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Yesterday many of those most committed to, and interested in, Web preservation attended the Missing links: the enduring web conference held at the British Library. The event, which had over 100 attendees (from academia, galleries, museums, libraries, archives, government, research groups and beyond) was an attempt to 'develop and strength the links between content creators, tools developers, preservation services and user in order to ' secure an enduring web'.
If anyone can successfully preserve the Web it was this lot!
Session 1: Setting the scene
Keynote: Adrian Brown, Assistant Clerk of the Records, Parliamentary Archives
The opening keynote was given by Adrian Brown from the Parliamentary Archives who did adept job of setting the scene and the challenges ahead. His talk centred around the key jigsaw pieces of selection, capture, storage, access and preservation. He pointed out that the Web used to be primarily publisher of fixed content and it is the new types of content (discussions on wikis, Twitter, blogs etc.) that offer the biggest challenge. Parliament themselves are using many new forms of information, and although permission is not always an issue capturing content on other sites often is. You may own the content but someone else often owns the presentation of that content. Adrian also emphasised the need for us to co-ordinate selection and be as explicit about what we are not going to capture as what we are going to capture (the unpublishing button on facebook being a classic example of how difficult it can be to go back!) Another major challenge is that of temporal cohesion – the rate of capture of content is often far slower than the rate of change of content.
He concluded with a Peter Murray Rust quote that stresses the need for us to "Create and release herds of cows, not preserve hamburgers in a deepfreeze."
Web Archive and Citation Repository in One: DACHS: Hanno Lecher, Librarian, Sinological Library, Leiden
HannoLecher talked about the citation problems he has encountered while working on the digital archive for Chinese studies, a resource that captures and archives relevant resources as primary source for later research. His work has indicated the possible need for citation repositories. Some optins might include verifying
URL references, evaluating the reliability of online resources, use of PURLs, avoidance ofobscure URLs and even the extreme banning of online resources as reference. As such approaches are not always practical (or appropriate) he use of applications like Snagit, Zotero or WebCite.
The future of researching the past of the Internet: Eric T. Meyer, Research Fellow, Oxford Internet Institute, Oxford University
Eric Meyer works primarily looking at social behaviour and the Internet and as part of the Transatlantic Digitisation Project spent some time building an archive collection of World War 1 and 2 Internet resources. The process gave the team incite into the feasibility of creation of such an archive. Lessons were also learnt on the need for involvement of domain experts (webometrics, SNA, eResearch, etc.) and the desire to move from snapshots to more continuous data. Eric concluded by stressing that what researchers really want is a global way to access archives, not a national one.
After the morning coffee break the workshop moved from the general to the specific.
Session 2: Creation, capture & collection
An overview of Web Archiving Tools by Helen Hockx-Yu, Web Archiving Programme Manager, The British Library
Helen Hockx-Yu provided a very practical overview of current tools, covering Heritrix, NetArchiveSuite, Web Curator Tool and PANDAS. She also discussed archival formats such as ARC and WARC, which is highly desirable from a long term archival standpoint. Helen concluded a brief discussion on the limitations and challenges harvesters present from issues with rendering and dealing with 'bad' content to reliance on open source tools that are still very much evolving
Context and content: Delivering Coordinated UK Web Archive to User Communities: Cathy Smith, Collections Strategy Manager, The National Archives
Cathy Smith and the UKWAC team have recently been working on study entitled Delivering coordinated UK web archives looking at what audiences should web archives anticipate and what does this mean for selection, ingest and preservation and what do researchers want from archives. The conclusions include the notion of a single view to an archive, though this does not necessarily mean a single repository. Cathy explained that "hey just want the car to work – they don't want to see what's under the bonnet". In response to the study the NA have recently begun automated whole domain harvesting – shallow as well as selective harvesting and they are looking at allowing all archiver to be searched together – a collection.
Capture and Continuity: Broken links and the UK Central Government Web Presence: Amanda Spencer and Tom Storrar from the National Archives.
Amanda Spencer and Tom Storrar were set with the task of sorting out the problem of broken links on government Web sites. 60% of URLs quoted in Hansard between 1997-2006 are broken leaving the public unable to find information and with little faith in the authority of government Web sites. The Web Continuity project has begun to create an archive of all Central Government Web space. Some thinks they are trying out include XML site maps, using redirects instead of 404 messages and capturing all government Web sites before they are closed.
In the questions and discussion session the panel were asked what advice they would give to Web managers in how they can allow archiving of their sites to be more effective. The suggestions tackled content (following accessibility guidelines, W3C standards, making code valid, adding in hard links to files next to streaming content, having transcripts of audio files) and communication (enabling a dialogue between Web archivists and Web creation people.)It was noted that there is a fine line between encouraging good practice and stifling innovation and that at times communication with content creators is a luxury. Responsible harvesting also means explaining why you are doing it to those involved.
The discussion then moved to other possible points of capture such as using Google Cache or asking ISP providers.
Session 3: Issues and approaches to long term preservation of web archives
After lunch the programme moved on from the specific problems of now to problems of the future.
Diamonds in the Rough: Capturing and Preserving Online Content from Blogs: Richard Davis, Project Manager, University of London Computing Centre (ULCC)
Richard Davis, a member of the JISC PoWR team, started off by emphasising the importance of blogs today. This has lead him and colleague Maureen Pennock to consider the need for their preservation, particularly at institutional level, resulting in the ArchivePress project. Richard pointed out that traditional Web archiving tools can be difficult to configure and use: a 'hammer to crack a nut'. A comment by Chris Rusbridge that "blogs represent an area where the content is primary and design secondary" suggested that using blog feeds might be key. The feed could be a point at which to gather blog content for archiving. The test bed for ArchivePress will include blogs from the DCC, Lincoln University and UKOLN. In the future ArchivePress could possibly be used to harvest Twitter.
Beyond Harvest: Long Term Preservation of the UK Web Archive: Maureen Pennock, Web Archive Preservation Project Manager, The British Library
Maureen Pennock started her talk by giving some general background to UK Web Archive. Now the archive has been established the next task is preserving the archive, an ongoing activity. The main undertakings are documenting System Dependencies, consideration of containers and metadata standards (following a review, WARC is the preferred format for preservation, but they are also using a combination of features from METS and PREMIS), preservation workflow and defining the preservation strategy. The future involves the consideration of many new areas, for example should we preserve computer viruses.
From Web Page to Living Web Archive: Thomas Risse, Senior researcher, L3S Research Center
Thomas Risse introduced the LiWA (Living Web Archives) project, an EU FP7 research project. LiWA has been looking at building tools to address the specific challenges of the current generation Web, e.g. link extraction from dynamic pages.
Emulating access to the web 1.0: Jeffrey van der Hoeven, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Netherlands
Jeffrey van der Hoeven started off with a whirlwind history of the Web browser. From the WorldWideWeb browser in 1991, which was more like a document viewer, followed by Mosaic and Netscape, and onto now with Firefox and Google Chrome. Today's browser do many things, from rendering Web sites, bookmarking, caching, authentication and providing RSS feeds. They have changed from viewers to all round workplaces – Google Wave is an extreme example of this. The browser is currently the centreal application of the computer and there is a need for a sustainable solution to render Web sites. At the Koninklijke Bibliotheek they have been recently working on the Dioscuri project, a durable emulator. They have also been working with the planets project using Global Remote Access to Emulation (GRATE) and on the Keep Emulation Environments Portable (KEEP) project.
After another coffee break we moved onto the final discussions
Session 4: Discussion and next steps
What we want with web-archives; will we win? Kevin Ashley, Head of Digital Archives, University London Computer Centre (ULCC) Kevin Ashley
Kevin Ashley, also part of the JISC PoWR team, kicked off his talk by introducing us to the future of the Web, Web 8.0. Although Kevin was just joking with us he explained that when the next major change in the Web happens, we will need a much better metaphor than 'Web 3.0': it is the future that we need to think about. We need to be asking the key question as to what we want from Web archives, e.g. potential use cases. Preserving the Web is not just about content. Sometimes it will be useful to look at Web content in aggregate, e.g. for visualisation, linguistic analysis, etc. Right now many academics are doing own Web archiving – content and presentation or both. However we need to not take just a document centred view of data but also consider the web of data and data about the web. A lot of future interest will not in Web content, but in the context of use.
The day concluded with a round table discussion with many speakers from the day. Some of the topics discussed were the permissions challenge (primarily with regard to UKWAC and similar initiatives). Other countries and initiatives have favour a more 'just do it' approach.
The day left most people enthused and positive about the future for Web archiving.
A conference report will follow on the DPC Web site and will be sent out via the dpc-discussion and digital-preservation JISCmail lists.
All presentations are now available in PDF Format from the DPC Web site.
WAC09 was used as the Twitter tag for the event. You can see the tweets at http://hashtags.org/tag/wac09/messages.
The event was sponsored by the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) and the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and the six partners of the UK Web Archiving Consortium (British Library, National Library of Wales, JISC, Wellcome Library, The National Archives and the National Library of Scotland).


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Or how to walk from a reaction to criticism towards an acknowledgement, discernment, learning and embracing of it as a way to assist ourselves to grow and develop ourselves to better ourselves in many ways.
I was listening to this documentary IDO PORTAL – JUST MOVE (filmed by London Real) while preparing some canvasses yesterday and it was quite amazing to hear the parallels that can be drawn from walking through this mind-self change process that some of us have been working on for the past 9 years and someone developing physical movement in all sorts of ways in their body in order to 'master' themselves, which becomes not so much about the end result, but the process of 'mastering the craft' as Ido says.
To begin with, this documentary or 'topic' is something that I would not have been 'interested' on years ago, yet the more I saw the name of this guy being shared around within the London Real channel, the more I got curious about it and this recently released documentary is quite a recommended and enjoyable thing to watch because it's an awesome confirmation of many of the principles and 'tests' I've gone through in my own life within developing things I thought I would 'never do' and in general within this process of self-change – or dare I say the 'reinvention' process of myself.
There are many, many points that are valuable in it and it serves as a great source to cross-reference 'who one is' in relation to what Ido shares, however one that got my attention is where he speaks about criticism, which you can watch/hear here https://youtu.be/qJDz7qHBGQg?t=53m14s and there are a few points that I want to take on and write out because I consider that many times, for anyone starting to do something new, or doing something 'for the first time' or completely 'out of the box' of 'normalcy' in this world – which easily can be associated with embarking oneself in this process of developing self-awareness and self-forgiveness and getting to change in our day to day living – can seem like a daunting task, something that one is 'never ready for' and sometimes we allow criticism to 'overpower' ourselves if we start reacting to our own 'beliefs' about not being able to do it, or about others' sudden rather 'harsh' input in how we are doing things or how we are 'changing,' not questioning what of ourselves can be 'hurt' by criticism.
Many times throughout sharing my vlogs related to this process on YouTube I learned to read the worst of the worst kind of criticism, trolling and bullying that you can imagine: judging everything about my voice and the way that I speak, how I look, how wrong I am in my statements, how they wish I would die or how I should go kill myself.. all kinds of stuff, not worth mentioning or typing here really, but you get the idea.
Of course the initial experience for most people is to react and go into defense mode, try and 'win against' those that bully/troll in that sense, but in my case I also learned to start seeing where such words reflected back to the person that expressed them – and other times being able to humbly recognize they were truly supportive feedback even if myself/my ego didn't like it, because they enabled me to look at myself, my stance, the way I spoke and start questioning the righteousness in my 'intellectualism' that I many times shared in my YouTube videos as 'this is how things are and that's it' – lol, the 'fascist me' as I call it – which led me to in fact question in a very honest manner towards me: what is it about myself and my expression that is being shared from a starting point of fear: fear of being told I'm wrong, fear of receiving criticism, fear of being seen as weak, fear of not being credible enough… all those fears were there, so what did I do next? I then worked on really seeing what of 'my ego' can be hurt through criticism, writing it out, self-forgiving it and applying a humbleness and understanding to it, while of course practically not allowing the 'overwhelming' experience criticism can create to take me for a ride, which sure can be difficult but, any process of change involves that kind of challenge and resistance and difficulty, hence my suggestion to watch Ido's documentary as well who explains this beautifully.
I grew up being a child that was mostly praised by adults and at times hated/envied/bullied by my peers, because it seems we like to destroy that which is in any way perceived as being 'ahead of us' and through the support of my mother in those days, I learned to grow a 'thick skin' to it and realize that whatever others said or did towards me spoke more about 'who they are' not about 'me' in essence, and started to learn to 'take the heat' so to speak, though not really yet learning to 'reflect' on such criticism or learning to 'discern' things, which eventually took me to create a certain 'defensive stance' that was still 'here' within me not until long ago.
However I have also been on the other side of the coin, where I have craved feedback, I have craved criticism from those that know me best and so far only one person keeps having the guts to let me know where I am still being 'taken over' by myself in my ego/mind patterns, which is my mother and I'm grateful for that because it is so that only those that have known you for such a long time can really have a stand point to let you know where you are 'losing your ground' in any given moment.
Many times I have asked partners and friends to let me know when I am losing my ground, where I am becoming a 'problem' about something, where I am being righteous, where I am being one-dimensional or 'tunnel visioned' about something and I'm also grateful that I've had such wake up calls from them and other people here and there, but ultimately I realize that no one has the 'imperative' duty to let me know all of these things, that I can also get to see these points for myself when observing me in self-honesty as 'who I am' in the words I write, in how I express, in what I create, in how I decide to work and do things… it becomes a self-evident measure which then I use as a way to develop self-trust so that even if those that I've come to 'trust' the most can come at me with certain criticism, I can know and be honest with myself about it being a fact or being a perception or interpretation coming from them – and that's where self-honesty is the key to see 'who am I' in the eye of criticism.
To me facing, dealing with, reading, listening, getting to know of criticism about myself has been one of the most challenging yet most supportive points in my life, and not long ago I was still fearing how certain people would 'see me' based on certain decisions I've made in my life and through walking through the fears of that 'potential criticism' I've realized one thing: the worst only critic exists within myself, I am the only one that can allow myself to be 'affected' by words, I am the only one that can accept and allow a certain word to cause an effect within me, and you know what? If it does, then, that's actually quite great! How else would I know that I am still holding on to an 'idea' of myself as 'untouchable' or 'superior' or where I am still standing in inferiority to a word, a concept, an idea if no one would dare to come at me with certain words of criticism? And here's an awesome audio that opens this up nicely as well and that I recommend having a listen to: Who Are You When Challenged – The Future of Awareness – Part 91
If anything, I actually would like to get more feedback in whatever I do and am, because in that it doesn't mean that I have to change myself to be what others want me to be, it doesn't mean that what others say will be 'right,' but because I can always learn something from anything that anyone has to say about me – either about separating the wheat from the chaff as they say as in taking what I can test out/apply/try out as a way to expand myself and test 'new ways' discerning what's supportive and what's plain backchat/reactions coming from others and 'who they are' towards someone that maybe is projected as a reaction to the challenges experienced through my doings/expression, or where one becomes a 'boxing bag' for them to blame for everything they can be dissatisfied for in their own lives… both and possibly many more reasons and starting points may exist in criticism.
I've done such kind of criticism as well, in fact I was sharing with an old friend yesterday how I was 'wired' to be constantly criticizing everything and everyone, which is the same as judging or creating 'beliefs' about anything that's 'out there' of course within that 'vantage' point of seeing my judgments as right and just… lol the typical self-delusion. And so how it took me a process to really get down from my 'high horse' and start to truly hear/read/see criticism from others towards myself as a supportive process for me to 'see me through the eyes of others' and get to know what is it that can in fact be 'standing out the most' in creating more reactions in people than support.
In that, I got to test out new ways of expressing myself: stopping wanting to seem 'absolutist' and 'right' at all times – or fearing being wrong – being less intimidating or stopping wanting to 'impose' myself onto others – being less attackative or stopping fearing being undermined or 'proven wrong' by others, being less self-infatuated or learning to question my principles through trial and error – and stop being arrogant or stop seeing 'my way' as 'the only way' to live life – which is how I can agree I 'felt' within myself while sharing experiences, knowledge and information in my YouTube videos for example – and how that is definitely something I continue to work on in being more 'chilled' about things, which has proven to be a physical process of literally relaxing, not being as 'tense' and 'anxious' and 'rigid' in my expression, but to allow myself to actually 'breathe' and be more in my body as I am communicating and expressing with others.
That way I took criticism to really look at myself and test out a few changes that I can now reference have in fact been very supportive within my current life and the way I relate to others and how genuinely enjoyable it is for me to 'be me' currently, whereas before I would still feel like being in a constant battlefield where anyone was an 'enemy' that I had to watch out my back for and be constantly assessing 'who was out to get me' type of thing, lol, yes like living 'war' mentality within me, all because of mostly fearing criticism… man, have I limited myself so much because of this and it's not like I am 'completely over it,' nope, it's still a point to continue walking but here I'm sharing some distinctive differences around it.
Even recently someone came at me with quite a nasty kind of defamation and twisting of information about something I once shared with them, and for a moment I could notice there was this reaction coming up until I forced myself to re-read and see how what was being said was a plain attack, with no validity or veracity to it and how the intent was mostly to – sorry for the words – but spread shit about myself. I was able to then cross reference 'who I am' in the face of being criticized, judged in this particular way, understand the person, their possible context and starting point for it, self forgive the initial 'knee-jerk' reaction and then let it go, because there was truly nothing to 'learn' from such trolling.
Back to Ido Portal here, I can relate to what he says in what he once believed he wanted to be which was 'to be liked by everyone' which I also really tried hard to do before – and now I realize that it's not about being 'accepted' or liked by others, but simply be myself, developing that stance of 'this is me, this is the new me that can stand by my words, that is aware of what I say, do, decide to act on and then whatever 'heat comes at me' I can take the criticism, work with my reactions if there are any, take the considerations as constructive feedback and keep moving on' which also exists within a humbleness of being open to learn from others, to learn to question my own 'tenets' and be willing to hear different perspectives and ways of living life, which lol, was quite a difficult thing for me to embrace some years ago, but it's cool to deliberately be challenging myself within that.
As Ido says, critics, trolls, haters usually don't provide feedback from a practical 'walking in your own shoes' point which means they usually lack understanding of the process that it takes to be/become/express/do what one does, and within that it makes sense to obviously discard criticism that is not at all considering the time, the practice, the trial and error, the evolution, the changes, the adaptations that any point of creation or change involves. As he says, it's not to avoid criticism either but to embrace it for growth and self-development – which ultimately it is so, it's about having a 'mirror' of sorts wherein we can reflect back to ourselves to see how is it that what we are sharing is being received by others, and to me that's something really precious in life, sincerely, because that's what I personally enjoy about being a human being, where I can learn about myself through others, I can learn new things, new ways, new approaches from others and in turn also get to hear or read how other people have benefited from who I am, what I am, what I share, how I share, how I live – I consider that that's already one steps into 'making an impact' on someone in a supportive manner.
Of course I am aware how I have probably also impacted people in and for all the 'wrong reasons' or 'the wrong way' as they say, but then it would also become an opportunity for them to question certain things, to maybe 'snap' themselves out of a certain expectation and be confronted with a more harsh, direct and 'challenging' point of view which I can now relate to as 'who I was' in those old YouTube videos that I certainly have to stop being ashamed of myself and understand within the context of who I was at that time, at that moment in my process and ultimately see that it might have assisted others to 'check themselves' if they felt affected, insulted or plainly attacked by whatever I said – that will be my part to take responsibility for, where I wasn't being clear within me when sharing, where I deliberately wanted to attack 'the perceived wrong side' of things and where I wasn't truly embracing 'both sides' as myself, because antagonism has certainly been one of the main 'wires' in my overall 'wiring' in my mind – and for that I've forgiven myself for not taking 'all sides' into considerations – and I continue to catch myself doing this and continue to learn how to practically embrace all sides, which is also quite an expansive, nurturing and fascinating process to me.
So, something I got from the documentary as well is how we have to have the courage to do things differently, to break our patterns, to decide to 'stand up from the crowd' not in an egotistical/superiority way, but to challenge the status quo and this begins with all the ways that we 'share' ourselves, which as it was recently mentioned in an Eqafe interview, we share ourselves all the time that we are around people, with words or actions, they all represent forms of communication and to me this entails both a gift and a responsibility that I have towards myself and so towards others to honor that ability, that capacity of understanding, of verbalizing, of moving, of doing that I can use as a constant point of expression, like constantly making sure who I am and what I do can become an 'act of creation' in itself – just like the one project I said I would do in terms of 'becoming my own work of art' and that's truly then embracing our capacity as creators and authors in our own life.
In this chat I had with this friend yesterday, it was interesting to see how he considers this same point of responsibility towards himself as part of what he defines as 'godly' as ever present in everything, that 'divinity' if you will that exists within it all – which I call life – and as such it's about taking responsibility for it/as it, honor it ourselves in the best way that we can. Of course the 'ways' to do it are as varied as there are human beings in this world, but that's also what I've learned to see as unique and enjoyable, no two 'human beings' will have the absolute same 'truth' to themselves even if united by the same principles, it will always be different, unique yet always relatable to one another as 'who we are' towards one another.
So that's how I've been walking a process to discharge my relationship to 'criticism' experienced in a negative way only and actually learn to embrace it, in my case many times being thankful whenever one comes at me challenging my perceived 'truth' or 'righteousness' because it's not many people that dare to be so upfront with me either, and that's something I'd like to challenge as well, because if anything I can learn a lot more from it in seeing who am I in relation to that criticism, discerning what I can use to learn, expand, grow and develop myself further and what is the kind of criticism that only contains reactions, projections with no supportive substance at all.
Another point I've learned is to take responsibility for my criticism towards others. If I am perceiving something is not 'good enough' and I have ideas of how to make it better, I am not just placing them out for 'others to do and implement' and leave the work-load for others to 'do that for me,' but I am learning to take responsibility/be in charge of my own criticism and turn it into a proposal for change and expansion that I can actively create and commit myself to contribute with, which is a way where one can take that stand of not only 'noticing flaws' and blaming or pointing fingers at others because 'they are not doing it,' but rather turn it into a self-empowering point of contributing to the cause, of being the one that does, acts, creates that which we can see is 'missing' within something or that could better things for everyone – now that's quite a constructive criticism as well that leads to actions, doings, to creating changes for the betterment of something or someone, which is lined to sharing responsibility, to empowering oneself in such capacities as well and of course considering the benefit for ourselves and others in it.
Here also making sure that I am aware of 'who I am' within that criticism or providing such feedback, if I am doing so from a starting point of blame and disempowerment or if I am truly genuinely wanting to assist with something to better it, and that's also something where I can only check within myself and how even if it may be perceived as finding faults or blame, I can only ever focus on making sure my starting point is clear, which also makes room for becoming more specific in how to communicate things in a way where one's intent, starting point and contribution is clear for all people involved in such situation.
So, if there's any reaction of disempowerment, feeling 'not good enough' etc. when getting criticism by others – or even within one's own mind – it's definitely time to place it out on paper, write it out, using self-forgiveness to see 'who am I' or 'what of me' is being 'hurt' by it, where am I going into disempowerment, where am I actually believing myself to not be capable to stand this 'heat' of the moment and use that to strengthen ourselves, to identify our weaknesses and actively work on re-aligning ourselves within them to a version of ourselves that can learn to read/watch/hear criticism objectively and develop an understanding of 'where it is coming from' and discerning what's supportive and what's not – that's something that surely takes some practice but as anything, we all start somewhere and the point is getting to actually Do it, that's the difference, rather than just remaining wallowing in worry, concern, pity and disempowerment about it, and that's why I also recommend watching that first part of Ido Portal's documentary, quite a fascinating parallel to understand what it entails to change at a Physical level – and not only talking about exercise/movements here – but about who we are in our minds as well.
Criticism is a great way to challenge myself and as such, I definitely have open doors to it, I kind of crave it at times which is an imbalance as well lol, so I have to simply take it as it comes and use it constructively as I've explained in this blog today.
Thanks for reading.
Please take your time and invest in supporting yourself while also supporting Desteni/Eqafe providing this information/courses that I have benefitted tremendously from and without which I would not have been able to write my story as I did just now, and you can do so by getting self-support audios, all of which will enrich your life in many more ways than what I've just shared above, including Ido Portal's input on several things coincidentally being echoed in the content of this material, which is quite a cool confirmation of how this physical process of self-change takes place:
Exploring the Physical with Bruce Lee – The Future of Awareness – Par…
Bruce Lee on Becoming Idle for our Idols – The Future of Awareness – …
Who Are You When Challenged – The Future of Awareness – Part 91
Debunking Self Beliefs – Back to Basics
Introduction to Self Bullying and Self-Hatred – Atlanteans – Part 473
Self Bullying and Self Hatred Part 2 – Atlanteans – Part 474
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subset: commoncrawl


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Just thought I'd do a little test. I am putting the biggest searches to see how many hits I get on this post. Sorry, there won't be any tantilyzing or provocative pictures, just deadly boring text. I will also list some tags I have used and gotten big draws. Please excuse this cheap trick. I will definitely not be posting this on Facebook.
Update on this trashy post. I posted this yesterday to see how many hits I'd get with these awful tags……….only 55. I got more when I posted about my Sunday School teacher, Miss Tilly. Go figure.
So here's the link to Miss Tilly


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During our second week in Rio (Brazil), I received an email from my good friend Manish Jain, one of the founders of Shikshantar and Swaraj University, in Udaipur, India. Manish was writing to give me the name of Edgard Gouveia – someone we 'really should try to connect with' as he was doing some really exciting and inspiring work in Brazil.
Following through on our principle of openness to what-arises-along-our-journey, I contacted Edgard right away and told him something of Enlivened Learning – what we were doing and why. Edgard responded within a day and invited us for a visit with him at the small and magical coastal town of Paraty, located about mid-way between Rio and Sao Paulo. He was there co-creating and co-developing a game project – 'Play the Call' which he said he would tell us lots more about once we arrived… Udi saw that we could stop and visit Edgard on our way back to Rio after visiting the Landless Movement University, which was only an hour from Sao Paulo. We were a bit concerned about finding a place to stay, especially with costs. I emailed Edgard and asked for accommodation suggestions. His response came – 'we are exercising gift economy as much as possible' … plenty of space in exchange for us cooking a few meals!
I first came across the ideas and language of 'gift economy and gift culture' when I visited Shikshantar: Rethinking Education and Development in Udaipur, India in 2008. Manish and his wife, Vidhi co-founded Shikshantar in 2000 as an open space for gathering together, co-learning and co-creating alternatives to mainstream ideas and practices of education and development (so-called progress). Aside from the many activities I engaged in while visiting Shikshantar, all of which included a generosity of time, creative spirit and skills, I spent hours delving through the deluge of donated books, magazines and other texts stacked on shelves that lined the walls. In particular, however, there was a stack of self-designed, 'copy-left' booklets on a range of topics that Shikshantar had self-published on a back table. One of them, Reclaiming the Gift Culture (edited by Manish and his sister, Shilpa) caught my eye. It became my first encounter with the language and ideas of gift culture, or gift economy, as it is often called. The Shikshantar booklets were available through contribution (whatever anyone feels moved to give). I donated a small amount of money at the time to take several of these publications home with me. I found them inspiring and engaging – I used several of these booklets and incorporated them into different classes I taught at the University of Bath. ………. Back to Brazil ………. We arrived into Paraty after a day of bus travel from the Landless Movement University. We were without a phone and about 3 hours later than we had said we would arrive. All of us were tired, hungry and a little car/bus sick from the hours of travel. Paraty is a beautifully preserved Portuguese colonial town along the Costa Verde (Green Coast), a lush green section of coastline in the state of Rio de Janeiro, south of the city of Rio de Janeiro. The town looks much like it did when it was settled during the Portuguese colonial days – the buildings are all refurbished, left over from the colonial era, the majority of the streets have not been paved and have unique forms of large cobblestone.
It had been raining when we arrived and some of the streets were nearly flooded. The pedestrian-only streets of Paraty consisted of large stones where we had to either hop or take large steps between them, because of the rain. Not such an easy mode of transport carrying heavy bags and feeling tired and sluggish. However, we all felt a burst of new energy as we walked/hopped deeper into the town in search of the house with the address where Edgard was staying. We finally found the address at a huge corner house, one block from the sea. We rang the doorbell and no one answered. Suddenly around the corner came three people. We heard a loud, booming voice, 'Kelly? Udi?' Edgard was suddenly there with two other friends. He enveloped each of us into a big hug (quite easy for him to do as he is 2 metres tall!) and ushered us into the house. We entered into an exquisitely beautiful house that looked as if it could still be the 1800s. The floors were dark wood, high ceilings and lots of windows.
The walls were adorned with signs and posters from what I was assuming were drawn by the different people that had been joining Edgard to co-create the game project.
We all sat down in the huge main room and a long conversation ensued. The friends that were with him – Chris was leaving the next morning and was just passing through town as Udi, Marina and I were. The other friend, a lovely woman called Adrienne, had been there several months offering her time and creativity on their game project, 'Play the Call'. The intent of the game is to involve young people to engage more directly in making change within their community. It had evolved as an online, virtual game that is carried out in real life. Young people over the age of 8 are given a series of 'missions' to plan and carry out, each one more challenging than the previous. In order to move to the next mission, each player also had to engage with others about what they are doing and why, take a few photos to exchange the story of how they had accomplished each mission – and have it 'liked' by many on facebook, before moving on to the next mission.
The entire project had been completed almost entirely without monetary exchange. The aim was for the game to be entirely accessible, for anyone and without any barrier-of-entry due to some financial requirement. The idea was that the planning, creating and establishment of the game should be completed in the same way. In other words, all stages of 'Play the Call' (from its conception to its full functionality) were to become part of a gift economy and culture. Edgard had been experimenting with various possibilities of a gift economy to not only provide access to the game, but to set it up as well.
Edgard made the point that if you are clear in what you want and open to asking and giving (through acts of reciprocity) things open up, often beyond what you think is possible. The idea of 'Play the Call' aspired to contribute to a more peaceful and just society. But, to get things rolling, Edgard needed a place to stay, to host other people, access to food, technical expertise and people who could help co-create the specificities of the game.
Most of us are completely dependent on money to 'do the things we want to do'. I hear this statement all the time. If ONLY I had the money, I could…. I would… Again and again – before embarking on this journey, and during this journey, we have met many people who stopped projects because of the lack of financial resources 'it just became impossible because we did not have enough resources'. Yet, many, many others along our journey have used their lack of financial resources as a welcome opportunity to imagine alternative forms of resources to be more creative and further enhance what it is that they want to do – to reach out – building communities and learning (and exchanging) time, creativity, energy, hospitality, new skills in the process. At the base of this, it has seemed to me is a willingness, a confidence and a courage to re-define what is meant by 'resources' and to see the abundance of what is around you, immediately available (if you can see it in this way), rather than seeing most of the world through a perspective of scarcity.
Udi and I have been trying to do this as well – where we can. Coming from research backgrounds where institutional money is spent much more freely (e.g. – hotels, restaurants, taxis) during time spent in the field conducting research, we have been unlearning on this journey — by being committed to engaging in gift economy practices as much as we can. Although there are obvious costs associated with flight travel that are difficult to negotiate (especially long flights between countries), we have been taking many long (15+ hour) bus rides, staying in homestays and with friends– as well as couchsurfing (rather than staying in hotels). We have also been offering our skills with filmmaking and photography from a 'copy-left' (what is mine, is yours) perspective when we can.
Edgard had been searching for a place in which he could host people to help create and support all aspects of 'Play the Call'. A friend of his let him live in a house of theirs for 4 months, for free – a house that accommodated many people at the same time. To feed himself and the people who came to help, Edgard reached out to local restaurants and food businesses and asked that they donate meals during the months they were creating and finishing the game. For the technological expertise needed to create and complete the game, Edgard invited people he knew – to then reach to more people that they knew – to locate interested and technologically skilled people to come and give their time and energy. All of these steps of reaching out worked. Gifts of accommodation, food, skills and creative energy were exchanged in this way through reciprocity. The abundance that is there, literally right at Edgard's doorstep – was not out of reach. It just had to be located and asked for. The reason it worked? Edgard's humility, energy, commitment and passion for what 'Play the Call' could be … would be … once completed. Not just for the young people participating, but for their communities – and as a huge network of individuals and communities across the globe. As Edgard explained – 'who can say no to the earnest and innocent energy and courage of children? — as adults, we are far more likely to listen to the views of children than other adults' This was a fledgling, but very much living gift economy that Edgard helped to setup in the local community of Paraty around his project. These gifts were actually alive – providing sustenance, energy… as Lewis Hyde describes the ideal of a gift in his wonderful book 'The Gift'.
The gifts exchanged as part of the 'Play the Call' gift economy were imbued with a spiritual energy surviving the consumption from those individual participants – these gifts literally, kept the creation and development of the project alive… and they created new networks of community relationships out of individual heart-felt expression of hope toward the project. These gifts as part of the 'Play the Call' gift economy were simultaneously material, social and spiritual. A gift economy or gift culture focuses on exchange as any economy does – but this exchange avoids typical exchanges that we are used to within a capitalist system. In other words, beyond money … money is seen as one form of many different types of exchanges, rather than the ONLY form. A gift economy and culture exchanges services, skills, time, non-commodified labor, care, hospitality, love…
… and as Edgard taught Udi, Marina and me, a gift economy increases the livingness, the value of the gift by creating community and bringing forth abundance where it might not have been seen or experienced previously. Typical to gift economy or gift culture, there was the avoidance of the interaction of money or consumer good as the center point of the exchange. Gifts exchanged within a gift culture or economy, are centered on relationships between those exchanging gifts (which again Lewis Hyde beautifully describes in his book). Imagine if learning communities that emerged from gift culture were commonplace. Imagine if our learning was to imagine, create and experiment with different forms of gift culture and reciprocity. How much richer could our worlds be?
There are communities all over the world that are experimenting with different forms of gift economy – places like Universidad de la Tierra (University of the Earth in Oaxaca, Mexico), Swaraj University (that emerged from Shikshantar in Udaipur, India), transition towns creating local currencies and time banks, home-schooling communities tapping into the wealth of local knowledge and skills that are within walking distance of their homes… In various forms, each of these places are experimenting with gift culture and economy. Last October, Manish and many others organized a 'Giftival' in Istanbul, Turkey followed by another Giftival held in Kerala (India). See this link for a detailed blog posting about the Giftival event in Turkey. I hope to write much more about our continued learning and encounters with gift economy and gift culture as our journey continued… Edgard taught us about the possibilities of taking a brilliant idea and creating a living project and community — by finding the abundance that is right around you and engaging in a reciprocal gift economy. We did cook those few days with Edgard — and he gave us the invaluable gifts of courage, wisdom, hospitality and friendship, to inspire us to notice the abundance around us – and to spread that awareness and inspiration with others….


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Problem 2091. return row and column indices given 2 values which define a range
Solution Stats
Problem Comments
5 Comments
last test suit gives an error:"'Error using assert The condition input argument must be a scalar logical. Error in TestPoint11 (line 5) assert(and(R9==1,C9==1))"
also even when I'm using find just to check the results of test suits some of them fail. please fix it ... Thank you !
although the problem does not STATE it you are required to post the solution as a column vector (rowidx colidx that is) . In the case that donnot use magic matrix the solution will pass as row vector too but for the ones that the matrix is magic it wont.
As @Shahriar mentioned, the test suits still have problems. Kindly fix it.
#1,#4: assumes x2 is the lower limit and x3 is the upper limit while all other take x2 as upper limit
@Dyuman Joshi: the problem description specifically states that the inputs can be passed in in random order. What you indicate as an error is actually intended.
@goc3 I must have overlooked it while solving the problem.
Thanks for pointing it out.
Solution Comments
2 Comments
1 Comment
My bad on the comment. But still test suits have problems:
#1: assumes x2 is the lower limit and x3 is the upper limit while all other take x2 as upper limit
#4 same issue
1 Comment
2 Comments
Nice solution, I overlooked the potential usage of ind2sub.
You should use 'varargin' here ;-)
take a look: http://www.mathworks.de/matlabcentral/cody/problems/2091-return-row-and-column-indices-given-2-values-which-define-a-range/solutions/382339
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Riot police on Monday quickly and forcefully broke up an opposition attempt to occupy a downtown square in a bid to challenge Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's victory in Russia's presidential election, arresting dozens of participants, including some prominent opposition leaders.
The harsh police action could fuel the opposition anger and trigger bigger protests against Putin's rule, but it also underlined the massive challenges faced by the opposition.
Putin seems to command the unswerving loyalty of police and the military, whose wages have recently been doubled. The urban middle-class forming the core of the protests could be more reluctant to attend future protests after seeing the tough police response.
The police action followed a rally in downtown Moscow that drew about 20,000 protesters angry over a campaign slanted in Putin's favor and reports of widespread violations in Sunday's ballot.
The big rally went on peacefully, but hundreds of police in full riot gear violently dispersed several hundred protesters who had vowed to stay on the iconic Pushkin Square in downtown Moscow until Putin steps down. Police moved quickly to stamp out the protests, apparently fearing they could act as a catalyst for bigger demonstrations.
Charismatic protest leader Alexei Navalny, who sought to electrify the crowd with a passionate call of "We are the power!" was among those arrested along with opposition leader Sergei Udaltsov. Scores were put in police vans parked around the square.
Monday's attempt to occupy the square marked a change of tactics for the opposition that is looking for ways to maintain the momentum of the protests. During the first massive protests in December, Navalny was the first to propose occupying streets to raise the heat on Putin.
"We are calling for peaceful action of civil disobedience, and we shall not leave," he shouted to the crowd during Monday's protest. "We know the truth about this government. This is the authority of crooks and thieves."
Putin won more than 63 percent of the vote, according to the nearly complete official returns, but the opposition says the election was marred by massive fraud.
"The campaign has been unfair, cowardly and treacherous," said opposition leader Grigory Yavlinsky, who had been denied registration for the race on a technicality.
International election monitors pointed at the lack of real competition and said the vote count "was assessed negatively" in almost a third of polling stations observers visited.
"There was no real competition, and abuse of government resources ensured that the ultimate winner of the election was never in doubt," said Tonino Picula, the head of the short-term Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe observer mission. "Broadcast media was clearly biased in favor of one candidate and did not provide fair coverage of the other candidates."
Russian observers pointed at numerous reports of "carousel voting," in which busloads of voters are driven around to cast ballots multiple times and various other violations, saying their number appeared to be as high as in December's disputed parliamentary vote that kicked off the protests.
Monday's rally was sanctioned by authorities, but security was tight, with some 12,000 police deployed to ensure order.
While the rally's attendance of some 20,000 was significantly smaller than some of the previous opposition protests, which drew up to 100,000, it could be explained by the relatively modest size of the tree-lined square. The rally organizers picked the location for its symbolic importance for the nation's democratic movement and also its proximity to the Kremlin.
Udaltsov, one of the protest organizers, urged protesters to stay on the square until Putin steps down.
"If it was a free election, why have they flooded the entire city with troops?" Udaltsov shouted to the crowd, which responded with cries: "They fear us!"
After the rally ended, Navalny, Udaltsov and other opposition leaders were joined by several hundred protesters who heeded their call to stay on the square, chanting: "We shall not leave!"
Hundreds of riot police surrounded them, but waited for more than an hour before they moved to break up the protest.
Shortly after his arrest, Navalny posted a picture to Twitter of a group of people detained along with him in the same prison van.
"One man in a paddy wagon is calmly smoking an electronic cigarette. One is using his iPad to talk on Skype. One person is reading a book," he wrote in a separate tweet.
Earlier, police also rounded up protesters who tried to walk toward the Kremlin after the big rally was over. They also quickly arrested Eduard Limonov, the leader of the banned National Bolshevik Party and several dozen of his supporters, who attempted to hold a protest on the Lubyanka Square near the headquarters of Russia's election commission. The main KGB successor agency is also located on Lubyanka.
About 100 protesters were arrested in St. Petersburg, where about 2,000 gathered for an unauthorized rally.
Putin's win was assured as he faced a weak slate of Kremlin-approved candidates and many across the vast country still see him as a guarantor of stability and the defender of a strong Russia against a hostile world, an image he has carefully cultivated during 12 years in power.
He has relied on massive coverage by state television stations, denouncing his foes as Western stooges working to weaken Russia.
The independent Russian elections watchdog Golos said Monday that incomplete reports from its observers of individual polling station counts contradicted the official vote count, indicating that Putin hovered perilously close to the 50-percent mark needed for a first-round victory.
"It's one pixel away from a second round," said Golos' Roman Udot.
Putin claimed victory Sunday night when fewer than a quarter of the votes had been counted, his eyes brimming with tears. He defiantly proclaimed just outside the Kremlin walls before a sea of supporters that they had triumphed over opponents intent on "destroying Russia's statehood and usurping power."
U.S. Sen. John McCain, who had goaded Putin in the past on Twitter, reacted quickly to the images of a tearful Putin with an acerbic Tweet: "Dear Vlad, Surprise! Surprise! You won. The Russian people are crying too!"
The protesters on Monday derided Putin's tears as evidence of his fear of the opposition. "We have seen a man who wasn't sure of himself," said Ilya Yashin, one of the opposition leaders.
Mikhail Kasyanov, who served as prime minister during Putin's first term before becoming an opposition leader, urged the protesters to focus on demanding a rerun of the fraud-tainted parliamentary election in December, which allowed Putin's party to retain its majority in the lower house.
"Early Duma election is our immediate goal!" he shouted. "Putin is afraid of us!"
In an apparent bid to assuage the opposition anger, outgoing President Dmitry Medvedev told the Justice Ministry to present its explanation for last year's rejection of registration for the People's Freedom Party, an organization led by some of the opposition's most prominent figures.
He also ordered the prosecutor-general to re-examine the legality of the conviction of imprisoned former oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky and more than 30 others regarded by the opposition as political prisoners, in an apparent attempt to soothe protesters.
The West can expect Putin to continue the tough policies he has pursued even as prime minister, including opposing U.S. plans to build a missile shield in Europe and resisting international military intervention in Syria.
The U.S. administration congratulated the Russian people for turning out to vote in big numbers in Sunday's election, but also expressed concern about allegations of fraud and urged a full investigation into the charges. The State Department said Monday the U.S. would work with Russia's "president-elect" once the votes are certified, but pointedly did not mention Putin by name or congratulate him.
Communist Party candidate Gennady Zyuganov was a distant second in the election, followed by Mikhail Prokhorov, the billionaire owner of the New Jersey Nets basketball team whose candidacy was approved by the Kremlin in what was seen as an effort to channel some of the protest sentiment. Prokhorov attended Monday's protest.
The clownish nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky and socialist Sergei Mironov trailed behind. The leader of the liberal opposition Yabloko party was barred from the race.


text:
Massachusetts Speaker DeLeo spent $300,000 on legal fees
Probation scandal has rattled Beacon Hill
House Speaker Robert DeLeo has reported spending $300,000 on legal fees during the first half of the year as investigators ramped up their probe of the Massachusetts Probation Department.
In a filing on Monday, DeLeo reported spending $300,000 on the law firm of Mintz, Levin, Cohn, Ferris, Glovsky and Popeo. A campaign spokesman would only say that Robert Popeo has represented DeLeo for years and the $300,000 relates to that representation.
A federal indictment alleges that former probation commissioner John O'Brien bribed lawmakers by giving jobs to supporters in exchange for increases to his department's budget.
No lawmakers have been charged in the case.
DeLeo has said he only recommended qualified job applicants for jobs in the probation department
O'Brien was acquitted earlier this year of state corruption charges.


text:
Jazzboat Prague. Unique moving jazz stage. Dinner + live jazz concert + boatcruise. Best value concept. Daily 8.30 PM all year.
Listen to Czech jazz musicians on moving jazz stage. Professional sound, great atmosphere. Three sets of traditional or latin jazz as well as blues and swing nights. Popular Prague night event.
Taste romantic gourmet dinner. Fresh ingredients, top culinary quality, served a la carte at your table. Three course menu available as well as fully loaded bar.
Look at Prague from the river, enjoy surprising views on Charles Bridge, Prague Castle, Vyšehrad or modern Dancing House. Most complex tour through illuminated Prague by night.


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Knox, Frank
Knox, Frank (William Franklin Knox), 1874–1944, U.S. Secretary of the Navy (1940–44), b. Boston. He joined the Rough Riders in the Spanish-American War and also served in World War I. Knox was general manager (1928–31) of the Hearst papers and after 1931 owner of the Chicago Daily News. A strong opponent of the New Deal, he was the unsuccessful Republican candidate for Vice President in 1936. In 1940, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, seeking to create national unity in defense preparations, made Knox Secretary of the Navy. He died in office and was succeeded by James V. Forrestal.
The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright © 2023, Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.
See more Encyclopedia articles on: U.S. History: Biographies


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This site contains explicit images and videos of consenting
By entering this site you have accepted all of the terms and conditions below.
The following pages deal with human sexuality, explicit materials, sex videos, and other mature subjects. The site is designed and intended solely for consenting adults - people who are at least 18 years old (21 in any location where 18 is not the age of majority)who are interested in and wish to have access to hardcore, gay, sexual images and video depicted male/male activity. If you are under 18 or the age of majority in your community, or viewing from a community where sexually explict gay imagery is unacceptable or illegal - DO NOT ENTER THIS SITE. You also confirm that you will not redistribute this material including the sex videos to anyone nor will you permit any minor to view this material, or any other person who might find such material personally offensive. The act of entering this site affirms that you understand the type of material this site contains and further release the site creator, its employees, agents and vendors from all liability.


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The Hands-on Relay School in Pullman, WA is probably the best environment for relay training there is. I highly recommend that everyone attend. Sign up as soon as you can because they sell out quickly.
Here's a description of the school from their website:
3rd Annual Hands-On Relay School
March 14-18, 2016
Washington State University
The Hands-On Relay School is a professional development short course to train protective relay technicians, eletrical/power plant technicians, engineers and protective relay test specialists.
Students are enrolled in one of seven tracks for the duration of the school:
- Basic
- Distribution
- Transmission
- Generation
- Electromechanical
- Automated Relay Testing
- Theory
Students participating in these tracks will:
- Become familiar with manual or automated test methods for a variety of protective relays and test equipment.
- Gain valuable knowledge relating to relay applications and operating characteristics.
- Exchange ideas and resolve problems in an open forum.
- Learn preventative and corrective maintenance methods.
Application Process and Fees
- School fee of $650 includes the electronic copies of lecture notes, Sunday night reception, Tuesday night Vendor Showcase, one Wednesday night banquet meal, break refreshments, and parking fees.
- Priority is given to utilities providing lab facilitators, lecturers, steering committee support, and Western Energy Institute member utilities, if the application is received by January 25, 2016.
- Remaining slots will be filled on a first-come, first-served basis.
- Applicants select which track they wish to attend in order of preference. Every effort will be made to place students into their preferred track, but track placement is by availability and subject to the priorities as described above. Many tracks will fill up and students may not be able to get their preferred track. If we are unable to place you in a track you have selected, or in an acceptable substitute track, your full application fee will be refunded.
- Students will be notified in writing no later than February 10th as to their acceptance into the school and track placement. You are not accepted to attend unless you receive the confirmation of acceptance from WSU.
Questions? Call 800-942-4978 or 509- 335-3530, or e-mail us at [email protected]. Visit our website at http://conferences.wsu.edu


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Oct. 26, 2012— -- Another person has died from fungal meningitis in an outbreak linked to tainted steroid injections, bringing the total to 25 deaths, health officials reported today.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has increased the tally of cases to 338: 331 cases of fungal meningitis and seven cases of joint infections. South Carolina became the 18th state affected by the outbreak on Sunday.
For a map of cases by state, click here.The outbreak has been linked to contaminated vials of methylprednisolone acetate, an injectable steroid used to treat back and joint pain. Sealed vials of the steroid, made by the New England Compounding Center in Framingham, Mass., contained exserohilum rostratum, a fungus found in soil and plants. It's unclear how the fungus landed in the sealed vials.
The New England Compounding Center has recalled all its products and shut down operations earlier this month.
A quarter of the steroid vials in a bin at the New England Compounding Center contained "greenish black foreign matter," according to an FDA form released today. The form went on to identify several clean rooms -- where sterile products are produced -- that had either mold or bacterial overgrowths.
As many as 14,000 patients are thought to have received injections of the suspect steroid.
Seventy-six clinics in 23 states that received methylprednisolone acetate from the recalled lots have been instructed to notify all affected patients. The "potentially contaminated injections were given starting May 21, 2012," according to the CDC.
For a full list of clinics receiving the recalled lots of spinal steroid injections, click here.
Meningitis affects the membranous lining of the brain and spinal cord. Early symptoms of fungal meningitis -- including headache, fever, dizziness, nausea, sensitivity to light, stiff neck, weakness or numbness, slurred speech and pain, and redness or swelling at the injection site -- can take more than a month to appear.
The longest duration from the time of injection to the onset of symptoms in the current outbreak is 42 days, according to the CDC's Dr. Benjamin Park.
"But we want to emphasize that we don't know what the longest will be," he added, stressing that patients who received injections of the recalled drug should stay attuned to the subtle symptoms "for months."
Fungal meningitis is diagnosed through a spinal tap, which draws cerebrospinal fluid from the spine that can be inspected for signs of the disease. Once detected, it can be treated with high doses of intravenous antifungal medications.
Unlike bacterial meningitis, fungal meningitis is not transmitted from person to person and only people who received the steroid injections are thought to be at risk.


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Butler Lampson
Currently a senior engineer at the Systems Research Center of Digital Equipment Corporation in Palo Alto, California, Butler Lampson was an associate professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, a founder of the Berkeley Computer Corporation, and a senior research fellow at Xerox PARC's Computer Science Laboratory.Lampson's many accomplishments in so many areas of computer design and research make him one of the most highly regarded professionals in the field. He has worked on hardware systems, such as the Ethernet local network and Alto and the Dorado personal computers; operating systems, such as the SDS 940 and Alto; programming languages, such as LISP and Mesa; application programs, such as the Bravo editor and the Star office system; and network servers, such as the Dover printer and the Grapevine mail system.
I met Butler Lampson in Palo Alto at the offices of Digital Equipment Corporation where he works one week out of a six-week cycle; the other five weeks he works in Philadelphia. He is what he calls a "tele-commuter," doing much of his work via telecommunication lines.Unlike so many others in this fast-paced, quickly growing industry, Butler Lampson doesn't exhibit many entrepreneurial interests. His focus is singular: He is concerned with the successful design of a computer system, whether it be hardware, software applications, languages, or networks. Lampson writes very little source code today, he is a system designer, the person with the vision and expertise who lays the groundwork for a complex system. And he is undoubtedly one of the best.INTERVIEWER: What attracts you to computers?
LAMPSON: I think the computer is the world's greatest toy. You can invent wonderful things and actually make them happen.
INTERVIEWER: But you can do that in other fields too ….
LAMPSON: It's much, much harder to make things happen in other fields. If you're a physicist, you have to live with what nature has provided. But with computer science, you invent whatever you want. It's like mathematics, except what you invent is tangible.
INTERVIEWER: Is your background in math and physics?
LAMPSON: I studied physics at Harvard. Toward the end of my studies I did quite a bit of programming for a physics professor who wanted to analyze spark-chamber photographs on a PDP-1. When I went to Berkeley to continue studying physics, a very interesting computer research project was going on, but it was well concealed. I found out about it from a friend at a computer conference I attended in San Francisco. He asked me how this project was doing. When I said I'd never heard of it, he told me which unmarked door to go through to find it.
INTERVIEWER: And what lurked behind this door?
LAMPSON: It was the development of one of the first commercial timesharing systems, the SDS 940.
INTERVIEWER: Did you get involved with the project?
LAMPSON: Deeply. I eventually gave up physics, because I found computer work a lot more interesting. That was fortunate because, if I had stayed in physics, I would have gotten my Ph.D. right around the time of the great crash for physics Ph.D.s.
INTERVIEWER: So you walked through an unmarked door into a concealed computer project and changed from physicist to computer scientist? Apart from programming on the PDP-1, did you have any earlier contact with computers?
LAMPSON: Yes, a friend and I did some hacking on an IBM 650 while I was still in high school. The 650, which was the first business computer, was nearing the end of its useful life, so there wasn't much demand for time on it.
INTERVIEWER: You've studied a range of sciences. Do you see an overlap between physics, mathematics, and computer science?
LAMPSON: Only in the sense that physics and mathematics, like other respectable disciplines, require that you think clearly to succeed in them. That's why many successful computer people come from these fields. It's harder to do what people do nowadays-start in computer science and stay in it_because it's a very shallow discipline. It doesn't really force you to exercise your intellectual capabilities enough.
INTERVIEWER: Do you think the field is shallow because it's so primitive and young?
LAMPSON: That's the main reason. There seems to be some evidence of it becoming less shallow, but it's a slow process.
INTERVIEWER: Do you consider computer science to be on the same level as physics and mathematics?
LAMPSON: I used to think that undergraduate computer-science education was bad, and that it should be outlawed. Recently I realized that position isn't reasonable. An undergraduate degree in computer science is a perfectly respectable professional degree, just like electrical engineering or business administration. But I do think it's a serious mistake to take an undergraduate degree in computer science if you intend to study it in graduate school.
INTERVIEWER: Why?
LAMPSON: Because most of what you learn won't have any long-term significance. You won't learn new ways of using your mind, which does you more good than learning the details of how to write a compiler, which is what you're likely to get from undergraduate computer science. I think the world would be much better off if all the graduate computer-science departments would get together and agree not to accept anybody with a bachelor's degree in computer science. Those people should be required to take a remedial year to learn something respectable like mathematics or history, before going on to graduate-level computer science. However, I don't see that happening.
INTERVIEWER: What kind of training or type of thought leads to the greatest productivity in the computer field?
LAMPSON: From mathematics, you learn logical reasoning. You also learn what it means to prove something, as well as how to handle abstract essentials. From an experimental science such as physics, or from the humanities, you learn how to make connections in the real world by applying these abstractions.
INTERVIEWER: Like many influential programmers, in the early seventies you spent time at the Xerox PARC think tank, surrounded by great minds. Was that an inspiring time for you ?
LAMPSON: It was great. We felt as through we were conquering the world.
INTERVIEWER: Did any of your colleagues from that time influence your thinking?
LAMPSON: We all influenced each other. There was a lot of give and take. Bob Taylor's influence was very important. It was a combination of how he ran the laboratory and his consistent view of the ways in which computers are important.
INTERVIEWER: Even though Xerox created a think tank of computer experts, they failed to implement and bring to market many of the ideas. Did that disappoint you; did you think the world wasn't ready for those products?
LAMPSON: It's always hard to know what people are ready for. Were we aware of the outside world? Yes, we knew that it existed. Did we understand the whole situation perfectly? Probably not. Were we surprised when Xerox was unable to sell Stars? No, not really.
My view of the whole enterprise at Xerox PARC was that we couldn't expect something like that to last forever. It lasted almost 15 years, so that was pretty good.
The purpose of PARC was to learn. You owe something to the company that's paying you to learn, and we felt we should do what we could, within reasonable bounds, to benefit Xerox. But it wasn't critical that Xerox develop those ideas. Their failure was not really surprising, because they were trying to get into a new business that nobody knew much about. There were many ways for things to go wrong. Some things went wrong in marketing–the quality of the technical people was high, but they never got the quality of marketing people the company needed.
For example, Bob Sproull and I spent a lot of time designing this project called Interpress, which was a printing standard. I put a lot of energy into that, and I would have really liked Xerox to take it and make everybody adopt it. Instead, they completely screwed it up. As a result, some of the people who worked on it went off and started Adobe Systems, and invented a similar product called PostScript, which is clearly a standard everyone will now adopt. That sort of thing is annoying, but the main product of a research laboratory is ideas.
INTERVIEWER: Are there any research labs devoted to ideas today?
LAMPSON: I have my own biases on that. The best research places are Digital Equipment Company, where I am now, and Bell Labs.
INTERVIEWER: Do you feel that research has a practical limit?
LAMPSON: I think it is unlikely that expert systems are going to work. In the early seventies, it was clear that the projects we were involved in then could be made to work. At least, I couldn't see any fundamental reasons why they should not work, whereas now I can see a lot of fundamental reasons why artificial-intelligence systems are unlikely to work. It seems that some people have taken a very small number of experiments, which often have very ambiguous outcomes, and have made generalizations about those results in a totally crazy way.
INTERVIEWER: Why do you think people are so fascinated by the idea of artificial intelligence?
LAMPSON: Well, I'm not sure. Part of it is the basic computer fallacy that states the computer is a universal engine that can do anything. If there is no obvious way to show that something is impossible, then some people assume it must be possible. A lot of people don't understand what the consequences of complexity are, and without that understanding they are likely to get burned. If they are not willing to take the word of someone who has gotten burned, then the only way they are going to find out is to try it and get burned themselves. Very few of the people who are excited about artificial intelligence have tried it.
I see really extreme versions of this. For instance, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is funding a program that is supposed to use all of these wonderful expert systems and AI techniques, as well as parallel computing, to produce truly wonderful military devices, such as robot tanks. They published a ten-year plan that included a foldout showing lines of development and milestones when breakthroughs would be made. It's all nonsense because no one knows how to do these things. Some of the problems may be solved within the next ten years–but to have a schedule! The world doesn't work that way. If you don't know the answers to the problems, you can't schedule when you're going to finish the project.
INTERVIEWER: You seem to scorn complexity. When you design a system, do you strive for simplicity?
LAMPSON: Right. Everything should be made as simple as possible. But to do that you have to master complexity.
INTERVIEWER: In practical terms, how do you achieve that?
LAMPSON: There are some basic techniques to control complexity. Fundamentally, I divide and conquer, break things down, and try to write reasonably precise descriptions of what each piece is supposed to do. That becomes a sketch of how to proceed. When you can't figure out how to write a spec, it's because you don't understand what's going on. Then you have two choices: Either back off to some other problem you do understand, or think harder.
Also, the description of the system shouldn't be too big. You may have to think about a big system in smaller pieces. It's somewhat like solving problems in mathematics: You can write books that are full of useful hints, but you can't give an algorithm.
INTERVIEWER: I know your experience with computers is broad. You've developed computers, operating systems, and applications. Does each of these require a different discipline?
LAMPSON: Obviously, if you want to develop applications, you need a fair amount of sensitivity about user interface, which is not as important in developing a piece of hardware. When you design hardware, typically you're much more concerned with the arbitrary constraints imposed by the particular technology that you are working with. Nobody knows how to build really complicated hardware systems, so designing hardware tends to be simpler. Software is much more complicated.
INTERVIEWER: Do you still program?
LAMPSON: Only in an abstract sense. I no longer have the time to write actual programs. But I've spent the first half of this year writing a twenty-five page abstract program for a name server. To give you a sense of the relationship between an abstract program and a real program, the abstract has been translated into about seven thousand lines of Modula-2 code. So I cheat. I haven't done hall-time programming for about six or seven years. I did a lot of it before that.
INTERVIEWER: What are some of the more important programs that you wrote?
LAMPSON: I wrote sizeable chunks of the 940 operating system and I wrote two or three compilers for an interactive language for scientific and engineering calculations. I wrote a SNOBOL compiler. In addition, Peter Deutsch and I designed a programming language that was one of the predecessors to C and wrote a compiler for it. I've written design-automation programs, and another operating system that I did in the early seventies at Xerox.
INTERVIEWER: Is it easier for you to develop programs now than it was ten or fifteen years ago?
LAMPSON: Designing programs is probably harder now because the aspiration level is so much greater. But the actual programming is a lot easier now than it used to be. The machines have much more memory so you don't have to squeeze as hard. You can concentrate more on getting the job done and not worry about getting the most out of limited resources. That helps a lot. Also, the programming tools are somewhat better now. But, since I don't write code anymore, development is much easier for me.
INTERVIEWER: What sort of processes do you go through when you design or develop a program?
LAMPSON: Most of the time, a new program is a refinement, extension, generalization, or improvement of an existing program. It's really unusual to do something that's completely new. Usually I put into a new program an extension or improvement on something that's already a model in an existing program or user interface. For example, Bravo was the result of two ideas I had. One was about how to represent the text that was being edited inside the computer model and the other was how to efficiently update the screen. But the basic idea for Bravo came from a system called NLS that was done in the late sixties by Doug Englebart at SRI. NLS provided a mouse-oriented, full-screen display of structured text. The confluence of those ideas led to the development of Bravo.
In the old days, I would scribble notes down on a piece of paper and start hacking, or get somebody else enthralled and start them hacking. Nowadays, I try to write the crucial parts of the idea in fairly precise, but abstract, language. Typically, there's a lot of iteration at that stage.
For example, I worked on a name-server project with Andrew Birtell and Mike Schroeder. At Xerox, they had built a system called Grapevine, which was a distributed name server. Grapevine could handle a few thousand names, and it started to break down as it grew toward the few-thousand limit. After we did that project, we had some idea of how a name server should hang together, but we wanted to handle a few billion names, which posed some significant design problems. I decided that its basic elements should be local databases, and each one would essentially implement a fairly standard tree-structured name scheme. And all of these databases would fit together in a loosely coupled way.
The operations were defined and programs were written on a fairly high level, without too much concern for detail. We ended up with a twenty-five or thirty-page combination of program and specifications. This served as a detailed design from which a summer student turned out the seven thousand lines of prototype implementation.
That's usually the process I follow. How long it takes depends on how difficult the problem is. Sometimes it takes years.
INTERVIEWER: Did the languages you developed take as much work?
LAMPSON: Sometimes it's quick: Peter Deutsch and I had the first version of one language going in about two months. On the other hand, I've been working with Rod Burstall on a kernel programming language that we work on two or three times a year. That project's been going on for about five years now and we still don't have an implementation. We keep changing our minds.
INTERVIEWER: Do you think there are certain techniques that lead to a good program or a good system?
LAMPSON: Yes. The most important goal is to define as precisely as possible the interfaces between the system and the rest of the world, as well as the interfaces between the major parts of the system itself. The biggest change in my design style over the years has been to put more and more emphasis on the problem to be solved and on finding techniques to define the interfaces precisely. That pays off tremendously, both in a better understanding of what the program really does, and in identification of the crucial parts. It also helps people understand how the system is put together. That's really the most important aspect of designing a program.
Designing a program is completely different from inventing algorithms. With algorithms, the game is to get the whole plan in your head and then shuffle all the pieces around until you settle on the best way to accomplish it. The trick here is to sufficiently define the algorithm so that you can get it completely in your head.
INTERVIEWER: When you design a system or a program, what makes you certain that it can be implemented?
LAMPSON: One possibility is to carry the design down to a level of programming where two things are true. First, I already know about the primitives I write the programming in — they have been implemented many times before, so I have a high degree of confidence that the program will work. Second, I understand the primitives well enough to estimate within a factor of two or three how much memory they are going to cost. I can then design my program in a sensible way. So I can be fairly confident that it's possible to implement a function, and I can roughly estimate its performance. Of course, it's possible to do that and overlook something very important. There's no way around that.
The other possibility is to very carefully and formally write down what properties the program should have and then convince yourself that it has them. You always do that in an informal way, but as you do it more formally, it gets to be a lot more work, and the chance of missing something important gets smaller. At some point, the formal analysis becomes counterproductive. But if you do too little of it, the risk of missing something important increases. If you don't find out about the missing element until the program's all coded, then a tremendous amount of work has been thrown away.
Of course, what usually happens is that you don't throw that work away; you try to patch it up. That has very bad consequences. First of all, you don't solve the problem. You just convert it into another problem, which isn't the one you should really be solving. And then you patch the program until it solves the other problem. That approach is very unsatisfactory.
Sometimes I think that the goals people are trying to reach are just too much to ask for. Programmers often lose sight of the fact that the problems in building software systems arise because what they are trying to do is just too hard. They believe the computer is a universal engine that can do anything. It's very easy to be seduced into the proposition that a group of one or five or ten or fifty or a thousand programmers can make the computer do anything. That's clearly not right.
INTERVIEWER: What qualities does a programmer need to write a successful program?
LAMPSON: The most important quality is the ability to organize the solution to the problem into a manageable structure, with each component specified in a simple way. Sometimes successful programmers can do that but can't explain what they did, because they can't see the structure. Some people are good programmers because they can handle many more details than most people. But there are a lot of disadvantages in selecting programmers for that reason–it can result in programs that no one else can maintain. That doesn't seem to happen so much anymore, because now it's more fashionable to have one person or group design the programs and then hire someone else to write all the code.
INTERVIEWER: Do you see a hazard in that approach?
LAMPSON: The hazard is that eventually the designer can lose touch with reality, and that leads to designs that can't be implemented.
INTERVIEWER: And have you ever designed programs that could not be implemented?
LAMPSON: No, I don't think so. The closest I've come to that was in the mid-seventies, at Xerox PARC. With several other people, I designed a file system that provided transactions. That's the ability to make several changes to stored data as an atomic operation: Either all the changes get made or none of them do. An example of a transaction is the transfer of money from an account at one bank to an account at a different bank. You don't want to leave the system in a state where the money was removed from one account but not added to the other. I worked a lot on an early design of that system, and it was built. It did work, but was generally judged to be quite unsatisfactory.
INTERVIEWER: Can you describe a beautiful program?
LAMPSON: I don't know if it's possible to answer that question. I can't tell you what a beautiful painting is, or a beautiful piece of music. Perhaps it's easier to describe a program because it is composed of diverse qualities; it is an engineering object as well as art.
A beautiful program is like a beautiful theorem: It does the job elegantly. It has a simple and perspicuous structure; people say, "Oh, yes. I see that's the way to do it."
INTERVIEWER: If you could draw a parallel between programming and another art, such as painting, writing, composing music, or sculpture, which one would it be?
LAMPSON: It would be better to choose architecture, which encompasses major engineering considerations. Very few programs can be regarded as pure art. A program is expected to do something and art is part of it. But when I say programming is an art, it's in the same way that mathematics is: People don't normally classify mathematics as an art.
INTERVIEWER: In what sense is computer science a science?
LAMPSON: The easiest answer is that it's a science to the same extent that mathematics is a science. A computer program can be viewed as a mathematical object. One way to understand such an object is to make abstract statements about it that you can prove. The only other way of understanding the object is trial and error, which doesn't work very well. If it is the least bit complicated, you can try for a long time and never find out what an object's properties are.
INTERVIEWER: Do you think the way that systems are designed and developed will radically change?
LAMPSON: Well, yes and no. What really makes design better is the development of higher levels of abstractions to work with. For instance, you can program a VisiCalc spreadsheet more easily than you can write a BASIC program to solve a certain type of problem.
On the other hand, our aspirations are constantly increasing, so the development of better abstractions doesn't make the task of programming much easier: It means we can do more elaborate things. We can do more because the primitives that we are using are much more powerful.
INTERVIEWER: Do you think the microcomputer and personal computer are part of a phase that will pass into something else?
LAMPSON: Of course not! I give a talk to general audiences titled The Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet. Its basic theme is that major changes in the world take a long time. Look at the industrial revolution. It was at least sixty years or more from the time it started until it had a major impact on people's lives. That was true for the second industrial revolution as well. Telephones and electric lights were invented around 1880 but it wasn't until the twenties that their use became widespread.
I think this is true for the computer revolution. People like to think that we're moving much faster because we go from idea to finished product in six months. That's nonsense. Computing is just beginning to become a significant part of the economy and just starting to affect people's lives. Technical trends are going to increase at a furious rate, and the natural form for those trends is the so-called personal computer.
You can look at the trends in the base technology and see where it's going. It takes silicon, a rotating magnetic medium, a keyboard, and a display to make a computer. Each of those components is evolving so you can get more and more of what you want in a small box at a modest price. There's no indication any of that is going to change. I'm not saying there won't be any big computers, but there is an overwhelming trend toward personal computers.
INTERVIEWER: Where do you see the industry in five to ten years?
LAMPSON: The computer industry will increase at a good clip for at least another twenty years. There are innumerable other things that computers eventually will do that they're not doing currently because they're not quite cheap enough, fast enough, or people simply do not understand a problem well enough.
INTERVIEWER: Do you think the status of computer science or the computer industry in our society will change? Will computer scientists become like the physicists in the early twentieth century, making great breakthroughs that significantly change society?
LAMPSON: No. It will be nothing like the status of physicists in the early twentieth century. Most people didn't even know physicists existed until 1945, when they became well known because of the atom bomb. I don't think computers are dramatic enough to compare with that. But the saying, "The computer revolution hasn't yet begun," means that in twenty years there will be a computer on every fingernail. They will be pervasive in ways we can foresee, and in many ways which we can't. This will result in a tremendous change in the way the world works, just as the automobile resulted in a tremendous change. But it will also take a long time, just as the automobile took a long time to change society. In 1920 when the automobile was first introduced, it was very hard to predict the consequences. Some were obvious, but not all of them. This will be even more true with the computer because the changes it creates will be much more profound.
INTERVIEWER: Do you see any problems with a computer on every fingernail in twenty years?
LAMPSON: I don't see anything wrong with that. Certainly on every wrist. Computers are there to help and I hope they will do that in a positive way.
I recently read an interesting article about how encryption techniques could give individuals more control over how their personal data is disseminated. It is always hard to predict how these things will actually come out because a lot of political issues are involved as well as technical ones, but that article is an interesting illustration of how computer technology can give individuals more control over their lives. Even in situations where big organizations like banks are intimately and unavoidably involved in our lives, we can still find ways to give individuals far more control by using machines cleverly. Ten years ago nobody could have imagined that computers would give us more individual control. In fact, everybody thought the exact opposite would happen.
INTERVIEWER: What do you see as problem areas for the personal computers that exist today?
LAMPSON: Personal computers are fairly junky. I don't define that as a problem. They're new and people are learning about them, and they're getting better rapidly. Alan Kay made a great comment about the Mac–it was the first computer good enough to criticize. It makes sense for people who are building the next generation of computers or programs to think about what's wrong with the current ones, in order to make the next ones better.
That's why I think the idea of computer literacy is such a rotten one. By computer literacy I mean learning to use the current generation of BASIC and word-processing programs. That has nothing to do with reality. It's true that a lot of jobs now require BASIC programming, but the notion that BASIC is going to be fundamental to your ability to function in the information-processing society of the twenty-first century is complete balderdash. There probably won't be any BASIC in the twenty-first century.
INTERVIEWER: So how should we prepare ourselves for the future?
LAMPSON: To hell with computer literacy. It's absolutely ridiculous. Study mathematics. Learn to think. Read. Write. These things are of more enduring value. Learn how to prove theorems: A lot of evidence has accumulated over the centuries that suggests this skill is transferable to many other things. To study only BASIC programming is absurd.
INTERVIEWER: Is the industry being overrun by BASIC programmers?
LAMPSON: No, and I don't think there's anything particularly harmful about programming in BASIC. What is bad is that people get very worried and feel that their children won't have a future if they don't learn to program in BASIC. There's no reason for them to worry.
INTERVIEWER: But nobody knows for certain what skills will be required.
LAMPSON: Well, there's some truth to that, but we have some idea of the direction in which computer science is evolving. You can look at the systems that are built in research laboratories and get a feeling for it. You could have visited Xerox in 1975 and gotten a very good sense of what the high end of the personal computer world was going to be like in 1985.
INTERVIEWER: Do you think we'll see the day when everyone will write their own programs?
LAMPSON: There are different degrees of programming. When the SmallTalk system was built, Alan Kay said one of his visions was that children would be able to use it and write interesting programs. But it didn't work that way. He said SmallTalk was like providing children with a lot of bricks: Children can build certain kinds of structures from bricks, but it's a very rare child that will be able to invent the arch.
If programmming just means giving the computer instructions, I think everybody will do that at some level. Most business people operate a spreadsheet and that's programming in some sense. I think you'll see more of that. Creative programming is another matter.
INTERVIEWER: As a programmer, did you find that your work became an all-consuming part of your life?
LAMPSON: I went through that stage earlier in life, but not anymore. I'm too old for that.
Copyright 1986, 2008, All Rights Reserved, Susan Lammers
Copyright 2008, All Rights Reserved,


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I must apologize for being very absent over the last week; but we had a busy weekend of events, fun, love and mini adventures.
I'll share more later, but can you guess what we did from this collage? I'll be catching up on all your blogs this weekend since I will be laying low! 😘❤


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Fresh face for Assembly Dist. 1
After taking 63.8 percent of the Siskiyou vote in November, first-time Assembly member Brian Dahle is confident that his experiences in agriculture and with the Lassen County Board of Supervisors will help him take local issues to the state level.
In an interview Dec. 12, Dahle said he believes that he will bring to the California Assembly a greater understanding of how state programs are implemented at the local level – including any problems that county governments might have "where the rubber meets the road."
Asked what that means for Dist. 1, Dahle said that as a third-generation farmer he has first-hand experience with many of the environmental issues in Siskiyou County, including Total Maximum Daily Loads, the Klamath dam agreements and forest management. On the latter issues, Dahle said that he is opposed to the removal of the dams and that he would like to see fire issues in the national forests addressed with ground-level management of tree density through planned thinning projects.
In addition to natural resources, Dahle said he has a major focus on balancing the state budget, a task for which he feels suited after helping Lassen County become debt-free. Asked for a specific fix to the state budget problems, he said that he will likely look at reforming the pension program, which, according to a 2011 Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research paper, constitutes approximately 5-6 percent of California's General Fund budget, or about $5 billion.
Dahle said that another target will be regulation of businesses – regulations he feels need to be cut back to allow businesses to operate more freely. While specific regulations were not discussed, he did note that he feels that one of the biggest problems is the number of regulations business owners face.
With a multitude of issues across Dist. 1's large square footage, Dahle said he feels he can still keep in touch with constituents to hear their concerns during his time in office. "I've lived it," Dahle said of life at the rural level, "and people respect that."