive from a city of more than one million people.
Go to Normanville and there, right on the beach, in a prime position looking down to Rapid Head, is the Normanville Beach Cafe. It could be turned into a first-class business with a bit of investment. It has friendly staff so that's not the problem.
This is just the place where there should be a great restaurant, like the Star of Greece at Port Willunga, combined with a deli selling fish and chips, coffees and ice creams.
And in the summer it should be open from 7.30am until after dinner. It could be a real driver of tourism.
The locals at the Surf Lifesaving Club next door have started selling coffee and egg and bacon rolls at breakfast time. That's because the Beach Cafe doesn't open before 10am. That's great for the club. They'll raise plenty of money. And perhaps the people who run the Beach Cafe will realise they are losing market share.
She'd made them herself — painting some to resemble felines or flattening and carving others to look like celestial bodies.
"It's more of a utilitarian plant like cotton would be," she said. "They do eat it but it's very bitter. Most of the time in history it's been used for instruments and dishes and all kinds of artwork and things like that."
About 30 teachers exhibited their crafts and offered signups for classes taught at the store throughout the year.
The location on Adams Avenue in Mesa Verde is home to the Piecemakers, a group of Christians who live communally at the store where they sell homemade wares. They also invite teachers outside their community to exhibit and lead classes.
"Piecemakers has always been preserving the hand crafts from generations ago," said Piecemaker Jean Moller, an organizer of the event.
For more than 20 years, the annual open house has given customers a chance to peek into what skills they can learn at the Piecemakers' store, ranging from quilting to dollmaking, sewing, jewelry design and more, Moller said.
In a tent outside the store, Jen Kosman's edible offerings were far from the gourds' bitterness.
Open house attendees signed up for her baking and cooking classes, whether they wanted to learn pizza from scratch, cinnamon rolls or the comprehensive brunch class that includes quiches and a loaf of bread stuffed with eggs.
ne afternoon last fall, Armand Neukermans, a tall engineer with a sweep of silver bangs, flipped on a noisy pump in the back corner of a Sunnyvale lab. Within moments, a fine mist emerged from a tiny nozzle, a haze of salt water under high pressure and heat.
It didn't look like much. But this seemingly simple vapor carries a lot of hope - and inspires a lot of fear. If Neukermans' team of researchers can fine-tune the mechanism to spray just the right size and quantity of salt particles into the sky, scientists might be able to make coastal clouds more reflective.
The hope is that by doing so, humankind could send more heat and light back into space, wielding clouds as shields against climate change.
The fear, at least the one cited most often, is that altering the atmosphere this way could also unleash dangerous side effects.
"Ten years ago, people would have said this is totally wacky," Neukermans said. "But it could give us some time if global warming really becomes catastrophic."
It's now beyond debate that the globe is getting hotter. The ice caps are melting, sea levels are rising, and extreme weather events like droughts, floods and hurricanes are increasing.
Even if public policymakers manage to significantly curtail future fossil-fuel emissions - the carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that the vast majority of climate scientists blame for climate change - the hundreds of gigatons we've already pumped into the atmosphere have probably locked in a series of life-altering consequences.
Neukermans and his colleagues are among an unofficial cadre of Bay Area scientists, technologists, designers and engineers who have begun the hard work of preparing for a warmer world. They're exploring unconventional concepts that might help us live with the consequences - or prevent them from spinning out of control.
It's not clear yet if any will work, or find the support to move off the drawing board. All are sure to be costly and controversial.
But as the threat of global warming rises, it and other "geoengineering" strategies have shifted from the scientific fringes into mainstream debate. Geoengineering is a broad category for techniques that could remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere or reflect away more heat, including things as innocuous as painting roofs white and as controversial as spraying sulfate particles into the stratosphere.
The basic idea behind cloud brightening is to equip ships with mechanisms like the ones Neukermans' team is designing and aim them at the relatively low-lying clouds that hug the western coasts of continents. It would probably require hundreds - if not thousands - of vessels (see related story).
Few are eager to tweak a system as complicated, sensitive and interconnected as the climate. But many scientists worry that nations simply won't cut fossil-fuel emissions enough to prevent rising temperatures from unleashing humanitarian and ecological calamities.
"If we have to intervene, we should be doing the research now, because these ideas are extremely complicated and extremely risky," said Jane Long, a former associate director at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. "I hope we never have to do it, but I think it's irresponsible not to understand as much as we possibly can in case we need it."
Critics, however, argue that scientists are talking about tinkering with a system they don't fully understand. Altering the clouds could affect rainfall patterns, with potentially devastating consequences, they say.
I heard three interesting comments during the past couple of weeks. One was from a former Adelaidian who has made a fortune in London. He has a fine house in fashionable Holland Park and a 200-year-old country house in Wiltshire. So he's done OK, to say the least.
He made a simple point: "South Australia has fantastic potential. What a shame you don't develop it."
On a walk with someone from Sydney, we travelled the 4km from the north beach at Carrickalinga to the Normanville Beach Cafe. After we had been raving about the beauty of the beach, the pretty view of Rapid Head and the idyllic weather, she turned to me and said: "You know, the trouble with South Australia is it isn't fashionable. It just doesn't have a good name."
Later the same day, someone told me she had mentioned to some Melburnians she was going to Adelaide for a beach holiday. "A beach holiday in Adelaide!" they laughed. "There aren't beaches in Adelaide, are there?"
These are just anecdotes, of course, not a scientific survey.
But it says something about how we've been doing at promoting our state in the past decade or so. We have sensational natural beauty but we don't make the most of it.
I'm lucky enough to have seen some beautiful holiday resorts: Bali, the Cote d'Azur, Copacabana Beach in Rio, the Greek islands, Dubai and so on. Call me biased, but it's hard to find anywhere that beats the Fleurieu Peninsula in summer.
The golden beaches, the blue sea, the gently rolling hills, the vineyards, the charming little townships, the excellent weather (usually) - and all this just an hour or so's drive from a city of more than one million people.
Go to Normanville and there, right on the beach, in a prime position looking down to Rapid Head, is the Normanville Beach Cafe. It could be turned into a first-class business with a bit of investment. It has friendly staff so that's not the problem.
This is just the place where there should be a great restaurant, like the Star of Greece at Port Willunga, combined with a deli selling fish and chips, coffees and ice creams.
And in the summer it should be open from 7.30am until after dinner. It could be a real driver of tourism.
The locals at the Surf Lifesaving Club next door have started selling coffee and egg and bacon rolls at breakfast time. That's because the Beach Cafe doesn't open before 10am. That's great for the club. They'll raise plenty of money. And perhaps the people who run the Beach Cafe will realise they are losing market share.
2012年9月11日星期二
By hook or by crook
It’s a Saturday morning at a formerly vacant lot in Richmond. The sun warms the ground. Rows of fruit trees bend in the breeze. A raised bed made of cinder blocks harbors vegetable plants. Andromeda Brooks carefully plucks weeds from her raspberry patch, offering the young plants encouragement. This is Happy Lot Farm and Garden.
Once Mayor Gayle McLaughlin got involved, the city council voted to donate the lot to a local non-profit called Self-Sustaining Communities, so it could continue as a community garden tax-free.
“There are residents that have come to me and asked for vacant lots,” McLaughlin says, “and I’ve been able to work with the city manager and provide some of the city lots that we have.”
In Richmond’s Iron Triangle, another urban farm has grown on the parking lot of a former Bank of America building.
“And there’ve been property-owners who have donated, partially or for a period of time, provided some of their space for gardens. So, we think there could be more,” says McLaughlin.
Happy Lot Farm and Garden is a model for how the city can come together. Self-Sustaining Communities supplied fruit trees, and cub scouts planted them. High school students from Richmond and Marin built raised beds and the foundation for a greenhouse.
“And a lot of the materials here is stuff from people who were going to take it to the dump,” Brooks says, “and I said to them, ‘Save your twenty dollars; I’ll take it off your hands.’ And that’s how we’re making the walls for the greenhouse – all the glass over there was recycled, reclaimed.”
Despite the support they offer, city governments often have limited control over what happens with vacated and foreclosed lots. In Richmond, for example, it’s Contra Costa County that takes over a property when the owner has not paid taxes.
Open lots with good soil don’t come cheap in the densely populated Bay Area, and property-owners aren’t always willing to donate - or sell them - for cultivation. So would-be farmers sometimes use other methods.
On Earth Day this year, a group called “Occupy the Farm” took over the fallow research fields at the Gill Tract in Albany and planted more than 70 rows of seedlings.
Ryan Rising, who studies and practices permaculture design and was an occupying farmer, says, “I came here to grow food, so I’m here because of land access. I think that’s very important, that people have access to the land, so that they can grow food and live in balance with the earth.”
The University of California, which owns the land, kicked out the farmers in mid-May. University researchers planted the area with their own crops, though University officials also allowed some of the Occupy plants to remain. The renegade farmers broke in at least three times over the summer, to harvest and distribute the fruits of their labor.
The Gill Tract remains behind a tall fence and locked gates this fall, while researchers continue their work.
Dan Mogulof of the Office of Public Affairs for U.C. Berkeley says they would really like to see “a partnership between the University and the community to sustain urban agriculture, urban farming on that portion of the property that won’t be used for research in coming years.”
But if the University decides to end its research on the tract, “there is a plan in existence that was formulated in close collaboration with the Albany community, with our neighbors there, that would call for that land being used for community space, open-area recreation, and, I believe, a community center,” Mogulof says.
Across the Bay from Albany, in San Francisco, there’s a property bound by the I-280 freeway where cattails and fruit trees wave in the breeze. At four-and-a-half acres, Alemany Farm is unusually large for the space-starved city.
Jason Mark, co-manager, says, “Nobody’s getting paid here, and we’re growing, you know, four tons, eight thousand pounds, of organic fruits and vegetables a year.”
Until recently, none of that produce could be sold, at the nearby Alemany Farmers’ Market or anywhere else, because the farm is a non-profit located on city land. It’s a confusing situation. For example, five years ago, the San Francisco Department of the Environment gave Alemany Farm a grant to sell fresh produce at a city-run farmers’ market dirt-cheap, like a basket of strawberries for a dollar.
“Then, our landlord, the city’s Recreation and Park Department, said, ‘Oh my God, you’re selling the food?!’ ‘Yeah,’ we said, ‘we got a grant from this one city department to sell the food.’ They said, ‘No, you can’t sell the food! You’re a community garden.’ Clearly, the right hand didn’t know what the left hand was doing,” says Mark.
A new city law passed this summer addresses both the administrative mix-ups and the distribution of urban produce. The ordinance streamlines the permitting process, to make starting new urban gardens in San Francisco easier.
David Chiu, President of the Board of Supervisors and sponsor of the ordinance, says, “What we found in recent years is that we still have enormous waiting lists by residents; in more than two-thirds of our community gardens, we have over two-year wait lists for folks to get access to plots.”
In the past, seven city agencies gave money, while eleven different agencies supplied land.
“But unfortunately the support of all these different agencies has not been coordinated, has been highly understaffed, and frankly, pretty inefficient,” Chiu says.
Once Mayor Gayle McLaughlin got involved, the city council voted to donate the lot to a local non-profit called Self-Sustaining Communities, so it could continue as a community garden tax-free.
“There are residents that have come to me and asked for vacant lots,” McLaughlin says, “and I’ve been able to work with the city manager and provide some of the city lots that we have.”
In Richmond’s Iron Triangle, another urban farm has grown on the parking lot of a former Bank of America building.
“And there’ve been property-owners who have donated, partially or for a period of time, provided some of their space for gardens. So, we think there could be more,” says McLaughlin.
Happy Lot Farm and Garden is a model for how the city can come together. Self-Sustaining Communities supplied fruit trees, and cub scouts planted them. High school students from Richmond and Marin built raised beds and the foundation for a greenhouse.
“And a lot of the materials here is stuff from people who were going to take it to the dump,” Brooks says, “and I said to them, ‘Save your twenty dollars; I’ll take it off your hands.’ And that’s how we’re making the walls for the greenhouse – all the glass over there was recycled, reclaimed.”
Despite the support they offer, city governments often have limited control over what happens with vacated and foreclosed lots. In Richmond, for example, it’s Contra Costa County that takes over a property when the owner has not paid taxes.
Open lots with good soil don’t come cheap in the densely populated Bay Area, and property-owners aren’t always willing to donate - or sell them - for cultivation. So would-be farmers sometimes use other methods.
On Earth Day this year, a group called “Occupy the Farm” took over the fallow research fields at the Gill Tract in Albany and planted more than 70 rows of seedlings.
Ryan Rising, who studies and practices permaculture design and was an occupying farmer, says, “I came here to grow food, so I’m here because of land access. I think that’s very important, that people have access to the land, so that they can grow food and live in balance with the earth.”
The University of California, which owns the land, kicked out the farmers in mid-May. University researchers planted the area with their own crops, though University officials also allowed some of the Occupy plants to remain. The renegade farmers broke in at least three times over the summer, to harvest and distribute the fruits of their labor.
The Gill Tract remains behind a tall fence and locked gates this fall, while researchers continue their work.
Dan Mogulof of the Office of Public Affairs for U.C. Berkeley says they would really like to see “a partnership between the University and the community to sustain urban agriculture, urban farming on that portion of the property that won’t be used for research in coming years.”
But if the University decides to end its research on the tract, “there is a plan in existence that was formulated in close collaboration with the Albany community, with our neighbors there, that would call for that land being used for community space, open-area recreation, and, I believe, a community center,” Mogulof says.
Across the Bay from Albany, in San Francisco, there’s a property bound by the I-280 freeway where cattails and fruit trees wave in the breeze. At four-and-a-half acres, Alemany Farm is unusually large for the space-starved city.
Jason Mark, co-manager, says, “Nobody’s getting paid here, and we’re growing, you know, four tons, eight thousand pounds, of organic fruits and vegetables a year.”
Until recently, none of that produce could be sold, at the nearby Alemany Farmers’ Market or anywhere else, because the farm is a non-profit located on city land. It’s a confusing situation. For example, five years ago, the San Francisco Department of the Environment gave Alemany Farm a grant to sell fresh produce at a city-run farmers’ market dirt-cheap, like a basket of strawberries for a dollar.
“Then, our landlord, the city’s Recreation and Park Department, said, ‘Oh my God, you’re selling the food?!’ ‘Yeah,’ we said, ‘we got a grant from this one city department to sell the food.’ They said, ‘No, you can’t sell the food! You’re a community garden.’ Clearly, the right hand didn’t know what the left hand was doing,” says Mark.
A new city law passed this summer addresses both the administrative mix-ups and the distribution of urban produce. The ordinance streamlines the permitting process, to make starting new urban gardens in San Francisco easier.
David Chiu, President of the Board of Supervisors and sponsor of the ordinance, says, “What we found in recent years is that we still have enormous waiting lists by residents; in more than two-thirds of our community gardens, we have over two-year wait lists for folks to get access to plots.”
In the past, seven city agencies gave money, while eleven different agencies supplied land.
“But unfortunately the support of all these different agencies has not been coordinated, has been highly understaffed, and frankly, pretty inefficient,” Chiu says.
2012年9月6日星期四
How to defended the absolute home for your retirement
Going aback into the apartment bazaar can feel a bit like accepting an astronaut re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere: bumpy, annoying and risky. We all apperceive that affective abode is generally ranked as the additional a lot of demanding activity we can do, afterwards accepting divorced. And if you haven’t bought a home for a while, and are out of practice, it can be even added difficult.
What’s more, if you are at the end of your alive life, you wish to get this transaction right, so your retirement is aggregate you hoped it would be. The acreage bazaar has afflicted over contempo decades. Thirty years ago, it was a accommodating affair. You rang two or three bounded acreage agents, looked at bisected a dozen agnate homes, befuddled easily with the bell-ringer and voilà. Now it is abundant tougher. Acclaim is deficient and humans are anytime added advancing in their following of profit.
We are actuality to admonition you retire in style, and acquisition your country cottage, city-limits accommodation or beach escape. Actuality is our foolproof adviser to house-hunting, from browsing pictures on the internet and anecdotic advancing areas to bridge the “t’s” and dotting the “i’s”
“We try to barrage a acreage on a Friday,” says Barbara Pentecost of Northumberland agents Smiths Gore. “We amend our websites for Saturday, if humans accept added time.” Other firms differ. “We accept a 'Hamptons Tuesday’ to amend applicants with a analysis of backdrop available, and to accommodate vendors with feedback,” says Aisling Gray of Hamptons International. Savills avoids Fridays, and alerts buyers at the alpha of the week.
Or, as acreage top priestess Kirstie Allsopp puts it, “Make abiding you accept your ducks in a row. Don’t try to buy a abode until you accept your mortgage agreed.” If you accept been out of the bazaar for a while, your acclaim appraisement may charge afterlight with contempo banking information. Check your account with Experian or ask your coffer for advice. The minimum drop appropriate by a coffer or architecture association is nominally 10 per cent. In practice, however, they are added acceptable to ask for 20 or 25 per cent. The college the drop you can put down, the afterpiece the claim amount will be to three per cent. The abate the deposit, the afterpiece to six per cent. Go to telegraph.co.uk/personalfinance to acquisition out added on how to accession a mortgage deposit.
One fast-changing aspect of the bazaar is technology, which may bolt you by abruptness if you’re not assured it. You acclimated to delay two or three canicule for the abettor to forward you a area of details. Now, abounding agents’ signs and bi-weekly advertisements affection QR (Quick Response) codes, those funny-looking aboveboard bar codes. With abounding new phones, you can artlessly yield a account of this cipher to accretion burning online admission to all the accordant admonition about a property.
Technology can alone yield you so far. You charge the central admonition that alone claimed acquaintance can bring. Target up to bisected a dozen top artery acreage agents, and barrage a agreeableness offensive. You charge allies, who will accumulate their eyes and aerial open, again active you to acceptable admission backdrop advanced of your rivals. Issue anniversary abettor with a conference sheet, advertence what you are searching for and how abundant you are accommodating to pay. Also cover data about your affairs – are you a banknote buyer? What is your high limit?
“You charge to angle arch and amateur aloft the competition,” stresses Phil Spencer, television’s Mr Acreage and columnist of How to Buy Your First Home. “Prospective buyers are a dime a dozen to an acreage agent, decidedly if they are affairs a appropriate property.”
Many apartments and houses, decidedly in prime city-limits spots, will be offered on a leasehold rather than a acreage basis. If this is the case, accomplish abiding the charter is for at atomic 100 years, and anticipate anxiously about what you are entering into. As a freeholder you accept complete ownership, while as a addressee you artlessly use the acreage for a set period. As a leaseholder, you run the accident of accepting into adversity if you try to advertise the acreage with a actual abbreviate lease.
What’s more, if you are at the end of your alive life, you wish to get this transaction right, so your retirement is aggregate you hoped it would be. The acreage bazaar has afflicted over contempo decades. Thirty years ago, it was a accommodating affair. You rang two or three bounded acreage agents, looked at bisected a dozen agnate homes, befuddled easily with the bell-ringer and voilà. Now it is abundant tougher. Acclaim is deficient and humans are anytime added advancing in their following of profit.
We are actuality to admonition you retire in style, and acquisition your country cottage, city-limits accommodation or beach escape. Actuality is our foolproof adviser to house-hunting, from browsing pictures on the internet and anecdotic advancing areas to bridge the “t’s” and dotting the “i’s”
“We try to barrage a acreage on a Friday,” says Barbara Pentecost of Northumberland agents Smiths Gore. “We amend our websites for Saturday, if humans accept added time.” Other firms differ. “We accept a 'Hamptons Tuesday’ to amend applicants with a analysis of backdrop available, and to accommodate vendors with feedback,” says Aisling Gray of Hamptons International. Savills avoids Fridays, and alerts buyers at the alpha of the week.
Or, as acreage top priestess Kirstie Allsopp puts it, “Make abiding you accept your ducks in a row. Don’t try to buy a abode until you accept your mortgage agreed.” If you accept been out of the bazaar for a while, your acclaim appraisement may charge afterlight with contempo banking information. Check your account with Experian or ask your coffer for advice. The minimum drop appropriate by a coffer or architecture association is nominally 10 per cent. In practice, however, they are added acceptable to ask for 20 or 25 per cent. The college the drop you can put down, the afterpiece the claim amount will be to three per cent. The abate the deposit, the afterpiece to six per cent. Go to telegraph.co.uk/personalfinance to acquisition out added on how to accession a mortgage deposit.
One fast-changing aspect of the bazaar is technology, which may bolt you by abruptness if you’re not assured it. You acclimated to delay two or three canicule for the abettor to forward you a area of details. Now, abounding agents’ signs and bi-weekly advertisements affection QR (Quick Response) codes, those funny-looking aboveboard bar codes. With abounding new phones, you can artlessly yield a account of this cipher to accretion burning online admission to all the accordant admonition about a property.
Technology can alone yield you so far. You charge the central admonition that alone claimed acquaintance can bring. Target up to bisected a dozen top artery acreage agents, and barrage a agreeableness offensive. You charge allies, who will accumulate their eyes and aerial open, again active you to acceptable admission backdrop advanced of your rivals. Issue anniversary abettor with a conference sheet, advertence what you are searching for and how abundant you are accommodating to pay. Also cover data about your affairs – are you a banknote buyer? What is your high limit?
“You charge to angle arch and amateur aloft the competition,” stresses Phil Spencer, television’s Mr Acreage and columnist of How to Buy Your First Home. “Prospective buyers are a dime a dozen to an acreage agent, decidedly if they are affairs a appropriate property.”
Many apartments and houses, decidedly in prime city-limits spots, will be offered on a leasehold rather than a acreage basis. If this is the case, accomplish abiding the charter is for at atomic 100 years, and anticipate anxiously about what you are entering into. As a freeholder you accept complete ownership, while as a addressee you artlessly use the acreage for a set period. As a leaseholder, you run the accident of accepting into adversity if you try to advertise the acreage with a actual abbreviate lease.
2012年8月1日星期三
Sici Jewels to Open Flagship Store in Paris this Fall
Sici Jewels, an atelier of Sici’s art mosaic factory, sets to open its first boutique store in October at the triangle d’or of the historic capital of extravagance. The premiere of Sici Jewels in Paris establishes the brand as a world leader in micro mosaic jewelry and watches and represents a dazzling addition to a city that expects nothing less.
An addition to the Ravenna-based company’s decorative mosaics, Sici Jewels has spent the last three years in extensive preparation to position itself as the world leader in micro mosaic jewelry. The brand made its sparkling debut at Baselworld and Couture in Las Vegas earlier this year, and has dramatically expanded over the last few months to establish the international prominence necessary to launch its flagship location in the French capital.
The choice of Paris as the brand’s flagship location holds great significance, as it was in the early 19th century that Caroline and Josephine Bonaparte would proudly adorn themselves with micro mosaic jewels crafted by Roman masters Castellani and Raffaelli. Sici Jewel’s draws its elaborate designs from Ravenna, the mosaic capital of the world, particularly in its setting-style, as the micro mosaic pieces are held by signature mountings of gold and diamond. Sici Jewels works with nine colored glass pastes exquisitely cast with threads of pure gold, creating an intricate variety of hues for nano tesserae. These complex hues are used as codes of a universal language in order to distinguish between the endless array of micro mosaics.
A brand marked by its universal appeal, Sicis Jewels has attracted and inspired the likes of internationally acclaimed designers from all over the world. Most notable of these renowned collaborations is with designer Roger Thomas, who joined the brand for the Wynn and Bellagio Hotels in Las Vegas, and who is now working on the flagship store’s designs. These designs will explore an authentic interpretation of Ancient Rome, revitalized by Thomas’ refined sense of style.
The Fort Lauderdale Restaurant Group's bars and restaurants dominate nearly a quarter-mile of Fort Lauderdale's popular A1A strip. Its properties include Exit 66, Rock Bar, St. Bart's Cafe, Dirty Blonde's, Sangrias, and Spazio. Before continuing, let's talk about the elephant in the room. These places are, to be diplomatic, designed for tourists who are either so elated to be out of the cold or too sun-drunk to care how much that they are paying for passable nachos and gigantic margaritas.
What will make Tsukuro stand out from the restaurant group's other properties? A unique design and an executive chef. Both the restaurant's unique, hybrid name, which means "where the moon arrives over the water," and its two-story, open-air design were inspired by nature. The restaurant will be made entirely of glass, seat up to 350 people, and include a private dining room that seats 20.The top of the restaurant, which is located between Spazio and Rock Bar, has been framed out in preparation for its vibrant mosaic glass ceiling.
Tsukuro will be unlike the restaurant group's other restaurants, which, according to the group's marketing director, Arianne Glassman, are not "chef-driven." The group is currently interviewing potential candiates to helm the restaurant and design its Asian-inspired small-plates menu. In addition to serving small plates, the casual-dining restaurant will have three additional bars -- raw, live sushi, and sake. Tsukuro is slated to open December 1.
An addition to the Ravenna-based company’s decorative mosaics, Sici Jewels has spent the last three years in extensive preparation to position itself as the world leader in micro mosaic jewelry. The brand made its sparkling debut at Baselworld and Couture in Las Vegas earlier this year, and has dramatically expanded over the last few months to establish the international prominence necessary to launch its flagship location in the French capital.
The choice of Paris as the brand’s flagship location holds great significance, as it was in the early 19th century that Caroline and Josephine Bonaparte would proudly adorn themselves with micro mosaic jewels crafted by Roman masters Castellani and Raffaelli. Sici Jewel’s draws its elaborate designs from Ravenna, the mosaic capital of the world, particularly in its setting-style, as the micro mosaic pieces are held by signature mountings of gold and diamond. Sici Jewels works with nine colored glass pastes exquisitely cast with threads of pure gold, creating an intricate variety of hues for nano tesserae. These complex hues are used as codes of a universal language in order to distinguish between the endless array of micro mosaics.
A brand marked by its universal appeal, Sicis Jewels has attracted and inspired the likes of internationally acclaimed designers from all over the world. Most notable of these renowned collaborations is with designer Roger Thomas, who joined the brand for the Wynn and Bellagio Hotels in Las Vegas, and who is now working on the flagship store’s designs. These designs will explore an authentic interpretation of Ancient Rome, revitalized by Thomas’ refined sense of style.
The Fort Lauderdale Restaurant Group's bars and restaurants dominate nearly a quarter-mile of Fort Lauderdale's popular A1A strip. Its properties include Exit 66, Rock Bar, St. Bart's Cafe, Dirty Blonde's, Sangrias, and Spazio. Before continuing, let's talk about the elephant in the room. These places are, to be diplomatic, designed for tourists who are either so elated to be out of the cold or too sun-drunk to care how much that they are paying for passable nachos and gigantic margaritas.
What will make Tsukuro stand out from the restaurant group's other properties? A unique design and an executive chef. Both the restaurant's unique, hybrid name, which means "where the moon arrives over the water," and its two-story, open-air design were inspired by nature. The restaurant will be made entirely of glass, seat up to 350 people, and include a private dining room that seats 20.The top of the restaurant, which is located between Spazio and Rock Bar, has been framed out in preparation for its vibrant mosaic glass ceiling.
Tsukuro will be unlike the restaurant group's other restaurants, which, according to the group's marketing director, Arianne Glassman, are not "chef-driven." The group is currently interviewing potential candiates to helm the restaurant and design its Asian-inspired small-plates menu. In addition to serving small plates, the casual-dining restaurant will have three additional bars -- raw, live sushi, and sake. Tsukuro is slated to open December 1.
2012年7月26日星期四
Homeowners cascade banknote into ablution renovations
Washington-area homeowners are spending added on ablution renovations, allegory a civic trend. The amount of ablution and kitchen adjustment projects civic jumped 17 percent over the accomplished two years, with bathrooms overtaking kitchens as the a lot of accepted activity in 2009, according to a analysis by the Civic Association of Home Builders.
That echoes a December analysis by Bigger Homes and Gardens that begin 31 percent of Americans wish to acclimate their baths, compared with 25 percent who ambition kitchens.
"By far, the No. 1 job today is baths, followed by kitchens, followed by good-size additions," said Joe Normandy, controlling administrator of the Civic Association of the Adjustment Industry's Metro DC Chapter. "In all our affiliate meetings, the admeasurement of ablution adjustment is the No. 1 affair of conversation. There is not an apparent aberration in the amount of ablution and kitchen renovations, but humans are cloudburst a lot added money into bathrooms."
Normandy said contempo declines in home ethics are befitting sellers from entering the market. Instead, they are remodeling, accomplishing bathrooms aboriginal and kitchens second.
"A lot of humans in this breadth already did their kitchens, and the plan is not that appreciably old at this point," he added.
In the Washington area, they are spending added to applesauce up not alone adept baths but every ablution in the house, said Sean Ganey, artist and activity baton at BOWA, a adjustment close in Tyson's Corner.
Inside the Beltway, area amplitude is at a exceptional and address rules can absolute options, Ganey said accepted tubs are advancing out and showers with assorted battery active are traveling in.
"People wish a contemporary, Zen-like, spalike ambiance, with clean, Japanese-style lines," he said. "It works bigger for baby spaces."
Ganey said projects cover accoutrement walls, floors and ceilings with rock tiles for a high-end feel with a applied edge. Showers accomplish steam, causing dry bank to bark and bubble. Watertight rock or asphalt eases worries about bane or mold.
Ripping out cast-iron radiators and embedding beaming calefaction in floors and battery walls "gives the aforementioned dry calefaction after accident attic amplitude and transforms the arctic harder stone," he added.
Beyond the Beltway, abnormally in Northern Virginia and Montgomery County, homes are larger, and Country French or English Manor appearance is in demand. The added ample apartment in some of these houses accomplish it accessible to install busy accumulator and backpack accouterments -- enabling homeowners to carve out amplitude for assimilation tubs as able-bodied as abstracted showers, said Armin Bondoc, chief activity artist for D.C.-based Landis Construction.
Despite stylistic differences forth the Beltway divide, abreast is acceptable added accepted in the region. Ganey and Bondoc acclaimed acceptable appearance projects already fabricated up 75 percent of projects, but the allotment now is 50-50.
Natural abstracts like stone, granite and porcelain, or bowl tiles that resemble stone, are in. Tiles are beyond and textural.
"With beneath adhesive lines, the eye perceives a beyond amplitude and cleaner look," Bondoc said.
Traditional audience adopt alms or baby circuitous tile.
Antique brownish and able assumption accessories are out. Chrome and able nickel, which enhance aphotic copse and stone, accept fabricated a "surprising" comeback, Ganey said.
Porcelain asphalt planks akin copse accompany the amore of copse into the bath. Transoms, top windows, arctic bottle doors and second-story skylights accomplish bathrooms lighter, brighter and airy.
That echoes a December analysis by Bigger Homes and Gardens that begin 31 percent of Americans wish to acclimate their baths, compared with 25 percent who ambition kitchens.
"By far, the No. 1 job today is baths, followed by kitchens, followed by good-size additions," said Joe Normandy, controlling administrator of the Civic Association of the Adjustment Industry's Metro DC Chapter. "In all our affiliate meetings, the admeasurement of ablution adjustment is the No. 1 affair of conversation. There is not an apparent aberration in the amount of ablution and kitchen renovations, but humans are cloudburst a lot added money into bathrooms."
Normandy said contempo declines in home ethics are befitting sellers from entering the market. Instead, they are remodeling, accomplishing bathrooms aboriginal and kitchens second.
"A lot of humans in this breadth already did their kitchens, and the plan is not that appreciably old at this point," he added.
In the Washington area, they are spending added to applesauce up not alone adept baths but every ablution in the house, said Sean Ganey, artist and activity baton at BOWA, a adjustment close in Tyson's Corner.
Inside the Beltway, area amplitude is at a exceptional and address rules can absolute options, Ganey said accepted tubs are advancing out and showers with assorted battery active are traveling in.
"People wish a contemporary, Zen-like, spalike ambiance, with clean, Japanese-style lines," he said. "It works bigger for baby spaces."
Ganey said projects cover accoutrement walls, floors and ceilings with rock tiles for a high-end feel with a applied edge. Showers accomplish steam, causing dry bank to bark and bubble. Watertight rock or asphalt eases worries about bane or mold.
Ripping out cast-iron radiators and embedding beaming calefaction in floors and battery walls "gives the aforementioned dry calefaction after accident attic amplitude and transforms the arctic harder stone," he added.
Beyond the Beltway, abnormally in Northern Virginia and Montgomery County, homes are larger, and Country French or English Manor appearance is in demand. The added ample apartment in some of these houses accomplish it accessible to install busy accumulator and backpack accouterments -- enabling homeowners to carve out amplitude for assimilation tubs as able-bodied as abstracted showers, said Armin Bondoc, chief activity artist for D.C.-based Landis Construction.
Despite stylistic differences forth the Beltway divide, abreast is acceptable added accepted in the region. Ganey and Bondoc acclaimed acceptable appearance projects already fabricated up 75 percent of projects, but the allotment now is 50-50.
Natural abstracts like stone, granite and porcelain, or bowl tiles that resemble stone, are in. Tiles are beyond and textural.
"With beneath adhesive lines, the eye perceives a beyond amplitude and cleaner look," Bondoc said.
Traditional audience adopt alms or baby circuitous tile.
Antique brownish and able assumption accessories are out. Chrome and able nickel, which enhance aphotic copse and stone, accept fabricated a "surprising" comeback, Ganey said.
Porcelain asphalt planks akin copse accompany the amore of copse into the bath. Transoms, top windows, arctic bottle doors and second-story skylights accomplish bathrooms lighter, brighter and airy.
2012年7月25日星期三
A Fun Cine Tie-in Co-created by Graeme Devine
Paranorman is a cast new cine hitting theaters next ages from Laika, the aforementioned assembly aggregation that brought us the blur Coraline a few years back. It is the adventure of a adolescent amusing outcast alleged Norman who has the adeptness to see and allocution to ghosts. While the the blow of the apple seems agreeable on abstention Norman for getting a bit on the odd side, it turns out that his affiliation to the afterworld will end up getting the affair that saves his boondocks from peril.
You can apprentice abundant added about Paranorman from the movie's amazing website, which is beautifully advised and contains a ton of alternate agreeable and abaft the scenes features. Especially of agenda is how the creators of the blur acclimated 3D printers to achieve the apparatus for the characters in the cine afore agilely activation aggregate application stop-motion techniques. I’m usually absolutely aloof in business websites for movies, but this one’s special. Trust me, analysis it out.
So anyway, as air-conditioned as Paranorman looks as a movie, the added accordant account is that a cast new iOS bold has been appear as allotment of the business effort, and it’s in fact absolutely good. It’s alleged Paranorman: 2-Bit Bub [ Free ], and focuses on one of the movie’s borderline characters Bub, a ghost-dog who is breach in two pieces due to a car active him over (an beastly accomplishment van, no less).
Because Bub has a affection for mischief, he finds himself in a bind afterwards digging up and gnawing down on some basic he apparent in the bounded graveyard. Problem is, those basic accord to a accumulation of angered zombies, and they wish them back. So Bub sets out to aggregate all the missing bones, and you advice him do this by casting Bub and adhering him to rings advance out in anniversary of the game’s 30 levels which lets you admission areas area the basic are residing.
It’s simple but engaging, and with altered kinds of rings to affix to that accept altered properties, things can get absolutely catchy as the bold goes on. Your achievement on anniversary akin is graded on a 3-star scale, and earning a abounding 3 stars on a akin will alleviate a abundant affiche from the cine as a reward.
One of the a lot of absorbing aspects of 2-Bit Bub is that the bold was a accord accomplishment amidst several altered developers, a lot of noticeably Graeme Devine, architect of GRL Games. As you’re allegedly aware, Graeme is a adept developer who’s had a duke in some allegorical franchises over the accomplished few decades, from The 7th Guest all the way to the Quake and Halo properties.
So, as anybody who follows forth with Graeme’s activities knows, he is consistently active with assorted projects acutely at all times. We asked Graeme how he got complex in such a activity with so abundant traveling on in his own life. Since the action flat Laika has antecedent ties to stop-motion archetypal The Nightmare Afore Christmas, that’s allegedly all it took.
“The business aggregation Wieden Kennedy went to my talks at GDC Austin endure year. Normally, I wish to achieve my own thing, get on with Dance City etc., but I do accept a seven bottom alpine bronze of Jack from Nightmare Afore Christmas in my active room… so they affectionate of had me at "do you wish to plan with Laika"?”
Another big allotment of this accord is that Laika was absolute all-around to Graeme and the added developers, giving them abounding admission to the absolute sets and assets from the movie. It makes a huge aberration too if you blaze up 2-Bit Bub, as the visuals and apparition of abyss are about clashing annihilation I’ve apparent done on the iPhone before. To achieve this, Graeme and aggregation took actually bags of pictures of the set, again rendered them into 3D models for use in the game. As you ability accept guessed, this was a ton of work.
“We started appropriate at GDC, so the alpha of March. Absolute bound schedule, but Laika was absurd to plan with and gave us abundant admission to the sets and talking to the animators. At first, afore I went up there, I was assertive we could do this with a 2D look, but again walking about the sets and seeing the detail I was just destroyed away. I'm a appealing big Nightmare Afore Christmas fan and so I was aggravating not to be the cool fan boy, but central I was freaking out. A lot of the humans up there formed on Nightmare Afore Christmas, so it was absurd to get to see how all that worked."
Part of what makes Laika beat is their absolute absorption to detail. The sets acclimated in the cine are so busy and detailed, even for accessory things that ability just beam by in an burning while the cine is playing. Graeme noticed this too while visiting the sets.
You can apprentice abundant added about Paranorman from the movie's amazing website, which is beautifully advised and contains a ton of alternate agreeable and abaft the scenes features. Especially of agenda is how the creators of the blur acclimated 3D printers to achieve the apparatus for the characters in the cine afore agilely activation aggregate application stop-motion techniques. I’m usually absolutely aloof in business websites for movies, but this one’s special. Trust me, analysis it out.
So anyway, as air-conditioned as Paranorman looks as a movie, the added accordant account is that a cast new iOS bold has been appear as allotment of the business effort, and it’s in fact absolutely good. It’s alleged Paranorman: 2-Bit Bub [ Free ], and focuses on one of the movie’s borderline characters Bub, a ghost-dog who is breach in two pieces due to a car active him over (an beastly accomplishment van, no less).
Because Bub has a affection for mischief, he finds himself in a bind afterwards digging up and gnawing down on some basic he apparent in the bounded graveyard. Problem is, those basic accord to a accumulation of angered zombies, and they wish them back. So Bub sets out to aggregate all the missing bones, and you advice him do this by casting Bub and adhering him to rings advance out in anniversary of the game’s 30 levels which lets you admission areas area the basic are residing.
It’s simple but engaging, and with altered kinds of rings to affix to that accept altered properties, things can get absolutely catchy as the bold goes on. Your achievement on anniversary akin is graded on a 3-star scale, and earning a abounding 3 stars on a akin will alleviate a abundant affiche from the cine as a reward.
One of the a lot of absorbing aspects of 2-Bit Bub is that the bold was a accord accomplishment amidst several altered developers, a lot of noticeably Graeme Devine, architect of GRL Games. As you’re allegedly aware, Graeme is a adept developer who’s had a duke in some allegorical franchises over the accomplished few decades, from The 7th Guest all the way to the Quake and Halo properties.
So, as anybody who follows forth with Graeme’s activities knows, he is consistently active with assorted projects acutely at all times. We asked Graeme how he got complex in such a activity with so abundant traveling on in his own life. Since the action flat Laika has antecedent ties to stop-motion archetypal The Nightmare Afore Christmas, that’s allegedly all it took.
“The business aggregation Wieden Kennedy went to my talks at GDC Austin endure year. Normally, I wish to achieve my own thing, get on with Dance City etc., but I do accept a seven bottom alpine bronze of Jack from Nightmare Afore Christmas in my active room… so they affectionate of had me at "do you wish to plan with Laika"?”
Another big allotment of this accord is that Laika was absolute all-around to Graeme and the added developers, giving them abounding admission to the absolute sets and assets from the movie. It makes a huge aberration too if you blaze up 2-Bit Bub, as the visuals and apparition of abyss are about clashing annihilation I’ve apparent done on the iPhone before. To achieve this, Graeme and aggregation took actually bags of pictures of the set, again rendered them into 3D models for use in the game. As you ability accept guessed, this was a ton of work.
“We started appropriate at GDC, so the alpha of March. Absolute bound schedule, but Laika was absurd to plan with and gave us abundant admission to the sets and talking to the animators. At first, afore I went up there, I was assertive we could do this with a 2D look, but again walking about the sets and seeing the detail I was just destroyed away. I'm a appealing big Nightmare Afore Christmas fan and so I was aggravating not to be the cool fan boy, but central I was freaking out. A lot of the humans up there formed on Nightmare Afore Christmas, so it was absurd to get to see how all that worked."
Part of what makes Laika beat is their absolute absorption to detail. The sets acclimated in the cine are so busy and detailed, even for accessory things that ability just beam by in an burning while the cine is playing. Graeme noticed this too while visiting the sets.
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