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- On average, multi-channel marketing and selling increases revenue by 38%, 120%, and 190% with each additional channel
- Cupshe, a Shopify Plus merchant north of $50M, attributes 35% of their revenue directly or indirectly to social selling
- Since launching Shopping on Instagram, ORO LA has seen a 29.3% lift in MoM revenue directly attributable to Instagram
- Pura Vida Bracelets' social-meets-email-meets-referrals strategy increased sales from referral reps by 300% YoY and AOV 11%
The buzzwords are all around us. Cross-platform touchpoints. Multi-device optimization. Experiential ecommerce.
Every brand wants to capture its market in totality, to reach customers new and old through mediums onsite and off. Today if your company doesn't have a multi-channel marketing strategy … good luck keeping up.
And yet, defining and optimizing a multi-channel strategy is no easy task. If you're not prepared, wasted time, wasted capital, and uneven results can find you long before profit ever will.
The way forward is marked by five stages that culminate in a principle that's anything but new …
- Definition: What Is Multi-Channel Marketing?
- Identification: Where Does a Multi-Channel Start?
- Model: How to Track Multi-Channel Attribution?
- Unity: Who Should a Multi-Channel Strategy Serve?
- Value: Why Is Multi-Channel Not Enough?
1. Definition: What Is Multi-Channel Marketing?
Definition: multi-channel marketing is promoting and selling anywhere your customers buy. Beyond advertising, it brings commerce to various channels — namely, marketplaces, social media, messaging apps, and online communities — where your target market already spends their time.
A true multi-channel strategy does this natively in a way that honors …
- Consumer choice
- Purchase patterns
- Platform usage
Even for large online retailers, growth stalls when a website and direct-response advertising are your only means of reaching shoppers. You need a solid multi-channel and online-to-offline (O2O) strategy.
The best brands sell to their customers wherever they consume content, whether that is through buyable Pins, shoppable Instagram posts, a native Facebook store, or ecommerce marketplaces like Amazon, eBay, Houzz, etc.
When you create natural purchase paths on those channels, multi-channel marketing comes to life:
Although sometimes used interchangeably, omni-channel retailing goes beyond multi-channel by harmonizing those touchpoints with a single view of each customer, thereby delivering a tailored and interlocking experience:
In an omni-channel retail strategy, everything works together seamlessly:
- Abandoned carts lead to email coupon codes
- Retargeting ads remind prospects of those discounts
- Completed orders result in cross-sells and even financing options for other products
Whether a business chooses to sell through omni-channel vs multi-channel, the most successful companies don't just spread out and hope for the best.
Marc Weisinger — Director Merchant Revenue Acceleration at Shopify —described this pitfall in a recent webinar:
"We're doing Facebook marketing. We're doing Google marketing. We're doing customer relationship management marketing through Gmail. We're doing Pinterest advertising.
"When you think about all of those campaigns, there's going to be a lot of crossover in terms of how many different marketing channels the same consumers actually will interact with you on. Multi-channel, at its core, is understanding how those channels interact."
Simply listing your products all across the web, on every social network and marketplace, creates neither an omni-channel nor a multi-channel strategy.
Instead, companies must understand where their most-valuable audiences exist and how to harness that data for growth.
To do this demands establishing your offsite strategy upon onsite insight …
Are you selling everywhere your customers buy?
Keep reading to discover the stages of a true multi-channel strategy, but if you'd like an executive guide distilling everything, download The Enterprise Guide to Multi-Channel Ecommerce.
Inside, you'll get one-pagers detailing …
- Comprehensive data on the opportunities and threats
- Merchant spotlights for insights on top channels
- A checklist for selecting the right multi-channel platform
2. Identification: Where Does a Multi-Channel Start?
Even though multi-channel marketing lives offsite, it's foundations reside within. And this doesn't just mean within your website. The real driving force is far deeper.
Whether visitors are coming to your site through organic search, social media, or paid advertising – each channel tells a slightly different story. Unfortunately, few sites take advantage of that story by leveraging a psychological principle known as "consistency and commitment."
Rather than treat all visitors the same, you can start building your strategy around identifying customer intent via their traffic source. The best course is to serve up custom content so that a visitor's first impression aligns with where they came from.
For instance, if Pinterest is how they got to your page, you can queue up a scroll-delayed overlay with a message like:
It's a welcome and relevant personal touch that builds on the mirco-conversion the visitor has already taken — clicking on your link from Pinterest — and moves them toward the macro conversion of becoming a buyer.
But offering customized experiences based on channel source won't allow you to unmask the people your multi-channel strategy is designed to serve.
What will? Email.
Capturing a visitor's email address is the Holy Grail and organizing principle around which multi-channel marketing turns.
"Let's make sure that you are getting as little anonymous traffic on your site as possible," Weisinger drove home. "So, when you're looking at an attribution model, one of the main conversion goals you can possibly have is grabbing that email address. And once you have that, it opens up a whole world of testing and understanding someone's complete user journey across your website."
The way to do this is through triggered overlays built on a visitor's real-time behavior. Entry overlays have been an online staple for years, but that doesn't mean they need to be bland:
Alternatively, when an anonymous visitor moves their cursor to close a window, an exit-intent box ought to appear:
But rather than give those existing the same treatment as those entering, the incentive and urgency of an offer need to be turned up — especially if something has been added to cart:
However, exit and entry overlays are just the beginning.
A behavioral-based approach to capturing a visitors email address would also rely on overlays triggered by …
- Scroll depth or time on page
- Multiple page views of products or collections
- Out of stock items or sizes
- Returning visitors who have yet to identify themselves
- Contextual overlays based on product types
- Popular on-site search terms
- Interactive content: i.e., quizzes
- FAQ clicks, like size, customer reviews, and onsite chat
Of course, not all visitors will respond. That's why your on-site multi-channel strategy should also be augmented through:
(1) User-IDs
Within Google Analytics, user-ID enables near-comprehensive identification so that a visitor's browsing sessions on desktop, mobile, and elsewhere are logged under the same umbrella.
"If you're a retailer," says Peter Northrop Jr. — New Media and Content Marketing Manager at BounceX — "there's zero reason not to implement User-ID. Zero. Absolutely none. There are no privacy issues, and you could use that information to essentially do a lot of amazing things from a measurement, and then the testing, perspective."
(2) UTMs
UTM parameters are a staple of smart ecommerce: tags added to URLs so that, when a link is clicked offsite, a trackable note is sent to your Google Analytics dashboard.
"We add this tracking on all our links so when someone actually comes to our site, we know what drove them there," explained Weisinger. "This was the campaign that they came from, so if that was a branded search campaign and they know our name beforehand, that tells us a lot of information about someone."
Only by identifying visitors are you then able to enter the next stage …
3. Model: How to Track Multi-Channel Attribution?
With the right multi-channel identification in place comes a wealth of customer data, and it's up to the merchant to know what to do with it.
Take the recently launched Amazon Go. No cashiers. No checkouts. No lines. You just walk in, pick out what you want, and everything else takes place via your smartphone:
It's about as close to a genuinely omni-channel experience as you can get. Luckily, the multi-channel backbone of Amazon Go isn't beyond the reach of other retailers.
"They know your email, they know who you are, so how does Amazon then use that data to change what you actually see on Amazon.com?" Weisinger asked. "By getting an input and changing an output. It's about finding the right experimental model that works."
For most multi-channel strategies, the website will be the hub that channels unify around. Channel unity hinges on proper branding, focused and dedicated messaging that broadcasts consistency across all your sales channels, yet that is not a company's only hope to ensure cohesion across all its sales platforms.
To make channels work together, technology is your friend.
Multi-channel ecommerce software can be used to organize and manage channels all through one dashboard, where you can edit listings, change item descriptions, and — above all — measure bottom-line effectiveness.
On Shopify Plus, this can be done through the Sales by channel report or Sales by traffic referrer (including custom coupon codes to track specific campaigns):
In Google Analytics, we've written extensively about various attribution models and how to demystify your multi-channel traffic and sales:
Our own Data Analysis Course contains custom Google Data Studio dashboards and detailed instructions on how to track and optimize conversion metrics throughout your online funnel:
In addition, Shopify apps — like Sellbrite — can also be used to track the big and small picture alike:
With each, if your inputs aren't optimized, the output won't lie. You'll know exactly which channels need improvement and which to invest your resources for maximum ROI.
Once tracking is in place, the next question becomes …
4. Unity: Who Should a Multi-Channel Strategy Serve?
A multi-channel strategy may span far and wide, but it must be brought home under one, simple ethos: convenience.
That means streamlined checkouts could not be more important. More ways to pay. Fewer fields to fill out. Less friction, greater conversion.
"It's going to be the convenience revolution," said Weisinger. "That's going to be the thing that makes brands win the most. So, checkout has to be as quick as possible, mobile checkout has to have as few forms as possible, and as many different payment options as possible."
To ensure no wasted movement or repeated communication, the smartest companies will be able to segment their customers based on their previous interaction with a product.
Identify who is getting your ads first, then deploy content-specific messaging so your retargeting efforts do not go in vain. On Facebook, for instance, you might create separate ads or campaigns to retarget:
- Recent visitors to product or category pages (0-7 days)
- Non-recent visitors to product or category pages (8-30 days)
- First-time customers to recommended products
- Recurring customers to new releases
- Long-term customers to loyalty programs
Convenience for a customer means making your product the right product for them to buy in that moment. Each buying journey may not be the same, but — for your customers — it should feel like an intuitive process every time.
5. Value: Why Is Multi-Channel Not Enough?
In principle, a multi-channel strategy makes sense. It plays to new buying behaviors, it honors customer choice, and it leads to deeper, more profitable relationships.
In practice, it can a big task: a tall, wide-reaching order the likes of which may forecast how your business fares in a hyper-competitive ecommerce space.
But we end here with a reminder that no company survives without one thing, what every business must remember at its heart.
When your core is right – that means branding, messaging, product, and customer fit – expanding outward will have a solid foundation to build upon. An "anywhere" experience should only be created when your product and enterprise ecommerce platform ready.
"Have a good product," said Weisinger. "Provide value for people."
Want an executive summary of multi-channel ecommerce?
That's exactly why we created The Enterprise Guide to Multi-Channel Ecommerce.
Inside, you'll get one-pagers detailing …
- Comprehensive data on the opportunities and threats
- Merchant spotlights for insights on top channels
- A checklist for selecting the right multi-channel platform
Read More
- 14 Video Ads That Blew Our Minds In 2015
- Back-to-School Marketing: Ideas, Stats & How to Automate the "Other" Black Friday
- Multi-Channel Management: Delighting Customers and Increasing Profits
- Reimagining Racial Equity in the Fashion Industry
- 7 Conversion Rate Optimization Experts Answer the Questions You Were Too Afraid to Ask
- B2B vs B2C Ecommerce: What's The Difference?
- Conversion Rate Optimization: What Everyone Gets Wrong and How to Do It Right


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This is a new site, with many pages imported from a site hosted by the University of Stirling. That site still exists, and is now exclusively about the Critical Religion Research Group (CRRG) based at Stirling. So why this new site?
We have been pleasantly surprised, overwhelmed even, by the success of the CRRG site, which has attracted many thousands of visitors (the university even had to give us reserved server-space to accommodate the numbers!). The blog that we produced on the CRRG site was the primary attraction in this regard, and our readership has grown consistently and sometimes in unexpected ways since we started that site with a posting on 31.1.11 by Andrew Hass, asking the ever pertinent question, What is a University for? On the back of that and a subsequent posting on a related theme, he was interviewed for a BBC programme broadcast earlier this year. This is but one example of the numerous ways in which our site has reached people in many different settings.
This extensive readership has emerged in part through our good connection to Ekklesia, Britain's leading think-tank on religion, and we are very grateful to them. In particular, we want to record our thanks to Simon Barrow, one of the co-directors, for continual support, encouragement, and reposting of blog entries. Whilst we have generated many thousands of hits on our website, Ekklesia's reposting of our blogs has ensured a readership well into six figures. Ekklesia has also been involved in a public lecture we organised in London, held by Prof. Naomi Goldenberg (as an aside, we are very glad that she is joining this new project). We are delighted that Ekklesia are happy to continue their engagement with the new CRA, and we look forward to ongoing collaboration with them.
As the CRRG site became more well-known, we also began to receive requests from other scholars seeking to be involved. We – the Stirling staff running the CRRG site – discussed this at length this summer, and decided that the best way for the site to include scholars working in Critical Religion elsewhere would be to create an entirely new website. This would not be based so explicitly at Stirling, though its roots would be there. Instead, the new website would enable scholars from around the world to become more easily involved, make connections, and foster intellectual exchange. This, the Critical Religion Association website, is the result of that decision.
All the blog postings from the old site are being imported here (at the time of writing, a small number still need to be republished, but that will happen very soon). Our first new blog posting is by Stirling's Timothy Fitzgerald, and addresses the issue of the breadth of Critical Religion. The following week, we will be posting a fascinating piece on Lebanon by Alex Henley, a PhD student at the University of Manchester, currently based at Harvard University's Centre for Middle Eastern Studies. We see these two blog postings as an important symbol of the new site: Critical Religion is not only a way of approaching topics that long-established scholars are picking up on, but it is also something that some of the most promising emerging scholars in critical thought are engaging with, and indeed, perhaps some of the most exciting ways of thinking about Critical Religion are to be found with newer scholars.
It is our hope that the new site will enable this kind of range of scholarship to reach a much broader audience. Whilst staff based at Stirling will continue to write blog entries, we will be featuring contributions from many other scholars based in other institutions and countries around the world. We expect the Scholars page – today dominated by those at Stirling involved in this project – to gradually grow and include many other people, all of whom will be writing for the blog. Critical Religion, as Tim Fitzgerald says in his blog posting today, is not just about 'religion', but about interrogating many other assumptions about modes of thought, and in that context, we look forward to wide-ranging discussions and engagement. On this note: we welcome enquiries from scholars seeking to join us: please take a moment to look at the Organisation page for details. We also intend the engagement with these topics to happen in new ways as well (for example, we are now on Facebook), and details of further plans we have will be forthcoming (these include development of audio and video content, more formal publications, and much more). We also welcome suggestions for additional things we might pursue.
We want to thank you, our readers, for stimulating our thinking in these areas for nearly two years now. As the new site has been worked on over recent months, blog postings have become infrequent, but we look forward to picking up on that again now. This is a new and exciting stage in our exploration of Critical Religion and we are grateful that you are with us, engaging with our work, challenging established thinking, and enriching everyone's understanding.
Tim Fitzgerald, Andrew Hass, Alison Jasper, Michael Marten
On a practical note:
Whilst we have tried to update the links on all the main pages, the blog postings will take time to update. Please tell us as soon as you can about any broken links. In general, if a link in a blog posting is to another page/blog entry on this site, you can edit the link by replacing http://www.criticalreligion.stir.ac.uk with criticalreligion.org – in many cases this should work.

subset: commoncrawl


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Operating alongside electronics brands like Cambridge Audio, Mordaunt-Short has been an integral part of Audio Partnership for a number of years. Audio Partnership was one of the first hi-fi companies to appreciate the advantages of combining UK design talent with low Chinese manufacturing costs, accumulating a reassuring amount of experience working alongside its Chinese partners.
There's always a sense of deja vu when a new Mordaunt-Short Avant speaker arrives. We've reviewed a number of examples since the 900-series was first introduced around the Millennium, and all look as though they could have hatched from the same pod.
The original 900 evolved into the Avant 900, and is now the Avant 900i. The overwhelming majority are based on 135mm main drivers, but more recently a larger 165mm driver has started to appear, initially in the 914, and now in this 914i, and its larger 916i brother. All models share very similar and attractively sharp styling on the outside, and the core ingredients inside have also undergone steady refinement.
In terms of pricing, this £300 per pair Avant 914i sits halfway between the two-way 904i and the two-and-a-half-way 906i. Like the 904i, it's a simple two-way design, but has a larger main driver and enclosure. Available in either black, calvados or maple woodprint, part of the enclosure is blanked off near the base, allowing mass loading/damping material to be added.
An aluminium 'skin' covers the upper front section, matching the alloy drive unit diaphragms. The main driver has a 120mm diameter dish-shaped diaphragm, described as a Continuous Profile Cone (CPC), which is reinforced by small radial ribs just in from the edge. The tweeter has a mesh-protected 25mm metal dome. Signal is applied to stylish twin terminal pairs, and moulded 'outrigger' feet improve mechanical stability.
We couldn't match Mordaunt-Short's claim for 90dB sensitivity here - 88dB looks closer to the mark using our far-field in-room averaged technique. However, that's still a respectable enough figure in view of the ingredients, relatively easy load, and good bass extension.
The overall frequency balance isn't all that smooth, but remains pretty well ordered overall. Output is a little lean through the upper bass and lower mid; dips are visible around 600Hz and 5kHz; and the treble looks a little exposed. The impedance traces reveal a modest pair-matching discrepancy at low frequencies.
The ports are tuned to 40/43Hz, and the load stays above six ohms across the band, albeit dipping to around four ohms at around 12kHz. Under in-room conditions, the bass shows decent extension down to around 25Hz.
The 914i is a thoroughly competent design that disguises its inevitable limitations pretty well. Box colorations are notably well controlled, and if dynamic expression is hardly dramatic, it does seem to offer a significant improvement over the Avant models using the smaller 135mm drivers.
Imaging is very good in terms of lateral positioning, though the modest degree of transparency somewhat inhibits depth perception and precision. Midband colorations seem pretty well controlled, but because consonants are slightly weak, speech does sound a little 'shut in', and intelligibility is slightly affected in consequence.
The midband is where these speakers shine brightest, as the performance tails off somewhat towards the top and bottom ends of the audio band. The top end is not particularly sweet, and it's also a little too exposed, so it does draw rather too much attention to itself.
Systems with an inherently bright balance will not make an ideal match. The bottom end isn't too strong, but it does sound a trifle detached, perhaps because some lack of warmth and punch in the upper bass and lower midband.


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Book News: 'Rabbit-Proof Fence' Author Doris Pilkington Garimara Dies
The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.
• Doris Pilkington Garimara, the aboriginal author who wrote of the forced separation of mixed-race aboriginal children from their families, died on April 10. She was thought to be 76. Garimara's novel Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence was based on the story of her mother, one of the so-called Stolen Generation, who was taken from her family and placed in a government settlement. She escaped with two other girls and walked more than 1,000 miles through the Australian wilderness. Garimara, too, was a member of the Stolen Generation and grew up in a mission believing she had been abandoned by her mother. "[W]hile we were in the mission, again, we were continually told, you know, that the Aboriginal culture was evil ... [a]nd the people who practiced it were pagans and devil worshippers," she said in a 2003 interview. Reunited years later, Garimara's mother told her the story of her escape, which became a novel and then a celebrated film.
• Michele Glazer has a poem titled "Issue" in the Boston Review:
We have arrived at what we dread: the
diminution of loved ones, livid
and unmistakable lapses, quick
angers that lap at, lick at
dread: dread
that is the one certain shore.
The Best Books Coming Out This Week:
• Lisa Robinson began reporting at a time when rock journalism "was in its infancy and mostly populated by boys who had ambitions to become the next Norman Mailer," she writes in her pleasantly gossipy memoir, There Goes Gravity: A Life in Rock and Roll. Her memories of some of music's biggest legends, from Mick Jagger to Michael Jackson to Lady Gaga (whom she describes as "a cute girl in her twenties who had really good manners"), animate this book, though Robinson sometimes gets a little too misty with nostalgia.
• Francine Prose's Lovers At the Chameleon Club, 1932 follows Lou Villars, a French lesbian racecar driver who spied for the Nazis. Told by competing narrators, the book is more a story about the unreliability of memory and storytelling than a tale about Lou. The book is flawed, mostly because of its habit of assigning ever-more elaborate identities (lesbian Nazi racecar driver, wealthy baroness who worked for the Resistance) to its characters rather than developing them as people. But it also makes a persuasive point about the ways that the authors of history have their own agendas.
Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.


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Kids, this it what hipsters looked like in 1985
Personal Effects
"Bring Out the Jazz"
1985, Earring Records
When I found this I honestly thought it was going to be a recording of a high school jazz band. I have to admit being a bit disappointed to find out Personal Effects is actually a nerdy synth-pop group from Rochester, NY. Not sure what look they were going for on this cover. The mid-80′s were a weird, confused time…
In a band called Margaret Explosion


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ARMONK, N.Y. -- IBM is looking to add more parking at its Armonk headquarters.
IBM recently met with the North Castle Planning Board to obtain site plan approval to add 442 additional parking spaces, which would increase the number of parking spaces from 1,223 to 1,665.
According to IBM's proposal, 412 parking spaces will be located on the south side of the building and 30 spaces will be provided at the building entry roadway. The additional parking spots are necessary following the closure of the Somers campus, IBM said.
To view the proposal, click here.
Click here to follow Daily Voice Armonk and receive free news updates.


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Inspectors look for peanut butter product
ST. PAUL - Food inspectors are fanning out across Minnesota this week to make sure potentially tainted peanut butter products no longer are for sale.
ST. PAUL - Food inspectors are fanning out across Minnesota this week to make sure potentially tainted peanut butter products no longer are for sale.
The list of products that could be infected with possibly deadly salmonella bacteria tops 800, leading to what some say is the biggest recall in the country's history.
"They are looking for any of those 800 products ... making sure all of those identified products are removed from sale," Ben Miller of the Minnesota Agriculture Department said Monday about the inspectors.
They will visit places such as grocery and convenience stores.
The peanut butter problem did not begin in Minnesota, but three of the country's eight deaths believed related to the contaminated Georgia-produced peanut butter were in Minnesota. Thirty-six Minnesotans were reportedly sickened in the outbreak, among the most in the country.
At a Minnesota House agriculture committee hearing Monday, state agriculture and health department officials passed around the remainder of a five-pound tub of peanut butter - sealed in plastic - that allowed them to solve the nationwide outbreak.
The tub came from a Brainerd nursing home, where a Perham woman's death is blamed on salmonella in the peanut butter. Relatives of Shirley Mae Almer sued the peanut butter maker over her death.
"That is, in fact, the smoking tub," Leeann Johnson of the Agriculture Department told lawmakers.
Minnesota health and agriculture department employees put together the pieces of the salmonella puzzle that allowed national health officials to slow the outbreak.
"The more we looked at it, the more the peanut butter began to stand out," Miller said.
"Once we had identified peanut butter as probably the suspect vehicle, we began to look back," Miller added.
That is when it was discovered the Georgia-made King Nut peanut butter was distributed by Sysco of Fargo, N.D., to institutions such as schools, nursing homes and hospitals in northwestern Minnesota.
National health officials say brand-name peanut butter on store shelves is safe, but products ranging from crackers to ice cream that contain peanut butter should be avoided.
Dr. Kirk Smith of the Health Department said his agency is receiving more calls than normal from people with diarrhea, a salmonella poisoning symptom. Most are not connected to the peanut butter problem, he said.
The outbreak began in October and peaked in December.
Nationwide, more than 500 people in 43 states have been affected, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports. Minnesota's 36 illnesses and three deaths centered on the northern part of the state.
Rep. Dean Urdahl, R-Grove City, wanted to know what was being done to prevent Minnesota-made products from problems like the Georgia peanut butter. Miller said the state's most senior inspectors check food-manufacturing plants.
However, Rep. Tim Faust, DFL-Mora, complained that the state does not require samples of each batch of a food product to be preserved for later testing if needed. Rep. Steve Drazkowski, R-Wabasha, added that very few problems have been reported with Minnesota food products.
Still, Rep. Rod Hamilton, R-Mountain Lake, said that anything government can do to increase consumer confidence would be food for agriculture.
While legislators heard about Minnesota's part in solving the mystery, U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar was praising Minnesotans' work.
The Minnesota Democrat did that in a letter she sent to President Barack Obama, who on Monday called for an investigation into the Food and Drug Administration's handling of the outbreak.
"I think that the FDA has not been able to catch some of these things as quickly as I expect them to," Obama told NBC News.
On the Internet:


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The worst raaaaacism charge against
Romney evah?
by Jazz Shaw at HotAir:
Our story begins with the author speaking to two middle class, working guys. I should point out… white guys since Ron takes such pains to do so. And one of them is a childhood friend of his. They are discussing the question of "middle-class blacks and Hispanics are far more optimistic about their children's future than are whites of the same economic status.
"What do you think the unemployment rate is among blacks? In Detroit, it's probably 40 percent. If the unemployment rate is that high, why is it that they are so optimistic about their future and the future of their children?"
Benson paused, heard no reply, and answered his own question.
There it is. The Macomb County buzz word for welfare, a synonym that rests on the tongues of the white middle class like sour milk.
And even though Ron takes pains to point out that these men "don't use the N-word" and are not "filled with hate," he decides to translate their words for them. (Including his friend.)
"It's a generational apathy," Miller said, "and they keep getting more and more (apathetic) because they don't have to work. If they sleep all day and free money …"
" … Comes in the mail," Benson said.
"… not in the mail anymore," Miller said, "It's in a magic card they can swipe."
They poked at their egg yolks until Miller broke the silence. "I feel like a fool for not jumping on that shit and getting some (welfare) myself," Miller said. "But I couldn't sleep at night."
I share this story to crack the code – the subtle language of distrust and prejudice that whites use to communicate deep-set fears, and that cynical politicians translate into votes. Translating Miller and Benson:
"Subsidization" = Welfare
"Generational Apathy" = Lazy
"They Slept All Day" = Blacks Sleep All Day
"I Feel Like a Fool" = I'm Mad As Hell
So Ron has decided to take these friends who he defines as people who don't engage in hate speech and redefine their answers to his questions to make them racists. Why? Because he wants to talk about Mitt Romney's opposition to the recent changes proposed to welfare rules by President Obama. Fournier dismisses the idea that "work is being removed from welfare" even though it flies in the face of the entirely vague, open door nature of the order. So since we're not going to bother actually reading the rule and seeing what sort of "options" might be enacted by the states in such an open door situation, Ron finds another reason for Obama penning it.
Kaufman who I've known and respected for years, accused me of playing the race card — a fair point, strictly speaking, because I raised the question in a public setting: a joint interview with CBS' John Dickerson before a large audience and live-streamed.
Still, Romney and his advisers stand by an ad they know is wrong — or, at the very least, they are carelessly ignoring the facts. That ad is exploiting the worst instincts of white voters — as predicted and substantiated by the Republican Party's own polling.
That leaves one inescapable conclusion: The Romney campaign is either recklessly ignorant of the facts, some of which they possess — or it is lying about why (and how) it is playing the race card.
In one overly wordy swipe, Ron throws his own friend under the bus for the sake of claiming that an advertisement on this subject by Romney doesn't prove that Mitt is a racist. Oh no! He charges that working class white people across the country are racists, and Mitt is the disingenuous scam artist seeking to capitalize on their hatred for electoral advantage.
This, my friends, is what derangement and desperation look like.
Filed under: Barack Obama, Economics and Finance, Marxism, Mitt Romney |


text: Marnie Stern travels with a companion that helps her cope with life on the road. It's her Maltese-Yorkshire terrier mix dog, named Figgy. "She's very perfect," Stern says. "We need her." Stern, the New York-based guitarist/singer, says her dog provides love and affection during long stretches of touring, providing a calming influence for Stern and her tour mates. Taking Figgy on walks in new cities also gives Stern a chance to explore and break free from the process of loading in and out of gigs. "It takes us out of the touring element," Stern says. "We're used to touring with her." Pictures of Figgy figure prominently on Stern's blog, where she also puts random musings, videos and pictures. The tongue-in-cheek website is Vajamming.blogspot.com. Most of the content reflects the band's life on the road. "It's just what our lives are like," Stern says. Currently, Stern is out on the road supporting her third record, a self-titled effort released in October 2010 by Kill Rock Stars. During a Friday afternoon phone conversation with The Reader , Stern talked in middle of her tour during a one-night stay at her home in New York. "It stinks coming home in the middle (of a tour) because you want to stay," she says. The self-titled record is once again Stern and drummer Zach Hill of Hella, who does not tour with Stern. Stern had been working on the material for the record for quite some time, doing more recording layers than she had ever done before. Things were much more fleshed out this time around, she says. "It was a bit more personal for me," Stern says. Stern records all the guitar parts by herself, then sends them to Hill to drum on. Once the tracks are sent off, the two will decide which ones they like the best. Then she will work with him on vocals and overdubs in the studio. The separated process has also been how Stern works, since she was first asked by her label about which drummer she would want to work with. "I always have written on ProTools and tried to put things together," Stern says. "I've gotten a little bit better at arrangements." At the start of working with Hill, Stern says there was a bit of apprehension about the tracks she would send him, but that's not the case anymore. Now she just sends everything, including things that Stern thinks are weird and things that she doesn't think are very good. Through her three records and live performances, Stern has also developed a reputation for her intricate guitar playing. She's only been serious about playing since her early 20s, she says. She was quickly drawn to bands like Hella, Don Caballero and the Flying Luttenbachers and how they used noise elements with a sense of controlled chaos. Stern says she would spend thousands of hours, trying to incorporate those stylistic choices into her own playing by recording tons of material onto four track and later on, onto ProTools. Despite the hours spent in the lab working on guitar, Stern says she's not a guitar obsessive. "I don't really have any personal relationship with the guitar," she says. Those hours set up the latest record to take the next step, as this time around Stern didn't focus as much on the guitar work first then finding a vocal melody to pair with it second. While she's always sought out guitar parts with the goal of putting it into a song. She was ready to evolve beyond that. This time it was geared toward writing complete songs. The shift in approach presented some frustration and difficulty, but ultimately Stern says she was excited to sit at her desk and try to come up with stuff. "When the songs finally came together, it was really rewarding," Stern says. Marnie Stern w/ Tera Melos and Thunder Power play the Slowdown, 729 N. 14th St., Friday, March 11 at 9 p.m. Tickets are $8. For more information, visit onepercentproductions.com.


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There was a time I thought this was more of Canadian thing, but apparently it happens in various types of churches: Big and small, urban and rural, independent and denominational, established and recently planted. We call it 'Summer Shutdown.' Simply put it means that many of the programs of the church start shutting down at the end of April and don't resume again until after Labor Day (that's the week after the August Bank Holiday for you Brits.)
The logic in shutting down various children's programs has to do with competition from evening sports programs, particularly kids baseball and soccer (that's football for you Brits.)
The logic in shutting down the Thursday morning ladies prayer time totally escapes me (that's 'totally escapes me' for you Brits.)
This phenomenon seems to be more pronounced in North America, but here in Ontario it is coupled with something called 'the cottage mentality.' Perhaps where you live the term cabin is more prevalent than cottage. Or the lake house. It means that if it is the weekend in June, July, or August; one is officially at their summer cottage, even if they don't actually own one. This means that the summer shutdown becomes evident even in the Sunday morning programming of the churches here.
To me, this just leaves a lot of people detached from other people; it leaves them with feelings of isolation and loneliness; it leaves them with more inactivity; and it leaves them increasingly disconnected from their local church. As I wrote recently,
Imagine the greatest institution the world has ever seen suddenly shutting shop. Imagine a movement so powerful that nothing can stop it dispersing its followers for an extended holiday. Imagine the Church of Jesus Christ simply not being there for the hungry, the thirsty, the needy.
It waves the white flag of surrender to the calendar, the school year, football games, and the arrival of hot and humid weather. It gives up because so-called "key leadership" decided to spend weekends at the lake. It broadcasts the message that summer ministry simply isn't worth the bother. It says, "There's a big game being televised so probably nobody is going to show up anyway."
I remember one woman returning to church in September after an absence of at least 90 days, announcing to all nearby that she was back and ready to help "whip this place back into shape." That did not go over well among those who had been faithful throughout the warmer months. She wanted to pick up the pieces and create a fresh start, when in fact the church had a colorful and vibrant ministry during the weeks she was at the cabin enjoying the sunshine, the barbecue and the swimming.
The loss of continuity here is gigantic. I have however noticed that among some megachurches the programs just become so overarching that it is impossible to curtail them in the summer months. This may actually be a major positive attribute for megachurches at a time when people are so quick to emphasize their negatives. But then these same megachurches will have a weekend where the simply shut down everything altogether. Everything. The doors are locked. For you mainline Protestants, think of it as the non-Sunday of Ordinary Time.
Can you imagine a Roman Catholic church not having the mass the week after Christmas? Or a long weekend? No. Neither can I. Where did this day-off-mentality come from anyway?
Two years ago I wrote on this subject with respect to a church which also shuts down the week after Christmas:
We live at a time when people are taking an extremely casual approach to church attendance. Families with children have already sacrificed weekly continuity on the altar of getting their kids into team sports: Soccer, baseball, three-pitch, t-ball, gymnastics, swim teams, etc. What hasn't been destroyed by athletics has been decimated by dads working weekend shifts or moms working retail Sunday openings.
These days, if you can get a family out to church 26 out of 52 Sundays, you're doing well.
So why chop that down to only 50 Sundays? Why create even the most subtle suggestion that taking time off church is perfectly acceptable?
We did attend a local church since moving to this small town where the Sunday School ministry didn't really miss a beat in the summer. I noted their dedication. It was like they believed in a God that doesn't take three months off each summer. Last year however, they succumbed to the influence of what other churches are doing.
So here's to those local churches who provide spiritual nurture at full throttle during the holiday months. Good on ya. People are hungry for more of God's word and teaching, and also opportunities for fellowship twelve months of the year. I'm willing to bet there are stories of spiritual starvation that take place when 'spiritual providers' take off. I'd like to start a crusade to fight on behalf of those who are simply not looking forward to the next few months of meetings suspended until the fall. Some of those are hurting and some are lonely.
The people making the decision to curtail programming or shut down a particular weekend are usually well-connected and have lots of social activity planned for the time they are away.
For many large churches, it's all or nothing. They can't do small church anymore. Think about it:
The modern megachurch simply cannot offer an alternative service in a smaller room in the church where Mrs. Trebleclef will play some well known choruses or hymns on the keyboard (or Mr. Coolhair on the guitar), the head of Men's Ministry will speak, and then we'll have a coffee time in the atrium. That would be a simple service. It would involve said pianist, the person giving the short devotional message, and the person to make the coffee, as well as someone to unlock the doors and check the restrooms before locking up. But that's not the brand these churches want to offer. You can't have a simple, grassroots service like that. Better to have locked doors.
So where do those KidMin, worship and parking volunteers come from on Christmas and holidays? They don't. You change up the brand image for the sake of one Sunday and using a skeleton staff, offer something for the people who really need to be connected. Maybe not Mrs. T. on the piano. Maybe it's a film. It might involve a guest speaker or guest musicians. Perhaps it's a shorter service.
Sadly however, this is not going to happen. 'It's not how we do things.'
Wanna buck the trend? Light a candle! Use the summer to invite people over to your home for informal events. Can't lead a Bible study? Just find a good teaching DVD and set up the machine in the living room; make some coffee and then let whatever is meant to happen next, simply happen. There are sermon DVDs from pastors you've heard of available as downloads online, you can purchase some from various ministry organizations, or you can buy them at Christian bookstores.
Can't lead a Bible study? Don't do anything fancy. Just pick a short Biblical book, invite people over; make the aforementioned coffee; and start in on chapter one. Don't even suggest getting together the following week for chapter two; let those who are present suggest that. (Some may offer their home for the following week, especially if you don't have air-conditioning!)
Counter the summer shutdown mentality with impromptu, informal events in your home this summer. And no, you don't need your pastor's permission; in fact, make it a non-church event by inviting some people from a different church. Or if the DVD has good outreach potential, invite some non-churched neighbors.
If you feel like you've read this before here, you have. This is a recurring, annual Thinking Out Loud rant. But this time around the rant you're reading is a mash-up of four previous articles with additional content.


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We Own The Night Movie Review
The crime thriller We Own The Night was released here three months late so we already know that it was a moderate success in the USA. In India it wouldn't be expected to do brisk business being of the genre that it is.
The movie is a serious one. A story that we in Bollywood are all too familiar with…brother vs brother. One a cop, the other the bad guy. Well, not really. Bobby (Joaquin Phoenix) isn't really the bad guy. He's just leading a slightly wayward life. As the manager of a successful nightclub with a dubious clientele, he mixes his drinks with drugs, doesn't have a home life…instead he spends time with his sexy girlfriend (Eva Mendes). The cop brother (Mark Wahlberg) heads a drug busting crime unit in the New York police.
Th trouble starts when the police identify this club as the hub of drugs. So there's the clash between the brothers. Bobby objects even though he is not into drug dealing himself. What adds fuel to the fire is the presence of the dad (Robert Duvall) who is the deputy chief of the new York police. Both dad and brother put pressure on Bobby, try to make him feel guilty about his ways, but Bobby is unwilling to give up his fancy lifestyle. Lots of emotional tug of war here, between the two brothers and between father and son but the director, James Gray does it in Hollywood style. Despite the strong emotional undercurrents, the slick editing leaves you no time to think or to cry.
Joaquin Phoenix is the hero and steals the show. Mark Wahlberg has a lesser role. A tad disappointing as I was expecting some action from Wahlberg.
The problem with this movie is that it's all too predictable. Half an hour into the movie I was sure what the end would be or even how it was going to play out. Everything played out as expected and the lack of suspense killed the movie for me. I've seen too many clichéd Bollywood movies to enjoy this type of movie. Good thing it's short, about 2 hours.
The movie can seem a bit slow to those who are looking for all out action but there is action too, lots of it. Mostly in the second half. The shoot-out scene at the end and the car chase are nicely handled.
Gray has managed to capture the atmosphere of the eighties well enough. And the editing was very good…but I didn't think this movie was all that great, certainly not deserving of the three and a half stars that so many reviewers in India gave it. I was surprised that reviewers here gave this movie more stars than American Gangster because the latter is a better movie. And the acting in AG is better. The characters more convincing.
Sure, here it's all good, but good in an average sort of way. A decent enough story, good dialogues, and good acting from all. The scenes are shot in a very realistic way and the movie moves fairly fast. But the movie was a trifle too dark for my liking and after watching it for an hour or so, I felt like walking out for a breather. The scenes seem repetitive. Overall, an average thriller, certainly not boring, but for me at least the entertainment quotient was missing.
(Photograph from the bbc)
ulag permalinkFebruary 6, 2008 8:32 am
I havent seen the movie yet but i can well imagine Mark Wahlberg as the tough talking police officer after his swear-a-minute role in The Departed. I think hes a very talented actor but hes being typecast in the same role after his success in The Departed. All of his roles have been cops and deadpan secret agents. His next big role is that of a renegade cop again in the movie version of the popular PC game "Max Payne". Wish someone would probe into his talents further with meatier roles.


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FDA News
Consumer Inquiries: 888-INFO-FDA
Glycerin contaminated with diethylene glycol (DEG) remains a potential health hazard to consumers
May 7, 2007 — /FDA News/ — The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is warning pharmaceutical manufacturers, suppliers, drug repackers, and health professionals who compound medications to be especially vigilant in assuring that glycerin, a sweetener commonly used worldwide in liquid over-the-counter and prescription drug products, is not contaminated with diethylene glycol (DEG). DEG is a known poison used in antifreeze and as a solvent. Today, the agency is issuing guidance to industry recommending methods of testing glycerin and other controls to identify any contamination with DEG before use in the manufacture or preparation of pharmaceutical products.
At the present time, FDA has no reason to believe that the U.S. supply of glycerin is contaminated with DEG, though the agency is cognizant of reports from other countries over the past several years in which DEG-contaminated glycerin has caused human deaths. FDA is emphasizing the importance of testing glycerin for DEG due to the serious nature of this potentially fatal problem in combination with the global nature of the pharmaceutical supply chain and problems that continue to occur with this kind of contamination in some parts of the global supply of glycerin.
DEG poisoning is an important public safety issue and FDA is exploring how supplies of glycerin become contaminated. In addition, FDA is working with a variety of manufacturing and pharmacist organizations to raise awareness of this risk and to put into place controls to ensure that this problem does not happen in the U.S. or elsewhere.
The most recent incident occurred in Panama in September 2006 and involved DEG-contaminated glycerin used in cough syrup, which resulted in dozens of hospitalizations for serious injury and more than 40 deaths. In late 1995 and early 1996, at least 80 children died in Haiti due to DEG-contaminated glycerin in acetaminophen syrup. Between 1990 and 1998, similar incidents of DEG poisoning reportedly occurred in Argentina, Bangladesh, India, and Nigeria and resulted in hundreds of deaths. In 1937, more than 100 people died in the United States after ingesting DEG-contaminated Elixir Sulfanilamide, a drug used to treat infections. This incident led to the enactment of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, which is the nation's primary statute on the regulation of drugs.
FDA reminds pharmaceutical manufacturers, compounders, repackers, and suppliers, as well as brokers and distributors, that all pharmaceutical manufacturing operations, including the re-packaging and re-labeling of ingredients like glycerin, must conform to current good manufacturing practice (CGMP). The guidance provides recommendations for complying with CGMP and is intended to help manufacturers, compounders, repackers, and suppliers avoid the use of glycerin that is contaminated with DEG and prevent incidents of DEG poisoning. For a copy of the guidance, go to http://www.fda.gov/cder/guidance/7654fnl.htm.


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Linden Rose Miniatures
Sunday, January 31, 2016
Posted by Frederica at 6:22 PM 14 comments:
Saturday, October 3, 2015
Linden Rose Brocante , new shop , new knitwear!
|Peak through door into courtyard, on side of shop !
|A little bit of Christmas already!
|Front of shop!
|Shop will have an upstairs room!
|beautiful newly knitted blanket in gorgeous pink , fabric on little couch is Tilda Sweetheart range!
|Gorgeous blanket knitted in 2 colors blue, with little fringe !
Posted by Frederica at 10:56 PM 14 comments:
Saturday, July 11, 2015
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Obviously, I"ve had a lot of luck finding obituaries about the Wulff family. This time, I came across my great-great grandmother's, Carolina Sophia Wulff, from the Freeport Journal-Standard, Sept 30, 1949, page 16.
The portrait of Lena is a scan of a copy. I do not have the original, have never seen the original, and do not remember how I received this image. Probably through an ancestry.com contact. I'm not sure what's going on with the photo. It sort of looks like the paper is curling.
Transcription of obituary:
Mrs. Lena Bohnsack
Elizabeth, Ill., Sept. 30. — Mrs. Lena Bohnsack, 81, widow of the late Herman Bohnsack, died about 7:10 o'clock Thursday night at her home at Schapville.
Mrs. Bohnsack, formerly Miss Lena Wulff, was born in Mecklenburg, Germany, Nov. 15, 1867, the daughter of Henry and Marie Wulff. She came to the United States when she was 16 years of age. On Jan. 13, 1891 she was united in marriage to Herman Bohnsack, who died several years ago.
She leaves two daughters, Mrs. Mary Brandt, of near Elizabeth, Mrs. Alvin Hammer, of Galena, one son, Leo Bohnsack, of Galena, one brother, Henry Wulff, of Apple River, one sister, Miss Anna Wulff, of Galena, 13 grandchildren and 13 great-grandchildren.
Mrs. Bohnsack has been a member of the Zion Lutheran church at Schapville since the church was founded.
Funeral services will be held at 1:30 o'clock Sunday afternoon at the home and at 3 o'clock at the Zion Lutheran church at Schapville. Rev. Randolph P. Hahn will officiate and burial will be made in the adjoining cemetery.
Friends may call at the home Saturday afternoon.


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USS Topeka conducts plaque hanging ceremony at shipyard
KITTERY, Maine — Portsmouth Naval Shipyard hosted a plaque hanging ceremony Wednesday for USS Topeka (SSN 754) recognizing the official start of Topeka's engineered overhaul in Kittery.
In this time-honored tradition, the ship's Commanding Officer Cmdr. James Belz joined Shipyard Commander Capt. Bryant Fuller, Topeka Project Superintendent Pete Hall, and Kittery Town Manager Robert Markel in hanging the ship's plaque in the shipyard's historic Tirante Tavern.
"Today's ceremony is just one indication of the outstanding welcome and incredible support the ship has received from the project team and from the community," said Belz. "We are off to a good start in the overhaul."
Numerous local representatives from the ship's host community of Kittery were on hand to welcome the Topeka crew.
The shipyard's host community program partners a local Seacoast community with a submarine for the duration of the time the ship is at the shipyard. The residents welcome the officers, crew, and families of the ship and include them as part of their community.
The submarine crew enjoys the area's hospitality and in return, the locals get the opportunity to learn about the Navy's submarine force while introducing the sailors and their families to the many treasures found in New England.
"We look forward to a mutually fulfilling relationship with the town of Kittery," said Belz.
Topeka and its crew of 15 officers and 161 enlisted sailors arrived at Portsmouth Naval Shipyard Dec. 16. While at the shipyard, Topeka is undergoing a major availability consisting of various maintenance projects and system upgrades.


text:
Click for
larger image
SWR Analyzer
SWR Analyzer
Download Manual
Read Complex Impedance as series resistance and reactance (R+jX)
or as magnitude (Z) and phase (degrees). You can determine
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and baluns. Measure distance in feet to a short or open in
faulty coax. Measure length of a roll of coax, coax loss,
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the MFJ-259B is a complete ham radio test station including
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Use 10AA or Ni-Cad batteries (not included) or 110VAC
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For calibration instructions, please
click here.


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Apple fanboys vs HTC fandroids. Crackberry junkies vs Nokia cheerleaders. All of them have their arguments and neverending doses of absurdly blind faith in a corporation. But who is really winning this race? Who is really the dominant smartphone manufacturer?
It's hard to tell
See, when you take into consideration more than one factor, you get a different picture of how things are. Here you can see that Samsung is gaining market share faster than all its competitors, but their profit share growth is going down. Then you can see that Apple is gaining market share at a good rate, but their profit share growth dwarfs everyone else. The iPhone is one popular smartphone, with a hefty profit.
Asymco, who produced these graphics, argues that you can pair manufacturers according to their current growth vectors (in the chart above, you can see those pairs by color). According to them, Apple is destroying Nokia, while RIM is crunching Sony Ericsson, and Samsung is doing the same with Motorola. HTC and LG are doing something down there too, but both are doing it slowly, so let's ignore them for a while.
The fight for true domination
When you look at their 2007 vs 2010 comparison, things get even better:
Why better? Because despite its star status, Apple is still not the dominant player. Nobody is. Unlike with computers—where Microsoft still dominates—there is still no emperor in the smartphone empire. Apple is in a great position to claim that crown, but the game is still open.
One last thought: Looking at Nokia, I can't help to think that the CEO and his execs were complete imbeciles. If they had snatched Palm before Hewlett Packard—and scrap their stupid, outdated, horrible Symbian—they could have probably retained the dominant position they lost so quickly. Which is too bad, because they always made good hardware. [Asymco]


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Google's new Gmail calling may be a great way for consumers to make free and low-cost voice calls, but the service isn't quite ready for business customers using Google Apps, the search giant's suite of cloud-based productivity programs.
That's the word from Google Voice product manager Vincent Paquet, who told reporters on Wednesday at a San Francisco news conference that, at least for now, Gmail voice calling isn't available to enterprises that have made the move to Google Apps.
That will change, however. While administrative tools that would allow IT departments to manage Gmail voice chat aren't here today, they'll arrive--eventually. According to InformationWeek, Paquet suggested that Gmail calling--potentially a big money-saver for businesses--is part of Google's grand voice-calling strategy. No timetable for a business rollout was given, however.
Even without Google Apps integration, Gmail video and voice chat can save business users money, particularly smaller shops that make a lot of browser-based calls to overseas landline and mobile phones.
Taking a not-so-subtle swipe at Skype, the leader in voice-over-IP (VoIP) calling, Google says its international rates undercut those of a "leading internet telephone provider." For instance, Google charges 15 cents per minute for calls to mobile phones in France. By comparison, Skype's pay-as-you-go plan for Francophiles costs 20.3 cents per minute.
Skype, however, offers numerous cost-cutting service bundles, including a $10.29/month plan for 60 minutes of calls to landline and mobile phones in France. That comes out to 17.2 cents per minute. Yes, that's still higher than Google's offering, but the difference may not be great enough to persuade Skype users to switch to Gmail voice. Google, of course, will no doubt offer a slate of bargain bundles of its own.
Even if Skype users don't jump ship, Google can attain a sizable voice-calling market share simply by signing up business and consumer users that haven't yet tried Skype or competing VoIP services. Indeed, Google's tempting pitch--Gmail integration and dirt-cheap calling--is bound to resonate with cost-cutters everywhere.
Contact Jeff Bertolucci via Twitter http://twitter.com/jbertolucci or at jbertolucci.blogspot.com.
Join the CIO Australia group on LinkedIn. The group is open to CIOs, IT Directors, COOs, CTOs and senior IT managers.


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Following it's successful launch earlier this year the first new colorway of the Nike+ FuelBand will be on sale from today in select locations in US and UK
On July 27, 2012 NikeTown locations in London, San Francisco and New York will carry the Nike+ FuelBand ICE. The product will also be available from London's Boxpark, the House of Innovation at Selfridges and New York's 21 Mercer Street. From August 12, 2012 www.nikestore.com will also have availability.
The ICE edition of the Nike+ FuelBand is a limited edition run and the special nature of this product is clearly visible. The frozen looking cover of this version of the Nike+ FuelBand allows the user to partially see inside the product and view the technology that makes the magic work. The name comes from the trophy recieved when the user doubles their daily goal on the Nike+ FuelBand application and inspires it's visual aesthetic.
The Nike+ FuelBand is an innovative wristband that tracks movement throughout the day, designed to motivate and inspire users to be more active.
The ergonomic Nike+ FuelBand captures and displays four different metrics: time, calories, steps and NikeFuel – a metric that will be the ultimate measure of your athletic activity. NikeFuel is a proprietary technology that measures your activity and motivates athletes to do more. The NikeFuel score makes movement fun, meaningful and comparable, letting you compete with athletes of all levels in most activities. The more you move, the more NikeFuel you earn, whether you're playing basketball, throwing a Frisbee or going for a run.
Nike worked with some of the world's top experts in science and sports to engineer NikeFuel algorithms based on oxygen kinetics. Unlike calorie counts — which vary based on someone's gender and body type — NikeFuel is a normalized score that awards all participants equal scoring for the same activity regardless of their physical makeup. A user can also choose to also receive a calorie count to understand how many calories are burned versus how much NikeFuel is earned.
As you wear the Nike+ FuelBand throughout the day, the built-in three-axis accelerometer measures your motion and translates it into NikeFuel. Each day you can set your goal for activity and the level of NikeFuel you want to achieve. As you move closer to your goal, the band's series of 20 LED lights go from red to green. The user-friendly interface provides encouragement and motivation as you hit and exceed your goals.
The Nike+ FuelBand experience doesn't end on your wrist. All of the data you capture on your wristband connects to a rich web and mobile experience. It syncs with the NIKE+ website, through a built-in USB, or wirelessly through Bluetooth to a free iPhone app to record activity each day and track progress.
Below is Run247's video from the Nike+ House of Innovation at Selfridges London:
Click here for further information


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Dashboards: not just a pretty face
Dashboards can be integrated with controls, meters, and external resources to display energy, environmental, and economic performance.
Imagine walking into the lobby of an office building you recently designed, and seeing the building's real-time performance displayed on a 42-in. flat-screen monitor. Displayed are the energy and water usage, greenhouse gas emissions, and even the photovoltaic (PV) array on the roof. Now imagine that you can make instant changes to the building's lighting and HVAC system, based on that usage information, right in the lobby.
Sound like science fiction? Hardly. Dashboards providing these functions and more are popping up more frequently as owners want to showcase the environmental performance of their buildings. With displays that can include corporate logos and messages, animated graphics, and pages of current and historical data, dashboards have become a trend to be taken seriously.
Some commercial buildings and schools have the dashboard displays in a readily accessible place, allowing occupants and visitors to see exactly how the building is performing, and possibly showcase energy systems, such as a PV array or a wind turbine. Some dashboards are developed to simplify the displays of operator workstations, providing alarms, adjustable trend capabilities, and control functions in addition to the graphical displays.
The selection process
Because owners are requiring more assurance that buildings are performing as designed, and using green buildings as showcases and education/demonstration centers, dashboard displays are becoming increasingly common. Here are a few selection guidelines to consider.
The first decision is to determine what to track, and if the dashboard will be used to control as well as display. Products offer a wide variety of options, so you can pick and choose what you want. Google PowerMeter ( www.google.org/powermeter ), for example, tracks only home electricity usage—and it's free and easy to start with as a basic learning tool. Other products can integrate with a variety of BAS, energy metering systems, local utilities, lighting control systems, and security systems to track all aspects of a facility's energy usage.
Almost any internal or external data point can be routed to a dashboard, even if it takes a stand-alone sensor and a communications connection, but parameters typically displayed include:
Gas consumption, sometimes against a baseline or goal
Electricity consumption, sometimes against a baseline or goal
Carbon-equivalent emissions and/or savings, calculated from energy use
Water consumption, sometimes against a baseline or goal
Real-time and aggregated power generated by a PV array or wind turbine
Weather data (including National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration information)
Graphical performance indicators, such as dials, arrows, or buttons that provide rewards or alarms according to selected parameters getting better or worse.
Real-time data are essential, especially if solar or wind power systems are involved. When solar or wind power is being generated, it's useful to show how much conventional power also is being provided so people have a sense of scale about the actual contributions of the renewable energy.
If carbon equivalents need to be displayed and are included with the dashboard, check where the conversion calculations came from and what they include. If you have to provide your own, consider using the conversion methods provided by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency ( www.epa.gov/RDEE/energy-resources/calculator.html ). On the page is a link, " Click Here for Calculations and References ," that provides information programmers can use for creating a dashboard carbon emissions readout for the building. If the company also wants to display the emissions savings as equivalent trees planted or rail-cars of coal averted, guidance for these conversions are provided by the EPA as well.
The best way to begin is to establish the owner's requirements. What does the owner want to see, and where does he or she want to see it? Who else will be looking at the data? Will the dashboard provide controllability? Will the dashboard be accessible online to the public or be password-protected? Will the dashboard integrate data from multiple buildings, and if so, how close are they in proximity? Does the owner want to educate tenants on energy usage, such as retail tenants in a mall, or students in a science classroom?
Some dashboards are part of sophisticated enterprise systems that integrate with human resources and accounting departments. These tools are especially useful to firms that provide environmental report cards to shareholders, For example, IBM and SAP offer tools like this so an owner knows when an employee has entered the building (via a smart card or other device), which then determines whether he requires heating or cooling, lighting, etc. Dashboards could also integrate with accounting software, weather data, or enterprise resource planning systems.
Consulting engineers who want to specify a dashboard into a controls system and who use Master Format 2004 Edition (revised 2005) may wish to include the enterprise dashboard concept in Division 25 (Integrated Automation) with necessary communications equipment added to Division 27 (Communications), said Terry Hoffman, director for BAS marketing with Johnson Controls Inc . (JCI). Both divisions reside in the Facility Services Subgroup. In the MasterFormat 1995 Edition, it was common for the enterprise dashboard to be specified as part of a special section in Division 17, he said.
Dashboards fall into two basic categories. An off-the-shelf tool gives a user the ability to select from a host of options, which can be chosen based on the O&M team's needs. Customization gives the building owner the opportunity to build out very specialized tools, such as with Trane's product.
Prices vary widely (from free to tens of thousands of dollars), based on the data you want to collect, process, and display, and the type of display you are using.
Some dashboards are offered as a service, while others are offered as a product. The service typically includes an up-front software license cost and a monthly or annual service agreement.
When the dashboard is offered as a product, building owners may work with the dashboard provider to select specific hardware, software, and parameters; receive training; and then monitor and maintain the dashboard data on their own.
Sometimes the company's IT department will need to get involved because of networking and security issues, and especially if enterprise solutions are being sought.
Why dashboards?
According to JCI's Hoffman, there are three factors behind the push toward adding dashboards. First, the cost of energy is a big driver. Depending on the building's location—both geographically and on the site—the kWh cost of electricity and the cost of gas (natural or otherwise) plays a big role in the metrics a building owner might track.
Second, said Hoffman, the green movement drives owners to purchase dashboards. For some companies, green is a way of life, so a tool that helps track efficiency and usage is the logical next step. (See Kenneth Elovitz's story on green liability, page 20 .)
Finally, competition with other company facilities or similar buildings can work as a driver. Building managers push their buildings to be the best, to become the most efficient, and to leave the smallest carbon footprint possible.
All three of these factors play into the return on investment a building owner is seeking. He or she typically will want to track savings, and then progress toward becoming more efficient or carbon-neutral. Some owners will even set a monetary goal once the dashboard is in play. Without an understanding of the business objectives, however, the owner will not benefit from dashboard data.
Decoding the data
Data generated by dashboard software typically is real-time. More data is better, said David Wollins from Scientific Conservation Inc . (SCI), which leads to better O&M efficiency. Instant information gives O&M staff the power to make instant decisions and changes.
Some systems are centralized, and only on-site operations personnel can access data. Other dashboards are accessible via an Internet interface, which allows the O&M staff to make changes even while they're off-site. Data can be shown either graphically—such as trending bars that show monthly use—or in numeric format, such as kWh.
Once the building has sufficient data (several months' or years' worth), energy management software like EnergyPrint can compare data against benchmarks or forecast energy consumption. With a powerful tool like this, building owners can manage budgets and equipment. The premise of EnergyPrint is that the service can quickly tell you if the building's performance is getting better or worse. More sophisticated products, like SCI's, provide more access to BAS monitoring and control points, which informs specific actions that can be taken to address energy problems.
Owners need to understand the capabilities and limitations of dashboard products, and, relative to their cost, decide how much detail they need and how much money they are willing to spend.
If looking to use dashboards for education or motivation, instead of just operations, QA Graphics' Energy Efficiency Education Dashboard (EEED) is sometimes used to encourage occupants to be more efficient and allow them to immediately see the results of their efforts, said Dan McCarty, QA Graphics' president. The EEED also can be developed to educate the public—showing off the building's initiatives and the results—such as how much taxpayer money is being saved.
The buildings market is becoming more data driven and information-savvy. Dashboards provide a graphical, user-friendly way to see, absorb, and react to snapshots of selected data. Perhaps, because of dashboards, people will learn to drive buildings better, saving money and the environment.
Dashboard products
Here's a list of some companies providing dashboards for tracking your building. Each product is quite different. Some show all data on one screen, while others have "tabbed" browsing, allowing users to view only one portion of the data at a time, such as carbon emissions or water usage.
Johnson Controls Inc.
Lucid Design Group
QA Graphics
Scientific Conservation Inc .
Schneider Electric
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Under the Obama administration, there has been a 60 percent increase in warrantless electronic surveillance by the Department of Justice, according to a report Thursday by the American Civil Liberties Union. According to the report, the DoJ monitored 37,616 phones in 2011 alone.
"The report shows a dramatic increase in the use of these surveillance tools… [m]ore people were subjected to pen register and trap and trace surveillance in the past two years than in the entire previous decade," the ACLU explains, making reference to two tactics used by the Department of Justice (DoJ) to monitor and track phone calls, email messages, and social networking website use.
The 37,616 phones being tapped by the DoJ alone is a staggering figure. The sharp increase over the past two years, and the huge number of people being monitored, give the lie to any claim that this spying is related to ordinary criminal investigations. Without a doubt, this figure includes political activists, members of left-wing political groups, and other opponents of government policy.
The ACLU report serves as a further indictment of Obama administration, which came to power in 2008 by riding a wave of popular hatred of the Bush administration's expansion of police state measures. The Obama administration has not only kept Bush's domestic spying programs intact—it has also greatly enlarged them.
It is worth noting at the outset that the ACLU report only takes into account surveillance figures obtained from the Justice Department. Given the absence of figures from the Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Secret Service, and state and local police forces, the ACLU states that "the reports likely reveal only a small portion of the use of this surveillance power."
During the same time period, the DoJ increased its tracking of email and social networking data by 361 percent. Though tracking email and social networking is still much rarer than phone tracking, the exponential increase seen over the past two years likely foreshadows further expansion.
Dean Boyd, an Obama administration spokesman, told NBC News that "as criminals increasingly use new and more sophisticated technologies, the use of orders issued by a judge and explicitly authorized by Congress to obtain non-content information is essential for federal law enforcement officials to carry out their duty to protect the public and investigate violations of federal laws."
The ACLU report only covers wiretapping that the government claims is "non-content" related. In other words, the statistics cited above do not include content-related spying. The dubious distinction between "content" and "non-content" related spying is that, allegedly, "non-content" related spying only reveals who an individual is in communication with—not what the content of the communication is. However, there is no meaningful oversight over what the government does with information it obtains through supposedly "non-content-related" spying.
Irrespective of the content/non-content classification, the massively expanded domestic spying in either form is a blatant violation of the constitution's Fourth Amendment, which protects the population from warrantless searches and seizures, as well as the First Amendment, which protects free speech.
The existing legal threshold for so-called "non-content" wiretapping is strikingly low. According to the ACLU report, the government needs only to "submit certification to a court stating that it seeks information relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation." There is no requirement for a judge to actually "consider the merits of the request."
The Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals explained that its role in the process is "ministerial in nature" in a 1995 ruling. The historic requirement of "probable cause" is no longer required for the government to tap into the phones or personal emails of a US citizen.
The government initially refused the ACLU's request under the Freedom of Information Act to release DoJ tallies of wiretapping from 2009 to 2011. The records were only released after the ACLU filed a lawsuit to compel the release of the records.
The ACLU report is only the latest confirmation of the massive increase in domestic surveillance launched by the Obama administration. Over the past year, it has been revealed that the Obama administration has authorized armed surveillance drones to begin flights over the US mainland, and it has constructed "bottomless" databases to house all of the information it has begun collecting on the American public.
In 2009, the New York Times revealed that the National Security Agency - an entity independent of the DoJ - was also intercepting personal communications between citizens.
In 2011, Obama signed a four-year extension of the PATRIOT Act, explaining, "It's an important tool for us to continue dealing with an ongoing terrorist threat." Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid backed the president, warning at the end of the extension deadline that "when the clock strikes midnight tomorrow, we would be giving terrorists the opportunity to plot attacks against our country, undetected."
The New York Times reported that the administration made 1.3 million requests for subscriber information from cell phone companies in 2011 alone.
The administration has constantly sought to block all legal challenges to domestic surveillance programs by means of the authoritarian "state secrets" doctrine and references to the president's so-called "Commander in Chief" wartime powers. Earlier this year, a federal judge threw out a case that challenged domestic spying on the grounds that "any practice, no matter how abusive, may be immunized from legal challenge by being labeled as 'counterterrorism' and 'state secrets'."


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Home Energy Minute #01: Alaska's Griffin Hagle
Posted by Home Energy Magazine on May 15, 2019
Welcome to the first in a series of quarterly interviews conducted by Corbett Lunsford of Home Diagnosis TV, that will focus on the topic of home performance! Hear from a home performance pro dealing with issues in one of the coldest climates in North America - Alaska! Check it out!
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WANA: We may not have it all together, but together we have it all.
I've hijacked David's blog again! He's being held hostage at Marcia's Richard's blog. He will be released later today, starting in the comments section, but only if you voice your opinions loudly and proudly below! Until that time, I'm taking over, and I'll be talking about the value of critique groups.
All of us have goals. We want to find a job we love, save some real money this year, learn to make beef bourguignon, whatever! What we don't always do so well is ask for help, real help. When striving for something new, the chances for success exponentially improve when you write your goal down and start talking about it with people around you. So wouldn't your odds of success be even greater if the people around you gave honest and open feedback?
I'll give you an example. I don't know how many of you took a creative writing class at some point in your educational career, but I had a class in college where we all sat in a big circle and took turns sharing our poems and short stories to the group then asked for feedback. The replies usually sounded something like "I like the title. It all went together. I thought the character was good. I like you, do you like me? Circle yes or no."
Ok, maybe that last one wasn't in there, but you get the point. In traditional critique groups it's hard to get real feedback. Everyone's sitting in the circle not wanting to speak up or not wanting to hurt the writer's feelings so they focus on only the good comments. And good is good! We want to know what's working well, but we also need to know what's NOT working well. The reality is after you submit your work for publication, it goes into a pile read by someone you don't know who is BRUTALLY honest.
Here's what I know. I also took a literary publication class and acted as poetry editor with a team of readers. We didn't know all the individuals of the odd 400-some submissions. We had to weed through for the best. And we were harsh! We didn't have the time or energy to look at each poem and say "Gosh, this author spent a long time thinking up words for his acrostic poem! He sure is swell!"
N – Needs
O – Only
P – Practical
E – Editing
The best thing we all can do for achieving our goals is to have a person or group keep us accountable and willingly give honest advice. For those of you who are writers looking for critique groups, check out Social Media Expert for Writers, Kristen Lamb's post A New Approach to a Traditional Group: The Concept Critique. She has great things to think about when looking for a good set of eyes to assist your work.
Other examples of critique groups and support networks that work include Kristen's #MyWANA hashtag and WANA author brand classes. Taking her book's theme, We Are Not Alone, Kristen created both a twitterverse and class group of writers wanting to help other writers. The hashtag is designed as a place for you to find inspiration, tips, research help, useful links, and oh yah, laughter! Her classes also formed their own hashtags of #WANA711 and #WANA1011 where we continue to support one another by tweeting for each other's blogs, sharing useful links, promoting new works, getting feedback on others, etc. Stop by sometime, we're a friendly bunch!
Not a writer? No problem! Ask about joining the Life List Club, or start your own with friends or other bloggers who you know will give you honest feedback. While a lot of the Life List Club seems like fun and games of guest blogging, we're doing this with a goal in mind. All of our contributors and members are working on their "to do" lists for life. We hold milestone parties and give updates because we have to hold each other accountable to what we committed to do. None of us are perfect as we start out on this journey, heck, we're over 6 months in, and some of us still have lessons to learn about our goals. The point is, we're benefiting from the group's advice. What you don't see is a lot of emails and behind the scenes work we do, helping match up, host, and promote other guest bloggers, getting successful ideas on our resolutions, support when we're making big changes, and even a reaming out if it's necessary to make deadline.
So ask yourself, who are the people supporting the dreams and big changes in your life? You may not have even met them. Don't forget how powerful this blogosphere can be! Check with your local library about discussion groups, be a mentor yourself and work with a non-profit like Big Brothers Big Sisters, invest in a personal trainer that is going to motivate and energize you. The sky is the limit! What's holding you back from getting the help you need and deserve?
Bio: Jess Witkins claims the title Perseverance Expert. She grew up in a small Wisconsin town as the much younger youngest sibling of four, she's witnessed the paranormal, jumped out of a plane, worked in retail, traveled to exotic locations like Italy, Ireland, and Shipshewana, Indiana, and she's eaten bologna and lived to tell about it! She deals with it all and writes about it! Come along on her midwest adventures; Witkins promises to keep it honest and entertaining. Go ahead, SUBSCRIBE, you know you want to.
Follow on Twitter: @jesswitkins


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Meetings & Groups
Whether you are planning a regional meeting, a statewide conference, family or military reunion or any special event, Columbus, GA is the perfect destination. We have over 750,000 square feet of flexible meeting space, more than 4,600 hotel rooms, and endless ways to entertain everyone in your group when the meetings are over. Plus, we'll personally plan every little detail for you. We're here to help! See Why Columbus


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Why There are Two Peaks of Death and Disease in Older Age …and Testosterone
(This also involves loss of testosterone: see "DHEA, Estradiol, Testosterone, and the Relevance of Their Ratio …The Androgen Receptor …and the Secular Trend" at: http://anthropogeny.com/Androgen%20Receptor%20and%20Secular%20Trend.htm ; this added to this document August, 2013)
Copyright, 2004, James Michael Howard, Fayetteville, Arkansas, U.S.A.
It is my hypothesis that DHEA was selected by evolution because it optimizes replication and transcription of DNA. Therefore, all genes and tissues are activated by DHEA. I think the rise of DHEA caused the evolution of mammals (Hormones in Mammalian Evolution, Rivista di Biologia / Biology Forum 2001; 94: 177-184). DHEA production may be involved in the pattern described by Dr. Steven Frank: "Humans die at an increasing rate until late in life, when mortality rates level off." ("A Multistage Theory of Age-specific Acceleration in Human Mortality," BMC Biology 2004; 2: 16, an online journal)
DHEA is very high through the first month of life, followed by a severe decline until ages 5-7 years (adrenarche), whereupon it increases rapidly until age 20-25 years, then declines again, reaching very low levels in old age.
I suggest this represents the onset of neonatal production of DHEA which triggers rapid growth and development, especially in the brain. This rapid growth of the brain causes the decline of "measurable" levels of DHEA prior to adrenarche. The brain literally absorbs the available DHEA for growth and development. Once the brain begins to finalize growth and development, measurable levels of DHEA reappear and adrenarche begins. This frees DHEA for growth and development of the body, which, when near completion, again allows DHEA for activation of the brain centers which control puberty. (This is the basis for a switch from growth and development to activation and maintenance.) Availability of DHEA is first used for the brain, then the body, and is then used for activation of puberty. DHEA continues production until our reproduction is completed, then it declines. There is no need to continue DHEA production after reproduction and children are able to exist without parents. DHEA production begins to decline thereafter; activation of all tissues declines correspondingly. I think the loss of DHEA results in aging. (DHEA declines in AIDS; I think AIDS represents premature aging because of this abnormal decline of DHEA.)
The decline of DHEA reduces the activity level of all tissues. (I think the brain is especially able to use DHEA so the brain, usually, declines last. Remember the hypothetical use of DHEA for growth and development of the brain.) As an individual's genome contains genes that differ from that state most optimal for maintenance of the person, the decline of DHEA will expose them, again, correspondingly. That is, declining levels of DHEA are less able to participate in activation of genes that differ from optimal configuration for transcription. These genes then increase the probability of consequences of gene loss. These consequences are exposed as DHEA declines. Many diseases and disorders manifest themselves with age. Some of these cause death.
If a person does not carry genes that are prone to malfunction during DHEA decline, then that person will live beyond the average age of individuals who carry genes prone to the dire consequences of DHEA decline. These people exhibit the "normal" life span dependent upon DHEA production. At some point in old age, DHEA declines to the point that brain function fails to maintain cardiovascular function.
I suggest the "early-life increase and late-life decrease in mortality acceleration" may be explained by this combination of DHEA decline in individuals with genes prone to malfunction and individuals who do not carry these genes.