Before we get teary eyed with joy or scoff with derision, we should take a closer look at President Obama’s June 25 speech on climate change, and set it within the context of his five years in power. This is a position he himself argued for during his speech when he said that we need to “be more concerned with the judgment of posterity” than short–term political considerations.
So is Obama, in the words of World Resource Institute President Andrew Steer, really “resetting the climate agenda” and can we honestly say that “it’s a wonderful thing to see that he is really reclaiming this issue"?
While many other environmentalists, including Bill McKibben of 350.org, are fervently hoping that this is true, history and facts demonstrate otherwise. Obama’s dismal domestic and international track record on environmental issues—it was, Ceramic tile, he who was the lead protagonist in wrecking the international climate talks in Copenhagen in 2009—and his commitment to U.S. imperial power as a representative of American corporate interests surely point toward the need for a greater and more thoroughgoing critique than a character assessment of the man himself allows for.
Furthermore, it’s hard to take someone seriously when that person has presided over the biggest expansion of the security state in U.S. history and relentlessly pursued government whistleblowers with unprecedented ferocity, when they say simultaneously in a climate speech that they are directing the EPA to generate new standards for the regulation of existing power plants in “an open and transparent way.”
With a more systematic, broader analytical framework, unimpeded by misty visions of an Obama rebirth as a climate champion, one immediately recognizes the inadequacy of his Action Plan On Climate Change to keep the planet below the critical threshold of 2 degrees Celsius of average warming.
This needs to be acknowledged, even as we welcome the fact that—after a five–year hiatus, including a re–election campaign where he never even mentioned climate change—Obama has been forced to re–engage with the central issue of our time by the power of grassroots protest, even to the extent of referencing the divestment movement and the fight against the Keystone XL pipeline.
Rather than celebrating Obama’s renewed “commitment” to environmental action, we should recognize it for what it is: After five years of doing all he can to promote fossil fuel production, it’s the first, timid, grudging response of the U.S. state to the growing environmental movement against Obama and all that he represents: the economic, political and military priorities of U.S. imperial power.
The growth of the environmental movement and its threat to U.S. imperial and corporate interests has been well catalogued, tracked and, as we now know, extensively spied upon by the U.S. security apparatus. After reporting on a raft of documentary evidence to this effect, Dr. Nafeez Ahmed writes.
There is, therefore, the overriding requirement that we continue to build the movement independent of the limitations imposed by the Democratic Party, until we achieve the kind of changes that are actually necessary to prevent catastrophic climate change, by stitching together all forces aimed at this objective.
The biosphere of which humans are a part cannot afford half measures or rely on dubious “friends” in high places. Nor can we set our sights any lower than the swift dismantling of the fossil–fuel infrastructure of death and its replacement with publicly owned and democratically controlled clean energy systems. As many studies have shown, this is eminently doable with current technology and will create millions of worthwhile jobs through the generation of genuinely renewable energy from sources such as wind and solar power, alongside massive energy efficiency and conservation measures.
Such a transformation is far less utopian than believing that capitalism can solve the problem that it created. Such a transition cannot mean a continuation or expansion of the criminal agro–fuel production, still less the increase in natural gas production through fracking, the continuation of nuclear power and the entirely ridiculous concepts of “clean coal” and carbon capture and storage, all of which Obama includes as part of his planned solution—his “all of the above” strategy.
The fact that Obama is using executive authority to attempt to push through some changes to U.S. energy and climate policy, most significantly new rules on existing power plants, is a reflection not of strength, but of his preceding weakness on the issue, turning it from a positive into a negative, as the right wing has made all the running. Notwithstanding the catastrophic climate change that levels above 350 ppm of carbon portend and have already initiated—as droughts, floods, crop failures, super–storms and wildfires become the “new normal” across the globe from Australia to India, from the U.S. to Pakistan—politicians across the political spectrum greeted the news of 400 ppm of carbon earlier in May with a giant shrug of collective indifference.
While on the one hand Obama’s action plan doesn’t require Congressional approval, and that can be seen as encouraging in the face of an utterly recalcitrant Congress, it is also a flaw. The new rules will be vigorously challenged in the courts, and as and when the other corporate party manages to work out how to win an election again, they can be overturned just as easily, assuming they have even been implemented.
It needs to be highlighted that, in contrast to how Democrats and Obama like to portray the issue, it is not a solidly partisan one. While elected Republicans are certainly more likely to be climate–change denialists, the reality is that things are much more regional and dependent on which state a political representative is from. A much more reliable indicator of whether a state’s Representative is pro– or anti– climate change policy and clean energy, is whether the state’s economy is directly connected to fossil fuels or ethanol production, than whether they are Democrats or Republicans.
And on the ground, where people are forced to deal with the growing ramifications of climate change and the disruption and cost to their lives, the picture is very different. As reported in a recent survey of self–described Republicans and Republican–leaning independents, 62 percent said the U.S. should address climate change, and 77 percent said that the U.S. should use more renewable energy sources. This is all the more remarkable given that virtually no political representative from either party has been arguing for these things, and they have certainly not appeared on the TV screens or in the newspapers of the mainstream media.
In contrast to Obama’s glib reference to work being undertaken to prevent Miami from sinking below the waves, Jeff Goodell writing in Rolling Stone, paints a very different picture, underlining the calamitous reality of climate change in an article cheerily titled “Goodbye Miami.” On our present course, it is not a question of if, but when, the city of Miami—which vies with Las Vegas as the citadel to capitalist non–conformity with nature, along with most of southern Florida—will be underwater.
Read the full story at www.tilees.com!
2013年6月30日星期日
2013年6月27日星期四
Human Recognition Systems to launch platform
According to the company, this new system, built on its MVerify platform, allows the automated capture and verification of student identity documents, such as passports and visas. In addition, says the company, MVerify also automates the capture of student attendance during teaching sessions using fingerprint or smartcard technology built into handheld devices.
Student attendance reporting is increasingly significant for institutions with international students enrolled, as visa restrictions as well as UK Home Office Tier 4 student immigration rules have tightened.
“Tier 4 compliance is set to be one of the key topics of discussion at this yeara€?s UKCISA as universities seek to attract international students while navigating the complex Home Office reporting requirements,” Jon Busby, Business Development at HRS said. “With our extensive expertise in identity management, we have developed a cost-effective solution for the higher education sector that can simplify the Tier 4 reporting structure, reduce time spent on manual data administration and lower the associated costs. Operated from a handheld device that can be passed among students, MVerify also supports an improved student experience by enabling more time to be spent on teaching rather than taking registers.”
Well, I think the time has come to change the make-up of this current Phillies team and make some moves at the trade deadline that will help build the team for the future.
I'm not taking this point of view because the Phillies are too far out or can't make the playoffs because I've seen crazier things happen and teams get hot.I think it's time to give this team a make-over because I don't think this collection of players will get hot, and the time to take advantage of some deals that can bring some promising young talent is now.
Let's start with Jonathan Papelbon. Right now there are a number of teams that are in the playoff hunt and need closers. The Detroit Tigers need a closer! Fortunately they have three great prospects in their farm system, and I think the Phillies can get two of the three.
Nick Castellanos is listed as the top hitting prospect for the Tigers. Avisail Garcia is their best outfield prospect, and Bruce Rondon is the best arm in their system and future closer. If the Phillies could get one of the outfield prospects coupled with Rondon, they could have an outfielder to play alongside Dom Brown for a good number of years to go along with a quality arm who should be their future closer.
The next Phillies player that could get an impact prospect back in return would be Cliff Lee. The Texas Rangers are once again in the playoff hunt and need a starter. This might be a perfect fit for Lee who does have a no-trade clause in his contract but would likely not mind pitching in Texas. He pitched for the Rangers in 2011 when they went to the World Series. The Rangers have the best prospect in baseball, Jurickson Profar, a shortstop/second baseman who offers great middle-infield skills with a big bat. Unfortunately for Profar, he's playing behind two All-Stars in Texas. This deal needs to be done.
Jimmy Rollins is getting old and still has a couple years on a big contract. If Profar can be acquired, there is no need for Rollins. Send Rollins to a needy suitor, get a couple more prospects and save $11 million.
Lastly I would get rid of Carlos Ruiz, who will be a free agent at the end of the year. The Yankees could use a veteran catcher and a quality right-handed hitter. The Phils could get a catching prospect in return such as Austin Romine. The only question with this deal is if the Yankees would take on a player with a history of using a banned substance.
I would say that the Phillies need to trade Chase Utley, but I know too many Phillies fans who have named their kids Chase. This would be like trading Derek Jeter if you are a Yankees fan. You just have a talk with Utley when the time comes and make him a coach and keep him a Phil for life.
Thurles-based Andrew Slattery has yet to secure his first win of the current Turf campaign, but Ucanchoose can put that right in the five-furlong handicap. With 18 modest sorts chasing a first prize of less than €5,000, this is wide open.
Still, Ucanchoose is the most appealing option, having run his best race of the year when leading to the furlong pole over six at the Curragh last time. Declan McDonogh's mount eventually finished fifth, so he should have a live chance of getting back to winning ways over his optimum trip off a pound lower mark now.
In the 12-furlong maiden, McDonogh is also trusted to land the nap on Mick Halford's Zarkiyr at the chief expense of Ballydoyle's Waver. This is a pretty weak heat, and Waver's Curragh second to the selection's stable-mate Dabadiyan is at least encouraging, but Zarkiyr is slightly more progressive.
Stepped up to this trip for a first time in a handicap at headquarters the same day, he stayed on with great effect to lose out by just a nose to Levanto off a mark of 80. That's the single most robust piece of form, so Zarkiyr is fancied to collect.
Goolds Cross-based David Wachman might get proceedings under way in the opening juvenile maiden with Little Fastnet, a Fastnet Rock debutante that is out of Wachman's former top-class juvenile Damson.
Little Fastnet is a three-parts sister to Requinto, another smart two-year-old for the stable that won a Listed race here in 2011 before scoring twice in Group company in England. Of the three in the nine-runner affair that have been placed, Celtic Man is feared most for Bansha's David Marnane, but Little Fastnet is bred to be a bit special.
Nurse Ryan might also plunder a popular local win for Martin and Shane Hassett of Killenaule. The dual hurdle-winning mare will be suited by the fast ground and trip in the Gathering Handicap.
Click on their website www.tilees.com for more information.
Student attendance reporting is increasingly significant for institutions with international students enrolled, as visa restrictions as well as UK Home Office Tier 4 student immigration rules have tightened.
“Tier 4 compliance is set to be one of the key topics of discussion at this yeara€?s UKCISA as universities seek to attract international students while navigating the complex Home Office reporting requirements,” Jon Busby, Business Development at HRS said. “With our extensive expertise in identity management, we have developed a cost-effective solution for the higher education sector that can simplify the Tier 4 reporting structure, reduce time spent on manual data administration and lower the associated costs. Operated from a handheld device that can be passed among students, MVerify also supports an improved student experience by enabling more time to be spent on teaching rather than taking registers.”
Well, I think the time has come to change the make-up of this current Phillies team and make some moves at the trade deadline that will help build the team for the future.
I'm not taking this point of view because the Phillies are too far out or can't make the playoffs because I've seen crazier things happen and teams get hot.I think it's time to give this team a make-over because I don't think this collection of players will get hot, and the time to take advantage of some deals that can bring some promising young talent is now.
Let's start with Jonathan Papelbon. Right now there are a number of teams that are in the playoff hunt and need closers. The Detroit Tigers need a closer! Fortunately they have three great prospects in their farm system, and I think the Phillies can get two of the three.
Nick Castellanos is listed as the top hitting prospect for the Tigers. Avisail Garcia is their best outfield prospect, and Bruce Rondon is the best arm in their system and future closer. If the Phillies could get one of the outfield prospects coupled with Rondon, they could have an outfielder to play alongside Dom Brown for a good number of years to go along with a quality arm who should be their future closer.
The next Phillies player that could get an impact prospect back in return would be Cliff Lee. The Texas Rangers are once again in the playoff hunt and need a starter. This might be a perfect fit for Lee who does have a no-trade clause in his contract but would likely not mind pitching in Texas. He pitched for the Rangers in 2011 when they went to the World Series. The Rangers have the best prospect in baseball, Jurickson Profar, a shortstop/second baseman who offers great middle-infield skills with a big bat. Unfortunately for Profar, he's playing behind two All-Stars in Texas. This deal needs to be done.
Jimmy Rollins is getting old and still has a couple years on a big contract. If Profar can be acquired, there is no need for Rollins. Send Rollins to a needy suitor, get a couple more prospects and save $11 million.
Lastly I would get rid of Carlos Ruiz, who will be a free agent at the end of the year. The Yankees could use a veteran catcher and a quality right-handed hitter. The Phils could get a catching prospect in return such as Austin Romine. The only question with this deal is if the Yankees would take on a player with a history of using a banned substance.
I would say that the Phillies need to trade Chase Utley, but I know too many Phillies fans who have named their kids Chase. This would be like trading Derek Jeter if you are a Yankees fan. You just have a talk with Utley when the time comes and make him a coach and keep him a Phil for life.
Thurles-based Andrew Slattery has yet to secure his first win of the current Turf campaign, but Ucanchoose can put that right in the five-furlong handicap. With 18 modest sorts chasing a first prize of less than €5,000, this is wide open.
Still, Ucanchoose is the most appealing option, having run his best race of the year when leading to the furlong pole over six at the Curragh last time. Declan McDonogh's mount eventually finished fifth, so he should have a live chance of getting back to winning ways over his optimum trip off a pound lower mark now.
In the 12-furlong maiden, McDonogh is also trusted to land the nap on Mick Halford's Zarkiyr at the chief expense of Ballydoyle's Waver. This is a pretty weak heat, and Waver's Curragh second to the selection's stable-mate Dabadiyan is at least encouraging, but Zarkiyr is slightly more progressive.
Stepped up to this trip for a first time in a handicap at headquarters the same day, he stayed on with great effect to lose out by just a nose to Levanto off a mark of 80. That's the single most robust piece of form, so Zarkiyr is fancied to collect.
Goolds Cross-based David Wachman might get proceedings under way in the opening juvenile maiden with Little Fastnet, a Fastnet Rock debutante that is out of Wachman's former top-class juvenile Damson.
Little Fastnet is a three-parts sister to Requinto, another smart two-year-old for the stable that won a Listed race here in 2011 before scoring twice in Group company in England. Of the three in the nine-runner affair that have been placed, Celtic Man is feared most for Bansha's David Marnane, but Little Fastnet is bred to be a bit special.
Nurse Ryan might also plunder a popular local win for Martin and Shane Hassett of Killenaule. The dual hurdle-winning mare will be suited by the fast ground and trip in the Gathering Handicap.
Click on their website www.tilees.com for more information.
2013年6月25日星期二
Septic cleaning company charged with dumping waste in yard
The owner of a sewage cleaning company has been charged with cleaning a man's septic tank and twice dumping the waste on his property.
Tom Vasiliou and A&B Sewer and Drain were charged Tuesday in 3rd District Court with two counts of violation of the Water Quality Act, a third-degree felony.On Sept. 15 and Oct. 1, 2012, employees of A&B Sewer cleaned the septic tank of a resident at 7221 W. Rose Canyon Road and then dumped the sewage material they had just collected into an adjacent field owned by the same person, according to charging documents.
The property owner said Vasiliou asked for permission to dump the sludge and he agreed.But Salt Lake County District Attorney Sim Gill said Vasiliou, who has held a permit to haul and dispose liquid waste since 2002, should have known better.
The alleged illegal dumping was discovered because of an anonymous citizen who saw what was going on, took pictures and submitted them to the Salt Lake Valley Health Department.Gill praised the citizen and noted that he has a special interest in environmental cases. Gill specialized in environmental crimes when he worked as a prosecutor and his office has an Environmental Task Force.
It's not just the major oil spills that need prosecuting, but smaller acts of crimes against the environment, he said, adding that the public needs to be educated to prevent them from happening."It's really important to ask our citizens to be on the lookout for that," Gill said.
The public also needs to realize that the smaller acts of abuse against the environment aren't "your typical crime" but can have a long-lasting negative effect on the environment as much as a large oil spill, he said.Vasiliou said he traditionally took the grease from septic tank and sewer line cleanings to a local oil company and other parts to South Valley Sewer, according to charging documents.
In the nineteenth century, New York City was full of Ceramic tile. You can see what that meant in this horrific image of a dead horse rotting in the street where kids were playing. But then there was a revolution that transformed New York into an experiment in urban trash planning.
Anthropologist Robin Nagle has just published a book about NY's sanitation history called Picking Up. She pored over decades of the city's records to piece together how exactly this filthy urban center was cleaned up. Below, you can see a late-nineteenth century sanitation worker in New York, sweeping up trash that would ordinarily have been left outside to decompose.
There was a police corruption scandal in the early 1890s that was so spectacular the Tammany political machine could not control the reaction. So they were kicked out of office in the mayoral elections of 1894. A guy named William Strong took over as mayor, and he swore to appoint people of integrity as his commissioners. For street cleaning, he first reached out to Teddy Roosevelt, who basically said, ‘What, are you nuts? Nobody should do that. That’s an impossible job. I’m not going to do that.’ So Roosevelt took over the police department, which was also in dire need of reform.
Mayor Strong reached out to a Civil War officer, a veteran and a self-titled “sanitary engineer” and a bit of a showman, named George Waring. He asked Waring to take over street cleaning, and they had a conversation that Waring later recounted to the press in which he said, “I’ll do it under one condition – you leave me alone. If you want to fire me, of course, that’s your right. But I will appoint and hire the people I feel are best for the job, not because they’re people you want to do favors for.
The mayor agreed and Waring immediately gave the department a hierarchical, military-type structure that is still in place today. This made people immediately responsible for very clearly defined tasks, like someone was assigned to sweep from this corner to that corner 10 blocks down, and they were going to do it inside these eight hours, and this cart was going to follow and the driver of the cart had these set hours. If there were any problems, the officer immediately in charge of that crew would have to answer for them, and then the officer above had to answer for the larger regional work.
Tom Vasiliou and A&B Sewer and Drain were charged Tuesday in 3rd District Court with two counts of violation of the Water Quality Act, a third-degree felony.On Sept. 15 and Oct. 1, 2012, employees of A&B Sewer cleaned the septic tank of a resident at 7221 W. Rose Canyon Road and then dumped the sewage material they had just collected into an adjacent field owned by the same person, according to charging documents.
The property owner said Vasiliou asked for permission to dump the sludge and he agreed.But Salt Lake County District Attorney Sim Gill said Vasiliou, who has held a permit to haul and dispose liquid waste since 2002, should have known better.
The alleged illegal dumping was discovered because of an anonymous citizen who saw what was going on, took pictures and submitted them to the Salt Lake Valley Health Department.Gill praised the citizen and noted that he has a special interest in environmental cases. Gill specialized in environmental crimes when he worked as a prosecutor and his office has an Environmental Task Force.
It's not just the major oil spills that need prosecuting, but smaller acts of crimes against the environment, he said, adding that the public needs to be educated to prevent them from happening."It's really important to ask our citizens to be on the lookout for that," Gill said.
The public also needs to realize that the smaller acts of abuse against the environment aren't "your typical crime" but can have a long-lasting negative effect on the environment as much as a large oil spill, he said.Vasiliou said he traditionally took the grease from septic tank and sewer line cleanings to a local oil company and other parts to South Valley Sewer, according to charging documents.
In the nineteenth century, New York City was full of Ceramic tile. You can see what that meant in this horrific image of a dead horse rotting in the street where kids were playing. But then there was a revolution that transformed New York into an experiment in urban trash planning.
Anthropologist Robin Nagle has just published a book about NY's sanitation history called Picking Up. She pored over decades of the city's records to piece together how exactly this filthy urban center was cleaned up. Below, you can see a late-nineteenth century sanitation worker in New York, sweeping up trash that would ordinarily have been left outside to decompose.
There was a police corruption scandal in the early 1890s that was so spectacular the Tammany political machine could not control the reaction. So they were kicked out of office in the mayoral elections of 1894. A guy named William Strong took over as mayor, and he swore to appoint people of integrity as his commissioners. For street cleaning, he first reached out to Teddy Roosevelt, who basically said, ‘What, are you nuts? Nobody should do that. That’s an impossible job. I’m not going to do that.’ So Roosevelt took over the police department, which was also in dire need of reform.
Mayor Strong reached out to a Civil War officer, a veteran and a self-titled “sanitary engineer” and a bit of a showman, named George Waring. He asked Waring to take over street cleaning, and they had a conversation that Waring later recounted to the press in which he said, “I’ll do it under one condition – you leave me alone. If you want to fire me, of course, that’s your right. But I will appoint and hire the people I feel are best for the job, not because they’re people you want to do favors for.
The mayor agreed and Waring immediately gave the department a hierarchical, military-type structure that is still in place today. This made people immediately responsible for very clearly defined tasks, like someone was assigned to sweep from this corner to that corner 10 blocks down, and they were going to do it inside these eight hours, and this cart was going to follow and the driver of the cart had these set hours. If there were any problems, the officer immediately in charge of that crew would have to answer for them, and then the officer above had to answer for the larger regional work.
2013年6月23日星期日
Israel unequipped to handle high level soccer
Amsterdam hosted the Europa League final between Chelsea and Benfica a month ago. What an experience, in no small part due to the fantastic organization by the Dutch.
True, it wasn’t the biggest or most glitzy competition in the world, not even in Europe. But they understood that soccer at this level isn’t just 90 minutes on the pitch. The organizers set up special facilities for the fans around the stadium. There were souvenir stores, bars, snack bars and stands with activities and prizes.
Hours before the final, the area outside the stadium was a happening place. Trains efficiently delivered tens of thousands of fans to the Amsterdam Arena. The atmosphere was wonderful. Reaching the stadium two hours before the opening whistle wasn’t enough to enjoy everything the event had to offer.
Around 90 minutes before the beginning of the under-21 Euro semifinal between Spain and Norway last Saturday night, the area near the Netanya stadium was dullsville. Many fans came early ? not because of the special atmosphere but out of fear of getting stuck in traffic jams.
It was clear that no thought was put into the approaches to the stadium. No one greeted the fans. The Israel Football Association didn’t hire musicians or anyone to paint children’s faces. They didn’t invite photographers, didn’t set up food or drink stands, and didn’t offer contests or special deals.
There was just one small tent there, where a simple souvenir scarf was being sold at an exorbitant price. And some shirts were available at even more exorbitant prices. That’s it.
Israeli amateurism in organizing the under-21 tournament was apparent from the moment tickets went on sale. The sale opened at the end of March. Anyone who tried to order tickets during the first days for the games in Netanya discovered that on the website of the authorized ticket seller there was no map of the stadium.
“How can I know which ticket is closest to the center line?” I asked a ticket sales representative on the phone. She couldn’t help. After a few days I went to collect my tickets for the championship games in Netanya, but they weren’t available.
“We were unable to overcome a snag in the system,” someone explained to me. “Try again in a few days.” Oh well, I thought, it’s just a small screw-up.
The best tickets quickly ran out. Foreign fans who are not Hebrew speakers couldn’t obtain them. Over the first few days it was impossible to find a referral in English to the sales site, not even on the UEFA website.
Further on, it turned out that the Football Association had sold all the tickets to the championship in advance. Besides a few invitations to VIPs and cronies, no one set aside tickets for fans of the national team.
The Dutch said that after advancing to the semifinal they asked groups of fans to come to Israel, but to fly to Israel and stay outside the stadium without a ticket? There’s a limit to what people are willing to do for the under-21 Euro. They simply gave up. There were several empty seats in the stadium. That’s what happens when you give out tickets in a slew of deals to people who aren’t really interested in the tournament.
And maybe the Dutch did well by not coming and saving themselves sitting in traffic jams on the way to and from the stadium. There were 12,000 spectators at the Netanya stadium. That’s it. It’s a big event, but nothing exceptional. Still, it seems the Football Association and the police made every mistake possible. They promised to augment the trains and they didn’t; they promised efficient shuttles and didn’t come through.
On the way to the opening game between Israel and Norway, the shuttle from the Beit Yehoshua train station stood in a long traffic jam, like everybody else. After the game, hundreds of fans waited for the shuttle where it had dropped them off, and it simply never came. Ushers weren’t around, and the police had no idea what they were talking about.
Inside Moshava Stadium I was happy to see signs leading to the special exit for Highway 5. After 15 minutes of driving on an unpaved road, it turned out the exit led to a neighborhood and back all the way to the junction next to the stadium ? simply pathetic.
The situation was much worse in Jerusalem. The area around Teddy Stadium remained a construction site throughout the tournament. The access road has been under repairs for a long time, the new southern section of stands lacks a roof. It was really as if the Euro had taken everyone by surprise.
As if that weren’t enough, the police closed traffic lanes leading to the stadium before the game. Is there any greater absurdity than this?
An acquaintance of mine tried to reach the Israel-England game and didn’t make it, so he gave up and turned around. Next to Pat Junction, near the stadium, he asked the police where he could park and board a shuttle. “There’s no such thing here,” an officer answered. Dejected, he went home and didn’t watch the game on television. His seat remained empty.
Luck actually played into my hands. An hour and a half before that game, I managed with great difficulty to crawl into the Malha Mall parking garage. An hour after the game I returned to my car. Another hour passed until dozens of other frustrated fans and I managed to get out of the garage into an endless traffic jam.
We have to give credit to IFA chairman Avi Luzon. He brought to Israel a tournament of the highest level. The soccer was wonderful, and the fans came in droves to watch the stars of the future. Isco, Lorenzo Insigne, Adam Maher and others totally delivered the goods.
But it’s doubtful we’ll see here a sporting event of this order in the future. Israel’s facilities are unsuitable for hosting a World Cup, Euro, Champions League final or even Europa League final. It’s a shame the Football Association was satisfied with merely holding a championship in Israel and didn’t make an effort to produce an unforgettable show.
Click on their website www.tilees.com for more information.
True, it wasn’t the biggest or most glitzy competition in the world, not even in Europe. But they understood that soccer at this level isn’t just 90 minutes on the pitch. The organizers set up special facilities for the fans around the stadium. There were souvenir stores, bars, snack bars and stands with activities and prizes.
Hours before the final, the area outside the stadium was a happening place. Trains efficiently delivered tens of thousands of fans to the Amsterdam Arena. The atmosphere was wonderful. Reaching the stadium two hours before the opening whistle wasn’t enough to enjoy everything the event had to offer.
Around 90 minutes before the beginning of the under-21 Euro semifinal between Spain and Norway last Saturday night, the area near the Netanya stadium was dullsville. Many fans came early ? not because of the special atmosphere but out of fear of getting stuck in traffic jams.
It was clear that no thought was put into the approaches to the stadium. No one greeted the fans. The Israel Football Association didn’t hire musicians or anyone to paint children’s faces. They didn’t invite photographers, didn’t set up food or drink stands, and didn’t offer contests or special deals.
There was just one small tent there, where a simple souvenir scarf was being sold at an exorbitant price. And some shirts were available at even more exorbitant prices. That’s it.
Israeli amateurism in organizing the under-21 tournament was apparent from the moment tickets went on sale. The sale opened at the end of March. Anyone who tried to order tickets during the first days for the games in Netanya discovered that on the website of the authorized ticket seller there was no map of the stadium.
“How can I know which ticket is closest to the center line?” I asked a ticket sales representative on the phone. She couldn’t help. After a few days I went to collect my tickets for the championship games in Netanya, but they weren’t available.
“We were unable to overcome a snag in the system,” someone explained to me. “Try again in a few days.” Oh well, I thought, it’s just a small screw-up.
The best tickets quickly ran out. Foreign fans who are not Hebrew speakers couldn’t obtain them. Over the first few days it was impossible to find a referral in English to the sales site, not even on the UEFA website.
Further on, it turned out that the Football Association had sold all the tickets to the championship in advance. Besides a few invitations to VIPs and cronies, no one set aside tickets for fans of the national team.
The Dutch said that after advancing to the semifinal they asked groups of fans to come to Israel, but to fly to Israel and stay outside the stadium without a ticket? There’s a limit to what people are willing to do for the under-21 Euro. They simply gave up. There were several empty seats in the stadium. That’s what happens when you give out tickets in a slew of deals to people who aren’t really interested in the tournament.
And maybe the Dutch did well by not coming and saving themselves sitting in traffic jams on the way to and from the stadium. There were 12,000 spectators at the Netanya stadium. That’s it. It’s a big event, but nothing exceptional. Still, it seems the Football Association and the police made every mistake possible. They promised to augment the trains and they didn’t; they promised efficient shuttles and didn’t come through.
On the way to the opening game between Israel and Norway, the shuttle from the Beit Yehoshua train station stood in a long traffic jam, like everybody else. After the game, hundreds of fans waited for the shuttle where it had dropped them off, and it simply never came. Ushers weren’t around, and the police had no idea what they were talking about.
Inside Moshava Stadium I was happy to see signs leading to the special exit for Highway 5. After 15 minutes of driving on an unpaved road, it turned out the exit led to a neighborhood and back all the way to the junction next to the stadium ? simply pathetic.
The situation was much worse in Jerusalem. The area around Teddy Stadium remained a construction site throughout the tournament. The access road has been under repairs for a long time, the new southern section of stands lacks a roof. It was really as if the Euro had taken everyone by surprise.
As if that weren’t enough, the police closed traffic lanes leading to the stadium before the game. Is there any greater absurdity than this?
An acquaintance of mine tried to reach the Israel-England game and didn’t make it, so he gave up and turned around. Next to Pat Junction, near the stadium, he asked the police where he could park and board a shuttle. “There’s no such thing here,” an officer answered. Dejected, he went home and didn’t watch the game on television. His seat remained empty.
Luck actually played into my hands. An hour and a half before that game, I managed with great difficulty to crawl into the Malha Mall parking garage. An hour after the game I returned to my car. Another hour passed until dozens of other frustrated fans and I managed to get out of the garage into an endless traffic jam.
We have to give credit to IFA chairman Avi Luzon. He brought to Israel a tournament of the highest level. The soccer was wonderful, and the fans came in droves to watch the stars of the future. Isco, Lorenzo Insigne, Adam Maher and others totally delivered the goods.
But it’s doubtful we’ll see here a sporting event of this order in the future. Israel’s facilities are unsuitable for hosting a World Cup, Euro, Champions League final or even Europa League final. It’s a shame the Football Association was satisfied with merely holding a championship in Israel and didn’t make an effort to produce an unforgettable show.
Click on their website www.tilees.com for more information.
2013年6月20日星期四
Adobe Photoshop CC review
Creative Cloud changes everything. Well, maybe not everything: Adobe Photoshop CC looks nearly identical to its CS6 predecessor, but it packs several powerful new features, including a revolutionary photo motion blur corrector, more effective image upscaling (capable of getting those low-def images looking good on a Retina display), new photo geometry corrections, and multiple shape and path selections.
Since it's part of the cloud subscription, as long as you pay ￡17.58 a month for Photoshop alone, or ￡46.88 for the full creative suite (￡27.34 for upgraders from CS3 or later, ￡15.88 for the Student and Teacher edition), you'll always have access to any new features that come along. That sounds more palatable to me than the old ￡650 or ￡950 up front, though I realise that some long-time users have expressed displeasure at having to continue paying to use the software. However, with the subscription, it would take you at least 3 years to spend the previous up front money, and by then, you'd probably want to upgrade anyway.
Another way that Creative Cloud affects new Photoshop users is that they'll now get all the Photoshop tools, including features that used to be available only in the Photoshop Extended edition, such as 3D modelling and image analysis. Extended costs ￡950, so this is quite a perk, not to mention the fact that it simplifies your product choice.
You should only consider installing Photoshop on a fairly powerful PC or Mac. You also need to sign in with your Adobe ID before the installer will let you start. I installed it on a Windows 8 PC (Photoshop CC runs on Windows 7 with Service Pack 1, but not on earlier Windows OS versions) with a 3.4GHz quad-core processor and 4GB of RAM. It took about 20 minutes, and, right off the bat, I got a message saying that 3D editing wouldn't be available because of my video card or its driver. Mac users will need OS X 10.7 or 10.8.
The Photoshop UI remains largely unchanged from that of Photoshop CS6, which was a big advance over CS5. All your left-side tools and right-side panels are still available, in a choice of workspaces suited to standard image editing, 3D, motion, painting, photography, and typography. It's incredibly customisable, and you can save presets for all your customisations. The new cloud connectivity also means that you can log into a copy of Photoshop at a different location and have all your interface customisation show up.
Another helpful aspect of the interface is that, for most updated features, you can check a "Use legacy" box to get the old tool you're used to. Plenty of other little conveniences (which Adobe likes to call JDIs, for "just do it") have been added to the world's premiere photo editing software. For example, you can now nudge a path with the spacebar. Actions can now be conditional, using if/then expressions.
Behance
Behance is a social network for creative professionals, offering online portfolios and connections. It will be built into all the Creative Cloud applications, and will let users post projects for feedback from colleagues and clients. Users can post their files directly from Photoshop CC via a one-click share button at the lower left. They can share their work from within Behance, and discuss the work and even connect with potential and existing clients and freelancers.
Behance's ProSites are customisable online portfolios which Creative Cloud subscribers can use with their own URLs. I found Behance's presentation elegant, clean, and it incorporated all the essential social features du jour. I especially like the fact that it offers statistics of your page activity. You can also export photos in Zoomify format – a cool viewer that lets viewers zoom deep into large images – but I'd like to see more sharing options, like built-in email and Flickr sharing. Of course, you can do all this from Photoshop's ancillary Bridge image organiser app.
The hottest, most anticipated new feature of Photoshop CC is the modestly named Camera Shake Reduction. This was first shown by Adobe two years ago at its Max conference, and it was met with a very positive reaction. The tool analyses a photo to find the path of shake motion, and then aligns the shifted pixels. It sounds simple enough, but it's harder to get right than it may seem. This is because the path won't be the same everywhere in the photo unless you shook it exactly along a single plane – highly unlikely. You can use the tool's best guess, or select a region (or regions) where you want the blur trace to be estimated.
You can also adjust Blur Trace Bounds, Smoothing, and Artifact Suppression – the last two let me create a less "sharpened" looking result. I'd love to see a simple "effect strength" adjustment like that you get with Smart Sharpen (which, by the way, with this release gets a new Reduce Noise slider). Shake Reduction is not a panacea, but it's definitely a finer effect than even the Smart Sharpen tool. If the subject is simply out of focus, it won't help you; a simply blurry subject won't be fixed.
Photoshop CC also benefits from several new Camera Raw capabilities, some of which we've already seen in the Lightroom 5 beta. The latter includes a new geometry correction tool, Upright (see the above image). This lets you fix parallel vertical and horizontal lines. Its Auto setting attempts to fix perspective, but you can choose only to align verticals or only horizontals, or mess with the perspective to taste with transforming sliders for pincushion/barrel distortion, vertical, horizontal, and aspect ratio.
A couple more new capabilities designers will be thrilled to take advantage of are rounded rectangles and the ability to select multiple paths and shapes when applying effects. You can now save formatting of type as styles that can be easily applied to other text later. Type can also now be viewed in a way that previews system antialiasing used in web browsers. For web designers, Photoshop CC now can generate CSS code that produces the exact look designed in the software. Going in the other direction, they can also now import colour from a website's HTML or CSS code.
Read the full story at www.tilees.com!
Since it's part of the cloud subscription, as long as you pay ￡17.58 a month for Photoshop alone, or ￡46.88 for the full creative suite (￡27.34 for upgraders from CS3 or later, ￡15.88 for the Student and Teacher edition), you'll always have access to any new features that come along. That sounds more palatable to me than the old ￡650 or ￡950 up front, though I realise that some long-time users have expressed displeasure at having to continue paying to use the software. However, with the subscription, it would take you at least 3 years to spend the previous up front money, and by then, you'd probably want to upgrade anyway.
Another way that Creative Cloud affects new Photoshop users is that they'll now get all the Photoshop tools, including features that used to be available only in the Photoshop Extended edition, such as 3D modelling and image analysis. Extended costs ￡950, so this is quite a perk, not to mention the fact that it simplifies your product choice.
You should only consider installing Photoshop on a fairly powerful PC or Mac. You also need to sign in with your Adobe ID before the installer will let you start. I installed it on a Windows 8 PC (Photoshop CC runs on Windows 7 with Service Pack 1, but not on earlier Windows OS versions) with a 3.4GHz quad-core processor and 4GB of RAM. It took about 20 minutes, and, right off the bat, I got a message saying that 3D editing wouldn't be available because of my video card or its driver. Mac users will need OS X 10.7 or 10.8.
The Photoshop UI remains largely unchanged from that of Photoshop CS6, which was a big advance over CS5. All your left-side tools and right-side panels are still available, in a choice of workspaces suited to standard image editing, 3D, motion, painting, photography, and typography. It's incredibly customisable, and you can save presets for all your customisations. The new cloud connectivity also means that you can log into a copy of Photoshop at a different location and have all your interface customisation show up.
Another helpful aspect of the interface is that, for most updated features, you can check a "Use legacy" box to get the old tool you're used to. Plenty of other little conveniences (which Adobe likes to call JDIs, for "just do it") have been added to the world's premiere photo editing software. For example, you can now nudge a path with the spacebar. Actions can now be conditional, using if/then expressions.
Behance
Behance is a social network for creative professionals, offering online portfolios and connections. It will be built into all the Creative Cloud applications, and will let users post projects for feedback from colleagues and clients. Users can post their files directly from Photoshop CC via a one-click share button at the lower left. They can share their work from within Behance, and discuss the work and even connect with potential and existing clients and freelancers.
Behance's ProSites are customisable online portfolios which Creative Cloud subscribers can use with their own URLs. I found Behance's presentation elegant, clean, and it incorporated all the essential social features du jour. I especially like the fact that it offers statistics of your page activity. You can also export photos in Zoomify format – a cool viewer that lets viewers zoom deep into large images – but I'd like to see more sharing options, like built-in email and Flickr sharing. Of course, you can do all this from Photoshop's ancillary Bridge image organiser app.
The hottest, most anticipated new feature of Photoshop CC is the modestly named Camera Shake Reduction. This was first shown by Adobe two years ago at its Max conference, and it was met with a very positive reaction. The tool analyses a photo to find the path of shake motion, and then aligns the shifted pixels. It sounds simple enough, but it's harder to get right than it may seem. This is because the path won't be the same everywhere in the photo unless you shook it exactly along a single plane – highly unlikely. You can use the tool's best guess, or select a region (or regions) where you want the blur trace to be estimated.
You can also adjust Blur Trace Bounds, Smoothing, and Artifact Suppression – the last two let me create a less "sharpened" looking result. I'd love to see a simple "effect strength" adjustment like that you get with Smart Sharpen (which, by the way, with this release gets a new Reduce Noise slider). Shake Reduction is not a panacea, but it's definitely a finer effect than even the Smart Sharpen tool. If the subject is simply out of focus, it won't help you; a simply blurry subject won't be fixed.
Photoshop CC also benefits from several new Camera Raw capabilities, some of which we've already seen in the Lightroom 5 beta. The latter includes a new geometry correction tool, Upright (see the above image). This lets you fix parallel vertical and horizontal lines. Its Auto setting attempts to fix perspective, but you can choose only to align verticals or only horizontals, or mess with the perspective to taste with transforming sliders for pincushion/barrel distortion, vertical, horizontal, and aspect ratio.
A couple more new capabilities designers will be thrilled to take advantage of are rounded rectangles and the ability to select multiple paths and shapes when applying effects. You can now save formatting of type as styles that can be easily applied to other text later. Type can also now be viewed in a way that previews system antialiasing used in web browsers. For web designers, Photoshop CC now can generate CSS code that produces the exact look designed in the software. Going in the other direction, they can also now import colour from a website's HTML or CSS code.
Read the full story at www.tilees.com!
2013年6月18日星期二
PaySmart launches EMV offering in the cloud using Multos
PaySmart's Software as a Service (SaaS) approach to EMV uses cloud computing technology and MULTOS to dramatically reduce the complexity and time required to conduct an EMV migration project, especially for independent EMV issuers.
"Everything is executed under a class 5 datacenter with disaster recovery and redundancy in two separate cities, a mission-critical environment supporting high-volume transactions and the same infrastructure used by major banks, insurance companies and credit cards companies worldwide. With paySmart, an issuer can start issuing chip cards in 30 days, with almost zero investments and paying a flat, monthly fee, only for cards which are actually generating revenues. Depending on the requirements, low cost MULTOS Step/One cards can be issued, which helps to reduce the total cost of ownership of the solution", explains Daniel Nunes de Oliveira, Business Development Director of paySmart.
Oliveira reveals why MULTOS simplifies the issuance model for paySmart: "the beauty of MULTOS for us is that we can perform data preparation in the cloud and send enciphered files directly to the cards, using card personalization bureaus or instant issuance printers. What was once risky, complex and used to take a long time to deploy, has now become low risk, simple and very fast. It is not necessary to invest in infrastructure and in human resources - all software and hardware is already plugged in,Ceramic tile, in a secure, private cloud."
Julio Rost, paySmart's Marketing Coordinator says, "The idea of the new brand is to help us to communicate to customers and partners that in addition to the Smartcon products and services that have made us leaders in this industry, we are now providing EMV technology as a service, a complete offer for independent issuers who want to migrate from magstripe to chip, quickly and efficiently".
So, earlier this month I went with my lil bro to my first significant live poker event. In Troia near Lisbon in Portugal. Free hotel, Dad offering to pay for the flights – free holiday! With the chance to turn a profit playing poker…who could say no!? I tried to qualify online a few times and reached the third and final tier three times. Close but no cigar. Ah, but there are satellites when we are there….
I’m moved tables four times and I take advantage of both my chip stack and the players lack of knowledge of me to make some more moves and I’m looking pretty damn good. We’re getting down to the bubble and I’m thinking take it easy. No rash moves. Give me the rubbish I had day 1. But 77 in first position…I make a min raise. I get an all in for another min raise and call it down. His AK hits but I’m still looking fine….then an all in ahead of me and I’m looking down at 10,10. I want to slow down and let someone bust out, but I’ve got the 5th best starting hand and it would only be 2/5 of my stack to call. Too tempting. He has Jacks. Sigh. They hold up. Sigh again. Then someone busts and it’s the final ten.
Final Table – there’s me on around 30K, same-ish as three other players. The blinds are 4k and 8k, owch. I get dealt the button so the other three shorties have to go through the blinds before me. Just don’t be tenth I think, just don’t. The other short stacks make moves all in, don’t get called. Survive a round. I look down at KQs in first position. AHHHHHH! First position! The blinds have to go through the short stacks again so I let it go. And agonise about it since. I’ve then got nowt when I face all ins on my blinds. Its ok I’m thinking, I can take one blinds hit since they have to take the blinds again before me. I steal some blinds on the button against my new best friend for the day Diogo. He doesn’t look happy but neither am I. The short stacks move all in again…and survive. The blinds hits me again with nowt, nowt again, nowt again. Guy to my right goes all in. By now I’m starting to worry, expecting to look down at a 7 and “the rules for playing poker card” that comes with the deck, but low and behold KK! My meagre stack goes in, and the big blind moves all in too.
The first all in guy shows AK. Perfect. He has three aces against my kings. Couldn’t ask for better. The second caller shows Q7. Q7!?!? He’s thinking there are more cards to bust me, but the AK has him covered chipwise so if he’s third he’s out and if he’s second he’s crippled. These are the two most likely outcomes, even not knowing the cards. Stupid move. But hey, I’ll take em all day. I’m 60%ish percent with double the chips on offer. Can’t ask for better. Flop is;
So I’m out at the same time as AK but my stack is shortest so I’m tenth. With nowt. I stare disbelievingly, try to weasel a joint ninth place finish, then rap the table, say good game, and walk away to swear and drink. Poker can be so cruel at times. But overall the experience was good. Statistically I was better than one in seven players in that sat, and since Mr. Q7 had already sucked out on me one earlier on when he was underdog I definitely had the better of him too.
Mint holiday, nearly free…and as lil bro already said, I won the 20 Euros bet offering him 10/1 odds that he couldn’t catch a fish in the marina with his bare hands. I’m watching him, howling with laughter, and one of the Portuguese poker lads walks over and see’s the Golem impression going on. ‘What are you doing?’ he says.
However, the school district is not willing to fund the project alone. It will cost $30,000 to employ a coordinator. SD71 committed $10,000 and is hoping other stakeholders will also chip in.
"It's not just a school project," said Taylor. "It's bigger and more sophisticated than that. It involves municipalities, schools and other stakeholders as well. So because so many components of the community are involved it needs to be championed of some kind. And because we've already been doing a lot of work in schools like bike rodeos, we're part of the push behind this."
"We need to have every one aligned. We need adequate funding for a coordinator because from our experienced, the coordinator is key to making all of these happen. We're just a volunteer group and already have our hands full with our own activities. We're willing to help out with this but we don't have anyone that's going to take this on. It needs to be a part-time paid position for someone to do all the coordination involved."
"Everything is executed under a class 5 datacenter with disaster recovery and redundancy in two separate cities, a mission-critical environment supporting high-volume transactions and the same infrastructure used by major banks, insurance companies and credit cards companies worldwide. With paySmart, an issuer can start issuing chip cards in 30 days, with almost zero investments and paying a flat, monthly fee, only for cards which are actually generating revenues. Depending on the requirements, low cost MULTOS Step/One cards can be issued, which helps to reduce the total cost of ownership of the solution", explains Daniel Nunes de Oliveira, Business Development Director of paySmart.
Oliveira reveals why MULTOS simplifies the issuance model for paySmart: "the beauty of MULTOS for us is that we can perform data preparation in the cloud and send enciphered files directly to the cards, using card personalization bureaus or instant issuance printers. What was once risky, complex and used to take a long time to deploy, has now become low risk, simple and very fast. It is not necessary to invest in infrastructure and in human resources - all software and hardware is already plugged in,Ceramic tile, in a secure, private cloud."
Julio Rost, paySmart's Marketing Coordinator says, "The idea of the new brand is to help us to communicate to customers and partners that in addition to the Smartcon products and services that have made us leaders in this industry, we are now providing EMV technology as a service, a complete offer for independent issuers who want to migrate from magstripe to chip, quickly and efficiently".
So, earlier this month I went with my lil bro to my first significant live poker event. In Troia near Lisbon in Portugal. Free hotel, Dad offering to pay for the flights – free holiday! With the chance to turn a profit playing poker…who could say no!? I tried to qualify online a few times and reached the third and final tier three times. Close but no cigar. Ah, but there are satellites when we are there….
I’m moved tables four times and I take advantage of both my chip stack and the players lack of knowledge of me to make some more moves and I’m looking pretty damn good. We’re getting down to the bubble and I’m thinking take it easy. No rash moves. Give me the rubbish I had day 1. But 77 in first position…I make a min raise. I get an all in for another min raise and call it down. His AK hits but I’m still looking fine….then an all in ahead of me and I’m looking down at 10,10. I want to slow down and let someone bust out, but I’ve got the 5th best starting hand and it would only be 2/5 of my stack to call. Too tempting. He has Jacks. Sigh. They hold up. Sigh again. Then someone busts and it’s the final ten.
Final Table – there’s me on around 30K, same-ish as three other players. The blinds are 4k and 8k, owch. I get dealt the button so the other three shorties have to go through the blinds before me. Just don’t be tenth I think, just don’t. The other short stacks make moves all in, don’t get called. Survive a round. I look down at KQs in first position. AHHHHHH! First position! The blinds have to go through the short stacks again so I let it go. And agonise about it since. I’ve then got nowt when I face all ins on my blinds. Its ok I’m thinking, I can take one blinds hit since they have to take the blinds again before me. I steal some blinds on the button against my new best friend for the day Diogo. He doesn’t look happy but neither am I. The short stacks move all in again…and survive. The blinds hits me again with nowt, nowt again, nowt again. Guy to my right goes all in. By now I’m starting to worry, expecting to look down at a 7 and “the rules for playing poker card” that comes with the deck, but low and behold KK! My meagre stack goes in, and the big blind moves all in too.
The first all in guy shows AK. Perfect. He has three aces against my kings. Couldn’t ask for better. The second caller shows Q7. Q7!?!? He’s thinking there are more cards to bust me, but the AK has him covered chipwise so if he’s third he’s out and if he’s second he’s crippled. These are the two most likely outcomes, even not knowing the cards. Stupid move. But hey, I’ll take em all day. I’m 60%ish percent with double the chips on offer. Can’t ask for better. Flop is;
So I’m out at the same time as AK but my stack is shortest so I’m tenth. With nowt. I stare disbelievingly, try to weasel a joint ninth place finish, then rap the table, say good game, and walk away to swear and drink. Poker can be so cruel at times. But overall the experience was good. Statistically I was better than one in seven players in that sat, and since Mr. Q7 had already sucked out on me one earlier on when he was underdog I definitely had the better of him too.
Mint holiday, nearly free…and as lil bro already said, I won the 20 Euros bet offering him 10/1 odds that he couldn’t catch a fish in the marina with his bare hands. I’m watching him, howling with laughter, and one of the Portuguese poker lads walks over and see’s the Golem impression going on. ‘What are you doing?’ he says.
However, the school district is not willing to fund the project alone. It will cost $30,000 to employ a coordinator. SD71 committed $10,000 and is hoping other stakeholders will also chip in.
"It's not just a school project," said Taylor. "It's bigger and more sophisticated than that. It involves municipalities, schools and other stakeholders as well. So because so many components of the community are involved it needs to be championed of some kind. And because we've already been doing a lot of work in schools like bike rodeos, we're part of the push behind this."
"We need to have every one aligned. We need adequate funding for a coordinator because from our experienced, the coordinator is key to making all of these happen. We're just a volunteer group and already have our hands full with our own activities. We're willing to help out with this but we don't have anyone that's going to take this on. It needs to be a part-time paid position for someone to do all the coordination involved."
2013年6月16日星期日
2013 Nissan Pathfinder
This week, we're driving Nissan's new generation Pathfinder, a larger SUV that is now more dedicated to highway driving comfort more so than the previous Pathfinders, even though the name "Pathfinder" exudes more of an off-road affinity.
The new Pathfinder is still a four-door, seven-passenger SUV that comes in eight shades of dress, from the two wheel drive "S" at $28,650 up the top line Platinum 4x4, which goes for $41,150... and happens to be our tester for the week.
Important to note is all new Pathfinders come with the same engine under the hood, which means regardless of choice you're receiving the same underpinnings and mechanical attributes. Specifically, a fine running 3.5-liter V6 produces a stout 260-horses and 240 lb. ft. of torque. Pathfinder also delivers excellent fuel mileage at 20 city and 26 highway EPA numbers. If you opt for the 4x4 versions, you'll lose just one MPG on both ends thanks to Nissan's new and standard on all models Xtronic CVT overdrive automatic.
Pathfinder's major change, however, lies underneath for 2013. The former truck style full chassis that made Pathfinder a real off-road and towing mouthpiece is now swapped for a car-like unibody construction, resulting in more creature comfort and less truck like stiffness. There's also more interior room to utilize for the family and suitcases although as for towing, the weight allowed is lower than the last generation by 2,000 lbs. Still, Pathfinder's new tow numbers are good for a unibody at 5,000 lbs. max.
During our week long test, we allowed a fellow newspaper auto enthusiast a test drive and he was quick to give much praise. He cited Pathfinder as one of the very best riding and amenity loaded Crossover/SUVs he's ever driven.
Inside, the top line Platinum is indeed "top line," and is as close to sibling Infiniti in luxury as Nissan allows. The seating is firm yet very comfortable, and the reclining features of front and second rows are an added feature.
We utilized the second row slid and tilt feature while moving some bigger items. The seats also fold in the third row for even more cargo space. Notable is the ease of entry for adults that ride in the third row, which really is for full size adults.
Standard equipment on all Pathfinders include the necessities like tri-zone air, 18-inch tires, nice alloy wheels, keyless entry, cruise, 60/40-split second-row (slides, reclines and folds), tilt-and-telescopic, and a nice six-speaker stereo with six-CD player.
When you arrive at the top line Platinum, everything imaginable is included as standard, including power front seats, leather, Bluetooth, eight-inch color display, rearview safety camera, XM radio, USB/iPod,
fog lamps, roof rack, rear park sensors, roof rack, heated front and rear seats, driver memory functions, 20-inch wheels on alloys, tow package, multi-view parking camera, cooled front seats, heated steering wheel, navigation system, real-time traffic and a spectacular 13-speaker Bose stereo audio system.
The options on our tester came in the form of a $2,300 Platinum Premium package that includes a dual panoramic sunroof and a DVD movie/entertainment system with two headrest seven-inch displays and some power tint sunshades. A roof rail costs $300 and carpeted floor mats were $200.
The 2013-2014 school year may well be remembered as the year with six snow days — including one on May 2. The senior class co-presidents included the phenomena in their addresses to the class, describing it as an event to be remembered. Undoubtedly 2012-2013 will also be remembered for the successful building referenda.
School may be out for the year, but things are just gearing up in the design phase for the renovation projects and the summer work planned in buildings and on grounds. The board of education established an ad hoc committee, which is meeting more frequently to help guide the process. In addition to the board committee, there have been numerous small group meetings and staff discussions about the final designs.
The schematic designs are on schedule to be completed and approved in early August. Once completed, the construction documents will be finalized. That work will take several months. The documents are scheduled for release and bidding in January 2014. It will then take some time to prepare for construction.
During the referendum process, we worked with design concepts. The basic design layouts now being prepared are largely consistent with the earlier ideas but more detailed and more closely aligned to how the spaces are used.
River Heights Elementary will have a new entrance and parking area on the east side and a new central core, including offices, a library-media center and renovated classrooms. The classrooms will also share flexible learning spaces, have better soundproofing and sight lines, and a new HVAC system that includes air conditioning. The staff, parents and students are very excited about the changes — especially the air conditioning!
River Heights Elementary is considered a "lighthouse" school with wrap-around childcare in the morning and a full schedule of after school programming that runs until 5:30 p.m. The improved environment will have significant impact on the functionality of the building. It will have a modern look and feel.
We have just begun the design work for Downsville Elementary. While the project is much smaller than the renovations at River Heights, they will also have a redesigned entrance and central core. Downsville will see major changes in energy projects, such as new windows, HVAC and roof.
Both of the schools are located in areas that may be able to utilize geothermal systems. Our strategic plan includes consideration of sustainable practices throughout the district. The action planning team met with members of the board and design team to discuss the various sustainable practices that could be considered during the renovation and maintenance work.
As a result of the discussions, proposals will be developed for multiple options and the board will be able to consider the costs and benefits of each. The community facilities task force also asked the board to place a high priority on energy projects that would have a good return on investment. The projects and planning have taken that into consideration.Read the full story at www.tilees.com!
The new Pathfinder is still a four-door, seven-passenger SUV that comes in eight shades of dress, from the two wheel drive "S" at $28,650 up the top line Platinum 4x4, which goes for $41,150... and happens to be our tester for the week.
Important to note is all new Pathfinders come with the same engine under the hood, which means regardless of choice you're receiving the same underpinnings and mechanical attributes. Specifically, a fine running 3.5-liter V6 produces a stout 260-horses and 240 lb. ft. of torque. Pathfinder also delivers excellent fuel mileage at 20 city and 26 highway EPA numbers. If you opt for the 4x4 versions, you'll lose just one MPG on both ends thanks to Nissan's new and standard on all models Xtronic CVT overdrive automatic.
Pathfinder's major change, however, lies underneath for 2013. The former truck style full chassis that made Pathfinder a real off-road and towing mouthpiece is now swapped for a car-like unibody construction, resulting in more creature comfort and less truck like stiffness. There's also more interior room to utilize for the family and suitcases although as for towing, the weight allowed is lower than the last generation by 2,000 lbs. Still, Pathfinder's new tow numbers are good for a unibody at 5,000 lbs. max.
During our week long test, we allowed a fellow newspaper auto enthusiast a test drive and he was quick to give much praise. He cited Pathfinder as one of the very best riding and amenity loaded Crossover/SUVs he's ever driven.
Inside, the top line Platinum is indeed "top line," and is as close to sibling Infiniti in luxury as Nissan allows. The seating is firm yet very comfortable, and the reclining features of front and second rows are an added feature.
We utilized the second row slid and tilt feature while moving some bigger items. The seats also fold in the third row for even more cargo space. Notable is the ease of entry for adults that ride in the third row, which really is for full size adults.
Standard equipment on all Pathfinders include the necessities like tri-zone air, 18-inch tires, nice alloy wheels, keyless entry, cruise, 60/40-split second-row (slides, reclines and folds), tilt-and-telescopic, and a nice six-speaker stereo with six-CD player.
When you arrive at the top line Platinum, everything imaginable is included as standard, including power front seats, leather, Bluetooth, eight-inch color display, rearview safety camera, XM radio, USB/iPod,
fog lamps, roof rack, rear park sensors, roof rack, heated front and rear seats, driver memory functions, 20-inch wheels on alloys, tow package, multi-view parking camera, cooled front seats, heated steering wheel, navigation system, real-time traffic and a spectacular 13-speaker Bose stereo audio system.
The options on our tester came in the form of a $2,300 Platinum Premium package that includes a dual panoramic sunroof and a DVD movie/entertainment system with two headrest seven-inch displays and some power tint sunshades. A roof rail costs $300 and carpeted floor mats were $200.
The 2013-2014 school year may well be remembered as the year with six snow days — including one on May 2. The senior class co-presidents included the phenomena in their addresses to the class, describing it as an event to be remembered. Undoubtedly 2012-2013 will also be remembered for the successful building referenda.
School may be out for the year, but things are just gearing up in the design phase for the renovation projects and the summer work planned in buildings and on grounds. The board of education established an ad hoc committee, which is meeting more frequently to help guide the process. In addition to the board committee, there have been numerous small group meetings and staff discussions about the final designs.
The schematic designs are on schedule to be completed and approved in early August. Once completed, the construction documents will be finalized. That work will take several months. The documents are scheduled for release and bidding in January 2014. It will then take some time to prepare for construction.
During the referendum process, we worked with design concepts. The basic design layouts now being prepared are largely consistent with the earlier ideas but more detailed and more closely aligned to how the spaces are used.
River Heights Elementary will have a new entrance and parking area on the east side and a new central core, including offices, a library-media center and renovated classrooms. The classrooms will also share flexible learning spaces, have better soundproofing and sight lines, and a new HVAC system that includes air conditioning. The staff, parents and students are very excited about the changes — especially the air conditioning!
River Heights Elementary is considered a "lighthouse" school with wrap-around childcare in the morning and a full schedule of after school programming that runs until 5:30 p.m. The improved environment will have significant impact on the functionality of the building. It will have a modern look and feel.
We have just begun the design work for Downsville Elementary. While the project is much smaller than the renovations at River Heights, they will also have a redesigned entrance and central core. Downsville will see major changes in energy projects, such as new windows, HVAC and roof.
Both of the schools are located in areas that may be able to utilize geothermal systems. Our strategic plan includes consideration of sustainable practices throughout the district. The action planning team met with members of the board and design team to discuss the various sustainable practices that could be considered during the renovation and maintenance work.
As a result of the discussions, proposals will be developed for multiple options and the board will be able to consider the costs and benefits of each. The community facilities task force also asked the board to place a high priority on energy projects that would have a good return on investment. The projects and planning have taken that into consideration.Read the full story at www.tilees.com!
2013年6月8日星期六
Starbucks Stock May Benefit From Swipe Fee Battle
Because the $7.2 billion swipe fee settlement with Visa and MasterCard doesn't really settle the issue but merely delays it for eight months, Starbucks stock may ultimately benefit from the alternative payment processing path it is blazing.
Nineteen major retailers, including Starbucks, Wal-Mart, and Target, along with the National Federation of Independent Business, are opting out of the settlement and are considering pursuing new litigation against the credit card processors and the big banks like Bank of America, which are the ultimate recipients of the fees charged.
They allege the settlement does little to change an unfair system that costs consumers about $50 billion annually. Considering Visa and MasterCard agreed to pay $6 billion to settle the lawsuit, plus delay imposing the fees again for eight months -- a move that would cost them another $1.2 billion -- it amounts to little more than chump change when they reimpose the fees.
Yet some retailers are exploring alternatives to credit and debit card payments that can mitigate the cost of using plastic. Home Depot, for example, is pioneering the use of PayPal to complete a transaction at the cash register. The swipe fee issue was one reason the eBay payment solution is now available when you walk up to checkout, and the service has signed up 23 national retailers thus far, including Abercrombie & Fitch, American Eagle Outfitters, and J.C. Penney.
But the more interesting option to my thinking is the mobile wallet solution, where you can quickly use your smartphone to pay for a product or service. The industry is still in its infancy, but market researchers at Berg Insight think it will turn into a $35 billion industry by 2017, though that's obviously still just a small portion of overall credit and Ceramic tile use. Still, it offers a path for retailers to follow.
Starbucks is the trendsetter here with a stupid-simple smartphone app, so easy to use, in fact, that of the $500 million worth of goods and services purchased last year using mobile wallet apps, almost all of them were conducted in a Starbucks. That underscores the statements made earlier this year by CEO Howard Schultz, who said the coffee slinger was processing 3 million mobile payment transactions a week.
If other retailers follow suit, creating equally easy-to-use apps that consumers can readily access (apparently not every mobile wallet app is as clean as Starbucks'), they could bypass the credit and debit card issuers and processors altogether, saving themselves and consumers billions.
The proliferation of smartphones combined with a simple-to-use app could lead to the decline of Visa and MasterCard. Not everyone is going to release their grip on plastic, of course, but I think the market researchers may be underestimating its potential, and there's little reason to doubt that Starbucks, as a first-mover here, will see its stock becoming one of the biggest beneficiaries of the coming boom.
The retail space is in the midst of the biggest paradigm shift since mail order took off at the turn of last century. Only those most forward-looking and capable companies will survive, and they'll handsomely reward those investors who understand the landscape. You can read about the 3 Companies Ready to Rule Retail in The Motley Fool's special report. Uncovering these top picks is free today; just click here to read more.
One of the smallest schools in the district brought home one of the biggest prizes last week! The Fort McMurray Christian School recently won the Oil Sands Discovery Centre “Science Olympics 2013”.
“We weren’t surprised they won,” said Principal Joe Champion, speaking of the team of grade 7 and 8 students who competed at last Thursday’s event. “They are smart kids and they put a lot of time and work into it. They were pretty excited to come back to the school and tell us the good news!”
The guidelines of the event were straight forward: Each team of six students was given two projects to work on in advance, while a third was kept secret until the end of the event. The Christian School Team – called SOTWACA (Science Olympic Team With A Cool Acronym) won the first event — the Golf Ball Tower. In this event, each team was asked to construct a tower using only plastic straws, 50 centimeters of tape, 30 paper clips and one index card. “It was hard because we didn’t have much tape,” said grade 7 student Celine Nyange. “But we practiced a lot and made it work!” In 30 minutes the students created the highest tower that would independently support a golf ball for at least one minute. “Our golf ball was still standing at the end of the afternoon” added Caleb Odeleye proudly.
The second challenge — constructing and flying a plane — turned out to be a little different. It worked, but it wasn’t the best! So the race to win the final “secret” event was on!
“Gravity is very Egg-Citing” was the name of the egg dropping adventure. All teams were provided with one cup of Styrofoam peanuts, some tissue paper and felt, a sheet of cardboard with scissors and wire, some string, tape, a 1 L milk carton and one raw egg. In 40 minutes the students made a container with just the right engineering skill to make sure it dropped from a distance equivalent to the top of an oilsands dump truck to the bull’s eye — without breaking the egg! Out of 8 teams, very few achieved this goal, and only one of them — The Christian School — was right on target! “We were really excited that we had a good drop” said Caleb, the “dropper” of the egg.
Nineteen major retailers, including Starbucks, Wal-Mart, and Target, along with the National Federation of Independent Business, are opting out of the settlement and are considering pursuing new litigation against the credit card processors and the big banks like Bank of America, which are the ultimate recipients of the fees charged.
They allege the settlement does little to change an unfair system that costs consumers about $50 billion annually. Considering Visa and MasterCard agreed to pay $6 billion to settle the lawsuit, plus delay imposing the fees again for eight months -- a move that would cost them another $1.2 billion -- it amounts to little more than chump change when they reimpose the fees.
Yet some retailers are exploring alternatives to credit and debit card payments that can mitigate the cost of using plastic. Home Depot, for example, is pioneering the use of PayPal to complete a transaction at the cash register. The swipe fee issue was one reason the eBay payment solution is now available when you walk up to checkout, and the service has signed up 23 national retailers thus far, including Abercrombie & Fitch, American Eagle Outfitters, and J.C. Penney.
But the more interesting option to my thinking is the mobile wallet solution, where you can quickly use your smartphone to pay for a product or service. The industry is still in its infancy, but market researchers at Berg Insight think it will turn into a $35 billion industry by 2017, though that's obviously still just a small portion of overall credit and Ceramic tile use. Still, it offers a path for retailers to follow.
Starbucks is the trendsetter here with a stupid-simple smartphone app, so easy to use, in fact, that of the $500 million worth of goods and services purchased last year using mobile wallet apps, almost all of them were conducted in a Starbucks. That underscores the statements made earlier this year by CEO Howard Schultz, who said the coffee slinger was processing 3 million mobile payment transactions a week.
If other retailers follow suit, creating equally easy-to-use apps that consumers can readily access (apparently not every mobile wallet app is as clean as Starbucks'), they could bypass the credit and debit card issuers and processors altogether, saving themselves and consumers billions.
The proliferation of smartphones combined with a simple-to-use app could lead to the decline of Visa and MasterCard. Not everyone is going to release their grip on plastic, of course, but I think the market researchers may be underestimating its potential, and there's little reason to doubt that Starbucks, as a first-mover here, will see its stock becoming one of the biggest beneficiaries of the coming boom.
The retail space is in the midst of the biggest paradigm shift since mail order took off at the turn of last century. Only those most forward-looking and capable companies will survive, and they'll handsomely reward those investors who understand the landscape. You can read about the 3 Companies Ready to Rule Retail in The Motley Fool's special report. Uncovering these top picks is free today; just click here to read more.
One of the smallest schools in the district brought home one of the biggest prizes last week! The Fort McMurray Christian School recently won the Oil Sands Discovery Centre “Science Olympics 2013”.
“We weren’t surprised they won,” said Principal Joe Champion, speaking of the team of grade 7 and 8 students who competed at last Thursday’s event. “They are smart kids and they put a lot of time and work into it. They were pretty excited to come back to the school and tell us the good news!”
The guidelines of the event were straight forward: Each team of six students was given two projects to work on in advance, while a third was kept secret until the end of the event. The Christian School Team – called SOTWACA (Science Olympic Team With A Cool Acronym) won the first event — the Golf Ball Tower. In this event, each team was asked to construct a tower using only plastic straws, 50 centimeters of tape, 30 paper clips and one index card. “It was hard because we didn’t have much tape,” said grade 7 student Celine Nyange. “But we practiced a lot and made it work!” In 30 minutes the students created the highest tower that would independently support a golf ball for at least one minute. “Our golf ball was still standing at the end of the afternoon” added Caleb Odeleye proudly.
The second challenge — constructing and flying a plane — turned out to be a little different. It worked, but it wasn’t the best! So the race to win the final “secret” event was on!
“Gravity is very Egg-Citing” was the name of the egg dropping adventure. All teams were provided with one cup of Styrofoam peanuts, some tissue paper and felt, a sheet of cardboard with scissors and wire, some string, tape, a 1 L milk carton and one raw egg. In 40 minutes the students made a container with just the right engineering skill to make sure it dropped from a distance equivalent to the top of an oilsands dump truck to the bull’s eye — without breaking the egg! Out of 8 teams, very few achieved this goal, and only one of them — The Christian School — was right on target! “We were really excited that we had a good drop” said Caleb, the “dropper” of the egg.
2013年6月7日星期五
'We Steal Secrets' juicy look at WikiLeaks
Prolific documentary-maker Alex Gibney delivers a gripping account of the wins and losses of hard-charging idealism on the front lines of the information wars in "We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks." Exhaustively researched and balanced in its view of the controversial key player, the film slips in ahead of DreamWorks' dramatic take on the exploits of Julian Assange, "The Fifth Estate," which is currently shooting.
Unfolding like an espionage thriller but with a methodical journalistic skill at organizing a mountain of facts, the film raises stimulating questions about transparency and freedom of information in a world in which governments and corporations have plenty to hide. It should be a magnet for op-ed coverage.
In addition to WikiLeaks founder Assange, Gibney devotes almost equal time to the fascinating figure of U.S. Army Pfc. Bradley Manning, allegedly the source of the largest volume of classified military documents leaked by Assange. It's an awkward irony that one of WikiLeaks' first major coups was a 2007 video showing a U.S. Apache helicopter mowing down unarmed civilians in Baghdad, released under the title "Collateral Murder."
Manning in a sense was also collateral damage. A brilliant but lonely tech geek from Bible-Belt Oklahoma struggling with gender-identity issues, he enlisted to get a government-funded college education. But his homosexuality made him a target for sergeants determined to "beat the macho into him."
Despite a supervisor's recommendation that he not be deployed, Manning went to Iraq as an intelligence analyst. But his isolation and unhappiness led him to dig deeper into easily cracked classified military files. Distressed by what he found there, he reached out to WikiLeaks.
While Assange has repeatedly asserted that WikiLeaks' encryption systems ensure that its sources remain undetectable, the fact emerges that Manning took all the risks as well as the fall. He was betrayed by fellow hacktivist Adrian Lamo and held for almost a year at Quantico under conditions of extreme duress before being transferred to Fort Leavenworth, where he awaits trial in July. Hard evidence that the information spread by him has led to casualties or compromised missions remains elusive, according to Gibney's film. Humiliation of the Pentagon appears to have been the bigger issue.
Manning's story is framed by a thorough, more or less chronological account of Assange's rise and fall. The early sections dovetail with the dramatic depiction in Robert Connolly's TV movie "Underground." Operating under the codename Mendax as part of a small hacker group in Melbourne, Australia, called "The International Subversives," Assange became a dedicated proponent of information-sharing.
While no link has been verified, Gibney speculates in the opening of "We Steal Secrets" that Assange may have been behind the cheekily dubbed WANK (Worms Against Nuclear Killers), a virus that entered NASA's network in the run-up to the 1989 launch of its plutonium-powered Jupiter probe, Galileo.
The doc then traces Assange's success in exposing corrupt banking practices during Iceland's economic collapse in 2009-10, which led to heated public protests and provided the budding whistleblower with a new national base and sympathetic allies. Other early WikiLeaks efforts focused on tax evasion in Swiss banking, government corruption in Kenya and toxic-waste dumping.
Assange hooked up with like-minded German technology activist Daniel Domscheit-Berg, who became his right-hand man. When the incoming load of U.S. military and diplomatic secrets started burning a hole in Assange's pocket, WikiLeaks entered into a media alliance that included The Guardian and The New York Times to disseminate the information, much of which cast American intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan in a damning light.
However, when Manning's actions were uncovered and WikiLeaks became an international hot potato, those broadsheets both distanced themselves from Assange - notably so in a critical New York Times Magazine profile.
During this time, allegations of sexual assault surfaced against Assange in Sweden, which the WikiLeaks founder and many of his supporters have tried to paint as a fabricated smear campaign, possibly orchestrated by the CIA. A British legal rep for Assange amusingly calls it "a surreal Swedish fairy tale only missing the trolls." But the film implies with what seems like reasonable certitude that the conspiracy angle is bogus.
The unraveling of WikiLeaks was accelerated when major credit-card companies and PayPal bowed to pressure to stop processing donations to the organization, effectively setting up a financial blockade. The legal costs incurred in fighting Assange's extradition order to Sweden ate up much of WikiLeaks' remaining funds. Its founder lived in semi-isolation in England before landing at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he remains holed up.
Gibney provides no shortage of support for Assange's noble mission to keep governments and corporations in check. But the film also digs into the questionable ethics and hypocrisy of his methods, as well as the ego and paranoia that clashed with his idealism. Domscheit-Berg quit the organization when it became apparent that WikiLeaks had lost control of what information was being spread and how.
There's a suggestion here that once Assange stepped out from undercover, his judgment was impaired by the rock-star seduction of the spotlight, and self-protection gradually trumped other concerns. The strength of the film is that it leaves the audience to decide whether he remains a figure of heroism or recklessness.
Given that "We Steal Secrets" is out less than a year after Gibney's equally dense account of pedophilia in the Catholic church, "Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God," it's clear the filmmaker must have a virtual army of researchers working full-time. The volume of information here is considerable, but Gibney and editor Andy Grieve keep it pacey and accessible, incorporating smart graphics and animation, and a suspenseful score by Will Bates. The film could stand to be tightened by 10 minutes or so, but this is a tremendously fascinating story told with probing insight and complexity. Read the full story at www.tilees.com!
Unfolding like an espionage thriller but with a methodical journalistic skill at organizing a mountain of facts, the film raises stimulating questions about transparency and freedom of information in a world in which governments and corporations have plenty to hide. It should be a magnet for op-ed coverage.
In addition to WikiLeaks founder Assange, Gibney devotes almost equal time to the fascinating figure of U.S. Army Pfc. Bradley Manning, allegedly the source of the largest volume of classified military documents leaked by Assange. It's an awkward irony that one of WikiLeaks' first major coups was a 2007 video showing a U.S. Apache helicopter mowing down unarmed civilians in Baghdad, released under the title "Collateral Murder."
Manning in a sense was also collateral damage. A brilliant but lonely tech geek from Bible-Belt Oklahoma struggling with gender-identity issues, he enlisted to get a government-funded college education. But his homosexuality made him a target for sergeants determined to "beat the macho into him."
Despite a supervisor's recommendation that he not be deployed, Manning went to Iraq as an intelligence analyst. But his isolation and unhappiness led him to dig deeper into easily cracked classified military files. Distressed by what he found there, he reached out to WikiLeaks.
While Assange has repeatedly asserted that WikiLeaks' encryption systems ensure that its sources remain undetectable, the fact emerges that Manning took all the risks as well as the fall. He was betrayed by fellow hacktivist Adrian Lamo and held for almost a year at Quantico under conditions of extreme duress before being transferred to Fort Leavenworth, where he awaits trial in July. Hard evidence that the information spread by him has led to casualties or compromised missions remains elusive, according to Gibney's film. Humiliation of the Pentagon appears to have been the bigger issue.
Manning's story is framed by a thorough, more or less chronological account of Assange's rise and fall. The early sections dovetail with the dramatic depiction in Robert Connolly's TV movie "Underground." Operating under the codename Mendax as part of a small hacker group in Melbourne, Australia, called "The International Subversives," Assange became a dedicated proponent of information-sharing.
While no link has been verified, Gibney speculates in the opening of "We Steal Secrets" that Assange may have been behind the cheekily dubbed WANK (Worms Against Nuclear Killers), a virus that entered NASA's network in the run-up to the 1989 launch of its plutonium-powered Jupiter probe, Galileo.
The doc then traces Assange's success in exposing corrupt banking practices during Iceland's economic collapse in 2009-10, which led to heated public protests and provided the budding whistleblower with a new national base and sympathetic allies. Other early WikiLeaks efforts focused on tax evasion in Swiss banking, government corruption in Kenya and toxic-waste dumping.
Assange hooked up with like-minded German technology activist Daniel Domscheit-Berg, who became his right-hand man. When the incoming load of U.S. military and diplomatic secrets started burning a hole in Assange's pocket, WikiLeaks entered into a media alliance that included The Guardian and The New York Times to disseminate the information, much of which cast American intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan in a damning light.
However, when Manning's actions were uncovered and WikiLeaks became an international hot potato, those broadsheets both distanced themselves from Assange - notably so in a critical New York Times Magazine profile.
During this time, allegations of sexual assault surfaced against Assange in Sweden, which the WikiLeaks founder and many of his supporters have tried to paint as a fabricated smear campaign, possibly orchestrated by the CIA. A British legal rep for Assange amusingly calls it "a surreal Swedish fairy tale only missing the trolls." But the film implies with what seems like reasonable certitude that the conspiracy angle is bogus.
The unraveling of WikiLeaks was accelerated when major credit-card companies and PayPal bowed to pressure to stop processing donations to the organization, effectively setting up a financial blockade. The legal costs incurred in fighting Assange's extradition order to Sweden ate up much of WikiLeaks' remaining funds. Its founder lived in semi-isolation in England before landing at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he remains holed up.
Gibney provides no shortage of support for Assange's noble mission to keep governments and corporations in check. But the film also digs into the questionable ethics and hypocrisy of his methods, as well as the ego and paranoia that clashed with his idealism. Domscheit-Berg quit the organization when it became apparent that WikiLeaks had lost control of what information was being spread and how.
There's a suggestion here that once Assange stepped out from undercover, his judgment was impaired by the rock-star seduction of the spotlight, and self-protection gradually trumped other concerns. The strength of the film is that it leaves the audience to decide whether he remains a figure of heroism or recklessness.
Given that "We Steal Secrets" is out less than a year after Gibney's equally dense account of pedophilia in the Catholic church, "Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God," it's clear the filmmaker must have a virtual army of researchers working full-time. The volume of information here is considerable, but Gibney and editor Andy Grieve keep it pacey and accessible, incorporating smart graphics and animation, and a suspenseful score by Will Bates. The film could stand to be tightened by 10 minutes or so, but this is a tremendously fascinating story told with probing insight and complexity. Read the full story at www.tilees.com!
2013年6月5日星期三
Can This Be a Laptop?
Tablets are great, but how productive can people really be with them? When it comes to getting things done, nothing beats a mouse and keyboard. The struggle to have it all in one device has led to hybrids like the Lenovo Yoga and productivity-focused tablets like the Surface Pro.
Those products have their individual merits, but they always force the user to make the PC equivalent of Sophie's Choice: Do you sacrifice the keyboard for greater portability, or do you keep it and just accept your laptop will always be bulkier than a tablet?
Sony may have just spared us that terrible decision with the Vaio Pro 11. The Windows 8 PC weighs just 1.92 pounds, or about an ounce lighter than the Surface Pro tablet, and it measures just 0.68 of an inch at its thickest point. And yes, it's a laptop. With touch.
How can this be? Sony built the Vaio Pro 11 partly out of carbon fiber to keep the weight down, but other than that it attributes the laptop's featherlight status to "a passion for design." That passion seems to acknowledge that battery life is an issue, since Sony's product sheet says it'll last "all day" only with an optional sheet battery.
Sony lent me one of its super-slim Vaios to check out. It has a few odd design choices — and that battery life is an issue — but I still came away blown over that such a little device can pack a huge PC punch. That's partly because Sony sent over a machine configured with an Intel Core i7 chip rather than a less powerful i5.
It's hard to use the Vaio Pro 11 and not constantly marvel at the overall design. Still, while Sony appears to have perfected compactness in the laptop form factor, it needs to work on some of its specific design choices.
The keyboard, for example, feels a little less polished than others. Although the chiclet-style keys look good and provide nice breathing room for the fingers, a couple of them were slightly misaligned on my unit (then again, it was a pre-production unit). Also, the keys have slightly too much "give" for an ideal typing experience — this isn't exactly a MacBook Air.
On the plus side, the keyboard's backlit, and the light is intelligent enough to turn itself off if you don't touch the keyboard for Ceramic tile. When you open the laptop, the hinge is built so the back of the keyboard is elevated slightly — a very smart decision.
The trackpad is nice and big, although otherwise it's nothing to write home about. Here it feels like the pad actually has not enough give, and my presses sometimes threatened to topple the thing over if the laptop was resting in an irregular position. Still, it works fine.
The other touch interface — the screen — is beautiful: a full HD (1,920 x 1,080) display that's enhanced with Sony's Triluminous tech for better color, contrast and everything else that TVs have prioritized for years. It looks great, although for a touchscreen, I found it a tad "sticky" and sometimes hard to swipe on even if I was just a tad sweaty.
If there's a dumb decision in the Pro 11 design, it's the corners. For some reason Sony designed the corners to be incredibly pointy. They're not arrowheads, but they're sharp enough that they do poke out noticeably, and bring new meaning to the term "hot corners." God help the poor guy who drops this Vaio corner-first onto his foot.
I was able to forgive Sony its design sins, however, after using the Vaio Pro 11 for just a little while. Windows 8 boots up fast, but on this machine it's like lightning. Apps launch quickly as well, and it responds fluidly to gestures and taps on the screen. Just as I'd expect from a high-end Ultrabook.
It doesn't take much to coax the fans into turning on — fire up just a few apps, a high-res YouTube video, or start thinking about launching an app from Adobe, and sure enough that whirring will start. It's not as loud as, say, a MacBook Pro, but it's a near-constant presence.
What you're looking at, though — especially if it's video — will make you forget about the noise. Watching some movie trailers in 1080p on the Vaio Pro 11, I found the picture quality to have better contrast with lifelike motion and eye-popping color.
Sony attributes the Vaio's superior picture quality to both its Triluminous display tech as well as its X-Reality engine, which is said to reduce visual noise. Comparing the recent trailer for Man of Steel on the Vaio vs. my MacBook Pro, the Sony was the clear winner, even at the smaller screen size.
Sony also included its ClearAudio+ sound processing to improve the sound. I did find that music and videos sounded great on the Vaio, but it couldn't play very loud for it to be practical. To really use the Pro 11 as a primary video machine, you'll want to invest in an external speaker or headphones.
Those products have their individual merits, but they always force the user to make the PC equivalent of Sophie's Choice: Do you sacrifice the keyboard for greater portability, or do you keep it and just accept your laptop will always be bulkier than a tablet?
Sony may have just spared us that terrible decision with the Vaio Pro 11. The Windows 8 PC weighs just 1.92 pounds, or about an ounce lighter than the Surface Pro tablet, and it measures just 0.68 of an inch at its thickest point. And yes, it's a laptop. With touch.
How can this be? Sony built the Vaio Pro 11 partly out of carbon fiber to keep the weight down, but other than that it attributes the laptop's featherlight status to "a passion for design." That passion seems to acknowledge that battery life is an issue, since Sony's product sheet says it'll last "all day" only with an optional sheet battery.
Sony lent me one of its super-slim Vaios to check out. It has a few odd design choices — and that battery life is an issue — but I still came away blown over that such a little device can pack a huge PC punch. That's partly because Sony sent over a machine configured with an Intel Core i7 chip rather than a less powerful i5.
It's hard to use the Vaio Pro 11 and not constantly marvel at the overall design. Still, while Sony appears to have perfected compactness in the laptop form factor, it needs to work on some of its specific design choices.
The keyboard, for example, feels a little less polished than others. Although the chiclet-style keys look good and provide nice breathing room for the fingers, a couple of them were slightly misaligned on my unit (then again, it was a pre-production unit). Also, the keys have slightly too much "give" for an ideal typing experience — this isn't exactly a MacBook Air.
On the plus side, the keyboard's backlit, and the light is intelligent enough to turn itself off if you don't touch the keyboard for Ceramic tile. When you open the laptop, the hinge is built so the back of the keyboard is elevated slightly — a very smart decision.
The trackpad is nice and big, although otherwise it's nothing to write home about. Here it feels like the pad actually has not enough give, and my presses sometimes threatened to topple the thing over if the laptop was resting in an irregular position. Still, it works fine.
The other touch interface — the screen — is beautiful: a full HD (1,920 x 1,080) display that's enhanced with Sony's Triluminous tech for better color, contrast and everything else that TVs have prioritized for years. It looks great, although for a touchscreen, I found it a tad "sticky" and sometimes hard to swipe on even if I was just a tad sweaty.
If there's a dumb decision in the Pro 11 design, it's the corners. For some reason Sony designed the corners to be incredibly pointy. They're not arrowheads, but they're sharp enough that they do poke out noticeably, and bring new meaning to the term "hot corners." God help the poor guy who drops this Vaio corner-first onto his foot.
I was able to forgive Sony its design sins, however, after using the Vaio Pro 11 for just a little while. Windows 8 boots up fast, but on this machine it's like lightning. Apps launch quickly as well, and it responds fluidly to gestures and taps on the screen. Just as I'd expect from a high-end Ultrabook.
It doesn't take much to coax the fans into turning on — fire up just a few apps, a high-res YouTube video, or start thinking about launching an app from Adobe, and sure enough that whirring will start. It's not as loud as, say, a MacBook Pro, but it's a near-constant presence.
What you're looking at, though — especially if it's video — will make you forget about the noise. Watching some movie trailers in 1080p on the Vaio Pro 11, I found the picture quality to have better contrast with lifelike motion and eye-popping color.
Sony attributes the Vaio's superior picture quality to both its Triluminous display tech as well as its X-Reality engine, which is said to reduce visual noise. Comparing the recent trailer for Man of Steel on the Vaio vs. my MacBook Pro, the Sony was the clear winner, even at the smaller screen size.
Sony also included its ClearAudio+ sound processing to improve the sound. I did find that music and videos sounded great on the Vaio, but it couldn't play very loud for it to be practical. To really use the Pro 11 as a primary video machine, you'll want to invest in an external speaker or headphones.
2013年6月4日星期二
African markets outperforming emerging peers
In a column last week, I mentioned the significant outperformance of the S&P 500 index since 2010 compared with the MSCI emerging market index, this at a time when the economies of emerging markets are growing faster than those of developed countries.
Monday was another bearish one for emerging markets, with, for instance, Turkish stocks down by as much as 10% and Russia’s RTS index declining up to 2.1%.
The JSE’s all share index was down 2.48% on the stronger rand and the market playing follow-my-leader from a sell-off in the US on Friday — although US stock markets were rebounding by late Monday afternoon.
Standard Bank on Monday released a research report saying African currencies, bonds and equities remained relatively uncorrelated to other emerging markets, "potentially offering outperformance during the present profit-taking".
The report says that in the year to May this year, the MSCI African index was up 28.8%, the S&P 500 had climbed 18% over the same period, while the MSCI emerging markets index declined 3.7%
Standard says African currencies have performed better than expected against the strengthening dollar so far this year, and it is only the rand, Botswana pula and Mauritian rupee that have produced a negative return. "We expect a similar situation to materialise in the coming months, albeit we may see some short-term weakness, in line with global sentiment ."
A STORY flighted on SABC3 on Thursday night about the securitisation of South Africa’s mortgages by the banks prompted me to delve a little into the health of the local mortgage securitisation sector, a market not often covered by newspapers in this country.
Securitisation is the conversion of a pool of assets with a regular and predictable cash income such as mortgage repayments or credit card receivables into a security or marketable instrument.
It allows mostly the banks to "sell" a large number of its assets such as mortgage loans, which would otherwise not be attractive as individual purchases, to a specially formed company, which funds the purchase by issuing debt securities in the capital markets. It helps banks to improve their liquidity.
Other than the fact that I found out that these markets are relatively healthy, I discovered also that recent concerns among JSE investors about the exposure of some banks to high levels of unsecured lending may also affect the securitisation market.
For instance, Moody’s Investors Services senior analyst Anthony Parry says South Africa’s securitised mortgage market has a negative ratings outlook because of a number of macroeconomic factors. One such factor is unsecured debt, which "has grown significantly. We can’t separate that from the fact that consumers are already under pressure," he said.
Global rating agency Fitch said earlier this year that low economic growth and rising interest rates were not significant risk factors on the performance of mortgages, but "another downside risk ... would lie in a further, unexpected economic deterioration".
ON THE subjects of unsecured lending and property, cracks in the unsecured lending sector are as a result of an increase in bad debts and a slowdown in consumer household spending.
Gary Palmer, CEO of Paragon Lending Solutions, says the bank’s push into more profitable non-interest income was because of it not making sufficient earnings from traditional mortgage bonds. He argues that a decrease in interest rates and new lending regulations such as Basel 3 have pushed local banks into focusing on more profitable noninterest income, with increased involvement in the recovery process. This was why there had been a sharp decline in mortgage lending and a boom in unsecured credit.
Property investors may start finding it more difficult to obtain funding in the tighter economic environment, while commercial property owners will need to focus on rent collections from tenants, Mr Palmer says. But there remains big demand for income-generating properties, especially from blue-chip tenants.
The company developing tools that let people create stuff, today announced the official launch of Stitch -- the FREE iPhone app that takes a user's message, music and photos and puts it into motion. Saying "Good luck," "Happy birthday" or "Sorry I sold your cat" used to mean spending too much time online searching through old-school eCards. Users can now "Stitch" together slides with their images and music to create and share personalized messages at any time for any moment. The app is available exclusively in the Apple App Store.
"People want to create cool stuff and share it, and the products currently on the market don't allow us to get creative and personal," said Dustin Haisler, President of KlabLab. "Stitch was developed to give people the opportunity to convey the message they want to. Stitch isn't your grandma's greeting card."
Stitch fills the creativity void in the eCard space as the only mobile app that lets people design original content and put that content in motion. Templates act as guides, with popular subjects like Happy Birthday, I Love You and Thinking of You, while the blank template gives users total freedom to say exactly what is on their mind, whether that's wishing your son luck in the big game, saying hello to someone after a first date or asking mom to make her famous chocolate chip cookies.
Users can pull music directly from their iTunes library to customize the Stitch or select stock music within the app. Stiches can be further personalized by pulling images from the user's camera roll, Instagram's photo feed or Google Images. Text boxes can be inserted, sized and placed anywhere on the slides and users can also change the font color, size and justification. Stitchers can quickly render and share their completed Stitch on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and through email and text, without ever connecting to Wi-Fi.Click on their website www.tilees.com for more information.
Monday was another bearish one for emerging markets, with, for instance, Turkish stocks down by as much as 10% and Russia’s RTS index declining up to 2.1%.
The JSE’s all share index was down 2.48% on the stronger rand and the market playing follow-my-leader from a sell-off in the US on Friday — although US stock markets were rebounding by late Monday afternoon.
Standard Bank on Monday released a research report saying African currencies, bonds and equities remained relatively uncorrelated to other emerging markets, "potentially offering outperformance during the present profit-taking".
The report says that in the year to May this year, the MSCI African index was up 28.8%, the S&P 500 had climbed 18% over the same period, while the MSCI emerging markets index declined 3.7%
Standard says African currencies have performed better than expected against the strengthening dollar so far this year, and it is only the rand, Botswana pula and Mauritian rupee that have produced a negative return. "We expect a similar situation to materialise in the coming months, albeit we may see some short-term weakness, in line with global sentiment ."
A STORY flighted on SABC3 on Thursday night about the securitisation of South Africa’s mortgages by the banks prompted me to delve a little into the health of the local mortgage securitisation sector, a market not often covered by newspapers in this country.
Securitisation is the conversion of a pool of assets with a regular and predictable cash income such as mortgage repayments or credit card receivables into a security or marketable instrument.
It allows mostly the banks to "sell" a large number of its assets such as mortgage loans, which would otherwise not be attractive as individual purchases, to a specially formed company, which funds the purchase by issuing debt securities in the capital markets. It helps banks to improve their liquidity.
Other than the fact that I found out that these markets are relatively healthy, I discovered also that recent concerns among JSE investors about the exposure of some banks to high levels of unsecured lending may also affect the securitisation market.
For instance, Moody’s Investors Services senior analyst Anthony Parry says South Africa’s securitised mortgage market has a negative ratings outlook because of a number of macroeconomic factors. One such factor is unsecured debt, which "has grown significantly. We can’t separate that from the fact that consumers are already under pressure," he said.
Global rating agency Fitch said earlier this year that low economic growth and rising interest rates were not significant risk factors on the performance of mortgages, but "another downside risk ... would lie in a further, unexpected economic deterioration".
ON THE subjects of unsecured lending and property, cracks in the unsecured lending sector are as a result of an increase in bad debts and a slowdown in consumer household spending.
Gary Palmer, CEO of Paragon Lending Solutions, says the bank’s push into more profitable non-interest income was because of it not making sufficient earnings from traditional mortgage bonds. He argues that a decrease in interest rates and new lending regulations such as Basel 3 have pushed local banks into focusing on more profitable noninterest income, with increased involvement in the recovery process. This was why there had been a sharp decline in mortgage lending and a boom in unsecured credit.
Property investors may start finding it more difficult to obtain funding in the tighter economic environment, while commercial property owners will need to focus on rent collections from tenants, Mr Palmer says. But there remains big demand for income-generating properties, especially from blue-chip tenants.
The company developing tools that let people create stuff, today announced the official launch of Stitch -- the FREE iPhone app that takes a user's message, music and photos and puts it into motion. Saying "Good luck," "Happy birthday" or "Sorry I sold your cat" used to mean spending too much time online searching through old-school eCards. Users can now "Stitch" together slides with their images and music to create and share personalized messages at any time for any moment. The app is available exclusively in the Apple App Store.
"People want to create cool stuff and share it, and the products currently on the market don't allow us to get creative and personal," said Dustin Haisler, President of KlabLab. "Stitch was developed to give people the opportunity to convey the message they want to. Stitch isn't your grandma's greeting card."
Stitch fills the creativity void in the eCard space as the only mobile app that lets people design original content and put that content in motion. Templates act as guides, with popular subjects like Happy Birthday, I Love You and Thinking of You, while the blank template gives users total freedom to say exactly what is on their mind, whether that's wishing your son luck in the big game, saying hello to someone after a first date or asking mom to make her famous chocolate chip cookies.
Users can pull music directly from their iTunes library to customize the Stitch or select stock music within the app. Stiches can be further personalized by pulling images from the user's camera roll, Instagram's photo feed or Google Images. Text boxes can be inserted, sized and placed anywhere on the slides and users can also change the font color, size and justification. Stitchers can quickly render and share their completed Stitch on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and through email and text, without ever connecting to Wi-Fi.Click on their website www.tilees.com for more information.
2013年6月2日星期日
Mike London Style
It was quite the unusual scene at the new George Welsh Indoor Practice Facility. Friday night, hundreds of women in matching orange tees, myself included, swarmed the field to hear from the coaches, run drills, and learn the basics from the top folks associated with Virginia Football.
The evening opened up at the McCue Center, allowing the participants to get the forbidden look into the men's locker room and interact with the coaches before the on-field portion commenced. A line wrapped around the entire room, through the rich mahogany lockers (or what appeared and smelled to be rich mahogany), to get a photo and autograph with Coach London.
A couple sets of uniforms were in some of the lockers, which was perfect for hilarious 'look how my little feet fit inside these huge shoes' moments. Tight End Jake McGee's locker was filled with sticky notes wishing him luck and saying how much they loved him, most of which I can only assume came from the group of ladies wearing tees with '83' on the front and 'McGee' on the back. My guess is that they were family, but the possibility remains that they were enthusiastic fans. Either way, I'm totally on board with it. In fact, a little jealous I did not think of it first.
As it neared seven o'clock, the cats were herded into the indoor facility, which is absolutely breathtaking. Nothing could get you more amped up to play some football than a huge image of Chris Long with the words "Strong body, strong mind" surrounding him.
Coach London came out to raucous applause and welcomed the campers, stating it is his favorite camp of the summer. He wasted no time reiterating his team rules of, "Go to class. Show class and treat people with dignity and respect." There was no question he was directly addressing the recent dismissal of QB Phillip Sims when he continued, saying it was not his responsibility to go to class for players and not his job to turn in their work.
The crowd loved it, and I was impressed with the apparent understanding of the Sims reference. London is a hell of a motivator, and I can absolutely see why his recruiting abilities are a thing of lore. After a short five to six minute speech, I was ready to throw down.
After introducing the coaches, the participants were split up into four groups to receive information on play calling, offensive communication, and defensive schemes. I consider myself pretty football savvy, but the information we received from Coaches Hagans, Brown, and Lewis was fascinating.
From there, we got a presentation from ACC official Tom Pace on the positioning and responsibilities of each of the referees, with some solid cajoling going back and forth between Mr. Pace and Coach London. If nothing else, we all know who to blame if we get any suspect calls this season.
Coach Evan Marcus got us stretched out and ready for drills with a variety of exercises including trunk twists, moving toe touches, lunges, and jumping jacks. Campers were split into their pre-determined groups of eight and sent to skill specific drills, each granted seven minutes and led by two coaches or graduate assistants.
We started with Coach Chip West and covered basic cornerback skills, including stance, drive, and backwards running. Backwards running. Seems easy, but not what I would choose as an activity when I am trying to keep from looking like an idiot in front of an NCAA coach. Definitely gives you a sense of respect for what Demetrious Nicholson and the cornerback crew does on a daily basis, keeping up with some of the fastest on the field.
After that, glorious group eight moved to Coach Fairchild and learned the basic five step drop and pass for the quarterback. For the number of women there, the organizers did a phenomenal job of having enough lines/balls/coaches to keep everything moving fluidly. Each station went over each skill from the most basic point before adding to it and asking us to execute.
Safeties Coach Anthony Pointdexter covered the running back hand off and proper carry technique, and very eloquently explained the importance of protecting the ball. "You fumble, we are gonna fire yo' ass. I have kids to feed." Laughs ensued, but the point was made.
Marques 'Biscuit' Hagans provided my first big 'oh man, that was so cool' moment as he went over wide receiver routes and hit us with passes as we ran an out play. I will brag and say I made both my catches, each at about 15 to 20 yards. No big deal.
Coach Scott Wachenheim and Coach O'Brien provided us with offensive line drills, which are very unsexy but very necessary. I must say, three point stance is NOT comfortable, and I am not surprised by the amount of knee braces worn by those guys.
Punting was next, which was my second 'oh man, that was so cool' moment. Coach London, who wandered throughout the drills all evening, caught glimpse of one of my longer, higher punts, leading to some praise and a joke about signing me. I'm waiting for my information in the mail any day now.
Coach Vincent 'The Undertaker' Brown and Graduate Assistant Jonathan Lewis ran a couple fun defensive line drills which including some tackling dummies and hoop runs simulating sacking the quarterback. Coach Brown is an intimidating man, but that is to be expected from someone dubbed 'The Undertaker' while playing in the NFL.
Last, but not least, was Coach Tenuta and Grad Assistant Mike Saint Germain and linebacker skills. Coach Tenuta hands down wins best motivational voice award, and it is neat to put into practice the movements you see your favorite players make on the field.
I know, it all sounds very simple and most of it was. I know you're probably thinking, "Oh, big deal, you ran around and caught some balls. Who hasn't." BUT organized drills led by high quality coaches is something we weren't exposed to growing up.
All in all, it was a phenomenal experience and I could not be more impressed with the caliber of personnel and facilities associated with the University of Virginia football program. Coach London stayed around after the conclusion until everyone who wanted pictures and/or autographs got their wish. He photo and twitter documented the entire evening, illustrating his dedication and enthusiasm about the event.Click on their website www.tilees.com for more information.
The evening opened up at the McCue Center, allowing the participants to get the forbidden look into the men's locker room and interact with the coaches before the on-field portion commenced. A line wrapped around the entire room, through the rich mahogany lockers (or what appeared and smelled to be rich mahogany), to get a photo and autograph with Coach London.
A couple sets of uniforms were in some of the lockers, which was perfect for hilarious 'look how my little feet fit inside these huge shoes' moments. Tight End Jake McGee's locker was filled with sticky notes wishing him luck and saying how much they loved him, most of which I can only assume came from the group of ladies wearing tees with '83' on the front and 'McGee' on the back. My guess is that they were family, but the possibility remains that they were enthusiastic fans. Either way, I'm totally on board with it. In fact, a little jealous I did not think of it first.
As it neared seven o'clock, the cats were herded into the indoor facility, which is absolutely breathtaking. Nothing could get you more amped up to play some football than a huge image of Chris Long with the words "Strong body, strong mind" surrounding him.
Coach London came out to raucous applause and welcomed the campers, stating it is his favorite camp of the summer. He wasted no time reiterating his team rules of, "Go to class. Show class and treat people with dignity and respect." There was no question he was directly addressing the recent dismissal of QB Phillip Sims when he continued, saying it was not his responsibility to go to class for players and not his job to turn in their work.
The crowd loved it, and I was impressed with the apparent understanding of the Sims reference. London is a hell of a motivator, and I can absolutely see why his recruiting abilities are a thing of lore. After a short five to six minute speech, I was ready to throw down.
After introducing the coaches, the participants were split up into four groups to receive information on play calling, offensive communication, and defensive schemes. I consider myself pretty football savvy, but the information we received from Coaches Hagans, Brown, and Lewis was fascinating.
From there, we got a presentation from ACC official Tom Pace on the positioning and responsibilities of each of the referees, with some solid cajoling going back and forth between Mr. Pace and Coach London. If nothing else, we all know who to blame if we get any suspect calls this season.
Coach Evan Marcus got us stretched out and ready for drills with a variety of exercises including trunk twists, moving toe touches, lunges, and jumping jacks. Campers were split into their pre-determined groups of eight and sent to skill specific drills, each granted seven minutes and led by two coaches or graduate assistants.
We started with Coach Chip West and covered basic cornerback skills, including stance, drive, and backwards running. Backwards running. Seems easy, but not what I would choose as an activity when I am trying to keep from looking like an idiot in front of an NCAA coach. Definitely gives you a sense of respect for what Demetrious Nicholson and the cornerback crew does on a daily basis, keeping up with some of the fastest on the field.
After that, glorious group eight moved to Coach Fairchild and learned the basic five step drop and pass for the quarterback. For the number of women there, the organizers did a phenomenal job of having enough lines/balls/coaches to keep everything moving fluidly. Each station went over each skill from the most basic point before adding to it and asking us to execute.
Safeties Coach Anthony Pointdexter covered the running back hand off and proper carry technique, and very eloquently explained the importance of protecting the ball. "You fumble, we are gonna fire yo' ass. I have kids to feed." Laughs ensued, but the point was made.
Marques 'Biscuit' Hagans provided my first big 'oh man, that was so cool' moment as he went over wide receiver routes and hit us with passes as we ran an out play. I will brag and say I made both my catches, each at about 15 to 20 yards. No big deal.
Coach Scott Wachenheim and Coach O'Brien provided us with offensive line drills, which are very unsexy but very necessary. I must say, three point stance is NOT comfortable, and I am not surprised by the amount of knee braces worn by those guys.
Punting was next, which was my second 'oh man, that was so cool' moment. Coach London, who wandered throughout the drills all evening, caught glimpse of one of my longer, higher punts, leading to some praise and a joke about signing me. I'm waiting for my information in the mail any day now.
Coach Vincent 'The Undertaker' Brown and Graduate Assistant Jonathan Lewis ran a couple fun defensive line drills which including some tackling dummies and hoop runs simulating sacking the quarterback. Coach Brown is an intimidating man, but that is to be expected from someone dubbed 'The Undertaker' while playing in the NFL.
Last, but not least, was Coach Tenuta and Grad Assistant Mike Saint Germain and linebacker skills. Coach Tenuta hands down wins best motivational voice award, and it is neat to put into practice the movements you see your favorite players make on the field.
I know, it all sounds very simple and most of it was. I know you're probably thinking, "Oh, big deal, you ran around and caught some balls. Who hasn't." BUT organized drills led by high quality coaches is something we weren't exposed to growing up.
All in all, it was a phenomenal experience and I could not be more impressed with the caliber of personnel and facilities associated with the University of Virginia football program. Coach London stayed around after the conclusion until everyone who wanted pictures and/or autographs got their wish. He photo and twitter documented the entire evening, illustrating his dedication and enthusiasm about the event.Click on their website www.tilees.com for more information.
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