It was. I hadn’t really intended to move, but a friend told me about this place because some people he knew were moving out. It’s one of the few rentals left in this area of Old Montreal. They’re tearing them all down and turning them into condominiums. It’s very cheap. I pay only $530 a month.
Having to downsize actually forced me to get rid of some of the furniture I’d brought with me from Saskatchewan. A lot of what you see here (she indicates the turquoise covered sofa and an armchair) are hand-me-downs or things I’ve picked up at St. Vincent de Paul. I paid $25 for chair and $50 for the couch. I’ve just had it re-covered.
(To illustrate her point, she shows me her camera collection, neatly arranged, with one old film camera on top of the other, on a CD rack. MacPherson is an accomplished photographer and her work, along with that of artist friends, hangs on the walls. We walk into her long, narrow kitchen. Her office space is at one end. A door to a terrace, “big enough for a barbecue” is at the other. In the kitchen, more of her collections — a row of vintage cocktail shakers and aquamarine glass containers.)
I notice you’ve used a lot of blues and greens in your decor. Are those your favourite colours?
Those and shocking pink. (She shows me the tiny bathroom, which has fuchsia walls and two bright pink gnomes, perched atop the toilet.) A friend gave these to me. I could do with a bigger bathtub, but the water pressure is great. That’s not always the case in older buildings.
His name is Mack. He’s a schnauzer and because he’s a German breed, I decided to name him after Kurt Weill’s Mack the Knife. That’s another great thing about living in this area. There are lots of places to walk him along the Lachine Canal.
Also, I’m so handy to everything. When I lived in Hochelaga-Maisonneuve, friends used to remark that I lived so far away. I didn’t agree because it took me only 30 minutes to cycle downtown. (She still has a bike, leaning up against the bottom of the stairs to her apartment.) Living here, so close to downtown, I can see they were probably right.
It needed a complete makeover. My parents helped me renovate. We put in a laminate floor in the living area, painted the walls and doors and my dad — he’s very handy — modified the kitchen cabinets. The floor in the living room was all square tiles covered in some kind of ship’s varnish. It was a real “manly man” decor. I prefer a retro, girlie look!
Before my dad redesigned the cabinets, they were really high. He actually cut one of them in half so that I could fit the fridge underneath. All in all, we probably spent about $3,000.
It probably dates back to around the late 19th century. It has a colourful history. There are seven apartments within the block and they’re cut into really weird shapes. I’ve heard from a couple of sources that the building may at one time have been a brothel!
One of the apartments has a sweeping staircase, which could have been where the Madame paraded the girls. We’re so close to the harbour — lots of sailors — and near what was once Montreal’s first prison for women.
Perhaps more interesting is the personal collection that was reserved for the seacoast retreat that is now a permanent repository for museum-quality maritime art, Civil War naval maps, Revolutionary War letters from the North Carolina signers of
the Declaration of Independence, first edition North Carolina history books plus scrimshaw, earthenware pottery and more decorative accessories that resonate with meaning for the lifetime steward.
All have found a new address in one of Wrightsvilles bedroom communities overlooking the skyline of the tiny beach town from a top berth above the Intracoastal Waterway. On a clear day its possible to see the southern tip of Masonboro Island from the window hanging above the kitchen sink.
The three-bedroom condominium floorplan is simple. The kitchen gives way to a small dining area that adjoins the living room. Both areas open to a terrace anchored at its southern edge by a Carrara marble urn purchased from the Palm Beach estate of Bernie Madoff. Italian tiles cover the terrace floor. Cushioned outdoor wicker settees and chairs surround conversation tables and a few well placed conversation pieces, like the 1850 confit pot and an 18th century walnut oil vessel.
Sliding glass doors separate the terrace from the living room appointed with built-in display cases. One is a showcase for English Delft. The tin glaze pottery is rarer than its Dutch namesake. This particular assemblage includes 1690 King William and Mary Regina chargers. The large 14-inch decorative plates bear the portraits of the king and queen of England who reigned from 1689 until 1702.
The regents portrait chargers are flanked by German Westerwald jugs, scrimshaw clock hutches and a 1720 English Delft bowl from Bristol, a locale, like London, well known for its Delft earthenware.
Making way for the display of more antiquities, a chase located along the living rooms interior wall allowed the addition of French doors leading into the entrance hall. This underutilized space allows the housing for the collection of scrimshaw made from whale teeth and bones.
Out at sea, when whalers were bored they whittled and engraved keepsakes called scrimshaw for their wives and children. This display includes a childs teething ring and ball, clothespins, corkscrews, a comb, a toy spinning wheel, a yarn caddy, rolling pin, pie dough crimper and a device that strapped on a sailors belt holds needles for sail mending.
2012年12月29日星期六
City ready to make waves
The huge stainless steel swimming pool at the heart of Windsor's new aquatic centre is only 19 weeks away from being filled with 1.4 million gallons of water.
The chaotic work site doesn't look close to completion, but construction of Windsor's $77.6-million indoor water park is about to move into the home stretch, city officials were told during a tour before the project shut down for Christmas.
Both concrete dive towers have been poured, and the balcony around the two-storey glass lobby facing north to Detroit is taking shape. Installers have finished torquing 30,000 bolts into place on the custom-built competition pool, and the final structural steel for the fun park side of the seven-pool complex will spring up over the next two weeks.
On Jan. 7, give or take a day, contractors will turn on the centre's gas furnaces for the first time to warm up the recently enclosed western half of the structure. Tile installers need the heat to lay a few acres of ceramic flooring in time for the 47th International Children's Summer Games scheduled for Aug. 14.
The cost of all that ceramic will be about $1.3 million, says contractor Max De Angelis. It will take a crew of eight people weeks to lay all that flooring as the project rockets toward its handover deadline of June 21.
The water park side of the building to the east, which will house a half dozen amusement park water features when it opens six months later, will be floored with "soft walk" material to protect children's feet. The floor of the big pool will be vinyl.
Five city councillors, top administrators and parks officials charged with bringing the project in on time and on budget were wowed during a tour of the building on Dec. 20.
"Fantastic. Just fantastic," Coun. Hilary Payne murmured to himself 30 minutes into an inspection of the three-storey structure. Payne became an early proponent of building a world-class aquatic centre in Windsor after touring a similar installation in his native Ireland.
It may be just starting to look big from the outside, but from the inside the place is impressively huge, from its 1,600-spectator capacity to the spacious health club overlooking the fun park and the rentable activity rooms.
The basement, which most visitors will never see, is a Borg-like maze of pumps, filter tanks, cisterns and electrical controls. It's lined with miles and miles of PVC water pipe and 10inch steel heating and cooling lines from Windsor's downtown district energy system.
In the centre of the basement is a massive concrete bunker the size of a small bungalow - a surge tank to keep water levels properly balanced in the main pool. Designed by Myrtha Pools, the three-bay swimming hole (diving, laps, and recreation) has special gutters designed to keep the waves, or "chop" levels down, to help swimmers post Olympic competition times.
Two movable bulkheads will keep the three bays separate, so that different groups can use the pool at the same time for different purposes; competitive swimmers prefer cooler water temperatures of 78 F, while seniors taking some exercise will want the water at 80 F and up. Practising divers like it up to 82.
"This will be the only pool in Canada with that feature," says Don Sadler, Windsor's retired parks and rec boss who is supervising the project on contract for taxpayers. While still on staff, he also oversaw construction of the WFCU arena complex.
They've made some changes to the original plans for the aquatic centre, and the kids and competitors who are expected to be the centre's main customers will probably benefit the most from them.
For instance, while there will be no windows on the competition pool for safety reasons, extra windows have been added on the building's eastern side. That's so people waiting for a ride at the downtown bus station on a wintry day can gaze in with envy upon those cavorting on the double FlowRider surfing machine.
There are only 50 double FlowRid-ers in use worldwide, and none yet in Canada. The other features on the amusement side of the building will include a wave pool, toddler pools, huge slides and a lazy river float ride.
There are no windows on the big pool because glare on the water can cause deadly or crippling accidents for divers plunging off the high tower. "We were told by the experts to be very careful about how much light gets in," says Onorio Colucci, the city's treasurer and a member of the executive committee overseeing construction of the pool centre.
Windsor has consulted widely to get the project right: showers and infrared heaters will be installed underneath the dive towers, because divers must carefully balance their body temperatures during competition. A fully connected media room has been added, for international meets which Mayor Eddie Francis is pushing to become a regular occurrence in the building.
The project is still on budget, the executive committee was told. But there are plans for some last-minute upgrades similar to those made at the WFCU Centre that could improve public enjoyment of the building. They're trying to make it perfect.
"There are no more surprises," Sadler told the committee about costs. While engineers had contingency plans to cope with the usual bad soil and other underground horrors often encountered on Windsor's soggy construction sites, they found none. That saved hundreds of thousands of dollars.
"We discovered that the site had very good soil - in Windsor, who woulda thunk? So what we have now is the opportunity for some enhancements" with the savings, Sadler said.
Among the other unbudgeted extras being considered, the building committee is debating spending an extra $100,000 to upgrade the centre's hallway floors with a coating of non-slip epoxy to keep running kids safe from falls. They are also looking at installing a giant video screen on the eastern exterior of the building to promote events inside, and a sign on Riverside Drive.
Fulvio Valentinis, one of five councillors on the steering committee, has been demanding some kind of design change to break up the monotony of a two-block-long stretch of blue siding. Neighbours are already complaining about its bleak western face, he said.
Colucci, the money man, vetoed all of the extras last week. "Let's put these (suggestions) on the back burner until the last possible moment until we see how the budget goes," he told the committee.
Naming rights have yet to be determined for the building, which will also affect the final price tag. Unusually for a major government project anywhere in the world today, the aquatic centre is being paid for entirely in cash rather than public debt. About $21 million has already been paid to contractors so far, Colucci said, and the project will be paid off during the fiscal year it opens.
Francis says the new energy-wise aquatic centre will also be much cheaper to staff and to operate than its aging predecessors around the city.
De Angelis says he thinks the centrepiece of the project is something that employees were just unwrapping from its concrete formwork last week as the city hall suits were touring the site: the 10-metre-high diving tower at the south end of the big pool.
The chaotic work site doesn't look close to completion, but construction of Windsor's $77.6-million indoor water park is about to move into the home stretch, city officials were told during a tour before the project shut down for Christmas.
Both concrete dive towers have been poured, and the balcony around the two-storey glass lobby facing north to Detroit is taking shape. Installers have finished torquing 30,000 bolts into place on the custom-built competition pool, and the final structural steel for the fun park side of the seven-pool complex will spring up over the next two weeks.
On Jan. 7, give or take a day, contractors will turn on the centre's gas furnaces for the first time to warm up the recently enclosed western half of the structure. Tile installers need the heat to lay a few acres of ceramic flooring in time for the 47th International Children's Summer Games scheduled for Aug. 14.
The cost of all that ceramic will be about $1.3 million, says contractor Max De Angelis. It will take a crew of eight people weeks to lay all that flooring as the project rockets toward its handover deadline of June 21.
The water park side of the building to the east, which will house a half dozen amusement park water features when it opens six months later, will be floored with "soft walk" material to protect children's feet. The floor of the big pool will be vinyl.
Five city councillors, top administrators and parks officials charged with bringing the project in on time and on budget were wowed during a tour of the building on Dec. 20.
"Fantastic. Just fantastic," Coun. Hilary Payne murmured to himself 30 minutes into an inspection of the three-storey structure. Payne became an early proponent of building a world-class aquatic centre in Windsor after touring a similar installation in his native Ireland.
It may be just starting to look big from the outside, but from the inside the place is impressively huge, from its 1,600-spectator capacity to the spacious health club overlooking the fun park and the rentable activity rooms.
The basement, which most visitors will never see, is a Borg-like maze of pumps, filter tanks, cisterns and electrical controls. It's lined with miles and miles of PVC water pipe and 10inch steel heating and cooling lines from Windsor's downtown district energy system.
In the centre of the basement is a massive concrete bunker the size of a small bungalow - a surge tank to keep water levels properly balanced in the main pool. Designed by Myrtha Pools, the three-bay swimming hole (diving, laps, and recreation) has special gutters designed to keep the waves, or "chop" levels down, to help swimmers post Olympic competition times.
Two movable bulkheads will keep the three bays separate, so that different groups can use the pool at the same time for different purposes; competitive swimmers prefer cooler water temperatures of 78 F, while seniors taking some exercise will want the water at 80 F and up. Practising divers like it up to 82.
"This will be the only pool in Canada with that feature," says Don Sadler, Windsor's retired parks and rec boss who is supervising the project on contract for taxpayers. While still on staff, he also oversaw construction of the WFCU arena complex.
They've made some changes to the original plans for the aquatic centre, and the kids and competitors who are expected to be the centre's main customers will probably benefit the most from them.
For instance, while there will be no windows on the competition pool for safety reasons, extra windows have been added on the building's eastern side. That's so people waiting for a ride at the downtown bus station on a wintry day can gaze in with envy upon those cavorting on the double FlowRider surfing machine.
There are only 50 double FlowRid-ers in use worldwide, and none yet in Canada. The other features on the amusement side of the building will include a wave pool, toddler pools, huge slides and a lazy river float ride.
There are no windows on the big pool because glare on the water can cause deadly or crippling accidents for divers plunging off the high tower. "We were told by the experts to be very careful about how much light gets in," says Onorio Colucci, the city's treasurer and a member of the executive committee overseeing construction of the pool centre.
Windsor has consulted widely to get the project right: showers and infrared heaters will be installed underneath the dive towers, because divers must carefully balance their body temperatures during competition. A fully connected media room has been added, for international meets which Mayor Eddie Francis is pushing to become a regular occurrence in the building.
The project is still on budget, the executive committee was told. But there are plans for some last-minute upgrades similar to those made at the WFCU Centre that could improve public enjoyment of the building. They're trying to make it perfect.
"There are no more surprises," Sadler told the committee about costs. While engineers had contingency plans to cope with the usual bad soil and other underground horrors often encountered on Windsor's soggy construction sites, they found none. That saved hundreds of thousands of dollars.
"We discovered that the site had very good soil - in Windsor, who woulda thunk? So what we have now is the opportunity for some enhancements" with the savings, Sadler said.
Among the other unbudgeted extras being considered, the building committee is debating spending an extra $100,000 to upgrade the centre's hallway floors with a coating of non-slip epoxy to keep running kids safe from falls. They are also looking at installing a giant video screen on the eastern exterior of the building to promote events inside, and a sign on Riverside Drive.
Fulvio Valentinis, one of five councillors on the steering committee, has been demanding some kind of design change to break up the monotony of a two-block-long stretch of blue siding. Neighbours are already complaining about its bleak western face, he said.
Colucci, the money man, vetoed all of the extras last week. "Let's put these (suggestions) on the back burner until the last possible moment until we see how the budget goes," he told the committee.
Naming rights have yet to be determined for the building, which will also affect the final price tag. Unusually for a major government project anywhere in the world today, the aquatic centre is being paid for entirely in cash rather than public debt. About $21 million has already been paid to contractors so far, Colucci said, and the project will be paid off during the fiscal year it opens.
Francis says the new energy-wise aquatic centre will also be much cheaper to staff and to operate than its aging predecessors around the city.
De Angelis says he thinks the centrepiece of the project is something that employees were just unwrapping from its concrete formwork last week as the city hall suits were touring the site: the 10-metre-high diving tower at the south end of the big pool.
2012年12月27日星期四
Jacksonville man describes time aiding New Yorkers
Street vendors were busy last week on Broadway Avenue selling lamb over rice with white sauce, and families milled about Macy’s department store on 34th Street where Santa Claus told their children that “while Santa can’t get you everything you want, he will surely surprise you on Christmas morning.”
Yet as life is largely back to normal for many after Superstorm Sandy slammed into the East Coast, there remains so much to do. That’s what Paul Locke took away from his time volunteering with the Red Cross in New York in early December.
The retired Jacksonville police chief returned to Alabama Dec. 12 after spending 15 days there, mostly in the boroughs of New York City.
Locke’s job was to act in sort of a police-function capacity, following up on complaints and keeping tempers down when residents would – as he described it – understandably lose their cool at the slow pace of the relief efforts.
But those blowups were few, Locke said, and he spent most of his time making sure that feeding stations and shelters were operating as they should.
“You saw a few flashes of temper where people are getting frustrated, but that was a rare thing,” Locke said. “And 10 minutes later they’d say, ‘I am sorry. I just had to let it go.’ And you understand that. I’d have been worse than them I’d imagine.”
Locke described one beachside subdivision of around 2,800 homes called Breezy Point on the Rockaway Peninsula in Queens. In the hours after Sandy hit, 111 of those homes burned and many more were flooded by storm-water. Amazingly, and despite the numbers of people who chose to stay in their homes even after an order was given to evacuate, no one was killed in that subdivision of tightly-packed homes.
Just how bad is it along portions of the East Coast? Locke said that things are “worse than I expected. It’s worse than what we see on TV.”
He described the residents of Breezy Point whose homes were destroyed by fire as the “lucky ones,” because while the majority of homes in the neighborhood had fire insurance, very few had insurance to cover flooding.
“And that’s something that doesn’t register when you see it. It didn’t register with me,” Locke said.
Homeowners have been cleaning as much water-soaked sheetrock and flooring as they can, so they can get electricity re-connected and reheat the homes to keep out mold, Locke said.
But the prospect of moving all those displaced families back into their homes does not look good in the near future, Locke said.
“If they started today, tearing houses down and replacing them, you’re still looking at a long-term event,” Locke said.
Many of those families are staying with friends and family, and there are several Red Cross shelters still open, but finding long-term housing for those families is the next biggest obstacle in the relief efforts, Locke said. On his last trip through Breezy Point, Locke could only find three homes with power.
Locke stayed just off of Times Square, and said that the city largely has picked itself up and moved on. The damage left behind is spotty, he said.
“You drive through some areas and you think, ‘they haven’t even had a rain here in six months. Everything’s just perfect.’ And you get 10 miles down the road and it looks like a bomb went off,” Locke said.
“The biggest thing I heard was they thought I had an accent,” Locke said. “I kept laughing. I said, ‘Ya’ll are the ones that talk funny. Not me.’ That really lightened people up. They enjoyed having something to laugh and smile about. They were ready for a break.”
Toward the end of his 15 days in New York, Locke said, there were signs that at least some of the families had begun to find places to live. He noticed that shelters had begun to consolidate, and some were closed for good, all pointing to an end to the first phase of disaster relief.
“Almost every day they were taking some off our list that we didn’t need to worry about anymore,” Locke said.
That’s good news, but for many who have lived in their homes for decades, finding a new place to live is not something done with happy hearts.
“They want back in their homes, and they want to be made whole again,” Locke said.
While the Red Cross can’t bring people’s lives back to the way they were before the storm, Locke said the organization is very good at putting the right people in the right places, and those people are working very hard to help. But he stressed “It’s not one of these things that you can make better quickly.”
The U.S. Senate passed a bill Friday to pay $60.4 billion toward recovery efforts to the states affected by the storm. The bill will now head to the House, where some say it may face an uphill battle with some conservative lawmakers who say the bill is bloated with unnecessary payments to Alaskan fisheries and museums unaffected by the storm. The House adjourned Thursday for the Christmas holidays.
On his trip home, Locke and another Red Cross volunteer discussed the frustration that he and many other workers felt at the enormity of the situation.
Variation is very important in any instructional material in order to keep the learner interested and motivated. Most typing tutor software only relies on the same old copies of texts, making the tutorial experience more tedious than entertaining. This is where Ultimate Typing breaks from the mold, offering a new Wiki Integration Feature as part of its software package.
Essentially, what this feature does is to allow the learner to base their typing exercises on articles lifted from Wikipedia, Wiki Books, Wiki University, and any other text sources of interest to the user. In effect, the learner does not only get to practice essential typing skills, they are also able to learn whatever new information is provided in the articles. It’s a two-in-one deal that will maximize the learning opportunities for the user.
Apart from the Wiki Integration Feature, Ultimate Typing also provides a library of over 600 practice ebooks for all typing levels. From self-help books to novels, children’s books, business management books, and more, the program immediately gives the user access to almost $3,500 worth of literature alone!
Variety and text availability are just two of the quality features included the typing tutorial software that have the specific goal of making the exercises more interesting for the user. Ultimate Typing has over 220 expertly-designed lessons, on top of a staggering amount of practice activities (more than 600 in all). It is because of this volume of activities that Ultimate Typing is able to deliver results in as little as a few days, with regular practice. Fortunately, one other good thing about this typing tutor software is that it does not demand too much time from the learner at all. Even for as little seven minutes in a day, the user can finish a lesson and get valuable practice in typing skills. Even a slow typist will soon be on the way to becoming a professional touch typist.
Yet as life is largely back to normal for many after Superstorm Sandy slammed into the East Coast, there remains so much to do. That’s what Paul Locke took away from his time volunteering with the Red Cross in New York in early December.
The retired Jacksonville police chief returned to Alabama Dec. 12 after spending 15 days there, mostly in the boroughs of New York City.
Locke’s job was to act in sort of a police-function capacity, following up on complaints and keeping tempers down when residents would – as he described it – understandably lose their cool at the slow pace of the relief efforts.
But those blowups were few, Locke said, and he spent most of his time making sure that feeding stations and shelters were operating as they should.
“You saw a few flashes of temper where people are getting frustrated, but that was a rare thing,” Locke said. “And 10 minutes later they’d say, ‘I am sorry. I just had to let it go.’ And you understand that. I’d have been worse than them I’d imagine.”
Locke described one beachside subdivision of around 2,800 homes called Breezy Point on the Rockaway Peninsula in Queens. In the hours after Sandy hit, 111 of those homes burned and many more were flooded by storm-water. Amazingly, and despite the numbers of people who chose to stay in their homes even after an order was given to evacuate, no one was killed in that subdivision of tightly-packed homes.
Just how bad is it along portions of the East Coast? Locke said that things are “worse than I expected. It’s worse than what we see on TV.”
He described the residents of Breezy Point whose homes were destroyed by fire as the “lucky ones,” because while the majority of homes in the neighborhood had fire insurance, very few had insurance to cover flooding.
“And that’s something that doesn’t register when you see it. It didn’t register with me,” Locke said.
Homeowners have been cleaning as much water-soaked sheetrock and flooring as they can, so they can get electricity re-connected and reheat the homes to keep out mold, Locke said.
But the prospect of moving all those displaced families back into their homes does not look good in the near future, Locke said.
“If they started today, tearing houses down and replacing them, you’re still looking at a long-term event,” Locke said.
Many of those families are staying with friends and family, and there are several Red Cross shelters still open, but finding long-term housing for those families is the next biggest obstacle in the relief efforts, Locke said. On his last trip through Breezy Point, Locke could only find three homes with power.
Locke stayed just off of Times Square, and said that the city largely has picked itself up and moved on. The damage left behind is spotty, he said.
“You drive through some areas and you think, ‘they haven’t even had a rain here in six months. Everything’s just perfect.’ And you get 10 miles down the road and it looks like a bomb went off,” Locke said.
“The biggest thing I heard was they thought I had an accent,” Locke said. “I kept laughing. I said, ‘Ya’ll are the ones that talk funny. Not me.’ That really lightened people up. They enjoyed having something to laugh and smile about. They were ready for a break.”
Toward the end of his 15 days in New York, Locke said, there were signs that at least some of the families had begun to find places to live. He noticed that shelters had begun to consolidate, and some were closed for good, all pointing to an end to the first phase of disaster relief.
“Almost every day they were taking some off our list that we didn’t need to worry about anymore,” Locke said.
That’s good news, but for many who have lived in their homes for decades, finding a new place to live is not something done with happy hearts.
“They want back in their homes, and they want to be made whole again,” Locke said.
While the Red Cross can’t bring people’s lives back to the way they were before the storm, Locke said the organization is very good at putting the right people in the right places, and those people are working very hard to help. But he stressed “It’s not one of these things that you can make better quickly.”
The U.S. Senate passed a bill Friday to pay $60.4 billion toward recovery efforts to the states affected by the storm. The bill will now head to the House, where some say it may face an uphill battle with some conservative lawmakers who say the bill is bloated with unnecessary payments to Alaskan fisheries and museums unaffected by the storm. The House adjourned Thursday for the Christmas holidays.
On his trip home, Locke and another Red Cross volunteer discussed the frustration that he and many other workers felt at the enormity of the situation.
Variation is very important in any instructional material in order to keep the learner interested and motivated. Most typing tutor software only relies on the same old copies of texts, making the tutorial experience more tedious than entertaining. This is where Ultimate Typing breaks from the mold, offering a new Wiki Integration Feature as part of its software package.
Essentially, what this feature does is to allow the learner to base their typing exercises on articles lifted from Wikipedia, Wiki Books, Wiki University, and any other text sources of interest to the user. In effect, the learner does not only get to practice essential typing skills, they are also able to learn whatever new information is provided in the articles. It’s a two-in-one deal that will maximize the learning opportunities for the user.
Apart from the Wiki Integration Feature, Ultimate Typing also provides a library of over 600 practice ebooks for all typing levels. From self-help books to novels, children’s books, business management books, and more, the program immediately gives the user access to almost $3,500 worth of literature alone!
Variety and text availability are just two of the quality features included the typing tutorial software that have the specific goal of making the exercises more interesting for the user. Ultimate Typing has over 220 expertly-designed lessons, on top of a staggering amount of practice activities (more than 600 in all). It is because of this volume of activities that Ultimate Typing is able to deliver results in as little as a few days, with regular practice. Fortunately, one other good thing about this typing tutor software is that it does not demand too much time from the learner at all. Even for as little seven minutes in a day, the user can finish a lesson and get valuable practice in typing skills. Even a slow typist will soon be on the way to becoming a professional touch typist.
No Women In CS? Well, Not For Long
Bonnie McLindon, a junior computer science major at Stanford University, fumes as she works in CS 103, her hardest class at Stanford, office hours. The two guys sitting behind her are referring to the tinsel in her hair, a tradition of Stanford’s Kappa Alpha Theta sorority. Despite serving as section leader and interning at Apple, McLindon struggles with the stereotype that girls, especially sorority girls, don’t major in computer science.
In 2009, the Stanford CS department revamped its undergraduate curriculum, broadening the program so students could focus on tracks in areas that most interested them. Stanford Professor Mehran Sahami says the addition of multi-disciplinary tracks, such as collaboration with psychology, product design, and others, helped to cast a broader net for potential CS majors.
The department has seen growth across the board since the 2009 revisions, Sahami says, with female enrollment increasing faster on a relative basis. Since 2009, the number of female undergraduates majoring in CS at Stanford has increased by 9.5 percent.
The introductory course, CS 106A, has exploded in popularity and has reached a near celebrity status. Around 600 students (10 percent of the entire undergraduate population) take the class every quarter and over 90 percent of undergraduates will take at least one CS class, usually 106A, before they graduate. This past fall, so many students enrolled in the class that they were sitting on the floor and in the corridors of the packed auditorium.
Many students continue from 106A to further develop their skills in CS 106B. But those who want to major in computer science must continue from 106B to the daunting 107, often considered a “weeding” class to separate the wheat from the chaff before students can take upper-level courses.
Women do just as well as men in CS 106A and 106B but continue on to 107 in far fewer numbers. While many students, regardless of gender, drop the class, several students say that stereotypes, misconceptions, and lack of confidence cause women to drop the class in large numbers. The often anti-social, male-dominated culture is characterized by 107’s unofficial mantra of “dump your girlfriend before this class.”
Further broadening the gap is the fact that, on average, women at Stanford take their first CS class later than their male counterparts, often because they come to Stanford with less CS experience from their secondary schooling.
Sophia Westwood is a senior CS major who has worked at Google and Palantir, led CS sections, and is very active in recruiting more women to the major. She says her roommate took 106A the winter of sophomore year, loved it, and would have majored in it had she taken it earlier in her undergraduate career.
Despite taking programming classes in high school, Westwood didn’t consider CS as a major when she came to Stanford, fearing that she would be typing away in a cubicle all day and that all of her classmates would be stereotypes from The Social Network.
Her first professor in 106A recognized her ability and told her to consider the CS major, answering her questions about CS and its applications. When she realized she could use the degree for social good—she raves about Palantir’s work helping relief agencies prepare for Hurricane Sandy—Westwood was sold.
In the fall of 2011, Westwood organized a group of CS 106A section leaders to identify the best female freshmen and sophomores in each of their sections and invited them to small dinners sponsored by the department. The idea was for faculty and CS majors to mix with first- and second-year undergrads in an informal setting to answer their questions and encourage them to consider CS as a major. They now hold a dinner every quarter in response to high demand. Westwood estimates 50-70 people attend each dinner, and recent graduates who work in the industry return and share their experiences, both at Stanford and in the field.
“We didn’t know most of the girls in CS,” senior section leader Molly Mackinlay says. “Suddenly you recognized faces in your classes.”
Bonnie McLindon went to the first dinner in the fall of 2011 and talked to senior and junior CS majors, learning more about their work in the classroom and at internships before declaring. She says the dinners helped change her notions of being unable to handle the major or not being a good fit.
“I think people are really starting to break that down and say, ‘I can be a sorority girl and a CS major. I can be an athlete and a CS major,’” McLindon tells me. “The idea of ‘you have to fit a certain mold’ is evaporating.”
Westwood says that from these meetings with students, the section leaders have collected a ton of informal, anecdotal data about the kinds of things that almost a hundred female undergrads who are considering CS are thinking. She says the two biggest factors have been a lack of confidence — especially not having a sense of belonging in the department and field — and not understanding what CS is really about and its applications.
The students at these dinners have been selected by their section leaders as some of the most skilled in the entry-level classes, yet Westwood says students’ low confidence often makes it feel like they’re talking to the bottom of the class.
“It’s a delicate subject with the chats,” junior CS major and section leader JJ Liu says. “We don’t want to push females into CS because that’s definitely not good for anyone. It’s not a numbers game.”
Facebook director of engineering Jocelyn Goldfein has attended the dinners before and argues that universities need to stop being so reserved about encouraging undergrads to take one major over another. She believes departments need to be less shy about telling students that it’s better for them and better for the country if they major in CS.
Ayna Agarwal and Ellora Israni describe themselves as “good girls gone geeks.” Agarwal came to Stanford with an intention to be pre-vet while Israni intended to study psychology; the two juniors now study Symbolic Systems and CS, respectively.
“I think a major reason we have so few female engineers is the lack of concrete role models–that is, the lack of individuals we can point to and say, ‘Look, if you pursue technology, you could be her someday,’ Israni tells me.
The duo founded she++ in January 2012 as a Stanford community for women in tech, hoping to inspire more women to go geek. Unlike Westwood and the section leaders’ dinners, Agarwal and Israni look to make an impact beyond Stanford.
“We would like to see a self-sustaining community of female technologists in the Bay Area working to collaborate with and inspire each other to make technology a field as welcoming to women as it is to men, and to have this community be a model for similar microcosms throughout the nation and the world,” Israni says.
In 2009, the Stanford CS department revamped its undergraduate curriculum, broadening the program so students could focus on tracks in areas that most interested them. Stanford Professor Mehran Sahami says the addition of multi-disciplinary tracks, such as collaboration with psychology, product design, and others, helped to cast a broader net for potential CS majors.
The department has seen growth across the board since the 2009 revisions, Sahami says, with female enrollment increasing faster on a relative basis. Since 2009, the number of female undergraduates majoring in CS at Stanford has increased by 9.5 percent.
The introductory course, CS 106A, has exploded in popularity and has reached a near celebrity status. Around 600 students (10 percent of the entire undergraduate population) take the class every quarter and over 90 percent of undergraduates will take at least one CS class, usually 106A, before they graduate. This past fall, so many students enrolled in the class that they were sitting on the floor and in the corridors of the packed auditorium.
Many students continue from 106A to further develop their skills in CS 106B. But those who want to major in computer science must continue from 106B to the daunting 107, often considered a “weeding” class to separate the wheat from the chaff before students can take upper-level courses.
Women do just as well as men in CS 106A and 106B but continue on to 107 in far fewer numbers. While many students, regardless of gender, drop the class, several students say that stereotypes, misconceptions, and lack of confidence cause women to drop the class in large numbers. The often anti-social, male-dominated culture is characterized by 107’s unofficial mantra of “dump your girlfriend before this class.”
Further broadening the gap is the fact that, on average, women at Stanford take their first CS class later than their male counterparts, often because they come to Stanford with less CS experience from their secondary schooling.
Sophia Westwood is a senior CS major who has worked at Google and Palantir, led CS sections, and is very active in recruiting more women to the major. She says her roommate took 106A the winter of sophomore year, loved it, and would have majored in it had she taken it earlier in her undergraduate career.
Despite taking programming classes in high school, Westwood didn’t consider CS as a major when she came to Stanford, fearing that she would be typing away in a cubicle all day and that all of her classmates would be stereotypes from The Social Network.
Her first professor in 106A recognized her ability and told her to consider the CS major, answering her questions about CS and its applications. When she realized she could use the degree for social good—she raves about Palantir’s work helping relief agencies prepare for Hurricane Sandy—Westwood was sold.
In the fall of 2011, Westwood organized a group of CS 106A section leaders to identify the best female freshmen and sophomores in each of their sections and invited them to small dinners sponsored by the department. The idea was for faculty and CS majors to mix with first- and second-year undergrads in an informal setting to answer their questions and encourage them to consider CS as a major. They now hold a dinner every quarter in response to high demand. Westwood estimates 50-70 people attend each dinner, and recent graduates who work in the industry return and share their experiences, both at Stanford and in the field.
“We didn’t know most of the girls in CS,” senior section leader Molly Mackinlay says. “Suddenly you recognized faces in your classes.”
Bonnie McLindon went to the first dinner in the fall of 2011 and talked to senior and junior CS majors, learning more about their work in the classroom and at internships before declaring. She says the dinners helped change her notions of being unable to handle the major or not being a good fit.
“I think people are really starting to break that down and say, ‘I can be a sorority girl and a CS major. I can be an athlete and a CS major,’” McLindon tells me. “The idea of ‘you have to fit a certain mold’ is evaporating.”
Westwood says that from these meetings with students, the section leaders have collected a ton of informal, anecdotal data about the kinds of things that almost a hundred female undergrads who are considering CS are thinking. She says the two biggest factors have been a lack of confidence — especially not having a sense of belonging in the department and field — and not understanding what CS is really about and its applications.
The students at these dinners have been selected by their section leaders as some of the most skilled in the entry-level classes, yet Westwood says students’ low confidence often makes it feel like they’re talking to the bottom of the class.
“It’s a delicate subject with the chats,” junior CS major and section leader JJ Liu says. “We don’t want to push females into CS because that’s definitely not good for anyone. It’s not a numbers game.”
Facebook director of engineering Jocelyn Goldfein has attended the dinners before and argues that universities need to stop being so reserved about encouraging undergrads to take one major over another. She believes departments need to be less shy about telling students that it’s better for them and better for the country if they major in CS.
Ayna Agarwal and Ellora Israni describe themselves as “good girls gone geeks.” Agarwal came to Stanford with an intention to be pre-vet while Israni intended to study psychology; the two juniors now study Symbolic Systems and CS, respectively.
“I think a major reason we have so few female engineers is the lack of concrete role models–that is, the lack of individuals we can point to and say, ‘Look, if you pursue technology, you could be her someday,’ Israni tells me.
The duo founded she++ in January 2012 as a Stanford community for women in tech, hoping to inspire more women to go geek. Unlike Westwood and the section leaders’ dinners, Agarwal and Israni look to make an impact beyond Stanford.
“We would like to see a self-sustaining community of female technologists in the Bay Area working to collaborate with and inspire each other to make technology a field as welcoming to women as it is to men, and to have this community be a model for similar microcosms throughout the nation and the world,” Israni says.
2012年12月25日星期二
Homeless, low-income and code-compliant housing issues
People still face waiting lists at shelters and low-income housing units in Casper, but code enforcement has made some progress with safety inspections over the past year.
Casper’s McKenzie Apartments and the House of Hope transitional shelter closed in 2012, while the Sunshine Apartments opened. The new multiplex sits on the former site of the KC Apartments, which were closed in 2009 for code violations and demolished in 2011.
The city also rejected a low-income complex in Paradise Valley and ordered updates for a number of housing facilities, including Skyline Towers — a low-income senior housing center.
Meanwhile, federal numbers suggest homelessness in Wyoming increased by 75 percent between 2011 and 2012, according to an annual “point-in-time” count. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development reported in December that Wyoming’s total homeless population jumped from 1,038 to 1,813, although national homelessness numbers declined slightly overall.
“The needs haven’t really changed,” said Lu Ann Allhusen, executive director of the Casper Housing Authority. “What’s tough is when people are in crisis, they need housing then, and not always do they get the housing through the different agencies.”
The housing authority owns 75 housing units and operates assistance programs, serving more than 600 families each month. Allhusen said the waiting list for HUD vouchers has continued to grow, and the list for public housing is equally long. The voucher program had nearly 100 people on the waiting list in June, a number that ballooned to 1,200 by December.
Marilyn Dymond Wagner, executive director at Interfaith of Natrona County, said she has also noticed a steady need for housing. She estimated her number of clients increased by 10 percent between 2011 and 2012. Aside from the general surge brought on by winter, Wagner said Interfaith had an extraordinary amount of visitors in July.
“The influx of people from out of state that were here looking for jobs in oil and gas certainly attributed to that number,” she said. “Then just an influx of folks from out of state, period, [who] think that Wyoming’s economy is so much better than elsewhere.”
Administrators at LifeSteps Transitional Housing and the Wyoming Rescue Mission reported full shelters in December, a trend consistent for most of 2012.
Brandon Espinoza, program manager at LifeSteps and former coordinator of an annual homeless count, said the family housing works off a constant waiting list. The agency attempts to refer people when possible.
“We will communicate with other organizations like Seton House, Turning Point, the Rescue Mission,” he said.
This year’s annual “point-in-time” homeless count, required by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development for areas that receive federal funding, is being coordinated by social workers at Interfaith. Plans are underway for the one-day tally done by communities across the nation to estimate the homeless population.
“It’s going to be very well orchestrated in terms of logistics this year,” Wagner said.
The 2012 count had plenty of volunteers, but social services reported a difficult time mobilizing them. To combat that problem, Wagner said the Casper Area Transportation Coalition will provide two buses for use.
Wagner also said La Cocina has offered to serve free tacos to the homeless, Little Caesars will provide pizza, and the Wyoming Food Bank of the Rockies will give out boxes of food at Set Free Ministries during the event.
HUD has also changed the rules this year regarding people who are doubled up, or staying with others because they don’t have a home of their own. They will not be counted as homeless in 2013.
Administrators of the transitional housing facility moved to Green River in late 2012 and are attempting to reopen. Bishop Charles Trimm, founder of the House of Hope, said he has identified two potential locations that would require a special use permit. The nonprofit expects to present their plans to City Council sometime in January.
Until then, Trimm said the agency will continue a partnership with Southwest Wyoming Recovery Access Programs to place people in hotels.
“I know it’s a Band-Aid, but that’s the best we can do until we get a permanent facility,” he said.
In addition to the House of Hope, the city of Casper closed the McKenzie Apartments for code violations in March. Code Enforcement Manager Doug Barrett said the building on Grant Street is now under new ownership and in the process of being remodeled by Trinity Builders.
A North Lincoln Street multifamily unit with prior reported problems that caught fire earlier this year is also being remodeled. Barrett said the city has worked with “several other units” to bring them to code in the past year.
A priority list of housing inspections created after code violations closed the KC Apartments in 2009 is still being addressed. Barrett said the city is currently focusing on high- and medium-risk locations but notes updates made to “problem properties” as proof the program is working.
Being optimistic that the next day would reveal mountain tops, I stayed an extra night and resolved to rise at 4 a.m. to catch the first glimmer of light. Others at the lodge were skeptical of my plan and thought it was crazy for me to get up so early on a cold morning. But I was already regretful about missing that moment while driving up the mountain and was not about to miss a second chance. Rising late and missing the magical morning light is the bane of a photographer.
Before dawn, out behind Paradise Lodge, I wandered, looking for the best composition and following the tiny tracks of a fox. Yep, there it was slinking from behind the lodge before daylight, a silver phase red fox that sat and posed long enough to find out that it wasn't getting fed, before running off. My first wild fox.
There were birds flying about, landing on snow laden branches - Jays, grey and Stellar, black-capped chickadees, Pine Siskin, and Dark-eyed Juncos. The Jays were looking for food handouts, but I did not know that at the time.
It was cold and the air snapped beneath my exhilarated breaths. My fingers could barely feel the cold camera. The sky was clear and I waited eagerly with my shaky tripod, my Nikon D200, and its kit landscape lens that was not wide enough for a shot behind the lodge with the mountain towering above it. But giving up or making do is not an option.
Working the angles and making the only footprints in the fresh snow, I waited for the perfect moment, but the sun came up like a lifeless ball in the sky and produced little in the way of alpenglow.
The fog began moving in to cover everything once again, and so I simply hurried from spot to spot, capturing every available view and moment -- the Tatoosh Mountain range, a lost gull in the snow, frozen moments in ice, and snow covered trees backlit by flares of the sun that had finally begun peeking over the mountains -- before, poof it was gone, and it was time for the breakfast buffet in the lodge.
Casper’s McKenzie Apartments and the House of Hope transitional shelter closed in 2012, while the Sunshine Apartments opened. The new multiplex sits on the former site of the KC Apartments, which were closed in 2009 for code violations and demolished in 2011.
The city also rejected a low-income complex in Paradise Valley and ordered updates for a number of housing facilities, including Skyline Towers — a low-income senior housing center.
Meanwhile, federal numbers suggest homelessness in Wyoming increased by 75 percent between 2011 and 2012, according to an annual “point-in-time” count. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development reported in December that Wyoming’s total homeless population jumped from 1,038 to 1,813, although national homelessness numbers declined slightly overall.
“The needs haven’t really changed,” said Lu Ann Allhusen, executive director of the Casper Housing Authority. “What’s tough is when people are in crisis, they need housing then, and not always do they get the housing through the different agencies.”
The housing authority owns 75 housing units and operates assistance programs, serving more than 600 families each month. Allhusen said the waiting list for HUD vouchers has continued to grow, and the list for public housing is equally long. The voucher program had nearly 100 people on the waiting list in June, a number that ballooned to 1,200 by December.
Marilyn Dymond Wagner, executive director at Interfaith of Natrona County, said she has also noticed a steady need for housing. She estimated her number of clients increased by 10 percent between 2011 and 2012. Aside from the general surge brought on by winter, Wagner said Interfaith had an extraordinary amount of visitors in July.
“The influx of people from out of state that were here looking for jobs in oil and gas certainly attributed to that number,” she said. “Then just an influx of folks from out of state, period, [who] think that Wyoming’s economy is so much better than elsewhere.”
Administrators at LifeSteps Transitional Housing and the Wyoming Rescue Mission reported full shelters in December, a trend consistent for most of 2012.
Brandon Espinoza, program manager at LifeSteps and former coordinator of an annual homeless count, said the family housing works off a constant waiting list. The agency attempts to refer people when possible.
“We will communicate with other organizations like Seton House, Turning Point, the Rescue Mission,” he said.
This year’s annual “point-in-time” homeless count, required by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development for areas that receive federal funding, is being coordinated by social workers at Interfaith. Plans are underway for the one-day tally done by communities across the nation to estimate the homeless population.
“It’s going to be very well orchestrated in terms of logistics this year,” Wagner said.
The 2012 count had plenty of volunteers, but social services reported a difficult time mobilizing them. To combat that problem, Wagner said the Casper Area Transportation Coalition will provide two buses for use.
Wagner also said La Cocina has offered to serve free tacos to the homeless, Little Caesars will provide pizza, and the Wyoming Food Bank of the Rockies will give out boxes of food at Set Free Ministries during the event.
HUD has also changed the rules this year regarding people who are doubled up, or staying with others because they don’t have a home of their own. They will not be counted as homeless in 2013.
Administrators of the transitional housing facility moved to Green River in late 2012 and are attempting to reopen. Bishop Charles Trimm, founder of the House of Hope, said he has identified two potential locations that would require a special use permit. The nonprofit expects to present their plans to City Council sometime in January.
Until then, Trimm said the agency will continue a partnership with Southwest Wyoming Recovery Access Programs to place people in hotels.
“I know it’s a Band-Aid, but that’s the best we can do until we get a permanent facility,” he said.
In addition to the House of Hope, the city of Casper closed the McKenzie Apartments for code violations in March. Code Enforcement Manager Doug Barrett said the building on Grant Street is now under new ownership and in the process of being remodeled by Trinity Builders.
A North Lincoln Street multifamily unit with prior reported problems that caught fire earlier this year is also being remodeled. Barrett said the city has worked with “several other units” to bring them to code in the past year.
A priority list of housing inspections created after code violations closed the KC Apartments in 2009 is still being addressed. Barrett said the city is currently focusing on high- and medium-risk locations but notes updates made to “problem properties” as proof the program is working.
Being optimistic that the next day would reveal mountain tops, I stayed an extra night and resolved to rise at 4 a.m. to catch the first glimmer of light. Others at the lodge were skeptical of my plan and thought it was crazy for me to get up so early on a cold morning. But I was already regretful about missing that moment while driving up the mountain and was not about to miss a second chance. Rising late and missing the magical morning light is the bane of a photographer.
Before dawn, out behind Paradise Lodge, I wandered, looking for the best composition and following the tiny tracks of a fox. Yep, there it was slinking from behind the lodge before daylight, a silver phase red fox that sat and posed long enough to find out that it wasn't getting fed, before running off. My first wild fox.
There were birds flying about, landing on snow laden branches - Jays, grey and Stellar, black-capped chickadees, Pine Siskin, and Dark-eyed Juncos. The Jays were looking for food handouts, but I did not know that at the time.
It was cold and the air snapped beneath my exhilarated breaths. My fingers could barely feel the cold camera. The sky was clear and I waited eagerly with my shaky tripod, my Nikon D200, and its kit landscape lens that was not wide enough for a shot behind the lodge with the mountain towering above it. But giving up or making do is not an option.
Working the angles and making the only footprints in the fresh snow, I waited for the perfect moment, but the sun came up like a lifeless ball in the sky and produced little in the way of alpenglow.
The fog began moving in to cover everything once again, and so I simply hurried from spot to spot, capturing every available view and moment -- the Tatoosh Mountain range, a lost gull in the snow, frozen moments in ice, and snow covered trees backlit by flares of the sun that had finally begun peeking over the mountains -- before, poof it was gone, and it was time for the breakfast buffet in the lodge.
The Jewish Home is waiting for the IDF
"At the moment we are seen as some kind of non-commissioned officer for the religious affairs of Israel. Netanyahu doesn't take us into account. Not with regard to the Supreme Court, not with regard to freezing, not with regard to appointing Ehud Barak as defense minister."
That was how Naftali Bennett explained his decision to run for the leadership of the Habayit Hayehudi party and to remodel it. It was not by chance that he chose the metaphor of an NCO for religious affairs: It represents the "old-time religious" young man, the kind who came to terms with the fact he would have a marginal status in the army.
Naftali Bennett, on the other hand, represents the "new religious" young man, the kind who was motivated to throw off the image of the NCO for religious affairs and who, in the 1980s and 1990s, enlisted with a great deal of self-confidence in the combat units and gained a prominent place in the command hierarchy. There are other figures alongside Bennett who are identified with the newly combative religious young men, the most conspicuous being Moti Yogev and Maj. Yoni Shatbon. Bennett's generation succeeded in bringing about a profound change in the Israel Defense Forces.
Now he is going on to the next stage of this transformation - attaining a political position. Habayit Hayehudi under Bennett is appropriating as its own the enterprise of the religious preparatory military courses and the hesder yeshiva program in the army, making the party no longer merely identified with this enterprise, as was Habayit Hayehudi's predecessor, the National Religious Party.
Bennett was elected party leader after making efforts to enlist masses of students at the preparatory courses and hesder yeshivas and getting thousands to join the party. There was even an attempt to place polling booths in the hesder yeshivas during the party primaries.
The large presence of religious soldiers in the field units and positions of command, in combination with powerful political representation, will significantly increase that camp's bargaining chips vis a vis the army's top brass and the political echelon.
Until now, the influence of Bennett's generation had led to limitations on the freedom of action of the army and its cultural mold, in a manner that weakened its secular identity. But this influence was limited as long as NRP/Habayit Hayehudi showed only passive involvement in what was happening in the army. Exclusion of women, threats to refuse to evict settlers, cooperation between soldiers and settlers, control by the military chaplaincy of some of the educational system - none of these aroused active support and involvement on the part of the religious politicians.
The change is likely to come now with the changing of the guard in the national religious leadership and the retirement of the relatively moderate generation led by Zevulun Orlev, or that of Brig.Effi Eitam, an opinionated officer who became newly religious but was not part of the "knitted kippa" generations that saw the army as a flag to be captured.
The trend came to the forefront during an interview last week with Bennett on Nissim Mishal's program on Channel 2. Bennett explicitly declared that a soldier should refuse to carry out an order to evict a Jew from his home, even at the price of going to prison. He said quite simply that this is an order he would not be able to carry out. Even the statement of reservation that he later published is not able to erase this: For the first time, the person claiming to represent the collective identity of the religious soldier supports refusal to follow orders.
The significance of this is that the ability of religious soldiers to bargain over the issue of which mission will be placed on the army has been strengthened even further. That capacity to bargain found clear expression on the eve of the disengagement from Gaza, when the army sent a large number of religious soldiers away from the focal points of the eviction, and even more so afterward, in a way that led the army to demand of the political decision-makers not to force it to deal with future evacuations of settlements, including the illegal outposts in the territories.
Now, however, this is no longer merely a question of negotiations within the army, or between the army and the hesder rabbis. Another important player has been added, in the form of one of the large factions in the Knesset, and apparently a partner in the next government. There is no doubt about it - the generation of grandsons of the NCO for religious affairs will certainly have their say.
Your stress level could be measured on the Richter Scale. It's the week before Christmas, so there are a zillion people at the airport. Your flight has been delayed. The kids are crying. Your husband is yelling. Starving, you find the nearest food vendor and order a $12 basket of chicken fingers with fries.
Been there? Done that? Eating healthy on the road has long been a struggle for holiday travelers. It's one of the many reasons people tend to gain a couple extra pounds between Thanksgiving and New Year's.
The good news is that consumers are demanding more nutritious options when they fly -- and the industry is responding, says Renate DeGeorge, director of culinary services for HMSHost, which operates dining facilities at more than 100 airports worldwide.
In recent years HMSHost has made several changes to their menus, including adding a variety of new salads, offering hummus plates as an appetizer and providing whole-grain bread for sandwiches.
"Most places now offer a variety of healthy options no matter where you stop, so that every traveler can find something they are looking for," DeGeorge wrote in an email.
Platkin publishes an annual food investigation survey that ranks the snacks and onboard food-service offerings from most major airlines.
"When you're a passenger on an airplane, you don't really have much choice," he says. "You're a captive audience and that creates a higher standard that airlines need to have."
Virgin America and Air Canada each earned four stars on Platkin's site for offering plenty of healthy options and providing calorie information for consumers. Platkin recommends Virgin's snack boxes -- like the protein meal with hummus -- and Air Canada's Roasted Chicken Wrap with salsa. You can check out his recommendations for other airlines here.
Most of us have at least a general idea of what's good for our bodies (a fruit plate) and what's not (a king-size chocolate bar). Making smart decisions is half the battle.
The other half is knowing where hidden dangers lie. Platkin cautions consumers to be wary around anything that comes with a sauce, whether it's salad dressing, mayonnaise on a sandwich or caramel dip for your apple slices. Even an extra tablespoon can add unnecessary calories.
Also be on the lookout for packaged snack foods like chips or crackers that are probably high in sodium. "Look for things that are in their natural state," he says.
Most importantly, avoid fried food, DeGeorge says. Anything smothered in batter then dipped in hot oil isn't good for your health, even if it did at one time resemble a vegetable.
That was how Naftali Bennett explained his decision to run for the leadership of the Habayit Hayehudi party and to remodel it. It was not by chance that he chose the metaphor of an NCO for religious affairs: It represents the "old-time religious" young man, the kind who came to terms with the fact he would have a marginal status in the army.
Naftali Bennett, on the other hand, represents the "new religious" young man, the kind who was motivated to throw off the image of the NCO for religious affairs and who, in the 1980s and 1990s, enlisted with a great deal of self-confidence in the combat units and gained a prominent place in the command hierarchy. There are other figures alongside Bennett who are identified with the newly combative religious young men, the most conspicuous being Moti Yogev and Maj. Yoni Shatbon. Bennett's generation succeeded in bringing about a profound change in the Israel Defense Forces.
Now he is going on to the next stage of this transformation - attaining a political position. Habayit Hayehudi under Bennett is appropriating as its own the enterprise of the religious preparatory military courses and the hesder yeshiva program in the army, making the party no longer merely identified with this enterprise, as was Habayit Hayehudi's predecessor, the National Religious Party.
Bennett was elected party leader after making efforts to enlist masses of students at the preparatory courses and hesder yeshivas and getting thousands to join the party. There was even an attempt to place polling booths in the hesder yeshivas during the party primaries.
The large presence of religious soldiers in the field units and positions of command, in combination with powerful political representation, will significantly increase that camp's bargaining chips vis a vis the army's top brass and the political echelon.
Until now, the influence of Bennett's generation had led to limitations on the freedom of action of the army and its cultural mold, in a manner that weakened its secular identity. But this influence was limited as long as NRP/Habayit Hayehudi showed only passive involvement in what was happening in the army. Exclusion of women, threats to refuse to evict settlers, cooperation between soldiers and settlers, control by the military chaplaincy of some of the educational system - none of these aroused active support and involvement on the part of the religious politicians.
The change is likely to come now with the changing of the guard in the national religious leadership and the retirement of the relatively moderate generation led by Zevulun Orlev, or that of Brig.Effi Eitam, an opinionated officer who became newly religious but was not part of the "knitted kippa" generations that saw the army as a flag to be captured.
The trend came to the forefront during an interview last week with Bennett on Nissim Mishal's program on Channel 2. Bennett explicitly declared that a soldier should refuse to carry out an order to evict a Jew from his home, even at the price of going to prison. He said quite simply that this is an order he would not be able to carry out. Even the statement of reservation that he later published is not able to erase this: For the first time, the person claiming to represent the collective identity of the religious soldier supports refusal to follow orders.
The significance of this is that the ability of religious soldiers to bargain over the issue of which mission will be placed on the army has been strengthened even further. That capacity to bargain found clear expression on the eve of the disengagement from Gaza, when the army sent a large number of religious soldiers away from the focal points of the eviction, and even more so afterward, in a way that led the army to demand of the political decision-makers not to force it to deal with future evacuations of settlements, including the illegal outposts in the territories.
Now, however, this is no longer merely a question of negotiations within the army, or between the army and the hesder rabbis. Another important player has been added, in the form of one of the large factions in the Knesset, and apparently a partner in the next government. There is no doubt about it - the generation of grandsons of the NCO for religious affairs will certainly have their say.
Your stress level could be measured on the Richter Scale. It's the week before Christmas, so there are a zillion people at the airport. Your flight has been delayed. The kids are crying. Your husband is yelling. Starving, you find the nearest food vendor and order a $12 basket of chicken fingers with fries.
Been there? Done that? Eating healthy on the road has long been a struggle for holiday travelers. It's one of the many reasons people tend to gain a couple extra pounds between Thanksgiving and New Year's.
The good news is that consumers are demanding more nutritious options when they fly -- and the industry is responding, says Renate DeGeorge, director of culinary services for HMSHost, which operates dining facilities at more than 100 airports worldwide.
In recent years HMSHost has made several changes to their menus, including adding a variety of new salads, offering hummus plates as an appetizer and providing whole-grain bread for sandwiches.
"Most places now offer a variety of healthy options no matter where you stop, so that every traveler can find something they are looking for," DeGeorge wrote in an email.
Platkin publishes an annual food investigation survey that ranks the snacks and onboard food-service offerings from most major airlines.
"When you're a passenger on an airplane, you don't really have much choice," he says. "You're a captive audience and that creates a higher standard that airlines need to have."
Virgin America and Air Canada each earned four stars on Platkin's site for offering plenty of healthy options and providing calorie information for consumers. Platkin recommends Virgin's snack boxes -- like the protein meal with hummus -- and Air Canada's Roasted Chicken Wrap with salsa. You can check out his recommendations for other airlines here.
Most of us have at least a general idea of what's good for our bodies (a fruit plate) and what's not (a king-size chocolate bar). Making smart decisions is half the battle.
The other half is knowing where hidden dangers lie. Platkin cautions consumers to be wary around anything that comes with a sauce, whether it's salad dressing, mayonnaise on a sandwich or caramel dip for your apple slices. Even an extra tablespoon can add unnecessary calories.
Also be on the lookout for packaged snack foods like chips or crackers that are probably high in sodium. "Look for things that are in their natural state," he says.
Most importantly, avoid fried food, DeGeorge says. Anything smothered in batter then dipped in hot oil isn't good for your health, even if it did at one time resemble a vegetable.
2012年12月23日星期日
Guns Don't Kill People, Video Games Do
The charade of Friday's NRA press conference was best summed up by one of the last lines uttered at it by NRA President David Keene: "...this is the beginning of a serious conversation. We won't be taking questions today."
Of course, neither Keene nor NRA executive vice president Wayne LaPierre would be taking questions. This "press conference" was not the beginning of any conversation -- it was the NRA leadership telling us all that we were wrong.
They were there to enlighten us so that we understood that: "It's not guns that kill people, it's video games." It's movies. It's the media. It's "monsters." It's a society that worships celebrities and money. It's greedy corporate executives and shareholders. It's foreign aid to other countries.
The one thing that Wayne LaPierre apparently doesn't believe is responsible in any way for shooting deaths are guns. Not the guns used in the Newtown shooting that took the lives of 20 young children and 6 adults. Not the guns used in July to kill 12 and wound 58 in an Aurora, Colorado movie theater. Not the guns used to kill six people at a Sikh Temple in August. And not the guns used to kill 94 more people in the U.S. since the Newtown shooting. Yes, 94 people have been murdered by gun violence since December 14.
While LaPierre claimed that violence in movies and in video games like "Grand Theft Auto," caused gun violence, he offered no explanation for why people in other countries where they watch the very same movies and play the same video games have remarkably lower numbers of people killed by guns. For example, "Grand Theft Auto" broke UK sales records for fast selling video with over 600,000 units sold in its first day. However, in the UK, only 51 one people were killed by guns in 2011. In contrast, in the US, 8,583 people were murdered by guns in 2011.
The real difference between the U.S. and UK isn't that they are watching different movies or playing different video games. It's guns. We have close to 300 million guns legally owned while the UK has only approximately 1.8 million guns.
What the NRA leadership should have said -- and what I know from twitter some NRA members expected they would say -- is that the NRA was going to embrace sensible "human safety" laws. (To me, we should stop using the term "gun control" -- I'm not concerned with controlling people's guns, I'm concerned with saving lives.)
At the very least the NRA should have called for a few common sense changes to our laws. The first and most obvious being to close the "gun show loophole." Our current federal law only requires background checks to determine if the purported gun buyer has a criminal record or history of mental illness if the gun is so sold by a licensed firearm dealer. But that only accounts for 60% of the guns legally sold. Meaning, 40% of the guns legally sold are to people who have had no background check at all.
Only 19% of Americans polled want to keep the law the way. The problem is that the NRA leadership is part of this 19% and has lobbied to keep the gun hole loophole intact.
How can any organization that truly cares about saving the lives of Americans ever oppose a law to ensure that the mentally ill and criminals are prohibited from buying firearms?
So what did the NRA called for at its press event? More guns. LaPierre proposed that every school in America should have an armed guard. There are roughly 100,000 public schools meaning a boon in gun sales to arm these new guards.
But here's a glaring problem with the NRA's proposal. At the horrific Columbine High School shooting in 1999 that left 15 dead and 23 wounded, there was an armed guard. A 15-year veteran of the Sheriff's office was on the location. While he exchanged gunshots with one of the two shooters, he was unable to stop the shooting. How could the NRA leadership not be aware of this fact? And does this mean that every school would need two armed guards?
Will the NRA next suggest we have armed guards at every movie theater, shopping mall, Sikh temple, workplace, church -- or any of the other location where mass shootings have recently occurred?
Clearly, the NRA leadership is not prepared to have an honest conversation on the issues about the role that GUNS play in the deaths of Americans. The one bright spot is that the rank and file members of the NRA disagree with the NRA elite on a growing number of issues, including 69% who favor closing gun show loophole.
The NRA leadership is at a crossroads. It can either begin to embrace policies that will save American's lives or find the NRA marginalized to the fringes of American society. While I know that NRA leaders LaPierre and Keene aren't taking questions right now, they may want to consider this one.
Each Nextdoor neighbourhood is a closed loop in the area it serves, to ensure the residents’ privacy and security. Members are only accepted after Nextdoor has verified their addresses. The size and area of each neighbourhood varies by its location. In a big city, a Nextdoor neighbourhood could be limited to just a few blocks, whereas it could cover entire townships in more sparsely populated areas.
Nextdoor serves as a virtual chat room, where neighbours exchange referrals on local businesses, buy and sell items or even alert each other about illnesses or crime in their area.
“We have an elderly neighbour who has cancer and is quite frail. She had a security issue and when other neighbours got wind of it through Nextdoor, they came out of the woodwork to offer assistance,” says Bob Thornburg, a resident of Sante Fe, New Mexico.
A user in California, Nicole Perkins, says when a teenager in her area was diagnosed with meningitis, his parents used the network to alert their neighbours, so that other children could get tested immediately. “The ability to broadcast the news very likely saved lives,” says Perkins.
Other uses include quick retrievals of a lost special needs child, and even a duck and a puppy, thanks to watchful neighbours alerted via Nextdoor. In other words, the concept of the neighbourhood watch gone virtual.
Says Tolia, “Many social networks are about status updates, photo sharing, but that’s not what we are about. Nextdoor is about utility, it’s about finding a plumber, selling a used car, learning about a gas leak. It’s about all the things that you’d want to know, given that you live in a particular area.”
In fact, in over 60 cities, including big ones such as Atlanta, Dallas and San Jose, local governments and police departments are partnering with Nextdoor to communicate with their residents. For instance, in Oakland, near San Francisco, members used Nextdoor to alert their neighbours about two young men going door-to-door, posing as salesmen. Police asked one resident to get their photo when they came to her door. With this information, they later arrested the two men and recovered goods stolen from a neighbourhood home, which was reported on Nextdoor as having been burglarised.
Of course, neither Keene nor NRA executive vice president Wayne LaPierre would be taking questions. This "press conference" was not the beginning of any conversation -- it was the NRA leadership telling us all that we were wrong.
They were there to enlighten us so that we understood that: "It's not guns that kill people, it's video games." It's movies. It's the media. It's "monsters." It's a society that worships celebrities and money. It's greedy corporate executives and shareholders. It's foreign aid to other countries.
The one thing that Wayne LaPierre apparently doesn't believe is responsible in any way for shooting deaths are guns. Not the guns used in the Newtown shooting that took the lives of 20 young children and 6 adults. Not the guns used in July to kill 12 and wound 58 in an Aurora, Colorado movie theater. Not the guns used to kill six people at a Sikh Temple in August. And not the guns used to kill 94 more people in the U.S. since the Newtown shooting. Yes, 94 people have been murdered by gun violence since December 14.
While LaPierre claimed that violence in movies and in video games like "Grand Theft Auto," caused gun violence, he offered no explanation for why people in other countries where they watch the very same movies and play the same video games have remarkably lower numbers of people killed by guns. For example, "Grand Theft Auto" broke UK sales records for fast selling video with over 600,000 units sold in its first day. However, in the UK, only 51 one people were killed by guns in 2011. In contrast, in the US, 8,583 people were murdered by guns in 2011.
The real difference between the U.S. and UK isn't that they are watching different movies or playing different video games. It's guns. We have close to 300 million guns legally owned while the UK has only approximately 1.8 million guns.
What the NRA leadership should have said -- and what I know from twitter some NRA members expected they would say -- is that the NRA was going to embrace sensible "human safety" laws. (To me, we should stop using the term "gun control" -- I'm not concerned with controlling people's guns, I'm concerned with saving lives.)
At the very least the NRA should have called for a few common sense changes to our laws. The first and most obvious being to close the "gun show loophole." Our current federal law only requires background checks to determine if the purported gun buyer has a criminal record or history of mental illness if the gun is so sold by a licensed firearm dealer. But that only accounts for 60% of the guns legally sold. Meaning, 40% of the guns legally sold are to people who have had no background check at all.
Only 19% of Americans polled want to keep the law the way. The problem is that the NRA leadership is part of this 19% and has lobbied to keep the gun hole loophole intact.
How can any organization that truly cares about saving the lives of Americans ever oppose a law to ensure that the mentally ill and criminals are prohibited from buying firearms?
So what did the NRA called for at its press event? More guns. LaPierre proposed that every school in America should have an armed guard. There are roughly 100,000 public schools meaning a boon in gun sales to arm these new guards.
But here's a glaring problem with the NRA's proposal. At the horrific Columbine High School shooting in 1999 that left 15 dead and 23 wounded, there was an armed guard. A 15-year veteran of the Sheriff's office was on the location. While he exchanged gunshots with one of the two shooters, he was unable to stop the shooting. How could the NRA leadership not be aware of this fact? And does this mean that every school would need two armed guards?
Will the NRA next suggest we have armed guards at every movie theater, shopping mall, Sikh temple, workplace, church -- or any of the other location where mass shootings have recently occurred?
Clearly, the NRA leadership is not prepared to have an honest conversation on the issues about the role that GUNS play in the deaths of Americans. The one bright spot is that the rank and file members of the NRA disagree with the NRA elite on a growing number of issues, including 69% who favor closing gun show loophole.
The NRA leadership is at a crossroads. It can either begin to embrace policies that will save American's lives or find the NRA marginalized to the fringes of American society. While I know that NRA leaders LaPierre and Keene aren't taking questions right now, they may want to consider this one.
Each Nextdoor neighbourhood is a closed loop in the area it serves, to ensure the residents’ privacy and security. Members are only accepted after Nextdoor has verified their addresses. The size and area of each neighbourhood varies by its location. In a big city, a Nextdoor neighbourhood could be limited to just a few blocks, whereas it could cover entire townships in more sparsely populated areas.
Nextdoor serves as a virtual chat room, where neighbours exchange referrals on local businesses, buy and sell items or even alert each other about illnesses or crime in their area.
“We have an elderly neighbour who has cancer and is quite frail. She had a security issue and when other neighbours got wind of it through Nextdoor, they came out of the woodwork to offer assistance,” says Bob Thornburg, a resident of Sante Fe, New Mexico.
A user in California, Nicole Perkins, says when a teenager in her area was diagnosed with meningitis, his parents used the network to alert their neighbours, so that other children could get tested immediately. “The ability to broadcast the news very likely saved lives,” says Perkins.
Other uses include quick retrievals of a lost special needs child, and even a duck and a puppy, thanks to watchful neighbours alerted via Nextdoor. In other words, the concept of the neighbourhood watch gone virtual.
Says Tolia, “Many social networks are about status updates, photo sharing, but that’s not what we are about. Nextdoor is about utility, it’s about finding a plumber, selling a used car, learning about a gas leak. It’s about all the things that you’d want to know, given that you live in a particular area.”
In fact, in over 60 cities, including big ones such as Atlanta, Dallas and San Jose, local governments and police departments are partnering with Nextdoor to communicate with their residents. For instance, in Oakland, near San Francisco, members used Nextdoor to alert their neighbours about two young men going door-to-door, posing as salesmen. Police asked one resident to get their photo when they came to her door. With this information, they later arrested the two men and recovered goods stolen from a neighbourhood home, which was reported on Nextdoor as having been burglarised.
Asperger's Syndrome Not Linked To Killings In Newtown
It has been more than a week since the massacre of 20 children, and six adults took place in Newtown, Conn. As the time has passed, and people around the world are mourning the lives lost, answers continue to be sought, and new details revealed, though many questions still remain unanswered.
Much is still unclear about the shooter, who originally was reported as Ryan Lanza, but was later apparently identified as Adam Lanza, age 20, Ryan Lanza's younger sibling (click here for the original article by The Alternative Press), a resident of Newtown.
Adam Lanza reportedly died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound after taking the other lives that day.
Ryan Lanza of Hoboken, N.J. was interviewed by police right after the shooting, and according to news sources, was released as a suspect. Reports also indicate Ryan Lanza said he has been estranged from his brother since 2010, and Adam Lanza dealt with Asperger's syndrome, and personality disorders.
According to Wikipedia, Asperger syndrome (abbreviated as "AS," and also known as "Asperger's syndrome, and "Asperger disorder," is "an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) that is characterized by significant difficulties in social interaction, alongside restricted and repetitive patterns of behavior and interests. It differs from other autism spectrum disorders by its relative preservation of linguistic and cognitive development. Although not required for diagnosis, physical clumsiness and atypical (peculiar, odd) use of language are frequently reported."
Reports in the media, especially a December 22 Associated Press article, have noted Adam Lanza rarely spoke publicly, typically wore the same outfit to school, pushed himself next to walls as other students would pass him in the hallways at school, and, even during a presentation at school, permitted his computer to speak for him, rather than presenting the material himself.
The same article alleges Adam Lanza had an obsession with computers, and was often sequestered in the family's basement room, which was equipped with couches, a flat-screen TV, computer, and video games. A former classmate of Lanza's in high school said Lanza once played the video game "Counter-Strike" with him, a game featuring terrorists, and counter-terrorists, and chose a military assault rifle and Glock to use during the game (a Glock 10 mm handgun, and a Bushmaster AR-15 were purportedly two of the weapons used by Lanza during the killings).
Adam Lanza's mother, Nancy Lanza, who was reportedly the first victim of the December 14 killing spree, is said to be the registered owner of all of the weapons used by Adam Lanza in the slaughter. Reports from ABC News indicate as well, Nancy Lanza directed Adam Lanza's steps in life in diffierent instances; a former babysitter has now come forward stating Nancy Lanza told him to never let Adam Lanza out of his sight when caring for him, requesting he not even use the bathroom when watching the boy. Hairstylists who used to cut Adam Lanza's hair every six weeks when he was a teenager, said his mother would always accompany him on the appointments, and instruct Adam Lanza when he was permitted to move in the chair; according to the stylist, he never uttered a word, and only stared at the floor tiles as they cut his hair.
The Alternative Press interviewed Johnny Regan, a Sussex County resident, who was diagnosed as an adult with Asperger's syndrome in 1999. Previous to that, Regan, who said he is also a cancer survivor (a blood disorder, which he is now cancer free from for seven years), was told he was "neurologically impaired," before the Asperger's diagnosis. However, Regan has been able to hold down a job, including having worked 17 baseball seasons at Skylands Park as a scoreboard operator. Regan is also very involved in the Sussex County NJ Sports Hall of Fame (click here for a previous article by The Alternative Press), as the group's historian. At the recent induction dinner, he introduced one of the speakers from the podium, and spoke to many of the attendees during the evening.
Coincidentally, when The Alternative Press of Sussex County released the first article about the shooting in Newtown, Regan was a reader who reached back when a request for comment was posted on Facebook looking for comments about the tragedy, and indicated a friend of his lives in Newtown, Conn. When Regan first heard of the shooting, he said he immediately called his friend to check on his well-being, and learned his friend was safe, and, the friend's children were as well; they were too young to attend Sandy Hook Elementary School. Click here for the story.
Of the possibility of Adam Lanza having Asperger's syndrome, Regan commented, about the link some news outlets have attempted to make between Adam Lanza's supposed issues with Asperger's, and the violence committed. "It doesn't apply to everybody."
"The chilling fact is you don't have to be mentally ill to be violent," Cherney said. "There's nothing definitive between Asperger's, or any other disorder. It's a myth."
Cherney described Asperger's syndrome as, "sustained impairment in social interaction that starts in youth. It's one of the defining features."
Cherney said another defining feature can be the "restricted range of activity. They [those with Asperger's] can be acutely interested in certain subjects and goals with great intensity. Restricted focused activities are a hallmark."
This can create disturbances, and difficulties, from work and especially in the relationship domain, in which those with Asperger's may have difficulty interpreting non-behavioral cues, and gestures, which, in turn, can impact the development of peer relationships.
"Categorical schemes don't try to capture reality, where intensity or spectrum can shade one into the other," Cherney said. "This has created diagnostic disputes, and it's not settled."
The fourth edition of the DSM, the "DSM-IV," was published in 1994. Of the revision of the newest manual, and, who decides what is kept, and what is axed, according to the American Psychiatric Association's DSM-5 website, the planning stages for the upcoming version started in 1999; and between 2006 and 2008, the co-chairs to help bring about the revised manual were chosen, as well the task and work groups formed. Since then, field trials, and tests have taken place, and the draft put together.
The DSM-5 draft manual is scheduled for printing on December 31, and is planned for unveiling at the American Psychiatric Association's annual meeting in San Francisco, Calif., in May 2013.
In regard to the building process of the manual, Cherney said, "They [the creators] land somewhere by consensus in the building process. It doesn't mean everyone is in favor."
Wikipedia notes Asperger's syndrome was named by Hans Asperger, an Austrian pediatrician, in 1944, to describe four of his patients. The children had difficulties socializing, which Asperger called "autistic psychopathy." Yet, he also said his patients were "little professors," for their high intellectual abilities, and potential for achievement in their adulthoods.
Much is still unclear about the shooter, who originally was reported as Ryan Lanza, but was later apparently identified as Adam Lanza, age 20, Ryan Lanza's younger sibling (click here for the original article by The Alternative Press), a resident of Newtown.
Adam Lanza reportedly died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound after taking the other lives that day.
Ryan Lanza of Hoboken, N.J. was interviewed by police right after the shooting, and according to news sources, was released as a suspect. Reports also indicate Ryan Lanza said he has been estranged from his brother since 2010, and Adam Lanza dealt with Asperger's syndrome, and personality disorders.
According to Wikipedia, Asperger syndrome (abbreviated as "AS," and also known as "Asperger's syndrome, and "Asperger disorder," is "an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) that is characterized by significant difficulties in social interaction, alongside restricted and repetitive patterns of behavior and interests. It differs from other autism spectrum disorders by its relative preservation of linguistic and cognitive development. Although not required for diagnosis, physical clumsiness and atypical (peculiar, odd) use of language are frequently reported."
Reports in the media, especially a December 22 Associated Press article, have noted Adam Lanza rarely spoke publicly, typically wore the same outfit to school, pushed himself next to walls as other students would pass him in the hallways at school, and, even during a presentation at school, permitted his computer to speak for him, rather than presenting the material himself.
The same article alleges Adam Lanza had an obsession with computers, and was often sequestered in the family's basement room, which was equipped with couches, a flat-screen TV, computer, and video games. A former classmate of Lanza's in high school said Lanza once played the video game "Counter-Strike" with him, a game featuring terrorists, and counter-terrorists, and chose a military assault rifle and Glock to use during the game (a Glock 10 mm handgun, and a Bushmaster AR-15 were purportedly two of the weapons used by Lanza during the killings).
Adam Lanza's mother, Nancy Lanza, who was reportedly the first victim of the December 14 killing spree, is said to be the registered owner of all of the weapons used by Adam Lanza in the slaughter. Reports from ABC News indicate as well, Nancy Lanza directed Adam Lanza's steps in life in diffierent instances; a former babysitter has now come forward stating Nancy Lanza told him to never let Adam Lanza out of his sight when caring for him, requesting he not even use the bathroom when watching the boy. Hairstylists who used to cut Adam Lanza's hair every six weeks when he was a teenager, said his mother would always accompany him on the appointments, and instruct Adam Lanza when he was permitted to move in the chair; according to the stylist, he never uttered a word, and only stared at the floor tiles as they cut his hair.
The Alternative Press interviewed Johnny Regan, a Sussex County resident, who was diagnosed as an adult with Asperger's syndrome in 1999. Previous to that, Regan, who said he is also a cancer survivor (a blood disorder, which he is now cancer free from for seven years), was told he was "neurologically impaired," before the Asperger's diagnosis. However, Regan has been able to hold down a job, including having worked 17 baseball seasons at Skylands Park as a scoreboard operator. Regan is also very involved in the Sussex County NJ Sports Hall of Fame (click here for a previous article by The Alternative Press), as the group's historian. At the recent induction dinner, he introduced one of the speakers from the podium, and spoke to many of the attendees during the evening.
Coincidentally, when The Alternative Press of Sussex County released the first article about the shooting in Newtown, Regan was a reader who reached back when a request for comment was posted on Facebook looking for comments about the tragedy, and indicated a friend of his lives in Newtown, Conn. When Regan first heard of the shooting, he said he immediately called his friend to check on his well-being, and learned his friend was safe, and, the friend's children were as well; they were too young to attend Sandy Hook Elementary School. Click here for the story.
Of the possibility of Adam Lanza having Asperger's syndrome, Regan commented, about the link some news outlets have attempted to make between Adam Lanza's supposed issues with Asperger's, and the violence committed. "It doesn't apply to everybody."
"The chilling fact is you don't have to be mentally ill to be violent," Cherney said. "There's nothing definitive between Asperger's, or any other disorder. It's a myth."
Cherney described Asperger's syndrome as, "sustained impairment in social interaction that starts in youth. It's one of the defining features."
Cherney said another defining feature can be the "restricted range of activity. They [those with Asperger's] can be acutely interested in certain subjects and goals with great intensity. Restricted focused activities are a hallmark."
This can create disturbances, and difficulties, from work and especially in the relationship domain, in which those with Asperger's may have difficulty interpreting non-behavioral cues, and gestures, which, in turn, can impact the development of peer relationships.
"Categorical schemes don't try to capture reality, where intensity or spectrum can shade one into the other," Cherney said. "This has created diagnostic disputes, and it's not settled."
The fourth edition of the DSM, the "DSM-IV," was published in 1994. Of the revision of the newest manual, and, who decides what is kept, and what is axed, according to the American Psychiatric Association's DSM-5 website, the planning stages for the upcoming version started in 1999; and between 2006 and 2008, the co-chairs to help bring about the revised manual were chosen, as well the task and work groups formed. Since then, field trials, and tests have taken place, and the draft put together.
The DSM-5 draft manual is scheduled for printing on December 31, and is planned for unveiling at the American Psychiatric Association's annual meeting in San Francisco, Calif., in May 2013.
In regard to the building process of the manual, Cherney said, "They [the creators] land somewhere by consensus in the building process. It doesn't mean everyone is in favor."
Wikipedia notes Asperger's syndrome was named by Hans Asperger, an Austrian pediatrician, in 1944, to describe four of his patients. The children had difficulties socializing, which Asperger called "autistic psychopathy." Yet, he also said his patients were "little professors," for their high intellectual abilities, and potential for achievement in their adulthoods.
2012年12月19日星期三
Five predictions for 2013
After riding out the economic storm that many of their OEM customers endured with some measure of success, moldmakers should be seeing some calmer waters. Many had high hopes at the beginning of 2012 for a banner year, but that didn’t materialize. Most now have a more realistic outlook that 2013 will be what they make it. Business over the last quarter of 2012 has been a bit slower, much of it due to the fact that tooling budgets are typically spent by October in preparation for the new year.
New business for the first quarter of 2013 appears to be spotty, depending on the markets being served and how much impact the various new taxes written into the Affordable Care Act (19 new taxes, to be exact) will have on their ability to hire and expand their business. Some moldmakers have commented to PlasticsToday that in light of the pull-back on new mold purchases over the past few years, many molds are on their last legs, and replacement molds are badly needed. An air of uncertainty still plagues many of these small-business owners as they take a “wait-and-see” stance with their OEM customers.
A Plante & Moran study of the North American Plastics Industry through 2011, and released in October, noted several interesting facts that favor moldmakers. Molders are seeing strong earnings. “Gross profits, which never varied more than a few percentage points for the past 13 years, increased almost 20% in 2010 and remained steady in 2011,” reported Plante & Moran. “We speculate that there are a number of reasons for the retention of the strong earnings in 2011.”
First, press utilization increased for a second year in a row, noted the Plante & Moran study. However, utilization is still “depressed” considering that average utilization is just 40% based on a 24/7 calculation. Typically, “increased utilization comes with increased complexity”—i.e. number of molds, part numbers and materials—“and thus with high labor costs.” Still, Plante & Moran’s report notes that this is only the fifth year out of the last 15 with an increase in utilization. “For those with good margins, any increase in utilization results in improved profits,” said the report.
Secondly, resin costs shrank an additional 1.6% in 2011, and again in 2012. Sales growth among molders “nearly doubled” in 2011, up 8.7% for the median processor. “The growth appears to have allowed processors to be more discerning with customer contracts as median complexity actually decreased from 2010,” said Plante & Moran. Larger molding companies enjoyed healthy growth, while smaller enterprises were still working to get back to pre-recession levels of production.
Third, business is strong for several industries, noted the Plante & Moran survey. For example, the automotive industry, which had a decent 2011 and an even better 2012, has managed to keep its Tier 1 and Tier 2 busy. They even softened their stance on payments for a while. However, Plante & Moran reported that it is “the aggressive supply chain practices that had taken a sabbatical during the recession that may have more impact on the desirability of the industry than a volume recovery.”
A number of mold manufacturers have found the aerospace industry to be a good fit with their automotive know-how as aircraft sales hit record highs in 2012, with builds out through 2015. That could mean good business for both molders/thermoformers and mold makers that specialize in this industry.
Other industries that are faring well include the industrial products sector that “enjoyed an increase in sales growth in 2011 for the first time in two years.” The construction and furniture industries, while still in the doldrums during 2011 when the Plante & Moran survey was being taken, has generally started on a slow upward trend in 2012.
Just when everyone thought it was safe (and profitable) to get into the medical industry to avoid the pitfalls of the automotive industry, medical and pharmaceutical are running into some headwinds. The medical device tax has many big OEMs in that sector rethinking their strategy, utilizing their foreign operations to a greater extent and even planning some “near-shoring” within North America.
A report from McKinsey & Company on the pharmaceutical industry said that “The good old days of the pharmaceutical industry are gone forever” as it heads “toward a world where its profit margins will be substantially lower than they are today.” With the rapid growth of generics, McKinsey noted that the expectation of “Big Pharma’s current level of R&D spending to become a luxury that investors no longer tolerate. . . as some investors and analysts believe that many of Big Pharma’s R&D investments destroy value.”
Given these new clouds on the horizon for both medical and pharmaceutical, moldmakers might be squeezed on price unless they provide the value proposition for molds with greater productivity for products sold in emerging markets.
Starborn Industries, a leading manufacturer and international distributor of premium fastening products, has introduced the new Smart-Bit for Fiber Cement Board. The tungsten carbide tipped pre-drilling and countersinking tool is designed to create a perfect hole and fit for matching fasteners, while ensuring consistently superior finishes.
Fiber cement board products are used in a wide variety of construction applications. The Smart-Bit for Fiber Cement is the first tool that makes it possible to pre-drill and countersink in one step at a consistent depth, without damaging the work surface. The Smart-Bit tool features a free spinning stop collar, which controls the depth of the drill and countersink. The stop collar is fitted with a rubber O-ring to prevent surface damage or marking. Once the stop collar stops spinning, the hole is complete. Additionally, the tool is able to keep debris away from the stop collar, with its built-in debris cavity, which allows for the tool to maintain a perfect and consistent depth compared to conventional flush mounted countersinks.
New business for the first quarter of 2013 appears to be spotty, depending on the markets being served and how much impact the various new taxes written into the Affordable Care Act (19 new taxes, to be exact) will have on their ability to hire and expand their business. Some moldmakers have commented to PlasticsToday that in light of the pull-back on new mold purchases over the past few years, many molds are on their last legs, and replacement molds are badly needed. An air of uncertainty still plagues many of these small-business owners as they take a “wait-and-see” stance with their OEM customers.
A Plante & Moran study of the North American Plastics Industry through 2011, and released in October, noted several interesting facts that favor moldmakers. Molders are seeing strong earnings. “Gross profits, which never varied more than a few percentage points for the past 13 years, increased almost 20% in 2010 and remained steady in 2011,” reported Plante & Moran. “We speculate that there are a number of reasons for the retention of the strong earnings in 2011.”
First, press utilization increased for a second year in a row, noted the Plante & Moran study. However, utilization is still “depressed” considering that average utilization is just 40% based on a 24/7 calculation. Typically, “increased utilization comes with increased complexity”—i.e. number of molds, part numbers and materials—“and thus with high labor costs.” Still, Plante & Moran’s report notes that this is only the fifth year out of the last 15 with an increase in utilization. “For those with good margins, any increase in utilization results in improved profits,” said the report.
Secondly, resin costs shrank an additional 1.6% in 2011, and again in 2012. Sales growth among molders “nearly doubled” in 2011, up 8.7% for the median processor. “The growth appears to have allowed processors to be more discerning with customer contracts as median complexity actually decreased from 2010,” said Plante & Moran. Larger molding companies enjoyed healthy growth, while smaller enterprises were still working to get back to pre-recession levels of production.
Third, business is strong for several industries, noted the Plante & Moran survey. For example, the automotive industry, which had a decent 2011 and an even better 2012, has managed to keep its Tier 1 and Tier 2 busy. They even softened their stance on payments for a while. However, Plante & Moran reported that it is “the aggressive supply chain practices that had taken a sabbatical during the recession that may have more impact on the desirability of the industry than a volume recovery.”
A number of mold manufacturers have found the aerospace industry to be a good fit with their automotive know-how as aircraft sales hit record highs in 2012, with builds out through 2015. That could mean good business for both molders/thermoformers and mold makers that specialize in this industry.
Other industries that are faring well include the industrial products sector that “enjoyed an increase in sales growth in 2011 for the first time in two years.” The construction and furniture industries, while still in the doldrums during 2011 when the Plante & Moran survey was being taken, has generally started on a slow upward trend in 2012.
Just when everyone thought it was safe (and profitable) to get into the medical industry to avoid the pitfalls of the automotive industry, medical and pharmaceutical are running into some headwinds. The medical device tax has many big OEMs in that sector rethinking their strategy, utilizing their foreign operations to a greater extent and even planning some “near-shoring” within North America.
A report from McKinsey & Company on the pharmaceutical industry said that “The good old days of the pharmaceutical industry are gone forever” as it heads “toward a world where its profit margins will be substantially lower than they are today.” With the rapid growth of generics, McKinsey noted that the expectation of “Big Pharma’s current level of R&D spending to become a luxury that investors no longer tolerate. . . as some investors and analysts believe that many of Big Pharma’s R&D investments destroy value.”
Given these new clouds on the horizon for both medical and pharmaceutical, moldmakers might be squeezed on price unless they provide the value proposition for molds with greater productivity for products sold in emerging markets.
Starborn Industries, a leading manufacturer and international distributor of premium fastening products, has introduced the new Smart-Bit for Fiber Cement Board. The tungsten carbide tipped pre-drilling and countersinking tool is designed to create a perfect hole and fit for matching fasteners, while ensuring consistently superior finishes.
Fiber cement board products are used in a wide variety of construction applications. The Smart-Bit for Fiber Cement is the first tool that makes it possible to pre-drill and countersink in one step at a consistent depth, without damaging the work surface. The Smart-Bit tool features a free spinning stop collar, which controls the depth of the drill and countersink. The stop collar is fitted with a rubber O-ring to prevent surface damage or marking. Once the stop collar stops spinning, the hole is complete. Additionally, the tool is able to keep debris away from the stop collar, with its built-in debris cavity, which allows for the tool to maintain a perfect and consistent depth compared to conventional flush mounted countersinks.
Washington Artist Ariane Luckey Shares Artistic ‘Soliloquy’
In the world of literature and theater, a soliloquy is defined as a dramatic or literary form of discourse in which a character talks to himself or herself or reveals his or her thoughts without addressing a particular listener. It was a device used frequently in dramas, and used to great effect in particular by William Shakespeare in such famous speeches as “To be or not to be” in “Hamlet,” and Juliet’s “O, Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou, Romeo?”
The literary device fell out of fashion, however, in the late 18th century, when tastes shifted toward realism.
Washington painter Ariane Luckey has not only revitalized, but redefined the term with her latest exhibition of paintings and pastels, aptly titled “Soliloquy,” which opened last weekend at the Minor Memorial Library Community Gallery in Roxbury. Instead of using words, Ms. Luckey discloses her feelings through paint, sharing with viewers her painterly view of our region’s historic architecture and its sweeping vistas and sylvan meadows, her brilliantly colored landscapes reminiscent of renowned representational painter Wolf Kahn.
She works, she said, to “celebrate the moment when seeing and feeling become one,” focusing her brush on the effects of light on the picturesque landscapes that surround her.
“I react to the moment when light becomes color,” Ms. Luckey explained of her work. “By working primarily on location, I find a direct and spontaneous response to the moment. I paint both with pastels and oil paints and try to evoke the mood instilled in me by the trees on a hill that make me think of sentinels or how the swaying grass of a summer meadow meets the cool shadows of the woods.”
The show will continue through Saturday, Jan. 19, during regular library hours, when the Community Room is not in use for a special program.
Just before her opening last Saturday, Ms. Luckey said she was looking forward to her first exhibition at the Minor Memorial Library, where natural light bathes her work in a warm hue, offering further dimension to the landscapes she has painted. But, in many ways, painting full-time has been a long time coming for the artist, who earned a B.A. in studio art at Smith College in Northampton, Mass. The self-proclaimed self-taught artist said her art was put on hold—or rather put into the closet—for years.
“I was always painting, but much of my work was kept in the closet,” she recalled. “Once my kids went to school, I was able to pursue it again. When my kids were little, I always said, ‘I wish I had time to paint.’ I suppose you should be careful what you wish for, because now I’m painting full time.”
Inspiration, she said, comes from the works of Monet, Cezanne, Bonnard, Hopper, Kahn and Diebenkorn, among others. But her biggest inspiration, perhaps, comes from the countryside around her Washington home. Actually, it’s her mother’s old home, a rustic structure set “way back in the woods, away from everything.” But, she said, its surrounding landscape has been an extraordinary muse, sparking the creativity within.
“It is the light and the color that draw me to a subject, the way light suffuses the landscapes in color and the moods they evoke. My work is expressive and loose in application, but there is a strong underlying composition. My paintings are loosely representational, celebrating the moment when seeing and feeling become one,” she explained of her work in an artist statement. “I try to capture the transitory quality of light in a moment with fleeting impressions. I frequently paint en plein air, which brings a direct and passionate response to a particular moment—the light changes, my hands get cold. … My goal is to share a simple enjoyment of the moment with the viewer.
Each painting, she said, begins as a pastel painted en plein air. “It’s like a dance. A very passionate dance,” Ms. Luckey explained. “Then I do a work in oils. Two winters ago, when we had all of that snow, I started painting in the studio and I discovered the joy of painting indoors, which is a very different experience.”
Ms. Luckey said she was introduced to painting on location by her mother, a plein air painter in San Francisco. Her mother’s father was also a painter who, she said, painted exquisite paintings in a style similar to the Hudson River School of painters.
Luckey has shown her work at the Washington Art Association—most recently in its 60th annual members show—at Carole Peck’s Good News Café in Woodbury, at The Silo Gallery at Hunt Hill Farm in New Milford, and at the Gunn Memorial Library in Washington, as well as other solo and juried shows throughout the region. Her painting, “Into the Hill,” was selected as the poster image for the 2010 “Celebration of Connecticut Farms.”
“Through her vibrant, high-key palette, innate sense of design and impressionistic method of mark making, Ariane creates pictures that are very engaging and pleasant to view,” said painter Robert Lenz, a juror of the “Still Life” show in which Ms. Luckey participated at The Silo Gallery in 2010. “Whether intentional or not, I see influences of Wolf Kahn, Henry Twactman and Pierre Bonnard. … I would hope that she will never lose her unique voice.”
Local artist Carol Brightman Johnson has long held a deep affection for the Steep Rock Association, which oversees three glorious preserves in town, two of them along the Shepaug River and the other containing a trail that leads up to The Pinnacle, overlooking Lake Waramaug.
If there were any way she could give something back to area’s premier land trust, one that oversees more than 5,100 acres of preserved land throughout Washington and adjacent towns in all, the oil painter would happily. It turns out that she’s found one.
In Washington Depot’s Marty’s Café, more than 20 of her landscape and other paintings make up her latest exhibit, “My Favorite Things.” The Roxbury resident’s showing is intended, in large part, to benefit the Steep Rock Association.
She specified that her donations to Steep Rock Association be used specifically for trail maintenance. “My Favorite Things” will be up until Dec. 31 at Marty’s Café.
Ms. Brightman Johnson is known in the area for her work, in which she depicts nature’s delicate nuances, from “the miracle of light falling on objects,” to roots burrowed in rock, and even the varying colors reflected upon water. She sees such phenomena as a gift, and her talent for painting as a way of examining the world and communicating its beauty. She shares these natural marvels, which she calls “many small discoveries,” by painting en plein air. During the last year she traveled the country to do just that.
“I paint to share my discoveries,” Ms. Johnson explained. “There is [so] much to explore, I often feel inadequate. Yet I cannot abandon the quest for everyday wonders or a higher level of skill. The process of painting requires total presence in the moment. Heightened concentration brings unexpected revelations, which I attempt to share. A successful painting communicates my vision and my feeling.
The literary device fell out of fashion, however, in the late 18th century, when tastes shifted toward realism.
Washington painter Ariane Luckey has not only revitalized, but redefined the term with her latest exhibition of paintings and pastels, aptly titled “Soliloquy,” which opened last weekend at the Minor Memorial Library Community Gallery in Roxbury. Instead of using words, Ms. Luckey discloses her feelings through paint, sharing with viewers her painterly view of our region’s historic architecture and its sweeping vistas and sylvan meadows, her brilliantly colored landscapes reminiscent of renowned representational painter Wolf Kahn.
She works, she said, to “celebrate the moment when seeing and feeling become one,” focusing her brush on the effects of light on the picturesque landscapes that surround her.
“I react to the moment when light becomes color,” Ms. Luckey explained of her work. “By working primarily on location, I find a direct and spontaneous response to the moment. I paint both with pastels and oil paints and try to evoke the mood instilled in me by the trees on a hill that make me think of sentinels or how the swaying grass of a summer meadow meets the cool shadows of the woods.”
The show will continue through Saturday, Jan. 19, during regular library hours, when the Community Room is not in use for a special program.
Just before her opening last Saturday, Ms. Luckey said she was looking forward to her first exhibition at the Minor Memorial Library, where natural light bathes her work in a warm hue, offering further dimension to the landscapes she has painted. But, in many ways, painting full-time has been a long time coming for the artist, who earned a B.A. in studio art at Smith College in Northampton, Mass. The self-proclaimed self-taught artist said her art was put on hold—or rather put into the closet—for years.
“I was always painting, but much of my work was kept in the closet,” she recalled. “Once my kids went to school, I was able to pursue it again. When my kids were little, I always said, ‘I wish I had time to paint.’ I suppose you should be careful what you wish for, because now I’m painting full time.”
Inspiration, she said, comes from the works of Monet, Cezanne, Bonnard, Hopper, Kahn and Diebenkorn, among others. But her biggest inspiration, perhaps, comes from the countryside around her Washington home. Actually, it’s her mother’s old home, a rustic structure set “way back in the woods, away from everything.” But, she said, its surrounding landscape has been an extraordinary muse, sparking the creativity within.
“It is the light and the color that draw me to a subject, the way light suffuses the landscapes in color and the moods they evoke. My work is expressive and loose in application, but there is a strong underlying composition. My paintings are loosely representational, celebrating the moment when seeing and feeling become one,” she explained of her work in an artist statement. “I try to capture the transitory quality of light in a moment with fleeting impressions. I frequently paint en plein air, which brings a direct and passionate response to a particular moment—the light changes, my hands get cold. … My goal is to share a simple enjoyment of the moment with the viewer.
Each painting, she said, begins as a pastel painted en plein air. “It’s like a dance. A very passionate dance,” Ms. Luckey explained. “Then I do a work in oils. Two winters ago, when we had all of that snow, I started painting in the studio and I discovered the joy of painting indoors, which is a very different experience.”
Ms. Luckey said she was introduced to painting on location by her mother, a plein air painter in San Francisco. Her mother’s father was also a painter who, she said, painted exquisite paintings in a style similar to the Hudson River School of painters.
Luckey has shown her work at the Washington Art Association—most recently in its 60th annual members show—at Carole Peck’s Good News Café in Woodbury, at The Silo Gallery at Hunt Hill Farm in New Milford, and at the Gunn Memorial Library in Washington, as well as other solo and juried shows throughout the region. Her painting, “Into the Hill,” was selected as the poster image for the 2010 “Celebration of Connecticut Farms.”
“Through her vibrant, high-key palette, innate sense of design and impressionistic method of mark making, Ariane creates pictures that are very engaging and pleasant to view,” said painter Robert Lenz, a juror of the “Still Life” show in which Ms. Luckey participated at The Silo Gallery in 2010. “Whether intentional or not, I see influences of Wolf Kahn, Henry Twactman and Pierre Bonnard. … I would hope that she will never lose her unique voice.”
Local artist Carol Brightman Johnson has long held a deep affection for the Steep Rock Association, which oversees three glorious preserves in town, two of them along the Shepaug River and the other containing a trail that leads up to The Pinnacle, overlooking Lake Waramaug.
If there were any way she could give something back to area’s premier land trust, one that oversees more than 5,100 acres of preserved land throughout Washington and adjacent towns in all, the oil painter would happily. It turns out that she’s found one.
In Washington Depot’s Marty’s Café, more than 20 of her landscape and other paintings make up her latest exhibit, “My Favorite Things.” The Roxbury resident’s showing is intended, in large part, to benefit the Steep Rock Association.
She specified that her donations to Steep Rock Association be used specifically for trail maintenance. “My Favorite Things” will be up until Dec. 31 at Marty’s Café.
Ms. Brightman Johnson is known in the area for her work, in which she depicts nature’s delicate nuances, from “the miracle of light falling on objects,” to roots burrowed in rock, and even the varying colors reflected upon water. She sees such phenomena as a gift, and her talent for painting as a way of examining the world and communicating its beauty. She shares these natural marvels, which she calls “many small discoveries,” by painting en plein air. During the last year she traveled the country to do just that.
“I paint to share my discoveries,” Ms. Johnson explained. “There is [so] much to explore, I often feel inadequate. Yet I cannot abandon the quest for everyday wonders or a higher level of skill. The process of painting requires total presence in the moment. Heightened concentration brings unexpected revelations, which I attempt to share. A successful painting communicates my vision and my feeling.
2012年12月16日星期日
Hollow victory
Although only half way through Egypt’s constitutional “referendum,” it seems that even if only a fraction of the charges against the process turn out to be accurate, the vote is far from democratic.
Seven rights groups, perhaps ironically including the state’s own body, the National Council for Human Rights, claim that Saturday’s vote was beset by violations, ranging from the standard – denying entrance to Christians, who were more than likely to vote “no,” and polls closing early – to the surreal, with power cuts occurring in tandem with the vote count, a phenomenon perhaps borrowed from Lebanon’s Kesrouan district.
But the vote was marred before it even began. The vast majority of judges boycotted the referendum, so most ballots were without neutral observation and rights groups have now alleged that some of those who identified themselves as judges Saturday actually presented false papers.
The lead up to the election had also paved the way for a rocky referendum, with violence between President Mohammad Mursi’s supporters and opponents leading to some 10 deaths and around 1,000 wounded.
After the first round of voting Saturday, the only cities to have a majority “no” vote were Alexandria and Cairo, perhaps not coincidentally the country’s two largest cities, and those areas with the highest levels of education and literacy.
Rights groups claim that in other areas, voters were actively encouraged to vote “yes,” by whispering Brotherhood members, often present within polling stations.
Asides from all these flagrant violations, the turnout for the referendum was low enough to render any verdict worthless. Around 32 percent of people voted, after the first round, with a 56 percent majority. So really, only 18 percent of Egyptians are in favor of the Constitution, if in fact, this was the option they chose, with their free will and without external pressure.
The overwhelming majority of Egyptians does not want the new Constitution then, or does not feel well enough informed or motivated either way. Short of a miracle, however, it seems the Constitution, which will affect the lives of all of Egypt’s citizens, will pass.
Without a large or at least comfortable popular majority, any referendum on a topic this decisive is destined to fail, in so much as its passing will undoubtedly lead to more of the street anger and violence which has already been seen. Passed in such a way, this referendum looks set to sow more dissension and sectarianism.
In this test, apparently designed to display the Muslim Brotherhood’s power, Mursi and his allies have failed. The president has revealed himself to be little more than a puppet for the party, and one happy to do their bargaining for him, no matter what the expense to the country and its citizens as a whole.
Since his election, Mursi has repeatedly acted as if he a representative of one sector of society, and not the country’s many diverse faiths, parties and classes.
This mistake will continue to haunt him, and the country. Making decisions based on the wishes of one party damages Egypt now and in the future.
In the short term it will continue to create strife on the streets, meaning the government will be unable to direct much-needed attention to the dire situation of the economy, the real issue affecting people’s lives.
In the long term it creates a system whereby each successive government will see fit to mold the country and the Constitution as it sees fit. A strong house is not built on shaky foundations. If Mursi does not realize this soon, the future of this new democracy is in jeopardy.
Then there are the two teams from the SEC that had good BCS credentials, but because of the two-team rule had no chance of getting that at-large spot: the Tigers and South Carolina Gamecocks. The Gamecocks had numerous injury problems on offense with quarterback Connor Shaw missing a few games and running back Marcus Lattimore’s season ending early for the second year in a row thanks to a gruesome knee injury again. The Gamecocks still went 10-2 and put on particularly great defensive performances against the Bulldogs and later against Tajh Boyd & the Clemson Tigers. The Tigers also went 10-2, and their offensive issue throughout the year was quarterback Zach Mettenberger never fully getting into high gear, though he finally did late in the season.
And of course, there’s the Texas A&M Aggies. In their first year in the SEC, not much was expected out of them. Enter Johnny Manziel, or “Johnny Football” as he is now known to the country. Just a freshman, Manziel took the offensive approach that is more typical in the Big 12, brought it to the SEC, and ended up being the first freshman to win the Heisman Trophy. His numbers were huge, but the one really big game against a really big team that Manziel had this season was handing the Crimson Tide their only loss of the season. The Aggies finished 10-2 and will be playing in the Cotton Bowl.
And there you have it: six out of the 14 teams finished with ten or more wins and all six are in the current BCS top ten. This is the best conference in college football. Period. End of story. End of discussion. End of debate. Some may whine about favoritism with the rankings, and that may be true. However, you simply can’t deny the fact that this conference produces quality football teams practically in the old-school mold. And they win year after year after year. It’s a slap in the face to people who want to believe that defense and rushing are dead in college football, and I like that.
But the SEC’s continued success is further proof of a simple reality in college football that few people want to accept: it’s not about if you lose, but when you lose. Even if you lose during the season and it’s not too bad of a loss against a good enough team, you’re not out of the title hunt. Three of the SEC’s six straight national champions have had at least one loss. Why they were able to stay in the national title hunt is simple: they lost before the stuff hit the fan. If you look through these last seven seasons you will see the SEC’s best only lose early in the season or early in November. The rest of those in the title hunt each year tend to lose late in November, on Thanksgiving weekend, or on Championship Week. In other words, these teams tend to lose in any of the final three weeks of the season, a time when the SEC team or teams still in the title hunt are back to winning every week.
Robert and Judy Peeler have plastered their house and yard with 50,000 lights, which is actually down from their all-time high of 69,000, because Robert stayed away from his tallest trees this year.
Strings of cars, even buses, move slowly down this country road in eastern Rowan County to marvel at the Peelers’ Christmas decorations.
“I live next door to it,” says daughter-in-law Vicki Peeler, one of several people who nominated the Peelers’ property for the newspaper’s “Yule Light Up My Life” contest. “He does a great job, and he made all the wood cut-outs that he uses and has Christmas music playing.”
Peeler told me he starts work on his house and yard two weeks before Halloween so it’s ready by Thanksgiving.
If you haven’t figured it out by now, the Peelers’ house makes the “Yule Light Up My Life” Top 10 list of places to see in Rowan County for holiday decorations.
I spent several nights during the past week visiting nominated locations for the “contest.” About 40 nominations came in, though many people mentioned the same properties.
In the end, I performed drive-by inspections of 22 different places, from one end of Rowan County to the other.
The goal of the contest was to come up with 10 places worthy of getting into your car and — except for the gas — having a cheap night’s entertainment by visiting sites that are jaw-dropping and suitable for all ages.
It’s definitely a G-rated tour and one worthy of taking if you’re into grand gestures, music, ingenuity, light pollution, moving parts, figurines and blowups, secular and religious themes and indomitable Christmas spirits.
Seven rights groups, perhaps ironically including the state’s own body, the National Council for Human Rights, claim that Saturday’s vote was beset by violations, ranging from the standard – denying entrance to Christians, who were more than likely to vote “no,” and polls closing early – to the surreal, with power cuts occurring in tandem with the vote count, a phenomenon perhaps borrowed from Lebanon’s Kesrouan district.
But the vote was marred before it even began. The vast majority of judges boycotted the referendum, so most ballots were without neutral observation and rights groups have now alleged that some of those who identified themselves as judges Saturday actually presented false papers.
The lead up to the election had also paved the way for a rocky referendum, with violence between President Mohammad Mursi’s supporters and opponents leading to some 10 deaths and around 1,000 wounded.
After the first round of voting Saturday, the only cities to have a majority “no” vote were Alexandria and Cairo, perhaps not coincidentally the country’s two largest cities, and those areas with the highest levels of education and literacy.
Rights groups claim that in other areas, voters were actively encouraged to vote “yes,” by whispering Brotherhood members, often present within polling stations.
Asides from all these flagrant violations, the turnout for the referendum was low enough to render any verdict worthless. Around 32 percent of people voted, after the first round, with a 56 percent majority. So really, only 18 percent of Egyptians are in favor of the Constitution, if in fact, this was the option they chose, with their free will and without external pressure.
The overwhelming majority of Egyptians does not want the new Constitution then, or does not feel well enough informed or motivated either way. Short of a miracle, however, it seems the Constitution, which will affect the lives of all of Egypt’s citizens, will pass.
Without a large or at least comfortable popular majority, any referendum on a topic this decisive is destined to fail, in so much as its passing will undoubtedly lead to more of the street anger and violence which has already been seen. Passed in such a way, this referendum looks set to sow more dissension and sectarianism.
In this test, apparently designed to display the Muslim Brotherhood’s power, Mursi and his allies have failed. The president has revealed himself to be little more than a puppet for the party, and one happy to do their bargaining for him, no matter what the expense to the country and its citizens as a whole.
Since his election, Mursi has repeatedly acted as if he a representative of one sector of society, and not the country’s many diverse faiths, parties and classes.
This mistake will continue to haunt him, and the country. Making decisions based on the wishes of one party damages Egypt now and in the future.
In the short term it will continue to create strife on the streets, meaning the government will be unable to direct much-needed attention to the dire situation of the economy, the real issue affecting people’s lives.
In the long term it creates a system whereby each successive government will see fit to mold the country and the Constitution as it sees fit. A strong house is not built on shaky foundations. If Mursi does not realize this soon, the future of this new democracy is in jeopardy.
Then there are the two teams from the SEC that had good BCS credentials, but because of the two-team rule had no chance of getting that at-large spot: the Tigers and South Carolina Gamecocks. The Gamecocks had numerous injury problems on offense with quarterback Connor Shaw missing a few games and running back Marcus Lattimore’s season ending early for the second year in a row thanks to a gruesome knee injury again. The Gamecocks still went 10-2 and put on particularly great defensive performances against the Bulldogs and later against Tajh Boyd & the Clemson Tigers. The Tigers also went 10-2, and their offensive issue throughout the year was quarterback Zach Mettenberger never fully getting into high gear, though he finally did late in the season.
And of course, there’s the Texas A&M Aggies. In their first year in the SEC, not much was expected out of them. Enter Johnny Manziel, or “Johnny Football” as he is now known to the country. Just a freshman, Manziel took the offensive approach that is more typical in the Big 12, brought it to the SEC, and ended up being the first freshman to win the Heisman Trophy. His numbers were huge, but the one really big game against a really big team that Manziel had this season was handing the Crimson Tide their only loss of the season. The Aggies finished 10-2 and will be playing in the Cotton Bowl.
And there you have it: six out of the 14 teams finished with ten or more wins and all six are in the current BCS top ten. This is the best conference in college football. Period. End of story. End of discussion. End of debate. Some may whine about favoritism with the rankings, and that may be true. However, you simply can’t deny the fact that this conference produces quality football teams practically in the old-school mold. And they win year after year after year. It’s a slap in the face to people who want to believe that defense and rushing are dead in college football, and I like that.
But the SEC’s continued success is further proof of a simple reality in college football that few people want to accept: it’s not about if you lose, but when you lose. Even if you lose during the season and it’s not too bad of a loss against a good enough team, you’re not out of the title hunt. Three of the SEC’s six straight national champions have had at least one loss. Why they were able to stay in the national title hunt is simple: they lost before the stuff hit the fan. If you look through these last seven seasons you will see the SEC’s best only lose early in the season or early in November. The rest of those in the title hunt each year tend to lose late in November, on Thanksgiving weekend, or on Championship Week. In other words, these teams tend to lose in any of the final three weeks of the season, a time when the SEC team or teams still in the title hunt are back to winning every week.
Robert and Judy Peeler have plastered their house and yard with 50,000 lights, which is actually down from their all-time high of 69,000, because Robert stayed away from his tallest trees this year.
Strings of cars, even buses, move slowly down this country road in eastern Rowan County to marvel at the Peelers’ Christmas decorations.
“I live next door to it,” says daughter-in-law Vicki Peeler, one of several people who nominated the Peelers’ property for the newspaper’s “Yule Light Up My Life” contest. “He does a great job, and he made all the wood cut-outs that he uses and has Christmas music playing.”
Peeler told me he starts work on his house and yard two weeks before Halloween so it’s ready by Thanksgiving.
If you haven’t figured it out by now, the Peelers’ house makes the “Yule Light Up My Life” Top 10 list of places to see in Rowan County for holiday decorations.
I spent several nights during the past week visiting nominated locations for the “contest.” About 40 nominations came in, though many people mentioned the same properties.
In the end, I performed drive-by inspections of 22 different places, from one end of Rowan County to the other.
The goal of the contest was to come up with 10 places worthy of getting into your car and — except for the gas — having a cheap night’s entertainment by visiting sites that are jaw-dropping and suitable for all ages.
It’s definitely a G-rated tour and one worthy of taking if you’re into grand gestures, music, ingenuity, light pollution, moving parts, figurines and blowups, secular and religious themes and indomitable Christmas spirits.
Hudson’s C&M Machine Products expanding
The smell comes from the canola-based cooling liquid used in the many machines that churn out millions of small metal components for the family-owned “job shop.” The smell is evidence that C&M is not just surviving during the recession, it is growing.
“We had about 60 employees in 2008; now we have 100,” said CEO Dan Villemaire.
The firm is in the process of expanding and refurbishing a building in the Sagamore Industrial Park in south Hudson, where it has been located in various buildings for decades. When the work is finished by late winter, C&M will have 135,000 feet of manufacturing, office and warehouse space in two buildings a quarter-mile apart, roughly double its current footprint.
The expansion and move reflects the fact that C&M still has a lot of family involvement. It was founded by Villemaire’s late grandfather and his father, Paul, who is still a co-owner with Dan.
Ten family members work there in various capacities, including George Villemaire, Dan’s uncle, who as the company’s property manager has been in charge of the expansion.
“It’s going quite well. It’s on schedule,” George told a reporter during a recent tour, as they watched stucco being applied to the exterior of the new building.
“We were under budget until my father got involved,” added Dan. The two men laughed together.
Dan Villemaire says C&M has thrived by responding to the many pressures that result from bad economic times.
“A customer might have 3,000 vendors – buy components from 3,000 places – and wants to get it down to 1,500,” he said. “We have consistently come out on top of the supply chain.”
Making the manufacturing process faster and less expensive was key, through better processes, training, and better technology. The latter includes a $1.7 million rotary-transfer precision machining device from Hydromat which allowed C&M to reduce the turnout time for one piece from 90 seconds to 3 seconds.
But even older, simpler computer-controlled machine tools are big and expensive. They can take a 12-foot rod of metal and turn it into thousands of pieces during a single autonomous run, and most cost six digits: This is a capital-intensive business. C&M has “oh, a least $20 million, probably a lot more” worth of devices on the floor, Villemaire estimated. The company has four full-time maintenance workers just to keep them humming.
C&M – a name taken from initials of early partners – was started in Lowell, Mass., in 1979 by Villemaire’s grandfather and father to make metal components used in other firms’ devices.
Such companies, called machine shops or job shops, have a long tradition in industrial manufacturing, and remain a large, if largely overlooked, component of the region’s business scene. In particular, they provide much of the area’s manufacturing employment for the technicians needed to operate the computer- controlled machines that shape the copper, aluminum or steel parts.
C&M moved to New Hampshire decades ago, and their best source of employees remains Greater Lowell Technical High School in Tyngsborough, Villemaire says, although C&M is working harder with New Hampshire high schools and community colleges.
The company’s customers include defense, automotive and firearm manufacturers, and it does product runs ranging from 500 pieces to millions at a time. One customer, which Villemaire declined to name, has such a large contract that it prompted the whole expansion and move.
Villemaire, 29, a 2002 graduate of Bishop Guertin High School, joined the firm six years ago after getting a finance degree from UNH’s Whittemore School of Business. Like many children of business founders, he says he was initially uncertain about following his predecessors.
The story of what’s happened to First Data since it was taken over by KKR is an instructive look into the growing impact of private equity firms here and around the world. KKR, Bain Capital and other private equity firms have bought up roughly $3 trillion worth of companies around the globe with the backing of pension funds, Wall Street banks, foreign nations’ investment funds and other backers.
After KKR bought First Data, thousands of jobs were shed. First Data’s debt rocketed past $22 billion — more than double its annual revenue — due to the junk bond-fueled deal. The company went from earning $1 billion-plus yearly profits to losses of hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars. And it recently had to renegotiate most of its debt to get more time to pay back the loans.
KKR “went really to the edge, and then the economy tanked,” said Eric Grover, a longtime veteran from the payments processing industry, now with consulting firm Intrepid Ventures. Since KKR’s acquisition, he said, First Data has done a good job of re-tooling and recovering under KKR’s direction. But the company remains vulnerable because of its huge debt load, he said.
“The good news is they have a long runway” because First Data got extensions on most of is debt to 2017 or after, said Grover. But, he added, “the business is over-leveraged.” If interest rates shot up, driving up the cost of its debt, “that company would tank,” he said.
First Data, with 24,000 employees, is the world’s largest processor of credit and debit card transactions. It moved its headquarters back to Atlanta from Denver in 2009, and now employs 1,200 in metro Atlanta and 200 in Columbus.
Other local companies wholly or partially owned by private equity firms include Alpharetta-based Colonial Pipeline (KKR); The Weather Channel (Blackstone Group) and Church’s Chicken (Friedman, Fleisher and Lowe). Bain Capital, the firm co-founded by former presidential candidate Mitt Romney, owns stakes in The Weather Channel, specialty credit card firm FleetCor; former Home Depot wholesale arm, HD Supply; and radio broadcaster Cumulus Media.
Private equity firms — once more commonly called leveraged buyout firms — amassed their huge portfolios using a strategy that hasn’t changed much over time. First, the firms assemble a buyout fund by wooing money from pension funds and other big investors who become partners in the fund. The buyout firms then use that money, plus billions more of borrowed money, to buy up companies in highly-leveraged deals that are akin to buying a house with a small down payment plus a big mortgage.
The buyout firms try to look for “fixer-upper” companies that are still basically solid. They spend a few years retooling them by cutting costs or coming up with new products or strategies, then sell them again to new owners or through a public stock offering. The buyout firms and their partners then split up the profits.
“We had about 60 employees in 2008; now we have 100,” said CEO Dan Villemaire.
The firm is in the process of expanding and refurbishing a building in the Sagamore Industrial Park in south Hudson, where it has been located in various buildings for decades. When the work is finished by late winter, C&M will have 135,000 feet of manufacturing, office and warehouse space in two buildings a quarter-mile apart, roughly double its current footprint.
The expansion and move reflects the fact that C&M still has a lot of family involvement. It was founded by Villemaire’s late grandfather and his father, Paul, who is still a co-owner with Dan.
Ten family members work there in various capacities, including George Villemaire, Dan’s uncle, who as the company’s property manager has been in charge of the expansion.
“It’s going quite well. It’s on schedule,” George told a reporter during a recent tour, as they watched stucco being applied to the exterior of the new building.
“We were under budget until my father got involved,” added Dan. The two men laughed together.
Dan Villemaire says C&M has thrived by responding to the many pressures that result from bad economic times.
“A customer might have 3,000 vendors – buy components from 3,000 places – and wants to get it down to 1,500,” he said. “We have consistently come out on top of the supply chain.”
Making the manufacturing process faster and less expensive was key, through better processes, training, and better technology. The latter includes a $1.7 million rotary-transfer precision machining device from Hydromat which allowed C&M to reduce the turnout time for one piece from 90 seconds to 3 seconds.
But even older, simpler computer-controlled machine tools are big and expensive. They can take a 12-foot rod of metal and turn it into thousands of pieces during a single autonomous run, and most cost six digits: This is a capital-intensive business. C&M has “oh, a least $20 million, probably a lot more” worth of devices on the floor, Villemaire estimated. The company has four full-time maintenance workers just to keep them humming.
C&M – a name taken from initials of early partners – was started in Lowell, Mass., in 1979 by Villemaire’s grandfather and father to make metal components used in other firms’ devices.
Such companies, called machine shops or job shops, have a long tradition in industrial manufacturing, and remain a large, if largely overlooked, component of the region’s business scene. In particular, they provide much of the area’s manufacturing employment for the technicians needed to operate the computer- controlled machines that shape the copper, aluminum or steel parts.
C&M moved to New Hampshire decades ago, and their best source of employees remains Greater Lowell Technical High School in Tyngsborough, Villemaire says, although C&M is working harder with New Hampshire high schools and community colleges.
The company’s customers include defense, automotive and firearm manufacturers, and it does product runs ranging from 500 pieces to millions at a time. One customer, which Villemaire declined to name, has such a large contract that it prompted the whole expansion and move.
Villemaire, 29, a 2002 graduate of Bishop Guertin High School, joined the firm six years ago after getting a finance degree from UNH’s Whittemore School of Business. Like many children of business founders, he says he was initially uncertain about following his predecessors.
The story of what’s happened to First Data since it was taken over by KKR is an instructive look into the growing impact of private equity firms here and around the world. KKR, Bain Capital and other private equity firms have bought up roughly $3 trillion worth of companies around the globe with the backing of pension funds, Wall Street banks, foreign nations’ investment funds and other backers.
After KKR bought First Data, thousands of jobs were shed. First Data’s debt rocketed past $22 billion — more than double its annual revenue — due to the junk bond-fueled deal. The company went from earning $1 billion-plus yearly profits to losses of hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars. And it recently had to renegotiate most of its debt to get more time to pay back the loans.
KKR “went really to the edge, and then the economy tanked,” said Eric Grover, a longtime veteran from the payments processing industry, now with consulting firm Intrepid Ventures. Since KKR’s acquisition, he said, First Data has done a good job of re-tooling and recovering under KKR’s direction. But the company remains vulnerable because of its huge debt load, he said.
“The good news is they have a long runway” because First Data got extensions on most of is debt to 2017 or after, said Grover. But, he added, “the business is over-leveraged.” If interest rates shot up, driving up the cost of its debt, “that company would tank,” he said.
First Data, with 24,000 employees, is the world’s largest processor of credit and debit card transactions. It moved its headquarters back to Atlanta from Denver in 2009, and now employs 1,200 in metro Atlanta and 200 in Columbus.
Other local companies wholly or partially owned by private equity firms include Alpharetta-based Colonial Pipeline (KKR); The Weather Channel (Blackstone Group) and Church’s Chicken (Friedman, Fleisher and Lowe). Bain Capital, the firm co-founded by former presidential candidate Mitt Romney, owns stakes in The Weather Channel, specialty credit card firm FleetCor; former Home Depot wholesale arm, HD Supply; and radio broadcaster Cumulus Media.
Private equity firms — once more commonly called leveraged buyout firms — amassed their huge portfolios using a strategy that hasn’t changed much over time. First, the firms assemble a buyout fund by wooing money from pension funds and other big investors who become partners in the fund. The buyout firms then use that money, plus billions more of borrowed money, to buy up companies in highly-leveraged deals that are akin to buying a house with a small down payment plus a big mortgage.
The buyout firms try to look for “fixer-upper” companies that are still basically solid. They spend a few years retooling them by cutting costs or coming up with new products or strategies, then sell them again to new owners or through a public stock offering. The buyout firms and their partners then split up the profits.
2012年12月9日星期日
Using a scandal to drive change
I arrived at Siemens at a very difficult moment. The company faced allegations of bribery in several countries, and eventually it paid US$1.6 billion (S$1.95 billion) in fines.
But as I always remind anybody who is listening: Never miss the opportunities that come from a good crisis - and we certainly did not miss ours.
The scandal created a sense of urgency without which change would have been much more difficult to achieve, regardless of who was CEO.
Siemens is a very proud company with a history of innovation and success. In the absence of a catalyst like this, people would have asked themselves: "Why alter anything?"
Yet, Siemens had to change. It is not so much the uniqueness of your strategy that matters nowadays - it is the strength of your execution. How can you adapt continually to the changing world we are in right now?
Siemens needed to execute more rapidly, and to do that we had to take a hard look at both our organisational structure and whether we had the right people in the right jobs.
Although I was Siemens' 12th Chief Executive, I was the first one who knew the company not from the inside but from the outside.
Getting to know the company meant really engaging with its people. So I went off travelling around the world.
I developed a daily routine: First, I would have breakfast with customers. Then morning sessions with either individual customers or politicians. Lunch with young high-potential Siemens employees. After lunch, business reviews with the local team and then a town hall meeting. Dinner with the top leadership team of the specific location. After dinner, I would fly out and follow exactly the same routine in another city the next day.
Doing this repeatedly gives an extremely good view of what is really happening. What I learned was that Siemens employees were frustrated with bureaucracy and wanted more independent decision-making.
At the same time, people felt that the corruption scandal represented a failure of leadership. They were shocked and ashamed, because they are very proud to be part of Siemens.
When it came to changing the company, I worked with my immediate team. I did not want to bring in consultants to tell us what to do. The exercise became very painful at the end. Four-fifths of the managing board members had to leave.
In Germany, companies have two boards: One is the supervisory board, with 50 per cent employee representatives and 50 per cent lenders and shareholders. The other is the managing board, made up of top executives, with the CEO as chairman.
But at Siemens, the managing board consisted of two levels as well: Some "coaches" and their direct reports, who operationally led the business as part of committees within each Siemens division - miniboards.
We got rid of this two-layer system. There were 12 units, and I could not afford to have all 12 operating CEOs sitting at my table.
Asking long-time employees to step down is never easy. I wanted to have a transparent process in which we benchmarked each of the positions externally. I asked the search firm Egon Zehnder to manage this.
Many people welcomed the process, but it was highly threatening for others. Some of them showed up in my office and said: "You know, I've been running this business successfully for 20 years. I'm not willing to go through the process."
My answer to them was very simple: "Either you go through it, or you have to decide for yourself to leave the company."
By November 2007, the executive level just below the managing board was a good mix of experienced people who were already running the divisions and people who came from below in the organisation. By the end of the year, the new CEOs two levels down had decided on their teams.
Then there were the country organisations. It was clear to me from the time I had spent competing against Siemens that its strong country organisations were one secret to its success. Nevertheless, some of these organisations had become like separate companies, with the local teams operating almost independently.
For example, many years ago, Siemens decided to get out of the mobile-phone handset business. Some of the country organisations decided that for them, it was a great business, and they would stay in it.
So we found ourselves with a very eclectic collection of local businesses, and we immediately got rid of them. I decided that every business needed one person who was accountable for global performance. Together with my new leadership team, I also decided to group these country operations into fewer clusters.
Siemens is probably the most global industrial company in the world: We operate in 190 countries, and our only real rivals in terms of reach are Coca-Cola, FIFA and the Catholic Church. Those 190 countries were grouped into 70 clusters before I came. We decided to reorganise them into 20 clusters and create a steering group that would meet on a quarterly basis.
These organisational changes had a simple goal: To reduce bureaucracy and make Siemens nimbler in a fast-changing world. Nowhere is the world changing faster than in emerging markets.
There were hardly any cars. You looked across the river to Pudong and you could see rice fields. I would never have been able to imagine how different it would become.
When you see this with your own eyes, you realise that mankind radically and consistently underestimates the speed of change.
What we did not have with the old Siemens structure was the ability to cope with that pace. In a slow-moving, relatively constant global environment, we could manage as we had in the past. Not any more.
To push forward with appropriate speed after the reorganisation, we needed a clear strategy. To a degree we already had one, introduced by my predecessor - the strategy of megatrends, in which we organise our businesses to take advantage of broad changes occurring in the world: Globalisation and the ageing population, which calls for a focus on health care and diagnostics.
I added our environmental portfolio, which showcases our products that are more energy-efficient and resource-efficient than the marketplace average. Siemens had never tracked things this way.
Historically, our customers had relationships with the country organisations, but I added the management of key accounts to the managing board's responsibilities. We have around 100 key accounts, so each member of the board is responsible for roughly a dozen companies.
In my first year, I tried to find other ways to emphasise to the entire organisation that customers should be our primary focus.
In 2008, I collected the Outlook calendars for the previous year from all my division CEOs and board members. Then I mapped how much time they had spent with customers and I ranked them. The rankings were a classic bell curve, with most people in the middle. I was No 1, having spent 50 per cent of my time with customers.
I said: "Is this a good sign or a bad sign? In my opinion, it's very bad. The people who are running the businesses should rank higher on this measure than the CEO."
Now, some people have passed me, and most are near me at the top of the distribution - because everybody knows this matters and that names will be up there at the next leadership meeting.
With this simple approach, we have achieved a much stronger emphasis on customers in the top management echelons.
But as I always remind anybody who is listening: Never miss the opportunities that come from a good crisis - and we certainly did not miss ours.
The scandal created a sense of urgency without which change would have been much more difficult to achieve, regardless of who was CEO.
Siemens is a very proud company with a history of innovation and success. In the absence of a catalyst like this, people would have asked themselves: "Why alter anything?"
Yet, Siemens had to change. It is not so much the uniqueness of your strategy that matters nowadays - it is the strength of your execution. How can you adapt continually to the changing world we are in right now?
Siemens needed to execute more rapidly, and to do that we had to take a hard look at both our organisational structure and whether we had the right people in the right jobs.
Although I was Siemens' 12th Chief Executive, I was the first one who knew the company not from the inside but from the outside.
Getting to know the company meant really engaging with its people. So I went off travelling around the world.
I developed a daily routine: First, I would have breakfast with customers. Then morning sessions with either individual customers or politicians. Lunch with young high-potential Siemens employees. After lunch, business reviews with the local team and then a town hall meeting. Dinner with the top leadership team of the specific location. After dinner, I would fly out and follow exactly the same routine in another city the next day.
Doing this repeatedly gives an extremely good view of what is really happening. What I learned was that Siemens employees were frustrated with bureaucracy and wanted more independent decision-making.
At the same time, people felt that the corruption scandal represented a failure of leadership. They were shocked and ashamed, because they are very proud to be part of Siemens.
When it came to changing the company, I worked with my immediate team. I did not want to bring in consultants to tell us what to do. The exercise became very painful at the end. Four-fifths of the managing board members had to leave.
In Germany, companies have two boards: One is the supervisory board, with 50 per cent employee representatives and 50 per cent lenders and shareholders. The other is the managing board, made up of top executives, with the CEO as chairman.
But at Siemens, the managing board consisted of two levels as well: Some "coaches" and their direct reports, who operationally led the business as part of committees within each Siemens division - miniboards.
We got rid of this two-layer system. There were 12 units, and I could not afford to have all 12 operating CEOs sitting at my table.
Asking long-time employees to step down is never easy. I wanted to have a transparent process in which we benchmarked each of the positions externally. I asked the search firm Egon Zehnder to manage this.
Many people welcomed the process, but it was highly threatening for others. Some of them showed up in my office and said: "You know, I've been running this business successfully for 20 years. I'm not willing to go through the process."
My answer to them was very simple: "Either you go through it, or you have to decide for yourself to leave the company."
By November 2007, the executive level just below the managing board was a good mix of experienced people who were already running the divisions and people who came from below in the organisation. By the end of the year, the new CEOs two levels down had decided on their teams.
Then there were the country organisations. It was clear to me from the time I had spent competing against Siemens that its strong country organisations were one secret to its success. Nevertheless, some of these organisations had become like separate companies, with the local teams operating almost independently.
For example, many years ago, Siemens decided to get out of the mobile-phone handset business. Some of the country organisations decided that for them, it was a great business, and they would stay in it.
So we found ourselves with a very eclectic collection of local businesses, and we immediately got rid of them. I decided that every business needed one person who was accountable for global performance. Together with my new leadership team, I also decided to group these country operations into fewer clusters.
Siemens is probably the most global industrial company in the world: We operate in 190 countries, and our only real rivals in terms of reach are Coca-Cola, FIFA and the Catholic Church. Those 190 countries were grouped into 70 clusters before I came. We decided to reorganise them into 20 clusters and create a steering group that would meet on a quarterly basis.
These organisational changes had a simple goal: To reduce bureaucracy and make Siemens nimbler in a fast-changing world. Nowhere is the world changing faster than in emerging markets.
There were hardly any cars. You looked across the river to Pudong and you could see rice fields. I would never have been able to imagine how different it would become.
When you see this with your own eyes, you realise that mankind radically and consistently underestimates the speed of change.
What we did not have with the old Siemens structure was the ability to cope with that pace. In a slow-moving, relatively constant global environment, we could manage as we had in the past. Not any more.
To push forward with appropriate speed after the reorganisation, we needed a clear strategy. To a degree we already had one, introduced by my predecessor - the strategy of megatrends, in which we organise our businesses to take advantage of broad changes occurring in the world: Globalisation and the ageing population, which calls for a focus on health care and diagnostics.
I added our environmental portfolio, which showcases our products that are more energy-efficient and resource-efficient than the marketplace average. Siemens had never tracked things this way.
Historically, our customers had relationships with the country organisations, but I added the management of key accounts to the managing board's responsibilities. We have around 100 key accounts, so each member of the board is responsible for roughly a dozen companies.
In my first year, I tried to find other ways to emphasise to the entire organisation that customers should be our primary focus.
In 2008, I collected the Outlook calendars for the previous year from all my division CEOs and board members. Then I mapped how much time they had spent with customers and I ranked them. The rankings were a classic bell curve, with most people in the middle. I was No 1, having spent 50 per cent of my time with customers.
I said: "Is this a good sign or a bad sign? In my opinion, it's very bad. The people who are running the businesses should rank higher on this measure than the CEO."
Now, some people have passed me, and most are near me at the top of the distribution - because everybody knows this matters and that names will be up there at the next leadership meeting.
With this simple approach, we have achieved a much stronger emphasis on customers in the top management echelons.
2012年12月5日星期三
Survival of the most digital?
If our museums were a Dickensian character, who would they be: Miss Havisham stuck in an old wedding dress in a room gathering cobwebs; or Fagin the entrepreneur, sending urchins out to spread his influence across the city?
The second option was favoured by speaker Ross Parry at a recent Question Time style debate at the Science Museum in London – Museums in the information age: evolution or extinction? Organised by the University of Leicester and featuring a panel of thought leaders from the sector, the panel considered how effectively museums are responding to technological developments or whether they are lagging behind.
Museums need to evolve to remain relevant in the age in which they operate, stressed Carole Souter of the Heritage Lottery Fund. That includes engaging with people who can't physically come to the museum, as well as showcasing unseen collections to a broader online audience, with the opportunity for non-experts to contribute their comments.
By his own admission, Ian Blatchford of the Science Museum played the role of old fogey, agreeing with the principle of evolving towards a digitally component museum but citing the Dad's Army catchphrase: "Don't panic, Captain Mainwaring." He refuted the notion of digital exhibitions as an equal substitute for real-time museums.
"Digital technology shouldn't burrow away at a museum's core sense of identity as the fundamentals stay the same," he said. "Many of the traditional things museums do, such as scholarship, caring for collections and museum displays, now seem ever more relevant and is reflected in the increasing rise of visitor numbers."
In an age when we are so flooded with information, authenticity and trust matter even more to people, he added – we must not confuse what audiences really want with what we think they ought to want.
It is in a museum's DNA to evolve, argued Dr Ross Parry, academic director and senior lecturer at the University of Leicester's School of Museum Studies. The modern museum has inevitably changed its structure, aspects of its purpose and audience relationships, as well as the intellectual framework used to make sense of its collections – Robert Cotton, Hans Sloan, Henry Cole and Oppenheimer would no longer recognise the museums they helped to create.
According to Ross, the choice we need to make in the digital age is this. Do we hold on to qualities that are defiantly analogue and rely on people being present at a venue, and having to ritualistically cross the threshold to get there as a social encounter that involves us looking mainly at physical objects? Or, do museums choose to change and converge in a digital age where content is distributed, people are networked and everyone can have a voice to create or produce?
Museums could redefine themselves as multi-platform service brands that publish and broadcast, as well as exhibit, he suggested – or will the physical object always spark a stronger spiritual and emotional reaction than digital formats?
Blatchford was quick to thwart what he sees as this myth of real objects, upheld as a sacred creed by curators. "Just because a beautiful object is put on display in a designated space, people will not automatically feel privileged to see it," he said. The digitised drawings of the Charles Babbage archive at the Science Museum are more beautiful and more useful to researchers than the original, he suggested.
Digitisation projects are also helping to break up the cosy clubs that used to exist inside museum archive departments, he added. Now ordinary people can have access to collections, not just the privileged few. Souter agreed, referring to the British Museum's Turning the Pages, which enables visitors to see extraordinary manuscripts close up on screen, online or in a gallery. Nor does multimedia necessarily impoverish the realness of objects, said Ross, citing the success of A History of the World in 100 Objects and the website, The Making of the Modern World.
Museums have been slow to develop in comparison with libraries and are yet to reach a point of radical change, Ross continued. But there have been some big leaps forward, such as the Science Museum's Web Lab project with Google, the UK aggregator Culture Grid, and Europeana, a one-stop shop for searching digital collections across Europe. JISC, NESTA and the AHRC are also supporting ventures.
Blatchford offered a more sober analysis, citing David Edgerton's The Shock of the Old and civilisation's classic error of making neat linear relations between technology and outcomes. Every museum prides itself on having an app project and the accumulative effect amounts to nothing more than a selection of apps, he said.
Souter also cautioned that some digital resources produced by museums quickly become disposable if not easily discoverable by potential users. However, the Heritage Lottery Fund is now willing to invest in digital only projects, she said, as people who do find them will play around and use them in ways we cannot yet imagine.
Matters of money and copyright were also raised in questions from the floor. But in summarising the case for the digital evolution of museums, Ross said museums need to be social (understanding the ecology of the social web), situated (providing location specific content), sensual (blurring the join between physical and digital) and semantic (responding to changing machinery). But, he warned, we must consider the ethical implications and moral consequences too.
A man arrested in the minutes after Kelly’s murder outside his home in Killester, north Dublin, yesterday afternoon was still being questioned today.
While he was arrested on foot on the same street the getaway vehicle was abandoned, Garda sources said he was a distance away from the car when detained and his proximity to the vehicle will not be enough to charge him directly in relation to the murder.
However, he is being questioned about illegal possession of a firearm and membership of an illegal organisation, with a criminal charge on the latter now seen as most likely before his period of detention expires tomorrow.
The man is in his early 30s and is a member of the Real IRA. He has served prison sentences following a number of serious convictions related to his association with the dissident organisation.
The gun used to kill Kelly has still not been recovered and gardaí are now working on the theory that the man under arrest was the getaway driver and not the person who pulled the trigger.
They believe the gunman had escaped the scene on Stiles Court in Clontarf just before a patrol car arrived and uniformed gardaí arrested the suspect who is now in custody.
Detectives have not ruled out the possibility that the gunman took the murder weapon with him after getting out of the getaway car. They also believe the gun may have been discarded in the general location of the killing on Furry Park Road or as the killer and his driver sped down Howth Road before turning in the residential area at Stiles Court.
The second option was favoured by speaker Ross Parry at a recent Question Time style debate at the Science Museum in London – Museums in the information age: evolution or extinction? Organised by the University of Leicester and featuring a panel of thought leaders from the sector, the panel considered how effectively museums are responding to technological developments or whether they are lagging behind.
Museums need to evolve to remain relevant in the age in which they operate, stressed Carole Souter of the Heritage Lottery Fund. That includes engaging with people who can't physically come to the museum, as well as showcasing unseen collections to a broader online audience, with the opportunity for non-experts to contribute their comments.
By his own admission, Ian Blatchford of the Science Museum played the role of old fogey, agreeing with the principle of evolving towards a digitally component museum but citing the Dad's Army catchphrase: "Don't panic, Captain Mainwaring." He refuted the notion of digital exhibitions as an equal substitute for real-time museums.
"Digital technology shouldn't burrow away at a museum's core sense of identity as the fundamentals stay the same," he said. "Many of the traditional things museums do, such as scholarship, caring for collections and museum displays, now seem ever more relevant and is reflected in the increasing rise of visitor numbers."
In an age when we are so flooded with information, authenticity and trust matter even more to people, he added – we must not confuse what audiences really want with what we think they ought to want.
It is in a museum's DNA to evolve, argued Dr Ross Parry, academic director and senior lecturer at the University of Leicester's School of Museum Studies. The modern museum has inevitably changed its structure, aspects of its purpose and audience relationships, as well as the intellectual framework used to make sense of its collections – Robert Cotton, Hans Sloan, Henry Cole and Oppenheimer would no longer recognise the museums they helped to create.
According to Ross, the choice we need to make in the digital age is this. Do we hold on to qualities that are defiantly analogue and rely on people being present at a venue, and having to ritualistically cross the threshold to get there as a social encounter that involves us looking mainly at physical objects? Or, do museums choose to change and converge in a digital age where content is distributed, people are networked and everyone can have a voice to create or produce?
Museums could redefine themselves as multi-platform service brands that publish and broadcast, as well as exhibit, he suggested – or will the physical object always spark a stronger spiritual and emotional reaction than digital formats?
Blatchford was quick to thwart what he sees as this myth of real objects, upheld as a sacred creed by curators. "Just because a beautiful object is put on display in a designated space, people will not automatically feel privileged to see it," he said. The digitised drawings of the Charles Babbage archive at the Science Museum are more beautiful and more useful to researchers than the original, he suggested.
Digitisation projects are also helping to break up the cosy clubs that used to exist inside museum archive departments, he added. Now ordinary people can have access to collections, not just the privileged few. Souter agreed, referring to the British Museum's Turning the Pages, which enables visitors to see extraordinary manuscripts close up on screen, online or in a gallery. Nor does multimedia necessarily impoverish the realness of objects, said Ross, citing the success of A History of the World in 100 Objects and the website, The Making of the Modern World.
Museums have been slow to develop in comparison with libraries and are yet to reach a point of radical change, Ross continued. But there have been some big leaps forward, such as the Science Museum's Web Lab project with Google, the UK aggregator Culture Grid, and Europeana, a one-stop shop for searching digital collections across Europe. JISC, NESTA and the AHRC are also supporting ventures.
Blatchford offered a more sober analysis, citing David Edgerton's The Shock of the Old and civilisation's classic error of making neat linear relations between technology and outcomes. Every museum prides itself on having an app project and the accumulative effect amounts to nothing more than a selection of apps, he said.
Souter also cautioned that some digital resources produced by museums quickly become disposable if not easily discoverable by potential users. However, the Heritage Lottery Fund is now willing to invest in digital only projects, she said, as people who do find them will play around and use them in ways we cannot yet imagine.
Matters of money and copyright were also raised in questions from the floor. But in summarising the case for the digital evolution of museums, Ross said museums need to be social (understanding the ecology of the social web), situated (providing location specific content), sensual (blurring the join between physical and digital) and semantic (responding to changing machinery). But, he warned, we must consider the ethical implications and moral consequences too.
A man arrested in the minutes after Kelly’s murder outside his home in Killester, north Dublin, yesterday afternoon was still being questioned today.
While he was arrested on foot on the same street the getaway vehicle was abandoned, Garda sources said he was a distance away from the car when detained and his proximity to the vehicle will not be enough to charge him directly in relation to the murder.
However, he is being questioned about illegal possession of a firearm and membership of an illegal organisation, with a criminal charge on the latter now seen as most likely before his period of detention expires tomorrow.
The man is in his early 30s and is a member of the Real IRA. He has served prison sentences following a number of serious convictions related to his association with the dissident organisation.
The gun used to kill Kelly has still not been recovered and gardaí are now working on the theory that the man under arrest was the getaway driver and not the person who pulled the trigger.
They believe the gunman had escaped the scene on Stiles Court in Clontarf just before a patrol car arrived and uniformed gardaí arrested the suspect who is now in custody.
Detectives have not ruled out the possibility that the gunman took the murder weapon with him after getting out of the getaway car. They also believe the gun may have been discarded in the general location of the killing on Furry Park Road or as the killer and his driver sped down Howth Road before turning in the residential area at Stiles Court.
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