text:
Lviv National Medical University which is formally known as the Danylo Halytsky Lviv National Medical University is the largest medical University of Ukraine. It also has the tag as one of the oldest Universities of Ukraine and is located in the region of Lviv(Ukraine).
Direct Apply For Admission in University Click Here
The University was basically established in the year of 1784 and is the leading medical University, which offers decent medical courses to the aspirants around the world. This is the reason why the MBBS aspirants often seek their admission into the University due to the standard of education and the affordable fee structure.
Today in this article we would discuss the various aspects of the Lviv National Medical University, which would help you in knowing it from the closer view. It would help you in making your analysis for the University so that you can pursue your own course of medical studies.
Courses Provided by Lviv National Medical University
Well, if you are living in Ukraine and are looking for the decent option of studying the MBBS, then Lviv National Medical University can be a decent option for you. The University offers almost all kinds of medical courses just like any other developed country's medical institution.
Here below are the courses that you can study from this University.
2- Bachelor of Dental Surgery
3- Nursing
4- Diploma in Forensic Medicine
5- Public Health Diploma
6- Psychological Medicine Diploma
7- Community Medicines
Other Doctor of Medicine Courses
MBBS Program of Lviv National Medical University
MBBS is the most sought and the subscribed program of the Lviv National Medical University which is pursued not just by the native aspirants but also by the foreign aspirants as well.
The duration of the course is almost 6 years just like the usual length where the 5 years have been set for the academic studies and the last 1 year is about the internship session.
The internship is held at the medical hospitals where aspirants get the chance to test their medical knowledge on the real aspects.
Here is the major domain of MBBS studies that you will study in the course.
– General Medicine&Surgery
– Human Anatomy
– Biochemistry
– Orthopedics
– Obstetrics
– Psychiatry
– Physiology&Anesthesiology
– Radiotherapy
– Pediatrics
– Gynecology
– Ophthalmology
So, these are the major course of studies that will be studied by the students in their MBBS course in this medical institution.
Lviv National Medical University Fees Structure For MBBS
The fee structure is the important aspect that we all consider before taking the decision of pursuing the MBBS from any institution.
So, if you are looking for the MBBS fee structure of the Lviv National Medical University then you can get it from here.
– First Year Fee- $8500
– Second Year Fee- $ 5100
– Third Year Fee- $5100
– Fourth Year Fee- $5100
– Fifth Year Fee- $5100
– Sixth Year- $5100
Kindly note that the above-mentioned fee structure doesn't include the cost of tuitions and the living cost as well. Aspirants would be required to pay for that in the addition of the fee structure.
Facilities and Amenities Provided by the Lviv National Medical University
We all know that medical students need several kinds of basic facilities in the course of their studies so that they can finish it without any discomfort. This is the reason why all the MBBS aspirants look for one such medical institution where they can be provided with all such facilities.
In the Lviv, the students are offered with all such facilities so that they can carry their studies with the utmost convenience.
Here are the basic facilities that you will get here.
– Internet along with the library facilities to explore the mines of knowledge.
– Spacious lecture halls for enough space.
– Hostel and the mess facilities
– 24/7 medical facilities
– Canteen and other refreshment facilities
– Gym and the sports club facilities.
The above-mentioned facilities will make sure that the students don't lack the sense of convenience to them.
Scholarship Provided by Lviv National Medical University
There are many MBBS aspirants around the world who want to study this course but can't afford the fee. As we know that MBBS fee is very high which generally can't be afforded by the majority of the aspirants, and thus the scholarship program can assist such aspirants who can't afford their fee.
The scholarship program of the University has been designed to be based on the merit of the students and also on the financial background. You can check the eligibility criteria and the quantum of the scholarship by visiting the campus of the institution, as there is not much information available on the web regarding the scholarship program.
Scope & Placement of Lviv National Medical University
We all aspire that we can pursue the MBBS from the well recognized medical University or the college, which provides us the full value of a degree and thus we accordingly make our research in this context.
Well, if you have made up your mind to study the MBBS from the Lviv National Medical University, then you don't need to think more about the scope and the placement aspects of this University.
It is a well known medical University not just in Ukraine but around the whole world. All the major medical bodies of the world recognize this University, and thus you will get the full value of your medical degree after earning it from the Lviv National Medical University.
Climate of Lviv and the Contact Information of Lviv National Medical University
Climate is the very first aspect which comes in the first place to be considered while planning to stay in any other country. If you are a Non-Ukraine resident and want to study MBBS living there then you must be aware of the climate of the country so that you can accordingly take your decision of going there.
The climate of Lviv (Ukraine) is a very typical eastern European style where you will face the warm summers and the cold winters. In the season of winter, you can get the average temperature nearly -3 degrees while in the season of summer the average temperature may be around 20 to 23 degrees, which is still considered favorable in the comparison of many other Asian countries.
The summer in this region of Ukraine is still considered as the mild nature, and thus it won't be problem spending the summer while the winter may be a tough season for the students who don't come from the alike climate.
Website: www.lvivmedicaluniversity.com


text:
Washington, D.C. counsel Katherine Armstrong was quoted in an FTC Watch article titled "FTC's 'Stick with Security' Blog Called Useful as Critics Point out Flaws," which discussed the FTC's new blog series that aims to help companies understand the agency's stance on data security.
The blog, "Stick with Security," publishes a post every Friday that covers recent lessons the agency has learned from its data security investigations and provides general tips to help companies safeguard their data. Katherine stated that the blog's content can be helpful to small businesses and emphasized the importance of staying abreast of data security developments, nothing that, "[There's no] one-and-done or one-size-fits-all solution in the world of data security because a robust data security program is always evolving."
Read "FTC's 'Stick with Security' Blog Called Useful as Critics Point out Flaws" (subscription required).

subset: commoncrawl


text:
You possibly can search through more than 1000 WWW pages around the world with updated music charts! A month later, Leona Lewis placed five tracks from her album Spirit concurrently on the singles chart. On 1 January 2007 the integration of downloaded music into the charts grew to become complete when all downloads – with or with out a bodily equal – grew to become eligible to chart, redefining the UK singles chart by turning it into a "songs" chart.
This episode finds Top Of The Pops smack in the course of the Eighventies in a state of flux, after being off air for nine weeks on account of a Musicians Union strike. She's the first female rapper in almost 20 years to hit No. 1 on the Billboard singles chart with out the assistance of every other credited artist.
This episode, Pop-Crazed Children, sees us making one other Sam Tyler-like voyage to Spangleland in an attempt to see if 1974 could sustain the standard ranges of the year earlier than, or if it was already lurching into the hell of 1975. Following the cancellation of its physical release, " Say It Proper " by Nelly Furtado was the first High 10 hit to go through its chart career and not using a single copy appearing in a shop.
The chairman of the Official Charts Company stated it will present "perception into how the race for primary is shaping up". Since there was no rule governing a minimal number of pressings, Gorillaz launched only 300 vinyl copies of their single " Really feel Good Inc.
The dying of Michael Jackson on 25 June 2009 triggered a surge in sales of his recordings; this was the first time within the download period that the impact of a serious star's dying on the chart might be observed. Penayangan dihitung untuk setiap lagu berdasarkan Worldwide Customary Recording Code (ISRC), yaitu sebuah "tag" yang mengidentifikasi trek musik secara digital.


text:
The following is a collection of links to web sites on a variety of topics. If you are aware of any sites out there that would be helpful or interesting to those in the barony or any of the links on this page don't work or are otherwise inappropriate, please contact the web minister at webminister-AT-black-diamond.atlantia.sca.org .
Click on a category header to view (or hide) the links for that category. Important Note: All of these links are to external web sites.


text:
Healthy snacks are one of the most searched for and underserved topics in the healthy eating space. Not only are they something that millions of people search for when they start their healthy eating journey but they're also becoming increasingly popular with people who are looking for unique recipe ideas when they host guests during sporting events such as the Super Bowl.
You can use these 5 HD Healthy Snack Recipes PLR Videos to connect with the huge numbers of people who are seeking healthy snack ideas and introduce them to your business.
Use them as part of a premium membership to boost your revenue or add them to your blog posts to increase your traffic levels.
Here are recipes and run times for each of the five videos:
- Cauliflower Nachos: 00:42
- Cauliflower Pizza Bites: 00:33
- Greek-Style Stuffed Mushrooms: 00:43
- Sweet Pea Crostini: 00:31
- White Bean Dip: 00:25


text:
Abu Dhabi, The United Arab Emirates condemned the shooting of 2 mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, claiming the lives of innocent people.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation affirmed its full solidarity with the State of New Zealand in the face of extremism and terrorism, supporting all measures taken to preserve its security and the safety of its citizens and residents in its territory, expressing its condolences to the New Zealand government and the families of victims, wishing the injured a speedy recovery.
Source: Saudi Press Agency


text:
Evan Tan. Product & Industrial Design graduate. Winner of Best of Show and Best of Design categories, Crowbar Awards 2017.School of Design
Temasek Polytechnic has been crowned 'Institution of the Year' at the Crowbar Awards 2017. Together with the Best of Design, Best of Film & Photography and Best of Show awards, TP racked up a total of 8 Golds, 12 Silvers, 10 Bronze medals and 33 finalists.School of Design
In June, the Land Transport Authority launched a trial run of its stroller restraint system for public buses using PID student Jordan Ang's concept and idea.School of Design
Product & Industrial Design graduate Jordan Ang has designed a stroller system, adopted LTA, to secure open strollers on the bus.School of Design


text:
Culled from the Ghanaian Observer.
Dr. Sekou Nkrumah, son of the late Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah of blessed memory(photo), is set to join the ranks of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) in a move that will shock most Ghanaians and possibly the NDC itself. Sekou's decision, our sources added, has been fired by his desire to get himself a platform to politically push his ideas for a Ghana free of poverty with a happy people. He has already hinted of a press conference in the coming days to announce his decision.
Sekou has told our Managing Editor and Kweku Baako Jnr as well as a few other associates of his surprising decision which has caused more than a stir.
Kweku Baako Jnr views Sekou`s decison as a joke whilst Egbert Faibille. Jnr says `Sekou is capable of anything but I will be shocked if he carries out his decision.' "I know Sekou has been having a battle with his conscience over what to d o in the last few months in relation to his politics but I never thought he could gather the courage to pass this information to some of his associates,` Faibille said in further comments.
Sekou has been berating his father`s CPP for its apparent ineptitude in making itself a party of relevance in the fourth republic which has seen the NPP and NDC share two terms each with nothing for the CPP so far.
'He has all along been torn between joining the NDC and the NPP, but I believe he has finally opted for Rawlings' NDC as his party of choice...He had hoped that his mother party which is the CPP, would organise itself properly and function as a healthy political entity...He did not find that vim and verve in his party, so he has decided to call it quits and join the NDC, where he hopes to expand his world as an active politician and Pan Africanist...,` one source told GO.
The younger Nkrumah, married to an American lady, will soon go public with his intentions and regist er fully with the party amidst fanfare, another source added.
A Phd in modern languages and literature, Sekou has done time as Director of the DuBois Centre in Accra and remains the only child of Osagyefo Kwame Nkrumah and Madam Fathia Nkrumah who lives in Ghana. His other siblings Gamal Gorkeh Nkrumah and Samia Yaaba Nkrumah are domiciled in Egypt and Italy respectively. Samia was in town for the 50th independence anniversary.
It is not immediately known if Sekou has consulted his elder brother Prof. Francis Nkrumah about his intentions. Many associates of Sekou who have had hints of his intention are quietly discussing it and hoping it will never happen. Yet others maintain that Sekou who is passionate about his beliefs and convictions will not be stopped or prevailed upon by anyone once he has made up his mind.
His lamentations about the state of the CPP, according to one of his associates `... have been very touching and it appears that he has arrived at th is conviction out of frustration at what has happened to the CPP.' Others also maintain that the usually likeable and unassuming Sekou is torn between the NPP and the NDC and that any overtures from either party may see him officially signing up.
A political animal of no mean repute, Sekou has been involved in the politics of Ghana from the immediate period preceeding the struggle to return Ghana to multi-party constitutional rule in 1992 and now.


text:
Stand Out
Modern branding designed to attract your ideal audience.
Clean, User-friendly Flatsome page design.
Custom blog and sidebar design.
Fast + Reliable, Secure WordPress hosting.
Mailchimp integration for email marketing.
1 Month of content ideas for blog.
Priority Email + Phone Support.
I design brands & websites that help creative entrepreneurs and small business owners thrive. Together we'll create an engaging online brand that resonates with your business's core values and vision.Let's Work Together!
Book your project:
Complete your Checklist:
Brand your business:
Design your website:
Launch your Website:
After your launch:
Kind words about my work
Rufus did a wonderful job on our website. His professionalism and work product is second to none.
Rufus is amazing. Extremely knowledgeable and ready to hit the ground running. Perfect communication and willing to go the extra mile.
Great Designer! I am truly happy that I decided to go with Roof.


text:
Afternoon Press Snacks 10.12.16
It's that time again! Happy snacking:
- The Club for Growth was proud to sign this letter asking Congress to cease with bailouts for insurance companies under Obamacare, Club for Growth Blog
- ICYMI: The Federal Trade Commission seems to be considering action against patent trolls in a report released last Thursday. What this means for copyright holders and small businesses remains to be seen, Morning Consult


text:
Envy is available for pre-order now!
It's always exciting when a new book comes into the world, kind of like giving birth. There have been months of blood, sweat, and tears in the making, the final edits can be as painful as labor, and then there it is. A brand new novel.
Writing Envy was a trip down memory lane.
I met my husband in Laguna Beach, where the book takes place. I was married in front of the house described in the story, the house my characters call the fortress. I have pictures of my dad walking me down the aisle along the cliffs Rosie (my hero) views from its windows.
I've always wondered what that house was like on the inside. Now I know.
Well, not really. I've never been through the doors in any way other than my imagination, but sometimes that's best. My guess is a horror writer troubled by murders that mimic those in his books is more riveting than the lives of the actual occupants. I'm sure they hope so!
It was fun trotting around my old stomping grounds creating art galleries, shops, and characters that don't exist but really should. Here's the description of the art in a gallery I call The Nightshade.
Rosie replaced her cup with a shaky hand. It clattered onto its saucer. Talking about murder and dismemberment wasn't pleasant anywhere, but here in Peter's gallery it was intolerable. She glanced around at the paintings closest to her.
Most were like the dahlia—nice enough at first. But the field of poppies dripped blood. The lovely dark-haired woman in the portrait had dead eyes and blue lips. And the crystal waterfall hid a demented, demonic face. Nothing in Peter's shop was as it seemed. Including Peter.
As you can tell from the above excerpt, I've returned not only to the Cliff Drive of A Margin of Lust, I've returned to a little bit creepier storyline. Thoughtful thrillers are great, but every now and then you just want to feel the chill.
Read the first chapter here, and let me know what you think.


text:
Product › Details
Xevo® TQ-GC mass spectrometer (GC-MS/MS)
|Next higher product group
|triple quadrupole mass spectrometer GC/MS system
|2018-09-01 sales start
|Waters Corporation (NYSE: WAT)
|Waters (Group)
Waters Corporation. (8/28/18). "Press Release: Waters and Restek Co-Marketing Agreement Created with Needs of International Food Safety Laboratories in Mind". Milford, MA.
The Waters Xevo TQ-GC Mass Spectrometer and Restek Gas Chromatography Consumables Are a Winning Combination for Routine GC-MS Pesticide Residue Analyses and Screening
Waters Corporation (NYSE:WAT) and Restek Corporation have entered into a co-marketing agreement in an effort to give food safety laboratories access to the GC-MS instrumentation and consumables they need to perform pesticide residue GC-MS analyses and support a safe, secure, sustainable and nutritious global food supply.
We are delighted to enter into this agreement with Restek. Like Waters, they are strongly committed to making customers successful and their market-leading GC consumables and technical support play an important role in helping our customers monitor for pesticides and other contaminants and meet the sensitivity requirements of global regulated methods, said Jeff Mazzeo, Vice President, Marketing, Waters Corporation.
Restek is excited to work with Waters on this new venture because we both place great value in bringing exceptional service and quality to our respective customers. By collaborating, we can combine our unique expertise to help analysts around the world perform the vital job of ensuring the safety of a food supply we all share, said Rick Lake, Vice President, Marketing, Restek Corporation.
Under the terms of the agreement, Waters and Restek will work together to provide food safety laboratories with training and applications support of GC-MS methods and workflows for pesticide monitoring and screening.
Shipping This September: The Waters Xevo TQ-GC Mass Spectrometer
The Waters® Xevo TQ-GC Mass Spectrometer is a tandem quadrupole mass spectrometer with an electron impact (EI) ionization source. When paired with highly-inert Rxi columns and Topaz liners from Restek, the Xevo TQ-GC Mass Spectrometer allows laboratories to meet and exceed low part-per-billion limits of detection when quantifying pesticide residues and other contaminants in food using GC-MS/MS methods set forth by worldwide regulatory agencies/authorities.
Waters is exhibiting the Xevo TQ-GC System at these international scientific conferences this week: 132nd AOAC International Annual Meeting & Exposition and the 22ndInternational Mass Spectrometry Conference (IMSC).
Waters recently published a poster featuring a multi-residue analytical method titled The Determination of Pesticide Residues in Quechers Extracts of Fruit Commodities by GC-MS/MS. Download a copy here.
For more information: www.waters.com/tqgc.
About Restek (www.restek.com)
Restek Corporation is a leading developer and manufacturer of chromatography products. With renowned Plus 1 service, applications and expertise, Restek directly serves analysts across 100+ countries and six continents, bringing them the GC and LC columns, sample preparation products, reference standards, and accessories they rely on to monitor the quality and safety of air, water, soil, foods, pharmaceuticals, chemical, and petroleum products.
About Waters Corporation (www.waters.com)
Waters Corporation (NYSE:WAT), the world's leading specialty measurement company, has pioneered chromatography, mass spectrometry, and thermal analysis innovations serving the life, materials, and food sciences for nearly 60 years. With approximately 7,000 employees worldwide, Waters operates directly in 31 countries, including 15 manufacturing facilities, and with products available in more than 100 countries.
Waters and Xevo are trademarks of Waters Corporation. Restek, Rxi and Topaz are trademarks of Restek Corporation.
Waters Corporation
Brian Murphy, 508-482-2614
Public Relations Manager
Restek Corporation
Jonathan Edelman
Business Development Manager
Record changed: 2018-08-28
More documents for triple quadrupole mass spectrometer GC/MS system
- [1] Shimadzu Scientific Instruments, Inc.. (10/11/16). "Press Release: Shimadzus New Triple Quadrupole GCMS Achieves Worlds Highest Sensitivity Down to Femtogram Level"....
- [2] Shimadzu Corporation. (8/26/16). "Press Release: Shimadzu's Quick-DB GC/MS/MS Forensic Toxicological Database Enables Rapid Screening for Substances that Cause Drug Poisoning"....
- [3] Shimadzu Corporation. (8/26/16). "Press Release: Shimadzus New GCMS-TQ8050 Triple Quadrupole Gas Chromatograph Mass Spectrometer Offers the World's Highest Sensitivity and Supports Ultra-Trace Analysis"....
- [4] Agilent Technologies Inc.. (7/18/16). "Press Release: Agilent Technologies Showcases Unprecedented Sensitivity and Ease of Use in New Triple Quadrupole GC/MS Instruments". Santa Clara, CA....
- [5] Bruker Corporation. (7/17/15). "Press Release: Bruker Announces Name Change of SCION GC-TQ to EVOQ GC-TQ"....
- [6] Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc.. (9/8/14). "Press Release: New GC-MS Runs Both Single and Triple Quadrupole Methods Using Familiar Software". San José, CA....
- [7] Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc.. (9/3/14). "Press Release: Thermo Fisher Scientific Teams with National Reference Labs on New European Regulation, Allowing GC-MS/MS to Confirm Dioxins in Feed and Food"....
- [8] Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc.. (7/23/14). "Press Release: Thermo Fisher Scientific Reports Second Quarter 2014 Results. Raises 2014 Earnings Guidance". Waltham, MA....
- [9] Shimadzu Scientific Instruments, Inc.. (6/16/14). "Press Release: Shimadzus New GCMS-TQ8040 Triple Quad GC-MS/MS with Smart MRM Transforms Laboratory Analysis"....
- [10] Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc.. (6/16/14). "Press Release: Next Generation Triple Quadrupole GC-MS Designed to Be More Sensitive and Three Times Faster than Predecessor". Baltimore, MD....
To subscribe to our free, monthly mass spectrometry newsletter, please send an e-mail to email@example.com and simply fill the subject line with the word »MSC Newsletter«
To get even more information, please take a look at our [gs] professional services offering and read the gene-sensor Product Flyer [PDF file]
Please visit also our web portals for the Eurpean life sciences and the life sciences in German-speaking Europe (DE, AT & CH) at Life-Sciences-Germany.com and Life-Sciences-Europe.com
» top


text:
The holidays are coming and we are working on some very cool stuff! One of them being an Advent Calendar!
Three different age groups, 6-11, 12-17 and 18+, these cute calendars have a special treat, starting every day from December 1 until Xmas Eve!
Soaps, bath bombs, creams, lotions, lip products, a cool treat every day. And, calorie free! We are taking pre-orders now, at 508-533-3800. Pick up only. We only have 40
of each age group available, so order early. If there are any left over, they will be available in the stores as of Thanksgiving week.


text:
Real Kids
Real kids have always intrigued me.
Real kids are the ones who grew up with the people who created them. What a weird concept.
What is that like? I don't know.
To live with people who look like you. Even if they are assholes, they still are yours. What a bizarre thing.
All my life I've been surrounded by real kids. I've got one. I'm a step-mom to a few of them. I'm married to one. I was adopted by two of them. I work with them. I live next door to them. Even though I don't remember her, a real kid gave birth to me. Another real kid made her pregnant.
I like real kids, even though the majority of them don't know shit about being adopted. And why should they? They've never thought about it really. It's only when a real kid winds up somehow knowing a fake kid like me that they start to think about it.
I read a book over the weekend by a real kid that knocked my socks off. Actually that is a lie. I read the book Saturday and into Sunday... I started it when I went to bed Saturday, and it kept me up all night. And then when it was over I spent the next two hours crying.
When I came back here tonight I meant to catch up on all the blogs I wasn't able to read last week, but instead I read back through this real kid's archives at her blog.
Julia Scheeres is one damn cool real kid. She's got a great blog. She's been blogging since 2005 actually; I just never knew about her until I came across her book at Barnes & Noble this weekend. Julia Scheeres also wrote a book that kept me up all Saturday night.
Jesus Land is her story of being a real kid with an adopted brother, David, just a few months younger than her. Julia's white. Her adopted brother David was African American. They were 16 years old in the middle of the racist
I think what I loved most about this book, bizarrely enough, is that I couldn't relate to either Julia or David. I could kinda relate to David, being adopted, but shit I couldn't relate to being the only African American in town. And I could kinda relate to Julia, as she's only a few years younger than I am and has a kick-ass memory of what it feels like to be 16, as well as providing a kick-ass musical soundtrack in my head as she brought back memories of all the cool hits from the '80's. But I can't relate to being a real kid. All I could do was let their stories wash over me and listen to what she had to say. And then marvel at her as Goddess-like, she descends into the underworld of Escuela Caribe like
Jesus Land is an incredibly powerful book. So powerful I wanted to share it with y'all if you haven't read it already. I'm pretty grateful I found it.
Now if you'll excuse me, I've got some blog reading I need to catch up on.
Buy this book, you bastards! Don't forget.


text:
The Spanish Wine Duo
If you simply cannot decide between red wine or white wine to gift your recipient this Christmas then look no further – with the Spanish Wine Duo hamper you can give both!
Gift Dimensions: W:225mm H:134mm D:382mm
Delivery Options & Surcharges
|Delivery Type
|Order and Delivery
|Delivery Surcharges
|Cost and Terms
|Standard Delivery
|3-5 working days
|No Surcharge Applied
|Standard delivery price
See individual product listing
|Saturday Delivery
|Order in advance for a Saturday delivery or by 13.00 (GMT) on a Friday
|Standard delivery price + £3.95 surcharge
Deliveries will made between 9am and 5pm
Not available for Highlands, Islands or Overseas
|Sunday Delivery
|Order in advance for a Sunday delivery or by 13.00 (GMT) on a Friday
|Standard delivery price + £15 surcharge
Deliveries will made between 9am and 5pm
Not available for Highlands, Islands or Overseas
|Next Day or Named Day Delivery
|Orders for Next Day Delivery will need to be placed by 13:00 (GMT) or order in advance for a specific date (excl. Saturday & Sunday).
Please note that Letterbox Gifts are delivered using Royal Mail, so when selecting a Named Day delivery we cannot guarantee a
precise delivery date for these gifts. However, in our experience, 90% of orders are delivered on time.
|Standard delivery price + £1 surcharge
Gifts ordered on a Friday will be delivered on a Monday
Not available for Highlands, Islands or Overseas
In Time For Christmas
(when applicable)
|Order in advance for Christmas gifts
|Standard delivery price - see individual product listing
Typically, we will deliver between the 7th and 23rd December
Gifts ordered on a Friday will be delivered on a Monday.
Deliveries will made between 9am and 5pm.
Delivery Discounts
For larger orders we can offer discounts, please contact us directly to discuss your requirements.
We offer tiered delivery discounts for 2 or more hampers being delivered to the same UK address, on the same day. The discounts are calculated as follows:
|Amount of items
|2 - 3 items
|25% delivery discount
|4 - 6 items
|30% delivery discount
|7 - 9 items
|35% delivery discount
|10 - 14 items
|40% delivery discount
|15+ items
|50% delivery discount
If you purchase via our website your discount will be automatically calculated at the checkout.
If you place your order over the phone or via email, our friendly team will calculate the discount for you.
Unfortunately we cannot offer delivery discounts on hampers being delivered outside mainland UK.
If you simply cannot decide between red wine or white wine to gift your recipient this Christmas then look no further – with the Spanish Wine Duo hamper you can give both!
Attractively packed in a natural canvas jute bag in between sheets of rich burgundy tissue paper, your recipient will find a duo of Oleo wines which will make a wonderful addition to any Christmas table, party or just to enjoy whilst relaxing in front of the fire. Both wines are made from grapes widely grown in the Rioja region of Spain and have been carefully chosen by us for their wonderful flavours. The red wine is made from the flagship grape of Spain the Tampranillo grape, and has been chosen for its dark fruit and cherry flavours which make it the perfect warming tipple to enjoy on a cold winter's night and mild notes of wildflowers are found in the white wine which has been made from the Macabeo grape, one of the most popular grapes in Spain.
An ideal choice for a corporate gift or as a thank you for hard working staff, the Spanish Wine Duo gift makes the perfect choice and is sure to be well received.
Gift Dimensions: W:225mm H:134mm D:382mm
- Tempranillo Oleo Castilla Spain 75cl 12.5% vol
- Macabeo Oleo Castilla Spain 75cl 11.5% vol
- Natural Canvas Bottle Bag
Delivery Information
Use our calendar function at the checkout to select a delivery date that's convenient to you. If you're purchasing multiple hampers then you'll have the option of selecting a different date and address for each one.
United Kingdom Delivery Options
- Loading Delivery Rates..
Please note: order by 13:00 for next day delivery (if available based on your address).Delivery Options & Surcharges
Bulk Delivery Discounts


text:
- monthly subscription or
- cancelable any time
"Tell the chef, the beer is on me."
This is part of the Velocity Profiles series, which highlights the work and knowledge of web ops and performance experts.
Previously I was working as a consultant for Linux, open source tools and virtualization. While this is a great job, it has one major drawback: One usually does not stay with one customer long enough to enable the really big changes, especially with regard to how the customer works. When ImmobilienScout24 came along and offered me the job as a Systems Architect, this was my ticket out of consulting and into diving deeply into a single customer scenario. The challenges that ImmobilienScout24 faced were very much along the lines that occupied me as well:
There are a number of them:
The real challenge is not to hack up a quick solution but to work as a team to build a sustainable world. Technical debt discussions are now a major part of my daily work. As tedious as they can be, I strongly believe that at our current state sustainability is at least as important as innovation.
Asking questions and trying to understand with everybody together how things really work. Walking a lot through the office with a coffee cup and talking to people. Taking the time to sit down with a colleague at the keyboard and seeing things through. Sometimes it helps to shorten a discussion with a a little hacking and "look, it just works" — but this should always be a way to start a discussion. The real work is better done together as a team.
I hope that I manage to help us all to look forward to the next day at work. I also try to simplify things until they are really simple, and I annoy everybody by nagging about separation of concerns.
At a recent lunch, John noted that back in the dawn of the computer age, there was no distinction between dev and ops. If you developed, you operated. You mounted the tapes, you flipped the switches on the front panel, you rebooted when things crashed, and possibly even replaced the burned out vacuum tubes. And you got to wear a geeky white lab coat. Dev and ops started to separate in the '60s, when programmer/analysts dumped boxes of punch cards into readers, and "computer operators" behind a glass wall scurried around mounting tapes in response to IBM JCL. The operators also pulled printouts from line printers and shoved them in labeled cubbyholes, where you got your output filed under your last name.
The arrival of minicomputers in the 1970s and PCs in the '80s broke down the wall between mainframe operators and users, leading to the system and network administrators of the 1980s and '90s. That was the birth of modern "IT operations" culture. Minicomputer users tended to be computing professionals with just enough knowledge to be dangerous. (I remember when a new director was given the root password and told to "create an account for yourself" ... and promptly crashed the VAX, which was shared by about 30 users). PC users required networks; they required support; they required shared resources, such as file servers and mail servers. And yes, BOFH ("Bastard Operator from Hell") serves as a reminder of those days. I remember being told that "no one" else is having the problem you're having — and not getting beyond it until at a company meeting we found that everyone was having the exact same problem, in slightly different ways. No wonder we want ops to disappear. No wonder we wanted a wall between the developers and the sysadmins, particularly since, in theory, the advent of the personal computer and desktop workstation meant that we could all be responsible for our own machines.
But somebody has to keep the infrastructure running, including the increasingly important websites. As companies and computing facilities grew larger, the fire-fighting mentality of many system administrators didn't scale. When the whole company runs on one 386 box (like O'Reilly in 1990), mumbling obscure command-line incantations is an appropriate way to fix problems. But that doesn't work when you're talking hundreds or thousands of nodes at Rackspace or Amazon. From an operations standpoint, the big story of the web isn't the evolution toward full-fledged applications that run in the browser; it's the growth from single servers to tens of servers to hundreds, to thousands, to (in the case of Google or Facebook) millions. When you're running at that scale, fixing problems on the command line just isn't an option. You can't afford letting machines get out of sync through ad-hoc fixes and patches. Being told "We need 125 servers online ASAP, and there's no time to automate it" (as Sascha Bates encountered) is a recipe for disaster.
The response of the operations community to the problem of scale isn't surprising. One of the themes of O'Reilly's Velocity Conference is "Infrastructure as Code." If you're going to do operations reliably, you need to make it reproducible and programmatic. Hence virtual machines to shield software from configuration issues. Hence Puppet and Chef to automate configuration, so you know every machine has an identical software configuration and is running the right services. Hence Vagrant to ensure that all your virtual machines are constructed identically from the start. Hence automated monitoring tools to ensure that your clusters are running properly. It doesn't matter whether the nodes are in your own data center, in a hosting facility, or in a public cloud. If you're not writing software to manage them, you're not surviving.
Furthermore, as we move further and further away from traditional hardware servers and networks, and into a world that's virtualized on every level, old-style system administration ceases to work. Physical machines in a physical machine room won't disappear, but they're no longer the only thing a system administrator has to worry about. Where's the root disk drive on a virtual instance running at some colocation facility? Where's a network port on a virtual switch? Sure, system administrators of the '90s managed these resources with software; no sysadmin worth his salt came without a portfolio of Perl scripts. The difference is that now the resources themselves may be physical, or they may just be software; a network port, a disk drive, or a CPU has nothing to do with a physical entity you can point at or unplug. The only effective way to manage this layered reality is through software.
So infrastructure had to become code. All those Perl scripts show that it was already becoming code as early as the late '80s; indeed, Perl was designed as a programming language for automating system administration. It didn't take long for leading-edge sysadmins to realize that handcrafted configurations and non-reproducible incantations were a bad way to run their shops. It's possible that this trend means the end of traditional system administrators, whose jobs are reduced to racking up systems for Amazon or Rackspace. But that's only likely to be the fate of those sysadmins who refuse to grow and adapt as the computing industry evolves. (And I suspect that sysadmins who refuse to adapt swell the ranks of the BOFH fraternity, and most of us would be happy to see them leave.) Good sysadmins have always realized that automation was a significant component of their job and will adapt as automation becomes even more important. The new sysadmin won't power down a machine, replace a failing disk drive, reboot, and restore from backup; he'll write software to detect a misbehaving EC2 instance automatically, destroy the bad instance, spin up a new one, and configure it, all without interrupting service. With automation at this level, the new "ops guy" won't care if he's responsible for a dozen systems or 10,000. And the modern BOFH is, more often than not, an old-school sysadmin who has chosen not to adapt.
James Urquhart nails it when he describes how modern applications, running in the cloud, still need to be resilient and fault tolerant, still need monitoring, still need to adapt to huge swings in load, etc. But he notes that those features, formerly provided by the IT/operations infrastructures, now need to be part of the application, particularly in "platform as a service" environments. Operations doesn't go away, it becomes part of the development. And rather than envision some sort of uber developer, who understands big data, web performance optimization, application middleware, and fault tolerance in a massively distributed environment, we need operations specialists on the development teams. The infrastructure doesn't go away — it moves into the code; and the people responsible for the infrastructure, the system administrators and corporate IT groups, evolve so that they can write the code that maintains the infrastructure. Rather than being isolated, they need to cooperate and collaborate with the developers who create the applications. This is the movement informally known as "DevOps."
Amazon's EBS outage last year demonstrates how the nature of "operations" has changed. There was a marked distinction between companies that suffered and lost money, and companies that rode through the outage just fine. What was the difference? The companies that didn't suffer, including Netflix, knew how to design for reliability; they understood resilience, spreading data across zones, and a whole lot of reliability engineering. Furthermore, they understood that resilience was a property of the application, and they worked with the development teams to ensure that the applications could survive when parts of the network went down. More important than the flames about Amazon's services are the testimonials of how intelligent and careful design kept applications running while EBS was down. Netflix's ChaosMonkey is an excellent, if extreme, example of a tool to ensure that a complex distributed application can survive outages; ChaosMonkey randomly kills instances and services within the application. The development and operations teams collaborate to ensure that the application is sufficiently robust to withstand constant random (and self-inflicted!) outages without degrading.
On the other hand, during the EBS outage, nobody who wasn't an Amazon employee touched a single piece of hardware. At the time, JD Long tweeted that the best thing about the EBS outage was that his guys weren't running around like crazy trying to fix things. That's how it should be. It's important, though, to notice how this differs from operations practices 20, even 10 years ago. It was all over before the outage even occurred: The sites that dealt with it successfully had written software that was robust, and carefully managed their data so that it wasn't reliant on a single zone. And similarly, the sites that scrambled to recover from the outage were those that hadn't built resilience into their applications and hadn't replicated their data across different zones.
In addition to this redistribution of responsibility, from the lower layers of the stack to the application itself, we're also seeing a redistribution of costs. It's a mistake to think that the cost of operations goes away. Capital expense for new servers may be replaced by monthly bills from Amazon, but it's still cost. There may be fewer traditional IT staff, and there will certainly be a higher ratio of servers to staff, but that's because some IT functions have disappeared into the development groups. The bonding is fluid, but that's precisely the point. The task — providing a solid, stable application for customers — is the same. The locations of the servers on which that application runs, and how they're managed, are all that changes.
One important task of operations is understanding the cost trade-offs between public clouds like Amazon's, private clouds, traditional colocation, and building their own infrastructure. It's hard to beat Amazon if you're a startup trying to conserve cash and need to allocate or deallocate hardware to respond to fluctuations in load. You don't want to own a huge cluster to handle your peak capacity but leave it idle most of the time. But Amazon isn't inexpensive, and a larger company can probably get a better deal taking its infrastructure to a colocation facility. A few of the largest companies will build their own datacenters. Cost versus flexibility is an important trade-off; scaling is inherently slow when you own physical hardware, and when you build your data centers to handle peak loads, your facility is underutilized most of the time. Smaller companies will develop hybrid strategies, with parts of the infrastructure hosted on public clouds like AWS or Rackspace, part running on private hosting services, and part running in-house. Optimizing how tasks are distributed between these facilities isn't simple; that is the province of operations groups. Developing applications that can run effectively in a hybrid environment: that's the responsibility of developers, with healthy cooperation with an operations team.
The use of metrics to monitor system performance is another respect in which system administration has evolved. In the early '80s or early '90s, you knew when a machine crashed because you started getting phone calls. Early system monitoring tools like HP's OpenView provided limited visibility into system and network behavior but didn't give much more information than simple heartbeats or reachability tests. Modern tools like DTrace provide insight into almost every aspect of system behavior; one of the biggest challenges facing modern operations groups is developing analytic tools and metrics that can take advantage of the data that's available to predict problems before they become outages. We now have access to the data we need, we just don't know how to use it. And the more we rely on distributed systems, the more important monitoring becomes. As with so much else, monitoring needs to become part of the application itself. Operations is crucial to success, but operations can only succeed to the extent that it collaborates with developers and participates in the development of applications that can monitor and heal themselves.
Success isn't based entirely on integrating operations into development. It's naive to think that even the best development groups, aware of the challenges of high-performance, distributed applications, can write software that won't fail. On this two-way street, do developers wear the beepers, or IT staff? As Allspaw points out, it's important not to divorce developers from the consequences of their work since the fires are frequently set by their code. So, both developers and operations carry the beepers. Sharing responsibilities has another benefit. Rather than finger-pointing post-mortems that try to figure out whether an outage was caused by bad code or operational errors, when operations and development teams work together to solve outages, a post-mortem can focus less on assigning blame than on making systems more resilient in the future. Although we used to practice "root cause analysis" after failures, we're recognizing that finding out the single cause is unhelpful. Almost every outage is the result of a "perfect storm" of normal, everyday mishaps. Instead of figuring out what went wrong and building procedures to ensure that something bad can never happen again (a process that almost always introduces inefficiencies and unanticipated vulnerabilities), modern operations designs systems that are resilient in the face of everyday errors, even when they occur in unpredictable combinations.
In the past decade, we've seen major changes in software development practice. We've moved from various versions of the "waterfall" method, with interminable up-front planning, to "minimum viable product," continuous integration, and continuous deployment. It's important to understand that the waterfall and methodology of the '80s aren't "bad ideas" or mistakes. They were perfectly adapted to an age of shrink-wrapped software. When you produce a "gold disk" and manufacture thousands (or millions) of copies, the penalties for getting something wrong are huge. If there's a bug, you can't fix it until the next release. In this environment, a software release is a huge event. But in this age of web and mobile applications, deployment isn't such a big thing. We can release early, and release often; we've moved from continuous integration to continuous deployment. We've developed techniques for quick resolution in case a new release has serious problems; we've mastered A/B testing to test releases on a small subset of the user base.
All of these changes require cooperation and collaboration between developers and operations staff. Operations groups are adopting, and in many cases, leading in the effort to implement these changes. They're the specialists in resilience, in monitoring, in deploying changes and rolling them back. And the many attendees, hallway discussions, talks, and keynotes at O'Reilly's Velocity conference show us that they are adapting. They're learning about adopting approaches to resilience that are completely new to software engineering; they're learning about monitoring and diagnosing distributed systems, doing large-scale automation, and debugging under pressure. At a recent meeting, Jesse Robbins described scheduling EMT training sessions for operations staff so that they understood how to handle themselves and communicate with each other in an emergency. It's an interesting and provocative idea, and one of many things that modern operations staff bring to the mix when they work with developers.
What does the future hold for operations? System and network monitoring used to be exotic and bleeding-edge; now, it's expected. But we haven't taken it far enough. We're still learning how to monitor systems, how to analyze the data generated by modern monitoring tools, and how to build dashboards that let us see and use the results effectively. I've joked about "using a Hadoop cluster to monitor the Hadoop cluster," but that may not be far from reality. The amount of information we can capture is tremendous, and far beyond what humans can analyze without techniques like machine learning.
Likewise, operations groups are playing a huge role in the deployment of new, more efficient protocols for the web, like SPDY. Operations is involved, more than ever, in tuning the performance of operating systems and servers (even ones that aren't under our physical control); a lot of our "best practices" for TCP tuning were developed in the days of ISDN and 56 Kbps analog modems, and haven't been adapted to the reality of Gigabit Ethernet, OC48* fiber, and their descendants. Operations groups are responsible for figuring out how to use these technologies (and their successors) effectively. We're only beginning to digest IPv6 and the changes it implies for network infrastructure. And, while I've written a lot about building resilience into applications, so far we've only taken baby steps. There's a lot there that we still don't know. Operations groups have been leaders in taking best practices from older disciplines (control systems theory, manufacturing, medicine) and integrating them into software development.
And what about NoOps? Ultimately, it's a bad name, but the name doesn't really matter. A group practicing "NoOps" successfully hasn't banished operations. It's just moved operations elsewhere and called it something else. Whether a poorly chosen name helps or hinders progress remains to be seen, but operations won't go away; it will evolve to meet the challenges of delivering effective, reliable software to customers. Old-style system administrators may indeed be disappearing. But if so, they are being replaced by more sophisticated operations experts who work closely with development teams to get continuous deployment right; to build highly distributed systems that are resilient; and yes, to answer the pagers in the middle of the night when EBS goes down. DevOps.
Photo: Taken at IBM's headquarters in Armonk, NY. By Mike Loukides.
This is part of the Velocity Profiles series, which highlights the work and knowledge of web ops and performance experts.
I started working as a software engineer, and being at Amazon working on the internals of the retail website it was almost impossible not to have some exposure to pager duty and operations. As my career progressed and I moved into leadership roles on teams working on 24/7 websites, typically spanning hundreds of servers (and now instances), it was necessary to understand operations and performance.
Memorable can be two things, really good or really bad. Right now I am excited about the work we have been doing on Decide.com to make our website super fast and work well across devices (and all the data mining and machine learning is also really interesting).
As for really bad, though, there was a launch almost a decade ago where we implemented an analytics datastore on top of a relational database instead of something like map/reduce. If only Hadoop and all the other great data technologies were around and prevalent back then!
Building an index of all the links on the web (a link search engine, basically) in one year with less than $1 million, including the team.
Tools: pick the best one for the job at hand. Techniques: take the time to slow down before making snap judgements.
Artur Bergman, Cliff Moon, Ben Black, John Allspaw, Rob Treat, and Theo Schlossnagle.
Software architecture. You have to design your applications to be operational.
In this new Velocity Podcast, I had a conversation with Kate Matsudaira (@katemats), Vice President of Engineering at Decide.com. This conversation centers mostly on the human side of engineering and performance. Kate has some great insights into building an environment for human performance that goes along with your quest for more performant, reliable, scalable, tolerant, secure web properties.
Our conversation lasted 00:20:00 and if you want to pinpoint any particular topic, you can find the specific timing below. Kate provides some of her background and experience as well as what she is currently doing at Decide.com here. The full conversation is outlined below.
If you would like to hear Kate speak on "Leveling up - Taking your operations and engineering role to the next level," she is presenting at the 2012 Velocity Conference in Santa Clara, Calif. on Wednesday 6/27/12 at 1:00 pm. We hope to see you there.
Here's a look at the top stories published across O'Reilly sites this week.
Carsharing saves U.S. city governments millions in operating costs
Carsharing initiatives in a number of U.S. cities are part of a broader trend that suggests the ways we work, play and learn are changing.
Complexity fails: A lesson from storage simplification
Simple systems scale effectively, while complex systems struggle to overcome the multiplicative effect of potential failure points. This shows us why the most reliable and scalable clouds are those made up of fewer, simpler parts.
Operations, machine learning and premature babies
Machine learning and access to huge amounts of data allowed IBM to make an important discovery about premature infants. If web operations teams could capture everything — network data, environmental data, I/O subsystem data, etc. — what would they find out?
State of the Computer Book Market 2011
In his annual report, Mike Hendrickson analyzes tech book sales and industry data: Part 1, Overall Market; Part 2, The Categories; Part 3, The Publishers; Part 4, The Languages; Part 5, Wrap-Up and Digital.
Never, ever "out of print"
In a recent interview, attorney Dana Newman tackled issues surrounding publishing rights in the digital landscape. She said changes in the current model are needed to keep things equitable for both publishers and authors.
Fluent Conference: JavaScript & Beyond — Explore the changing worlds of JavaScript & HTML5 at the O'Reilly Fluent Conference, May 29 - 31 in San Francisco. Save 20% on registration with the code RADAR20.
Photo of servers: Google Production Server, v1 by Pargon, on Flickr
Julie Steele and I recently had lunch with Etsy's John Allspaw and Kellan Elliott-McCrea. I'm not sure how we got there, but we made a connection that was (to me) astonishing between web operations and medical care for premature infants.
I've written several times about IBM's work in neonatal intensive care at the University of Toronto. In any neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), every baby is connected to dozens of monitors. And each monitor is streaming hundreds of readings per second into various data systems. They can generate alerts if anything goes severely out of spec, but in normal operation, they just generate a summary report for the doctor every half hour or so.
IBM discovered that by applying machine learning to the full data stream, they were able to diagnose some dangerous infections a full day before any symptoms were noticeable to a human. That's amazing in itself, but what's more important is what they were looking for. I expected them to be looking for telltale spikes or irregularities in the readings: perhaps not serious enough to generate an alarm on their own, but still, the sort of things you'd intuitively expect of a person about to become ill. But according to Anjul Bhambhri, IBM's Vice President of Big Data, the telltale signal wasn't spikes or irregularities, but the opposite. There's a certain normal variation in heart rate, etc., throughout the day, and babies who were about to become sick didn't exhibit the variation. Their heart rate was too normal; it didn't change throughout the day as much as it should.
That observation strikes me as revolutionary. It's easy to detect problems when something goes out of spec: If you have a fever, you know you're sick. But how do you detect problems that don't set off an alarm? How many diseases have early symptoms that are too subtle for a human to notice, and only accessible to a machine learning system that can sift through gigabytes of data?
In our conversation, we started wondering how this applied to web operations. We have gigabytes of data streaming off of our servers, but the state of system and network monitoring hasn't changed in years. We look for parameters that are out of spec, thresholds that are crossed. And that's good for a lot of problems: You need to know if the number of packets coming into an interface suddenly goes to zero. But what if the symptom we should look for is radically different? What if crossing a threshold isn't what indicates trouble, but the disappearance (or diminution) of some regular pattern? Is it possible that our computing infrastructure also exhibits symptoms that are too subtle for a human to notice but would easily be detectable via machine learning?
We talked a bit about whether it was possible to alarm on the first (and second) derivatives of some key parameters, and of course it is. Doing so would require more sophistication than our current monitoring systems have, but it's not too hard to imagine. But it also misses the point. Once you know what to look for, it's relatively easy to figure out how to detect it. IBM's insight wasn't detecting the patterns that indicated a baby was about to become sick, but using machine learning to figure out what the patterns were. Can we do the same? It's not inconceivable, though it wouldn't be easy.
Web operations has been on the forefront of "big data" since the beginning. Long before we were talking about sentiment analysis or recommendations engines, webmasters and system administrators were analyzing problems by looking through gigabytes of server and system logs, using tools that were primitive or non-existent. MRTG and HP's OpenView were savage attempts to put together information dashboards for IT groups. But at most enterprises, operations hasn't taken the next step. Operations staff doesn't have the resources (neither computational nor human) to apply machine intelligence to our problems. We'd have to capture all the data coming off our our servers for extended periods, not just the server logs that we capture now, but any every kind of data we can collect: network data, environmental data, I/O subsystem data, you name it. At a recent meetup about finance, Abhi Mehta encouraged people to capture and save "everything." He was talking about financial data, but the same applies here. We'd need to build Hadoop clusters to monitor our server farms; we'd need Hadoop clusters to monitor our Hadoop clusters. It's a big investment of time and resources. If we could make that investment, what would we find out? I bet that we'd be surprised.
Military strategist John Boyd spent a lot of time understanding how to win battles. Building on his experience as a fighter pilot, he broke down the process of observing and reacting into something called an Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act (OODA) loop. Combat, he realized, consisted of observing your circumstances, orienting yourself to your enemy's way of thinking and your environment, deciding on a course of action, and then acting on it.
The Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act (OODA) loop. Click to enlarge.
The most important part of this loop isn't included in the OODA acronym, however. It's the fact that it's a loop. The results of earlier actions feed back into later, hopefully wiser, ones. Over time, the fighter "gets inside" their opponent's loop, outsmarting and outmaneuvering them. The system learns.
Boyd's genius was to realize that winning requires two things: being able to collect and analyze information better, and being able to act on that information faster, incorporating what's learned into the next iteration. Today, what Boyd learned in a cockpit applies to nearly everything we do.
In our always-on lives we're flooded with cheap, abundant information. We need to capture and analyze it well, separating digital wheat from digital chaff, identifying meaningful undercurrents while ignoring meaningless social flotsam. Clay Johnson argues that we need to go on an information diet, and makes a good case for conscious consumption. In an era of information obesity, we need to eat better. There's a reason they call it a feed, after all.
It's not just an overabundance of data that makes Boyd's insights vital. In the last 20 years, much of human interaction has shifted from atoms to bits. When interactions become digital, they become instantaneous, interactive, and easily copied. It's as easy to tell the world as to tell a friend, and a day's shopping is reduced to a few clicks.
The move from atoms to bits reduces the coefficient of friction of entire industries to zero. Teenagers shun e-mail as too slow, opting for instant messages. The digitization of our world means that trips around the OODA loop happen faster than ever, and continue to accelerate.
We're drowning in data. Bits are faster than atoms. Our jungle-surplus wetware can't keep up. At least, not without Boyd's help. In a society where every person, tethered to their smartphone, is both a sensor and an end node, we need better ways to observe and orient, whether we're at home or at work, solving the world's problems or planning a play date. And we need to be constantly deciding, acting, and experimenting, feeding what we learn back into future behavior.
We're entering a feedback economy.
Consider how a company collects, analyzes, and acts on data.
The big data supply chain. Click to enlarge.
Let's look at these components in order.
The first step in a data supply chain is to get the data in the first place.
Information comes in from a variety of sources, both public and private. We're a promiscuous society online, and with the advent of low-cost data marketplaces, it's possible to get nearly any nugget of data relatively affordably. From social network sentiment, to weather reports, to economic indicators, public information is grist for the big data mill. Alongside this, we have organization-specific data such as retail traffic, call center volumes, product recalls, or customer loyalty indicators.
The legality of collection is perhaps more restrictive than getting the data in the first place. Some data is heavily regulated — HIPAA governs healthcare, while PCI restricts financial transactions. In other cases, the act of combining data may be illegal because it generates personally identifiable information (PII). For example, courts have ruled differently on whether IP addresses aren't PII, and the California Supreme Court ruled that zip codes are. Navigating these regulations imposes some serious constraints on what can be collected and how it can be combined.
The era of ubiquitous computing means that everyone is a potential source of data, too. A modern smartphone can sense light, sound, motion, location, nearby networks and devices, and more, making it a perfect data collector. As consumers opt into loyalty programs and install applications, they become sensors that can feed the data supply chain.
In big data, the collection is often challenging because of the sheer volume of information, or the speed with which it arrives, both of which demand new approaches and architectures.
Once the data is collected, it must be ingested. In traditional business intelligence (BI) parlance, this is known as Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL): the act of putting the right information into the correct tables of a database schema and manipulating certain fields to make them easier to work with.
One of the distinguishing characteristics of big data, however, is that the data is often unstructured. That means we don't know the inherent schema of the information before we start to analyze it. We may still transform the information — replacing an IP address with the name of a city, for example, or anonymizing certain fields with a one-way hash function — but we may hold onto the original data and only define its structure as we analyze it.
The information we've ingested needs to be analyzed by people and machines. That means hardware, in the form of computing, storage, and networks. Big data doesn't change this, but it does change how it's used. Virtualization, for example, allows operators to spin up many machines temporarily, then destroy them once the processing is over.
Cloud computing is also a boon to big data. Paying by consumption destroys the barriers to entry that would prohibit many organizations from playing with large datasets, because there's no up-front investment. In many ways, big data gives clouds something to do.
Where big data is new is in the platforms and frameworks we create to crunch large amounts of information quickly. One way to speed up data analysis is to break the data into chunks that can be analyzed in parallel. Another is to build a pipeline of processing steps, each optimized for a particular task.
Big data is often about fast results, rather than simply crunching a large amount of information. That's important for two reasons:
Much of the hype around big data companies today is a result of the retooling of enterprise BI. For decades, companies have relied on structured relational databases and data warehouses — many of them can't handle the exploration, lack of structure, speed, and massive sizes of big data applications.
One way to think about big data is that it's "more data than you can go through by hand." For much of the data we want to analyze today, we need a machine's help.
Part of that help happens at ingestion. For example, natural language processing tries to read unstructured text and deduce what it means: Was this Twitter user happy or sad? Is this call center recording good, or was the customer angry?
Machine learning is important elsewhere in the data supply chain. When we analyze information, we're trying to find signal within the noise, to discern patterns. Humans can't find signal well by themselves. Just as astronomers use algorithms to scan the night's sky for signals, then verify any promising anomalies themselves, so to can data analysts use machines to find interesting dimensions, groupings, or patterns within the data. Machines can work at a lower signal-to-noise ratio than people.
While machine learning is an important tool to the data analyst, there's no substitute for human eyes and ears. Displaying the data in human-readable form is hard work, stretching the limits of multi-dimensional visualization. While most analysts work with spreadsheets or simple query languages today, that's changing.
Creve Maples, an early advocate of better computer interaction, designs systems that take dozens of independent, data sources and displays them in navigable 3D environments, complete with sound and other cues. Maples' studies show that when we feed an analyst data in this way, they can often find answers in minutes instead of months.
This kind of interactivity requires the speed and parallelism explained above, as well as new interfaces and multi-sensory environments that allow an analyst to work alongside the machine, immersed in the data.
Big data takes a lot of storage. In addition to the actual information in its raw form, there's the transformed information; the virtual machines used to crunch it; the schemas and tables resulting from analysis; and the many formats that legacy tools require so they can work alongside new technology. Often, storage is a combination of cloud and on-premise storage, using traditional flat-file and relational databases alongside more recent, post-SQL storage systems.
During and after analysis, the big data supply chain needs a warehouse. Comparing year-on-year progress or changes over time means we have to keep copies of everything, along with the algorithms and queries with which we analyzed it.
All of this analysis isn't much good if we can't act on it. As with collection, this isn't simply a technical matter — it involves legislation, organizational politics, and a willingness to experiment. The data might be shared openly with the world, or closely guarded.
The best companies tie big data results into everything from hiring and firing decisions, to strategic planning, to market positioning. While it's easy to buy into big data technology, it's far harder to shift an organization's culture. In many ways, big data adoption isn't a hardware retirement issue, it's an employee retirement one.
We've seen similar resistance to change each time there's a big change in information technology. Mainframes, client-server computing, packet-based networks, and the web all had their detractors. A NASA study into the failure of Ada, the first object-oriented language, concluded that proponents had over-promised, and there was a lack of a supporting ecosystem to help the new language flourish. Big data, and its close cousin, cloud computing, are likely to encounter similar obstacles.
A big data mindset is one of experimentation, of taking measured risks and assessing their impact quickly. It's similar to the Lean Startup movement, which advocates fast, iterative learning and tight links to customers. But while a small startup can be lean because it's nascent and close to its market, a big organization needs big data and an OODA loop to react well and iterate fast.
The big data supply chain is the organizational OODA loop. It's the big business answer to the lean startup.
Just as John Boyd's OODA loop is mostly about the loop, so big data is mostly about feedback. Simply analyzing information isn't particularly useful. To work, the organization has to choose a course of action from the results, then observe what happens and use that information to collect new data or analyze things in a different way. It's a process of continuous optimization that affects every facet of a business.
Software is eating the world. Verticals like publishing, music, real estate and banking once had strong barriers to entry. Now they've been entirely disrupted by the elimination of middlemen. The last film projector rolled off the line in 2011: movies are now digital from camera to projector. The Post Office stumbles because nobody writes letters, even as Federal Express becomes the planet's supply chain.
Companies that get themselves on a feedback footing will dominate their industries, building better things faster for less money. Those that don't are already the walking dead, and will soon be little more than case studies and colorful anecdotes. Big data, new interfaces, and ubiquitous computing are tectonic shifts in the way we live and work.
Big data, continuous optimization, and replacing everything with data pave the way for something far larger, and far more important, than simple business efficiency. They usher in a new era for humanity, with all its warts and glory. They herald the arrival of the feedback economy.
The efficiencies and optimizations that come from constant, iterative feedback will soon become the norm for businesses and governments. We're moving beyond an information economy. Information on its own isn't an advantage, anyway. Instead, this is the era of the feedback economy, and Boyd is, in many ways, the first feedback economist.
Velocity Europe is less than two weeks away. It's happening November 8-9 in Berlin at the Hotel Maritim ProArte. I've heard good things about the venue and am excited to get there and check it out.
This event has been a long time coming. A handful of web performance and operations savants (including members of the Program Committee) have been encouraging us for years to bring Velocity to Europe, and now it's actually happening. And (drum roll please) the price is only EUR 600 (excl. VAT) if you use the 20% discount code veu11sts.
The Velocity Europe speaker line-up is exceptional. Some highlights include:
I want to give a shout out to the Velocity Europe Program Committee: Patrick Debois, Aaron Peters, Schlomo Schapiro, Jeroen Tjepkema, and Sean Treadway. They've participated in numerous video concalls (yay Google Hangouts!) to review proposals, build the program, and shape Velocity to be a European conference. And they might have one more card up their sleeve – more on that later.
If you're heading to Berlin you should also check out CounchConf Berlin on Nov 7. NoSQL has great performance benefits and Couchbase is a good choice for many mobile apps. Use couchconf_discount for 10% off registration.
The last time I was in Berlin was for JSConf.eu 2009. The city had a high-tech vibe and the crowd was extremely knowledgeable and enthusiastic. I'm excited to get back to Berlin for Velocity Europe and do the web performance and operations deep dives that are the core of Velocity. If you want to have a website that's always fast and always up, Velocity Europe is the place to be. I hope to see you there.
According to Tim O'Reilly, the motivation behind the 2007 meeting was a call to "gather the tribe" of people who cared about web performance and create a new conference. The audience for this conference, in 2007 as it is today, is made up of the people who keep the web running, the people behind the biggest websites in the world. The participants in that first meeting reflected a change that was underway in the relationship between web development and web operations. Even saying that there was a single "tribe" to be gathered was important. Participants in the 2007 meeting had already realized that there was a single web performance community, uniting both developers and operations staff. But in many organizations, web performance and web operations were disciplines that were poorly defined, poorly documented, and insufficiently recognized. In some organizations, then and now, people involved with web operations and web development were hardly even aware of each other.
The participants in that 2007 meeting came from organizations that were in the process of finding common ground between developers and operations, of making the cultural changes that allowed them to work together productively, and wanted to share those insights with the rest of the Web community. Both developers and operations staff are trying to solve the same problems. Customers aren't happy if the site isn't up; customers aren't happy if the site is slow and unresponsive; new features don't do anyone any good if they can't be deployed in a production environment. Developers and operations staff have no trouble agreeing on these unifying principles. Having agreed on these unifying principles, developers and operations staff quickly discover that they speak the same language: they both know the code intimately, understand performance issues, and understand tweaking servers and hand-tuning code to optimize performance. And when we held the first Velocity conference in 2008, it was indeed a "meeting of the tribe" — two groups that found they were really allies.
Velocity became the ground for discussing and testing a number of important new ideas. Perhaps one of the most important was the idea of agile operations. Agile development methodologies had taken the software world by storm: instead of long, waterfall-driven release cycles, software developers started by building a minimal product, then iterating quickly to add features, fix bugs, and refactor the design. Continuous integration soon became part of the agile world, with frequent builds and testing of the entire software package. This practice couldn't help but affect operations, and (with a certain amount of trepidation), forward-thinking companies like Flickr started deploying many times a day. Each deployment represented a small change: part of a new feature, a bug fix, whatever. This was revolutionary. Frequent deployment meant that bugs surfaced before the developers had moved on to their next project, and they were still available to fix problems.
At the same time, tools for managing large networks were improving. They had to improve; we were long past the stage where networks of computers could be set up and managed by hand, on a one-at-a-time basis. Better tools were particularly important in a server environment, where software installation and configuration were increasingly complex, and web companies had long since moved from individual servers to server farms. Cfengine, the first tool for automating software installation and configuration, started a revolution in the mid-'90s, which is carried on by Puppet and Chef. Along with better tools came a change in the nature of the job. Rather than mumbling individual incantations, combined with some ad-hoc scripting, system administration became software development, and infrastructure became code. If there was any doubt about this shift, Amazon Web Services put an end to it. You can't administer servers from the console when you don't even know where the servers are, and you're starting them and shutting them down by the dozens, if not thousands.
One talk in particular crystallized just how important performance is: In their 2009 presentation, "Performance Related Changes and their User Impact," Eric Schurman of Microsoft's Bing and Jake Brutlag of Google showed that imperceptibly small increases in response time cause users to move away from your site and to another site. If response time is more than a second, you're losing a significant portion of your traffic. Here was proof that even milliseconds counted and users clearly respond to degradation that they can't detect.
But perhaps the companies the speakers represented were even more important than their results: developers from Microsoft and Google were talking, together, about the importance of performance to the future of the Web. As important as the results were, getting competitors like Microsoft and Google on the same stage to talk about web performance was a tremendous validation of Velocity's core premise that performance is central to taking the web into the next decade.
We're now in the next decade, and mobile has become part of the discussion in ways we could only begin to anticipate a few years ago. Web performance for mobile devices is not the same as desktop web performance; and it's becoming ever more important. Last year, we heard that users expect mobile websites to be as responsive as desktop sites. But are the same techniques effective for optimizing mobile performance? We're in the process of finding out. It looks like client-side optimization is even more important in the mobile world than for the desktop/laptop web.
With those broader themes in mind, what's Velocity about this year? We have plenty of what you've come to expect: lots of material on the culture and integration of development and operations teams, plenty of sessions on measuring performance, plenty of ways to optimize your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. There's a new track specifically on mobile performance, and a new track specifically for products and services, where vendors can showcase their offerings.
Here are some of the topics that we'll explore at Velocity 2011:
This year, we're expecting our largest crowd ever. It's going to be
an exciting show, with people like
Nicole Sullivan looking at what's really important in HTML5 and CSS3;
Steve Souders introducing this year's crop of performance tools;
Sarah Novotny discussing best strategies for effective web caching;
John Allspaw on conducting post-mortems effectively;
much more.
Finally, Velocity doesn't end on June 16. We're planning Velocity conferences to take place in Europe and China later in 2011 — details are coming soon and we hope to see you there. And if you can't make it to either of those locations, we'll see you again in June, 2012.
Guest blogger Andrew Clay Shafer is helping telcos and hosting providers implement cloud services at Cloudscaling. He co-founded Reductive Labs, creators of Puppet, the configuration management framework. Andrew preaches the "infrastructure is code" gospel, and he supports approaches for applying agile methods to infrastructure and operations. Some of those perspectives were captured in his chapter in the O'Reilly book "Web Operations."
"Technical debt" is used two ways in the analysis of software systems. The phrase was first introduced in 1992 by Ward Cunningham to describe the premise that increased speed of delivery provides other advantages, and that the debt leveraged to gain those advantages should be strategically paid back.
Somewhere along the way, technical debt also became synonymous with poor implementation; reflecting the difference between the current state of a code base and an idealized one. I have used the term both ways, and I think they both have merit.
Technical debt can be extended and discussed along several additional axes: process debt, personnel debt, experience debt, user experience debt, security debt, documentation debt, etc. For this discussion, I won't quibble about the nuances of categorization. Instead, I want to take a high-level look at operations and infrastructure choices people make and the impact of those choices.
Debts are created by some combination of choice and circumstance. Modern economies are predicated on the flow of debt as much as anything else, but not all debt is created equal. There is a qualitative difference between a mortgage and carrying significant debt on maxed-out credit cards. The point being that there are a variety of ways to incur debt, and the quality of debts have different consequences.
Jesse Robbins' Radar post about operations as the secret sauce talked about boot strapping web startups in 80 hours. It included the following infographic showing the time cost of traditional versus special sauce operations:
I contend that the ongoing difference in time cost between the two solutions is the interest being paid on technical debt.
Understanding is really the crux of the matter. No one who really understands compound interest would intentionally make frivolous purchases on a credit card and not make every effort to pay down high interest debt. Just as no one who really understands web operations would create infrastructure with an exponentially increasing cost of maintenance. Yet, people do both of these things.
As the graph is projected out, the ongoing cost of maintenance in both projects reflects the maxim of "the rich get richer." One project can focus on adding value and differentiating itself in the market while the other will eventually be crushed under the weight of its own maintenance.
Without a counterbalancing investment, system and software architectures succumb to entropy and become more difficult to understand. The classic "Big Ball of Mud" by Brian Foote and Joseph Yoder catalogs forces that contribute to the creation of haphazard and undifferentiated software architectures. They are:
These same forces apply just as much to infrastructure and operations, especially if you understand the "infrastructure is code" mantra. If you look at the original "Tale of Two Ops Teams" graphic, both teams spent almost the same amount of time before the launch. If we assume that these are representative, then the difference between the two approaches is essentially experience and skill, which is likely to be highly correlated with cost. As the project moves forward, the difference in experience and skill reflects itself in how the teams spend time, provide visibility and handle complexity, change and scale.
Using this list, and the assumption that balls of mud are synonymous with high technical debt, combating technical debt becomes an exercise in minimizing the impact of these forces.
Each of these forces and specific examples of how they impact infrastructure would fill a book, but hopefully that is enough to get people thinking and frame a discussion.
There is a force that may be missing from the "Big Ball of Mud": tools (which might be an oversight, might be an attempt to remain tool-agnostic, or might be considered a cross-cutting aspect of cost, experience and skill). That's not to say that tools don't add some complexity and the potential for technical debt as well. But done well, tools provide ongoing insight into how and why systems are configured the way they are, illumination of the complexity and connections of the systems, and a mechanism to rapidly implement changes. That is just an example. Every tool choice, from the operating system, to the web server, to the database, to the monitoring and more, has an impact on the complexity, visibility and flexibility of the systems, and therefore impacts operations effectiveness.
Many parallels can be drawn between operations and fire departments. One big difference is most fire departments don't spend much time actually putting out fires. If operations is reacting all the time, that indicates considerable technical debt. Furthermore, in reactive environments, the probability is high that the solutions of today are contributing to the technical debt and the fires of tomorrow.
Focus must be directed toward getting the fires under control in a way that doesn't contribute to future fires. The coarse metric of time spent reactively responding to incidents versus the time spent proactively completing ops-related projects is a great starting point for understanding the situation. One way to insure operations is always a cost center is to keep treating it like one. When the flow of technical debt is understood and well managed, operations is certainly a competitive advantage.
At Velocity 2010, John Rauser presented four funny & powerful examples of cultural change, from a campaign at his office to get people to fill the coffee pot after taking the last cup, to an award winning advertising campaign. This talk explains how to "sneak past people's mental filters" and make things happen.
Public clouds are based on the economics of sharing. Cloud providers can charge less, and sell computing on an hourly basis without long-term contracts, because they're spreading costs and skills across many customers.
But a shared model means that your application is competing with other users' applications for scarce resources. The pact you're making with a public cloud, for better or worse, is that the advantages of elasticity and pay-as-you-go economics outweigh any problems you'll face.
Enterprises are skeptical because clouds force them to relinquish control over the underlying networks and architectures on which their applications run. Is performance acceptable? Will clouds be reliable? What's the tradeoff, particularly now that we know speed matters so much?
We (Bitcurrent) decided to find out. With the help of Webmetrics, we built four test applications: a small object, a large object, a million calculations, and a 500,000-row table scan. We ported the applications to five different clouds, and monitored them for a month. We discovered that performance varies widely by test type and cloud:
Here are some of the lessons learned:
In the end, it's clear that there's no single "best" cloud: PaaS (App Engine, Force.com) scales easily, but locks you in; IaaS (Rackspace, Amazon, Terremark) offers portability, but leaves you doing all the scaling work yourself.
The full 50-page report is available free from Webmetrics.
Web performance and cloud architecture will be key topics at this week's Velocity conference.
We're entering our third year of Velocity, the Web Performance & Operations Conference. Velocity 2010 will be June 22-24, 2010 in Santa Clara, CA. It's going to be another incredible year.
Steve Souders & I have set a new theme this year, "Fast by Default". We want the broader Velocity community & to adopt it as a shared mission & mantra. The reason for this is simple...
At Velocity earlier this year Marissa Meyer explained why performance mattered so much to Google. Then Eric Schurman (Bing & Velocity Program Committee member) and Jake Brutlag (Google Search) made history with a co-presentation on just how crucial performance is to revenue .
Phil Dixon of Shopzilla explained that a 5 second performance improvement increased their revenue by 7-12 percent while reducing hardware spend by 50%!!!
Getting to Fast isn't just about any one part of the system. Browser & Client performance is crucial, and requires an equally fast server & infrastructure to support it. When load increases, infrastructure must scale quickly or performance suffers. The operational tools and processes for managing software & infrastructure must support rapid changes in a dynamic environment, and be backed by an organization & culture that embraces it.
Do you have ideas and experience for improving Web Performance & Operations and making things "Fast by Default"? We want you as a speaker at Velocity 2010.
Submit your Proposals Now! Entires are due no later than January 11th, 2010 at 11:59 PM Pacific.
Past Velocity Conference participants get a 50% discount & get a 25% discount off Velocity 2010.
See the full schedule after the jump...
Velocity Online Conference
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
9:00am-12:40pm PT
Speaker: Mike Belshe
Speaker: Charles Jolley
Speaker: Yehuda Katz
Speaker: Artur Bergman
Speaker: Lindsey Simon
Speaker: J Chris Anderson
Moderator: Jesse Robbins
Speakers: Artur Bergman, Adam Jacob, John Allspaw
"Tell the chef, the beer is on me."
"Basically the price of a night on the town!"
"I'd love to help kickstart continued development! And 0 EUR/month really does make fiscal sense too...


text:
Muskegon Community College will hold a Downtown Center Renovation Groundbreaking ceremony on Wednesday, Nov. 2, 2016, at 1 p.m. at the College's parking lot located at Clay Avenue and Fourth Street adjacent to the facility.
Renovations have already begun on the MCC Downtown Center with the architectural firm C2AE overseeing work on the $14.27 million project. Clark Construction is doing the building and renovations, which are expected to be completed by Fall 2017.
The ceremony is free and open to the public. Design renderings will be on display and refreshments will be served.
MCC President Dale K. Nesbary will preside over the event, which includes comments by MCC Board of Trustees President Dr. Donald Crandall, Clark Construction President Sam Clark, and C2AE Principal Owner Dennis J. Bekken.
Once completed, the Downtown Center main level will be home to the Richard H. and Ann U. Kraft Rapid Prototype Center, the CNC Machine Lab, the Welding Lab, the Collaboration Lobby and Student Services offices. The second floor will house the Alcoa Foundation Automation Lab; an Electricity Lab; classrooms for CAD, Renewable Energy, Applied Technology and Electronics; and faculty offices. The lower level will house the CWC Textron Foundry Lab, the James and Florence Jackson Pattern Shop, a Materials Testing Lab, Finishing Room, classrooms, and rentable entrepreneur office space. The Rooks | Sarnicola Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies includes a Fab Lab, a Youth Entrepreneurial Space, Best Financial Credit Union, and the Barnes & Noble Bookstore.
For more information, contact Trynette Lottie-Harps at (231) 777-0559 or Cindy DeBoef at (231) 777-0303.


text:
'Plant man' of Kashmir is no more
Srinagar, May 24 (KNS): Well-known plant taxonomist Dr. A. R. Naqshi, former faculty at the Department of Botany, University of Kashmir passed away after brief illness on Wednesday.
According to KNS, Dr.Naqshi famously known as 'plant man' of Kashmir has immensely contributed in the scientific documentation of floral wealth of J&K state.
During his active service, spanning more than three decades, Dr. Naqshi had undertaken botanical exploration across the entire state including far-flung areas of Gurez, Nubra, Zanskar and other such areas.
Dr. Naqshi has been the pioneer in the establishment of internationally recognized KASH herbarium-a rich repository representing floral heritage of the state.
By his death, his colleagues believe that the state has lost the scientist of global stature, whose research contribution in the botanical sciences will remain always immortal.
Paying tributes, Director Ecology and Environment Op Sharma has written a poem in remembrance of Dr Naqshi.
"He trained us in the field of plant identification. His contribution in the field of plant taxonomy will be remembered for ever," one of his students told KNS. (KNS)


text:
The Alaskan Blade Trader is the perfect choice for hunters. It gives you a big skinning blade with non-clogging gut hook, a sturdy saw blade, and a handy do-everything-else clip-point utility blade. All three blades, plus the comfortable Blade Trader handle, store in a compact leather belt sheath.
Features:1 handle, 3 interchangeable blades
|Knife Edge:
|Plain, Serrated
|Best Use:
|Everyday Carry
|Blade Finish:
|Knife Type:
|Fixed Blade


text:
Smart cars, smart phones, smart toys, smart appliances—you name it and somebody, somewhere, is adding sensors to it. But the push for smaller, cheaper sensors is also having a big payoff for research, especially environmental monitoring. As concern about global warming grows, the ability to measure what's actually happening to the planet helps us understand the interwoven systems that keep our climate systems stable.
Tagging Turtles
An article from World Changing, "Marine Animals Used As Ocean Sensors," reports that researchers are tagging albatrosses, elephant seals, sharks, and other apex predators to gather data on migratory paths and ocean conditions. Visit the Tagging of Pacific Pelagics Web site and you can view the paths of the tagged animals. What better way to see what's happening in and around the ocean than to hitch a ride on one of its inhabitants? I'll grant you that instrumenting an albatross is a bit more exotic than the average data collection application, but it's such an elegant solution to the problem!
What's even more exciting is combining these data with those from the various satellite-based imagers to place the animals' travels in the context of sea surface temperatures, chlorophyll concentrations, sea surface height, currents, and sea floor topology. Our climate is inextricably linked with the ocean and its behavior and this combination approach gives us a much better idea of what's going on, backed by actual numbers.
The Big Picture
For the new year, the Jet Propulsion Lab created a slide show of images from 2005. You can view it here. Sure, these are pretty, pretty pictures but their beauty obscures their utility. They represent a huge amount of information about our planet and our universe, all obtained using sensor technology of various types. While the smart gadgets are fun and make my life just that little bit easier and more comfortable, I think that these sensor uses are a lot more compelling. Smart planet vs. smart car? No contest.