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If a museum needs to campaign against the cuts, or a change is mooted in the curriculum for 'A' Level study, or a failure in intellectual property law cries out for lobbying in Parliament – who speaks for photography?
At the ceremony on 18 September 2012 to mark the start of construction by which the former Commonwealth Institute in High Street Kensington will become a new Design Museum, Sir Terence Conran used the opportunity to once again "persuade government of the importance of design in this country". Ed Vaizey, the Minister of Culture, replied by saying "Government has taken note of Terence's comments, and I'll take back what he said and see what we can do." Sir Terence is the founder of the museum, and a generous patron. But he is also the owner of a number of businesses whose profitability might well be affected by the government's response.
Lord Rogers of Riverside, whose 1997 book Cities for a Small Planet (based on his Reith Lectures of 1995) established his credentials as an advocate for sustainable and liveable cities, has advised both Prime Minister Tony Blair and London Mayor Boris Johnson on urbanism. Lord Rogers has designed a number of very private buildings in London whose contribution to the liveable city is to say the least open to question. It is not plain, for example, that the great corporate monuments which are 122 Leadenhall Street (known as the Cheesegrater) or the Lloyds Building do anything very much for ordinary citizens, for permeability, or for the small planet, come to that. Lord Rogers got himself into a mildly embarrassing pickle earlier this year when he drew attention to the large number of empty homes in the most expensive sectors of the London residential market, only for it to be pointed out that he himself was the architect of the luxury apartments at One Hyde Park, which were easily predicted to become, as they almost all have, second homes owned by non-residents and most of which are used only a few weeks per year.
Even Sir Paul Smith – a man who once reacted to Prime Minister David Cameron's horribly self-promoting down-with-the-guys public dithering on whether or when to wear a tie with the terse fly-swat "the political arena is not the place to make fashion statements" – has been known to appear at industry gets-together with Business Secretary Vince Cable promoting UK textile mills or that more nebulous something called 'creativity'.
Creative industries in the UK have a number of leading figures who can routinely be called on to provide a headline or shape a point of view. Sir Martin Sorell, CEO of WPP, the largest advertising agency in the world, has been a frequent voice for years. He gave a famous speech at the D&AD in 1996 which made broad claims on behalf of the industry: "What we sell are pearls. Whether we are designers or planners or writers or art directors or corporate strategists, our raw material is knowledge. We turn that knowledge into ideas, insights, and objects that have a material, quantifiable value to our clients".
Another such voice has been that of Sir Nicholas Hytner, outgoing director of the National Theatre. ("Sir Nicholas Hytner: Arts are Economic Gold for Britain – The Daily Telegraph, April 2013).
Some of these figures carry a more or less official appointment (Lord Rogers, for example, as well as setting up the Urban Task Force at the request of government, held for a number of years a role as Chair of the Greater London Authority Panel on Architecture); many others do not. Some speak ex-officio: the Director-General of the BBC, Director of the Tate, and so on. But most do not. In a very British way, speaking up on behalf of a whole cultural industry is part of a position among 'the Great and the Good' ; that may well carry fringe benefits, but these voices are not really being heard for the money, or at least never directly. Crucially, too, these spokesknights and spokeslords are not by any means specifically limited to pronouncing on their own particular area. Across a broad swathe of the cultural industries and the creative industries, these voices form a ready-made and fairly establishment lobby.
Nobody really cares about possible conflicts of interest in these circumstances. A sound-bite, a photo-opportunity, are not to be seen as audits. Just an opportunity to scatter a little business, promote a few of the good guys.
Most of the people I've listed here are in design fields. Design has become a shorthand way of referring to a supposed way of thinking, and claims are routinely made for design that it lies at the heart of the creative industries. I'm rather sceptical about all of this. I think design in its contemporary incarnation is often largely an advertising word, a weasel-word. Design at its worst is a pseudo-culture that can be painted onto almost any activity the easier to sell it. Quite often, 'design' has been the camouflage for a very Thatcherite agenda whereby the shareholding has been kept in one set of hands, based or at least serviced in the UK, while the labour of making things has been exported to cheaper markets elsewhere. Dyson, for example, the design-branded electrical-appliance company, has steadily moved production from its base in Malmesbury, Wiltshire, to Malaysia while keeping research and development mainly in the UK. It is naturally no coincidence that the production was mainly done by people who were members of trade unions; the R&D is done mainly by people who are not.
Similarly, while a wide range of businesses thrive in the UK for whom some part of their assets are creative thinking and creative practices, a lot of blather about the 'creative industries' refers to a sector in which many of the participants would not recognise those with whom they are supposed to share the label, let alone acknowledge any common ground. We may be world leaders in computer aided graphics effects for films, for example, but I doubt that the people who work doing that have ever felt close cousinhood with those who run market research companies for advertising. Sometimes it would be better to think of the creative industries as just one sector of the new European reality that says we are better at services than we are at goods.
There is a huge culture of design, of course, and very important and serious it is, too. But it is not that which is under discussion when a Marc Newson Lockheed Lounge chair sells for £1 million at auction, nor when the word 'designer' is used as a kitemark for aspirational and safe and expensive. Designer handbag. Designer restaurant. Design in fact is very like photography: long history, wide spread, deep range from vernacular or applied to wholly self-conscious. But somehow design has been actively marketed and lobbied-for in the last half-generation, with predictable increases all around. Design is booming. Auction houses now have glamorous sales of design quite separate to the sales of furniture or print or clothing (or other designed stuff) they used to have. University courses in design areas are multiplying by the year. And at the upper end of all of that, lots of designers are quite regularly asked to speak on behalf of the whole pack of cards. So are TV people, people in theatre, music, publishing, architecture…Universities of course relentlessly lobby government and bend the ears of the upper reaches of the press corps. It works. It makes a difference.
Design makes the interesting contrast to photography. Who has the equivalent role for photography? If a museum needs to campaign against the cuts, or a change is mooted in the curriculum for 'A' Level study, or a failure in intellectual property law cries out for lobbying in Parliament – who speaks for photography?
Silence. Resounding, echoing silence.
There are plausible systemic reasons for this, or at least one could argue so.
The first is the sheer breadth of photography. It is naturally very hard to find a strategic or policy stance which might sensibly apply to photography as a main driver of contemporary fine art, photography in advertising, photography as a tool of memory (or group memory), journalism, scientific photography, photography in education, photography as just another of the many ways a modern person has of expressing herself …. Some of the members of each of those sectors actively despise the members of the others, and few of them know enough about each other to feel any shared social connection simply by their shared ownership of an extraordinarily diverse practice which is hardly recognizably the same for all of them.
For a long time I have been writing that the fact that we all own cameras and can use them at the drop of a hat not only to take pictures but to disseminate them, too, does not make us all photographers. We need a new vocabulary. The estate agent who routinely makes and disseminates photographs as part of his work is not a photographer. I've suggested that we use the expression camera-operator for all those uses, and reserve photographer for those who self-consciously expect some appreciation of what they do as connected to previous photographs.
That's problematic enough. Who can speak for photography as a whole if we're already hiving off great chunks of photographic activity as being non-photographic?
There's another way of looking at it. With only a small shift of mindset, photography is not a sector or a sub-sector of the creative businesses. Photography dates from a long time before bicycling, but it helps to think of it in the same way. Both are tremendous Victorian technologies which triggered social change far beyond the expectations of the pioneers who launched into them. It is a romantic thought but hardly an exaggeration to say that the bicycle was the single most important factor in the liberation of women, in particular. The stifling conventions of British industrial towns were broken down partly by the two genders sharing long cycle tours – the first affordable individual transport for ordinary waged people. And if it should so happen that a lady and a gentleman should be delayed by a puncture, well, that happened, and the rest of the club would wait for them at the chosen campsite or Cycle Touring Club hostel further on. Courting would never be the same.
This simple machine, readily affordable, mendable, adaptable, light in the resources needed to make it and slow to decay helped to defeat the trillion-dollar US army in Vietnam and powered the Chinese social uplift in its early phases. In countries which have embraced it – in the Netherlands, say – you no more call yourself a cyclist than you call yourself a trainist because you use a train to get from one city to another. Everybody uses a bike, granny or schoolchild, to go about business. She does it in normal clothes, without feeling the need to adhere to a sect of activists to do it. The government sees that cycling is a universal good, and facilitates it, by policy and by funding and by administration in its favour. There are certainly racers and mountain-bikers and long-distance people, too. But they choose to identify themselves: they are cyclists. Everyone else is just a citizen, who will be, many times a week, upon a bike.
Precisely the same can be said about photography. Photography has been for years a universal tool. It too is a wonderful Victorian technology that has spread far beyond its origins. The successive democratisations of photography have had their effect. Of course there are some enthusiasts who want to think about photography and photographs. I'm one of them. But the vast majority are just citizens, who many times a week want to communicate or be communicated to through photographs and their derivatives. We're mostly not photographers. We're consumers of photography on a huge scale, and some of us are camera operators.
So another parallel seems to fit. Photography is like gardening. It's something which tends to the common good, but only a tiny proportion of those who do it would regard themselves as 'serious' and an even smaller number earn their living from it. Yet that is enough to make a large interlinked group of professions depend on gardening. No doubt gardening between all its aspects represents a share of the balance of trade. Huge numbers of people are passionately literate in gardens without for a moment considering it even among their specialist activities. But people speak for gardening all the time. Gardening permeates our culture. Design is beginning to. More specific cultural activities like cinema and literary fiction and opera have disproportionately huge broadsheet coverage, funding and numberless hordes of spokespeople. Yet photography, which is really the shared culture of all of us, has none of that. There are few photography writers and fewer photography sections in the papers. There is no administration to facilitate it, no policy.
Photography is not really defined as an industry in quite the same way as the (pop) music business or advertising or television or even architecture (with its direct connections to construction). In contrast to other creative industries, photography as an industry is actually rather diminished, now. Where fashion can still be more or less be quantified by pounds spent, even if they are now spent online, photography no longer has huge factories churning out film or cameras. The former manufacturing base has been disseminated through a wide range of digital hardware and software manufacturers few of whom now think of themselves as mainly in photography . Much of the online practice of photography is free. Getty Images in March of this year made the final price reduction – to £0.00, free to use – on thirty-five million pictures. Photography departments in museums are tiny groups of four or five people. The truth is that photography remains, in spite of one or two massive attempts to aggregate it into corporate blocks, essentially a group of interlinked cottage industries. One of the salient facts about photography is that nobody controls it in the way that the music business or the film business or even the big-bucks sectors of publishing are controlled by corporate entities. That militates against one voice speaking on behalf of the whole of it.
Photography tends to show a remarkably wide range of business models corresponding in some way to a wide range of forms of expression. The guy who rents out his drone-helicopter with a number of rotors to act as a stable platform for aerial photography may not feel that he has much in common with Miss Cara Delevingne. One can see that it might be hard to find representative voices for both of them, and then to multiply that out by hundreds of sectors. It would be fun to map the readerships of the various magazines which are based upon photography. Is there any single person with a subscription both to Esquire and to Railway Modeller? Yet both are in a real sense photo-magazines.
There are Getty Images, of course, and Corbis. But I have never been made aware of any public pronouncement from either which had any claim to broad general application. They are companies, and when they speak they speak in the interests of the shareholders or owner. Maybe they are too young still to feel any public responsibility for 'the field' or the business'. Or maybe they just stick to their onions.
There has only ever been one holder of the position of Photography Officer at the Arts Council. Barry Lane held that job from 1973, and oversaw a specialist photography sub-committee which carried on throughout the 1980s allocating grants and also purchases into the Arts Council collection by acquisition. But, as David Mellor's 2008 touring show No Such Thing as Society so vividly demonstrated, there are enormous gaps in the Arts Council collection, notably after Barry Lane left. Photography was then subsumed in the wider visual arts as far as the Arts Council was concerned, there to sink or swim as it might. Lane was anyway more concerned with documentary than with other practices, and the Arts Council never really even glanced at the wider photography world. With tiny budgets, incomprehension if not downright hostility from those who might have helped, an impossible task in a dozen different ways, Lane tried to speak for the whole and within reason made a good job of it. Could one envisage his post being re-created? I think so, although Lane's own struggles go a long way to showing that it can't be done without structure, strategy, and support.
There is no national 'home' for photography. The museum in Bradford deliberately (and disastrously) abjured the role when it changed its policy from being the museum anchored to collections in photography, film and television, to being a museum anchored in something weaselly defined as media, in which it still holds no serious collection and likely never will. There has never been a BBC strand devoted to photography — and I continue to be amazed that there has not. Given that photography stretches from high art to high vernacular, it would be hugely popular. The BBC should at the very least have a photography correspondent, to be wheeled out across their various platforms when photography comes to be at issue. That might be for the release of a new set of Abu Ghraib pictures or potentially trumped-up phone photos from the ISIS insurgency in Iraq or it might be for the latest papped picture of documents carefully-carelessly exposed by ministers rushing in to Cabinet or to analyse satellite pictures of pollution in the Western Approaches. The UK is actually falling back in photography. We're falling back in the museology of the thing, in commerce, everywhere. We have had (although at the moment the UK lags far behind other countries in this area) absolutely world-leading creative directors and art-directors, but they don't act in concert. We have lost a number of photographic festivals, and although there are new ones in the pipeline, the catch-up to the Rencontres at Arles or Paris-Photo is dauntingly far. We are especially bad at promoting our own: in the UK excellent photographers routinely fall into obscurity for lack of that proud national conviction that they should be honoured, whose equivalent is so visible in other countries with a comparable photographic culture.
The great national museums do what they can, but not one of them has at the moment a charismatic leader in the photographic field. Excellent departmental curators, certainly. But national figures? Probably not. We have museum practitioners, itching and twitching to do more than they can. Yet who in the wider public has ever heard a word pronounced by John Falconer, devoted and long-term head of photographs at the British Library? The British Library is headed by Roly Keating, who grew up in the cultural reaches of the BBC. You can bet your bottom dollar that he has been heard arguing for books, literacy, culture in general. He is the head of one of the great photographic collections in the world. Has he ever said a word in public even about his own holdings, leave alone photography in the wild?
There are really no voices on the model even of the people I opened with above. The day when a government minister can say with a straight face that 'Government has taken note..' of a spokesman for photography will be the day that the tide will have turned. We have in photography our share of time-servers and officials in the Ministry of Circumlocution, of course. No doubt even as you read this, somebody is including photography in a seven-point plan or a 'downwardly reassigned budgetary solution'. But that's not speaking for photography. That's merely trying to manage it.
When there were more physical photographic products to be advertised than there are now, there was no natural place in the mainstream media to advertise them. The Sunday supplements, photographic papers in the very fibre of their bones, never made any attempt to seduce the industry. My own specialist corner reveals the same picture. I review exhibitions and sometimes books for a broadsheet audience. But I have suggested for years that I be allowed to review advertising campaigns, news photographs, scientific pictures… I want to write obituaries of great picture editors, write about how estate agents use photography. Zilch. Zip. No interest. Photography, which could be as widely discussed (I was tempted to write 'is as important') as food, is still kept in its little marginal corners.
We used not to have a culture ministry, deeming it a rather threatening, European, slightly rum sort of thing. We had a Reithian BBC and an Arts Council which was once run on the principles laid down by Jennie Lee. We had heroic short-cutters of museum directors like Kenneth Clark or Roy Strong. But in 1992, the day after the election, we got a ministry, (perhaps partly because some civil servants had looked with envy at the centralised, almost imperial, cultural regime run – with a gap – by Jack Lang in France from 1981 to 1992). It was originally called the Department for National Heritage, and entrusted with a weird magpie's collection of bits and pieces from elsewhere. The jewels in the crown – mishandled without exception – were the granting of licenses to exploit mobile communications, the development of broadband, the reform of the horse racing industry, a number of Olympic bids, and an untried form of voluntary taxation in the shape of a new National Lottery whose winnings would in some mysterious way be devoted to the celebration of the Millennium. The Department of Culture, Media and Sport has stayed one of the smaller departments, and with the exception of Chris Smith, one which has always been headed by people who were manifestly less than thrilled to be placed there and whose collective contribution to national cultural prosperity has been nugatory. David Lammy, anyone? Maria Miller?
Periodically, the DCMS has conducted a weird exercise in Blairite social control, which has been the attempt to map the creative industries. Modern management – and a fortiori government – can't do things without obsessive collation of measurables, and unfortunately in the cultural sphere more than in any other (except perhaps religion) measuring is the last thing you can do with any precision. 'Creative industries', after all, is not only an unsatisfactory catch-all term that doesn't hold water, but is also obviously a domain where it's harder than usual to match outputs from specific inputs in order to measure them. In the Blairite vision (shared, by the way between Labour and Conservatives quite indifferently – I only use Blair's label because his people articulated it most clearly) culture has to pay its way. Ask anybody who has run a publicly-funded gallery or a ballet company or even a library in recent years and they will sigh as they tell you about the struggle to do things in the hallowed names of diversity, and access, and fitting in with the national curriculum… In other fields, notably in that of finance, practitioners have been allowed to do whatever they liked in the name of excellence; the massive public bail-outs in the banking industry, the constant vast subsidy of the nominally self-financing railway companies, any number of examples show that it wasn't always necessarily such a good idea. But in culture, where the risks and costs were much lower, practitioners have been forced to toe the line. Culture has had to have social utility or face being cut off from the money. Excellence has come a long way behind.
So the DCMS conducts this absurd exercise every so often in mapping the cultural industries. So does the Arts Council, and, guess what? Neither of them has ever been able to find room for photography. Because, you see, nobody speaks for photography in their meeting rooms any more than they do in the broadsheets or on the radio. Terra Incognita. Here be Monsters.
The greatest recent public contribution to photography has arguably been the Artist Rooms, the touring shows of individual artists from the enormous donation of the art dealer Anthony d'Offay, which happened to be weighted quite markedly towards photography. The ethos of the gift – touring shows, works not separated from each other – was set by the donor. That the donor happened to be interested in — more than interested in: passionate about — photography to some extent set the agenda. The Tate and the National Galleries of Scotland, which together administer the gift, simply had to hold out their hands. The d'Offay donation has willy-nilly accelerated the interest those institutions took in photography. It is even arguable that it changed the national agenda quite specifically. His donation, called "the most important thing that has happened in the art world in this country in my lifetime" by Richard Dorment, art critic of the Daily Telegraph, was announced in spring of 2009. By the autumn of that year, the Tate had appointed Simon Baker as its first ever curator of photographs. Is it wrong to see that the two were intimately connected? Is it possible to think that Baker might not have been appointed and the Tate would have carried on serenely mistreating photography as it had for generations, had d'Offay's pressure not been brought most specifically to bear? One can have reservations about how it has been done without denying that photography has been a success at the Tate. It beggars belief that it might not have been an act of policy at all, however much the bland corporate announcements and press releases suggested that it had been. It might have been a purely pragmatic response to one very powerful donor speaking for photography.
It is impolite to recall that less than a generation earlier, the Circulation Department of the Victoria & Albert Museum, responsible for a permanent succession of tours (some of which had also been of photography) which represented similar brilliant value for money, had been axed. No one spoke for photography then.
The sad detail is that photography really does tick every one of the social-utility boxes. It is transnational and transcultural. It traverses (nearly) seamlessly from one kind of support to another, being notably successfully transplanted to the internet and to digital screens. It can be used and understood by children and by professors: no-one, however disadvantaged, need be excluded from photography, and everyone can find some benefit from it. It can tell truths or stories, be useful or be exalting. It is the communication tool of the age, and still we treat it as a marginal offshoot of the visual arts. If it's commercial, we condescend to it; if it's personal we overlook it.
There still exists (or until recently there still existed – it is hard to tell the precise moment of death of something moribund) a nearly unknown entity called the Committee of National Photographic Collections. The curators of a dozen or more great national collections of photography meet every so often, to discuss matters of shared import. Over many years, these discussions have been more a professional exchange than a strategic one: setting sensible standards for the number of lumens appropriate to fall on older photographs, knowledge exchange about digital files, that kind of thing. As things stand, the committee struggles because it has no independent financing. To attend a meeting, curators need to find a train fare and maybe a couple of nights in a hotel, and (absurdly) that simple and necessary strategic expenditure is often beyond their reach. Every so often we read of the discontinuation of the Committee, and indeed, we are in a period now again when it is talked about as under threat or actually disbanded.
The core of the national interest in photography is represented in the national collections. There are certainly dozens of photographic activities which are not intimately tied to collecting or the old institutional framework which kept collecting at its heart. But all could benefit from a vigorous, informed, flexible, contemporary, brave collecting culture. It is through the collections that analysis can be disseminated; and it is shared analysis of photographs that we lack. Scholarship in all its forms (far beyond the scholarship merely of learned men; I mean the scholarship which gives a new producer the chance to see the things done in his field before himself, which allows children to see that old wars were not so different to new wars…) is anchored in collections. There are plenty of great art directors and photographers who would no more set foot in the V&A or the Birmingham Central Library than they would set foot in the Opera House. But make the collections more relevant to them and they will be there. You have to start somewhere.
But the committee that could bind these great collections is toothless. Give it a director, a secretariat, a small budget, and some legislative teeth, and it could do wonders. Let us give it a try. Let us have a Director of the National Photography Collections, or let's broaden it and say a Director of Photography Policy, to shout from the rooftops on behalf of photography. That person naturally won't represent all the many constituencies of photography evenly, but without him or her, the gradual silencing of photography as a cultural asset will continue.
It is amazing, but true, that there are no conservators of photography employed full-time by the state in Britain. There used to be one - a brilliant one – named Liz Martin, who worked at the V&A in London. She died sadly early (in 2003) and her post has been 'frozen' ever since. Other institutions have conservators who work sometimes on photographs, but they are trained experts in glass or paper, not necessarily specialists in photography. Yet photography was invented in Britain, and boomed here early. We have an incredible stockpile of fragile early material in the national holdings that already needs attention. Appoint someone to oversee strategy in photography, and major long-term problems like that should begin to be addressed. That the problems have been allowed to grow so urgent has been partly because no-one speaks for photography.
So I envisage a director of the national collections, looking not to oversee the individual choices of the collecting departments, but to lobby on their behalf, to draw together workable strategic plans and to work toward their implementation. Such a person would naturally have been answerable to the Museums, Libraries and Archives council, but that no longer exists. So the role will have to answer to the Arts Council or perhaps directly to the ministry. Gradually, that role, one person and a small office, will touch others, and suddenly there will be people – concertedly and with purpose – speaking for photography. High time, too.


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7 little things that almost everyone steals
Have you ever thought of yourself as a thief? Odds are you have stolen something at least once in your life. Of course, this doesn't mean you are a vicious criminal who creates manipulative plots to rob banks or steal diamonds.
But more than likely, at one time or another, you have "borrowed" something and forgotten to give it back, picked up something you thought was yours and put it in your pocket, or accidentally borrowed a dish from your neighbor that is now your favorite serving plate.
You may be thinking "that does't count" about some of these small things. You may have thought it was yours, and, hey, nobody's really going to miss it.
Though these cases of petty, petty, petty, petty, petty theft are probably not going to get you time in the slammer, when you take a second to think about it, we steal a lot of stuff. We created a list of some of the most common things we like to steal the most — some of them accidentally and others, we steal on purpose.
1. Pens
"Darn it, Joe stole my pen again." Pen theft is so common around the office that 70 percent of office employees say they've have had a pen go missing, and 40 percent have actually caught a co-worker stealing their pen red-handed. We steal pens so much that doctor's offices actually tie them to clipboards. And banks, well, they chain those pens down so our thieving hands don't walk out with them.
It may sound ridiculous, but is it? If we steal, say, 1,000 pens from the doctor's office at 25 cents a pop, that's $250. Have you ever stolen someone's pen?
2. A spot in line
Have you ever cut in line? When someone cuts in line, in all actuality, that person is stealing someone else's time. That person has to wait longer because the line cutter stole the spot he or she waited for. This can produce varying reactions. The person who stood there waiting may become infuriated and confront the line-cutter; he or she may give the line cutter a dirty look, but figure it's not really worth a confrontation and simply let it go; or he or she may assertively tell the line-cutter to move to the back of the line.
The Journal of Personality of Social Psychology studied how people react in this situation. Although its research is dated, it is still compelling. When someone cuts in line, people object 54% of the time. When two people try to cut, however, people objected much more frequently — about 91% of the time.
You may be thinking, "I've never cut in line." But think about those times when you're in a long line at the store and a new register opens up. When the cashier says, "I can take someone at this register," have you ever rushed to get to that empty register before the person who should theoretically be next in line?
3. Hotel amenities
When staying in a hotel, many people want to enjoy a relaxing experience: a comfy bed, coffee in the morning, and a nice, hot shower. A survey by Hotels.com found that 23% of travelers look for rooms with high-end coffee makers, and 34 percent say that free Wi-Fi is a must-have. Many people look for the comforts of home and some, well, they like to take hotel comforts home with them.
More than one-third (35%) of hotel guests admit to stealing hotel amenities like towels and linens. Of the countries surveyed, Denmark appears to steal the least from hotels, and Colombia admits to stealing the most, which means those people either steal a whole lot of hotel swag or they're just more honest than some of the other survey respondents. The U.S. was not at the bottom, but we did rank pretty low on the honesty list, ranking in at No. 23 out of 29 countries.
4. Parking spots
It's Black Friday. The parking lot is completely packed and it appears as though there's not a single place to park your vehicle. All of the sudden, you see a spot in the next row over. The only problem is, another car is already going for that same spot. Do you try and get there first?
Now, you're in a duel — a dangerous game where winner takes all. Maybe you turn on some old Western music for motivation. Driving through the Walmart parking lot at 17 miles per hour, you reach the spot first and park.
Although the scenario may not have been as dramatic, most people have, at one time or another, taken a parking spot that someone else had their eye on first.
5. Books and magazines
These days, we have e-readers, tablets, and phones with reading apps. But many of us still love a good old-fashioned book. Have you ever borrowed a book and forgotten to return it? Is that book sitting on your shelf?
While scanning through a magazine, maybe you inadvertently brought it with you instead of putting it back down before you left. Many doctor's offices and hair salons have piles of magazines in the waiting area to reduce boredom during the waiting period. Have you ever accidentally taken one of those magazines home with you?
6. Lighters
A lighter is one of the most commonly lost items, along with pens and wallets. For a smoker, a lighter is an essential item — that person needs his or her lighter to light cigarettes around 20 times a day. Have you ever seen a smoker out in public who doesn't have a light? He or she may scan the surroundings, looking for other smokers who can lend one, or a nearby convenience store where a lighter can be purchased.
It's easy to place something so small into your pocket. You may be used to holding a lighter in your hand, and when you have someone else's, you think it's yours and just walk away with it. Enjoying your new lighter?
7. Restaurant straws, napkins and condiments
Do you steal the sugar or Sweet 'n' Low packets from the tables at restaurants? What about ketchup and mustard packets? "A few extra napkins for my glove box won't hurt anyone," you may think to yourself. If so, you're certainly not the only one.
CNN reported on sugar and condiment swiping. When CNN asked Jim 'N' Nick's BBQ about sugar theft in restaurants, CEO Nick Pihakis told CNN that "as a restaurant operator, it is amazing to me how much of a negative financial impact every sugar packet, ketchup packet that leaves the building unaccounted for affects our bottom line." These condiments account for around 1% of the restaurants' total supply cost, which equates to around $900,000.
Sugar and condiments are not the only foods we steal from food establishments. Ever taste something from your pay-by-weight container at the store or deli before it's weighed? Caught you!
Wall St. Cheat Sheet is a USA TODAY content partner offering financial news and commentary. Its content is produced independently of USA TODAY .

subset: commoncrawl


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Canon believes that there is currently no competitor for its recently announced G1X premium compact camera.
The Canon G1 X was launched during CES 2012 and features an almost APS-C sized sensor and 4x optical zoom. It doesn't replace the G12 premium compact, with Canon instead branding the camera as a new category.
UPDATED: Check out our in-depth Canon G1 X review
Many people were expecting Canon to launch a compact system camera, as it is now the only major camera manufacturer on the market without a model. Its biggest rival, Nikon, was also surprised by the decision to announce a new premium compact.
Some now believe that the sensor found inside the G1 X is what will eventually make its way into any CSC it chooses to release, but for now, Canon is maintaining that there is no obvious competitor for the G1 X.
David Parry from Canon UK told TechRadar: "This is a pretty unique camera in the market. If you look at other ones available, you've either got ones with interchangeable lenses, or you've got those with a similar look and design but don't have the zoom flexibility."
Perhaps the most likely competitor is the Fujifilm X100, which proved extremely popular. It boasts an APS-C sized sensor, which is bigger than the G1 X's, but it has a fixed focal length lens.
No retro
The Fujifilm X100 is regularly lauded for its retro styled good looks, but Canon has decided not to go down the same trend.
"There are lots of cameras out there that have gone for the chrome look," Parry said, "But we really wanted to stick with a form factor and look that people are comfortable with.
"We have to remember that cameras at this sort of level are going to be used by people who see cameras as tools, or use them to get the right image. They don't want to relearn how a camera works."
According to Parry, the G1 X has been in development for a long time. "It's been a dream of Canon Inc to actually build a camera like this for quite a while," he told us.
"It's finally come around to being produced, and I think we've hit the nail on the head with what we were trying to do, which is SLR style image quality in a compact form."
Only time will tell if Canon does eventually relent and produce its own compact system camera, and of course you will find out here if they do.


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Growing up in West Virginia, I lived in a contemporary home surrounded by tall trees and mountains. My brother and I spent many of our days playing along a small creek that wound through the valley behind our house. Being a year older and four inches taller than my brother, I saw the creek first and quickly proclaimed it mine. My brother protested; I boasted. Giving in to the fatigue created by chasing two boys under the age of five, our parents simply relented, "Okay, it's Gat's Creek." The name stuck and actually appears on maps now. My brother eventually and kindly forgave me. Today, Gat Creek lives in our minds as a home of youth, nature and discovery—the essence of furniture that you will find in the following pages.
I began designing furniture in 1996 after purchasing a small furniture manufacturing company. The company, located in my home state, has built beautiful antique reproductions for over 40 years. Believing that great craftsmanship need not be limited to traditional furniture, I created Gat Creek. While the furniture bears my name, it really comes from the dedicated work of over 175 people that share a passion for woodworking, nature and home.
We build Gat Creek furniture specifically for you. We don't import, and we don't run an assembly line. Each piece is hand-made from solid Appalachian Cherry and personally signed by the person who builds it.
Over the past five years we have won a number of design, environmental and workplace safety awards. The award we cherish most is our customers' trust. We hold home sacred and hope to have the opportunity to share some of our craft with you and your home.


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PHOENIX — The Los Angeles Dodgers became the first team to clinch a postseason berth, wrapping up their first NL West title since 2009 when they rallied past the Arizona Diamondbacks 7-6 on Thursday behind two homers from Hanley Ramirez.
Despite an NL-high payroll of $214 million-plus on opening day, the Dodgers got off to an 30-42 start and were last in the division, 9½ games behind the first-place Diamondbacks, before play on June 22. Los Angeles has gone 58-23 since.
The Dodgers trailed 6-3 in the sixth and A.J. Ellis hit a tiebreaking homer off Josh Collmenter (4-4) leading off the eighth. J.P. Howell (2-1) got two outs for the victory. P


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Hartford Financial Exiting Annuity Business
HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) — Hartford Financial Services Group Inc. is exiting the annuity business so it can focus on its property and casualty insurance, group benefits and mutual funds businesses.
Its shares rose more than 6 percent in premarket trading.
The announcement on Wednesday comes a little over a month after hedge fund manager John Paulson urged Hartford to spin off its property and casualty insurance business. At that time Hartford said that it would review Paulson's plan, but warned that a breakup wouldn't be easy.
Hartford said that it will stop new annuity sales on April 27 and anticipates taking a $15 million to $20 million after-tax charge in the second quarter. Annual run-rate expenses are expected to decline by about $100 million, before taxes, starting next year.
Paulson's hedge fund, Paulson & Co. Inc., owns an 8.4 percent stake in Hartford. A representative for the hedge fund could not be immediately reached for comment.
Hartford Financial also said it is looking to sell or pursue other options for its individual life, Woodbury Financial Services and retirement plans but that it will continue to write new business in those areas.
Its shares rose $1.34, or 6.2 percent, to $23.05 in premarket trading.
The Hartford, Conn., company said its decision to exit the annuity business came after a board evaluation that was conducted over the past several quarters that ended this week. Annuities, which are a popular component of retirement plans, enable individuals to invest and get payments at a later date or series of dates.
In February, Hartford reported that earnings for its individual annuity business fell to $86 million in the fourth quarter, down from $96 million in the prior-year period.
"The Hartford's sharper focus will lead to an organization that, over time, will be positioned for higher returns on equity, reduced sensitivity to capital markets, a lower cost of capital and increased financial flexibility," President and CEO Liam McGee said in a statement.
Christopher Swift, executive vice president and chief financial officer, said in a statement that the individual life, Woodbury Financial Services and retirement plans "will be better positioned for success as part of other organizations."


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Vehicles Bobbleheads
- $99.00Trucker
- $98.90Male in a car
- $98.90Male in a car
- $89.00Speedboat
- $99.00Female on Motorcycle
- $99.00Tractor Driver
- $99.00Man and a car
- $79.90Male on Motorbike
- $99.00A man and a car
- $99.90Man and a car
|Displaying 1 to 18 (of 18 products)
|Displaying 1 to 18 (of 18 products)
We know that many people are passionate about their vehicles and that s why we have a section of bobble head dolls committed to it. We have motorbikes, cars and even a speedboat, lawn mower, sailboat and surf board, each with its own bobble head doll with it. This means that if you know someone who loves their vehicle then you will be able to buy them an appropriate bobble head doll. It is easily possible to personalize your bobble head doll as well. You can choose the hair color, eye color and complexion as well as sending in a photo of the face so that it is sculpted to look as like the person as possible. This means that you can give your friend a bobble head doll gift which looks just like them posing with their favorite vehicle. It is a unique gift which will be personal to the recipient and therefore really appreciated and valued by them. Imagine how they will feel if you hand them a mini replica of themselves with their favorite vehicle. They will probably have never seen such a gift before and they will be really impressed with the thought that has gone into it and the originality of it.ô


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I have always wondered if queries against a SSAS cube while it is processing would be forced to wait the entire time the cube is processing, or just for a few minutes? Or would the query bomb out? Surprisingly, I found little information on the internet about this. Fortunately, with help from SSAS guru's Chris Webb and Adam Jorgensen, they lead me to an old posting that explained it. Here is my summation:
You can query a cube while it is processing. The worst that could happen is near the end of processing there is a brief period of time where your query could be killed or it might be queued, and it would be queued only for a short time, even if the cube processing takes hours. The reason is the way a cube is processed:
When an cube object is processed a new version of the object is created and this new version is where the processing actually takes place.
For example, the first time you process a dimension you will see in the dimension folder files with a name like 1.(All).astore where '1′ stands for the version of the dimension. When you process the dimension again you will see files with version '2′, so the above file will change to 2.(All).astore.
When the processing is complete a "pending commit" lock is placed on the object that was being processed (and any dependent objects). If there are any current queries executing against the object in question they will be allowed to continue, and any new queries will be queued up until the current version can be swapped out for the new version. So the only time a cube query could be delayed is during this swapping, which could be anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes, depending of course on the size of the object.
After the commit operation the old set of object files are deleted and Analysis Server will start to use the new files.
In this example if the dimension was called Reseller, the DDL definition of the Reseller dimension, which is kept in the Dim Reseller.1.dim.xml file, would be deleted and you would see a new file created called Dim Reseller.2.dim.xml. If you looked inside this file, you would see <ObjectVersion>2</ObjectVersion>
There is an SSAS property called ForceCommitTimeout that specifies what happens to a query that is executing against the cube when the "pending commit" lock is placed, meaning these queries are blocking it from completing. ForceCommitTimeout is a signed 32-bit integer property that defines the timeout, in milliseconds, before a pending commit should cancel other commands that preceded the current command, including queries in process. The default value is 30 seconds (30000 milliseconds).
If the ForceCommitTimeout has expired and there are queries still executing they are cancelled (the receive a "Server: The operation has been cancelled") and the old version of the object is swapped out for the new one and any queries that were queued up are allowed to commence.
This means that increasing the ForceCommitTimeout will give currently executing queries more time to complete. But it also means that queries that were executed soon after the "pending commit" lock was taken will be stalled for the timeout period before they even start to be executed. This will result in the perception of inconsistent performance as any queries executed during this window might take nearly twice as long to start producing results.
The "pair" to the ForceCommitTimeout setting is the CommitTimeout setting, where you could cause the commit of the process operation to timeout and roll back, allowing currently executing queries to continue to completion. Seems unlikely you would want to use this as much as the ForceCommitTimeout as you are basically saying that queries are more important than the processing operation. The default value for this property is zero (0), which indicates that the server will not time out commit operations.
This also leads to another question: If you process a cube and the processing bombs, will the users continue to be able to query the cube? If you fully process a dimension, such as after making dimension structural changes, but you don't process the cube that references that dimension (or the cube bombs when you try to process it), the cube will be left in an unprocessed state and it will be unavailable for querying. Other than that particular case, the users will be able to query the cube. So if you decide to do a full process on the cube and it errors out, you don't have to worry that you just made the cube un-accessible.


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Problem 91. Get the area codes from a list of phone numbers
Solution Stats
Problem Comments
6 Comments
An explanation of common notations of area codes would be nice for us non-Americans :)
I (as French) Agree. A Wikipedia link which would explain supported area codes is definitely missing.
"You can assume the first three digits of a ten-digit number will always be the area code." Hmmm.... too bad there was no explanation applying to telephone numbers with more (or less?) than ten digits.
The problem fails to mention that the area codes should be sorted, and that phone numbers may have country codes.
This isn't about American-style phone numbers, but US-style. Otherwise it would be nice to include other test cases so people would be required to actually parse the country code away. Now it is just a matter of removing a leading 1.
Madness of cellfun regexp
Solution Comments
1 Comment
1 Comment
1 Comment
Apparently the order needs to be the same as that defined by the test suite; which is not in the order of the phone numbers given :(
1 Comment
Is there a way to execute regexp/regexprep with multiple expresssions at the same time?
1 Comment
1 Comment
Not sure what's going on here, but it works in my actual MATLAB program, and Octave.
Problem Recent Solvers926
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[](/sites/default/files/uploads/2012/09/mb-in-wh.jpeg)If anyone needed evidence that Hillary Clinton is in the pocket of the Muslim Brotherhood, the events of the last few days should be more than sufficient. On the anniversary of 9⁄11, on what should be a day of shame for the Muslim world, the US Embassy in Cairo issued a statement condemning critics of Islamofascism in language appropriate to the office of propaganda for the Muslim Brotherhood. Islamofascists launched violent attacks on Americans, repeating the outrages in miniature of the World Trade Center attacks 11 years ago. In the face of these outrages the posture of the U.S. government is one that would make Neville Chamberlain blush. In four years Barack Obama has managed to turn the entire Middle East over to America's enemies. So that our readers can understand how this has happened and how far advanced the infiltration of the Muslim Brotherhood into the Obama administration has progressed, we are publishing this pamphlet by Frank Gaffney, President of the Center for Security Policy, called The Muslim Brotherhood in the Obama Administration. We are printing 200,000 copies to distribute to concerned Americans. We are selling them at cost if you buy 25 or more to share with your friends.—David Horowitz
Read the pamphlet below or order your copy by clicking here.
Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: Click here.


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Patrick Marleau lifts Sharks past Red Wings in shootout
DETROIT -- Patrick Marleau helped San Jose start strong and finish well.
Marleau scored a short-handed goal early in the game and the shootout winner, lifting the Sharks to a 3-2 win over the Detroit Red Wings on Thursday night.
San Jose, trying to earn home-ice advantage in the first round of the playoffs, moved into fourth place for at least a couple hours in the Western Conference, one point ahead of St. Louis and Los Angeles.
"It's huge," Marleau said. "But still a lot of room for error both ways."
Detroit's margin is very slim.
The Red Wings, clinging to the eighth and final playoff spot in the West, are hoping to extend the franchise's streak of consecutive postseason appearances to 22. They have hurt their chances by losing five of last seven games.
Detroit is just two points ahead of Phoenix, three ahead of Dallas and Columbus with Edmonton and Nashville lurking within striking distance.
The Sharks and Red Wings are the only teams who have been in the playoffs every season since the 2004-05 lockout.
"Anybody that has been in the playoffs knows they're pretty special," Red Wings coach Mike Babcock said. "You got to earn your right to play a playoff game."
Antti Niemi made 27 saves through overtime and Jimmy Howard stopped 28 shots for Detroit. Niemi got his glove on Niklas Kronwall's slap shot with 44 seconds left in the extra period, giving the Sharks a chance in the shootout and to earn a rare road win.
The Sharks have won just seven of 19 games away from home, including just two of their previous nine. They had lost two straight overall, including a 4-0 setback at Columbus, after a seven-game winning streak.
"Our road game has been lacking a little bit," Marleau said. "We came out strong in the first and showed a lot of resiliency in the third."
Detroit, meanwhile, has won only one of its last six home games.
The Red Wings looked like they might get a much-needed win and two points when Pavel Datsyuk opened the shootout with a goal, but Logan Couture slipped a shot between Howard's pads to tie it. Damien Brunner then was stopped by Niemi and Joe Pavelski got a shot past Howard, but hit the post. Detroit's Gustav Nyquist made a nifty spin move but was stopped by Niemi, and Marleau followed with the winner on a quick wrist shot.
"Some of the saves he made were unbelievable," Sharks coach Todd McLellan said. "And the shootout saves were flat out brilliant."
The extra goal and save, and the additional point that came with the shot and stop, puts San Jose five points ahead of Detroit in the standings.
McLellan, though, said his team can't be satisfied with the cushion.
"We're living day to day right now," McLellan said.
The Red Wings start a four-game road trip Friday night at Chicago and return home to play three of their last four games of the regular season.
San Jose's road trip continues Saturday at Dallas and Phoenix before finishing the regular season with four of six games at home.
At Joe Louis Arena, Marleau had a short-handed goal to put San Jose ahead 2:35 into the game. Detroit's Justin Abdelkader tied it midway through the second period.
The Red Wings took their first lead early in the third on Jakub Kindl's first power-play goal and quickly lost it. Couture scored 1:31 later on a power play to make it 2-all.
Detroit had a shot to get off to a good start when San Jose's Tommy Wingels was called for boarding less than a minute into the game, but the Sharks took advantage of a giveaway.
Henrik Zetterberg passed instead of shooting into a partially open net, Pavelski got in front of it, carried the puck deep into the Detroit on a 2-on-1 rush and perfectly set up Marleau for his team-high 17th goal.
"We had lots of hockey to overcome that," Babcock said.
Abdelkader scored on a one-timer from the bottom of the right circle to match his career high with an eighth goal midway through the second period.
San Jose couldn't clear the puck early in the third, allowing Zetterberg to make up for his costly mistake by making a centering pass on Kindl's go-ahead goal at the 2:29 mark. A little more than a minute later, Red Wings rookie Brendan Smith was called for holding and Couture took advantage of having extra space and an extra skater by tying the off a rebound.
"Both teams played desperate," Zetterberg said. "Unfortunately, we couldn't really finish it off when we had our chances there in the end."
Game notesHoward said after the morning skate that he's "very, very close" to signing a contract extension with the Red Wings. ... San Jose D Brad Stuart played in his first game at Joe Louis Arena since playing for the Red Wings from their 2008 Stanley Cup championship season through last year. ... Detroit F Mikael Samuelsson, out with a chest injury, said he's feeling better each day, but doesn't have a timetable for his return. ... San Jose's Joe Thornton has a point in 13 straight games against Detroit.
Regular Season Series
SJ Wins 2-1
Game Information
- Referees:
- Don VanMassenhoven
- Kevin Pollock
- Linesmen:
- Jean Morin
- Tim Nowak


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SP08 - Ecological and economic valuation of ecosystem services
Ongoing Research
The impact of human beings on earth is increasing with their population and the nature of their land use activities; a common symptom is land degradation. As we the general awareness of the linkages between the ecological and socio-economic dynamics in our societies increases, means to consider the environment in decision making in a meaningful way are being sought. Engaging in a decision making process implies the use of a set of criteria which guide the decision. These criteria and their weights are chosen according to the priorities of the decision maker; and underlying those are his values. Values thus play an important role in the design of sustainable land use.
Until now, the valuation of nature has contributed greatly and mostly to rising awareness on the usefulness of nature for the functioning of our society and economies by attempting to quantify its worth. The question of how to use the valuation of nature and natural capital for an improved decision making process is being explored at the moment. The SP08 sub-project aims to make a contribution to this effort by developing a framework to incorporate the provision of ecosystem services in land use planning or design. The working group puts its emphasis on the fact that valuation provides opportunities to transparently express the values considered in decision making processes for land use. It aims at providing more than one valuation type by including ecological indicators, economic indicators and multi-criteria processes.
SP08 will focus on existing and potential types of land uses in the Okavango catchment, with different levels of reliance on river waters. Six work packages were defined. In task 1, a conceptual framework for the translation of ecosystem processes studied in the natural science work packages into ecosystem services will be identified. A farming system analysis will deliver much information on economic-ecological relationships at the farm level and will allow the calculation of first simple value indicators (task 2). Bio-economic modeling makes the link between results of the farming system analysis and the ecological dynamics investigated in other work packages. Resource values will be measured using the concept of shadow prices (task 4). Parallel, an emphasis on tourism-related services and the issue of (re)distribution of benefits from tourism in order to preserve water availability in the whole catchment will be addressed in tasks 3 and 5. Finally, a meta-analysis will attempt to draw a holistic view of the various findings by comparing scenarios of land use alternatives (task 6). This analysis will constitute a step towards the formulation of sustainable land use patterns.
The team
The team consists of one consultant and eight researchers and students from four research institutions in Germany, Angola, Namibia and Botswana. Our expertise is in resource and environmental economics as well as environmental management and agriculture. We have experience in institutional environmental economics, bio-economic modeling, stated preference elicitation, farming system analysis, ect
The working group will use methods derived both from orthodox and heterodox economics. The valuation of marginal changes in ecosystem service provision at the scale of the farming system and willingness to pay methods will be completed by the calculation of ecological indicators (HANPP) and energy flows within farming systems. Scenarios for land use will be compared using a multi-criteria analysis. At the scale of the catchment, the potential contributions of a Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) scheme to the sustainable water use of water will be explored.
Photo gallery


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Sustainable packaging upstart Ecovative Design LLC has received tremendous attention over the past year for its disruptive technology introduction of protective packaging materials grown from agricultural byproducts bound together by mycelium, or mushroom "roots." As Sam Harrington, Ecovative sales and marketing, told Packaging World last summer after winning a 2011 Greener Package Award, "The materials we've developed … represent the first time humans have capitalized on the amazing structural properties of another kingdom of biology: fungi."
To bring this unprecedented material to market, not only did Ecovative have to learn how to harness a biological process for the purpose of creating a revolutionary packaging material, but it also had to develop custom machinery and tools to "manufacture" the material on a commercial scale. Primary to the manufacturing process are what Ecovative has labeled "thermoformed grow trays." The grow trays are reusable plastic molds in which the biological material is placed while it grows.
In spring 2010, Ecovative began developing a line of standard-size shipping coolers made from EcoCradle™ Mushroom® Packaging as an alternative to those made from petroleum-based expanded polystyrene. To design and create the molds for this project, the company worked closely with custom thermoformer Dordan Manufacturing. The result was a meticulously engineered a custom grow-tray solution capable of increasing the overall efficiency of Ecovative's unique manufacturing process.
Production process like nothing else
Formed in 2007, Ecovative operates a pilot production facility in Green Island, NY, that can produce up to 10,000 packaging parts per month. A new, commercial-scale 100,000-part-per-month facility, also in Green Island, is under construction and is expected to open in mid-2012. To date, its most recognizable customers include Dell computers and furniture maker Steelcase, both of which are using EcoCradle for their distribution packaging. Ecovative has also been selling stock packaging for wine shipping and standard-design corner blocks.
The process of creating an EcoCradle part begins when Ecovative combines agricultural waste with mycelium and water into a wet solid. A number of different crop-waste materials can be used for the mixture, such as cotton burrs or oat hulls, depending upon what is regionally available. Once the mixture is formed, Ecovative uses a custom-engineered, automated filling machine to fill the grow trays with the wet material.
Says Harrington of the filler: "The machine was custom-designed and built in-house by our team of engineers. It is one of our most important pieces of equipment and is unlike anything else out there. Not only does it fill these trays, but it also does so in a sanitary, biological way."
Once the trays are filled, lids are securely snapped onto them, and they are loaded onto racks, where they sit for five to seven days in a dark, indoor environment. During the growing process, the mycelium breaks down the crop waste, self-assembling lignin and cellulose into strong biopolymers and forming a solid packaging part. The grow trays can be configured in virtually any size or shape to create the custom part required. Once the material has grown into the desired shape, it's removed from the trays and heat-treated to stop the growth.
For packaging parts that need further assembly, like the coolers, before the parts are heat-treated, they are positioned next to one another, and within one day, says Harrington, "live panels assemble themselves together without any glue."
After use, grow trays are sent through a custom-built wash station, where they are cleaned for reuse.
Optimized tray design
In developing its manufacturing process, Ecovative worked with several thermoformers to produce its grow trays. For the cooler project, it further diversified its supplier base, working with Dordan. Harrington says Ecovative was impressed with Dordan's engineering-based design capabilities, as well as its proactive approach to sustainable packaging. Since 2009, Dordan sustainability coordinator Chandler Slavin has been an aggressive and vocal advocate for developing the systems and infrastructure required to recycle non-bottle rigid PET, such as the thermoforms produced at Dordan.
"I have been really impressed with Chandler's efforts at trying to get thermoforms recycled," says Harrington. "I think it's very important work. It certainly had an influence on us in deciding to go with them. Eventually, we will recycle these grow trays, and I think it's a noble goal to extend that to consumers."
According to Slavin, when Ecovative approached Woodstock-based family-owned and operated Dordan, it had three main requirements for the design of the cooler grow trays. It specified:
• Part geometries that could be easily integrated into its existing filling, growing, and washing processes and that could be easily modified pending alterations to its production processes.
• A structurally rigid design that would reduce the likelihood of bowing between tray and lid.
• Aggressive denest features that would not compromise the real estate of the tray cavities.
Adds Harrington, "The grow trays also needed to support the wet EcoCradle substrate while it grows, seal properly with the lid, and be reused at least 100 times on average before wearing out."
Dordan general manager John Kreider collaborated closely with Ecovative to research and develop a number of concepts that could address these requirements, while bearing in mind thermoforming's limitations. Thoroughly investigated, explains Slavin, was the feasibility of creating a standardized tooling scheme aimed at reducing overall tooling costs through the integration of a universal base with modular cavities.
The resulting design is one that uses a standard, 21 x 21-in. base and lid, with tooling customized for different cavity sizes within the trays. Explains Harrington, "We have designed the grow tray in such a way that we are not remaking that common base every time. We are just making the cavity, and bolting it on. It involves slightly more machining to start with, but it saves a lot of costs and is simpler in the long run." The trays are thermoformed on an in-line, PC-controlled thermoformer from Lyle Industries, Inc.—one of 11 at the facility.
The trays are made from 60-mil PETG and include three shallow cavities and a design embossed on the lid with the Ecovative name and mushroom-shaped logo. Each grow tray produces the parts for one-half of a cooler.
Challenges addressed
The resulting trays meet virtually all of Ecovative's requirements, but the project did not come without challenges. Says Slavin, "Ecovative's process is constantly evolving to allow for increased production capacity. As such, Dordan designed the cooler tray to be compatible with Ecovative's current and future production requirements. Designing something for future requirements always has its limitations, insofar as assumptions must be made. In discussions of engineering, this always makes people hesitant."
Another challenge she cited was that the crop-waste material used in the production of EcoCradle parts will change, depending upon availability, and each material has its own shrinkage rate. "Therefore, the trays had to be designed in coordination with the substrate shrinkage rate, which wasn't an exact science," she explains.
Another design difficulty was that the trays had to withstand extremely heavy load stacking, so robust denest features had to be engineered to be even more aggressive. And, based on the previously defined structure of the grow trays, bowing become unavoidable to some extent. "Dordan and Ecovative continue to collaborate on how to solve this problem," Slavin remarks.
Mutual respect
At the completion of the project, Harrington says Ecovative was very happy with Dordan's expertise. "I am constantly learning what is possible with thermoforming," he says. "Unlike a lot of engineering processes, thermoforming is a little bit of an art form, so I have a lot of respect for the designers and engineers at Dordan. They really have this deeper understanding that you can only get through experience.
"Dordan also has one of the most professional and cleanest shops I have ever seen," he adds. "They have a nice layout and nice equipment."
Concurs Slavin, "We have a great working relationship with all of Ecovative's engineers based on the establishment of a systems-based approach to understanding their grow-tray design problems in the context of total production processes."
Source : www.packworld.com


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Louisiana Baton Rouge Gameday Bow Tie Gold
This product is sold out
Southern Proper and State Traditions state-inspired ties are perfect for the office, a cocktail party or a football Saturday.
100% silk with printed state logo.
The ties ship from a separate location from our other items. Please contact us (205.254.8933 or email@example.com) regarding overnight shipping if needed.


text:
The National Institutes of Health SBIR/STTR Program is pleased to announce that a Scientific Poster Session will be held on June 22 (2:45 - 3:45 pm) as part of the 13th Annual NIH SBIR/STTR Conference. Fifty SBIR and STTR Phase II awardees will be selected to present their non-proprietary scientific findings resulting from their SBIR/STTR projects. (NOTE: This is a public meeting and sharing proprietary information could affect your ability to patent.)
The goals of the sessions are to: (1) create opportunities for SBIR/STTR awardeesto present their research and technologies to their peers, (2) foster discussions that may lead to collaborations and (3) identify potential research partnerships. This is not an exhibit or tradeshow, but is instead an opportunity to share information.


text:
After it opens, Kuwait censors pull Disney's 'Beauty and the Beast' for edits
KUWAIT CITY (AP) — Beauty and the Beast was pulled from cinemas in Kuwait on Monday after censors raised concerns over the content of the new film, which includes what has been called the first "gay moment" for a Disney character.
The film, which has grossed more than $180 million overseas, had been showing in the predominantly Muslim country of Kuwait since Thursday. But those who'd purchased tickets to see the movie Monday received text messages from Kuwait's National Cinema Company informing them that screenings were cancelled due to "unforeseen difficulties." The company also promised ticket buyers a full refund.
Duaij Al-Khalifa Al-Sabah, a board member at the National Cinema Company, which operates 11 of Kuwait's 13 movie theaters, told The Associated Press a newly edited version of the movie may be in theaters later this week.
He said concerns center on a scene late in the movie involving the character LeFou, which director Bill Condon describes as an "exclusively gay moment."
"We were requested to stop the screening and further censor the movie for things that were deemed offensive by the Ministry of Information's censorship department," Al-Sabah said.
In some predominantly Muslim countries, same-sex relations can lead to lashings, imprisonment and fines. In a few, it carries the death penalty.
A superfan's take on 'Beauty and the Beast': More backstory but a little less magic
Hollywood magic: Here's how Disney got 'Beauty and the Beast' right
Those in support of the ban on the film in Kuwait launched hashtags calling for "respect" and urging the cinema company to protect children by blocking the movie. The film was given a PG-13 rating in Kuwait.
Disney officials did not immediately respond to a request of comment.
Similar concerns over the film's brief scene prompted a drive-in theater in the U.S. state of Alabama to cancel showings. Censors in Malaysia required the scene be edited, but Disney pulled the film from release there.


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Hack into your body's DNA to fight fat
What's the biggest nutrition breakthrough for the next 25 years? Our vote goes to nutrigenomics—the study of the interaction between what you eat and your DNA. Researchers have recently uncovered a handful of common foods that crank up your fat burning genes.
Here's how it works: Each cell contains the DNA for your entire genetic code. This master cookbook of proteins, hormones, and molecules remains relatively unchanged through your life. What does change is the recipes (or genes) your body is using. Drugs, foods, hormones, and other molecules can tell your body what recipes to use to create more of the specific enzymes, hormones, and compounds that you need.
More From Men's Health
So what foods can crank up your body's natural fat-burning power?
Green tea. Green tea—both as a supplement or the brewed leaves—turns off genes that are responsible for fat cells' sugar uptake and turns on genes that mediate sugar uptake by muscle cells. The result: smaller fat cells and more active muscle cells. A review from the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition showed that drinking green tea every day will trim up to an extra inch off your waistline in 12 weeks. (Caffeine and the antioxidant EGCG are also part of green tea's fat-fighting arsenal.) Click here to learn whic tea beat out 14 others and was named the best green tea when we analyzed the antioxidant content of popular brands.
Fish oil. Touted for its many health benefits, the fats in fish oil—EPA and DHA—activate a group of specific proteins in your cells called Peroxisome proliferator-activated receptors (PPARs). PPARs interact with your genes and can increase the burning of fat for energy as well as improve insulin sensitivity. Researchers from University of South Australia showed that when men combined a supplement of 1.9 grams of EPA and DHA each day with regular aerobic exercise, they lost 4.5 more pounds compared to men who just did regular aerobic exercise during the 12-week study. (That's one reason why fish oil was named one of our 18 Best Supplements for Men.)
Pistachios. Pistachios fight inflammation—a driving force of weight gain—by reducing the expression of the inflammatory gene IFN-stimulated response element by a whopping 78 percent. Researchers from UCLA showed that snacking on 1.5 ounces of pistachios per day instead of 2 ounces of pretzels helped subjects lose 2 extra pounds over 12 weeks. (Pistachios—which are higher in fat and protein—are also more satiating than pretzels, which could have helped subjects eat less overall.)
More from MensHealth.com: The Best and Worst 100-Calorie Snacks
Pomegranates. Pomegranates are packed with high levels of a potent class of antioxidants called anthocyanins. Anthocyanins are famous for having beneficial effects on your blood vessels and your heart, and they are now also being show to be fat-cell killers. When exposed to anthocyanins, the growth of premature fat cells to full-blown fat cells is stopped. How? The anthocyanins down-regulate the expression of the pro-obesity and diabetes gene plasminogen activator inhibitor-1.
Olive oil. Subjects in a study ate on different days a high-carbohydrate meal and a meal high in monosaturated fats—including 2 tablespoons of olive oil. The high-carb meal suppressed the genetic sequence that creates adiponectin, a hormone that helps your muscles use sugar. The meal with olive oil, however, had the opposite effect.
For more foods with superpowers, stock your kitchen with the 125 Best Foods for Men.
More from MensHealth.com: The Truth about Protein
Author Mike Roussell, Ph.D., is an independent nutrition researcher, speaker, and private consultant.
Mike Roussell, Ph.D., is a nutrition consultant who takes complex nutritional concepts and breaks them down into easy-to-understand, useful strategies with one goal in mind: to help his clients keep the pounds off for good.
His most recent work


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Arthur Jules Morin
Quick Info
Paris, France
Paris, France
BiographyArthur Jules Morin grew up at a turbulent time in French history although Paris was peaceful during much of his youth. He was only four years old when Napoleon Bonaparte became first consul and by 1802 peace reigned in Europe. However soon hostilities broke out again and, despite the naval defeat at Trafalgar in 1805, the French armies won decisive victories against Austrian and Russian armies. Morin was fifteen in 1810 when Napoleon was at the height of his power and Paris thrived. The disastrous Russian campaign of 1812 saw Napoleon return to Paris to strengthen his power and his army. By this time Morin was studying at the École Polytechnique and the next two years saw the French position deteriorate and the French army suffered a humiliating defeat at the Battle of Leipzig in October 1813. As the armies of the allies moved towards Paris in 1814, Morin had to terminate his studies at the École Polytechnique and join in the efforts to defend Paris. As Napoleon led the remnants of the French army east to attack the rear of the enemy troops approaching Paris, Talleyrand, as head of the government in Paris, ordered the city to capitulate.
Following the Treaty of Fontainebleau which ended hostilities, Morin's defence duties ended and he entered the École d'Application de Metz where he undertook practical studies in engineering. There he met Jean-Victor Poncelet who was a military engineer. Morin remained at Metz for four years, and then entered the army as a lieutenant in the pontoon unit which had been created in the 1790s. It was certainly an appropriate unit for an engineer with Morin's interests and the pontoon unit had been an important feature of Napoleon's army carrying pontoons of wood, copper, or other material [2]:-
His military career was marked by a rapid and regular promotion through the different grades, terminating in his appointment as an Artillery General of Division in 1855.It was on 7 April 1855 that Morin reached the rank of General of Division, having been made général de brigade on 26 March 1852. However, he had much more to his life than a military career. In the 1830s he taught mechanics at Metz, He was appointed to the newly created chair of mechanics at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers in 1839. This National Conservatory of Arts and Crafts had been opened in 1802 and ordered to:-
... improve the nation's industry, cultivate engineering methods, teach widely and illuminate ignorance.The teaching of mechanics at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers had begun in 1819 and other theoretical subjects had been introduced in the 1820s. As professor of mechanics Morin, who never renounced his army commission, drew heavily on the theoretical and practical work of his friend and teacher Poncelet and of other military officers. He also used the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers to promote a two-way flow of theory and practice between the military and private industry. Morin was Professor of Mechanics for ten years, and then in 1849 he became Director of the Conservatoire. He served in this leading role for 30 years and greatly improved the efficiency and influence of the Conservatoire. One of his greatest achievements was opening the first teaching laboratory of engineering in 1852.
One might wonder how a military man became Professor of Mechanics. Well he had spent much time undertaking research into problems of mechanics and between 1833 and 1835 he had submitted a number of important memoirs to the Academy of Sciences. These memoirs presented the results of a series of carefully executed experiments on friction which he began planning in 1829. Due to the complicated experimental apparatus used, built under the supervision of Poncelet, the experiments only began in May 1831. They then continued without interruption until September of that year, when funds given for the research were used up. The results confirmed and extended Coulomb's work on friction, verifying its three general laws: friction is proportional to the normal force exerted; friction depends upon the nature of the surfaces in contact but is independent of the area of contact; and, within large limits, friction is independent of velocity. He also devised an apparatus to study the laws of falling bodies. It consisted of a cylinder rotating beside the falling body, set up in such a way that a marker on the falling body describes a curve on the cylinder. He was able to give an accurate experimental proof of Galileo's result that distances travelled by a falling body increase as the square of the times. In 1849 Morin, working with Poncelet, invented the dynamometer of rotation, which together with later refinements, became the basic investigative tool in the study of work. He had already published work on dynamometers in Notice sur divers appareils dynamometriques Ⓣ (Paris, 1841), a work which describes the recording mechanism onto paper, as well as describing a mechanical integrator used so that results of longer experiments could be read off directly. His results on mechanics were all published in the five volume work Leçons de mécanique pratique à l'usage des auditeurs des cours du Conservatoire des arts et métiers Ⓣ (1846-1853). Joseph Bennett made an English translation under the title Fundamental ideas of mechanics and experimental data which was published in 1860.
During 1853-56 Morin undertook a series of experiments on the resistance of building materials which he published in a series of papers. This work was important in having practical applications to architecture. He published the results in a book form in 1863 when the two volume work Résistance des matériaux Ⓣ appeared. Let us mention a selection of his other works: Nouvelles expériences sur le frottement, faites à Metz en 1831 Ⓣ (1832), Expériences sur les roues hydrauliques à axe vertical appelées turbines Ⓣ (1838), Expériences sur le tirage des voitures, faites en 1837 et 1838 Ⓣ (1839), Notice sur divers appareils dynamométriques Ⓣ (1841), Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers. Catalogue des collections Ⓣ (1851), Notions géometriques sur les mouvement et leurs transformations, où élémens de cinématique Ⓣ (1857), Rapport de la commission sur le chauffage et la ventilation du Palais de Justice Ⓣ (1860), Études sur la Ventilation Ⓣ (1863), Des machines et appareils: destines a l'elevation des eaux Ⓣ (1863), Notes sur les appareils de chauffage Ⓣ (1866), and Salubrité des habitations. Manuel pratique du chauffage et de la ventilation Ⓣ (1868). His work on ventilation made him a leading world expert on the topic, and he used this knowledge in undertaking research into carbon monoxide in rooms heated by iron stoves in 1869 and research into the preservation of flour in 1870.
Another important role that Morin filled was as President of the Commission for the first Universal Exhibition which opened in Paris in May 1855. The Commission had spent more than two years in elaborate preparation for the Exhibition, which was designed to symbolise peace and culture. The aim was to impress those who visited the enormous halls with France's achievements in commerce and industry [4]:-
The exhibition buildings were designed to exploit the use of metal and glass as structural materials. The exhibits they contained were similarly dominated by a common fascination with novelty and a closely related faith in the material promise of technological progress. ... in the effort to be more truly universal, its organisers included with its industrial display a vast retrospective exhibition of paintings, sculpture, prints and architecture to recall man's accomplishments in the arts, as well as in science, technology, and business.Not only was Morin the President of the Commission, he also exhibited some of his apparatus. For example, he exhibited [3]:-
... a totalizing anemometer, one of a series which was to be set into chimneys in the new buildings of the Palais de Justice in order to monitor ventilation. ... [it] was a substantial piece, consisting of six aluminium vanes arranged in a helix ... and set upon a steel axis. The revolutions were counted through a series of gear wheels, so as to indicate the volume of air passing through the shaft in a period of time. Despite the long gear train and its considerable size, the anemometer was extremely sensitive.Morin received many honours for his contributions. He was elected to the mechanics section of the Academy of Sciences in 1843 to succeed Gaspard-Gustave de Coriolis who died in September of that year. He was decorated with the Légion d'Honneur in 1858 and then in 1862 he was elected to the French Society of Civil Engineers and later served as their president.
In the issue of Nature which appeared on 5 February 1880 the following report appears:-
We regret to state that General Morin, the well-known director of the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers, is lying in a very precarious state in consequence of a severe cold. Great anxiety is felt for him at the Institute, of which he is one of the most respected and popular members. The General is aged 85 years.In the following issue of Nature [2], his death in Paris on 7 February was reported.
References (show)
- C Fontanon, Un ingenieur militaire au service de l'industrialisation : Arthur-Jules Morin (1795-1880), Cahiers d'histoire et de philosophie des sciences 29 (1990), 90-118.
- T H N, Arthur Jules Morin, Nature 21 (537) (1880), 349-350.
- A McConnell, Aluminium and its Alloys for Scientific Instruments, 1855-1900, Annals of Science 46 (1989), 611-620.
- F A Trapp, The Universal Exhibition of 1855, The Burlington Magazine 107 (747) (1965), 300-305.
Additional Resources (show)
Other websites about Arthur Jules Morin:
Honours (show)
Honours awarded to Arthur Jules Morin
Written by J J O'Connor and E F Robertson
Last Update December 2008
Last Update December 2008


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Skitch 2.0.3 for iOS brings improved text editing
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Skitch for iOS was recently updated to version 2.0.3. The 2.0.3 version brings a new text editor, allowing users to add and resize image annotations more simply and effectively. There are also several unspecified improvements to the app to fix reported bugs and increase the overall functionality and speed of Skitch for iOS.
Skitch is an Evernote designed app (through acquisition) that is used for adding annotations, shapes and sketches to graphics. Download it from the App Store for your iOS device.
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There are a few seats left in my Liquid Polymer Clay Bookmark and Art Tag class is this Friday, October 1, 10:00am to 2:00pm at Ink About It in Westford.
Here is the class description:
In this class, you will learn how to create bookmarks and art tags with liquid polymer clay. First, you will learn how to use liquid polymer clay as a resist with rubber stamps to create art tags. Then we'll explore how to make polymer clay paper with multiple thin layers of liquid clay. We'll stamp, color, and embellish the polymer clay paper to create personally inspired bookmarks. You will leave class with several art tags and bookmarks.
And the materials list:
Most materials provided by instructor. Please bring a Staz-On ink pad (black or brown; gold if you have it), 3-4 favorite rubber stamps, scissors, apron, or smock, and basic tool kit. If you have the following, please bring them to class: 3-4 light color alcohol inks (Pinata or Ranger), 3-4 acrylic paints in squeeze bottles (Lumiere or Ranger), Mod Podge or gel medium (regular/soft), an acrylic brayer.
Cost: $40
Here are samples of the bookmarks and art tags we'll make in this class:
You can register for this class by calling Ink About It or stopping in and signing up in person. Hope to see you there!


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We know that ladymag readership is down, seriously badly down, for the first six months of 2012. But now we know who the culprits are: the celebrities whose well-lit, smiling, Photoshop-enhanced faces have failed to open wallets in supermarket checkout aisles all across the land. Poorly selling issues of note include Vogue's Olympics-themed June edition with Lochte, Serena Williams, and Hope Solo. It was the magazine's weakest of the year so far, moving just 202,000 newsstand copies — which might have been just Ryan Lochte's mom buying the same issue over and over again. That total is 33% below its six-month average.
If athletes do badly on the covers of fashion magazines, Kardashians might do even worse: Kim Kardashian was a loser for Allure in March (which sold 7% below average) and all three sisters failed to make an impression on the cover of Glamour in January (which sold 11% below average).
Who did well? Adele, for one, handily beat Vogue's sales average. So did Kate Moss for both W and Harper's Bazaar. And Glamour's topless Lauren Conrad cover sold a whopping 18% above the title's average. [WWD]
Apple MacBook Air Laptop
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The M1 chip delivers 3.5x faster performance than the previous generation all while using way less power. Get up to 18 hours of battery life.
Gwen Stefani is on the cover of September's Harper's Bazaar. At 375 pages, the issue is the magazine's biggest ever. Stefani says she started wearing red lipstick in high school in the '80s: "I remember sitting in my ghetto, beat-up Honda Prelude and putting on that lipstick in the rearview mirror and being like, 'Uh-huh, I like that. That's the shit right there.' I never stopped after that." [HB]
British designer Louise Grey is launching a capsule collection for Topshop on August 23. "The dresses and tops are all totally covered in sequins and I made them to go dancing in," says Grey. [Telegraph]
Cute Circuit — that's the company that made Katy Perry's light-up 2010 Met Ball dress, you will recall — wants to bring to market a t-shirt with an embedded LED screen. So that you can display, um, your favorite Tweets. Or whatever other shit you've downloaded from the Internet. Light-up and interactive clothing is not new, but it is getting more sophisticated. Would you wear this? [Atlantic]
André J — the man, the beard, the legend — Tweeted a photo of himself and Carine Roitfeld on a rooftop. Hopefully this means he and Roitfeld are working together on something related to the former Vogue Paris editor's forthcoming print magazine, CR Fashion Book. Roitfeld famously had Andre J and Carolyn Murphy shot by Bruce Weber for the cover of Vogue Paris in 2005. [@AndreJWorldWide]
Meanwhile, Roitfeld confirmed that the magazine's Web site will be hosted on Tumblr. [Fashionista]
Here is Lana Del Ray, a gold bar, and a kitty cat in the pages of Vogue Italia. [VI]
Female French politicians are fed up with commentary on their clothing, makeup, and shoes — and even cat-calling from colleagues:
Wearing a blue-and-white flowered dress by U.K. mail-order clothing company Boden (a shirt dress named Riviera priced on the French version of the Web site at 119 euros, or $146.57 at current exchange rates, currently discounted at 59.50 euros, or $73.29 dollars), Cécile Duflot, minister of territorial equality and housing, had to endure whistles from male deputies last month as she walked down steps to stand in front of the National Assembly. [...] The high heels worn by Yamina Benguigui, a politician, and the critical length of the dress worn by [minister for small- and medium-sized enterprises, innovation and the digital economy, Fleur] Pellerin (which went above her knees when she walked the steps of the Elysée Palace in late June), also created a buzz. In July, one top journalist asked Pellerin if she got the job because she is a beautiful woman from a minority background. The question drew ire on Twitter.
"It is very complicated to be a woman in politics. If you dress up, everyone makes a comment. If you don't, it is even worse," lamented Amor Ouni, whose responsibilities include advising [first lady Valérie] Trierweiler on her wardrobe. "'Normal chic' is what I try to achieve in terms of looks for her."
Sigh. [WWD]
Meanwhile, the purse carried by North Korean first ladyRi Sol-Ju — wife of notorious dictator Kim Jong-Un — has drawn criticism for somewhat less sexist reasons: because she's been carrying a Miss Dior handbag that costs thousands of dollars even as North Koreans are facing famine and food shortages due to the inefficiencies of their centrally planned economy. The bag is a symbol of the privileges and wealth enjoyed by the small cadre of party officials who run the country. [Telegraph]
Lady Gaga really wants to unveil her September Vogue cover. "Don't worry I've been txting Wintour all morning trying to get that cover queens," she Tweeted. "Next im sending bagels to VOGUE (complex carbohydrate war)." [@LadyGaga]
LOVE magazine is launching an iPad app with artist Yayoi Kusama. Users can reportedly use the app to play with polka dots, like the ones that populate Kusama's work. [WWD]
Bar Refaeli says she'd try JDate "maybe if I'm still single when I'm 40." [P6]
Talbots, which has been struggling, now has a new C.E.O., C.O.O., and company president. [WWD]
With an annual income of $72 million, Gisele Bündchen and Tom Brady came second in Forbes' list of the top-earning celebrity couples of the year. They were beaten — though only by $6 million — by Beyoncé and Jay-Z. [Forbes]
Macy's says its second quarter saw healthy growth. Net income rose to $279 million from $241 million during the same period one year ago. Same-store sales were up 3%, to a whopping $6.12 billion. [WWD]
Tod's SpA net income rose year-on-year by 13.7%, to $96.5 million, during the first six months of 2012. Sales were strongest at Tod's (which was up 19.4%) but they dropped at Hogan (down 12%) and Fay (down 8.1%). [WWD]
Profits during the quarter just ended at Ralph Lauren were up by 5.1%, to $193.4 million. [WWD]