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William H.
Calvin, W. H., and Stevens, C. F. (1967). Synaptic noise as a source of variability in the interval between action potentials. Science 155:842-844.
Ehrlich, A., and Calvin, W. H. (1967). Visual discrimination behavior in Galago and owl monkey. Psychonomical Science 9:509-510.
Calvin, W. H., and Stevens, C. F. (1968). Synaptic noise and other sources of randomness in motoneuron interspike intervals. Journal of Neurophysiology 31:574-587.
Calvin, W.H. (1968). Evaluating membrane potential and spike patterns by experimenter-controlled computer displays. Experimental Neurology 21:512-534.
Calvin, W.H., Sypert, G.W., Ward, A.A., Jr. (1968). Structured timing patterns within bursts from epileptic neurons in undrugged monkey cortex. Experimental Neurology 21:535-549.
Calvin, W.H. (1969). Dendritic synapses and reversal potentials: theoretical implications of the view from the soma. Experimental Neurology 24:248-264.
Calvin, W. H., and Schwindt, P. C. (1972). Steps in production of motoneuron spikes during rhythmic firing. Journal of Neurophysiology 35:297-310.
Schwindt, P.C., and Calvin, W. H. (1972). Membrane-potential trajectories between spikes underlying motoneuron firing rates. Journal of Neurophysiology 35:311-325.
Calvin, William H. (1972). Synaptic potential summation and repetitive firing mechanisms: input-output theory for the recruitment of neurons into epileptic bursting firing patterns. Brain Research 39: 71-94.
Calvin, W. H., Ojemann, G. A., and Ward, A. A., Jr. (1973). Human cortical neurons in epileptogenic foci: Comparison of inter-ictal firing patterns to those of "epileptic" neurons in animals. Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology 34:337-351.
Kjerulf, T. D., O'Neal, J. T., Calvin, W. H., Loeser, J. D., Westrum, L.E. (1973). Deafferentation effects in lateral cuneate nucleus of the cat: correlation of structural alterations with firing pattern changes. Experimental Neurology 39: 86-102.
Schwindt, P.C., and Calvin, W. H. (1973). Equivalence of synaptic and injected current in determining the membrane potential trajectory during motoneuron rhythmic firing. Brain Research 59: 389-394.
Schwindt, P.C., and Calvin, W. H. (1973). Nature of conductances underlying rhythmic firing in cat spinal motoneurons. Journal of Neurophysiology 36: 955-973
Calvin, W. H. (1974). Three modes of repetitive firing and the role of threshold time course between spikes. Brain Research 69:341-346.
Calvin, W. H., and Sypert, G. W. (1975). Cerebral cortex neurons with extra spikes: a normal substrate for epileptic discharges? Brain Research 83: 498-503.
Calvin, W. H. (1975). Generation of spike trains in CNS neurons. Brain Research 84:1-22.
Calvin, W. H., and Loeser, J. D. (1975). Doublet and burst firing patterns within the dorsal column nuclei of cat and man. Experimental Neurology 48:406-426.
Calvin, W. H., and Sypert, G. W. (1976). Fast and slow pyramidal tract neurons: An intracellular analysis of their contrasting repetitive firing properties in the cat. Journal of Neurophysiology 39:420-434.
Howe, J. F., Calvin, W. H., and Loeser, J. D. (1976). Impulses reflected from dorsal root ganglia and from focal nerve injuries. Brain Research 116:139-144.
Howe, J. F., Loeser, J. D., and Calvin, W. H. (1977). Mechanosensitivity of dorsal root ganglia and chronically injured axons: A physiological basis for the radicular pain of nerve root compression. Pain 3:25-41.
Calvin, W. H., and Hartline, D. K. (1977). Retrograde invasion of lobster stretch receptor somata in the control of firing rate and extra spike patterning. Journal of Neurophysiology 40:106-118.
Calvin, W. H., Loeser, J. D., and Howe, J. F. (1977). A neurophysiological theory for the pain mechanism of tic douloureux. Pain 3:147-154.
Loeser, J. D., W. H. Calvin, and J. F. Howe (1977). Pathophysiology of trigeminal neuralgia. Clinical Neurosurgery 24:527-537.
Calvin, W. H., J. F. Howe, and J. D. Loeser (1977). Ectopic repetitive firing in focally demyelinated axons and some implications for trigeminal neuralgia. In: Pain in the Trigeminal Region (edited by D. J. Anderson and B. Matthews), pp. 125-136.
Ojemann, G. A., Calvin, W. H., and Ward, A. A., Jr. (1978). Intrinsic neuronal membrane abnormalities in human epileptic foci as inferred from effects of focal cooling. Society for Neuroscience Abstracts 4:145.
Calvin, W. H. (1978). Setting the pace and pattern of discharge: Do CNS neurons vary their sensitivity to external inputs via their repetitive firing processes? Federation Proc. (Symp.) 37:2165-2170.
Calvin, W. H. (1978). Re-excitation in normal and abnormal repetitive firing of CNS neurons. In: Abnormal Neuronal Discharges (N. Chalazonitis and M. Boisson, eds.), Raven Press, New York, pp.49-61.
Calvin, W. H. (1979). Some design features of axons and how neuralgias may defeat them. In: Advances in Pain Research and Therapy (J. Bonica, ed.), 3:297-309.
Calvin, W. H., and Graubard, K. (1979). Styles of neuronal computation. Chapter 29 in: The Neurosciences, Fourth Study Program. Edited by F. O. Schmitt and F. G. Worden. Cambridge: MIT Press, pp.513-524.
Graubard, K., and Calvin, W. H. (1979). Presynaptic dendrites: Implications of spikeless synaptic transmission and dendritic geometry. Chapter 18 in: The Neurosciences, Fourth Study Program. Edited by F. O. Schmitt and F. G. Worden. Cambridge: MIT Press, pp.317-331.
Calvin, W. H., and K. Graubard (1979). Somatic vs dendritic synapses: Membrane resistivity is often unimportant in determining relative strengths. Society for Neuroscience Abstracts 5:1690.
Calvin, W. H., and D. A. Turner (1980). Voltage and current transfer along dendrites of lobster stretch receptor neurons. Society for Neuroscience Abstracts 6:197.
Calvin, W. H. (1980). Normal repetitive firing and its pathophysiology. In: Epilepsy: A Window to Brain Mechanisms (J. Lockard and A. A. Ward, Jr., eds.), Raven Press, New York, pp. 97-121.
Turner, D. A., and Calvin, W. H. (1981). Dendritic analysis of lobster stretch receptor neurons: Electrotonic properties with single and distributed inputs. Cellular and Molecular Neurobiology 1:189-207.
Calvin, William H. (1981). The throwing theory for language origins. Human Ethology Newsletter 3:17-22.
Graubard, K., and William H. Calvin (1981). Aplysia buccal ganglion motorneurons: Morphology and electrotonic properties. Society for Neuroscience Abstracts 7:113.
Calvin, William H. (1982). Book review of: Neurones Without Impulses by A. Roberts and B. M. B. Bush. Journal of Neurobiology 13:199-200.
Calvin, W. H. (1982). Ectopic firing from damaged nerve: Chemo- and mechanosensitivity, afterdischarge and crosstalk. In: Etiology of Idiopathic Low Back Pain (A. A. White III, S. Gordon, eds.), C. V. Mosby: Philadelphia. pp. 433-443.
Calvin, W. H. (1982). To spike or not to spike? Controlling the neuron's rhythm, preventing the ectopic beat. In: Abnormal Nerves and Muscles as Impulse Generators. Edited by W. J. Culp and J. Ochoa. Pages 295-321. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
Calvin, W. H., Devor, M., and Howe, J. F. (1982). Can neuralgias arise from minor demyelination? Spontaneous firing, mechanosensitivity, and afterdischarge from conducting axons. Experimental Neurology 75:755-763.
Calvin, W. H. (1982). Did throwing stones shape hominid brain evolution? Ethology and Sociobiology 3:115-124.
Calvin, W. H. (1983). Timing sequencers as a foundation for language. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 6(2):210-211.
Calvin, W. H. (1983). A stone's throw and its launch window: timing precision and its implications for language and hominid brains. Journal of Theoretical Biology 104:121-135.
See also BOOKS
Calvin, W. H. (1984). Precision timing requirements suggest wider brain connections, not more restricted ones. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 7(3):334.
Calvin, W. H. (1984). Fine discrimination as an emergent property of parallel neural circuits. Society for Neuroscience Abstracts 10:218.11.
Calvin, W. H. (1986). The great encephalization: Throwing, juvenilization, developmental slowing, and maternal mortality roles in prehuman brain enlargement. Society for Neuroscience Abstracts 12:136.9 (abstract; entire text was subsequently published in Human Ethology Newsletter, September 1987).
Calvin, W. H. (1987). On evolutionary expectations of symmetry and toolmaking. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 10:267-268 (June 1987).
Calvin, W. H. (1987). Bootstrapping thought: Is consciousness a Darwinian sidestep? Whole Earth Review 55:22-28 (Summer 1987).
Calvin, W. H. (1987). Darwin machines: Selection among stochastic sequencers in parallel command buffers as a mimic of consciousness. Society for Neuroscience Abstracts 13(3):428.16.
Calvin, W. H. (1987). Of fast teeth and big heads. Nature 328:481 (6 August; scientific correspondence).
Calvin, W. H. (1987). The Great Encephalization: Throwing, juvenilization, developmental slowing, and maternal mortality roles in prehuman brain enlargement. Human Ethology Newsletter 5(3):6-8 (September 1987).
Calvin, W. H. (1987). The brain as a Darwin machine. Nature 330:33-34 (5 November).
Calvin, W. H. (1988). Fast Tracks to Intelligence: Considerations from Evolutionary Biology and Neurobiology. In: Bioastronomy - The Next Steps, edited by George Marx (D. Reidel, Dordrecht, Holland), Proceedings of the International Astronomical Union, Bioastronomy Colloquium 99, Lake Balaton, Hungary (June 1987), pp.237-245.
Calvin, W. H. (1988). The evolutionary sidestep. Whole Earth Review 60:4-9 (Fall 1988).
Calvin, W. H. (1988). Why "Grandmother's Face" and "Command" Neurons Are Rare (Answer: The Fireworks Finale). Society for Neuroscience Abstracts 14:260.
Calvin, W. H. (1988). A global brain theory (a book review of Gerald Edelman's Neural Darwinism). Science 240:1802-1803 (24 June 1988).
Calvin, W. H. (1989). Commentary on "The archaeology of perception." Current Anthropology 30(2):138-139 (April 1989).
Calvin, William H. (1989). Darwinian view of language: A well-formed sentence as analogous to speciation and the immune response. Society for Neuroscience Abstracts 15:415.12.
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Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake brought her latest project to iOS on Thursday: Findery, a social discovery platform that lets you learn about specific places on a map through notes and tidbits curated from other users.
The Web version of Findery has been in a private beta since 2012—originally under the name Pinwheel—but this is Findery's first public jump onto mobile. Considering that Findery is all about exploring locations and learning new things, a mobile app sounds like the perfect platform for a service like this. Although it's difficult to create a location-based exploration app that stands out from the crowd, this one certainly seems to have a competitive edge.
The first thing I noticed upon launching Findery was its dynamic design, expertly optimized for iOS 7 users. The welcome screen's background image of a beach moved and expanded when I tilted my iPhone, which immediately sparked feelings of wanderlust. (I have a feeling that's exactly what Fake and her team had in mind.)
For starters, it's best to allow Findery to access your location, and then explore things in your immediate area. You can launch the map and look at individual notes at random, or look at a specific notemap, which is a collection of notes about a topic, theme, or location. Notes themselves contain a variety of tidbits, from photos to news stories to personal diary entries to activity tips. It's up to the user to decide what kind of note he or she wants to leave behind.
Notemaps are especially helpful for discovery and at-length storytelling. For example, one of my favorite notemaps highlights local news in San Francisco. You can see where these events took place, and tap on a note to read that news story. Other notemaps in San Francisco include owl sightings, walking tours for specific neighborhoods, and notes about Findery written by team members. Of course, these selections should grow as Findery's user base builds.
Apart from notemaps, you can follow specific users to keep tabs on their individual notes. If you connect via Facebook or Twitter, you can see which of your friends are already members; Findery can also peruse through your contacts—if you let it—to find matches.
Creating notes of your own is easy: Just tap the "Create" button to get started. You'll first select the location you want to add a note to, which is much easier if you happen to be nearby at the time. If not, you can type in a city or major landmark, and then dive down more through scrolling to find the exact spot you want. Then you leave your note, associating a picture, message, and any other information you'd like to share. Finally, you mark the desired level of privacy before you publish your note. Notes can be seen by anyone, just you, or just by certain recipients that you select.
Findery is a truly customizable experience with several cool use cases. You could log memories from your latest vacation, explore new things to do in your current city, find activity recommendations, and much more: How the app gets used is entirely up to its users. And with a pretty sizable membership at launch, Findery is well on its way to making waves in the social discovery scene.
Findery is available now for free in the App Store, and is compatible with any iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch running iOS 7.0 or later. There's no Android-specific version yet (though you can access Findery through a mobile browser), but one is reportedly in the works.

subset: commoncrawl


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Cheerleader Effect: Why People Are More Beautiful in Groups
New research recommends recruiting a wingman/woman with a complementary face.
Who should I hang out with if I want to look the most attractive? And how many of said people must I acquire?
The basic idea of research published this week in the journal Psychological Science is that our asymmetries and disproportionalities tend to "average out" amid a group of faces, and our weird little faces are perceived as slightly less weird.
Drew Walker and Edward Vul of the University of California, San Diego, did five experiments wherein subjects rated the attractiveness of people in photographs. Some people were pictured alone, and others were in groups. (Sometimes the "groups" were actually collages of people alone.)
In every case, for men and women, the people in groups got higher attractiveness ratings. Walker reasoned: "Average faces are more attractive, likely due to the averaging out of unattractive idiosyncrasies." They refer to this as the "cheerleader effect."
The cheerleader effect was first entered into Urban Dictionary in 2008, where it is defined by exemplary, hyperbolic premises: "Altogether the cheerleading team looks attractive ... [however] on closer inspection [each person] is quite ugly, [another heteronormative example might be] the spice girls, [or] the group of women who dance in a circle at the bar-usually with a pile of purses in the middle [Ed. note: What?], [or the sort of situation that] occurs at any Canadian fraternity common room [Ed. note: Gross generalization] where all together the men look hot but when checked out are actually bunk-ass."
The cheerleader effect is apparently familiar to watchers of the popular TV show How I Met Your Mother, where it was introduced in the seventh episode of the fourth season. Neil Patrick Harris' character, leaning on a barstool "unimpressed with the talent in here tonight," refers to a group of women in a bar as collectively attractive but individually "sled dogs."
Sled dogs are actually gorgeous, but it was meant as an insult.
Then from boorish observation to scientific postulate, Walker and Vul say the effect is borne of "the fact that the visual system represents objects as an ensemble, individual objects are biased toward the ensemble average, and average faces are perceived to be more attractive than faces in isolation. Together, these phenomena should cause faces in a group to appear more like the group average than when presented alone, and that group average should tend to be more attractive than the individual faces, on average."
Notably, though, the effect did not depend on the number of faces in the group. Any size group should do. "Having a few wingmen or wingwomen," Walker and Vul conclude—writing in the academic journal article—"may indeed be a good dating strategy, particularly if their facial features complement and average out one's unattractive idiosyncrasies."
Maybe! Good only if it's serendipitous of course, and not because you're consciously cultivating a friend group that mitigates your physical insecurities. Nervous laughter.
The nice part of the idea is that it might give us another excuse to socialize and travel in numbers. For almost all people, relationships are integral to health, and time spent socializing offline correlates with quality of life. Maybe we actually look more attractive among friends not solely because of complementary bone structures, but because we're happier.


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The entire ProTaper line uses cutting-edge technology to develop the lightest, strongest products on the market.
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On the fence about legalizing marijuana? If so, consider this: legalizing weed could save your life. In the most comprehensive study of its kind ever conducted, the Institute for the Study of Labor has revealed in a provisional discussion paper that the legalization of medical marijuana in the United States is linked to a dramatic decrease in traffic fatalities.
Before we go any further, let's clear two things up. First: driving impaired — whether you're drunk or stoned — is always a terrible idea. Second: statistically speaking, it's been clear for a while that driving drunk is a much more dangerous move than driving while stoned.
Back in 2009, a review published in the American Journal of Addiction concluded that alcohol's detrimental effects on the performance of complex driving tasks, combined with its tendency to increase risk-taking behavior, make it significantly more dangerous than pot when it comes to driving under the influence.
Just how dangerous are we talking? A 2005 study of close to 11,000 French motor vehicle fatalities found that while rates of alcohol and cannabis intoxication in the drivers were similar (nearly 3%), ten times as many crashes were associated with alcohol as with cannabis.
Of course, demonstrating with science that one drug is more dangerous than another doesn't make driving under the influence of either any more acceptable. What it does do, however, is highlight a glaring non-sequitur, namely that here in the States, it's the pot that's most likely to get you in trouble with the law.
Which brings us back to legalization. Believe it or not, the study released yesterday by The Institute for the Study of Labor is the first to examine the relationship between the legalization of medical marijuana and traffic deaths.
Researchers Daniel Rees and Mark Anderson conducted the study using data from a number of sources (provided by the Centers for Disease Control and states that have passed medical marijuana legislation), including the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, and the Fatality Analysis Reporting System.
"We were astounded by how little is known about the effects of legalizing medical marijuana," Rees said. "We looked into traffic fatalities because there is good data, and the data allow us to test whether alcohol was a factor."
Rees and Anderson describe their findings:
To date, 16 states have passed medical marijuana laws, yet very little is known about their effects. Using state-level data, we examine the relationship between medical marijuana laws and a variety of outcomes. Legalization of medical marijuana is associated with increased use of marijuana among adults, but not among minors. In addition, legalization is associated with a nearly 9 percent decrease in traffic fatalities, most likely due to its impact on alcohol consumption.
The study goes on to explain that the 9% decline in traffic fatalities can be accounted for almost entirely by a drop in alcohol-related traffic deaths, and that the increased use of marijuana observed in adults has corresponded with a drop in alcohol consumption. In other words, the data suggests that alcohol and weed are substitutes — with pot winning out in the safety department, at least when it comes to highway fatalities.
"I think this is a very timely study given all the medical marijuana laws being passed or under consideration," Anderson said. "These policies have not been research-based thus far and our research shows some of the social effects of these laws. Our results suggest a direct link between marijuana and alcohol consumption."
Rees agrees, adding that while he and Anderson "make no policy recommendations, it certainly appears as though medical marijuana laws are making our highways safer."
[Via the American Journal of Addiction and The Institute for the Study of Labor]
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The wife of News Corp Chief Executive Rupert Murdoch, Wendi Murdoch, has switched lawyers in a move signaling that their divorce proceedings could take an acrimonious turn, the New York Times reported on Monday.
Murdoch, 82, filed for divorce in June. He married the former Wendi Deng, 44, in 1999 in his third and her second marriage. They have two young daughters.
The newspaper said Deng has hired William Zabel, a New York trusts and estates lawyer who has represented several women in divorce cases involving wealthy businessmen, including Jane Beasley Welch, the ex-wife of former General Electric chief executive John Welch.
A spokesman for Deng, Christopher Giglio, confirmed the hiring of Zabel to the New York Times, but otherwise declined to comment.
Zabel's law firm Schulte Roth & Zabel LLP could not immediately be reached for comment by Reuters.
Deng had been represented by attorney Pamela Sloan, chair of the Family Law section of the New York State Bar Association.


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Driving a teal Ford Escort is no crime, but it apparently raised the ire of a crazed motorist the other day. Emily Lawson, 34, and her friend Morley Gordon, 25, were driving near Seattle, Wash. when a man in a black car cut them off and began screaming at them.
When he flipped the bird at the two women, they shot one back, laughing the whole thing off. Only the man, whom Lawson described, more or less, as a muscle-bound psycho, wouldn't be laughed off. He followed them on the shoulder, screaming obscenities. When they reached an intersection, he jumped out of his car, ripped the spoiler off of Lawson's car and swung it into the back window, shattering the glass.
"He was a big, scary guy. I thought he was going to kill us," Lawson told Seattle's KING5. "We're two women in a car and we're being attacked by this hulk guy that's freaking out and there's a whole bunch of other people there and nobody came to help us. The police officer said nobody called it in, either."
Wait a tick. This is only an hour from where Daman Lehman beat James Foster nearly to death for complimenting his rims. Is there something in the water around there, or is some of the area's population experiencing a roid rage epidemic?
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Anyway, if you happened to see the guy's license plate or car when this happened, the Washington State Patrol is still looking for him.
Photo credit: KING5


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'Forgotten Bookmarks' Between the Pages
You know how easily it happens (or happened, back in the day when people read actual books): You'd use your grandmother's favorite chicken soup recipe or the only negative of the twins' birth from the 1950s as a bookmark, then you'd get busy with the twins or the chicken soup, and you'd put down the book three-quarters of the way through. A few months pass, and the book goes into a pile of things to finish, then ends up quietly back on the bookcase, where it sits for a couple of decades until you decide it's time for a quick spring cleanup. And suddenly the book you never quite finished, with the only negative of the picture of the twins' birth and Bubbe's favorite chicken soup recipe, has been delivered to the local used bookstore.
Or, if you're lucky — or unlucky, depending on how much you value your privacy — your precious bookmark, the high school letter in which undying love was expressed along with an appreciation of the way your hair looked in the moonlight in 1949, will fall into the hands of Michael Popek, manager of the family-owned Popek's Used and Rare Books in upstate Oneida, New York. Popek lovingly explores every page of every secondhand book that passes through his store. Now, he has compiled his findings in a new book, "Forgotten Bookmarks: A Bookseller's Collection of Odd Things Lost Between the Pages."
Thanks to his meticulous sourcing, those of us who love nothing more than the idea of snooping through other people's journals and attics will find between these pages much of what we dream of discovering: love letters; hate letters; letters to mothers from sons overseas during the war; letters to mothers from sons asking for money; strident letters to mothers from sons explaining that they will be proposing to their girlfriends, regardless of their parents' approval. In essence, everything that we turn on the TV to get, but love nothing more than discovering in private.
Popek's journey began in 2007, when he started sending images of his finds to a few close friends. In response to their clamoring for more, he started an online museum of sorts, forgottenbookmarks.com, containing letters, ticket stubs, photographs, four-leaf clovers and anything else you can imagine fitting between two leaves of paper. As these modern stories tend to go, suddenly people he had never met started commenting on his findings, and the website developed a fan base.
"People just like to see little pictures of someone else's life," Popek explained. "We are human, and our brains work in funny ways. We find a recipe, and we imagine a grandmother in her kitchen, hearing it on the radio, writing it down and stuffing it into her cookbook; I make [up] stories like that all the time in my head. These little things are like miniature time capsules."
Popek's findings range from the profoundly appropriate W.B. Yeats poem "A Prayer for My Daughter," found in a book aptly titled "Cutting: Understanding and Overcoming Self-mutilation," to the mind-boggling letter signed by French author and philosopher Albert Camus in 1959, written just 17 days before his own death, urging an American professor to take up the plight of refugees from the Spanish Civil War, found decades later in a copy of his famous "L'Etranger." The findings include a letter written on a prescription pad for the antipsychotic drug Haldol, tucked neatly into a book titled "The Living Talmud," in which someone named Rena informs Max and Ilse that they instead of the Goodmans will now be Rena's guests for a Sabbath dinner in December; and a Hanukkah song sheet and a clipping of a New York Times newspaper article titled "Holy Land's Treasures Come Home to New York at Last," both found in a copy of "The Jews in Their Land" by David Ben-Gurion.
Popek has successfully reacquainted several finds with their owners. One time, a hand-painted cloth bookmark signed by artist Ingrid Kirn appeared on the blog and was discovered, thanks to the beauty of a Google Alert that Kirn had set up for her own name; this past June, a woman in Scotland discovered on the blog a recipe for maple sugar that had been handwritten by her mother and tucked inside an old 1970s recipe book. She didn't ask for it back, but Popek returned it to her nonetheless.
Surprisingly, Popek said, not everyone wants to be reconnected with their past. "I once found this couple's entire history. Every anniversary is marked with little handmade books that the husband made for his wife," he said. "All these letters showing love and affection over 30 or 40 years. I managed to track down one of the sons, who was a bus driver in Vermont. I spent literally hours finding this person, but he had no interest.… As far as he was concerned, it went in the estate sale. He'd moved on. I still have the box somewhere. I couldn't toss it or give it to the Goodwill. It's back in the storage building."
Lest you think Popek is any different from the rest of us mortals, on the very day that "Forgotten Bookmarks" was published, he posted on his blog:
"Today's post is a personal one, I came across this paperback biography of Ted Williams while I was sorting through our baseball section. There's a gift inscription, from my grandfather to me, dated 1986. He passed away a few years ago…. I like to think he'd be proud of me today."
The inscription reads, "to michael peter popek, give it your best — love you. Natan 'Poppy' popek."
In a time when more and more of our interactions and memories are created and exist solely online, there is an added beauty to Popek's discoveries. For when the generation of Facebook love-letter writers die, there will be no magical shoebox to end up in Popek's hands, no way for future generations to pick up an actual letter penned with a real pen by a real person expressing a real sentiment.
Nicola Behrman is a playwright and screenwriter who lives in Los Angeles and runs the blogs www.poetry-post.com and weseehearts.tumblr.com.


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CCC is excited to welcome guest contributor, Katrina Manning! You can learn more about Katrina at the end of her article.
When it comes to marketing your business, one of your most critical tools is blogging. For starters, it gives you an effective way to communicate with your customers. Secondly, it can help boost the SEO of your website. Yet, is your blog still having trouble getting noticed? There isn't any question that blogs have a lot of competition. In order to get people to read your blog, you need to make it easy to find, produce high-quality and relevant content and have a design aesthetic that appeals to the contemporary viewer.
Here are five tips for revamping your blogging techniques:
Keep your content original and interesting
It should be common sense to understand that people only want to read articles that are original and interesting. Yet, you may be surprised to see that there are thousands of blogs with copied and illogical articles that cause most viewers to shake their heads and never return to those spammy sites again. When it comes to revamping your blogging techniques, you might want to take inventory of your current article cache. Do they provide relevant and informative content? Are they original? If not, it may be time to do some housekeeping. You don't want search engines to pass over your blog. Use keyword searches to look for fresh ideas, or offer a different angle on a popular topic. Just make sure you are not writing the same types of articles found on almost every other blog within your niche.
Put mobile first
In 2015, Google announced that more searches were performed on mobile devices than on computers in 10 countries. In fact, U.S. web designers always advise building sites that are mobile-first, then creating desktop versions. Smartphone screens are getting larger, and tablets continue to increase in popularity. Many users enjoy the card-style layouts, made trendy by Pinterest. This might be something to consider with regard to revamping the overall look of your blog.
Think of video
When it comes to external communication strategies, brands are increasingly focusing on video and — the buzzword for 2016 — virtual reality. Although video is helping to strengthen messages many brands are trying to convey, content isn't going anywhere any time soon. Think of the stories that videos tell, different formats and even videos with no sound. If you can successfully integrate video with content and perhaps start dabbling in virtual reality, you'll have something superior on your hands.
Work on your social media profiles
One of the most cost-efficient methods of advertising is through social media. With that being said, you should make sure you cross-link your accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn with your blog. In addition, you need a voice of your brand to promote your blog posts throughout your social media platforms. Do this on a consistent basis to get the word out and drive more traffic.
Connect with readers
One thing that readers will value is a personal connection. Other than your content, there isn't anything to keep your readers coming back to your blog. On the other hand, if they have an outlet to share their thoughts and get the sense that a response will be made, they might be more inclined to revisit. Compare this to your personal Facebook page. When you post about something you like, do you not go back to see if any of your friends liked or commented on your post? When one of your readers has the opportunity to comment on your articles, they may come back to see if you've responded or if anyone else has responded.
On top of that, you can create an email list of willing subscribers by placing an optional subscription link on your blog. You can make it non-optional, but people don't like to feel they were forced into doing things. If you make it optional, you have a higher likelihood that the people who signed up will be more receptive to your messages. When you email your subscribers with your updates, you can use your real voice to give it a more personal touch. You can be a subject matter expert and still appeal to the human trait of desiring companionship. People don't want to feel like a number, they want to feel important.
As markets and personal preferences change, so should your blog. Performing a revamp every several years isn't just good for you, it's also good for business.
Katrina Manning is a web writer and editor with over six years of experience penning content for a wide variety of sites and publications, such as Yahoo! Small Business Advisor, IBM, The Purple Cow Agency blog, Sweet Lemon Magazine, Udemy, Business 2 Community, Personal Finance Hub, The Iowa City Owl, Newsiosity and Seven12 Magazine.


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The late summer's riotous plot—
The gourd, the liquored grapes, and flies
Besotted where the apples rot.
There always comes the killing frost;
And then not one forgiving stet
To spare so little as the moth.
And let the season have its say,
Accepting what the short days give
And what the long months take away;
Counter to the grain, knowing
Whatever expurgates the world
Might well choose me the next one going.
The crass defiance of the crow
Plopped on a spit of long-dead fir—
A quarrelsome smudge condemning the snow.


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This wallpaper starts from $10 per square foot.
Samples (8.5" x 11") at $5.00 each.
Product Code: DSO10342
Our wallpaper is custom made to your specifications. Instead of online purchase, we offer a personalized service and liaise directly with you to ensure your order exactly meets your requirements. Please contact us for further enquiries.
Samples are available to help you make decisions and represent the final print however they may not contain all aspects of a design or may contain text or scaled images.
Donna Solovei. Born in South Africa, 1981. Studied at both Chelsea and Camberwell College of Art, London. Exhibited locally and internationally with a range of works varying from Illustration, printmaking, textiles and product. Now living in Cape Town.
This body of work has been produced to evoke emotion and thought. Donna's work has become a synchronicity of impressions from nature. Water, air, light, and the movement of these elements established a flow for the production of these pieces. It encompasses a broad palette derived from the library of nature. Donna has used many layers of almost transparent ink, and nuances of tone to create a suggestion and reveal a slightness of the delicate and fragile nature of our world.
It's her translation of textures and color depicted from Cape Town's environment that we observe and begin to feel through her painting and printmaking.
The wallpaper substrates we use come in a range of finishes suitable for different environments. Each is fire retardant in accordance with EN13501-1:2007. We can also laminate wallpapers to make them ideal for humid spaces such as kitchens and bathrooms.Our paper finish wallpaper is PVC free and 100% recyclable. Printed with non-toxic latex inks and matt UV varnish, providing our clients with an eco-friendly, quality product.Robin Sprong's customisable prints are endorsed with both Green Guard Gold® & UL ECOLOGO.
For information about the various substrates we use - please check our Wallpaper FAQs
Sample lead times are 14-21 days.
Final order lead times 14-21 days.
Shipping price will be confirmed at placement of order.
Cost of samples will be reimbursed on confirmation of an order.
Trade customers customers contact us about sample pricing discounts.


text: Back Understanding the Power of Addiction If a loved one suffers from alcoholism or addiction, you may wonder why the person can't or won't stop using a substance that has such negative and dangerous consequences. Chances are the ability to stop abusing the substance is no longer within his or her control. People who develop drug addictions or alcoholism almost always begin with occasional use or experimentation. With continued use, brain structure and function are altered, and they depend on the drug not simply to feel good, but to feel normal. For these individuals, using drugs or alcohol is no longer a choice. When addicted, the drug user will do just about anything to obtain the drug. The drug becomes the most important part of the person's life, overshadowing any other aspect. Not inevitable Even so, addiction isn't inevitable for everyone. Drugs differ in their addictive qualities, and people differ in their sensitivity to drugs. Just under one-third of people who try heroin become addicted to it, as will just over one-third of people who try tobacco and 12 to 15 percent of those who drink alcohol. Genetics and environment are important. Children with an alcoholic parent or anyone with a history of sexual or physical abuse or who grows up in an household, school, or community environment where substance abuse is the norm is more likely to develop addiction than someone without these risks. Research over the last decade reveals that addictive drugs and alcohol alter the function of the brain and the way cells work. As a result, normal thought processes, memory, and emotions are fundamentally affected and changed permanently. The person with addiction appears to risk his or her own survival to use the drug. Because the emotional and physical "need" to drink or use drugs becomes stronger than any natural drives, like that for food or sex, the overpowering drive to drink or use drugs becomes an involuntary one. Desire always there When the brain has experienced these changes, the desires created will always be there. The changes in brain structure, function, and memory that develop in addition are long-lasting, and some may be permanent. There is always potential to rekindle addictive behaviors if a person drinks or uses drugs again. That's why addiction is considered a chronic illness that has to be managed for the remainder of a person's life. Recovery is a lifelong process to avoid triggers, significant stress, and any use of addictive substances.


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For more on this story, visit the websites of CNN affiliates KABC, WMBF, WITN, WSTM and WAFF.
Story highlights
NEW: "No deal's worth that," one witness shopper says of pepper spraying
L.A. police seek woman suspect in Walmart incident
Psychologist says Black Friday tactics make shoppers frenzied
Incidents mar Black Friday shopping in at least seven states
Violence marred Black Friday shopping in at least seven states, including California, where police say a woman doused fellow shoppers with pepper spray in a bid to snag a discounted video game console.
The incident happened Thursday night at a Walmart in the Porter Ranch area of Los Angeles, said Officer Robert Chavira, a police spokesman.
Ten people were exposed to the spray. Los Angeles firefighters treated them at the scene and no one required hospitalization, Chavira said.
The woman sprayed the crowd as people were grabbing for Xbox video game consoles, Los Angeles Police Detective Gus Villanueva said.
The suspect was able to pay for her purchases and leave the store before police arrived, Chavira said.
Villanueva described the suspect as a Hispanic woman, 32 to 38 years of age, 5-foot-3, 140 pounds and wearing black pants and a black sweater.
Authorities haven't identified the suspect and will be looking at available video, Villanueva said.
He said charges such as spraying a caustic compound would be determined later, but the action doesn't appear to have been self-defense.
One witness to the incident, Juan Castro, said he and other shoppers were hunting for "deals," when a woman began using pepper spray. He was trying to buy a Wii video game at $20, marked down from a typical $60, he said.
"I don't know if she felt threatened or she felt she had to do that to get what she wanted," Castro told CNN.
"I didn't see her personally, but I sure got the scent of the mace. I got it in my throat. It was burning. I saw people around me, they got it really bad. As you see in the video, some woman was crying 'my eyes, my eyes,'" Castro said.
"I tried to get away as quickly as possible because I didn't think it was worth it. No deal's worth that," he said.
Incidents also occurred in South Carolina, North Carolina, Florida, New York, Alabama and Connecticut, with most of the reported incidents happening at or near Walmart stores.
Despite the reports, Walmart said the day's shopping frenzy had been remarkably safe for shoppers at its thousands of stores nationwide.
"There were a few unfortunate incidents but overall we have received very positive feedback from our customers," Walmart spokesman Greg Rossiter said.
In 2008, crowds of frantic Black Friday shoppers trampled a Walmart employee in New York as he and other workers tried to unlock the door at 5 a.m.
While no deaths were reported in this year's shopping, authorities said they handled fights, shootings and other incidents through the morning.
Psychologist Jeff Gardere, in an appearance Friday on CNN, put some of the blame on retailers for staging sales that encourage hyper-competitive behavior among shoppers who may be desperate because of the poor economy.
"They shouldn't be psyching them up so much and using all sorts of psychological tactics to get them to feed into this desperation and competitive spirit," he said.
"I think people are whipped into a frenzy, physically, psychologically," he said.
In San Leandro, California, police had one man in custody and another was hospitalized after a 1:45 a.m. shooting in a Walmart parking lot.
"It was a robbery gone bad," police Sgt. Mike Sobek told reporters. "The victim's family fought with the robbers. They were able to detain one suspect. We are not sure if that suspect is the shooter, but we do have one person in custody right now."
In Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, police said two people suffered injuries in an apparent armed robbery attempt after they left a Walmart store around 1 a.m. Friday, CNN affiliate WMBF reported.
Would-be robbers struck a man on the head and shot a woman in the leg before another shopper displayed a gun and the assailants fled, the station said, citing Myrtle Beach Police Capt. Kevin Heins. The woman was taken to a hospital for treatment, he said.
Sheriff's deputies in Fayetteville, North Carolina, were looking for two men after shots were fired about 2 a.m. at a shopping mall.
And in Kinston, North Carolina, an off-duty officer working security at a Walmart sprayed shoppers with pepper spray in an effort to stop a disturbance there, WITN reported, citing police Sgt. Roland Davis.
Customer Angel Bunting told the station it happened while people were waiting to buy discount cell phones and a man fell into a display. She said she thought security believed there was a fight, according to WITN.
Police arrested a man in a Kissimmee, Florida, Walmart on a resisting arrest charge after an early morning altercation at the jewelry counter, according to the police department.
In Rome, New York, a brawl broke out in the electronics department at a Walmart moments after midnight, CNN affiliate WSTM reported, citing the Oneida County Sheriff's Office. Two people were taken to the hospital for treatment of minor injuries, the station reported.
Police in Florence, Alabama, said they had to use a stun gun – twice – on a Walmart customer, CNN affiliate WAFF reported. The 22-year-old man was charged with public intoxication, disorderly conduct and resisting arrest around 11 p.m. Thursday, an hour after the store opened its doors for Black Friday, WAFF reported, citing police.
A picture of the incident distributed on Twitter shows the man lying face down in an aisle, the officer atop him with a knee on his back.
And in Southington, Connecticut, iReporter Ryan Casale said he witnessed police using a stun gun on a man at the Walmart store where he was shopping. He said he wasn't sure what was happening or why, but said the event left an impression on him.
"This was my first Black Friday shopping experience, and I'll never forget what I saw," he said. "You see sides of people that they, themselves didn't even know existed."
CNN's Vivian Kuo, Michael Saba, Sandra Endo, Michael Cary and Michael Martinez contributed to this report


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Anyone in the eastern portion of the U.S. this week who was forced to evacuate an office, home or school following Tuesday's magnitude 5.8 earthquake soon noticed that cell phone service was spotty or, in many cases, nonexistent. For New Yorkers herded outside of their skyscrapers and into the streets, it was a communication blackout reminiscent of (although of course not the same as) the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In both situations, mobile phone users were unable to connect to the cell network to communicate with loved ones.
Whereas the 9/11 cell phone outage was the result of many factors—including the downing of cell phone towers—this week's problems (though brief) were caused purely by volume. Countless cell phone users were fighting for limited access, leaving most without service. With Hurricane Irene bearing down on the East Coast, one is left to question the reliability of mobile phones in the face of serious emergencies.
Scientific American spoke with Andrea Goldsmith, a Stanford University electrical engineering professor and researcher at the school's Wireless Systems Lab, about why mobile phone users are often unable to connect during emergencies, as well as options for improving cell network performance when it matters most.
[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]
What is happening when, during an emergency, you try to use your mobile phone and can't get a signal?
There's a finite capacity that the cell phone system can support at any given base station. Say it's 10 users or 100 users talking on their phones. When the 101st user calls in, there's no channel available for that user to occupy. That's a little bit of a simplistic description, but that's effectively what happens. When there's an event like an earthquake that causes people to want to make more phone calls or want to access the Internet more, the systems just become overloaded.
How have cell-phone services changed since 9/11?
Cell phones are coming up now on their fourth generation of technology, so we've had two evolutions of cell phone technology since 2001. Most of the work in between evolutions has been aimed at getting higher data rates because people now also use their phones for accessing the Internet and for exchanging videos and pictures. There have been improvements in capacity, but not enough to keep up with just a tsunami of traffic across the wireless networks.
With the introduction of smartphones, many mobile phone users have the ability to connect over the cell network or via Wi-Fi. Shouldn't this provide additional capacity during emergencies that wasn't there years ago?
Cell networks and Wi-Fi both have limitations. Cell phone networks have a lot less bandwidth than Wi-Fi, but at least the cell phone service providers own the part of the spectrum over which their customers communicate. This enables the cell providers to guarantee a certain quality of service. Still, it's not easy for them to add capacity because there isn't a lot of spectrum available for them to purchase.
Wi-Fi has access to a large amount of bandwidth for connecting to the Internet but doesn't have exclusive rights to that space. Smartphones have to share the spectrum with a large number of different wireless devices, including baby monitors, cordless phones and Bluetooth gadgets. With Wi-Fi, when there are a lot of people trying to get on the network, nobody can get on.
So your ability to connect via the cellular network or Wi-Fi really depends on the people around you?
Yes. If you went into a Starbucks in Times Square, say, probably you wouldn't be able to get on the Internet via Wi-Fi. And if you were in the part of the city where the cell phone towers were not overloaded, you probably got a connection just fine.
What can be done to improve cell networks so they are less likely to be overloaded during emergencies?
Typically you design any system for average use. The problem is, if it's designed for average use and there's an event that's statistically unusual, typically you're going to overload the capacity of the system. One option is to just build in extra capacity, and one way of doing that is to make the cells smaller. Right now the coverage of the base station that your phone talks to is fairly large. These cell towers put out about 10 watts of power, so they can, for example, cover a fairly large region of New York City. If a large cell can support something like 1,000 users in Midtown and you make that cell smaller, so that it covers a couple of blocks, you can now support 1,000 users within a much smaller region.
In terms of making these cells smaller, would these be public cells, or would people start carrying around their own mini cell towers with them?
Small cell towers known as picocells and microcells are public. They're part of the architecture laid out by the cellular operators. Femtocells are desktop cell phone towers that a company or an individual would buy this for better cell phone coverage in their office or home [they can enhance a signal within a radius of 10 to 200 meters around the device].
In the case of an emergency like the earthquake or hurricane, would you have been more likely to get a signal if you had your own femtocell?
There are a number of challenges with femtocells. Earlier femtocells didn't manage their interference with one another well and weren't able to hand off to the larger cell towers outdoors. So a femtocell might have helped if you made a call indoors and stayed indoors. The question is how to do dynamic optimization of all the picocells, microcells and femtocells so that you're adapting not just to traffic changes under normal conditions but in particular under emergency situations. If an earthquake or the 9/11 attacks take out a number of towers the way the cell phone towers are configured now, service providers have to manually reroute cellular traffic; they can't adapt to dynamic changes in traffic.
The ability to do this dynamically is referred to as self-organized networks, or SONs. Combining that capability with small cells has tremendous potential to increase both the capacity and the ability to adapt to changes that are unpredictable.
How would self-organized networks, or SONs, be implemented into a cellular network?
It's a software network management tool for base stations. It can sit in the cloud, or it can sit on the mobile gateway that's managing all of the cell phone base stations.
What are some other options for improving wireless network performance?
Obviously, if capacity is a problem, throwing more spectrum at it is a way to increase capacity. Given that there just isn't a lot of spectrum available, another option is cognitive radio, which can take spectrum that's already occupied and use it more intelligently. In this way users sharing the spectrum, as they do with Wi-Fi, don't interfere with the licensed users of the spectrum, such as broadcasters. You would have to have a cell phone equipped with cognitive radio software that can find spectrum holes. For example, if you're trying to make a mobile phone call and can't get a signal, your phone would switch into cognitive radio mode and scan not just the cell phone bands but other bands for some piece of spectrum it could use.
That's a promising technology, but I'm skeptical that in the near term it will solve the capacity problem or even be viable politically. Spectrum is so precious to broadcasters and other spectrum bandwidth owners that they don't trust that secondary users can share their space without interfering.
Certainly, this distrust has been a big part of the controversy over the use of so-called white spaces between licensed bandwidth by wireless gadgets. What impact will the expansion of 4G networks have on these emergency bottlenecks that we currently experience?
Newer, 4G networks are optimized for data in the sense that they use the same network that the Internet is using. Telephone operators might just leave voice traffic on their 3G networks, which are still fairly new and not going away anytime soon. Voice requires a lot less bandwidth than data, which would then be pushed to 4G networks. In that case, things will be better in an earthquake because when you walk outside and try to make a phone call you won't be competing with people using their smartphones to send data across the same network.
Can Mobile Phone Networks Be Improved to Better Cope with Emergencies?
Cell coverage can be spotty immediately following events like this week's earthquake, rendering many handsets useless for contacting family and friends. New technologies may provide a solution
Anyone in the eastern portion of the U.S. this week who was forced to evacuate an office, home or school following Tuesday's magnitude 5.8 earthquake soon noticed that cell phone service was spotty or, in many cases, nonexistent. For New Yorkers herded outside of their skyscrapers and into the streets, it was a communication blackout reminiscent of (although of course not the same as) the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In both situations, mobile phone users were unable to connect to the cell network to communicate with loved ones.


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July 29th, 2013
Should there be choking warning labels on food?
Choking is a leading cause of injury in children, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics, especially those four years and younger. Although the number of choking incidents involving toys and toy parts has gone down in the last 20 years due to manufacturer and federal government warnings, the number of food-choking cases in youngsters is still high.
"We have done a great job in this country (of) preventing choking in children on toys, "says Dr. Gary Smith, co-author of a new study on choking injuries and a professor of pediatrics at The Ohio State University College of Medicine. "Since the 1990s we've had laws and regulations, systems where we can monitor these injuries when they happen. We have no such systems in place currently for food."
The Research Institute at Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, reviewed thousands of statistics on children who had choking-related emergency room visits between 2001 to 2009. The study authors found that an average of 12,400 children under the age of 15 were treated for non-fatal, food-related choking each year, which equals about 34 children per day.
"That's because hot dogs, nuts and seeds are hard to chew," noted Smith. "The hot dog is the perfect size to block the airways, in a young child, so that's why those are much more dangerous foods to give to a child."
More than 60% of the choking episodes happened in children 4 years of age and younger, according to the study. Choking incidents decreased as a child got older. After the age of 7 the number of cases remained relatively unchanged through age 14.
Parents need to keep in mind the age of their children when giving them certain foods, the study authors warned, especially when it comes to newborns. There has always been discussion on when to start a baby on solid foods. Dr. Jennifer Shu, a pediatrician with the Children's Medical Group, in Atlanta, Georgia, says 4 months is a good starting point.
"Before 4 months, foods can be a choking hazard" says Shu. "But if you wait much longer than 7 or 8 months then babies get really used to full liquid diet and may have a harder time adjusting to thicker textures."
Child experts note parents and caregivers should be aware of food choking prevention recommendations and guidelines. The AAP recommends children younger than 5 years of age should not be given hard candies or gum, and raw veggies and fruits should be cut into little pieces. Young children should be supervised while eating and should eat sitting down.
In order to cut down food on related choking incidents, the study authors recommend placing warning labels on foods that pose a high choking risk for babies and children. They also believe a public awareness campaign should be designed to educate parents about the dangers of food-related choking among little ones.
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About this blog
Get a behind-the-scenes look at the latest stories from CNN Chief Medical Correspondent, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, Senior Medical Correspondent Elizabeth Cohen and the CNN Medical Unit producers. They'll share news and views on health and medical trends - info that will help you take better care of yourself and the people you love.


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SAS switches enable direct-attached storage to be used as a scalable, low-cost storage network for SMB, mega data center and cloud computing environments
MILPITAS, Calif., March 16, 2010 – LSI Corporation (NYSE: LSI) today announced the sampling of the industry's first series of 6Gb/s SAS switches to OEM customers. The new LSITM model SAS6160 and SAS6161 switches significantly extend the capabilities of SAS in direct-attached storage (DAS) environments by allowing multiple servers to connect to one or more independent external storage systems. SAS616x series switches are designed to provide a low-cost and easy-to-use shared storage option for rack-mounted server and storage installations in cloud computing, mega data center and small- to medium-sized business environments.
Both SAS switches feature zoning, which enables storage resources to be safely shared across multiple hosts, helping to maximize storage resource utilization, eliminate islands of storage and simplify storage management, backup and upgrades.
"The SAS interface is widely used inside servers and storage arrays," said Bob Laliberte, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. "However, with the introduction of 6Gb/s SAS and now 6Gb/s SAS switches, organizations of all sizes will have the ability to extend SAS beyond today's DAS environments to create simple, low-cost and high-performance networked storage environments. Given the need for storage to support virtualized server environments and the advanced features and benefits offered by shared storage, these solutions are well-timed."
LSI SAS616x series switches are based on enterprise-hardened LSI silicon, firmware and software. The model SAS6160 and SAS6161 switches feature a rack-mountable 16-port, 1U profile in respective half-width and full-width form factors for quick and easy installation with rack-mounted servers and are fully compatible with existing SAS infrastructures. Both models feature 24Gb/s SAS connections on 16 x4 SAS lanes to deliver an aggregated bandwidth of 384Gb/s. Each model supports SAS and SATA connectivity to more than 1,000 devices, enabling customers to take advantage of larger SAS topologies and tiered storage solutions.
LSI SAS616x switches offer complete SAS domain management including port configuration, zoning, firmware management, diagnostics and viewing of the SAS topology. High-availability applications can be supported by using two switches with redundant data paths.
"Leveraging our expertise and technology leadership, we are delivering the industry's first high-performance SAS switching solution for extending DAS environments," said Steve Fingerhut, senior director of marketing, Storage Components Division, LSI. "With fully integrated management software and extensive end-to-end interoperability testing, customers are assured of plug-and-play simplicity when deploying SAS616x series switches into existing SAS-based environments."
Since the inception of SAS, LSI has shipped over 18 million SAS-based products across its industry-leading portfolio of controller ICs, expanders, host bus adapters, MegaRAID® and 3ware® RAID controller cards, RAID-on-Motherboard (ROMB) solutions and storage systems. By offering best-in-class SAS technologies, assured interoperability and single vendor support, LSI is the silicon-to-systems supplier of choice for OEMs that want to deliver a broad set of storage solutions.
Production quantities are expected to be available to OEM customers in the second half of this year.
About LSI
LSI Corporation (NYSE: LSI) is a leading provider of innovative silicon, systems and software technologies that enable products which seamlessly bring people, information and digital content together. The company offers a broad portfolio of capabilities and services including custom and standard product ICs, adapters, systems and software that are trusted by the world's best known brands to power leading solutions in the Storage and Networking markets. More information is available at www.lsi.com.
Editor's Notes:
- All LSI news releases (financial, acquisitions, manufacturing, products, technology, etc.) are issued exclusively by PR Newswire and are immediately thereafter posted on the company's external web site, http://www.lsi.com.
- LSI, the LSI & Design logo, MegaRAID and 3ware are trademarks or registered trademarks of LSI Corporation.
- All other brands or product names may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies
For further information, contact:
Brian Garabedian


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If you travel a lot and live life from one hotel room to the next, this collapsible portable night stand will bring some much needed consistency to your nomadic lifestyle. Forget toiletries, this is the first thing we're packing for our next trip.
When folded, the $15 Urban Shelf is just a half-inch thick so it won't take up much room when buried in your suitcase. And when deployed, a lip designed to slide under a mattress lets this sturdy shelf hold up to four pounds of overnight sundries, including your glasses and phone. It's even got a couple of strategically cut slits designed to prevent your charging cables from sliding off onto the ground when you unplug your toys.
If you ever find yourself in a hotel room where the nightstand kept your phone just out of reach, you'll realize why this is truly an ingenious creation.


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1. Ibiza: Beach Hopping Cruise w/ Paddleboard, Snacks, & Drinks
Step aboard your cruise from San Antoni harbor and breeze along the dazzling Ibiza coastline. While traveling, take in the pleasant sights from the water and indulge in a variety of fresh fruit and snacks as well as up to 4 refreshing beverages. Dock at and discover two amazing cream-colored beaches, Cala Bassa and Cala Conta. Spend one hour at each unique beach to sunbathe and swim in the clear waters. As you hop between the beaches, catch a glimpse of Es Vedra and Conejera. Enjoy up to 4 alcoholic drinks and unlimited soft drinks on the sunset cruise. On the daytime cruise, all drinks are unlimited. Nibble on a variety of snacks such as croquettes, bread, alioli, pastries, cured meats, prawns, fresh fruits, and sweets as you relax and admire the scenic views. Return to the boat to travel leisurely over to a secluded bay where you'll practice some paddle boarding and snorkeling. Your guide will assist you throughout, making sure you have a safe and fun experience. Finally, set off on the return leg of the journey and relax as you sail back to the harbor. If you have selected the afternoon option, you can admire the views of a beautiful sunset to finish the day in front of Mambo.


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Twitter users should be able to download their entire archive of tweets by year's end, the company's CEO, Dick Costolo said today.
During a keynote conversation at the Online News Association conference in San Francisco, Costolo told interviewer Emily Bell of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism that Twitter expects to provide its users by the end of the year with one of the most-desired capabilities of all -- being able to download their entire tweet history.
"The caveat is that this is the CEO saying this," Costolo joked, "not the engineer who's building this....[But it's] a priority we absolutely want to have out by the end of the year."
That news will certainly make a lot of Twitter users happy. But Costolo's comments on the growing discontent among developers and why Twitter is making the changes that rankle them may ultimately be far more important.
Over the past few weeks, many developers have complained that Twitter's moves have curtailed what they can do with their apps. That discontent was inflamed Thursday by claims by IFTTT, a service that lets users create "recipes" such as automatically retweeting any tweet by a specific Twitter user, or sending a thank you direct message to any new Twitter follower, that it would no longer be able to provide its core service. IFTTT CEO Linden Tibbets wrote in a letter to users that because of the changes, it will disable users' ability to "push tweets to places like email, Evernote and Facebook" starting Sept. 27.
But Costolo took issue with that assessment, arguing before the ONA audience that IFTTT's complaint had no merit. "I don't mean to be flip here at all," Costolo said, "but it's become a little bit [like] 'I didn't get my homework done because Twitter changed their API. The IFTTT... removing (Twitter Triggers) has absolutely nothing to do with any changes to our API, irrespective of how any change was rolled out. Zero."
This week has been something of a public showcase for Costolo. On Tuesday, he appeared on the Today Show to roll out Twitter's new "mobile-first" strategy. And later that night, he went on "Charlie Rose" and gave a 40-plus minute interview. And if one thing has been a theme across all three of the CEO's public appearances this week, it's that Twitter is dead-set on influencing the kind of third-party applications developers create. And while many who have built third-party Twitter clients may be upset at new restrictions that limit what they can do, Costolo insisted that the company's recent moves are all about expanding the value of the service for its 140 million users.
"We have tens of thousands of developers around the world who leverage [our] API and build successful businesses with it," Costolo said today. "We are going to build a platform that enables third-party developers to add value to Twitter and build into Twitter and get all [kinds of] additional value from our distribution engine."
Expanding on that thought, the Twitter CEO outlined an example of what he called the "accretive" nature of what the company is trying to foster. He explained that the NBA commissioner had recently suggested that in the future, he'd like to allow Twitter users to select the MVP award winner for the basketball league's All-Star Game. "It would be great if that was a single tweet, and the poll was right there," Costolo explained, "and that canvas changed to 'There are 90 seconds left to vote, here's the leader,' and that canvas followed [the tweet] wherever it went," such as ESPN, or NBA.com.
Costolo went on to suggest that Twitter could potentially support real-time updates and information. "Think about it....There are all sorts of amazing functionalities that third parties can build into Twitter," he said, bringing new benefits to developers and users alike. "That's the general framework for where we're going."
Costolo's explanation certainly makes a lot of sense. But the CEO has carefully avoided talking about another pressing reason Twitter has been cracking down on developers' access to the company's APIs, especially developers of Twitter clients -- it wants as much control as possible over the way people use Twitter in order to get the lion's share of advertising revenue the service generates.
In answer to an audience question, however, Costolo did allow that Twitter may well have done a "crap job" of explaining its reasoning to the developer community -- and he seemed intent on rectifying that. But he also assured the audience -- and those watching from afar -- that 2012 would bring no "more things we're going [to do to] constrain and restrict" developers' access.


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Introducing the Vertical Amusement Park
Growing up in the middle of Ohio, we had two of the country's best amusement parks just a few short hours away. Part of the fun of going to them was the growing sense of anticipation as we got close enough to see the skyscrapers peaking up on the horizon. And then there was the completely overwhelming wave of joy that ensued once we finally entered the park: rides over here, games over there, junk food and souvenirs everywhere you look.
That very idea of an expansive, wide-open land of delight is my template for what an amusement park should be. So, when a first heard Ju-Hyun Kim's idea for a vertical amusement park designed to be housed inside a skyscraper in a crowded metropolis, I certainly had my reservations. How the heck could you make a log ride work in building?
But, after checking out his renderings of what the park could look like, I'm ready to buy my season pass. Here is a quick preview of some of the different areas that his park would contain:
(Via Inhabitat)


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In the Midst of the Syria Crisis, the Military Is Not "Ready for Anything"
The headline above a September 13 article in Politico blares that the Department of Defense is stating that the U.S. military is "ready for anything."… Read More
The headline above a September 13 article in Politico blares that the Department of Defense is stating that the U.S. military is "ready for anything."… Read More
In recent days, the House of Representatives and the Senate Armed Services Committee adopted different versions of the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year… Read More
Among the amendments cleared for action during House consideration the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for fiscal year 2014 is an amendment sponsored by Representative… Read More
Last Wednesday, off the coast of Kauai, Hawaii, the Navy cruiser USS Lake Erie conducted a successful test of the next-generation missile defense weapon, engaging… Read More
Reform of the U.S. arms export control took a major step forward this week when the Departments of State and Commerce released final rules governing… Read More
Tomorrow, President Obama will finally release his overdue budget request, and the next day, the House Armed Services Committee will hold a hearing on that… Read More
On March 28, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released its annual assessment of the performance of the Department of Defense (DOD) in purchasing specific new… Read More
Yesterday, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel gave his first major speech since he was confirmed for the job in February. "The Department must understand the… Read More
Public perception may be that the sequestration cuts to the defense budget is about eliminating waste and inefficiency in the Department of Defense (DOD). In… Read More
A February 26 article by CATO Institute Analyst Christopher A. Preble wrongly asserts that the imposition of automatic spending cuts, called sequestration, will not make… Read More


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iOS 5.1 Jailbreak: How To Unlock Any Jailbroken iPhone On Any Baseband (iOS 5.0 To 5.1) With SAM
For those, who have been waiting for an unlocking solution that supports iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4 or iPhone 4S (CDMA+GSM) on any firmware above iOS 5.0 and also on any baseband, here's some real good news.
iPhone Dev Team's MuscleNerd has confirmed that a Chinese researcher named Loktar_Sun has discovered a method that allows unlocking any model of the iPhone on any baseband with the help of the Subscriber Artificial Module (SAM) by Sam Bingner. MuscleNerd took to his Twitter account and said that he was able to unlock his T-Mobile iPhone 4S with the method.
That method worked for T-Mobile on my 4S. Probably expect an update to SAM from @sbingner to incorporate that trick from Loktar_Sun, MuscleNerd tweeted.
Before going ahead with the unlocking process, users must be aware of some of the details:
Users need to have a jailbroken iPhone, which is not listed on any IMEI blacklists.
Users need to ensure that the latest version of iTunes is installed. They should also know which carrier their iPhone is locked into.
The method produces a ticket that is valid to the SIM card used during the process, which means that if anyone wants to use some other SIM card in the unlocked iPhone, the process needs to be repeated with the new card.
Step 1: Open up Cydia on the jailbroken iPhone and add the official repository for the SAM package. The repo URL is http://repo.bingner.com and contains the official up to date SAM package and the required dependencies.
Step 2: Once the repo is added, go to the sources page by simply tapping on it from the list of installed source. Now find the SAM package and install it to your iPhone. Make sure that the SIM card you would like to use on your unlocked iPhone is inserted in the iPhone.
Step 3: Now launch the SAM interface by tapping the SAMPrefs icon on your Springboard, or by finding the SAM preferences bundle through the Settings.app.
Step 4: After SAM has been launched, go into the Utilities tab and then tap on the De-Activate iPhone option. To double check that the iPhone is truly de-activated, return to the main settings menu and go into the More Information tab. Look at the ActivationState label and it should display as Unactivated.
Step 5: Go back to the main settings pane and then into the Method tab where you will need to select the By Country and Carrier option. Now select the Country you are going to be using your iPhone in and then your actual Carrier.
Be aware that some networks work with more than one network ID. In such cases, you need to select the SIM ID option.
Step 6: Go to More Information and make a copy of the IMSI number that is present in the SAM Details section.
Step 7: Tap on the Spoof Real SIM to SAM and go back to the main SAM screen and change Method to manual. After selecting the manual option and returning to the main screen, you will notice an IMSI input field. Paste the IMSI number you copied in the previous step.
Step 8: Connect the iPhone to the computer using the USB cable and use iTunes to re-activate the phone. After iTunes re-activates the iPhone, double click the Phone Number label found in the details pane and ensure the displayed ICCID matches that are found on the SIM card. If the strings do not match, you'll have to repeat the process from the beginning.
Step 9: If the strings match, you will need to unplug your iPhone, go back into SAMPrefs and disable SAM by sliding the Enabled button to the off position. Now, re-connect the iPhone to iTunes and don't panic if error messages pop-up saying that the device cannot be activated. This error is normal and requires iTunes to be shut down and then restarted.
Step 10: After a few minutes you should notice signal bars on your iPhone, meaning the process has been successful.
In case the push notifications don't work, you can fix the issue by selecting the Clear Push option found in SAM and then re-connecting the iPhone to iTunes.
After successfully unlocking the iPhone using this method, users are also recommended to save the activation ticket generated due to the fact that it could prove crucial in the future to preserve your unlock. Here's the process to manually save activation ticket.
Step 1: An unlock ticket will be generated after you successfully follow steps 1-10 outlined above.
Step 2: Use an SSH program to access your iPhone's filesystem (WinSCP Windows or Cyberduck Mac OS X). You can also use something like iFile on your actual iPhone.
Step 3: Navigate to /var/Root/ibrary/Lockdown and make a copy of everything that is found in that directory for each SIM card you unlock your iPhone with.
[Source: Redmond Pie, iJailbreak]
Must Read: iOS 5.1 Jailbreak: How To Use RedSn0w 0.9.10b8 To Backup Your iPhone's Unlock Activation Ticket [VIDEO]
Also Read: iPhone 5 Release Date, Features: In-Cell Touch Panels To Make Next iPhone Significantly Thinner [REPORT]
© Copyright IBTimes 2023. All rights reserved.


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A Mother's Worst Fear
Posted June 10, 2010on:
- In: family | Uncategorized
- 1 Comment
Ok I admit it I am first and foremost a mom, but as the kids have gotten older I have been trying my best to prepare them and myself for the transition to adulthood. I have provided them with all of the basic life skills to function on their own, cooking, laundry, money management all they might need.
My son having turned 18 last October has been seeing more of the adult world that he hadn't planned on. He has been making all sorts of life decisions regarding his education and work, time management and lots of other areas of life.
Then one fine day as he is enjoying a game of touch football with his classmates things changed in a heartbeat. Luckily for technology he was there on the phone just moments after the collision that changed his summer.
"Hey mom, I've broken my leg. It's pretty bad and they're going to send me to the hospital in an ambulance. I know you are working midnights this week so you don't need to come down." My heart broke a little when I heard those words.
1 Response to "A Mother's Worst Fear"
Good Grief!
I hope he's doing ok! How scary for you both!


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Akai LPD8
Laptop Pad Controler
Ultra-portable production pad.
The LPD8 laptop pad controller is a USB-MIDI controller for musicians producers DJs and other music creators. It measures less than 13 inches across and weighs less than a pound to easily fit into a laptop case backpack or messenger bag for extreme portability.
The LPD8 is based on Akai Professional's MPC line of iconic music production stations. Producers who love the feel of the MPC and want to work with software on their computer will find that the LPD8 gives their laptop the controls they prefer over a mouse and keyboard.
The LPD8 has eight orange light-up pads that are velocity sensitive for programming rhythmic or melodic parts. The pads can also send program-change information to software. Additionally the LPD8 has eight assignable Q-Link knobs you can assign to virtually any parameters in their software for hands-on control.
The LPD8 works plug and play with Mac and PC and requires no software driver installation or wall power for operation. It has four memory banks for programming and recalling settings appropriate to different software programs you use.
Make music in any setting with the LPD8.
Key Features:
- USB-MIDI controller works with virtually all audio software
- Eight backlit velocity-sensitive drum pads can send note or program change
- Eight Q-Link knobs for controlling virtually any parameters in software
- Plug-and-play USB connection for Mac and PC requires no driver installation
- Small enough to fit in a backpack or laptop bag
- Four programmable memory banks
- Comes with editor software for Mac and PC
- USB bus powered – no additional power cable needed
- LPD8 controller
- USB cable
- Software CD
LPD8 Laptop Pad Controller
- Dimensions: 3.2"H x 11.9"W 1"D
- Weight: 0.7 lb


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Hunt for killer in Brockton slaying continues
Teddy bears and bottles of Hennessy cognac line the sidewalk edge, a memorial to a 24-year-old city man gunned down outside a Main Street house.
A mother pushing a stroller walks by, eyes forward. A teen on a bike zips past without stopping. Cars and trucks pass on the busy street.
Life outside 684 Main St., where Delacey A. Hinton was gunned down around 2 a.m. Aug. 15 continues.
And so does the hunt for his killer.
Police obtained an arrest warrant, charging Derrick D. Waller, 24, of 52 Ithica St., Brockton, with murder and illegal possession of a firearm in connection with Hinton's slaying, according to Plymouth County District Attorney Timothy J. Cruz.
Assistant District Attorney Bridget Norton Middleton said authorities have been searching for the suspect and are now hoping someone in the public who knows where he is will call police.
An autopsy found Hinton died of a single gunshot to the chest.
State and Brockton detectives have been quietly interviewing people since the slaying, trying to piece together what led to the shooting and who may be responsible. What investigators may have uncovered has not been released.
But friends of Hinton say they hope an arrest is made soon.
"He never started trouble with anybody," one friend, looking over at the street memorial, said. "He was a good person ... He was a good dude and I miss him. I miss him to death."
"RIP Lace We Miss You" is spray painted on the sidewalk where Hinton died. A few candles have been left, along with bottles of liquor.
Across the street, tacked to a pole, is a weathered flier with the photo of a young girl, the victim of another slaying. "Help me, I was murdered," it pleads. Beneath the words is a photo of Chantel LaMay Matiyosus, 16, shot to death on April 25 as she left a baby shower on Addison Avenue.
Like in the Hinton slaying, no one has been arrested in her slaying.
Maureen Boyle can be reached at email@example.com.


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Methodological Guidelines for the Gender Analysis of National Population and Housing Census Data
Number of pages: 670
Publication date: 07 Nov 2014
Author: UNFPA
Publisher: UNFPA
Number of pages: 670
Publication date: 07 Nov 2014
Author: UNFPA
Publisher: UNFPA
One of the main pillars of UNFPA's technical support for national Population and Housing Censuses is to make certain that the best possible use is made of the information collected to inform policy and programming; particularly in areas such as sexual and reproductive health and rights, adolescents and youth, population dynamics and gender.
Gender analysis needs to assess, analyze and reveal the processes of differential social roles, variance in social treatment and outright discrimination that explain the observed results.
UNFPA collaborated up with UN Women, the UN Statistics Division and UNICEF.
It complements the more general manual on gender statistics by the UN Statistics Division (United Nations, 2013), reviews a variety of data sources, and the manual recently published by the Asia and Pacific Regional Office (UNFPA, 2013), which covers all aspects of the census process in the specific context of Southern Asia.
It is anticipated that the methodological guidance provided in this manual will offer National Statistical Offices and those concerned with gender issues to make increasingly effective use of the data from Population and Housing Censuses. More importantly, based on sound systematic analysis, we hope that national authorities are in a better position to celebrate success where it has been measurably achieved, and squarely address inequality and discrimination wherever it remains.


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Story highlights
George Wright, 68, arrested Monday in Portuguese resort town
He escaped from prison in 1970 and hijacked plane to get to Algeria
There was no trace of him for decades afterward
Incident prompted screening of passengers, carry-on bags at airports
He had been on the run for four decades. He escaped from prison when Richard Nixon was in the White House, joined the Black Liberation Army in Detroit, hijacked a plane and (in)famously demanded that FBI agents deliver ransom money in bathing suits. And they did.
Now, after a manhunt spanning three continents that often appeared to run cold, the FBI has finally found George Wright.
At age 68, he was living quietly in the resort of Sintra near Lisbon in Portugal when he was arrested Monday.
The United States is seeking his extradition from Portugal to serve the remainder of a 15- to 30-year sentence for murder. Portuguese judicial authorities could not be reached Tuesday for details of the extradition process.
Wright is fighting extradition, a U.S. federal agent said, and his next court appearance in Portugal is in about two weeks.
Wright's life story reads like an international crime novel. In 1962, at the age of 19, he and three associates carried out a series of robberies in New Jersey. Wright and another man shot and killed a World War II veteran in a gas station robbery in Farmingdale.
He was arrested soon afterward and, after pleading no defense, was sentenced to 15 to 30 years in prison. But in 1970, Wright escaped from Bayside State Prison in Leesburg, New Jersey, reportedly stealing the warden's car to make his getaway.
Wright made his way to Detroit, then a hotbed of militant black politics, and joined the Black Liberation Army. (He is also reputed to have made some money during this period as a part-time model, using an alias.)
On July 31, 1972, Wright and four other members of the Black Liberation Army went to Detroit airport and boarded Delta Flight 841 for Miami. Wright was dressed as a priest and carried a handgun in a hollowed-out Bible.
Airport security was different in those days. Various Palestinian groups were hijacking planes regularly, as were individuals keen to go to Cuba. Altogether, the U.S. Department of Transportation recorded 364 hijackings worldwide between 1968 and 1972: more than one a week on average.
The hijackers of Delta 841 – three men and two women accompanied by three children – seized the plane as it approached Miami. The FBI says "subsequent investigation identified Wright as one of the hijackers."
Once on the ground, the hijackers demanded that FBI agents dressed only in bathing suits deliver $1 million ransom to the plane. They wanted to be sure the agents were not carrying guns. The money was duly delivered by the scantily clad agents.
The hijackers allowed the 88 passengers off but kept the flight crew on board and ordered that the plane fly to Boston. With the addition of an extra navigator (wearing swim trunks and a shirt), the DC-8 was refueled there and flew on to Algiers.
Algeria in the early 1970s was run by a hard-line socialist government that was no friend of the United States and allowed various dissidents, militants and alleged terrorists to take sanctuary there. A leading member of the Black Panthers, Eldridge Cleaver, had been welcomed as a political refugee there in 1968 after jumping bail in California.
The Algerian government confiscated and returned the $1 million in ransom money to the U.S., but Wright and his associates melted away. Some of the hijackers were arrested in Paris in 1976, but for decades, there was no trace of Wright.
Then, nine years ago, a fugitive investigator with the New Jersey Department of Corrections working with the U.S. Marshals Service got a lead. Officials won't comment on reports that Wright had begun to contact relatives in the United States.
Juan Mattos, U.S. marshal for the District of New Jersey, said: "Over the course of nine years, their tenacious resolve has proven to be very powerful in seeking justice and closure for the victims."
And in a press release Tuesday, Michael Ward of the FBI's Newark Division said the case should "serve notice that the FBI's determination in pursuing subjects will not diminish over time or distance."
At the time of the hijacking, there was limited screening of passengers at U.S. airports. This screening system did not require every passenger to be examined, only those who met a profile established by the Federal Aviation Administration.
After the Algiers flight and several hijackings that turned violent, the Nixon administration instructed the FAA to adopt emergency regulations to improve screening. At the end of 1972, the FAA ordered airports to ensure that all passengers and their carry-on baggage be inspected before boarding.
CNN's Emily Smith contributed to this report.


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We already know that Camilla Paglia jumped the shark awhile back—perhaps an entire school of sharks, while wearing a neon-pink ski hat and scream-singing Ace of Base's "I Saw The Sign." This might account for the rant before this one, which concerned how best-selling, powerful female artists Katy Perry and Taylor Swift are sexless, vapid idiots killing feminism; on the other hand, best-selling, powerful female artists Beyonce and Jennifer Lopez are nothing more than the fulfillment of Paglia's Exotic, Sassy Minorities fetish. (Paglia writes of J. Lo: "[She] will go down in history for a revolutionary full-page photo in a 1998 Vanity Fair where she fetchingly turned her ample, lingerie-clad buttocks to the camera." And not for any other reason.)
A few days ago Paglia covered the Sunday Times Magazine with a piece that compares the similarities of the late Princess Diana and Rihanna's "ravishingly seductive flirtation(s) with the press," using each photo opportunity to convey "allure, defiance or revenge." She praises Rihanna's Instagram shots for their "genuinely artistic atmospheric eroticism," comparing this image of Princess Diana outside the Taj Mahal alone with shots of Rihanna on her balcony in Barbados.
Haha, OKAY, so here's the problem.
Paglia added that both women were victims of a "festering romantic triangle and had transformed themselves from 'sensitive, wounded, but appealingly bubbly and good-natured provincial girls' into 'living sculptures for the lens.'"
This echoes a previous nugget of absolute crazyfood in her Perry/Swift piece: "Urban rappers' notorious sexism seems to have made black female performers stronger and more defiant." Once again, she imbues the men involved in these women's' lives as some kind of weird Ultimate Source of Power that zaps their talent into them.
So women can basically only be strong or interesting (in a way that Paglia approves of, I mean!) when they're being oppressed or abused. Sure, it's impossible to listen to Rihanna's "Stay" without putting it in context, but to infer that her ability to ensnare her millions of fans owes itself to fucking Chris Brown, of all people... I mean, shudder.
'Rihanna is the new Diana': Provocative claim by feminist writer Camille Paglia' [ONTD]
Double Take [Sunday Times of London]


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Trafficking of children, a serious threat in the EU
Human trafficking is a shocking reality still present in our days. More than half (64%) of all child victims are trafficked for the purpose of sexual exploitation. Children are also trafficked for labour exploitation, forced criminality and begging, as well as for drug-related crimes and forced and sham marriages. They are at particular risk of falling victim to traffickers online.
To mark the 15th EU Anti-Trafficking Day on 18 October, Commissioner for Home Affairs Ylva Johansson, will participate in an online event on Twitter Spaces . This year's event which will focus on trafficking of children, follows the new EU Strategy on Combatting Trafficking in Human Beings, presented by the Commission on 14 April 2021, which sets out actions to identify and stop trafficking early on and to protect the victims and help them rebuild their lives.
The Commissioner will be joined by Ladislav Hamran, President of Eurojust; Diane Schmitt, EU Anti-Trafficking Coordinator; Ilias Chatzis, Chief of the Human Trafficking and Migrant Smuggling Sector, United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC); and Stana Buchowska, Regional Coordinator for Eastern Europe and Central Asia at ECPAT International (a global network of civil society organisations that works to end the sexual exploitation of children).
The event can be followed live on Twitter at 10:00 CET on Monday.


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As might be expected, there has been a pile of attention in the popular press being paid to the ancient version of the Olympics and I figured it would be a useful thing to gather a bunch of them together in one post to give you some way to kill time while you were waiting for the opening ceremonies, or if you wanted to read something instead of watching the opening ceremonies, or whether you missed the opening ceremonies, or whether the opening ceremonies made you wonder what the ancients did. 'Nuff said? Ecce and enjoy … you should be able to kill a couple hours with this one:
First and foremost, the fine folks at Cambridge Journals have made a huge selection (20+) of articles available (for free) which touch upon the ancient Olympics/athletics in some way:
I mentioned this as a Blogosphere post, but it bears repeating … the Ancient Olympics blog has a feature on the Ancient Opening Ceremonies, such as they were (and there's plenty of other items of interest at the AO blog, of course):
A video break … the Iris Project's Lorna Robinson talks about the Olympics 2012 project (tip o' the pileus to the Classics Confidential folks):
Ages ago, BBC Magazine had a nice feature on the 'basics' of the ancient games:
Tip o' the pileus to Arthur Shippee for drawing our attention to an NPR interview with Tony Perrottet about poetry and the Olympics:
You can get a sense of the focus of the London Evening Standard's feature on Olympia and the ancient games from the headline:
In a similar vein is the Daily Mail's offering, which actually is a semi-review of Neil Faulkner's A Visitor's Guide to the Ancient Olympics:
Margaret Butler (Tulane) has some commentary on the ancient game v. the modern ones which will be showing up in various forms this weekend, I suspect:
Self-explanatory, from the University of Sydney (tip o' the pileus to John McMahon):
Greek Reporter seems to not have liked a British Documentary:
We can do some more clearing of our email box by noting that the Nemean Games revival also has been getting some press attention … first (and most recent), an ITV news report:
… and from the Spenborough Guardian (the date on this is today, but it's older):
… and the other Guardian … they also have video:
And now some more videos which I came across in my idleness (not recent, but useful):
An Emory-sponsored lecture by Dr. Hans-Joachim Gehrke on excavations at Olympia:
I suppose we should include the Horrible Histories coverage:
… and since I still can't find a video of Boris Johnson's complete performance of Armand D'Angour's ode, here's a performance of the first part of a modern adaptation of Pindar's first Pythian:


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Even though comic book movie Kick-Ass didn't do so well in the theaters, the DVD sales were pretty good. So good, in fact, that the graphic novel's writer, Mark Millar, says the next movie has been greenlit.
While we're pumped for another awesome Kick-Ass film, we're urging everyone to take Millar's word with a giant grain of salt. An AICN commenter heard Millar on the radio claiming that Kick-Ass 2, the movie, was good to go.
Been listening to Mark Millar on Radio 5 in the UK who says that because of the fantastic number of DVD sales of Kick Ass that Kick Ass 2 has been greenlit and will go ahead and be based on Millar's follow up comic.
So does this mean we'll get an on screen villain called "The Cunts"? Perhaps, but we're not holding our breath just yet.