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When it comes to change, I'm a person who is not comfortable with taking time about it all. So since starting at Joeys I have been brimming with optimism for the opportunity to 'get digital'. Lots of new things began to happen as the year progressed, and we made some wonderful advances in our thinking and in the things we are doing.
So you can imagine how excited I was when Peggy Sheehy invited me to Suffern Middle School for the day, on my recent trip to New York City. My ever-patient husband, Martin, was heard to say "You want to do what? take a day out of your 5 days in NYC and work??"
Needless to say, work it was not!
Peggy Sheehy has been leading the way for many years, demonstrating the power of virtual worlds for learning! Based at Suffern Middle School, Peggy leads the Ramapo Islands initiative, and if you haven't been reading her blog I suggest you start watching it now. Virtual worlds are the future as learning becomes wrapped in interactive and immersive 3D environments.
It was totally amazing to visit Peggy, meet the Principal and staff, and participate in some introductory classes – new kids launching themselves into Ramapo Islands. Peggy very kindly brought forward some lessons so I could see and participate. How natural it all seemed! How easily the kids understood what it was all about! In one period these kids were dressing their avatar, walking and flying around, talking with friends, and playing – the favourite experiment was sliding down the large water slide. If this all sounds like a lot of fun and games – it was! But don't for a minute assume it was wasted time.
Read Peggy's blog to see what happens after these first lesson as students become more involved with virtual learning opportunities that teachers create at Suffern Middle School. Peggy writes that they will soon be tearing down the virtual walls and opening Ramapo Island to collaboration with other Teen Life education projects.
I rode the train back to New York City, and wondered how long it would be before I could do such exciting things.


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Bal d'Afrique
"Bal d'Afrique is one of my earliest fragrances. At the time of its formulation, I was obsessed with the translation of memories into scent. At the same time, I felt confident enough to include an imaginary component. My father lived and travelled in Africa for about 10-15 years. I would read his diaries; the way he travelled on freight ships, met all kinds of different people… For me, this was the fantasy of arriving in Africa through somebody else's words. Bal d'Afrique reflects that; it's an imaginary journey as well as a complete celebration of how I see African culture and its influence."
With a focus on beauty and fantasy, BAL D'AFRIQUE is Ben Gorham's 'love letter' to Africa. Wanting to sum up and celebrate the reach and influence of Africa through time, particularly the way its myriad cultures have shaped dance, art and music, the idea of an imaginary event
- Vegan formula
- Floral
- Rich texture
- 7% of shea butter
- Top: African Marigold, Bergamot, Buchu
- Heart: Cyclamen, Violet
- Base: Moroccan Cedarwood, Vetiver
Please be aware that ingredient lists may change or vary from time to time. To confirm that a BYREDO product is suitable for your personal use, please consult the list of ingredients that is included on our product packaging.
Every order comes with:
- Fully covered import duties
- Free shipping
- 30 days free returns
- A Byredo wrapping- 2 Complimentary samples of your choice

subset: commoncrawl


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The problem with EVE is that it can sometimes take a lot of time to accomplish something when you log in. So lately given the fact I've been so swamped with work I've only been able to mess around with games that give a shorter term payoff. I'm a pretty big fan of the original F.E.A.R., so getting the new one was a no brainer.
In terms of genre, this one's a sci-fi anime-inspired j-horror first person shooter. It's something any nerd would love to play really. It even has a very well done version of bullet-time, which makes the ultra-violent shooter action all the more sweet when you have the edge of slow motion.
It's been oh… since Bioshock I think, when I've played a shooter this atmospheric. The city got blown to hell at the end of the first game, and making your way through it in this one is extremely well presented. The streets are totally screwed, with debris and dust everywhere. And as typical of the series it's scary as all hell with all the horrific madness happening because of Alma.
Multiplayer's nothing too out of the ordinary which is probably not a good thing, but if you're looking for a solid single player scarefest in a sci-fi shooter form you should check this one out.


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Contemporary Masculine Baggage claim can be a nightmare when you can't identify your luggage, which is why the classic notebook makers at Moleskine have created the Moleskine Luggage Tag ($9.99). At 3.75″ x 2.25″, these luggage tags are just like the Moleskine Classic Hard Cover Journals.
We can't promise that your luggage won't get lost, but our guess is that you will at least have the most stylish luggage tag at the baggage claim. Comes in four colors.
Read the article:


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Winnipeg Free Press – Partners in Progress
From the day the first edition rolled off the presses in 1872, the Winnipeg Free Press has been an integral part of the city and province it serves. It is a position the newspaper is certain to maintain in the new millennium.
Part of the Free Press's success can be attributed to the fact that it is only two years younger than the province of Manitoba, which joined Confederation in 1870, and actually two years older than the City of Winnipeg, which was incorporated in 1874. the result is that the newspaper has been around as long as the community itself, faithfully recording the growth and development of a muddy Prairie settlement at the forks of the Red and Assiniboine Rivers into one of Canada's leading cities and the capital of a thriving province of more than one million people.
Indeed, there is no other major newspaper in Canada that is so closely associated with the hopes, dreams and ambitions of its readers than the Free Press. Over the years, the newspaper has gained a reputation as the province's leading source of news, information and debate about local matters and ideas, as well as Manitoba's voice on national and international issues.
It is a reputation that can be traced back to the original owner and editor of the Free Press, W.F. Luxton, and his partner John A. Kenny. Together, these men launched a newspaper that was to grow into a formidable journalistic and commercial force and serve as the linchpin for a national chain of newspapers stretching across much of the country.
With a population of 1,467, the Winnipeg of 1872 was the largest of several budding communities in Manitoba at a time when the future was as wide open and bright as the blue Prairie sky. Yet its future was by no means assured. By late 1880, the recently incorporated City of Winnipeg found itself in a competition with the nearby communities of Selkirk and Emerson for the new railroad that was being built across the country. After some debate, Winnipeg was eventually selected as the site, forever assuring the community's place as the province's leading city and providing the Free Press with a source of readers that would help make it one of the most important newspapers in the country.
By the turn of the century, Manitoba had become an important player on the national scene. The railroad had helped bring hundreds of thousands of settlers to the Prairies, making Winnipeg a boomtown and the most important city in the West. And as the city became more important in local and national affairs, so did the Free Press.
In retrospect, it is clear that two developments at this time were crucial to the continued success of the Free Press and its eventual development as one of Canada's great newspapers. One was the acquisition of the newspaper by Sir Clifford Sifton, a man who distinguished himself as a powerful cabinet minister in the government of Sir Wilfrid Laurier and would be remembered as one of the patriarchs of Western Canada. The other was Sifton's decision to hire John W. Dafoe as editor of the newspaper and E.H.. Macklin as its chief business manager. Together, these three men provided the Free Press with the journalistic and commercial leadership required to outlast its competitors and maintain its position as the largest selling newspaper in Manitoba.
It was during these years that the Free Press cemented its reputation as the leading voice of Western Canada, thanks in large measure to the talents of John Dafoe. Writing on the editorial page of the Free Press Dafoe consistently and elegantly put forward the case for Western Canadian interests. He supported the drive to reduce tariffs and the attempt to strike a reciprocity treaty with the United States, launched a campaign to strengthen Canadian autonomy from Britain and was a central figure in drumming up support for conscription and the formation of Sir Robert Borden's union government during the First World War.
But perhaps Dafoe – who turned down both a knighthood from then British prime minister Lloyd George and an offer to represent the government of Canada in Washington – is best known for his early understanding of the forces at work in the 1930s that would eventually lead to the Second World War. His most famous editorial is perhaps one entitled "What's the cheering for?", which was written following the signing of the Munich Pact in 1938. Dafoe stood alone among Canadian editorialists in refusing to praise the deal, even though many subscribers of the Free Press had grown tired of his pessimistic outlook.
Other journalists also contributed to the growing reputation of the Free Press. Cora Hind, who joined the Free Press in 1901 as an agriculture writer, was one of the leading female journalists of her day. Legend has it that she could walk into a grain field in August and predict the size of the crop in the fall.
Over the years, the Free Press has continued to build on the foundation laid down by Sifton, Dafoe and Macklin. As the city and province grew, so did the newspaper's circulation. By the mid-1980s, the Free Press had outgrown its once–grand downtown quarters at 300 Carlton Street and began developing plans for construction of a $150–million plant on Mountain Avenue, in the city's northwestern corner.
Completed in 1991, the new building and its equipment represented the latest in newspaper technology. The three state–of–the–art computerized presses are capable of world–class colour reproduction and can each print newspapers at a rate of 75,000 per hour.
In December, 2001, a new era began for the Free Press. The newspaper, along with sister paper Brandon Sun, was bought from Thomson Newspapers by FP Canadian Newspapers Limited Partnership, a company founded by Ronald Stern and Bob Silver, two businessmen with strong Winnipeg roots. Stern and Silver, both born and raised in the city, have been partners for 20 years in Western Glove Works and, for lesser amounts of time, in other businesses, including two large newsprint mills in Alberta and Ontario. Stern is also the former publisher of Vancouver Magazine.
The purchase of the Free Press by Stern and Silver bucked the North American trend toward bigger media companies. With the purchase, FP Canadian Newspapers Limited Partnership became the owner of the largest independent newspaper in Canada.
The success of any newspaper depends on more than good journalism. Display and classified advertising are important ingredients in maintaining healthy circulation and a viable business. The evolution of television news, including 24–hour news stations such as Newsworld and CNN, and the steady advancement of direct-mail advertising, specialty publications and Internet online news services pose a serious challenge to newspapers at the beginning of the 21st century.
The Free Press has risen to the challenge, redefining itself as a full-service marketing and communications company and focusing its energy on the things it does best: providing news and information to subscribers. The Free Press' total weekly readership in combined print and digital formats is 407,000 Winnipeg adults, and on Saturdays alone that number stands at 302,000 readers. This has meant redefining the role of the newspaper by creating new sections and overhauling existing ones to ensure the content is focused on the interests of readers. It has also meant finding better ways to serve advertisers, mostly through the creation of specialty products and supplements tailored to meet the need of the customer.
Today's Free Press is very different from the one published by Luxton and Kenny more than a century ago. However, one thing remains the same: the Free Press' commitment to quality journalism and its dedication to promoting the intellectual, social and economic growth of the community it serves.


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NFL: Vikings counting on youth among cornerbacks
MINNEAPOLIS -- The Minnesota Vikings are counting on some savvy, productive performances by their unseasoned cornerbacks.
Playing beyond their years will be a must in this pass-happy league.
The guys in charge of this critical position begin with Chris Cook, Josh Robinson and rookie Xavier Rhodes. Combined, this trio has played in 38 regular-season games and totaled just two interceptions, both by Robinson last year. A.J. Jefferson is the only other player in the mix for playing time with significant experience in the secondary.
''I think any corner in the NFL is hungry, especially if he's not known,'' Robinson said this week. ''He's hungry to make himself known, and that's how we are as a unit. Not just with us three, but our entire secondary. We're hungry for that success. We're hungry to be the best.''
Missing of course is stalwart veteran Antoine Winfield, who was let go and is now with Seattle. Not only will the group be without his leadership, but his steady play and sure tackling will be hard to replace. Robinson has been asked to move inside to the slot in the nickel package on obvious passing downs, a spot he's never played before in his life. Cook and Robinson will start together in the base defense.
Robinson and Rhodes each missed some practice time at the beginning of training camp because of hamstring injuries, which didn't help the push for cohesion.
''They haven't had much time together on task,'' coach Leslie Frazier said. ''For Josh Robinson, we need to get a feel for him playing a new position, playing a slot corner. Xavier Rhodes as well, having to play hopefully a lot of snaps for us in nickel situations, is like being a starter now. So that secondary, these next two games, will be very, very important to find out where we are and what we are trying to do improve before we play that first game. It is a key area for us to get a feel for coming out of this preseason.''
The Vikings play at Buffalo on Friday and at San Francisco on Aug. 25, the two exhibition games when starters typically play significantly. For Rhodes, the first-round draft pick from Florida State, these contests will especially be important. After returning from his hamstring issue, Rhodes has looked slow out of his break in certain full-team drills against the wide receivers.
''There are going to be some growing pains,'' Frazier said. ''That's just the way it is in our league, at that position especially. Not only with him but with Josh as well. We have to keep giving them a lot of other looks and situations, while letting them respond, react, grow, and learn. But we have to expose them to a lot because when we line up in September, nobody is going to feel sorry for the fact that this is the first time starting at their positions.''
Robinson played sparingly last week against Houston, but Rhodes was held out. So this will be his first NFL action this weekend.
''I'm getting the technique down pat, getting the scheme down pat. So you could say I'm ready,'' Rhodes said.
NOTES: Outside LB Desmond Bishop, among a handful of players who missed the exhibition opener due to injury, is on track to play on Friday, which would be his first game of any kind in more than a calendar year since tearing his right hamstring. Last week, he was bothered by groin trouble. ''This is kind of an urgent time right now,'' Bishop said. ... QB Christian Ponder is expected to play on Friday into the second quarter with the rest of the starting offense, though RB Adrian Peterson's participation level had yet to be determined. Ponder took only two snaps last week, completing one pass and getting picked off on another. ''These next two games are crucial for us as an offense and for everybody because we're going to get a lot of snaps,'' he said.


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The public and those who are responsible for child health and safety are encouraged to attend, including: child-care providers, child-recreation leaders, disaster-relief volunteer coordinators, educators, healthcare providers, school officials, lawmakers and community and government decision-makers. Free admission.
June, 11, 2011, Children's Environmental Protection Alliance (Children's EPA) Community Forum: Protecting Schoolchildren From Environmental and Chemical Hazards will be held in Semmes, Alabama (near Mobile) from 2:30 to 4:30 p.m., in the meeting room of Semmes Branch of the Mobile Public Library.
Host Nancy Swan will discuss the health impact on child health and precautions learned from natural disasters and disaster clean-up, including recent tornadoes, the BP Oil Spill disaster, Hurricane Katrina. Discussion and Q & A are encouraged. Refreshments will be provided.
Claire Barnett, whose younger son was pesticide-injured at school while she served on a New York State Governor's commission, has a BA from Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, MA and a MBA from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY. She is founder and Executive Director of the Healthy Schools Network, Inc. a national award-winning environmental health not for profit research, education, and advocacy organization, and the Coordinator of the national Coalition for Healthier Schools, convened by the Network and its national advisers.
The Healthy Schools Network has challenged the nation with a call to action to ensure that schools are environmentally responsible to children, to personnel, and to communities. She convened the fledgling Network in 1995 as a New York statewide coalition; it has won new funds and multiple laws on school environments in the nation's third largest educational system (New York State) and the nation's single largest school district (New York City). She also fostered successful replications of the Network's agenda in over a dozen states. Under her leadership, the national Coalition has won two federal laws and funds for schools, including US EPA Healthy Schools Initiative which will issue federal environmental health guidelines and state grants to advance healthy environments for children. The Network is an EPA partner in environmental health and coordinates National Healthy Schools Day annually.
Dr. Turner-Henson is a Professor at the University of Alabama School Of Nursing, University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). She holds joint adjunct faculty appointments in the UAB Schools of Medicine (General Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine) and Public Health (Maternal Child Health Division). Dr. Turner-Henson has dedicated herself to providing visionary leadership in research, policy development (local, state, national), and community empowerment in the areas of child health, environmental health, and children with special needs. She has conducted interdisciplinary research to test innovative models of care (e.g., asthma, secondhand smoke reduction, household chemicals), resulting in adoption of these programs in various Alabama communities in local school districts, child care programs (Head Start) and community-based organizations. She serves on multiple state and national committees as an advocate for child health. Dr. Turner-Henson is a member of the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Children's Health Protection Advisory Committee.
Dr. Turner-Henson is project director of the Leadership Education in Child-Health Nursing program (LECHN), funded by the Maternal Child Health Bureau, DHHS. The aim of the LECHN program is to prepare the next generation of nursing faculty leaders in child-health nursing education who conduct biobehavioral research. Empowering communities through building grassroots initiatives to reduce children's environmental risk and promote healthy communities is a key focus of her work.
In 2010, Professor Turner Henson, gave a one day workshop for nurses at the University of South Alabama in Mobile, Nurses & Environmental Health: Health Consequences of the Gulf Oil Spill The workshop informed nurses and health professionals about the environmental health consequences of the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill and taught health risk communication strategies. Continuing education credit was offered without cost to attendees of the workshop, which was sponsored by the University of South Alabama College of Nursing, University of Alabama, Birmingham, School of Nursing, Leadership Education in Child-Health Nursing (LECHN) Program, and University of Maryland Environmental Health Education Center.
Nancy Swan, founder and director of Children's Environmental Protection Alliance and host of Children's EPA Community Forum, will make a presentation about her chemical exposure and injury, and injuries to more than two dozen schoolchildren during a roofing renovation project at the school where she was teaching school. She will introduce Children's EPA mission to promote federal and state disaster plans to include specific Disaster Plans for children and schools. Nancy Swan will moderate Q and A, include submitted Q and A, commentary, suggestions.
Mrs. Swan hosted three CDC/ATSDR Community Conversations in Mobile, Alabama in 2010 as part of the CDC/ATSDR National Conversation on Public Health and Chemical Exposure. She submitted the results of the Community Conversation and participated in review of CDC/ATSDR policy changes.
Nancy Swan earned a BA in Home Economics and Theater and attended graduate school at San Jose State University of California and the University of Southern Mississippi. While teaching public school for ten years, Mrs. Swan earning a masters level education through the University of Southern Mississippi, wrote and illustrated Threads and Stuff, a textbook/workbook for to teach basic learning skills through practical application, and directed and designed lighting for dozens of community, church, and school musicals and plays.
From 2009-2011, Nancy Swan initiated the signing of six National Healthy Schools Day governor's proclamations: three consecutive Alabama National Healthy Schools Day Proclamations, including two from Governor Bob Riley and one this year from Governor Robert Bentley. Mrs Swan also secured two NHSD proclamations from Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour, and one from Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam. She met with Alabama Governors Bob Riley in 2010 and Robert Bentley and Tennessee Governor Haslam in 2011 and requested their support for healthier schools. On April 29, 2011, Pat Greenwood, news anchor for WPMI Local 15 TV, interviewed Nancy Swan about her experience and her soon to be completed book, Toxic Justice. See article published June 5 in Mobile Press Register, "Toxic exposure is a serious issue on campus."
Mrs. Swan will moderate questions, provide resources for additional information, and suggest opportunities and programs available for community members, school officials, and government support to improve environmental and chemical protection for schoolchildren.
Children's Environmental Protection Alliance will continue to sponsor Children's EPA Community Forums and to invite guest speakers to
Free admission. Preregistration is not necessary, but is encouraged. Attendees may email questions and concerns in advance. Please email Nancy Swan at firstname.lastname@example.com
Please provide the following information:
Events >


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Is it a wonderful new Christmas decoration come too late? Blood plunging into a pool of bath water? Or has someone just dropped the ketchup in the sink?
The Boogeyman's Sophie Thatcher Reveals What Draws Her to Dark Characters | io9 Interview
Turns out it's actually nothing quite as excitng. It's just boring old red ink dropped into water. But it is beautiful red ink, lit wonderfully and captured with delicate precision by Italian illustrator and graphic designer Alberto Seveso.
The best thing? A selection of these photographs, with different colors of ink, are available to download as high-res wallpaper images here. Don't say we never give you anything. [Alberto Seveso via Colossal]


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It's that chilly, cozy time of year and you're reaching to light up those festive candle scents; earthy pine, spicy cinnamon apple, warm vanilla cookie. That is, until you realize your candles are nearly dead from last season's use. You can barely fit your hand in to light the wick at the bottom of the jar and even if you can, the wick is completely burnt out. We recently found ourselves in a similar situation with a significant collection of useless but oh-so-amazing-smelling candles that still had plenty of wax in them. Rather than being wasteful and tossing them out, we assessed our inventory and devised a plan to revive them. Using small mason jars leftover from our baby shower last year, we made new candles out of the old ones, layering some our favorite scents for a colorful look. With new wicks, pretty glass jars, and some TLC, you too can have your favorite candle(s) brought back to life!
Dead candles
Glass mason jars (or any cool glass container of your choice-here's your chance to get creative!)
Large pot with boiling water
Candle wicks
1. Fill a large pot with just enough water to submerge the candle jar(s) halfway, place on the stove, and bring to a boil.
2. Turn the fire on low and carefully place your candle jars in the pot until the wax is completely melted.
3. Using tongs, remove the old wicks from the melted candle jars and dispose of them.
4. Dip a new wick in the melted wax and place it at the bottom of your new jar/container.
5. Let it cool and solidify.
6. Secure the wick in place so that it is standing straight up when you pour the melted wax in the jar.
7. Using an oven mitten or kitchen towel for protection, remove the melted candle jars from the pot and pour the hot wax into your newly prepared jar/container.
8. Lay the candle on a flat surface to set and harden. If you want this process to happen more quickly then put your candle on a tray and pop it in the fridge.
9. Once your first layer has solidified, pour the next layer.
10. Repeat steps 7-9 until you've filled your jar.
11. Trim the wick.
It's seriously that easy! We made these for our home but with a pretty container these can make beautiful gifts for friends or loved ones. I mean, who doesn't love candles?
What do you do with your old, dying candles? We would love to hear from you! And as always…
If you liked this post please follow us and share!


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LONDON (Reuters) - Spoof billboards celebrating Russian President Vladimir Putin's "contribution" to Brexit have been put up in London by a satirical group which says it wants to secure recognition for the role Russian military intelligence played in the referendum.
Britain has said it found no evidence that Russia interfered in the 2016 Brexit vote and Moscow has repeatedly denied even trying, though opponents of Brexit have repeatedly questioned whether the Kremlin played a role.
In the referendum, 17.4 million voters, or 51.9 percent, backed leaving the EU while 16.1 million, or 48.1 percent, backed staying. Britain is due to leave on March 29.
The posters in London showed a picture of Kremlin chief Putin winking and holding the Russian flag beside the slogan: "Lets celebrate a Red, White and Blue Brexit." The "r" of Brexit was reversed to give it the look of a Cyrillic letter.
In a statement, the people claiming to be behind the campaign said they were a group of Russian military intelligence (GRU) officers who wanted their true role in the Brexit vote to be recognized.
"The group hopes to counter recent unwarranted negative publicity about the GRU by putting up advertisements highlighting their part in Britain's imminent liberation from the EU," said the group, which calls itself Proud Bear.
Britain accuses the GRU of trying to poison former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter with a nerve agent in the English city of Salisbury in March.
A video posted by the @Pr0ud_Bear group showed Putin riding a bulldog with the face of Brexit campaigner Arron Banks.
"People of tiny island - it is time to celebrate," the video said.
It asked for funding to celebrate the GRU's role in Brexit by hiring a digital billboard at Waterloo station and extolled the economic possibilities of post-Brexit trade with Russia including a booming trade in vodka.
When contacted by Reuters, a representative of the group said in a statement in Russian that it was concerned by the health of Russian democracy and opposed the authoritarian tendencies of Moscow.
The group expressed solidarity with Russian journalists but the representative declined to say who was behind the stunt. The Russian embassy did not immediately comment.
Reporting by Guy Faulconbridge; editing by Stephen Addison
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.


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And so it begins...
The NDP ads start with "average Canadians" raising an issue - it's a cute trick, since it shows Jack responding directly to Canadians. There are BC and Ontario-specific HST ads, along with this one:
So if you're keeping track, Jack is now in his "making parliament work" mood. For those of you without your Parliament Hill decoder rings at home, "making parliament work", "putting partisan games aside", and "getting results" (for people?) can all be translated loosely as "rolling over". Of course, even if Jack wants a way out, he still needs Harper to offer him one or we'll be in an election campaign by month's end.
And judging from the CPC ad buy (which has included Superbowl and Oscar commercials), they're very much ready for that. The latest from our Conservative friends includes a surprisingly policy-related attack ad going after Ignatieff on corporate taxes.
There's also a positive spot where you can see Steve playing the piano, see Steve in a hard hat, and see Steve visiting world leaders. Oh, and there's a $16 billion dollar F-35 fly over:
Labels: Ads


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Biologic Therapy for Kidney Cancer
According to the American Cancer Society, kidney cancer affects nearly 65,000 people every year and, as with many types of cancer, the main treatment is often surgery to remove the tumor and surrounding cancer cells.
The decision to perform surgery or another type of treatment depends on your age, your health and ability to handle the treatment, the size and location of the tumor, and whether the kidney cancer has spread to other parts of your body.
In addition to surgery, kidney cancer treatment options include targeted therapy using drugs to destroy the cancer and another drug-based approach called biologic therapy.
How biologic therapy works
Biologic (or biological) therapy is a type of cancer treatment that focuses on strengthening your body's own immune system rather than destroying the cancer cells with medication. Also called immunotherapy, the idea is to help your immune system better defend your body and fight off the cancer cells. Biologic therapy also works by helping to shrink existing tumors, slow their progression, and prevent kidney cancer from spreading to other parts of the body.
Biologic therapy can shrink tumors by about half in 10 to 20 percent of people with kidney cancer. For years, it was the primary treatment for this cancer, but because of uncomfortable and serious side effects, biologic therapy is now usually used only after targeted therapy has failed.
Types of biologic therapy
Depending on the drug, biologic therapy may be given as pills, by injection, or through an IV. The main medications used in biologic therapy for kidney cancer are cytokines, proteins known to "turn on" the immune system. Interferon-alpha and interleukin-2 (IL-2) are the most commonly used cytokines. IL-2 tends to offer longer lasting effects in people who respond well to it, but it is effective in only a small percentage of people who take it.
Side effects
As with many cancer treatments, biologic therapy does cause side effects, though medications are available to help ease some of them.
Serious side effects from cytokines can include:
Changes in mental function
Lowered blood pressure
Pain in the abdomen
Chills with a high fever
Feeling extremely fatigued
Rapidly beating heart
Other, more severe side effects of cytokines are possible:
Heart attack
Bleeding in the intestines
A buildup of fluid in the lungs
Difficulty breathing
Damage to the kidneys
In rare cases, side effects can be fatal. Because of the risk of these side effects, biologic therapy is usually used to treat kidney cancer only in people who are otherwise in good overall health and can withstand the difficult treatment.
Biologic therapy is still being studied to find better ways to use these drugs to fight cancer.


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To compare a foam mattress overlay with a foam mattress replacement for reducing pressure ulcers in newly admitted nursing home residents.
Randomised controlled trial.
A 250 bed teaching nursing home in Nebraska, USA.
492 patients who were newly admitted were screened and 40 patients (mean age 77 y, age range 22–98 y, 55% women) were enrolled. Inclusion criteria were expected stay ≥10 days, absence of pressure ulcers, and being at risk of pressure ulcer development defined as a Braden Scale score <18 with a subscale score of <3 in sensory perception (limited ability to feel or report pain), mobility (able to make only slight changes in position), or activity levels (chairbound or unable to walk). Follow up was complete.
Patients in both groups received standard care. 20 patients were allocated to the Iris 3000 mattress overlay (Bio Clinic of Sunrise Medical Corporation, Ontario, Canada). The overlay is 10 cm of foam designed to be placed over a standard mattress to decrease the pressure between the bony prominence and the bed surface. It has a flat dimpled surface, a 6 month warranty, is for single patient use, and the cost is $US 38. Twenty patients were allocated to a foam mattress (MAXIFLOAT, BG Industries, Northridge, CA, USA). It has 4 primary sections: a water repellent, antibacterial top cover; a 4 cm thick, 2 kg dual indentation force load deflection, luxury grade, high resiliency, antimicrobial foam inner cover; a centre core 13 kg indentation force load deflection, flame retardant, polyurethane foam with exclusive die cuts and a 41 by 66 cm non-removable polyester fibre heel pillow to provide extra protection; and a waterproof, antibacterial bottom cover attached directly to the top cover. It has a 5 year warranty, is designed for multiple use, and the cost is $260 per bed.
Main outcome measure
The Bergstrom Skin Assessment was used to determine the incidence of pressure ulcers. It was used 3 times per week for 10–21 days.
Main results
12 patients developed 16 ulcers in the overlay group compared with 5 patients who developed 5 ulcers in the mattress group (60% v 25%, p=0.025) (table⇓). The groups did not differ for the mean number of days to development of pressure ulcers (6.5 d for the overlay group v 9.2 d for the mattress group, p=0.3).
Newly admitted patients who were at risk of the development of pressure ulcers had a lower incidence of ulcers when they used a specially designed foam mattress compared with a foam overlay and a standard mattress.
Research that assesses therapeutic surfaces must be emphasised as an important tool in expanding nursing knowledge. The work of Vyhlidal et al provides concrete information on the comparison of 2 specific surfaces: a foam overlay and a mattress replacement. Jester and Weaver1 suggest in a report from research by Krouskop and Garber,2 that technological advances, as reflected in a variety of new pressure relieving devices, can only show benefits if they are used correctly. Their research strongly supports the need for rigorous evaluation of pressure relieving devices. In 1994, Kemp and Krouskop completed a study that showed a reduction in the occurrence of ulcers by managing the therapeutic surface correctly.3 The problem for nurses is the absence of adequate research on which to base clinical decisions.
Two limitations must be considered. Firstly, only 2 surfaces were reviewed. The United States Agency for Health Care Policy and Research Pressure Ulcer Treatment Guideline suggests that a minimum of 6 therapeutic surfaces should be considered.4 This study therefore provides a beginning for future research as additional clinical comparisons will certainly assist nursing decision making. Secondly, it is not clear that the assessors were blind to the surface used.
The conclusions provide nurses with good clinical data to assist with choosing therapeutic surface interventions.
Source of funding: no external funding although BG Industries loaned the study mattresses to the facility.
For article reprint: Dr N Bergstrom, College of Nursing, University of Nebraska Medical Center, Omaha, NE 68022, USA. Fax +1 402 559 4303.


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Flight Planning
January 19, 2010
[ We studied methods of computing sines in a previous exercise. In today's exercise, guest author Jos Koot, a retired physicist, amateur pilot, and Scheme enthusiast, gives us an example of the use of sines. Feel free to contact me if you have an idea for an exercise, or if you wish to contribute your own exercise. Jos writes this disclaimer: Do not use the example program for real life flight planning. It may not be fool proof!!! Use more appropriate equipment and procedures after studying aeronautics more profoundly. I do not accept any claims. There is a lot more to flying than presented in this exercise. ]
When preparing to fly, a pilot must know:
- The direction and distance from the airfield of departure to the airfield of destination. This direction is called the ground track (GT).
- The name (WN) and speed (WS) of the wind. The name is the direction from which the wind blows and is measured in degrees clockwise from north. The direction proper (WD) is opposite to that of the name.
- The air speed of the plane (AS) This is the speed of the airplane relative to the moving air.
Directions are measured in degrees clockwise from geographic north, 360 degrees on the compass-card. You may measure distances and times in any unit you like. Speeds should be in unit of distance per unit of time, of course. We take the air speed as a given datum and we ignore time needed for climbing and descending. Because the plane may be drifted by the wind, the pilot must calculate which direction to head for in order to compensate the drift. For this purpose the pilot may draw a triangle whose sides are speeds:
- Ground track. This side is to be drawn in the direction from takeoff to destination but with unknown speed. This still unknown speed is called the ground speed (GS).
- Drift caused by the wind. Both direction and speed are known thanks to meteorologists. The drift points in the direction the wind blows to and is opposite to that of the name of the wind. For example, wind from east causes drift to west.
- True heading (HT). This is the direction the pilot must choose in order to compensate for the drift. The direction is unknown, but the speed is: it is the air speed, also called the cruise speed.
It is instructive first to draw some navigation triangles by means of a pair of compasses and a ruler. The air speed is significantly greater than the wind speed, of course. First draw a line in the direction of the ground track. On this line choose a point B. Draw the drift ending in point B. Now we have point C. Draw a circle with point C for its centre and the air speed for its radius. The circle has two points of intersection with the ground track. One of the intersection points is A. Point A and the other point of intersection correspond to the two roots of the quadratic equation. Because the ground speed is directed from point A to point B it is not difficult to see which point of intersection is the right one. Now the vector equation AB = AC + CB is satisfied.
The known data are: ground track GT, distance (D) from departure to destination, wind name WN, wind velocity WS and the air speed AS. The air speed is significantly greater than the velocity of the wind, of course. From these data we want to compute: true heading TH, ground speed GS and time of the flight (FT=D/GS).
One solution uses the law of sines, which states that the ratio of the length of a side to the sine of the opposite angle is the same for all three sides of any triangle. We have , hence . The ground speed can be calculated as .
Another solution uses the cosine rule c² = a² + b² – 2ab cos(θ) to compute the third side of a triangle when two sides and the included angle are known, a quadratic equation is obtained. Solving this equation for the unknown ground speed, we have . Because we want a positive ground speed, take the root with the plus sign. Finally use the cosine rule again in order to compute the angle of correction (angle A), which is the angle between the ground track and the required true heading: , so the true heading is . This angle must be added or subtracted from the direction of the ground track depending on which side the wind drifts the plane.
Your task is to write two functions, as above, that take a distance, ground track, wind speed and direction, and air speed and computes the true heading, ground speed, correction and duration of flight. When you are finished, you are welcome to read or run a suggested solution, or to post your own solution or discuss the exercise in the comments below.


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The world of tablets is about to get very interesting.
New evidence published this week suggests Amazon is growing closer to launching its own tablet device. Taiwanese newspaper Digitimes says a manufacturer called Quanta Computer has received orders to work on the Android-based gadget, which will supposedly ship in the second half of this year.
We've heard about a possible Amazon Android tablet before, but this is the first time we've seen such firm-sounding details. Previous speculation has suggested the Amazon tab could include tightly integrated access to the company's retail services, ranging from music and video purchases to a Kindle-like bookshop, all packaged within a custom interface.
Amazon Tablet: Not Your Average Android Product
Now, anyone who's followed my musings over the years knows I tend to shy away from manufacturer-added skins baked into the Android OS. The reason: On a typical device, these skins tend to slow down performance and add needless delays into the Android upgrade process. They also force users to carry around a bunch of uninstallable extra weight they may or may not actually want. The manufacturers could just as easily offer their features as removable widgets and apps without welding them into the operating system and causing all sorts of issues.
With this rumored Amazon tablet, though, we're looking at a completely different kind of product. Provided the buzz we've heard turns out to be true, the Amazon tab could be so heavily customized that it wouldn't even look or feel like Android. We're talking about someone taking the basic Android infrastructure and using it to create a whole new kind of item — one where the traditional Android upgrade cycle would be far less significant, as you'd barely know you're using an Android-based device.
This is where the Android ecosystem really has the potential to open up some fascinating doors. While other manufacturers have taken the stock Android software and muddled it up for no apparent reason, a company like Amazon has the potential to build a truly unique and useful platform around its own services. The recently launched Amazon Appstore for Android and Amazon Cloud Drive — the latter of which provides integrated purchasing, storing, and streaming of digital music — could play key roles in the experience. Throw in an eyeball-friendly E Ink display and an Amazon-connected platform for streaming and storing videos, and you've got a pretty compelling little gizmo on your hands.
Amazon Tablet and the Rest of the Tablet Market
So, the big question: Would something like this be better than more traditional tablets like the Motorola Xoom, LG G-Slate, or Apple iPad? Not necessarily; it all comes down to what you want. The point is that it'd be something different — and something that'd add a new kind of value into the tablet market. An Amazon tablet, in the incarnation we're envisioning, would address a very different segment of the market than a regular Honeycomb tab or an iPad. Whether or not it'd be your cup of tea, the kind of diversity and competition it could add into an often homogenous-seeming field is an exciting prospect to consider.
Back when Amazon first gave us a glimpse at its Android app store — amidst plenty of pish-poshing from execs of a certain competing mobile platform — I sensed we were seeing the beginning of something big. Days later, when Amazon announced its Cloud Drive music storage solution, it became even more apparent that the company was out to seriously shake up the mobile landscape.
A fully functioning Amazon tablet would be the next logical piece in that rapidly forming puzzle. Between that and whatever tricks Google still has up its sleeve (an Android Nexus tab, perhaps?), the realm of slates is shaping up to be anything but stagnant in the months to come.
JR Raphael is a PCWorld contributing editor and the author of the Android Power blog. You can find him on both Facebook and Twitter.


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A little early morning tarck action
April 6, 2012 Comments Off on A little early morning tarck action
The tarck is a place where you go 'round and 'round, but nothing ever changes except for you, who gets tarder and tarder until you quit, most usually dejected at not having reached whatever hopeless goals you began with. It is, like life, a metaphor for life.
I'm locked into the weekly Friday tarck session of your worst nightmare at the newly re-branded Velo Sports Center in Carson. Fridays were once a happy time when I would meet up at Malaga Cove with Howard Hughes, and with Jack from Illinois (not his real name) when he was in town. We'd pedal over to Hermosa and watch Chief get dressed, which was its own form of entertainment, and often lasted well into the morning. Then Chief would make the monster 250-yard pedal down to CotKU, we'd quaff a cup of coffee, sometimes delaying the inevitable with a ride around the hill, but usually going straight into the office, and Chief would, if he'd been in trial, engage in some long-distance "punitive riding" up the coast.
That's all a distant memory. Now on Fridays I am bound to the Habitrail from Hell, where, by virtue of having rented a locker, I am now forced to use it once a week or feel the gentle yet steely reproofs of my lockermate who, by the way, has terrible designs on me. Although he's only been cycling for a few years, and is older than an igneous rock deposit, he is fierce, fast, canny, disciplined, and focused beyond belief.
The opposite of me, in other words, who is smiley, slow, clod-like, lazy, and scattered to the four winds.
Each Friday we do a 40 or 50 or 100-lap warm-up on the blue line, alternating every two laps. With ten to go I take the front, we drop down to the pole lane, and I try to fend him off in the final 500 or 250 meters. He's never come around me except for the time he miscounted and passed me after the final lap, but he's, like 287 years older than me and comes close to beating me every time. Each time he's just a little bit closer.
So now I go to bed every Thursday with worry on my head that's the size of a block of granite, and I wake up at 5:00 AM each Friday wondering only one thing: "How'm I going to keep that bastard at bay again today?" This is, by the way, why Eddy retired from cycling. He couldn't take the incessant pressure to win. [No snide comments, please, about how beating an octogenarian in a warm-up isn't "winning." My coach, @captaintbag1, has already advised me that since I totally suck and can't win anything of significance I should choose events that I really can win, even if they're just totally faux races. This is one. Rather, this is the only one. So shut the fuck up now.]
Anyway, we weren't the only ones at the tarck this morning. Here's who was there and what was done by them, a nice little passive voice construction that will hopefully piss at least someone off who works in the Language Arts field, which, when I was a kid, had the really weird name of "English."
Oldasdirt: After 99 laps, with one to go I jumped hard, opened up a few bike lengths, and just managed to stave him off. It didn't feel like a victory so much as a reprieve from the inevitable execution.
CM & W: How often do you see an older brother doing what older brothers are supposed to do, i.e. helping a sibling instead of pounding the living snot out of them? CM took his little sister out on the tarck and they had a fantastic workout. She is a little motor and we will be seeing her in a stars-and-stripes jersey soon. Of course I acted like a dick when I yelled at CM not to cross the tarck with his cleats on, even though it turned out that he had been wearing the proper rubber clogs. You see, I crossed the tarck once in my cleats and Johnny saw me from, like, three miles away and read me the riot act. So for the past year I've been looking for someone I could read the riot act to, but just ended up accusing the innocent. CM was cool about it, though, as I immediately apologized.
Kurt S.: Have you ever watched a rocket lift off? Kurt was doing starts. Whoever's going to beat him at nationals this year better bring an engine in their down tube, because Kurt is absolutely flying.
Katherine: Parent of CM & W, she was out there getting in a solid workout with the guys.
Jack K.: Most people think Jack lives at the tarck, but he doesn't, or at least he's not paying rent. Jack is the most consistent early morning tarck rider and jaw flapper in SoCal. If he can't talk about it, that's because the words to do so haven't yet been invented.
Niva: Joined me and Oldasdirt midway through our warm-up, then dropped us without so much as an effort with four to go. I don't know what she's training for, but I'm putting my money on her to win it.
Bigdude in blue: Dude just pedaled around the tarck and looked happy as a clam doing it.
Since I only did the 100-lap warmup with Oldasdirt I got into the office early. Which is a bad thing. Right?


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There is more to the story; much more.
The basis of a Stanford study, called "The Marshmallow Experiment",
that was begun in the 1960's and has been replicated several times (and validated)… looking at the long-term effects of delayed gratification that could be demonstrated in 4-5 years old who were followed through adulthood, for 40 years!
The ability to delay eating a marshmallow for 15 minutes to get TWO instead of just one marshmallow, was indicative of abilities that would translate into an increased life-long capacity to delay immediate gratification for long-term benefits. The implication was that the inherent genetic programming of the child had already pre-determined their path.
That was the implication of the study, but further study brought out more insights which creates a picture of a much more complicated process; one in which the environment actually plays a significant role, in the first 4 years. The environment that the parents create, actually.
As a labor & delivery nurse for some 25 years+ I'm well versed in the innate personality differences that are present from the very moment of a newborn's first breath. Having had the unique experience to be part of over several thousand births, it always continues to be incredibly inspiring.
A newborn, in those first few minutes of life, show great variability in their response to emerging into the world. Some open their eyes and look around at the new world that they have entered, calm & accepting, while others have their eyes clamped shut as they scream bloody murder until placed in their mother's arms and are calmed by her heartbeat and touch. There is indeed a whole spectrum of responses.
Some, of course are a response to the type of deliver: varying from easy, short labor vrs long, traumatic vrs newborn's responses depressed due to being recipients of drugs for maternal pain relief, vrs those that had oxygen issues during labor and delivery. But generally, for those rough deliveries, these are temporary adaptive responses and the newborns innate personality shortly becomes apparent.
Differing Personality Types
From the moment of birth, normal delivery and Cesarian section deliveries, newborns show a range of responses that are part of their own personal patterns. It's easily recognizable at birth; how does the newborn respond to stimulation, to change, to touch, to comforting measures, to voice, etc. He recognizes mother, and father, in the delivery suite, illustrated by the quiet, calm responses when parents interact with the newborn, who "tunes in".
Dr. T. Berry Brazelton wrote a book, in the early 1970's that looked at how newborn's communicate with us, as well as identifying newborn temperament that are all within the normal range of development. He moved beyond the "sick" or premature newborn, to what the normal newborn brought to the table.
Infants and Mothers: Differences in Development Dr.T.Berry Brazelton Harvard Medical School
While babies may not speak their first word for a year, they are born ready to communicate with a rich vocabulary of body movements, cries and visual responses: all part of the complex language of infant behavior.
He identified three major personality groups he called Quiet, Average, Active Baby.
Brazelton was able to identify ways that mother's could interpret their newborns behavior patterns and work with them. So yes, many things are innate, part of our genetic backup. It turns out that being able to "hear" our newborns and respond to their needs influences the way they interact with the world around them. (To learn more about the specifics of the process check out this webpage: Brazelton Assessment ).
Getting back to the Marshmallow Experiment; if a newborn or toddler, is raised in a world where their needs are heard and met fairly consistently then they build a picture of a world that is dependable.
The Marshmallow Experiment, with a Twist, at the University of Rochester; divided the children into two groups.
- The first group was exposed to a series of unreliable experiences. i.e. promises were made but not kept.
- The second group was exposed to a series of promises that were made and consistently kept.
Each group was learning something about the world around them.
The first group had no reason to build trust. "A bird in hand is worth two in the bush" would be an apt expression for that group. If your world is constantly changing and unreliable… you tend to live for the moment.
The second group was learning two important things: waiting can be worth it, and, I have the ability to wait; in fact they would wait up to 4 times longer than the first group! Impressive. Especially given that it only took a few "reliable experiences" to influence their behavior.
As mothers and fathers we have an enormous effect on the world our children experience. If we build a framework that is caring and consistent, then our children find it dependable.
In an experiment: when a newborn cries are answered within 3 – 5 minutes, they quickly settle. That same newborn if left to cry for 10 minutes, so that they are not 'spoiled', are unable to settle for over 30 minutes. Babies do not get spoiled, they only know their needs are answered, or not. But once they are "out of sorts" (i.e. abandoned) it takes much longer for them to calm back down when their needs are attended to.
Responding & nurturing our children works toward building healthy adults, as we create a dependable world as much as is possible, from which to reach out and deal with a world full of experiences. Over time, as our experiences and awareness expands we are able to tolerate more "ambiguity" in our world and work toward the goals we have set.
Incredible Value of Parenting
I often think, that we don't realize just how important our young mothers and fathers are, in the development of their children. It's not enough to "birth" the child, feed, cloth, & educate. Not if we want them to successfully navigate the future world. Here is 3 min video on how dependent the child is to social interaction with mom: Mother/child interaction
The biggest complaint that we heard voiced, when working with "street kids" (those who had left home, and were roaming the country)… was the sense that they had been abandoned by their parents to the TV, the video games, to someone else, while their parent's focused on their careers. (NOT my statement, but what I heard from them). Or parents just were too tired to interact with them, when they did come home from work.
Few (uh, as in none) had been taught life-skills (cooking, mechanics, gardening, sewing, etc). This was true of most of our farm interns, as well. (Usually from stable families and educated.) They lived a life of either processed foods out of a box/bag or fast foods. (In the '70's only 2% of meals were out of the home; today over 50-70%).
I worked hard to get my nursing degree and to work in Maternal-Child nursing. I will say that we tried to make it a point that at least one parent was home most of the time, and that I worked only 3 days a week for most of my nursing career. I felt like 4 days a week, life revolved around work but working 3 days a week allowed life to revolve around family. This is NOT a choice most people have, though.
I ended up dropping my nursing program with my 2nd child. I delivered her in the middle of my semester on Maternal-Child Nursing (with lectures on how important the maternal connection was in the first two years of life). The dichotomy was crushing. Coming home from a lecture to a newborn that I had abandoned for school (a choice I had the luxury of making) was more than I could emotionally deal with. My first responsibility, if within my power to do so, was to the child. It's not always an easy choice, it was a high price to pay. It took me years to get my nursing degree because of the detour.
Just before the housing crash, when we put our 10 year project of a remodeled home (we were all involved in the building process) on the market, the kids were devastated (not little kids but young adults, college & senior in high school).
We had all poured heart and soul into creating a home that worked for us. All I had to say to them was, "would you rather have dad home/retire or he continues to work full-time ?" They opted for having dad there & getting to live life, in lieu of having "things" (possessions that posses us, I guess).
Real happiness is not things, of course, but it is meaningful work and relationships, after all. It felt good to see the choices the young adults opted for.
The take home message for me, from "The Marshmallow Study, with a Twist", was how important our interactions are, with little ones. To be consistent, to follow through on our word, and to nurture them creates a world they can trust. That trust factor allows them to look past grabbing the immediate satisfaction, building the capacity to work toward longer range goals. Your interactions with preschoolers is more significant than you might think!
With a Twist:


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This is part 3 of my continuing experience with an old Epson 9600 i picked up on Craigslist. (See part 1 and Part 2)
Do you see what I see?
After spending as much on paper, ink, and parts as I did purchasing the printer, I decided to put another ($400) drop in the bucket to pick up a X-rite (formerly GregtagMacbeth) i1 Basic Pro spectrophotometer (a.k.a Eye-One Pro, EFI ES-1000) on Ebay. This tool handles profiling both my display and my printer. Display profiling confirms that the colors on the screen are actually what's in the image file. Printer profiling confirms that the ink hitting the paper matches what the computer thinks it's sending. Having both sides of the equation in place means what you see on the screen should match what you see on the page.
In my last few projects, I've been dealing with lack of supported software for older hardware. This effort is no exception. The i1 Basic Pro (Is that an oxymoron or what?) originally came with i1Match, ProfileMaker and MonacoPROFILER all of which won't run on my Intel-based Macbook running OSX 10.8. X-Rite recommends upgrading to i1Profiler. You can download it from their site easily enough, but unless your device has a license key for it, it will run in evaluation only mode. There is an upgrade path you can buy, but that will run you $699. For that I could have bought a brand new i1 Basic Pro 2 at $1200. Though, more likely, I would have gotten the popular and less-expensive prosumer version, the ColorMunki Photo.
From previous experience, I was aware that the open-source software, ArgyllCMS, supported the i1 without purchasing the upgrade. It's worth noting that with X-Rite and Spyder a lot of their offerings have the same device and it's only the software included that limits or enables the device's capabilities. So, using ArgyllCMS can allow you to get more for less (i.e. free).
ArgyllCMS to the Rescue
Installing Argyll is very straightforward. The website has some instructions for Mac installation which I needed to modify for my newer OS. Here is a revised version that should work on 10.8.5 and later.
Download the latest version and unzip it. I put the resulting folder in my Application directory. I also recommend removing the version number from the folder name so that when you upgrade, you can just drop the updated files in this directory without having to redo the next step.
On the Mac, you will need to add the ArgyllCMS to the path.
Step 1: Open Terminal
Step 2: Enter the follow commands:
open ~/.bash_profile
Step 3: Add the following line to the end of the file adding whatever additional directory you want in your path in the format PATH=$PATH:$HOME/PATH_TO_DIRECTORY/Argyll/bin
Step 4: Save the .bash_profile file and Quit
Step 5: Force the .bash_profile to execute. This loads the values immediately without having to reboot. In your Terminal window, run the following command.
source ~/.bash_profile
Step 6: You can confirm the new path by opening a new Terminal window and running:
echo $PATH
So, once you're done, you just need to open Terminal, navigate to the ArgyllCMS directory and run the commands that follow. I keep the commands saved in a text document so it's a cut n' paste operation. Easy peasy! See my earlier post for a handy utility that opens terminal directly from a Finder window.
Color Management for Doctorates
The ArgyllCMS site has a page that gives a run down on the steps involved in creating a printer profile. It's detailed. Very detailed. Very, very detailed. To quote;
"Most printers running through simple drivers will appear as if they are RGB devices. In fact there is no such thing as a real RGB printer, since printers use white media and the colorant must subtract from the light reflected on it to create color, but the printer itself turns the incoming RGB into the native print colorspace, so for this reason we will tell targen to use the "Print RGB" colorspace, so that it knows that it's really a subtractive media. Other drivers will drive a printer more directly, and will expect a CMYK profile. [Currently Argyll is not capable of creating an ICC profile for devices with more colorants than CMYK. When this capability is introduced, it will by creating an additional separation profile which then allows the printer to be treated as a CMY or CMYK printer.] "
Hmm. Yup. Yup. Yeah. I recognize some of these words. Yup, definitely words.
Even if you know what Color Management is, the documentation can be a bit dense; detailed to the point of obscurity, some might say. If you don't know what Color Management is, then you may want to start backing away very slowly. While I lack an advanced degree in color theory, I do have quite a bit experience with command-line programs. So, after a few days of trial, error, and Google, I have developed a simple workflow that should help other newbies get started.
In summary, you'll create a print target, one or many pages with rows of colored squares, and then read that target with your spectrophotometer. From that reading, ArgyllCMS generates a printer profile (.icc). There are five steps;
- targen – this command tells ArgyllCMS how many patches to put in the target
- printtarg – here you generate TIF file(s) of your target
- Print the TIF file(s) without Color Management
- chartread – captures the data coming from the spectrophotometer
- colprof – creates the printer profile from the chart scan
Technically, you only need to do the first two steps once, because once you have your TIF file generated, you can just reprint that for any subsequent re-profiling. (Though this may not be entirely correct, since the ArgyllCMS documentation differentiates between printer profiling and printer calibration with the latter being used to "allow day to day correction of device drift without resorting to a full re-profile". Honestly, it's outside the scope of my understanding thus far and maybe I'll revisit it after I delve into it more.)
If you just want the ArgyllCMS commands I used without the details and colored commentary (pun intended), jump to the Summary at the end.
Step 1 – Targen
By default, targen with the minimum options for an RGB printer [-d2] will generate 836 patches, which when printed on US Letter, will span a little under 2 pages.
Now you may be asking yourself, "Do I have an RGB printer?" If in doubt, try answering the following questions;
- Name an aquatic animal that can see more than RGB?
- How the heck does the K in CMYK mean black?
- Is RIP something that only pertains to funerals?
- Did you buy your fine art printer at Costco?
Answers: 1) The Mantis Shrimp, 2) The K in CMYK stands for "Key Plate". In CMYK, this is usually done with black ink. Plus, B already meant Blue. 3) No. See Raster Image Processor. 4) Seriously?
If you answered "What the what?" to most or all of these questions, you probably have a printer that uses an RGB driver regardless of how many ink colors are physically put into it. If you have a driver or RIP that is printing directly to CMYK, than you should probably be writing this article. I humbly await your comments.
But, I digress… Good paper's not cheap. So, I wanted to maximize the patches per square inch. If you look at the chart at the bottom of the targen documentation, it lists the ideal patches/page for your device. For the Eye-One Pro, it's 462 for 1 page, 924 for 2 pages, and in multiples of that so forth.
With some fiddling, I got 700 patches on a single letter sized sheet. Let's break down how.
targen -v -d2 -G -e8 -g128 -f700 EyeOne1pg
- [-v] – Shows progress on the screen so, you aren't just left listening to the fan whirr and wondering what's going on
- [-d2] – Because you have an RGB printer from Costco
- [-G] – "Generate good optimized points rather than Fast" because good is better than fast. That's what she said.
- [-e8] – White color test patches. Default is 4.
- [-g128] – Prints 128 greyscale patches so you can do accurate B&W prints later. Probably want to multiply this if you do multiple pages.
- [-f700] – Overall patch count.
Some threads I read suggested patch counts of 2000-3000 for accurate profiles on large format printers. That seems excessive to me. The profiles I produced with a single sheet looked great. Though if you wanted to, just scale the [-f] number accordingly; 1400 for 2 pages, 2100 for 3 pages, etc.
Step 2 – Printtarg
This is the part that I spent the most time tweaking. Setting the number of patches is easy. Getting it to fit properly on the page will kill a few trees. Here's how I got the one pager above.
printtarg -v -ii1 -L -a0.87 -m8 -M8 -T360 -P -pLetter EyeOne1pg
- [-v] – Because watching the text output makes me feel like Neo.
- [-ii1] – Specifies the device; i1. For example, Colormonki would be [-iCM]
- [-L] – Gets rid of the extra whitespace created for the clip on the scanning board. You don't need it. It's a over-engineered gimmick.
- [-a0.87] – Scales down the patches. The i1 can read patches a minimum of 7mm2. Default is 10mm2.
- [-m8 -M8] – Sets the top/bottom and left/right margins to 8mm.
- [-T360] – Create a TIF (postscript is default) at 360 dpi
- [-P] – Doesn't limit the strip length.
- [-pLetter] – set the page size to US Letter (8.5″ x 11″)
- EyeOne1pg – name of the resulting TIF
If you want to print multiple pages and modified the patch count accordingly inTargen, you don't need to change anything here.
Step 3 – Print the Target
Use the Adobe Color Printer Utility application to print your targets without color management applied. Don't use Photoshop, since newer versions don't let you print without color management. With Epson printers, you also want to be sure you're not using the color controls built into the printer.
I've also heard you can also use Mac's native ColorSync (Applications > Utilities), if you select "Print as Color Target" under ColorSync Utility on the print options. While I couldn't see any difference between the outputs of the two methods, I went with the Abobe utility as it was recommended by more users.
In the Adobe Color Printer Utility, select the TIF created in the previous step. Go to File > Page Setup and select your printer and paper size, US Letter. Your paper size options may be named differently and you may have several options within US Letter. Just be sure to select the one that has the minimum borders or is borderless. Hover over the option to see the margin sizes.
Next, select File > Print. Under Printer Settings, select the correct media type. If you're using a non-Epson brand paper, look on the manufacturer's website for the media equivalent. For example, I'm using Canson Baryta Photographique 310gsm which according to their website is equivalent to Epson's Premium Semi Gloss Photo Paper.
Set your print quality. Confirm ColorSettings is disabled and print away. Let the print dry for a few hours (or even overnight) before scanning.
Step 4 – Chartread
Go back to terminal and enter;
chartread -T0.4 EyeOne1pg
The program will run you through a set off prompts to complete the scan. First it will ask you to place the i1 on its calibraton plate. Next, it will ask you to start scanning starting a row A.
Here are some tips on scanning;
- The scan starts when you press the button on the side of the i1, but there is a delay. So, wait till you hear the "Bonk" sound on your computer before starting to move the device. The sound plays through the computer not the device and is very low, so make sure your volume is turned up.
- You can scan in either direction; top to bottom or vice versa. Alternating each line makes the whole process go faster.
- Center the row vertically in the ruler opening so there is whitespace on both ends.
- Line the row up horizontally in the center in ruler opening so that the patches aren't touching the edges.
- If you have to retry a row of a few times, try re-positioning the ruler.
- Because we eliminated the white space on the left you can't clip the page and use the ruler on the first few rows. Once you're past those rows you can move the paper and clip it if you want to. I find the weight of the ruler hold the paper in place even without the clip.
- If you don't have a backing board any flat surface will do but, be careful, because the color of that surface can show through the paper. Put another sheet of the same paper beneath it to prevent any color bleeding through.
Step 5 – Colprof
The last step is to generate the printer profile from the scan.
First, copy AdobeRBB1988.icc (located in HD > System > Library > Colorsync > Profiles) to the ArgyllCMS Directory.
Next, here's the command I used and the breakdown.
colprof -v -A "Epson" -M "Stylus Pro 9600" -D "*Epson 9600 Canson Baryta Photographique CCpro" -qh -S AdobeRGB1998.icc -cmt -dpp -O Epson9600BarytaPaperCCPro.icc EyeOne1pg
- [-v] – You'll definitely want progress shown. This process can take a while.
- [-A] – Manufacturer (optional)
- [-M] – Model (optional)
- [-D] – Very important. This is what you'll see as the profile name in Photoshop and Lightroom. I put a leading * in the name to bring it to the top of the list and clearly differentiate the custom from standard profiles (see image below). In this example, I use the printer model, paper name, and ink type (CCpro = ConeColor Pro K3).
- [-qh] -Set quality to 'High"
- [-S AdobeRGB1998.icc] – I used Adobe1998 as source profile for gamut mapping. I confess to doing this only because most of the threads I read suggested doing so. That's all the color profile I use in Photoshop, so it made sense. Reading About ICC profiling and Gamut Mapping didn't exactly clarify things. So, let's take this one on faith.
- [-cmt] – "Monitor in typical work environment" Taking this one on faith, too.
- [-dpp] – "Monitor in typical work environment" And this one as well.
- [-O Epson9600BarytaPaperCCpro.icc] – resulting filename
The last step is to copy the .icc file from the ArgyllCMS directory to Macintosh HD > Library > ColorSync > Profiles. You'll have to enter your password to do so.
Open up Photoshop, go to print and now you'll see your new profile available in the list of available Printer Profiles under Color Management. If you don't see it listed, try restarting your computer.
In summary, the steps are;
- targen -v -d2 -G -e8 -g128 -f700 FileName
- printtarg -v -ii1 -L -a0.87 -m8 -M8 -T360 -P -pLetter FileName
- Print the TIF file
- chartread -T0.4 FileName
- colprof -v -A "Printer Brand" -M "Printer model" -D "Profile Name/Description" -qh -S AdobeRGB1998.icc -cmt -dpp -O ProfileName.icc FileName
To test my results, I compared a test image I printed on my 2200 using third party inks and Epson's standard profile with the same image printed with the same inks and my new custom profile; both on Epson Photo Glossy paper. (I'm using my Epson 2200 instead of my 9600 because there was a more noticeable improvement with that printer/ink combination.)
Above, I put my 'before' print on top of my 'after' print and took an (admittedly poorly lit) photo of the two to illustrate the difference, which I found most pronounced in the skin tones on my test image. The bottom print made with my custom inks and profile had less of a color cast and much more natural colors in the faces.
I also compared the 'after' print to a test image I printed a few months ago on my 2200 using Epson's inks and profile. Using the custom ink/profile combination gave results that looked much closer to output from Epson's standard ink/profile combination.
In closing, ArgyllCMS is a very sophisticated application of which, like Photoshop, I feel I am only scratching the surface of. From the forums I've read, its level of sophistication is on par with X-rite's i1Profiler and superior to the Colormunki's software. As my understanding of color management practices increases I may revisit some of the options I used here and get even better results. That being said, I was able to get results I was very happy with with only a small learning curve. Some users may be turned off using a command line interface, but having gone through the steps once and saving the commands in a text document, I feel that the next go around would be painless.
On the hardware side, the i1 may be an advanced piece of kit, but in my opinion, it could use some better product design. You can tell it was engineered for one purpose and then retrofitted to serve others. The form factor is clearly designed for reading printed targets. Which is evident by all the awkward accessories needed to set it up to do display or projector calibrations. The Colormunki, with its single-body multi-purpose design, is superior in comparison even if it's inner-workings are inferior. If I had to make the choice again, I might opt for the one that took up far less room in my small NYC apartment.
Hope this was helpful.


text:
Most people know John Frankenheimer's movie "The Manchurian Candidate," which stars Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey, Janet Leigh, and Angela Lansbury in the story of an American soldier who is captured in Korea and programmed by Chinese Communists to kill on command. And most people probably think of the movie as a classic of Cold War culture, like "On the Beach" and "Invasion of the Body Snatchers"—a popular work articulating the anxieties of an era. In fact, "The Manchurian Candidate" was a flop. It was released in the fall of 1962, failed to recover its costs, and was pulled from distribution two years later, after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. It turned up a few times on television, but it was not shown in a movie theatre again until 1987, which—nearly the end of the Cold War—is the year its popularity dates from. The true artifact of Cold War culture is the novel, by Richard Condon, that the movie was based on.
Condon's book came out in 1959 and was a best-seller. It was praised in the Times ("a wild, vigorous, curiously readable melange") and The New Yorker ("a wild and exhilarating satire"); Time named it one of the Ten Best Bad Novels—which, from a publisher's point of view, is far from the worst thing that might be said about a book. The novel's success made Condon rich; he spent most of the rest of his life abroad, producing many more works in the genre that Time had identified, including "Winter Kills," in 1974, and, in 1982, "Prizzi's Honor." His adaptation of that novel for the John Huston movie received an Academy Award nomination in 1986. He died in 1996.
Condon was a cynic of the upbeat type, not unlike Tom Wolfe: his belief that everything is basically shit did not get in the way of his pleasure in making fun of it. He learned that attitude in the finest school for it on earth, Hollywood. Before he was a novelist, Condon was a movie publicist. He began, in 1936, at Walt Disney Productions, where he promoted "Fantasia" and "Dumbo," among other animated masterpieces, and moved on to a succession of studios, finishing up at United Artists, which he left in 1957. He didn't know what he wanted to do next; he just wanted out. "The only thing I knew how to do was spell," he later explained, so he did the logical thing and became a writer. Condon claimed that his work in Hollywood had given him three ulcers. He also claimed that he had seen, during his years there, ten thousand movies, an experience that he believed gave him (his words) "an unconscious grounding in storytelling."
Frankenheimer called "The Manchurian Candidate" "one of the best books I ever read," but admirers of Frankenheimer's movie have not been so gracious. Greil Marcus, in a characteristically overheated appreciation of the movie in the British Film Institute's Film Classics series, calls the novel a "cheaply paranoid fantasy," and he goes on, "That the story would lodge in the nation's psyche and stay there was the work of other hands." The film historian David Thomson describes it as "a book written so that an idiot could film it." No doubt Condon wrote "The Manchurian Candidate" with a movie deal in mind. It was his second novel; his first, called "The Oldest Confession," was also made into a movie—"The Happy Thieves," starring Rex Harrison (a flop that stayed a flop). But the claim that Condon's "Manchurian Candidate" is not much more than a draft for the screenplay (which was written by George Axelrod, the author of "The Seven Year Itch") is peculiar. Michael Crichton writes books that any idiot can film; he practically supplies camera angles. But Condon's is not an easy book to film, in part because its tone is not readily imitated cinematically, and in part because much of it is, or was in 1962, virtually unfilmable. Strange as the movie is—a thriller teetering on the edge of camp—the book is stranger.
Time, a magazine whose editors, after all, have daily experience with overcooked prose, was not wrong in seeing something splendid in the badness of Condon's book. "The Manchurian Candidate" may be pulp, but it is very tony pulp. It is a man in a tartan tuxedo, chicken à la king with shaved truffles, a signed LeRoy Neiman. It's Mickey Spillane with an M.F.A., and a kind of summa of the styles of paperback fiction circa 1959. The writing is sometimes hardboiled:
Sometimes it adopts a police-blotter, "degree-zero" mode:
Occasionally, and usually in an inconvenient place, it drops a mot recherché:
It signals feeling by waxing poetic:
It signals wisdom by waxing incomprehensible:
And, when appropriate, it salivates:
Some people like their bananas ripe to the point of blackness. "The Manchurian Candidate" is a very ripe banana, and, for those who have the taste for it, delectable.
The magnificent forty-nine-year-old body in the last passage belongs to the mother of Raymond, the assassin, who in Frankenheimer's movie is played by Angela Lansbury as a proper and steely middle-aged matron. For Condon, though, Raymond's mother is no matron. She is a sexually predatory heroin addict who commits double incest. She is the serpent in the suburban garden of Cold War domesticity, and, in imagining her and her history, Condon almost certainly had in the back of his mind the book that, three years earlier, had become the first blockbuster in American publishing, Grace Metalious's "Peyton Place"—a story that also had to be sanitized for the movies. The plot of "Peyton Place" turns on incest (as, for that matter, does the plot of "Lolita," a sensation when the American edition came out, in 1958). But the luridness of Condon's novel did not make it to the screen. There is no equivalent in the movie, for example, of the proto-Pynchonesque sequence in which Raymond's stepfather, Johnny Iselin, attempts to have sex with an Eskimo. Frankenheimer's idea of satire was a lot more conventional than Condon's. He was also a Hollywood filmmaker, of course, and obliged to observe a different decorum.
Counterintuitive as it sounds, the secret to making a successful thriller, as Michael Crichton and Tom Clancy have demonstrated, is to slow down the action occasionally with disquisitions on Stuff It Is Interesting to Know—how airplanes are made, how nuclear submarines work, how to build an atomic bomb. Ideally, this information is also topical, food for the national appetite of the day. In "The Manchurian Candidate," the topic is brainwashing.
Fear of Communist brainwashing seems an example of Cold War hysteria, but in the nineteen-fifties the fear was not without basis. United Nations ground forces began military action in Korea on July 5, 1950. On July 9th, an American soldier who had been captured just two days earlier delivered a radio speech consisting of North Korean propaganda. Similar broadcasts by captured soldiers continued throughout the war. At the end of the war, the Army estimated that one out of every seven American prisoners of war had collaborated with the enemy. (The final, generally accepted estimate is one out of ten.) Twenty-one Americans refused to return to the United States; forty announced that they had become Communists; and fourteen were court-martialled, and eleven of those were convicted.
The term "brainwashing" was coined by a journalist named Edward Hunter, who had served in the Morale Operations section of the U.S. Office of Strategic Services during the Second World War, which he spent mostly in Asia, and who became an outspoken anti-Communist. Hunter's book "Brainwashing in Red China: The Calculated Destruction of Men's Minds" appeared in 1951. In it, he explained that "brainwashing" was his translation of the Chinese term hsi-nao, which means "cleansing of the mind," and which he said he had heard frequently when speaking with Europeans who had been caught inside China in 1949, the year of Mao's revolution.
In 1955, two years after the armistice ending the Korean War, the Army issued a huge report on the treatment of American prisoners called "POW: The Fight Continues After the Battle." The Army had interviewed all surviving prisoners of war on the ships that brought them back across the Pacific—more than four thousand soldiers—and had learned that many of them underwent intensive indoctrination by Chinese Communists. The Chinese had carefully segregated the prisoners they had identified as incorrigibles, sometimes housing them in separate camps, and had subjected the prisoners they judged to be potential converts to five hours of indoctrination a day, in classes that combined propaganda by the instructors with "confessions" by the prisoners. In some cases, physical torture accompanied the indoctrination, but in general the Chinese used the traditional methods of psychological coercion: repetition and humiliation. The Army discovered that a shocking number of prisoners had, to one degree or another, succumbed. Some were persuaded to accuse the United States, in signed statements, of engaging in germ warfare—a charge that was untrue but was widely believed in many countries.
The Army report instigated a popular obsession with brainwashing that lasted well into 1957. Stories about the experiences of American prisoners appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, Life, the Times Magazine, and The New Yorker. The term itself became a synonym for any sort of effective persuasion, and writers struggled with the question of whether aspects of contemporary American life, such as advertising and psychiatric therapy, might really be forms of brainwashing. Condon must have read much of this material; he did know Andrew Salter's "Conditioned Reflex Therapy" (1949), a book he has the Chinese psychiatrist in his novel, Yen Lo, cite in the speech in which he announces his successful brainwashing of the American prisoners. Yen Lo names a number of other studies of hypnosis and conditioning, including "The Seduction of the Innocent," by Frederic Wertham, an alarmist account of the way comic books corrupt the minds of American youth. (Yen Lo evidently has, in addition to his other exceptional powers, a crystal ball, since "Seduction of the Innocent" was not published until 1954, after the Korean War was over.) These books and articles apparently persuaded Condon that brainwashing, or psychological conditioning using a combination of hypnosis and Pavlovian methods, was a real possibility—as the recent experience of the Korean P.O.W.s had persuaded many other Americans that it was.
Condon's book played on the fear that brainwashing could be permanent, that minds could be altered forever. By the time Frankenheimer's movie came out, though, it had become clear that most conditioning is temporary. In 1961, in "Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of 'Brainwashing' in China," the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, who had conducted some of the shipboard interviews with returning P.O.W.s, concluded that the indoctrination of prisoners was a long-term failure. All of the "converts" eventually returned to the United States, and the former prisoners who had come home praising the good life to be had in North Korea soon reverted to American views.
Still, conditioning is the theme (if "theme" is not too grand a term) of Condon's novel. Even before Raymond falls into the hands of Yen Lo, he is psychologically conditioned, by his mother's behavior, to despise everyone. His mother is conditioned, by her early incest, to betray everyone. And the American people are conditioned, by political propaganda, to believe her McCarthy-like husband's baseless charges about Communists in the government. It is not, in Condon's vision, the Communist world on one side and the free world on the other. It is just the manipulators and the manipulated, the conditioners and the conditioned, the publicists and the public. In such a world, it's probably better to be the publicist, if you can deal with the ulcers.
Frank Sinatra, who plays Marco, the only friend Raymond has, is supposed to have asked his friend Jack Kennedy for his approval before Frankenheimer's movie was released. United Artists was apparently afraid that the assassination scene might give some nut an idea. Kennedy, as it happened, loved the movie; he was, after all, the world's most famous Ian Fleming fan. He was killed a year after "The Manchurian Candidate" came out. Did Lee Harvey Oswald see it? The problem has been examined in depth by John Loken, in a book called "Oswald's Trigger Films" (2000). Loken concludes that although the evidence is not definitive, Oswald almost certainly did see it. "The Manchurian Candidate" opened in Dallas in November, 1962, and played there for several months; Oswald, who was living in Dallas at the time, had a habit of going to the movies by himself (he was in a movie theatre when he was arrested on November 22, 1963); and Loken has determined that the bus Oswald probably took to work passed within ten yards of a theatre where the movie was playing. (Loken is much struck by the fact that references to "The Manchurian Candidate" are almost nonexistent in the literature, official and otherwise, on the Kennedy assassination. He concludes, in the spirit of all scholars of that assassination, that "the probable Oswald connection, so utterly obvious if one but thinks about it, has been suppressed for decades by a powerful conglomerate that might aptly be called the 'media-entertainment complex.' ")
Immediately after Kennedy was shot, Condon got a call from a newspaper reporter asking if he felt responsible. Condon couldn't see the relevance, and he was not being defensive. He had not introduced political assassination to popular American culture. Robert Penn Warren's "All the King's Men" was published in 1946 and was made into a movie in 1949; a version for television, directed by Sidney Lumet, was broadcast in 1958. Assassination is the subject of John Huston's "We Were Strangers" (1949) and Lewis Allen's "Suddenly" (1954), also starring Frank Sinatra. Oswald might easily have seen those movies as well. More to the point: "The Manchurian Candidate" is the story of a man programmed to kill at the command of other people. What self-respecting assassin would take such a character for his role model? Either Oswald acted according to his own wishes, in which case he wasn't imitating Condon's killer, or he really was programmed by the Communists, in which case the question isn't whether Oswald saw Frankenheimer's movie but whether his Communist masters did.
United Artists withdrew "The Manchurian Candidate" from theatres in 1964, although the movie could occasionally be seen on television and in art houses. In 1972, Sinatra bought the rights and, in 1975, removed it from circulation entirely. Whether or not he was motivated by guilt over Kennedy's death is unclear. He did, however, give his daughter Tina permission to produce a remake, and it is being shot, this fall, by Jonathan Demme. (Demme's previous movie, "The Truth About Charlie," was also a remake, of Stanley Donen's "Charade," of 1963. His method, judging from that effort, is to update the story and then salt it with allusions to the period of the original. "Charade" was filmed in Paris at the time of the French New Wave, and so in Demme's version there are appearances by Charles Aznavour, Agnès Varda, and the grave of François Truffaut—none of which have anything to do with the story. Demme has reportedly set "The Manchurian Candidate" in the time of the Gulf War; Liev Schreiber plays Raymond, Meryl Streep is his dragon mother, and Marco is played by Denzel Washington. We can be fairly confident that at some point Denzel Washington will be seen listening to a Frank Sinatra song.)
The Kennedy assassination does not fulfill Condon and Frankenheimer's prophecy. On the contrary, it buries it. If any assassin might plausibly have been a Communist puppet, it was Oswald, a man who had lived in the Soviet Union for three years, who had a Russian wife, and who once handed out leaflets for an outfit called the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. These facts were widely known within hours of Oswald's arrest, and yet the theory that he was an agent who was directed, wittingly or not, by Communist handlers has never been an important part of the folklore of the Kennedy assassination. Until the late nineteen-seventies, the official line (endorsed, incidentally, by Condon at the time) was that Oswald acted alone. Dissenters from that view have been drawn mainly to theories involving the Mafia and the Central Intelligence Agency, even though hooking Oswald up with those entities requires a far greater imaginative stretch than associating him with the Soviets. Almost no one thinks of Kennedy (except in some convoluted way) as a casualty of the Cold War, and his death does not represent the culmination of the national anxiety about Communist infiltration. It represents the end of that obsession, and of the panic that Condon's novel and Frankenheimer's movie both so happily exploit. ♦


text:
Welcome to Instrumentation and Detectors Laboratory
It is quite frequent that FEL and Synchrotron radiation experiments require devices and instrumentation that are not available on the market.The development of these instruments often requires a variety of skills and qualifications, hardly available in a single company, ranging from UHV and mechanics knowledge to microelectronics and detectors expertise.
Although at the beginning of its activity the laboratory focused on electron and photon detectors, in the last 10 years many other devices have been realized and are currently working on beamlines and storage rings of several synchrotron radiation sources around the world. in addition to multianodes and cross delay anode detectors, the most significant instruments developed are picoammeters suited for 4 quadrants detectors, current and voltage power supplies designed for magnetic multipoles or mirror bending, time to digital converters for time-resolved measurements, fast STM electronics and several kinds of ion chambers and CVD diamond based BPM.
Many of these devices are now commercialized by Sincrotrone Trieste through the Industrial Liaison Office. All products are fully described there; thanks to their excellent performances, almost every major Synchrotron Radiation Source in the world uses instruments developed by the Detectors and Instrumentation Laboratory.


text:
Tube Love
Its name in medical-ese is a gastrojejunostomy tube
Or a GJ tube for short
I just call it The Tube
Through nothing more than some tubes
And a syringe
And a feeding pump
I give myself water
I give myself food
I give myself meds
I give myself life
Bypassing my paralyzed stomach
I drain out the life-destroying bile
That would otherwise suffocate me
In pneumonia after pneumonia
Until I eventually got unlucky and died
There are no words for the feeling
Of giving myself a big syringe of cold water
On a hot day
And feeling every inch of it go
Into my intestines
No stomach to hold it back
No stomach to vomit it up
Maybe the word is love?
My tube is not an inhuman machine
It is a part of me
If love means that you take care of someone
If love means that you save someone's life
Without thought for your own
If love means that day by day, you do the hard work
Without complaining or tiring
Even when you get clogged up and miserable
Then surely my tube loves me
And I love my tube
It has a personality
It's grumpy on some days
And happy on others
I try to make it happy
I know more about making a feeding tube happy
Than any of those doctors and nurses
From Gastroenterology
From Interventional Radiology
From Pulmonology
They said I had the mind of a child
That I would pull my tube out trying to play with it
The way young babies do with their feeding tubes
They said I didn't have the cognitive capacity
To take care of a feeding tube
They said I would fail
They said I would be better off dying
Than even trying the feeding tube
And above all, they said I wouldn't know
How to take care of it
That it would be a huge burden
That maybe, I belonged in a nursing home
Where they knew how to take care of things like that
And people like me
I just got out of the hospital
The nurses were amazing people
But they nearly ruined my feeding tube
They didn't know how to make it happy
I've been to Interventional Radiology enough
To know that they don't know the slightest thing
About making a feeding tube happy
Not even the doctors who predicted my doom
Know how to make a feeding tube happy
But I know how to make a feeding tube happy
I have been learning for a year now
Every day, I learn more
Every day, I learn that
If you treat something as if it is alive
And you treat it with respect
Then it will be happier
And it will work better
And it will like you in return
Maybe even love you
And it will give you
Everything it has to give
I love my feeding tube
And my feeding tube loves me
My feeding tube takes care of me
It keeps me alive
It works hard all day long
To keep food and meds and water moving smoothly
And I work hard all day long
To make sure it has the resources to do it with
My feeding tube and me are friends
My feeding tube and me are a team
My feeding tube and me like each other
My feeding tube and me love each other
We have a relationship
My feeding tube and me
We are connected intimately
It is not just a piece of plastic
It is a life-saver
It brought me back from certain death
How can I fail to love it?
And how can I fail to interpret its efforts on my behalf
As its own kind of plastic cyborg love?
I love my feeding tube
I will always love my feeding tube
I don't care how it sounds
I don't care if anyone understands
You can't go through some things with someone
Without finding love there
And with its fate intertwined with mine
Its plastic intertwined with my stomach and intestines
Love is what we've found,
Me and my feeding tube
And I will always find ways
To make it happy
Art and poem by Mel Baggs, art 2013, poem 2014. This is my contribution to Gastroparesis Awareness Month. To learn more about Gastroparesis and related forms of Digestive Tract Paralysis, go to the G-PACT Website.
I also wrote a longer and more serious post about my life with gastroparesis, which you can read here at Gastroparesis Awareness Month: A Day In The Life.