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Durban, 11 December 2011 Several key and important steps forward were agreed at the UN climate convention meeting that closed today in Durban, including an agreement to negotiate a new and more inclusive treaty and the establishment of a Green Climate Fund.
But the outcome in the South African coastal city has left the world with some serious and urgent challenges if a global temperature rise is to be kept under 2° Celsius in the 21st century.
The 'Bridging the Emissions Gap' report, coordinated by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) with climate modeling centres across the globe, underlined in the run-up to Durban that the best available science indicates that greenhouse gas emissions need to peak before 2020.
It also underlined that annual global emissions need to be around 44 Gt of C02 equivalent by around that date in order to have a running chance of achieving a trajectory that halves those emissions by 2050 below 2005 levels.
The report also concluded that bridging the divide is economically and technologically do-able if nations raise their emission reduction ambitions and adopt more stringent low-carbon policies across countries and sectors.
The key question of the Durban outcome is whether what has been decided will match the science and lead to a peaking of global emissions before 2020 to maintain the world on a path to keep a temperature increase below 2° Celsius.
Achim Steiner, UN Under-Secretary-General and UNEP Executive Director, said: "The outcomes of Durban provide a welcome boost for global climate action. They reflect the growing, and in some quarters unexpected, determination of countries to act collectively. This provides a clear signal and predictability to economic planners, businesses and investors about the future of low-carbon economies. A number of specific commitments agreed in Durban also indicate that previous decisions on financing, technology and Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) are moving to implementation."
"The big question many will ask is how this will translate into actual emission reductions and by when? Whatever answer will emerge in the coming months, Durban has kept the door open for the world to respond to climate change based on science and common sense rather than political expediency," he added.
By some estimates the cost of cutting emissions will cost four times more beyond 2020 than they would cost today with the price rising over time.
By some estimates the current emissions trajectories, unless urgently reversed, could lead to a global temperature rise of 3.5° Celsius or more sometime by the end of the century.
"The Government of South Africa and the Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change should be congratulated for what has been achieved, given the low expectations in the months and weeks before Durban," added Mr. Steiner.
Today the European Union and several other countries agreed to continue the Kyoto Protocol beyond 2012 if other governments, including major emitters from developed and developing ones, agreed to negotiate a new legally binding treaty with deeper emission reductions by 2015 to come into force afterwards.
The continuation of the Kyoto Protocol during this new negotiation phase means the provisions of this existing emission reduction treaty, ranging from emissions trading to the Clean Development Mechanism, will also continue providing some benefit to the climate and the ambitions of developing economies over the near term.
Green Climate Fund, Adaptation and Technology
Durban also made progress on the decision at last year's UN climate convention meeting in Cancun, Mexico, to establish a Green Climate Fund.
The operationalization of the Green Climate Fund (GCF) is a key step forward as is reconfirmation of the commitment of mobilizing US&dollar100 billion to support developing countries by 2020.
Readiness actions in developing countries will be a vital part of helping prepare for the investments that will eventually flow from the GCF. Other steps forward included operationalizing Cancun agreements on adaptation and technology.
In Durban governments agreed to establish an Adaptation Committee and a process that will lead to the establishment of a Climate Technology Centre and Network with likely funding from the Global Environment Facility.
"The movements forward on the Cancun agreements in respect to adaptation and climate technology institutions are welcome, as is the operationalization of the Green Climate Fund. But the core question of whether more than 190 nations can cooperate in order to peak and bring down emissions to the necessary level by 2020 remains open-it is a high risk strategy for the planet and its people," said Mr. Steiner.
"Nationally many governments are acting as are companies, cities and individual citizens. In 2010, over US$210 billion was invested in renewable energy, for example. But this bottom-up approach needs a top to which it can aim-and a time line for building that top is narrowing ever year," he added.


text: Becoming a man of YHWH is something we learn and grow into. It doesn't happen over night. In fact, as long as we are alive on this side of eternity, we should be constantly becoming more like our Heavenly Father. Continually growing into a man of YHWH. In this 12th chapter of a never ending book to come, we look at the topic of Sacrifice.

subset: commoncrawl


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Caught on Camera: Marine Goes Apeshit in 'Traumatizing' Road Rage Incident
An unnamed Marine Sergeant from Camp Pendleton was filmed unleashing a torrent of threats and obscenities in the direction of a driver who allegedly rear-ended his car.
The passenger who captured footage of the incident on camera is a wounded Marine who is paralyzed from the waist down, according to 10News. The man behind the wheel is her brother and caregiver.
The two say the marine's violent temper has traumatized them, and they asked to remain anonymous.
A friend who spoke on their behalf said the accident occurred after the verbally abusive marine stopped short several times.
"He cut them off and apparently he kept brake-checking them," said the friend. "He would slam on his brakes abruptly. They hit into the back of him on the third time."
Sources with knowledge say the Marine's car sustained "minor scratches" while the truck belonging to the paralyzed Marine and her brother "needs a new bumper and grill."
After the incident was brought to the attention of Camp Pendleton officials, the Marine was detained and cited for communicating a threat.
"This individual's behavior does not meet the standards that are expected of our Marines and it has received the attention of senior base staff," a base spokesman said in a statement.
It is unclear if criminal charges will be filed. A Purple Heart recipient, the Marine is said to be suffering from PTSD and may be exhibiting signs of intermittent explosive disorder, according to one psychologist.


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Rose Miller
1904 - ?
Full Name: Rose Roberta Miller
Gender: F Nicknames: Alias:
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Birth - January 24, 1904
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© 2023 CD Key House · All Rights Reserved. www.cdkeyhouse.com · Terms & Conditions
|A unique Steam key is emailed which can be activated and downloaded with Steam enabling all acheivements. Steam Account is required to activate.
|Region Free - game key can be activated in any country, no restrictions.
Developed by Rock steady Companies, Batman Arkham City builds upon the excessive, ecological platform of Batman Arkham Asylum, providing players improving into Arkham Town, the fresh, largest and biggest security "home" for whole Gotham Town's gangsters, thugs and harebrained criminal mastermind. Set-up inside the extremely ready areas of a extensive area in the heart of Gotham City, this long anticipated series provides a brand-new story that draws together a new all star cast of traditional figures and murderous bad guys from the Batman galaxy, and also a huge selection of improved and new gaming functions to deliver the unique experience as the Dark Knight.
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Knowing whether your computer matches the requirements of a game can sometimes be tough. To help you be sure about your purchase, we suggest visiting CanYouRunIt.com*. This website will analyse your computer's hardware, and match it with the system requirements for your game of choice.
Not only does it evaluate every part of your computer, but even recommendations are given on how to improve your computer to match the requirements!
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In quite a flurry of activity this week, the Big Scary Monsters** label is to celebrate its very own existence with a rather enticing show at Rota, London, plus most importantly, a succulent sporting drama in the first ever BSM 5 a Side tournament. Naturally, DiS will be flailing its legs up and down the pitch with our very own team.
Onto the business end;
Big Scary Monsters vs Alcopop! @ _Rota, Notting Hill Arts Club, London, Saturday 7th July
4-8pm – entrance free_.
4 or 5 Magicians
BSM five a side tournament @ Linford Christie Sports Centre, NW10
Group Draw – more info here;
Group A: Tubelord, Punktastic, Get Cape Wear Cape Fly, House of Brothers
Group B: XFM, Alcopop! Records, Rock Sound, The Fly
Group C: _Vagrant/Hassle Records, Rolo Tomassi/I Was A Cub Scout, Secondsmile, _DiS
Group D: Big Scary Monsters, Meet Me In St Louis, Xtra Mile Recordings/Dartz!, Yndi Haldi
Full report next week, with photos and what not. Scary.
Current DiS squad is; _Dan Wale, Gareth Dobson, Mike Diver, Samuel Strang, Peter White _and some ringers. We're going to get mashed… we do, however, have nice Argentina-style kits. Holla!
Oh, Big Scary Monsters have a special label sampler this coming Monday. Click here for details. And see a special BSM label feature this Friday.


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I Know Who You Are and I Saw What You Did: Social Networks and the Death of Privacy
Lori Andrews
From the Publisher: Social networks are the defining cultural movement of our time, empowering us in constantly evolving ways. We can all now be reporters, alerting the world to breaking news, participating in crowd-sourced scientific research, and helping the police solve crimes. Social networks have even helped to bring down governments, but they have also greatly accelerated the erosion of our personal privacy rights. As leading expert on social networks and privacy Lori Andrews shows through ground- breaking in-depth research and a host of stunning stories of abuses, as we work and chat and shop and date (and even sometimes have sex) over the Web, we are opening ourselves up to increasingly intrusive, relentless, and anonymous surveillance—by employers, schools, lawyers, the police, and aggressive data aggregator services that compile an astonishing amount of information about us and sell it to any and all takers. But the legal system cannot be counted on to protect us—in the thousands of cases brought to trial by those whose rights have been violated, judges have most often ruled against them. That is why in addition to providing the best expert advice about protecting ourselves, Andrews pro- poses that we must all become supporters of a Constitution for the Web, which she has drafted and introduces in this book. Now is the time to join her and take action—the very future of privacy is at stake.
Legal Aspects of Managing Technology
Lee B. Burgunder
From the Publisher: This book is designed for businesspersons working with technological innovations in any field, including business, management, computer science, engineering, architecture, biology, or law. It focuses on integral technology law topics with substantial attention paid to the wide range of controversial issues regarding intellectual property rights, and coverage of all other key topics such as e-commerce, privacy, antitrust, and biotechnology. Its goal is not to make readers legal experts; rather it is too allow managers to understand the fundamental legal issues pertinent to technology management so that they can competently create strategic plans in consultation with their attorneys.
That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back
Thomas L. Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum
From the Publisher: In That Used to Be Us, Thomas L. Friedman, one of our most influential columnists, and Michael Mandelbaum, one of our leading foreign policy thinkers, offer both a wake-up call and a call to collective action. They analyze the four challenges we face—globalization, the revolution in in- formation technology, the nation's chronic deficits, and our pattern of excessive energy consumption— and spell out what we need to do now to sustain the American dream and preserve American power in the world. They explain how the end of the Cold War blinded the nation to the need to address these issues seriously, and how China's educational successes, industrial might, and technological prowess remind us of the ways in which "that used to be us." They explain how the paralysis of our political sys- tem and the erosion of key American values have made it impossible for us to carry out the policies the country urgently needs.
The Real ID Act: Privacy and Government Surveillance
William Eyre
From the Publisher: Civil society in the United States in the 21st century has seen the abandonment of American concepts of individual freedom, privacy, expression and autonomy. Eyre ex- amines the Real ID Act in this context, as an example of laws passed since September 2001 restricting civil liberties. The Real ID Act facilitates the current and future surveillance regime. Real IDs and the database(s) to which they are linked represent a de facto national ID system facilitating monitoring citizens' movements, speech and political activities when fully operational. The Real ID Act is examined as an unfunded mandate and vehicle for unconstitutional abridgement of First Amendment guarantees including political expression.
Computer Games and Virtual Worlds: a New Frontier in Intellectual Property Law
Ross A. Dannenberg … [et al.], editors.
From the Publisher: As the uses and ubiquity of video games and virtual worlds expand, the legal issues they raise grow more complex and commonplace. These issues include the traditional areas of intellectual property law, namely, copyright, trademark, patent and trade secrets, as affected by contractual issues arising from the end user licensing agreements (EULA) and terms of service (ToS) promulgated by each video game and virtual world proprietor. This book explores and discusses how to obtain these traditional rights in the non-traditional settings of video game and virtual world environments, and serves as a primer for legal practitioners researching these emerging legal issues. Each chapter addresses, in order, end user license agreements, copyrights, patents, trademarks, and trade secrets, as addressed by U.S. law. The book also includes a commentary on international legal issues stemming from the multi-national user-base and foreign operation of many virtual worlds.
Principles of Cybercrime
Jonathan Clough, Monash University, Victoria
From the Publisher: We live in a digital age. The proliferation of digital technology, and the convergence of computing and communication devices, has transformed the way in which we socialize and do business. While overwhelmingly positive, there has also been a dark side to these developments. Proving the maxim that crime follows opportunity, virtually every advance has been accompanied by a corresponding niche to be exploited for criminal purposes; so-called 'cybercrimes'. Whether it be fraud, child pornography, stalking, criminal copyright infringement or attacks on computers themselves, criminals will find ways to exploit new technology. The challenge for all countries is to ensure their criminal laws keep pace. The challenge is a global one, and much can be learned from the experience of other jurisdictions. Focusing on Australia, Canada, the UK and the US, this book provides a comprehensive analysis of the legal principles that apply to the prosecution of cybercrimes.


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GOIANIA, Brazil – MMAjunkie.com was on scene for today's official fighter weigh-ins for UFC Fight Night 32, where all 22 fighters made weight for Saturday's card.
In the main event, former UFC light heavyweight champion Vitor Belfort puts his hot streak of two straight head-kick knockouts on the line, fighting for the third straight time in his home country of Brazil. He meets former Strikeforce and two-division PRIDE champ Dan Henderson.
Both Belfort and Henderson, who are fighting at light heavyweight, came in two pounds under the division maximum at 204 pounds before engaging in a civil face-off.
The co-main event is a bout that was supposed to happen a year and a half ago in the finals of the first season of "The Ultimate Fighter: Brazil." But an injury to Daniel Sarafian took him out of that fight, and Cezar Ferreira instead fought Sergio Moraes to win the "TUF: Brazil" middleweight crown. Now the two Brazilians finally meet with Ferreira 2-0 in the UFC and Sarafian 1-1. Ferreira was 185 pounds, while Sarafian came in at 186.
And in a fight that may be considered a must-win for each fighter, light heavyweights Rafael Cavalcante and Igor Pokrajac will go at it. "Feijao," fighting in front of his home fans for the second straight time after a June loss to Thiago Silva, was 205 pounds, while Pokrajac was 204.
Friday's weigh-ins took place at Goiania Arena in Goiania, Goias, Brazil. Saturday's card takes place at the same venue with a six-fight main card on FOX Sports 1 (8 p.m. ET), while five fights on the preliminary card stream online at MMAjunkie.com (5:30 p.m. ET).
For a full rundown of the proceedings, check out our UFC Fight Night 32 weigh-in results post and check out a replay of the weigh-ins at MMAjunkie.com. Additionally, check out images of all the fighters above.
For more on UFC Fight Night 32, stay tuned to the UFC Rumors section of the site.


text:
Tips on Applying
The biggest tip we can give students looking for scholarships is to apply, apply, apply! Not everyone is awarded a scholarship right away, so don't be discouraged; persevere. Intensify your search. Keep a record of all scholarships and reapply each year.
Here are some additional tips:
Start early.
Each donor has its own deadline. Research potential donors.
Be prepared.
Write an application request letter, send for transcripts, test scores and ask for at least two letters of recommendation from people who know your educational success and potential.
Evaluate yourself.
Consider the following requirements:
- What career do you hope to pursue?
- How do your goals and ambitions relate to the implied goals of the scholarship?
- How do your qualifications compare to the requirements of the scholarship?
- What are your past successes, achievements, honors received and positions of leadership held?
- What are your abilities and potential?
- Where do you want to see yourself in five years? Ten years?
- What accomplishments and in which way would you like to be remembered?
Write to all possible donors.
Do not call. Make the letter short and to the point; identify yourself; request information and an application. Make sure to include personal contact information.
Be professional.
Present yourself professionally on the application as if you were applying for a job. Be complete, concise and clear in your responses. The application represents you to the scholarship committee.
For assistance in locating possible scholarships try the FastWeb (Financial Aid Search Through the WEB) scholarship search service.
Remember, when searching for financial assistance such as scholarships you should not pay any money. The websites we recommend are legitimate and offer free assistance in searching.


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Brisbane, Sir Thomas Makdougall
Brisbane, Sir Thomas Makdougall brĭz´bən, –bān [key], 1773–1860, British soldier, astronomer, and colonial administrator in Australia, b. Scotland. From 1793 to 1814 he served in the army in Flanders, in the West Indies, in Spain, and in Canada, rising to the rank of brigadier general. In 1821 he was appointed governor of New South Wales, where he encouraged agriculture, land reclamation, exploration, and, most important, immigration, thus stimulating the transformation of New South Wales from a dependent convict outpost into a free, self-supporting colony. He had poor financial sense, however, and was recalled in 1825. Brisbane had an observatory built (1822) at Paramatta, near Sydney, where work was done (1822–26) resulting in the
Brisbane Catalogueof 7,385 stars. After his return to Scotland, he founded an observatory at Makerstoun, where valuable observations on magnetism were started (1841); these were incorporated into three volumes in the transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He was made president of the society in 1833. The city of Brisbane and the Brisbane River in Australia were named for him.
The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright © 2023, Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.
See more Encyclopedia articles on: British and Irish History: Biographies


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OBAMA vs. POVERTY
In Anacostia in 2007, Barack Obama acknowledged that changing the odds in our cities will require humility in what we can accomplish and patience with our progress. But real change would take more than that, he said: "Most importantly, it will require the sustained commitment of the President of the United States.
By PAUL TOUGH
From the back seat of Steve Gates's white Pontiac, Monique Robbins spotted Jasmine Coleman walking home from school alone. It was an icy December afternoon on Chicago's South Side, and Jasmine's only protection against the wind was a thin purple jacket. She looked cold. Gates pulled the car over to the curb, and Robbins hollered at Jasmine to get in.
Jasmine was 16, and Robbins and Gates, who were both in their 30s, were her neighbors. All three of them lived in or around Roseland, a patch of distinctly subprime Chicago real estate that stretches from 89th Street to 115th Street, way down past the last stop on the El. Fifty years ago, Roseland was a prosperous part of Chicago, home to thousands of blue-collar workers, most of them white, employed by the South Side's many steel and manufacturing plants. But the plants closed long ago, the white residents all moved away and Roseland has become one of the worst-off parts of the city by just about every measure you can think of: unemployment rate, dropout rate, murder rate or just the barren, empty feel of the streets.
Looking out for Jasmine and young people like her in Roseland and other blighted sections of Chicago was Gates's full-time job. He worked for an organization called Youth Advocate Programs (YAP), acting as a mentor to the students in public high schools who were deemed most "at risk." I met Gates, who is a laid-back, burly guy with tight dreadlocks and penetrating pale gray eyes, in the fall of 2010, and for several months he let me watch him at work, becoming, in the process, my unofficial guide to Roseland.
Gates pulled the car up in front of Jasmine's house on Lafayette Avenue, and Jasmine ran in to fetch her brother, Damien, who was also enrolled in YAP. Their house looked small and battered. The metal gate guarding the front door was torn off its hinges, and there was a fist-size hole in the front window. Damien, a handsome 17-year-old, sauntered out to the car behind Jasmine, and the two of them piled in the back while Gates kept the car running for warmth.
"Man, it's critical in our house," Damien said with a little laugh.
"It's cold!" Jasmine said. "You go in there, you think you still outside."
Damien and Jasmine's mother had been fighting a long, losing battle with the gas company. The previous summer, after she failed to pay the heating bill, the company shut off the gas line. Now there was no heat at all, winter had arrived in force and that hole in the living-room window let in a steady stream of frigid air all night long.
Gates still lives in the house he grew up in, just a few blocks away from Damien and Jasmine's home. Things in Roseland were pretty bad when he was growing up, Gates told me, but they are much worse today, and the web of poverty that he saw kids like Damien and Jasmine caught up in, a paralyzing mix of unforgiving economic conditions, destructive social influences and shortsighted personal decisions, seemed almost impossible for them to escape. Some days, it seemed to Gates that he was making progress with the kids in YAP, but often the job felt hopeless and depressing, an unbroken cycle of hospital visits, school-expulsion hearings, court dates and funerals. It was taking a toll on his mood and his health, he told me. He and his girlfriend of 15 years had just broken up. He was smoking way too many Newports. He couldn't sleep.
One reason Gates's job was so daunting was the simple fact of the multitude of problems the students were facing. One had just been sent to boot camp for stealing a car. Jasmine's ex-boyfriend was shot and killed one night while sitting in a car in a snowstorm. A girl in YAP told me she was so angry at her mother for not protecting her from the sexual predations of a relative that she used to come to school just to find somebody to fight. "Just when you think it can't get worse, it gets worse," Gates said.
But the job was also daunting because it often seemed like such a lonely enterprise. When you're down in Roseland, it's easy to feel very far from the center of the nation's attention. The big question that Gates wrestled with every day — how do you help young people growing up in poverty to succeed? — was not too long ago a major focus of public debate in the United States. During the Johnson administration, the place to be for smart, ambitious young people in Washington was the Office of Economic Opportunity, the command center for the War on Poverty. In the 1990s, Washington once again saw a robust public discussion of poverty, much of it centered on the issue of welfare reform. But not today. It is not that poverty itself has disappeared. In 1966, at the height of the War on Poverty, the poverty rate was just under 15 percent of the population; in 2010, the most recent year for which data is available, it was 15.1 percent. And the child-poverty rate is 22 percent — substantially higher today than it was then. And yet as a political issue, especially during this presidential campaign season, poverty has receded almost to silence.
If any American president might have been expected to focus his attention on Roseland and its problems, it would be Barack Obama. The neighborhood, as it happens, played a critical role in Obama's personal and political history. As a young community organizer, he worked in Roseland and at a nearby low-rise housing project called AltgeldGardens for three years in the late 1980s; it was in these communities, Obama said in the speech announcing his presidential run, that he "received the best education I ever had." And when he finally left Roseland, for HarvardLawSchool and a political career, he did so, he said, to gain the knowledge and the resources that would allow him to eventually return and tackle the neighborhood's problems anew.
When Obama ran for president the first time, urban poverty was a major policy focus for his campaign. Senator Obama gave speeches on the issue, his campaign Web site had a dedicated poverty section with a variety of policy proposals, and in his platform, he committed his administration to "eradicating poverty," pledging that "working together, we can cut poverty in half within 10 years." But the official poverty rate has continued to rise under Obama. In May, Bob Herbert, the former New York Times Op-Ed columnist, castigated the president in the online magazine The Grio for his failure to address publicly the "catastrophe" of children growing up in urban poverty. "Barack Obama can barely bring himself to say the word 'poor,' " Herbert wrote.
The idea that Obama hasn't done much for poor Americans is simply not true; by some measures, he has done more than any other recent president. But Herbert is right that Obama has stopped talking publicly about the subject. Obama hasn't made a single speech devoted to poverty as president, and if you visit barackobama.com these days, you would be hard-pressed to find any reference to the subject whatsoever. As a result, he is missing — so far, at least — an important opportunity to change and elevate the national conversation on poverty. What we know about poverty, and specifically about its effect on children, has shifted markedly in the last few decades. New ideas are emerging from the fields of economics, neuroscience and developmental psychology. Four years ago, Barack Obama was the one politician in Washington who seemed attuned to those ideas and most concerned about addressing them. And the intellectual journey that led him to these new ways of thinking about poverty started in Roseland.
Obama arrived in Roseland in the summer of 1985 as a 23-year-old ColumbiaUniversity graduate on a quest for a sense of purpose and belonging. It was a confusing, conflicted time to be black in Chicago. The election two years earlier of Harold Washington, the city's first African-American mayor, energized black residents, but many of them were still living in poverty, and whole sections of black Chicago seemed to be turning into war zones. The dispatches that journalists like Alex Kotlowitz and Nicholas Lemann filed from the city's gigantic high-rise housing projects during Obama's time in the city are shocking even today: children crawling on the ground to avoid bullets, apartments firebombed, a prolonged gun battle between gangs in two neighboring high-rise buildings that drew not a single police car in response.
Life in Roseland in those days was not as bad as it was in the high-rise projects like Cabrini-Green and the RobertTaylorHomes, but the neighborhood was changing, and as Obama conducted fact-finding interviews with local residents, he heard again and again the anxiety and fear that those changes were producing. In his memoir, "Dreams From My Father," Obama wrote that the middle-aged, working-class African-Americans he met in Roseland expressed satisfaction at what they had achieved in life: "On the strength of two incomes, they had paid off house notes and car notes, maybe college educations for the sons or daughters whose graduation pictures filled every mantelpiece." But when they talked about the neighborhood's future, Obama wrote, "our conversations were marked by another, more ominous strain." They worried about the neighborhood's trajectory of decline, "the decaying storefronts, the aging church rolls, kids from unknown families who swaggered down the streets — loud congregations of teenage boys, teenage girls feeding potato chips to crying toddlers, the discarded wrappers tumbling down the block — all of it whispered painful truths, told them the progress they'd found was ephemeral, rooted in thin soil; that it might not even last their lifetimes," Obama wrote.
As Obama's time on the South Side progressed, he grew preoccupied by the fate of Roseland's young people, especially the teenage boys, who seemed increasingly directionless and hopeless. It was not just money they were lacking, he realized, but something deeper. As a boy, Obama spent several years in Indonesia, with a close-up view of third-world poverty, and in his memoir, Obama compared the lives of the children he saw in AltgeldGardens with the lives of the children he saw as a boy growing up in the slums of Jakarta. In many ways, Obama wrote, the Indonesian slum-dwellers had it better. "For all that poverty, there remained in their lives a discernible order," he explained. "The habits of a generation played out every day beneath the bargaining and the noise and the swirling dust. It was the absence of such coherence that made a place like Altgeld so desperate."
In the spring of 1987, Obama wrote, he began to feel that "something different was going on," on the South Side. It was a subtle shift — "a change of atmosphere, like the electricity of an approaching storm" — but to Obama, that spring brought to Roseland the "sense, shared by adults and youth alike, that some, if not most, of our boys were slipping beyond rescue."
Steve Gates turned 14 in 1987; he and his peers in Roseland were precisely the rootless and wayward young men that Obama was so concerned about. When I asked Gates about that year, he said he, too, remembered it as a dark time. "That was when crack really hit," Gates said. "And that changed things. Before crack came into our neighborhood, I never heard gunshots." Before long, Gates was carrying a gun himself. And as the violence increased, he said, families with any kind of prospects left Roseland for the suburbs south of the Chicago city limits. The families that stayed behind more often than not were the ones that were falling apart. The only reason Gates survived to adulthood, he told me, was that his mother worked extra shifts as a bus driver to put him in Catholic school and then send him off to college.
In the fall of 1987, Obama traveled to Cambridge, Mass., for a conference at HarvardDivinitySchool, and as David Maraniss recounts in his recent biography, one of the talks Obama attended was by the University of Chicago sociologist William Julius Wilson, who had just published his landmark book "The Truly Disadvantaged." There is probably no book that did more to explain the changes that were taking place in neighborhoods like Roseland. Wilson identified a major shift in American poverty at that time. Sociologists define a neighborhood as being in "extreme poverty" if 40 percent or more residents are poor, and Wilson showed that from 1970 to 1980 in the five largest American cities, the number of poor people living in extreme poverty almost tripled. That degree of concentrated poverty, Wilson wrote, was extraordinarily toxic, especially to children, and it led, in neighborhoods like Roseland, to "an exponential increase in related forms of social dislocation."
The organizing techniques in which Obama was trained increasingly seemed to him inadequate to the social ills that Roseland faced. So Obama proposed something new: a "youth-counseling network" to provide mentoring and tutoring to teenagers while working directly with their parents — a program that sounds quite a bit like YAP, in fact. But by that time, Obama had decided to apply to HarvardLawSchool.
He left Roseland with profoundly mixed feelings. He felt at times as if he were abandoning the South Side. But as he later described it in "Dreams From My Father," he was able to convince himself that going to Harvard would be a natural extension of his work on behalf of Roseland's poor. An essential tenet of community organizing is that change comes from political power; going to Harvard, Obama reasoned, was a way of getting more of it. "I would learn power's currency," Obama wrote, and then bring that knowledge "back to where it was needed, back to Roseland, back to Altgeld, bring it back like Promethean fire."
And indeed, Obama's approach to poverty as a politician was activist and innovative. Early in his presidential campaign, in July 2007, he gave an entire speech about poverty at a community center in Anacostia, a high-poverty neighborhood in southeast Washington. While Obama expressed support in the speech for some of the traditional, broad-brush Democratic antipoverty policies — raising the minimum wage, strengthening unions, expanding access to health care, improving educational opportunity — his focus was on the need for new solutions to concentrated urban poverty, which he described as "the cause that led me to a life of public service almost 25 years ago."
With a nod to the ideas of William Julius Wilson, Obama made the case that inner-city poverty is qualitatively different from other strains of poverty. "What's most overwhelming about urban poverty is that it's so difficult to escape," he said. "It's isolating, and it's everywhere." Addressing this kind of poverty was neither simple nor straightforward, Obama said. "If poverty is a disease that infects an entire community in the form of unemployment and violence, failing schools and broken homes, then we can't just treat those symptoms in isolation. We have to heal that entire community."
Obama laid out an ambitious agenda to do just that. At its center was a proposal to expand the work of Geoffrey Canada and his organization, the Harlem Children's Zone, which takes an intensive and comprehensive approach to child development in a 97-block high-poverty neighborhood in central Harlem, providing poor children with not just high-quality charter schools but also parenting programs, preschools, a medical clinic, a farmers' market, family counseling and help with college applications. (My 2008 book, "Whatever It Takes," is a profile of Canada and a history of the Children's Zone.)
"When I'm president," Obama said, "the first part of my plan to combat urban poverty will be to replicate the Harlem Children's Zone in 20 cities across the country." With a candor unusual for a presidential candidate, Obama acknowledged the high price of his program: "Now, how much will this cost?" he asked. "I'll be honest — it can't be done on the cheap. It will cost a few billion dollars a year. . . . But we will find the money to do this because we can't afford not to."
Looking back at the Anacostia speech today, what is striking about Obama's proposal, beyond its size and scope, was that he didn't conceive of it as just one more federal spending program. It was, instead, something more potentially disruptive: a thorough overhaul of existing federal aid to inner cities, a blueprint for a more coordinated, more effective, more responsive way to direct the often haphazard flow of government money into urban neighborhoods devastated by the multiple effects of concentrated poverty. It represented a break from the past: a new way of doing things in neighborhoods like Roseland.
As president, Obama has followed a very different path from the one he described in Anacostia. The Promise Neighborhoods program exists, but it is a small item tucked away in the discretionary budget of the Department of Education. Rather than devoting "a few billion dollars a year," his administration has spent a total of $40 million on the program in the last three years, with another $60 million in grants going out to community groups later this year. A few other initiatives have focused on concentrated urban poverty, but they are mostly small and scattered. Instead, the antipoverty path that Obama has pursued looks more like a traditional Great Society Democratic approach: his administration has spent billions of dollars on direct aid to poor people, mostly working-poor families.
The reason for this shift in priorities, according to people in the Obama administration, was the economic crisis they inherited. As David Axelrod, Obama's former senior adviser and current chief campaign strategist, described it to me, "We were essentially an economic triage unit, trying to prevent the country from sliding into a second Great Depression." The president's economic team during the transition was staffed mostly with centrist economists — Lawrence Summers, Tim Geithner, Jason Furman — but one of their top priorities, early on, was to send aid to poor people. A central tenet of Keynesian stimulus spending is that in an economic crisis, you try to get as much money as quickly as possible into the hands of people who will spend it right away, and the less money people have, the more likely they are to spend every dollar they receive from the government. The previous summer, Mark Zandi, the chief economist for Moody's Analytics, who was serving, at the time, as an adviser to the McCain campaign, testified before Congress on the need for an aggressive stimulus program. In his testimony, he included a handy chart, based on his own algorithm, that listed the "Bang for the Buck" that various stimulus measures would provide. According to Zandi's calculations, aid that went to wealthier Americans would not be very effective as stimulus: for every dollar that Congress cut from corporate taxes, the G.D.P. would gain 30 cents; making the Bush tax cuts permanent would boost it by 29 cents for every dollar added to the deficit.
Stimulus measures that gave money to poor and distressed families, on the other hand, would be much more productive: extending unemployment-insurance benefits would boost G.D.P. by $1.64 for every dollar spent. And at the top of Zandi's list was a temporary boost in the food-stamp program, which he calculated would produce $1.73 in G.D.P. gains for every dollar spent.
Jared Bernstein, who was Joe Biden's main economic adviser during the financial crisis, told me that Zandi's chart was taken very seriously by the economic team. "Everyone was carrying around this list of multipliers," Bernstein said. "And food stamps was always at the top. That had the largest multiplier." (Almost four years later, Bernstein still had the food-stamp multiplier committed to memory.)
Jason Furman, who is now the deputy director of the National Economic Council, was the subject of an outpouring of liberal outrage when he became the economic-policy director for the Obama campaign in the summer of 2008. (His critics mainly objected to positive statements he made about Wal-Mart and other multinational corporations.) But it was Furman who, in the early days of the transition, called Robert Greenstein, the head of the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, to ask for a wish list of possible stimulus-spending initiatives for the poor. Greenstein told me that he and his colleagues drew up a long memo detailing different antipoverty programs that the White House might want to finance, and he sent it to Furman. A few days later, Furman called Greenstein with a complaint: his list wasn't long enough. "He said, 'You need to think bigger,' " Greenstein said. " 'Give us more options.' " As the economy continued to decline that fall, the numbers continued to increase; the total amount in the stimulus package that was targeted specifically at low-income Americans in 2009 topped $80 billion.
And so in 2009 and 2010, the Obama administration put a tremendous amount of money, very quickly, into the hands of low-income Americans. As part of the Recovery Act, the administration extended the eligibility rules for existing programs like food stamps and unemployment insurance, and the combination of the collapsing economy and the more generous rules meant the programs grew quickly. The number of individuals receiving food stamps rose to 45.1 million in 2011 from 27.4 million in 2007. From 2008 to 2010, an additional 6.8 million people, mostly children, began receiving Medicaid. Temporary changes in the eligibility criteria for various tax credits, including the earned-income tax credit and the child tax credit, produced tax refunds for millions of low-income workers, often totaling thousands of dollars a year.
And while it is true that the Census Bureau's official poverty figures have grown steadily worse under Obama, rising to 15.1 percent of Americans under the poverty line in 2010 from 13.2 percent in 2008, those dismal numbers come with a significant caveat. When government statisticians calculate the poverty rate, they include only cash income. And over the last two decades, and especially during the Obama administration, the way the federal government gives aid to poor people has shifted away from cash transfers toward noncash transfers — food stamps, Medicaid subsidies, housing vouchers — none of which are included in a family's income for the purposes of poverty statistics. If you do count food stamps and other noncash aid, the poverty rate has, according to some calculations, not gone up much at all during the Obama administration, during the worst economic crisis in 70 years. That is a remarkable accomplishment. When I asked William Julius Wilson last month for his thoughts on the current administration's antipoverty efforts, he said that Obama had "done more for lower-income Americans than any president since Lyndon Baines Johnson."
In Roseland, the stimulus may not have made things much better, but it stopped them from getting much worse. Food stamps helped some families get enough to eat, teenagers got summer jobs, some tenants received help with their rent. A stimulus grant to the Chicago public schools helped pay for the YAP program, which let Steve Gates start working with children like Jasmine and Damien. But it was, by definition, a temporary fix.
When administration officials talk about longer-term solutions to poverty these days, they often talk about education. And the cabinet member who expresses the most personal concern about the plight of disadvantaged children is Arne Duncan, the education secretary. Before arriving in Washington, Duncan was the chief executive of the Chicago Public Schools. There, he put a high priority on overhauling the city's failing high schools, many of which were on the South Side, and as education secretary, he expanded that effort by adding more than $3 billion to a federal program to turn around 1,300 of the lowest-performing schools in the country. "What I fundamentally believe — and what the president believes," Duncan told me, "is that the only way to end poverty is through education."
There is a growing body of evidence that for many low-income children, a great school can provide a route out of poverty. And Duncan is a firm believer in the idea that transforming the schools in neighborhoods like Roseland will in turn transform the lives of the children who live there. But the record of school reform in Roseland is not encouraging. Jasmine and Damien attended Christian Fenger High School, a three-story redbrick hulk on 112th Street that, under both Duncan and his predecessor, was the target of multiple reforms — from its brief incarnation as a math-and-science academy, complete with a $525,000 NASA-sponsored science lab, to the introduction of a "transformation" program partly financed by a large grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. But despite all the efforts, Fenger's academic results never really budged during Duncan's tenure. About half of each freshman class dropped out before graduation, and each year, only 2 or 3 percent of Fenger's juniors scored 20 or higher on the A.C.T., which is the college-readiness target of the Chicago Public Schools.
School reforms over the last decade have produced some notable successes for poor children. But there is a growing concern in education-policy circles that those reforms — like charter schools that require a significant level of parental involvement — tend to have a much higher success rate with better-off low-income students, the ones who come from more stable and capable homes. Chicago's public-school population is almost entirely low-income — just one in eight students does not qualify for a federal lunch subsidy — but within that population, some students are much more disadvantaged than others. Researchers from the University of Chicago's Consortium on Chicago School Research were able, recently, to identify a subset of students who were particularly disadvantaged, living in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty and unemployment, with high levels of crime and an elevated incidence of child abuse. The researchers found that these students were clustered at 46 public schools, which the researchers, borrowing a phrase from William Julius Wilson, labeled "truly disadvantaged" schools. These 46 schools were the targets of frequent reform efforts. But they were much less likely to respond positively to those reforms than schools with a less disadvantaged (but still poor) student body.
The divisions that the consortium's researchers found among Chicago's schoolchildren have an echo in national poverty trends. The Census Bureau tracks a category that the government calls "deep poverty"; families are said to be in deep poverty if they earn less than 50 percent of the poverty line — which means around $11,000 a year for a family of four, not including food stamps or other noncash support. The number of families in deep poverty grew sharply during the recent recession and its aftermath, and in 2010, the share of Americans whose families made less than half of the poverty line hit a record: 6.7 percent of the population, or 1 in 15 Americans. The numbers are even higher for children, disturbingly so. In 2010, 1 in every 10 American children lived in deep poverty.
This increase in deep poverty certainly has something to do with changes in the economy. But it has more to do with a shift, over the last two decades, in government aid to the poor. A working paper published last year by a team of economists led by Yonatan Ben-Shalom of Mathematica Policy Research tells the story of a growing divide. In 1984, federal aid to poor families was progressive, in the literal sense of the term — the poorest families got the most help. Single-parent families below 50 percent of the poverty line received, on average, $1,231 (in current dollars) per month from the federal government. Those in what could be considered shallow poverty, between 50 and 100 percent of the poverty line, received $448. But over the following 20 years, that situation was reversed. Government aid to families in deep poverty fell by 38 percent on average, while aid to families in shallow poverty increased by 86 percent. By 2004, the government was actually giving more, each month, to families in shallow poverty than to families in deep poverty.
This shift is mostly the result of a series of legislative changes in the 1990s meant to encourage work among the poor — among them the expansion of the earned-income tax credit and a law permitting children of single mothers working low-wage jobs to be covered by Medicaid. At the same time, government support for nonworking poor families began to drop sharply. The welfare-reform law passed by Congress in 1996 continued to provide cash aid to some poor families but did so with stringent requirements that adults who received that aid — mostly single mothers — either be working or actively looking for work. Over the last two decades, cash aid shrank steadily, and in many states, it has now all but disappeared. In Wyoming, just 314 families currently receive cash welfare. Illinois's caseload fell by 86 percent from 1997 to 2011. In Georgia, in 1996, more than 90 percent of poor families received cash aid. Now 8 percent of them do.
In theory, at least, this tough new approach makes economic sense; if you want to make low-wage work more appealing for poor adults, you need to make nonwork less appealing. A little carrot, a little stick. Where the theory breaks down is in the fact that these adults are raising children, and many of the adults — like Jasmine and Damien's mother — are having great difficulty doing so. Cutting their income, as the government has done over the last decade or two, seems unlikely to make them more effective parents, and it inevitably hurts their children.
There are now seven million American children whose families earn below 50 percent of the poverty line. And in the last decade, we learned quite a lot about what it does to children to grow up surrounded by the kind of everyday chaos that often accompanies life in a family that is earning less than $11,000 a year. Neuroscientists and developmental psychologists can now explain how early stress and trauma disrupt the healthy growth of the prefrontal cortex; how the absence of strong and supportive relationships with stable adults inhibits a child's development of a crucial set of cognitive skills called executive functions.
In fact, though, you don't need a neuroscientist to explain the effects of a childhood spent in deep poverty. Your average kindergarten teacher in a high-poverty neighborhood can tell you: children who grow up in especially difficult circumstances are much more likely to have trouble controlling their impulses in school, getting along with classmates and following instructions. Intensive early interventions can make a big difference, but without that extra help, students from the poorest homes usually fall behind in school early on, and they rarely catch up. When you cluster lots of children with impulse-control issues together in a single classroom, it becomes harder for teachers to teach and for students to learn. And when these same children reach adolescence — unless someone like Steve Gates has managed to intervene — they are more likely to become a danger to themselves, to each other and to their community.
Jack Shonkoff, a pediatrician who directs the Center on the Developing Child at HarvardUniversity, is leading a campaign to translate the science of adversity and brain development into new policies to better serve American children living in deep poverty. He says that current government policies actually provide a pretty good way to identify the children who are going to need additional intensive help to succeed in school. If your parents can't handle the work requirements to get federal cash aid, then you're more likely to need extra help to perform well in kindergarten. But these children are often among the least likely to get additional specialized services. In other words, the way we direct services to poor children would work better if we did more or less the opposite of what we're doing today.
One afternoon in April of last year, I visited Fenger High with a YAP counselor named Sean Lett, and we ran into Damien and his mother. It was report-card pickup day, and Lett was acting, quite literally, in loco parentis, checking in with the teachers of all of his clients, sitting down with one and going over his report card with him line by line. When he saw Damien, he asked to see his report card, and it was awful — lots of Ds and Fs. Lett lit into Damien right there in the hallway. "This isn't good enough, man," he said, leaning in. "You got to start handling your business, for real. No one else can do the work for you." His voice rose. "Quit playing. This life is real, boy. How old are you?"
"Eighteen," Damien said.
"Eighteen? You gonna blink and be 21. Seriously." He put his hand on Damien's shoulder. "I know you can do this, Damien. You just got to put your mind to it."
Lett, when I first met him, told me that he saw his role as not just a mentor, but something more. "A lot of our children are without fathers," he said. "If you don't have a father figure in your life, you don't have discipline and structure, and without structure, you don't have anything. You have chaos."
Lett's analysis has support from many of the academics who study how poverty has changed over time. Looking back on the lives and prospects of the American poor during President Johnson's War on Poverty, you can see two broad changes. In material terms, the trends have been mostly positive. Americans who live below the poverty line are much less likely to be hungry or malnourished today than they were then. A majority of families below the poverty line now have material possessions that would have been unthinkable luxuries in the 1960s: air-conditioning, cable TV, a mobile phone.
But while the material gap has diminished, a different kind of gap has opened between poor and middle-class Americans: a social gap. In the 1960s, most Americans, rich, middle-class and poor, were raising children in two-parent homes; they lived in relatively stable, mixed-income communities; they went to church in roughly similar numbers; their children often attended the same public schools. Today, those social factors all diverge sharply by class, and the class for which things have changed most starkly is the poor. Damien may have a cellphone, but he has never met his father.
The two social scientists who are most prominently chronicling these social changes today are Charles Murray, the conservative scholar, who wrote about them in his recent book, "Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010," and Robert Putnam, the progressive Harvard political scientist best known for his book "Bowling Alone." What Murray and Putnam have each reported is that college-educated and well-off Americans today tend to raise their children in stable, two-parent families. Among this cohort, divorce rates have fallen over the last few decades. Rates of unmarried births are rising slowly, but they are still quite low. According to Putnam's data, churchgoing rates have held steady since 1990, measures of social connectedness have gone up and the amount of time parents spend interacting with their children, especially their infants, has risen sharply.
But among Americans at the bottom of the socioeconomic scale, things are quite different. Churchgoing has dropped since 1990 for less-educated and low-income Americans, and divorce rates have risen. Two-parent families are on the decline: in 2010, 88 percent of the children in the top third of the income distribution were being raised by married parents, and just 41 percent of the children in the bottom third were. While it's certainly true that many single parents are raising happy and successful children, these trends as a whole are taking a significant toll on low-income children.
"From a child-development point of view," Shonkoff told me, "we know that being a child in a family at the bottom end of the disadvantage scale means that you're going to be less likely to get the kind of parenting or other care-giving that will lead to good outcomes and more likely to face the kind of adversity that leads to bad outcomes." For children, these social factors make a big difference — not just in their current well-being, but also in their future economic prospects. This is a relatively new idea in the study of poverty, but it is one that is gaining acceptance among scholars: a critical factor perpetuating poverty from one generation to the next is family dynamics and their effects on child development. This means that if we want to improve social mobility, we need to find a better way to help disadvantaged parents and their children.
While this theory of poverty is still being debated by social scientists, it is not particularly controversial in poor neighborhoods. Obama saw it himself in Roseland. In "The Audacity of Hope," Obama wrote that poor African-Americans were well aware of the role that family breakdown played in the perpetuation of urban poverty. As he put it, "black folks can often be heard bemoaning the eroding work ethic, inadequate parenting and declining sexual mores with a fervor that would make the Heritage Foundation proud."
I experienced something similar during my time in Roseland. Steve Gates is by no means a conservative, but when he talked about the root cause of the problems his YAP clients were facing in school and in life, he always came back to their home environments. "Take a close look at our kids' family structures, and you get a perfectly clear picture of why they are the way they are," Gates told me. "There is a very direct correlation between family issues and what the kids present in school. The lapses in parenting, the dysfunction — it all spills over to the kids, and then they take that to school and the streets and everywhere else."
Unfortunately, these social changes pose an enormous challenge to policy makers. Americans know how to use their government to remediate a certain kind of poverty. If a family does not have enough food to eat or money to survive, we know how to issue food stamps or cut a check. But when children are growing up in a home without the kind of stability and support and order that they need to succeed in life, Americans don't always know — and certainly don't always agree — on what we want the government to do. We generally agree that we want the government to help increase opportunity and social mobility. But we don't like the idea of the government meddling in the home lives of private families. And so we're in a dilemma: the biggest factor holding back social mobility for poor children may be one we don't have a good strategy to solve — and it may be one we don't feel comfortable even addressing at all.
Given that political bind, what could President Obama do differently for young people like Damien and Jasmine? What Roseland needs is not necessarily a big new infusion of federal dollars. What it needs more than anything else is an antipoverty strategy that is much more comprehensive and ambitious than what exists there today, an approach that focuses on improving outcomes for children from birth through adolescence. Food stamps and other assistance are crucial, but parents like Damien's mother need help that goes far beyond that. Schools need to be better, yes. But better teachers and higher expectations can't on their own alter the pervasive influence of an entire neighborhood. And so the president could do what he pledged to do in Anacostia in 2007: create more programs that take on, in a direct way, the family dislocations that are holding many poor children back, like home-visiting programs for parents, intensive early-childhood education targeted at the most disadvantaged families and mentoring programs for teenagers, like YAP.
The Obama administration has, in fact, financed programs in all those fields, but in relatively small and uncoordinated ways, and often only temporarily. The stimulus grant that helped pay for YAP in Chicago ran out after two years. YAP's administrators lobbied school officials and Mayor Rahm Emanuel to continue the program with city money, but a year ago, YAP's funds were cut by nearly half, and next month, the program will end entirely. Steve Gates will lose his job.
And while it's almost a cliché among liberals that what Obama needs to do is give a few more good speeches, it really would make a difference for a president to talk publicly about the challenges of poverty policy in the candid and thoughtful ways that Obama did as a senator and in his first presidential campaign. When I asked Valerie Jarrett, Obama's longtime friend and mentor who is now a senior adviser to the president, about his relative silence on urban poverty, she said that the way the president spoke about poverty as a candidate in Anacostia — as a unique problem specific to one group of Americans — simply wasn't the right way for him to speak about it as president. A better approach, Jarrett said, was for the president to propose and support a set of broad programs that raised all Americans economically, an approach that she described as inclusive. She added: "I think our chances for successfully helping people move from poverty to the middle class is greater if everyone understands why it is in their best interest that these paths of opportunity are available for everyone. We try to talk about this in a way where everyone understands why it is in their self-interest."
It's a challenge for any politician in troubled economic times: how do you persuade voters to devote tax dollars to help the truly disadvantaged when the middle class is feeling disadvantaged itself? The problem is that universal economic progress will not help those in deep poverty — or at least not enough. Places like Roseland need specific, targeted, effective help if they are ever going to change.
When I visited Roseland in June, almost two years after I first met Steve Gates, what struck me most was how much hadn't changed in the neighborhood. The storefronts were still mostly boarded up. The graduation rates were as low as ever. I went with Gates to yet another funeral of yet another young man who had been shot and killed. But Gates was trying to be positive. On a Friday night, he invited me to a YAP graduation celebration held in the basement of a Baptist church. Damien received a plaque, and he gave a little speech to his peers and mentors. He has two babies now, he said, and it's hard, but he also has a high-school degree and a job at a shoe store. The front window of his house is broken again, but it's summer, so it's not such a big deal.
It may well be that the kind of small, personal and incremental changes that have to take place in families like Damien's in order for him and his children to have any real hope of success are simply beyond the power of any government or any president. But for a couple of years, Steve Gates was, in a roundabout way, a representative of the federal government in Roseland, and the work he did, to me at least, pointed the way to a different and more productive kind of engagement with young people like Damien.
Finding a new approach won't be easy, of course. Back in Anacostia in 2007, Obama acknowledged that "changing the odds in our cities will require humility in what we can accomplish and patience with our progress." But real change would take more than that, he said: "Most importantly, it will require the sustained commitment of the president of the United States."
Paul Tough is a contributing writer and the author of "How Children Succeed," which will be published next month.
Editor: Vera Titunik
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The double sun halo is the result of simple optics and suspended crystals in the atmosphere. And yet these beautiful circles have great significance for the movements of planets other than our own. It's either a strange cosmic coincidence — or proof that someone arranged all of this and is signing their handiwork.
Some of the most beautiful sights on Earth are the result of uncanny coincidences about the arrangement of the solar system. For one thing, the Moon, the sun and the Earth seem to be a very particular size and distance away from each other. When the Earth passes in front of the Moon, blocking the sun's light, its shadow fits over the moon pretty much perfectly for a lunar eclipse. Meanwhile, when the Moon gets between the sun and the Earth, it blocks out the sun perfectly. If any of these objects were any other size, or placed a different distance from each other, we wouldn't get the spectacular eclipses we do now.
But there are even more uncanny placements in the solar system, and they have their echoes right here on Earth.
When the atmospheric conditions are right, tiny ice crystals fill the atmosphere. They bend light coming in from the sun at a certain angle, creating a halo around the sun at an angle of twenty-two degrees. This is an ice halo. A double ice halo appears when other crystals bend light to forty-six degrees. On very cold, clear days, with a lot of ice bumbling around in the sky, entire sets of curved lines can appear around the sun, but the picture above shows the full glory of a double halo.
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Meanwhile, we see the sun every day, but the sun obscures the planets that move around it. They move around it at different rates, and at different distances from the sun. The two that are closer to the sun than we are, and whose orbits can be inscribed in our sky, move around the sun at about what we would see as twenty-two degrees and forty-six degrees from the sun. If you see an ice halo around the sun, its path is approximately the same as the mean orbit of Mercury. If you're lucky enough to see the faint impression of the outer halo (In this image, it's near the number two), you're seeing, roughly, the mean orbit of Venus.
There is no way the way the light that refracts from ice crystals can have an effect on the orbits on the Earth, Venus, and Mercury, making each of them line up in this precise way. So we can be forgiven for considering this just a bit on the spooky side. Of course, if they hadn't lined up in the sky the way they do, we'd never have noticed — we'd have gone about our business until we found something else that was a coincidence.
Still, even without the mystical connection, it's amazing to look up in the sky on a cold day, see a circle around the sun, and realize that a distant planet is roughly somewhere along that circle.
Top Image: Martyn Gorman
Second Image: Kojan
Via Quadrivium.


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With yesterday's announcement of the Sonus SBC SWe, Sonus claims to have introduced the industry's first session border controller with both unlimited scalability and hardware functionality on a virtualized platform.
The flexibility, scalability, and agility that virtualization can bring to the table have made it increasingly important to the enterprise. Virtualization can bring those benefits to VoIP and Unified Communications (UC) deployments as well, according David Tipping, VP and GM of the SBC business at Sonus.
"Virtualization is now driving the next wave of Unified Communications. Many applications supporting UC today are either virtualized or are on a virtualized platform. Therefore, it is a logical step to virtualize the SBC," Tipping said.
Irwin Lazar, VP and service director of Nemertes Research, echoed Tipping's sentiment in a statement for Sonus. "More than 67 percent of companies have virtualized Unified Communications applications to reduce costs, improve resiliency and enable more efficient utilization of server resources. The ability to run Unified Communications on virtual servers is critical buying criteria," he said.
According to Sonus, the SBC SWe—which stands for Software edition—packs the same feature set as Sonus's hardware-based SBC 5000 series of session border controllers and shares the same codebase and management interfaces as the rest of Sonus's SBC portfolio. Customers with existing Sonus hardware can therefore easily slot the SWe into their existing infrastructure. Enterprises looking to take advantage of new network function virtualization (NFV) technology, meanwhile, may find the SBC SWe more practical and cost-efficient than hardware solutions, particularly when it comes to remote locations, branch offices, and call centers with variable or season-specific volume demands.
Deployed as a software download, the SBC SWe can scale up "as few as 25 to an unlimited number of sessions," according to a Sonus statement. Customers specify the performance levels they require at purchase and then scale up using license keys to expand the SWe's capacity, calls per second, transcoding, and other features as business needs demand.
Sonus's hardware SBC portfolio runs all the way from single-instance for SMBs up to large-scale multi-instance for service providers. The vendor positions the SBC SWe as spanning that entire spectrum in one package. Ideal enterprise customers are those with little or no space for new hardware in their data centers, those interested in NFV and other data center virtualization technology, and those looking for offsite disaster recovery. Additionally, with this announcement, Sonus targets service providers looking for scalable and flexible ways to sell SIP trunking solution packages or to whitelabel interconnect services. Sonus is also aiming the SWe at networking and UC application providers planning to embed SBC functionality in their products.
"The Sonus SBC SWe will help enterprises and service providers harness the power of software and virtualization to create a more dynamic Unified Communications environment with greater scale and deployment flexibility," Tipping said.
Jude Chao is executive editor of Enterprise Networking Planet. Follow her on Twitter @judechao.


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This website has been designed to comply with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA), which established standards for the privacy of individually-identifiable health information (protected health information*).
We have implemented security procedures on this Web site in an effort to protect your personal medical information.
*Protected Health Information (PHI) is defined as health information, including demographic data, that permits identification of an individual or could reasonably be used to identify that individual. It includes information regarding the diagnosis, medical treatment, care, advice or counseling of an identified member, the physical or mental condition of the member, or prescription-drug therapy for the member.
For protection of your personal information, this website uses 128-bit encryption. Data is transferred from our databases to you during a "secured session" using Secure Socket Layer (SSL) 128-bit encryption technology. SSL is the industry-standard security protocol for encoding sensitive information and works by creating a shared digital key, which allows only the sender and receiver of the transmission to scramble and unscramble the information. SSL encryption can be broken only by intercepting the encrypted message, recording it and using a computer to try every possible combination (up to a billion or more) of characters to capture the correct digital key.
If your Internet browser does not support 128-bit encryption, you should download the most current version. If you access the Internet via a corporate network, please check with your system administrator before downloading a new Internet browser. If your Internet browser is provided by a commercial Internet service provider (ISP), you will need to check with your ISP to see if your version supports 128-bit encryption.
Your Internet browser can tell you whether or not you are in a Web site secured by SSL technology by the presence of a padlock or key somewhere along the bottom of your browser's window. If the lock is closed or the key is unbroken, you are in a secured section of your host's Web site.
When you register to use this website, we request information from you in connection with your registration. Once you have logged in and activated your account, you may view or modify the information we have captured about you or change your password.
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|For information only - not an official document.
|Press Release No: UNIS/SG/2582
|Release Date: 31 May 2000
|Secretary-General, Marking World Environment Day,
Sees "No Easy Solutions";
Calls for Government Commitment to Conservation, Stewardship
NEW YORK, 30 May (UN Headquarters) -- Following is the text of the message of Secretary-General Kofi Annan to mark World Environment Day, 5 June:
We may be at the dawn of a new millennium, but the environmental problems we face are painfully familiar. They may even be getting worse. Despite the Earth Summit, and despite success stories like the Montreal Protocol to protect the Ozone Layer, human beings continue to plunder the global environment. Unsustainable practices remain deeply embedded in the fabric of our daily lives. We are failing to protect resources and ecosystems. We are failing to invest enough in alternative technologies, especially for energy. We are failing even to keep the debate alive.
These are deeply troubling trends. I recommend four priorities for reversing them.
First, we need a major public education effort. Understanding of the challenges we face is alarmingly low. Corporations and consumers alike need to recognize that their choices can have significant consequences. Schools and civil society groups have a crucial role to play.
Second, environmental issues must be fundamentally repositioned in the policy-making arena. The environment must become better integrated into mainstream economic policy, and the surest way is through green accounting.
Third, Governments must not only create environmental agreements, they must enforce them. They can, for example, cut the subsidies that sustain environmentally harmful activities each and every year. They can also devise more environment-friendly incentives for markets to respond to.
And fourth, we need sound scientific information. This is the only basis for effective policy, yet large gaps in our knowledge remain.
Technological breakthroughs that are unimaginable today may well solve some of the environmental challenges we face. But it would be foolish to count on them and to continue with business as usual. The theme for this year's World Environment Day says it best: the year 2000 begins the environment millennium; the time to act is now. There will be no easy solutions. Unpleasant ecological surprises lie ahead. But the start of the new century could not be a more opportune time to commit ourselves -- peoples as well as governments -- to a new ethic of conservation and stewardship.
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Looking Up: See the Great Nebula of Orion
The next clear night, be sure to see Orion, which stands so bright and clear in the south on January evenings. Among the bounty of celestial treats in this region of the sky is the "Great Nebula of Orion," which is visible even without binoculars.
Notice the three stars in a row that make the "belt" of Orion the Hunter. Beneath the left star of the belt you will notice a small nearly vertical line of stars, that make up "Orion's sword." In the center of this line is one that looks a little "fuzzy."
This is not a star at all, but the brightest part of the vast Great Nebula of Orion, otherwise known as M42.
Be sure to train your binoculars here, or better yet a telescope if you have one.
This fuzzy "star" of the sword bursts into view as a bright wispy cloud of gas and dust.
This is one many nebulas where stars are believed to be forming. A collection of bright stars within this nebula causes the cosmic cloud to shine. Close inspection with even a small telescope will show one of these stars is actually a quadruple star system- four stars in very close proximity, known as the "Trapezium."
The first recorded mention of the nebula was made by a Jesuit astronomer named Johann Baptist Cysatus, in 1648. He used it as a way to compare with a comet seen that year.
Small to medium sized telescopes will show several nebulae, all too faint to detect with eyes alone. There are a few showpieces, but the best views of these cosmic clouds are captured by long-exposure photographs. The Milky Way Galaxy is swarming in interstellar dust and gas.
Note: Most published photos of nebulae are alive in color. For an observer at the eyepiece of the telescope, however, almost all you will see are shades of gray and white, against the blackness of space. Color is very difficult to detect in dim light.
Another "fuzzy" spot in the night sky you can see with unaided eyes is the Andromeda Galaxy, also well seen on a winter night. It is very impressive in binoculars.
You need to be away from serious light pollution and there must be no Moon in the sky, to see them easily.
While looking at Orion, take note of the fiery red star, Betelgeuse at the upper left corner, and brilliant blue-white Rigel is at lower right from the belt.
Further away to the lower left of Orion stands glorious Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky. To the upper right of Orion is a bright orange-red star, Aldebaran, which appears at a tip of what seems to be a capital letter "V" on its side; this is the Hyades star cluster. To the upper right of this is the much more compact and brighter star cluster, the Pleiades.
Shining gloriously bright in the southwestern sky after dark sets in is the planet Venus. In the early morning, before dawn,, planet Jupiter shines very bright, high in the southeast.
The last quarter Moon was on January 12.
Keep looking up!
—Peter Becker is Managing Editor at The News Eagle in Hawley, PA. Notes are welcome at email@example.com. Please mention in what newspaper or web site you read this column.


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Your personal computer could be a lot more personal. For most computer users, the desktop is little more than a clutter of shortcut icons obscuring a vacation picture, while the Web browser serves as a simple windowpane to the Internet. But, software developers big and small have recently been putting a lot of thought into these two pieces of operating system real estate, resulting in a host of downloadable utility programs that can customize and add functionality to your interface, and supercharge your surfing experience. Best of all, these programs are completely free.
Search Better Google Desktop (www.desktop.google.com) indexes all the files on your hard drive, from Word documents, e-mail and instant messages to MP3s and digital photos, allowing you to search for and find anything almost instantly. Google Desktop also includes Google Sidebar, which is a panel that sits on the desktop offering instant access to information stored both on your PC and on the Web, so you can read your e-mail, view digital photos, scroll through news stories, check the weather and view stock quotes without having to open separate applications.
More From Popular Mechanics
Run Applets From the Desktop If you like Google Sidebar, you'll love Yahoo's Konfabulator (www.konfabulator.com). This application enables you to download free programs, called widgets, from Konfabulator's downloads site at www.widgetgallery.com that you can then place on your desktop. There are news widgets, such as The New York Times Reader and National Weather Service; there are system utility widgets, such as System Temp Monitor, Wi-Fi Watcher and CPU Meter; and there are fun widgets, such as Typing Speedometer and Turkish Radio.
Tweak Settings PowerToys (www.microsoft.com) is a collection of handy utilities for Windows XP that was created by Microsoft's Windows development team, but isn't officially supported by Microsoft (that means you can't call tech support about it). There are about a dozen separate utilities that are part of PowerToys, but four of them really help to extend the functionality of Windows.
The first is Tweak UI, a small tool that gives you fine control over many Windows settings, such as deleting My Network Places and other permanent icons from the desktop and automating your Windows logon.
The next PowerToy is Image Resizer, which is perfect for scaling down photos for e-mail.
Then there's Alt-Tab Replacement, which improves upon Windows' standard utility for switching among open applications. It shows a large thumbnail of each program--ideal if you have multiple Word documents or Internet Explorer windows open at the same time.
Finally, there's Virtual Desktop Manager, which lets you alternately display up to four desktops on your screen. If you're working on a report, for example, you can group all the Word documents, Internet Explorer windows and other applications and files associated with it onto one desktop, separate from your e-mail and all your other open programs.
Search Faster, Block Pop-ups Google is the best search engine on the Web, but you don't have to go to www.google.com to run a query. You can add the Google Toolbar (www.toolbar.google.com) to Internet Explorer to search the Web without leaving the site you're on. You can use Google Toolbar to search the Web, Froogle, Google Images or Google Groups. The toolbar also can highlight search terms found on a Web page, translate words from other languages and block pop-up ads.
Use Tabbed Browsing MSN Search Toolbar (toolbar.msn.com) includes desktop search and Web search functions that don't compare favorably to Google Desktop or Google Toolbar, but it has one handy feature that makes Web browsing much more convenient for those of us who like to load multiple pages simultaneously. Rather than open each new Web page in a separate window, MSN Search Toolbar can make multiple Web pages accessible from a series of tabs at the top of Internet Explorer, which lets you find and open them much more quickly.
Get a Better Browser Rather than accessorize Internet Explorer with toolbars, why not just upgrade to a Web browser that already features a built-in search engine, tabbed browsing and a pop-up blocker? In addition to these features, Mozilla's Firefox (www.mozilla.org) offers the Download Manager, which shows the progress of downloaded files, and lets you pause and resume downloads.
The best feature of Firefox is its search toolbar. It lets you add virtually any search engine to its list. If you want to buy a digital camera, enter the brand you're looking for and click Amazon.com or eBay; if you need directions, enter your address and click Google Maps. It's one-click access to your information.
Microsoft knows good ideas when it sees them. The company will be folding many of the functions mentioned in this article into its next version of Windows, named Vista, which is expected to launch in 2006. Expect to see:
- "Virtual folders" that automatically organize personal files, pictures, music, etc.
- Faster boot-ups.
- An improved Start menu with application search function.
- Integrated color management to ensure consistency between what's onscreen and what comes out of the printer.
- An improved Internet Explorer with a toolbar search box, personalized news feeds, automatic page resizing when printing, tabbed browsing, and protection against phishing and spoofing scams.
- Security features like registry monitoring, integrated virus and spyware protection, and beefed-up two-way firewall filtering.


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Summer's Funner in Fort Lauderdale! Check out These LauderDeals
Visit Lauderdale's annual summer savings program! LauderDeals is back with deals and discounts on hotels and attractions. Most of the hotel and attraction deals run from June 1 to September 30 with some extending through the end of the year. Increased demand for hotel and vacation rentals this year as well as inflation means that prices are higher, so those deals are even more desirable this summer.
A range of hotel and attraction deals are posted now at VisitLauderdale.com/deals offering a wide range of ways to save. Conrad Fort Lauderdale Beach hopes to lure both locals and visitors from outside Greater Fort Lauderdale with its Ultimate Beach Staycation that includes a waived resort charge, 50 percent off valet parking and a late checkout. Fort Lauderdale Marriott Pompano Beach Resort & Spa's Family Package includes daily breakfast buffets for two adults and two children plus turndown service and freshly baked cookies on arrival. If you're looking for a wellness retreat, W Fort Lauderdale is waiving its resort fee in its Escape to The W Fort Lauderdale Package, meaning that fitness options like the beach boot camp, sunrise beach yoga, and beach bike rentals are included in your nightly rate, along with one free in-room movie to enjoy while you recuperate.
Attractions have money-saving deals listed, including Sunrise Paddleboards' $59 off Jet Ski Tours offer. There are numerous 2-for-1 offers at attractions including Flamingo Gardens, History Fort Lauderdale, Sun & Fun Cycles, as well as the South Florida Adventure Pass with unlimited admission to multiple attractions for one low price.
Some deals are available all year, but most LauderDeals are offered from June 1 through September 30. Check the redeemable time frame on each LauderDeals listing to find out when you can take advantage of the savings.
Dine Out Lauderdale, your entrée into Greater Fort Lauderdale's culinary scene, takes place this year during August and September. Diners will enjoy the very best tastes of Greater Fort Lauderdale at some of the area's top restaurants by taking advantage of taste-tempting meals, all with at least three courses, for $35 or $45. Spa Days, also taking place during August and September, tempts those in need of self-care with great prices on specialty treatments, some starting for as low as $99. Restaurant and spa treatment menus will be posted closer to the August 1 start date, along with all the other deals at visitlauderdale.com/deals.
On the Visit Lauderdale LauderDeals page, there are also listings for Cruise & Play deals, Florida Resident Deals and First Responder and Military Deals.
About Greater Fort Lauderdale
Greater Fort Lauderdale boasts an average year-round temperature of 77 ?F and has 3,000+ hours of annual sunshine and is known as the Venice of America and Yachting Capital of the World. Explore 4,000+ eateries, 300+ miles of navigable waterways, eight distinct beaches, a thriving arts and culture scene, craft breweries, rooftop bars, diving, fishing and other outdoor adventures, world-class shopping and boats, yachts and superyachts moored at the area's many marinas - all conveniently located in the center of South Florida.
Made up of 31 municipalities, the destination boasts more than 38,000 lodging accommodations at a variety of hotels, luxury resorts and boutique properties, reflecting a cosmopolitan vibe. Upon arrival at FLL Airport (Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport), it is just five minutes to the beach, Port Everglades, the Greater Fort Lauderdale/Broward County Convention Center and downtown. Find
trip planning inspiration at visitlauderdale.com and follow @VisitLauderdale on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube.
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