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About this paper
This paper illustrates how a SAS team of modelers used SAS Enterprise Miner and KDD Cup competition data to create a highly accurate model for predicting churn. They applied several data preparation, feature creation and dimension reduction techniques to prepare the data for modeling. They then used several machine learning approaches, including an open source model that could be incorporated into SAS Enterprise Miner. The models were accessed using the assigned validation criteria. Learn how they approached the problem and which model was declared the "winner."
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SAS is the leader in analytics. Through innovative software and services, SAS empowers and inspires customers around the world to transform data into intelligence. SAS gives you THE POWER TO KNOW®.
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subset: commoncrawl


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MTSU plans to test its tornado sirens on campus Tuesday, Feb. 11, at 12:20 p.m.
This is a brief, routine test of the system, and no safety actions will be required.
The university notifies the campus and surrounding neighborhoods before these tests each month. Tests are conducted on alternating Tuesdays and Wednesdays to minimize distractions for classes and community neighbors.
Members of the campus community can prepare for emergency weather situations anytime by checking MTSU's list of "safe places" at http://bit.ly/MTSUSafePlaces. You also can make note of the siren-testing schedule by visiting http://mtsunews.com/tornado-siren-testing. Bookmark both sites!


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NSA violations compared to Obamacare website ills
WASHINGTON - The intelligence community's top lawyer on Tuesday defended the surveillance violations by staff of the National Security Agency by comparing programs that collect mass amounts of information on Americans to problems with the troubled health care website.
"Complicated technology systems frequently don't work as they expect them to," Robert Litt, general counsel for the director of National Intelligence, told a conference at the Georgetown University Law Center. "Using the word 'abuse' in the context of the operation of the surveillance program is a little bit like saying the Department of Health and Human Services is abusing people because of the fact that the Obamacare websites don't work properly. They are complicated."
In 2011, after the government disclosed what it said were technical problems with its computer systems, a court found the NSA had violated the Constitution for three years. Litt's statement on Tuesday could be read as significantly downplaying the constitutional violations cited by the court or as highlighting the politically sensitive problems with the health care website.
The Obama administration on Monday declassified another round of secret documents, showing that the NSA has made serious mistakes in collecting American communications records. The documents also show that agency reported those errors and took action to prevent future missteps.
According to court records released by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper Monday, the NSA admitted to gathering material improperly - in one case because of a typographical error, and in another case because of "poor management, lack of involvement by compliance officials and lack of internal verification procedures, not by bad faith."
The Obama administration published the heavily censored files as part of ongoing civil liberties lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of the government's collection of U.S. communications records, which the White House has said is crucial to track terrorists.
The latest release - with much of the documents heavily blacked out - reflects the administration's strenuous efforts to maintain its legal authority to collect Americans' phone records and some email data amid opposition on Capitol Hill. The administration has been under pressure to reveal more details about NSA operations since former NSA systems analyst Edward Snowden leaked top-secret documents detailing the agency's collection of millions of U.S. communications records.
In one of the newly released documents, the secret intelligence court judge, U.S. District Judge John D. Bates, expressed dismay in 2009 over the continuing errors after the government had repeatedly said it would fix the problems. "Those responsible for conducting oversight at the NSA had failed to do so effectively," Bates said.
Litt said Tuesday the NSA had taken multiple steps since those documents were produced, including appointing a compliance officer and hiring a 300-person team to oversee operations - which he said has helped address the frequent "disconnect" between NSA operators and lawyers in the early days of the program, such that those doing the searching didn't always know the rules. He pointed out that NSA is now hiring a privacy officer who will further monitor whether Americans' civil liberties are being protected.
Similar documents about the U.S. collecting phone records were previously declassified and published in response to a lawsuit filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the Obama administration has revealed others to persuade Congress to allow it to continue collecting the phone records.
After the NSA began the bulk collection program in 2006, one NSA inspector general's report said rules already in place were "adequate" and "in several aspects exceed the terms" of what the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court had required. But it recommended three additional practices be formally adopted. These included such obvious ideas as not allowing analysts who searched phone records in the terror database also to approve which numbers can be searched, and periodically checking the phone numbers that analysts searched to make sure they had actually been approved.
Despite the assurances in 2006 that rules were adequate, problems surfaced in 2009 that were so serious that the intelligence court temporarily shut down the surveillance program.
One of the newly disclosed files was a slap - intentionally or otherwise - at Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee who is leading the fight on Capitol Hill to rein in the government's phone records collection. In a ruling to justify the program by the then-chief judge of the intelligence court, Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, she quoted a 2001 floor speech by Leahy to explain that Congress believed that phone records could be collected under U.S. laws.
Leahy has proposed ending the NSA's sweep of phone records, allowing the government to seek only records related to ongoing terror investigations.
The documents included training materials for NSA analysts, who were warned that they should only search the database of all phone records for numbers they suspected were associated with terrorists: "Analysts are NOT free to use a telephone selector based on a hunch or guess," according to a 2007 training presentation. It added that the NSA's legal standard for picking a phone number for a terror suspect required "some minimal level of objective justification."
The training slides noted that the government shouldn't snoop on the phone records of Americans whose only suspicious behaviors were protected by the First Amendment, such as speaking or writing in opposition to the U.S. government, worshipping at a mosque or working as a journalist.
"A telephone selector believed to be used by a U.S. person shall not be regarded as associated with (censored) solely on the basis of activities protected by the First Amendment," it said.
The documents also include a ruling by Kollar-Kotelly that allowed NSA to gather bulk Internet information such as who Americans e-mail, but not the email content. Litt said Tuesday that the NSA later curtailed that program because it did not prove useful.


text: Pretty the Series LIVE Brunch on Sunday April 17th with our entire cast. Fans can chat and ask questions while they watch us LIVE stream the event on Mingle Media TV Network. Watch the series at http://www.prettytheseries.com – season's 1 and 2 are now playing. We're gearing up to shoot season III – so be sure to watch all the episodes again so you are ready for the new season! Watch Pretty the Series on Mingle Media TV too! http://www.minglemediatv.com/prettytheseries.html


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Michiko Kakutani recently embarked on her 25th year as a New York Times book critic, and it's gotten to the point that when her name is mentioned in print, you can see the smoke rising from the page. The late Susan Sontag complained, "Her criticisms of my books are stupid and shallow and not to the point." Salman Rushdie referred to her as "a weird woman who seems to feel the need to alternately praise and spank." Most notoriously, last year Norman Mailer called Kakutani, who is of Japanese descent, a "one-woman kamikaze" and a "token" minority hire.
Those who rip her are usually authors she has ripped, and their indignation often muddies their logic. Certainly Mailer's insinuations, in addition to being boorish, are unsupportable. It should be clear to anyone who has read Kakutani's reviews that she has an estimable intelligence; she backs this up with what must be many real or virtual all-nighters in which she digests every word ever published by the writer under review. She takes books seriously, a valuable and ever-rarer trait. Furthermore, in my observation, she is more or less right in her judgments most of the time. (I slightly knew Kakutani when we were undergraduates at Yale about 30 years ago but have not spoken to her since.)
But the sour-grapes sniping from spurned authors should not obscure the fact that Kakutani is a profoundly uninteresting critic. Her main weakness is her evaluation fixation. This may seem an odd complaint—the job is called critic, after all—but in fact, whether a work is good or bad is just one of the many things to be said about it, and usually far from the most important or compelling. Great critics' bad calls are retrospectively forgiven or ignored: Pauline Kael is still read with pleasure even though no one still agrees (if anyone ever did) that Last Tango in Paris and Nashville are the cinematic equivalents of "The Rite of Spring" and Anna Karenina. Kakutani doesn't offer the stylistic flair, the wit, or the insight one gets from Kael and other first-rate critics; for her, the verdict is the only thing. One has the sense of her deciding roughly at Page 2 whether or not a book is worthy; reading the rest of it to gather evidence for her case; spending some quality time with the Thesaurus; and then taking a large blunt hammer and pounding the message home.
That message is harsh an awful lot of the time, and publishing folk commonly complain that Kakutani is too hard to please. It's true that the pleasure she appears to take in hurling a voluminous stream of harsh epithets at each dead horse is a bit unseemly, and that her perennial frustration with writers gives her a prim, schoolmarmish air. But negativity has been a good career strategy for her: The citation on her 1998 Pulitzer Prize gave props to her "fearless and authoritative" judgments. And the bigger problem, once again, isn't the number or severity of the pans but the pan-rave mentality. She sometimes seems to be channeling Matthew Arnold, a titan of literature but not the best role model for a newspaper book critic. Arnold was the solemn Victorian who defined criticism as "the disinterested endeavor to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world" and believed "its business is to do this with inflexible honesty." Arnold compared every work that came across his desk to the "touchstones" that represented the highest standards. If something lacked "high seriousness" (as he felt of Chaucer's and Robert Burns' poetry), it got the inflexible honesty treatment.
Kakutani started her career as a reporter, and her reviews usually have a who-what-when-where news lede right up top that sums up the verdict. In the second paragraph of her review of Nick Hornby's latest novel, she calls it a "… maudlin bit of tripe. 'A Long Way Down' is utterly devoid of the wonderfully acute observations of pop culture that made the author's debut novel, 'High Fidelity' (1995), such a rollicking delight to read, and it is equally devoid of the sorts of savvy social and psychological insights that fueled his impassioned soccer memoir, 'Fever Pitch' (1994). Instead, this cringe-making excuse for a novel takes the sappy contrivances of his 2001 book, 'How to Be Good,' to an embarrassing new low."
I've read A Long Way Down, so let me use it as a case study and the passage just quoted as a case study of Kakutani's problems as a writer. Kakutani is right: A Long Way Down is far from "a rollicking delight," as she described his first novel. (That characterization of High Fidelity, by the way, is an example of how Kakutani's prose is even flatter when it praises than when it buries.) But neither does A Long Way Down deserve to be called tripe. For Kakutani, there is no middle ground:a list of deficiencies, and a bit of plot summary, are all she has for us, and, lacking any other ideas or themes, she (characteristically) exaggerates the novel's faults. In her world, books tend to be masterpieces or rubbish; in the real one, they're almost always somewhere in between. She also (characteristically) sets up a bogus dichotomy between A Long Way Down and the "good" Hornby books. In fact, an artist's works almost always have more similarities than differences; if the disjuncture here were really as big as she claims, it should be the main subject of her review. The core question is how the current piece fits into the oeuvre, and we expect reflective reviews to address it. In this case, I'd be curious to see a critic consider Hornby's oft-stated and almost obsessive pledge to write books that are entertaining and ultimately uplifting—and how such a project could be expected eventually to encounter artistic and philosophical difficulties.
You'd want this Platonic critic to touch on other stuff, too. He or she could share some insights about the nature of novels written in dramatic monologues, or novels about suicide, or novels, or art, or life. Kakutani's refusal ever to take her eyes off the thumbs up/thumbs down prize, or to lay any of her own prejudices, tastes, or tangentially relevant observations on the table, is dispiriting. One of her favorite gimmicks for ducking subjectivity is to invoke the supposed reactions of "the reader" to a book. This is a rather underhanded device with a tweedy scent of 1940s and '50s arbiters like Lionel Trilling and Clifton Fadiman—and it's a perfect emblem of the way Kakutani muffles her own voice by hiding behind a mask. But it provides the only fun I get from her reviews: First thing, I always hunt for "the reader" (whom I visualize as a kind of miniature androgynous Michelin man) the way I used to count the Ninas in a Hirschfeld drawing. Imagine my delight to come upon Kakutani's January review of Richard Reeves' President Reagan and find two successive sentences telling us that "the reader turns in eager anticipation" to the book because Reeves' previous works on Kennedy and Nixon gave "the reader minutely detailed accounts" of their presidencies.
As a student at Oxford, the future drama critic Kenneth Tynan got back a paper with this comment: "Keep a strict eye on eulogistic & dyslogistic adjectives—They shd diagnose (not merely blame) & distinguish (not merely praise.)" Tynan's tutor, who happened to be C.S. Lewis, was offering a lesson Kakutani could have benefited from. "Utterly devoid … wonderfully acute observations … debut novel … savvy social and psychological insights … cringe-making … embarrassing new low": Virtually every word or phrase is a cliché, or at best shopworn and lifeless,and evidence of Kakutani's solid tin ear. (She has justly been called out for her near-obsessive use of "lugubrious" and "limn," words that probably have never been said aloud in the history of English.) That's what can happen to a writer when she merely praises and merely blames. Kakutani appears incapable of engaging with language, either playfully or seriously, which puts her at a painful disadvantage when she is supposed to be evaluating writers who can and do. Here, she tries to energize the prose with lapel-grabbing intensifiers like utterly and wonderfully and superfluous adjectives like savvy and embarrassing, but they just make her look like she's protesting too much. (Another Lewis quote with relevance to Kakutani: "If we are not careful criticism may become a mere excuse for taking revenge on books whose smell we dislike by erecting our temperamental antipathies into pseudo-moral judgments.")
The qualities most glaringly missing from Kakutani's work are humor and wit. Maybe in an attempt to compensate, she writes one or two parody reviews a year: of a book about swinging London in the voice of Austin Powers, of a Bridget Jones book in the voice of Ally McBeal, of Benjamin Kunkel's novel Indecision in the voice of Holden Caulfield, of Truman Capote's recently discovered novella in the voice of Holly Golightly. Talk about cringe-making. They are so awful, from start to finish, that you cannot avert your eyes, much as you would like to.
The voice this reader would really like to hear in Michiko Kakutani's reviews is not a mock-Holly Golightly voice or the enervated (or prissy) voice of an enshrined critic, but Kakutani's own. Here's a modest suggestion on how to start: Just once, instead of describing what "the reader" expects, thinks, or does, she might try using the word "I."


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Red Cabbage Slaw with Cilantro and Lime Dressing
Thank you guys for all the kind word over the past couple of days! I know you're all waiting for the post about the Purple Ombre Cake. I just haven't had enough time to finish it up. I promise it's coming soon. To hold you over, I've got some tasty Red Cabbage Slaw instead.
I happen to love slaw of all types. Even the mayo based ones. I was intrigued by this lime vinegrette based slaw. And obviously, since it's purple, I had to include it in my 1000th Post Party. This slaw has a great crunch and a summery flavor from the cilantro and lime. I will definitely be making this again over the summer for a cookout.
One Year Ago: Homemade Peeps
Four Years Ago: Plum Rolls (Zwetschgenschnecken)
Red Cabbage Slaw with Lime Dressing
Yield: Serves 8
1 head red cabbage, cored
6 oz carrots, peeled and shredded
1 large bunch cilantro, leaves roughly chopped
3 limes, juiced (about 1/3 cup)
2/3 cup neutral oil, such as peanut or safflower
1 to 2 tsp sugar
Kosher salt and freshly ground pepper
Shred the cabbage finely in using a chef's knife, a mandoline, or a food processor's shredding blad. In a very large bowl, toss together the shredded cabbage with the shredded carrots and chopped cilantro.
Whisk the lime juice and oil together in a bowl or measuring cup, and whisk in the sugar. Toss with the slaw, and season generously with salt and pepper (it may need more than you think it will at first, and this salad definitely needs its salt!).
Best served within a day or two, cold from the fridge, but you can refrigerate it for up to 3 days or until it loses its crispness.
Recipe adapted from The Kitchn
3 Responses to "Turnip Puff"
This sounds great! And I really can't imagine you heating up frozen mashed turnip… you know you can make it just like mashed poatoes? That's one of my favorite dishes at Thanksgiving because I really only have it that one time each year.
Ah yes the turnip dish! when we get our giant 4lb heirloom next year, this is the dish to make!!
I have to try this…I didn't know this recipe…thank you!!Ciao Flavia


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L.A. comes of age with opera giant
The City of Angels readies Wagner's mythic Ring Cycle for 2010 festival.
| Los Angeles
Standing in the darkened wings of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, where the Los Angeles Opera is readying its upcoming production of "Das Rheingold," it's easy to feel the vastness of a Wagner opera. As the dress rehearsal progresses, singers bustle on and offstage in outsized, wildly decorated costumes.
The stage, raked up to nearly 11 feet, looms over the performers. And an 80-foot scrim spans the front of the stage to allow such startling effects as a sheer wall of blood to slowly wash down from the ceiling.
Then, of course, there's the music, 14 hours in the four operas that comprise Wagner's masterwork known as the Ring Cycle. The company plans to present the entire quartet over the next 14 months in preparation for "Ring Festival L.A.," a two-and-a-half-month, citywide Wagner-themed celebration involving more than 50 arts and cultural organizations.
The company's general director, Placido Domingo, calls the $32 million Ring Cycle "audacious." City leaders and opera watchers say the festival – the first of its kind – is an important moment for the nation's second-largest city. "L.A. has come of age when it comes to the arts," says L.A. County supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky. "We couldn't ask for a better way to punctuate the last decade."
Says OPERA America president Marc Scorca, "L.A. has made great strides in the past two decades in becoming a major cultural center of gravity, and this ring festival adds substance to that."
No doubt, Richard Wagner himself would have appreciated the scale of these giddy pronouncements. His own music has been called one of the pinnacles of Western culture and a definitive launchpad for 20th-century classical music – not to mention popular entertainment.
"It is nearly impossible to overestimate the impact of Wagner's operas on Western culture," says Ralph Locke, professor of musicology at the University of Rochester's Eastman School of Music. Wagner's extensive exploration of musical motifs in connection with action unfolding on stage, as well as his expansion of orchestral sounds that paved the way for modern tonal pioneers, influenced composers around the world, Mr. Locke says. Beyond that, his ideas have influenced film scores from their earliest silent-film days, when accompanists often overplayed the relationship between the music and the film action. Look no further than the film version of "The Lord of the Rings," he adds, for further evidence of Wagnerian influence. "The film's composer, Howard Shore, uses highly characterized themes and colors for the different characters and their temptations and travails."
There is no worldwide shortage of Wagner operas. New York's Metropolitan Opera regularly presents the whole work, and Seattle Opera will mount a Ring Cycle this summer. But the arrival of a new version always causes a stir among the global fan base, an occasionally over-the-top group of passionate Wagner followers who travel the world to take in the latest rendition.
Indeed, while festival organizers clearly hope to educate the locals, it is the economic potential of this international fan base they hope to exploit. Local philanthropist and relentless hometown cheerleader Eli Broad donated $6 million in seed money for the Ring Cycle and hopes to tap into this tourism bonanza. In conjunction with the Los Angeles Economic Development Corporation, his own foundation conducted a study several years ago which suggested that if the 2.5 million cultural tourists visiting L.A. annually doubled, the region would gain 10,000 new jobs, $55 million in tax revenues, and an overall $1 billion in economic impact. "L.A. is one of the world's great cultural centers," says Mr. Broad. "This festival has the potential of introducing L.A. to the rest of the world."
No arm-twisting is necessary for Colorado minister and composer Chris Mohr. He is a former "Ring leader" in his local Wagner Society, a phrase he coined for his own passionate commitment. He and his wife like to get a "Ring fix" every seven or eight years, he says. "We already have our tickets for Los Angeles."
Retired Tennessee farmer and journalist Jim Leeson says he would make the trip if he could still travel. In his heyday, he says, he twice made the pilgrimage to the Bayreuth Festival in Germany, the one designed by Wagner himself. He describes the experience of entering the Wagner-conceived opera house in reverential tones.
"They sent us down these rows of seats with no aisles, then the huge side doors shut with a whoosh and they slid these huge curtains over them to block any light," he says. "Then the music began to come from an orchestra that you couldn't see because it's buried under the stage. It's really dramatic, like entering a whole other world."
While the L.A. Opera resides in the 45-year-old multiuse pavilion, music director James Conlon hopes to capture that transformational sense. The orchestra pit will be covered, as it is in the Bayreuth Festival house. The production design is not anchored in any specific time or place, but hews closely to what Mr. Conlon calls the composer's original desire to create a world of classic, mythic power on the scale of the great legends. "Timelessness is not just a component of Wagner's intentions," he says, "but integral to its essence."
Whether in mythic or everyday terms, the Ring Cycle is like no other opera to produce, says Seattle Opera general director Speight Jenkins. The sheer scale of the undertaking means, "things happen that just don't happen with other operas," Mr. Jenkins says. He recalls the flying Rhinemaidens in his "Das Rheingold" production. One of the singers had eaten some bad seafood and simply couldn't mount the flying harness for the debut of the first opera. After a last-minute scramble, the company's assistant director gamely substituted herself in the aerial contraption while the singer sang the role from behind the scenes.
The venture is financially and artistically ambitious for any opera company, says Michael Steinberg, director of the Cogut Center for the Humanities at Brown University in Providence, R.I. "It's not only a great work of art," he says, "but it is disruptive, psychologically important, and even potentially dangerous." Indeed, in Israel public performances of Wagner are still unofficially banned because of the close association between his music and Hitler's Nazi Germany. But, says Mr. Steinberg, the work transcends the politics of any period.
A major production of the Ring Cycle is long overdue for a city of L.A.'s size and importance, Conlon says. He expects the experience to stretch every muscle the company has, from orchestra to singers and stagecraft. "But when it's over," he adds, "everything else will seem easy."


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- Low beds are a good height to sleep on. Price includes one FREE Cilek Star bonnell spring mattress, but you can request to remove the mattress for -$100 per bed, or upgrade to another mattress at the price difference.
- Yakut is a bold and classy blend of dark pink and white, which makes the furniture stands out in its own right.
- All Cilek products are made in Turkey and come with 2 years warranty unless otherwise stated. Wooden products are made of MDF board with extra strengthening full piece wood, adhering to the highest EU safety standards for your loved ones.


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This morning at a very small press conference in Kansas City at the National Genealogical Society annual conference we made a very large announcement.
In fact, we announced something that I have personally hoped for and dreamed of for more than a decade.
Today we announced a partnership between FamilySearch and FamilyLink.com to publish the Family History Library Catalog — the largest single database of genealogy sources in the world — in Web 2.0 fashion.
This means that individual genealogists, librarians, archivists, and others from around the world will be able, when the Catalog 2.0 comes online in the coming months, to enhance and extend the value of the catalog. Users will be able to add new sources that are currently in the library catalog, and thus extend its scope of coverage. They will be able to improve the source descriptions, and even rate and review sources as to their usefulness.
Whenever a source listed in the catalog has been digitized, and exists somewhere online, there will be links created to the digital version by users or through automation technology that FamilyLink.com will utilize.
The catalog lists millions of sources from more than a hundred countries, including more than 2 million rolls of microfilm. About.com genealogy guide Kimberly Powell calls it the "gem of the Family History Library," and "the best resource on the FamilySearch web site."
The Genealogical Society of Utah has been microfilming valuable records from all over the world since 1939. The catalog lists all of these films, and organizes them by locality and record type. Some of the records that have been filmed have since been destroyed by war or accident, and so the films become the only surviving copy of the valuable records. And the films themselves are preserved in the famous Granite Mountain Vault.
The catalog also lists books, periodicals, maps, and all kinds of other holdings in the world's largest family history library (in Salt Lake City) that would otherwise be unknown and unused.
As I said earlier, I have wanted to work with the catalog for more than a decade. I think it is one of the most valuable tools in the world for family history, and I think it can become more accessible and more useful to millions of people worldwide, who don't yet know that it exists or how to best use it.
When we founded Ancestry.com in 1996-97, our vision was to digitize the genealogical records in all nations and make them available online. We saw the catalog playing a key role in that vision.
I had started a Masters Degree program at BYU in Library Science back in 1990 (although I had to drop out early to focus on my electronic publishing business.) I have a great respect for libraries and library science. After all, the accessibility to most of the world's information, prior to the internet, came because of the organizational skills and care of libraries and archives around the world.
I had also watched as the founders of Yahoo began to turn an online classification system for web sites into a multi-billion dollar company. Until Google came along, Yahoo was the most valuable of all web sites. Why? Because it catalogued all the rest. It could be the starting point for all queries, even before search had been perfected, when browsing was one of the dominant activities on the web.
We made several attempts over the years to see if we might be able to license and publish the catalog. But the timing must not have been right. Until Web 2.0 and social networking came on the scene, I'm not sure what value we would have been able to add to it, so our attempts were not successful.
But today, I'm overjoyed that my new company, FamilyLink.com, will have the privilege of working with this precious asset in partnership with FamilySearch, to develop the next generation version of the catalog, that will become more comprehensive, more open, more accurate, and provide more intelligent, algorithmic guidance to sources for family historians worldwide.
Since only a tiny fraction of the known genealogical content in the world is in digital format today, the catalog serves an incredibly valuable purpose, directing researchers to offline sources including microfirms that contain the answers they are looking for. (And those microfilms can be accessed from over 4,500 family history centers around the world, for a very small fee.)
As more and more sources become transcribed or digitized, the catalog will directly link to the online version, whether they exist on Ancestry.com, WorldVitalRecords.com, FamilySearch.org, Footnote.com, NEHGS.org, or on Google Books, Microsoft Live Books, USGenWeb, WorldGenWeb, or other web sites, saving researchers countless time.
The new catalog, which will be available via both FamilyLink.com and FamilySearch.org in the future, may become the single best starting point for family history searches, the way Yahoo used to be the best place to find any web site, and may help any researcher quickly see which sources will help the most, and which other researchers have used those sources previously.
This project will bring the "wisdom of the crowds" to genealogy in a way that has never been possible before, showing which of the sources for any locality in the world ought to be consulted, and in what order.
I want to thank everyone who made this announcement possible, including those who have worked on the catalog for many years to make it the wonderful resource that it already is, and those who have been designing the next version of it, as well as the decision makers at FamilySearch who believe with us in what is possible for this catalog.
In addition to what has been described above, how would you like to see the catalog enhanced? What would make it most useful to you personally, or to your institution?
As always, I welcome your comments and feedback.


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Long check-in lines and distances between gates were the top factors that make airports stressful, according to a new study.
A study released Wednesday by KRC Research on behalf of Concur, a provider of travel and expense management solutions, ranked the 16 most stressful U.S. airports based on interviews with 1,500 business travelers. The survey also revealed that availability of electrical outlets and Wi-Fi are important factors among road warriors.
So which airport ranked most stressful — and most hassle-free?
Most Stressful U.S. Airports
Here's the list of the most stressful U.S. airports according to business travelers:
- Chicago O'Hare International Airport
- Los Angeles International Airport
- John F. Kennedy International Airport
- Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport
- New York's LaGuardia Airport
- Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport
- Newark Liberty International Airport
- George Bush Houston Intercontinental Airport
- San Francisco International Airport
- Miami International Airport
- Washington Dulles International Airport
- Charlotte/Douglas International Airport
- Philadelphia International Airport
- Orlando International Airport
- Boston Logan International Airport
- Las Vegas McCarran International Airport
Not surprisingly the most stressful locations — including Chicago O'Hare and Los Angeles International Airport — will be among the busiest next week during the peak Thanksgiving holiday travel period. (Read more: Which Airports Will Be Busiest This Thanksgiving?)
Stress-Inducing Factors
The majority of respondents (56 percent) found the vast distance between gates and terminals to be the biggest challenge at Chicago O'Hare, while nearly half (49 percent) agreed John F. Kennedy International Airport presents some of the longest lines.
Other factors that contribute to airport stress included:
- Confusing airport signs (28 percent)
- Poor service from airport staff (28 percent)
- Not enough or crowded bathrooms (19 percent)
- Poor Wi-Fi coverage (19 percent)
- Insufficient amount of electrical outlets (18 percent)
On the positive side, business travelers named Dallas-Fort Worth as the most hassle-free airport thanks to clear signage (42 percent), good Wi-Fi coverage (41 percent) and a variety of quality food options (41 percent).
For more results and tips to help sooth airport stress, click here.


text: RnB star Ella Mai sextape porn blowjob sucking dick & nude photos inside a car leaks online. Shes is making the headlines today when a video leaked showing her sucking the soul out of some random man. People all over social media are applauding Ella Mai's head game. Check the video out and tell us what you think. Maybe this is who Ella Mai was singing Boo'd Up to because she is going in.


text:
Aug. 7, 2012 -- Capt. Hank Hughes, a decorated platoon leader, served twice in Afghanistan but now has left the military to find a new career. Many others are doing the same: Last year 180,000 troops retired from the military, and this year that number is expected to increase to 300,000.
"You return home in a bit of a time machine," Hughes told ABC News. "Everyone else has moved on, and you've just arrived."
Since he was a kid, Hughes dreamed of becoming a filmmaker. Growing up, Hughes' favorite movies were "Star Wars" and "Indiana Jones."
Click Here for More Information About Standing Up for Heroes
In college he majored in film but put his dreams on hold for his country. Now, back at home, he's studying to become a director. Hughes says his dream is to make movies for the rest of his life.
As part of the series "Standing Up for Heroes," ABC News worked to find Hughes a mentor who could guide him along his new path.
And help came from an American movie legend, the man who created the movies Hughes had admired and adored since childhood: George Lucas.
"These guys are heroes, and we need to help them," Lucas told ABC News.
Join the Veteran Mentor Network on LinkedIn
During their first meeting, Lucas started right in with the lessons.
"The first thing you do is come up with an idea," Lucas told Hughes. "The secret of directing is to be persistent."
Most important, Lucas explains, is to enjoy the work you are doing.
Lucas even revealed new details to Hughes about the original "Star Wars" films.
"It wasn't done as a trilogy, it was really done as one movie," Lucas told Hughes. "The script was like 250 pages, and I couldn't crush it down ... so I cut it in three pieces and then it became a sequel."
Hughes described the first meeting with his mentor as "unbelievable."
"It's amazing that George Lucas would ... take that time out of his day to talk to me just because I was a veteran," he said. "I don't know if I could articulate an equal to his action in gratitude. It's fantastic."
The two will meet again in September so that Hughes can show Lucas the movie he is working on in film school. And just like Yoda and Luke Skywalker, their relationship will go on.


text:
Thanks to the scanning services of Penn's Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text and Image (SCETI), and a loan of over a dozen volumes from Stanford University Libraries, we have now posted online records of copyright renewals for drama (and works intended for oral delivery) up to 1968. They can be found in page image form at our Catalog of Copyright Entries information page.
We've had copyright renewals for normal books, and periodicals, online for some years now. But we've been missing renewal records for one important type of literary text: the kind primarily meant for performing or proclaiming, rather than reading. And it turns out that copyright renewal records for works that aren't books are harder to find than you'd expect: I could find no copies at all in the Philadelphia area for the years 1955-1968. So I'm grateful to Stanford for the loan of their volumes. There are still a few more years of drama renewals left to digitize, but I'm hoping to find the later volumes in local libraries.
So far, we've only posted page images. But I'm hoping that they'll help people to make transcriptions and structured data records, as has been done with earlier page images we've posted. I've tried to post easily readable but not-too-big copies of the pages online, to support manual searching and OCR. Folks who need to see the masters, which have higher resolution but are substantially larger, can contact me.
Because Google is also starting to post original copyright registrations, it's also possible to correlate renewals with original registrations, and look for interesting statistical phenomena and trends. Already, for instance, one can see both that most copyrights were not renewed, and that the renewal rate can vary a lot by genre. For instance, in 1931, there were 552 "Class C" copyright registrations, covering lectures, sermons, addresses, and other works prepared for oral delivery. (See page 1659 of this volume.) There were also 5,993 drama registrations ("Class D"; see page 406 of this volume). In 1959, around the time these copyrights were up for renewal, there were 780 Class D renewals, a renewal rate of about 13%. There was only 1 Class C renewal in 1959, a renewal rate of well under 1%. (A few previous years have slightly higher Class C renewal rates, but not by much.)
After I get through with drama, there's one more class of renewal I'd like to see online as soon as possible: image renewals. Only a few years worth of image renewals (from the early 1950s) are online, but what's there suggests that the renewal rate for most published images was also quite low. Since a large number of books and periodicals include images of one kind or another, knowing which images are still under copyright will be very important for folks who want to look at complete facsimiles of older works.
The proposed Google Books settlement, for instance, proposes blanking out anything in a book that might be an image (unless rights for that image have been cleared). This could make many books substantially less useful than they would be if the images were cleared (especially since Google's processing algorithms have to guess where images are, and may blank out not only images, but also text that can't be easily auto-recognized.)
In the meantime, the drama renewals just posted will also help me look into some requests I've received for mid-20th-century plays and speeches whose status I've been unable to determine previously. I hope it will prove useful for others as well. Thanks again to SCETI and Stanford for these.


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Banana skin joke
Modern man. He walks with confidence. He wears shoes. He never slips.
The banana is his nemesis.
The original:
A man walks down a street, slips on a banana skin and falls over. That's it. The pure form. It might not seem like much in today's laser-powered world of comedy, but when it first appeared in 1913 it was the funniest thing on the music hall scene. It easily beat Jugs Mahony's Spoon Dance and it fended off strong competition from The Singing Duck of Dresden. Today, it lives on in collective memory as an example of primitive early humor, sort of like Benny Hill does, but less frightening.
The French Version:
A woman, in high heels, with a poodle called "Oui Oui", walks down the street, slips on a banana skin and falls over revealing a shocking degree of ankle in the process.
This version was very popular in France for a while before it was banned by Charles de Gaulle because it gave him cramps
The Leningrad Twist:
A man walks down a street and very nearly collides with a lamp post, but just avoids it and turns to the audience with knowing wink. Then he slips on a banana skin and falls over.
When this version was first performed in Leningrad in 1931 it provoked riots and death threats against its neo-realist author, Mikhail Kataev Vassily Nikolaevich Alekseyevich Tsveteava Mandelstam. The addition of the lamp post, it was felt, was an insult to the purity of the Soviet nation. The Russians like their jokes simple, short and with a dash of vodka. In fact, a lot of vodka. Russian comedy generally involves several gallons of vodka, since people will laugh at even Russian comedy when they are drunk enough.
Project Cobain:
A man is eating a banana. He throws away the skin and then slips on it, thus becoming the master of his own downfall in an ironic and amusing fashion. More amusing than, for instance, shooting himself in the head.
Deep inside a bunker in Arizona, in the 1950s, a team of American humorologists were assigned the task of beating the supremacy that the Russians enjoyed with the Leningrad Twist. They came up with the novel idea of making the man be eating the banana. This emphasises the freedom of the individual for which America is justly proud. In America, if a man wants to slip up on his own banana, he is at liberty to do so and without risk of constant electro-convulsive political re-education.
The Benny Hill
A man is chased at high speed all around some fields, over mountains, past streams, down roads, through a kitchen and past the post office by a lot of semi-naked women, to the sound of Yakety Sax. The man hides behind a tree. All the women run past. He comes out from his hiding place, runs away, slips on a banana skin and falls over.
Benny Hill's version of the joke. Benny Hill has brought happiness to millions, none of which can be contacted.
The Shaftsbury Stalemate:
A man, who happens to be - and this is important - the head of the International Organization for Banana Safety, is walking down the street, eating a banana. Forgetting himself for a moment, he throws away the skin, which bounces off the side of a rubbish bin onto the pavement. The man then slips on it and falls over ironically.
Recorded for Saturday Night Live but never used. Steve Martin played the banana.
The Sorrowful Wife:
The head of the International Organization for Banana Safety tells his wife:
Darling, whatever you give me for lunch tomorrow, please, under no circumstances give me a banana. For I am the head of the International Organization for Banana safety, and imagine what they'd say on the news if I was eating a banana in the street and then I slipped on the peel. My career would be in ruins and we could never give our children a private education in assorted fruit dangers. So, absolutely no bananas ok? Not even a little one.
But his wife forgets and packs him a particularly delicious looking banana. The next day, he's walking to work and he opens his lunch box and sees the banana, which looks so nice, plump, yellow and somehow yielding, that he decides to risk it. Then he slips on the peel and falls over. A small group of woodland creatures applauds.
Popular songsmith Nick Cave recorded this joke as a song but he removed all references to woodland creatures and bananas and added a whole bunch of EVIL.
The Alien Intervention:
The head of the International Organization for Banana Safety tells his wife:
Darling, yesterday I fell over when I slipped on a banana skin. That's the second time in two days. I had to buy the silence of a small group of woodland creatures and now I'm in a Nick Cave song, so please, please, I am begging you, please, whatever you give me for lunch tomorrow, please, under no circumstances give me a banana, no matter how delicious it looks. Or even any banana related substitute. I just can't take the risk. I also like oranges.
His wife hears him, but then she's trapped, because a group of aliens, which happen to be shaped exactly like bananas, have kidnapped the cat. They're depending on her to smuggle one of them into the headquarters of the International Organization for Banana Safety, so they can tell the world about the dangers bananas also have to face on the planet Venus. So she absolutely has to give her husband a banana, no matter what he says, or the cat gets peeled. So she smuggles one into his lunch box while he's watching Fox News.
Then, on his way to work, he's feeling a bit peckish and he opens the lunch box and he thinks
...flipping heck, another damned banana, will my cravings never be satisfied?
Just as he peels the 'banana' he hears this tiny little scream and a voice telling him that the government of Venus is going to get him for this, and he is so shocked that he drops the peel and slips on it and lands face first on the pavement, right in front of all these cameras from Fox News, who just happened to be filming the building behind him, where he works, for their special report: How the world was made safe from banana accidents. The scene is replayed again and again on TV sets all over the world and everyone laughs and discusses corruption in serious tones.
And then, suddenly, all these Venusian ships appear in the sky and fire lasers into major cities and these massive tidal waves sweep the globe until there is nothing left but water. Nothing but water all over the globe, except there is this one surviving banana left on it, and as it floats past, it waves to the camera, grins, and says
Boy, am I glad I learned to swim!
...Ah, the old ones, eh?
See also
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|Featured version: 25 May 2006
|This article has been featured on the main page. — You can vote for or nominate your favourite articles at Uncyclopedia:VFH.


text:
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text:
Jeb Bush's Bold Move on Taxes
His embrace of the deficit reduction deal puts him at odds with almost all of the Republican primary candidates.
Last summer, when the Republican primary candidates, every one a supposed deficit hawk, declared on an Iowa debate stage that they'd all reject a deficit reduction plan even if its spending cuts were ten times bigger than its tax hikes, National Review's Kevin Williamson incredulously avowed that "if Congress wanted to get rid of tax exemptions and exclusions amounting to $100 billion in new taxes in exchange for $1 trillion in cuts, and Republicans turned the deal down, I would personally drive down to Washington and pelt them with rotten vegetables, and possibly with rocks. $100 billion in new taxes plus $1 trillion in cuts balances the budget in 2012."
The moment stands out as the strongest evidence available for commentators like me who think that, like Howard Jarvis and Grover Norquist, the GOP remains a party that cares more about tax cuts than deficits, and that a Republican majority is unlikely to balance the federal budget. Only Jon Huntsman, widely dismissed by the GOP base, has since said his answer was a mistake. But there is one prominent Republican speaking up in favor of the hypothetical deal.
Meet former Florida governor Jeb Bush, whose political prospects are uncertain due to a sibling who sullied his family's name. Bush has already endorsed Mitt Romney in Election 2012, and now says he hopes the former Massachusetts governor would take a hypothetical 10-to-1 deficit reduction deal in real life, even though he said he wouldn't do so during the GOP primary debates. Bush quickly went on to explain that he doesn't favor raising tax rates, just cutting deductions. (His father once got in trouble for prioritizing balanced budgets over taxes.)


text:
As the USCCB's Fortnight for Freedom continues, we take an alternative track here. I've been promising more voices, and today, guest blogger Fran Rossi Szpylczyn contributes a stirring testimony for a stirring woman of our times. You can find more of Fran's work at her personal blog, There Will Be Bread and also at The Parish Blog of St. Edward the Confessor.
No review of worthy women of our Church can exclude the woman who would not be excluded at any cost – Sister Thea Bowman, FSPA. As a woman religious who stated that she wanted to "go home like a shooting star," she also lived that way; her life was like a blazing tale of God's glory, against the sky of her life.
Born to a teacher and a doctor in Yazoo City, Mississippi on December 29, 1937 and named Bertha Bowman, she was reared as a Methodist in Canton, Mississippi. Her beginnings were humble but noble, given that her grandparents were slaves. An only child who was extremely bright. At the age of 9 asked about becoming Catholic, which her parents agreed to. Bertha's, (soon to be Thea's) vocation began like the birth of a star, with various elements coming together to create a unique light.
At the age of 15, she moved to LaCrosse, Wisconsin, home of the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration, to begin her novitiate. These sisters were here teachers in Mississippi, and she was profoundly influenced by them. As the only African-American in her community, Thea encountered challenges in retaining her own cultural identity, which for her, was at the heart of who she was as a child of God.
Gifted in many ways, Thea excelled in her studies and earned a PhD in Linguistics and English Literature from the Catholic University of America. In 1989, she also received a Doctor of Religion from Boston College. Her work as a woman religious found her in the classroom where she generously shared her knowledge, along with God's love, with great joy. Having taught elementary, secondary and ultimately university level students, Sister Thea illuminated many minds through her work as a teacher and professor.
At the core of her vocation was a fiery passion for unity and justice. Breaking down barriers and inviting all to live in one in Christ was her focus, above all else. Sister Thea had an enormous drive to communicate Christ across barriers, no matter what the cost. If she could facilitate bringing people together through and in God, that is what she would do.
Eventually Sister Thea was asked to become the consultant for Intercultural Awareness in the Diocese of Jackson, Mississippi. This was a role in which she flourished by breaking down barriers at home and afar, by bringing people together. Sister Thea often made over 100 speaking appearances a yer. Her gift to shine light in dark places, and to reveal Christ as unifier and redeemer was realized in many ways. She was undaunted by challenge, and always pushed forth by her beloved Jesus.
Thea was also passionate about the revelation of African roots and the impact of those roots in the Church. For Thea, inclusion was not negotiable and recognition of how we are all created in God's image was essential.
In 1984 Thea's parents died and then she was diagnosed with cancer. When confronted with this disease her response was typical of her resolve, as she said she would "live until I die." And live she did, for several more years. Thea kept going, making her final years, burn with the brightest fire.
In 1987, Mike Wallace interviewed her for 60 Minutes. Reminding us that we all have something to give, she told Wallace, "I think the difference between me and some other people is that I am content to do my little bit. Sometimes people think they have to do big things in order to make change. If each one of us would light the candle, we've got a tremendous light."
In June of 1989, the US Bishops were meeting and they asked Sister Thea to address them on the meaning of being black and Catholic. It was here that she began a 30 minute address by asking what it meant to be black and Catholic out loud and replying to herself, and the bishops, by belting out, "Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child." It is worth noting that as she was introduced, the bishop introducing her joked that she was on 60 Minutes and not because she was the subject of a "criminal investigation." Hearing those words from a bishop at this time made me wince with discomfort!
Sister Thea then launched into a wide ranging talk, filled with her signature passion, and all delivered from her position in a wheelchair. If you watch the video of the talk, well worth your 32 minutes, you will see a wide range of reactions and emotions on the bishops' faces, including eyes that are welled-up with tears. At the end of the talk Sister Thea asked the bishops to cross arms and clasp hands and to join her in singing, "We Shall Overcome."
Most of the bishops appeared to follow her instructions, but some did not. Some of the bishops appeared, to my eye anyway, visibly uncomfortable, others appeared moved. The video of her talk to them is a testament to a worthy woman living a remarkable moment.
Brother Mickey O'Neill McGrath wrote about Sister Thea in "This Little Light of Mine." (The image at the top left of this post, as well as the one to the right, are from his website and are gratefully used with his permission.)
Brother Mickey often shares an anecdote about Sister Thea's meeting with the bishops. In what sounds like an astounding moment, according to what he heard from someone who was present at the meeting. Apparently as her wheelchair was being wheeled out of the hall, the bishops formed an honor guard and knelt before her as the chair passed by.
Sister Thea remained focused on a vision of strength in unity throughout her life. She would often say, "You walk together and you won't get weary. You might get tired, but you won't get weary." May her legacy be to keep us together, tired perhaps, as we continue to encounter injustice, but to never grow weary, as we walk together in Jesus' name.
Sister Thea Bowman to the US Bishops from Rocco Palmo on Vimeo.


text:
Author: Carmen Jenner
Series: Taint #1
Publisher: Self-Published
Release Date: TBA
Genre: Erotic Romance
More Info: Goodreads
Cooper Ryan is living the dream. Between the parties with rock royalty, booze, groupies and performing to crowds of thousands with his band Taint, life seems pretty sweet. There's just one thing missing: the feisty little red-head that took his baby and ran off with his heart. Throwing himself into music is the only thing keeping him sane.
Until a run-in with a nonplussed, package-wielding PA throws everything off balance.
Ali Jones is having a craptastic life. Her grandmother died, leaving her homeless, penniless, and alone, and her boyfriend left her for a tramp who takes her clothes off for money. That's why when she lands her dream job at a record company it seems like it's too good to be true.
Because it is.
Slapped with an ultimatum, Ali must decide if facing the horror of the unemployment line is a fate worse than going on the road with four rowdy rockers hell-bent on making her life misery.
He's adored by millions.
She's not even loved by her cat.
Can they ignore their hatred long enough to survive the tour from hell? Or will their chemistry force everything to come crashing down around them?


text:
I often disagree with the pro-life hardliners around the bloggernacle. But the relatively recent Florida infanticide in the news lately — according to the news stories I've seen, there is not a lot of dispute as to the facts — is something everybody should agree on.
Some readers are opposed to abortion in most or all cases, but for those who are not, the only reasonable arguments for abortion rights center around the freedom and autonomy of the mother. Once a child is delivered, there is no question. Infanticide is never acceptable.
Pro-choice progressives should be more vocal in denouncing this infanticide. It's a shame that the pro-life crowd have been the only folks complaining about this incident. Yes, some conservative commenters are using the incident to make broader critiques of abortion. But that's no reason why progressive pro-choicers should not be vocally denouncing the infanticide and calling for punishment of the doctor, as well as safeguards against this kind of thing happening again.


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Michael Frazier II a huge threat for Florida
ARLINGTON, Texas – It was 6:45 a.m. on a Saturday, more than four hours before tip-off against Mississippi, and Florida guard Michael Frazier II was in the visiting arena putting up shots.
About 400 of them.
By the time Frazier was done, he was soaked in sweat and reeking from the hour-long workout.
For him, this was the look, feel and smell of success.
Frazier's sharp-shooting prowess comes at a price. He's one of coach Billy Donovan's hardest workers, spending countless extra hours in the gym, and it's paying off big time for the top-seeded Gators (36-2).
Frazier set the school record for 3-pointers in a season with 117 and a Southeastern Conference record with 11 treys against South Carolina last month. And while Florida's four seniors are getting significant attention at the Final Four, Frazier is the one to watch against Connecticut on Saturday night.
"He's an outstanding weapon," UConn coach Kevin Ollie said Thursday. "He creates so many spacing challenges for us on the defensive end where we have to guard him. … We're going to have to make sure we communicate and talk at a (high level), so we can make sure he gets covered. Then also in transition we have to get back and locate and identify where Michael Frazier is at all times."
Many teams have tried and failed.
Frazier is shooting 45 percent from behind the arc. The sophomore from Tampa, Fla., was a staggering 10 of 15 from 3-point range in the SEC tournament, including four treys that helped beat Kentucky in the title game.
The NCAA tournament hasn't been quite as smooth.
Albany used a triangle-and-two defense to limit Frazier's looks in the opening round and Dayton had similar success guarding him in the South Region final. Frazier had several 3s rim out against Pittsburgh and finished 2 of 9 from beyond the arc. His one solid tournament game came against UCLA, which left him wide open early and often.
Frazier has made 10 of 26 shots from 3-point range in four tournament games, creating some speculation he needs to find his stroke for the Gators to win it all.
"Would I like Michael Frazier to knock down five, six, seven 3s a game? That would be great for us," Donovan said. "But sometimes the defense has something to do with that. If they are taking him away, we need to understand what else is open.
"Sometimes that is the greatest sign of respect for a player is when they try to take you out of the game. Some teams tried to do that to Michael, but we've still been able to move on and advance by doing different things."
True, but there's no question that Frazier can change games with just a few of his smooth strokes.
Donovan calls him one of the purest shooters he's been around, ranking him right up there with Lee Humphrey (2004-07). Humphrey holds the NCAA tournament record with 47 3s, hitting clutch shots that helped the Gators win back-to-back national titles in 2006 and 2007.
Frazier is just as dangerous.
He and Humphrey have two of the most consistent releases Donovan has ever coached, and both know exactly what causes every miss.
Frazier credits his success to repetition.
"On a typical game day, 350, 400 shots I try to make just so that I have a good rhythm going into the game," Frazier said. "My favorite player in the NBA is Ray Allen, and he's a great worker. But ever since I was in high school, I always liked to get into the gym early and just get a nice lather, get a good warm-up just so I'm in rhythm."
UConn vs. Florida: 3:09 p.m. (TBS)
Kentucky vs. Wisconsin: 5:49 p.m. (TBS)
Championship: 6:10 p.m. (CBS)


text:
The Barclays story is an example of what happens when an organisation's 'Core Group' turns malign
In my last post I wrote about how Art Kleiner's idea of the Core Group helped us to understand Barclay's recent history. In this post I am going to develop this idea. If Bob Diamond survived in his position despite his division breaching the rules in 1998 because he'd become a member of the Core Group, we still need to understand why. In the rest of this post I am going to go further into the history.
Patterns of behaviour
There is an important clue in Barclays' more recent history. When John Varley stepped down as Chief Executive in 2010, the bank chose to appoint Diamond as Chief Executive in the face of warnings about what that said about the bank's culture. Similar alarm bells were ringing, as seen in the exchanges with the Financial Services Authority (the letters are here), about the bank's "pattern of behaviour". The list includes the Protium deal and the 'extreme tax avoidance' scheme that fell foul of the Treasury earlier this year, and others. The rap sheet is here.
My former colleague Patrick Harris works with companies to identify 'guiding principles', the rules of thumb that make it possible for staff to understand, quickly and viscerally, the values of the company they work for. In his work, his intention is to help then 'do the right thing' for customers, or suppliers, or colleagues, rather than having to leaf through a rule book.
Misguided principles
Patrick does this work because he wants companies to work better. But what if a company's implicit guiding principles are not benign? Reading Martin Taylor's account, quoted in my earlier post, and knowing what we know about Barclays' history over the past 15 years, it is possible to imagine that Barclay's guiding principles included, "It's OK to break the rules, as long as you can justify it to the business". And that one of the reasons it took Diamond so long to resign after the LIBOR scandal was revealed – nudging the chairman out of the door first – was that it took him a while to realise that the world outside the business didn't see things that way.
Another guiding principle seems to have been, "Helping out your colleagues is more important than respecting the integrity of the banking system or looking after the interests of your customers". Or again: "The regulators are out to get you" (certainly a driving force in the lengths the bank went to to avoid a British government bail-out in 2008).
Questions of culture
When Diamond became Chief Executive, the FSA expressed concern (the whole exchange is politely British) about "setting the right culture". In his BBC lecture, given in November last year, just after the quote about culture I mentioned in the previous post, Bob Diamond says a bit more on tone and culture. It's worth quoting this in full:
Our culture must be one where the interests of customers and clients are at the very heart of every decision we make; where we all act with trust and integrity. But it's not just about how we behave towards our customers and clients. It's also about how we work together with our colleagues, because if you have to deliver for customers with 150,000 colleagues around the world, as we do, you better be able to work as a team.
I used to work in radio and television as a producer, and when you do that work you listen, carefully, to what people say. One of the things I learnt is that people's syntax always gives them away. Notice that Diamond says, "Our culture must be…". And there's a shuffle between 'customers and clients' and 'colleagues': "If you have to deliver for customers…". In case this seems obscure, other people in Diamond's place might have said "Our culture is…." and that "When you deliver for customers…"
Global seduction
So why did Barclays' culture change? The best explanation seems to be that the Board was seduced by the idea of becoming a global investment bank, and Barclays Capital, and Bob Diamond, were seen as the agents which would deliver this. And, of course, they did, partly through the acquisition of Lehman Brothers assets after the collapse of the American bank. In the process Barclays Capital become the dominant institution within Barclays, and its traders – not just Diamond – the dominant members of the Core Group, in the same way that the marketing department provides the Core Group of a consumer packaged goods company such as Proctor and Gamble.
Because of this, by 2010, when John Varley stepped down as Chief Executive, there was no alternative to Bob Diamond as his replacement, despite his lack of direct retail banking experience, and despite the signals it sent out about Barclays. And the co-head of Barclays Capital, Jerry del Missier, now resigned, became Chief Operating Officer of the bank despite having little operational experience.
Of course, bankers should have learnt by now that ruin is only two steps along the road from hubris: look at the way in which Andy Hornby wrecked the Halifax and Fred Goodwin destroyed the Royal Bank of Scotland. But perhaps they are blind to this because the step in between involves senior executives amassing huge amounts of personal wealth in salaries and bonuses.
Authority and responsibility
But while the 'blind eye' culture of the trading floor may be good at generating rewards for bankers, it is not good for the integrity of the organisation. The economist John Kay, a sharp critic of the culture of Britain's banking system, has written about this:
In his letter to Barclays staff the day before his resignation, Bob Diamond used the naval phrase "on my watch" in finally accepting responsibility for traders' behaviour during his tenure. Mr Diamond had struggled with the meaning of the phrase but eventually grasped, or was told, what it meant: that the corollary of unquestioned authority is unquestioned responsibility. …
Managers and politicians prefer to follow the maxim of T.S. Eliot's cat: "When they reach the scene of crime, Macavity's not there." On that maxim, an officer is responsible only for things of which he can be shown to have direct personal knowledge: his incentive is therefore to have formal knowledge of as little as possible. … There is a world of difference between an organisation in which you are rewarded for telling management what it needs to know and one in which you are punished for telling management what it does not wish to hear.
In a second article, where he links scandals at Barclays, BP, GSK, and RBS, he makes a broader point about the gap between corporate rationality and public expectations:
We are not interested in whether these companies made good or bad calculations. We are interested in what these incidents tell us about the values of the companies concerned.
As an aside, it is this concern about values which leads Polly Toynbee to suggest that Barclays Board members are purged from public life, on both sides of the Atlantic; the corruption of the Barclay's Core Group corrupts other Core Groups un the process.
Shocking the system
So what do we learn from this? The key for me is Kleiner's hypothetical question at the top of Part 1 of this post: "Suppose instead that all organizations are doing precisely what they're supposed to be doing?" Organisations deliver what their Core Group wants them to deliver, and people in organisations internalise a whole set of expectations about what the Core Group wants or doesn't want. The only way to change that is to change the Core Group. The question at Barclays is whether the LIBOR scandal and the senior resignations are enough of a shock to create a new Core Group. As a citizen, as someone interested in the integrity of business culture, I hope so; just as I fear it still might not be.
The reworking of the Barclays logo at the top of this post is from The Lakelander's View blog. It is used with thanks.


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Bevels - Photos
Iconic. That's the word generally associated with Ducati Bevels. Again, with this gallery I have tried to include bikes that inspire. Both original and customs because parts are hard to find and expensive but these motors are so fun to ride that they all need a way to be brought to life!Read More


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Sean Combs Gold Pendant
Sean Combs finished off his ensemble in luxe style with a couple of chunky gold pendant necklaces.
Sean Combs Square Sunglasses
Sean Combs hid behind a pair of square sunglasses as he left Chateau Marmont.
Browse: Sean Combs | Gold Pendant | Square Sunglasses
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(CNN) — A 3-year-old boy in Southern California died Wednesday after he climbed into an unlocked car on a hot summer's day and was trapped, police said.
The toddler was playing alone in the front yard of his house in Sylmar while his parents were home when he got into the car and couldn't get out, said Officer Bruce Borihanh with the Los Angeles Police Department.
Police told CNN affiliate KABC that the boy's father woke up from a nap and found the boy unresponsive. It was unclear how long the child was in the car, KABC reported.
The toddler was rushed to the hospital, but was pronounced dead.
Police are investigating, but they do not suspect any foul play, Borihanh said.
While the case of a Georgia father accused of intentionally leaving his toddler son to die in a hot car has gripped the nation this summer, the heatstroke deaths of children left inside a car are not uncommon.
At least 19 have died this year alone, according to San Francisco State University. In 2013, the number was 44. And about 625 children in the United States have died this way since 1998.
"It's reasonable to call this an epidemic," says memory expert Dr. David Diamond, a scientist at the Veterans' Hospital in Tampa, who is often consulted on such cases. "It happens, on average, once a week from spring to early fall."
Yet another child dies in a hot car; foster father arrested
Should the government step in to prevent hot car deaths?
After leaving a child in a car, 'that pain…never goes away'
"It highlights the importance … of not taking for granted where your kids are and what they might be doing," Los Angeles police Lt. Paul Vernon said.


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About 18 months ago, following a gradual slowdown in posting here at the Cocktail Chronicles, I realized that the future of this blog lay in one of two directions: either I could make a graceful bow and head for the exit after four years of intense booze-blogging; or I could pull my shit together enough to trot out a few new things in thanks to those who've been visiting the blog since the early days, and for the more recent arrivals, as well. Choosing the latter course, I inaugurated 30/30, which was just a lazy shorthand way of saying, "I'll write about 30 drinks over the course of 30 days†– a manageable yet still challenging workload, especially for someone whose enthusiasm for blogging was still barely visible in my rear-view mirror, waving forlornly in the receding distance as I headed down the metaphorical highway without it.
Well, if mid-2009 was a slowdown for the Cocktail Chronicles, late 2010 has been all but dead. It's been a couple of months since my last recipe went up, and if it weren't for a bit of enthusiasm for Audrey Saunders' and Dave Arnold's recent event in New York, it would have been total radio silence here — not that there's enough of a readership right now to really notice the quiet. But as one commenter noted on my most recent post — my ONLY recent post: "screw the rest of your life and responsibilities – get back to work on this more often to make me happy.†And as tongue-in-cheek as that was intended, it's also absolutely spot-on — this blog originated in mid-2005 as an alternative to what I had going on in my day-to-day at the time, and was designed not only for my own entertainment but for the purpose of getting good drinks into the hands of more people. Now that the Cocktail Chronicles has helped lead me into writing about drinks full time, there's no reason the blog shouldn't be a continuing part of my boozy little world, so it's time to once again show my thanks to those who keep coming around to this site by actually posting on a drink or 60.
Yes — I'm making "Thirty in 30†a double. Starting today, and continuing until — oh, hey, that's Christmas Eve! –I'll post recipes and detailed nonsense about two drinks every day, for a grand total of 60 shots of joy, wrapped into 30 posts that will more-or-less run along clear themes. In an attempt to reconcile my day-job drink-writing with my free-time booze-blogging, I'll be raiding my own back catalog to a certain extent, writing about some of the drinks I've come across while working on articles for magazines or newspapers but which I never got around to posting online. I'll also dust off a few drinks I've written up over the past few years for Serious Eats, and throw in a few recipes that have been hanging out in my notebook for months or years, that were always intended as posts but just never made it all the way. And finally, I'll be featuring a few cocktails that are more gestures of gratitude on my part than drink recipes per se, that I'm soliciting from a few Seattle bartenders who have been so incredibly patient and helpful to me over the past five or so years.
Is this some sort of gimmick? Hell yes! But why not — it was fun the first time around, mostly, and I could probably use the exercise in speed-blogging. I can't promise there'll be photos for everything, and I'll certainly not promise that they'll all be drinks you've never had – indeed, I have a few on the list that are either recently celebrated oldies or in the running for contemporary classics; obscurity isn't the goal here, quality is. One thing I can promise is that I've sampled my way through all of these drinks, and there are some genuine winners on the list.
So, enough talk – let's bring on the first round of 60/30.


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by Miško Hevery
We talked about how it is important to separate the new operators from the application logic. This separation forces your code to have factories which are responsible for wiring your application together. By separating this responsibility the tests can always wire together a subset of an application with key components replaced for friendlies making testing easier and more focused.
But lets look at a sample factory
class CarFactory { Car create() { return new Car( new EngineCompartment( new Engine(), new ManualTransmission(), new PowerSteering(), new Battery() ), new Cabin( new Door(new PowerWindow()), new Door(new PowerWindow()), new PowerSeat(), new PowerSeat() ), Arrays.asList( new Wheel(new Tire(), new Rim()), new Wheel(new Tire(), new Rim()), new Wheel(new Tire(), new Rim()), new Wheel(new Tire(), new Rim()) ) ); } }
This factory builds a car. The first thing to notice is that all of the new-operators are here (If you were to look inside each of the classes it would be devoid of "new"s). The second, is a complete lack of logic (no loops or conditions). And finally the third, your application behavior is controlled by the way the classes are wired together. If I wanted a automatic-transmission car, all we have to do is to wire the classes differently. The wiring responsibility is in the factory class not with the application logic.
However, why do we need to tell the JVM how to wire these Classes together? Is it not self obvious? After all look at the constructors of these classes:
Car(EngineCompartment ec, Cabin c, List<Wheel> ws); EngineCompartment(Engine e, Transmission t, Steering s, Battery b); Cabin(Door driverDoor, Door pasangerDoor, Seat driverSear, Seat passangerSear); Engine(float dissplacement, int pistonCount); Battery(float voltage); Door(Window window); PowerWindow() implements Window; PowerSeat() implements Seat; Wheel(Tire tire, Rim rim); ...
Imagine you could just ask for things. Lets start simple and look at the Wheel. The constructor of Wheel needs a Tire and Rim. So when we ask for a Wheel it should be self obvious that we want new Wheel(new Tire(), new Rim()). Why do we need to make this explicit in our factory? Lets build a framework from which we can ask for a class and it returns an instance of that class. So in our case if we ask for getInstance(Wheel.class) it returns instance of new Wheel(new Tire(), new Rim()). Now a framework like this is easy to build since all we need to do is look at the constructor and recursively try to instantiate the objects until all recursive constructors are satisfied.
But things are a bit more complicated than that. What if we ask for Cabing as in getInstance(Cabin.class). Well Cabin needs two Doors and two Seats, but Seat is an interface and so we have to make a decision. What subclass of Seat should we instantiate. To help our framework make that decision we will add a bind method such as bind(Seat.class, PowerSeat.class). Great now we call get(Seat.class) the framework returns new PowerSeat(). Similarly, we will have to call bind(Window.class, PowerWindow.class). Now we can call get(Cabin.class) and the framework will return new Cabin(new Door(new PowerWindow()), new Door(new PowerWindow()), new PowerSeat(), new PowerSeat()).
Notice that a closer to the root a class, the class you ask for is, the more work will the framework do for us. So ideally we just want to ask for the root object. In our case Car. Calling get(Car.class) will cause the framework to do all of the work originally in our factory.
As you can see a framework which will call the new operators on your behalf is very useful. This is because you only have to ask for the root object (in our case the Car) and the framework will build the whole object graph on your behalf. This kinds of frameworks are called Automatic Dependency Injection frameworks and there are few of them our there. Namely GUICE, PicoContainer, and Spring.
Since I know most about GUICE, The above example can be rewritten in GUICE like this:
class CarModule extends AbstractModule() { public void bind() { bind(Seat.class, PowerSeat.class); bind(Seat.class, PowerSeat.class); bind(Transmission.class, ManualTransmission.class); bind(new TypeLitteral<List<Wheel>>(){}) .toProvider(new Provider<List<Wheel>>(){ @Inject Provider<Wheel> wp; List<Wheel> get() { return Array.asList(wp.get(), wp.get(), wp.get(), wp.get()); } }); } } Injector injector; injector = GUICE.createInjector(new CarModule()); Car car = injector.getInstance(Car.class);
As you can see Automatic Dependency Injection frameworks can do a lot of things for you. Namely, that you don't have to worry about writing the factories. You simply write your application logic and ask for your dependencies in the constructor and let the framework resolve all of them for you. You move the responsibility of calling the new operator to the framework. Or to put it differently DI-framework is your new "new". Now DI-frameworks can do lot of other things, which are beyond the scope of this article, such as manage object lifetimes, enforce singletons (in a good way, see: Root Cause of Singletons and Singletons are Pathological Liars) and manage different configurations of your application such as production vs development server.
For a more real life example of a GUICE Module see: CalculatorServerModule.java


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Editor's Note: Jeanne Bishop is a criminal defense lawyer in Cook County, Illinois, and a survivor of family members murdered by a juvenile. Mark Osler is a professor of law at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota and a former federal prosecutor.
Story highlights
Jeanne Bishop, Mark Osler: Court ruling on mandatory sentences for juveniles fraught
They say people have long been divided on issue: whether to show mercy or demand justice
Court forcing discussion of how to decide which kids should be released and when, they say
Writers: It's time for both sides to set aside conflict, bring best people to table, move forward
Last week, the Supreme Court ruled that states cannot give juvenile offenders life without parole as a mandatory sentence. The 5-4 decision in Miller v. Alabama raised some hard questions. Many states now have to both address past sentences under mandatory schemes and come up with a new rule for future sentences.
Outside the court, in the real world, this decision presents for many a difficult moment on a fraught issue, one we have both been engaged with – each for our own reasons – for years. We each represent different sides of the juvenile life-without-parole debate, a conflict that has long raged among legal organizations, family groups and others.
Mark, a former prosecutor and law professor, has argued that juvenile murderers are different from others sentenced to life terms because they are unformed children at the time of the killing. In the same way that we treat children differently in many other areas because they are still developing, he believes there should be some chance for rehabilitation allowed in every juvenile case. He represents the view of many criminal law professionals who seek consistency with other areas of law: He seeks mercy.
In contrast, Jeanne, a criminal defense attorney, believes that some juveniles convicted of murder deserve life without parole. Her belief comes in part through personal experience: In 1990, a 16-year-old named David Biro killed her pregnant sister, Nancy Bishop Langert, and her husband, Richard Langert, in their townhouse in Winnetka, Illinois. He broke into her loved ones' home only to kill them; he took nothing. In advocating on this issue, she has stood with those who love someone who was killed by a juvenile – a group that bears the pain of a thousand social failures. She seeks justice.
The Supreme Court has now come down on Mark's side, at least in cases where the sentence of life without parole was mandatory. (About 80% of the 2,500 inmates who are serving life sentences for crimes committed when they were juveniles were sentenced under mandatory sentencing systems, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.) Now the question is what an alternative to juvenile life without parole should look like, particularly in states without adult parole or with restricted adult parole.
It's tricky, emotional terrain, but we must now go there. And it will not be easy. Too often, the discussion surrounding the issue has been strident. Victims' groups, such as the National Organization of Victims of Juvenile Lifers, have depicted some advocates for juveniles as callous to the trauma of victims. Some opponents of juvenile life sentences, such as Mary Ellen Johnson of the Pendulum Foundation, have characterized life without parole as pure retribution.
Neither side has made much effort to find a middle ground between justice and mercy. We need a new model, one that provides a meaningful opportunity for juveniles who have served an appropriate amount of time for taking a human life to seek release, while at the same time weighing public safety and ensuring that the voices of victims' families are sought out and heard.
And now that the Supreme Court has forced our hand, we call on those who have opposed one another to come together and talk. The important questions are not the ones behind us, but the ones in front: Who gets to decide on releasing these convicts, and when?
What notification and resources, if any, should be provided to victims' family members whose loved ones were murdered by a juvenile? How often and under what conditions should a murderer who was a juvenile at the time of his crime be able to seek release?
What should inform the decision of whether to release him?
The range of factors in making such a decision is vast: It could include observations about the juvenile made by guards and social workers in correctional facilities who come into contact with him every day; input from childhood teachers, neighbors and family members; psychological and medical information; anything that would shed light on future dangerousness.
We need at the table experts in child psychology and brain development, prison staff, counselors, academics, murder victims' family members – all important voices that have too often been left out of the process.
Other reforms should include eliminating mandatory transfers of defendants from juvenile to adult courts and shifting funds from incarceration to crime prevention programs and victims' services.
As the Supreme Court's decision reflected, juvenile life without parole strikes to the core of key definitional issues for our society: the meaning of childhood, the role of rehabilitation and redemption in criminal law, and the searing pain caused by senseless murders.
These issues have been important enough to divide us; now that the Supreme Court has ruled, they should unite us.
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The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Jeanne Bishop and Mark Osler.


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Last week, after an eight-year run, the Mahmoud Ahmadinejad show closed in New York. The final appearance at the United Nations General Assembly by the Iranian President, who will leave office after the elections next summer, reprised all the familiar numbers: anti-Israeli statements to the press; insinuations that the September 11, 2001, attacks were an inside job; a long sitdown with a TV interviewer (this time, Piers Morgan), in which he gleefully parried questions about Iran's nuclear program and the threat of an attack from Israel; and a sanctimonious speech to the General Assembly, minus those delegates who walk out or absent themselves, about the perfidy of certain powerful Western nations that arrogate to themselves the authority to police a world they have aggressed, oppressed, and immiserated.
This made for great theatre eight years ago. Now mostly just tourists turn up at the box office. It's hard to say exactly when the Ahmadinejad show jumped the shark: the year the N.Y.P.D. denied him permission to visit Ground Zero; the time he spoke at Columbia, after a lacerating introduction by the university's president; the fall of 2009, when Iranian-Americans flocked to the city to protest the bloody suppression of dissent after his contested reëlection; or last year, when he calmly announced that there were no political prisoners in Iran, just as he had told his audience at Columbia that there were no homosexuals in his country. Maybe it was when the adjective "fiery" affixed itself to just about every description of his speeches, despite their nearly identical content year after year.
To be fair, Ahmadinejad isn't the only player reading from an unchanging script. Every year, Iran is reported to be a year away from building a nuclear weapon. Every year, Israel is reported to be a year away from bombing Iranian nuclear facilities. And every year the Internet lights up with opinion pieces by knowledgeable people denouncing the coming war with Iran while proclaiming it inevitable. Come September, there is no war and no nuke, and Ahmadinejad is back in town.
And yet much has changed in Iran since Ahmadinejad took office, in 2005. He came to power as the establishment's candidate; he inherited an economy that was sick but not wasted, and a polity that was disillusioned but not completely cynical. Today, the President is an isolated figure. His relationship with the Supreme Leader has soured. Last spring, Ahmadinejad became the first Iranian President to be summoned to parliament for hostile questioning, his close allies were barred from running for office, and one of his top aides was sentenced to prison. The Leader has even toyed with the idea of abolishing the Presidency.
Ahmadinejad's economic policies stoked inflation well before the latest round of sanctions, but the current situation is far more severe. In the past year, the Iranian rial has depreciated by two hundred and fifty per cent against the dollar; official statistics put inflation at about twenty-four per cent, which means that it's probably higher; and the price of chicken has increased threefold, leading to a riot in the city of Neyshabur, and an outpouring of "chicken crisis" jokes on the Web. Under the circumstances, New York must have been a welcome respite for Ahmadinejad, and not only because of the ready availability of an affordable chicken dinner. Here he's a big man; in Tehran, he's approaching irrelevance.
The ebbing of Presidential power in Iran is one of many indicators of worsening repression under the hand of the Supreme Leader. Iran leads the world in the imprisonment of journalists; opposition leaders languish under house arrest; and even the once powerful former President Hashemi Rafsanjani has two children in Evin Prison. The week that Ahmadinejad travelled to New York, the regime cut access to Google and Gmail, in what was rumored to be the first step toward introducing a threatened national intranet, scrubbed clean of foreign influence and susceptible to total surveillance.
The United States, preoccupied with the Iranian nuclear program, has encountered firm resistance in Tehran, despite a ferocious regime of multilateral sanctions that the Obama Administration has put into effect in the past two years. An oil embargo has decreased Iranian exports by more than a million barrels a day; financial sanctions, including those on Iran's Central Bank, are even more devastating. If the goal was to inflict pain, the policy is working. No one is more apt to bear the brunt of that pain than Iran's already beleaguered middle class. If the goal was to halt the progress of the nuclear program, the policy's efficacy is less clear. The regime has never had much problem living with popular discontent, and it is not inclined to beg for mercy. Multiple rounds of talks have ended in stalemate. Proponents of the policy say to give it more time. Meanwhile, sanctions, it has been said, have a logic of their own: until they achieve their goal, they must keep intensifying. That means increased hardship for the Iranians, with no end in sight.
Critics of the sanctions point in two directions: to diplomacy without pressure or to war. If non-coercive diplomacy were ever a realistic option, it ceased to be so the minute sanctions were locked into place. But the military option is the worst by far. Eleven days before the opening of the General Assembly, a bipartisan group in New York, called the Iran Project, released a report titled "Weighing Benefits and Costs of Military Action Against Iran." The group, which is composed of thirty-two foreign-policy heavyweights who run the gamut from Richard Armitage to Anne-Marie Slaughter, persuasively argues that a sustained U.S.-Israeli bombing campaign, supplemented by cyber-attacks and covert operations, could delay the Iranian nuclear program by at most four years, and that it would do so at considerable cost to American and Israeli interests. If Israel were to act alone, it might delay the program by no more than two years. In the long run, bombardment would make the Islamic Republic all the more likely to go nuclear. Any more lasting objective—such as regime change—would require a wholesale invasion and occupation of Iran, which, according to the report's authors, would cost more in blood and treasure than have the past ten years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan combined.
Iran policy is a conundrum for the United States. Every four years, we hear otherwise—that it is only want of courage or good sense that prevents us from bringing the Islamic Republic to heel. But our options are bad, our objectives are ambiguous, and the Iranian people stand as hostages between their government and ours. The Ahmadinejad show may be over. But Groundhog Day has only just begun. ♦