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The first time I realized my color blindness was affecting how I played games was back in 2004.
EA was fresh off of MVP Baseball 2004 and was looking to improve on a game that I still hold as one of the best sports titles of all time. Their big addition for MVP Baseball 2005 was the Hitter's Eye, a mechanic designed to simulate how hitters pick up different pitches coming out of a pitcher's hand. The ball would stay white for a fastball, or flash red or green for a breaking ball or changeup respectively.
The ball flashes red here right before the pitcher releases it to indicate curveball. I'm told it works great when you can actually see what red looks like.
The Hitter's Eye wrecked me for the first few games. I swung and missed at changeups that I thought were curveballs and sliders that I thought were changeups until I got fed up and turned off the feature entirely. Friends have told me that the Hitter's Eye was one of the best things about MVP Baseball 05, but that major selling point was lost on me.
Welcome to life as a colorblind gamer.
It's hard to simulate, but similar hues like this Borderlands 2 text actually bleed together for people like me and make it hard to differentiate the letters.
Fast forward seven years and I'm roaming across Pandora with a pack of Vault Hunters in Borderlands 2 – friends that I've known since college in real life. We're basking in the spoils of our latest raid when a trade request for one of my new guns pops up from my buddy Mike.
"Do you swear these guns have the same rarity?" I asked
"Totally," he said. "I promise they're both purple."
I hit 'accept' and hear Mike snickering.
"Damn it, Mike!"
Who the hell decided that a rarity ranking system should include blue, purple AND magenta text all on a bluish-purple background anyway?
These enemies in Guacamelee! are supposed to be distinctly red and green, but when they're next to each other I can't tell which is which.
There's rarely a game where my color blindness doesn't rear its head in some way. My latest bane is Guacamelee! Super Turbo Championship Edition, a game that I had been tearing through like an unstoppable suplex machine until I met the enemies with four different colored overshields that require specific attacks to break.
I can't tell which shield is which when they're next to each other so I'm using random special attacks and hoping for the best. Guacamelee! is technically an action platformer, but now it's effectively a Russian roulette simulator (coming soon to Kickstarter and Steam Greenlight).
This test tells you how well you see color. 0 is perfect, my wife got a 2, I got 183.
Two things happen when I tell someone I'm colorblind – they ask me what it's like to see in black and white, and they point to their shirt and ask me what color I think it is. And that's when I have to explain that yes, there are some people who only see in monochrome (black and white), but that's an extremely rare condition that only affects 1 in 33,000 people and I'm not one of them.
My results. Anything above 99 is considered 'low' color acuity.
What I have is actually much more common. Your eyes have three groups of cells shaped like cones that are responsible for seeing color. If you can see colors properly it means that all three cones are working the way they should, and you're called a trichromat. But people like me have at least one faulty cone, and which cone is faulty determines which color you have trouble seeing. I have deuteranomaly – reduced sensitivity to green light, the most common form of color blindness – so I have trouble distinguishing between reds, greens, browns, oranges, and some blue and purple hues.
TL;DR – I have trouble telling certain colors apart, to the point where similar hues bleed together when they are next to each other. I can tell that a green shirt is green and a brown shirt is brown, but show me a pattern with green and brown alternating squares and my eyes start to go haywire. Just like, for example, the red and green overshields of the Chupacabras tearing my Guacamelee! luchador apart.
The worse you are at differentiating colors, the more difficult BioShock 2's hacking becomes. Since I'm red-green colorblind, the red and the green looks almost the same.
Calling my type of color blindness a disability feels melodramatic, but admittedly it does affect the way I need to approach certain games. If I'm playing FIFA online I need to pay extra attention to the uniform my opponent picks in case it's a shade too similar to my own. Puzzlers that rely on color matching like Zuma and Hexic are downright impossible, and even games with green text like Fallout 3 can be a challenge.
But what gets frustrating is when games have color issues that could be addressed to include colorblind gamers but aren't. Guacamelee! could ease my frustration by putting a button prompt above its shielded enemies. Far Cry 3 could let me change the color indicators on the minimap. And if BioShock 2 wants to include hacking games based on color, it could at least make each color wedge have a distinctive pattern. I've avoided BioShock 2 entirely because every locked room or hostile turret that I'd try to hack would be a 50-50 tossup for me. Green bars are successful hacks, red bars set off alarms, and I'd have no other way of knowing which is which.
FTL's colorblind mode changes the color scheme for more contrast and adds patterns.
The good news for people like me is that some developers are starting to realize that color blindness affects almost 10% of their male users – it's much rarer in women, with less than 1% of the female population suffering any sort of color blindness – and they're adjusting their games accordingly.
Every Call of Duty since Modern Warfare 3 has included a colorblind mode that lets you change teammate and enemy indicators from green and red to a much more deuteranomaly-friendly light blue and orange (I found that out after a few months of playing 'blind'), and Borderlands 2 released a patch that added text descriptors to their color-coded rarity system. Industry giants World of Warcraft, DOTA 2, and Team Fortress 2 all have their own colorblind-assist options, and Sim City launched with multiple image filters catering to different types of color blindness.
What's most encouraging to me are the developers like FTL's Subset Games who are reaching out to the colorblind community for input on what makes a game more playable for them. It's nice to feel included in the creative process, and it makes me hopeful that colorblind filters will one day become as standard an option as subtitles are now.
Ultimately we want games to be as inclusive as possible. I hate to think of someone missing out on what could have been their favorite game for something as simple as text color.
Cameron Gidari is a travel writer by trade and a videogame aficionado by choice. You can follow him on twitter at @CGidari.

subset: commoncrawl


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July was Earth's 4th-hottest month on record
Despite the cool July in much of the USA, the Earth as a whole had its fourth-hottest month on record in July, the National Climatic Data Center reported Monday. Only the Julys of 2005, 2010 and 1998 were warmer.
July is typically the hottest month of the year.
The world's oceans had their warmest July on record, tying July 2009.
Overall, the combined average temperature over global land and ocean surfaces for July 2014 was 1.15 degrees above the 20th-century average of 60.4 degrees, the climate center reported.
Eight of the 10 warmest Julys have occurred within the past 10 years (2002 also ranks among the 10 warmest). "This is what to expect with continued global warming," noted University of Arizona climate scientist Jonathan Overpeck on Twitter.
This follows on the heels of the hottest May and hottest June on record globally.
Additionally, July 2014 marked the 38th consecutive July — and 353rd consecutive month — with a global temperature that was above average.
Thirty-two countries or territories across every continent, with the exception of Antarctica, reported at least one station with a record warm July temperature. Norway had its hottest month on record.
In the USA, several states in the West had a July temperature among their 10 warmest, while Indiana and Arkansas each had their coolest July in the 120-year period of record.
The eastern half of the USA and much of central Asia were the two spots on Earth that had a significantly cooler-than-average July.
The average Arctic sea ice extent for July was 3.19 million square miles, 560,000 square miles below the 1981-2010 average and the fourth smallest July extent since records began in 1979, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center.
On the opposite pole, the Antarctic sea ice extent for July was 6.72 million square miles, 370,000 square miles above the 1981-2010 average. This marked the largest July Antarctic sea ice extent since records began in 1979.
"Why the Antarctic sea ice extent is expanding, even as the amount of Antarctic ice decreases (thinning) is an active area of research," said NCDC climate scientist Deke Arndt.
"Like most issues in climate, it is complex, but some major areas of research involve better understanding the interplay between increased winds, basal melting leading to more freshwater, and the speed of ice flow to the sea," he said. (Basal melting is the melting of the ice from underneath.)
Global sea ice extent during July is decreasing at an average rate of 2% a decade, according to the data center.
For the year-to-date, the first seven months of 2014 (January–July) tied with 2002 as the 3rd-warmest such period on record for the world.


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I am becoming a bit wary of this great-great-grandmother of mine, Mary Jane Minor. She does not appear to have had much of a design plan for this photograph album, for turning to pages six and seven, I am greeted by strangers once again. Strangers from Iowa.
The man sports a full beard and moustache, and wears his plaid coat unbuttoned to show off the matching vest and watch chain. He appears to be in his mid-late forties. The woman looks to be about ten years his junior and wears her hair parted in the middle with no bangs and severely swept back to the nape of her neck. Her dress is made of a dark cloth, the tightly fitted bodice decorated with ornate embroidery trim on either side of the column of buttons and a bit of lace peeking out at the throat. The puffed shoulders of her slim sleeves are my best hint that this photograph was taken sometime between 1888 and 1893, when women's fashion dictated ever fuller leg of mutton sleeves. Before 1888, the sleeve would have been sewn flat at the shoulder.
The photographer was Matthew G. Maxwell who first learned his trade while working for Mr. Goldsberry of Bedford,Taylor County, Iowa. By the time of these portraits, Mr. Maxwell had an established studio in Mt. Ayr, in the neighboring county of Ringgold.
Neither of these two folks are Mary Jane's children, all of whom can be accounted for back east. John P Minor (Jr.) was married with a child, and living right down the road from Mary Jane and Marion. Sarah Minor Herrington was a widow, with a child, and living nearby. Olfred had died in 1886, and his widow and children were being cared for locally by Mary Jane and Marion. And Robert, my grandfather, was still living at the home farm on Ceylon Road with his parents.
Time to shake the family branches!
A few candidates fall out during the search for middle aged relatives living in or near Mt. Ayr, Ringgold County, Iowa in the late 1880s.
- John Minor Stephenson was Mary Jane's nephew, as his mother, Hannah, was Marion Minor's sister. John had moved to a farm near the village of Maloy in Ringgold County with his wife, Mary Dulaney, in 1867. In 1888, John would have been 54 and Mary would have been 44. If Iowa fashion lagged trends, and the photographs were actually taken in the early 1890s, then John would have been in his late fifties and Mary in her late forties.
- John P. Keenan was another nephew, son of Isabelle Minor Keenan. John went to Taylor County, Iowa in the 1870s, and for several years herded cattle before purchasing land of his own in neighboring Ringgold County. He married Minnie and eventually went back to Taylor County farming land close to the town of Blockton. In the late 1880s John P. would have been in his early thirties, and his wife Minnie in her early twenties.
- John Keenan's sister was also in Taylor County, Iowa. Hannah and her husband, John Milton Hartley relocated from Greene County, Pennsylvania to Iowa in 1874. The two raised their family on a Taylor County farm before starting a business in the town of Maloy, Ringgold County, Iowa. In 1888, Hannah would have been 35 years old and husband John would have been 48.
- Two other Greene County boys had settled in Taylor County, Iowa by the late 1880s, Jesse and John P. Minor, sons of Marion's brother–and next door neighbor–Samuel. They and their wives held contiguous farms just south of the town of Blockton. Jesse would have been in his late thirties and Olive in her late twenties. John P. and Mary Ellen would have been in their late twenties.
Let's suppose at the time of the portrait session, the residences of all these Minor kids were within traveling distance of Matthew G. Maxwell's studio in Mt. Ayr. Jesse and John P. Minor were too young to be the gentleman shown. Furthermore, I have comparison portraits of these guys which confirm that Mr. Page Seven is not a picture of them!
John Stevenson would have been much older than the man in this photograph.
John and Minnie Keenan would have been much younger than the two pictured here.
The most likely identity of this couple–with what I know now–is Hannah Keenen Hartley and her husband John Milton.
I will have to keep an open mind as I continue this puzzle, matching up letters and documents with what clues I have in photographs. But for the moment…I think have added one more stranger to my family tree.
Well, THAT sense of satisfaction was short-lived!!!
I followed up my blog post yesterday with another google search for the Hartleys, to expand my sense of their space, their era, their dreams. And found this page on the Ringgold, Iowa GenWeb site:
Dare to compare. Hannah Hartley appears to have a bigger frame and a broader nose than my Victorian lady. And John Milton Hartley appears to be bald, whereas my dude is thinning at the temple. I must return these faces to the stranger pile, to be hung on my family tree at some future date.


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Whether your small business survives a natural disaster may depend as much (if not more) on the plans you put in place now, before a disaster occurs, as on what you do after a disaster strikes. Here are some disaster preparedness ideas for you to consider for your small business.
Before the disaster
Evaluate possible natural disasters that may affect your small business. Determine the probability of a disaster occurring and its likely impact. Some natural disaster risks to consider might include hurricanes, tornadoes, straight-line winds, thunderstorms, lightning, snow and ice storms, avalanches, extreme temperatures, flooding, drought, volcanoes, earthquakes, tsunamis, mudslides, sinkholes, and wildfires.
Identify the critical functions of your business that must be maintained or restored as soon as possible. Be sure to consider the means of communication for your business, whether through phones, Internet access, or direct contact at a physical location. Also, consider possible disruptions to your supply lines.
Identify critical functions of your business that require power. Consider a power backup solution in case of a power outage.
Estimate the revenue that may be lost if disaster strikes. For both the short term and longer, will you still have goods or services to provide, and customers to purchase them?
Identify expenses that must be paid even if a natural disaster strikes. For example, mortgage, lease, or rental payments may still need to be made even after a disaster strikes your business.
Keep emergency contact information handy and in a safe place. Also, back up all of your critical data and keep a copy at one or more other safe locations. If your small business has more than one location, consider whether operations could be redirected to other locations if a natural disaster strikes at one location.
Maintain one or more disaster kits. Consider stocking the kits with water, nonperishable food, a flashlight, a portable radio, batteries, a first aid kit, and a cell phone.
Consider any steps that could mitigate the risks of a natural disaster. For example, rent or build facilities that may withstand the forces of a hurricane or an earthquake, or locate on sites less prone to flooding.
Insure against losses to your small business resulting from natural disasters. Property insurance may insure against some damage to property. Key person life insurance may protect against the loss of a key employee. Business interruption insurance may cover certain expenses if you are unable to operate your small business due to a natural disaster.
Caution: Special insurance may be required if you wish to insure your small business against certain natural disasters such as flooding or earthquakes.
Communicate your business plans for a natural disaster with your employees. Consider running a disaster drill to put your plan to the test.
Monitor impending or approaching potential natural disasters, where possible. Take appropriate steps to keep your employees and yourself safe.
After the disaster
Communicate with your employees. They may have to deal with personal disaster-related issues of their own.
Focus initially on restoring critical functions as quickly as possible. Hopefully, any planning you did prior to the disaster will serve you well.
Document any damage or losses and contact your insurance company or agent. You may need to mitigate damages (for example, having a roof that is damaged tarped so that further damage does not occur).
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), along with state and local governments, may provide some assistance. However, most assistance provided by FEMA is to individuals, rather than to businesses, and is intended to provide only for essential needs. The assistance cannot duplicate any benefit you receive from insurance.
The Small Business Administration (SBA) can provide a disaster loan for up to $2 million (generally, at favorable terms). The loans cannot duplicate any benefit you receive from your insurance or FEMA. The loans can be for losses that are not covered by or compensated for by your insurance (including deductibles). The loans can be used for the repair or replacement of certain physical property used in your small business, or for normal financial obligations of your business that you could have met if the disaster had not occurred.
If your business is in a federally declared disaster area, you may be entitled to special tax treatment. This may include an extended time for filing tax returns and paying tax, or certain other favorable tax provisions occasionally granted to individuals who work or live in a federal disaster area.
Prepared by Broadridge Investor Communication Solutions, Inc. Copyright 2012


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In celebration of Slate Plus' first anniversary, we're republishing a selection of pieces from the past year, including this article, which was originally published on July 15, 2014.
I've been a member of Slate's copy desk for the past three years, meaning I'm one of the people responsible for being the last line of defense before pieces go live on our site. I read the pieces for grammar and style and then create the article pages using our CMS (content management system, aka the program we use to upload our articles). My job is to read Slate! It's up there with the people whose job is to watch Netflix.
Everyone on the copy desk has additional copy-related tasks. Mine is to handle our corrections; internally I've been (lovingly, I hope) crowned our "corrections czar" (but maybe I should opt for "corrections princess"?).
I inherited a pretty solid corrections policy from the previous czar: Essentially, every factual change or addition to any piece must be noted in some way. At Slate, we want to be as transparent and upfront with our readers, as possible. This goes for something small like a misspelled name or misplaced decimal point, to larger issues like a mathematical miscalculation or a misquote. Typos, like a misspelled word (that's not a proper noun) or missing comma, we don't note.
There are two ways that we let readers know that we've changed or added to a piece: We either add a correction or an update. Simply put, a correction is any time we got something wrong. An update is any time we want to add information: sometimes to clarify a point that's not wrong, just maybe unclear, or (and this is the most common update) information becomes available after we've published the piece.
No matter what, though, we try to be as clear as possible about the change. We'll tell you what we got wrong when we post a correction—if we said someone is 72 and he's really 52, we won't just tell you we got his age wrong; we'll tell you the age we initially put there. If we update a piece, we'll explain if it's because President Obama announced a new policy after the piece went live or if it's because we found a sentence to be unclear.
Recently, Poynter highlighted this policy of ours, focusing mostly on the great corrections policy of our social team, explaining what they do if we accidentally tweet an incorrect photo or explanation. Overall, the policy is the same: Never delete, always correct.
And no, we're not embarrassed about our corrections. Why should we be? We're proud to be accurate, and when we get something wrong, we want to fix it. Which is where you occasionally come in. If you've ever emailed firstname.lastname@example.com, you're emailing me! We have some loyal readers (some that we've written about!) who love to catch our mistakes and help us out. I try to respond to almost all of the emails, at least the ones that are intended to be helpful, and let you know when we've made the correction or explain why we won't be adding one.
And if you want to know all the articles we've corrected each week, you're in luck because we have a roundup. Unlike in a newspaper, there's no obvious Page 2 on which to print the day's corrections, so we collect our corrections each Friday. I'm always baffled by how many people seem to share them.
While I take corrections very seriously, it doesn't mean I can't have some fun with them. Here are three of my most recent favorites:
You may remember our popular "Carlos Danger Name Generator." Well, when we first published it, we forgot to check one important thing:
Correction, July 23, 2013: An earlier version of the Carlos Danger Name Generator suggested incorrectly that the Carlos Danger Name for Anthony Weiner is Armando Catastrophe. The Carlos Danger Name for Anthony Weiner is Carlos Danger.
In Willa Paskin's TV review for Silicon Valley, there was some translation difficulty:
Correction, April 4, 2014: This article originally misstated what nonsensical buzzword a character in HBO's Silicon Valley is constructing elegant hierarchies for. It is for maximum code reuse and extensibility, not maximum code reuse and ostensibility.
And, probably one of my all-time favorites because of its subtlety:
Correction, April 3, 2014: This post originally quoted photographer Tom Sanders as saying it takes him five years to get on the dance floor. It takes him five beers.
Correction, July 15, 2014: This post originally misstated the email address for corrections. It's email@example.com not firstname.lastname@example.com. It's only fitting that this post has a correction.


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Jim Growden is my (Steve Hayes) third cousin once removed. Jim was educated at Tullahoma High School, Motlow State Community College, Belmont University, New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary and Trinity Theological Seminary. He spent 10 years in the US Marine Corps, and entered the ministry in 1968, and became pastor of Westwood Baptist Church, Manchester, Tennessee in 1999.
He is the son of Arthur Franklin Growden and Flora Myers. He and his wife Carol have two sons.
Filed under: Growden family | Tagged: Growden family | 1 Comment »


text: 字幕列表 影片播放 列印英文字幕 MR. : We all want to save money heating or cooling our house or office, right? The answer may be under your feet, literally. Much of the heating and cooling can come from the ground, below the surface, with something called a geothermal heat pump. You see, below the frost line about 10 feet down, the Earth maintains a nearly constant temperature of 54 degrees. We can tap into this energy to provide heating in the winter and cooling in the summer. OK, now, here's how it works. Bury a loop of pipes called a heat exchanger just below the surface, and fill them with water or a water and antifreeze solution. During the winter months, the air is usually cooler than the temperature below ground. The solution circulates in a loop underground and absorbs the Earth's heat. This heat is brought to the surface and transferred to a heat pump. The heat pump warms the air, and then your regular heating system warms the air some more to a comfortable temperature. Finally, ducts circulate the air to the various rooms. Now, a huge benefit is that the geothermal system doesn't have to work as hard to make people inside comfortably warm, and you save lots of money on your heating bill. In the summertime, the system works in reverse. When it's hot outside the temperature below the surface is cooler than the summer heat. So the fluid in the loop absorbs heat in the building and sends it underground. The ground's lower temperature cools it, and it's circulated again and again. Now you're saving money on air conditioning. Now, this church uses a large geothermal heat pump to heat and cool the building. It has a very big parking lot, which lets it spread out is loop horizontally. But if you don't have all that space, you can go straight down and use a vertical loop system instead. Geothermal heat pumps can be used just about anywhere in the U.S. because all areas have nearly constant shallow-ground temperatures, although systems in different locations will have varying degrees of efficiency and cost savings. The constant temperature of the Earth just below our feet is a sustainable resource literally in our own backyard. It's a clean energy source ready for us to use to heat and cool our homes and buildings while lowering our utility bills.


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The assignment was daunting: Build a remote-controlled aerial vehicle; make it tiny but highly maneuverable; install a camera so that pilots can navigate it into buildings using only a live video stream; and model the craft after an actual bird. "There could be no thrusters, no propellers," says Todd Hylton, who oversaw the project for DARPA's Nano Air Vehicle program—just two wings that flap.
Matt Keennon, an engineer for California-based AeroVironment, led the team that met this challenge, building the first-ever robotic hummingbird. "As far as we know, this is a new form of man-made flight," says the lifelong model-airplane fanatic. Altering wing speed changes thrust, while slight modulations in wing angle send the craft zipping off in any direction. It can also hover in place against gusting wind. The team custom-built most of the aircraft by hand using machine tools, microscopes and an old-school Swiss watchmaker's lathe to fashion parts, including tiny flanged pulleys in the flapping-wing transmission. The whole craft, including motors, battery, communication systems and video camera, weighs less than a AA battery.
The Pentagon hopes the Nano Hummingbird will usher in a new class of aerial surveillance vehicles capable of identifying targets, collecting intel and locating hostages indoors, not just on the battlefield. Law enforcement agencies might also use the drone to gather evidence—during standoffs or drug raids, for instance—and for search-and-rescue missions. During last spring's nuclear meltdown in Japan, says Hylton, "it would have been great to have a small vehicle to fly into the reactors to see what was going on before sending in humans."


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Because of slack buyer interest and other obstacles facing mobile payments in the U.S., Apple and other companies must inject new features and inducements to boost adoption.
Apple is expected to announce at its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), which starts Monday, new technology to combine customer rewards with its existing Apple Pay mobile payments service. That service launched last October.
The technology would allow customers to automatically get coupons, rewards, loyalty points and special offers from a specific retailer -- or from Apple itself -- applied when a purchase is made from an NFC-ready iPhone or Apple Watch.
Google recently announced at Google I/O that its upcoming Android Pay service would do something similar by combining rewards with payments when its service launches later this year alongside the older Google Wallet system.
But will it matter?
Too few retailers -- and credit card use is entrenched
A number of surveys and analyst assessments indicate that despite the excitement generated by Apple Pay, the U.S. buying public isn't very excited about making payments from a phone or watch when it's just as easy to use a credit card or cash.
The findings show that some customers are still worried about security and privacy, even with tokenization in NFC-based systems (like Apple's), which is more secure than magnetic-stripe credit cards -- by a long shot.
Also, many people who have tried mobile payments for in-store purchases find they use the system once or twice, then give up because so few retailers support NFC so far.
Apple in March boasted 700,000 locations supporting Apple Pay, which sounds like a lot. But it's still just a fraction of the estimated 12 million physical payment terminals in the U.S. It will take up to a decade for 90% of U.S. retail locations to install and support NFC terminals; it took Canada eight years to widely adopt smart card technology.
An IDC survey of hundreds of Americans and Western Europeans found low interest in making in-store payments with smartphones. "No one in the survey seemed that jazzed-up about using mobile payments," said IDC analyst Will Stofega, who said Apple, Google and other mobile payment providers now face a "slog" in winning over customers.
"Last year, I thought that with Apple on the scene, people would be using this stuff, and maybe they are in San Francisco and New York, but there really aren't that many elsewhere," he said.
Apple hasn't said much about actual number of users adopting Apple Pay. In January, CEO Tim Cook said Apple Pay accounts for two-thirds of dollars spent with contactless payments, which includes NFC. But the overall use of mobile payments is very low still, about 4% of all in-store payments in the U.S., according to an online survey released in January by Verifone, a company that makes in-store payment terminals.
"Adding rewards to mobile payments is certainly helpful, but whether it is enough to get people fantastically crazy about this stuff, we'll have to see," Stofega said.
An April survey by Kantar WorldWide found that fully 76% of users of iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus smartphones (the only phones that include NFC) hadn't tried Apple Pay. On the other hand, the survey found only 2.6% didn't use Apple Pay because they didn't trust it, while only 4.1% said they didn't use it because they didn't understand how it works.
"People don't use Apple Pay and other services because they don't need to; their credit card works just fine," said Carolina Milanesi, chief of research at Kantar.
A separate survey of 1,000 iPhone 6 users done in March by PYMNTS.com found 15% had tried Apple Pay, but only 6% said they continued to use it. Some analysts have linked that fall-off to the shortage of stores offering the service.
If Apple links reward cards to payment options next week, "that will be interesting, but not much of a driver of mobile payments in my view," Milanesi said. "But some kind of cash-back or point system, similar to how credit cards work, will be more appealing to users who are more reticent about trying out the technology."
Mobile payments are inevitable
Patrick Moorhead, an analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, said Apple Pay will probably catch on in the coming year in greater numbers for reasons beyond any new rewards capabilities.
"I've watched year after year the failures of mobile payments, but I'm positive on Apple Pay because it provides ease of use with the experience and offers users privacy that Apple won't resell your personal information," Moorhead said. "Apple doesn't take personal data and use it like Google does."
Another analyst, Garter's Avivah Litan, said the real growth with mobile payments in the U.S. will come when retailers of all sizes get on board in greater numbers than they have so far. Apple's biggest focus has been to reassure consumers about its service and working with banks and credit card companies -- and less so, merchants, she said.
"Apple Pay is very consumer friendly, but that doesn't necessarily drive out a new payment system," he said. "It's really about the merchants. The mobile payment area is still really small and it's a major inflection point to install equipment in stores to support smartphones to make payments, so you've got to find a big critical mass of merchants who can benefit. It doesn't seem like Apple's found that critical mass yet."
Litan argued that merchants generally want to avoid paying fees of 2% to 5% per transaction to credit card companies and the banks behind the cards, which still happens with Apple Pay and its use with Visa, MasterCard, American Express and others. "Apple's system is consumer friendly and is tight from a security and privacy standpoint and that's why they are aligned with Visa and MasterCard, who are also consumer-driven. But the banks and card companies are not aligned with the merchants," Litan said.
Apparently aware of the need to bring in more merchants, Apple has reportedly been aggressive in signing up the 100 biggest U.S. retailers this year. A spokesman for Apple, according to a Reuters report, said that about half of the top 100 will accept Apple Pay by the end of 2015, with many more in 2016.
However, Reuters surveyed the top 100 merchants and found fewer than 25% currently accept Apple Pay, while nearly 66% said they won't be accepting Apple Pay this year. Four of the 100 said they have plans to join next year. The top reasons retailers cited for not accepting Apple Pay were insufficient customer demand, lack of access to personal data about buying habits generated by Apple Pay transactions and the cost of the technology.
Some in the Reuters survey said they belong to the MCX coalition of big retailers, which includes WalMart and 18 others in the top 100. They support an alternative new payment system called CurrentC coming later this year.
Moorhead believes that Apple's projection of getting half of the 100 top retailers to accept Apple Pay by year's end is spot on. Some retailers might be reluctant to say they are moving ahead in a survey format because they could be bound by nondisclosure agreements, he explained.
"Granted, there's going to be no sudden 'on' switch to mobile payments, but as more and more people use it and as wearables get more pervasive, it will come," Moorhead said. "It's going to be like the difference between going to the bank to get money versus using an ATM."
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text: Anything with the name Panache brings comfort, support and high style. Sister brand of the company, Sculptresse by Panache has stepped out with their own styles and fashions. Sculptresse by Panache offers sizes for the full busted and full figured woman ranging in sizes from 34-46, up to an HH cup from an E cup. Sculptresse by Panache brings you bras and panties in many different colors, prints and patterns. Embellishments like embroidered lace and silky satin give these styles a touch of elegance. Smoothing sides and backs, padded adjustable straps and leotard backs bring you extra support and comfort. Multi-part cups and side slings bring you shape and additional support. Panties are offered in different rises so you can find the level of coverage you need. Sculptresse by Panache fits you in supportive, fashionable lingerie styles. Shop HerRoom for the latest styles of Sculptresse by Panache.


text: New Book on Racial Identity by Dr. Yaba Blay to be Released on Black Friday with Launch Party at the Painted Bride November 04, 2013 On Black Friday, Nov. 29, a new book on racial identity by Drexel University's Dr. Yaba Blay, one of today's leading voices on colorism and global skin color politics, will be released from Blay's recently launched independent press, Black Print Press. To celebrate the release, a launch party will take place at The Painted Bride Art Center (230 Vine St.) on Nov. 29 from 6 p.m. – 9 p.m. A concurrent photography exhibition is currently on display at The Painted Bride through Dec. 21. The book, entitled (1)ne Drop: Shifting the Lens on Race, seeks to challenge narrow perceptions of what Blackness is and what it looks like. By combining candid narratives and photos from 60 contributors hailing from 25 different countries, the book provides a living testimony to the diversity of Blackness. It is intended to spark dialogue about the intricacies and nuances of racial identity and the influence of skin color politics. A pre-release reading and book-signing with Blay and other contributors to the book will take place at The Painted Bride on Sunday, Nov.10 from 5 p.m. – 6:30 p.m., as part of the 12th Annual First Person Arts Festival. The storytelling event will interweave history with candid stories from participants in the Project and turns the spotlight on living testimonies of diversity. Participants include Danielle Ayers, Perry "Vision" Divirgilio, Zun Lee, Sembene McFarland, Biany Pérez and Brandon Stanford. The book will be available for purchase at this event. The book also will be available for purchase from Amazon.com, beginning Nov. 29. Blay is an assistant professor and co-director of the Africana Studies program in Drexel University's College of Arts and Sciences. The book is part of her larger, multi-platform project called (1)ne Drop – a reference to the "one-drop rule" from the early 1900s that held that anyone with 1/32 of "African Black blood" was Black. "In recent history, many Americans have used the term 'post-racial' to describe the state of current U.S. race relations, somehow suggesting that we have 'gotten over race' or that we no longer have racial issues," said Blay. "What (1)ne Drop demonstrates is that concerns about race and what 'box' people fit into are as important now, as it was when the country instituted the one-drop rule." The Project, which includes an online and traveling photography exhibition, ultimately seeks to raise social awareness and spark community dialogue about the complexities of Blackness as both an identity and a lived reality. The Project was the inspiration behind "Who is Black in America?", the fifth installation of CNN's Black in America television documentary series with Soledad O'Brien in 2012, on which Blay served as a consulting producer. "(1)ne Drop offers an eye-opening look at issues that many of us too often take for granted," said Amy DuBois Barnett, editor in chief of Ebony magazine. "Blay broadens our ideas about what counts as Black and challenges readers to rethink Blackness not only as a category but as an experience. As a biracial Black woman, I think this book is not only a must-read but a must-share." Actor Nicole Ari Parker said, "This book reveals that even though racism has a stronghold on our bodies and minds, a healing is at hand. People everywhere are taking the time to learn about and claim the fullness of themselves, one drop at a time. With each page, another tablecloth in the proverbial Big House is shaken off, and the crumbs of our systematically dismantled identity are powerfully, lovingly and proudly pieced back together, all over the world." Blay received her doctorate in African American studies and a graduate certificate in women's studies from Temple University in 2007. Her research interests include skin bleaching, the politics of Black embodiment (skin color/hair), Black identity, Africana cultural aesthetics and aesthetic practices, issues of gender in Africa and the Diaspora and global Black popular culture. Blay is the recipient of a 2010 Leeway Foundation Art and Change Grant. Media Contact Alex McKechnie email@example.com 215-895-2705


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Problem 970. Piecewise linear interpolation
Solution Stats
Problem Comments
2 Comments
It seems someone messed up the test code: the defintion of x for the first test is now in the comment line and its impossible now to solve the problem (except cheating...)
I think there is something wrong with the test.
Solution Comments
5 Comments
This is showing some strange behavior. If you use the second solution for y, the hard coded answer, it fails the first test case and also shows differing input values for the original x and y. However, if you use the first solution for y (taken from Alfonso's solution), then the correct input values for x and y are shown. I don't understand how the input values for the test suite do not match (you can see the values displayed in the answer.
Just noticed the issues that some people were having with this problem. I added a "%%" at the start of the test suite, which has helped in the past. Rescoring the two solutions that you have commented on fixed your problems. Your hard coded answer now works, and all three of the test cases show up in your test suite.
Hello, James. Any chance you could check the somewhat similar Cody bug I seem to encounter with Problem 753? I am puzzled as to why it only affects some Players. Thanks, DIV.
Thanks for the suggestion, James. I didn't get a response from them, but the fatal bug in the Test Suite of Problem 753 has somehow morphed into a non-fatal bug anyway. —DIV
...Or not. Anyway, I think I've figured out the way Test Suites are parsed in Cody: "%%" defines the start of a new test case, and omission of "%%" for the first lines of code means they become _shared variables_! Sorry for going off-topic (w.r.t. piecewise linear interpolation), but I couldn't see this documented anywhere. It is actually quite handy, as per the Test Suite in Problem 44655. —DIV
1 Comment
Too bad the test cases don't work anymore :(
I get the same input for x and y each time
x = 1 1 3 0 1 1
y = 5 3
1 Comment
This solution shows a little bit different approach to the problem. It leads to nice, short code.
2 Comments
There are some rounding issues with the test suite. assert(isequal(a,b)) where a and b are doubles can be problematic. I would suggest using assert(all(all(abs(a-b)<1e-10))) or something similar instead
I picked out the numbers in the test cases to hopefully avoid doing that. Looks like your solution (which is quite impressive, btw) runs into the issues I was hoping to avoid.
I'll change the assert condition in a bit.
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text:
Slices of Life...That ever happen to you? Me neither
I'm intrigued by human behavior. As humans we operate under certain norms. Most often, we seek approval from one another. So, when we have an urge, opportunity or occasion to bend the norms, we often hope no one is watching.
I'm intrigued by human behavior. As humans we operate under certain norms. Most often, we seek approval from one another. So, when we have an urge, opportunity or occasion to bend the norms, we often hope no one is watching.
Because, at the end of the day, don't we all just want to be normal?
But what is that, really? Do normal people get caught picking their noses, tooting in public or singing in the shower when they believe no one is home? We've all been there, done that (yes, we have). I believe we normal people have more of these tricky, tacky, taboo and tangled situations in common than we realize (or would like to admit). For instance:
Ever take a crumpled shirt (or pants) from the dresser and tumble it in the dryer in order to fluff out the wrinkles because you really do hate ironing that much? Me neither.
Ever see a photo of yourself from 10 years ago and think, "I didn't look too bad then," and in your mind believe you still look like that right now? Me neither.
Ever run naked and dripping wet from the shower to get a towel because you forgot to get one before your shower and you hope no one sees you through your wide-open picture window? Me neither.
Ever get teary-eyed after watching a well-done, poignant and touching 30-second TV commercial and try to hide it from your spouse because he wouldn't understand that kind of deep emotion? Me neither.
Ever find yourself without any clean socks so you take the pair you wore yesterday and turn them inside out and wear them again? Me neither.
Ever Google yourself, to see if you're on the web, and then click on all the pages that mention your name to find out if it's you or someone else with the same name as you? Me neither.
Ever put on a baseball hat and extra-large sweatshirt and dash through the grocery store as fast as possible, hoping you won't run into anyone you know, because you didn't have time to shower before going? Me neither.
Ever been surprised to find you are talking to yourself and have your overall level of shock crescendo when you find you are also answering yourself - out loud - at the superstore? Me neither.
Ever go on Facebook, scroll down, then down again and again and perhaps again and (finally) get a sense of relief when you reach the post you already read - last time - so you know you can quit? Me neither.
Ever run into a friend from high school whom you haven't seen in years and think that some of the people from your high school are getting old? Me neither.
Ever borrow money from your kids and promise to pay them back (with interest) on payday? Me neither.
Ever heated your coffee or tea or hot cocoa in the microwave for the third time in one morning and then been distracted by the laundry, causing you to forget about your beverage until you found it, now cooled, in the microwave, the next day? Me neither.
Ever received a snide or angry comment from someone and been left speechless and then spent the next hour thinking of all the smart comebacks you woulda coulda shoulda said? Me neither.
Ever make your bed at night, just so you could unmake it before going to bed an hour later? Me neither.
We're all normal people, engaging in normal behaviors. Or maybe not, depending on your definition of normal. I could go on and on creating more of these imaginary scenarios, but you probably couldn't relate anyway, right? Yeah, me neither.
Follow Slices of Life on Facebook and hit Like (please). Jill Pertler is an award-winning syndicated columnist, playwright and author of "The Do-It-Yourselfer's Guide to Self-Syndication" Email her at firstname.lastname@example.com ; or visit her website at http://marketing-by-design.home.mchsi.com/ .


text:
Industrial Control Systems (ICS) has been saved
Industrial Control Systems (ICS)
ME PoV Summer 2013 issue
Protecting the 'other' network
Industrial Control Systems (ICS), those big machines with lights, switches and big knobs common to manufacturing environments, have long been considered a matter for engineers and Operations. But the recent spate and proliferation of cyber attacks - attacks utilizing technology and the Internet, has brought to light how these systems affect our daily lives and are raising questions about how they are being managed and protected.
Download and read this article


text:
Hi all!
We are back with some updates from the Birthday Dollhouse that we helped my sister build for my niece's birthday!
Once the dollhouse was complete, it was time to add the furnishings. My sister purchased the Our Generation kitchen set. This kitchen is made entirely out of plastic.
At first I wasn't sold on a red kitchen, but when she put it in the house, I fell in love! It is so cute against the teal walls!
And she found the perfect spot to put the little shelf that she found at the thrift store. It fits perfectly above the kitchen! Awesome!
I have to say, this little kitchen is well worth the money. Like many of the Our Generation brand sets, it comes with so much food and accessories! It was a huge hit with my niece who opened it with her family the night before her big party. The look on her face was priceless in the video that my sister took when she opened it. 🙂 ❤
The fridge is my favourite. It is a separate piece from the rest of the kitchen. It has double doors with a drawer freezer. There is plenty of space for all of the food accessories!
I am serious when I say that you get your money's worth in doll food with this set! There is a ton of doll sized goodness in there!
I love that everything opens, and all of the knobs turn. This kitchen is very interactive. It is also very easy to open and close the doors. It is well made, and well thought out.
The oven has a baking rack that slides out. There is even a mini banana loaf in there! 🙂
Under the oven door is the cookie sheet/baking pan storage drawer.
Next to the stove is this little cupboard.
Then we have the dishwasher. The little racks in the dishwasher pull out, and you can put dishes in there. ❤
Some of the dishes that come with this set are doubles of the Our Generation baking set. My niece already had that set, but that's okay. At least they are in different colours, so they are not exactly the same.
Above the stove there is a little microwave.
My niece was making a hamburger in there I see. 🙂
This little cubby behind the clock was kind of a big deal to the girls.
It's like a secret hiding spot for spies! they said. ❤ LOL!
Being a spy is quite obviously the coolest thing in the universe. 😛
This is the cooktop and sink area. It comes with a dish rack and some pots and pans as well as some cleaning supplies. The backsplash is a sticker.
On the very far side of the kitchen, right at the top are a couple of shelves. There is also a window behind the sink, but there isn't any background, just a window frame. I might suggest that my sister print out an outside scene for it.
My niece made a little utensil tray to hold all of her doll's kitchen tools. She is crafty like her Aunty! ❤
All in all, we think that this little kitchen is great. It is well priced for everything that you get, and I can see that it will last for years to come.
I believe that this set also comes in pink or silver, but you know what? The red is actually growing on me. 🙂
What do you think?
Leave a comment below!
❤ ❤ ❤


text:
Sinful Colors Professional Nail Polish 947 MINT APPLE .5 Fl Oz
Whether you're looking to add a dash of glitter to your nails or just a high-gloss solid color, Sinful Colors Professional Nail Color has you covered. This salon-quality nail lacquer comes in a wide range of colors that'll leave your nails looking great. The nail polish dries quickly so you can get back to your day without worrying about immediate smudges or chips, and it comes off cleanly, making it easy to switch up your manicure as often as you like.


text:
Story highlights
UDOO seeks to combine the power of four Raspberry Pis and Arduino in a mini PC
It is intended to be a powerful prototyping board for software development and design
UDOO will be able to run with either Android or Linux
The project has received $95,000 in six days on Kickstarter
The Raspberry Pi is all the rage for hobbyists in search of cheap, credit card-sized computers that can run a full PC operating system. Arduino boards have been around nearly a decade, meanwhile, powering robots and all sorts of other creative electronics projects.
Now, a project called UDOO ("you do") seeks to bring the best elements of Raspberry Pi and Arduino together into a single mini-PC that can run either Android or Linux.
Read: Hacking the world's cheapest computer
"With UDOO, we want to combine the winning characteristics of Arduino and Raspberry Pi in one single board. The simplicity of Arduino in managing sensors, combined with the flexibility of a microcomputer based on ARM are integrated in UDOO, giving you a powerful prototyping board able to run Linux or Android," UDOO project coordinator Bruno Sinopli, a Carnegie Mellon professor in electrical and computer engineering, said in a video on UDOO's Kickstarter page.
UDOO-based projects demonstrated in the video included a camera-equipped toy car controlled remotely with a tablet, programming education for kids, and a video game involving players running on equipment reminiscent of the Wii Balance Board. Touchscreens and various other types of sensors can be connected to the UDOO.
"Want to build an LED light-controller, an RFID reader, or a creative game controller? UDOO allows you to create any kind of project and share it with the community," the Kickstarter page states. "Combining the flexibility of Arduino with the power of Android or Linux, you can create and update tons of stand-alone solutions without worrying about the linking between the two worlds and their wiring."
UDOO's designers claim the board will have "the power of four Raspberry Pis," apparently in reference to the quad-core chip (the Raspberry Pi uses a single-core). The UDOO also has twice as much RAM (1GB) and Gigabit Ethernet as opposed to the Pi's 100 Megabit Ethernet. The Raspberry Pi has the UDOO beat on price, though, with models selling for $25 or $35.
Read: Coder club turns out tween tech prodigies
The UDOO was seeking $27,000 to jump start development of the computer. It has already received over $250,000 with 46 days of funding still to go.


text:
Facebook's Mobile Growth Trumps Growth Elsewhere, Margin Drifts Lower
Facebook, Inc. (NASDAQ: FB) is out with its fourth quarter earnings. The social media giant reported $0.17 in earnings per share on revenue of $1.585 billion. Thomson Reuters had estimates of $0.15 per share and sales of $1.53 billion. This represents 40% sales growth for Facebook in its fourth quarter.
Founding CEO Mark Zuckerberg is trying to sound more like a public company CEO than a social media geek. He said, "We enter 2013 with good momentum and will continue to invest to achieve our mission and become a stronger, more valuable company." Zuckerberg did not offer any formal guidance in the press release. As of December 31, 2012, Facebook's cash and marketable securities came to a sum of $9.63 billion.
Revenue from advertising was $1.33 billion, representing 84% of total revenue and a 41% increase from the same quarter last year. Payments and other fees revenue for the fourth quarter was $256 million. Monthly active users were up 25% to 1.06 billion and daily active users were up 28% to 618 million.
Mobile Monthly active users were up 57% to 680 million. Facebook said that its mobile daily active users exceeded web daily active users for the first time in the fourth quarter of 2012. Mobile revenue represented approximately 23% of advertising revenue, up from approximately 14% of advertising revenue in the prior sequential quarter.
Investors may raise some brows after seeing the margin compression, although some of this was known due to hiring and expense items. GAAP operating margin was 33% for the fourth quarter versus 48% for the fourth quarter of 2011. Excluding share-based compensation and related payroll tax expenses, non-GAAP operating margin was 46% versus 55% for the fourth quarter of 2011.
The company said, "Fourth quarter costs and expenses were $1.06 billion, an increase of 82% from the fourth quarter of 2011. Excluding share-based compensation and related payroll tax expenses, non-GAAP costs and expenses were $849 million, an increase of 67%… The GAAP income tax provision for the fourth quarter was $441 million, representing an 87% effective tax rate. Excluding share-based compensation expense and related payroll tax expenses, the non-GAAP effective tax rate would have been approximately 41%."
Facebook shares closed up almost 1.5% at $31.24 on the day but shares are down about 4% at $30.20 in the after-hours. Until the shares move from the conference call, we would consider this unfinished business.
Filed under: 24/7 Wall St. Wire, Earnings, Internet, Media, Technology, Technology Companies Tagged: FB, featured


text:
Volume 19 - Article 23 | Pages 855–906
Romania: Childbearing metamorphosis within a changing context
|Date received:
|09 Aug 2006
|Date published:
|01 Jul 2008
|Word count:
|childbearing, Europe, fertility, Romania
|You will find all publications in this Special Collection "Childbearing Trends and Policies in Europe" at http://www.demographic-research.org/special/7/
In 1989, the socialist regime in Romania collapsed and the state's coercive pro-natalist policy ended. Since then, fertility has gone through major changes, namely, a massive reduction in fertility and important structural changes: birth postponement, an end to universal childbearing, and the emergence of non-marital births. Family formation has been postponed, but a pattern of early marriage still persists compared to other European countries. Although unmarried cohabitation is rising, it is rarely seen as an alternative to marriage. Modern contraceptive methods are being used increasingly, but traditional contraceptive methods continue to be widespread. Abortion, which was re-legalized in 1989 and made available after two decades of prohibition, has been practiced extensively ever since, especially after first birth. Romanians in 2004 continue to have a universal preference for parenting. However, the preference for the two-child family has declined and the desire for a larger family has become the exception. The transformation of the socialist regime into a democratic society with a market economy generated a socio-economic crisis, and the majority of social benefits have therefore been oriented towards alleviating poverty. Other social policies, including those affecting the family, were redefined. However, fewer funds were made available than for those geared to promote economic development or reduce poverty and, as a consequence, their impact on childbearing has been small.
Author's Affiliation
Cornelia Muresan - Babeș-Bolyai University, Romania
Paul-Teodor Hărăguş - Babeș-Bolyai University, Romania
Mihaela Hărăguş - Babeș-Bolyai University, Romania
Christin Schröder - Max-Planck-Institut für Demografische Forschung, Germany
Other articles by the same author/authors in Demographic Research
Co-ethnic marriage versus intermarriage among immigrants
and their descendants: A comparison across seven European countries using event-history analysis
Volume 39 - Article 17
Recent fertility patterns of Finnish women by union status: A descriptive account
Volume 28 - Article 14
The negative educational gradients in Romanian fertility
Volume 22 - Article 4
The influence of parents on cohabitation in Italy - Insights from two regional contexts
Volume 19 - Article 48
Most recent similar articles in Demographic Research
Understanding low fertility in Poland: Demographic consequences of gendered discrimination in employment and post-socialist neoliberal restructuring
Volume 21 - Article 20 | Keywords: childbearing, Europe, fertility
Sweden: Combining childbearing and gender equality
Volume 19 - Article 28 | Keywords: childbearing, Europe, fertility
Spain: Short on children and short on family policies
Volume 19 - Article 27 | Keywords: childbearing, Europe, fertility
Slovenia: Generous family policy without evidence of any fertility impact
Volume 19 - Article 26 | Keywords: childbearing, Europe, fertility
Russian Federation: From the first to second demographic transition
Volume 19 - Article 24 | Keywords: childbearing, Europe, fertility
Cited References: 44
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text:
New satellite images from space reveal the storms bringing much-needed rains to California.
Yesterday (Feb. 27), a satellite image captured by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's GOES-West satellite showed one system winding down after showering the California coast, with another big front waiting offshore.
That big cyclone was expected to inundate California with heavy rains today (Feb. 28) and through the weekend. The rains should push through the Southwest and the Intermountain region and reach the Rockies by nightfall. Southern California should brace for thunderstorms and some flash flooding, meteorologists warn. The unusually bare Sierra Nevada Mountains could see a foot of snowfall during the storm.
An atmospheric river of moisture-rich air snaking across the Pacific was responsible for several inches of rain that fell around northern and central California earlier in the month. But the weekend's storms are caused by a low-pressure system that picked up tropical moisture deep in the Pacific, and its counter-clockwise orientation means it will spit a lot of that moisture out as rainfall, said Bob Benjamin, a forecaster with the National Weather Service in Monterey, Calif.
The storms, though welcome, aren't enough to make a big dent in the crushing drought that has plagued the region. Right now, about three-fourths of California is experiencing an exceptional or extreme drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.
Several storms are needed to offset the year's lows, an unlikely prospect, as the wet season in California typically ends March 31.
For instance, in an average year, the San Francisco region typically receives about 17.6 inches (44.7 centimeters) of rain from July 1 to this time of year, but has received only about 6.2 inches (15.7 centimeters), according to the National Weather Service. The storms will bring only an additional inch or two or rainfall.
Mountain snow is also at a historic low: A statewide measure taken by the Department of Water Resources yesterday estimated that snowpack water content was 24 percent of the average for this time of year.
Follow Tia Ghose on and. Follow Live Science, &. Original article on .


text:
Carly Rae Jepsen Reveals 'Kiss' Track Listing
Carly Rae Jepsen tweeted the track listing for her upcoming album 'Kiss,' which lands at retail on Sept. 18. The album is 16 songs strong, and Jepsen shared a handwritten image, featuring all sorts of bubble letters and doodling, of the track titles via Twitter. So cute, just like her.
Jepsen tweeted: "So excited to reveal the track list for #Kiss!" And we're so excited to see it, CRJ! Thanks for sharing. It's a little Labor Day weekend gift, one that gets us excited for a big smooch! She drew a line after track 12, so it makes us wonder if the standard edition is 12 tracks and the special edition is 16. Maybe?
'Call Me Maybe' is undeniably one of the biggest songs of summer 2012, with 'Good Time' nipping at its heels as another smash for CRJ. Let's hope that any of the other 14 songs on the album blow up at radio and become emblems and reminders of fall 2012.
Some of the titles are cutesie, like 'Tiny Little Bows' and 'Sweetie.' Others appear more serious, like 'Heart Is a Muscle' and 'Tonight I'm Getting Over You.'
We know just one thing – we cannot wait to be a recipient of this 'Kiss.' Pucker up – MWAH!
Carly Rae Jepsen 'Kiss' Track Listing
1. 'Tiny Little Bows'
2. This Kiss'
3. 'Call Me Maybe'
3. 'Curiosity'
5. 'Good Time'
6. 'More Than a Memory'
7. Turn Me Up'
8. 'Hurt So Good'
9. 'Beautiful'
10. 'Tonight I'm Getting Over You'
11. 'Guitar String / Wedding Ring'
12. 'Heart Is a Muscle'
13. 'Drive'
14. 'Wrong Feels So Right'
15. 'Sweetie'
16. 'Almost Said It'
Watch the Carly Rae Jepsen 'Call Me Maybe' Video


text:
Editor's Note: The following report is excerpted from Joseph Farah's G2 Bulletin, the premium online newsletter published by the founder of WND. Subscriptions are $99 a year or, for monthly trials, just $9.95 per month for credit card users, and provide instant access for the complete reports.
WASHINGTON – With the world focused on the latest Middle East flareup and the increasing prospect for a wider military conflict there, a little-noticed U.S. report has sounded new alarms over the vulnerability of the U.S. electric power-grid system to terrorist attacks, which could cause even more damage than natural disasters, according to a report from Joseph Farah's G2 Bulletin.
The effect, according to the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences, would be blackouts over large regions of the country for weeks and even months, costing billions of dollars to repair.
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The NRC report warned that the power grid is "inherently vulnerable" physically given the distances it covers, an already overly stressed bulk high-voltage system that can result in multiple failures. In addition, most of the major facilities remain unguarded.
A potential scandal surrounding this report is that it actually was written in 2007 but ordered classified in its entirety by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. This means that DHS has known for at least five years of the various natural and manmade threats to the nation's national grid system but has done virtually nothing to minimize potential damage.
TRENDING: Who is Jesus? The question we all will answer eventually
The fact that it was released now strongly suggests that little has been done in the intervening years by DHS to mitigate the threats to the national grid system.
As WND/G2Bulletin recently reported, DHS has come under congressional fire for not giving EMP effects on the national grid system a high priority in disaster scenarios that would prompt action by DHS.
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Failure to release the report for five years was briefly addressed in a forward to the report by Charles M. Vest, president of the National Academy of Engineering, who said that key findings of the report remain "highly relevant."
"We regret the long delay in approving this report for public release," Vest said.
"We understand the need to safeguard security information that may need to remain classified. But openness is also required to accelerate the progress with current technology and implementation of research and development of new technology to better protect the nation from terrorism and other threats."
Release of this report comes on top of mounting concerns over the increasing prospects of intense natural and manmade electromagnetic pulse, or EMP, events that similarly could knock out large sections of the national grid system for months – and even years – potentially costing hundreds of billions of dollars affecting tens of millions of people.
Especially vulnerable to an EMP event and terrorist attacks are the high-voltage transformers. They are large, very difficult to move, are custom-built and take years to replace under normal circumstances. These transformers no longer are made in the United States.
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Destruction of these transformers also can be done through terrorist cyber-attacks, either through Internet connections or by direct penetration at remote sites, since they rely on electronics, sensors and telecommunications which are linked to the outside and are not secure.
"Security of the U.S. electric power system is in urgent need of attention," the report said.
"Power system disruptions experienced to date in the United States, be they from natural disasters or malfunctions, have had immense economic impacts," said M. Granger Morgan of Carnegie Mellon University at Pittsburgh, who chaired the committee that wrote the report.
"Considering that a systematically designed and executed terrorist attack could cause disruptions even more widespread and of longer duration, it is no stretch of the imagination to think that such attacks could produce damage costing hundreds of billions of dollars," he said.
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Keep in touch with the most important breaking news stories about critical developments around the globe with Joseph Farah's G2 Bulletin, the premium, online intelligence news source edited and published by the founder of WND.
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Healy, Timothy Michael
Healy, Timothy Michael, 1855–1931, Irish statesman, first governor-general of the Irish Free State (1922–27). Elected to Parliament in 1880, he worked closely with Charles Stewart Parnell until the O'Shea divorce scandal (1890). Thereafter he led the anti-Parnell nationalists in Parliament. He was expelled from the party in 1902 but retained his seat in Parliament until 1918, when he resigned it to a Sinn Féiner. In the meantime he practiced at the bar, especially in the interests of Irish tenants and woman suffragists. On the foundation (1922) of the Irish Free State he was appointed governor-general and showed a remarkable spirit of conciliation in the performance of his duties. He resigned in 1927.
The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright © 2023, Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.
See more Encyclopedia articles on: British and Irish History: Biographies


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Dessert lovers
Number to Know
78 percent: The percentage of Americans savoring dessert after dinner has increased 5 percent since 2009, and 78 percent of treats enjoyed after dinner include chocolates, according to a study by The Hartman Group on U.S. eating habits.
— Brandpoint
Food Quiz
How many different colors of carrots are there?
Answer at bottom of rail.
Wise to the Word
za'atar: Also known as zahtar, za'atar is a Middle Eastern blend of spices. The typical ingredients are thyme, sesame seeds and sumac, but some blends may also include cumin, oregano or fennel seed.
— Cookthink
The Dish On...
"Martha Stewart's Cakes: Our First-Ever Book of Bundts, Loaves, Layers, Coffee Cakes, and more," by Editors of Martha Stewart Living.
A one-stop resource for cakes — birthday, chocolate, coffee, Bundt, upside-down, loaf and more. From pound cake and angel food (with many variations) to genoise and streusel-topped, from comfort classics like red velvet, six-layer coconut, rich chocolate, lemon meringue and cheesecake to sophisticated grown-up fare including chiffon cakes and tortes with luscious fruits, these 150 recipes and color photographs cover techniques, decorating and gifting ideas for every taste and occasion, whether no-fuss or fancy.
— Amazon
Food Quiz answer
- D. (Carrots come in orange, yellow, white, red and purple, according to WebMD.com. Carrots also are loaded with beta-carotene, a compound that is naturally converted to vitamin A when consumed. The deeper orange the carrot, the more beta-carotene you're getting.)


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Post by: AC360
Filed under: 360° Radar • John Zarrella
Diana has worked tirelessly for years, to accomplish her dream. How sad it is that people have to try to destroy her happiness and joy over this great accomplishment. I am so proud of her for not quitting. It seems there always are troublemakers, that try to ruin our hero's.
Nyad is a cheater. The hard data from her GPS positions, the tide chart analysis and her activity logs DO NOT tally. And she is NOT transparent about the data and her observers arent independent.
sorry - i do not believe that she did it without being towed or resting on the boat
Cheating in sports is very dispicible and dishonest and even more when setting a rocord by cheating. This should be thoroughly examined and if not proven genuine than should be excepted as a cheat. Think about the damage to the future generations because looks like she did impossible. Unless the whole 57 hours recorded and made public we should not trust anybody. Their word should not set the record.
This has to be a very small community, marathon swimmers, so why would one of your own who knows exactly how difficult this feat is be so willing to toss stones at someone who will likely never have the opportunity to repeat it and prove them wrong. Perhaps that's the very reason. They can place doubt in the minds of the unschooled, they should hope that should they ever succeed in the future in a record breaking swim, she isn't the one throwing stones.
I agree with you, & it's sad how quickly people want to believe the worst in others & that their success is failure. Competition is fierce in any sport & there will always be someone within each sport trying to knock the record holder off the top. Calling someone a cheat is the easiest way, & for anyone who watched the show about Diane Nyad's first attempt, training, process & ultimate victory, there should really be no doubt! She is an amazingly strong, committed & competitive woman, who wanted so very badly to accomplish something & she was able to do it! She should be congratulated, instead of having to deal with people who are stupid enough to believe in "Joe's matter of truth, just because he throws around a bunch of relevant words as so do conspiracy theorists!!
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Minnesota auditor calls for more special education funding
In a response to the concerns of school officials about spiraling special education costs, Minnesota's Legislative Auditor is recommending more state funding and steps to curb the increasing costs of those programs.
In a response to the concerns of school officials about spiraling special education costs, Minnesota's Legislative Auditor is recommending more state funding and steps to curb the increasing costs of those programs.
The auditor's report, released Wednesday, notes that special education is taking up an increasing part of school district budgets at a time when federal and state funds don't fully cover the $1.6 billion that schools spend on special education.
About 112,000 students in Minnesota, or 13 percent of the school population, received special education services during the 2010-2011 school year.
That represents an 11 percent increase from a decade ago, said Jody Hauer, a program evaluator in the auditor's office.
"We see the population of special education children rising at the same time that the full K-12 population is slightly decreasing," Hauer said.
Under federal law, any student who has a disability that affects their ability to learn is entitled to free special education programs. For some students that involves extra help with reading in a mainstream classroom. Others may need a staff member assigned to help them throughout the school day.
Hauer said the growing number of special education students is just one factor pushing up costs. Staffing is also a factor.
While the number of Minnesota students increased by 11 percent over a decade, the number of full-time special education staff increased by 25 percent.
The report recommends that lawmakers, the Department of Education and schools work together to reduce the cost of special education, but doesn't offer specific suggestions on how that could be done.
At the same time the report recommends lawmakers find a way to send more money to schools to close the $600 million gap between federal and state funding for special education, and what schools spend on the programs.
Minnesota districts spend more an average of $600 per special education student per year to fill the funding gap. In his budget request this session, Gov. Mark Dayton is asking for an increase of $125 million dollars for special education.
The funding shortfall has led districts to use money from their general budgets on special education, money they could otherwise use to reduce class sizes, or invest in new technology, Hauer said.
"The legislature should consider options to reduce school districts reliance on the general education funding that they've been using to pay special education expenses," she said.
Hauer admits fixing that problem won't be easy, and will require lawmakers to shift money from other areas, or raise revenue.
The report also found that Minnesota occasionally goes above and beyond what's required by the federal government.
For example, federal officials require a type of student evaluation be done in 60 days. Minnesota requires it be done in 30 days.
That led some lawmakers to ask if savings could be found by easing certain special education mandates from the state.
Minnesota's Commissioner of Education, Brenda Cassellius, cautioned lawmakers that those mandates are in place to help students to ensure that the system does not fail students with special needs.
"We're open to finding ways to reduce the burden, but also responsibly so that students and families have what they need and so that students get the best education possible."
Any discussion of pulling back on special education mandates is troubling to advocates of disabled children.
Sue Abderholden, executive director of the Minnesota chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, wants lawmakers and education officials to concentrate on ways to make the special education system better and more efficient.
"How can we partner with community organizations in the mental health area or even autism experts?" Abderholden asked. "Maybe there are other ways to bill Medicaid for the services provided in the school, maybe there's different ways to arrange personnel."
The legislative auditor's report directs lawmakers and the state Department of Education do something along those lines.
It recommends looking at potential changes to the special education system, and then figuring out how they might affect school's budgets and student performance.


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NEW YORK — The best news on the 80th day of the NHL lockout was that hockey owners and players did most of their talking in front of each other instead of making public statements.
The dueling sides in hockey's labor fight met for nearly eight hours — over two long sessions — on Tuesday, and those conversations lasted until midnight. NHL deputy commissioner Bill Daly stood side-by-side with union special counsel Steve Fehr at the end of the long and seemingly positive day, but didn't take questions from a large group of reporters who staked out the meetings at a Manhattan hotel.
The sides already have plans to meet Wednesday morning with the same group before the league's planned board of governors gathering, and could get back together after that is completed.
"We had a long day," Fehr said. "We thought it was a constructive day. We had a good dialogue. In some ways I'd say it might be the best day we've had, which isn't too overly optimistic of a picture. There is still a lot of work to do and a lot to be done. We will be back at it tomorrow morning."
Daly echoed Fehr's comments, and spoke well of the talks that included 18 players and six team owners.
"I appreciate the efforts of the players," Daly said. "Everybody is working hard. I think everybody wants to get a deal done, so that's encouraging. We look forward to hopefully making more progress tomorrow.
"Hopefully, we'll have more to update you on tomorrow. We are going forward with our board meeting. Hopefully be back at it after that, as well."
That was the extent of the details revealed by the two sides, which could be another good sign that neither group wanted to say anything that could throw the discussions off the rails.
A group of six owners and 18 players — many more than were originally expected — gathered to try to find some common ground as the search for a deal that would save the hockey season continued. NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman and union executive director Donald Fehr were at the hotel but stayed outside the meeting room.
Not much had worked up until Tuesday so the sides agreed to a different format to see if that would shake things up.
"I'm hoping we get to where we need to be," Bettman said before talks got under way Tuesday afternoon.
The dialogue continued, sometimes in smaller groups, throughout the day until the sides separated for a dinner break. The owners left while the players stayed to have a meal inside the hotel. The owners then returned to the hotel later Tuesday night for another round of talks with the union.
As more and more days pass by, the possibility that the entire hockey season will be lost grows. A lockout forced the cancellation of the 2004-05 season in February, and the belief is that the NHL won't wait that long this time to call off this already-delayed and shortened campaign.
All games through Dec. 14, along with the New Year's Day Winter Classic and the All-Star game have been wiped off the schedule.
The NHL board of governors will meet in New York on Wednesday, likely to discuss Tuesday's developments and perhaps where to go from here if a deal isn't reached soon. More game cancellations could be announced then, and an internal deadline for eliminating the season could also be established.
Originally the thought was no one other than owners and players would be in attendance for Tuesday's meeting, but each side had staff present, as well. The six selected owners were Ron Burkle (Pittsburgh Penguins), Mark Chipman (Winnipeg Jets), Murray Edwards (Calgary Flames), Jeremy Jacobs (Boston Bruins), Larry Tanenbaum (Toronto Maple Leafs) and Jeff Vinik (Tampa Bay Lightning).
Jacobs, considered one of the hard-line owners, and Edwards are the only members of the group of six to have taken part in previous negotiations.
The NHL had no objection for more than six players to take part, so Sidney Crosby, Jonathan Toews, Shane Doan, Brad Richards, Martin St. Louis, Ryan Miller, Craig Adams, David Backes, Michael Cammalleri, B.J. Crombeen, Mathieu Darche, Ron Hainsey, Shawn Horcoff, Jamal Mayers, Manny Malhotra, Andy McDonald, George Parros and Kevin Westgarth took part in negotiations.


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Hello, I am Daniel Sauerwein and I am the creator and head contributor for this blog. I am a Ph.D. candidate in History at the University of North Dakota and my fields are in North American History (with emphasis on new military history), Rural History, Public History and Geography. My areas of interest are in early American history, specifically military, which includes the Civil War and other early American wars.
I currently hold a Master of Arts degree from the University of North Dakota in History, with a major concentration in American history and a minor in Geography. My thesis explored camps of instruction in Illinois and focused on the transition from civilian to soldier as soldiers took their basic training in the camps. I also hold a Bachelor of Arts degree (magna cum laude) from Illinois College, with a major in History and double minors in Economics and Geography.
I currently work as a Reference Specialist with the North Dakota State Archives, where I assist patrons in accessing our materials for various types of research. My specialties will be on military history related collections and records.
I recently served as a History and Political Science Instructor at Northland Community and Technical College during the 2016-17 academic year. Previously, I taught both History and Geography courses for the University of North Dakota and Lake Region State College.
Over the course of my time teaching college, I have taught the following courses:
United States to 1877 (both in class and online)
United States since 1877
United States History pre-1865
United States History since 1865
Western Civilization I (online)
Western Civilization II (online)
Western Civilization Pre-1500
American Minorities (both in class and online)
American Politics and Government
State and Local Government (both in class and online)
North Dakota History
The United States: The Roaring Twenties
Civil War and Reconstruction
World War II (online)
Historical Geography
Special Topics in Geography: Heritage Tourism
I originally hail from Jerseyville, IL, but have lived in Missouri, Germany, Kansas, and Texas while my dad was in the Army. I have also visited 20 other states, Washington, DC, and five other countries in my life. Outside of my academic pursuits, I am involved with the Civil Air Patrol, Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War, and Sons of the American Legion. I also enjoy reading, writing, playing guitar, and firearms. I am an avid Civil War reenactor, currently serving as President/Lieutenant of Fifth Minnesota Infantry Regiment, Company D, where we do educational programming in the region, especially at Fort Abercrombie State Historical Site.
My areas of interest in the Civil War are camps of instruction, which are where soldiers took basic training, the Western theater of the war, and U. S. Grant. I like to focus on the soldiers from the "Old Northwest" (Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, etc.) as they are quite interesting and in many ways were better than their eastern counterparts.


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The Great Barrier Reef is the largest living structure on Earth. It might also represent the most prolific cradle for new types of animals on the planet, according to new research published in the January 8 edition of Science.
"In the oceans, new species and genera tend to originate in the tropics and in the shallows near shore," says paleobiologist Carl Simpson of Humboldt University in Berlin, one of the researchers on the new paper. By using a massive collection of data on fossils from mollusks to South American mammals, which records where a fossil was found, how often it is found and what accompanied it, Simpson and his colleagues find "that a majority of genera first evolve in reefs and then later expand to other habitats."
In fact, of the 6,615 seabed invertebrates surveyed in the so-called Paleobiology Database, 1,426 evolved in a reef ecosystem. And the result is not just an artifact of reef and shallow-water fossils being relatively more studied. "Reefs are actually rare compared to other habitats," Simpson notes. "If anything, there is a bias against finding that reefs are cradles."
The phemonenon of reefs acting as cradles of biodiversity seems to have peaked in the Paleozoic—from 542 million to 251 million years ago—for reasons that are unclear. One possibility is that by seeding other environments with new species, reefs undercut their own preeminence as cradles. "The consequence would be that reefs become one of many important cradles, rather than the most common cradle," Simpson says.
And reefs do not seem to have helped the oceans rebound from mass extinction events, like the one at the end of the Paleozoic era that wiped out as much as 90 percent of marine life. That's likely because "reef-building as a process had to recover from mass extinction events, because the ecosystem engineers that built reefs were severely affected," says marine scientist Richard Aronson of the Florida Institute of Technology, who was not involved with the study. "Reefs in general were not available to enhance biodiversity rebound because they first had to be reconstituted as viable ecosystems."
But coral reefs do offer a variety of ecological niches and "bumpiness," as Aronson puts it, or a "great variety of physical spaces, [water] flow regimes and other ecological opportunities." That has made them cradles not just for sponges and the like but also snails, shrimps, urchins, fishes and even extinct animals like trilobites.
Plus, vicious competition for space and food on a reef leads to a lot of "turnover," Simpson notes, or extinctions that allow for new species to develop as new habitats form or ecological niches open. "If turnover is high, then the brief window of opportunity for new species is a common occurrence."
According to some mathematical estimates, 99.9 percent of all species that have ever existed are now extinct. As it stands, estimates of the number of species on Earth at present range from five million to as many as 100 million, with science having identified only two million members of the biodiversity extant today. That means literally billions of species have come and gone in the 4.5 billion years Earth has existed.
New research will be needed to determine exactly why reefs are such efficient cradles for new life-forms. But the threats faced by coral today—from rising ocean acidity to agricultural runoff and rampant disease—do not bode well for marine biodiversity in the near future. After all, it is possible that during mass extinction events the destruction of reefs might have played a role in the decline of diversity in other marine environments, as well. As Aronson asks: "If modern reefs continue to degrade, will that have cascading evolutionary consequences for other ecosystems by cutting off the supply of new genera?"
Another Reason to Save Coral? Reefs Are Responsible for Ocean Biodiversity
An analysis of the fossil record shows that coral reefs are most often responsible for the diversity of sea life
The Great Barrier Reef is the largest living structure on Earth. It might also represent the most prolific cradle for new types of animals on the planet, according to new research published in the January 8 edition of Science.


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Girls on the Run: Join us on March 28!
In association with Decathlon Sports, Kalenji Club, OnMobile and Forum Value Mall, Runner Girls India is proud to present the second edition of "Girls on the Run".
* Distance: 5k, 10K
* Registration time: 6 am
* Start time: 6.30 am
* Registration fee: Rs 100*
* Date: March 28, 2010
* Venue: Decathlon Sports, Sarjapura Road
* Registration process:
Call +91 505 101035 to register
(Only Visa Cards accepted and Call charges Rs. 6/- per minute)
Walk-in registrations at Decathlon store March 15 onwards (10 am – 7 pm)
Get onto to Sarjapur Road (you will cross Springfields Apartments on your right) till you see the WIPRO office on the left.
After WIPRO, keep going straight towards the railway crossing on Sarjapur Road (away from TOTAL Mall), you will come to the Bellandur intersection and Bellandur bus stop.
Continue straight and cross the railway crossing. Then immediately you will see the store on your right.
Visit: Runner Girls India


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Wordless Wednesday: Only 28 Days Until Spring
Almost wordless: I've had enough of the colorless world of winter. No snowy pictures this week, I need green. This photo was taken last year at Cantigny Park in early May.
More Wordless Wednesday. © 2014 Under My Apple Tree. All rights reserved.
Advertisements appearing on this site are placed by WordPress and are not endorsed or approved by me.


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This Detailed Lace Trimmed Bubble Chiffon Blouse
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