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For those of you who are upset about how the large number of Georgia players drafted by the NFL haven't translated into a national title, Todd McShay thinks you should chill.
"Think about how close they were to beating Alabama. And then they go on and beat Notre Dame and win the national championship. This team was extremely close," McShay said Friday during a teleconference to preview the draft. "They overcame a lot of off-the-field issues, all those suspensions and a couple injuries early in the year. And they finally jelled. Their schedule was not the toughest, I'll give you that. If you're a Georgia fan, I'm assuming there's probably a little bit of frustration with all these players from Alec Ogletree to Jarvis Jones and maybe John Jenkins in the first round; Bacarri Rambo and Shawn Williams at safety, Cornelius Washington at defensive end, Sanders Commings at cornerback-safety, Kwame Geathers, Abry Jones, I mean the list goes on and on with these guys. It's remarkable how much talent. I get it.
"But I also think you have to keep perspective, and how close they were to playing for the national championship and a game they in all likelihood would have been able to win. It was just that close, and they almost got started a quarter of the way into the year because of all the suspensions. Which, you can blame on the coaching staff, or the lack of discipline, wherever you wanna put it. But I don't think you can lose sight of how close this team was."
I really do wonder how we'll look back on last year's SECCG loss, say, five years from now.


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Rutherford et al 2005 (the et al being half the Hockey Team: Mann, Bradley, Hughes, Briffa, Jones, Osborn) is a re-statement of the MBH98 network (flawed PCs and all) and the Briffa et al 2001 network using RegEM. I haven't figured out exactly what the properties of the RegEM method are as compared to other multivariate methods, but that's a story for another day. This is the article where they first put forward the idea that the verification r2 is a "flawed" statistic.
While one could seek to estimate verification skill with the square of the Pearson correlation measure (r2), this metric can be misleading when, as is the case in paleoclimate reconstructions of past centuries, changes are likely in mean or variance outside the calibration period. To aid the reader in interpreting the verification diagnostics, and to illustrate the shortcomings of r2 as a diagnostic of reconstructive skill, we provide some synthetic examples that show three possible reconstructions of a series and the RE, CE, and r2 scores for each (supplementary material available online at http://fox.rwu.edu/~rutherfo/supplements/jclim2003a)
In our discussion of verification statistics, we've not argued that a verification r2 is sufficient for model success, only that it's necessary. So their illustration has nothing to do with any actual argument that we've ever made. But, hey, they're the Hockey Team. Their illustration of the above paragraph showed the following "synthetic" example where there is high verification r2 with poor model behavior.
Figure 1. verifexample.pdf top panel from Rutherford et al 2005 SI
It seems hard to imagine a real-world model where you would actually get an r2 of 1 and lose track of the mean level so badly. Actual statisticians (as opposed to "I am not a statistician" statisticians) use other methods to test for situations like this – a Durbin-Watson statistic would have picked up this sort of situation effortlessly. There's no real need for the Hockey Team to re-invent time series statistics. If they think that they've proved something about the r2 statistic, they should submit it to a real statisticl journal and not just push it by Andrew Weaver at Journal of Climate. It's embarrassing that the Journal of Climate, which has published much sophisticated and interesting material in the past, should, under Andrew Weaver's watch, publish such a juvenile sketch.
However, for today's little irony, they really didn't need to invent a synthetic example. I'll rotate this example, just to get your eye in (although the comparison I'm about to give is pretty obvious). Here you see a case where the divergence is upwards.
Figure 1 rotated 180 degrees
Now here is Figure xx from Rutherford et al, showing one of their reconstructions which has MXD data in it and the resultant "divergence problem". There seems to be some high-frequency coherence which would help the r2 (but the r2 is not JUST a high-frequency statistic as the diverging trend will penalize the r2 statistic.) A Durbin-Watson statistic would pick up the divergence effortlessly – or simply looking at the plot wouldn't do any harm. So Rutherford, Mann et al. didn't need to invent a synthetic example, they could have just used their own reconstruction with MXD data.
Figure 3. From Rutherford et al 2005.
If the point of their synthetic example was to say that such cases are flawed, then surely they had an obvious example right at hand. They could have said – here's the MXD data, it demonstrates what happens with flawed models.
But this is the Hockey Team, so they handle it differently. Remember the Briffa MXD reconstruction, which had the same divergence problem. They truncated it in 1960 and snipped off the embarrassing bits at the end. This was done for the first time in IPCC TAR (I reported this last May: you had to blow up the graphic to see the truncation). In the article cited by IPCC (Briffa 2000), there was no truncation. It occurred in print in a later article (Briffa et al JGR 2001, not cited in TAR).
Rutherford has archived a number of reconstructions from this article both at his website (where I'm blocked) and at WDCP. If you examine them, you'll see that he's done the same trick. The digital data is truncated. None of the series contain digital data for the series illustrated above with the closing downtrend; they are all truncated, nearly all of them to 1960.
Has an MXD-based reconstruction shown any ability to measure warm periods? Who knows? They sure haven't provided any evidence so far.
Now let's suppose hypothetically that IPCC 4 AR had a spaghetti graph and that both the Briffa et al 2001 reconstructions and a Rutherford et al 2005 reconstruction were in it. Do you suppose that they would show the entire series, complete with "divergence" in the late 20th century? Or do you suppose that they would obtain "consensus", so to speak, by censoring the post-1960 values of these series so that the reconstructions all appear to go up in the late 20th century? A hypothetical question, of course.

subset: commoncrawl


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Someone accidentally puts hand dishwashing liquid instead ofautomatic dishwasher detergent
into your dishwasher, and you end up with an avalanche of suds on your kitchen floor. No need to panic! Follow these easy steps to avert a kitchen disaster.
- First, cancel the cycle so the dishwasher drains the water. Place towels on the floor under the machine to catch the water and suds that are still spilling out. Then remove all the dishes and put them in the sink, for the time being.
- Slide out the bottom rack and liberally pour table salt on top of the suds to break down the foam. Run a quick rinse-only cycle and check for remaining suds.
- If there are still tons of suds pouring out of the dishwasher, add more salt and repeat the rinse cycle until the foam stops coming out of the machine.
- Once the foam starts to dissipate, toss a tray or so of ice cubes onto the remaining suds and allow them to melt. Push the cancel button to drain the melted ice. Run another quick rinse cycle, and repeat the ice cube-rinse sequence until all the suds are gone.
Get a firsthand look at how we evaluate products by touring the Good Housekeeping Research Institute.


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During the lazy month of June New.Ox. offers a random but largely relevant selection of things I like to read and think about. rjh
John Dewey
[Previously] we noted incidentally the distinction made in the classic tradition between knowledge and belief, or, as Locke put it, between knowledge and judgment. According to this distinction the certain and knowledge are co-extensive. Disputes exist, but they are whether sensation or reason affords the basis of certainty; or whether existence or essence is its object. In contrast with this identification, the very word "belief" is eloquent on the topic of certainty. We believe in the absence of knowledge or complete assurance. Hence the quest for certainty has always been an effort to transcend belief. Now since, as we have already noted, all matters of practical action involve an element of uncertainty, we can ascend from belief to knowledge only by isolating the latter from practical doing and making.
In this chapter we are especially concerned with the effect of the ideal of certainty as something superior to belief upon the conception of the nature and function of philosophy. Greek thinkers saw dearly-and logically-that experience cannot furnish us, as respects cognition of existence, with anything more than contingent probability. Experience cannot deliver to us necessary truths; truths completely demonstrated by reason. Its conclusions are particular, not universal. Not being "exact" they come short of "science." Thus there arose the distinction between rational truths or, in modern terminology, truths relating to the relation of ideas, and "truths" about matters of existence, empirically ascertained. Thus not merely the arts of practice, industrial and social, were stamped matters of belief rather than of knowledge, but also all those sciences which are matters of inductive inference from observation.
One might indulge in the reflection that they are none the worse for all that, especially since the natural sciences have developed a technique for achieving a high degree of probability and for measuring, within assignable limits, the amount of probability which attaches in particular cases to conclusions. But historically the matter is not so simple as to permit of this retort. For empirical or observational sciences were placed in invidious contrast to rational sciences which dealt with eternal and universal objects and which therefore were possessed of necessary truth. Consequently all observational sciences as far as their material could not be subsumed under forms and principles supplied by rational science shared in the depreciatory view held about practical affairs. They are relatively low, secular and profane compared with the perfect realities of rational science.
And here is a justification for going back to something as remote in time as Greek philosophy. The whole classic tradition down to our day has continued to hold a slighting view of experience as such, and to hold up as the proper goal and ideal of true knowledge realities which even if they are located in empirical things cannot be known by experimental methods. The logical consequence for philosophy itself is evident. Upon the side of method, it has been compelled to claim for itself the possession of a method issuing from reason itself, and having the warrant of reason, independently of experience. As long as the view obtained that nature itself is truly known by the same rational method, the consequences at least those which were evident-were not serious. There was no break between philosophy and genuine science-or what was conceived to be such. In fact, there was not even a distinction there were simply various branches of philosophy, metaphysical, logical, natural, moral, etc., in a descending scale of demonstrative certainty. Since, according to the theory, the subject-matter of the lower sciences was inherently of a different character from that of true knowledge, there was no ground for rational dissatisfaction with the lower degree of knowledge called belief. Inferior knowledge or belief corresponded to the inferior state of subject-matter.
The scientific revolution of the seventeenth century effected a great modification. Science itself through the aid of mathematics carried the scheme of demonstrative knowledge over to natural objects. The "laws" of the natural world had that fixed character which in the older scheme had belonged only to rational and ideal forms. A mathematical science of nature couched in mechanistic terms claimed to be the only sound natural philosophy. Hence the older philosophies lost alliance with natural knowledge and the support that had been given to philosophy by them. Philosophy in maintaining its claim to be a superior form of knowledge was compelled to take an invidious and so to say malicious attitude toward the conclusions of natural science. The framework of the old tradition had in the meantime become embedded in Christian theology, and through religious teaching was made a part of the inherited culture of those innocent of any technical philosophy. Consequently, the rivalry between philosophy and the new science, with respect to the claim to know reality, was converted in effect into a rivalry between the spiritual values guaranteed by the older philosophic tradition and the conclusions of natural knowledge. The more science advanced the more it seemed to encroach upon the special province of the territory over which philosophy had claimed jurisdiction. Thus philosophy in its classic form became a species of apologetic justification for belief in an ultimate reality in which the values which should regulate life and control conduct are securely enstated.
There are undoubted disadvantages in the historic manner of approach to the problem which has been followed. It may readily be thought either that the Greek formulation which has been emphasised has no especial pertinency with respect to modern thought and especially to contemporary philosophy; or that no philosophical statement is of any great importance for the mass of non-philosophic persons. Those interested in philosophy may object that the criticisms passed are directed if not at a man of straw at least to positions that have long since lost their actuality. Those not friendly to any form of philosophy may inquire what import they have for any except professed philosophers.
The first type of objection will be dealt with somewhat in extenso in the succeeding chapter, in which I shall try to show how modern philosophies, in spite of their great diversity, have been concerned with problems of adjustment of the conclusions of modern science to the chief religious and moral tradition of the western world; together with the way in which these problems are connected with retention of the conception of the relation of knowledge to reality formulated in Greek thought. At the point in the discussion now reached, it suffices to point out that, in spite of great changes in detail, the notion of a separation between knowledge and action, theory and practice, has been perpetuated, and that the beliefs connected with action are taken to be uncertain and inferior to value compared with those inherently connected with objects of knowledge, so that the former are securely established only as they derived from the latter. Not the specific content of Greek thought is pertinent to present problems, but its insistence that security is measured by certainty of knowledge, while the latter is measured by adhesion to fixed and immutable objects, which therefore are independent of what men do in practical activity.
The other objection is of a different sort. It comes from those who feel that not merely Greek philosophy but philosophy in any form is remote from all significant human concern. It is willing to admit or rather assert that it is presumptuous for philosophy to lay claim to knowledge of a higher order than that given by natural science, but it also holds that this is no great matter in any case except for professional philosophers.
There would be force in this latter objection were it not. that those who make it hold for the most part the same philosophy of certainty and its proper object that is held by philosophers, save in an inchoate form. They are not interested in the notion that philosophic thought is a special means of attaining this object and the certainty it affords, but they are far from holding, either explicitly or implicitly, that the arts of intelligently directed action are the means by which security of values are to be attained. With respect to certain ends and goods they accept this idea. But in thinking of these ends and values as material, as related to health, wealth, control of conditions for the sake of an inferior order of consequences, they retain the same division between a higher reality and a lower that is formulated in classic philosophy. They may be innocent of the vocabulary that speaks of reason, necessary truth, the universal, things in themselves and appearances. But they incline to believe that there is some other road than that of action, directed by knowledge, to achieve ultimate security of higher ideals and purposes. They think of practical action as necessary for practical utilities, but they mark off practical utilities from spiritual and ideal values. Philosophy did not originate the underlying division. It only gave intellectual formulation and justification to ideas that were operative in men's minds generally. And the elements of these ideas are as active in present culture as they ever were in the past. Indeed, through the diffusion of religious doctrines, the idea that ultimate values are a matter of special revelation and are to be embodied in life by special means radically different from the arts of action that deal with lower and lesser ends has been accentuated in the popular mind.
Here is the point which is of general human import instead of concern merely to professional philosophers. What about the security of values, of the things which are admirable, honourable, to be approved of and striven for? It is probably in consequence of the derogatory view held of practice that the ion of the secure place of values in human experience is seldom raised in connection with the problem of the relation of knowledge and practice. But upon any view concerning the status of action, the scope of the latter cannot be restricted to self-seeking acts, nor to those of a prudential aspect, nor in general to things of expediency and what are often termed "utilitarian" affairs. The maintenance and diffusion of intellectual values, of moral excellencies, the aesthetically admirable, as well as the maintenance of order and decorum in human relations are dependent upon what men do.
Whether because of the emphasis of traditional religion salvation of the personal soul or for some other reason, there is a tendency to restrict the ultimate scope of morals to the reflex effect of conduct on one's self. Even utilitarianism, with all its seeming independence of traditional theology and its emphasis upon the general good as the criterion for judging conduct, insisted in its hedonistic psychology upon private Pleasure as the motive for action. The idea that the stable and expanding institution of all things that make life worth while throughout all human relationships is the real object of all intelligent conduct is depressed from view by the current conception of morals as a special kind of action chiefly concerned with either the virtues or the enjoyments of individuals in their personal capacities. In changed form, we still retain the notion of a division of activity into two kinds having very different worths. The result is the depreciated meaning that has come to be attached to the very meaning of the "practical" and the useful. Instead of being extended to cover all forms of action by means of which all the values of life are extended and rendered more secure, including the diffusion of the fine arts and the cultivation of taste, the processes of education and all activities which are concerned with rendering human relationships more significant and worthy, the meaning of "practical" is limited to matters of ease, comfort, riches, bodily security and police order, possibly health, etc., things which in their isolation from other goods can only lay claim to restricted and narrow value. In consequence, these subjects are handed over to technical sciences and arts; they are no concern of "higher" interests which feel that no matter what happens to inferior goods in the vicissitudes of natural existence, the highest values are immutable characters of the ultimately real.
Our depreciatory attitude toward "practice" would be modified if we habitually thought of it in its most liberal sense, and if we surrendered our customary dualism between two separate kinds of value, one intrinsically higher and one inherently lower. We should regard practice as the only means (other than accident) by which whatever is judged to be honourable, admirable, approvable can be kept in concrete experienceable existence. In this connection the entire import of "morals" would be transformed. How much of the tendency to ignore permanent objective consequences in differences made in natural and social relations; and how much of the emphasis upon personal and internal motives and dispositions irrespective of what they objectively produce and sustain, are products of the habitual depreciation of the worth of action in comparison with forms of mental processes, of thought and sentiment, which make no objective difference in things themselves?
It would be possible to argue (and, I think, with much justice) that failure to make action central in the search for such security as is humanly possible as a survival of the impotency of men in those stages of civilisation when he had few means of regulating and utilising the conditions upon which the occurrence of consequences depend. As long as man was unable by means of the arts of practice to direct the course of events, it was natural for him to seek an emotional substitute; in the absence of actual certainty in the midst of a precarious and hazardous world, men cultivated all sorts of things that would give them the feeling of certainty. And it is possible that, when not carried to an illusory point, the cultivation of the feeling gave man courage and confidence and enabled him to carry the burdens of life more successfully. But one could hardly seriously contend that this fact, if it be such, is one upon which to found a reasoned philosophy.
It is to the conception of philosophy that we come back. No mode of action can, as we have insisted, give anything approaching absolute certitude it provides insurance but no assurance. Doing is always subject to peril, to the danger of frustration. When men began to reflect philosophically it seemed to them altogether too risky to leave the place of values at the mercy of acts the results of which are never sure. This precariousness might hold as far as empirical existence, existence in the sensible and phenomenal world, is concerned; but this very uncertainty seemed to render it the more needful that ideal goods should be shown to have, by means of knowledge of the most assured type, an indefeasible and inexpugnable position in the realm of the ultimately real. So at least we may imagine men to have reasoned. And to-day many persons find a peculiar consolation in the face of the unstable and dubious presence of values in actual experience by projecting a perfect form of good into a realm of essence, if not into a heaven beyond the earthly skies, wherein their authority, if not their existence, is wholly unshakeable.
Instead of asking how far this process is of that compensatory kind with which recent psychology has made us familiar, we are inquiring into the effect upon philosophy. It will not be denied, I suppose, that the chief aim of those philosophies which I have called classical, has been to show that the realities which are the objects of the highest and most necessary knowledge are also endowed with the values which correspond to our best aspirations, admirations and approvals. That, one may say, is the very heart of all traditional philosophic idealisms. There is a pathos, having its own nobility, in philosophies which think it their proper office to give an intellectual or cognitive I certification to the ontological reality of the highest values. It is difficult for men to see desire and choice set earnestly upon the good and yet being frustrated, without their imagining a realm in which the good has come completely to its own, and is identified with a Reality in which resides all ultimate power. The failure and frustration of actual life is then attributed to the fact that this world is finite and phenomenal, sensible rather than real, or to the weakness of our finite apprehension, which cannot see that the discrepancy between existence and value is merely seeming, and that a fuller vision would behold partial evil an element in complete good. Thus the office of philosophy is to project by dialectic, resting supposedly upon self-evident premises, a realm in which the object of completest cognitive certitude is also one with the object of the heart's best aspiration. The fusion of the good and the true with unity and plenitude of Being thus becomes the goal of classic philosophy.
The situation would strike us as a curious one were it not so familiar. Practical activity is dismissed to a world of low grade reality. Desire is found only where something is lacking and hence its existence is a sign of imperfection of Being. Hence one must go to passionless reason to find perfect reality and complete certitude. But nevertheless the chief philosophic interest is to prove that the essential properties of the reality that is the object of pure knowledge are precisely those characteristics which have meaning in connection with affection, desire and choice. After degrading practical affairs in order to exalt knowledge, the chief task of knowledge turns out to be to demonstrate the absolutely assured and permanent reality of the values with which practical activity is concerned! Can we fall to see the irony in a situation wherein desire and emotion are relegated to a position inferior in every way to that of knowledge, while at the same time the chief problem of that which is termed the highest and most perfect knowledge is taken to be the existence of evil-that is, of desires errant and frustrated?
The contradiction involved, however, is much more than a purely intellectual one-which if purely theoretical would be innocuously lacking in practical consequences. The thing which concerns all of us as human beings is precisely the greatest attainable security of values in concrete existence. The thought that the values which are unstable and wavering in the world in which we live are eternally secure in a higher realm (which reason demonstrates but which we cannot experience), that all the goods which are defeated here are triumphant there, may give consolation to the depressed. But it does not change the existential situation in the least. The separation that has been instituted between theory and practice, with its consequent substitution of cognitive quest for absolute assurance for practical endeavour to make the existence of good more secure in experience, has had the effect of distracting attention and diverting energy from a task whose performance would yield definite results.
The chief consideration in achieving concrete security of values lies in the perfecting of methods of action. More activity, blind striving, gets nothing forward. Regulation of conditions upon which results depend is possible only by doing, yet only by doing which has intelligent direction, which take cognisance of conditions, observes relations of sequence, and which plans and executes in the light of this knowledge. The notion that thought, apart from action, can warrant complete certitude as to the status of supreme good, makes no contribution to the central problem of development of intelligent methods of regulation. It rather depresses and deadens effort in that direction. That is the chief indictment to be brought against the classic philosophic tradition. Its import raises the question of the relation which action sustains to knowledge in fact, and whether the quest for certainty by other means than those of intelligent action does not mark a baneful diversion of thought from its proper office. It raises the question whether mankind has not now achieved a sufficient degree of control of methods of knowing and of the arts of practical action so that a radical change in our conceptions of knowledge and practice is rendered both possible and necessary.
That knowing, as judged from the actual procedures of scientific inquiry, has completely abandoned in fact the traditional separation of knowing and doing, that the experimental procedure is one that installs doing as the heart of knowing, is a theme that will occupy our attention in later chapters. What would happen to philosophy if it whole-heartedly made a similar surrender? What would be its office if it ceased to deal with the problem of reality and knowledge at large? In effect, its function would be to facilitate the fruitful interaction of our cognitive beliefs, our beliefs resting upon the most dependable methods of inquiry, with our practical beliefs about the values, the ends and purposes, that should control human action in the things of large and liberal human import.
Such a view renounces the traditional notion that action is inherently inferior to knowledge and preference for the fixed over the changing; it involves the conviction that security attained by active control is to be more prized than certainty in theory. But it does not imply that action is higher and better than knowledge, and practice inherently superior to thought. Constant and effective interaction of knowledge and practice is something quite different from an exaltation of activity for its own sake. Action, when directed by knowledge, is method and means, not an end. The aim and end is the securer, freer and more widely shared embodiment of values in experience by means of that active control of objects which knowledge alone makes possible. [In reaction against the age-long depreciation of practice in behalf of contemplative knowledge, there is a temptation simply to turn things upside down. But the essence of pragmatic instrumentalism is to conceive of both knowledge and practice as means of making good excellencies of all kinds – secure in experienced existence.]
From this point of view, the problem of philosophy concerns the interaction of our judgments about ends to be sought with knowledge of the means for achieving them. just as in science the question of the advance of knowledge is the question of what to do, what experiments to perform, what apparatus to invent and use, what calculations to engage in, what branches of mathematics to employ or to perfect, so theproblem of practice is what do we need to know, how shall we obtain that knowledge and how shall we apply it?
It is an easy and altogether too common a habit to confuse a personal division of labor with an isolation of function and meaning. Human beings as individuals tend to devote themselves either to the practice of knowing or to the practice of a professional, business, social or aesthetic art. Each takes the other half of the circle for granted. Theorists and practitioners, however, often indulge in unseemly wrangles as to the importance of their respective tasks. Then the personal difference of callings is hypostatised and made into an intrinsic difference between knowledge and practice.
If one looks at the history of knowledge, it is plain that at the beginning men tried to know because they had to do so in order to live. In the absence of that organic guidance given by their structure to other animals, man had to find out what he was about, and he could find out only by studying the environment which constituted the means, obstacles and result of his behaviour. The desire for intellectual or cognitive understanding had no meaning except as a means of obtaining greater security as to the issues of action. Moreover, even when after the coming of leisure some men were enabled to adopt knowing as their special calling or profession, merely theoretical uncertainty continues to have no meaning.
This statement will arouse protest. But the reaction against the statement will turn out when examined to be due to the fact that it is so difficult to find a case of purely intellectual uncertainty, that is one upon which nothing hangs. Perhaps as near to it as we can come is in the familiar story of the Oriental potentate who declined to attend a horse race on the ground that it was already well known to him that one horse could run faster than another. His uncertainty as to which of several horses could out-speed the others may be said to have been purely intellectual. But also in the story nothing depended from it; no curiosity was aroused; no effort was put forth to satisfy the uncertainty. In other words, he did not care; it made no difference. And it is a strict truism that no one would care about any exclusively theoretical uncertainty or certainty. For by definition in being exclusively theoretical it is one which makes no difference anywhere.
Revulsion against this proposition is a tribute to the fact that actually the intellectual and the practical are so closely bound together. Hence when we imagine we are thinking of an exclusively theoretical doubt, we smuggle in unconsciously some consequence which hangs upon it. We think of uncertainty arising in the course of an inquiry; in this case, uncertainty until it is resolved blocks the progress of the inquiry – a distinctly practical affair, since it involves conclusions and the of producing them. If we had no desires and no purposes, then, as sheer truism, one state of things would be as good as any other. Those who have set such store by the demonstration that Absolute Being already contains in eternal safety within itself all values, have had as their interest the fact that while the demonstration would make no difference in the concrete existence of these values – unless perhaps to weaken effort to generate and sustain them – it would make no difference in their own personal attitudes – in a feeling of comfort or of release from responsibility, the consciousness of a "moral holiday" in which some philosophers have found the distinction between morals and religion.
Such considerations point to the conclusion that the ultimate ground of the quest for cognitive certainty is the need for security in the results of action. Men readily persuade themselves that they are devoted to intellectual certainty for its own sake. Actually they want it because of its bearing on safeguarding what they desire and esteem. The need for protection and prosperity in action created the need for warranting the validity of intellectual beliefs.
After a distinctively intellectual class had arisen, a class having leisure and in a large degree protected against the more serious perils which afflict the mass of humanity, its members proceeded to glorify their own office. Since no amount of pains and care in action can ensure complete certainty, certainty in knowledge was worshipped as a substitute. In minor matters, those that are relatively technical, professional, "utilitarian," men continued to resort to improving their methods of operation in order to be surer of results. But in affairs of momentous value the requisite knowledge is hard to come by and the bettering of methods is a slow process to be realised only by the cooperative endeavour of many persons. The arts to be formed and developed are social arts; an individual by himself can do little to regulate the conditions which will render important values more secure, though with shrewdness and special knowledge he can do much to further his own peculiar aims – given a fair share of luck. So because of impatience and because, as Aristotle was given to pointing out, an individual is self-sufficient in that kind of thinking which involves no action, the ideal of a cognitive certainty and truth having no connection with practice, and prized because of its lack of connection, developed. The doctrine worked out practically so as to strengthen dependence upon authority and dogma in the things of highest value, while increase of specialised knowledge was relied upon in everyday, especially economic, affairs. Just as belief that a magical ceremony will regulate the growth of seeds to full harvest stifles the tendency to investigate natural causes and their workings, so acceptance of dogmatic rules as bases of conduct in education, morals and social matters, lessens the impetus to find out about the conditions which are involved in forming intelligent plans.
It is more or less of a commonplace to speak of the crisis which has been caused by the progress of the natural sciences in the last few centuries. The crisis is due, it is asserted, to the incompatibility between the conclusions of natural science about the world in which we live and the realm of higher values, of ideal and spiritual qualities, which get no support from natural science. The new science, it is said, has stripped the world of the qualities which made it beautiful and congenial to men; has deprived nature of all aspiration towards ends, all preference for accomplishing the good, and presented nature to us as a scene of indifferent physical particles acting according to mathematical and mechanical laws.
This effect of modern science has, it is notorious, set the main problems for modern philosophy. How is science to be accepted and yet the realm of values to be conserved? This question forms the philosophic version of the popular conflict of science and religion. Instead of being troubled about the inconsistency of astronomy with the older religious beliefs about heaven and the ascension of Christ, or the differences between the geological record and the account of creation in Genesis, philosophers have been troubled by the gap in kind which exists between the fundamental principles of the natural world and the reality of the values according to which mankind is to regulate its life.
Philosophers, therefore, set to work to mediate, to find some harmony behind the apparent discord. Everybody knows that the trend of modern philosophy has been to arrive at theories regarding the nature of the universe by means of theories regarding the nature of knowledge-a procedure which reverses the apparently more judicious method of the ancients in basing their conclusions about knowledge on the nature of the universe in which knowledge occurs. The "crisis" of which we have just been speaking accounts for the reversal.
Since science has made the trouble, the cure ought to -be found in an examination of the nature of knowledge, of the conditions which make science possible. If the conditions of the possibility of knowledge can be shown to be of an ideal and rational character, then, so it has been thought, the loss of an idealistic cosmology in physics can be readily borne. The physical world can be surrendered to matter and mechanism, since we are assured that matter and mechanism have their foundation in immaterial mind. Such has been the characteristic course of modern spiritualistic philosophies since the time of Kant; indeed, since that of Descartes, who first felt the poignancy of the problem involved in reconciling the conclusions of science with traditional religious and moral beliefs.
It would presumably be taken as a sign of extreme naïveté if not of callous insensitiveness, if one were to ask why all this ardour to reconcile the findings of natural science with the validity of values? Why should any increase of knowledge seem like a threat to what we prize, admire and approve? Why should we not proceed to employ our gains in science to improve our judgments about values, and to regulate our actions so as to make values more secure and more widely shared in existence?
I am willing to run the risk of charge of naïveté for the sake of making manifest the difference upon which we have been dwelling. If men had associated their ideas about values with practical activity instead of with cognition of antecedent Being, they would not have been troubled by the findings of science. They would have welcomed the latter. For anything ascertained about the structure of actually existing conditions would be a definite aid in making judgments about things to be prized and striven for more adequate, and would instruct us as to the means to be employed in realising them. But according to the religious and philosophic tradition of Europe, the valid status of all the highest values, the good, true and beautiful, was bound up with their being properties of ultimate and supreme Being, namely, God. All went well as long as what passed for natural science gave no offence to this conception. Trouble began when science ceased to disclose in the objects of knowledge the possession of any such properties. Then some roundabout method had to be devised for substantiating them.
The point of the seemingly crass question which was asked is thus to elicit the radical difference made when the problem of values is seen to be connected with the problem of intelligent action. If the validity of beliefs and judgments about values is dependent upon the consequences of action undertaken in their behalf, if the assumed association of values with knowledge capable of being demonstrated apart from activity, is abandoned, then the problem of the intrinsic relation of science to value is wholly artificial. It is replaced by a group of practical problems: How shall we employ what we know to direct the formation of our beliefs about value and how shall we direct our practical behaviour so as to test these beliefs and make possible better ones? The question is seen to be just what it has always been empirically: What shall we do to make objects having value more secure in existence? And we approach the answer to the problem with all the advantages given us by increase of knowledge of the conditions and relations under which this doing must proceed.
But for over two thousand years the weight of the most influential and authoritatively orthodox tradition of thought has been thrown into the opposite scale. It has been devoted to the problem of a purely cognitive certification (perhaps by revelation, perhaps by intuition, perhaps by reason) of the antecedent immutable reality of truth, beauty and goodness. As against such a doctrine, the conclusions of natural science constitute the materials of a serious problem. The appeal has been made to the Court of Knowledge and the verdict has been adverse. There are two rival systems that must have their respective claims adjusted. The crisis in contemporary culture, the confusions and conflicts in it, arise from a division of authority. Scientific inquiry seems to tell one thing, and traditional beliefs about ends and ideals that have authority over conduct tell us something quite different. The problem of reconciliation arises and persists for one reason only. As long as the notions persist that knowledge is a disclosure of reality, of reality prior to and independent of knowing, and that knowing is independent of a purpose to control the quality of experienced objects, the failure of natural science to disclose significant values in its objects will come as a shock. Those seriously concerned with the validity and authority of value will have a problem on their hands. As long as the notion persists that values are authentic and valid only on condition that they are properties of Being independent of human action, as long as it is supposed that their right to regulate action is dependent upon their being independent of action, so long there will be needed schemes to prove that values are, in spite of the findings of science, genuine and known qualifications of reality in itself. For men will not easily surrender all regulative guidance in action. If they are forbidden to find standards in the course of experience they will seek them somewhere else, if not in revelation, then in the deliverance of a reason that is above experience.
This then is the fundamental issue for present philosophy. Is the doctrine justified that knowledge is valid in the degree in which it is a revelation of antecedent existences or Being? Is the doctrine justified that regulative ends and purposes have validity only when they can be shown to be properties belonging to things, whether as existences or as essences, apart from human action? It is proposed to make another start. Desires, affections, preferences, needs and interests at least exist in human experience; they are characteristics of it. Knowledge about nature also exists. What does this knowledge imply and entail with respect to the guidance of our emotional and volitional life? How shall the latter lay hold of what is known in order to make it of service?
These latter questions do not seem to many thinkers to have the dignity that is attached to the traditional problems of philosophy. They are proximate questions, not ultimate. They do not concern Being and Knowledge "in themselves' and at large, but the state of existence at specified times and places and the state of affection, plans and purposes under concrete circumstances. They are not concerned with framing a general theory of reality, knowledge and value once for all, but with finding how authentic beliefs about existence as they currently exist can operate fruitfully and efficaciously in connection with the practical problems that are urgent in actual life.
In restricted and technical fields, men now proceed unhesitatingly along these lines. In technology and the arts of engineering and medicine, men do not think of operating in any other way. Increased knowledge of nature and its conditions does not raise the problem of validity of the value of health or of communication in general, although it may well make dubious the validity of certain conceptions men in the past have entertained about the nature of health and communication and the best ways of attaining these goods in fact.
In such matters, science has placed in our hands the means by which we can better judge our wants, and has aided in forming the instruments and operations by which to satisfy them. That the same sort of thing has not happened in the moral and distinctly humane arts is evident. Here is a problem which might well trouble philosophers.
Why have not the arts which deal with the wider, more generous, more distinctly humane values enjoyed the release and expansion which have accrued to the technical arts? Can it be seriously urged that it is because natural science has disclosed to us the kind of world which it has disclosed? It is easy to see that these disclosures are hostile to some beliefs about values which have been widely accepted, which have prestige, which have become deeply impregnated with sentiment, and which authoritative institutions as well as the emotion and inertia of men are slow to surrender. But this admission, which practically enforces itself, is far from excluding the formation of new beliefs about things to be honoured and prized by men in their supreme loyalties of action. The difficulty in the road is a practical one, a social one, connected with institutions and the methods and aims of education, not with science nor with value. Under such circumstances the first problem for philosophy would seem to be to clear itself of further responsibility for the doctrine that the supreme issue is whether values have antecedent Being, while its further office is to make clear the revisions and reconstructions that have to be made in traditional judgments about values. Having done this, it would be in a position to undertake the more positive task of projecting ideas about values which might be the basis of a new integration of human conduct.
We come back to the fact that the genuine issue is not whether certain values, associated with traditions and institutions, have Being already (whether that of existence or of essence), but what concrete judgments we are to form about ends and means in the regulation of practical behaviour. The emphasis which has been put upon the former question, the creation of dogmas about the way in which values are already real independently of what we do, dogmas which have appealed not in vain to philosophy for support, have naturally bred, in the face of the changed character of science, confusion, irresolution and numbness of will. If the men had been educated to think about broader humane values as they have now learned to think about matters which fall within the scope of technical arts, our whole present situation would be very different. The attention which has gone to achieving a purely theoretical certainty with respect to them would have been devoted to perfecting the arts by which they are to be judged and striven for.
Indulge for a moment in an imaginative flight. Suppose that men had been systematically educated in the belief that the existence of values can cease to be accidental, narrow and precarious only by human activity directed by the best available knowledge. Suppose also men had been systematically educated to believe that the important thing is not to get themselves personally "right" in relation to the antecedent author and guarantor of these values, but to form their judgments and carry on their activity on the basis of public, objective and shared consequences. Imagine these things and then imagine what the present situation might be.
The suppositions are speculative- But they serve to indicate the significance of the one point to which this chapter is devoted. The method and conclusions of science have without doubt invaded many cherished beliefs about the things held most dear. The resulting clash constitutes a genuine cultural crisis. But it is a crisis in culture, a social crisis, historical and temporal in character. It is not a problem in the adjustment of properties of reality to one another. And yet modern philosophy has chosen for the most part to treat it as a question of how the realities assumed to be the object of science can have the mathematical and mechanistic properties assigned to them in natural science, while nevertheless the realm of ultimate reality can be characterised by qualities termed ideal and spiritual. The cultural problem is one of definite criticisms to be made and of readjustments to be accomplished. Philosophy which is willing to abandon its supposed task of knowing ultimate reality and to devote itself to a proximate human office might be of great help in such a task. It may be doubted whether it can indefinitely pursue the task of trying to show that the results of science, when they are properly interpreted, do not mean what they seem to say, or of proving, by means of an examination of possibilities and limits of knowledge, that after all they rest upon a foundation congruous with traditional beliefs about values.
Since the root of the traditional conception of philosophy is the separation that has been made between knowledge and action, between theory and practice, it is to the problem of this separation that we are to give attention. Our main attempt will be to show how the actual procedures of knowledge interpreted after the pattern formed by experimental inquiry, cancel the isolation of knowledge from overt action. Before engaging in this attempt, we shall in the next chapter show the extent to which modern philosophy has been dominated by effort to adjust to each other two systems of belief, one relating to the objects of knowledge and the other to objects ideal value.
The Quest for Certainty (1933), publ. Capricorn Books, 1960.and at http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/dewey.htm


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I've written about Martha before in the post What's Martha's maiden name?. This morning I finally sent a request to Cook County Illinois Clerk office to obtain a copy of a marriage license for who I believe are my great, great Keithley grandparents. I've never sent the request before because I really never expected to learn much based on what they collected on the form at that time.
This evening I decided to search again for Joseph Henry Keithley and his wife, Martha Conn and discovered that now they have it online! I don't know whether to be happy or sad that I found this after I sent the $15 for a copy. I am pleased that there is some useful information on the license.
It is quite clear that this is my Joseph H Keithley who was from Fairview, Illinois except it isn't in Cook county. From this marriage license it says that he married a Miss (not married) Martha Conn or Coun of Chicago, Illinois. The Chicago Tribune listed them as J. H. Keithley and Martha Coun.1 They were married by James MacLaughlan the Presbyterian minister who was the pastor of the Scotch Church in Chicago.
Since they were not married by the Justice of the Peace I wonder if Martha attended this church. Here's some information on the minister and the church.
…Rev. James Maclaughlan, well known two score of years ago in Chicago as the pastor of the Scotch Presbyterian Church, and at the time of his decease, some two years ago, one of the oldest members of Chicago Presbytery, and minister of the Brighton Park Presbyterian Church. from The Scots and their Descendants in Illinois by Thomas C. MacMillan, M.A., LL.D.
FIRST SCOTCH PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH After the pastorate of Rev. Mr. Burns, which closed in April 1870, this church was without a minister until July 11, 1872, when Rev James Maclaughlan was called. His ministry continued until February 1882. For some time after the fire of 1871, this house of worship, like many others was used as a place of refuge, and the church people were among the foremost in the labor of caring for the destitute from the burned district. Mr Maclaughlan was followed by the present pastor, Rev. Henry Sawers, of Middletown, Iowa on June 10 1883, whose administration has been very successful. — page 800 of The History of Chicago, Volume 3.2
Family tradition says that Martha was Irish so I wonder if there is a connection with this church and heritage. On her oldest daughter's birth certificate it indicates she was from Ohio. I haven't had any luck in finding Martha or some other Conn/Coun family member on the census to gain a lead. One of the frustrations is that Conn is a difficult name to search since it is the old style abbreviation for the state.
For now, we have a little more information to use in the search and I hope to one day learn of Martha's parents and what happened to her. For now it appears that I know Martha's maiden name was Conn or Coun.
- "Marriage Licenses," Chicago Tribune, Chicago, Illinois, January 21, 1881, 8, Newspaper.
- Andreas, Alfred Theodore. History of Chicago, Vol 3. : A. T. Andreas, 1886.


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I'm turning 50 in April, but I'm putting aside how shocking that is. I've been pulling together a mix of one defining song for me for each year from 1963 to the present, in terms of the songs I most love now that was released then. I wasn't aware of many good songs in the '60s at that age, so including a Dylan or Velvet Underground track comes from a later appreciation. I've realized that the earliest album I was aware of at the time that I still consider a favorite today is Simon & Garfunkel's Bridge Over Troubled Water. I was 7, listening to endless loops on my parents' 8-track, and it was so mysterious, so poetic. There are several singles I loved on the radio in real-time, from The Beatles and others, but that's the first album. What's the earliest album you loved and still consider a favorite today? —Charles Eskridge
Tasha Robinson
I first encountered the soundtrack to Carole King's Really Rosie as a child when the animated special hit TV, but I gradually became addicted to it mostly because my cousin Rebekah was over the moon for it. She had the books and the soundtrack, and we sang the songs together over and over. Some of the songs are mighty simple (pro-tip: don't center your song around ending half the lines with "sufferin'" if you have no rhyme for it other than "Bufferin"), but they're awfully catchy, and the musical as a whole has an appealing, sunny gloss that recalls childhood pretend-games and the magic of long afternoons caught up in make-believe worlds. I'm still tickled by "The Awful Truth," in which precocious wannabe-star Rosie drools over her dream role, as Dracula's wife. ("Dear Academy, take note / I should get the Oscar vote / If I don't, I'll bite your throat!") But the one that still gets to me emotionally the way it did when I was a kid is "Avenue P," in which Rosie touts the power of imagination and uses it to transform a neighborhood that bores and depresses her. I don't listen to it all that often because I can sing most of the songs from memory, but it remains a favorite to this day.
Jason Heller
I grew up in a good, white-trash, radio-worshipping household in Florida in the '70s. As such, we listened to FM country and rock. But every once in a while, my mom would bring home an LP for the turntable—and the first one I remember latching onto, one that I still unapologetically love, is The Eagles' Their Greatest Hits (1971-1975). The Eagles get all kinds of shit because they're ubiquitous, catchy, easy prey for otherwise-intelligent people who don't know how to draw the line between quoting The Big Lebowski and having your own opinion. On paper, every complaint about The Eagles seems sensible to me. But all that goes out the window as soon as I throw on Greatest Hits and the country-rock classics start rolling out: "Lyin' Eyes," "Tequila Sunrise," "Best Of My Love," and my favorite, the upbeat anthem "Already Gone." When I was a kid, "Already Gone" seemed tailor-made for me—I mean, why else would Glenn Frey be singing, "You'll have to eat your lunch all by yourself?" It's power-pop with a dollop of twang, and that's a formula that still speaks to me. In fact, I still love "Already Gone" so much, I covered it last month when an old band of mine got back together to play a show. Yeah, I know, we're sloppy and out-of-tune. But that song—and Their Greatest Hits as a whole—is sturdy enough to take a beating. (Naysayers, pay particular attention to my disclaimer before the song kicks in.)
Ryan McGee
I feel like this AVQ&A will be a series of apologies for picking the most obvious albums, but let me pile onto that trend and select U2's The Joshua Tree. Released in March 1987, it came along at a time in which I was first starting to really get into music above and beyond whatever Casey Kasem played on that week's American Top 40. What gives The Joshua Tree such a lasting impact for me is the way I keep discovering new slivers about it over the years. Sometimes it's just a track that suddenly leaps to the forefront and becomes my go-to song when listening to it. (Right now, it's "Red Hill Mining Town." Next week… who knows?) Sometimes it's realizing what a song is actually about for the first time. ("Running To Stand Still"? Not about an intense cardio workout.) Or sometimes it's just finding a new snippet of musicality that previously lay hidden in plain sight. (I'm still unpacking the blow-your-eardrums-out guitar solo on "Bullet The Blue Sky.") I've had plenty of albums that I loved more at one time or another. But this is the one that has held onto my imagination the longest, and I don't see that changing anytime soon.
Andrea Battleground
There's a bit of a story here, so bear with me. Sometime in the early '80s, my mom transferred several of her albums to cassette so she could listen to them in the car. Well, the time she transferred Carole King's Tapestry roughly coincided with the time I was allowed to have my own music, and was gifted a truly shitty hand-me-down cassette player that quickly became my most prized possession in the world. But I only had kids' music to play on it. (And 5-year-old Andrea could only take so much Raffi.) So I would frequently swipe cassettes from around the house and listen to them. I absconded with Tapestry before Mom even had a chance to label it, and she ended up letting me just keep it. I had no idea what album I had listened to every day for a solid six months when I was a kid until I was something like 14, because I never labeled that cassette. I also had no idea which was Side A and which was Side B. To this day, I choose to believe that album starts with "You've Got A Friend" and ends with "Way Over Yonder." The latter still has some kind of calming-effect/comfort-food element for me, probably because I fell asleep to it so many nights as a kid.
Noah Cruickshank
Everyone who knows me finds out pretty quickly that I have an unhealthy obsession with David Bowie. (I have about 26 hours of his music, all told, and my dog is named after him.) But my first real encounter with him was when my father purchased David Live, his album from the tour supporting Diamond Dogs. I'm not sure when I actually got Diamond Dogs on CD, but by then, I already knew most of the songs by heart. For me, the album perfectly blends his theatrics, avant-garde leanings, and pop sensibility. (Basically, it's both weird and catchy as fuck.) It has always been my answer, without hesitation, when people ask me what my favorite Bowie album is. It's not in as steady rotation as some of his other work right now, but I've never lost my wholehearted love for it. When I have kids (one of whom my girlfriend demands we name after Bowie), Diamond Dogs is probably where I'll introduce them to his oeuvre.
Nathan Rabin
My dad is a big music lover with a particular fondness for the blues, and some of my most treasured childhood memories are of the joy he took in doing a silly approximation of the slickly choreographed moves of The Temptations and The Four Tops when he played Motown #1s, an album that stood proud alongside Michael Jackson's Thriller and The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club when I was a child. It doesn't get much better than 1960s Motown, Thriller, and The Beatles, but if I had to choose a favorite among those three unimpeachable apogees of Western culture it would be Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Everything about it appealed to me as a kid. How weird and crazy and cool The Beatles looked. That awesome, iconic cover, overflowing with strange characters I'd come to learn all about over the upcoming decades. The way the album seemed to tell an overarching story, but mostly was just a perfect vehicle for songs that lodged themselves in my psyche the first time around, and never left. I loved how cartoonish, old-fashioned, goofy, and beautiful the album was, and how it flowed together perfectly. The next album I remember clearly falling in love with was "Weird Al" Yankovic In 3-D, but my first love was, and remains The Beatles, who I still l think are pretty fab.
Phil Dyess-Nugent
When I was a wee tad, my parents separated. This in itself was reason enough to turn cartwheels down Main Street, but thanks to my father's ill-conceived, too-brief attempt to buy my love, I suddenly had disposable income for the first time in my life. I knew just enough about music to think it would be nice to own some of the songs I liked when I heard them on the car radio on the drive to school. There were no record stores within miles of our home, so I taped a few pennies to one of those mail-in ads in TV Guide and joined the RCA Record Club. (The fact that it wasn't even the Columbia Record Club is an indication of just how deprived my childhood was.) Of all the songs I'd really loved when they came on the radio in the preceding three or four years, the best ones seemed to be on Bob Seger's Night Moves and Fleetwood Mac's Rumours, which I ordered as my introductory selections; there probably were other selections, but I have no memory of what they might have been, or what else I ever got in the mail from RCA. I still love those albums, though I knew bupkis about the artists at the time, except that I liked their hits. This album-buying technique never turned out well for me again.
Kevin McFarland
In middle school, I worked for the local-access television station that broadcast out of a cramped classroom on the far end of my school. I learned to read a teleprompter and improv sports highlights like a SportsCenter anchor, but most importantly, I learned how to work a sound board, which my friends and I then used to blast loud music during recess. At the time I wasn't into much, outside of music my parents owned (plus Disney music, Raffi, and a Hanson record here and there), but one day a friend played me something by New Found Glory, and by the time its next record, Sticks And Stones, came out, it was my favorite band. I can remember a family vacation to Hawaii where I listened to Sticks And Stones exclusively for two weeks, and it was constant pump-up music for me before soccer games. By the time its next record rolled around, my tastes had changed—and by that, I mean I bought a Rolling Stone subscription and listened my way through its Top 500 albums list—so the Warped Tour lineup wasn't in heavy rotation anymore. Still, New Found Glory was my first step away from my parents' music, and holds a special place in my memory. Jordan Pundik's nasal whine makes NFG a non-starter for some, but every time I hear anything off Sticks And Stones, I can't help thinking that I wouldn't have found the music I like now if New Found Glory didn't send me down the path toward more (and much better) musical discoveries.
Sonia Saralya
I wasn't listening to proper albums until pretty late in my life—that's what happens when the first album you coax your parents into buying you is the Spice Girls' eponymous debut album, a CD which remained dear to me for about a month. Partly this was because my parents didn't know much about American pop culture, and partly this is because I was the biggest freak in 4th grade, a 9-year-old with a strangely encyclopedic knowledge of Celine Dion's lyrics. But I did love music—because I listened to it in movies. I grew up on movie musicals: animated, Bollywood, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Julie Andrews. I didn't understand half of what I was singing, but it didn't matter, because there was dancing and bright lights and colors. I'm tempted to say the album I've loved longest is the soundtrack to The Little Mermaid, which wormed its way into my brain when I was 3 and has never left, but truly, the music that makes me feel just as it did when I first saw it at 14—and then when I performed it at 18—and again this year when I saw the movie—is Les Misérables, that timeless classic that in my mind is the musical to end all musicals. I have loved it for years, I still do, and I always will. Few other albums have survived the test of time for me, and most of those, I didn't hear before high school, anyway. Les Mis stands alone, and I am fine with that.
Carrie Raisler
One of my very first combined music-and-television memories as a child was being ecstatic when we finally got cable, because that meant I could watch MTV. MTV is basically irrelevant to music these days, but in its first 10 years, it was vital to how my entire generation consumed music and television; its combination of music and visuals is a confluence of everything I already loved and continue to love to this day. I watched so much MTV in those days that my music tastes were inextricably linked to its playlist, resulting in a sad, pop-and-hair-band-heavy childhood. This slavish devotion finally paid off when Guns N' Roses exploded onto the scene with the video for "Welcome To The Jungle." Saying I was enthralled would be an understatement: I was frankly obsessed with its shiny, faux-grit L.A. rock intensity, likely unhealthily. It wasn't until "Sweet Child O' Mine" was released that I could convince my mother to buy me Appetite For Destruction, and it immediately became my favorite album for years, the place I went to when I needed a pure emotional release. It remains one of my most treasured albums today, and like a security blanket, it's never far from my side, either on my iPod or in my car. Hey, you just never know when you'll need a "Mr. Brownstone" fix to get you through your day.
Cory Casciato
While I still like most of the music I listened to as a child, I can't say any of it is still among my favorites. For me, the first album that earned a spot as a timeless classic came in my sophomore year of high school, with the release of The Cure's Disintegration. I was a pretty big Cure fan before that, and considered several of its albums as favorites then, but that album quickly became my favorite, and cemented The Cure as my go-to soundtrack for moping. These days, I find most of their catalogue pretty hit-or-miss, with some great material surrounded by a lot of mediocre chaff, but I still adore Disintegration. I'd go so far as to say it was the group's last great album, and the absolutely essential one, a near-perfect collection of dark, miserablist dream pop. It's actually more fun to listen to these days, because I don't feel the need to wallow in the sad while I do it.
Noel Murray
I could answer this question in a number of ways, from my favorite album from my first Columbia Record Club order (Thomas Dolby's The Golden Age Of Wireless, which I got just to fill out the last slot of my "10 albums for a penny," and ended up loving more than any of the others) to the first album I bought with my own money (which would be Men At Work's Cargo). But the real answer is the second album by the short-lived, disco-inflected Southern rock-pop band Starbuck: Rock & Roll Rocket. My dad was working as a DJ in Kansas when he brought home a promo copy of that album, shortly after we saw the group perform at Worlds Of Fun in Kansas City. The band and the record were both tailor-made for a 7-year-old boy in 1977: The songs are catchy and sound semi-futuristic, like a TV variety show crossed with Star Wars. My older brother and I used to listen to it over and over, lyric sheet in our laps, taking turns singing lead. I outgrew the album as my brother started getting more into album rock in the '80s—I tended to follow his lead on music as a kid—but five or six years ago, some retro label reissued the band's first LP, Moonlight Feels Right (which contained Starbuck's only real hit, the title track), and tacked on a handful of Rock & Roll Rocket songs as bonus tracks on the CD. Just the opening notes of the disco novelty number "Everybody Be Dancin'" were enough to transport me back to our living room in El Dorado.
Zack Handlen
I can't remember the first CD I ever bought. (I can remember the first cassette tape: Elton John's The One. I had the listening habits of a 55-year-old maiden aunt.) But I can remember the first artist I ever sought out entirely on my own, to the point where I went to a record store with the specific intention of buying a specific album: Lyle Lovett's I Love Everybody. This was primarily motivated by seeing a video for "Penguins," one of the album's goofier tracks, on VH1, and thinking it was so catchy and weird that I wanted to hear more. Most of the time when it comes to the pop culture I consume, I pick carefully, and rarely venture beyond my comfort zone. But every once in a while, something will strike me, and for reasons I don't completely understand, I'll feel compelled to follow a hunch. I Love Everybody is an odd album, composed mostly of cast-offs and half-formed ideas, but it still feels warm and funny and kind to me, no matter how many times I hear it. When I was a teenager, I felt like I was taking a brave new step into the world, buying music that nobody I knew listened to; it's sort of hilarious just how mundane and non-revolutionary my first CD really was. But I love it just the same. I went on to buy all Lovett's other albums, and he was my favorite recording artist until a few years later, when my uncle told me I had "Elvis Costello glasses," I bought King Of America to figure out just what the hell that meant.
Josh Modell
This is a tough one, because I had pretty good taste in 45s when I was 9 years old. I remember purchasing "Hang Fire" by The Rolling Stones and "We Got The Beat" by The Go-Gos, and I played Joan Jett's "I Love Rock 'N' Roll" over and over until my family made me turn it off. If we're talking strictly albums, I was all about Loverboy then, so I can't count that. But I do remember distinctly falling in love with "True Faith" by New Order in about 1987, and my classic-rock-loving big brother asking me why I liked it. At some point in there, I got Substance (probably from my other brother), and that's certainly one I've never left behind. I didn't realize for a while that it's not really even an album, but rather a greatest-hits collection of sorts, but 13-year-old me didn't care about that shit. It's a classic either way.
Joel Keller
My parents were in their early 20s when The Beatles hit The Ed Sullivan Show and changed the pop charts. But if you ask them what they mostly listened to in that era, my dad would have probably said doo-wop and folk, and my mom would have likely said Tony Bennett and Johnny Mathis. Which is why the only Beatles album they had in their collection was 1962-66, better known as the red album, for the red border around the cover art. They didn't have the blue album, which covered the Beatles' hits from 1967-70, I guess because they weren't into the Fab Four's "'shrooms" phase, what with my dad spending the late '60s as a crew-cutted IBM engineer, and my mom as a housewife. But since they likely bought the red album when I was but a toddler, I remember listening to it for as far back as I can remember things. It was my introduction to a band that I still love today, and a great way to trace its development from pure pop to deep songs like "Eleanor Rigby" that brought The Beatles to the cusp of their Sgt. Pepper, can-do-no-wrong phase. In fact, I can still see myself pretending to conduct to songs like "Eleanor Rigby," mainly because I didn't know how to pantomime any real instruments.
Brandon Nowalk
When I was a kid, my knowledge of albums didn't extend much beyond Journey's greatest-hits CD, which was always playing in my mom's car, and the soundtrack to The Lion King, which I played so often, the jewel-case door doesn't open so much as slide off. So technically, the first album I loved when it came out and love today is The Beatles' 1, the 2000 compilation of their No. 1 hits. While The Lion King stayed in my parents' cars, The Beatles came on Christmas with a CD player/radio. I lapped it up, the familiar tunes and new discoveries, the sweep and evolution. That album and CD player led to Napster, MTV, and beyond. Nowadays, I may prefer to listen to a '60s album with all those missing oddballs, but 1 is still dear to me. I only have one CD in my car in case of emergency (iPod failure), and it starts with "Love Me Do."
David Anthony
I was lucky enough to be part of a family that consumed music voraciously, meaning that trips to the local record store were routine. My family was also incredibly generous, as these excursions resulted in me getting to pick out a record of my own. At the time, these decisions were usually based on what album cover I thought was the coolest, and this led to some pretty questionable choices. Thankfully, it also led me to The Bouncing Souls' sophomore album, Maniacal Laughter. The cover made me pick the record, but the frenetic bursts of pop-punk hooked me. Maniacal Laughter's youthful energy made me believe I could play an instrument and start a dumb band with my friends, and inevitably, it sent me nose-diving into the world of punk and hardcore. When I listen to the album now, its flaws are much more pronounced, but hearing the opening notes of "The Freaks, Nerds, and Romantics" brings a smile to my face every time.
Erik Adams
Long before Napster twisted the piracy knife in the recording industry's back, my parents helped lend credence to the "home taping is killing music" campaign, converting their vinyl collection to dozens of cassette tapes with hand-numbered tracklists and sides split between full Michael Jackson, Chicago, and Steely Dan LPs. But when it came to the most popular act in the Adams household, Billy Joel, full albums were converted to cassette as well as a "favorite hits" mix featuring cherry-picked songs from Joel's 1970s to mid-'80s discography. (The tape also let my parents listen to cuts from The Nylon Curtain free from the worry that their son's youthful innocence would be forever sullied by that "fucking fool" line from "Laura.") Rather than giving me a jumpstart on my adult vocabulary, the tape produced a piecemeal love for Joel's 1977 breakthrough, The Stranger, a childhood preference for the colorful characters and AOR rock shuffle of "Movin' Out (Anthony's Song)" and "Only The Good Die Young" that led to teenage years soundtracked by deep cuts like "Get It Right The First Time" and my personal "favorite hit" from the Piano Man, the wistful "Vienna." In the event that this story now counts as evidence in an anti-piracy case against my folks, please know that they eventually purchased The Stranger on CD, as did I when I got tired of borrowing it every time I wanted to hear "Scenes From An Italian Restaurant."
Marc Hawthorne
I still listen to the first three albums I ever owned: Men At Work's Business As Usual (which was my first vinyl record and first cassette, the first two pieces of recorded music I ever purchased), Huey Lewis And The News' Sports (which has me scrambling to rearrange my summer plans, since they're out playing it in its entirety to celebrate the 30th anniversary), and Michael Jackson's Thriller. But it's definitely Thriller that I still truly, deeply love, and even though people may want to call bullshit on this, I don't love it in 2013 for any nostalgic reasons. It's just a perfect pop album with nine amazing songs, and sometimes when I'm listening to it, I wonder why I bother listening to anything else. (Until I put on Red House Painters' first self-titled LP, my favorite album of all time, which makes me think the same thing.) There are, admittedly, some rough memories attached to Thriller—I was given the tape to distract me when my brother was in a bicycle accident that put him in a coma (he's fine now), and of course it's depressing the way MJ's life played out and tragically ended—but when I'm singing along to "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'," swooning to "Human Nature," or air-keyboarding to "P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing)," every emotion I feel is connected to the present.
Kyle Ryan
Although I still own the first CD I ever bought way back in 1987—Invisible Touch by Genesis—it isn't because I love the album. I don't think it's been played since about 1988, but my attempts to sell it at used record stores in the early '90s didn't pan out. (I was similarly unsuccessful with my copy of Cloudcuckooland by The Lightning Seeds.) The album that I've owned the longest, in various formats, that I still play is probably It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back by Public Enemy. I first discovered PE shortly after that album came out, and the group couldn't have seemed more intimidating. The opening track is called "Countdown To Armageddon," and the cover has Chuck D and Flavor Flav behind bars. (I had a poster of them with the S1W and Terminator X standing in a cell on top of an American flag, which blew my mind.) It blew my mind and scared me more than a little, but I listened to it constantly. More than two decades later, those klaxons at the beginning of "Countdown To Armageddon" still make me a little nervous.
Todd VanDerWerff
I didn't buy a pop-music album until I was in high school (it was the Dumb And Dumber soundtrack!), and before that, my music collection consisted entirely of Christian rock, Christian children's albums, Broadway cast albums, and country albums recorded by groups with the word "Brooks" in them somewhere (see: Garth and Dunn). So I haven't really loved an album since childhood, unless you want me to lie and wax rhapsodic about the "mad beats" of Christian recording artist Rappin' Rabbit (who raps about making good manners a habit). In that case, the album I've listened to and loved the longest is likely Ben Folds Five's Whatever And Ever Amen, which I bought when I was 16 or 17 and immediately devoured over and over again. I still love every song on that album, and listening to it is one of the surest ways for me to time-travel back to late high school, when I had only a vague sense of what I was even doing, and women still seemed like a strange, undiscovered country. In fact, I listened to the album so much, a friend and I tried to get "Brick" played for the grand march at our high-school prom, only half-jokingly. (Sadly, wiser heads, i.e., our high-school principal, prevailed.) As a lonely, kind of aloof nerd who nonetheless had a surprisingly good dating life, that album had at least one good song for every single one of my moods, and when the group went on tour a few months ago and I finally got a chance to see it perform live, the album got almost as many spins from me as it did in 1998.
Will Harris
Although I have fond memories revolving of listening to Johnny Cash's At Folsom Prison on 8-track in my father's pickup truck and swooning to Barry Manilow's Even Now in my mother's car, it wasn't until I was in my teens—which more or less coincided with the rise of MTV—that I started caring enough about music to actually purchase my own. In what would quickly become a hallmark of my music-buying tendencies, the first album I really remembering spending money on and utterly devouring was a follow-up to a far more successful release: Men At Work's Cargo. I don't really know what possessed me to buy it. All I know is that I was out spending the money I got for my 13th birthday, I walked into Mother's Records And Tapes at Greenbrier Mall, and I walked out with a copy of it on cassette. I presume the decision was based on having fallen for the band's singles from its debut album, Business As Usual, and since Cargo was the latest release, it seemed appropriate to buy that one first. (It also probably didn't hurt that the album's first two singles, "Overkill" and "It's A Mistake," were still fresh in my mind.) While I wouldn't say that every song on the record has held up over the years—Ron Strykert's "Settle Down My Boy" continues to serve as a perpetual reminder why Colin Hay was the band's predominant songwriter—I still feel like "High Wire" deserved to be a bigger hit.


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Uman o͞omän´ [key], city (1989 pop. 91,000), central Ukraine, at the confluence of the Kamenka and Umanka rivers. It is a rail junction and has plants producing scientific instruments. Mentioned in 1659 as a strongpoint, Uman was the seat of the wealthy Potocki nobility until 1834. In the late 17th cent. it was an important fortress for protection against Crimean Tatar attacks on right-bank Ukraine. In 1768 the city was the scene of a Ukrainian peasant and Cossack uprising that resulted in a general massacre and that Taras Shevchenko later depicted in his poem
Haydamaki.Uman passed to Russia in 1793 during the second partition of Poland.
The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright © 2023, Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.
See more Encyclopedia articles on: CIS and Baltic Political Geography


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11/05/2014 Liebherr to Supply Engine Bleed Air System for the Airbus A330neo
Airbus has selected Liebherr-Aerospace to supply the bleed air system with electro-pneumatic technology of the new generation for the A330neo program. The system features compact, light-weight and highly reliable valves as well as a pre-cooler with integrated controls. It benefits from Liebherr's experience in bleed air systems gained through various projects for a wide range of commercial aircraft, in particular such Airbus aircraft as the A320neo and the A380. The system, which will enable a substantial reduction in operating costs and a significant increase in reliability, will be developed, qualified and manufactured in Toulouse (France) by Liebherr-Aerospace Toulouse SAS.
The first A330neo is due to be delivered in 2017. Liebherr already supplies several key systems and components for the current Airbus long range program, e.g. high lift actuation, spoiler and rudder actuation, as well as air conditioning. The A330neo bleed contract contributes to the further consolidation of Liebherr's partnership with Airbus.


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05/05/2014 - Smarter planning for natural and man-made disasters that increases collaboration between countries and encourages households and businesses to take more responsibility would improve resilience and reduce future economic losses, a new OECD report says.
Boosting Resilience through Innovative Risk Governance estimates that earthquakes, social unrest, industrial accidents, terror attacks, pandemics and other disruptive events cost advanced and emerging nations around USD 1.5 trillion in damages and economic losses over the last decade, more than double what they cost over the previous 10 years.
Without action, these costs could rise further as climate change, higher concentrations of people and assets in risk-prone areas and closer economic links between countries mean the impact of such events spreads more quickly across borders and business sectors.
"Major disruptive events are happening more frequently and our ever-denser cities and interconnected economies mean the costs are getting higher all the time," said Rolf Alter, Director of Public Governance and Territorial Development at the OECD, launching the report at the OECD Forum in Paris. "Smarter risk management to improve our resilience to shocks is the only way to lessen the impact on societies and economies."
Economic losses due to disasters in OECD and BRIC countries, 1980-2012
>> Download the underlying data in Excel
The report identifies weaknesses that risk driving up future losses. These include lapses in maintenance of protective infrastructure, a failure of regulatory reform to keep pace with new risk patterns, deficiencies at some private-sector providers of key infrastructure like energy and insufficient investment by individuals to protect assets. It finds that one country's failure to properly manage a major risk can have a serious impact on others.
Governments should take action to raise public awareness and reduce over-reliance on the state for covering the cost of disasters, the report says. It suggests making better use of financial incentives to encourage businesses and people to protect against risks, and more national and international coordination and data sharing as a way to lessen disaster costs.
OECD ministers will discuss the report during the Organisation's annual Ministerial Meeting on 6-7 May in Paris with a view to formally recommending their governments act on it.
On top of the tragic loss of life from recent disasters, earthquakes in Chile and New Zealand in 2010 and 2011 cost 10% and 20% of annual GDP respectively. Japan's 2011 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster contributed heavily to a 0.7% economic contraction that year and reverberated around the world economy by disrupting industrial supply chains.
For further information on the report, please contact author Catherine Gamper in the OECD's Risk Management Division. Copies of the report are available by emailing the OECD Media Division or via the OECD's password-protected website.
Also available:
- 各国は災害からの回復力を向上させることで、コストの増大を押さえることができる (Japanese)
- Los países deben mejorar la capacidad de resilencia a los desastres o se enfrentarán a costos cada vez mayores, dice la OCDE (Spanish)
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The slow-moving fire in Los Padres National Forest near state Highway 1 had consumed 769 acres, or a little over a square mile, by Tuesday night and was 20 percent contained.
It has destroyed 22 buildings, Los Padres National Forest spokesman Lynn Olson said. About 14 of those structures were homes, she said.
No injuries have been reported.
Mark Nunez, the incident commander of the team fighting the fire, said 829 firefighters had deployed to the area, and thus far, weather has been working in their favor. But Wednesday would be another matter, depending on which way the wind blows.
Olson said a weather front was approaching. "It could possibly help us. It could possibly hurt us," she said.
Big Sur - miles of rugged coast, cliffs and wilderness - is a popular tourist destination about 150 miles south of San Francisco with high-end resorts and beautiful views of the Pacific Ocean.
The fire was burning a little more than a mile from Ventana Inn and Spa, a favorite spot among celebrities where former Facebook president and Napster co-founder Sean Parker got married in June.
In the summer of 2008, a lightning-sparked wildfire forced the evacuation of Big Sur and blackened 250 square miles before it was contained. That blaze burned more than a dozen homes.
California's fire season traditionally peaks by mid-fall, but the drought of the last several years has given the state essentially year-round danger.
The Big Sur fire began Sunday, fueled by dry vegetation and fanned by winds.
Among the homes destroyed was that of Big Sur Fire Chief Martha Karstens. She tearfully told reporters Monday night that the loss of her home of 23 years had not yet sunk in.
"I'm just trying to function as a chief," she said.
Other residents anxiously tried to get information about their homes.
Jim Walters, who was up the coast in Carmel when the blaze started, told the Monterey Herald he had gone to entrance to his street, local restaurants and the fire command station but had no luck learning anything about his home.
"I don't know where else to go," he said.
The Red Cross set up an overnight shelter for displaced people, said Los Padres National Forest spokesman Andrew Madsen.
The Monterey County Sheriff's Department issued an evacuation watch Tuesday afternoon for the area west of Highway 1 between Fernwood Resort and River Inn, but no more mandatory evacuations were ordered. Highway 1 remains open, Olson said.
A wildfire so late in the year is unusual in Northern California, where the fire season is generally at its peak over the summer, said Larry Smith, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Monterey.
Smith said the Big Sur area has averaged nearly 45 inches of rain yearly between 1981 and 2010. But the area has received about 7 inches of rain this year, about 16 percent of its normal amount.
"That's very, very dry," Smith said.
Still, officials said they were hopeful they could contain the blaze this week as temperatures were expected to be in the 50s on Wednesday and Thursday.
"We're cautiously optimistic that we're going to pin this thing down within the next couple of days," Madsen said.
The cause of the fire was under investigation.
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Arctic Cat Portal Gear Lift Conversion Kit - Gen 1 To Gen 2 - Wildcat / 4 inch / PGH-5-25-001
$ 1,039.95
Have a Question?
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Vendor: Super ATV
Type: Drivetrain
Part #: PGH-5-25-101-UK
Inventory: Might be drop shipped by manufacturer
Lead Time: Contact Us
$ 1,039.95
When filling gear box use only 80W-90 gear oil. Using grease will cause failure of gears and bearings. Using grease will void your warranty.
SuperATV takes pride keeping your GDP Portal Gear Lift in working order. That's why we give you, the original purchaser, a lifetime of portal protection contingent on the following conditions. SuperATV warrants this product and its parts (excluding bearings, seals, & gaskets). Warranty is limited to material and / or workmanship defect at the time of shipment from the factory, and in no event shall seller have any liability for consequential damages of any kind resulting from a breach of this warranty. This warranty will be void on all products that show evidence of misapplication, improper installation, abuse, lack of proper maintenance, negligence, or alteration from original design. This warranty is in lieu of any other warranties, either expressed or implied, INCLUDING ANY IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILTY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
Procedures for obtaining warranty service:
Should you have any problems with your Gear Driven Performance product, please call SuperATV Customer Service at 855-743-3427. Please have a copy of your original purchase receipt available, with dealer name (if applicable), date of purchase, and invoice number when calling for technical help. Most often, installation, or break in procedural issues (See break in procedure information, located in the instructions) can be handled quickly by speaking with one of our customer service representatives.
If it is determined that repairs are required to your Gear Driven Performance portal, you MUST acquire an RGA number from our customer service team. RGA's and repair services are ONLY rendered by SuperATV. Any shipping costs incurred after 30 days (starting from the original purchase date) on any Portal returned for repair is the customer's responsibility. ALL Portals must be returned in the original box, with the original packaging, or a similarly well protected box. ALL portals must have the RGA number clearly written on the outside of the package. NO COD packages will be accepted, and no package will be accepted without an RGA number written on the outside of the box. Shipping information, including address and method, will be given to you by our customer service team and/or listed on our website when you create your RGA.
Upon arrival of your warranty parts we will have them inspected by our technicians to determine if the damage was a manufacturing defect or rider/installation error. The inspection usually takes place 1-2 days after the package arrives. SuperATV will then call you with the results of the inspection. Depending on the outcome of the inspection, you may be required to pay a replacement fee for the broken parts (prices may vary depending on parts that need to be replaced). We do our best to get your issues corrected as soon as possible so you can get back out on the trails. We also match shipping labels for our customers. If you ship the warranty parts to us with an overnight label, we will return the favor and send you the replacements parts on an overnight shipment at no charge.
If you have product that is outside of warranty coverage or it is determined that product shows evidence of misapplication, improper installation, abuse, lack of proper maintenance, negligence, or alteration from original design. Customer will be notified and we will repair for a $250 fee.
Replacement bearings, seals and gaskets can be found at www.SuperATV.com.
Thank you for your business!
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Christmas Gifts Delivery In Delhi - Order/ Buy Christmas Gifts In Delhi
Send awesome Christmas gifts to your loved ones in Delhi from BloomsVilla. We are offering free home delivery of quality Christmas gift items in Delhi such as fresh flowers, cakes, chocolate hampers, sweets, live plants, fruit baskets, chocolate bouquets, dry fruits, etc. You can buy Christmas gifts for all relations in Delhi, such as gifts for mother, father, husband, wife, boyfriend, girlfriend, brother, sister, etc. We have same-day express Christmas gift delivery service in Delhi. You can also order Christmas gifts for delivery at midnight in Delhi.