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Please, insult my religion
September 20, 2012 § 26 Comments
There's been a lot of fuss about criticizing religions lately, so I thought I'd offer up mine. Go ahead and laugh or call it stupid or whatever. It won't bother me at all.
1: In the beginning Dog created the bike and the road.
2: And the road was without stoplights, and traffic; and darkness was upon the faces of the murderous drivers on their way to church. And the Spirit of Dog moved upon the pedals.
3: And Dog said, Let there be lycra: and there was lycra.
4: And Dog saw the lycra, that it was good and tight: and Dog divided the lycra from the darkness.
5: And Dog called the lycra Kit, and the baggy pants he called Fred. And the jogging shorts and the saggy athletic socks were the first object of his derision.
6: And Dog said, Let there be thighs in the midst of the lycra, and let them divide the wankers from the peloton.
7: And Dog made the peloton, and divided the wankers which were hanging on for dear life from the peloton: and it was called Off the Back.
8: And Dog called off the back Purgatory. And the group ride was on the second day.
9: And Dog said, Let the cyclists be gathered together unto one place of abundant coffee and jelly donuts, and let hammers appear: and it was so.
10: And Dog called the hammers Leaders of the Pack; and the gathering together of the wankers called he Category 5: and Dog saw that it was good as long as they didn't go too far forward and gap everyone out.
11: And Dog said, Let the group ride bring forth pain, the pain yielding misery, and the misery yielding defeat, whose seed is pain itself, so that it may beginneth all over again: and it was so.
12: And the group ride brought forth pain, and pain yielding misery, and the misery yielding defeat especially when the road tilteth up, whose seed was in itself pain, after his kind: and Dog foresaw a vast market for nutritional supplements.
13: And the USCF races were the third day.
14: And Dog said, Let there be wankers in the peloton so deluded as to think they have a chance of victory, and let them and their entry fees be for the beer money and rent of Charon and Meeker and Rudy:
15: And let them be purchasers of aero wheelsets and bladed spokes and other overpriced gewgaws: and it was so.
16: And Dog made two great tours ; the greater tour to rule the French, and the lesser tour to rule the Italians: he made Flanders also, that even the slow-witted Belgians would also have a field of battle upon which they might win.
17: And Dog set in the roadways of Flanders and Northern France great cobbles, to give misery and suffering untold upon the pedalers,
18: And to rule over the cobbles and the French and the Italians, and to divide the bull from the shit, Dog created Merckx: and Dog saw that it was good.
19: And the circular road made of wooden planking were the fourth day.
20: And Dog said, Let the circular planking bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life but no brain other than to ride in circles, and fly around the planking like a complete imbecile, and they shall be called Trackies.
21: And the rock and tree studded mountain were the fifth day. And Dog created insane creatures minute of brain, who hurled splattingly into the trees and rocks without thought down the great mountains, which the mountains brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fool after his kind: and Dog saw that it was good.
22: And Dog blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and multiply over and over, and over and over, as ye Bikers of the Mountain will for the most part have thy brains dashed against the stones and require much and frequent replacement, and he made them the most fecund of all.
23: And the pit of mud and barriers of wood and rope were the fifth day.
24: And Dog said, Let these living creature be the dumbest of all, and the creepingest of all things, and beasts of the earth who shall half-run, half-cycle in a stupor of pain: and it was so.
25: And Dog made the 'cross racer after his kind, smallest brained of all his creatures: and God saw that while it was good, it wasn't as good as the others, but it was already Friday and he was getting tired.
26: And Dog said, Let us make cyclists in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the roads, and over the angry motorists en route to church, and over the drunken truckers, and over all the traffic police, and over every stop sign and traffic control signal upon the earth.
27: So Dog created cyclists in his own image, in the image of Dog created he them; male and female he created alike except that the female was much cuter to observe from the rear.
28: And Dog blessed them, and Dog said unto them, Wear helmets, and lights at night, and replenish the energy drink when it runneth low in the bottle, and subdue the wankers who are overconfident: and have dominion over the race officials who judge but dare not race themselves, and over Officer Knox, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth but most especially thy non-cycling spouse who would withhold precious gold for purchase of badly needed powermeters and such.
29: And Dog said, Behold, I have given you every bicycle, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every wheelset and electronic shifter, in the which is the path of least rolling resistance; to you it shall be to pedal.
30: And to every chubby motorist who commuteth in a rage, and to every traffic jam, and to every thing that creepeth slowly upon the 405, wherein there is only a semblance of life, I have given every cyclist superiority over thee: and it was so.
31: And Dog saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good, especially when washed down with a craft beer brewed in small batches. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day, and Dog created the hangover.
32: Thus the bikes and the roads and the mountains and the tracks and the mud pits were finished, and all the host of cyclists too lazy to work but full of energy to ride, of them.
33: And on the seventh day Dog ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made.
34: And Dog blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it: because that in it he had rested from all his work and recovered from his hangover of the fifth day and was now ready for the group ride.
§ 26 Responses to Please, insult my religion
Praise be to the Dog . Curse to all the four wheel road Pigs & bottle breakers!!!
Divinely inspired!
NOTICE: Crazy SO CAL CHRISTIANS are rioting at North Pier and the Switchbacks have been sabotaged with brie and rhinestones.
All hail the New Fundaligionism. Hallelujahgobble!
Call me a convert. I will now be tithing my 10% to the church of WM.
Now that I've stopped laughing (it took a while), where the hell is part 2?
Well done!
Put a smile on my face Mr. Dantes.
Impressive Seth, bringing smiles and joy to a lot of people.
….. and Dog never did create the Triathlete……
Dog is omniscient, therefore, dog knew better than to create triathlete. No, Natas created triathlete. And Natas begat a son, Ecnal, who preached the evil message of triathlon to the world without success.
So Ecnal and Natas hatched an evil plan. Ecnal forsaked his triathlete birthright and joined the peloton. And dog saw through the Ecnal's facade of desiring to become a cyclist and he grabbed Ecnal by the balls and struck down Ecnal with cancer. But lo, the unholy alliance of Natas and Ecnal beat back the cancer. And so Ecnal came to dominate the peloton, throwing Cycling into the Dark Ages. And Ecnal's dominance of the peloton was so complete that he amassed a collection of stomped dicks larger than even dog could imagine. Ecnal's power was so great that even after his dominance of the peloton faded he still kept cycling in the Dark Ages.
Dog was so angry about the Dark Ages, that he considered a forty day flood of automobiles that would wipe all cyclists off the face of the Earth. But dog knew cycling was good and decent. So dog hatched an evil plan of his own. Dog knew he could defeat Natas and Ecnal with conventional weapons, but that could take years and cost millions of lives. No, dog knew he would have to go all out. He knew that this situation absolutely required a really futile and stupid gesture be done on somebody's part! And he was just the somebody to do it.
Dog knew he would need to enlist one of Natas's most evil fallen angels, but which one? Wall Street Banker? No, too greedy. Used Car Salesman? Not evil enough. Congressman? No, for there were still lines that dog was unwilling to cross. Lawyer? Yes!
So dog lavished praise and affection on the Lawyer Sivart Tragyt. Dog knew that Tragyt had been a decent boy before turning to the dark side and becoming a hall monitor and then a Lawyer. And dog knew that if he could turn Tragyt's heart away from darkness, with all of the skills he had learned as a hall monitor and Lawyer, he might be able to defeat Ecnal. And dog did turn Tragyt's heart and Tragyt joined USADA.
Tragyt began his quest by hunting down the sacred hidden grand jury scripture. Virtually everyone on the planet was barred from reading it. A fellow Lawyer in the BALCO case was convicted and disbarred for leaking it. But Tragyt proved worthy of dog's praise. Constitutional protections, judicial mandates and statutes were no match for him. The sacred grand jury scriptures were his. And lo Tragyt used the scriptures to blackmail and coerce Ecnal's previously loyal lieutenants into testifying exactly as Tragyt wanted them to testify
So based on the coerced testimony, Tragyt prepared to charge Ecnal with a string of vague accusations dating back 14 year. But one of Tragyt's USADA minions pointed out that statute of limitations is only 7 years. So Tragyt convinced WADA, an organization full of former members of Natas's Army of Lawyers, to change the statute of limitations to 14 years. And Tragyt did charge Ecnal with the vague accusations. Ecnal protested to the Federal Courts. The Courts agreed with Ecnal that the accusations were vague, but threw Ecnal to the Wolves of Arbitration anyway saying Ecnal had consented to being throw to the Wolves by joining the peloton.
Ecnal was afraid of the Wolves of Arbitration, for nary an athlete had survived a confrontation with them. But Ecnal knew that Tragyt's and USADA's power stopped at the nation's border, that they had no power over UCI and ASO, the keepers of the peloton. And Ecnal knew, that no matter what Tragyt and USADA did to him, UCI and ASO would not foresake him. So Ecnal surrendered and Tragyt did try to strip Ecnal of all his Sacred Tour Victories. But as Ecnal knew, UCI and ASO remained silent and steadfast; the Sacred Tour Victories remained his.
And dog was disappointed with Tragyt. Though the Dark Ages have given way to the Overcast Age of Skepticism, and despite a test for Natas' Elixr, EPO, as well as a biological passport, many of dog's creatures still see cycling as a dirty sport populated by the spawn of Natas.


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So Twitter hasn't made money just being a social media darling. Instead it is relying on a medium from another century — your television set — to sell broadcasters and advertisers new methods to more directly connect with their core audiences.
And for that it turned to a small outfit in Cambridge, Bluefin Labs, which it bought earlier this year for $67.3 million. Born out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Bluefin has developed a clever tool to mine Twitter to gauge viewers' reactions to television shows and commercials. And now as part of prepping for its initial public offering expected for later this year, Twitter is talking to investors about how Bluefin will help turn a money-losing enterprise into a profit machine.
In many ways, Bluefin figured out the value of television for Twitter long before its new owner did. With more people talking about their favorite TV shows and commercials over the Web, Bluefin found ways to analyze that commentary and sell it to networks or other advertisers as new ways to monitor viewer sentiment.
The social Web has become a digital watercooler for conversations around TV programming, as millions of Twitter users regularly tap out 140-character quips while watching "The Walking Dead" or "The Voice," and other favorites. In just a few years, Bluefin amassed an impressive roster of customers that included just about every TV network including NBC, CBS, and FOX, as well as some of the biggest brands in the world such as PepsiCo Inc. and Mars Inc. — customers that now belong to Twitter.
"The goal is for Twitter to become the social TV analytics company," said Marie-Jose Montpetit, a research scientist at MIT. "Bluefin brought the analytics."
Bluefin was founded in 2008 by MIT professor Deb Roy and his former doctoral student Michael Fleischman, and was among the first Internet start-ups working in a burgeoning field known as social TV.
"It was this idea of using electronic means to socialize around TV content," said Montpetit, who teaches a course in social TV at the MIT Media Lab. "Television has always been social," she said, but what Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking sites do is create online communities and discussion groups around shows and sporting events.
"What Bluefin managed to do was to link the Twitter chatter to what was happening on television," said Montpetit.
Roy, the founder, is now chief media scientist for Twitter and his former student, Fleischman, is a product manager at Twitter. Both are in Kendall Square, where Twitter has established its East Coast headquarters. It also bought another Cambridge company earlier this year, Crashlytics, which makes software that detects bugs in mobile apps.
Twitter declined to comment, citing its upcoming IPO. But in a recent Forbes cover story, Twitter chief executive officer Dick Costolo said that "broadcasters have come to understand that Twitter is a force multiplier for the media they've created."
Indeed, advertisers and networks don't just want to know what viewers are saying, they want to directly engage with fans to increase viewership or more precisely target those consumers who are likely to buy their products.
Not long after Twitter acquired Bluefin, it released a product that advertisers can use to find out exactly who is watching which shows or commercials, based on the content and time of related tweets, and then advertise directly to those viewers on their Twitter feeds.
"Instead of advertising on TMZ and hoping that the people watching TMZ are 15-year-old girls, they can refine their advertising on Twitter and target just girls who follow Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, and Miley Cyrus," said Michael Pachter, an analyst at Wedbush Securities in Los Angeles. "It's a natural tie-in because advertisers and TV programmers are always trying to understand their audience."
That's just one way Twitter is courting TV. Earlier this month, Twitter announced a partnership with Comcast where subscribers can use their Twitter accounts to select and watch shows from the cable broadcaster. And in partnership with Twitter, ratings company Nielsen rolled out in October the first ever Twitter TV Ratings, which ranks shows based on their popularity in tweets. Twitter has also been hiring top executives who come from the television industry and ramping up efforts to build relationships with networks.
This TV business is a recent conversion for Twitter, as the company was figuring out ways to make a profit and was preparing for its IPO, said Brian Blau, an analyst at the technology research firm Gartner Inc.
"They really didn't know what kind of company they wanted to be for awhile," he said. "They have a very short list of markets they want to go after. Twitter picked TV as the one to go after during the IPO period."
Twitter's revenues hit $422 million for the nine-month period that ended in September, more than double the same period last year. But it continues to lose money, shedding $133 million so far this year.
Analysts tracking Twitter agree that the company is on track to become profitable in the near future, and that its focus on the growing social TV phenomenon will help it get there. Twitter is expected to push further into this market after its public offering, which the company hopes will raise $1 billion.
But relying on TV may take Twitter only so far. After all, according to Nielsen, only about 600,000 Twitter users tweeted about the huge season finale of "Breaking Bad," compared with the 10.3 million people who watched the episode.
Michael B. Farrell can be reached at firstname.lastname@example.com.

subset: commoncrawl


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Here's my latest blog on the Huffington Post website, from my visit to Mozambique and Ethiopia with Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg.
Today I met a future doctor, accountant and engineer. They were all 13 year old girls. The aspirations of these Ethiopian girls is heartening. The engineer says she wants to train to help "build up her country". I wouldn't bet against her doing just that. And the UK Department for International Development (DFID) is working with Ethiopia to make sure she is joined by many others.
The deputy prime minister and I are in Kokebe Tsebeh school in Addis Ababa this morning to launch the first Girls Education Challenge Fund projects in Ethiopia, following a launch in Mozambique yesterday. These projects together will help educate 89,000 girls in remote areas, targeting whatever holds them back – using radio to emphasise the benefits of girls' education to the community, giving grants for uniforms to the poorest students and bicycles to the most remote, and making schools feel safer. But this is just the start, with the Challenge Fund due to benefit one million girls in total around the world.
Lynne Featherstone and Nick Clegg meet school children at the launch of the Girls Education Challenge Fund in Mozambique. Picture: Crown Copyright
Girls education just makes sense. With education, girls are likely to have children later and are less likely to experience HIV or AIDS. Its not just the health benefits for the girl – benefits often accrue to any children she may have too. And each year of education can add around 10-20% to her salary later in life.
We went on to meet Bethlehem Tilahun at her SoleRebels shoe factory. She's showing just what women can achieve here, building up a business from scratch to now employ 120 people making fantastic shoes (Nick Clegg was given a rather stylish bright yellow pair, with recycled tyre soles). And she did it with little help.
How can we make more Bethlehems? Ethiopia and its partners, including DFID, are working on just that. Maybe access to finance or business training is the answer. Maybe extending education to those without, particularly girls, will help. Either way, Ethiopia and its girls are on the move. Sometimes in bright yellow shoes.


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Cavs can't get it done on the road
Watch them at home and the Cavs look like they are headed back to the NBA Finals. They lock down on defense. They knock down big shots on offense.
Then come the road games.
Watch out. The defense cracks, the offense stalls and the Cavs stumble to losses.
"We just haven't been able to get it done on the road and that's concerning," Head Coach Mike Brown said after Saturday's 108-98 loss at Milwaukee.
Less than five weeks from the playoffs, the Cavs are riding a nine-game home winning streak and a five-game road losing streak. Overall, they have lost seven of eight away from home, and those road woes are trumping their success at Quicken Loans Arena.
"I'm worried because if we expect to be a very good playoff team, we got to know how to win on the road," Brown said. "And for some reason it doesn't matter who we're playing, it's almost like we just think we can show up and turn it on at the end of the game instead of coming out and playing the right way."
Frequent slow starts have been a problem on the road. In five of their seven road losses since Feb. 26, the Cavs have trailed after one quarter. But they've also been ripped late in some games, and generally, they fail to set a tone on the defensive end.
The Cavs go from giving up just 85.6 points a night their last nine home games to yielding 103.3 points their past eight road game.
"That is scary, especially this late in the season," Brown said.
Saturday, Milwaukee took a 27-14 lead after one quarter, getting a number of easy layups and open jump shots.
"We didn't show any fight," Brown said.
And it's not like the Cavs are running into the '72 Lakers or '86 Celtics.
Outside of losses at Orlando and Boston, they have fallen twice to Milwaukee, in addition to Chicago, New Jersey and Washington. The Wizards have been surging, but the other three are well below .500. The Bucks and Nets each have won just three of their last 12 games.
Their lone road win in this stretch came in New York. And it took a 50-point night from LeBron James for the Cavs to finally subdue the woeful Knicks, 119-105.
"We've been a good road team in the past," James said. "We got to a point where we were winning road games, and then we've just got to a point where we just can't win one."
True enough, the Cavs won eight of 10 road games before this stretch, which probably not coincidentally began after their Feb. 21 blockbuster trade.
Trying to fit in four new players while dealing with continual injuries makes things tough on any team. But the Cavs also began their nine-game home winning streak the day after the trade.
"At home, you have the crowd to keep you in the game," Brown said.
On the road, it falls on the Cavs themselves to get it going.
"We have not shown the ability to do that as of late, which hopefully is alarming to not only myself, but to the rest of our team," Brown said.
The Cavs look like they will be the fourth seed for the playoffs, so winning on the road soon becomes an imperative.
"In the postseason, we know we're not going to have homecourt throughout ... so at one point, you're going to have to win on somebody's floor to continue to advance," James said. "So we'll figure it out. ... We have to win one (on the road), and just get the focus back going into the postseason."
Reach Repository sports writer Chris Beaven at (330) 580-8345 or e-mail email@example.com.
No 'D' on the road
The Cavs are riding a nine-game winning streak at home and five-game losing streak on the road. One look at their defensive numbers points to why they are playing so well at home, but have lost seven of eight away from Cleveland.
Here's a comparison of their home and road defensive numbers since Feb. 22:
- Allowing 85.6 points per game on 41.9 percent shooting from the floor in the nine home games.
- Seven of their nine opponents have scored fewer 90 points, including limiting Detroit to a season-low 73 points.
- Five of the nine have shot less than 40 percent from the floor.
- Allowing 103.25 points per game on 47.52 percent shooting in the eight road games.
- Seven of their eight opponents have scored more than 100 points.
- Four of the eight have shot better than 50 percent from the floor.


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December 6, 2017- Here's an excerpt from my untitled novel that is coming out late next year (2019). Let me know your thoughts in the comments section below.
Before I close my eyes I catch a glimpse of his tiny body covered in my blood; he has two perfect hands and feet, and a beautiful face. I struggle to stay awake to hear his cry, but the room is silent; at that moment, I know that our son is dead.


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George Zimmerman Painting Sells For $100,099.99
George Zimmerman is an unemployable broke asshole, so maybe it's no real surprise that he's also an amateur artist. That original painting he was hawking on eBay this week — the one he described with a joke about Trayvon Martin ("my art work allows me to reflect, providing a therapeutic outlet and allows me to remain indoors :-)") — has potentially sold for six figures.
When bidding closed last night, the final offer for the painting that reads "God, One Nation, with Liberty and Justice for All" stood at $100,099.99. But as with all stunt eBay listings such as this one, the auction site will have to authenticate the bid. Of course, it's far from outrageous to think that some NRA freak would relish forking six figures over to Zimmerman for some tone-deaf patriotic propaganda.
Zimmerman, who recently added "alleged domestic abuser" to his rap sheet, needs the money, too. Last month, he revealed that he is currently $2.5 million in debt thanks to legal fees stemming from the Martin investigation and trial. In a court filing that would have allowed him to hire a public defender for that domestic violence case, Zimmerman said that he had $150 cash on hand and no income.
Maybe he and fellow conservative hero/noted painter George W. Bush should hit the road together.


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I've never seen a work by Pina Bausch. As with those of us who come too late, who miss the boat, who weren't there, my knowledge of her work with Wuppertal Tanztheater has been limited to the scraps you gather together - critical books, photographs, videos, reviews, the descriptions of friends, even the traces of her influence in the work of others. I have built a patchwork Bausch, intuiting the language of this choreographer, whose work galvanised modern dance and theatre, from the traces left behind. It's never as good as being there. It never will be.
Wim Wenders knows this. His beautiful documentary film Pina is all about absence: most signally, the absence of Bausch herself, after her sudden death in 2009, five days after being diagnosed with cancer, and just as she and Wenders were planning to make a film about her work. It is not a biography of Bausch, so much as an invocation of her work and her company. Among improvisations made for the film by the different dancers, we are shown some of her most famous dances, including three iconic pieces from the 1970s - Le Sacre du Printemps, Kontakthof, and Café Müller - and a more recent work, Vollmond.
Wenders opens with an evocation of a virtual theatre, in which 3D technology permits him to open up illusory spaces and perspectives to give the spectator something like the shape of Bausch's choregraphy. As he begins, with scenes from Kontakthof, the 3D illusion is heightened, emphasising its artifice to a degree that I found discomforting. The powerful illusion of depth, of the rounded presence of dancers, made clear what was missing: the bodies of the dancers themselves.
These dancers were creatures of light, phantoms who are exact in every visual degree: but in watching dance, I suddenly realised, other senses are also employed, subliminal animal senses that track physical weight, the smell of sweat, disturbances in the air, perhaps even changes in heat. The lack of these other stimuli was at first alienating, then strangely revelatory: the absence of the dancers' bodies was sometimes as strong a feeling as the loss of Bausch. This is, in a real sense, a posthumous film: it's a tribute to a choreographer who is dead, recording performances that have long vanished from the air.
What's beautiful is how conscious Wenders is of these limitations. He knows very well that he can't reproduce the experience of performance, so he doesn't attempt to: from the beginning, his framing of the documentary makes this very clear. He subtly highlights what is missing, and then translates dance into the language of film, the language of light and shadow and illusion. Sometimes this is stunning; there's a particular moment when, as audience members, we standing between curtains at the edge of the stage, looking in at the dancers. He films dances on stage (without too many close-ups, a particular bugbear of mine in filmed performance), and places them also in different contexts - the industrial streets of Wuppertal, a quarry, a modern building that appears to be a glass gallery in the middle of a spring forest.
Wenders uses minimal documentary footage of Bausch herself; the major sequence is a moving black and white film of her role in Café Müller, which she danced with her eyes shut. He is, quite rightly, more interested in her work than her life. Her work, you feel, left her naked enough: and her recondite presence in the fleeting glimpses we are offered radiates a powerful sense of privacy. She is mainly remembered through her dancers, who are filmed in front of the camera, their faces mobile with thought, as a voice-over of their reminiscences plays against their silence. (In a couple of cases, the dancer remains speechless).
The film is not merely a tribute to Pina: it is also, with an increasing freight of emotion, a tribute to the company she made, the dancers who worked with her, in some cases for decades, attempting to realise her vision. They were, as becomes increasingly clear through the film, her collaborators, offering their ideas and feelings and wit as well as their skilled bodies to her work. As much as anything, this is a film about relationship: it permits us an insight into the profound relationships between these artists, and how these emerged into some of the most influential dance works of the past 30 years.
What I wasn't prepared for was the overwhelming emotional power of Bausch's dance. For all the difficulties of performance on film, this is where Wenders triumphs. All her dancers speak about the feeling of Bausch's work, of her scrupulous, pained search to create a language that could express and embody the inexpressible. "Words can only invoke," said Bausch. "That's where dance comes in..." A dancer said of Bausch: "She danced as if she had been risen from the dead... in her pain and loneliness..." In Pina, you can see that quality for yourself. I don't know how the precise gesture of a hand, the angle of a head, a leap, a step, can so surgically open the latent grief and love in your own psyche, but this is what Bausch's choreography does. I was floored by the immediacy and beauty of her language, the fluency and toughness of its emotional economy.
It's not surprising to learn that Wenders was a close friend of Bausch's. Without resorting to the vulgarity of declaring it, this film is made with a great deal of love. It's a lament and celebration, an invocation and farewell. Wenders never intrudes: he stands modestly behind the scenes, enabling us to see what he so admired in his subject. Like Bausch, with the maximum of tact and the minimum of fuss, he manages the translation of feeling into his own medium. It's a marvellous film, and essential viewing for anyone with even the slightest interest in contemporary dance.
Pina by Wim Wenders opens nationwide on August 18. Check Hopscotch Films for details.


text: In your previous course, you learned some medical interventions and skills to keep newborns healthy in the days and weeks after they have been born. In this course, you will learn what some additional skills that medical providers do to keep babies healthy. The Newborn Assessment Course will walk you through the physical examination from head to toe. You are going to learn that this is so much we can discover just by looking at a baby. And yes, we will be listening too, and discussing how medical equipment, such as a stethoscope or a pulse oximeter, can help in your exam. You will begin to be able to distinguish some normal findings from some abnormal findings. A newborn baby is an amazing beautiful life filled with hope. There is so much that goes into making sure that babies are born healthy, and so much more to think about after they are born. Whether you are in the health care field, or even a parent, this course is the perfect educational opportunity for you to keep newborn babies healthy in the days and weeks after they are born!


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Portfolio Payroll Ltd have achieved 82nd in the prestigious Sunday Times 100 Best Small Companies to Work for.
For the Second time, Portfolio have ranked in the top 100 and improved their overall Best Companies Accreditation standard, which follows the elite Michelin style star rating system, increasing from 2 stars to 3. The highest possible award given.
In addition to the 3-star accreditation, Best Companies described Portfolio as an 'extraordinary' small company employer.
Best Companies received entries from over 400 small companies across the UK to gain scores across their leadership, engagement, wellbeing and benefits.
Charlotte Turner, a Director of Portfolio said; "We are incredibly proud to win a place in this highly contested awards and to be name one of the Top 100 Small Companies to Work For. We've put a lot of effort into achieving this fantastic recognition and wouldn't have been able to achieve this without the dedication and commitment from our people. The fact that it is judged by our own staff's feedback makes it even more special winning this award and as an employer shows we stand out from the crowd."


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Palestinian Autonomous Territories
03.10.2011 / 13:22 | Aktualizováno: 05.04.2018 / 08:58
The Palestinian Autonomous Territories are among the poorest countries of the Middle East, with their economic and social stability being of vital importance for the entire region. The Czech Republic has, therefore, provided assistance to Palestine since the 1990s. In its activities, the Czech Republic has so far focused on the Tubas Governorate and the energy sector (since 1996, approximately 30 villages have been electrified thanks to Czech assistance).
The Palestinian Autonomous Territories are among 10 priority (project) countries according to the Development Cooperation Strategy of the Czech Republic 2010 -2017. Actual support of the Czech Republic to Palestine amounts 750 000 USD for the implementation of development projects a year. The donations are used to provide the Palestinian authorities with financial contributions to support the management and development of water resources, photovoltaic energy and agriculture. They are pursued via financial donation to the Tubas Governorate. Working closely with the Representative Office of the Czech Republic in Ramallah and with support of the Czech Development Agency, in 2011 and 2012 the Palestinian partners were provided with professional assistance to prepare new project specifications and selection procedures by means of which the Palestinian partners were to choose project contractors for the implementation phase.
In 2011, Czech Republic supported 6 projects (3 bilateral and 3 small local projects) in Palestine in total amount of 15.9 million CZK. ODA to Palestine reached 31.1 million CZK (approx. 1.5 million USD).
In 2011, the "Multi-year Water Allocation System" started with the Czech support. The project is implemented by Palestinian Water Authority. In 2012, Czech Republic supported a continuation of the project by 5 million CZK.
In 2012, the Czech Republic also provided 5 million CZK (250 000 USD) to Tubas Governorate's project on development of photovoltaic energy and 2.5 million CZK (125 000 USD) to a project on agriculture development.
Representative Office of the Czech Republic in Ramallah also implemented 3 small local projects in 2012 ("Testing the Waters: Simulating use of a Model Water Accord for Sharing Water Peacefully Between Israelis and Palestinians", "Israeli-Palestinian Cross-border cooperation: Barn Owls help reduce rodent damage and pesticide use", and "Support of Educational Activities in Al Quds University, Eastern Jerusalem").
In the academic year 2012/2013, Palestine was offered by 2 government scholarships, the total number of students from the Palestinian Autonomous Territories, currently enrolled in programmes in the Czech Republic, is 14.
In 2009 – 2012, Czech Republic provided Palestine with humanitarian aid in total value of 1.24 million USD via UNRWA and Caritas Jerusalem to support Palestinian population and refugees in Gaza as well as in the Western Bank.


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|Statement by H.E. Ambassador Wang Min, Deputy Permanent Representative of China to the United Nations At the 66th Session of the UN General Assembly On Agenda Item 76: Oceans and the law of the sea
|2011-12-06 11:45
Mr. President,
This year, affairs related to oceans and law of the sea have received more attention from the international community with further implementation of the regimes under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea and increasingly close international cooperation and interaction on matters of oceans and seas. Next year will mark the 30th anniversary of the UNCLOS and China will take advantage of that opportunity to make greater efforts together with other countries to build a harmonious ocean to promote peace, security and openness of the ocean, based on the international law, including the Convention, and to strive for the balance of science-based protection of the ocean on the one hand and rational utilization of the ocean on the other, to achieve common development for all members of the international community and mutually beneficial win-win results.
Guided by the concept of harmonious maritime order, the Chinese delegation took an active part in the consultations on the draft resolutions on oceans and the law of the sea and on sustainable fisheries during the current session of the General Assembly. Here, I wish to express my sincere gratitude to Ambassador Valle of Brazil and Ms. Holly of the United States for their contribution as coordinators for these two resolutions.
Mr. President,
I wish to take this opportunity to elaborate my delegation's position and views on questions related to this item.
I. On the work of the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf.
The Chinese government attaches great importance to the work of the Commission and commends the diligent work of the members of the Commission and the results achieved. We support the Commission in fulfilling its responsibilities in strict compliance with the Convention and the Commission's Rules of Procedure and hope that the delineation of the outer continental shelf will balance the legitimate rights and interests of the coastal States and the interests of international community as a whole. Now the Commission is tasked with very heavy workload, however many members from the developing countries do not yet have coverage for medical expenses during their work in New York. The Chinese delegation calls on the all relevant parties to continue to work towards an appropriate solution of relevant problems so as to facilitate the work of the Commission.
II. On the work of the International Seabed Authority.
The Chinese delegation congratulates the Seabed Authority on its achievement over the past year, especially the approval by the Council of the ISA of four exploration applications for seabed resources, which demonstrates the increasing vitality of international seabed activities. My delegation looks forward to an early completion of the drafting of the Regulations on Prospecting and Exploration for Cobalt-Rich Crusts and hopes that the Regulations will give a balanced reflection of the concerns of all parties. The Environment Management Plan for the Clarion-Clipperton Zone should follow the Convention, base itself on full scientific evidences and keep an appropriate balance between the protection of seabed environment and the exploration and utilization of seabed resources.
III. On the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea.
My delegation notes that the Tribunal has started the proceedings on its first maritime delimitation case. In addition, the Seabed Disputes Chamber issued an advisory opinion on the responsibilities and obligations of sponsoring States for international seabed activities. With these activities, the Tribunal, as the judicial organ established by the Convention to deal with disputes related to the interpretation and application of the Convention, has entered a new stage in which it is fulfilling the comprehensive responsibilities entrusted to it by the Convention. The Chinese Government values and supports the important role of the Tribunal in the peaceful settlement of maritime disputes and the maintenance of international maritime order.
IV. On marine biodiversity beyond areas of national jurisdiction.
The international community attaches great importance to the conservation and sustainable use of marine biodiversity beyond areas of national jurisdiction and the Ad-Hoc Working Group under the General Assembly in this respect has put forward concrete recommendations for its work on the questions concerned. The Chinese delegation appreciates the work of the Ad-Hoc Working Group and supports the adoption by the GA of the recommendations. At the same time, we'd like to emphasize that since the high seas and international seabed involve the interest of the whole international community and the appropriate handling of the question of marine biodiversity in those areas is of important significance for the maintenance of an equitable and rational international maritime order, the relevant work should proceed in a gradual manner and take into full consideration the legitimate need of countries, especially the developing countries, to use marine biological resources.
V. On the Regular Process for the Global Reporting and Assessment of the state of the Marine Environment.
The Chinese Delegation finds it highly gratifying that the institutional framework of the Process is largely in place and the relevant work is progressing at a good speed. My delegation believes that for the Process to go on smoothly and play its due role, it is imperative to formulate an appropriate Outline for Global Integrated Assessment of the State of the Marine Environment. China has applied to host in late February next year a symposium on the marine area of Eastern and South-eastern Asia seas. We hope that the symposium will make useful contribution to the environment assessment of this region of world seas and to the capacity building of countries in this region.
VI. On Sustainable Fisheries.
As a responsible fishery power, China takes an active part in the work of various international fishery organizations and commits itself to the enhancement of the conservation and management of fishery resources. The Chinese Government is willing to continue to work with the countries concerned in a joint effort to promote the development and improvement of international fisheries regimes, rationally regulate fishery activities so as to achieve the sustainable use of marine biological resources, maintain the marine ecological balance and ensure the sharing of the fishery interests by all countries.
Mr. President,
The ocean is an important foundation for human development and progress. Members of the international community should further strengthen cooperation, and show solidarity, jointly respond to challenges related to the ocean, share the opportunities and wealth offered by the oceans, work together to seek the sustainable development of the ocean, and make it a perpetual source of benefit for mankind. China is willing to work with other countries towards the harmonious oceans.


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Vegas' storied Sahara casino reborn, transformed
LAS VEGAS (AP) — The Moroccan-themed Sahara casino that once hosted Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and the Beatles seemed a lost cause in 2011, when its owners declared the 59-year-old property unprofitable and shut it down with little more than a vague promise to return.
SBE Group CEO Sam Nazarian had purchased the Las Vegas Strip resort in 2007 with dreams of restoring its former glory, but the recession stalled the plans, driving the owners to close two of the three hotel towers and hawk rooms for $1 per night over Twitter.
"There were some dark days," said Sam Bakhshandehpour, president of Los Angeles-based SBE, which owns a variety of hotels, nightclubs and restaurants. "But we held on."
The decision to cling to the shabby casino looks nothing short of prescient as the reincarnated Sahara opens as the vibrant SLS Las Vegas.
The Las Vegas Review-Journal said early Saturday that the resort opened just after midnight following a lavish reception for 3,600 guests and a fireworks display.
As the casino reinvents itself, it's ushering in a renaissance at the tired north end of the Las Vegas Strip, which for years had been home to empty lots, low-budget motels and half-built mega-resorts with their frozen construction cranes looming nearby.
Since construction began on the SLS, which stands for "Style, Luxury, Service," a Malaysian conglomerate announced plans to fold the half-finished Echelon casino into an Asian-themed Resorts World Las Vegas. Australian casino giant Crown Resorts has purchased the land where the New Frontier casino once stood. An open-air concert venue set to house the massive Rock in Rio USA music festival next spring is in the works, and Walgreens has started building a store across the street.
"Global gaming companies with deep pockets are investing in the north end of the Strip, and that bodes well for the north end of the Strip and the SLS," said Michael Paladino, an analyst with Fitch Ratings.
SLS Las Vegas' debut marks the first major resort opening since The Cosmopolitan's in late 2010, and it is likely the last one to open for another four years or so.
SBE spent $415 million gutting the casino, giving it a playful makeover at the hand of French designer Philippe Starck and stuffing it with all the trendy restaurants the company has been cultivating in Southern California.
Restaurant-centric SLS comes online at precisely the right time — Las Vegas visitors have awakened from their recession slumber hungry for fine food and nightlife and less inclined to gamble. The SLS is poised to capture their hearts and non-gambling dollars with celebrity chef Jose Andres' Bazaar Meat, gourmet burger joint Umami and The Griddle Cafe, a Los Angeles staple whose larger-than-life pancakes draw seemingly endless lines for Saturday brunch.
The casino floor is back, but it's smaller than before and spills over into the restaurants and bars.
Rooms, which start at around $100 a night next weekend, are airy and modern, with white sofas under the windows, mirrors on the walls and over the bed, and whimsical details like a monkey print on the ironing board cover.
"We're approachable luxury," SLS Las Vegas President Rob Oseland said. The average SBE customer is 38, about 10 years younger than the average Las Vegas visitor, Oseland said.
Sahara marquees once touted shows by Judy Garland, Don Rickles and Sonny and Cher, but now they're trumpeting Australian it-girl Iggy Azalea's opening Friday night show. Gone is the Sahara's small roller coaster and six-pound burrito-eating challenge; that gave way to a beer garden, several nightclubs and a pool club.
The typical Las Vegas Strip casino overhaul includes a dramatic implosion of the old building, but SBE made do with the original skeleton of the Sahara. It cost about one-tenth of what a ground-up rebuild would cost, and it allowed SBE to play off the rich past of the Sahara while transforming it beyond recognition.
Using the slogan "Be Legendary," ads for the SLS juxtapose images of youthful guests from the 1950s and their fun-loving counterparts of today.
"There's something special about bringing something back to life," Bakhshandehpour said.
The energy is palpable among Las Vegas residents, who watched as hundreds of people lost their jobs in the Sahara closure and everything from the slot-machine chairs to the camel lamps were sold off in a fire sale three years ago. SLS owners say they received 117,000 applications for their 3,400 positions.
"It was absolutely humbling," Bakhshandehpour said.


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Editorial Issue 10
Editorial - Alvin Pang
Editorial Digital Issue 4
Editorial - Alvin Pang
In this issue of ETHOS Digital Edition, public sector veterans from around the world discuss the future of governance in the digital age. Also, our more experienced colleagues share quick tips on how to do better at work in a new feature: PRO TIP.
Editorial Issue 20
Editorial - Alvin Pang
Our elders are not the problem, nor should they be passive recipients of society's largesse. How can we ensure seniors remain involved, empowered and active?
Editorial Issue 19
Editorial - Alvin Pang
Singapore's urban solutions are the outcome of efforts to address and overcome prevailing, complex constraints through unique approaches.


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Haim have cancelled their European dates this summer.
The band were due to be playing a handful of festivals over the next few months, including Reading And Leeds.
The sisters have been working on the follow-up to their debut album 'Days Are Gone'. They said in a note posted to their Facebook page that they had now reached a "critical point" in the process, which had led to the decision.
"We hate to disappoint you guys that had plans to come see us and promise we'll be back in the near future to share our new music with you," they wrote.
Read the full letter below, via The Line Of Best Fit.
Other cancelled festivals and shows affected include Way Out West, Tivoli, Oya, Frequency, Krakow, Zurich Openair and Electric Picnic.


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This article is a few notes from the excellent book "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" by Edward Tufte. Though flicking through the pages casually it may seem like quite a dry text on an equally arid subject, devoting proper time to reading through it I have found it enlightening and very interesting. Though the text concentrates on statistics and their representation in print, there are metaphors and ideas that I believe can be transferred in to user interface design for applications and games.
The format of this post follows the sequence in the book and includes quotes from each part together with my own notes. At the end of the article I identify how some principles have already been applied to applications and how they might be be applied to games and tools in the future.
Part 1 – Graphical Practice
Strong opening that is illustrated throughout the book. Quoting & paraphrasing the principles of graphical excellence ([1] p.13,51), graphics should:
* Show with clear purpose; description, exploration, tabulation, or decoration.
* Reveal data by inducing the viewer to think about the substance.
* Not obscure the data by the technology and methods used to display the data.
* Be truthful about the data and not misleading via how it is presented.
* Present many numbers in a small space so it can reviewed at a glance.
* Encourage the eye to compare the displayed data.
* Make large data sets coherent.
* Reveal the data at several levels of detail to allow the consumer to see the broad picture through to the fine detail.
* Be closely integrated around the context it was designed for, kept nearby with statistical and verbal descriptions of the data.
* Use simple methods to display simple data; do not waste real estate drawing graphs if a table would communicate data using less space.
* Be a well-designed presentation of interesting data. A harmony of substance and design.
* Communicate complex ideas clearly, concisely and precisely.
* Enable the viewer the greatest number of ideas in the shortest time using the least ink in the smallest space.
Geographical maps have historically been able to show a great deal of information in a small area. Overlaying information on to maps can reveal patterns to the eye that might not be readily recognisable from large tables of numbers that might be used to create an overlay
Shades of grey from black to white can show a range of numbers very succinctly without having to decode a legend. Shades of colour and transitions between colours are harder to decode and can pose accessibility issues.
Graphics are important to convey the "shape of the data" [2] to enable contrast and pick out patterns. The eye tends to be drawn towards line intersections, slopes, plateaus and clusters of information.
Often time series (snapshots of something over time) require contextual information to be useful, the graphic alone is unlikely to be enough so good labels and/or legends are important. They are useful in before and after studies (perhaps do and undo).
Some powerful graphics combine time and space with art and statistics – search for images of "A complete year long life cycle of the Japanese beetle" to see different interpretations of [3]. Tufte claims a graphic drawn by Charles Josepth Minard (1781-1870) of the the fate of Napoleon's army in Russia is perhaps the best statistical graphic ever drawn [4]. It combines several layers of data, including a map, temperature, the numbers of people left in the army and the passage of time. It cleverly shows the route taken by the men and the toll of the cold climate and various positions in the journey. One subtle colour is used with much of the data conveyed via line thickness and clearly labelled points of change along that line. It fulfils the criteria set out by Tufte summarised at the start of this part so it is easy to draw the conclusion as to why Tufte thinks so highly of this graphic. Indeed at a glance the graphic draws your eye along the important details, and closer inspection does yield greater detail.
The "graphical integrity" section covers the use of graphics over the years to deceive a viewer to support a particular agenda. Eye-opening in many ways, the section does also cover how not to deceive a viewer. These boil down to:
* Once a unit of size has been decided in a graphic, keep it consistent.
* Adding more dimensions to the graphic then there are in the data.
* Keep the measure along the horizontal axis consistent.
* Accurate labelling.
* Keep the "Lie Factor" ([1] pg.57) close to 1. Lie Factor = size of effect shown in graphic ÷ the size of effect in data.
Part 2 – Theory of Data Graphics
The concept of "data ink" is discussed throughout this chapter ([1] p.93). Data ink is the non-erasable core of a graphic that displays the variation in the numbers represented.
- Data ink ratio is:
- data ink ÷ total ink used to print the graphic.
- proportion of a graphic's ink devoted to the non-redundant display of data-information.
- 1.0 – proportion of a graphic that can be erased without loss of data-information.
An important idea in this part of the book is that less is more. Within reason maximise the data-ink ratio by erasing non-data ink. This could mean for example displaying part of the axis on a graph to mark data bounds, or if the data is displayed on a grid only show parts of the grid that directly add value.
Symmetry in data sometimes means that only half of the graphic need be displayed to convey the whole meaning of the data, as the eye wants to complete the symmetry ([1] p.97).
Redundancy in data can also be useful in situations where the data wraps around-for example, a 24-hour clock or a globe ([1] p.98).
Unintentional optical art via moiré effects creating a disconcerting illusion of movement should be avoided. Cross hatching and fine grids should be avoided – grids can be minimised by using them only around the data variation being displayed ([1] p.120).
Complicated colour keys that require memorisation of vocabulary for a particular graphic can prohibit quick understanding of that graphic ([1] p.154). Subtle use of colours can be used as a means of identification, but darker & lighter shading should be used for scaling values rather than colour blending.
Creating and maintaining a viewing architecture within a graph is important. Good architecture should enable the eye to follow several different and uncluttered paths through the data ([1] p.159). Within the framework the viewer should be able to spot patterns in the encoded data set and easily spot unusual parts of that data.
Experimentation and revision is the key to the concise depiction of information. Trying different methods of expressing the points, axis, grid and tables can help. Label important events in data. Use standardised units for things like money where unit value is effected over time ([1] p.77).
Sometimes the same ink can be use to serve more than one graphical purpose. For example, a blot on a map can convey an amount via shading rather than just being a binary indication via being black or white ([1] p.139). Too much complexity in multifunctional ink can lead to an encoding that can only be readily understood by the inventor, as graphic perception is very subjective in the first place ([1] p.56). Some advocate mobilising the numbers being represented in the graphic themselves. John Turkey inventor of the stem-and-leaf plot wrote "If we are going to make a mark, it may as well be a useful one. The simplest – and most useful – meaningful mark is a digit"[5].
Data density is the amount of entries being displayed divided by the area of the data graphic. High density data is desirable but should not come at the expense of legibility of the image. Many graphics, particularly lower density graphics, can be shrunk down enabling comparison of many graphics in a small space. This can be particularly useful when comparing time-series style images that are in essence snapshots of a data set over time.
An aesthetically pleasing graphic is one that follows a simple design that avoids distracting decoration and elegantly displays a complex data set. Something that takes little effort to comprehend yet reveals something interesting about the data. ([1] p.177). Attractive statistical graphics:
* Have a format and design appropriate for purpose.
* Use words, numbers and art together.
* Reflect a balance, a proportion, a sense of relevant scale.
* Are not cluttered from excessive detail.
* Have a narrative quality and tell a story about the data.
* Look professionally and carefully drawn.
* Avoid content-free information displayed on the graphic.
* For complex data-sets a combination of descriptive text, tables and graphics might be combined.
* Data graphics are paragraphs about data and should be treated as such ([1] p.181), arrange graphics in a narrative.
Use tables for simple sets of comparable values that the eye can quickly cross-reference. The order values are presented in a table can also provide a narrative to the numbers presented. Tables should be used in preference to pie charts especially in a series because pie chars can quite difficult to compare ([1] p.178).
Super tables can be constructed by clustering rows together within meaningful groups. Additional narrative can be provided by ordering rows within each cluster, and ordering the clusters themselves. This form of reference can be more powerful than many bar little charts representing the same data ([1] p.179).
Words and pictures belong together. Leonardo da Vinci's manuscripts integrate illustration and tables directly in to the text explaining his ideas ([1] p.182) [12]. Forcing the viewer to skip around the display looking for figure or reference elsewhere spoils the flow of narrative. Words used in graphics should be data themselves or explain how to read the graphic, rather than what to read.
Accessible Complexity: The Friendly Data Graphic ([1] p.183)
|Abbreviations avoided, mysterious elaborate encoding avoided.
|Abbreviations everywhere, requiring many trips away from graphic to decode.
|Words run in the usual direction for the language.
|Words run vertically along y axis or in other jarring ways.
|Labels explain data, displayed horizontally.
|Graphic is cryptic, requiring repeated references elsewhere to decode.
|Legends are avoided, labels used on graphic itself.
|Heavily encoded using shading and colours, requiring repeated reference to the legend.
|Graphic attracts viewer, provokes curiosity.
|Graphic is repellent and filled with unnecessary distractions ("chart-junk").
|Colours are used sensitively for colour-impaired viewers. Shading preferred. Blue can be distinguished by most colour-deficient people.
|Colour used insensitively, red and green used for essential contrasts.
|Type face is easy to read, letters are easily differentiated from each other.
|Type face is difficult to read, letters and numbers can be confused.
|Type is upper and lower case. Serif.
|Type is single case. Sans Serif.
Proportion and balance in the content of a graphic are important for creating attractive graphics. Musical scores provide a good example of how thickness of lines and proportion of symbols can not only look attractive but also carry meaning. A very lateral example can be found in Jarbas Agnelli, "Birds on a Wire" [8]. Art deco designs can display similar reverence for the beauty that can be found in strong lines and curves of different strengths [9][10].
Graphics should tend toward the horizontal, greater in length than height. The human eye is naturally practiced in picking detail out from a horizon thus sometimes a floating horizontal line can be made clearer by shading to the axis ([1] p.187). Turkey wrote [6] "Perhaps the most general guidance we can offer is that smoothly-changing curves can stand being taller than wide, but a wiggly curve needs to be wider than tall". Rectangles of a proportion of between 1.4 to 1.8 (1.618 being the "Golden Section" [7]) tend to be aesthetically pleasing ([1] p.189).
When the nature of the data suggests the shape of the graphic follow that suggestion. Otherwise move toward horizontal graphics about 50% wider than tall ([1] p.190).
Applications In Software
The spirit of the book is not to follow rigid principles, but to revise and create something that can communicate the complex simply. Often the realisation of this is something very desirable which can be a pleasure to use.
The Windows integrated search acts as an intelligent filter for a table of results and is consistent throughout the Explorer interface.
In the example shown to the right we can see that I have typed "snip". By the context of where I am typing snip, it has ordered the results found starting with Programs and Control Panel, enabling me to launch the snipping tool by just pressing enter. In an Explorer Window this would filter files and folders depending on the view type.
How many games with inventory systems do you think might benefit from taking on this search paradigm? Especially for games where you have very deep pockets.
Mass Effect was an awesome game, but the inventory management I personally found a chore. A lot of space ("ink") was devoted to prettiness rather than content, leading to a lot of navigation through the menus to get at what you want. There were many button pushes just for turning your unwanted items into the futuristic magic goo (Omni-gel).
RPGs and adventure games have long used maps to show transitions to other levels via "Indy dots" tracing across distances to provide interest while a new section is being loaded. Mass Effect used elevators to do the covering-up-loading thing, but it also did allow a role-player extra depth accessible via maps; encouraging players to explore to find hidden objects. Without a doubt, maps can provide a lot of information that is easy for a viewer to understand and drill down to. Twittervision gives tweets (single line status updates broadcast via a service called Twitter) extra context by placing a speech bubble on a map. Watching this map update in real time you can see trending conversations for a particular location and across the globe. I expect we will see more innovative usage of maps as games utilising social networks and reality-augmenting games via smart phones develop.
The Wolfire Editor already employs techniques suggested by this book. Their excellent article [11] explains what they have taken from Tufte and applied it – I highly recommend you taking a look. This article put Tufte's book on my own reading list.
Having worked on Fable II I have seen first hand quite how many variables and stats go in to making a great AAA title. Designers had to be able to tweak properties of creatures, items, equipment and augments. Adjusting the price and availability of something creates a ripple effect throughout the entire game. Make a creature too tough too early and the player might give up; make it too easy and there would be no challenge. Better visualising this sea of numbers and their effect on one another would have made the designers' lives easier.
I would be interested in comments on good examples of manipulating game data in an intuitive way – both in game and in tools.
[2] William Playfair "The Commerical and Political Atlas" (London, 1786). Cited [1] by Edward R. Tufte, (2002) pg.32.
[3] "A complete yearlong life cycle of the Popillia japonica Newman (the Japanese Beetle)", Man and Insects (London, 1965), pp. 104-105. Cited [1] by Edward R. Tufte, (2002) pg.43.
[4] Charles Joseph Minard, "Tableaux Graphiques et Cartes Figuratives de M. Minard, 1845-1869, Bibilotheque de l'Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussees, Paris, item 28. Cited [1] by Edward R. Tufte, (2002) pg.41.
[5] "Some Graphic and Semigraphic Displays" in T. A. Bancroft ed., Statistical Papers in Honor of George W. Snedecor (Ames, Iowa, 1972), pg. 296. Cited [1] by Edward R. Tufte, (2002) pg.140.
[6] John W. Tukey, "Exploratory Data Analysis" (Readin, Mass., 1977). pg. 129. Cited [1] by Edward R. Tufte, (2002) pg.188.
[7] Miloutine Borissavievitch, "The Golden Number and the Scientific Aesthetics of Architecture" (New York, 1958) and Tons Brunes, "The Secrets of Ancient Geometry (Copenhagen, 1967), vols 1 and 2. Cited [1] by Edward R. Tufte, (2002) pg.189.
[8] Jarbas Agnelli, "Birds on a Wire". http://www.vimeo.com/6428069
[9] Chanel 4, "Guildford: The Art Deco House". http://www.channel4.com/4homes/on-tv/grand-designs/episode-guides/guildford-the-art-deco-house-08-06-06_p_1.html
[10] Marta, "Art Deco Style". http://www.art-deco-style.com/art-deco-graphic-design.html
[11] Wolfire, "Design Principles from Tufte". http://blog.wolfire.com/2009/02/design-principles-from-tufte/


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A simple JIT job management framework in Python.
Project description
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Custodian is a simple, robust and flexible just-in-time (JIT) job management framework written in Python. Using custodian, you can create wrappers that perform error checking, job management and error recovery. It has a simple plugin framework that allows you to develop specific job management workflows for different applications.
Error recovery is an important aspect of many high-throughput projects that generate data on a large scale. When you are running on the order of hundreds of thousands of jobs, even an error-rate of 1% would mean thousands of errored jobs that would be impossible to deal with on a case-by-case basis.
The specific use case for custodian is for long running jobs, with potentially random errors. For example, there may be a script that takes several days to run on a server, with a 1% chance of some IO error causing the job to fail. Using custodian, one can develop a mechanism to gracefully recover from the error, and restart the job with modified parameters if necessary.
The current version of Custodian also comes with several sub-packages for error handling for Vienna Ab Initio Simulation Package (VASP), NwChem, QChem, FEFF, Lobster and CP2K calculations.
Getting custodian
Stable version
The version at the Python Package Index (PyPI) is always the latest stable release that will be hopefully, be relatively bug-free. Install as follows:
pip install custodian
Some plugins (e.g., vasp management) require additional setup (please see pymatgen's documentation).
Developmental version
The bleeding edge developmental version is at the custodian's Github repo. The developmental version is likely to be more buggy, but may contain new features. The Github version include test files as well for complete unit testing. After cloning the source, you can type:
python setup.py install
or to install the package in developmental mode:
python setup.py develop
Custodian supports Python 3.8+. There are no other required dependencies. However, if you wish to use many of the built-in error handlers and Jobs for VASP, NWChem, QChem, etc., you will likely need pymatgen to be install as well.
Please refer to the official custodian docs for details on how to use custodian.
How to cite custodian
If you use custodian in your research, especially the VASP component, please consider citing the following work:
Shyue Ping Ong, William Davidson Richards, Anubhav Jain, Geoffroy Hautier, Michael Kocher, Shreyas Cholia, Dan Gunter, Vincent Chevrier, Kristin A. Persson, Gerbrand Ceder. Python Materials Genomics (pymatgen) : A Robust, Open-Source Python Library for Materials Analysis. Computational Materials Science, 2013, 68, 314-319. doi:10.1016/j.commatsci.2012.10.028
Custodian is released under the MIT License. The terms of the license are as follows:
The MIT License (MIT) Copyright (c) 2011-2012 MIT & LBNL Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions: The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
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Resume versus CV – describing the differences
What's the difference between a Resume and a Curriculum Vitae (CV) – Resume versus CV?
This depends on where you are living and what you do for a living. There are as many explanations as there are different ways to use a CV or Resume. There are although some simple rules in the discussion about a Resume versus a CV. Below we will try to enlighten you and give you an insight in the biggest differences.
Differences from Geographical point of view
If you are living in Europe including the United Kingdom, you will be able to use the terms CV and Resume rather interchangeably. There is little difference between them for people living in EU/UK. Although CV is more used than Resume here. If you live in the United States, the differences between a Resume and a CV can be big; you could say that a CV in a way is a special type of Resume. In North America, most professionals in the business world would always have a Resume, being a two pager, consisting of the most important information about you and your expertise. If you are working in more specialized areas like highly academic jobs within for instance research, medicine or similar, you would probably know a CV as a presentation of everything that you have done in your career including, all work experience, all educations, diplomas, honours, project you worked on and concepts created in your work. A CV will be a substantial longer document with all this information.
Differences in the Length of a CV / Resume
There are off course more specific differences then how many pages a CV/Resume would consist off. Depending on if you have for instance listings of scholarly accomplishments, publications (academic or business), articles this would be considered a CV. On the other hand more business achievements, skill, and credentials would be part of a Resume. A basic guideline for a North American Resume would be a 1-2 page document consisting of the most important information, trying to sell you to potential employer. A North American CV, as used mostly for academic positions, will contain a substantial amount of information about everything that you have done, and all educations you have, and typically consist of several pages. Instead of a Resume which is the major accomplishments you have done the CV will have all the relevant and mandatory achievements and credentials. In EU/UK, CVs can be very short or extremely long, depending on what you want to achieve and what you want to share. It is mostly depending on what position you are applying for.
It is rather confusing what to do
It can be confusing what to do, but instead of just trying to do the right thing, consider sending an email to the employer and simply ask for what level of details they are asking for and offer them further details on request. The only thing that can happen is that they will remember your name and this might give you an opportunity to be seen as professional because you asked what they were looking for – an interview opportunity might not be as far away as it was if you had not asked or if you had made the wrong assumptions and had send your CV/Resume in the wrong format / level of detail. You should also be aware of the fact that the cover letter or the application will be seen as you trying to get the employer to read your CV/Resume to see if your competences are the right ones for the position.
Reference guide to the major differences between a CV and a Resume
North America
CV or Curriculum Vitae
- Typically 6-15 pages (can be even bigger)
- Usually used within academic or science
- Complete listing of all achievement and experience
- All elements are thoroughly described
- Must be read thoroughly and not easy to get a simple overview
- Typically 1-2 pages (max. 3 pages)
- Usually used within business (administration)
- Summary of accomplishments, credentials and achievements
- Highlighting the important elements
- Easy to get an overview
CV or Curriculum Vitae
- Can range from a simple 1-2 pages to as long as necessary
- Can be used in any area of business
- Depending on what job you are applying for it can be detailed or simple
- Not used in Europe
Main objective
The main objective of a CV or Resume is to give the employer all necessary information for him to create an overview of the person applying for a job so that he can decide whom to choose for an interview. If ever in doubt, call the potential employer and ask them what they need then you already have a "toe" in the door.
Let Comoto help you do it the easy way
Remember that when using Comoto, you can always put all information about yourself and you work life in there and then just pick the most important for the position at hand. Easy and convenient create a specific CV / Resume for you. Have multiple CV / Resume ready for you to use in different application. You can even have them in different languages and different specifications. When using our CV Templates you can export to these and then make minor adjustments afterwards, taking the hassle out of making CV / Resumes.


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