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Wednesday, February 07, 2007
Earthquakes, Radon, Satellites, and Humidity
Pulinets, S.A. and Dunajecka, M.A. (2007) Specific variations of air temperature and relative humidity around the time of [the] Michoacan earthquake M8.1 Sept. 19, 1985 as a possible indicator of interaction between tectonic plates, Tectonophysics, v. 431, p. 221-230.
It has been known for a while that radon levels in the atmosphere can correspond to tectonic activity. Direct measurements of radon levels have shown large fluctuations immediately preceding earthquakes. What this paper presents is the idea that instead of a direct measurement of radon levels, remotely sense temperature and humidity measurements can be used as a proxy for the same phenomena. When Radon in the air decays, it ionizes other nearby molecules or atoms. These newly formed ions are then hydrated by atmospheric water, with the result that air humidity drops. The latent heat of evaporation is released from the water during the phase transformation, which results in a temperature increase. So, big pulses of Radon into the atmosphere, as are associated with tectonic activity and seem to occur leading up to earthquakes, results in an initial decrease in humidity and increase in temperature. The radon flux reaches a maximum and starts to decrease just prior to the "seismic shock", during which time there is a corresponding rise in humidity and drop in temperature.
Truth is I do not feel like that good of a filter for climate data, because from my perspective, the data presented in this paper do not seem as tell-tale as the authors imply. There are many swings in temperature and humidity that are not associated with earthquakes. But, I am still intrigued. I have heard the term "earthquake weather" before, which usually makes me chuckle.. But the temperature and humidity swings presented in this paper would definitely be noticeable. Anyways, I'd love input from anyone who knows more about this, I learned long ago not to trust everything that is published (as a matter of fact, I am counting on that for this paper I am working on, perhaps these authors have been asked one time too many when that paper is going to be done, and they just wanted it out the door). They reference many similar studies, which is reason enough to visit the library.
10 comments:
- Chris R said...
I've blogged about similar phenomena before - my take is that although it seems that these phenomena sometimes appear to precede earthquakes, the occurence of similar signals without any ensuing earthquake somewhat limits their usefulness as a diagnostic tool - it's clear that any relationship to tectonic activity is not a simple one.
- 8:56 AM, February 08, 2007
- Thermochronic said...
I agree. The figure they have showing soil radon concentrations, measured independently, is more convincing that just the temp and humidity. Thanks for the link to your post.
- 9:08 AM, February 08, 2007
- Thermochronic said...
I meant to add that as a predictive tool I also agree it seems very far off, if possible at all.
- 9:10 AM, February 08, 2007
- Yami McMoots said...
You found that figure convincing? I won't believe it until I see a much longer record - what they've provided is not enough to get a sense of normal seasonal variability.
- 1:33 PM, February 08, 2007
- Thermochronic said...
Got me. I meant relatively more convincing when compared with the figures of temp and humidity, which are very noisy. Still intrigued.
- 2:04 PM, February 08, 2007
- C W Magee said...
I'm too lazy to actually to calculations on the back of the envelope, but just glancing at the flap from across the room, it seems like the total heat available from Radon << atmospheric specific heat, and radon <<< atmospheric water content.
Also, if this effect is true, there should be a relationship between the magnitude of the effect and the mafic/felsic ratio of the rocks on the fault, since mafics are low in U.
Note that for specific heat of water to be a factor, the water has to stay liquid. If it immediately re-evaporates, then the dQ is zilch. Ditto if you form hydrated ions that re-react back into satble molecules.
I suppose all the math is in his '04 book, but as I said, I'm lazy.
- 9:12 PM, February 08, 2007
- BrianR said...
I recently watched a television program about animals and their apparent sensitivity to 'pre-shocks'. The one thing that was missing in the show, however, was what seismometers have actually recorded with reference to these anecdotal stories. That is, even though humans can't feel these, what did our machines feel?
The other thing in the show that I disliked was using words like 'predict' and 'warn' with regards to animals. They aren't actively engaged in prediction (at least not in the way we do)...they are responding/reacting to something. We then have interpret it and use it as a warning.
- 3:42 PM, February 10, 2007
- Thermochronic said...
If odd behavior in animals predicted earthquakes anyone who owned a rabbit and/or kitten would expect them every day.
- 8:53 PM, February 10, 2007
- pulse said...
I'm just Sergey Pulinets, one of authors of the paper.
The problem is that due to some discussion between seismologists they decided that radon is not a precursor and regular observations of radon were stopped in many countries (like after decree of Communist party). I have at least one direct one-to-one correlation between radon and humidity at Acapulco before Copala M7.4 earthquake in September 1995.
I accept the critics that data are not very convincing, but the aim of paper was to conmemmorate the 20-th annyversary of Michoacan earthquake in 1985, and we used tha very old data in paper format.
I published recently in Eos the short paper explaining not only the thermal but ionospheric anomalies as well.
If anybody wants more references, on can find the electronic versions of publications (including humidity calculations) at my WEB page:
I'm open for any questions and discussions
Sergey Pulinets
- 9:05 PM, May 29, 2007
- Thermochronic said...
Thank you for the response! I posted about this paper because I had never heard of the technique before, and it really intrigued me. As I say in my blog, I am a thermochronologist by training, so this paper came up in my attempt to broaden my skills. Thanks for the links also, I'll have to check them out.
- 9:49 PM, May 29, 2007


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The more time I spend in the company of these two extraordinary women, the more I appreciate their energy and commitment, as well as the clarity and force of their prose. All of these qualities are on full display in this collection of their journalism. The editors, Paul Berry and Alan Bishop, have organized the contents thematically, a decision which makes sense on many levels, though the chronological leaps backwards as a new section begins are occasionally disconcerting. There is also an element of arbitrariness in the divisions, particularly, I found, between what was filed under "A Writer's Life" and what under "Politics"–for such intensely political writers, always aware that the personal is also political, there's not really much difference. In fact, the most striking thing for me across the collection was the consistency of tone, regardless of subject: straightforward, direct, assertive, drily humorous. To some extent, in their fearless confrontations with prejudice, folly, and hidebound tradition, they remind me of Victorian writers like Frances Power Cobbe (some of whose outstanding essays can be found in the excellent Broadview anthology Criminals, Idiots, Women, and Minors). But both Brittain and Holtby seem to me less artful than Cobbe, which I don't mean as a criticism but as recognition that Cobbe and her contemporaries had worked hard enough for women's causes that by the time these two are writing, there is less need (not no need, mind you) to dance around the issues, to pander strategically to masculine egos or social norms, or to adopt disingenuous poses.
A straightforward recapitulation of just how much progress had been made comes from Holtby in an essay she wrote for Time and Tide about King George V's Jubilee. She refused the invitation to join a resolution protesting against the celebrations on the grounds that the previous twenty-five years "were, on the whole, the most propitious that women in this country had ever known":
Twenty-five years ago forty thousand women marched through the streets of London in what was known as the Women's Coronation Procession. It was a protest against desires unfulfilled. It represented arts, sciences, authorities, powers; lawyers and doctors walked there, the prototypes of peeresses and abbesses; and they were led by women carrying banners who had been imprisoned for insisting on women's right to use their abilities in such service. 'It will not come in my time, ' Mrs Pankhurst said. But do I not remember the extraordinary service at which Mr Baldwin unveiled Mrs Pankhurst's statue under the shadow of Parliament, in which he, the constitutionalist, honoured her, the rebel, for having 'set the heather on fire,' at which Dame Ethel Smythe in the robes of a doctor of music led the police band playing The March of the Women, which she had once conducted with a tooth-brush through the bars of a window in Holloway Gaol to a chorus of exercising prisoners? I have seen a woman cabinet minister walking through the lobby of the House of Commons; I have seen a woman architect chosen to design the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre; I have seen my own mother applauded by a county council when she was elected as its first woman alderman; I have myself been heckled as an agitator at Marble Arch, demanding the vote in the equal franchise campaign of 1927 and 1928; and I have been enfranchised. I have voted. And I know that those people who say that the world is no better off since 'women have been let loose in it' simply do not know what they are talking about.
She goes on to detail the "revolution in social and moral values" which is "a direct result of that challenge to opinion which we call the Women's Movement." But for all her appreciation of these positive developments, she is clear about "the imperfections of the movement," about which she is equally clear and specific. Though these great gains have been made, the challenge going forward (which may sound all too familiar, depressingly, to feminists in the present moment) is to maintain momentum, build on successes, and extend the principles underlying it beyond those who have so far benefited–including looking beyond gender to consider inequalities of race and class. "I am constantly reprimanded for 'flogging the dead horse of Feminism,'" Holtby observes; "I do not think the horse is dead."
The articles, then, carry on the work of social analysis and criticism, sometimes at the micro level (as in the nice little piece "Should a Woman Pay," about the explicit assumptions and implications of men's picking up the tab–"the ethics of social encounter reflect the economics of an earlier epoch," Holtby observes), sometimes at the level of state or even international politics. Holtby writes stringently, for instance, about South African leader Jan Christiaan Smuts, "an indefatigable general in the nationalist Boer War; an architect of empire in the years succeeding it." Smuts "has achieved superb feats of generalship, statesmanship, and intellectual synthesis," Holtby acknowledges; he has unified "the Dutch and British sections of the white community" of South Africa; and he has recently given a "speech upon liberty" at St. Andrew's University "which has won the acclamation of the English-speaking world." Holtby's critique is relentless. Having conceded his skill, renown, and accomplishments, she takes him apart for presuming to speak as a champion of freedom and equality:
'Popular self-government and parliaments are disappearing,' he said. 'The guarantees for private rights and civil liberties are going.' Quite. Smuts should know. In Cape Province, until 1931, there was no constitutional distinction between European and non-European citizens in the matter of franchise and property. True, the educational tests and property qualifications for voting were so arranged that only a minority of black men were enfranchised . . . Still, liberty broadens down from precedent to precedent, we are told. . . . All change, we thought, would be an extension of freedom, at least under men like general Smuts. In 1931 European women were admitted to parliamentary franchise; non-European women were excluded. Today before the country is a Bill, almost certain … to be passed, disenfranchising non-European males as well as females. The Native Conference, supposed to serve as a substitute for other constitutional powers, criticized this and other Government proposals in 1926 and 1927, so has not subsequently been summoned . . . .
'Dissident views are not tolerated and are forcibly suppressed.' Smuts should know. He himself encouraged the South African Government to pass the Riotous Assemblies Act – an Act which makes 'incitement to ill-feeling between black and white' an offense punishable by banishment. Now where conditions in a country as as they are in South Africa . . . merely to speak aloud of the laws and administrations precisely as they exist is adequate to 'incite ill-feeling.' The Act has been used to prevent the development of trade unionism, to prohibit political protest, to render inarticulate any form of native criticism; it has been used to enable politicians to say – 'But the natives themselves do not protest.'
Smut should know: the refrain is initially, disarmingly, innocent-sounding, but ultimately damning. Holtby's conclusion goes beyond South Africa to a wider indictment of the consequences of failing, as Smuts fails, to imagine other people, different people, as fully human:
These abrupt failures of the imagination are among the most fruitful sources of injustice in the world. They are more common than deliberate sadism, more insidious than fear. Indeed, they breed fear. . . . The Jews to Nazi Germany, the Catholics to the Ku Klux Klan, Negroes to a southern states lynching party, women to eighteenth-century liberals – they are not human; they need not be accorded human privileges. The mind closes against any conception of their own point of view.
This is only one of many references to Nazi Germany, which is not surprising if you consider the general historical context (the piece on General Smuts is from Time and Tide in 1934), but it did surprise me a little because the majority of them are specifically feminist critiques, which is not the most familiar argument against Nazism today. In the piece on the Jubilee, Holtby makes a passing reference to "what has happened in Germany, where the pendulum of reaction has swung back so violently that all that had been gained seems lost again." In "Black Words for Women Only" (1934) she considers Sir Oswald Mosley's assertions about the importance of women to the Fascist movement–which would, he declared, "treat the normal wife and mother as one of the main pillars of the state." "It is not irrelevant," Holtby proposes, "to compare what Sir Oswald promises with what Herr Hitler has performed":
The German Constitution of 1918 granted equality before the law to all citizens. Women entered politics, the professions, the civil services. Between thirty and forty-two sat in each of the various Reichstags as deputies between 1919 and 1933 – a higher proportion than in any other country. They held high executive and municipal offices.
But the Nazi movement has reversed all that. Women may vote, but none stand on the lists as candidates. Their associations are all now directed by men; since July, 1933, all the girls' high schools have been controlled by men. Professional women are finding themselves compelled for one reason or another to resign from work. Married women are persuaded to leave their employment, and unmarried workers are often asked to surrender their jobs to men, as in one Hamburg tobacco factory, where 600 girls were asked to hand over their work to fathers, brothers or husbands, or to retire, marry, and claim the State marriage loan.
There is little hope for ambitious young women in Nazi Germany, where the brightest contribution of constructive economic thought towards the solution of the unemployment problem appears to have been the expulsion of large sections of the community from paid work, as a penalty for being women, Socialists or Jews, and their replacement by unobjectionable loyal male Aryans. Individual women have protested against this mass campaign to restore their economic dependence and drive them back to the kitchen. But their protests are penalized; public influence is strong, and there are women who have been temporarily persuaded to believe that Hitler's policy really serves their interests.
Quoting one such woman, who wrote to the Manchester Guardian declaring that "Woman has again been recognized as the centre of family life, and today it has again become a pleasure and an honour to be a mother," Holtby acerbically observes, "No explanation is offered of why or when motherhood ceased to be a pleasure and an honour – perhaps when children were driven to concentration camps?" "Throughout history," she concludes,
whenever society has tried to curtail the opportunities, interests and powers of women, it has done so in the sacred names of marriage and maternity. Exalting women's sex until it dominated her whole life, the State then used it as an excuse for political or economic disability. . . . Today, whenever women hear political leaders call their sex important, they grow suspicious. In the importance of the sex too often has lain the unimportance of the citizen, the worker and the human being. The 'normal' woman knows that, given freedom and equality before the law, she can be trusted to safeguard her own interests as wife, mother, daughter, or what you will.
I was reminded in these articles of Gaudy Night, which also ties together Nazism and the gathering clouds of war in Europe with hostility to women's rights at home: the strongest clues to the perpetrator's identity turn out to be her strong view that women's place is in the home, her most important identity that of wife and mother, not citizen, worker, or human being.
Brittain's political writing focuses more on her pacificism, which leads her to support, provisionally, Chamberlain's deal with Hitler at Munich in 1938–"a policy beset with problems and fraught with peril," she acknowledges, but an alternative to "an ever-darkening night of hatred, suspicion, and fear." Once that dark night has arrived, she continues to write about the horror of war and the need to act with what compassion and justice are possible under its terrible pressure. About "massacre bombing," such as that of Dresden, she is eloquent: "It made no undeniable contribution to military victory," she says (having cited a number of military experts on this controversial question), "and it relegated men, for whose salvation Christ died, to the level of hunted and outraged beasts"; "the ruthless mass bombing of congested cities is as great a threat to the integrity of the human spirit as anything which has yet occurred on this planet."
The section on "A Writer's Life" (though overlapping in some of its concerns with the sections on feminism and politics) takes us in some more personal directions, as with Holtby's account of her development as a writer–complete with quotations from a book of her juvenile poetry published, at her mother's instigation, when she was thirteen. "I was," she says, and it is borne out by the verses she quotes, "a creature of completely uncritical piety and sentimental convention." (I too endured the complex blend of satisfaction and utter humiliation of having my private poetic scribblings taken up and prepared for public viewing, though in my case the little volume was not released to the genuine public, only to a select group of family and friends–this at my grandmother's instigation. All I can say in defense of the poems in it is that they are not conspicuously worse than Holtby's, except in formal specificity.) Holtby's review of Woolf's The Waves was of particular interest: it shows the same generous reaching towards understanding of an aesthetics wholly unlike her own that she shows when explaining her decision to write her volume on Woolf's life. And Brittain's essay on "The Somerville Novelists" would probably be the kicking off point for the seminar I imagine offering on that subject.


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Former world number three, David Nalbandian, has announced his retirement from the game after enjoying a successful 13-year career.
The 31-year-old Argentinian won 11 titles and reached the 2002 Wimbledon final, when he was beaten by Lleyton Hewitt, as well as reaching four other Grand Slam semi-finals.
Nalbandian went through to the last four of the French Open in 2004 and 2006 as well as reaching the US Open semi-final in 2003 and the same stage of the Australian Open three years later.
A well-known player among tennis fans on betfair.com, he reached number three in the world in March 2006 and finished in the year-end top ten of the ATP rankings on five occasions.
However, he has been troubled by a shoulder injury recently and said, when confirming his decision to quit the game: "I can play matches, but my shoulder won't let me continue my career. I can't play like that at a professional level."
"It's tough because I have to announce my retirement from the sport that gave me so much. I'm very grateful."
Nalbandian represented Argentina in three Davis Cup teams that reached the final - in 2004, 2008, 2011 - and he has fond memories of those achievements, adding: "It's the event that I felt was different from the others.
"The pressure and the support of the people, it's something unique. It's a shame Argentina couldn't win it, but that's the way it was."
Nalbandian reached his last final at the 2013 Brasil Open in Sao Paulo, when the perennial favourite on betfair, Rafael Nadal, beat him. However, after helping his country beat France in the quarterfinals of the Davis Cup earlier this year, he was forced to undergo an operation on his right shoulder.
Nalbandian has announced that he will play a series of farewell exhibition matches against Nadal, which are scheduled to start on the 21st of November.


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In late summer the tomatoes are so sweet and juicy, but the cooler evening temperatures are a reminder that fall is just around the corner.
It makes me realize how much I'll miss these warm weather jewels.Sometimes I just like to serve them simply; sliced with a drizzle of olive oil and red wine vinegar, with a twist of salt and freshly ground pepper.
Sweet home-grown tomatoes and home-grown cukes from my kind neighbors ~ a few cubes of Feta cheese, quartered Kalamata olives, and a shower of crushed pink pepper corns makes me extra happy. :)
The first bite reminds me, one more time of why I love summer!


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Potholes, line cracks and alligator cracks are defects in the roadway caused by environmental factors such as heat and rain. Natural forces begin the deterioration by creating small cracks. As the cracks grow deeper, chunks of the pavement material separate and are pulled out as cars pass over them or as rains lift them. If left unchecked, they can erode the dirt underneath the road way and create sink holes.
The City of Riverside Paving Crews rehabilitate small streets, parking lots, and alleys. They will also inspect and mitigate road hazards. Larger paving rehabilitation projects are generally contracted to outside paving companies.
Contact the 311 Call Center to report street problems.
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Precise information about the location of the damage is required for the crews to locate the problem. "On Van Buren near Jurupa" is often not enough information to actually locate the problem being called in.
Adding estimated distance and direction or landmarks such as "on Van Buren next to the golf course, five to ten feet from Jurupa" will assist the crews to properly identify a location. We may ask if there are certain odors present, how deep the hole is and its general size/shape. Providing this information can help get the problem corrected sooner.
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Nothing. People often refer to any damage sustained by a street as a "pothole" or as a "hole in the street". When reporting a problem, describe the damage as accurately as possible so the Street Division can properly respond to the situation. A pothole in the street (missing asphalt) may cause traffic hazard conditions or undermine the stability of the ground, while alligator cracks (broken asphalt) may cause an uncomfortable ride but is not a hazard.
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Any damage to asphalt where water appears to be coming from the damaged area or is an immediate hazard to motorists or pedestrians is considered to be an emergency. If you believe an emergency situation exists, please contact the 311 Call Center and provide a detailed description of the situation. A Street Services crew or Supervisor will be dispatched to assess the danger and to mitigate it as needed.
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If the damage is identified as an emergency, Public Works Division staff will be immediately dispatched to assess the issue. If the damage is not an emergency, an inspection will be scheduled within 24-48 hours. Once the inspection is made, the location, size, and description of the damage is recorded, regardless of whether the damage is routine or an emergency. The Public Works Division staff will decide what steps need to be taken to mitigate the problem. If rehabilitation of the street is necessary the street is added to a list of rehabilitation work.
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Patching of potholes is prioritized on the severity of the problem and the amount of traffic the area is likely to experience. If Public Works Division staff determines that the pothole is an immediate danger, the appropriate steps will be taken to mitigate the problem. We strive to repair all non-emergency potholes within a 24-48 hour timeframe once reported. Stormy weather requires all crews to assist with storm related issues which may require a longer repair time for reported potholes.
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To extend the life of existing pavement and to protect the under-surface from water seepage, the Street Division will apply a sealant to the surface of the street. The sealant is called a "slurry seal". Slurry sealing is the most versatile and cost effective way to preserve and protect city streets.
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The length of time the slurry seal has to "cure" depends on the temperature and moisture of the air. Dry hot summer days can cure the sealant in as little as three hours. Wet cooler days can take the sealant as long as four hours to cure. Driving on tacky or uncured sealant can cause severe damage to the vehicle and to the street surface.
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Nine years after the box-office smash Sin City, the stories of the notorious city dwellers resume in the hugely anticipated sequel Sin City 2: A Dame To Kill For. Boasting an all-star cast led by Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Inception, The Dark Knight Rises), Eva Green (Dark Shadows), Juno Temple (Killer Joe), Jessica Alba (Sin City, Fantastic Four), Bruce Willis (Looper) and Josh Brolin (Old Boy), this next installment promises to take audiences on a visceral ride into the twisted minds of Frank Miller's unforgettable characters.
Co-directors Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller reunite to bring Miller's visually stunning "Sin City" graphic novels back to the screen in Sin City 2: A Dame To Kill For. Weaving together two of Miller's classic stories with new tales, the town's most hard boiled citizens cross paths with some of its more reviled inhabitants. Sin City 2: A Dame To Kill For is the follow-up to Rodriguez and Miller's 2005 ground-breaking film, Sin City.
Sin City 2: A Dame To Kill For is in cinemas nationwide on Monday 25th August 2014


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Biodiesel, Medicinal Plants, and Forensic Sleuthing, Oh My!
Evergreen's Science Carnival Combines Fun and Learning for All Ages
Whether you're a science buff or not, you'll find something fun and interesting at The Evergreen State College's fourth annual Science Carnival set for Friday, June 1 and Saturday, June 2 from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. each day. The event, Washington's largest science fair of its kind, offers more than 200 presentations from Evergreen science students with an emphasis on demonstration, hands-on participation and fun.
Participants can choose from as many as a dozen presentations at any given time. Each presentation lasts 30 to 60 minutes and many popular topics will be repeated over the two days. For a full schedule of presentations, visit the information desk in the Lab I Building, on the left as you enter Red Square, the main campus plaza. Preview it online at http://academic.evergreen.edu/events/sciencecarnival/index.html. The Science Carnival is free and open to the public.
The popular event is designed for middle and high school students, including home school students, and anyone in the community that has an interest in science. Demonstrations will cover chemistry, physics, biology, astronomy, criminal science, marine science, optics, health science, food science, computer science, and much more. In the spirit of interdisciplinary education, a hallmark of the Evergreen learning experience, the event will include more than a dozen science-related art demonstrations in a wide range of media.
"Many people don't realize that our liberal arts curriculum includes a broad range of rigorous science programs," explained Evergreen science staff member and event organizer Peter Robinson. "Science at Evergreen is taught by nationally and internationally recognized faculty - not graduate students - in small classes with hands-on opportunities for undergraduate research and access to sophisticated scientific equipment, including a scanning electron microscope and ultra-high-end analytical instruments. These types of opportunities are rare even at the largest research universities."
Recent national attention has been placed on Evergreen's science programs, from National Science Foundation grants for the study of global warming and insects to student and faculty work to eliminate E.coli from the human food chain.
"The Science Carnival is a fun way for our students to share their science learning with the community and for the community to learn more about Evergreen as well," Robinson added.


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Detroit Fire Department kicked-off the 2012 FPW Domino's program
NFPA teams up with organizations and fire departments across the country regularly to expand the reach of fire safety information, but the biggest push by far happens each October around Fire Prevention Week. FPW, as it is referred to by many, is a time when the fire service and communities rally around fire prevention and safety. NFPA has been involved in this effort for more than 90 years as the week's official sponsor. FPW will take place October 6-12 this year and NFPA is once again working with a variety of groups to help spread important fire safety information.
Marking its sixth year of collaboration on what has been a very successful Fire Prevention Week public awareness program, NFPA and Domino's are teaming up with fire departments to deliver fire safety to Domino's customers… with pizza! During Fire Prevention Week and throughout the month of October, in addition to fire safety tips being delivered on the top of pizza boxes, participating Domino's stores will partner with their local fire departments to reward customers who have working smoke alarms. The fire department will deliver select orders from the store aboard a fire truck and check smoke alarms at the home. If the smoke alarms are working, the pizza is free!
The Home Depot encourages learning in their communities by hosting Saturday workshops year round, and in October they include a focus on fire safety. In collaboration with Kidde, local fire departments, and others, stores host community events that feature information and activities geared toward fire safety. Last year, NFPA teamed up with The Home Depot and Kidde on Fire Prevention Week events and as part of a larger program, The Home Depot ran a sales contest for store associates where the reward to top selling stores was the ability to donate smoke alarms to their local fire department.
If you are a member of a fire department and are interested in learning more about how to participate in one of these fire safety initiatives or others in your community, please email escafidi today.
– by NFPA's Eileen Scafidi


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Wendy Murphy: And Justice for Some: Babies having babies
At least 17 Gloucester high school girls recently became pregnant, about half of them after reportedly making a pact to have babies together. Many were under the age of consent, which means some of the pregnancies are also felonies.
Pundits bemoaned the lack of stable families and a culture that encourages young girls to be sexual. The Mayor of Gloucester claimed educators couldn't stop the girls because they were too busy trying to comply with an underfunded "No Child Left Behind" law. Huh?
I have sympathy, but not so much that I'd give them all free Pampers and daycare down the hall from algebra class – which appears to be the plan for the little mommies.
I'd make them all go to different schools and suffer just enough to ensure that they, and all the girls watching, get the message that having a baby in high school is a profoundly stupid thing to do.
Lawmakers should help, too, and find a way to make teen pregnancy a very unpleasant event. But in this state where talking about punishment gets you kicked off Nut Island, there's little hope anything meaningful will come out of the State House.
In fact, there's a bill pending that's sure to make things worse.
State Rep. and criminal attorney Eugene O'Flaherty of Chelsea proposed a bill to impose mandatory prison time for one particular type of child rape. But it only ramps up the punishment for victims between ages 12 and 15 if the offender is at least 10 years older. Which means it wouldn't apply if a 12 year-old was raped by a 21 year-old, and it wouldn't cover any of the Gloucester cases – including the one where a 15 year-old was reportedly impregnated by a 24 year-old homeless man.
Then there's the cost of raising a child – which is barely manageable for working-class adults. Uneducated, unmarried kids have almost no chance of paying the bills.
If the point weren't so painfully obvious, I'd continue with a plethora of statistics that demonstrate how psychologically overwhelming life becomes when a child raises a child. The human desire to feel hopeful about the future gets lost in the endless responsibilities that come home from the hospital with a deceptively cute baby.
That we glamorize parenthood is part of the problem. I continue to be overwhelmed by the challenges of raising my children. The nurses taught me how to breastfeed but they didn't warn me about teenager-hood.
That we don't try very hard to deter underage sex makes the battle more difficult. And now lawmakers want to push us further in the wrong direction with a 10-year age gap in child rape laws.
No other state has such an absurd statute, yet politicians and prosecutors say they are delighted. No real surprise. They can't win without a hug-a-thug philosophy because Massachusetts doesn't have a democracy, it has a DeMasi-ocracy. The most powerful politician in Massachusetts, Speaker of the House Sal DiMasi, is a defense attorney – which means when it comes to criminal justice policy, sycophants get what they want because they keep King Sal's castle afloat.
I have a better idea. How about lawmakers take off their Birkenstocks and declare that kids don't need the freedom to have sex with adults. They need to know we care about them enough to deal harshly with issues that threaten to ruin their lives.
Now the bill's in the Senate where Sen. Steven Baddour and Senate President Therese Murray can fix things, but they won't – unless the public starts screaming and yelling about how the belly show in Gloucester is powerful proof that it's the wrong time to encourage even more underage sex.
If we don't get outraged, the proposal will soon become law, which means not only more teen pregnancies, but newly energized child predators and pornographers who have been champing at the bit for years to lower the age of consent to 12. The age-gap provision cracks open that dangerous door for the first time in Massachusetts.
And people wonder why young families are leaving this state in droves?
Wendy Murphy is a leading victims' rights advocate and nationally recognized television legal analyst. She is an adjunct professor at New England School of Law and radio talk show host. She can be reached at email@example.com.


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Increase the Memory Limit in Report Designer
Pentaho Report Designer's startup script uses the default memory settings for your Java environment, which may be insufficient for your work. If you're experiencing an OutOfMemory exception, you must increase the amount of heap space available to Report Designer by changing the Java options that set memory allocation. Follow the directions below to accomplish this.
Note: In the examples below, the memory size notations are m for megabytes and g for gigabytes. You can use whichever is most appropriate for your situation.
- Exit Report Designer if it is currently running.
- Edit the report-designer script and modify the value of -Xmx to allocate more memory to Report Designer's JVM instance.
Linux/Solaris shell script:
"$_PENTAHO_JAVA" "-Dpentaho.installed.licenses.file=$PENTAHO_INSTALLED_LICENSE_PATH" -XX:MaxPermSize=256m -Xmx2g -jar "$DIR/launcher.jar" $@
Windows batch file:
set OPT="-XX:MaxPermSize=256m" "-Xmx2g"
- Start Report Designer and ensure that there are no memory-related exceptions.
The Java virtual machine instance that Report Designer uses now has access to more heap space, which should solve OutOfMemory exceptions and increase performance.


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For this week's Fall Through the Cracks Friday we're taking a bit of a different approach. Instead of highlighting something funny, off beat or simply strange we instead decided to share a video from Ted.com (one of our favorite and regular FTTCF sources) featuring Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg addressing the issue of women in leadership roles in industry. If you're a member of the PLUS Foundation Women's Leadership Network group on LinkedIn you may have already seen this, but it is worth sharing again.
Enjoy the video, and have a great holiday week!


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November 21st, 2012
Rihanna, with a new No. 1, says sorry to plane press
The tales from press who were aboard Rihanna's tour jet for the past seven days have ranged from hilarious to distraught to some combination of both.
Rihanna herself, who couldn't have been completely unaware of the response to her 777 tour, made an apology to those who were along for her seven-day, seven-country, seven-city promotional ride when she landed back in the States Tuesday.
If you still haven't caught wind of the frustrated and forlorn updates from the "Rihanna plane," as it quickly became known, members of the press were frequently lamenting the inability to sleep, go outside, go to the bathroom, work with any ease or even have a drink of water. Worse still, the all-access that they were expecting was non-existent as Rihanna was barely around. (It got to the point that mock "Missing" flyers were created.)
But according to Us Weekly, whose editor Ian Drew was aboard the plane of pain, the singer isn't as "Unapologetic" as her new album's title makes her sound.
"I know you guys got barely any dirt," she said. "But I had to be good. I still sound like s***. It's impossible to spend time with everybody, and I'm sorry I didn't. But this was excellent and I would definitely do it again."
But Rihanna made press crews wait once again later that night in New York at her album release event in Manhattan. The Wall Street Journal chronicles waiting for "some two hours" before the pop princess made her appearance, but perhaps she was already celebrating her 12th No. 1 and was delayed.
According to Billboard, the "Diamonds" single from "Unapologetic," which is Rihanna's seventh studio album in seven years, has landed atop the Hot 100, overpowering Maroon 5's "One More Night."
"Diamonds" is one of 14 tracks on the recently released record, whose title is one of Rihanna's favorite words because "it sums it all up," the singer told press Tuesday night in Manhattan.
"The reason the album is called 'Unapologetic' is because it's the truth," she continued, "and there's only so much you can put into 14 songs."
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"Big" John McCarthy was the third man in the Octagon starting at UFC 2 and continuing for many many years until he walked away to try his hand at commentating. That didn't work out and he's back reffing, although not in Nevada.
McCarthy was on the MMA Hour on Monday and shared his thoughts on stand ups (transcribed by MMA Fighting):
"I will [only] stand a fight up when it's close to an even position," McCarthy said. "If you're in guard, or even half guard, and the action has stalled to the point, and I give you warnings [that] I need you to get busy and nothing really changes, you've shown me that you can't do anything, I'm going to stop you. I'm going to restart you. But if you get to dominant positions, be it side control, mount, back, the only way in the world that I would ever stand somebody up out of that, and I've done it once -- I tell this story, it's Jeremy Horn -- is if you go and clamp down and you're the one stalling the fight because you're not doing anything.
"You'll get fighters that'll sit there and they'll want you to stand them up, and you go, 'There's no way in the world I'm standing you up.' Don't look to me to get you out of your problem. Get yourself out.
"If we start to take people out of those positions that are dominant, then we start to become unfair to the fight," McCarthy finished. "We give an advantage to one fighter over the other, and that's not our responsibility. That's not our job. We're doing something that's completely opposite of what we should be doing.
"You've got to have some compassion about how hard it is to do some of the things these [fighters] are trying to do, and doing it against a guy who knows what you're trying to do," McCarthy explained. "When you get guys in these mad scrambles and they'll finally end up in a position on the ground, and you'll see a referee come in and five second later [say], 'Come one. Work.' It's like, 'Jesus Christ, don't you think they just did? Wouldn't you be trying to get your heart rate back and breathe a little bit?' You've got to be reasonable when you're looking at things. Sometimes that's what separates the referees that fighters want to have doing their fights compared to others, because they understand the complexities of what's going on."


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Butternut Squash Crumble with Goat Cheese and Sage
Of all the hypotheticals I've entertained in the daydream hours of spring, there's one I return to with special frequency. If I had my own restaurant kitchen, what would be on my opening night playlist?
To say music sets the tone for an eating experience may be an understatement, but in many dining rooms the soundtrack goes woefully ignored. Neutral and instrumental seems to be the direction of choice, followed closely by a Pandora-style lineup of "Greatest Coffee Shop Hits: 80s, 90s and Today." When a place does it right, though, the effect can be magical. Full disclosure: I loved The Little Owl on Bedford as much for their playlists as for their meatball sliders, and secretly bookmarked their website just for the pleasure of streaming Frankie Valli & the Four Seasons. (Do it! Their 3-song loop brings back many happy memories.)
At Love Apple Farms we frequently blasted music out over the garden terraces. Our garden manager had a proclivity for Phish and The Dead, but the best days were when a laptop in the tool shed was plugged into the speakers with an open playlist. "It's not about choosing a good song, it's about finding the song that captures your mood right now," Ross told me earnestly one afternoon, and I took the wisdom to heart. My choices were generally scattershot, often verging on embarrassing (Sting, anyone? No, not the Police… "Desert Rose"). Fortunately my cohorts had better musical taste. When I think of the farm on late-summer afternoons I think of overripe cherry tomatoes, the clouds parting over Monterey Bay, and Ross sprinting to the laptop to play The Talking Heads' "This Must Be the Place."
Recently I've realized the same wisdom can be applied to cooking. It's not about a perfect meal every night, but rather putting together what feels right. Sometimes I genuinely crave spaghetti with grated cheese; many afternoons I crunch on slices of raw red cabbage; other weekends I want a three-course Moroccan feast, the spices satisfying some unknown culinary desire. Some nights I need the pleasant ache of Madeleine Peyroux's "I'm All Right" and Mayer Hawthorne's "Just Ain't Gonna Work Out"; other nights I slide around the kitchen to Lyle Lovett's "Don't Touch My Hat." There's a lot to be said for being true to the moment—in music and in food.
Butternut Squash Crumble with Goat Cheese and Sage
I fell in love with this savory crumble the moment I saw it on La Tartine Gourmand, and though it took me awhile to get around to making it, it didn't disappoint. My adaptation uses goat cheese instead of tomato to make the filling smooth and creamy, and I also found that pre-roasting the butternut squash makes for a delicious, caramelized treat.
2 medium butternut squash
olive oil
salt & pepper
1 large onion
handful fresh sage leaves
1 small round goat cheese, crumbled
1/2 cup white whole wheat flour
2 Tbsp. butter, cut into small pieces
1/2 cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese
Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Peel the butternuts and cut them into small chunks; toss with olive oil, salt and pepper and arrange on a baking tray. Roast in the oven until soft and browned, about half an hour.
While the butternut is cooking, slice the onion and saute in olive oil in a medium saucepan. Roughly chop the fresh sage and add to the pan with a sprinkling of salt and pepper. Cook until the onion is translucent, then set aside to cool.
Mix the flour, butter and parmesan cheese in a bowl, rubbing the butter into the flour with your fingers until the mixture resembles course crumbs. Set aside.
Reduce oven heat to 350 degrees. Toss the warm roasted butternut with the onion mixture and the crumbled goat cheese. Spread evenly in a buttered baking dish and top with the crumble mixture. Bake until the topping is golden, about 25-30 minutes, and enjoy!


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Are you safe? has been saved
Are you safe?
ME PoV Summer 2015 issue
Your business growth strategies are at the heart of the cyber risks your organization faces.
Most reports on cyber security revolve around a common theme: despite heightened attention the number of cyber incidents–and their associated costs–continues to rise. They typically point to the growing sophistication of hackers and other adversaries as a particularly intractable problem, and some deliberate over whether being secure is even possible in today's rapidly evolving landscape of cyber-attacks.
The Middle East in particular is on high-alert with three dimensions of threat elevating the level of risk above global averages:
Regional geo-political instability
The growing political instability in various conflict zones throughout the Middle East has given rise to numerous hacktivist groups that have wreaked havoc on public and private institutions, both regionally and globally. These notorious, self-professed electronic armies use malicious and destructive techniques to undermine the security of the Internet as a means to promote political ends.
Perceived economic wealth
The Middle East, more specifically member states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), is perceived as a region of economic wealth. To cyber criminals who are trying to exploit governments, public and private institutions for financial gains, this makes the Middle East a central target for attack and indeed has been.
Above average malware infection rates
Since 2012, every country in the Middle East has had, almost without exception, at least double (and in some cases ten times) the number of infected systems than the global average as per Microsoft's quarterly report on the average malware infection rate per country


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Hattie Brooks was the daughter of Samuel and Mary Jane (Lightcap) Brooks. Mary Jane was the sister of my ggg-grandfather, Levi.
Hattie married her first husband, Anson Miley, on Christmas Day 1872 when she was 16 years old. He was 33. Their son, Drayton Luther Anson Miley, was born January 1874. Anson died in October 1875 leaving Hattie a widow.
Hattie married James Leiby in May 1876. To this union, nine children were born: Helen, George, Henry, Herbert, Dora, Jennie, Edward, William and Howard.


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AP: Iraqi authorities are planning to relocate the remaining residents of a camp housing dozens of Iranian exiles where 52 people were killed last week, the United Nations mission to the country said Saturday.
The Associated Press
By ADAM SCHRECK
BAGHDAD (AP) — Iraqi authorities are planning to relocate the remaining residents of a camp housing dozens of Iranian exiles where 52 people were killed last week, the United Nations mission to the country said Saturday.
The eviction could prove contentious. The Shiite-led Iraqi government long has wanted to remove the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq dissident group from Camp Ashraf, a Saddam Hussein-era compound about 95 kilometers (60 miles) northeast of the Iraqi capital, but the exiles have been extremely reluctant to leave. Baghdad considers their presence inside Iraq illegal.
Thousands of camp residents relocated to a Baghdad-area facility on what is meant to be a temporary basis last year following months of negotiations.
A core of about 100 MEK members stayed behind, 52 of whom were killed in shootings Sunday that the group blames on Iraqi security forces. Another seven people are missing and are believed to be detained, according to the MEK. Iraqi officials contend that an internal dispute was to blame.
The U.N. mission to Iraq said Saturday that Iraqi authorities have ordered the remaining residents from Camp Ashraf to be moved to the Baghdad-area facility, a former U.S. military base known as Camp Liberty. Iraqi officials are expected to carry out the order "without delay," according to the U.N.
Deputy U.N. envoy Gyorgy Busztin called on both sides to exercise restraint to avoid any violence during the relocation. He said the U.N. is ready to monitor the process.
"We strongly hope all parties will act responsibly and that the process of relocation to Camp Hurriya will be peaceful and voluntary," Busztin said.
Ali al-Moussawi, the spokesman for Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, confirmed that an order has been issued to evict the residents. He declined to say when the transfer would take place, but said the government insists it happen "as soon as possible."
The MEK opposes Iran's clerical leadership. It carried out a series of bombings and assassinations inside Iran in the 1980s and fought alongside Iraqi forces in the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war. Saddam granted several thousand of its members sanctuary inside Iraq.
The MEK's continued presence inside Iraq long has irritated Iraq's postwar leadership, which has worked to bolster ties with neighboring Shiite powerhouse Iran. The government is highly suspicious of those linked to the former regime.
The group says it renounced violence in 2001 and camp residents were disarmed by U.S. troops after the invasion. The U.S. considered the MEK a terrorist group until last year, and cooperation in leaving Camp Ashraf was a key factor in reversing that designation.
Shahriar Kia, a spokesman for the MEK residents, said in a statement that the Iraqi government is planning to "massacre" the remaining residents and called on the U.S. government to intervene.
A spokeswoman for the U.S. State Department, Marie Harf, said in a statement Friday that Washington is following the situation at Camp Ashraf and condemns Sunday's violence while expressing support for U.N. fact-finding efforts. She urged all sides to cooperate with efforts to relocate the residents to Camp Liberty.
Camp Liberty is meant to be a temporary way station for the exiles while the U.N. works to resettle them abroad. MEK supporters have complained about services and security at the compound, which has been repeatedly targeted by militants in deadly rocket attacks. It houses more than 2,800 exiles, according to U.N. figures.
Efforts to resettle the exiles outside Iraq has been slow because the U.N. has had difficulty securing commitments from member states to accept them and because some of them are reluctant to be separated from their comrades. They do not want to return to Iran because they fear persecution there.
A total of 198 former residents of the two camps have been resettled abroad so far, most to Albania.
Associated Press writer Qassim Abdul-Zahra contributed to this report.


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Sam Mariani Photography
Welcome to my site. Hope you enjoy my showcase of travels around the world as much as I did. Do come back every now & then so you can see what I have been up to and feel free to leave a comment or two. Sam
Although people may see vietnam through the lens of war, it is in reality filled with captivating natural beauty and tranquil village life. Today, this country is a proud and gracious destination whose culture and people welcome you with open arms and big smiles.Read More


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Reimagining the future
Two articles on attempts to move into high-tech; first, New York City
"THAT city will, in the course of time, become the granary of the world, the emporium of commerce, the seat of manufactures, the focus of great monied operations," predicted DeWitt Clinton, governor of New York in 1824. He was speaking about the effects of the Erie Canal, which connected the Great Lakes to the Hudson River. Originally derided as "Clinton's folly", the canal helped to open up the west, allowing New York to benefit enormously from an explosion of trade. Within 15 years of the opening, New York was the busiest port in America, moving more than Boston, Baltimore and New Orleans combined. The plan to open an applied sciences university campus in New York City, reckons Seth Pinsky, who heads New York's Economic Development Corporation, is an "Erie Canal moment".
The city's embrace of high-tech has already begun. Tech clusters have emerged in Manhattan's Flatiron District and Brooklyn's Dumbo, home to firms like STELLAService and Etsy. Venture-capital firms and angel investors have been looking at New York more seriously than they once did. Henry Blodget, of Business Insider, notes "the financing ecosystem has also gotten very well developed, from late-stage private equity right down to angel investing." Some $1.2 billion was invested by venture-capital firms in New York in 2010. The Big Apple even overtook Massachusetts in venture-capital funding for internet and tech start-ups, making it second only to Silicon Valley. And in the third quarter of last year, it surpassed it in venture capital in all categories. Between 2005 and 2010 employment in New York's high-tech sector grew by nearly 30%. Google alone has about 1,200 engineers in the city.
Much of this growth has been organic, but there has been some help from City Hall. Since 2002 the city has set up more than 40 projects to help the biotech sector and helped create a network of incubators supporting start-ups in that area. It also established a $22m municipal entrepreneurial fund, the first of its kind outside Silicon Valley. A year ago Michael Bloomberg, a tech entrepreneur before he became New York's mayor, called on universities to pitch plans to develop and operate a new tech campus in New York in exchange for access to city-owned land and up to $100m in public money.
New York received seven proposals from 17 top institutions, including Stanford University which did so much to create Silicon Valley. Almost 6,000 companies, including Google, Hewlett-Packard and LinkedIn, trace their beginnings to Stanford. But Stanford withdrew from the competition last month, days before the mayor announced the winning proposal, which came from Cornell, an Ivy League university, and its partner Technion, an Israeli technology institute. The latter is considered to be one of the driving forces in Israel's tech industry. It helped turn Israel from a country of orchards to one of semiconductors. Some 4,000 start-up companies are located around its campus.
The two bodies have plans to build a $2 billion 2m square feet (610,000 square metres) campus on Roosevelt Island, one subway stop from mid-town. Cornell and Technion hope to have a temporary facility up and running as soon as this autumn and complete their permanent home by 2017. The bid had huge support from Cornell alumni, including a $350m gift from Charles Feeney, who made his fortune through the Duty Free Shopping Group. That is one of the largest donations in the history of American higher education.
According to the city's analysis, over the next 30 years the campus will generate more than $7.5 billion in economic activity, with 600 companies spinning out of the new school directly; these are projected to create 30,000 jobs. Some 20,000 construction jobs will also be created, not to mention about $1.4 billion in extra tax revenue. And it should help quench the never-ending demand for qualified engineers. The mayor has not ruled out naming additional winners. And some of the losing plans will go forward regardless. So New York could soon have several applied sciences campuses. Look out, Silicon Valley.
This article appeared in the United States section of the print edition under the headline "Reimagining the future"
From the January 7th 2012 edition
Discover stories from this section and more in the list of contentsExplore the edition
More from United States
America may be a step closer to banning TikTok
What the grilling in Congress means for the future of the app
The cases against Donald Trump are piling up
The Manhattan indictment, if it comes, will not be the last one
Anti-Semitism in America is becoming flashier, louder and rarer
Incidents of anti-Semitic hate are up, while assaults are down. How can this be?


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We began our year in the wake of China landing a probe on the Moon triggering fears of mining operations on the Moon, by declaring an artists' 'Republic of the Moon' and transforming the Bargehouse on London's South Bank into the lunar republic's Earth-based embassy. The exhibition was a popular and critical success. It included works by Agnes Meyer Brandis, Liliane Lijn, Leonid Tishkov, Katie Paterson, and Joanna Griffin and the Moon Vehicle Group, and an evolving installation and residency by artists We Colonised the Moon (Sue Corke and Hagen Betzwieser). We animated the exhibition with performances, workshops, music, talks, a pop-up moon shop by super/collider and playful protests against lunar exploitation.
In June, we brought the spectacular artist road-rail vehicle SEFT-1 to London. SEFT-1 was created by Mexican artists Ivan Puig and Andrés Padilla Domene to explore the abandoned and ruined passenger railway networks of Mexico and Ecuador. Arts Catalyst, in partnership Furtherfield commissioned a new exhibition about their journeys, with video, photographs, objects, and a scale-model diorama of a viaduct ruin in Mexico, which the artists had explored on their travels. The exhibition reflected on how the ideology of progress is imprinted onto historic landscapes through the modern ruin.
July saw us visit Japan with a group of artists to explore the artistic, societal and political responses to nuclear energy post-Fukushima. In partnership with S-AIR in Sapporo, and curated by Arts Catalyst's associate curator Ele Carpenter, we organized the Actinium exhibition, which included works by James Acord, Shuji Akagi, Chim↑Pom, Crowe & Rawlinson, Karen Kramer, Cécile Massart, Eva & Franco Mattes, and Thomson & Craighead, which formed part of the Sapporo International Art Festival Collaborative Program and acted as a base for discussions, screenings and field trips to nuclear facilities around Hokkaido, and further afield to Eastern Japan around Fukushima.
Meanwhile, our curated exhibition Ice Lab: New Architecture and Science in Antarctica, commissioned by the British Council, and featuring some of the most innovative and progressive examples of contemporary architecture in Antarctica, toured from MOSI (Manchester Museum of Science & Industry) to New Zealand's IceFest in Christchurch and then to Otago Museum, New Zealand.
As part of our ongoing investigatory project with YoHa, Wrecked on the Intertidal Zone, we organized workshops in Leigh-on-Sea over the summer months to involve local people and artists in exploring and mapping the changing ecology of the Thames estuary. Wrecked is setting up a network of local people, artists and technologists to explore how local "situated" knowledge of the estuary can be combined with artistic investigations and citizen science techniques to explore and respond to a changing, contested estuary.
The Arts Catalyst's 20th anniversary party in October was delightfully celebrated with many friends, glow-in-the-dark cocktails, a moon landing darts game organized by We Colonised the Moon, a whisky tornado by Bompas & Parr, and music by Teleplasmiste and the Pond Scum Light Orchestra.
Kosmica Mexico moved into its third festival in Mexico City in November in partnership with Laboratorio Arte Alameda and the Centro Cultura Digitale, programmed by Nahum Mantra. Artists, scientists, performers, scholars, space explorers, workshop leaders and musicians from Mexico, UK, France, Canada and USA came together to explore the cultural and artistic aspects of space exploration, including Bompas and Parr and super/collider's recreation and extension of their intoxicating and wildly popular event 'A brief history of drinking in space' from Republic of the Moon' as well as topics such as sex and sexuality in space, and nostalgia for the Earth.
In a series of international "epic residencies" throughout the year, we enabled artist Alistair McClymont to spend several weeks at the Central Laser Facility in Didcot with some of the most powerful lasers in the world, facilitated visits and field trips for six artists and curators to Japan (Revital Cohen, Tuur Van Balen, Ele Carpenter, Jon Thomson, Alison Craighead, Karen Kramer and Susan Schuppli), and supported Kuai Shen's research in Yasuni National Park, Ecuador. We also advised and supported the Mexican project La Gravedad de los Asuntos, led by Nahum Mantra, which – inspired by The Arts Catalyst's zero gravity programme (2000-2005) – saw a group of Mexican artists and scientists, including Ivan Puig, Ale de la Puente, Arcángel Constantini, Fabiola Torres-Alzaga, Gilberto Esparza, Iván Puig, Juan José Díaz Infante, Marcela Armas, Miguel Alcubierre, Tania Candiani and Nahum, go to Star City Russia and undertake artistic research in zero gravity.
All that and a new website, our first e-reader, and a map of the Arts Catalyst's two decades of experimental, trail-blazing projects.
And, towards the end of the year, we said 'au revoir' to curator Rob La Frenais, off to undertake new freelance projects (although he will be working with Arts Catalyst on one-off projects in the future) …
Related reading material – for those who want:
Republic of the Moon manifesto
Railways, ruins & modernity blog post (on SEFT-1)
Nuclear Culture blog (Actinium)
and my blog posts on nuclear culture in Japan – Part 1 Part 2
Ice Lab book
Alistair McClymont's blog (Beam Time residency)
Arts Catalyst Reader Volume 1
A Brief History of The Arts Catalyst (20th anniversary booklet)


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Chrysler to Go Mainstream, Dodge to Become Performance Brand
AUBURN HILLS, Michigan - The decades long "turf war" between Chrysler and Dodge for customers is (mostly) over.
"Chrysler is to be FCA's mainstream American brand," said Chrysler brand CEO Al Gardner.
That means several new products for Chrysler, including a new compact in 2016 (called the 100), a full-size crossover in 2017, and a mid-size crossover in 2018. The full-size crossover will be offered as a plug-in hybrid, as will the Chrysler Town & Country from 2016 forward.
Dodge, for its part, will put the Grand Caravan on the chopping block. It joins the Avenger, which is already being phased out to make way for the new Chrysler 200.
Fiat Chrysler projects that the Chrysler brand will grow from its present 350,000 sales per year to 800,000 vehicles by 2018. During the same period, Dodge is forecasted to fall from about 600,000 cars today to 550,000 next year, eventually returning to 600,000 vehicles in 2018.
That sounds like a tough pill to swallow for Dodge, but brand chief Tim Kuniskis characterizes it as a "purification" that will allow it to focus on performance. To that end, SRT will come back under the Dodge umbrella and will produce versions of the Dart and the Journey replacement. The SRT Dart sounds especially appealing, as it promises all-wheel drive and a high-output turbo engine.
The Charger and the Challenger, which Kuniskis characterizes as the foundation of the brand (along with the strong-selling Durango), will be redesigned for 2018. They will remain full-size cars.
Making Dodge a performance brand sounds appealing, but it remains to be seen whether Chrysler, which presently fields only three vehicles, will be able to grow fast enough to make up for that contraction. Going mainstream also leaves Fiat Chrysler without a true luxury brand in the United States, unless one counts Alfa Romeo. It appears that the company is counting on Jeep and Ram to continue returning the sort of profits that one normally sees from premium cars.
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Continuing Education
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Ergonomics 101
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02/05/2018 M-Kran takes delivery of another Liebherr LTM 1500-8.1 mobile crane
- M-Kran buys its fourth Liebherr crane this year
- Second 500-tonne Liebherr mobile crane in the fleet
- LTM 1500-8.1 is a very popular mobile crane in Russia
Crane company M-Kran took delivery of a Liebherr LTM 1500-8.1 mobile crane in December. This is the second crane of this type in the fleet as the Liebherr 500-tonne machine is in particularly high demand in Russia. The 8-axle 500-tonne mobile crane represents an expansion in the Moscow company's fleet in this load capacity class. The LTM 1500-8.1 is now the fourth mobile crane that Liebherr has delivered to M-Kran this year.
M-Kran Sales Managers Alexandr Conic, Georgy Cuiujuclu and Anna Cuiujuclu travelled to the manufacturing plant in Ehingen to take delivery of the new 500-tonne crane in person. Georgy Cuiujuclu explains: "The Liebherr LTM 1500-8.1 will keep our fleet up to date." Alexandr Conic adds: "The 500-tonne machine is the fourth Liebherr crane delivered to us this year. The LTM 1500-8.1 will mainly be used in bridge construction and in the petrochemicals industry. In some cases, customers expressly ask for this crane model as it is very popular in Russia." The company has already had an LTM 1500-8.1 in its fleet for several years.
Family-run company M-Kran was founded in 2007 is a classic crane company. The crane rental company is based in Moscow, also has a branch office in Jekaterinburg and now has a workforce of around 100 employees. The company's fleet comprises 40 telescopic mobile cranes, 35 of which have been supplied by Liebherr. The largest crane in the fleet is a Liebherr LR 1750 crawler crane. The main business of the company remains crane rental.


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Slice of Life
It was inevitable. Invite a few folks over to your place for handmade-from-scratch pizza every Monday night, and more people were bound to show up the next Monday night. And when the growing number of Monday night insiders started spreading the word–relying heavily on justifiable hyperbole like "the best sauce ever" or "the most perfect crust in the whole world"–the word was liable to get Babeled. People would surely show up on the wrong nights, seeking 'za enlightenment.
If you're Ken Forkish, owner of Ken's Artisan Bakery (home of the Monday night pizza event), you keep your fans hoping that you'll open up another little joint that serves pizza more than one night a week, while you wait patiently for the right space. And when you find it in an old paint store at the south end of the ever-lengthening restaurant row on 28th Ave above and below East Burnside, you stick a sign up that teases, "Ken's Artisan Pizza: Coming Soon."
If you're one of Ken's many followers, you pine impatiently through winter, spring and nearly half the summer for the pizza pangs to end. And come opening day in July, when Ken has finally gotten his custom-made wood-burning oven up and running and had a cord or two of oak delivered, when he has Bitburger and Hair of the Dog pouring from the taps, has dough rising and fennel sausage and soppressata and basil and anchovies at the ready, with tomato sauce bubbling away on the stove and this week's plans for the seasonal roasted veggie plate all laid out, the doors and windows fling open, and you stand in line with the rest of us poor suckers, staving off a shared, long-suffered hunger for five nights a week worth of Ken's pizza, as we chant to ourselves, "Life is a banquet. Life is a banquet. Life is a banquet."


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Are celebrities using children's books to stay in favour with public
The latest in a long string of celebrities to write children's books when the going gets tough, Barack Obama has joined the ranks of children's authors with his book, Of thee I sing.
Bookstores across the world are filled with celebrity offerings and Obama is not the first celebrity to turn to writing children's books when they have been perceived less than favourably in the press. Though admittedly, he is the first president to aim his work at children. n.
Well-known names such as Madonna (who released her first of six children's books, The English Roses, back in 2003) and Sarah Ferguson (who has released a string of books throughout her many periods of disgrace) have jumped on the bandwagon.
It is thought that these celebrities (including former First-Lady, Hilary Clinton) believe that by showing their softer, compassionate side, will regain the public's trust and respect after falling from grace. Take Jordan, a.k.a Katie Price, for example – after a string of allegations and accusations in the press, Jordan released her sparkly pink offering, My Pony Care book.
Obama has provided himself some saving grace, in the form of all his proceeds going to charity. All money gained from sales of the publication will benefit the Fisher House Foundation, a charity dedicated to the children of soldiers wounded or killed in battle, and Obama is not giving any interviews in relation to the release.
Other cynics have also attributed the celebrities' enthusiasm to the success achieved by the phenomenally popular Harry Potter books, which made JK Rowling both a celebrity and a millionaire.
Despite the fact that many cynics see celebrities' writing ambitions as a money-making enterprise, it can be argued that it doesn't matter who's written the books; if children are more inclined to sit down and read just because their favourite celebrity is attached to the novel, where is the harm?
By reading more, children widen their vocabulary and advance their development. This outcome is positive even if the books themselves may ultimately be a cynical attempt at making cash and creating publicity.
About the author: Louis Sharman is a freelance author writes article on various topics. To learn more about various bookstores and Online Bookshops he recommends you to visit
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End of life care
Changes in the last hours and days
Open all pages about End of life care
Physical changes are likely to happen when you're dying. These happen to most people during the terminal (dying) phase, whatever condition or illness they have. This can last hours or days.
You'll start to feel more tired and drowsy, and have less energy. You'll probably spend more time sleeping, and as time goes on you'll slip in and out of consciousness.
Not wanting to eat is common in people who are dying. You may also find it difficult to swallow medicine.
Your healthcare professionals can discuss alternative ways of taking medicine with you and your carers, if necessary.
Your family and carers may find it upsetting or worrying if you do not eat, especially if they see you losing weight, but they do not need to make you eat.
As you get closer to dying, your body will not be able to digest food properly and you will not need to eat.
If you cannot swallow to drink, your carers can wet your lips with water.
Your breathing may become less regular. You may develop Cheyne-Stokes breathing, when periods of shallow breathing alternate with periods of deeper, rapid breathing.
The deep, rapid breathing may be followed by a pause before breathing begins again.
Your breathing may also become more noisy as a result of the build-up of mucus.
The body naturally produces mucus in your breathing system, including the lungs and nasal passages. When you're healthy, this mucus is removed through coughing.
When you're dying and no longer moving around, the mucus can build up and cause a rattling sound when you breathe.
Medicines or changes in the chemical balance of your brain can cause confusion or hallucinations.
A hallucination is when you see or hear things that are not there. If you become confused, you may not recognise where you are or the people you're with.
Some people may be restless or seem to be in distress. For example, they may want to move about, even though they are not able to get out of bed, or they may shout or lash out.
This can be out of character and distressing for family and carers.
The medical team can rule out or treat any underlying causes, such as pain, breathing problems or infection, or calm the person who is dying.
If no underlying cause can be identified, there are medicines that can ease distress.
Your feet and hands may feel cold because of changes in your circulation. Blankets over your hands and feet can keep you warm.
Your skin may look slightly blue because of a lack of oxygen in your blood. This is known as cyanosis.
Find more information about the last hours and days of life, including advice for carers and relatives.
- Helix Centre: What you can do to practically care for someone who is in their last days and hours of life (PDF, 210kb)
- Dying Matters: Being with someone when they die
- Marie Curie: What to expect in the last weeks and days
- Marie Curie: Final moments of life
- Cancer Research UK: Final days
Find out about:
Page last reviewed: 18/10/2021
Next review due: 17/10/2024


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4 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil, plus more for brushing and drizzling
4 teaspoons red wine vinegar, plus a little more for drizzling
2 teaspoons fresh lemon juice
2 cloves garlic, minced
Kosher salt and freshly ground pepper
½ pint grape tomatoes
1 red onion, quartered
2 large bell peppers (any color), quartered
1 medium zucchini, chopped in 2 inch chunks
1 (10-ounce) loaf ciabatta or French bread, sliced in thick slices
1/2 cup torn fresh herbs (basil, mint and/or parsley)
1/4 pound thinly sliced pastrami, cut into 2-inch ribbons
Preheat a grill to medium high. Make the dressing: Whisk the olive oil, vinegar, lemon juice, garlic, 1/4 teaspoon kosher salt, and pepper to taste in a bowl.
Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Lightly brush the tomatoes with olive oil and roast for 18 minutes, or until soft. Set aside.
Brush the grill with olive oil.
Put the red onions, peppers and zucchini in a bowl; drizzle with olive oil and vinegar and season with salt and pepper. Brush the bread with olive oil. Grill the bread and vegetables until cooked and toasted, about 2 minutes per side for the bread and 3 minutes per side for the peppers and zucchini. Transfer to the baking sheet and let cool slightly. Store vegetables together and bread in a cool dry place until ready to serve. Just before serving, cut the onions, peppers, zucchini, and bread into bite-size pieces; transfer to the bowl. Add the tomatoes, herbs, pastrami, dressing and any juices from the baking sheet. Season with salt and pepper and toss. Serve immediately.


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MessageMe, an app that launched last week and raced up the charts to the #2 spot in social networking in the U.S., is confronting Facebook's touchiness around access to its social graph.
The app's integration with Facebook stopped functioning earlier today (see left), the result of the company's decision to cut MessageMe off from its "Find Friends" functionality, according to sources familiar with decision. MessageMe CEO Arjun Sethi declined to comment in this story and Facebook didn't immediately respond to requests for comment.
The move resembles Facebook's decision last month to shut off Voxer's access to the graph, even though Voxer connected to Facebook for well over a year. Voxer is another communications app that supports calling and voice chat. Facebook cut the app off around the same time that it launched competing functionality with free voice calling to other users.
In that decision, Facebook cited Section 10 of its platform policy (which is the same one it's using in MessageMe's case):
Reciprocity and Replicating core functionality: (a) Reciprocity: Facebook Platform enables developers to build personalized, social experiences via the Graph API and related APIs. If you use any Facebook APIs to build personalized or social experiences, you must also enable people to easily share their experiences back with people on Facebook. (b) Replicating core functionality: You may not use Facebook Platform to promote, or to export user data to, a product or service that replicates a core Facebook product or service without our permission.
MessageMe apparently replicates too much of Facebook Messenger's functionality for the company to be comfortable with it. Facebook has long been touchy about providing access to the biggest of its strategic competitors like Google and Twitter. Back in 2010, Twitter's then-CEO Ev Williams griped about the company's unwillingness to let Twitter users look up their Facebook friends on the service or to send Facebook updates to Twitter. In the same year, Google and Facebook had a back-and-forth over Facebook's access to Gmail's contact importer because the social network wouldn't send data the other way.
But it's only in the last year that the company has really stepped up enforcement against other startups. After cutting off Voxer last month, Facebook clarified its policy, saying that apps needed to share content back to Facebook and couldn't replicate too much of Facebook's core functionality. It cited the same policy in cutting off Twitter's Vine hours after launch and Russian search engine Yandex's app Wonder, because it replicated too much of graph search.
In MessageMe's case, asking the company to share data back is kind of silly considering that people wouldn't want to reveal who they message with or what they privately say.
But the effect might not be too bad on the company. Vine has thrived over the last two months and still holds the #1 social networking spot in the U.S. on the iOS app store. Voxer's active usage appears to have stayed level in the month after Facebook cut them off.
Plus, MessageMe actually doesn't rely on Facebook for most of its growth. It instead uses the address book, which is the same method that other big messaging apps like WhatsApp and Line have used.


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located at 3115 Las Palmas Ave. Escondido Ca 92025
- The new ordinance that deals specifically with the organic farms & eye gnats will be explained.
- Who will conduct this meeting? Jack Miller – Director of Environmental Health & Rod Lorang – Senior Attorney for San Diego County.
- Your attendance in support of Be Wise Ranch & Organic farming, will confirm to the County Board of Supervisors that we are serious about keeping Be Wise Ranch in business.
- Bill Brammer, the organic farmer of Be Wise Ranch will be at this very important meeting.
- To let us know that we can expect your support, please email Sandra@bewiseranch
- Thank you and we hope to see you at the meeting.


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Resources for Teachers - Gender Representation
To make students aware of the ways in which male violence is used and promoted in advertising.
In this lesson students are introduced to the concept of «avatars» and share their experiences creating and playing avatars in video games and virtual worlds. They then create avatars using a program that is intentionally limited in terms of available body types and gender markers, first creating an avatar of their own gender and then of the opposite gender, and then discuss the program and relate it to representations of gender and body image in games and virtual worlds and in other media. Students then create avatars using a much more flexible version of the program and compare that experience to the more limited version. Finally, students use the more versatile program to create avatars that represent how they see themselves and how they would like others to see them online and reflect on the choices that went into creating them.
In this lesson, students look at how male and female characters are depicted in comic books.
This is the first of three lessons that address gender stereotypes. The objective of this lesson is to encourage students to develop their own critical intelligence with regard to culturally inherited stereotypes, and to the images presented in the media - film and television, rock music, newspapers and magazines.
This lesson develops a beginning awareness by students of how they feel towards, and respond to, different sports, and how the media represents athletics.


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Japan's latest cleaning robot not only has the dust-busting muscle to put Roomba to shame but it also includes a video camera, Wi-Fi and can humbly apologise to anyone whose feet it gets under.
The nameless robot (it's simply labelled 'Multipurpose Network Service Robot') created by Figla and on show as part of the Robot Laboratory project in Osaka, ostensibly acts as a floor cleaner but is really all about proof of various concepts ahead of commercial production.
Respecting the master
Using combinations of infrared, gyroscopes, bumper sensors and ultrasonics, the droid can navigate uneven terrain as it scrubs floors with its dustpan and brush, spotting and avoiding obstacles along the way.
If any of those are deemed to be human, and therefore worthy of ultra-polite Japanese respect, the little fella knows just the right words to use to greet all comers. With the niceties (and the loiterers) out of the way, cleaning recommences.
As for non-verbal communication, the onboard camera uses Wi-Fi to relay video back to a screen or control station, whether fixed or on a PC that's being used to feed instructions or monitor progress.
With the versatility to perform other tasks - the Osaka demonstration has the robot waxing floors as well as cleaning them - Figla's machine could be a success when commercialized some time next year. Pricing is unclear so far but should be around ¥1 million (£4,320).


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Last night I came across this MyScienceAcademy gem featuring Kelvin Doe, a 15 year-old Sierra Leonean who is nothing short of an engineering, mechanical, and technological prodigy. For years this kid (and I use the term "kid" loosely when referring to such a fine mind) has been rooting through "dust bins" in his neighborhood to scavenge old electrical components that he has used to construct his own radio station, where he goes by the performer name DJ Focus.
A radio station may sound small at first, but this is a community where electricity is available for maybe an hour each week. From discarded materials Kelvin engineered his own batteries, electrical circuitry, broadcasting apparatus, and audio equipment, all for two reasons: 1) So that he could play fantastic music for his friends and family. Everyone should listen to this song by Bobby Fala, which DJ Focus endorsed and played over his station — Fala has now also made it to SoundCloud, largely I bet, because of Kelvin's success and publicity. And 2) So that the community could use his radio station as a forum for public political discourse — a chance for the unheard to find their soapbox, a place for issues on the ground to find their voice.
Without question, Kelvin's enthusiasm, passion, genius, and focus are an inspiration. Imagine if more teenagers shared Kelvin's clarity of thought, his drive and his heart, his sense of commitment to community and to improving the lives of his friends and loved ones. Hopefully, with help of non-profit programs like Global Minimum Inc: Innovate Salone, the group that discovered Kelvin, more youthful brilliance will show itself.
Kelvin's story gives us all reason to be optimistic about humanity's future. What's he's done is truly astounding — and if he continues to receive the support he needs, I bet this radio station and his trip to MIT won't be the last time this young man makes headlines — particularly if he starts working on something like sustainable energy technology, improving batteries and energy efficiency, or developing small-scale alternatives to traditional electrical grids (though admittedly, he'll probably come up with better ideas all his own). I wouldn't put anything past him.
To Kelvin! Cheers!
JM Kincaid