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Although there are some applications available on the App Store that command relatively high prices, most of the software available is either free or sells for a buck or two. The fact that applications selling for more than a few dollars are swamped by inexpensive apps has caused some consternation, since the prevailing opinion is that all of the low-priced apps may discourage developers from creating sophisticated applications that they would need to sell at a higher price. Things may soon change, though, since Wired is reporting that Apple may introduce a "premium" section of the App Store to host more expensive applications.
Although we don't know a lot about the upcoming iPhone OS 3.0 event, the speculation is that Apple may announce the premium section then, since it would certainly be of interest to developers. The section would likely include offerings from larger game developers that would be more involved (and more expensive to develop) than current games, and for which the developers would presumably like to earn more than $1.99 per unit sold. Business and enterprise software could also appear there, since many business applications also cost a bit more to develop, or would come with more support than current App Store offerings.
In terms of a price point for the premium label, the article suggests that titles in the new section would sell for $20 and up, which to me seems pretty reasonable if you're talking about new games from big-name companies. A similar "$20 games" rumor has also appeared in the past, which may lend a bit of support to this latest tidbit. Overall, I think it's entirely plausible, but I wouldn't bet the farm that we'll see it announced at the event tomorrow.


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More so than just about any event outside of the Intel Developer Forum, Intel's annual R&D day provides the clearest and most worthwhile look into the collective psyche of the world's largest chipmaker. Designed to showcase Intel's current thinking on the future of technology, the event kicks off with a keynote, and then press and analysts are free to wander about the main exhibition hall looking at research initiatives in various stages of development. This year, Intel CTO Justin Rattner reprised his keynote role from last year, giving the audience an overview of Intel's research pipeline and showing us the primary trends on which the company is placing its bets.
I spent the day taking in the exhibits at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, where the event was hosted, and I wasn't able to see everything on display. I mostly confined my focus to Intel's security- and datacenter-related exhibits, and in this article I'll give you a glimpse of two of the key server-related technologies that Intel is cooking up. But first, the keynote.
Rattner highlighted five major areas where Intel focuses its R&D efforts: processing and programming, energy and sustainability, security and virtualization, electronics and photonics, and user experience and interaction.
In each of these areas, the word that Rattner kept hammering was "collaboration." "Collaboration" was to this year's Intel R&D day what "innovation" was to this past CES—a ubiquitously invoked abstraction that seemed to tie together everything and nothing at once. Cloud datacenters? These are massive collaboration platforms. Security? We need security before we can collaborate with each other safely. User experience? Check out the new ways we're dreaming up for people to collaborate with one another. I could go on, but it's painful, and you get the idea.
Rattner also talked up Intel's collaboration with industry, government, and universities. As an example of industry collaboration, he mentioned the Thunderbolt port that appears on new Macs.
Thunderbolt was "an Intel labs effort that we brought to Apple some years ago," Rattner said. Apple was excited by the technology, so "we moved up the timetable rather dramatically in response to Apple's needs in order to get it to market."
In an interesting aside, Rattner hinted that we'll see some novel things from Apple in terms of Mac system architecture, telling the audience to "watch for that." It's not clear what he could be referring to, but an external GPU is one possible and oft-cited use for Thunderbolt.
GPU-accelerated crypto
Speaking of GPUs, Intel would very much like to ship its integrated processor graphics (IPG) with all of its processors, from the Atom line up through the Xeon. The problem with cramming a GPU into a server-oriented Xeon chip, however, is that datacenter servers don't really have much use for that hardware, so it sits idle and wasted.
The current solution is to strip the GPUs from some of the Xeon line, but Intel would rather find interesting and worthwhile work for the GPU to do so that they can just leave it in. To this end, the company has its researchers working on alternative workloads for IPGs so that server customers can take advantage of the GPU as well as the CPU.
One area that Intel is investigating as a source of server-side GPU workloads is cryptography. No surprise—crypto acceleration has been the most commonly cited server-side use case for integrated coprocessors since the earlier part of the last decade, when Sun was talking up such things as part of its ill-fated MAJC architecture. Back when the AMD/ATI merger was announced, a crypto acceleration block was one of the few concrete ideas that the companies could think of for what would go into the generic application-specific coprocessor blocks in their SoC diagrams.
Of course, the approach that Intel is exploring isn't to bake a custom crypto accelerator into the server die, but rather to turn the GPU into a crypto accelerator by farming out some of the number-crunching to it.
Intel's Ken Grewal described how Intel researchers have managed to boost the number of concurrent HTTPS connections that a single chip can handle by a factor of 10 after using the GPU to accelerate the RSA algorithm.
"We've really tried to focus on accelerating the RSA pieces [of Transport Layer Security]," Grewal said, "and what we've done are some algorithm improvements. We're basically splitting workloads between the core CPU and the attached processor graphics."
The demo for this technology used a Sandy Bridge chip, which has a fixed-function GPU. But despite the limitations of the GPU, Intel was still able to send some code to it and have it do useful work.
After asking Grewal about the fixed-function nature of Sandy Bridge's GPU, I tried to pry a bit by saying, "Your lives will be easier with Ivy Bridge, since it's supposed to be more flexible," but I couldn't get him on-record confirming what everyone already knows, i.e. that Ivy Bridge will have a much more flexible, modern, DX11-capable GPU. Grewal just smiled and said, "As time goes on, we expect to have more functionality."
Grewal also emphasized that the crypto acceleration Intel was demonstrating is very early research, and he reiterated that "SDB [Sandy Bridge] processor graphics support through the server line is still undetermined."
SCCC: a cluster-on-die chip
At last year's Research @ Intel day, I asked Justin Rattner what he thought of Atom's server prospects, and specifically what he thought of SeaMicro's 512-Atom server system. He replied that the 48-core Single-Chip Cloud Computer that Intel was demoing for the first time on the floor was the best example of Intel's thinking for how to address the cloud datacenter's need for a sea of tiny cores.
Intel's stance on Atom has now changed, as the company has recently started talking about making Atom parts that are aimed straight at the cloud server market. But the SCCC is still going and has been turned into a testbed platform for many-core computing.
I got a change to see the SCCC in action at the booth for Intel's Many-core Applications Research Community (MARC). MARC consists of 80 different institutions and over 300 researchers, and it's all built around an SCCC-based system that Intel has been freely giving out to academic groups so that they can do their own research on many-core chips.
Intel's decision to start handing out these systems for free is significant because popular pre-MARC many-core research efforts have relied on Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA)-based systems that can essentially "simulate" large numbers of cores. I'm thinking specifically of the venerable Berkeley RAMP system, run by David Patterson's group. The MARC approach is definitely cheaper than RAMP (free!) and it looks like a big improvement.
As far as the SCCC chip that forms the heart of the MARC effort, we've described it previously in some detail. To recap, the SCCC is a 1GHz, 48-core chip made on a 45nm process, where each core is based on a variant of the classic Pentium (P54C) that was originally released in 1994.
The chip is divided into 24 dual-core tiles, and each tile has a four-port router that connects it to the routers in the four adjacent tiles (north, south, east, and west) to form a mesh network. This 2GHz mesh network has between 1.5Tb/s and 2Tb/s of bandwidth, and the overall chip itself has four memory controllers for getting data into and out of the socket.

subset: commoncrawl


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MONROVIA, LIBERIA (AFP) - Armed men claiming that "there's no Ebola" in Liberia raided a quarantine centre for the deadly disease in Monrovia overnight, prompting at least 20 patients infected with the deadly virus to flee, a witness said Sunday.
"They broke down the door and looted the place. The patients have all gone," said Ms Rebecca Wesseh, who witnessed the attack and whose report was confirmed by residents and the head of Health Workers Association of Liberia, Mr George Williams.
Mr Williams said the unit housed 29 patients who were receiving preliminary treatment before being taken to hospital. It was unclear how many are now at large.
"They had all tested positive for Ebola," he said, adding that nine had died, without elaborating.
Ms Wesseh said she heard the assailants shouting that President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf "is broke", adding: "She wants money. There's no Ebola" in Liberia.
Ms Wesseh said the mostly young men armed with clubs broke into the isolation unit set up in a highschool in a Monrovia suburb.
Nurses also fled the attack, Ms Wesseh said.
The Ebola outbreak, the worst since the virus first appeared in 1976, has claimed 1,145 lives in five months, according to the UN World Health Organisation's latest figures as of August 13: 413 in Liberia, 380 in Guinea, 348 in Sierra Leone and four in Nigeria.


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This year 2016
the Autumnal Equinox falls on September 22
it was yesterday! I wish you all a wonderful Fall Season!
Today is September 23 the Zodiac turn in Libra sign and….is…
HAPPY BIRTHDAY to Me!!!
"I wish to myself a wonderful Birthday fulfilled with joy, happiness, light and love,
creating the journeys of my life one step at the time doing what I love,
with a never-ending creativity that will always
speak to others through my heart and soul"
©Copyright Carolina Russo – yesterdayafter.com


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Vanilla Bean Jasmine Rice Pudding
February 8, 2010 at 10:18 pm 64 comments
Nobody understands it, but for some inexplicable reason I like to work in the dark.
Well, not complete darkness. But as long as there's a bit of gold left in the sky, I flick the light switches off before preheating the oven or leaving out the butter. I watch the lightbulb gradually dim until all that's left is the little red glow of the filament, like the scarlet flicker of a snake's tongue, until that too goes out in a snap. Then I get to work.
I throw open all of the curtains. Despite the chrome-colored damper of winter in Seattle, there's a natural light that filters through the glass and brightens the kitchen in a way that artificial light cannot. I like the shadows that fall from the measuring cups on the counters. I like the burnt-edged way my photographs come out, and despite my father's eye rolls and my friends' confusion, I like the way I feel at home.
Some days I want to tackle big projects, like French pastries and gourmet spice profiles. I feel ambitious, and I turn on the lights to help me keep focused.
But sometimes I'm having one of those afternoons where I want my mind to de-clutter. I had one of those last week. I wore my oversized hunter green sweater and soft brown slippers to school, calling it "the macaroni and cheese of clothing." In a word, it's comfort. That day, I wanted to eat something just as simple and comforting as a day in sweatpants or a kitchen bathed in vanilla-sugar light.
It's always hard to decide what to make. I usually pick based on what I feel like baking, since that's where I derive most of my joy. But that day, I focused on what I felt like eating. I couldn't think of anything that satisfied my craving, though, so I heated water to make myself a cup of jasmine green tea instead. That's when it came to me.
When I stumbled upon rice pudding, I felt my heels lift off the floor a little, and then I could think about nothing else. Rice pudding is my very favorite comfort food – creamy, soft, and studded with a million little vanilla bean seeds.
It's funny. I don't like to waste money or ingredients, so I have a "vanilla scale" in order to save on both. I have two brands of vanilla extract – one cheap and one quality – and two brands of vanilla beans – one cheap and one quality.
I use the cheap vanilla extract for experiments and where it "doesn't matter," in muffins and scones. I save the good vanilla beans for dishes where they'll shine, in my opinion where they belong: ice cream, custards, and really good rice pudding.
I didn't even blink before deciding to use one of my most precious vanilla beans for this rice pudding. As I began to cook the rice, I had a sudden stroke of inspiration. I quickly lit another burner on the stove, poured in the milk, and added three of my family's favorite jasmine green tea bags.
I didn't know how it would turn out. I didn't even consider that it might be awful and ruin my vanilla bean. I just inhaled the fragrant steam coming up from the jasmine milk, and the powerful aroma of the vanilla bean seeds speckled on my fingers. I knew I wasn't making a mistake.
The pudding came together quickly. I felt more and more serene with every stir of the wooden spoon. The kitchen was warm, and my heart felt full. I held a warm bowl of rice pudding and curled up in the rocking chair in our living room, the one by the huge window that stretches from floor to ceiling. I took the first spoonful of rice pudding.
Oh, oh, oh, the jasmine was so not a mistake!
I didn't taste it at first, just the beautiful woody creaminess of the vanilla. But then there it was, quietly, floral notes that crept up like crocuses in spring. The slight flowery bitterness of the jasmine green tea, complimented perfectly by the vanilla… I turned off my cell phone and put away my iPod. Then I got myself another bowl of rice pudding and snuggled into the chair until the very last ray of light went out in a snap.
This rice pudding would also be delicious without the tea, and maybe even without the vanilla bean (using 1-2 teaspoons of vanilla extract instead.) The rice pudding has a wonderful texture to it. Alternatively, I think you could use another type of tea, but you'll have to figure out exactly how much to use and how long to infuse, depending on how strong it is.
After cooking, the rice pudding should be kept chilled in the refrigerator. It does firm up after leaving the stove, so don't let it overcook! The jasmine also seemed stronger when the pudding was cold. It was good straight out of the tupperware, but I liked it best warm. I'd put some into a bowl and microwave it for about thirty seconds, and for me it was perfect.
Vanilla Bean Jasmine Rice Pudding
Adapted from Molly Wizenberg, via Bon Appetit
Makes 6-8 servings
1 1/2 cups water
3/4 cup basmati rice (use any short grain rice)
1/4 teaspoon salt
3 cups whole milk
3 bags of Jasmine Green Tea
1 cup heavy whipping cream (I used half and half because it was on hand, still rich and creamy)
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 vanilla bean, split lengthwise, or 1-2 teaspoons vanilla extract
Bring 1 1/2 cups water, rice, and salt to simmer in heavy large saucepan over medium-high heat. Reduce heat to low; cover. Simmer until water is absorbed, about 10 minutes. In the meantime, pour the milk into a small saucepan. Submerge the teabags in the milk, keeping the paper tags out of the liquid and away from the stove burner. Bring to a simmer, then remove from the heat and let sit uncovered until the rice is cooked (about 10 minutes.)
Add tea-infused milk, cream, and sugar to the rice. Scrape in seeds from vanilla bean; add bean. Increase heat to medium; cook uncovered until rice is tender and mixture thickens slightly to a soft, creamy texture, stirring occasionally, about 35 minutes.
Remove pudding from heat and discard vanilla bean. Divide pudding evenly among small bowls. Serve warm or press plastic wrap directly onto surface of each pudding and chill thoroughly.
Printer-Friendly Version – Vanilla Bean Jasmine Rice Pudding
Entry filed under: Breakfast/Brunch, Other Treats. Tags: comfort food, creamy, gluten free, jasmine, pudding, rice, Seattle, tea, vanilla, vanilla bean.
64 Comments Add your own
Loved this post, you do have a way of getting straight to your readers heart. Btw strange coincidence, but I just finished writing a post for. Rice pudding on my blog, and stepped over to check your blog, and what do I find, rice pudding again. :-) of course mine is a slightly different version. I'd surely be trying out your version one of these days
Sounds awesome, i think i shall have to make it next weekend as coming up with food options that i can share with my geekling at 1am is getting harder and harder.
This sounds wonderful, and I'll be coming back to it soon to make. But I also wanted to compliment you about the photos. Excellent use of light, depth of field, and I too love the "burnt-edge" vignettes. The 100mm2.8 lens I have adds those beautifully in natural lighting.
Keep it up!
I love how your write, its so smooth and natural. This looks amazing and I love those days when you just relax. They are always needed.
Lovely idea :) and a very sweet post!
Yum! That looks delicious. I love Jasmine green tea. There is something about the smell of jasmine that just makes me smile and relax at the same time. It is honestly hard to imagine how amazing that rice pudding is. Enjoy every last bite of it with your friends and family!
I love rice pudding but haven't made it in ages. My DDIL gave me some beautiful vanilla beans for Christmas and I plan to use them for this recipe. It's printed and ready to go! Thanks for sharing the recipe and the wonderful photos! ~~Rhonda :)
With all the snowy weather, there can be nothing more comforting than Rice Pudding. Vanilla is my favorite flavor and vanilla beans are simply beautiful so I am so pleased to see this and can't wait to give it a try!
I feel a bit bad always asking my parents to pick up ingredients (I'd get them myself, but no license.) so I think I'll stick to the vanilla extract. Any idea on how much extract you would use?
One of my friends introduced me to your blog a couple week ago to show me the beautiful floral cupcakes that you did. I have found myself checking your blog daily to see if you've updated, I love reading your posts and I am almost jealous of your willingness to experiment… I am very much so a stick to the recipe kind of person most of the time. Anyways, I just wanted to let you know I admire your writing, photographs and experimental recipes.
wow, this was a beautiful post. your writing, especially in the first paragraph was gorgeous and inspiring. it might help that i'm listening to city and colour simultaneously, but regardless, this looks delicious and i'm jealous of your creativity both in your words and in your food.
i've never had rice pudding…
does it taste good?
There is a certain comfort that comes out of natural light that would go perfect with this pudding.
[…] ganas de comer algo dulce y no quieres salir de casa reúne un par de ingredientes para cocinar un arroz con leche a la vainilla. Es una mezcla suave y sabrosa que, sin lugar a dudas, querrás […]
[…] ganas de comer algo dulce y no quieres salir de casa reúne un par de ingredientes para cocinar un arroz con leche a la vainilla. Es una mezcla suave y sabrosa que, sin lugar a dudas, querrás […]
Wow this rice pudding looks so good, I've always wanted to try making rice pudding, yours looks delicious! :)
I know those days and this does sound perfect for a day like that. I think I might try this with chai tea, thanks for the great idea.
I am drooling over this! the vanilla bean is so lovely!
This looks lovely – I love Stassen's jasmine green tea. Can't wait to try this.
Ohh…i can't wait to try this, it sounds amazing!
I made this recipe for Orange/Rum Rice Pudding a while back and it was great too:
There's something so comforting about a bowl of rice pudding!
Bravo! I am so hungry now.
I adore rice pudding but I've not had it for ages. Your description and photos have got me longing for some now. So thick and creamy mmm. I like it cold too when you can cut it into squares. Its also delicious when made with coconut milk
I make tea-flavored rice pudding too, but I've never tried Jasmine Green tea. I usually use either Republic of Tea Wild Blueberry or Octavia Wintermint. The Jasmine/vanilla combo sounds great, though. What kind of vanilla beans are your "quality" beans? I'd probably try Tahitian with Jasmine, to really bring out the floral notes.
I can almost smell it. I never have jasmine green tea in the house but I might have to get some!
You don't cook like you're a teen and you sure don't write like a teen. I don't know what you want to do with your life but you sure can write the pants off this blog.
keep it up kiddo….you have a knack!
I just wanted to let you know, I'm a high school senior who reads your blog religiously, and I think you are so skilled at all of your passions: writing, photography, AND cooking! I, too, enjoy these, and I hope to one day be ambitious and talented as you in all three. ;) This post was terrific–I love rice pudding, and can't wait to try making it with your twist!
It has been a long time since I have made rice pudding. This sounds very satisfying and comforting right now. I'm putting it on my must-make list!
I'm getting ready to make this right now. There's nothing more comforting than rice pudding…brings back memories of childhood.
I'm a new "follower"… & I have to say…I absolutely love your blog. Thanks for sharing with us!
Love your blog. You really know what you are doing here!! In an answer to your question, when I make the sugar cookies I use big cutout shapes so I'm not sure how many cookie sized cookies it makes. I guess I will have to try it out. My batch made 20 big heart cookies.
I just wanted to let you know that your blog is amazing and it inspired me to not only start baking more (I love food, especially deserts and candy but I don't quite have enough patience for recipes, ha!) but you were one of the reasons I started my own blog. I think you have a really unique voice and your blog is beautiful. (:
You have a wonderful writing style and are very talented. Your photographs are beautiful. Thank you for sharing I look forward to reading more.
Sounds delicious…we are vanilla fans too..must try this.Thanks a ton for sharing.
[…] Jasmine Rice Pudding recipe from 17 and Baking […]
Okay, I admit I'm not usually a fan of rice pudding but please, excuse me while I drool. I love your descriptions, you're an amazing cook, baker, writer AND photographer. I'm so envious :)
[…] Recipe adapted from 17 and baking. […]
The rice that you mention is long grain rice.To be defined as short the length cant be more than 2x the width.Risotta is the real king of rice pudding.If you learn to "throw" the rice out of the pan into the air and catch it you will make the best rp in the world.I admit I made a few spectacular messes til I got it down pat.I had to get the ladder only once to clean the ceiling but hey,thats what happens when guys cook.
When I first read this, a while ago, I went straight to the kitchen and made the most awesome vanilla bean rice pudding ever. But I forgot to thank you. And now, this morning, I decided to get some breakfast and made this again…I dare say it was even better than last time (although I didn't do anything different). Yummy, yummy, yummy, I like it with a teaspoon (or more) of cherry compote on top…yum! However, I couldn't feel the jasmine enough…almost not at all, maybe because I always eat it warm, or maybe because it was black jasmine tea? Ah well, never-mind, just wanted to say thank you fro this glorious recipe ;)
Oh wait, I felt the jasmine (I was eating the pudding as I was commenting). I did! I did! It's there, it's amazingly nice. Too bad it was the last spoonful :))
I throw open all of the curtains. Despite the chrome-colored damper of winter in Seattle, there's a natural light that filters through the glass and brightens the kitchen in a way that artificial light cannot. I like the shadows that fall from the measuring cups on the counters. I like the burnt-edged way my photographs come out, and despite my father's eye rolls and my friends' confusion, I like the way I feel at home.
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[Originally posted on PopMatters]
Much of the discourse from proponents of the "video games are art" position is centered on the medium's interactivity as its distinguishing advantage. Audience participation, as it were, is the reason why games exist. No other mode of storytelling so often depends on the actions, reactions, and experiences of its audience as the work is engaged with. Even the most linear or simplistic game is communicated through the player's progress in the world, not through passive consumption. But fixating on how the player experiences a work means that the player's continued entertainment is necessary for the story to progress. In other words, there must always be something for the player to keep doing, leaving only the briefest moments to reflect.
Any form of language requires that a thing is "doing something" in a sentence and any story must communicate in some form of language. Therefore, any story must be about a thing doing stuff. But the way that an introspective paragraph, a lingering shot on a scene, the expression on an actor's face, or the illustration in a panel in a comic tells a story is a way that often seems too slow for games. Specifically, games seem like they must be fast paced and straightforward. There are plenty of logical plots, interesting settings, strong characters, and poignant themes in games, but they must all be rushed through to serve gameplay [Unless you are Hideo Kojima—ed.]. The assumption seems to be that the player must always have a carrot dangling in front of them at all times.
Consider an extreme example: both Taxi Driver and Crazy Taxi are works about taxi drivers, both of whom could be fairly considered crazy. One is a slow burning character study about a man with a fragmented psychology, the other is a cartoonish romp through an over-the-top city with a high-energy, goofy atmosphere. There's nothing wrong with Crazy Taxi, but it's clear which work is a film and which is a game. A game can't have long scenes of a man practising threats into his mirror or staring at a crumpled twenty dollar bill.
Games tend to have plenty of direction, it's just that while we're keeping the Covenant from finding Earth, building an army to end the blight, or rescuing the princess, we must be continually distracted by the next level, the next sudden objective, the next set of keys that we need to unlock the next set of doors. Any change happens rapidly and continuously.
Even in games where there are only a few major changes in the setting or plot, the immediate takes precedence over the destination. The ultimate goal is only a context for several loosely connected events flashing by. The most breathtaking moments of Half-Life 2 happen in between the action sequences. Seeing the abandoned cottages flanking a radioactive river or the ruins of Ravenholm really strike the player with exactly the kind of world that they are living in. Moments of reflection like these really set the atmosphere and tone, and they make an already well developed cast seem even stronger by giving the player a sense of what's happened in the world between the first Half-Life and the second.
However, the moments to pause are brief, and before very long, the player is back to hovercraft chases, zombie shootouts, and storming prisons. Even in Limbo, which is probably the slowest paced game that I've ever played, the slow industrialization and opening up of the world happens literally in the background. The focus is on each puzzle as it comes up and is left behind.
All stories need a direction of some kind. But all that is important that ever happens in Kafka's Metamorphosis is described in the first sentence. But the novella is still one of the most important stories written in the last century not because of what it happens, in the way that it happens, who it's happening to and the meaning that can be extrapolated. It isn't just about the rush of events as they flicker by. Similarly, the aforementioned Taxi Driver is more about Travis Bickle as a person and the situation that he's in rather than what he does. In other media, slowing the pace of the crawl does not necessarily make it unapproachable, in fact many masterpieces demand full attention to every incremental step toward the climax.
Games don't seem to be able to do that, or at least there aren't many examples of it being done intentionally and with great success. Games, it seems to me, must be fast-paced. There must be something for the player to always do. Players can't passively absorb and reflect on material while the text is in progress. I get stymied any time that I try to think of a game that successfully demanded that the player take their time with the plot. I have an even harder time imagining what such a game would play like.
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text:
Pay a Bill
NorthShore University HealthSystem (NorthShore) is the primary teaching affiliate of the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine. Approximately one-third of 3rd year medical students will be on the NorthShore campus for their clinical rotations at any given time. Additionally, many 4th year students will rotate at NorthShore in both required and elective rotations.
Medical students provide care for a diverse group of patients from the NorthShore community with both established and undifferentiated medical needs. Students have experiences in both primary care and specialty care and work with an enthusiastic, dedicated group of teaching faculty.
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The Denzel Washington you meet backstage at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre is not exactly living a glamorous Hollywood life. He's more like a college kid during finals.
He wears a black Yankee cap, black sweat pants and blue sneakers. There are free weights on a counter and a bottle of diet cola. Notebooks and papers are everywhere. He's fighting off the New York chill with some chicken noodle soup laced with hot sauce.
"Have a seat," the star says, waving to a banged-up sofa and settling down in his own seat in front of a makeshift desk made from a mini-fridge. "I've got good heat here."
Good heat, comfortable clothes, soup — the unfussy Broadway version of Denzel Washington seems completely in his element as he puts the finishing touches on one of America's greatest plays, "A Raisin in the Sun."
"It's just a great opportunity — that's how I look at it," says Washington. "It's like getting back to your roots. It's going good. But around about the 70th show, I might be going, 'What am I doing?'"
Like an athlete in training and currently dressed the part, Washington has poured himself into the work, filling two composition books with notes and leaving every page of his script highlighted, underlined or annotated.
The first notebook starts with the poem "A Dream Deferred" by Langston Hughes, the work that helped inspire the play, which Washington has handwritten. A few pages later is a photo pasted of the playwright, Lorraine Hansberry ("I got her in there! I forgot I had her in there," he says while flipping through.)
The play marks Washington's first return to Broadway since his Tony Award-winning turn in "Fences" in 2010 and every preview has been sold out, with top premium tickets going for as much as $348.
"Denzel? Listen, he's a Stradivarius," says co-star LaTanya Richardson Jackson, an old friend and Samuel L. Jackson's wife. "He's so versatile. It's so wonderful being on the stage with him. He's so elegant and so giving."
Set in 1950s Chicago, "A Raisin in the Sun" centers on the struggling Younger family, who anxiously await a $10,000 insurance check — and the ensuing squabbles over how to spend it.
Washington plays Walter Lee, a chauffeur with dreams of opening a liquor store, a role made famous by Sidney Poitier, who played it in the original 1959 production and reprised it in a 1961 movie. In a twist, this revival is in the same theater where Poitier debuted the play.
How far has Washington gone in his research? It turns out all the way to Poitier's home. The two actors recently met to talk about the role and when Poitier rose to act out scenes, Washington pulled out his cell phone to film it ("As you can see, I'm no cameraman," he jokes as he shares the jerky images).
"He's so generous and complimentary and he was like, 'Oh you're going to kill. You're going to be better than I was,' and all this stuff," Washington says. "He's just a sweet, gentle man. It wasn't even about the play anymore. I was just like, 'I'm going to come hang with him.'"
Washington may be the Academy Award-winning actor known for "Glory" and "Training Day," but he says his dream when he first started acting at Fordham University was to be onstage. His first two roles in college were "The Emperor Jones" by Eugene O'Neill and Shakespeare's "Othello."
"I was too ignorant to know what pressure even was," he laughs.
As a young man, Washington once caught James Earl Jones star in "Oedipus the King" uptown and then sneaked into Jones' dressing room, where he hung out as the older actor greeted well-wishers.
"Obviously he didn't know who I was — I was a student. I'm picking up his rings and his props while he's talking to the people. He probably looked and thought, 'Oh, he's probably a young actor.' I'm like, 'Man, that's what I want. I want to do that. I want to do what he's doing,'" he says.
The revival of "A Raisin in the Sun" hasn't been completely without drama: Last month, the cast was shook up when Diahann Carroll pulled out and Richardson Jackson stepped in as the family matriarch.
"Diahann realized she just couldn't handle it, physically. If we live long enough, we're all going to come to that place where we go, like, 'OK,'" says Washington. "Even I had my doubts in the beginning. Can I remember all this?"
Richardson Jackson, who was last on Broadway in the Tony-winning 2009 revival of "Joe Turner's Come and Gone," had acted before opposite Washington — they both were in Ntozake Shange's "Spell #7" in the late '70s. He pushed for her to come onboard to play his mother, saying "I knew she was strong and powerful."
At 64, she's only five years older than Washington, 59, but he notes that a 32-year-old Poitier played Walter Lee opposite 41-year-old Claudia McNeil in the original Broadway production.
"No, you can't have a baby at 5 but I don't think you can have one at 9, either," jokes Washington. "That's acting. She's my mom and I'm her son."
This time on Broadway, Washington has changed a few things, starting with his Playbill bio, which had grown unwieldy. He sliced it down: "It was really blowing my own horn," he says. "I don't need to advertise. I got the part."
He also dedicates his performance to the late Tony Scott, who directed Washington in such films as "Crimson Tide" and "Man on Fire" and committed suicide in 2012. "I thought about Tony and I wanted to mention Tony," says Washington.
His mother, who turned 90 on Saturday, plans to come to New York to see her son in the play and another who has promised to come and cheer is none other than Poitier. "I said to him, 'Don't come early,'" Washington says. "He said, 'No, I'm coming.' I said, 'Not early. And don't tell me when.'"


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A well-fitting sweater has always been a charming look…(don't forget your accessories!)
…(circa 1952 Glamour Magazine)
find & follow CHIC KNITS on PINTEREST
A well-fitting sweater has always been a charming look…(don't forget your accessories!)
…(circa 1952 Glamour Magazine)
find & follow CHIC KNITS on PINTEREST
This time of year the heart grows lighter as the temps grow warmer.
Suddenly it's time to leave the confines and go a wandering…
A perfect destination?
Always: a fiber festival!
This last weekend I traveled out to Hood River for the Columbia Gorge Fiber Festival.
Now this was no ordinary day!
First of all, the drive from Portland through the Gorge is gorgeous (sorry)! The canyon road meanders along the Columbia River and in no time at all, one can feast their eyes on the Cascades and their outcroppings that come down to meet it.
From cliffs to unexpected waterfalls to some of the most lovely undulating green ever seen, there is a surprise around almost every curve. My friend Abbey, who'd never been this way before, wholeheartedly agreed. Just breathtaking – helped along by a on-again off-again rain shower. This is the land of rainbows, where the sunshine can be softly veiled by a tender mist…
What was waiting for us at the fest was another kind of banquet:
Here, in a lovely high-ceilinged lodge-type room was an incredible assortment of all the types of things that make our little fibery hearts go pitty-patter while in the adjacent main building were workshops.
From yarn (above is the Bumblebirch booth) to everything to make yarn
including this forest of gorgeous drop spindles from Steve and Connie Paulsen of Spindlewood.
The festival was produced by the lovely Sarah Keller, (who I finally got to meet!) who also owns and operates Knot Another Hat on Oak Street in Hood River, one of the loveliest yarn stores I've ever been in –
The picture I missed? A homey seating area that has a spectacular view of the river. Can't wait to visit again and enjoy a little sit'n'knit!
I leave you with two Chic Knits as seen in the wild:
AND some really really wild:
This is a spectacular shot taken by Abbey out of a moving car window while I drove back to Portland – it was raining and making the mountains oh so misty…
…(circa 1923) knitting in-the-round with friends, Albania via Frank Carpenter…
find & follow CHIC KNITS on PINTEREST


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Michigan's sudden push to pass a right to work bill in late December has generated talk about the possibility of a similar move here in Wisconsin. Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester) says it's not going to happen though.
Vos told reporters Monday "right to work is not going to come up this session."
While he admits a lawmaker could introduce legislation to make the change, which prevents employees from being required to join a union, he says the bill would not come to the floor for a vote.
Vos' statement echoes earlier comments from Governor Scott Walker, who has indicated he wants the Legislature to focus primarily on legislation that will help the private sector create jobs.
It's just one of several controversial bills being talked about as the session gets underway though. Vos on Monday declined to say if he would draw a line in the sand on any other proposals, such as eliminating Election Day voter registration. He says those ideas deserve at least a look and a chance to go through the committee process.
AUDIO: Andrew Beckett reports (1:08)


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- Home
- Departments
- Nation Gaming Agency
Nation Gaming Agency
The Administrative staff has been reviewing the updated policies and procedures that are planned, for MICS and TICS requirements, at both Quapaw Casino and Downstream Casino Resort. The Director attended the quarterly meeting of the DDA receiving updates and information on what's happening at Downstream. The Quapaw Casino QTGA Supervisor attended the bi-annual National Tribal Gaming Commissioners/Regulators organization conference, March 19 to 23, to exchange information on Oklahoma and national regulatory requirements. The QTGA continues to become updated with the regulations from the National Indian Gaming Commission as well as on the State of Oklahoma for any and all State action, and with the OTGRA and the NTGCR regulators for possible regulatory actions. Both casinos are continuing to upgrade their machines and their policies and procedures and we are working closely with them to assist in maintaining the time frame, with the deadline in mind.
Licensing Department
All gaming vendor invoicing remain completed for the annual renewal of all companies, requiring licensing for annual gaming vendor renewals and for vendors during the month March 2018, and/or the calendar year. Vendor licensing is continuous with the annual renewals for all gaming and gaming related vendors doing business with both Downstream Casino Resort and Quapaw Casino. Ending with March we have a total of 466 licensed and/or registered vendors.
- 2 Construction
- 43 Gaming Related
- 16 Gaming
- 215 Non-gaming
- 50 Tour Bus
- 6 Consultant
- 37 Entertainment
- 97 Exempt (includes all donations, memberships, and service providers)
We review the Electronic Gaming Machines at Quapaw Casino and Downstream Casino Resort as they enable continuous upgrades and changes that are being made to offer the most popular electronic gaming machines to be on the floor. The QTGA agents are continuing to work on our daily procedures and guidance policies.
Reported March Employee Licensing
Updating renewal licenses at both casinos remain an ongoing priority.
|Employee Type
|Quapaw Casino
|Downstream Casino Resort
|Total Employees
|Native Americans
|Quapaw Members
Compliance Department
We would like to take this time to announce one of the recipients of the Oklahoma Tribal Gaming Regulators Association, Jess Green Scholarship Award is our Compliance Agent, Zach Solomon. Congratulations to Zach for this outstanding opportunity. Our Compliance Departments are continuing to review two new options for futuristic compliance regulations through a standardized shipping and receiving document, proposed by the American Gaming Association called "Three Reforms to Streamline Shipping of Gaming Machines". The second program we are looking into is named GAT, Gaming Authentication Terminal, and a program for additional efficiency. Both Compliance Departments continue to assist with multiple changes to the policies and procedures at Quapaw Casino and at Downstream Casino, as they are meeting changes for both operations and the updates for the Tribal Internal Control Standards. Both Compliance Departments are, as time allows, continuing to work on the internal training information to assist in preparation of the procedural manuals for the QTGA. It is the goal of both departments to assist in making continuous required upgrades and changes and corrections that are required enabling the most popular electronic gaming machines to be on the floor, giving the patrons a more excellent variety of machines to play. We currently have two vacancies at the DCR QTGA Compliance Department.
IT Department
The IT Agent continues to update our systems; he has finalized the Quapaw Tribal Gaming Agency software installation for compliance. Our IT Department continues ongoing computer maintenance throughout the month. One of the next steps on his agenda will be to upgrade storage on our network. He will continue with training to enable us to do proper IT audits and evaluations, as per the MICS. We have also planned on some computer upgrades for the next fiscal year. Trouble shooting at both sites as well as any and all assistance to all agents is ongoing, as required.
Audit Departments
As the financial issues for the Quapaw Casino are now being corrected, the financial system is inclusive of the same system at the DCR, most all of the financial issues have been resolved. Several of the QC departments are inclusive in a plan with revisions, to update the QC as they move forward. The auditors are currently moving forward with all of their fiscal year, required audits, for the MICS. The auditors are very thankful for the cooperation of casino management and will continue assisting, both casinos, on updating required policies and procedures for all departments, inclusive of several special project issues, in addition to monthly promotional and player development documentation.
The Investigative Auditor has been working directly with the Licensing Department reviewing any inconsistencies. He has also been assisting in archiving our past case files for electronic filing and/or destruction. He is also assisting in the review of and/or the auditing of employee files that are to be archived. He is reviewing all required access logs, and the banned listings at both casinos for any and all corrections and/or required updates. He is assisting with licensure reviews and continues to work on multiple investigative audits inclusive of various violations, i.e. patron disputes, procedural/policies, and any other reported compliance issues inclusive of MICS/TICS reports and accidental incident reports within both casinos. We are continuing to try to keep updated on all regulatory issues brought forward to our department.


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The Soylent Subculture: 10 People Tell Us What It's Like Living on Powdered Food
Soylent is a powered food substitute that, for some, changes everything from your daily routine to your health.
In a 2013 blog post titled "How I Stopped Eating Food," founder Rob Rhinehart calls out conventional food — meat, produce, everything in a grocery store — as the "fossil fuel of human energy." Rhinehart enjoyed the occasional meal with friends but mostly found eating to be a wasteful expenditure of time and money.
Intent on doing better, he began an experiment consuming only the chemical components your body needs to survive. Carbohydrates instead of bread, amino acids instead of milk, and so on. Not only did his homemade mixture of stuff (he named it "Soylent") keep him alive, he thrived: "My physique has noticeably improved, my skin is clearer, my teeth whiter, my hair thicker and my dandruff gone."
Naturally, people were intent to try this for themselves. Rhinehart and company set up a crowdfunding campaign, selling $100,000 worth of pre-orders in the first hour and ultimately seeing some $3 million in total. A single serving costs roughly $4.
Now that Soylent has been out in the world for a while, we thought we'd check in with Soylent users around the country to get their take on this miracle foodstuff:
Kelly Heikkila: I got it right away, but I think what people "get" varies from person to person. I get that it's an easy, healthy way to avoid making poor food choices. That's why I bought it. I don't "get" the other more high-minded thing Rob and other fanboys are saying about how this changes everything, will bring food to the poor, etc.
I think Soylent will resonate with two primary camps: 1. The "hacker" culture, largely male, smart, curious, opinionated, vocal, willing to take risks, probably not fixated on food to begin with. 2. The overweight crowd, wanting to find a way to reprogram themselves to keep them from eating that bacon burger. I hate to say it, but this is me.
Wesley Cheng: Most of the people I know that are aware of my Soylent use have been supportive and curious. I think some are waiting to see if I spontaneously combust, but I'm feeling fine so far. For me, there are three main aspects of eating: social, nutritional, and taste. I use Soylent for any meal that I don't share with other people or if there is nothing available that I specifically enjoy eating.
I believe it is a brilliant idea and something that could be revolutionary if it catches on. Not only does it make it easier for people to eat healthily, but it's also relatively cost effective. If Soylent can ramp up its production and lower its costs further, it has the potential to greatly impact world hunger and nutritional deficits.
John Bardinelli: Back in early 2013, a few articles about Rob Rhinehart and his crazy food replacement started appearing on the internet. There were headlines like "This Man Thinks He Never Has To Eat Again." That got my attention! The more I read about it the more interested I became.
Physically I've been much more energetic, even though I spontaneously stopped drinking coffee. I didn't have any problem working out three times a week, though after a month I did need to increase my protein intake to prevent post-gym crashes. I lost about 10 pounds in all. My sleeping habits also improved, as has my daily routine. That could be explained by the simple fact that the ritual of food has changed, though. Living on Soylent was all positive for me. I didn't have any trouble transitioning from food to Soylent. No cravings, and no weird digestive issues, either.
Annie Kang: I heard it on the same day from multiple coworkers and ex-coworkers on Facebook. My social feed was filled with links to the Soylent project and friends posting how they just became early backers. We talked about it all day, talking about how convenient it would be, how we all wished that we would become advanced enough to take our food in pill form (sci-fi!).
My two closest female friends are weirded out and they think it's insane. I tell them it's just nutrition in another form. They relate it to some sort of strange diet fad (like those weird lemon and red pepper drinks that people do sometimes). It's alien to them. Interestingly enough, all my male friends in the tech fields are all really curious and accepting of this. A few others are curious, but they want to see if I'll die before they try it.
John L.: Usually the response is a combination of "Why would you want to do this?" and "How can you give up real food?"
For the former, I am pretty good at articulating the reasons that a person would be interested in such a thing, because in today's world they apply to almost everyone. Who doesn't want to save time, money and get healthy?
And for the latter, once the false dichotomy of "100% soylent or nothing" is dispensed with, people start to understand the convenience of a fully nutritional meal that takes seconds to prepare and stays good for a year on the shelf.
Shannon and Jonathan: We are located in Silicon Valley, California, executives in our 40s, busy cat parents running a digital marketing & software development company. Soylent fills the role in our lives that we want it to fill. It's fantastic and hits all the most important points — convenience, taste, nutrition, and cost. Basically, everyone who has a busy life knows what it's like to work really intensely on something and suddenly realize, "Oh crap, I haven't eaten anything in way too long."
The one "negative" I guess would be gas, which appears to be a very common thread amongst Soylent drinkers. The prevailing theory is that it's due to either the sudden increase in fiber, or protein. Doesn't seem to affect everyone though so it must have something to do with the person's previous diet too. For us it mostly went away after about a week to 10 days. I still have a little from time to time, but nothing catastrophic.
Since we don't have to spend time preparing food we actually get more free time to talk or interact in any way we want. We still go out to eat any time we feel like it, and thoroughly enjoy those times because they are completely optional. We never find ourselves saying, "I'm starving and don't feel like I can deal with cooking anything, let's just go out to eat." Instead we go out to eat because we just want a particular thing, and want to spend some time together away from the house.Soylent has put food entirely on our terms, and our relationship is definitely benefiting from that. So as you can see, it's not so obvious as "When I drink Soylent our sex life is so much better!" or anything like that. It's a ripple effect that Soylent starts, but that sends waves out into every aspect of our lives.
Stephen Espy: I'm a software architect at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee in my early 40's, overweight. I'm active for a technology professional, but that is not a very good standard. I keep thinking I will try a week or a month at 100% Soylent, but I really just end up right at 2/3 of my intake coming from the product.
Before Soylent I only rarely ate breakfast, and lunch was not very likely either. But I certainly made up for it at dinner, and felt bad when not eating, then felt bad after eating. I'm skeptical of it becoming the solution to worldwide hunger, to prison or hospital or military rations. But it has value to me.
The main payouts for me have been arriving at a way to have a continual supply of calories and continuous mild satisfaction without eating meals until the end of the day. It is not unpleasant and after a week it became slightly enjoyable to consume. It is quite convenient, and cheap to boot. Being perfectly happy with only one good, normal meal a day is easily worth the $6-8 a day it takes to make it to dinner. I don't suddenly feel energized, tired, alert, or smart. But I don't have swings up and down because of food. That's a pretty big deal. I've dropped a few pounds, which is a nice bonus. And I will be signing up for a subscription. I think I will be in this for quite some time.
David Deutsch: I am the CTO of a mid-sized telecommunications company and the only remote worker among our employees. I'm 37, long-term overweight due to my 96+ work hour weeks, married, and importantly a long-term sufferer of digestive issues that have prevented me from working in traditional office environments.
I would say that the reason I haven't tried many diets in the past is my need to deeply understand the science behind them. It kept me away from Herbalife, green coffee extract, and other products I would definitely put into the "fad" category. However with Soylent, I saw that the scientific intent at least made sense.
Day 1-3: No gas. Day 4-9: Lots of gas, lots... Day 10-12: A significant reduction in gas, getting back to normal.
Bradley Richardson: I wasn't too skeptical [of Soylent] because at first they weren't trying to sell me anything. It was a very methodical approach to nutrition and I really liked it. It made sense and I generally do not give in to the fear/unknown/danger arguments over things I don't understand, so all it did was push me to do my own research. [When Soylent did its crowdfunding], I took a look at what they were selling. It was simple and straightforward and something I could easily get behind. They were very open about things every step of the way and promoted the DIY community to do it themselves.
The benefit with having Soylent is that I am able to choose the meals that will consist of food and plan accordingly. There is no more rushing around and having to eat bad/unhealthy food because I am hungry and don't have the time/money to eat as well as I want to for every meal.
Cooking is not a chore that must be completed and cleaned up after every single night. Instead, I find a new recipe to cook for the weekends and take the time to enjoy making and eating it.
I just notice that I feel better, my weight has stabilized, and I enjoy the time after I finish eating. I never liked how bloated eating made me feel. I got icky, became a vegetarian, but still haven't found anything that makes me feel as good after eating. I do miss some foods and tastes sometimes, but when I do eat, I still prefer Soylent after. I definitely plan on keeping it a staple. If I travel I will indulge in local cuisine more but from the standpoint of being healthy, this outshines everything except the home cooked meals I do once or twice a week.
See Also:
- This Terrifying Swarm Of Flies Is So Massive It Shows Up On Weather Radar
- Here's What Your Handwriting Says About You
- Steve Wynn Knew Back In The 1980s That Atlantic City Was Doomed For Obsolescence
SEE ALSO: The Next Big Superfood Could Be Green and Slimy
SEE ALSO: Read more in this series.


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Barbeque Sauce
Our classic barbeque sauce, seasoned with spices, onion and garlic for a rich and bold flavor.
45 Calories
0g Fat
11g Carbs
0g Protein
**Prices vary by location
Water, tomato paste, distilled vinegar, sugar, brown sugar, corn syrup solids, corn syrup, pineapple juice concentrate, contains less than 2% of modified corn starch, salt, potassium sorbate and sodium benzoate (preservatives), natural hickory smoke flavor, caramel color, celery seed, dextrose, spice, red pepper, onion,* garlic,* natural flavor. *dried)
*Nutrition is calculated from the base recipe. Nutritional information may no longer be accurate if ingredients are added or removed. Learn more here
**2,000 calories a day is used for general nutrition advice, but calorie needs vary. Additional nutrition information available upon request.


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Super Wednesday for world's central banks
The Bank of Japan welcomes a new anti-deflation governor this week, the Bank of England might get a new pro-growth mandate and the Federal Reserve is likely to stick like glue to its aggressive bond-buying program.
Together, the three events speak volumes about the balance of risks in a global economy that is on the mend but still a long way from rude health.
Unemployment is intolerably high in the United States and most of Europe, while growth in many countries is well below its pre-crisis trend. As a result, inflation is firmly subdued.
Add to that the inability of many heavily indebted countries to cope with higher borrowing costs, and it is no wonder that central banks will do whatever is needed to keep a lid on bond yields, said Joachim Fels, chief international economist at Morgan Stanley in London.
"Despite the uptick in growth that we see, we don't think central banks are done easing yet," Fels said. "The fears that we get an early exit from quantitative easing and negative real interest rate policies are unfounded, at least for this year."
Supportive monetary policy is a big reason why Fels expects the global economy to emerge from the twilight as 2013 unfolds.
"We're still talking about sub-trend GDP growth this quarter and next. But in the second half of this year, we think we will move into daylight," he said.
For once, the Bank of Japan will be an important driver of this global reflation if Haruhiko Kuroda, who takes over at the helm of the central bank on Wednesday, makes good on his pledge to stop Japan's long deflationary rot.
Other central banks will feel the need to remain expansionary if their currencies rise due to yen weakness triggered by bold BOJ easing, Fels said.
Even the European Central Bank could come under a bit of pressure to do more, added Daniel McCormack, a strategist with Macquarie in London.
"Even though expectations are high for some pretty aggressive action from the BOJ, when it does happen and you can hold and see it and it's real, the market will still react positively," he said.
Regime change of sorts is also in the air at the Bank of England.
Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, Britain's finance minister, is expected to announce a review of the BoE's inflation-focused remit, or possibly outright changes to it, when he presents his annual budget on Wednesday.
With little room to change taxes or spending because of his determination to stick to austerity, Osborne might give more room for the central bank to loosen monetary policy further.
That would smooth the path for the arrival of Mark Carney, the current Bank of Canada chief, who takes over from Mervyn King as BoE governor in July. Indeed, McCormack suspects Osborne and Carney have struck a deal on the course of action to take.
"When Carney comes on board you can kind of expect some razzle dazzle in terms of monetary policy," he said. "His legacy will be judged by whether he turns the UK economy around in his five-year tenure. So he's going to give it everything he's got."
With the United States, China and possibly Germany gaining economic momentum, and central banks pushing the accelerator firmly to the floor, equity markets should be in a sweet spot for the rest of the year, McCormack added.
Minutes from the Bank of England's March meeting, also due on Wednesday, will show whether the bank is inching closer to easing even before Carney takes over. Three of its nine-member policy-making panel, including King, had already voted for additional bond-buying stimulus in February.
Rounding out Central Bank Wednesday is the Federal Reserve, which looks set to end a two-day policy meeting by agreeing to keep buying $85 billion a month in mortgage and Treasury bonds in an effort to encourage investment and bolster confidence in the economic recovery.
The policy is broadly working. The economy has shown such resilience in the face of higher taxes, gasoline prices and prospective federal spending cuts that some banks have marked up their forecasts for GDP growth this quarter by a full percentage point to an annual pace of 2.5 percent or more.
Figures this week on housing starts, building permits and existing home sales are likely to confirm housing as an important driver of the recovery.
Indeed, the Fed is likely to present a brighter outlook for both growth and unemployment in updated forecasts to be released with the outcome of the Fed's policy deliberations.
Ward McCarthy, chief financial economist with Jefferies in New York, said he expected Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke to reflect the more optimistic tone when he briefs the media.
"But I don't think he will be sufficiently upbeat that he will be suggesting in any way that the Fed is going to alter its policy intentions any time soon," McCarthy said.
In addition to the U.S. housing figures, preliminary polls of purchasing managers from China and the euro zone top the week's data slate alongside the monthly sentiment survey by Germany's IFO economic research institute.
According to a Reuters poll of economists, the index derived from the euro zone survey is likely to have edged up this month from 47.9 to 48.2, still below the 50 threshold denoting expansion.
Uncertainty cast by Italy's deadlocked elections and the unprecedented decision by euro zone finance ministers on Saturday to tax bank depositors in Cyprus to help pay for a bailout are among the many threats to still-fragile confidence in the single currency.
But Morgan Stanley's Fels believes Europe, too, will eventually emerge from the twilight zone. "We think the recession will die of old age at some stage this year," he said.
(Editing by John Stonestreet)


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By David Crane defrev at gmail dot com September 28, 2008 A company out of Apopka, Florida called Spike's Tactical is making and marketing some interesting products, including Class III AKM SBRs built on the Arsenal SLR 107UR Krink shorty AKM (updated Kalashnikov AK-47 with stamped receiver). Spike's is building these guns in 7.62x39mm Russian (7.62mm Russian) and 5.56x45mm NATO …Read More »
Tag Archives: sbr 5.56
FERFRANS Ultra-Concealable Piston-Driven 6-inch AR Subcarbine/SBR (Video!)
by David Crane defrev at gmail.com November 21, 2007 FERFRANS Specialties, manufacturer of the select-fire FERFRANS SOAR series AR-platform 5.56mm NATO/.223 Rem. weapons and new Fast Acquisition Sight (FAS) combat optic, is developing a semi-drop-in gas-piston/op-rod system for AR-15/M16-variant carbines and subcarbines/SBRs (Short-Barreled Rifles). In fact, the company has sent us photos of a prototype 6" test weapon (displayed below) …Read More »
Bushmaster Introduces Prototype 5.56mm Subcarbine/SBR and 9mm Subgun at IACP
by David Crane [email protected] All photos contained in this article were taken by, and are the property of, DefenseReview.com. Click on photos (below) to view them full-size. October 8, 2005 Alright, get a load of these two little honeys. I found them at IACP 2005 Miami at the Bushmaster Firearms booth. They're Bushmaster Carbon 15 prototype shorties, and both are …Read More »


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A's Offering Cheap All You Can Eat Seats
With the combination of the sad steroids scandal shadowing baseball, and economic hard times bringing attendance down, Bud Selig and his boys have got a hard sell on their hands.
Leave it to "America's Pastime" to pull through in a pinch, and in a country where half of all people are overweight, ya gotta keep fans fat & happy, so the teams are going all out this year…
The bloated innards of Oakland's McAfee Coliseum will be filled with happy gorging bleacher bums this summer as the soon to be Fremont A's offer up their take on the latest "innovative marketing" idea to hit MLB.
Hey corndog fans, have you ever craved "All You Can Eat" seating sections ?
Apparently the LA Dodgers started this ploy off a couple years ago, and it's all the rage, with Nascar & Hockey Teams now doing it as well. Be amongst the first in the Bay Area to enjoy this symptom of our societal sickness, and an obsequious toast to obesity…
I know previous dollar hot dog nights in Oakland have long been an insanely popular tribute to the Bay Area's reputation for gustatory excellence & impeccable taste, and if they throw in those nasty Nachos & bottomless Mountain Dews… now yer talking.
If you'd be interested in trying this out in April and filling your belly with an endless feast of soda pop, ice cream, franks and other ballpark cuisine health hazards, I've got discounted ticket code info below.
To purchase discount All-You-Can-Eat seats: visit www.oaklandathletics.com and select one of the below listed games, and enter the coupon code: EATS
This will get you in for just $20 each (instead of the usual $35) to enjoy your privileged feasting section at the following select games in April…
Saturday, April 5 vs. Cleveland @ 1:05PM
Friday, April 18 vs. Kansas City @ 7:05PM
Tuesday, April 22 vs. Minnesota @ 7:05PM
Order the tickets online, then get on Bart & get yer butt down to 7000 Coliseum Way in Oakland…


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Are Homemade Draws Reliable?
I have rigged my homemade draws with rubber bands to prevent the carabiners from crossloading, but I'm not sure if I am compromising my safety. Help!
More than once I have climbed above my gear only to look down and see that the carabiner on my runner had jostled around and was sideways, waiting to be cross-loaded. Because of that, I use two biners with gates opposed for critical placements, and added rubber bands to hold the rope-clip carabiner in place on my sewn slings. I know companies have been using rubber do-jiggers on quickdraws for years. What I want to know is, with my rigged rubber-band set-up, the runner gets all bunched up under the rubber band. Is this going to compromise the strength of the runner? —Pika via rockandice.com
I like your thinking and you are wise to be concerned. Cross-loaded carabiners can, and do, break. The steps you have taken to prevent this tell me that you are wise, with flowing gray hair and a beard to your crotch. Do you live under a bridge?
I don't think that your rubber-band "do-jigger" should do any harm. While a knot or hitch in a sling or rope causes a load concentration that makes that spot the weak point where it will break, a rubber band, since it stretches, should not cause such a weakness. Just to be safe, though, slack off the rubber band a wind. Duh! Next!


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Last May, Kathy Giusti was in midtown Manhattan pitching her current venture to an audience of potential investors. Giusti, a forty-eight-year-old Harvard Business School graduate and former pharmaceutical executive, believes that medical breakthroughs shouldn't be left to chance. In 1998, she created the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation, a charitable organization dedicated to the lethal blood cancer, which afflicts more than fifty thousand Americans and has no known cure. Most medical charities focus on increasing public awareness and on raising money to distribute to researchers, in the hope that some of the work will lead to a new drug or a cure; Giusti runs hers as if it were a for-profit business, expecting high returns on the money she raises from "investors"—her term for philanthropists. Her staff includes four scientists, who track myeloma research at academic institutions around the world, advising her on which projects are most likely to lead to new therapies for patients, and are thus the best candidates for funding. (Drug companies have typically not been interested in developing drugs for myeloma, preferring to focus on diseases that affect large numbers of people, for which treatments are most profitable.) Researchers who receive money from Giusti's foundation are required to meet strict deadlines for demonstrating progress. "We try to get academics to work like businesspeople," she told her audience in Manhattan. "Money gives you power to drive people's behavior."
Giusti's organization maintains a tissue bank of more than fourteen hundred bone-marrow samples and nearly twelve hundred blood samples from patients with myeloma, which researchers use to test novel compounds, and it helps finance clinical trials of experimental myeloma drugs. Since 2001, twenty-one drugs derived in part from research funded by the foundation have entered clinical trials, and eight are currently in Phase II—a track record that pharmaceutical companies would envy.
Since Giusti established her foundation, medical philanthropies that apply business principles to their work have become increasingly common. In 2002, Scott Johnson, a former C.E.O. of several Silicon Valley startups who suffers from multiple sclerosis, created the Myelin Repair Foundation, with the goal of facilitating academic research into treatments for the damaged nerves characteristic of patients with the disease. Johnson identified five leading M.S. researchers and persuaded them to collaborate on a research program funded by his foundation. "The academic system is broken," Johnson told me. "Researchers focus on publishing to get tenure. It's all about credit for discoveries." (Johnson hopes to have a drug ready for lab testing in 2009.) Two years ago, Susan G. Komen for the Cure, the oldest and largest philanthropic organization dedicated to breast cancer, hired a new C.E.O., Hala Moddelmog, the former president of Church's Chicken, the fast-food franchise. (The organization's departing C.E.O. was a former health-care executive.) "We have followed a traditional paradigm," Moddelmog told me. "But we believe there is a smarter way to do things." This year, Komen is considering allocating thirty-five million dollars of its hundred-million-dollar research budget to support a new initiative called Promise Grants, which would require recipients to share data with one another and to observe strict guidelines. "We need flexibility and speed to discover new treatments and deliver them to patients," Moddelmog said.
Giusti told me that she has been contacted by several other new medical charities, including the Lance Armstrong Foundation, which is devoted to cancer; the Kirsch Foundation, which supports research into Waldenström's macroglobulinemia, a rare blood cancer; and ABC2, which was created in 2001 by Steve Case, the co-founder of AOL, and his brother Dan Case to combat brain cancer. (Dan Case died of the disease in 2002.) But Giusti's aggressive approach to myeloma research has been controversial among some academic scientists, who argue that it's unrealistic—even counterproductive—for patients and their advocates to think that with enough money and the right business model they can buy a cure.
Giusti's move from the pharmaceutical industry to the nonprofit world began in December, 1995, when she was thirty-seven years old and living in Lake Forest, Illinois. "I was on the fast track at Searle"—the pharmaceutical company—"for a leadership position," Giusti, who has short blond hair, intense blue eyes, and an energetic voice, told me. For four years, she had overseen the marketing of Searle's popular arthritis drugs, including Daypro, and she was in charge of developing the strategy for selling a new one, Celebrex. She travelled frequently, and as Christmas approached she was exhausted and losing weight. She had an eighteen-month-old daughter, and she and her husband, a real-estate developer, had been trying to conceive again. In late December, Giusti visited her doctor, who ordered some blood tests and referred her to a fertility specialist. "Two days after Christmas, the doctor called and said he wanted me to come back and get the tests done again," she recalled. She repeated the blood tests, and in early January she received a phone message from the physician, asking to meet with her and her husband.
"I was driving back to Lake Forest from a regional sales meeting and finally reached him," Giusti said. "I was on my car phone, and I was driving, and I said, 'Look, I know something is horribly wrong. My father was a doctor, and you wouldn't ask me to come in with my husband unless something was really bad.' And he said, 'Well, just come in and I will talk you then.' And I said, 'No. You need to tell me now.' I'm driving down the Kennedy Expressway in Chicago, and this guy was telling me that I likely have myeloma. I got home that night, and I just looked at my husband and said, 'I think that I have cancer, and we've got to go in tomorrow morning.' " The next day, on their way to the doctor's office, Giusti and her husband stopped at a bookstore, where Giusti consulted a copy of "Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine," a textbook widely used in medical schools. "My husband and I were sprawled out in Borders reading this medical book, and, the more I read, I just had this huge knot in my stomach," Giusti recalled.
Myeloma is a cancer of plasma cells, which are normally found in bone marrow and produce antibodies that help the body fight infections. Under a microscope, plasma cells are easy to identify: they are robin's-egg blue and have a pale area behind the nucleus. When such cells become cancerous, they produce excessive amounts of a single kind of antibody, called a monoclonal protein, and release it into the blood. The malignant plasma cells can cause bone lesions, dangerously high levels of calcium in the blood, kidney failure, and nerve damage. Since 2003, several new drugs have been approved by the F.D.A. for treating the disease, including thalidomide, which was linked to severe birth defects after it was prescribed as a sedative to pregnant mothers in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, and Velcade, the first approved drug from a class of compounds that disable a structure in plasma cells called a proteasome, and by doing so kill the cell. Many myeloma patients are also given bone-marrow transplants, which are thought to extend the length of remissions. Even so, the cancer cells invariably return, evolving in such a way that they no longer respond to treatment.
Giusti had a bone-marrow transplant in 2006, and her cancer is in remission. But in public presentations she describes her case as "incurable." Kenneth Anderson, a professor at Harvard Medical School and a myeloma expert at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, in Boston, recently summed up the cancer's grim prognosis in the journal Nature Reviews Cancer. "In spite of conventional and high-dose chemotherapies," he wrote, "it remains uniformly fatal owing to intrinsic or acquired drug resistance."
The causes of myeloma are unknown, but risk factors include exposure to radiation and pesticides, and, possibly, having close relatives with the disease. Giusti's maternal grandfather had myeloma, and she told me that after she received her diagnosis she realized that she could "market" herself to researchers as an "interesting case," because she has a healthy, identical-twin sister, Karen Andrews; she discovered that doctors were eager to compare the sisters' plasma cells. "I did searches at the Searle library to see who was the best in myeloma in the country," Giusti said. "I needed to meet with people at Northwestern, the University of Chicago, the University of Arkansas, the Mayo Clinic, the Fred Hutchinson center, and Dana-Farber. I called all the doctors, and they all called me back, because I was smart enough to say in the message that I have an identical twin. I knew they were thinking, She is young, she is otherwise healthy, she has an identical twin, and she could be a fascinating research specimen. "
Giusti met with seven myeloma specialists and received contradictory advice. "Some people thought I should get a transplant immediately, while others thought that, because I was so healthy, I could potentially watch and wait," she said. Ultimately, she chose the more conservative approach, in part because she knew that she would not be able to conceive safely while taking the toxic drugs that are given to patients before a bone-marrow transplant. (Nevertheless, she and her sister provided plasma cells to several researchers.) "I put a plan together, and I went through the whole I.V.F. program to get pregnant," Giusti said. "After two tries, nothing was working, and I was really down in the dumps. I was, like, 'O.K., I'm dying, and I can't get the second child.' That was when my whole life was crashing, and I finally decided to try I.V.F. one more time, and my whole life changed when I found out I was pregnant. At that point, I realized that nothing was more important to me than finishing the pregnancy. We decided to move East, because now, with two little ones and the potential of my dying—back then I was supposed to live, at best, three years—I wanted to be where my twin sister could help my husband raise the kids." In July, 1997, four months after quitting her job at Searle, and after giving birth to a healthy boy, Giusti moved with her family to southern Connecticut, where Andrews—who had two children of her own—and Giusti's in-laws lived.
The previous summer, Giusti had attended a patient seminar in Florida sponsored by the International Myeloma Foundation, a philanthropic organization founded in 1990 that helps educate patients and doctors about the disease, and sponsors frequent meetings of myeloma specialists. The group also provides funding for research, according to the traditional model, in which individual investigators apply to the foundation for grants. "They asked me to be on the board," Giusti said of the foundation's directors. "So I started working for them, taking on the job of writing a business plan, because it turned out they didn't have a business plan. But the more I was challenging them about where they are heading and what they are doing with research and funding research, the more the I.M.F. was getting annoyed with me. So they booted me off the board." (Susie Novis, the president of the I.M.F., disputed Giusti's account. "She never challenged us about our research funding," Novis told me. "One day, at dinner, she mentioned to me that she was setting up her own foundation. That was a clear conflict of interest and she was asked to resign at the next board meeting." Novis added, "We don't agree with the business model." Still, she said, "We share the same goal: to end myeloma.")
In October, 1997, Giusti and her sister held a dinner at the Hyatt Regency hotel in Old Greenwich, Connecticut, to raise money for myeloma research. They invited their friends in the New York area, including employees at Time, Inc., where Karen Andrews was an in-house counsel; they raised four hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Giusti was unsure how to distribute the money. "I looped entrepreneurial management at business school intentionally," she said, using Harvard slang for taking a course pass/fail, "because I thought I'd never be an entrepreneur. But, if you were able to raise that kind of money on your first event, you were meant to do bigger and better things. And so I did. I incorporated as a 501(c)(3)"—the I.R.S. designation for a non-profit organization. She distributed most of the money she had raised to researchers and used the remainder to set up her foundation. Andrews's colleagues helped Giusti create a logo and a letterhead, and she began to contact potential donors. "I really had to ask for significant dollars to make the foundation happen, and at a time when there was no proof that I could do it," she said. In 1999, Bill McKiernan, a Harvard Business School classmate and the C.E.O. of an Internet company in California, gave her a million dollars. (He has since raised two hundred thousand more.) At the same time, Giusti was being treated by Kenneth Anderson, at Dana-Farber, who prescribed bisphosphanates, medications that help protect bones from deterioration.
Giusti realized that in order to accelerate the development of new myeloma drugs, she needed to foster greater collaboration between researchers at different academic institutions. In 2002, she decided to assemble a consortium of scientists who would be required to submit their research proposals to a steering committee for approval, and to publish their results jointly. In exchange, the scientists would receive access to a tissue bank of myeloma blood cells and bone marrow, as well as administrative and organizational support for lab tests and clinical trials. She approached eight institutions. Four—the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute; the Mayo Clinic Cancer Center; the H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center, in Tampa; and the Princess Margaret Hospital, in Toronto—accepted her offer. The consortium now has thirteen members, and at least two more institutions are expected to join this year.
Giusti figured that she needed a budget of at least three and a half million dollars to launch the consortium, and five million dollars to sustain it. A portion of the money would be used to pay clinical-research coördinators and data collectors, who would oversee trials of myeloma therapies at each academic center. In 2003, Giusti approached the writer Michael Crichton, who she knew had a family member with myeloma. Crichton gave Giusti's consortium half a million dollars to support the creation of the tissue bank. He told me that he admired Giusti's efforts to encourage academic researchers to coöperate with each other and to be accountable to donors and patients. "She had gone and talked to all these people, and she was very clear about how she intended to make them all work together," Crichton said. Giusti told him that she was having some difficulty getting philanthropists to understand what a tissue bank was and why it was important, he recalled. "And I understood it, so I said I would help with that, just out of the strong desire to see if anybody could pull it off—not simply to make the tissue bank but to actually get these fiefdoms to work together." Crichton went on, "I think there are a lot of people, in a lot of ways, who are coming to be very dissatisfied with medical research in terms of how it's organized. I'm guessing that the people in all these institutions must have intuited somehow that she was in some way the wave of the future."
Since 1998, Giusti's foundation has raised $92.4 million. The consortium's steering committee, composed of three myeloma researchers from member institutions, advises Giusti on which experimental drugs to test in clinical trials, and her team of scientists, recruited from pharmaceutical companies, evaluates the committee's decisions. In the fall of 2006, the foundation funded lab studies of a compound called perifosine, which attacks a protein in myeloma cells, in combination with two other drugs frequently given to patients who have the disease. Within four months, the foundation had launched a clinical trial of all three drugs, in collaboration with Keryx Biopharmaceuticals, which makes perifosine. The trial is being held at four of the consortium's centers; the foundation helped recruit patients, assisted each center in obtaining approval from its affiliated hospital to conduct the trial, and paid for coördinators to supervise the process. In December, preliminary results were presented by a researcher at the University of Michigan (a consortium member), at a conference of the American Society of Hematology. As Peter Sportelli, the director of oncology at Keryx, put it, "It's extremely unusual for experimental drugs to move from the lab to clinical testing so quickly, and Giusti's foundation deserves a lot of credit for spurring the process along."
In September, I visited Kenneth Anderson's laboratory at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, which, during the past decade, has been awarded nearly eight million dollars from Giusti's foundation. The laboratory occupies a series of rooms along a narrow corridor, each crowded with incubators containing myeloma cells, centrifuges, and tissue-culture hoods. Postdoctoral researchers stood elbow to elbow, decanting chemical solutions into beakers and extracting DNA and RNA from cells. One took a plastic flask from an incubator and placed it under a microscope. Cells adhered to a matrix of human bone marrow; others floated in the culture medium. In the nineteen-nineties, Anderson and William Dalton, a myeloma researcher at the Moffitt Cancer Center, discovered that the behavior of myeloma cells depends on whether they stick to the matrix—which helps explain why it has been so difficult to treat the disease. Traditionally, experimental drugs were considered promising if they killed the floating myeloma cells, but, as Anderson and Dalton realized, the cells' behavior changes when they are attached to bone marrow—as they are in our bodies—and they frequently become resistant to the drugs. Now experimental compounds are tested against both freely floating and attached myeloma cells.
The day I visited the lab, researchers were screening several compounds that interfered with the myeloma cells' proteasomes. Because Velcade, the proteasome inhibitor recently approved by the F.D.A. for the treatment of myeloma, can have serious side effects, including nerve damage, and often becomes ineffective against the cancer, new proteasome inhibitors have been developed by several biotech startup companies, and Giusti's foundation has given Anderson's lab money to study a promising one. The lab is also testing compounds that attack other parts of myeloma cells, including enzymes called kinases, and proteins that regulate cell survival and DNA replication.
Scientists at Giusti's foundation keep track of experimental drugs invented by pharmaceutical and biotech companies—usually for the purpose of treating diseases other than myeloma—by studying abstracts of articles in scientific journals, and by examining patent applications, which are publicly available. If the scientists identify a compound that they believe could be useful in treating myeloma, the consortium approaches the drug company that makes it, offering to cover the expense of having it tested at the consortium's centers, and, possibly, to cover some of the overhead costs of clinical trials. (The consortium allows the company to retain the right to any profit from sales of the drug if it is eventually approved by the F.D.A.)
In April, 2006, Steven Young, the executive director of the consortium, telephoned Joe Garlich, the chief scientific officer of Semafore, a biotech company in Indianapolis that is developing drugs to treat solid tumors, such as those of the prostate, kidney, and breast. "It was just sort of a courtesy call, to let us know they exist, and we really didn't think too much about it," Garlich told me. "There's not a lot of money floating into companies like ours, so we focussed single-mindedly on solid tumors, which we think will be our sweet spot." Two years earlier, Semafore had filed an application for a patent on a novel compound that blocks an enzyme called PI3 kinase, which plays a central role in cell survival. Scientists at Giusti's foundation speculated that the compound might be effective against myeloma, and in June, 2006, Giusti met with Garlich, who agreed to provide the compound, called SF1126, to the foundation. Tests at one of the consortium's laboratories showed that the compound was very active against the cancer.
That December, Giusti's foundation awarded Semafore a million dollars, to cover the costs of producing SF1126 and to help subsidize a clinical trial. (The trial is now under way.) "They bear the brunt of the cost, and it doesn't dilute our focus, because we still maintain all our people on solid tumors," Garlich said. "These guys aren't dummies; they look for things that are promising, and we get to tap into all their resources—the tissue bank, the experts, the clinical experience."
Not all the foundation's partnerships have worked so smoothly. Giusti said that consortium members have occasionally made "end runs" around the foundation: after accepting its funding and taking advantage of its experimental trials to test a compound in myeloma patients, they have negotiated a deal with a drug company to test the compound in, say, a set of patients whose disease is more advanced. "When researchers come to the consortium, all of the money is raised for them," Giusti said. "If they need it, and they give us a good case for the work, they will get the funding. And if it's a really great trial, and the company needs support, we will find funding for the company, too. But there are companies that still go directly to the centers. And here is where it gets ugly. Last spring, I said to the thirteen centers, 'Here are the five trials that are most important for us this year. Does everybody agree that we should be conducting these five trials this year? If you do not speak now, forever hold your peace.' " All thirteen centers said that they agreed with Giusti's choices. "Then I found out that one of the centers is going to do a trial with a drug company, of one of the five drugs—one of the most interesting ones—and they never told me," she said. "I was furious."
One leading myeloma expert who declined to join the consortium is Bart Barlogie, the director of the Myeloma Institute for Research and Therapy, at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, in Little Rock. Among the largest such centers in the world, Barlogie's institute, which he established in 1989, has twenty faculty members, including seven who conduct basic research, and receives between six hundred and seven hundred new patients every year. "I report directly to our chancellor and have quite a number of degrees of freedom, so the usual bureaucratic bullshit I do not have to contend with," Barlogie, a native of Germany who worked at the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center for fifteen years, told me. He said that researchers at the institute have analyzed fifty thousand chromosome samples from myeloma patients, enabling them to identify abnormalities that may help to predict the severity of the cancer.
"We give patients our program, which we call Total Therapy, and we throw the kitchen sink at these patients," Barlogie went on. The patients receive chemotherapy, followed by two blood-stem-cell transplants, more chemotherapy, and other medications—treatment that takes between three and four years to complete. In 2003, Barlogie added Velcade and thalidomide to the patients' regimen. Of two hundred and thirty-one patients treated at the institute between 1989 and 1994, fifty-four—about twenty-five per cent—have survived for more than ten years, and half of these have never experienced a recurrence. (According to the National Cancer Institute, of the myeloma patients diagnosed between 1996 and 2003, only a third were alive five years later.) "So when people come to me and say, 'Well, is myeloma curable?' I pause and show them the consent form where we state, 'The objective is to cure.' "
Barlogie, who is a member of the scientific advisory board of Giusti's foundation, has argued that, by seeking to develop new drugs, her consortium risks overlooking opportunities to make existing treatments more effective. "The thirteen centers in the consortium do a little bit of this and a little bit of that," he told me in August. "There are these many new drugs, and there is the issue of whether they should all be given initially, or only after patients enter remission. I want to continue to refine and improve on the Total Therapy approach." He continued, "I am sort of the generalissimo here. I don't believe in democratic rule when it comes to making medical choices and decisions." (Despite his differences with the foundation, Barlogie is in discussions with it to develop a protocol for treating myeloma patients with an especially poor prognosis.)


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ÆLA (meaning, literally translated, "puke"), Iceland's premier punk-rock-noir band, are hitting England for a week at the end of March. This band have been a regular highlight at Iceland's Airwaves festival for the last few years as well as getting a busload of TV and Radio coverage. Now their waves spread to these shores for a set of shows with all kinds of weird and wonderful underground bands from around the UK, including several DiS favourites.
Details are as follows:
26 Oxford Market Tavern w/ Junkplanet, The Walk Off, Worldview
27 London Artrocker w/ Children Collide
28 Brighton Engine Room w/ Applicants, Junkplanet, Power Up!
30 London The George Tavern w/ Applicants, Barbarians, Hot Pants Romance, Action Beat
31 London Brixton Dogstar w/ Fuck Buttons, J.I.M.C., Junkplanet, The Walk Off, DJs Bishi + Disastronaut
Find Æla on their MySpace to have a listen or contact the band.