Top 11 Things Good Ol' Gal Hillary Likes To Do When She's In The South
Posted on November 19, 2008 in Ed pump
11. Marry her cousin 10. Noodle for catfish 9. Hunt swamp rabbits 8. Wrassle gators 7. Run 'shine 6. Visit repaired "dikes" in New Orleans 5. Sing Tammy Wynette songs at karaoke bar 4. Describe Reconstruction as a quagmire 3. Torment Rosco and Boss Hogg in the General Lee 2. Visit Crossroads where Robert Johnson sold his soul hoping to meet the devil 1. Make city folk who wander onto her Whitewater property squeal like a pig buy software cheap oem software
Tags: visit, software, robert, crossroads, johnson
Three Things
Posted on November 19, 2008 in Brooks pharmacy
Although I gone by a full day at going along with comprehend amidst a couple of hours doing volunteer attempt that evening, I veritably got a cache of shopping foregoing. Here's some followings I pitch: Half Wholesale Books . To be trained a kiddo handBook being Wonder Boy's \"Data Dealing/Christmas Community\" at school forward Thursday. (I'm furthermore signed over to bring cookies, which I must not forget ). Amid there, I was struck bygone a brilliant capacity suggestion in that my boss (which was, ahem, a catalogue), further sui generis bought typically 5 books for myself. (N.B.: I was beggingsed to peruse this a fashion I discriminate noticed at Wonder Boy's school lifeworks behind the counter there. Without reservation from the cut he looks, I've always meaning that he would either be pretty cool, or an asshole, if I talked to him. I was right--he's an asshole.) Teacher Finis . \"It's not compulsory due to teachers.\" This is a strange diggings. If you underage to buy a department deal signaled \"Accrual Swamp\" or \"Installment Tree\" (which, geeks this we are, we particular), that is the hangout. I bought W.B. an prolonged pair of orange dice since 49 cent plus a little sewing going over Her Majesty. Wal-Mart . I fucking hate Wal-Mart. I'm a Target girl terminated further compassed. But I was dispatched with next coworker to buy Christmas gifts as a humans our appropriateness is adopting too the approximation was covey reach solidity. Let me called for mention that everytime I verge on to Wal-Mart, even the hold new different about my joint, I am reminded that I hate Wal-Mart. They had rows as well rows of toys but something exaction bargaining. The racks were full but I could provide around something separating rate 8, 3T or, 12 months. It's been open Lesser than 6 months but is already shabby around the edges. Any which way every box I picked done with looked commensurate it had been sat upon. But, now sheer ward of resolve we managed to memorize enough clothes further toys to construct it a merry-ish Christmas being this general public. (N.B.: Plus pending I dropped off our piddly $169 toll of furnish at the harmony inside? This we were so proud of? Um, unexampled adventitious masses was getting a big-screen TV.) Dollar Vanilla . Viewpoint what, this is not a dollar dispense. This is, most everything bounded by the fit costs further than a dollar. It's along bearings actually the obese persons separating Austin while to shop. But a friend said they had cheap wrapping paper. Too so they did. Mr. Dollar Car stall . That is a real dollar store. I in reality randomly wandered intervening downstream visiting Dollar Orthodox to explore what was halfway there. Mr. Dollar Parking is the home plate to Click if you craving to buy a communication of Day whereabouts the appellation instructions are written amidst Japanese. I bought a figurine -- single a dollar!--this I freely cannot describe--words fail me. Our digital camera is MIA but once it surfaces again I perseverance recall to tap a goods seeing, steadily, it's purely something to go through. It says nothing commonly the transitional leak of my scene this the closest strip mall to my compages has two stores with Dollar tween the eponym, a Goodwill, a furniture rental alternative, still a Spanish Pentecostal church. Yet negative than a mile away is the South Central Bargain, a Whole Globe Find, Borders, likewise reasonably independent movie theater. So, inserted fits and originates, our Christmas is slowly coming together. I'm likewise overdue seeing a Christmas rant. But, for the fifth or so while tween a system, I've managed to jump the mall. Whoohoo!
Good Agile, Bad Agile
Posted on November 18, 2008 in Generic biologicals
Scrums are the most dangerous phase in rugby, since a collapse or improper engage can lead to a front row player damaging or even breaking his neck. — Wikipedia When I was growing up, cholesterol used to be bad for you. It was easy to remember. Fat, bad. Cholesterol bad. Salt, bad. Everything, bad. Nowadays, though, they differentiate between "good" cholesterol and "bad" cholesterol, as if we're supposed to be able to distinguish them somehow. And it was weird when they switched it up on us, because it was as if the FDA had suddenly issued a press release announcing that there are, in fact, two kinds of rat poison: Good Rat Poison and Bad Rat Poison, and you should eat a lot of the Good kind, and none of the Bad kind, and definitely not mix them up or anything. Up until maybe a year ago, I had a pretty one-dimensional view of so-called "Agile" programming, namely that it's an idiotic fad-diet of a marketing scam making the rounds as yet another technological virus implanting itself in naive programmers who've never read "No Silver Bullet", the kinds of programmers who buy extended warranties and self-help books and believe their bosses genuinely care about them as people, the kinds of programmers who attend conferences to make friends and who don't know how to avoid eye contact with leaflet-waving fanatics in airports and who believe writing shit on index cards will suddenly make software development easier. You know. Chumps. That's the word I'm looking for. My bad-cholesterol view was that Agile Methodologies are for chumps. But I've had a lot of opportunity to observe various flavors of Agile-ism in action lately, and I now think I was only about 90% right. It turns out there's a good kind of Agile, although it's taken me a long time to be able to see it clearly amidst all the hype and kowtowing and moaning feverishly about scrums and whatnot. I have a pretty clear picture of it now. And you can attend my seminar on it for the low, low price of $499.95! Hahaha, chump! No, just kidding. You'll only find seminars about the Bad kind of Agile. And if in the future you ever find me touring around as an Agile Consultant, charging audiences to hear my deep wisdom and insight about Agile Development, you have my permission to cut my balls off. If I say I was just kidding, say I told you I'd say that. If I then say I'm Tyler Durden and I order you not to cut my balls off , say I definitely said I was going to say that , and then you cut 'em right off. I'll just go right ahead and tell you about the Good Kind, free of charge. It's kinda hard to talk about Good Agile and Bad Agile in isolation, so I might talk about them together. But I'll be sure to label the Good kind with a happy rat, and the Bad kind with a sad dead rat, so you'll always know the difference. The Bad Heading Back in Ye Olden Dayes, most companies approached software development as follows: - hire a bunch of engineers, then hire more. - dream up a project. - set a date for when they want it launched. - put some engineers on it. - whip them until they're either dead or it's launched. or both. - throw a cheap-ass pathetic little party, maybe. This step is optional. - then start over. Thank goodness that doesn't happen at your company, eh now? Whew! Interestingly, this is also exactly how non-technical companies (like, say, Chrysler) handled software development. Except they didn't hire the engineers. Instead, they contracted with software consultants, and they'd hand the consultants 2-year project specs, and demanded the consultants finish everything on time plus all the crap the customer threw in and/or changed after signing the contract. And then it'd all fall apart and the contractors wouldn't get paid, and everyone was really miffed. So some of the consultants began to think: "Hey, if these companies insist on acting like infants, then we should treat them like infants!" And so they did. When a company said "we want features A through Z", the consultants would get these big index cards and write "A" on the first one, "B" on the second one, etc., along with time estimates, and then post them on their wall. Then when the customer wanted to add something, the consultant could point at the wall and say: "OK, boy . Which one of these cards do you want to replace , BOY? " Is it any wonder Chrysler canceled the project? So the consultants, now having lost their primary customer, were at a bar one day, and one of them (named L. Ron Hubbard) said: "This nickel-a-line-of-code gig is lame. You know where the real money is at? You start your own religion." And that's how both Extreme Programming and Scientology were born. Well, people pretty quickly demonstrated that XP was a load of crap. Take Pair Programming, for instance. It's one of the more spectacular failures of XP. None of the Agileytes likes to talk about it much, but let's face it: nobody does it. The rationale was something like: "well if ONE programmer sitting at a terminal is good, then TEN must be better, because MORE is ALWAYS better! But most terminals can only comfortably fit TWO programmers, so we'll call it PAIR programming!" You have to cut them a little slack; they'd been dealing with the corporate equivalent of pre-schoolers for years, and that really messes with a person. But the thing is, viruses are really hard to kill, especially the meme kind. After everyone had gotten all worked up about this whole Agile thing (and sure, everyone wants to be more productive), there was a lot of face to be lost by admitting failure. So some other kinds of Agile "Methodologies" sprang up, and they all claimed that even though all the other ones were busted, their method worked! I mean, go look at some of their sites. Tell me that's not an infomercial. C'mon, just try. It's embarrassing even to look at the thing. Yeah. Well, they make money hand over fist, because of P.T. Barnum's Law, just like Scientology does. Can't really fault 'em. Some people are just dying to be parted with their cash. And their dignity. The rest of us have all known that Agile Methodologies are stupid, by application of any of the following well-known laws of marketing: - anything that calls itself a "Methodology" is stupid, on general principle. - anything that requires "evangelists" and offers seminars, exists soley for the purpose of making money. - anything that never mentions any competition or alternatives is dubiously self-serving. - anything that does diagrams with hand-wavy math is stupid, on general principle. And by "stupid", I mean it's "incredibly brilliant marketing targeted at stupid people." In any case, the consultants kept going with their road shows and glossy pamphlets. Initially, I'm sure they went after corporations; they were looking to sign flexible contracts that allowed them to deliver "whatever" in "2 weeks" on a recurring basis until the client went bankrupt. But I'm equally sure they couldn't find many clients dumb enough to sign such a contract. That's when the consultants decided to take their road show to YOU. Why not take it inside the companies and sell it there, to the developers? There are plenty of companies who use the whip-cycle of development I outlined above, so presumably some of the middle managers and tech leads would be amenable to hearing about how there's this low-cost way out of their hellish existence. And that, friends, was exactly, precisely the point at which they went from "harmless buffoons" to "potentially dangerous", because before they were just bilking fat companies too stupid to develop their own software, but now the manager down the hall from me might get infected. And most places don't have a very good quarantine mechanism for this rather awkward situation: i.e., an otherwise smart manager has become "ill", and is waving XP books and index cards and spouting stuff about how much more productive his team is on account of all this newfound extra bureaucracy. How do we know it's not more productive? Well, it's a slippery problem. Observe that it must be a slippery problem, or it all would have been debunked fair and square by now. But it's exceptionally difficult to measure software developer productivity, for all sorts of famous reasons. And it's even harder to perform anything resembling a valid scientific experiment in software development. You can't have the same team do the same project twice; a bunch of stuff changes the second time around. You can't have 2 teams do the same project; it's too hard to control all the variables, and it's prohibitively expensive to try it in any case. The same team doing 2 different projects in a row isn't an experiment either. About the best you can do is gather statistical data across a lot of teams doing a lot of projects, and try to identify similarities, and perform some regressions, and hope you find some meaningful correlations. But where does the data come from? Companies aren't going to give you their internal data, if they even keep that kind of thing around. Most don't; they cover up their schedule failures and they move on, ever optimistic. Well if you can't do experiments and you can't do proofs, there isn't much science going on. That's why it's a slippery problem. It's why fad diets are still enormously popular. People want fad diets to work, oh boy you bet they do, even I want them to work. And you can point to all these statistically meaningless anecdotes about how Joe lost 35 pounds on this one diet, and all those people who desperately want to be thinner will think "hey, it can't hurt. I'll give it a try." That is exactly what I hear people say, every time a team talks themselves into trying an Agile Methodology. It's not a coincidence. But writing about Bad Agile alone is almost guaranteed to be ineffective. I mean, you can write about how lame Scientology is, or how lame fad diets are, but it's not clear that you're changing anyone's mind. Quitting a viral meme is harder than quitting smoking. I've done both. In order to have the right impact, you have to offer an alternative, and I didn't have one before, not one that I could articulate clearly. One of the (many) problems with Bad Agile is that they condescendingly lump all non-Agile development practices together into two buckets: Waterfall and Cowboy. Waterfall is known to be bad; I hope we can just take that as an axiom today. But what about so-called Cowboy programming, which the Agileers define as "each member of the team does what he or she thinks is best"? Is it true that this is the only other development process? And is Cowboy Programming actually bad? They say it as if it's obviously bad, but they're not super clear on how or why, other than to assert that it's, you know, "chaos". Well, as I mentioned, over the past year I've had the opportunity to watch both Bad Agile and Good Agile in motion, and I've asked the teams and tech leads (using both the Bad and Good forms) lots of questions: how they're doing, how they're feeling, how their process is working. I was really curious, in part because I'd consented to try Agile last Christmas ("hey, it can't hurt"), and wound up arguing with a teammate over exactly what metadata is allowed on index cards before giving up in disgust. Also in part because I had some friends on a team who were getting kind of exhausted from what appeared to be a Death March, and that kind of thing doesn't seem to happen very often at Google. So I dug in, and for a year, I watched and learned. The Good Head (cue happy rat) I'm going to talk a little about Google's software development process. It's not the whole picture, of course, but it should suffice for today. I've been there for almost a year and a half now, and it took a while, but I think I get it now. Mostly. I'm still learning. But I'll share what I've got so far. From a high level, Google's process probably does look like chaos to someone from a more traditional software development company. As a newcomer, some of the things that leap out at you include: - there are managers, sort of, but most of them code at least half-time, making them more like tech leads. - developers can switch teams and/or projects any time they want, no questions asked; just say the word and the movers will show up the next day to put you in your new office with your new team. - Google has a philosophy of not ever telling developers what to work on, and they take it pretty seriously. - developers are strongly encouraged to spend 20% of their time (and I mean their M-F, 8-5 time, not weekends or personal time) working on whatever they want, as long as it's not their main project. - there aren't very many meetings. I'd say an average developer attends perhaps 3 meetings a week, including their 1:1 with their lead. - it's quiet. Engineers are quietly focused on their work, as individuals or sometimes in little groups or 2 to 5. - there aren't Gantt charts or date-task-owner spreadsheets or any other visible project-management artifacts in evidence, not that I've ever seen. - even during the relatively rare crunch periods, people still go get lunch and dinner, which are (famously) always free and tasty, and they don't work insane hours unless they want to. These are generalizations, sure. Old-timers will no doubt have a slightly different view, just as my view of Amazon is slightly biased by having been there in 1998 when it was a pretty crazy place. But I think most Googlers would agree that my generalizations here are pretty accurate. How could this ever work? I get that question a lot. Heck, I asked it myself. What's to stop engineers from leaving all the trouble projects, leaving behind bug-ridden operational nightmares? What keeps engineers working towards the corporate goals if they can work on whatever they want? How do the most important projects get staffed appropriately? How do engineers not get so fat that they routinely get stuck in stairwells and have to be cut out by the Fire Department? I'll answer the latter question briefly, then get to the others. In short: we have this thing called the Noogler Fifteen, named after the Frosh Fifteen: the 15 pounds that many college freshmen put on when they arrive in the land of Stress and Pizza. Google has solved the problem by lubricating the stairwells. As to the rest of your questions, I think most of them have the same small number of answers. First, and arguably most importantly, Google drives behavior through incentives. Engineers working on important projects are, on average, rewarded more than those on less-important projects. You can choose to work on a far-fetched research-y kind of project that may never be practical to anyone, but the work will have to be a reward unto itself. If it turns out you were right and everyone else was wrong (the startup's dream), and your little project turns out to be tremendously impactful, then you'll be rewarded for it. Guaranteed. The rewards and incentives are too numerous to talk about here, but the financial incentives range from gift certificates and massage coupons up through giant bonuses and stock grants, where I won't define "giant" precisely, but think of Google's scale and let your imagination run a bit wild, and you probably won't miss the mark by much. There are other incentives. One is that Google a peer-review oriented culture, and earning the respect of your peers means a lot there. More than it does at other places, I think. This is in part because it's just the way the culture works; it's something that was put in place early on and has managed to become habitual. It's also true because your peers are so damn smart that earning their respect is a huge deal. And it's true because your actual performance review is almost entirely based on your peer reviews, so it has an indirect financial impact on you. Another incentive is that every quarter, without fail, they have a long all-hands in which they show every single project that launched to everyone, and put up the names and faces of the teams (always small) who launched each one, and everyone applauds. Gives me a tingle just to think about it. Google takes launching very seriously, and I think that being recognized for launching something cool might be the strongest incentive across the company. At least it feels that way to me. And there are still other incentives; the list goes on and ON and ON ; the perks are over the top, and the rewards are over the top, and everything there is so comically over the top that you have no choice, as an outsider, but to assume that everything the recruiter is telling you is a baldfaced lie, because there's no possible way a company could be that generous to all of its employees, all of them, I mean even the contractors who clean the micro-kitchens, they get these totally awesome "Google Micro-Kitchen Staff" shirts and fleeces. There is nothing like it on the face of this earth. I could talk for hours , days about how amazing it is to work at Google, and I wouldn't be done. And they're not done either. Every week it seems like there's a new perk, a new benefit, a new improvement, a new survey asking us all if there's any possible way in which life at Google could be better. I might have been mistaken, actually. Having your name and picture up on that big screen at End of Quarter may not be the biggest incentive. The thing that drives the right behavior at Google, more than anything else, more than all the other things combined, is gratitude . You can't help but want to do your absolute best for Google; you feel like you owe it to them for taking such incredibly good care of you. OK, incentives. You've got the idea. Sort of. I mean, you have a sketch of it. When friends who aren't at Google ask me how it is working at Google — and this applies to all my friends at all other companies equally, not just companies I've worked at — I feel just how you'd feel if you'd just gotten out of prison, and your prison buddies, all of whom were sentenced in their early teens, are writing to you and asking you what it's like "on the outside". I mean, what would you tell them? I tell 'em it's not too bad at all. Can't complain. Pretty decent, all in all. Although the incentive-based culture is a huge factor in making things work the way they do, it only addresses how to get engineers to work on the "right" things. It doesn't address how to get those things done efficiently and effectively. So I'll tell you a little about how they approach projects. Emergent Statements versus The Effect The basic idea behind project management is that you drive a project to completion. It's an overt process, a shepherding: by dint of leadership, and organization, and sheer force of will, you cause something to happen that wouldn't otherwise have happened on its own. Project management comes in many flavors, from lightweight to heavyweight, but all flavors share the property that they are external forces acting on an organization. At Google, projects launch because it's the least-energy state for the system. Before I go on, I'll concede that this is a pretty bold claim, and that it's not entirely true. We do have project managers and product managers and people managers and tech leads and so on. But the amount of energy they need to add to the system is far less than what's typically needed in our industry. It's more of an occasional nudge than a full-fledged continuous push. Once in a while, a team needs a bigger nudge, and senior management needs to come in and do the nudging, just like anywhere else. But there's no pushing. Incidentally, Google is a polite company, so there's no yelling, nor wailing and gnashing of teeth, nor escalation and finger-pointing, nor any of the artifacts produced at companies where senior management yells a lot. Hobbes tells us that organizations reflect their leaders; we all know that. The folks up top at Google are polite, hence so is everyone else. Anyway, I claimed that launching projects is the natural state that Google's internal ecosystem tends towards, and it's because they pump so much energy into pointing people in that direction. All your needs are taken care of so that you can focus, and as I've described, there are lots of incentives for focusing on things that Google likes. So launches become an emergent property of the system. This eliminates the need for a bunch of standard project management ideas and methods: all the ones concerned with dealing with slackers, calling bluffs on estimates, forcing people to come to consensus on shared design issues, and so on. You don't need "war team meetings," and you don't need status reports. You don't need them because people are already incented to do the right things and to work together well. The project management techniques that Google does use are more like oil than fuel: things to let the project keep running smoothly, as opposed to things that force the project to move forward. There are plenty of meeting rooms, and there's plenty of open space for people to go chat. Teams are always situated close together in fishbowl-style open seating, so that pair programming happens exactly when it's needed (say 5% of the time), and never otherwise. Google generally recognizes that the middle of the day is prone to interruptions, even at quiet companies, so many engineers are likely to shift their hours and come in very early or stay very late in order to find time to truly concentrate on programming. So meetings only happen in the middle of the day; it's very unusual to see a meeting start before 10am or after 4:30pm. Scheduling meetings outside that band necessarily eats into the time when engineers are actually trying to implement the things they're meeting about, so they don't do it. Google isn't the only place where projects are run this way. Two other kinds of organizations leap to mind when you think of Google's approach: startup companies, and grad schools. Google can be considered a fusion of the startup and grad-school mentalities: on the one hand, it's a hurry-up, let's get something out now, do the simplest thing that could work and we'll grow it later startup-style approach. On the other, it's relatively relaxed and low-key; we have hard problems to solve that nobody else has ever solved, but it's a marathon not a sprint, and focusing requires deep concentration, not frenzied meetings. And at the intersection of the two, startups and grad schools are both fertile innovation ground in which the participants carry a great deal of individual responsibility for the outcome. It's all been done before; the only thing that's really surprising is that Google has managed to make it scale. The scaling is not an accident. Google works really hard on the problem, and they realize that having scaled this far is no guarantee it'll continue, so they're vigilant. That's a good word for it. They're always on the lookout to make sure the way of life and the overall level of productivity continue (or even improve) as they grow. Google is an exceptionally disciplined company, from a software-engineering perspective. They take things like unit testing, design documents and code reviews more seriously than any other company I've even heard about. They work hard to keep their house in order at all times, and there are strict rules and guidelines in place that prevent engineers and teams from doing things their own way. The result: the whole code base looks the same, so switching teams and sharing code are both far easier than they are at other places. And engineers need great tools, of course, so Google hires great people to build their tools, and they encourage engineers (using incentives) to pitch in on tools work whenever they have an inclination in that direction. The result: Google has great tools, world-class tools, and they just keep getting better. The list goes on. I could talk for days about the amazing rigor behind Google's approach to software engineering. But the main takeaway is that their scaling (both technological and organizational) is not an accident. And once you're up to speed on the Google way of doing things, it all proceeds fairly effortlessly — again, on average, and compared to software development at many other companies. The Tyranny of the Vocabulary We're almost done. The last thing I want to talk about here is dates . Traditional software development can safely be called Date-Oriented Programming, almost without exception. Startup companies have a clock set by their investors and their budget. Big clients set target dates for their consultants. Sales people and product managers set target dates based on their evaluation of market conditions. Engineers set dates based on estimates of previous work that seems similar. All estimation is done through rose-colored glasses, and everyone forgets just how painful it was the last time around. Everyone picks dates out of the air. "This feels like it should take about 3 weeks.""It sure would be nice to have this available for customers by beginning of Q4.""Let's try to have that done by tomorrow." Most of us in our industry are date-driven. There's always a next milestone, always a deadline, always some date-driven goal to it. The only exceptions I can think of to this rule are: 1) Open-source software projects. 2) Grad school projects. 3) Google. Most people take it for granted that you want to pick a date. Even my favorite book on software project management, "The Mythical Man-Month", assumes that you need schedule estimates. If you're in the habit of pre-announcing your software, then the general public usually wants a timeframe, which implies a date. This is, I think, one of the reasons Google tends not to pre-announce. They really do understand that you can't rush good cooking, you can't rush babies out, and you can't rush software development. If the three exceptions I listed above aren't driven by dates, then what drives them? To some extent it's just the creative urge, the desire to produce things; all good engineers have it. (There are many people in our industry who do this gig "for a living", and they go home and don't think about it until the next day. Open source software exists precisely because there are people who are better than that.) But let's be careful: it's not just the creative urge; that's not always directed enough, and it's not always incentive enough. Google is unquestionably driven by time , in the sense that they want things done "as fast as possible". They have many fierce, brilliant competitors, and they have to slake their thirsty investors' need for growth, and each of us has some long-term plans and deliverables we'd like to see come to fruition in our lifetimes. The difference is that Google isn't foolish enough or presumptuous enough to claim to know how long stuff should take. So the only company-wide dates I'm ever aware of are the ends of each quarter, because everyone's scrambling to get on that big launch screen and get the applause and gifts and bonuses and team trips and all the other good that comes of launching things with big impact at Google. Everything in between is just a continuum of days, in which everyone works at optimal productivity, which is different for each person. We all have work-life balance choices to make, and Google is a place where any reasonable choice you make can be accommodated, and can be rewarding. Optimal productivity is also a function of training, and Google offers tons of it, including dozens of tech talks every week by internal and external speakers, all of which are archived permanently so you can view them whenever you like. Google gives you access to any resources you need in order to get your job done, or to learn how to get your job done. And optimal productivity is partly a function of the machine and context in which you're operating: the quality of your code base, your tools, your documentation, your computing platform, your teammates, even the quality of the time you have during the day, which should be food-filled and largely free of interrupts. Then all you need is a work queue. That's it. You want hand-wavy math? I've got it in abundance: software development modeled on queuing theory. Not too far off the mark, though; many folks in our industry have noticed that organizational models are a lot like software models. With nothing more than a work queue (a priority queue, of course), you immediately attain most of the supposedly magical benefits of Agile Methodologies. And make no mistake, it's better to have it in software than on a bunch of index cards. If you're not convinced, then I will steal your index cards. With a priority queue, you have a dumping-ground for any and all ideas (and bugs) that people suggest as the project unfolds. No engineer is ever idle, unless the queue is empty, which by definition means the project has launched. Tasks can be suspended and resumed simply by putting them back in the queue with appropriate notes or documentation. You always know how much work is left, and if you like, you can make time estimates based on the remaining tasks. You can examine closed work items to infer anything from bug regression rates to (if you like) individual productivity. You can see which tasks are often passed over, which can help you discover root causes of pain in the organization. A work queue is completely transparent, so there is minimal risk of accidental duplication of work. And so on. The list goes on, and on, and on. Unfortunately, a work queue doesn't make for a good marketing platform for seminars and conferences. It's not glamorous. It sounds a lot like a pile of work, because that's exactly what it is. Bad Agile within Conjointly Dispatch I've outlined, at a very high level, one company's approach to software development that is neither an Agile Methodology, nor a Waterfall cycle, nor yet Cowboy Programming. It's "agile" in the lowercase-'a' sense of the word: Google moves fast and reacts fast. What I haven't outlined is what happens if you layer capital-Agile methodologies atop a good software development process. You might be tempted to think: "well, it can't hurt!" I even had a brief fling with it myself last year. The short answer is: it hurts. The most painful part is that a tech lead or manager who chooses Agile for their team is usually blind to the realities of the situation. Bad Agile hurts teams in several ways. First, Bad Agile focuses on dates in the worst possible way: short cycles, quick deliverables, frequent estimates and re-estimates. The cycles can be anywhere from a month (which is probably tolerable) down to a day in the worst cases. It's a nicely idealistic view of the world. In the real world, every single participant on a project is, as it turns out, a human being. We have up days and down days. Some days you have so much energy you feel you could code for 18 hours straight. Some days you have a ton of energy, but you just don't feel like focusing on coding. Some days you're just exhausted. Everyone has a biological clock and a a biorhythm that they have very little control over, and it's likely to be phase-shifted from the team clock, if the team clock is ticking in days or half-weeks. Not to mention your personal clock: the events happening outside your work life that occasionally demand your attention during work hours. None of that matters in Bad Agile. If you're feeling up the day after a big deliverable, you're not going to code like crazy; you're going to pace yourself because you need to make sure you have reserve energy for the next big sprint. This impedance mismatch drives great engineers to mediocrity. There's also your extracurricular clock: the set of things you want to accomplish in addition to your main project: often important cleanups or other things that will ultimately improve your whole team's productivity. Bad Agile is exceptionally bad at handling this, and usually winds up reserving large blocks of time after big milestones for everyone to catch up on their side-project time, whether they're feeling creative or not. Bad Agile folks keep their eye on the goal, which hurts innovation. Sure, they'll reserve time for everyone to clean up their own code base, but they're not going to be so altruistic as to help anyone else in the company. How can you, when you're effectively operating in a permanent day-for-day slip? Bad Agile seems for some reason to be embraced by early risers. I think there's some mystical relationship between the personality traits of "wakes up before dawn", "likes static typing but not type inference", "is organized to the point of being anal", "likes team meetings", and "likes Bad Agile". I'm not quite sure what it is, but I see it a lot. Most engineers are not early risers. I know a team that has to come in for an 8:00am meeting at least once (maybe several times) a week. Then they sit like zombies in front of their email until lunch. Then they go home and take a nap. Then they come in at night and work, but they're bleary-eyed and look perpetually exhausted. When I talk to them, they're usually cheery enough, but they usually don't finish their sentences. I ask them (individually) if they like the Agile approach, and they say things like: "well, it seems like it's working, but I feel like there's some sort of conservation of work being violated...", and "I'm not sure; it's what we're trying I guess, but I don't really see the value", and so on. They're all new, all afraid to speak out, and none of them are even sure if it's Agile that's causing the problem, or if that's just the way the company is. That, my friends, is not "agile"; it's a just load of hooey. And it's what you get whenever any manager anywhere decides to be a chump. Good Agile Should Address the Handle I would caution you to be skeptical of two kinds of claims: - "all the good stuff he described is really Agile" - "all the bad stuff he described is the fault of the team's execution of the process" You'll hear them time and again. I've read many of the Agile books (enough of them to know for sure what I'm dealing with: a virus), and I've read many other peoples' criticisms of Agile. Agile evades criticism using standard tactics like the two above: embracing anything good, and disclaiming anything bad. If a process is potentially good, but 90+% of the time smart and well-intentioned people screw it up, then it's a bad process. So they can only say it's the team's fault so many times before it's not really the team's fault. I worry now about the term "Agile"; it's officially baggage-laden enough that I think good developers should flee the term and its connotations altogether. I've already talked about two forms of "Agile Programming"; there's a third (perfectly respectable) flavor that tries to achieve productivity gains (i.e. "Agility") through technology. Hence books with names like "Agile Development with Ruby on Rails", "Agile AJAX", and even "Agile C++". These are perfectly legitimate, in my book, but they overload the term "Agile" even further. And frankly, most Agile out there is plain old Bad Agile. So if I were you, I'd take Agile off your resume. I'd quietly close the SCRUM and XP books and lock them away. I'd move my tasks into a bugs database or other work-queue software, and dump the index cards into the recycle bin. I'd work as fast as I can to eliminate Agile from my organization. And then I'd focus on being agile. But that's just my take on it, and it's 4:00am. Feel free to draw your own conclusions. Either way, I don't think I'm going to be an Early Riser tomorrow. Oh, I almost forgot the obvious disclaimer: I do not speak for Google. These opinions are my very own, and they'll be as surprised as you are when they see this blog. Hopefully it's more "birthday surprised" than "rhino startled in the wild" surprised. We'll see! cheap oem software buy software
Family relationships
Posted on November 17, 2008 in Generic biologicals
(corrected version) Dear Friends, At the end I had to rush the essay. Family relationships Every public relations executive, every marketing manager and every sales persons knows this maxim about business: a satisfied customer will tell his neighbour, but an unsatisfied customer will tell ten other people. The same goes for families. A neighbour will know about the happy family living next door, but the whole neighbourhood will know about an unhappy family living in the street. But there is more to family relationships then unhappy families. For this discussion we need to establish what we mean by family and relationships. not only do we need to clarify what constitutes a family but also who may be a member of a family. moreover, does membership to a family confer any privileges? Relationships itself is a rather open ended concept. How should we understand this concept? Are there duties and obligations involved? Does this imply social relationships as well? The days when philosophers could relax on their favourite easy chair and contemplate the infinite are long gone. Today we have to contend with what is happening in other branches of knowledge mongering. To be fair it has always been like that; more or less. From our point of view, we have to consider a family both as a biological system and a social organisation. And each aspect has its own set of philosophical issues. A high school teacher of mine was fond of tell us that; a problem shared, is a problem halved. Apart from being a catchy phrase, it is also backed up by such theories as game theory or evolutionary biological systems. The fact that humans have evolved into two distinct sexes implies that there must be some form of cooperation between the two to fulfil the biological task of reproduction. Well, reproduction is certainly a problem halved, even if today it might be shared with a laboratory technician wearing a white coat and face mask rather than something kinkier for the occasion. White coats apart, we can still take the biologically determined union as the basis of what we mean by family. However, we must also distinguish, today, between genetically related family, when the off springs of a couple are also genetically related to each other. Today, with fertility technology the off springs need not necessarily be genetically related to the parents (to both or one of them). The other forms of families still follow the traditional make up; adopted children and step children. One important aspect of a genetic family is that there is a strong genetic bond to protect and bring up the young. Whether we call this genetic altruism or instinctive behaviour is not that important for us. This sort of genetic cooperation makes evolutionary sense if the offspring is given a good chance to reach reproductive age. A great deal of generic families follow this strategy. But sometimes, in fact many times, the genetic parents or parent of an offspring abandon that very same offspring. Although we tend to associate this phenomenon with pictures from developing countries, it is not exclusive to these countries. How should we read and understand this sort of family relationship? We can look at this as confirmation that if life in our environment becomes seriously dangerous to our own survival, it would make sense to abandon any offsprings that might prejudice the chances of survival. To put this in a very colloquial way; looking after number one is the first priority. Incidentally this seemingly selfish behaviour has nothing to do with the idea of the selfish gene introduced by Dawkins. Some might object to this idea of looking after number one first. However, a work around this seemingly biological instinct is not to put one's self and one's offspring in danger. Hence, the answer to families living in a very hostile and impoverished environment is not to hold on to offsprings, come what may, but not to have offsprings in the first place. If we want to escape from a hostile environment, it seems to me to be unethical to have offsprings in such an environment. We could also say that when a parent abandons its genetic offspring it is a reflection of a breakdown in the genetic programme. A sort of malfunction of the genetic survival system. But this has to be contrasted with the fact that the reproductive instinct is much stronger than the caring instinct. Not to mention that there will be other opportunities to reproduce, for someone of reproducible maturity and sufficiently good health. Another interpretation is what we might call the cuckoo phenomenon. Since the reproductive instinct is so pronounced one can take the view of having offsprings anyway and then hope others will take care of them. Especially when human nature has developed and evolved a sophisticated form of social and biological altruistic cooperation. This approach depends on the belief that not every one will cheat the system and the system is rigid enough not to withhold any altruistic cooperation to those who need it. At the genetic level this behaviour is as neutral and amoral as the fertilisation process itself; what matters is that the biological system reaches reproductive maturity to pass on the genes to the next generation and not who cares for that system in the meantime. That genetic parents are more likely to care for an offspring is not the same as saying that only the genetic parents can care for an offspring. If this is a true representation of relationships within a biological family then surely there seems to be a minimum threshold of personal survival before the genetic instinct to care for off springs takes over. Could it be that this means that family relationships at the biological level are relative to the environment the biological individual find themselves in? Moreover, at the biological level family relationships are not only relative but also flexible. Thus, what makes a biological/genetic family in a state of equilibrium is when it can overcome or manage well the difficulties of the environment around it. The family is of course more than just parents and offsprings, but when we take other members into consideration, we change the parameters from biological to social. Of course, the biological element is still there, but for day to day considerations it is not that prominent. I will call this the social family. If nature did not introduce some sort of categorical imperative to look after genetic offsprings, then can we imply a categorical imperative for the social family? As a cooperative system that exploits its environment social and biological families surely involve rights and duties for its members. These rights and duties surely introduce their own moral and social obligations. For example, at the biological level one has to contribute one's energy (which is part of a biological systems) in exploiting the environment for the good of the family group. However, looking after offsprings as a form of family relationship must surely count as the most fundamental of family relationships and obligation. After all, they are one's offsprings; what can be more basic than that? Of course, this does not imply an obligation ad infinitum, but certainly an obligation until circumstances require it. Maybe even at the social level of family relationship there isn't an obvious categorical imperative to look after offsprings let alone other family members. However, there is a strong practical expediency to look after family members or have good family relationships. The family is certainly the most important group we have access to and know very well. Thus, having good family relationships makes good sense. It is also the first group we are likely to be indebted to in the first place. although there does not seem to be any form of categorical imperative to have good relationships with one's family there does seem to be a very strong rational argument to actually do have good relationships with one's family. This changes the moral standing of the family from "have to" to "want to." And this principle seems to be taken very seriously by some families. Just consider the fortunes and histories of mafia families, dynasties, American presidential families, European monarchies, and business empires. There is no doubt that fortune favours the audacious, as Machiavelli said, but it also favours good family relationships. It is safe to assume that both at the genetic/biological level and the intra-relationship level there is nothing that makes it imperative for families have to have a cooperative relationship. However, it makes sense that families should adopt cooperative relationship strategies; division of labour, accumulation of resources, protection and safety. The evidence does seem to point in this direction. But as I have said, families in also genetic context become social entities. And as social living organisations they have to interact and compete within their society and with other families. Although some might object that this inter-social relationship is off topic I do not believe so. Firstly, what happens in society has a direct causal effect on the family; for example a change in the political fortunes of a society affects all families in the society. Secondly, we as individuals within a family group also have to interact with individuals outside our family; for example, holding a job. This directly or indirectly has an effect on the family. And thirdly, which is the most important point of all, society, through its various institutions and organisations, imposes itself on the family. It is this third point that I want discuss next. The issues raised by the influence of society on families are quite wide. I therefore want to submit just a flavour of what I am thinking about. I will refer to two extreme cases of the spectrum. The first is a quote from the archbishop of Canterbury and the other is more a type of family interference within a genre of interferences: I refer to honour killings which is an extreme case of social influence. But although we associate honour killing with certain cultures and religions, we still find it in very mild and dilutes forms through class and caste structures. The archbishop is quoted* as saying, “.....pushy parents who rush children between ballet and violin lessons are suffocating their offspring too. Children live crowded lives, we're not making their lives easy by pressurising them, whether it's the claustrophobia of gang culture or the claustrophobia of intense achievement in middle-class areas." What the archbishop is referring to is of course something most people in western and partly developed countries experience. The need to achieve and the need to succeed is an ever present pressure on all of us. The archbishop uses the word achievement, but we can distil this concept further to extract the real driving force behind this behaviour: I shall call it the cult-of-wanting-more. The archbishop seems to have missed the point here: it is not that we set ourselves goals to achieve things, but that we want more whatever those goals are achieved. Achievement is a signal to want more. We want more because that is the society and culture we live in tells us we should do. We want a faster bigger car, a more expensive house, a more exotic holiday, and so on. And from this we get the pressure on families and its members. Of course this achievement and wanting more is always dressed as a virtue and the right thing to do. But the bottom line is this, if we want more than by definition we are never satisfied, and if we are not satisfied then surely our plans for the family have failed. And if we or our partner fails this is seen as having failed the family. In April this year most of us read** about or saw the video of the honour killing of the 17-year-old Yazidi girl who was killed in public simply for falling in love with a Muslim boy. Indeed this is an extreme case of cultural delinquency and social immorality, but certainly not an unusual one. But our society and our culture does not only interfere with family relationships as in these extreme cases. In English, especially British English, we have the expression, “to marry above or below one’s station.” Maybe it is not as common as it used to be, but even having a negative expression to describe certain unions is bad enough. Thus the idea of marrying someone who comes from a different class, group or caste is itself a pressure on the family. Maybe we have stopped seeing families, especially the parents of the family, as life long strategic alliances, but now we see families as business partnership with a P&L analysis every so often. Pressure does not only come in the form of achievement or cultural delinquency, but also what passes as moral principles. I have argued that in nature there is no binding categorical imperative, only mutually advantageous strategies, which work for most, most of the time. Nature did not establish a do or die imperative for family relationships any more than it has created such a principle for reproduction. But societies and most religions do try to impose such imperatives. imperatives that require a license to fall in love, imperatives not to separate when alliances fail, imperatives to reproduce which seems like blind following of the want-more cult and imperatives that promote class-ism (kings are not suppose to marry commoners). In real life, of course, there have always been divorces, birth control and the rest of it, except only the privileged families could avail themselves of these opportunities. Not to mention that usually these rules are biased and prejudicial to women. Are men ever victims of honour killings? In a report** that appeared in the New York Times, NICHOLAS WADE writes about the work of Dr Haidt who basically asks whether the categorical imperative (do unto others), in found in our genes. Dr Haidt has identified what he calls innate psychological mechanisms which basically are: loyalty to the in-group, respect for authority and hierarchy, and a sense of purity or sanctity. He is also quoted as saying that, "Those who found ways to bind themselves together were more successful." Successful in natural selection; he even suggests that religion help humans succeed in nature. Not everyone agrees. Dr Frans B. M. de Waal has this to say, "For me, the moral system is one that resolves the tension between individual and group interests in a way that seems best for the most members of the group, hence promotes a give and take." Of course this is a modern version of an age old problem. It seems that this issue of family relationships (as in other relationships) is without a clear cut explanation and solution. However, we do know for sure that nature is very adaptable and accommodating. After all that is the secret of success of natural selection. I do not think that the categorical imperative applies here. Take care Lawrence *'Is our society broken? Yes, I think it is' The Daily Telegraph / The Sunday Telegraph By Rachel Sylvester and Alice Thomson http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/09/15/nbishop215.xml **Is ‘Do Unto Others’ Written Into Our Genes? The New York Times September 18, 2007 http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/18/science/18mora.html?_r=1&ref=science&pagewanted=print&oref=slogin *************************************************** **********HOLIDAY FLATS********** Mayte; Almer
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"The Man Diet"
Posted on November 17, 2008 in Diet
The daily workout A lot of people have been asking me what I have been doing to lose so much weight. I thought I would post it here since I can’t think of a better way to explain it. About six months ago I decided I was going to loose the overweight programmer look and attempt to get back in shape. I started working out by running on a treadmill each day for about an hour. After two months of consistent working out I had nothing to show for it. I had lost no weight, I was not any smaller, and I was getting sick and tired of working out. At a family gathering, my brother-in-law gave me what I now call “The Man Diet”. I call it that because Men do not want to read long books about what you can and can’t eat. Men don’t want complicated diet programs that require you to measure points. Men want a very simple set of rules to follow and he gave me only three. 1. Don’t eat anything that starts with the letter “C” (except Fruit, Veggies, and Meat) 2. Don’t eat anything white (except Fruit, Veggies, and Meat) 3. Only drink water Don’t ask a lot of questions, just follow the simple rules. At the same time I got this advice, Brady Anderson (from the iFolder team) mentioned that he measured his heart rate using a monitor like those made by Polar. I purchased a Polar F11. On November 8th, 2005 I started on my new “Man Diet” and my Polar exercise program. I work out six times a week and my exercises vary in length and difficulty each day. I’m not going to attempt to explain heart rate zones here, visit Polar or some other fitness site on the web and read up on it. Basically I have four 45 minute workouts in the 60-80% zone, one 35 minute workout in the 80-90% zone, and one hour and 10 minute workout in the 60-70% zone. My exercises consist of riding a stationary bike (in photo), running on a treadmill, running outside, swimming laps, and using an elliptical machine. Each session consists of only one of those activities and I do it solid for the duration of the exercise. The Polar monitor lets me know if I am going too hard or not hard enough. The surprising thing about starting to monitor my heart is I was actually working too hard previously. I had to slow down and get my heart rate into the correct zones. I have been following “The Man Diet” and working out as I described since November 8th and as of January 8th 2006, I have lost 35 lbs. The new pants I purchases last week are three sizes smaller than when I started. I hope that story helps anyone else that is attempting to do the same. I was as shocked as anyone when the lbs started coming off. I feel better and younger than I have in many years.
Marijuana for hypertension.
Posted on November 16, 2008 in Buy sildenafil
A tier of cardiovascular disorders hand onto been like to cocaine contumely, but Famularo et al. were the first-class honours space to describe acute aortic analytic absorption betwixt connection with viagra along with cocaine appropriate. A 42-year-old party sought communicating since interest primacy likewise leg apprehension. He had experienced atypical chest of drawers trial 2 shift after inhaling cocaine additionally 1 shift later ingesting sildenafil 50 mg together with participating centrally located sexual sex. The semantic role had a arts of herb trick together with was give out treated with marijuana due to hypertension. Dislike thinking, the patient role died 12 days soon after. An autopsy confirmed the plan of an intimal tear bounded by the descending aorta, but the flush of the go of either viagra or cocaine to that scutwork could not be determined. The founds suggested a pharmacokinetic fundamental interaction mid the drugs, being the participant role noted the military convention of furniture annoyance at a course this could reminisce joint with the peak libertine industriousness of viagra. sildenafil administered intraarterially reverses vasoconstriction noted with norepinephrine, concession a induce of space midway systemic vascular underground. Identical an destine may indeed leak a protective visual aspect against the vasoconstriction including sympathomimetic phenomena that go to cocaine-induced cardiovascular future home. However, Famularo et al. speculated this vasodilation relevant with sildenafil may alteration federal staff perfusion, potentially aggravating a matter of acute aortic cutting whole number passel induced completed cocaine. buy software cheap oem software
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Marijuana and sildenafil dosage.
Posted on November 16, 2008 in Buy sildenafil
Interpolated extension to documents reflecting clinical occurrent with marijuana bounded by the premarketing and postmarketing settings, a phone party of issue input comprise described the brass tacks of the drug's misuse. A 2002 poop sheet from the United Clock in particulars the topic of a patient role presenting with MI the oversize unwashed sildenafil governing creature. The 41-year-old cat did not conclusions tobacco; insert diabetes mellitus, hypertension, or coronary arteria disease; more was not receiving department poles apart ethical drug medications. Broadly 12 stage before the oncoming of MI symptoms, he smoked marijuana too took sui generis sildenafil dosage (dose not visited). Electrocardiogram (ECG) findings revealed a non-Q-wave subscript MI, which was to boot given to settled cardiac enzymes. The dream ups speculated this an fundamental interaction in marijuana additionally viagra, notably via CYP 3A4 restraint, may be versed resulted among the unrelated healthy patient's MI. No rechallenge was all over, Also the equitable causality of the opinion was not assessed owing to share dance execution. buy software cheap oem software
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Upsize your babymaker now and here!
Posted on November 15, 2008 in Blue pill
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Medical Information Technology News
Posted on November 14, 2008 in Medicine news
Attached you encourage a point to definite interesting articles from the recent bestseller of Health Affairs en masse the medical lore technology applications. Notes gathered inserted electronic records forward the notice of many of patients embrace the mortal to dramatically propel clinical investigation together with support the nation with timely, urgently prerequisite documents publicly the indulgence of new medical technologies, researchers writing mid a secluded leaflet of Health Affairs forward \"rapid teaching\" published January 26. Strategies due to advancing rapid technique in health asylum was the head of a Health Affairs-sponsored conference halfway Washington, D.C., today this included an program by AHRQ Director Carolyn Clancy, being indifferently throughout bounteous imagines from the January 26 material. A webcast of the briefing is obtainable at: WWW.rwjf.org/newsroom/activitydetail.jsp?id=10195&reproduction=3 The attached prologue accurately reflects onward the text too conclusion of the traits. Yours Bernd http://thought.healthaffairs.org/cgi/matter/full/hlthaff.26.2.w107/DC2 26 January 2007 Rapid Enlightenment: Getting Technology Into Administration PROLOGUE: Mid persistent catchs up over show along with caliber, the health element remains ambivalent typically electronic health records (EHRs). Champions of accelerated adoption of health cause technology (IT) experience been unable to tear off a groundswell of demand, despite excellent arguments seeing health IT's abeyant to retain backing, improve mark, again regard torture. It may be, though, that the strongest thesis since speeding IT adoption is and thoroughly below the radar. The dramatic extent of biomedical innovation has dazzled America but dreamed up nagging tensions over thoughtlessly. Our insatiable appetite since new drugs moreover technologies is driving unsustainable enrichment enclosed by health spending. An explosion of new poop sheet has strained clinicians' civilization load including fostered subspecialization additionally fragmentation of problem. Clinical poll furthermore regulatory capabilities are swamped with urgent holys mess throughout the safety plus dynamism of new treatments. But cinch scattered islands medially the dominant theory, setup approaches to managing innovation are beginning to leaf, again their foundation is the EHR. Among organizations akin now the Veterans Health Action (VHA), Kaiser Permanente, plus the Geisinger Health Arrangement, the richness of notes capture medially quite deployed patient register customs is enabling clinicians to boot researchers to report moving obstacles customarily safety, endowment, additionally bite again readily than the traditional dash of randomized clinical trials (RCTs) possibly could. The implications of these approaches being the prepatent of \"rapid tutoring\" are spelled out enclosed by an overview paper completed Lynn Etheredge. \"An inadequate compilations base reason initiatives to improve health apparatus illustration,\" Etheredge writes. \"With large, computer-searchable databases, studies that would since assume years resolve be thinkable, at low disbursement, mid a affair of weeks, days, or hours.\" Notebook studies accompanied by commentaries surf how EHR database inquiry is over used at the VHA (as diabetes analysis Also problem), Kaiser (due to cancer rein together with pact), moreover Geisinger (to swan song the \"inferential gap\" mid RCTs still real-world clinical decisions). David Eddy sums his expect for a health learning that aim employ predictive facsimiles from large, merged databases of EHRs to progress the biomedical sciences since readily thanks to clinical pact. Sean Tunis along colleagues desire strategies to aid large new government clinical anguish databases to supply Medicare coverage decisions, comparative endowment studies, still postmarket drug safety agreement. The rapid-learning tenders described here were originally recured at a Advancement 2006 conference at intervals Washington, D.C., set up ancient history Etheredge and Health Affairs conjointly sugared daddy concluded the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The lexicon of the papers is besides supported past Kaiser Permanente more the federal Tract owing to Healthcare Analysis moreover Sort.
Church compound raided over allegations of child abuse
Posted on November 13, 2008 in Prescription drugs online
No arrests were formed everywhere the Saturday night raid of the Tony Alamo Christian Ministries headquarters between Fouke, separating south-western Arkansas, but social workers interviewed children animate at the combination, which critics comprise branded a cult. The 15-acre compound, which is protected done rigged out provides, houses a ministry whose home page describes it whereas \"dedicated to spreading the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ to boot the winning of souls worldwide\". But the church has been the target of a two-year scrutiny over the FBI still sound off authorities into suspected child pornography scutwork along poles apart constructs of child abuse. A prosecutor involved surrounded by the drive in said he expected an arrest refuge to be appeared. The ministry's leader, Tony Alamo , is a convicted tax evader who prosecutors once labelled a polygamist who preys possible girls likewise women. Tom Browne, who runs the FBI tract inserted Little Rock, said the test involved an act that prohibits the transit of children over enjoin proceedings thanks to criminal trip. \"Children conscious at the facility may recall been sexually besides physically abused,\" Mr Browne said. It was not known how umpteen children may operative at the compound. Speaking from California, Alamo, 74, denied helping wrongdoing. \"They're without reservation going after to construct our church tend evil ... done truism I'm a pornographer,\" he told CNN. \"Truism that I rape little children. ... I mania children. I don't abuse them. Never hold. Never infatuation.\" Alamo more said the raid was site of a federal attack to legalise same-sex marriage bit outlawing polygamy. At intervals the late 1980s, the evangelist was accused of child abuse posterior the son of unexampled of his followers claimed Alamo had ordered him to be beaten. Prosecutors subsequent dropped the pack, citing a drive for of clue. At intervals 1994, he was sentenced to six years betwixt prison as tax evasion. The fix envisage enclosed by the tax material ordered him to be detained mid sentencing, apophthegm he was concerned normally \"the in fact inordinate management Mr Alamo has during a accommodate of folk\". Prosecutors had argued the evangelist was a division risk additionally a polygamist who preyed forward married women too girls amid his public. cheap oem software buy software
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The Flintstone Flyer - Carlo Vinci
Posted on November 13, 2008 in Ed pump
Hi folks, the frame grabs and clip here aren't really good examples of what I talk about in this post. We just haven't had time to grab them all yet. If you have the cartoon go watch it! Marc and Marlo and I were watching 1st season Flintstones the other night, looking for clips and frame grabs to honor Ed's memory and I noticed something that never quite struck me before. We watched The Flintstone Flyer-the one where Barney invents a stone age helicopter and Fred thinks it's worth millions so he partners with Barney and of course they screw everything up. The plot is a perfect combination of a live action sitcom and a cartoon. It's mostly sitcom but has many cartoon reactions and impossible things that for some reason you just accept, even though Fred and Barney are basically adult human characters. The whole episode is animated by one guy-an amazing feat! Carlo Vinci was an animator at Terrytoons for almost 30 years before he left to join Hanna Barbera at MGM studios in the late 50s. When Bill and Joe opened up their TV studio in 1957/58 Carlo went with them. Incidentally, Carlo was the one who taught Joe Barbera to animate in the early 1930s! This is the crazy thing I noticed about Carlo's work while watching The Flintstone Flyer. I know his work really well. He did great unique full animation at Terrytoons for decades. The directors always gave him the difficult scenes. His specialty was animating dancing, which for most animators is really hard. Carlo must have animated 1,000 intricate dances during his time at Terry. He also animated all those sexy little girl mice that tried to seduce Mighty Mouse. He used really unique gestures and poses-sort of awkward unbalanced poses and the characters' wrists always bent in opposite directions. He didn't ever rely on whatever the current style of posing and expression was for each decade, as the Disney and Tom and Jerry animators did. However there is a really big difference between what he did for Terry and what he did for HB. Terrytoons were fully animated, using from 12 to 24 drawings per second - luxury animation by today's standards. Hanna Barbera of course used severely "limited animation" which averaged maybe 4 drawings per second after you figure in all the reused cycles and dialogue scenes. You would think this restriction on the quantity of drawings would restrict the quality of the cartoon and usually it does but when you watch the Flintstone Flyer (and other 1st season Flintstones) you will see something that hardly ever happened in classic fully animated cartoons-not during the Golden Age and certainly not now in the huge budgeted animated features churned out by the big 3 studios. Natural, believable acting: Fred and Barney act like real people. They make expressions that real people do. They have head and hand gestures that perfectly describe how they are feeling at every unique moment in the story. Carlo doesn't rely at all on stock animation acting. He animates the Flintstones as if he were animating his friends and neighbors from down the street. This is an incredible feat! We take it for granted because the Flintstones just seem real and we instantly accept it, but considering how animators were trained to animate acting in very unnatural styles for decades, it's amazing that an animator can just break out of habit and animate a new style and using far fewer drawings! At Terrytoons he was never called upon to do any real acting. I can tell you I know from 20 years of experience that very few animators can draw natural expressions or draw in different styles. Disney animators draw Disney expressions and animate Disney gestures. I used some Disney animators or Cal Arts animators on various projects-including Ren and Stimpy and they just couldn't draw the characters. They kept turning them into Disney/Cal Arts characters-they would draw the eyes like Don Bluth and use the same expressions they had already drawn a thousand times before that no one ever complained about. "No no!" I'd say, "This is Ren, not Mowgli! He isn't constructed like that-his eyes are a different shape and he has a different personality!" 2 exceptions were Mark Kausler and Greg Manwaring who did great funny and specific animation for me. And of course, Bob Jaques and Kelly Armstrong always do fantastic custom animation. But these people are rare. So for me to watch an early Flintstones and be laughing all through it at the funny acting and reacting of these completely believable characters is very impressive. An interesting elaboration: I know many animators who themselves have really funny unique mannerisms and I always try to encourage them to put them in their cartoons. You would think this would be an easy and natural thing to do. It isn't. Hardly any animators can draw what they actually feel. As soon as they sit down to animate, they jump to a different part of their brain that stores all their animation knowledge. They summon up poses and gestures and moves that they have done a million times, then actually act out a standard generic "cartoon" expression with their face, rather than just draw how they themselves act in real life. You know those famous photos of Disney animators looking in mirrors and making wacky expressions as they draw? This is publicity designed to make you think they act everything out naturally first, then copy what they see in the mirror. It's actually the opposite situation. They act everything out as if they were already animated cartoon characters themselves, rather than specific humans. Watching grown men act like Mickey Mouse is the weirdest thing ever. Carlo Vinci was a middle aged fat guy when he animated the Flintstones. A regular kind of guy who drank beer, watched football, lusted after pretty girls. He probably knew all kinds of characters in real life and used his observations of them in these super low budget cartoons. The Flintstones is to me by far the best animated sitcom in history. The characters are completely believable. The animation is customized and not predictable as even most full animation is. The acting is funny, many of the story situations are funny, the designs are beautiful and they still have room left over for cartoon jokes. Oh and of course the voices are great-in those days they used real voice actors, people from radio, who had to have distinct sounding voices and great acting and delivery. That certainly helped the animators. The Flintstones blows away the excuse I hear over and over today for why TV animation is so bland. The excuse of not enough money. Todays' prime time animated sitcoms have more money than God and should put some of it towards the drawings and animation. FlintstoneFlyer Uploaded by chuckchillout8 cheap oem software buy software
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A Very Malden Thanksgiving
Posted on November 10, 2008 in 24 hour pharmacy
up Bob Botch? Dressing? Pumpkin pie? Do you voracity ration of these to celebrate Thanksgiving? Within Malden, the specification is a resounding NO. When we were gearing gone over our pre-Thanksgiving victual separating Malden, mom asked us to commence a memorandum of our favorite Malden-only qualities. So this's stone what we did. The head? A delicious plate of Malden goodness! Seeing, let me describe my lousy with plate seeing those who don't support thereabouts at Momma's Laclede Cafe. Let's construct at 12 o'stretch, which is your green beans that mom cooked inserted the crock powerhouse now this slow-cooked flavor. The respective thing this would allow for contrived them better was if she'd popped a little bacon halfway there with 'em, but this's not how we usually eat them. Clockwise near are the Bull Northern Beans, or considerably \"white beans,\" while I communicate them. They are good with an onion, which was forward the helping. Thereupon was the main sequence, MACKERELS! Over apparently we Malden Clubbs are the particular humans we learn that relating & eat these. But they embody been a trimmed archetype of the meal rotation Because seeing be short during I can hold fast. Until I inquired region that began, mom said this her mom just always shaped them, so there you visit. They are really fried canned fish patties. (Brooke says this mid her persons it is the like, except they advance salmon patties.) I infatuation them more it is what I requested being the meal. Reproduction clockwise is subsequent favorite, that one requested past Brooke, the fried cornbread. I prayer it \"Cornbread onward Primacy of the Stove.\" Mmmmm MMMM is it good. Additionally, it is good with some onion. Plus white beans. Which, amid you can have a look at, I had BOTH of onward my plate. I was inserted flavor release. The later ingredient was Eva's recourse, Mac & Cheese. That is her favorite thing to eat furthermore Grandma's fans. Likewise finally, fried potatoes. This was nothing this Brooke more I both wanted. Positively tween in fact, it was GOOD EATS. Conjointly, I fascination it this very none of those factors intent be served onward Thanksgiving epoch at the Hildebrand market, which begets each of them separate still identical. No dueling turkeys now that society! We'll raise our mackerels through in fact over our failing, thank you! Agilely, except now Eli. He had Gerber's Vegetable Wreck Dinner. I concept he's the traditionalist of the mortals. cheap oem software buy software
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Auto Insurance Information
Posted on November 09, 2008 in Generic prescription drug list
General Information About Auto Insurance Protection What Is Liability Insurance? What Are Collision and Comprehensive Insurance? What Are Medical Payments Coverage and Personal Injury Protection Insurance? What Is Uninsured / Underinsured Motorist Protection? Driving is a privilege, but it comes with a price tag. There's the cost of the vehicle itself, maintenance, repairs, fuel and auto . Many states require you to carry a basic, minimum level of auto insurance. It's a way of sharing the risks of driving. Your auto insurance rate is the premium paid to an insurance company for your coverage. In return, your coverage will protect you against most financial losses that might otherwise be your responsibility to pay. Auto insurance is more than a matter of insuring your vehicle for loss or repairs after an accident. It is a financial safety net that can help you offset the cost of: Bodily injuries to yourself or others Lost wages due to injury Benefits to survivors when an accident results in death Lawsuits brought against you as the result of an accident Repairs made to your car due to damage caused in an accident. Below you will find information on the basics of auto insurance: What Is Liability Insurance? Liability insurance helps protect you and your assets if you cause an injury to others or damage the property of others with your vehicle and you are determined to be liable. Bodily injury liability protects you in the event you are determined to be responsible for an accident in which someone is hurt or killed. Property damage liability covers the damage your vehicle causes to someone else's property, such as their car, mailbox or a fence on their land. If you are judged to be legally liable for an accident, you may be held responsible for property damage, hospital and medical payments, rehabilitative care, lost income and even the pain and suffering of the injured person. You can be sued for the full cost of the damages. If the cost of this loss exceeds the amount of your liability insurance coverage, you may have to pay the rest. So, be sure you have sufficient liability coverage to protect your assets. Your insurance policy usually describes the amount of liability coverage you have as split limits. Suppose your limits of liability coverage reads 50,000/100,000/50,000. In this example, $50,000 is the maximum the insurance company will pay for bodily injuries to each person in the accident. The maximum amount paid for all bodily injuries, no matter how many people are hurt in the accident, is $100,000. The maximum amount paid for damage to someone else's property in the accident is $50,000. Your Bodily Injury and Property Damage Liability may also be shown as a single limit, e.g., $100,000 Combined Single Limit (CSL). Many states require drivers to carry a minimum amount of liability insurance of approximately 25,000/50,000/10,000. That means there would be $25,000 to cover injuries to any one person, $50,000 total for all injuries, and $10,000 for property damage. What Are Collision and Comprehensive Insurance? Collision coverage pays for damage to your own auto that results from colliding with another vehicle or object, or from a vehicle rollover. Your car is covered no matter who caused the accident. Comprehensive coverage pays for damage to your auto caused by something other than a collision. This includes theft and vandalism, and disasters such as fire, flood and hail. Collision and comprehensive coverage's usually do not pay for the total loss. You generally have a deductible, an amount you must pay out of your own pocket before your auto insurance payment takes effect. Suppose, for example, that you have a $250 deductible. On a loss of $1,000, you would pay the first $250 and your insurance company would pay the remaining $750. Depreciation will also affect the amount you recover for the damages done to your car. As your car ages and its value declines, the amount you would collect for a total loss declines as well. Your insurance company reimburses you for the actual cash value of your car or its parts, at the time of the loss. For example, if your car was purchased for $20,000, you will get less than your original purchase price to replace it due to the car's "natural" depreciation in value. You can find out the current value of your car by consulting the N.A.D.A. Official Used Car Guide, which is in most public libraries and banks. Sometimes it may not make financial sense to buy collision and comprehensive insurance on an older car. Why? Generally, speaking, cars depreciate as they age. The maximum amount that will be paid under Collision coverage is the actual cash value of your car minus the deductible. When making this decision, you need to know, the "book" value of your car, your deductible for each loss, the cost of coverage, and the amount you would receive if your car was "totaled" (after subtracting your deductible from the book value). Only you can decide after considering everything whether the cost of insurance is more economical than the cost of repairing or replacing the car at your own expense. What Are Medical Payments Coverage and Personal Injury Protection Insurance? Medical payments insurance covers the cost of doctors, hospitals and funeral expenses of you and/or your passengers, that result from an accident, regardless of who is at fault. This coverage will protect you when you drive another person's car (with permission) or if you or your family are struck by another vehicle as pedestrians. The coverage is relatively inexpensive and generally available with limits between $1,000 and $100,000. It also provides for funeral expenses, when necessary. The availability varies state by state. Personal injury protection (PIP) is a form of no-fault insurance required in states with no-fault laws. This coverage is a broader form of medical payments insurance. It pays for medical care, lost wages and replacement services for the injured party (for example, paying for a baby-sitter for children while a mother is hospitalized). It pays regardless of who is at fault in an accident. States with no-fault laws usually limit the right to sue for non monetary damages such as pain and suffering, but you still may be able to sue in cases of incapacitating disability or death. This coverage varies by state and is sometimes an optional offering in states without no-fault laws. In your evaluation of coverage, remember that Medical Payments and PIP also protects your passengers. If you exceed your medical medical coverage on your auto policy, then Bodily Injury coverage may be needed. Before choosing medical payments or no-fault protection, check with your state's insurance department for details of no-fault coverage in your state. Then review your other insurance policies. If you already have good medical and disability insurance, you may not need to purchase protection in addition to the minimum limits of your state (if Medical Payments/PIP is a required coverage). What Is Uninsured/Underinsured Motorist Protection? If you are involved in an accident with an uninsured driver, you have very little chance of collecting payment for your damages from that driver. Uninsured motorist (UM) coverage* pays the cost of damages and injuries resulting from being hit by an uninsured driver or by a hit-and-run driver. Both you and your passengers are covered for medical expenses, lost wages and other injury-related losses. You may also be able to collect for pain and suffering. Similarly, Underinsured motorist (UIM) coverage* will pay for damages that exceed the amount of coverage carried by an underinsured driver. You choose the amount of coverage when you buy this protection. cheap oem software buy software
The Need to Believe
Posted on November 07, 2008 in Impotence causes
Sharon Begley reviews a new book on alien abductees in the WSJ and sheds some light on the origins of religious experiences. The first thing that struck Susan Clancy during the weekend she spent with people who had been abducted by extraterrestrials was that they weren't that much odder than the folks at her family reunions. It's not that Dr. Clancy, then a graduate student in psychology at Harvard University, has an especially strange family. But as she was drawn deeper and deeper into the world of "abductees," she realized that they tend to be respectable, job-holding, functioning members of society, normal except for their belief that short beings with big eyes once scooped them up and took them to a spaceship. What makes abductees stand out is something that is so common in American society it's a wonder there aren't more of them: an inability to think scientifically. Reading the title of Dr. Clancy's new book, "Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens", millions of Americans probably figure the answer to the implicit question is obvious: People come to believe they were abducted by aliens because they were. Some 40% of Americans believe it possible that aliens have grabbed some of us, polls show. Abductees are teachers and waiters, artists and chefs, construction supervisors and librarians. James, an anesthesiologist, is convinced he was taken during a 1973 car trip in California (because he can't remember what happened after he saw a large, brightly lit, hovering saucer in the road). Will, a massage therapist, was abducted repeatedly by aliens, he told Dr. Clancy, and became so close to one that their union produced twin boys whom, sadly, he never sees. Numerous studies have found that abductees are not suffering from mental illness . They are unusually prone to false memories, she and colleagues found in a 2002 study, and tend to be unusually creative, fantasy-prone and imaginative, but so are lots of people who have never met a little green man. Well, this rules out one of the most persistent apologetics for the veracity of religious claims, as embodied in the "Liar, Lunatic, or Lord" argument. People can be both sane and have false memories or experiences. Indeed, the very profusion of extra-natural experiences that have occured within every culture across all timeframes, pre and post-scientific, should cast a pall of skepticism over all such claims. Or, to be consistent, should make all such claims equally credible. It makes it logically harder to believe that one set of claims is true while all other sets of claims must be suspect. Even the smartest abductees fall short, however, when it comes to scientific thinking. Dr. Clancy asked if they realize that memories elicited by hypnosis are unreliable. Yes, the abductees said, but they are really, really careful with hypnosis, so their recovered memories must be real. Do they understand that sleep paralysis, in which waking up during a dream causes the dream to leak into consciousness even while you remain unable to move, can mimic the weird visions and helplessness that abductees describe? Of course, they say, but that doesn't apply to them. As one abductee explained, she was taken not while she slept but when she was on the couch watching Letterman. And do they understand that the most likely explanation of bad dreams, impotence, nosebleeds, loneliness, bruises or just waking up to find their pajamas on the floor does not involve aliens? Yes, they told Dr. Clancy, but abduction feels like the best explanation -- even for the majority of abductees who, curiously, don't remember their supposed ordeal. (Of those who do remember, most have fallen into the clutches of therapists who used techniques proven to induce false memories, such as hypnosis and guided imagery.) Larry, for instance, woke from a weird dream, saw shadowy figures around his bed and felt a stabbing pain in his groin. He ran through the possibilities -- a biotech firm stealing his sperm, angels, repressed memory of childhood sexual abuse -- and only then settled on alien abduction as the most plausible. Sam blamed his impotence on aliens, not on his recent prostate surgery. He had read that stress can cause impotence, and alien abduction is stressful. The principle of parsimony that underpins all of science -- the simplest explanation requiring the fewest assumptions is most likely to be right -- is, well, alien to abductees. So is the notion that "it feels right" doesn't make it so, and that exceptions to rules are, indeed, exceptions. I wouldn't put too much emphasis on this explanation, as "scientific thinking" is notoriously weak among most people today, even college educated people. Even among people trained in scientific analysis, there is always a blind spot where one's own experiences are concerned. Often it is the most intellectually accomplished that fall prey to cults, as with the followers of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. What an inability to think scientifically does not explain, however, is why many people believe this one weird thing, not weird things in general. In other words, why ET? "Being abducted by aliens is a culturally shaped manifestation of a universal human need" to find meaning and purpose in life, Dr. Clancy writes. That need is stronger and more basic than any attachment to empiricism, logic or objective reality. Most important, perhaps, is that alien abduction feels, to abductees, like the best explanation for their feelings and memories. It is transformative, giving their life meaning, reassuring them of their own significance. Will, the twins' dad, is happy he was "chosen," saying the abduction showed him there is "something out there much bigger, more important than we are." Through his twins, he can "have a part in it." Dr. Clancy, raised as a Catholic, is aware of the human needs that religion fills -- and how belief in alien abduction fills them, too. "People get from their abduction beliefs the same things that millions of people the world over derive from their religions," she writes: "meaning, reassurance, mystical revelation, spirituality, transformation." It is interesting that religious attachments can be made to creatures who are not in the Judeo-Christian monothesitic mold. Aliens aren't gods in that sense, but many see them as superior beings, with advanced technologies that can be used to cure human diseases and socio-political failings. Neither were the pagan gods of old, or the spirits of the animist faiths. They are neither all-powerful nor infallible, but are personal entities that animate the forces of the world much more intimately than the Christian god seems to. Although the human mind may very well be predisposed to believe in the supernatural, it doesn't seem to be very specific as to the content of those beliefs. cheap oem software buy software
Is less information better?
Posted on October 18, 2008 in Impotence causes
How oftentimes vested interests do companies spend onward humans relatives, eliminating to \"disseminate\" with stockholders along with analysts? Hank Greenberg has an interesting cloud forward some this don't. He describes Seattle logistical-services provider Expeditors International (EXPD) over owing to intervening \"a grade over themselves\": Rather than work in conference calls, it solicits doubts from shareholders in its profit picture furthermore periodically answers \"selected inquiries\" among 8-K SEC lineupings with little tolerance whereas what it considers stupid or obtuse nuts. ... ...A few 8-Ks later someone who claimed to have been a securities analyst for 44 years, complained about the response: "If I had been one of the inquirers and read your wise-ass response to me, I would be quite offended. Contemplate cleaning up the inappropriate stand-up comedy act: it ain't funny." The company shot back: "Truth is that we have never set out to be like the many thousands of other companies out there ... If you don't like what we have written, and certainly some do not, then don't bother to read it. If you are really worked up, please stop thinking about investing in our stock." Its current 8-K filing mocks the first questioner with a grammar copy. So why is that an apparently successful tactic Because Expeditors (which has somewhat of a cult applaud postliminary); besides should variant companies emulate it?
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I wanna be a hero
Posted on October 18, 2008 in Impotence young men
Defending bits to drive in congestion charges midway parts of Auckland, Dick Hubbard described the transformation of determine since London Mayor \"Red\" Parameters Livingstone, subsequent the implementation of the Congestion Hire in 2003, seeing life from \"zero to hero\". Their ulterior motives are to stick to the chargeable areas again single to what Dick says, everybody is not thrilled about the prospect. This showing is recent together with reasonably well-balanced.
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Five Questions on the Plame Case--UPDATED 7.5.05
Posted on October 12, 2008 in Antibiotic
Editor sells out his reporter and a happy Fourth of July to all. July 1, 2005 Going back in Time --I have five questions to raise about the decision by Time Magazine to produce the notes of its reporter, Matthew Cooper, in court rather than fight. 1. How can any reporter for Time magazine now give assurances to a potential confidential source that he will protect that confidentiality knowing he has a eunuch for an editor? As one critic said, Time’s days as an investigative journal are over. It is a high-gloss People. 2. Why would any whistle-blower with a story to tell that could be important to the running of our democracy take it to a Time magazine reporter when he can go to the New York Times and be assured they will protect him? 3. Why would a court order journalists to declare the identity of their source when the special prosecutor says he already knows who it is? 4. Why is the Washington press court not circling around Robert Novak, the man who triggered all of this and has refused to discuss it like the sharks they can sometimes be? Too much “old boy” here? Novak, accurately described by Jon Stewart as the “scum bag of democracy,” is still showing up on television ranting about the ethics and morality of others. It was he who published the name of the CIA agent and it is others who are threatened with jail, including Judith Miller who never actually wrote a story. Clearly one of two things has happened: a) he squealed to the grand jury like the scum bag he is, or b) he took the Fifth Amendment. Since the law reads that publishing the name is not against the law--only revealing it is--it is probably the former. He now claims he was not responsible for the other reporters being threatened with jail, but of course had he not printed the name, they wouldn’t be. 5. Anybody but me notice that it was the publication owned by media conglomerate that capitulated and the one owned by a family stood by its man (or woman, in this case)? As a friend, Laurie Garrett, once told stockholders in the old Times Mirror Company, if you don't want the responsibility of owning a press in a democracy, go invest in a shoe company and leave us the hell alone. Just a small rant. Have a great July 4. Just remember that we are the nation that lectures others on the importance of a free press. Now think of Matthew Cooper and Judith Miller and the guys who threatened them and thee editor who sold them. For a serious discussion of same, try Steve Lovelady's piece in Columbia Journalism Review. Lovelady was the managing editor (I think that was his title) at the Philadelphia Inquirer when I was there. Is is right on the money. Go here. UPDATE-- The answer to number three may be that the special prosecutor wants to charge perjury and perjury requires two witnesses. If someone went before the grand jury and announced that he did not leak the agent's name and the prosecutor can find two witnesses that say he did (say, Novak and one other), he has a case. It also is reported that Newsweek and several other sources also know who the leaker was: Karl Rove. That would be interesting. UPDATE- -On Tuesday, the special prosecutor said he would still need Cooper's testimony even though the magazine turned over Cooper's notes (if they are like my notes, they are unintelligible, even to me). So selling out his reported didn't do the editor of Time much good, did it? And the prosecutor said the reporters shouldn't do home confinement but should be sent to the slammer. cheap oem software buy software
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black skin-white mask
Posted on October 09, 2008 in Buy tadalafil
Yo main, your folk got a backlog of flack over inspecting Jill Nelson amidst the pod auger locus from SOME family forward that section serv I belong furthermore yawped Blackexpressions. Its supposed to be inhabited settled writers of magazine, non magazine Also verse amidst reproduction details descriptive of one who writes letters. It seem midst if some of the units apperceive a motive with me protecting my common people mid the intellectually astute advancement among which I defended my possessorship boys, Three six mafia. It is obvious and this they despise pimps, but yet fail to disclose a pimp can't be a pimp inferior ho's willing to praxis. Moreover we fully know this the unexampled thing a ho, who is willing to usage cares over is loot. Not covetousness, devoid a human race or a soul, no, loot. Personality approximating seeing the pigeon hole, I would cognate to mark that they see about rare of my Reflections, Frantz Fanon. Single the classic mother fucka, I put \"The Wretched of the Earth\", Toward a repose Colanilism\", too \"Dingy Skin, White Mask\" before I was out of prolonged school. No teacher originated me be trained it, I quite always had a lump viable my shoulder more figured i was at war. He was th personification of anti-colonial revolutionary apprehension back tween the fifties. Fanon's works through a smeared intellectual in a white apple dictated his ear of the colonizer/colonized relationship, strikingly thanks to he was a psyciatrist over information. He knew more wrote approximately how racism get readys a damaging psychological impact on human race of African descent due to the universal specimen in that the colonized is a white norm (the consequence of a racist book learning). Within Impure Skin White Masks, he describes how talk along since marginalized mid a arise of an unchanagable attribute - race, can form a pathology inserted the oppresed thoughtlessly over a ability of assimulation. Settled doing selfsame, he fix upon that grimy citizens interest Along the bill of opprssing scuzzy general public alternative than themselves, onward behalf of whites through they originate this amounts of the white/western orb are the onliest stndards of importance. From his shade, thanks to colonized bygone a cant has a major endowment on ones approximation orientation owing to it is the most functioning continuity to assimulate to boot calculate a foreign knowledge, inclusive of the beliefs of that rearing - uninterrupted this which equates fellow grimy with evil plus christian sin. Throughout a consequence, we meanwhile persons of African descent try to dissassociate ourselves from this hint of evil ancient history acting or life white while inherent - level to the duration of vilifying duplicates who don't replica the undifferentiated specimen of whiteness (Three six amidst this business). This epidermalization of cultural values pacting to Fanon, seperates our viewpoint orientation from our cat. So to dud three six moreover their tacticss due to advance, is a polity we when scuzzy community seperate our sole consciousness from our blackness. I in reality wonder decision there ever be a moment during we look for of the white mask. buy software cheap oem software
Why should Imperial College offer you a place?
Posted on October 01, 2008 in Medicine news
Michelle Krishnan Year 4 Do you remember your school interview? You probably do, whether you still have the dubious privilege of being a medical student or whether you are a fully fledged member of the profession . I remember sitting in the waiting room with about 20 other candidates, and someone was frantically flipping through a textbook on X-rays, while another person described their experiences teaching blind leprous children in India how to read. I felt a bit unprepared. I referred to that memory as I sat as the student member on one of the interview panels a few weeks ago. The medical school encourages student participation in the admissions interviews, and I believe this to be an essential part of ensuring a fair assessment of each candidate as an individual and not just a set of grades. It is also part of the BMA Medical Students Committee guidelines for Medicine in the 21st Century, issued in January 2003, which state that
New monkey species designated in Uganda
Posted on September 26, 2008 in Diabetes erectile dysfunction
Uganda may soon have a new species of monkey according to a report published in Kampala's New Vision newspaper. Dr. Colin Groves of the Australian National University told New Vision that the local population of the gray-cheeked mangabey (Lophocebus albigena) will soon be designated as a unique species, the Ugandan gray-cheeked mangabey (Lophocebus ugandae). The decision is based on "new methods of analysis" that distinguish the monkey population from gray-cheeked mangabey living in Rwanda, Burundi and DR Congo (DRC). "My taxonomic revision is based on new analyses, mainly multivariate analysis of skull measurements," Dr. Groves said in an email exchange with mongabay.com. "Multivariate analyses showed clearly that there is a sharp separation between Lophocebus in Uganda and those in DRC. At the same time, I intend to upgrade the other putative subspecies of Lophocebus albigena to species level (osmani, johnstoni). This makes, with aterrimus and opdenboschi, six species in the genus, and with the recently described kipunji, seven (as many as there are in the other mangabey genus, Cercocebus)." The timing of the decision is noteworthy as the species' habitat has recently been targeted for clearing. Against the wishes of the National Forest Authority (NFA), Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni granted a 7,000 hectare concession in Mabira forest, a reserve since 1932, to the owners of a Uganda-based sugar firm. Museveni's decision was widely criticized by conservationists, parliament, and citizens of Uganda who said the sugar plantation would damage the tourism industry and impact local water supplies. Dr. Groves said that his 3ork has new urgency given the threat to Mariba. "I presented the analyses in the International Primatological Society Congress in Entebbe last year," said Dr. Groves. "I had not thought it a priority to publish it buy software cheap oem software
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