text:
Railroad Earth's, "Captain Nowhere," falls like a beautiful tear on the tumultuous face of humanity. Exposing a wonderful maturity throughout, Todd, Tim, John, Andy, and Andrew each freely offer one another all the space they need to create a multidimensional experience, while at the same time bringing about a singular effect. I marveled over, and deeply appreciated, the openness in which this small sample of songs (6) was delivered. Not afraid to look directly at what ails us, Railroad Earth sees right past the pettiness of issue in adding their voice, and touch that place within each of us that recognizes the deeper causes of today's symptoms. I couldn't help but feel the music rising out of the depths of time—time with one another, time on the road, time with the fans, (they molding us, we molding them) each of us growing together over the years as we reach for the gold ring down inside. This album couldn't be a better expression of what's at the band's core in a beautifully simplistic manner. I found myself welling over as some part of me kept opening up throughout the ride, from somewhere deep, profound. Was it the music? Was it what they had to say? Or was it that Captain Nowhere reveals all?
Opening with, "Blazin' A Trail", Tim and Andy immediately take us down the locomotive tracks with violin and banjo wheels a-spinnin', putting us on the run, busting us out. From what? A jail of our own defining? Physicality itself? We have to wonder as, "Only By the Light," puts an immediate stop to our sense of fleeing and sets us down by a serene pond, where we look to a sky of both meaning and being. Contained by Tim's violin, with gentle, melodic undertones occasionally rising to the surface in guitar and mandolin, Andrew bares all as we feel his cry for a better world, a better place . . . and we cry out with him.
Without a misstep, Todd adds to the dialogue in, "Addin' My Voice," and what a voice he has become. Touching on sounds that made me think, "Black Bear," Todd sings about a very different beast, offering an almost ironic delivery considering the peace the music offers and the disgust referenced. Yes! We're all tired of this ridiculousness. Can we please move on? Lead the way, guys! We're with you.
Allowing us time to ponder, we are next taken through the instrumental arrangement, "Berkeley Flash." This song could not have been more appropriately named, or delivered. Taking us for a pleasant stroll through the forest of sound, we are happy to point out each note and part as the musical landscape unfolds before us. I felt as if I was listening to six different songs being played at once, each with their own concert hall, their own expression . . . then suddenly, we're slapped together, and we're all in the same raft as we float the river. Breaking things up mid-song, Tim grabs us, rolls us over a few times, and releases us unto an unfolding of string, piano and percussion, which immediately expands into the wonderful everywhere of note and chord. Tim then reappears to neatly wrap things up, almost as if he were saying, "Did that really happen?" I don't know Tim, you tell me . . . preferably live at the next show.
We couldn't be better prepared for, "Raven's Child," than we are when struck by an oriental opening in which to deliver not a legend as one might think, but rather, our truth. In the midst of a fabulously haunting musical score, Todd's voice offers great comfort as he points the way. Simply put, we are the eyes of the world, we only need to become what we are . . . then we'll see the world with the eyes of itself. This is awakening!
Hey, "Captain Nowhere," where ARE we going to? Mutiny on the train tracks? Yes! Slavery's not over, just taken another form, another people. Yet truth cannot be contained, and it will shake the very heavens apart to remain free. The Captain's countenance is formed with subtle ambiance and driving force. Do you feel the waves? The truth in their expression? Railroad Earth means this one. Ship of fools, anyone?
While I understand the limitations of a studio album for a live band, Railroad Earth appears to have easily stretched those boundaries by planting seeds that left this listener thinking, "Boy, I'd sure like to hear that live!"
If I were to have any critique of this album, it would be that it left me wanting more. However, while just six songs, I certainly did not feel like the message wasn't delivered. Matter of fact, they could have just taken out the breaks, blended each song right into the next, and all would have been fine by me as one miraculous cry of an aching, yet striving soul. At just seven bucks minus a penny, this album offers infinitely more than the two-mocha value price tag. Not only a great addition to any music collection, but also a heart opening experience there for the sharing. Thank you, Railroad Earth, for an honest, genuine revealing of yourselves. Your subtlety and power of emotion were not lost on these ears. "Sometimes the songs we hear are the songs of our own." Good job, guys!


text:
Bangalore, Karnataka
Amazon is looking for a passionate, talented, and inventive Scientist with a strong machine learning background to help build industry-leading Speech and Language technology. Our mission is to push the envelope in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Natural Language Understanding (NLU), and Audio Signal Processing, in order to provide the best-possible experience for our customers.
As a Speech and Language Scientist, you will work with talented peers to develop novel algorithms and modeling techniques to advance the state of the art in spoken language understanding. Your work will directly impact our customers in the form of products and services that make use of speech and language technology. You will leverage Amazon s heterogeneous data sources and large-scale computing resources to accelerate advances in spoken language understanding.
We are hiring in the area of speech recognition (ASR).,
Graduate degree (MS or PhD) in Electrical Engineering, Computer Sciences, or Mathematics with specialization in speech recognition, natural language processing, or machine learning.
Familiar with programming languages such as C/C++, Java, Perl or Python.
Experience in building speech recognition and natural language processing systems (e.g. commercial speech products or government speech projects)
Solid Machine Learning background and familiar with standard speech and machine learning techniques.
Scientific thinking and the ability to invent, a track record of thought leadership and contributions that have advanced the field
Solid software development experience
Good written and spoken communication skills.
Amazon is an Equal Opportunity-Affirmative Action Employer Minority / Female / Disability / Veteran / Gender Identity / Sexual Orientation
Other details

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Misc. links Jan 15th - Feb 15th
This article, The Rise of the New Groupthink, does much to explain why I need my own office, and why I hate brainstorming meetings. ¶
Slavoj Zizek writes about The Revolt of the Salaried Bourgeoisie. ¶
The Scale of the Universe 2 is an interactive Powers of Ten. ¶
EUscreen is an archive of free videos from a number of Europe's public TV broadcasters. Portuguese RTP is conspicously absent — after all, our state broadcaster is notorious for its expensive and thoroughly copyrighted archives, despite being funded by taxpayers (our government does intend to fix this, though, by privatizing all this publicly-funded heritage as prescribed by the neoliberal zeitgeist, rather than giving free access to the archives to those who paid for them — for that would be Socialism, and therefore evil). ¶
It seems an English plainclothes police officer was running after himself for a while after being mistaken for a burglar by the CCTV operator. The whole incident has 'idea for short film' written all over it. ¶
Here are recipes for 'old-school Instagram filters'. Meaning: how to take analog photos that look like those digital photos that look analog… I think I'll have an headache. No wonder I'm more interested in messing with JPEGs. ¶
GIF: A Technical History is quite an interesting and accessible post about that nasty but cute, little image format that won't go away. ¶
David Bordwell's analysis of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is something I recommend you read if you've seen the film. I've found it great and demanding like a very fragile but precise piece of clockwork. It's unfortunate we spectators aren't used to stories this intricate told in such an economical fashion. I'd like more of this, please. ¶
Lists of Note lists lists. Of note. ¶
Rob Bechizza's Mixtape of the Lost Decade. A pop history of the phantom decade between the 1970s and the 1980s. Which explains a lot, even if it'd mean I would now be on my forties. ¶
On Goals Scored, a blog about great football (soccer) infographics. Football for nerds, yay! ¶
musicForProgramming(); has a few cool ambient mixtapes that are quite good for all kinds of work that require focus (and not just computer programming). ¶


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On raising a son on the autism spectrum, progressive politics, pop culture, and coffee addiction.
Thursday, December 15, 2005
In the beginning
I continued to think about it as I considered the explosion in the rate of autism diagnoses in recent years. Clearly, I thought, exposure to mercury via immunizations is one thing that has changed in that time; what else has changed that perhaps I should consider?
I thought about it months later when Astryngia posted these thoughts about stressful pregnancies.
I thought about it most recently when I read Gretchen's post about Henry's difficult entry into the world.
It's still an incomplete thought, but it goes like this: how many of the children who are currently diagnosed with autism would not have made it, say, twenty years earlier? How many would never have been conceived? How many would have miscarried early? How many of them (how many of us?) would have died in childbirth? Without the tremendous medical advances that have been made in infertility treatment, perinatology and the maintenance of high-risk pregnancies, neonatal intensive care, etc., how many of our children would not have survived the first hours, the first days, the first weeks, the first months of life? How many would not have been success stories in Darwin's survival of the fittest?
There are a lot of us out here in the blogosphere posting about our children and our current struggles, victories, advances and setbacks with autism spectrum disorders. But not many of us have posted about the path that led us to where we are. It makes me wonder:
How many of us struggled with infertility? (I did.)
How many of us lost other pregnancies? (I did.)
How many of us had high-risk pregnancies with our ASD babies? (I did.)
How many of us had complicated or troubled deliveries? (I did.)
How many of our children had to remain in the hospital longer than the "typical" newborn? (Mine did.)
Maybe it's all a coincidence. But I'd be interested to know if anyone else has had a similar experience.
16 comments:
- kristina said...
No to everything but: Charlie, big (8 lb 3 oz, 21 1/2 in--I am 5 feet tall) and beautiful began life in the ICU. He had contracted a strep-B infection during labor (21 hours). I had insisted on a natural delivery; I think a Caesarean might not have been a bad idea: They had to use a vacuum pump to get him out. He was my first (and last) pregnancy.
I pasted his sonograms into his babybook and his big brained head and huge eyes (the sockets) are exactly the same as when I watched him sleeping tonight.
My husband rehashes all this about once a month and I just shake my head and tell him, we have to take care of the boy in the house. You can kill yourself with regret and then what could we do for Charlie?
- December 16, 2005 12:55 AM
- Octobermom said...
I was pregnant with India through what was probably the absolute saddest time in my life. My mother is determined to prove that my state of mind was what caused India's "problems". The pregnancy itself was easy and the delivery easier (35 minutes from first contraction to delivery).
We both, however, tested positive for Group B strep and remained in the hospital for 4 days when they sent us home and said India was "just perfect".
- December 16, 2005 9:54 AM
- gretchen said...
This is exactly, EXACTLY, the type of conversation I have been wanting to have. My husband also likes to rehash the birth and say that "they didn't get Henry out fast enough". Could this be true?? Is it worth discussing? Could the answers help someone else?
I like to think that the scientists studying autism are already on this track, but one thing I've learned from Henry is that I can't assume any of the "experts" have thought of the same things we parents think of.
Looking forward to continuing this discussion...
- December 16, 2005 9:56 AM
- Eileen said...
When I first got pregnant with Andrew, Brian was only 4 months old. I was teaching preschool at this time and I was tired all the time. I didn't remember feeling this way with Brian's pregnancy. I attributed the fatigue to now having a baby to look after while pregnant and teaching. It could have very well been, but my blood test came back that I was anemic and they put me on iron pills. I also had a reoccurring cold of some sort that I couldn't get rid of. I never went to the doctor because I didn't believe that I could take any medication. My doctor did tell me I could take tylenol and I did.
Andrew's birth was similar to Brian's with no complications.
I have compared the two of my boys so many times tying to figure out what was different.
Andrew was a pound heavier than Brian and I believe most of that weight was in his head. Brian had a small head so I noticed the size of Andrew's. Andrew had bigger hands, not sure if this is significant. Andrew had an undescended testicle and needed to have surgery at 18 mos to remove it. Andrew was jaundice. Brian was a good eater, nursed easily and gained weight quickly. Andrew had a hard time nursing and lost weight. Enough to alarm the doctor the have me keep bringing him in to monitor weight gain in the beginning months. Andrew was tongue tied and his frenulum clipped during the same surgery at 18 months. I thought here comes the speech after the tongue tied thing was taken care of, so another sad reality set in when he didn't improve in his speech from this surgery.
At 3 1/2 months old Andrew broke out in these weird oval shaped like hives on his little body two days after receiving a round of 4 shots.
Andrew broke out in a rash after taking amoxycilin. He has an overgrowth of yeast we are still trying to treat.
Anyway, although pregnancy and birth were not anything so different, there were these other factors that make me think often.
- December 16, 2005 12:39 PM
Easy pregnancy, 1 month early delivery but full-size, no newborn complications, emergency C-section (I'm too small to deliver, apparently), and he was a bit jandiced. I had one miscarriage after him and then one other child (no complications except for same C-section problem).
- December 16, 2005 2:19 PM
Yes to all the things you mentioned. G. was born at 34 weeks, stayed in the hospital 2 extra weeks. I had IUGR, pre-term labor, low amniotic fluid, bedrest, and G. was breech, resulting in a c-section. The interesting thing is that my buddy M. (whom I met in the special care nursery) had her son 10 weeks early, after pre-eclampsia, etc., and he was also diagnosed Asperger's.
We have never really re-hashed this at home, but I have discussed this with my other friends who have children. And it is amazing how many of us had something go wrong with our pregnancies, or had a child with a disability or some other issue.
But I am just glad G. is here. I had her sister S. 2 years later, perfect pregnancy, resulting in a c-section after no dilating. S. is neuro-typical.
You raise some very good questions.
- December 16, 2005 4:26 PM
- Wendy said...
I don't think my pregnancy could have been more difficult. I was pregnant with twins and had a gallbladder attack the same day I found out I was pregnant. At 14 weeks they had to remove it (I frequently wonder if that's what "did it"). I experienced preterm labor starting at 24 weeks, high blood pressure, edema, protein in my urine, carpal tunnel syndrome, you name it, I had it. After being on bedrest for 2 months, I delivered the twins, via c-section at 34 weeks. My son, who is now autistic, was 5 pds. His twin sister was 5 pds, 11 oz. She ended up on oxygen and stayed in the NICU for a week. My son came home with me two days later and has been healthy, except for one ear infection, since the day he was born.
I've called to see if there was thimerisol in any of the vacs the twins received but there wasn't any. They did get flu shots when they were six months old though and flu shots DO contain thimerisol. I wish I knew then what I know now (although I'm not convinced of the connection).
I do know that I took antibiotics a couple of times during my pregnancy so I'm not sure of a yeast connection. I also took drugs to stop labor many times.
I wish I knew what caused this...I really, really do.
- December 16, 2005 7:46 PM
I had considered this idea even before my autistic son was born. My older son was constantly sick and I wondered if I had perpetuated my 'weak' genes (as I have severe allergies and asthma). Would my son have survived had he been born 50 years ago? The answer is probably no, but that doesn't mean it causes autism. It just makes my son's more susceptible. I have read something that has caused me to realize that it is not the root cause. The following is a quote from Jean Genet of Byonetics about the idea that autism is a complex disease with multiple causes:
"This assertion violates a truth that history demonstrates very
clearly: All epidemics in the history of mankind have a simple
cause. An epidemic is a sudden, widespread onset of a disease or
disorder. It is a statistical improbability that 50 unrelated
factors would all simultaneously manifest themselves in 1991 without any precedent. Think bubonic plague, swine flu, smallpox, HIV, SARS. Think autism."
Autism is not just increasing in coutries with good health care.
- December 19, 2005 8:02 AM
- MothersVox said...
M. was conceived 3 months after I miscarried.
Pregnancy wasn't unusual, but I was very sad--depressed actually--and not really expecting her to be born . . . As excited as I had been about the prior pregnancy, I was that skeptical about the pregnancy that resulted in M.'s birth. I sort of had this feeling of "I'll believe it when I see it." I didn't really believe she was going to be born.
On the advice of my doctor, I went back on my anti-depressant medication in the second trimester, and have often wondered if this affected M.'s neurological development. (Except that M. is an awful lot like her father, and his mom wasn't taking any antidepressant meds in France in the 1950s.;-)
M. was born by C-section . . . breech presentation and truly appalling care at the hands of NY's supposedly excellent "Midwivery Services" at St. Luke's/Roosevelt.
But she did not seem to have any delivery injuries (other than a tiny scratch on her bottom from the ob's scalpel.) Was a little jaundiced, but came home from the hospital with us . . .
Had feeding problems . . . my milk didn't come in (maybe from the C-section stress . . .).
And she had hip dysplasia (not uncommon in breech presentations), so had to wear a Pavlik harness for three months to correct the hip socket shape. That definitely altered the trajectory of her gross motor development.
Anything else? Not that I can think of . . . I think your point is interesting . . . Could these neurological differences be a feature of advanced maternal age? That is an interesting question . . .
- December 19, 2005 8:06 PM
i'm entering the conversation rather late (!) but i'll say that i had a HUGE amount of trouble conceiving but once pregnant with fluffy, everything went swimmingly: easy pregnancy, easy first birth (natural, 10 hours, slipped out after 1/2 hr pushing, pronounced 9.9 apgar, went home with me 2 days later) but he did have TERRIBLE colic and trouble with jaundice and the most significant thing that i can think of is that i received 2 shots of Rhogam early in the pg because i'm Rh negative and those shots are loaded with mercury. that's the only place fluffy could have gotten mercury, that and what was floating around my system in the breast milk he drank and drank and drank since i insisted all his vaccinations were thimerosal free.
i've had these same conversations.
- January 24, 2006 4:32 PM
I DID have a horrible delivery with Casey. In the last few weeks of my pregnancy she had dropped so low that it put my back in major stress. Unable to walk from pain my labor was induced a week early. The contractions came one on top of the other and it caused Casey to panic. The cord became wrapped around her neck, her blood pressure and heart rate dropped. Although she was delivered within 4 minutes of this event I still wonder if it was just too much for her. Also, I suffer from anxiety and took paxil for the entire pregnancy. Of course, having been told it was completely safe.
FYI, the 2005-2006 fluzone vaccine comes in four different presentations. One of which contains the preservative thimerosal. The pediatric presentations DO NOT contain thimerosal and are preservative free.
Still, I've noticed change in Casey since her 2 doses of fluzone. Alot less eye contact, blank stares and what seems to be deafness...but isn't.
- February 09, 2006 2:53 AM
Similar for us - jaundice, acid reflux, latching trouble. Apparently a lot this comes from a genetic defect in processing b12 (we did the test to confirm he had it). We give him b12 and his hearing "turned on" and in combo with yeast treatments he started doing the stairs. He went from zero words a few months ago to about 25 today. Progress...
- November 30, 2006 9:36 AM
- abby said...
Way late on this one, but Hallie qualifies for all of the above: my partner had trouble conceiving; we resorted to IVF; had an okay twin pregnancy until it became a not-okay one with premature labor at around 21 or 22 weeks and presentation at 23 weeks 90% effaced and 4 cm dilated; followed by 4 months in the NICU and the loss of Hallie's twin sister; lots of medical intervention and problems thereafter. So, yeah, I think we qualify.
- November 05, 2009 10:40 AM
I recently came accross your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I dont know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often.
- December 28, 2009 3:15 AM
- IVF Clinic India said...
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- January 12, 2010 8:25 AM
- Rachel said...
Wow. There are so many factors that could contribute, or might just be coincidence. My pregnancy was pretty routine, I did not have trouble conceiving, but I was working full-time while pregnant. The only really negative thing about the pregnancy was that I swelled a LOT in the last month or so. Sean was born exactly 4 weeks early, but didn't seem to have any initial preemie issues. He was readmitted four days after his birth because he developed severe jaundice. He did have a little trouble with nursing in the beginning which exacerbated the jaundice. Something I've wondered about: on his ultrasounds, they noticed a spot on his heart. We had a second ultrasound later in the pregnancy to check that out, but it didn't appear to be anything. I've wondered if any other children with autism might have had the same anomaly.
- August 05, 2010 1:15 PM


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Any category or concept is going to leave important things out. It's the nature of abstraction. Using the term 'Black' to describe a group of people can obscure more than it reveals. As a biological category it is meaningless, as is the concept of race generally. There is no clear biologically relevant distinction between blacks and non-blacks. There are some genetic diseases, such as sickle-cell anemia, that are more prevalent among those with African ancestry compared to those with European ancestry. Other diseases prevalent in the Black community, like hypertension, however, are related to social, not biological phenomena.
Even as a social category, it abstracts a lot of differences. Within the group of Black people, there are men and women, there are children and adults, there are wealthy and poor, there are powerful and disenfranchised, there are those with access to resources and those without, there those with legal status and those without. So a lot of detail and nuance is lost in the use of the concept.
Despite this, it is still very meaningful as a social category. Black people in the United States, for example, have less wealth, less income, suffer poorer health, and are disproportionately incarcerated compared to people who are not Black. To say that the concept of race has no biological value and that individuals are what they are, cannot be made into an argument to deny the social reality of racism. Racism is real. It is brutal. And in the system of caste that is US racism, Black people, and indigenous people, are at the bottom.
What about the concept of 'People of Color'? That, too, obscures a great deal. It obscures differentials in political power; it obscures class differences; it obscures gender differences; it obscures questions of imperialism; it obscures the crucial distinction in this world of those who have papers and passports and can cross borders and those who do not, cannot, and are 'illegal'.
Does it, however, have merit, like the concept of Black race or ethnicity, that countervails what it costs in abstraction? It has the merit of excluding whites, who, while they can be oppressed on gender or class lines, are at the top of the racial caste system. It can be a useful substitute for the term 'non-white'. But it can also lead to simple-minded analysis.
When whites in movements argue that everyone needs to get over race, transcend it, and work on common issues of class, against capitalism and the ruling elite, antiracists are unimpressed because such an approach enables the most privileged and powerful groups to impose their agenda on the rest. Such an approach denies problems of privilege and differentials of power within movements and organizations for social change. Denial is no basis for solidarity. As a substitute for denial, antiracists ask white activists to think about privilege, to be attuned to hierarchies and exclusion that can happen in organizations, and to work to overcome them. Pretending equality is already here is a recipe for maintaining inequality. Addressing and attempting to make structural redress for inequality can make a group, or a movement, stronger.
The way to fight racism is not to deny differences and hierarchies of privilege but to bring them out in the open and try to change them. But if that is the case, the 'People of Color' label is often not helpful, for several reasons.
First, because it leads to the same kinds of denial as comes from denying race altogether. There is a hierarchy of privilege within the group 'People of Color'. At the bottom are poor African Americans, indigenous people, and Latinos. At the top are an elite of people from different ethnicities selected and adopted into the ruling class. In between are groups of immigrants, some of whom have historically had a degree of upward mobility and are used against those below them as rhetorical devices: 'model minorities' who are supposed to have 'made it', proving that racism does not hold 'People of Color' back and thus that African Americans (as an example) have not 'made it' through their own fault. There are also groups of brutally exploited and oppressed immigrants and refugees, who work at low wages to try to remit money to support their families in poor countries under constant threat of deportation. These groups are treated differently within the racial system. They are subject to different stereotypes. They have different, and sometimes opposed, interests. Black people, for example, have an interest in a tighter labor market, while immigrants have an interest in the chance to go to the US to work. Many institutions, and often the law, think affirmative action obligations to Blacks to redress centuries of slavery and Jim Crow segregation and violence are met when an upper class Asian is hired.
Collapsing all of these groups under the rubric of 'People of Color' does exclude those at the top of the hierarchy (white people) but it leaves the rest of the hierarchy intact. As a result, people at the top of the new hierarchy – in movement organizations these are often drawn from the ranks of class-privileged academics from the least oppressed racial groups – can claim the oppression of everyone below them as their own. Rather than trying to understand and addressing our own privilege and hierarchy, we can posture and be righteous. This does not help those we ought to be most concerned about – those who are most oppressed, those who are at the bottom of the hierarchy.
If addressing privilege and working against it within social movements and organizations is onerous, then why should whites shoulder the burden alone, since they are not the only ones with privilege? If, conversely, as antiracists claim, addressing privilege and working against it is a positive personal growth experience, then why should whites monopolize such a wonderful thing? We could all benefit from understanding how privilege and hierarchy work, and taking an honest look at where we stand. Perhaps we could start by being a little more specific about the racial system and its impacts, which do not come down on everyone equally. Using a better set of categories might help. The categories I use for North America, with their own flaws and problems, are: European or white, South Asian, East Asian, West Asian, Latino, African or Black, and Indigenous; always with the question of citizenship and status (immigrant, refugee, status/non-status).
Recognizing these differences is particularly important when 'People of Color' groups, caucuses, and organizations are formed. A 'People of Color' caucus in a community antiwar group is an example. The idea here is good: to create an autonomous space where an oppressed group can work and develop without constantly negotiating boundaries and issues of privilege. So long as the creation of such a space does not come at the expense of representation of the oppressed in larger, integrated groups (in the antiwar example, the existence of a caucus should not prevent people of color from being represented in the leadership of the larger antiwar organization or coalition). But if the autonomous space is a 'people of color' space where highly privileged people of color interact with much less privileged people of color, the most oppressed still have no space, and can now be denied a voice, of their own.
It's true that no set of categories or concepts is perfect, and it would be easy to come up with arguments against the set I've chosen. But starting with a concept like 'People of Color', which obscures privilege and hierarchy within the racial system itself, can often make work harder for antiracists.
Justin Podur is a writer and activist based in Toronto.


text:
The 2009 J.D. Power Initial Quality Survey is out. Lexus takes top marks followed by Porsche, Cadillac, Hyundai and Honda. The worst? Land Rover, Smart, And Mini.
J.D. Power And Associates ranks brands by the number of problems per 100 cars sold. The industry average is 108 problems per 100 vehicles (PP100), down from 118 the previous year. The best performers were Lexus (84 PP100), Porshce (90 PP100), Cadillac (91 PP100), Hyundai (95 PP100) and Honda (99 PP100). Domestic automakers Ford, Chevy and Mercury were all above the industry average, with Chrysler way down near the bottom at 136 PP100. The worst performance came from Mini, with a whopping 165 PP100. Full results below.
J.D. Power and Associates Reports:
Embattled U.S. Automakers Make Substantial Gains in Initial Quality,
Outpacing Industry-Wide Improvement
While Quality Gap Continues to Narrow, Import Nameplates Capture 15 of 22 Segment Awards
WESTLAKE VILLAGE, Calif.: 22 June 2009 - New vehicles sold by Chrysler, Ford and GM's domestic brands have improved in initial quality by an average of 10 percent, compared with 2008, surpassing the 8-percent rate of improvement by the industry overall, according to the J.D. Power and Associates 2009 Initial Quality StudySM (IQS) released today.
Overall, the industry average for initial quality is 108 problems per 100 vehicles (PP100) in 2009, down from 118 PP100 in 2008. Initial quality for domestic brands has improved to an average of 112 PP100 in 2009 from 124 PP100 in 2008. Lower PP100 scores indicate a lower rate of problem incidences and higher quality.
"Even in the face of unprecedented challenges, the Detroit automakers are keeping their focus on designing and building high-quality vehicles, which is a precondition for long-term success," said David Sargent, vice president of automotive research at J.D. Power and Associates. "High quality generally translates into reduced re-engineering costs and lower warranty expenses during a vehicle's life cycle. High quality also enhances an automaker's reputation for reliability, which is a critical purchase consideration for many consumers."
In addition to the marked improvement by domestic automakers, many import brands continued to perform well in 2009. Lexus leads the overall nameplate rankings, averaging 84 PP100. Following in the rankings are Porsche, Cadillac (which moves from 10th rank position in 2008 to third in 2009), Hyundai (improves from 13th rank position in 2008 to fourth in 2009) and Honda, rounding out the top five. Suzuki posts the largest improvement in ranking, moving from 32nd place in 2008 to ninth in 2009.
The study finds that initial quality for newly launched and redesigned models in 2009 has improved compared with previous years. Historically, all-new models have typically launched with below-average levels of initial quality. However, several all-new models in 2009, including the Hyundai Genesis, Kia Borrego, Toyota Venza and Volkswagen CC, perform considerably better than their respective segment averages. Many redesigned models in 2009 also show notable improvement from the previous generation-particularly the Acura TL, Ford F-150, Honda Pilot and Nissan Z.
"Achieving high levels of initial quality in all-new models is one of the greatest challenges for manufacturers," said Sargent. "Now that more manufacturers are getting their launch quality right straight out of the gate, consumers can expect the quality of new vehicles to continue to rise."
The Initial Quality Study serves as the industry benchmark for new-vehicle quality measured at 90 days of ownership. The study is used extensively by manufacturers worldwide to help them design and build better vehicles and by consumers to help them in their vehicle purchase decisions. Initial quality has been shown over the years to be an excellent predictor of long-term durability, which can significantly impact consumer purchase decisions. The study captures problems experienced by owners in two distinct categories-design-related problems and defects and malfunctions.


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Top 10 Hottest NBA Cheerleading Squads
I love this game, but I also love the view at the arena too and that definitely includes the ladies. HoopsVibe's Very Quick Call: Some squads can be debated, but the best is simply the best. Now that the NBA season is underway, it is time to size up which teams have the right support. By support we of course mean sexy women barely dressed dancing around them while they play basketball. In the great tradition of beautiful cheerleaders HoopsVibe ranks to Top 10 Hottest NBA Cheerleading squads of the 2013 NBA season. Read More


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Geffré, Anne and Braun, Jean-Pierre and Germain, Claude and Palanché, Florence and Kueper, Robert and Trumel, Catherine. Comparison of measurements of canine plasma glucose, creatinine, urea, total proteins, alanine aminotransferase, and alkaline phosphatase obtained with the APOLOWAKO and Vitros 250 analyzers. (2008) Research in Veterinary Science, 84 (3). 354-360. ISSN 0034-5288


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PHOENIX - Rex Ryan said he knows for a fact that the Jets are not "actively trying to trade Darrelle [Revis],'' but the coach certainly seems to be bracing for the possibility.
"To me, I'll coach who's here,'' he said. "On opening day, we'll see who that is.''
Speaking at the AFC coaches' breakfast at the NFL's owners meetings Tuesday, Ryan termed reports of Revis being shipped to another team as "speculation.'' This past weekend, though, owner Woody Johnson said he would trade Revis if it improved the Jets. There have been reports that the Bucs are willing to give a first-round pick for the All-Pro cornerback, who is rehabbing from ACL surgery.
"It's almost like 'Well, it's a foregone conclusion,' '' Ryan said of losing his best defensive player. "I don't believe that. With that, I'm not naive enough to think [he'll definitely be back] . . . Obviously, there are going to be several people who are interested in your good players, whether it's Revis or anybody else. There's always that.''
Ryan said he would be "in the loop'' regarding any decisions the Jets make on Revis' future. But he said the ultimate decision-maker will be new general manager John Idzik. Ryan also distanced himself from any smoking guns that might be left lying around Florham Park should Revis be dealt away.
"I have nothing to do with trades,'' he said. "My job is to coach the football team, and that's exactly what I'm going to do.''
At least in 2013, because Ryan's future with the Jets might be tied to Revis'. If the Jets trade their best player, even though he is coming off knee surgery, it would be the strongest signal yet that they are rebuilding. In that case, Idzik might want to part ways with Ryan and bring in his own coach to replace the one he has inherited.
If Ryan can make the playoffs in 2013, though, with or without Revis, it will be difficult to get rid of him.
Ultimately, Ryan's future likely will be determined by the number of wins and losses in the upcoming season, which could be a transition year for the franchise.
"That's cool,'' Ryan said. "That's good with me. That's all I ever ask . . . I'm not afraid. I've never been afraid of anything in my life and I'm certainly not afraid of this.''
After being humbled by a 6-10 finish in 2012, a season that ended with three losses and a second consecutive postseason as a spectator, Ryan said it did not take him long to find his bravado once again.
Asked whether the Jets can make the playoffs this year, Ryan smirked and said: "That's not my goal.'' He spoke about knowing that the Jets are going to "bring it every game'' and knowing that fans want a team "that plays with unmatched determination.''
"I know what it takes,'' he said. "My team is going to be ready.''
But his team already has had a swift change in personnel, if not personality. The Jets have lost several key players to free agency, including tight end Dustin Keller, defensive tackle Mike DeVito and Pro Bowl safety LaRon Landry.
"That one hurt a little bit,'' Ryan said of losing Landry after only one season with the Jets.
Imagine how much pain losing Revis would inflict on him.
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Join the association for the segmental concrete pavement industry. ICPI is your resource for emerging trends, technology and education. As the voice of the industry, we work to promote and keep you informed on the industry interests.
The Interlocking Concrete Pavement Institute (ICPI), founded in 1993, is the North American trade association representing the segmental concrete paving industry.
Construction Tolerance and Recommendations for Interlocking Concrete Pavements


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Have a Healthy Day !!
Welcome to the world of health from Ayurveda conducted by Dr. Nikul Patel
Please start the following Medicines for three months and contact after for further medications and guidance.
Medicines for treatment
Diet :
1. Avoid Fermented and stale food
2. Avoid food from outside selling
3. Avoid Curd, Buttermilk, Lemon all sour and salty food,
4. Avoid Oily and fried food
I also advise you to have such Panchkarma therapies for fast recovery
Panchkarma treatment
1. Abhyan – swedan
2. Basti karma – Brihan basti karma
3. Nasya karma
4. Shirodharakarma
I advise you following Yogasan and Pranayam Procedures for better results…
Yoga and Pranayam treatment
1. Paschimotanasan
2. Chakrashan
3. Sarvangasan
4. Uttanpadasan
5. Pavan muktasana
In Pranayama
1. Bhasrika pranayam
2. Anulom – vilom pranayam
3. Kapalbhanti pranayam
Note :
Advises given here are basis on safety and availability of everywhere. Although, result may depends on quality from manufacturer of medicines.
We also have available good quality medicines. We are making medicines on non-commercial basis, and only dispatching from our clinic only. Anyone can carry pure medicines from our place or order to get via courier all over world (Courier charges extra). For getting medicines by online consulting, please send email or send message on whatsapp.
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The developers have been hinting that a major info dump is coming soon™, and that probably includes some more detail about how Vengeance will work in Warlords of Draenor. If you're a long-time reader of the blog, you probably know that we've been pretty hard on Vengeance several times in the past. But with a new expansion, there's new hope for an implementation that actually works well.
The Good
One of the things we do know about the new version of Vengeance is that it won't affect our DPS output. They're finally severing the connection between damage intake and damage output. After years of complaining about the pitfalls and frustrations of that mechanic, I'm considering this a moral victory.
More importantly, it means that for the first time in a long time I'm really enthusiastic about Vengeance. If you recall, most of the objections that Meloree and I have made about Vengeance over the years have centered around the damage output component. We've pointed out the backwards logic of encouraging tanks to take more damage to increase their DPS, the huge discrepancy between damage output in solo play and raids, the feeling of uselessness while off-tanking, the frustration of having little to no control over your DPS output (and thus no way to properly evaluate it), and the way it encourages cheesy tricks like one-tanking and /sit-tanking to game the mechanic. All of that is going away, hopefully for good.
This change is probably the one thing I'm looking forward to most in Warlords. Partly out of a feeling of vindication, but mostly just because of functionality. I can't wait to put out respectable damage in solo and small group content without having to switch to Retribution.
Lessons To Be Learned
Blizzard frequently talks about how they iterate on mechanics, applying the lessons they learn from previous incarnations to improve new versions. I think that severing the DPS connection is obviously one of those cases. But I don't think that's all that the devs can stand to learn from the 5.x implementation of Vengeance.
To illustrate that thought, I want to show you an excerpt from one my my recent heroic Thok logs. In particular, I want to consider a period in the last phase of the encounter immediately after I taunt Thok.
Here's the attack power graph for that section of the fight:
I start at 300k after taunting and rise to over 600k at the peak. This is pretty normal for the last few bosses of the tier, though of course earlier bosses don't hit as hard. But remember, I have around 40k-50k attack power out of combat. That means that as much as 90% of my DPS is coming from Vengeance, rather than my gear, and thus not directly under my control.
But the part that's really eye-opening is the healing graphs. Let's switch to the healing view and filter the log for Eternal Flame. As a point of nomenclature, I use "Word of Glory" to refer to the base heal and "Eternal Flame" to refer to the heal-over-time (HoT) portion to keep them straight. The log, of course, uses the same name for both. But nonetheless, let's look at the plot of healing done per second:
This plot, which includes overhealing, suggests that I'm producing about 150k-250k HPS just with Eternal Flame. And those two spikes are the Word of Glory heals, which are obviously really huge. Let's see exactly how huge:
The base Word of Glory heals are 1M (at ~400k Veng) and 1.5M (over 600k Veng) when I refresh Eternal Flame. The Eternal Flame ticks generated by those casts are ~260k and ~400k, respectively, occurring every ~1.8 seconds.
Note that I have a little over 1 million hit points. That means the base WoG heal is basically a Lay on Hands, limited only by Bastion of Glory ramp-up time. It also means that the HoT, which is providing 140k-220k HPS all by itself, is capable of healing me to full every four to six seconds at high Vengeance.
And that's just Eternal Flame. If you filter the log for Seal of Insight you'll see that it is also healing for 100k-140k per tick, producing another 100k-200k HPS. Combined, these two effects heal for ~250k to 420k every second. That means I'm essentially healing to full every 2-4 seconds just from these two passive sources.
You might note that I'm including overhealing here, but if you've read any of my survivability posts over the last year or so you should already realize that it's a mistake to immediately discount overhealing. Because that overhealing isn't overhealing when you're in a dangerous situation, like during a damage spike. The fact that it overheals when you're safe is irrelevant if it saves your ass when your ass actually needs saving.
It also has implications beyond just spikes. With enough avoidance and mitigation, I'm producing enough healing to keep myself alive without healers against this boss. This is an effect we've seen in Simulationcraft and discussed before. But it's also happening in-game, on fights like Thok and Siegecrafter Blackfuse. On more than one attempt, I've been able to tank each of these bosses for well over a minute after everyone else had died, just with my own self-healing. Other paladins I've talked to have been able to do the same (one even boasts a 3-minute solo on Thok until he hit enrage).
Playing The Blame Game
Now, as far as I can tell, other classes aren't capable of this degree of self-sufficiency. So it's not clear that this problem is all Vengeance's fault. But it's definitely one of several contributing factors. And it underlies one of the lessons we can learn from 5.x Vengeance: I think it is far too generous.
See, Vengeance increases with the boss's raw damage throughout an expansion, and even within a tier. So on early bosses you might only have 200k Vengeance, while later bosses will give you upwards of 500k. And of course, those later bosses do more damage than the earlier bosses do – which is why they give more Vengeance in the first place.
But as the expansion goes on, your mitigation and avoidance keep increasing. So while the 500k Vengeance boss gives you twice as much Vengeance as a 250k boss, your gear upgrades between the time you first encounter those bosses mean that you have more mitigation and avoidance. So you don't actually take twice as much damage from that later boss, because you're avoiding and mitigating more of it.
In addition, our self-healing grows rather generously with attack power thanks to Eternal Flame, Bastion of Glory, and Seal of Insight. So those later bosses are giving us (say) twice as much attack power, and thus roughly twice as much healing througput, without dishing out twice as much damage taken.
To give a more quantitative bent to that thought, consider the ratio of self-healing done to damage taken:
$$ R = \frac{{\rm SH}}{\text{DT}} \propto \frac{{\rm AP}}{(1-A)(1-M)\text{RD}} \propto \frac{k{\rm RD}}{(1-A)(1-M)\text{RD}}$$
Self-healing ${\rm SH}$ is proportional to attack power, which is proportional to some constant $k$ times the boss's raw damage $\text{RD}$. Our damage taken is also proportional to the boss's raw damage, but with additional factors $(1-A)$ and $(1-M)$ to account for our avoidance $A$ and average mitigation $M$ (I'm lumping armor, Shield of the Righteous, and blocking all together here).
Note that if this ratio is below one, then we take more damage than we can heal up. But if it goes above one, we're healing for more damage than we take. In other words, a ratio of $R=1$ is the self-sufficiency limit, above which we can take care of ourselves (at least up until the boss is capable of one-shotting us).
It should be pretty clear what happens over the course of an expansion. As the expansion goes on, $A$ and $M$ increase, $(1-A)$ and $(1-M)$ decrease, and the ratio gets larger. At the beginning of an expansion, we may be able to heal for 30% to 50% of our damage taken at best. But by the end of the expansion, when we're pushing ~75% Shield of the Righteous uptime, ~35% avoidance, ~35% block, and 60% mitigation from armor, we're able to push this ratio significantly above one. Which is why we can solo-tank Thok or Siegecrafter until their stacking debuff effects let them one-shot us.
Again, to illustrate that thought, let's look at my damage taken for this same period:
If you total that up, you get about 12.6 million damage during this 54-second period, or about 233k damage taken per second. Now look at the healing table:
Even if we only consider Seal of Insight and the HoT portion of Eternal Flame, that's 17.1 million healing. So from passive sources alone, our ratio is $R=1.36$. In other words, I'm passively healing for 36% more damage than we're actually taking. And that's ignoring the set bonus and my two Word of Glory casts, which would bring the total up to 21.1 million healing and a ratio of $R=1.67$.
The point in all of this is that our self-healing scales far too well with attack power, and thus with Vengeance. As we get more "tanky" with more gear, we actually get more Vengeance than we need to compensate for our damage intake. As a tank, I think this is a problem because I don't believe that tanks should ever be self-sufficient. The bulk of our healing should come from external sources to keep the tank–healer leg of the tank-healer-DPS interaction trinity alive. It's one thing to have a lot of control over your survivability (which we do, thanks to active mitigation). It's another thing entirely to be able to be your own healer when other classes can't.
I don't think the developers are ignorant of this fact, either. To compensate, the developers have reduced the conversion percent $(k)$ several times over the course of the expansion to attempt to account for this effect, but it simply hasn't been effective enough. Or at least, not for us. I think they've probably kept all of the other tanks in line with these reductions, but somehow we slipped through the cracks (more on that in a bit).
There are some ways to ensure this doesn't happen, or at least to prevent the need to change $k$ several times per expansion. The issue here is that the ratio of $k/(1-A)(1-M)$ grows as $A$ and $M$ grow. So the logical solution is to let $k$ vary the same way. The simplest way to do that is to use actual damage taken to determine Vengeance rather than raw damage. That introduces a factor of $(1-A)(1-M)$ in the numerator, which automatically corrects for variations.
Note that I argued strongly against doing this in the past, which may seem inconsistent. But the earlier versions of Vengeance gave us extra damage output for taking more damage. We've definitely seen antics this expansion that legitimized that concern. But if that's no longer possible then we don't have to worry about tanks feeling encouraged to stand in the fire to produce more DPS. As long as the damage-taken-to-Vengeance conversion is sane (i.e. even remotely balanced), we'll get less self-healing back than the extra damage we take, so there wouldn't be an advantage to taking more damage.
But while simple, this solution has its problems. For one thing, it would be awful for avoidance tanks, because it would make Vengeance really spiky. It would penalize you for avoiding attacks, which is bad if avoided attacks are something we should ostensibly be happy about. And while it may not matter as much once dodge and parry ratings don't show up on gear, it's still an odd quirk we'd like to avoid. Worse yet, it punishes you for using your active mitigation, which we definitely want to avoid.
An alternative that causes fewer issues is to keep the current Vengeance implementation, but use "estimated post-mitigation damage" rather than raw damage. And what I mean by that is that we define $k$ to be $k=(1-A)(1-M){\rm RD}$. In other words, every attack you receive gives you Vengeance whether you avoid it or not, just like it does now, but the amount of vengeance is artificially reduced based on your character sheet avoidance and mitigation.
This is tricky, insofar as it still has the negative interaction with avoidance, but it's a weaker and more smoothed-out effect. To make it work, they would probably also have to exclude active mitigation sources from $M$, which means it would be primarily armor, spec-based mitigation, and possibly blocking. Excluding active mitigation means there would still be some creep in the ratio over the course of the expansion, but a judicious choice of $k$ would ensure that it keeps the ratio at sensible levels.
Maybe the simplest version is to just keep Vengeance as it is (minus the damage component, obviously), but slash $k$ significantly enough to keep the ratio low even in the highest-Vengeance cases. This also weakens Vengeance a lot, but that may not be a bad thing. Before Vengeance existed, there was a real sense of fear tanking a harder-hitting boss because your defenses didn't immediately scale up to meet it. A weaker version of Vengeance would bring some of that feeling back. The downside, of course, is that WoG might lose ground compared to SotR in that system, making one or the other the better choice on a boss-to-boss basis.
But rather than dwell to long on ways to "fix" Vengeance, especially in the absence of information about how it will be calculated in WoD, I want to take this discussion in a different direction. For a moment, let's look at the big picture. What if we're the only class having these odd scaling issues. In fact, this isn't much of a "what if" because I think this is actually the case. So if the problem is us, then maybe the solution isn't to tweak Vengeance, but to tweak us. But how?
Back to Basics
From the logs we've analyzed above, it's clear that a large portion of the problem is the massive effect that Vengeance has on Seal of Insight and Eternal Flame. Sure, I think it's overpowered to be able to fire off a 1-million-point WoG every 20 seconds – Lay on Hands has a 5+ minute cooldown for a reason, after all – but the bulk of our self-sufficiency comes from these two passive healing sources. So the question becomes "Which abilities should 6.0 Vengeance affect, and how?" To answer that, first let's consider the purpose of Vengeance for a moment . Celestalon put it fairly succinctly during the twittergeddon following Friday's blog post:
So that things like Shield Block and Shield Barrier can stay competitive with each other.
In other words, it exists to keep point-based active mitigation (Shield Barrier, Word of Glory) competitive with percent-based mitigation (Shield Block, Shield of the Righteous).
To illustrate why that's an important goal, imagine that Vengeance didn't exist in Mists of Pandaria. Let's ignore Bastion of Glory for a moment and say WoG heals for about 30% of your health at a certain gear level. If you're raiding in a 25-man, you'd almost never cast it, because Shield of the Righteous will mitigate that much damage or more from a single swing, let alone two. But in a 10-man, where the bosses don't hit as hard, you could almost ignore Shield of the Righteous and chain-WoG yourself.
That disparity in gameplay isn't ideal. It would be better if your class worked the same way regardless of setting. It's more immersive if the question you ask yourself when choosing a finisher is "do I need a heal right now" rather than "are there more than X players in my raid." And this concern isn't going away in Warlords – in fact, it's getting more ubiquitous since normal and heroic modes will be flexible.
Another way to phrase the purpose of Vengeance is that it's there to make sure that active mitigation abilities have resource parity. If Shield of the Righteous and Word of Glory both cost 3 Holy Power, then they have to perform similarly. Not identically, of course – for good, solid, interesting gameplay there should be situations where you'd choose one or the other. But we can't have one of them be so dominant that you can take the other one off of your bars either.
Bastion of Glory accomplishes this to some degree, because it introduces an interaction between the two, and subsequently a time factor. You can chain-cast Word of Glory, but it will be weak. It gets a lot stronger (and thus more efficient per Holy Power) if you cast a few SotRs first. This interaction inherently makes that choice interesting, and limits the usefulness of strong WoGs to one every 20 seconds or so without artificially adding a cooldown to the spell. It's a really great design, all told.
But it doesn't solve everything, because it doesn't let Word of Glory scale with boss damage, and to compete with Shield of the Righteous for resources, it has to.
Hope Springs Eternal
However, Seal of Insight doesn't compete for our Holy Power. It's automatic – we don't even cast it. There is never a situation where we choose between another Shield of the Righteous and Seal of Insight.
Eternal Flame is a slightly different beast. In concept, it doesn't compete for Holy Power either because we get the same Word of Glory heal with or without the talent. The added bonus of Eternal Flame is the heal over time, which could be construed as an extra bonus. This is really only true if you have the T16 4-piece bonus though, which disconnects Eternal Flame maintenance from the Holy Power opportunity cost.
In practice, Eternal Flame's HoT is so strong that without the set bonus, we're really choosing between spending Holy Power on Shield of the Righteous and spending it on the Eternal Flame heal over time. It turns it into a choice between a Shield of the Righteous that shaves ~300k off of each boss attack for 3 seconds and an Eternal Flame that heals us for 300k every two seconds for 30 seconds. The latter is just far more efficient, and the ability to overlap them so powerful that it isn't even much of a choice. In some sense, Eternal Flame becomes our version of Inquisition, with the caveat that we'd rather refresh it at high Vengeance. The gigantic Word of Glory heal becomes a bit of an afterthought, and I think that's a bit of a problem.
And the weird self-sufficiency effects in 5.4 are all "collateral damage" from Eternal Flame and Seal of Insight due to the direct Vengeance-to-AP conversion. Eternal Flame in particular gets a huge boost from Vengeance thanks to it's collection of multiplicative modifiers, which makes it tough to keep other talents (Sacred Shield) competitive with EF over a large range of AP values.
The Last Bastion
Bastion of Glory is part of the problem too. Eternal Flame benefits from Bastion thanks to buffs back in 5.2 when Eternal Flame was far behind Sacred Shield in survivability. And while I advocated for those buffs at the time, in retrospect it was the wrong call. It definitely made Eternal Flame stronger for Protection (though at the time, still not strong enough to be competitive), but did it in the worst possible way. The difference between a 5-BoG EF and a 0-BoG EF is huge, roughly a factor of 3 or 4 depending on mastery levels. And since that factor ends up applying to our huge Vengeance accumulations, the multiplicative nature makes Eternal Flame ludicrously powerful if we can refresh it with 5 stacks and at high Vengeance.
It also introduces a number of annoying gameplay intricacies. For example, is it worth replacing a 5-BoG EF with a 3-BoG one? Your gut would say no, but in many cases (like after a taunt) it is. If you gained a lot of Vengeance, the 3-BoG EF would be significantly stronger. Likewise, sometimes it's not worth replacing a 3-BoG EF with a 5-BoG EF if you've lost Vengeance or if the 3-BoG EF was cast under Bloodlust and/or Avenging Wrath. It's complicated enough that nobody can do that math in their head on the fly, especially given the lack of any sort of Vengeance display in the base UI. So to take advantage of those nuances, a player needs equally-complex WeakAuras to simplify the problem down to a go/no-go decision they can use to make split-second decisions.
That last bit is what really pushes me into "this is a bad mechanic" territory. It's not transparent. The UI doesn't provide clear information about it. It's not easy for an advanced player to understand, let alone a beginner. It adds a type of depth and complexity to tanking, for sure, but it does so by making the timing of the EF refresh very sensitive to three or four different factors that the player doesn't have an easy way to monitor outside of add-ons.
And in the process, it removes depth and complexity of timing the Word of Glory heal based on your health or expected damage. So I'm not sure it's really adding that much depth overall, it's just shifting it from being aware of the boss, your health, and combat to being aware of three arbitrary indicator dials (Vengeance, Haste, and BoG stacks).
If anything, I'd actually call that a loss. Because it actively dissuades players from using Word of Glory the way it was meant to be used – to react to damage spikes. Now, if you have to use your emergency heal, but you don't have five Bastion stacks, you're sacrificing even more long-term survivability to use your emergency heal. You're actually penalized for using your emergency heal as an emergency heal!
In retrospect, I'm sorry I suggested that fix (though of course it's not clear my suggestion had anything to do with it being implemented). Because I think it would have been more aptly solved with a simpler one: the "100% more healing when self-cast" solution, or equivalently, just increasing the size of the AP coefficient for protection. While bland, it produces all of the desired effects. It can be tuned such that the spell remains competitive with Sacred Shield, but without the huge swings in power with Bastion of Glory stacks and without subverting the design of Word of Glory.
A Limited Time Only Flame
So how do the developers "fix" all of these problems?
First of all, I think that Vengeance should only affect Word of Glory. It can be balanced such that spending HP on Word of Glory should heal for more than is mitigated from a single attack by SotR. It should probably be tweaked such that a 5-BoG WoG heals for a little more than SotR would mitigate off of two attacks, but a 0-BoG WoG is close to the single-attack SotR value so that it's useful no matter how many BoG stacks you have. That's just a matter of fitting numbers, and keeps WoG an interesting choice over a large variety of content levels. And for clarity, that choice is "Do I need a heal right now to survive the next boss attack, or would I rather put up SotR to increase smoothness over the next two attacks?"
With none of our other healing abilities (Eternal Flame, Seal of Insight, and Sacred Shield) receiving a benefit from Vengeance, the balance of those abilities could be tuned much more finely. The drawback is that they wouldn't adapt to boss damage, but if the attack power coefficients are chosen appropriately they should remain useful over several tiers of content. Since the spells won't vary with Vengeance those AP coefficients can be made large enough to keep the skills significant without risking them being overpowered against certain bosses.
And finally, I think the Bastion of Glory interaction with Eternal Flame should be dropped. It has all sorts of unfortunate side effects, and it will be easier to balance Eternal Flame and Sacred Shield when one of them isn't capable of fluctuating in strength so significantly. Paring both skills down to a single AP coefficient each means they can control the two effects well enough to make them truly competitive, because it will be a simple question of "do you want to absorb X every 6 seconds or heal for Y every 3 seconds," where X and Y depend only on spellpower and can be independently tuned.
That's really what I want to see this week, to be honest. While I'm excited to find out about the mechanics of the new version of Vengeance, the details are less important to me than these bigger issues with Eternal Flame, Sacred Shield, and Seal of Insight. I'd really like to see these passive effects toned down to be reasonable, and the only way that will happen is if they aren't astronomically different in magnitude when they're buffed by Vengeance, or in Eternal Flame's case, Bastion of Glory.


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Browsing by Subject "05C Graph theory"
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Almost every tree with m edges decomposes K2m,2m (2014-01)
Open AccessWe show that asymptotically almost surely a tree with m edges decomposes the complete bipartite graph K2m,2m, a result connected to a conjecture of Graham and Häggkvist. The result also implies that asymptotically almost ...
An interlacing approach for bounding the sum of Laplacian eigenvalues of graphs (2014)
Conference report
Open AccessWe apply eigenvalue interlacing techniques for obtaining lower and upper bounds for the sums of Laplacian eigenvalues of graphs, and characterize equality. This leads to generalizations of, and variations on theorems by ...
Approximate results for rainbow labelings (2015-04-14)
External research report
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Caracterizaciones combinatorias y algebraicas de grafos distancia-regulares (Universitat Rovira i Virgili, 2014)
Conference report
Open AccessLos grafos distancia-regulares aparecen a menudo en el estudio de es- tructuras matemáticas con un alto grado de simetría y/o regularidad. Un ejemplo bien conocido de tales grafos son los esqueletos ...
Connectivity: properties and structure (CRC Press Taylor & Francis Group, 2013-12-05)
Part of book or chapter of book
Open AccessConnectivity is one of the central concepts of graph theory, from both a theoret- ical and a practical point of view. Its theoretical implications are mainly based on the existence of nice max-min characterization results, ...
Cycle codes of graphs and MDS array codes (2009-07-30)
Restricted access - publisher's policyWe investigate how to colour edges of graph so that any two colours make up a spanning tree. This problem is equivalent to transforming the cycle code of a graph into a Maximum Distance Separable (MDS) array code. Adopting ...
Decomposing almost complete graphs by random trees (2014)
Conference report
Restricted access - publisher's policyAn old conjecture of Ringel states that every tree with m edges decom- poses the complete graph K 2 m +1 . A more general version of the Ringel's conjecture says that every tree with m edges decomposes K rm +1 for each r ...
Decomposing almost complete graphs by random trees (2015-04-14)
External research report
Open Access
Further topics in connectivity (CRC Press Taylor & Francis Group, 2013-12-05)
Part of book or chapter of book
Open AccessContinuing the study of connectivity, initiated in §4.1 of the Handbook, we survey here some (sufficient) conditions under which a graph or digraph has a given connectivity or edge-connectivity. First, we describe results ...
On the algebraic theory of pseudo-distance-regulariry around a set (Elsevier, 1999-09)
Restricted access - publisher's policyLet C be a connected graph with vertex set V, adjacency matrix A, positive eigenvector and corresponding eigenvalue 0. A natural generalization of distance-regularity around a vertex subset C V , which makes sense ...
On the generalitzed arc routing problem (2013)
Conference report
Open Access
Some results on the structure of multipoles in the study of snarks (2015-02-25)
Open AccessMultipoles are the pieces we obtain by cutting some edges of a cubic graph in one or more points. As a result of the cut, a multipole M has vertices attached to a dangling edge with one free end, and isolated edges with ...
The Maximum degree of series-parallel graphs (2011-07)
Restricted access - confidentiality agreementWe prove that the maximum degree Δn of a random series-parallel graph with n vertices satisfies Δn/ log n → c in probability, and EΔn ∼ c log n for a computable constant c > 0. The same kind of result holds for 2-connected ...
Una fórmula explícita para obtener cuadrángulos generalizados y otros grafos pequeños de cintura 8 (Universidad de Almería, 2011)
Conference report
Open AccessPara cada potencia de primo q, se han constru do (q+1; 8)-jaulas como super cies cu adricas no degeneradas en 4-espacios proyectivos P(4; q). En primer lugar presentamos una construcci on de estos grafos de un modo ...


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The programmer was also one of the original developers of Reddit and authored the RSS specification when he was just 14 years old.
Swartz was set to begin a federal trial next month over charges of computer fraud, for which he had plead not guilty. The charges related to 5 million academic papers that Swartz allegedly downloaded from the academic online archive JSTOR, which costs money to access if you are not affiliated with a college/University. Prosecutors claimed he intended to share the files, for free, online after having stole them through illegal access on M.I.T's campus.
The programmer was facing 35 years in prison, and a $1 million fine if convicted.
Last year, Swartz also co-founded Demand Progress, a group to promote social justice issues online. The group helped take down last year's SOPA and PIPA Internet censorship bills.


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Freshly picked saffron crocus flowers in Consuegra, La Mancha, Spain. Saffron has been the world's most expensive spice by weight for decades. The flower has three stigmas, which are the distal ends of the plant's carpels. These are separated from the petals by hand and dried to make saffron spice.
- Filename
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- ©Peter Menzel, www.menzelphoto.com
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Intermediate phase
Intermediate phase: Grade 4 to Grade 7
In the intermediate phase, the emphasis is still on establishing basic foundations but learners are led into more abstract thought and independent work. Application of skills and concepts is also a focus area in this phase. This phase aims to prepare learners for the senior phase in the high school.
We aim to embrace 21st century learning by incorporating the use of tablets into our classrooms. We currently raise children who are 'digital natives'. By embracing innovative technology into our school, we are speaking the language our learners understand.
- English or Afrikaans home language
- English or Afrikaans first additional language
- Mathematics
- Life Skills
- Natural Sciences
- Social Sciences
- Information Technology
- Economic and Management Sciences (EMS)
To align with 21st century skills Curro Mossel Bay focuses on core subjects, namely Mathematics, Languages, Science and Technology.
The Mathematics curriculum has been rewritten to allow for a learner-centric, problem-solving approach.
Curro Mossel Bay uses an individualised approach of matching learners to book levels as well as using guided reading and writing when teaching languages. Added to this is the implementation of reciprocal teaching of reading to enhance each learner's deeper reading comprehension.
Science and Technology
In Robotics learners build and program Lego robots for 25% of the tuition time. The Science curriculum has been adapted to include 21st century content and learning.


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Prospect Eats starts at 5:30 p.m. at Prospect Downtown Park, 700 Tenacity Drive, Longmont. The night will feature the largest collection of food trucks in Northern Colorado and live music by Watersong. Go to prospectseats.com.
The Morbid Hearts Zombie Walk will be from 2 to 4 p.m. today at Brainfood Books, 322 Main St., Longmont. Author Susanne Lambdin will be available to sign copies. Dress up to join the zombie walk and costume contest for a chance to win a free signed copy of "Morbid Hearts." Go to facebook.com/BrainfoodLtd.
Prospect Eats starts at 5:30 p.m. at Prospect Downtown Park, 700 Tenacity Drive, Longmont. The night will feature the largest collection of food trucks in Northern Colorado and live music by Watersong. Go to prospectseats.com.
Make Your Jewelry at 2 p.m. Tuesday, June 25, at the Berthoud Community Library, 236 Welch Ave., Berthoud. Materials are provided. Call 970-532-2757.
Off the Record performs from 6:30 to 8 p.m. Tuesday, June 25, at Roosevelt Park, 700 Longs Peak Ave. The event is free. Please bring your own blanket or chair and park in the adjacent lot off Longs Peak Avenue. Call Longmont Recreation Services at 303-651-8404.
The Hoe and Hope Garden Club will meet at 9 a.m. Wednesday, June 26, at Flanders Park, 2229 Breakwater Drive, Longmont. Call Mindy at 303-808-8393.
The Longmont Studio Tour Outreach program presents Katherine Ware Wolniecwicz from 10 a.m. to noon, Wednesday, June 26, at the Longmont Recreation Center, 310 Quail Road, Longmont. Wolniecwicz will demonstrate with jewelry. Call Diane Wood at 303-678-7456 or go to http://lst2011.wordpress.com/outreach/.
Denny Driscoll performs from 7 to 9 p.m. at The Niwot Tavern, 7960 Niwot Road, Niwot. Enjoy a night of acoustic guitar. Call 303-652-0200 or email email@example.com.
Northern and Southern Plains Indian singers and dancers perform at 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, June 26, at the Longmont Museum, 400 Quail Road, Longmont. They will perform traditional songs and dances from the Plains Indians. Admission is free. Call 303-651-8374 or go to longmontmuseum.org.
The town of Frederick is hosting the Community BBQ Tour from 6 to 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, June 26, at No Name West Park. Frederick residents can enjoy free hot dogs and interact with local government officials. Call 720-382-5500 or go to frederickco.gov.
Rock N' Rails Summer Concert Series starts at 5 p.m. Thursday, June 27, at Whistle Stop Park, corner of First and Murray in Niwot. Enjoy this free event with kids activities, food, artisans and more. Live music by Rebecca Folsom. Email media@
niwot.com or go to niwot.com/niwot-events/2/rock-n-rails.
The town of Frederick presents the Downtown Sound Concert Series starting at 6 p.m. Thursday, June 27, at Crist Park, 105 Fifth St., Frederick. The Jay and Neil Show will perform to end the farmers market for the day, which is from 3 to 7 p.m. on Fifth Street. Go to frederickco.gov.
Lego in Motion: Animation Festival starts at 7 p.m. Thursday, June 27, at the Longmont Museum, 400 Quail Road. It's a night of grown up entertainment and beer. Cost is $5. Members admitted free. Call 303-651-8374 or go to longmontmuseum.org.
Lyons Good Old Days is Friday, June 28, and Saturday, June 29, on High Street in Lyons. Enjoy live music, food, vendors and a carnival.. Go to townoflyons.com.
Fun Family Friday is from 10 a.m. to noon Friday, June 28, at the Sandstone Visitor Center, 3001 Colo. Highway 119. Enjoy storytime, puppets, crafts and nature. Call 303-651-8404 or email RecSupport
The Longmont Downtown Summer Concert series is from 6 to 9 p.m. Friday, June 28, at Fourth Avenue and Kimbark Street, Longmont. Bring your own lawn chair and enjoy music from Chris Thompson and Coral Creek. Go to downtownlongmont.com.


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In an interview with FOX's Carl Cameron before he left Poland, Mitt Romney said that he wasn't talking about culture when discussing Israel and the Palestinian Authority during an fundraiser in Israel on Monday.
"I'm not speaking about it, did not speak about the Palestinian culture or the decisions made in their economy," Romney told Cameron. "That's an interesting topic that perhaps can deserve scholarly analysis, but I actually didn't address that. Certainly don't intend to address that in my campaign. Instead, I will point out that the choices a society makes have a profound impact on the economy and the vitality of that society."
Uriel Sinai / Getty Images
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney delivers a speech outside the Old City on July 29 in Jerusalem, Israel.
But according to even the transcript that the Romney campaign released of the fundraiser, Romney did specifically refer to culture when comparing per-capita GDP between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. Here's what Romney said:
"I was thinking this morning as I prepared to come into this room of a discussion I had across the country in the United States about my perceptions about differences between countries. And as you come here and you see the GDP per capita for instance in Israel, which is about 21,000 dollars, and you compare that with the GDP per capita just across the areas managed by the Palestinian Authority which is more like 10,000 dollars per capita, you notice a dramatic, stark difference in economic vitality. And that is also between other countries that are near or next to each other. Chile and Ecuador, Mexico and the United States."
Romney added:
"I noted that part of my interest when I used to be in the world of business is I would travel to different countries was to understand why there were such enormous disparities in the economic success of various countries. I read a number of books on the topic. One, that is widely acclaimed, is by someone named Jared Diamond called 'Guns, Germs and Steel,' which basically says the physical characteristics of the land account for the differences in the success of the people that live there. There is iron ore on the land and so forth. And you look at Israel and you say you have a hard time suggesting that all of the natural resources on the land could account for all the accomplishment of the people here. And likewise, other nations that are next door to each other have very similar, in some cases, geographic elements."
He concluded:
"But then there was a book written by a former Harvard professor named 'The Wealth and Poverty of Nations.' And in this book Dr. Landes describes differences that have existed -- particularly among the great civilizations that grew and why they grew and why they became great and those that declined and why they declined. And after about 500 pages of this lifelong analysis -- this had been his study for his entire life -- and he's in his early 70s at this point, he says this, he says, if you could learn anything from the economic history of the world it's this: Culture makes all the difference. Culture makes all the difference. And as I come here and I look out over this city and consider the accomplishments of the people of this nation, I recognize the power of at least culture and a few other things."
Also in the same FOX interview, Romney "accused reporters of trivializing the substance of his trip and trying to divert attention from President Obama's stewardship of the economy," National Journal reports.
Said Romney: "I realize that there will be some that in the Fourth Estate, or in whatever estate, who are far more interested in finding something to write about that is unrelated to the economy, to geo-politics, to the threat of war, to the reality of conflict in Afghanistan today, to nuclearization of Iran. They'll instead try to find anything else to divert from the fact that these last four years have been tough for our country."


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A red card box is placed on the table in full view. Performer explains that the box contains a blue backed prediction card. A red backed deck is handed to the spectator to mix. Spectator FREELY selects ANY card from this mixed deck. The blue backed card is removed from the card box. The prediction card and selected card are both turned face up. BOTH CARDS MATCH ! The performer looks at the spectator and say's 'I bet you think all the cards are the same?' Performer now say's ' You're correct !' The deck is now turned face up and ribbon spread across the table. ALL THE CARDS HAVE BLANK FACES !! No Force, No Rough and Smooth, No Sleights, Card box may be handled by the spectator before, during, and after the effect, Learn in minutes. This effect will ASTONISH any audience ! Complete with photo illustrated instructions, Blank Face Bicycle Deck, and that special something that makes this miracle possible.
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MWC 15 Special
Following the recent webOS update for North American Palm Pre's and Pixi's, Palm just released another minor update for its webOS smartphones. While the new webOS 22.214.171.124 doesn't features and new applications, it's just a buxfix for the webOS Calendar. The previous 1.3.5 version included an issue in which the Calendar app displayed no events for any account after a user synchronized Calendar with an Exchange account. With this update which fixes the issue, webOS Calendar events now appear correctly after an Exchange sync. As before the update will be distributed through an OTA (over the air) update, but it can be also downloaded through W-LAN.
It's yet not known when Palm will offer webOS 1.3.5.x for European Pre users but I've heard that the Exchange bug is one reason why the 1.3.5 roll-out was delayed.
Cheers ~ Arne
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Earth from Space: Bromo volcano, East Java
ESA's micro-satellite Proba observes the active Bromo volcano, a popular tourist attraction of East Java in Indonesia.
Indonesia is located within the Pacific 'Ring of Fire' volcano belt and has more than a hundred active volcanoes within its territory. With around 200 million inhabitants, Java is the most populated island in Indonesia and also the world. The island was formed by ancient volcanic activity.
Bromo is one of Java's most active volcanoes, located on top of the 16-kilometre-wide Tenegger Caldera in East Java, with a summit elevation of 2329 metres. The Caldera is part of Bromo Tengger Semeru National Park, situated about 112 km southeast of the East Java capital of Surabaya.
The volcano itself is the youngest of the cones at the centre of the Tenegger Caldera. It stands 133 metres above the lunar-like landscape of the Caldera and is 700 metres wide. The smaller, ribbed cone just north of it is the Batok volcano.
While Batok is no longer active, the same is not true of Bromo: the volcano has erupted at least 50 times since 1775 and last erupted in June 2004. Its ash cloud reached 3000 metres above the crater rim and stones rained down around the crater to a distance of about two kilometres away. Two visitors were killed and five more left injured by the volcanic activity.
Indonesian seismologists estimate that there is a magma chamber buried about a kilometre under the caldera floor, responsible for periodic inflation and deflation events monitored by GPS and levelling techniques.
Even in normally active conditions, Bromo still produces volcanic gases including the tasteless and odourless but also poisonous 'mofet' gas made up of carbon monoxide and dioxide.
Nevertheless, Bromo is one of the most frequently visited attractions in East Java. The volcano is noted for spectacular sunrises and expansive views across to Semuru volcano to the south. Visitors often cross the caldera floor on horseback.
This is a detail from a 19 June 2004 image acquired by the Compact High Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (CHRIS). Built by UK-based Sira Technology, CHRIS is the main payload on ESA's Proba microsatellite, designed to acquire hyperspectral images with a spatial resolution of 18 metres across an area of 14 kilometres.
The size of a washing machine, Proba was originally launched in 2001 as a technology demonstrator, but is now operated as an ESA Earth Observation Third Party Mission.


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I'm in the process of converting some Word documents to latex. I decided to go the following route:
Word -> ODF (with odf export or via libreoffice) -> latex (writer2latex).
The documents generated by writer2latex do look quite good, unfortunately, writer2latex creates what seems like a million different styles for every individual text element. Is there a way that I can minimize the amount of styles created? I understand that using the option
clean or
ultraclean will remove any styling, however, then I end up having to go through the entire document again, and apply styling manually. Is there a clever way around this?
And also: is there a way to convince writer2latex to use
\chapter and not
\section as the top level category?
Any advice regarding these issues is greatly appreciated!!
EDIT: The entire project is ~ 250-300 pages, made of 10 independent word documents.


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Shaft: Ping JZ Cushin Steel Regular Flex, Loft: 56°
Temporarily unavailable.
The Oversized Ping i3 Iron is larger which produces the optimum offset and bounce for players needing forgiveness. The Ping i3 Irons use the Custom Tuning Port in the cavity that allows feedback but takes away un-needed vibration. With less vibration, more energy is transferred to the center of the face for maximum distance.


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Useful links
Our 6,000 staff, working in a range of roles, contribute to our success as an international leader in teaching and research. Join us and you can expect exciting and rewarding opportunities within a dynamic and diverse working environment.
Community Relations
We are committed to building good community relations. These web pages will be of interest to local residents.
Maps, travel advice and more for visitors to the University.
About the University
This section holds a wealth of information about the University including facts and figures, history, governance and our Nobel Prize-winners.
Careers Service
Guidance, information and vacancy and work experience service for students and recent graduates of the University. We also provide a number of services for employers.
Sport Sheffield
Sport Sheffield manages all of the University of Sheffield's sports facilities and activities. The facilities are open to all students, university staff and the wider community.
Online Store
The Online Store sells products and services offered by the University of Sheffield including merchandise, workshops and courses.
Looking for something else?
The University has such a large and complex site that unfortunately we can't list all useful links on one page. This section just highlights some areas that might otherwise be difficult to find, as well as sections of the site that are accessed frequently.
A good place to start looking is the list of departments and services.
Alternatively you might want to try the search facility at the top right hand of the screen.


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Introducing FaceCafe, our new virtual gathering place.
Mission Statement
The Parent Advisory Committee (PAC) mission is to facilitate understanding, respect, and support for all children in our community by promoting a network of parents/guardians of school-aged children with concerns and to provide an opportunity to share information. To accomplish this, PAC will provide informational workshops, resource fairs and meetings with parents/guardians, educators, students, and professionals.
Our Purpose
Our Goal
Our goal is to educate the wider community on the needs of the school-aged children in District 6.


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Cascade Bicycle Club's tumultuous annual meeting on Thursday did little to further the club's progress in soothing the Chuck Ayers-David Hiller imbroglio.
The board of directors fumbled a golden opportunity to calm the waters by getting the membership fully aired and drawing some talking points from the gathering for moving forward. (We'd suggested breaking into small groups and having leaders report back to the plenary). Instead, heated exchanges prevailed.
So what next? There's a movement afoot to bust the board. A few good candidates — notably SeattleLikesBikes' Michael Snyder — have emerged, but it will take some persistent organizing between now and the board election to clear the air and set a solid agenda for the club.
In the meantime, here's a sampler of recent coverage:
Seattle Bike Blog covered the meeting.
Publicola's Twitter feed.
Cascade's message board reflects little confidence in the board of directors.


text: Education fairs in Asia Meet us at one of the educational fairs in Asia or fix an appointment to consult with our representation in Singapore. FAIRS IN ASIA 2020 Peking, China China Education Expo 24-25 October 2020 Shanghai, China China Education Expo 31 October-1 November 2020 Singapore, Singapore World Grad School Tour tbd 2020 Hub in Singapore: The University of St.Gallen (HSG) has a branch in Singapore. If you are interested in studying at HSG, please contact HSG representative Christine Scheef to fix an appointment to discuss the matter.


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betiko wrote:lol, crap talk has now started thanks to the legendary freakns !
i have my beer and popcorn, and i have been waiting for this since the start of the war. dont spoil it now
silversun6 wrote:Cof - just a bystander view , you are ruining all the fun.
If 4 of you cant win Josko and all his "puppets" you shouldn't complain about this, you should try harder.
he isnt! he is adding into a fun... i mean, who outside of KORT and TOFU cares about result?! the fun in this war is josko vs COF forum speak. im just loving it
and they arent losing... TOFU will win this


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Club Allocations
When a club is recognized by the Associated Students Council each semester, they have the ability to receive base allocation money, or seed money to spend on club activities. If a club wants to host an event that will cost more than what they have been initially allocated or have been able to fundraise, the can receive an additional allocation from the ICC if all the necessary steps are followed. Below you will find information on base allocations and additional allocations.
Base Allocations
In the Fall semester, your club must complete all the steps of the recognition process by the fourth week into the semester for $200.00 and by the sixth week into the semester for $100.00. Deadlines will be posted with specific dates on the ICC main homepage.
In the Spring semester, your club must complete all the steps of the recognition process by the third week into the semester for $200.00 and by the fifth week into the semester for $100.00. Deadlines will be posted with specific dates on the ICC main homepage.
Your club's base allocation should be used as seed money for future fundraising events, club activities and other campus wide events.
A club must spend or forfeit the base allocation within one academic year. If the base allocation is spent, any additional funds (e.g. fundraised or donated money) may be rolled over into your club account for the following academic year (one full academic year is from August through May) by completing the Request to Rollover Funds Form. These funds will rollover automatically from Fall to Spring, but not from Spring to the following Fall. If you have fundraised or donated money in your club account at the end of the Spring Semester, and do not complete the Request to Rollover Funds Form, your club will lose that money and it will be rolled into the Associated Students funds.
Additional Allocations
Each semester a club can request up to $500 in additional allocations for matching funds or campus wide events by submitting thorough proposals to the ICC Finance Committee. Below you will find an outline of the ICC proposal process as well as the link to the Proposal Form template.
Clubs may also request funding from the VP of Cultural Affairs for events that impact the campus and raise awareness of diverse interests of the college student community.
The Process
1. Submitting the Proposal
Request for ICC Funds Proposal Forms must be submitted to the ICC Finance Committee 21 days before the event (or else be subject to receive only 75% of the requested amount). You will either choose to request Campus Wide Funds or Matching Funds. Campus Wide Fund events are free and open to the public. Matching Fund events do not have to be open to the public and you can charge an admissions fee to the event, but your club must also put in the same amount requested in the proposal for no more than $1,000.00 to be spent on one event (i.e. $500.00 from the club and $500.00 from ICC). Submit a hard copy to the VP of ICC and an electronic copy to the ICC email address: email@example.com
2. ICC Finance Committee
The ICC Finance Committee will review your proposal. A representative from your club (preferably a club officer) MUST attend the ICC Finance Committee meeting to present the proposal and answer questions of the committee members. The committee may reject the proposal, ask for it to be resubmitted, or make a recommendation to the ICC to approve your proposal.
3. ICC General Assembly Meeting
If the ICC Finance Committee makes a recommendation to approve the proposal, a representative from your club must then present the proposal at the next ICC General Assembly meeting (with the amended changes, if applicable). Bring copies of your proposal and be prepared to answer questions. The ICC will vote to either approve or deny the allocation of requested funds.
4. What next?
The club will spend the money using payment vouchers or requisitions for performers, food, decorations, etc. When you fill out a payment voucher for example, you will use the Campus Wide Fund account number 731032 because the money approved from your proposal is put into this account for your use. If you received Matching Funds, you will use the account 731033. You will also need to transfer money from your club account to the Matching Funds account 731033 so that the Administrative Services Office can see that you have matched the funds. Speak to the Management Assistant or the Associate Dean of Student Activities if you have questions about how to do the paperwork once you the funding was approved by the ICC General Assembly.
The Request for ICC Funds Proposal Form
The four components of the proposal include:
- Proposal Form – Fill out all parts of the form found here
- If you need more room for explanation, you may attach additional sheets of paper. You may also attach a flyer or brochure of the event/field trip/conference if you think it will help your case.
- Line item budget – Template is included in the Proposal Form
- Club minutes – Attach a copy to proposal showing that
your club did approve to spend club money in the way it is stated in
the proposal