Heteroflexible? How very accommodating of him. I don't want to offer false hope, but there's certainly a chance that by describing himself thus your friend was sending you a signal of his availability. It's an unusual way for a heterosexual man to describe himself during a workaday chitchat with a pal, even if it's the latest "buzzword". Most men that I know who have close gay buddies spend an inordinate amount of time convincing anyone who cares that they're nothing like their mate, instead of intimating that they'd like to visit, if not join the club. Some of the worst homophobic jokes I've heard have flown from the mouths of such bosom buddies, and I wonder if such friendships only truly blossom when the lines are clearly drawn.
Or am I being too 80s about sexuality? It certainly used to be a lot easier to spot gay men back then. They seemed to be either swathed in leather, acting loud and proud about their alternative lifestyle or engaged in fierce political protest about Clause 28. Nowadays homosexuality is so much part of the mainstream it's a challenge to get to grips with who is and who isn't if you decide to start counting. From bishops to lawyers, sportsmen to politicians, labourers to literati, clues to a preferred sexual partner can be hard to uncover.
My two closest gay friends enhance my life in many ways, but can always be relied upon to make me look shabby with their perfectly pressed shirts and suits as tight as sausage skins – and that's when they pop over for a curry. By comparison, my husband looks like I've dragged him out of a skip. I can't imagine any gay man would sink so low on the grooming stakes, but as a blonde I've also learned not to be seduced by stereotypes. Nowadays it seems as if we're all open to persuasion. Sexual predilections have gained an increasing fluidity, and if that's a sign of evolution or just further proof that we're out for whatever we can grasp I'm not sure.
Holding firm beliefs, whether religious, political or sexual, is so last century. Personally, I think ambiguity is better in a lover. With a friend you want to know where you are. To have no definitive clue to your best friend's sexuality is a little unusual. Announcing that he's "heteroflexible" does seem like a green light, but without knowing the context of your discussion it's hard to know how such an admission was arrived at. Not that mates don't keep secrets from each other, but this would be quite a monster to conceal. It only heightens my worry that you're succumbing to a severe case of wish fulfilment. If you have a crush on him you're going to be looking for any small signal that he might be sympathetic to your desires, or better yet animated by them.
Let me remind you that even if your friend does swing it may not be in your direction. He may be testing you to see if he can be frank about his sexual adventures but not for a moment contemplating that you come along for the ride. In the face of such uncertainty I'd say far better to do your investigating by internet than face to face, where all kinds of humiliations could occur. Employ manipulative sleuthing skills to see if you can tease him out of his shell of ambiguity. Try bemoaning the dearth of suitable lovers in your location and tell him how you dream of a man just like him, but gay. If that doesn't lure him out of the closet I fear he's not for turning and you may have to look further afield. Should that turn out to be the case, don't despair – when you're no longer focused in one direction you'll be surprised how your romantic horizons expand.
Previously having had a South Buffalo constituency base as a Buffalo Councilmember, Assemblyman Kearns now represents residents of areas in Buffalo and Lackawanna as well as Orchard Park and West Seneca, and finds it important to be accessible to the people of those areas. As such the assemblyman is moving his office from the Seneca Street, South Buffalo space to a Southgate Plaza office located at 950 Union Road in West Seneca to allow for a more central location. He will maintain a satellite office in Buffalo at the Cazenovia Resource Center and Library located at 155 Cazenovia Street for easy accessibility to the residents of Buffalo.
Acknowledging that having been elected in this past spring’s special election has aided him in already having many legislative efforts underway, Assemblyman Kearns is working towards several efforts to improve the quality of life in our area and maintaining a solid tax base.
Assemblyman Kearns has filed real property related legislation aimed at minimizing the negative impact of the economy’s foreclosure market. One bill will require banks to act in “good faith”, making it illegal for lenders to indefinably delay obtaining a foreclosure, thereby requiring them to take responsibility for the foreclosed properties earlier. Another real property related effort will require lenders to have a contact organization readily available to maintain abandoned or vacant properties that were the subject or foreclosure, to allow for upkeep of the properties during time of transition.
Kearns is seeking support for his “Secret Settlement Prohibition” efforts that will forbid court approved secret settlement agreements on matters that involve public agencies, public bodies and public organizations in certain litigation matters of wide spread interest. Prior secrecy agreements that involved substantial public harm included clergy sex abuse claims, dangerous prescription drug litigation matters, and Boy Scout of America abuse matters. Kearns’ proposed legislation would address and prohibit closet settlements of such matters.
Other important legislation presently pending in Albany is the anti cyber-bullying legislation that will ensure that New York State public schools are safe and free from cyber-bullying. This legislative effort was initiated by the receipt of a letter written by West Seneca youth, Christopher LaRussa, who had been the target of bullying. Assemblyman Kearns and others took action on the letter, and are now seeking “swift passage” of cyber-bullying legislation to make our schools a safer place for our children.
With a Buffalo firefighter for a father, serving the public seems to be in Kearns’ blood. Working prior to his public service in a law office and for a private fundraising company, the Assemblyman’s past experiences seems to have culminated into a unique skill set that enables him to easily envision a project and take the proper avenue of steps to put the project into play. Kearns talks about his vision for the New Year with spirit and passion.
“The wonderful part about my job” the Assemblyman reveals, “is that I am able to see the work that I do come to life. I live and work here and I have the opportunity to observe what I envision become a reality.”
Saturday, December 29, 2012
Pirelli calendar turns over a new leaf with war photographer Steve McCurry
During its illustrious history, attempts to portray the Pirelli calendar as more than just a lavish collection of nude photographs have occasionally come close to bathos. Last year, for instance, discussing Mario Sorrento's Corsican shoot, the American supermodel and actor Milla Jovovich made the implausible argument that "the thing about Pirelli is the really great tyres. They're strong and modern and they work, so in the shoot you've got these really strong, amazing modern women. So there's this relationship between these really strong tyres and these really strong women."
Well, up to a point. This time round, however, Pirelli's claim to be offering something beyond the female form in a state of partial or total undress looks more solid. To celebrate its 40th calendar, the Italian company has decided to abandon the normal roster of fashion photographers such as Mario Testino and Terry Richardson, who transformed a trade publication into an annual celebration of "glamour" shots to grace the garage wall. Instead, for 2013, Pirelli turned to one of the world's most famous war photographers and sent him to Rio, host to the next football World Cup and Olympic Games, and vibrant hub of a country which is booming like never before.
Steve McCurry made his name documenting Afghanistan in the early 1980s, having smuggled himself into the country by growing a beard and wearing traditional dress. The American's photograph of Sharbat Gula, a teenage Afghan refugee with vivid, haunted green eyes, became one of the most famous images in 20th-century photography after featuring on the cover of National Geographic. Describing himself as a "street photographer doing found situations", the 62-year-old McCurry has since travelled and worked in places such as Beirut, Baluchistan, Cambodia, India and Japan. So how did he wind up with 11 of the world's leading models, shooting a Pirelli calendar?
The result is an act of homage to a city and a country that Pirelli recognises as one of its most important future markets. "You can photograph nudes anywhere," says McCurry. "But these models are clothed, and each of them has her own charity. They are purposeful and idealistic people. I wanted to photograph them in a special place, and Rio was perfect for that."
There is a temptation to be somewhat cynical when it comes to models and good works, but in McCurry's company it is hard to be world-weary. Stocky, white-haired now and brimming with enthusiasm for a city with "the best views on the planet", this native of Philadelphia has lost none of his photographic ambition. And his version of "the Cal", as Pirelli types like to call it, is simply fabulous to look at. Rio is the true star of the 34 images, described by McCurry as a "mythic" place, with "mountains, beaches and incredible light".
Loyal to his street aesthetic, McCurry ignored the famous sand of the Copacabana and Ipanema and headed into Rio's urban and historic heart, usually at night. This is a Rio of shadows, sultry allure and moments of ethereal beauty caught on the hoof. "I wasn't interested in doing the beach type of thing," he explains. "I was more interested in the darker, moodier places. So we went to areas like Lapa and Santa Teresa, places where there's more texture and more life. Where there's people hanging out on the street, people barbecuing, people dancing, bars with all kinds of characters in them. I became fascinated by the graffiti. That could have been a book in itself. We went into the favelas, too. They were teeming with life pressed together. We found this hotel in a favela – called Bob's Place, I think – and we shot there for a couple of days against this amazing backdrop of Rio."
Some of the images feature ordinary cariocas – as Rio inhabitants are known – rather than models. One extraordinary photograph shows a young couple walking high above the city at sunset, looking down on a landscape that seems too beautiful to be real. "This is the best view of any city in the world," says McCurry. "I knew that spot because a few years ago I was in Rio and I wanted to get a cityscape kind of photo. I saw this high point in the distance and I thought if we could find it there would just be a fabulous view of the city. By luck we found the location and on the top of the hill there was a park. So we went back this time and these people were just out walking. Look at that light! It's just amazing."
When the models appear, they seem to be offering an invitation to savour the drama of the city that is unfolding behind them. Petra Nemcova, the Czech model and actress, sits in front of an open window which looks out on the heart of nighttime Rio. Karlie Kloss (see picture above) leans against a graffiti-covered tram as a bus departs for the city and a shadowy figure passes by unseen. In another shot, a dark silhouette walks away from the camera, across the famous Lapa viaduct, heading for the warmth and light of Rio's skyscrapers. "I wanted the models to be part of the environment and have life swirling around them, to be integrated into the city," says McCurry.
There was also a sincere desire to showcase the various causes promoted by the women he chose to photograph. Since 2004, when Nemcova lost her fiancé in the tsunami which overwhelmed Thailand, she has run the Happy Hearts Fund, dedicated to assisting child victims of natural disasters. Kyleigh Kuhn, who graduated from Berkeley university in California, has founded a campaign dedicated to the funding of schools for Afghan girls. The calendar gives a meticulous account of each model's campaigning activities. "Working with Steve on a project like this was an amazing opportunity to publicise the causes we're trying to help," said Kuhn. "I've tried to use my modelling as a platform from which to promote these projects, and this was the perfect situation." According to Kloss, "the fact that the models are clothed helps take away attention from the women's bodies and direct it to their causes".
That may be overstating it a little. But McCurry is lost in admiration for his subjects. "Spending time with the girls outside the shoot and finding out about their work and causes was for me maybe the best thing about doing the calendar. You've got this false stereotype of models who don't have much to say… so to get to know them as real people was just fascinating and inspiring."
The launch of "Steve McCurry's Rio", compered by Sophia Loren, was an opportunity for Milanese executives to bask in the acclaim of Pirelli's first "social" calendar. Even Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the left-wing former Brazilian president, turned up. But for some seasoned observers of Pirelli calendars past, the combination of McCurry, clothed models and social commitment was just a little too baffling. In its early years, a calendar launch was a very different affair, populated exclusively by members of the tyre-making industry and that year's collection of models. As Loren presented Lula with a Pirelli award for "social engagement", there were those who remembered those simpler days with a degree of nostalgia.
"I can't quite figure out what the point of it is any more, I'm afraid," observed one veteran of a motoring publication. "What's the connection between nice pictures of Rio and Pirelli? You know, when you used to have the distinctive tyre tread painted on a model's bottom, you could see the marketing strategy. Not now."
Well, up to a point. This time round, however, Pirelli's claim to be offering something beyond the female form in a state of partial or total undress looks more solid. To celebrate its 40th calendar, the Italian company has decided to abandon the normal roster of fashion photographers such as Mario Testino and Terry Richardson, who transformed a trade publication into an annual celebration of "glamour" shots to grace the garage wall. Instead, for 2013, Pirelli turned to one of the world's most famous war photographers and sent him to Rio, host to the next football World Cup and Olympic Games, and vibrant hub of a country which is booming like never before.
Steve McCurry made his name documenting Afghanistan in the early 1980s, having smuggled himself into the country by growing a beard and wearing traditional dress. The American's photograph of Sharbat Gula, a teenage Afghan refugee with vivid, haunted green eyes, became one of the most famous images in 20th-century photography after featuring on the cover of National Geographic. Describing himself as a "street photographer doing found situations", the 62-year-old McCurry has since travelled and worked in places such as Beirut, Baluchistan, Cambodia, India and Japan. So how did he wind up with 11 of the world's leading models, shooting a Pirelli calendar?
The result is an act of homage to a city and a country that Pirelli recognises as one of its most important future markets. "You can photograph nudes anywhere," says McCurry. "But these models are clothed, and each of them has her own charity. They are purposeful and idealistic people. I wanted to photograph them in a special place, and Rio was perfect for that."
There is a temptation to be somewhat cynical when it comes to models and good works, but in McCurry's company it is hard to be world-weary. Stocky, white-haired now and brimming with enthusiasm for a city with "the best views on the planet", this native of Philadelphia has lost none of his photographic ambition. And his version of "the Cal", as Pirelli types like to call it, is simply fabulous to look at. Rio is the true star of the 34 images, described by McCurry as a "mythic" place, with "mountains, beaches and incredible light".
Loyal to his street aesthetic, McCurry ignored the famous sand of the Copacabana and Ipanema and headed into Rio's urban and historic heart, usually at night. This is a Rio of shadows, sultry allure and moments of ethereal beauty caught on the hoof. "I wasn't interested in doing the beach type of thing," he explains. "I was more interested in the darker, moodier places. So we went to areas like Lapa and Santa Teresa, places where there's more texture and more life. Where there's people hanging out on the street, people barbecuing, people dancing, bars with all kinds of characters in them. I became fascinated by the graffiti. That could have been a book in itself. We went into the favelas, too. They were teeming with life pressed together. We found this hotel in a favela – called Bob's Place, I think – and we shot there for a couple of days against this amazing backdrop of Rio."
Some of the images feature ordinary cariocas – as Rio inhabitants are known – rather than models. One extraordinary photograph shows a young couple walking high above the city at sunset, looking down on a landscape that seems too beautiful to be real. "This is the best view of any city in the world," says McCurry. "I knew that spot because a few years ago I was in Rio and I wanted to get a cityscape kind of photo. I saw this high point in the distance and I thought if we could find it there would just be a fabulous view of the city. By luck we found the location and on the top of the hill there was a park. So we went back this time and these people were just out walking. Look at that light! It's just amazing."
When the models appear, they seem to be offering an invitation to savour the drama of the city that is unfolding behind them. Petra Nemcova, the Czech model and actress, sits in front of an open window which looks out on the heart of nighttime Rio. Karlie Kloss (see picture above) leans against a graffiti-covered tram as a bus departs for the city and a shadowy figure passes by unseen. In another shot, a dark silhouette walks away from the camera, across the famous Lapa viaduct, heading for the warmth and light of Rio's skyscrapers. "I wanted the models to be part of the environment and have life swirling around them, to be integrated into the city," says McCurry.
There was also a sincere desire to showcase the various causes promoted by the women he chose to photograph. Since 2004, when Nemcova lost her fiancé in the tsunami which overwhelmed Thailand, she has run the Happy Hearts Fund, dedicated to assisting child victims of natural disasters. Kyleigh Kuhn, who graduated from Berkeley university in California, has founded a campaign dedicated to the funding of schools for Afghan girls. The calendar gives a meticulous account of each model's campaigning activities. "Working with Steve on a project like this was an amazing opportunity to publicise the causes we're trying to help," said Kuhn. "I've tried to use my modelling as a platform from which to promote these projects, and this was the perfect situation." According to Kloss, "the fact that the models are clothed helps take away attention from the women's bodies and direct it to their causes".
That may be overstating it a little. But McCurry is lost in admiration for his subjects. "Spending time with the girls outside the shoot and finding out about their work and causes was for me maybe the best thing about doing the calendar. You've got this false stereotype of models who don't have much to say… so to get to know them as real people was just fascinating and inspiring."
The launch of "Steve McCurry's Rio", compered by Sophia Loren, was an opportunity for Milanese executives to bask in the acclaim of Pirelli's first "social" calendar. Even Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the left-wing former Brazilian president, turned up. But for some seasoned observers of Pirelli calendars past, the combination of McCurry, clothed models and social commitment was just a little too baffling. In its early years, a calendar launch was a very different affair, populated exclusively by members of the tyre-making industry and that year's collection of models. As Loren presented Lula with a Pirelli award for "social engagement", there were those who remembered those simpler days with a degree of nostalgia.
"I can't quite figure out what the point of it is any more, I'm afraid," observed one veteran of a motoring publication. "What's the connection between nice pictures of Rio and Pirelli? You know, when you used to have the distinctive tyre tread painted on a model's bottom, you could see the marketing strategy. Not now."
Thursday, December 27, 2012
The Impossible is my first film about being a parent
Six months ago, Ewan McGregor strolled incognito down the Croisette at the tail end of the Cannes film festival. He was dressed in bright white, with a beard, shades and a wide-brimmed hat pulled down to the eyebrows. In the hubbub of the Cote D'Azur's garishly dressed, he somehow melted into the crowd. Intent, or accident? "I wasn't in disguise," he says, taking slight umbrage at the suggestion. "I'd just been given a really nice hat. So I thought I'd wear it. I think if you put a cap and a pair of shades on in an airport, of course everyone's gonna look at you. But I'm not worried about it. I don't feel like it's a curse. If you're gonna be on TV and film, and expect people to watch you, of course they're gonna look at you in the street. What else would they do?"
The Impossible is the second film by Spanish director Juan Antonio "Jota" Bayona, who caused a stir with his first, The Orphanage. Where The Orphanage dealt with the mysteries of the supernatural, The Impossible deals with the miracles of the real, telling the story of a married couple (McGregor and Naomi Watts) who go on holiday to Thailand and get caught up in the horrors of the tsunami that hit the country on Boxing Day 2004. McGregor gives a wonderful, low-key performance. One that truly serves the core, intimate drama of a film that, like Nicolas Roeg's Walkabout, isn't just an account of what happened but is also about the psychological aftermath. The trauma and the tragedy is replicated with incredible realism. A standing ovation greeted its premiere in Toronto, where we meet; it's now considered a good bet for a best picture Oscar nomination. Even the mere script, says McGregor, was devastating. "What you got from it was the brutality and truth of the story, through the eyes of that family. In terms of scale, though, it's all very well to read that your character is walking through a devastated area. But it's not until you get on the set that you think: Oh my God …"
He says this because, although many of the special effects were reproduced for real – being cheaper than CGI – in a studio tank in Alicante, much of the shoot took place on location, on beaches still scarred by the tragedy. "It was a very difficult film to make," he says, "especially with the weather. We had a lot of rain, and the actual day of the original tsunami was very beautiful, so we had to wait. There was some talk among the Thai crew that the film might be …" – he pauses – "… cursed, you know? That the spirits or the gods might be preventing us from making the film." He pauses again. "There were some spooky moments."
So spooky that the crew held a ritual to "appease" these spirits, sending lanterns up into the skies. As soon as they did so, the wind sent them flying in every possible direction. In retrospect, it probably wasn't so much a warning as a reminder of the unimaginable chaos of that day. Says McGregor: "Jota has always said – and he's right – that crying was a real privilege in that situation, because nobody had time. And so when people did cry, they totally fell apart."
McGregor is 41 now, and The Impossible is one of his best performances. It requires him to be loving, thoughtful, anxious, scared, bold and broken without the prop of a genre script where the bad guy will be brought to book and right will prevail. Because, although there is heroism, this is not a story about heroes. "I guess it's my first 'dad', really," McGregor says brightly. "I mean, I've been a dad in … Well, I think – because I can't remember – that in Nanny McPhee 2 I had kids."
He racks his brains. "Nothing springs to mind. Anyway, I've certainly never made a film that felt to me like an exploration of that, of what it means to be a parent and that love you have for your kids. This was that for me. This is something I've been experiencing for 16 years of my life, and it's not in my work really anywhere. I thought – albeit a really extreme version of that – it was a nice way to look at that specific and unique love you have for your kids."
Which is interesting in itself. For female actors, the leap from ingenue to mother roles is an occupational hazard, and one to be avoided. McGregor acknowledges the double standard. "The first time I remember anything like that was on the last film I did with Naomi – Stay [in 2005], with Ryan Gosling," he says. "One day on set I suddenly realised I was the doctor. And I went, 'Oh God … He's the young guy – I'm in the suit! Fuck!'"
He laughs. "But that was a long time ago, so it's been happening for a while."
Did he ever dread that day? "No. I didn't really. Not at all. I mean, I was somewhat surprised it didn't happen earlier, because, like I said, I've been a dad for so long. I really like kids."
Which seems a far cry from being the British film industry's great white sex symbol, the guy who should crash and burn, not live happily ever after. But McGregor seems content enough. He's still a very handsome man; his hair spikes up at wild angles, and there's a lovely glint in his eye, especially when he smiles. He's strikingly unguarded, too; at one point blurting out the title of his next project.
"Please don't mention it!" he pleads. "I totally forgot. It's funny; you do sort of lose your marbles. I was sitting here, and somebody went: 'What are you doing next?' And you're brought up up to answer questions, so I said: 'Oh … !' But I was told yesterday: 'Don't mention it! Well, not just yet."
Is he comfortable doing press? "It gets better, I think, because it gets easier. It's more difficult when you're younger, somehow. Maybe there's less to talk about." He sighs. "It's not great fun sitting in a TV junket all day. It's not. But this kind of thing is fine, having a chat with somebody. I always feel like saying to people: 'Just enjoy it more. Don't worry about it.'"
Is that a result of coaching? "I never had media training, because I'd been doing it for years. I remember the first ever interview I did. Oh fuck, it was in Salisbury Playhouse, and I had to do an interview with TV Quick for Lipstick on your Collar, which was coming out soon. I remember doing it on the phone in a broom cupboard, because I was so embarrassed. My big moment! I didn't know what to do. I probably talked too much. But I always think that you may as well say what you mean, or there's not much point in doing it, really. There are areas I won't talk about and don't feel that it's relevant to talk about. But not many. Not many."
The Impossible is the second film by Spanish director Juan Antonio "Jota" Bayona, who caused a stir with his first, The Orphanage. Where The Orphanage dealt with the mysteries of the supernatural, The Impossible deals with the miracles of the real, telling the story of a married couple (McGregor and Naomi Watts) who go on holiday to Thailand and get caught up in the horrors of the tsunami that hit the country on Boxing Day 2004. McGregor gives a wonderful, low-key performance. One that truly serves the core, intimate drama of a film that, like Nicolas Roeg's Walkabout, isn't just an account of what happened but is also about the psychological aftermath. The trauma and the tragedy is replicated with incredible realism. A standing ovation greeted its premiere in Toronto, where we meet; it's now considered a good bet for a best picture Oscar nomination. Even the mere script, says McGregor, was devastating. "What you got from it was the brutality and truth of the story, through the eyes of that family. In terms of scale, though, it's all very well to read that your character is walking through a devastated area. But it's not until you get on the set that you think: Oh my God …"
He says this because, although many of the special effects were reproduced for real – being cheaper than CGI – in a studio tank in Alicante, much of the shoot took place on location, on beaches still scarred by the tragedy. "It was a very difficult film to make," he says, "especially with the weather. We had a lot of rain, and the actual day of the original tsunami was very beautiful, so we had to wait. There was some talk among the Thai crew that the film might be …" – he pauses – "… cursed, you know? That the spirits or the gods might be preventing us from making the film." He pauses again. "There were some spooky moments."
So spooky that the crew held a ritual to "appease" these spirits, sending lanterns up into the skies. As soon as they did so, the wind sent them flying in every possible direction. In retrospect, it probably wasn't so much a warning as a reminder of the unimaginable chaos of that day. Says McGregor: "Jota has always said – and he's right – that crying was a real privilege in that situation, because nobody had time. And so when people did cry, they totally fell apart."
McGregor is 41 now, and The Impossible is one of his best performances. It requires him to be loving, thoughtful, anxious, scared, bold and broken without the prop of a genre script where the bad guy will be brought to book and right will prevail. Because, although there is heroism, this is not a story about heroes. "I guess it's my first 'dad', really," McGregor says brightly. "I mean, I've been a dad in … Well, I think – because I can't remember – that in Nanny McPhee 2 I had kids."
He racks his brains. "Nothing springs to mind. Anyway, I've certainly never made a film that felt to me like an exploration of that, of what it means to be a parent and that love you have for your kids. This was that for me. This is something I've been experiencing for 16 years of my life, and it's not in my work really anywhere. I thought – albeit a really extreme version of that – it was a nice way to look at that specific and unique love you have for your kids."
Which is interesting in itself. For female actors, the leap from ingenue to mother roles is an occupational hazard, and one to be avoided. McGregor acknowledges the double standard. "The first time I remember anything like that was on the last film I did with Naomi – Stay [in 2005], with Ryan Gosling," he says. "One day on set I suddenly realised I was the doctor. And I went, 'Oh God … He's the young guy – I'm in the suit! Fuck!'"
He laughs. "But that was a long time ago, so it's been happening for a while."
Did he ever dread that day? "No. I didn't really. Not at all. I mean, I was somewhat surprised it didn't happen earlier, because, like I said, I've been a dad for so long. I really like kids."
Which seems a far cry from being the British film industry's great white sex symbol, the guy who should crash and burn, not live happily ever after. But McGregor seems content enough. He's still a very handsome man; his hair spikes up at wild angles, and there's a lovely glint in his eye, especially when he smiles. He's strikingly unguarded, too; at one point blurting out the title of his next project.
"Please don't mention it!" he pleads. "I totally forgot. It's funny; you do sort of lose your marbles. I was sitting here, and somebody went: 'What are you doing next?' And you're brought up up to answer questions, so I said: 'Oh … !' But I was told yesterday: 'Don't mention it! Well, not just yet."
Is he comfortable doing press? "It gets better, I think, because it gets easier. It's more difficult when you're younger, somehow. Maybe there's less to talk about." He sighs. "It's not great fun sitting in a TV junket all day. It's not. But this kind of thing is fine, having a chat with somebody. I always feel like saying to people: 'Just enjoy it more. Don't worry about it.'"
Is that a result of coaching? "I never had media training, because I'd been doing it for years. I remember the first ever interview I did. Oh fuck, it was in Salisbury Playhouse, and I had to do an interview with TV Quick for Lipstick on your Collar, which was coming out soon. I remember doing it on the phone in a broom cupboard, because I was so embarrassed. My big moment! I didn't know what to do. I probably talked too much. But I always think that you may as well say what you mean, or there's not much point in doing it, really. There are areas I won't talk about and don't feel that it's relevant to talk about. But not many. Not many."
Top Apps For Smartphones And Tablets
Bad Robot Interactive's free app for Apple devices lets anyone add Hollywood-like special effects to their real surroundings. First, use your device's camera to record something around you - perhaps a co-worker smiling in the office - then initiate a virtual missile strike, which rains down on their desk. There are dozens of effects, some of which require an in-app purchase for 99 cents apiece. When you like what you've captured, share the humorous video clip with the world - right from your device. Video gamers might also like the explosive Call Of Duty: Black Ops II-themed options found inside this fun app.
While the YouTube app still rocks for its sheer quantity of videos, those looking for user-created "how-to" guides need look no further than the free Snapguide app for iOS. Learn to make beef jerky at home, how to open a beer bottle without an opener to perform a magic trick. A number of holiday-themed Snapguides are also available, such as "How to Make a Wine Cork Wreath" and "How to Make Spiced Chocolate Cupcakes With Eggnog Icing" (yum). Each guide offers a step-by-step lesson with photos or videos, along with written descriptions at the bottom of the screen. Simply swipe to the left to turn to the next page or swipe up for a list of what you need to perform the task. If you sign up for a free account, you can also leave comments, privately message other users, "follow them" to be alerted when there's a new lesson or start your very own Snapguide.
Every corner of this dirty little ball we live on has been mapped and uploaded to the internet. Now it's time to play with it. Life is Magic gives players the chance to team up and take over a fantasy version of the real world, one city at a time.
Once you choose one of the three character classes available in Red Robot Labs' Life is Magic — mage, machinist or monk — the game presents you with a map of your location, only instead of asphalt streets and concrete builds there are trees, dirt paths, inns and shops straight out of a fantasy novel. This is your world transformed.
Depending on where you live, your local map might be peppered with shops and crisscrossed with paths bearing the names of the streets you walk every day. If you live in a more rural area the effect won't be quite as impressive, but that's what zooming out and teleporting is for.
The world map is where the action is. Elemental dungeons dot the landscape, hungry for foolhardy adventurers to brave their depths. Other players appear on the map as well, waiting to be invited into your adventuring party. Up to three players can form an alliance, lending their particular talents in turn-based battles against fierce fantasy foes. Each dungeon level ends with a choice — leave and keep your loot, or delve deeper and chance losing it all to more fearsome beasts?
Players gain levels as they adventure, powering up towards the ultimate goal — conquering the tower that represents a major city. No one in my area has grown powerful enough to take Atlanta yet. I ventured into the tower and was slain in a single round. More grinding is in order. Luckily this is a persistent alternate world, and the tower will still be there when I am ready.
“We weren’t able to come up with a lease with the landowners that would allow us to stay open, and secondly, the particular area in Essexville, the market has softened in the last few years.”
Thompson also is co-owner of the Ponderosa Steakhouse on Wilder Road. He said that location will remain open.
“It is doing very well, so that’s very good news for us. It had a very good year.”
Nearby El Mexicano, at 3593 Center, has experienced a seasonal dip in business, but not a sustained decline, said one of the restaurant’s managers Francisco Mendoza.
“We’re doing OK, but for the past few weeks we’ve been really slow,” he said. “We’re hoping that after the holidays we should get back to normal.”
Thompson said the Center Avenue Ponderosa’s 35 employees were notified two weeks ago. It was at that time that a note was posted on the door to notify customers, as well.
The plan is to transfer as many of them as possible to the Wilder Road location, and possibly to the Saginaw location, which is owned and operated by LaBelle Management of Mount Pleasant, the note explains.
“We are moving them over as many and as fast as we can. We’re not sure how many we can keep,” Thompson said. “We told the people two weeks ago so we gave them an opportunity to not overspend for Christmas and have a little bit of a fair warning.”
Thompson said the employees were saddened by the news but glad to have the advance notice.
“Well, I think anybody that’s going to lose their job, they feel bad,” he said. “They’re happy that they got the warning. They thanked me for that, because most people just close the doors and I don’t believe in that.”
Mary Cornelius works the hot and cold bar at the Center Avenue location.
“I’m upset I’m going to be jobless. I’ve been here almost seven years,” she said. “...It’s like we were one big family.”
Bobbi Ovalle, who has been a shift manager at the Center Avenue location for five years, said customers are saddened by the news as well.
“We’ve had customers cry,” she said. “We have one who comes in every Sunday, he and his wife, and he started crying. He said we are the reason he comes here.”
Ovalle said the restaurant has many regular customers who come frequently, even daily, and some who have come for decades.
While the YouTube app still rocks for its sheer quantity of videos, those looking for user-created "how-to" guides need look no further than the free Snapguide app for iOS. Learn to make beef jerky at home, how to open a beer bottle without an opener to perform a magic trick. A number of holiday-themed Snapguides are also available, such as "How to Make a Wine Cork Wreath" and "How to Make Spiced Chocolate Cupcakes With Eggnog Icing" (yum). Each guide offers a step-by-step lesson with photos or videos, along with written descriptions at the bottom of the screen. Simply swipe to the left to turn to the next page or swipe up for a list of what you need to perform the task. If you sign up for a free account, you can also leave comments, privately message other users, "follow them" to be alerted when there's a new lesson or start your very own Snapguide.
Every corner of this dirty little ball we live on has been mapped and uploaded to the internet. Now it's time to play with it. Life is Magic gives players the chance to team up and take over a fantasy version of the real world, one city at a time.
Once you choose one of the three character classes available in Red Robot Labs' Life is Magic — mage, machinist or monk — the game presents you with a map of your location, only instead of asphalt streets and concrete builds there are trees, dirt paths, inns and shops straight out of a fantasy novel. This is your world transformed.
Depending on where you live, your local map might be peppered with shops and crisscrossed with paths bearing the names of the streets you walk every day. If you live in a more rural area the effect won't be quite as impressive, but that's what zooming out and teleporting is for.
The world map is where the action is. Elemental dungeons dot the landscape, hungry for foolhardy adventurers to brave their depths. Other players appear on the map as well, waiting to be invited into your adventuring party. Up to three players can form an alliance, lending their particular talents in turn-based battles against fierce fantasy foes. Each dungeon level ends with a choice — leave and keep your loot, or delve deeper and chance losing it all to more fearsome beasts?
Players gain levels as they adventure, powering up towards the ultimate goal — conquering the tower that represents a major city. No one in my area has grown powerful enough to take Atlanta yet. I ventured into the tower and was slain in a single round. More grinding is in order. Luckily this is a persistent alternate world, and the tower will still be there when I am ready.
“We weren’t able to come up with a lease with the landowners that would allow us to stay open, and secondly, the particular area in Essexville, the market has softened in the last few years.”
Thompson also is co-owner of the Ponderosa Steakhouse on Wilder Road. He said that location will remain open.
“It is doing very well, so that’s very good news for us. It had a very good year.”
Nearby El Mexicano, at 3593 Center, has experienced a seasonal dip in business, but not a sustained decline, said one of the restaurant’s managers Francisco Mendoza.
“We’re doing OK, but for the past few weeks we’ve been really slow,” he said. “We’re hoping that after the holidays we should get back to normal.”
Thompson said the Center Avenue Ponderosa’s 35 employees were notified two weeks ago. It was at that time that a note was posted on the door to notify customers, as well.
The plan is to transfer as many of them as possible to the Wilder Road location, and possibly to the Saginaw location, which is owned and operated by LaBelle Management of Mount Pleasant, the note explains.
“We are moving them over as many and as fast as we can. We’re not sure how many we can keep,” Thompson said. “We told the people two weeks ago so we gave them an opportunity to not overspend for Christmas and have a little bit of a fair warning.”
Thompson said the employees were saddened by the news but glad to have the advance notice.
“Well, I think anybody that’s going to lose their job, they feel bad,” he said. “They’re happy that they got the warning. They thanked me for that, because most people just close the doors and I don’t believe in that.”
Mary Cornelius works the hot and cold bar at the Center Avenue location.
“I’m upset I’m going to be jobless. I’ve been here almost seven years,” she said. “...It’s like we were one big family.”
Bobbi Ovalle, who has been a shift manager at the Center Avenue location for five years, said customers are saddened by the news as well.
“We’ve had customers cry,” she said. “We have one who comes in every Sunday, he and his wife, and he started crying. He said we are the reason he comes here.”
Ovalle said the restaurant has many regular customers who come frequently, even daily, and some who have come for decades.
Tuesday, December 25, 2012
Newspaper begins look at landmark book
The 1963 book forever changed Appalachia by exposing the plundering of the mountains of eastern Kentucky. The book established Caudill, then 41, as the voice of the beleaguered mountain people.
Commercially, "Night" was a modest success. Culturally, "Night" was a bombshell, with an impact far beyond mere sales.
"Tens of thousands of acres," Caudill wrote in its pages, "fell to the exploiters, from a people who, though they might fight each other with medieval brutality, at a business negotiation were as guileless as infants."
Ronald Eller, an Appalachian historian at the University of Kentucky, said "the book was a pivotal moment."
"Harry articulately and openly challenged the system," Eller said. "The fact that so much about 'Night' still rings true today is quite an indictment of the political culture of the commonwealth."
By fall 1963, the whole world was coming to Whitesburg to share a meal with Harry and Anne Caudill and take his "poverty tour" of shattered mountains and shantytowns.
Word spread of "ugly, poverty-ridden" Appalachia, as The New York Times' book review put it.
Harry Caudill wryly described the response: Americans cleaned out their closets and shipped tons of old clothes to eastern Kentucky; threadbare suits cut for 1940s fashions dominated the mountains for years. A charitable wholesaler sent 12,000 pairs of children's shoes. Other donations were less thoughtful.
"The town of Harlan was blessed with an entire carload of cabbages for several days on a side track while the cargo rotted, and the Louisville and Nashville — which touts itself as 'Old Reliable' — promptly discarded it on a riverbank," Caudill wrote. "The ten tons of decaying vegetables sent an odoriferous pall to plague the county seat and raise serious doubts about the whole idea of Christian charity."
In early November of 1963, President John F. Kennedy told incoming Gov. Edward "Ned" Breathitt that he was arranging a visit to eastern Kentucky to announce aid for the impoverished region, Breathitt said in a 1998 oral-history interview.
After Kennedy was assassinated on Nov. 22, 1963, his successor, Lyndon Johnson, assumed Kennedy's agenda as his own. In 1964, Johnson took the tour Kennedy planned, dropping into Martin County by helicopter to declare his War on Poverty and shake the hands of startled mountaineers on their front porches.
More than anything, Caudill said, Appalachia needed employers independent of coal.
Congress established the Appalachian Regional Commission, or ARC, in 1965 as a fairly traditional public works project. Billions of dollars in federal aid would go to counties designated as "Appalachia," predominantly for road construction, with other projects sharing smaller sums.
Thirteen states would share in the ARC's munificence, from New York to Mississippi. In Kentucky, Appalachia as Congress defines it extends through Lexington's suburbs to just outside Bowling Green in the western half of the state.
Caudill dismissed the ARC as an uncoordinated boondoggle. He said it didn't end the region's dependence on coal, improve schools or break up political cliques.
Medicare and Medicaid, created by Johnson, provided health care for the old and poor, which was much of Appalachia. That was good, Caudill said.
On the other hand, each new handout encouraged malingering by the lazy, he said. Free access to medicine let pill addicts claim "bad nerves" and stay doped up all day — a prescient criticism given the prescription drug abuse currently afflicting eastern Kentucky.
Another trend that has been emerging that meshes biology and technology is in the realm of body-enhancing electronic implants. This ranges from things like LEDs or magnets pierced under the skin to Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) implants. The functionality of these implants includes anything from location-based recognition and “sensory expansion” by being able to feel magnetic fields, to security and being able to secure wearable band-free gadgets.
Benjamin Popper, an editor at The Verge focused on the intersection of technology and culture, said, “This year has seen incredible progress in the advancement of cybernetics. A man with a bionic leg was able to climb the stairs at Chicago’s tallest building. He didn’t need a remote control, his brain was able to direct his mechanical limb as if it were his own flesh and bone. A robotic arm controlled by this woman’s thoughts has achieved new levels of fine motor control.
3D printing is something that will have transformative effects in areas spanning medical, tech and retail. In the medial realm, 3D printers have already been used to create anything from prosthetic limbs to hearing aids. But 3D printing’s next feat will be in creating human organs; already, human tissue has been printed from these devices. Some reports even predict that pharmaceutical companies will be able to use 3D printers for drug development. In the tech space, researchers have recently created an inexpensive conductive plastic composite called carbomorph that will in the future allow consumers to 3D print personal electronics like smartphones, iPods and other devices. But 3D printers will also play a large role in the retail space, as the technology will allow consumers to print their own clothing and accessories. In an interview with USA Today, Steve Yankovich, head of eBay’s mobile business, said that 3D printers would eventually allow consumers to print the things they previously ordered online or bought in-store.
Across areas, 3D printing will also offer consumers a higher level of customization. Craig Elimeliah, the VP, Director of Creative Technology and Digital Solutions at RAPP, a multichannel marketing agency network, said, “3D printing gives us the opportunity to create experiences that lets both brands and their loyalists collaborate on product development, innovation as well and co-creation of physical branded objects. Brands should be releasing 3D printing schemas that are customized to enhance a product or a product experience…. As 3D printers become cheaper and more ubiquitous, we will witness a new era of the customer experience, an era where brands are engaging one-to-one with their consumers on a level so intimate that the products themselves will be a collaborative experience. Some examples could be a soap dispenser that matches your exact kitchen décor printed directly from your 3D printer and all you had to do was buy the refill. The examples are endless and the possibilities are exciting,” he said.
Currently, many retailors are simply extending their website experience across all channels, but increasingly savvy consumers are beginning to demand more—looking for experiences like buying online but picking up in store, buying in store but having it delivered or even using a smartphones as a replacement sales associate in store. In the near future, personal smartphones will be used to do anything from checking product availability in store to getting product information.
As brick and mortar stores evolve to stay relevant, they will increasingly turn to location-based technologies like RFID in order to offer customers more relevant and personalized shopping experiences. Gartner analyst Kevin Sterneckert recently told USA Today that in the near future, by the time a customer walks into a brick and mortar store, “the employees there will probably know what you want to buy, based on information on your trusty phone or tablet. Merchants will know your gender, age, race and income.”
“The omni-channel shopping paradigm is all about providing an immersive and consistent consumer experience across all channels. It’s about reinforcing your retail brand, educating customers about merchandise, and reducing purchase friction,” said Shahram Seyedin-Noor, the CEO and co-founder of GraphDive, which unlocks the power of social data to give vendors insights into their customer’s interests, preferences and demographics. “Not only will that increase in 2013, but it will bring into its fold much stronger elements of social personalization and integration. Retailers will have access to new platforms, such as GraphDive, that integrate and analyze “big data” from different sources—combining, for example, prior purchase behavior with Facebook data – to enable personalized user experiences across the Web, mobile, and offline worlds.”
Commercially, "Night" was a modest success. Culturally, "Night" was a bombshell, with an impact far beyond mere sales.
"Tens of thousands of acres," Caudill wrote in its pages, "fell to the exploiters, from a people who, though they might fight each other with medieval brutality, at a business negotiation were as guileless as infants."
Ronald Eller, an Appalachian historian at the University of Kentucky, said "the book was a pivotal moment."
"Harry articulately and openly challenged the system," Eller said. "The fact that so much about 'Night' still rings true today is quite an indictment of the political culture of the commonwealth."
By fall 1963, the whole world was coming to Whitesburg to share a meal with Harry and Anne Caudill and take his "poverty tour" of shattered mountains and shantytowns.
Word spread of "ugly, poverty-ridden" Appalachia, as The New York Times' book review put it.
Harry Caudill wryly described the response: Americans cleaned out their closets and shipped tons of old clothes to eastern Kentucky; threadbare suits cut for 1940s fashions dominated the mountains for years. A charitable wholesaler sent 12,000 pairs of children's shoes. Other donations were less thoughtful.
"The town of Harlan was blessed with an entire carload of cabbages for several days on a side track while the cargo rotted, and the Louisville and Nashville — which touts itself as 'Old Reliable' — promptly discarded it on a riverbank," Caudill wrote. "The ten tons of decaying vegetables sent an odoriferous pall to plague the county seat and raise serious doubts about the whole idea of Christian charity."
In early November of 1963, President John F. Kennedy told incoming Gov. Edward "Ned" Breathitt that he was arranging a visit to eastern Kentucky to announce aid for the impoverished region, Breathitt said in a 1998 oral-history interview.
After Kennedy was assassinated on Nov. 22, 1963, his successor, Lyndon Johnson, assumed Kennedy's agenda as his own. In 1964, Johnson took the tour Kennedy planned, dropping into Martin County by helicopter to declare his War on Poverty and shake the hands of startled mountaineers on their front porches.
More than anything, Caudill said, Appalachia needed employers independent of coal.
Congress established the Appalachian Regional Commission, or ARC, in 1965 as a fairly traditional public works project. Billions of dollars in federal aid would go to counties designated as "Appalachia," predominantly for road construction, with other projects sharing smaller sums.
Thirteen states would share in the ARC's munificence, from New York to Mississippi. In Kentucky, Appalachia as Congress defines it extends through Lexington's suburbs to just outside Bowling Green in the western half of the state.
Caudill dismissed the ARC as an uncoordinated boondoggle. He said it didn't end the region's dependence on coal, improve schools or break up political cliques.
Medicare and Medicaid, created by Johnson, provided health care for the old and poor, which was much of Appalachia. That was good, Caudill said.
On the other hand, each new handout encouraged malingering by the lazy, he said. Free access to medicine let pill addicts claim "bad nerves" and stay doped up all day — a prescient criticism given the prescription drug abuse currently afflicting eastern Kentucky.
Another trend that has been emerging that meshes biology and technology is in the realm of body-enhancing electronic implants. This ranges from things like LEDs or magnets pierced under the skin to Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) implants. The functionality of these implants includes anything from location-based recognition and “sensory expansion” by being able to feel magnetic fields, to security and being able to secure wearable band-free gadgets.
Benjamin Popper, an editor at The Verge focused on the intersection of technology and culture, said, “This year has seen incredible progress in the advancement of cybernetics. A man with a bionic leg was able to climb the stairs at Chicago’s tallest building. He didn’t need a remote control, his brain was able to direct his mechanical limb as if it were his own flesh and bone. A robotic arm controlled by this woman’s thoughts has achieved new levels of fine motor control.
3D printing is something that will have transformative effects in areas spanning medical, tech and retail. In the medial realm, 3D printers have already been used to create anything from prosthetic limbs to hearing aids. But 3D printing’s next feat will be in creating human organs; already, human tissue has been printed from these devices. Some reports even predict that pharmaceutical companies will be able to use 3D printers for drug development. In the tech space, researchers have recently created an inexpensive conductive plastic composite called carbomorph that will in the future allow consumers to 3D print personal electronics like smartphones, iPods and other devices. But 3D printers will also play a large role in the retail space, as the technology will allow consumers to print their own clothing and accessories. In an interview with USA Today, Steve Yankovich, head of eBay’s mobile business, said that 3D printers would eventually allow consumers to print the things they previously ordered online or bought in-store.
Across areas, 3D printing will also offer consumers a higher level of customization. Craig Elimeliah, the VP, Director of Creative Technology and Digital Solutions at RAPP, a multichannel marketing agency network, said, “3D printing gives us the opportunity to create experiences that lets both brands and their loyalists collaborate on product development, innovation as well and co-creation of physical branded objects. Brands should be releasing 3D printing schemas that are customized to enhance a product or a product experience…. As 3D printers become cheaper and more ubiquitous, we will witness a new era of the customer experience, an era where brands are engaging one-to-one with their consumers on a level so intimate that the products themselves will be a collaborative experience. Some examples could be a soap dispenser that matches your exact kitchen décor printed directly from your 3D printer and all you had to do was buy the refill. The examples are endless and the possibilities are exciting,” he said.
Currently, many retailors are simply extending their website experience across all channels, but increasingly savvy consumers are beginning to demand more—looking for experiences like buying online but picking up in store, buying in store but having it delivered or even using a smartphones as a replacement sales associate in store. In the near future, personal smartphones will be used to do anything from checking product availability in store to getting product information.
As brick and mortar stores evolve to stay relevant, they will increasingly turn to location-based technologies like RFID in order to offer customers more relevant and personalized shopping experiences. Gartner analyst Kevin Sterneckert recently told USA Today that in the near future, by the time a customer walks into a brick and mortar store, “the employees there will probably know what you want to buy, based on information on your trusty phone or tablet. Merchants will know your gender, age, race and income.”
“The omni-channel shopping paradigm is all about providing an immersive and consistent consumer experience across all channels. It’s about reinforcing your retail brand, educating customers about merchandise, and reducing purchase friction,” said Shahram Seyedin-Noor, the CEO and co-founder of GraphDive, which unlocks the power of social data to give vendors insights into their customer’s interests, preferences and demographics. “Not only will that increase in 2013, but it will bring into its fold much stronger elements of social personalization and integration. Retailers will have access to new platforms, such as GraphDive, that integrate and analyze “big data” from different sources—combining, for example, prior purchase behavior with Facebook data – to enable personalized user experiences across the Web, mobile, and offline worlds.”
What you don't know about Soldier Mountain
Imagine riding a snowcat to untracked powder at 9,000 feet surrounded by pine glades, rocky cliff bands, and spectacular views of Idaho's Sawtooth Mountains.
This is the inevitable future of Soldier Mountain -- one of Idaho's smallest ski areas, but also one of its most promising. That's because the folks who run Soldier have big plans for its 1,400 vertical feet of terrain.
The area is scheduled to reopen Wednesday, December 26 as a non-profit, largely relying on volunteers.
When it does, a new board of directors will pick up where previous owner/actor Bruce Willis left off. Which is to say, they've got a lot of work ahead of them.
Boise-based Attorney Will Varin knew he had to act fast when word spread that Hollywood actor Bruce Willis wanted to donate Soldier Mountain to a nonprofit.
Willis had purchased the resort in 1996, and managed it from afar.
Doing so, the ski area experienced several years of financial loss and saw few improvements. One notable exception was a new lodge Willis built after an electrical fire destroyed the original structure in 2009.
Varin, whose law firm specializes in business, tax, and estate law -- among other areas -- knew the timing had to be right to put Soldier back on track.
He helped organized a five-member board, clocked double hours at his law firm, and sealed the deal with Willis' financiers that would put Soldier Mountain the hands of a non-profit, community-based organization.
Russell Schiermeier is a mechanical engineer-turned alfalfa farmer who lives near the Bruneau desert. Like many in Camas County, he grew up skiing the slopes of Soldier Mountain in the 90s.
He says it's still a place where skiers wear Wranglers and cowboys hats and "ski on straight sticks from the 70s."
Schiermeier's passion for Soldier led him to seek a place on its newly formed board of directors. He says the board's short- term goal is to make skiing available and affordable for locals -- just like it was when he was a kid.
"Our goal is to get it open, get cheap lift tickets, and get school kids back on the slopes," Schiermeier said. To do so, board members plan to offer cheap ski lessons with incentives for kids.
kids pay $57 for three days of ski lessons (the cost includes ski equipment rental). Upon completion, each new student qualifies for unlimited $15 lift tickets and free equipment rentals for the remainder of the ski season.
Schiermeier says Soldier Mountain has about 30 schools interested in the program already. He says getting more kids on skis is the key to getting more families on the mountain.
"The master plan is if the kids learn to ski, their parents are going to want to come up with them on the weekends," Schiermeier said.
One of Soldier Mountain's best kept secrets has long been its down-home cat ski operation.
That's because while the ski lifts stop at just over 7,400 feet, the surrounding peaks tower over 10,000. Here, mile-wide bowls, serrated ridge lines, and rocky chutes dominate the landscape.
Skiers and snowboarders have been able to access this area via snowcat since the mid-90s. However, mechanical issues with the mountain's aging snowcats have lately meant trips to the peaks have been few and far between. In fact, for the past two years the mountain hasn't offered cat skiing to anyone.
Last week, the mountain took delivery of three newer Pisten Bully snowcats meant for replacing several older models.
Schiermeier says the operation is also looking to upgrade its custom made cat ski passenger cab.
The first will be a unique in-bounds snowcat ride to the resort's Bridge Creek area. Schiermeier says this unguided experience will let skiers cruise down north facing, in-bounds slopes that aren't lift accessible. The cost will be free, to minimal.
The second option is a $275 "premier" snowcat experience. Here, riders will be transported to the top of the peaks where they'll have access to more than 3,000 feet of vertical powder during a day-long guided ski or snowbird trip.
That's because Frostenson's family is steeped in the history and lore of Soldier Mountain. His grandfather was the mountain's original owner. His great uncle oversaw the installation of Soldier Mountain's original chairlift in 1948.
As a child, Frostenson remembers "a special small community" present on the mountain. "You would go inside and see everyone from the lift operator to the owner eating lunch up there," Frostenson said.
Frostenson sees that vision of the past when he contemplates the future of Soldier Mountain.
"Our vision of the future is to get lots of families and lots of kids plugged back into there," Frostenson said. "Over the last 15 years or so, Soldier has lost a lot of its followers for a lot of reasons."
"I know that we'd like to expand, and whether that includes adding a lift or two -- I'm pretty sure that's in the future," Frostenson said. "But I'm not sure if being big resort is right for us."
Instead, Frostenson says he'd like to see the focus placed on "side country" and backcountry operations, along with snowcat skiing.
Varin says he'd like to see Soldier as a "compliment" to the nearby Sun Valley resort, including limited real estate development in the area.
Schiermeier says the north facing bowls and chutes high above Soldier Mountain are as tough and steep as expert runs at Snowbird and Jackson Hole. He says the terrain could attract skiers from around the world if the resort was to expand.
All board members agree that any future expansion must positively impact the area's economy and community as a whole. They want the resort to serve the people of Fairfield -- not the other way around.
"It's quite an honor, actually," Frostenson said. "It's been very humbling and exciting to become able to get back involved in it."
This is the inevitable future of Soldier Mountain -- one of Idaho's smallest ski areas, but also one of its most promising. That's because the folks who run Soldier have big plans for its 1,400 vertical feet of terrain.
The area is scheduled to reopen Wednesday, December 26 as a non-profit, largely relying on volunteers.
When it does, a new board of directors will pick up where previous owner/actor Bruce Willis left off. Which is to say, they've got a lot of work ahead of them.
Boise-based Attorney Will Varin knew he had to act fast when word spread that Hollywood actor Bruce Willis wanted to donate Soldier Mountain to a nonprofit.
Willis had purchased the resort in 1996, and managed it from afar.
Doing so, the ski area experienced several years of financial loss and saw few improvements. One notable exception was a new lodge Willis built after an electrical fire destroyed the original structure in 2009.
Varin, whose law firm specializes in business, tax, and estate law -- among other areas -- knew the timing had to be right to put Soldier back on track.
He helped organized a five-member board, clocked double hours at his law firm, and sealed the deal with Willis' financiers that would put Soldier Mountain the hands of a non-profit, community-based organization.
Russell Schiermeier is a mechanical engineer-turned alfalfa farmer who lives near the Bruneau desert. Like many in Camas County, he grew up skiing the slopes of Soldier Mountain in the 90s.
He says it's still a place where skiers wear Wranglers and cowboys hats and "ski on straight sticks from the 70s."
Schiermeier's passion for Soldier led him to seek a place on its newly formed board of directors. He says the board's short- term goal is to make skiing available and affordable for locals -- just like it was when he was a kid.
"Our goal is to get it open, get cheap lift tickets, and get school kids back on the slopes," Schiermeier said. To do so, board members plan to offer cheap ski lessons with incentives for kids.
kids pay $57 for three days of ski lessons (the cost includes ski equipment rental). Upon completion, each new student qualifies for unlimited $15 lift tickets and free equipment rentals for the remainder of the ski season.
Schiermeier says Soldier Mountain has about 30 schools interested in the program already. He says getting more kids on skis is the key to getting more families on the mountain.
"The master plan is if the kids learn to ski, their parents are going to want to come up with them on the weekends," Schiermeier said.
One of Soldier Mountain's best kept secrets has long been its down-home cat ski operation.
That's because while the ski lifts stop at just over 7,400 feet, the surrounding peaks tower over 10,000. Here, mile-wide bowls, serrated ridge lines, and rocky chutes dominate the landscape.
Skiers and snowboarders have been able to access this area via snowcat since the mid-90s. However, mechanical issues with the mountain's aging snowcats have lately meant trips to the peaks have been few and far between. In fact, for the past two years the mountain hasn't offered cat skiing to anyone.
Last week, the mountain took delivery of three newer Pisten Bully snowcats meant for replacing several older models.
Schiermeier says the operation is also looking to upgrade its custom made cat ski passenger cab.
The first will be a unique in-bounds snowcat ride to the resort's Bridge Creek area. Schiermeier says this unguided experience will let skiers cruise down north facing, in-bounds slopes that aren't lift accessible. The cost will be free, to minimal.
The second option is a $275 "premier" snowcat experience. Here, riders will be transported to the top of the peaks where they'll have access to more than 3,000 feet of vertical powder during a day-long guided ski or snowbird trip.
That's because Frostenson's family is steeped in the history and lore of Soldier Mountain. His grandfather was the mountain's original owner. His great uncle oversaw the installation of Soldier Mountain's original chairlift in 1948.
As a child, Frostenson remembers "a special small community" present on the mountain. "You would go inside and see everyone from the lift operator to the owner eating lunch up there," Frostenson said.
Frostenson sees that vision of the past when he contemplates the future of Soldier Mountain.
"Our vision of the future is to get lots of families and lots of kids plugged back into there," Frostenson said. "Over the last 15 years or so, Soldier has lost a lot of its followers for a lot of reasons."
"I know that we'd like to expand, and whether that includes adding a lift or two -- I'm pretty sure that's in the future," Frostenson said. "But I'm not sure if being big resort is right for us."
Instead, Frostenson says he'd like to see the focus placed on "side country" and backcountry operations, along with snowcat skiing.
Varin says he'd like to see Soldier as a "compliment" to the nearby Sun Valley resort, including limited real estate development in the area.
Schiermeier says the north facing bowls and chutes high above Soldier Mountain are as tough and steep as expert runs at Snowbird and Jackson Hole. He says the terrain could attract skiers from around the world if the resort was to expand.
All board members agree that any future expansion must positively impact the area's economy and community as a whole. They want the resort to serve the people of Fairfield -- not the other way around.
"It's quite an honor, actually," Frostenson said. "It's been very humbling and exciting to become able to get back involved in it."
Sunday, December 23, 2012
You Are Not Alone
A film that reminds me of home (northwest suburbs representin’, yo) and shows life in lower Illinois the way I remember it, there is a real weight placed on the location. It’s an odd way to begin a discussion about a trailer, I realize that, but the first thing this trailer sells is its sense of where we’re at. From the idyllic town where the action is about to go down, the breathless way we move through moment to moment in this first person narrative, and the powerfully haunting score that accompanies it, this is an incredible introduction to this world.
Now, unlike Doom and the shaky cam that United 93 has forever turned me off of thanks to nausea, I like the use of the perspective here. It’s novel, yes, but in the trailer it works to establish not only the characters but it manages to increase the tension when things go south. On a program like Peep Show it’s able to use that perspective to increase the subtlety on a moment and I just feel like it works in this case.
And it’s that moment as we’re riding in the back of a truck with that woman and the fireworks that go off by the house that illuminate the darkness ever so briefly that makes me lose my mind. I want to know so badly what is about to happen to these people that when things go south and it devolves into a real panic situation that I am in 100% love with this trailer. I am emotionally invested with the rage that explodes on the screen and the heaviness, the raw weight that the environment brings to this picture because we are so close to the carpet, the walls. It’s damn near hacky to say it but you do feel like you’re there and it’s a bit electric.
I can’t think of a better trailer I saw all week than this one and, God help me, it better be as good as the movie because I can’t imagine how you can package something this low budget, so well, and have it completely fall apart when you let it air out. Regardless, though, I am in love and now want to see some of my fellow midwesterners, oh yah hey dere, cut up like flank steak as soon as possible.
Director Christian James is bringing a whole new angle to this now tired and busted genre by just getting scatological. There’s something about seeing ladies getting frisky with each other, and me thinking someone just sent me zombie porno, only to hear the satisfying crunch of teeth digging into flesh.
There honestly isn’t much more to this trailer other than the literal parade of characters that begin to inhabit this toilet space. I’m at a loss to try and even imagine what this movie could possibly bring that new and fresh but I am won over by its charm and gumption. Using a demented version of “We Wish You A Merry Christmas” as a conga line of zombied, costumed characters enter the bathroom is a nice touch as well as the use of zombie Jesus which, in and of itself, is pretty meta. The nutty meter is off the charts with this one and good for James as we’ve been missing a fun zombie film for a little while and I’m feeling there might be a chuckle, a guffaw, or two to be had here.
Big ups for the quality kills, as well, as the makeup and blood and viscera on display kept me more than engaged with the insanity unfolding on the screen. There is no way I can’t not watch this now, you realize this, right? For better or worse I need to know how this ends.
You see a trailer like this and all you can do is marvel at the sheer amount of focus and dedication you have to possess in order to stick with a story for as long as he has. The trailer doesn’t do anything particularly flashy or novel but it sells the idea of a movie that is part of a larger whole. Seven previous editions are a bit unwieldy to get through but the trailer here just hits the highlights from the other films by having a few stories that have carried over.
It’s a trailer that helps carry you through these people’s life arc and explains how we’re here with them right now. In a way it’s melancholy to hear how the subjects themselves saw this project unfolding and the futile thrashing to push it away, you see how they’ve eased on their dreams and accepted what this life is all about for better or worse. Damn near made me depressed but it looks like it could be required viewing if for no other reason than to be educated to hear how people are reflecting on their human experience 56 years into their time on this planet.
All joking aside, this is a trailer that just hits the right way. With as much attention that has been paid to the Scandinavians and their strange-hold on all things crime in the last decade this appears to be yet another in a series of movies that deal with something savage with someone trying to get to the bottom of it all. And, when one of those people is Peter Stormare, you have a perfect storm brewing. And Peter delivers in this trailer.
We don’t have any clue what’s happening but what we are let in on is that we have a serial killer, that killer gets away and terrorizes some more, while Peter seems to be the deep, pensive thoughtful detective who is trying to keep his case, and his life, together. I like the beats we hit in how we move from crazy psychopath to Stormare going batty on a pile of paperwork. The juxtaposition is nice as well as momentOfficially commencing Friday, January 11, the conference will open with a full day of tutorials and workshops dedicated to topics such as “Consumer eHealth Platforms, Services and Applications,” “Internet of Things- RFIDs, WSNs and Beyond,” “People Centric Sensing and Communications,” “Advances in Home Networking Standardization and Related Research Opportunities” and “Emerging Technologies for Future Tele-Communication.” In the ensuing days, hundreds of business and industrial sessions will then detail the newest generation of consumer and home networking solutions. Among these will be the “Home Energy Management Networking Panel” on January 12 and the ongoing keynote addresses of experts like:
Donald L. Schilling, Chairman of LINEX Technologies, who will speak about his "Vision of Wireless Consumer Communications" and the development of “Wireless Cities,” where people will use just one phone or hand-held computer to enable nearly every form of electronic communication in real time Kilsu Eo, Senior Vice President, Samsung and leader of the company’s Convergence Solution Team at the Software R&D Center and User Experience Center at the DMC R&D Center, where he is responsible for developing cloud server/services, data analytics, web-centric solutions, and convergence platforms and ecosystems designed to advance the every day use of consumer electronic devices, future cars and health care devices.
Park, Executive Vice President and CTO at HARMAN International, who is currently overseeing the company’s automotive infotainment, consumer and professional audio system R&D activities.
In addition, the conference will be highlighted by numerous demonstrations showcasing new innovations in home appliance control systems, wireless sensor networks supporting indoor air quality monitoring, smartphone application defined computing and online weathering reporting incorporating micro blog entries, user videos and outdoor data. CES 2013 visitors will also have the opportunity to experience several of these demonstrations in-person and prior to the conference at IEEE booth #30242 located in the South Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center. This includes an introduction to "New e-health business models” detailing how non-IP supporting Continua-certified health devices, such as weighing scales, can be unlocked by Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) systems for use by other devices and services in the home as well as a demo of “New Security Frameworks Based On TLS For NFC P2P Applications In The Internet Of Things."
A third demo on “Application Defined Computing in Smartphones and Consumer Electronics” will be presented by Samsung to show how DRAM (memory) systems can improve energy delay product by 23% and performance by 17% for smartphones.s that show us that he’s genuinely able to play the side of the quiet intellectual and the nutty detective who finds himself being consumed by his work.
Now, unlike Doom and the shaky cam that United 93 has forever turned me off of thanks to nausea, I like the use of the perspective here. It’s novel, yes, but in the trailer it works to establish not only the characters but it manages to increase the tension when things go south. On a program like Peep Show it’s able to use that perspective to increase the subtlety on a moment and I just feel like it works in this case.
And it’s that moment as we’re riding in the back of a truck with that woman and the fireworks that go off by the house that illuminate the darkness ever so briefly that makes me lose my mind. I want to know so badly what is about to happen to these people that when things go south and it devolves into a real panic situation that I am in 100% love with this trailer. I am emotionally invested with the rage that explodes on the screen and the heaviness, the raw weight that the environment brings to this picture because we are so close to the carpet, the walls. It’s damn near hacky to say it but you do feel like you’re there and it’s a bit electric.
I can’t think of a better trailer I saw all week than this one and, God help me, it better be as good as the movie because I can’t imagine how you can package something this low budget, so well, and have it completely fall apart when you let it air out. Regardless, though, I am in love and now want to see some of my fellow midwesterners, oh yah hey dere, cut up like flank steak as soon as possible.
Director Christian James is bringing a whole new angle to this now tired and busted genre by just getting scatological. There’s something about seeing ladies getting frisky with each other, and me thinking someone just sent me zombie porno, only to hear the satisfying crunch of teeth digging into flesh.
There honestly isn’t much more to this trailer other than the literal parade of characters that begin to inhabit this toilet space. I’m at a loss to try and even imagine what this movie could possibly bring that new and fresh but I am won over by its charm and gumption. Using a demented version of “We Wish You A Merry Christmas” as a conga line of zombied, costumed characters enter the bathroom is a nice touch as well as the use of zombie Jesus which, in and of itself, is pretty meta. The nutty meter is off the charts with this one and good for James as we’ve been missing a fun zombie film for a little while and I’m feeling there might be a chuckle, a guffaw, or two to be had here.
Big ups for the quality kills, as well, as the makeup and blood and viscera on display kept me more than engaged with the insanity unfolding on the screen. There is no way I can’t not watch this now, you realize this, right? For better or worse I need to know how this ends.
You see a trailer like this and all you can do is marvel at the sheer amount of focus and dedication you have to possess in order to stick with a story for as long as he has. The trailer doesn’t do anything particularly flashy or novel but it sells the idea of a movie that is part of a larger whole. Seven previous editions are a bit unwieldy to get through but the trailer here just hits the highlights from the other films by having a few stories that have carried over.
It’s a trailer that helps carry you through these people’s life arc and explains how we’re here with them right now. In a way it’s melancholy to hear how the subjects themselves saw this project unfolding and the futile thrashing to push it away, you see how they’ve eased on their dreams and accepted what this life is all about for better or worse. Damn near made me depressed but it looks like it could be required viewing if for no other reason than to be educated to hear how people are reflecting on their human experience 56 years into their time on this planet.
All joking aside, this is a trailer that just hits the right way. With as much attention that has been paid to the Scandinavians and their strange-hold on all things crime in the last decade this appears to be yet another in a series of movies that deal with something savage with someone trying to get to the bottom of it all. And, when one of those people is Peter Stormare, you have a perfect storm brewing. And Peter delivers in this trailer.
We don’t have any clue what’s happening but what we are let in on is that we have a serial killer, that killer gets away and terrorizes some more, while Peter seems to be the deep, pensive thoughtful detective who is trying to keep his case, and his life, together. I like the beats we hit in how we move from crazy psychopath to Stormare going batty on a pile of paperwork. The juxtaposition is nice as well as momentOfficially commencing Friday, January 11, the conference will open with a full day of tutorials and workshops dedicated to topics such as “Consumer eHealth Platforms, Services and Applications,” “Internet of Things- RFIDs, WSNs and Beyond,” “People Centric Sensing and Communications,” “Advances in Home Networking Standardization and Related Research Opportunities” and “Emerging Technologies for Future Tele-Communication.” In the ensuing days, hundreds of business and industrial sessions will then detail the newest generation of consumer and home networking solutions. Among these will be the “Home Energy Management Networking Panel” on January 12 and the ongoing keynote addresses of experts like:
Donald L. Schilling, Chairman of LINEX Technologies, who will speak about his "Vision of Wireless Consumer Communications" and the development of “Wireless Cities,” where people will use just one phone or hand-held computer to enable nearly every form of electronic communication in real time Kilsu Eo, Senior Vice President, Samsung and leader of the company’s Convergence Solution Team at the Software R&D Center and User Experience Center at the DMC R&D Center, where he is responsible for developing cloud server/services, data analytics, web-centric solutions, and convergence platforms and ecosystems designed to advance the every day use of consumer electronic devices, future cars and health care devices.
Park, Executive Vice President and CTO at HARMAN International, who is currently overseeing the company’s automotive infotainment, consumer and professional audio system R&D activities.
In addition, the conference will be highlighted by numerous demonstrations showcasing new innovations in home appliance control systems, wireless sensor networks supporting indoor air quality monitoring, smartphone application defined computing and online weathering reporting incorporating micro blog entries, user videos and outdoor data. CES 2013 visitors will also have the opportunity to experience several of these demonstrations in-person and prior to the conference at IEEE booth #30242 located in the South Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center. This includes an introduction to "New e-health business models” detailing how non-IP supporting Continua-certified health devices, such as weighing scales, can be unlocked by Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) systems for use by other devices and services in the home as well as a demo of “New Security Frameworks Based On TLS For NFC P2P Applications In The Internet Of Things."
A third demo on “Application Defined Computing in Smartphones and Consumer Electronics” will be presented by Samsung to show how DRAM (memory) systems can improve energy delay product by 23% and performance by 17% for smartphones.s that show us that he’s genuinely able to play the side of the quiet intellectual and the nutty detective who finds himself being consumed by his work.
State was flash point for rifle ban
In a matter of minutes, a suicidal drifter named Patrick Purdy, armed with a Russian-style AK-47 rifle, raked the schoolyard with 106 bullets during lunch recess that day, killing five children and injuring 30 others before shooting himself in the head.
In the wake of carnage, Purdy left a nation in an uproar over the right to bear arms and whether that outweighed protecting the youngest and most vulnerable in our society. Purdy's actions spawned debates on mental illness and school security. And in an ironic quirk of serendipity, he raised cultural sensitivity for Southeast Asian refugees in Northern California.
Advocates on both sides of the gun control issue agree that the Stockton rampage was a flash point for dramatic measures to limit certain types of weapons. California soon passed the first assault weapons ban in the nation, which served as a model for a federal ban, and then adopted a universal background check for all gun sales in the state.
As we grapple with the painful images and accounts of the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in Connecticut, survivors and witnesses of the Stockton shooting are revisited by memories of their tragedy – one that predated Columbine High and Virginia Tech – its parallels to Sandy Hook and the aftermath of a day when innocence was shattered.
Finch and I abandoned the car several blocks from Cleveland Elementary and rushed to the unassuming school in a modest neighborhood. The first responders were already setting up a makeshift triage on the front lawn and were assessing and tending to small bodies laid out on blankets.
I saw a shy Asian girl tentatively standing at the fringes of the triage area, looking as if she didn't want to bother the busy medics. I asked her if she saw the shooter. She looked at me blankly.
I wondered if there was a language barrier, or if she was seriously injured, so I guided her to a firefighter. He asked her if she was hurt. She looked at us, hesitant and frightened. I told her it was OK, that the firefighter would help her. The girl turned around, lifted up her sweat shirt and bent over slightly.
Her upper thigh and buttock had been sprayed with shrapnel, or some material kicked up by bullets, leaving puncture wounds. I understood that she was not only scared and in pain, but ashamed at the location of her injury.
I walked away wordlessly, as she lay face down on a pallet. Behind me, I heard the kind, booming voice of the firefighter talking to her, and the rip of her jeans, until the sounds were swallowed up by the blur of the scene.
I felt powerless to find any words to comfort the girl. I was out of my element. I usually covered real estate and agriculture, and it would be two years before I became a mother. To imagine that midsized city newspaper reporters or photographers are somehow prepared for violent events is an overestimation of most of our credentials and a denial of our humanity.
Sovanna Koeurt, executive director of an Asian Pacific nonprofit in Stockton, said the image of young children at play being gunned down was unfamiliar to the nation.
"At that time, this was a big thing," Koeurt recalled last week. "Nothing like this ever happened in the U.S."
Koeurt was a 33-year-old mother of three boys attending Cleveland Elementary when Purdy snapped. She was at her home in the nearby Park Village complex, sewing costumes for an upcoming dance recital by Cambodian children, when she saw police cars and firetrucks at the school.
When she got there, her neighbors hurriedly drafted her as a translator. Many of the victims were Southeast Asian refugees living in her complex.
"All of the parents were panicking, crying," Koeurt said. "They grabbed my shirt, and pushed me to the podium. They handed me a list with names of kids who were injured and went to the hospital. They waited for me to read.
"All eyes look at me, thousands of eyes were looking at me," Koeurt said. "All I could think was, I didn't see the names of my kids. I was so lucky."
She stayed with the parents of the dead children after they were notified. I remember them being corralled into a classroom at Cleveland. I heard a mother's primal wail. It seemed like it would never end.
Koeurt pointed out the similarities between Sandy Hook and Cleveland. The four little girls and one boy shot to death in Stockton that day ranged in age from 6 to 9 years old, and troubled young men who unleashed vicious attacks.
"When I see the scenery (at Sandy Hook), it makes me cry, even though my kids are OK," Koeurt said. "There are still scars there. It haunts us."
Koeurt's son was good friends with Rathanar Or, the 9-year-old boy killed at Cleveland Elementary. Her son couldn't understand his friend's death and had trouble sleeping. She took him for counseling to deal with the loss.
I interviewed Or's family at their home the day after the shooting. The boy's parents were too upset to speak, but Rathanar's older sister was happy to show me his room, his school pictures, his toys. She told me funny stories about Rathanar that made her giggle. She kept referring to her little brother in the present tense.
"After the shooting, reporters from around the world came here and asked us questions," Koeurt said. "Newspaper reporters tried to learn about our culture. At that time, no one knew about us. We had no services at all, no sources for help. We came together as a community and said we cannot live like this."
In 1993, the families formed a nonprofit housing association and bought the complex, renovated the apartments, adding a community center, with children's and teen activities and tutoring. The association paid off the loan in 2010, said Koeurt, who leads the nonprofit.
"In spite of the shooting, we have many good stories, many good things happening," Koeurt said.
Dianne Barth-Feist, a Stockton Unified School District spokeswoman, said the 1989 shooting changed the way officials looked at school security. Within a few months, the district installed fences and locked gates around schools, and other California schools followed suit.
New schools in California are now architecturally designed with security in mind, including fencing and check-in points. Since the Cleveland school shooting, school districts now have frequent disaster drills, posted evacuation routes and lockdowns.
In the wake of carnage, Purdy left a nation in an uproar over the right to bear arms and whether that outweighed protecting the youngest and most vulnerable in our society. Purdy's actions spawned debates on mental illness and school security. And in an ironic quirk of serendipity, he raised cultural sensitivity for Southeast Asian refugees in Northern California.
Advocates on both sides of the gun control issue agree that the Stockton rampage was a flash point for dramatic measures to limit certain types of weapons. California soon passed the first assault weapons ban in the nation, which served as a model for a federal ban, and then adopted a universal background check for all gun sales in the state.
As we grapple with the painful images and accounts of the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in Connecticut, survivors and witnesses of the Stockton shooting are revisited by memories of their tragedy – one that predated Columbine High and Virginia Tech – its parallels to Sandy Hook and the aftermath of a day when innocence was shattered.
Finch and I abandoned the car several blocks from Cleveland Elementary and rushed to the unassuming school in a modest neighborhood. The first responders were already setting up a makeshift triage on the front lawn and were assessing and tending to small bodies laid out on blankets.
I saw a shy Asian girl tentatively standing at the fringes of the triage area, looking as if she didn't want to bother the busy medics. I asked her if she saw the shooter. She looked at me blankly.
I wondered if there was a language barrier, or if she was seriously injured, so I guided her to a firefighter. He asked her if she was hurt. She looked at us, hesitant and frightened. I told her it was OK, that the firefighter would help her. The girl turned around, lifted up her sweat shirt and bent over slightly.
Her upper thigh and buttock had been sprayed with shrapnel, or some material kicked up by bullets, leaving puncture wounds. I understood that she was not only scared and in pain, but ashamed at the location of her injury.
I walked away wordlessly, as she lay face down on a pallet. Behind me, I heard the kind, booming voice of the firefighter talking to her, and the rip of her jeans, until the sounds were swallowed up by the blur of the scene.
I felt powerless to find any words to comfort the girl. I was out of my element. I usually covered real estate and agriculture, and it would be two years before I became a mother. To imagine that midsized city newspaper reporters or photographers are somehow prepared for violent events is an overestimation of most of our credentials and a denial of our humanity.
Sovanna Koeurt, executive director of an Asian Pacific nonprofit in Stockton, said the image of young children at play being gunned down was unfamiliar to the nation.
"At that time, this was a big thing," Koeurt recalled last week. "Nothing like this ever happened in the U.S."
Koeurt was a 33-year-old mother of three boys attending Cleveland Elementary when Purdy snapped. She was at her home in the nearby Park Village complex, sewing costumes for an upcoming dance recital by Cambodian children, when she saw police cars and firetrucks at the school.
When she got there, her neighbors hurriedly drafted her as a translator. Many of the victims were Southeast Asian refugees living in her complex.
"All of the parents were panicking, crying," Koeurt said. "They grabbed my shirt, and pushed me to the podium. They handed me a list with names of kids who were injured and went to the hospital. They waited for me to read.
"All eyes look at me, thousands of eyes were looking at me," Koeurt said. "All I could think was, I didn't see the names of my kids. I was so lucky."
She stayed with the parents of the dead children after they were notified. I remember them being corralled into a classroom at Cleveland. I heard a mother's primal wail. It seemed like it would never end.
Koeurt pointed out the similarities between Sandy Hook and Cleveland. The four little girls and one boy shot to death in Stockton that day ranged in age from 6 to 9 years old, and troubled young men who unleashed vicious attacks.
"When I see the scenery (at Sandy Hook), it makes me cry, even though my kids are OK," Koeurt said. "There are still scars there. It haunts us."
Koeurt's son was good friends with Rathanar Or, the 9-year-old boy killed at Cleveland Elementary. Her son couldn't understand his friend's death and had trouble sleeping. She took him for counseling to deal with the loss.
I interviewed Or's family at their home the day after the shooting. The boy's parents were too upset to speak, but Rathanar's older sister was happy to show me his room, his school pictures, his toys. She told me funny stories about Rathanar that made her giggle. She kept referring to her little brother in the present tense.
"After the shooting, reporters from around the world came here and asked us questions," Koeurt said. "Newspaper reporters tried to learn about our culture. At that time, no one knew about us. We had no services at all, no sources for help. We came together as a community and said we cannot live like this."
In 1993, the families formed a nonprofit housing association and bought the complex, renovated the apartments, adding a community center, with children's and teen activities and tutoring. The association paid off the loan in 2010, said Koeurt, who leads the nonprofit.
"In spite of the shooting, we have many good stories, many good things happening," Koeurt said.
Dianne Barth-Feist, a Stockton Unified School District spokeswoman, said the 1989 shooting changed the way officials looked at school security. Within a few months, the district installed fences and locked gates around schools, and other California schools followed suit.
New schools in California are now architecturally designed with security in mind, including fencing and check-in points. Since the Cleveland school shooting, school districts now have frequent disaster drills, posted evacuation routes and lockdowns.
Wednesday, December 19, 2012
Assessing Gasol, Bargnani, other popular trade targets
Before we delve into this year’s most popular trade topic, it’s important to point out that we’re now just barely past the one-year anniversary of David Stern’s killing the three-team deal that would have sent Gasol to the Rockets and Chris Paul to the Lakers. A player’s value is bound to go up and down and Gasol is unquestionably at low tide right now because of poor play, knee injuries and an uncertain fit with the new-look Lakers, but how laughable does that trade scenario look right now? The Lakers avoided potential calamity by trading Andrew Bynum last summer, but the same can be said for the Rockets and Hornets, who both can’t be complaining too much about the vetoed deal. Houston wound up landing a far better franchise player — 23-year-old James Harden beats 32-year-old Gasol by a country mile — and the Hornets avoided the Lamar Odom headache, enjoy cleaner books and have the makings of a nice core, assuming Eric Gordon can ever get back on the court.
Recalling this bit of history not only illustrates how far Gasol’s value has plummeted but it also reaffirms the logic in the Lakers’ thinking. Moving big for small to land a dynamic point guard was a sensible play with the Thunder and Spurs standing in the way of a sixth ring for Kobe Bryant. Picking Bynum over Gasol made sense in 2011, and picking Dwight Howard over Gasol in 2012 isn’t even up for debate. The calculus has changed: Once Steve Nash is healthy, the dynamic point guard hole will be filled once again. The question now is whether the Lakers are better off trying to make things work with Gasol or moving him to address other problems: a lack of athleticism on the wings, depth or a stretch forward who fits better alongside Howard. Answering that question will be much easier after seeing how Nash’s presence affects Gasol. The simplest answer is there’s no real need to rush in advance of the Feb. 21 deadline, as general manager Mitch Kupchak and Co. seemingly have concluded.
The trickiest part is finding a trade partner. Gasol’s $19 million salary this season and $19.3 million salary next season eliminate some teams from the conversation right off the bat. Also, contenders with big salary commitments will find it hard to make a trade work: High-salary players are needed to make a Gasol trade legal for capped-out teams, but those players are likely to be important to their clubs and thus difficult to deal. From there, any team that might have sought Gasol as a No. 1 guy, like the Rockets did just one year ago, would be foolish to value him in the same way this year. Gasol can play better than his current averages of 12.6 points, 8.8 rebounds and 42 percent shooting. But he’s not getting any younger and his contract length is stuck in purgatory: He’s not on the books long enough to be considered a piece a team can build around, but the presence of next year’s big salary limits his appeal as a trade asset.
In a Lakers season marked by impatience, I’m glad that Kupchak and the Busses were able to come to such a sensible conclusion regarding Gasol’s fate. There is no ticking clock. There is no need for a reactionary move. There is only a team desperate for some strategic navel-gazing, as its health and coaching reboot are now creating something of a fresh start.
The question of whether to trade Gasol is complicated. The Lakers should deal Gasol in the sense that all players should be moved for better ones; Kupchak should trade Kobe Bryant if he were able to get Kevin Durant in return, or Nash were Paul somehow attainable. The calculus would be different with Gasol in that L.A. would most likely be looking to turn one star-caliber player into an assortment of supporting parts, but the prerogative remains the same: If you’re going to cut ties on a player this good, you better make damn sure that your team is getting better in the process.
I just don’t buy the notion that Gasol needs to be moved due to the grave sin of positional overlap — not after he managed well enough alongside Bynum, and especially not after Gasol outsmarted opponents in working from the high post for Spain during the London Olympics. Clearly, the early mid-range returns for Gasol haven’t been spectacular, but this is a player with tremendous basketball IQ going to work for a coach who has already proved willing to adapt his system to the Lakers’ needs. There are some redundancies to work around and some lineup issues to consider, but Gasol and Mike D’Antoni have miles to go in their regular-season schedule and all of the resources necessary to figure this out. That doesn’t mean they will or that Gasol won’t be dealt at some point, but there’s enough reason for confidence to abstain from making a significant, panic-driven change.
That’s why packaging Bargnani with pending free agent Jose Calderon does make some sense, even if doing so requires the Raptors to take back some heavy contracts. Calderon is a useful player for Toronto at this stage in its rebuild, but this could be GM Bryan Colangelo’s last chance to get something for a player who will surely be gone after the season. Better to pull some value from Calderon and Bargnani both than none at all, particularly considering that the Raptors are unlikely to have much cap room until 2014 unless they make some fairly considerable cuts via trade. In that, I see no problem with Toronto’s taking a chance on a potential Gasol deal, if such an offer comes to pass, or any well-compensated gamble provided that any contract it receives expires before 2014. What may end up happening is that the Raps foot the bill for another team’s mistake while also grabbing a prospect or pick for their trouble, though it’s hard to pin down which players/teams might fill that hypothetical scenario.
With Ersan Ilyasova, Drew Gooden and Luc Richard Mbah a Moute already signed to long-term deals, paying both Ellis and Jennings to stay makes even less sense. That core isn’t advancing deep into the postseason regardless of how much talent the Bucks have accumulated on rookie deals. What’s the justification in shelling out? The fact that Jennings is on his rookie deal right now reduces the urgency factor and makes it difficult and unlikely to find return value for him by the trade deadline. Let’s assume the Bucks keep winning at their current rate, putting themselves firmly in the playoffs. The strategy should be to shop Ellis and deal him if blown away by a return package, seeking young talent and picks or the ability to package him with one of the other questionable contracts on their books. If there’s no deal, playing out the stretch with Ellis and hoping for a good first-round playoff matchup is a fine backup strategy. No real harm done. If we assume the Bucks fall on hard times in advance of the deadline, then the asking price for Ellis simply drops and you try to cash out on him.
Recalling this bit of history not only illustrates how far Gasol’s value has plummeted but it also reaffirms the logic in the Lakers’ thinking. Moving big for small to land a dynamic point guard was a sensible play with the Thunder and Spurs standing in the way of a sixth ring for Kobe Bryant. Picking Bynum over Gasol made sense in 2011, and picking Dwight Howard over Gasol in 2012 isn’t even up for debate. The calculus has changed: Once Steve Nash is healthy, the dynamic point guard hole will be filled once again. The question now is whether the Lakers are better off trying to make things work with Gasol or moving him to address other problems: a lack of athleticism on the wings, depth or a stretch forward who fits better alongside Howard. Answering that question will be much easier after seeing how Nash’s presence affects Gasol. The simplest answer is there’s no real need to rush in advance of the Feb. 21 deadline, as general manager Mitch Kupchak and Co. seemingly have concluded.
The trickiest part is finding a trade partner. Gasol’s $19 million salary this season and $19.3 million salary next season eliminate some teams from the conversation right off the bat. Also, contenders with big salary commitments will find it hard to make a trade work: High-salary players are needed to make a Gasol trade legal for capped-out teams, but those players are likely to be important to their clubs and thus difficult to deal. From there, any team that might have sought Gasol as a No. 1 guy, like the Rockets did just one year ago, would be foolish to value him in the same way this year. Gasol can play better than his current averages of 12.6 points, 8.8 rebounds and 42 percent shooting. But he’s not getting any younger and his contract length is stuck in purgatory: He’s not on the books long enough to be considered a piece a team can build around, but the presence of next year’s big salary limits his appeal as a trade asset.
In a Lakers season marked by impatience, I’m glad that Kupchak and the Busses were able to come to such a sensible conclusion regarding Gasol’s fate. There is no ticking clock. There is no need for a reactionary move. There is only a team desperate for some strategic navel-gazing, as its health and coaching reboot are now creating something of a fresh start.
The question of whether to trade Gasol is complicated. The Lakers should deal Gasol in the sense that all players should be moved for better ones; Kupchak should trade Kobe Bryant if he were able to get Kevin Durant in return, or Nash were Paul somehow attainable. The calculus would be different with Gasol in that L.A. would most likely be looking to turn one star-caliber player into an assortment of supporting parts, but the prerogative remains the same: If you’re going to cut ties on a player this good, you better make damn sure that your team is getting better in the process.
I just don’t buy the notion that Gasol needs to be moved due to the grave sin of positional overlap — not after he managed well enough alongside Bynum, and especially not after Gasol outsmarted opponents in working from the high post for Spain during the London Olympics. Clearly, the early mid-range returns for Gasol haven’t been spectacular, but this is a player with tremendous basketball IQ going to work for a coach who has already proved willing to adapt his system to the Lakers’ needs. There are some redundancies to work around and some lineup issues to consider, but Gasol and Mike D’Antoni have miles to go in their regular-season schedule and all of the resources necessary to figure this out. That doesn’t mean they will or that Gasol won’t be dealt at some point, but there’s enough reason for confidence to abstain from making a significant, panic-driven change.
That’s why packaging Bargnani with pending free agent Jose Calderon does make some sense, even if doing so requires the Raptors to take back some heavy contracts. Calderon is a useful player for Toronto at this stage in its rebuild, but this could be GM Bryan Colangelo’s last chance to get something for a player who will surely be gone after the season. Better to pull some value from Calderon and Bargnani both than none at all, particularly considering that the Raptors are unlikely to have much cap room until 2014 unless they make some fairly considerable cuts via trade. In that, I see no problem with Toronto’s taking a chance on a potential Gasol deal, if such an offer comes to pass, or any well-compensated gamble provided that any contract it receives expires before 2014. What may end up happening is that the Raps foot the bill for another team’s mistake while also grabbing a prospect or pick for their trouble, though it’s hard to pin down which players/teams might fill that hypothetical scenario.
With Ersan Ilyasova, Drew Gooden and Luc Richard Mbah a Moute already signed to long-term deals, paying both Ellis and Jennings to stay makes even less sense. That core isn’t advancing deep into the postseason regardless of how much talent the Bucks have accumulated on rookie deals. What’s the justification in shelling out? The fact that Jennings is on his rookie deal right now reduces the urgency factor and makes it difficult and unlikely to find return value for him by the trade deadline. Let’s assume the Bucks keep winning at their current rate, putting themselves firmly in the playoffs. The strategy should be to shop Ellis and deal him if blown away by a return package, seeking young talent and picks or the ability to package him with one of the other questionable contracts on their books. If there’s no deal, playing out the stretch with Ellis and hoping for a good first-round playoff matchup is a fine backup strategy. No real harm done. If we assume the Bucks fall on hard times in advance of the deadline, then the asking price for Ellis simply drops and you try to cash out on him.
Nipping At The Heels Of Skype
When people think of consumer VoIP services, the first name to come to mind for many is Skype. But while Microsoft’s recent acquisition begins to explore a new role as a social advertising network, a competing VoIP provider, Rebtel, is hoping to gain some new ground. The Stockholm-based company, which has been in operation since 2006, today is announcing that it has passed 20 million active users, with 2012 revenues of $80 million and projected turnover of $100 million for 2013.
It has also seen a 250% increase in app downloads and paying users since 2011, with overall users growing currently at a rate of 500,000 each month.
The business of over-the-top telephony services is a hot space right now, with companies like Whatsapp nabbing business away from carriers by becoming users’ default mobile messaging service. As of August 2012 Whatsapp was delivering 10 billion messages per day. And as we’ve said in the past, we’ve heard that its been an acquisition target for Facebook.
Rebtel very much fits into that mold by offering a more cost-effective way of making calls on mobile devices, with a particular emphasis on long-distance calls that can cost a fortune otherwise if made via a mobile network. ”Our average users are consumers with a lot of first- and second-generation immigrants among them,” Bernstr?m notes, so many of them will want to be calling family abroad.
And while we don’t know whether Skype is profitable today (it wasn’t when Microsoft bought it), Rebtel’s CEO Andreas Bernstr?m tells me that his company is, and has been for the past two years. That’s one reason why Rebtel has yet to raise more money since picking up a Series A round of $20 million from Index Ventures and Benchmark the year it was founded. “We have $10 million in the bank today,” he tells me. Still, scale is nothing to be sniffed at: Skype currently has some 280 million monthly active users, and yesterday another competitor, Viber, yesterday announced 140 million users; its service is completely free.
That strategy may change in the future, as Rebtel gears up for further expansion. Earlier this month, it announced a new line of business as a white-label VoIP provider, releasing an SDK so that developers can incorporate Rebtel’s VoIP service into their apps.
Rebtel is primarily targeting mobile developers with the service, because that is where Rebtel itself focuses most of its business, with apps for iOS, Android and Windows Phone (in addition to PCs). As a point of comparison, although Skype makes a big point of how popular its mobile apps are, Bernstr?m says that about 90% of Skype calls are made from its desktop clients.
Similar to the services offered by Twilio, the idea with the SDK is a light VoIP client that can sit embedded in other services, without the need to download a separate application for it to work.
Unlike Twilio, Rebtel is using a freemium business model for this service to attract users. While still in beta, all of it will be offered for free “with no restrictions on it because we want to understand how the market will accept and work with the SDK,” he says. He notes that since Rebtel announced two partners — VIVfone, a mobile CRM app still in stealth mode; and app developer house MobisleApps, for it to incorporate it into that apps that it makes — it’s had “a number of calls from sizeable companies to test and use this.”
Ultimately, Rebtel will make money by offering SLAs and other services to larger companies that want to incorporate the SDK; and it will also introduce a licensing fee for particularly heavy usage.
There is also a third revenue stream that is more about pushing its direct-to-consumer service: when you press an icon to initiate a call, you get a “powered by Rebtel” notice.
For each person that clicks that to download the native Rebtel client, “We are willing to pay developers for that referral traffic,” he says, because Rebtel has figured out that it is relatively successful in generating revenue from users who download its apps. “We have a 5% conversion from downloads to paying customers, each of who pay $23 dollars per month. We typically have a 35% margin on that. That means we can work out what the value of one app download is.”
Nagamma lives in rural India. She has a cell phone with more than 200 songs on it, and yet just three years ago whenever she got her period, she sat on hay – that’s right hay – and simply waited. Nagamma’s story is just one of many that inspired filmmaker Chithra Jeyaram to make a short documentary on sanitary hygiene in her home country. That 3-minute film, Rags to Pads, tells the story of Arunachalam Muruganantham, a school dropout who – in trying to create a low-cost sanitary napkin for his wife – developed a machine capable of giving millions of women access to better lives. Jeyaram’s film was a semifinalist in the $200,000 Focus Forward competition and has shed much-needed light on the fact that only 20% of the female population in India uses sanitary napkins. Below Jeyaram shares her thoughts on why she chose to speak out on this issue, the man who is revolutionizing his country, and why sanitation has become the new social issue.
I spent my first ten years in India, then ten years in Kuwait, and 10 years in the United States. So I was aware of the sanitation issues growing up since many of my family members did not have bathrooms in their house. I spent most of my early childhood years at my aunt’s house and she had something similar to an outhouse, but in the woods and a block away. So you literally had to walk in the dark to get there. It was terrifying as a child because it was a huge pit and I was always afraid of falling into it. So when I started making films, I knew this was a story I wanted to tell.
There’s a whole gamut. In the very rural mountainous areas I interviewed women who use nothing. And then there’s a second segment of women who use fabric, but in some cases the same fabric that is used by the mom is used by the daughter. More than that there’s a myth in the country that says if you wash the fabric and air dry it or if someone sees it or even if an eagle flies over it, you will become infertile. So after washing the fabric women are afraid to air dry it in public, so they dry it in dark, dingy places which leads to mold or even insects. Women have actually died because of scorpion bites when they used the fabric not knowing a scorpion was inside. And then there’s another segment who has access to sanitary napkins but, because there aren’t many public toilets, they have nowhere to change or dispose of it.
Absolutely. When girls get their period they quickly figure out that it is cumbersome to go to school for those three or four days because there’s no way to manage their menstruation. So they start missing school days which eventually amounts to a lot of time lost so they start to fall behind. Then they start to drop out of school and once that happens their parents want to get them married – but that leads to early pregnancy which continues the cycle of poverty. Most girls are married off within one year of their first period and it’s amazing that something as simple and fixable as hygiene just snowballs into all these other issues.
It has also seen a 250% increase in app downloads and paying users since 2011, with overall users growing currently at a rate of 500,000 each month.
The business of over-the-top telephony services is a hot space right now, with companies like Whatsapp nabbing business away from carriers by becoming users’ default mobile messaging service. As of August 2012 Whatsapp was delivering 10 billion messages per day. And as we’ve said in the past, we’ve heard that its been an acquisition target for Facebook.
Rebtel very much fits into that mold by offering a more cost-effective way of making calls on mobile devices, with a particular emphasis on long-distance calls that can cost a fortune otherwise if made via a mobile network. ”Our average users are consumers with a lot of first- and second-generation immigrants among them,” Bernstr?m notes, so many of them will want to be calling family abroad.
And while we don’t know whether Skype is profitable today (it wasn’t when Microsoft bought it), Rebtel’s CEO Andreas Bernstr?m tells me that his company is, and has been for the past two years. That’s one reason why Rebtel has yet to raise more money since picking up a Series A round of $20 million from Index Ventures and Benchmark the year it was founded. “We have $10 million in the bank today,” he tells me. Still, scale is nothing to be sniffed at: Skype currently has some 280 million monthly active users, and yesterday another competitor, Viber, yesterday announced 140 million users; its service is completely free.
That strategy may change in the future, as Rebtel gears up for further expansion. Earlier this month, it announced a new line of business as a white-label VoIP provider, releasing an SDK so that developers can incorporate Rebtel’s VoIP service into their apps.
Rebtel is primarily targeting mobile developers with the service, because that is where Rebtel itself focuses most of its business, with apps for iOS, Android and Windows Phone (in addition to PCs). As a point of comparison, although Skype makes a big point of how popular its mobile apps are, Bernstr?m says that about 90% of Skype calls are made from its desktop clients.
Similar to the services offered by Twilio, the idea with the SDK is a light VoIP client that can sit embedded in other services, without the need to download a separate application for it to work.
Unlike Twilio, Rebtel is using a freemium business model for this service to attract users. While still in beta, all of it will be offered for free “with no restrictions on it because we want to understand how the market will accept and work with the SDK,” he says. He notes that since Rebtel announced two partners — VIVfone, a mobile CRM app still in stealth mode; and app developer house MobisleApps, for it to incorporate it into that apps that it makes — it’s had “a number of calls from sizeable companies to test and use this.”
Ultimately, Rebtel will make money by offering SLAs and other services to larger companies that want to incorporate the SDK; and it will also introduce a licensing fee for particularly heavy usage.
There is also a third revenue stream that is more about pushing its direct-to-consumer service: when you press an icon to initiate a call, you get a “powered by Rebtel” notice.
For each person that clicks that to download the native Rebtel client, “We are willing to pay developers for that referral traffic,” he says, because Rebtel has figured out that it is relatively successful in generating revenue from users who download its apps. “We have a 5% conversion from downloads to paying customers, each of who pay $23 dollars per month. We typically have a 35% margin on that. That means we can work out what the value of one app download is.”
Nagamma lives in rural India. She has a cell phone with more than 200 songs on it, and yet just three years ago whenever she got her period, she sat on hay – that’s right hay – and simply waited. Nagamma’s story is just one of many that inspired filmmaker Chithra Jeyaram to make a short documentary on sanitary hygiene in her home country. That 3-minute film, Rags to Pads, tells the story of Arunachalam Muruganantham, a school dropout who – in trying to create a low-cost sanitary napkin for his wife – developed a machine capable of giving millions of women access to better lives. Jeyaram’s film was a semifinalist in the $200,000 Focus Forward competition and has shed much-needed light on the fact that only 20% of the female population in India uses sanitary napkins. Below Jeyaram shares her thoughts on why she chose to speak out on this issue, the man who is revolutionizing his country, and why sanitation has become the new social issue.
I spent my first ten years in India, then ten years in Kuwait, and 10 years in the United States. So I was aware of the sanitation issues growing up since many of my family members did not have bathrooms in their house. I spent most of my early childhood years at my aunt’s house and she had something similar to an outhouse, but in the woods and a block away. So you literally had to walk in the dark to get there. It was terrifying as a child because it was a huge pit and I was always afraid of falling into it. So when I started making films, I knew this was a story I wanted to tell.
There’s a whole gamut. In the very rural mountainous areas I interviewed women who use nothing. And then there’s a second segment of women who use fabric, but in some cases the same fabric that is used by the mom is used by the daughter. More than that there’s a myth in the country that says if you wash the fabric and air dry it or if someone sees it or even if an eagle flies over it, you will become infertile. So after washing the fabric women are afraid to air dry it in public, so they dry it in dark, dingy places which leads to mold or even insects. Women have actually died because of scorpion bites when they used the fabric not knowing a scorpion was inside. And then there’s another segment who has access to sanitary napkins but, because there aren’t many public toilets, they have nowhere to change or dispose of it.
Absolutely. When girls get their period they quickly figure out that it is cumbersome to go to school for those three or four days because there’s no way to manage their menstruation. So they start missing school days which eventually amounts to a lot of time lost so they start to fall behind. Then they start to drop out of school and once that happens their parents want to get them married – but that leads to early pregnancy which continues the cycle of poverty. Most girls are married off within one year of their first period and it’s amazing that something as simple and fixable as hygiene just snowballs into all these other issues.
Sunday, December 16, 2012
Indigenous ideas
IDEAS has had a bad run in the past couple of years, the devastating floods in 2010 caused the event to be cancelled at the last moment and the event was not even held in 2011. However this year, the event has come of age and has provided the perfect platform for launching Pakistani defence products in the international arena.
As a child I grew up watching the Pakistan Day parade and wondered why it didn’t take place in my city. It was to satisfy the curiosity of the inner child and re-live that nostalgia that I visited IDEAS 2012 held in Karachi.
There were a number of international exhibitors but I was more interested in the wide variety of Pakistani products present. The JF-17 Thunders, the Karakorams, the Mashaks and the Al-Zarrar and Al-Khalid tanks are undoubtedly the pinnacle of Pakistan’s indigenous defence production. But I would like to highlight some of the lesser known gems that the local manufacturers had to offer — from the bizarrely simple to those straight out of a sci-fi movie.
At a huge stall belonging to the Global Industrial and Defence Solutions (GIDS), I spied what looked like a set of acoustic microphones and some very high tech speakers. It turned out that the microphones were part of what is called the Gunshot Detection System or GDS and it does exactly what its name suggests. The GDS can detect and convey the location of gunfire by using shock-waves created by the bullet. What’s even cooler is that an automatic machine gun can be configured with the system to lock onto the shooter’s position to return fire almost immediately! The “speakers” turned out to be explosion proof lights that could stand the shock-wave of a blast.
This took me back to the days when Knight Rider was king of the airwaves. This is a White Toyota Altis with dark tinted glasses. Nothing exciting about that, you say?” Well, the car is bullet proof and explosion proof! Capable of withstanding a barrage of gun-fire, grenade attacks and even IED blasts. Not even flat tyres can stop this car! HIT have improvised on their knowledge of armour plating gained from years of producing APCs and tanks. The package comes with reinforced chassis and shocks and a supercharger to compensate for the extra weight of the armour. Quite handy for Karachi driving too, I would imagine.
National Radio and Telecommunication Corporation (NRTC) were showing off a product that reminded me of the surveillance quad-rotor that Rancho from 3 Idiots helped build. Well, the NRTC had a high-tech version of that at IDEAS, called the Air Scout. This unmanned aerial system (UAS) has search and rescue abilities, urban surveillance and counter-terrorism potential. The built-in cameras can provide live video feeds and can be customised for thermal imaging, night vision, extended flight or weather proofing. Imagine the advantages of having one hovering between buildings and reporting on the proceedings at a rally, procession, protest or dharna! The system comes with a cool set of goggles that provide the pilot with point of view video for controlling the craft.
A simulation can be something as basic and physical as “net practice” in cricket or as advanced and sci-fi as the simulated “worlds” onboard the Starship Enterprise in Star Trek. The Military Vehicles Research and Development Establishment (MVRDE) have built cutting edge tank simulators complete with life-like pods. These pods are mounted on hydraulic systems that let the driver experience a simulated battlefield. MVRDE has also created a simulated shooting range. The “Shooter Profile System” is capable of analysing all the parameters that a shooter has to master, including breath control and pre-fire anxiety. To top off things, the G3 rifle’s recoil mode can be switched on to give you a real “jhatka”! They also had showcased their ATGM (Anti Tank Guided Missile) simulator which was very popular with some young engineers attending the exhibition.
One of the reasons I love IDEAS is that you can find all kinds of weapons there, from the gun that can be fired around corners to the gold-plated sub-machine gun. Yes you heard that right, a gun that can be fired around corners! The POF EYE, created by the Pakistan Ordnance Factories, allows the shooter to see, and fire, a gun around corners. Future versions will include night vision, infra-red vision and would also be able to transmit the video feed back to base in real time!
Last, but not least; I came across a couple of stalls that reminded me of the inflatable jumping castles. These are actually inflatable decoys which mimic aircraft and military equipment. Before I left, I could not help but stop at the stall serving piping hot curries with scrumptious looking parathas. I was invited to try the food and after my appetite was satisfied, I enquired what it was all about. It turns out that the food I had just polished off was more than a year old! PANA Force makes preserved food without using harmful chemicals. The food comes with a special self-fuelled burner for heating when required, remains fresh for over an year and tastes delicious — this last bit, I speak with experience!
Agero Connected Services has announced the launch of AgeroView, a cloud-delivered dynamic infotainment display system ready for the global market.
AgeroView gives automakers the ability to update apps, push content and deliver both data and services on demand over the lifetime of the vehicle, keeping in sync with changing driver, brand and manufacturer needs.
Through AgeroView, dealer service support can be delivered instantly, content and service updates downloaded invisibly and functions such as real-time, location-based advertising and user profile management integrated seamlessly with the driving and passenger experience. AgeroView allows owners to customize the user experience with just the touch of a button or a voice command.
“With AgeroView, automakers can change, reconfigure, expand or customize the content, as well as the look and feel, of the embedded infotainment system just as easily as refreshing their website,” said Frank Hirschenberger, Agero Connected Services senior director of Product Innovation. “If an Internet service falls in popularity or a new one emerges during the vehicle’s lifetime, AgeroViewallows automakers to adapt to these trends and deliver updates in all of their vehicles in the market, not just new models. ”
The system offers the complete flexibility to automakers to change or update applications and firmware and to deliver distinct experiences by brand, market or individual user.
As a child I grew up watching the Pakistan Day parade and wondered why it didn’t take place in my city. It was to satisfy the curiosity of the inner child and re-live that nostalgia that I visited IDEAS 2012 held in Karachi.
There were a number of international exhibitors but I was more interested in the wide variety of Pakistani products present. The JF-17 Thunders, the Karakorams, the Mashaks and the Al-Zarrar and Al-Khalid tanks are undoubtedly the pinnacle of Pakistan’s indigenous defence production. But I would like to highlight some of the lesser known gems that the local manufacturers had to offer — from the bizarrely simple to those straight out of a sci-fi movie.
At a huge stall belonging to the Global Industrial and Defence Solutions (GIDS), I spied what looked like a set of acoustic microphones and some very high tech speakers. It turned out that the microphones were part of what is called the Gunshot Detection System or GDS and it does exactly what its name suggests. The GDS can detect and convey the location of gunfire by using shock-waves created by the bullet. What’s even cooler is that an automatic machine gun can be configured with the system to lock onto the shooter’s position to return fire almost immediately! The “speakers” turned out to be explosion proof lights that could stand the shock-wave of a blast.
This took me back to the days when Knight Rider was king of the airwaves. This is a White Toyota Altis with dark tinted glasses. Nothing exciting about that, you say?” Well, the car is bullet proof and explosion proof! Capable of withstanding a barrage of gun-fire, grenade attacks and even IED blasts. Not even flat tyres can stop this car! HIT have improvised on their knowledge of armour plating gained from years of producing APCs and tanks. The package comes with reinforced chassis and shocks and a supercharger to compensate for the extra weight of the armour. Quite handy for Karachi driving too, I would imagine.
National Radio and Telecommunication Corporation (NRTC) were showing off a product that reminded me of the surveillance quad-rotor that Rancho from 3 Idiots helped build. Well, the NRTC had a high-tech version of that at IDEAS, called the Air Scout. This unmanned aerial system (UAS) has search and rescue abilities, urban surveillance and counter-terrorism potential. The built-in cameras can provide live video feeds and can be customised for thermal imaging, night vision, extended flight or weather proofing. Imagine the advantages of having one hovering between buildings and reporting on the proceedings at a rally, procession, protest or dharna! The system comes with a cool set of goggles that provide the pilot with point of view video for controlling the craft.
A simulation can be something as basic and physical as “net practice” in cricket or as advanced and sci-fi as the simulated “worlds” onboard the Starship Enterprise in Star Trek. The Military Vehicles Research and Development Establishment (MVRDE) have built cutting edge tank simulators complete with life-like pods. These pods are mounted on hydraulic systems that let the driver experience a simulated battlefield. MVRDE has also created a simulated shooting range. The “Shooter Profile System” is capable of analysing all the parameters that a shooter has to master, including breath control and pre-fire anxiety. To top off things, the G3 rifle’s recoil mode can be switched on to give you a real “jhatka”! They also had showcased their ATGM (Anti Tank Guided Missile) simulator which was very popular with some young engineers attending the exhibition.
One of the reasons I love IDEAS is that you can find all kinds of weapons there, from the gun that can be fired around corners to the gold-plated sub-machine gun. Yes you heard that right, a gun that can be fired around corners! The POF EYE, created by the Pakistan Ordnance Factories, allows the shooter to see, and fire, a gun around corners. Future versions will include night vision, infra-red vision and would also be able to transmit the video feed back to base in real time!
Last, but not least; I came across a couple of stalls that reminded me of the inflatable jumping castles. These are actually inflatable decoys which mimic aircraft and military equipment. Before I left, I could not help but stop at the stall serving piping hot curries with scrumptious looking parathas. I was invited to try the food and after my appetite was satisfied, I enquired what it was all about. It turns out that the food I had just polished off was more than a year old! PANA Force makes preserved food without using harmful chemicals. The food comes with a special self-fuelled burner for heating when required, remains fresh for over an year and tastes delicious — this last bit, I speak with experience!
Agero Connected Services has announced the launch of AgeroView, a cloud-delivered dynamic infotainment display system ready for the global market.
AgeroView gives automakers the ability to update apps, push content and deliver both data and services on demand over the lifetime of the vehicle, keeping in sync with changing driver, brand and manufacturer needs.
Through AgeroView, dealer service support can be delivered instantly, content and service updates downloaded invisibly and functions such as real-time, location-based advertising and user profile management integrated seamlessly with the driving and passenger experience. AgeroView allows owners to customize the user experience with just the touch of a button or a voice command.
“With AgeroView, automakers can change, reconfigure, expand or customize the content, as well as the look and feel, of the embedded infotainment system just as easily as refreshing their website,” said Frank Hirschenberger, Agero Connected Services senior director of Product Innovation. “If an Internet service falls in popularity or a new one emerges during the vehicle’s lifetime, AgeroViewallows automakers to adapt to these trends and deliver updates in all of their vehicles in the market, not just new models. ”
The system offers the complete flexibility to automakers to change or update applications and firmware and to deliver distinct experiences by brand, market or individual user.
The beginner’s guide to YouTube Analytics
As well as being the most popular video site in the world, YouTube is also the second biggest search engine next to Google, its parent company. Considering that over four billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube, we’re spending more time than ever on the site. Now that the site has been given a new layout, one that places a greater focus on subscriptions, it’s now more vital than ever to understand your audience and what content works best.
Since there are more companies using YouTube to drive sales and brand awareness, it’s as good a time as any to learn about it and see how you can improve your channel.
Under the audience retention tab, you can figure out which videos are the most popular, find out the average time the viewer spent watching and at what point they stopped watching. Under the engagement reports, you can see which videos have attained the most engagement, which videos get shared and commented on the most.
The usefulness of these tools can not be overstated. You can apply these results and enhance the quality of your work, making your videos more concise and ensuring they are viewed and shared by the broadest possible audience.
It’s important to note that good YouTube channels were usually created because of the passion behind them rather than trying to make money. Generally, it takes a long time and a lot of hard work to build up a large following. However, when you have gained a steady increase of followers and views, it’s worth monetizing your work.
There are a number of ad formats designed to help monetize your videos and through experimentation, you can discover which ones provide the greatest returns.
When you first access YouTube Analytics, you will be greeted by the overview page which displays all of your channel’s activity over the last 30 days. It’s entirely possible to base your future strategy on this screen alone as pretty much all important content is located here.
Views, estimated minutes watched, earnings, engagement, top videos and demographics. A good overview is provided, but chances are you will want to go further and see what areas you can improve upon. Clicking on any of the metrics that feature here will take you to that specific report where you can view it in further detail.
The entirety of YouTube’s analytics can be broken down into three different sections, views, engagement and earnings.
Before you proceed, a handy tool you should definitely keep in mind is the data filter located at the top of the screen. Unless you’ve only posted a small number of videos, this tool will be very useful in narrowing the number of videos you’re analysing. The main sections you can filter down is by video, geographical location, timeframe and dates. This can be used for any section so if you enter keywords into any of these sections, you will be presented with a number of different autocomplete options so finding videos is easy.
Also, the majority of reports featured use a line chart, which displays how your views (or the metric in question) are distributed. You have the option of checking data points in daily, weekly or monthly increments or even compare them to a second metric if required.
The first port of call when you’re analysing your results, views are the most basic metric to measure your success. Alongside the amount of views your videos get, it also tells you how many of those views were monetised as well as the estimated number of minutes spent watching your videos. It should be mentioned that views signify when the user intends to view the video. If a video is set to autoplay and someone watches it, that view isn’t counted.
Perhaps more importantly, you can find out where your views originated from as well as the number of views you’re getting per day. Knowing what location your views are coming from can be useful if your content is aimed at local audiences. If you have a high viewer rate in the U.S. for example and you’re based in Europe, you can make slight adjustments to your content so that it appeals more to this demographic.
The section you should pay the most attention to is ‘Audience retention.’ As the name suggests, this tells you just how good your videos are in keeping attention and ensuring that all viewers watch until the end.
Absolute audience retention shows the views of every moment of the video as a percentage of the number of views of the beginning of the video. It’s possible for this figure to go beyond 100% as any views where the video is rewinded or a particular moment is watched again will push this figure upwards. On the other hand, any instances where your video is fast forwarded or abandoned will see this figure fall.
Relative audience retention shows how well your videos keep viewers in comparison to other YouTube videos of similar length. The higher the figure, the more viewers that kept watching your video.
While it isn’t possible to get a perfect 100%, you should aim for an average viewing percentage of 60%. There are two ways you can ensure that this percentage is as high as possible. The first is to ensure that all content shown on your channel is interesting enough to keep you watching towards the end, while the other method is to keep your videos short. The latter is common sense: The shorter the video, the more likely someone will watch to the end.
The real meat of your analytics involves the social side of your videos. This section concerns how many people subscribe to your videos, the ratio of likes and dislikes, favourites, comments and sharing. The metrics in this section are relatively straightforward although the one section you may want to keep an eye on is annotations. If you’re regularly asking annotations to link to other videos or convince people to subscribe, you will see their click-through rate and close rate (the percentage of annotation impressions that were closed by the viewer).
Engagement has grown in importance thanks to the new layout YouTube introduced recently. As well as making the overall interface better for viewers and content producers, the site is placing importance on subscribing to channels.
For one, all videos now have the subscribe button directly underneath it. This is to help grow original channels and help grow content by placing subscriptions front and centre of the experience.
Unless you’re one of the top channels on YouTube, it’s probably not a good idea to place too much hope in payment. The average top 1,000 channel receives $23,000 net each month from YouTube ad revenue so while it’s possible to make a living out of it, it will take a lot of effort to reach that point.
Another factor that will work against you is that ads are only displayed to those who allow it so roughly between a quarter to half of all views will count towards it. And even then, you need a significant audience before you begin to see any tangible returns.
When your videos start getting some traction, it’s worth spending some time analysing ad performance. Here you will be shown how much you’re earning through playback-based cost per mille (CPM) and impression-based CPM. More importantly, the different type of ads will be displayed at the bottom so you can see just how well the different ads are performing. When you’re starting out, it’s good to activate all of them to see just how well each one performs. Then after a brief period of time, choose the ad formats that are performing the best.
Since there are more companies using YouTube to drive sales and brand awareness, it’s as good a time as any to learn about it and see how you can improve your channel.
Under the audience retention tab, you can figure out which videos are the most popular, find out the average time the viewer spent watching and at what point they stopped watching. Under the engagement reports, you can see which videos have attained the most engagement, which videos get shared and commented on the most.
The usefulness of these tools can not be overstated. You can apply these results and enhance the quality of your work, making your videos more concise and ensuring they are viewed and shared by the broadest possible audience.
It’s important to note that good YouTube channels were usually created because of the passion behind them rather than trying to make money. Generally, it takes a long time and a lot of hard work to build up a large following. However, when you have gained a steady increase of followers and views, it’s worth monetizing your work.
There are a number of ad formats designed to help monetize your videos and through experimentation, you can discover which ones provide the greatest returns.
When you first access YouTube Analytics, you will be greeted by the overview page which displays all of your channel’s activity over the last 30 days. It’s entirely possible to base your future strategy on this screen alone as pretty much all important content is located here.
Views, estimated minutes watched, earnings, engagement, top videos and demographics. A good overview is provided, but chances are you will want to go further and see what areas you can improve upon. Clicking on any of the metrics that feature here will take you to that specific report where you can view it in further detail.
The entirety of YouTube’s analytics can be broken down into three different sections, views, engagement and earnings.
Before you proceed, a handy tool you should definitely keep in mind is the data filter located at the top of the screen. Unless you’ve only posted a small number of videos, this tool will be very useful in narrowing the number of videos you’re analysing. The main sections you can filter down is by video, geographical location, timeframe and dates. This can be used for any section so if you enter keywords into any of these sections, you will be presented with a number of different autocomplete options so finding videos is easy.
Also, the majority of reports featured use a line chart, which displays how your views (or the metric in question) are distributed. You have the option of checking data points in daily, weekly or monthly increments or even compare them to a second metric if required.
The first port of call when you’re analysing your results, views are the most basic metric to measure your success. Alongside the amount of views your videos get, it also tells you how many of those views were monetised as well as the estimated number of minutes spent watching your videos. It should be mentioned that views signify when the user intends to view the video. If a video is set to autoplay and someone watches it, that view isn’t counted.
Perhaps more importantly, you can find out where your views originated from as well as the number of views you’re getting per day. Knowing what location your views are coming from can be useful if your content is aimed at local audiences. If you have a high viewer rate in the U.S. for example and you’re based in Europe, you can make slight adjustments to your content so that it appeals more to this demographic.
The section you should pay the most attention to is ‘Audience retention.’ As the name suggests, this tells you just how good your videos are in keeping attention and ensuring that all viewers watch until the end.
Absolute audience retention shows the views of every moment of the video as a percentage of the number of views of the beginning of the video. It’s possible for this figure to go beyond 100% as any views where the video is rewinded or a particular moment is watched again will push this figure upwards. On the other hand, any instances where your video is fast forwarded or abandoned will see this figure fall.
Relative audience retention shows how well your videos keep viewers in comparison to other YouTube videos of similar length. The higher the figure, the more viewers that kept watching your video.
While it isn’t possible to get a perfect 100%, you should aim for an average viewing percentage of 60%. There are two ways you can ensure that this percentage is as high as possible. The first is to ensure that all content shown on your channel is interesting enough to keep you watching towards the end, while the other method is to keep your videos short. The latter is common sense: The shorter the video, the more likely someone will watch to the end.
The real meat of your analytics involves the social side of your videos. This section concerns how many people subscribe to your videos, the ratio of likes and dislikes, favourites, comments and sharing. The metrics in this section are relatively straightforward although the one section you may want to keep an eye on is annotations. If you’re regularly asking annotations to link to other videos or convince people to subscribe, you will see their click-through rate and close rate (the percentage of annotation impressions that were closed by the viewer).
Engagement has grown in importance thanks to the new layout YouTube introduced recently. As well as making the overall interface better for viewers and content producers, the site is placing importance on subscribing to channels.
For one, all videos now have the subscribe button directly underneath it. This is to help grow original channels and help grow content by placing subscriptions front and centre of the experience.
Unless you’re one of the top channels on YouTube, it’s probably not a good idea to place too much hope in payment. The average top 1,000 channel receives $23,000 net each month from YouTube ad revenue so while it’s possible to make a living out of it, it will take a lot of effort to reach that point.
Another factor that will work against you is that ads are only displayed to those who allow it so roughly between a quarter to half of all views will count towards it. And even then, you need a significant audience before you begin to see any tangible returns.
When your videos start getting some traction, it’s worth spending some time analysing ad performance. Here you will be shown how much you’re earning through playback-based cost per mille (CPM) and impression-based CPM. More importantly, the different type of ads will be displayed at the bottom so you can see just how well the different ads are performing. When you’re starting out, it’s good to activate all of them to see just how well each one performs. Then after a brief period of time, choose the ad formats that are performing the best.
What is MyDistress?
Well, it is a smart-phone application used in combating crime and is available for free on all major smart-phone platforms. It allows the public to request assistance from the police during an emergency with just a touch of a button.
When you are in an emergency situation, the last thing you want to do is to spend precious time calling the police, explaining the situation and trying to figure out and explain your exact location.
Add panic, stress and trauma to the equation and you have a chaotic phone call in a situation where you need to remain calm and focused. Anyone who has made a 999 call will appreciate the wisdom behind this.
For the record, 999 calls are administered by Telekom Malaysia, and not the police as is popularly misconstrued.
Thus precious time is wasted while they elicit your personal details and then re-route your call to the Police, Ambulance, Fire Rescue or Civil Defense, where you go through the whole frustrating process of giving your personal details and explaining your particular emergency all over again.
MyDistress eliminates all that unnecessary hassle, as with just the click of a button, a distress message is sent to the police with your location details and officers will be dispatched immediately to your location.
MyDistress is also useful in life-threatening situations like kidnapping, break-ins and robbery where you might not be able to speak on the phone due to panic or being in a dangerous situation.
As with all public support services, users are advised to use MyDistress responsibly. Any abuse and/or misuse of this free app will divert crucial resources of the police which can be better utilized for situations of real emergencies.
Understandably, MyDistress requires GPS functionality and data connectivity on your mobile phone to work.
It should only be used when a crime is happening, someone suspected of a crime is nearby, someone is injured, being threatened or in real danger.
An SOS call on MyDistress allows automatic real-time location updates to the PDRM command centre on the exact GPS coordinates retrieved from your phone.
You firstly need to register online by filling up your personal details: Name, MyKad number, mobile number and email. Optionally, you can also attach a photo of yourself for easier identification. This data will be sent to the police in moments of distress.
You can preset a number of locations into your phone, such as your home, your office or places that you frequent.
If you live or work inside a high rise building, it helps to preset the location with details such as floor number, unit number or any other relevant details. This helps the police to come directly to you instead of searching for you in the whole building.
When in distress outdoors, you hit “Personal Alert” and your details with the current GPS location is sent to the police.
When you are in any of your preset locations hit the “SOS” button and then choose your present location.
If you are kidnapped and being moved in a vehicle, your MyDistress application will continue sending your GPS location information so that the police will be able to track and rescue you.
Besides the above services, MyDistress also provides you with the location details of all police stations in Selangor complete with routes to get to your selected station. It also comes complete with a list of all the important contact numbers for the Selangor PDRM.
It should be noted that the app respects your privacy and only releases your data and tracks your location when you activate it during an emergency. Otherwise it remains dormant until needed.
Yoav told me that when they started they were focusing on hardware to manage energy consumption (like a thermostat). I’ve personally gone down that road and I can tell you it’s not fun. You get the energy monitor, hook it up, watch the kWh increase and decrease, make a few small changes, get bored and abandon it. The guys at Simple Energy realized that the ”the real problem was not the hardware; but rather, that people just didn’t care.” And why would they? Who’s interested in counting kiloWatts per hour?
To solve this problem they have created a platform that makes saving energy engaging. You can win prizes, compete with friends, post achievements and get boasting rights. In return you also save energy and see your bills go down. As for the impact on the environment? If they could deploy the platform across the US they would be able to take 100 coal-fired power plants completely off the grid!
Of course this solution comes with its challenges. Although the energy companies have all the data, relationships and motives they still have the strongest requirements and a lot of checks in place to mitigate risk. This sometimes can ruin the user experience. Although the users cannot initiate the implementation of the tool, if you work for an energy supplier you should send out an internal memo.
“We’re solving the problem of lack of access to affordable, easily accessible capital for entrepreneurs in developing counties – namely, Kenya to start, and eventually all over the world.”
To achieve this they’ve of course tapped into gaming and use metrics in order to send money directly to the cell phones of borrowers in and around Nairobi. While gaming is usually seen as a leisure activity and sometimes even as a waste of time, Seeds is using the 3 billion hours spent per week playing games worldwide toward a highly productive end that will help people. Whether you are playing their game or a game that uses their API, every in-game purchase you make provides capital to micro loans.
Rachel got interested in micro loans when she read about the effects they’ve had with women around the world while working as a Stock Trader. Working in a sexist environment and having seen what opportunities are available to improve the world she left and went on a global expedition to identify what she could do to help. When she later found out that the average social gamer was a 43-year-old woman, and the biggest purchasers of virtual gold in World of Warcraft are women over 35, she clearly made a connection. The result was Seeds, a startup helping women in a for-profit context.
We’ve all read how micro loans can turn around people’s lives, so start playing and help get people out of poverty.
Imagine being a doctor in an operating theatre. While operating and staying completely sterile, you realize that you need to go over some notes. You now have two options. Option 1, go out of the room, access the information, memorize it, clean up and go back to the room (a process that can take 20 minutes each time you need to look something up!!). Option 2, put touch screens inside the room and risk sterilization. Neither sounds like a good solution to an important problem. Here’s the solution that TedCas has created.
Caitria explained to me that the problem they are solving is three-fold. First of all, large aid organizations can’t manage spontaneous volunteers, accept unsolicited donation items or stay there forever. It’s down to the local organizers to step up and match the resources to the needs, without having any training or tools. They solve this problem by providing a tool-kit specifically for local mutual aid that does not require training.
Secondly, ”all disaster interest is front loaded. People are interested in helping for about a week, then interest declines, and the area has only the resources people dropped off to meet the next five years of recovery needs.”
They solve this problem by putting the system in place ahead of a disaster. This way if an unfortunate disaster happens, everything is set to meet the needs. Lastly, people don’t like to think of and prepare for disasters. The solution this time is the creation of a platform for residents that helps them reduce risk and give clear instructions in an emergency situation.
When you are in an emergency situation, the last thing you want to do is to spend precious time calling the police, explaining the situation and trying to figure out and explain your exact location.
Add panic, stress and trauma to the equation and you have a chaotic phone call in a situation where you need to remain calm and focused. Anyone who has made a 999 call will appreciate the wisdom behind this.
For the record, 999 calls are administered by Telekom Malaysia, and not the police as is popularly misconstrued.
Thus precious time is wasted while they elicit your personal details and then re-route your call to the Police, Ambulance, Fire Rescue or Civil Defense, where you go through the whole frustrating process of giving your personal details and explaining your particular emergency all over again.
MyDistress eliminates all that unnecessary hassle, as with just the click of a button, a distress message is sent to the police with your location details and officers will be dispatched immediately to your location.
MyDistress is also useful in life-threatening situations like kidnapping, break-ins and robbery where you might not be able to speak on the phone due to panic or being in a dangerous situation.
As with all public support services, users are advised to use MyDistress responsibly. Any abuse and/or misuse of this free app will divert crucial resources of the police which can be better utilized for situations of real emergencies.
Understandably, MyDistress requires GPS functionality and data connectivity on your mobile phone to work.
It should only be used when a crime is happening, someone suspected of a crime is nearby, someone is injured, being threatened or in real danger.
An SOS call on MyDistress allows automatic real-time location updates to the PDRM command centre on the exact GPS coordinates retrieved from your phone.
You firstly need to register online by filling up your personal details: Name, MyKad number, mobile number and email. Optionally, you can also attach a photo of yourself for easier identification. This data will be sent to the police in moments of distress.
You can preset a number of locations into your phone, such as your home, your office or places that you frequent.
If you live or work inside a high rise building, it helps to preset the location with details such as floor number, unit number or any other relevant details. This helps the police to come directly to you instead of searching for you in the whole building.
When in distress outdoors, you hit “Personal Alert” and your details with the current GPS location is sent to the police.
When you are in any of your preset locations hit the “SOS” button and then choose your present location.
If you are kidnapped and being moved in a vehicle, your MyDistress application will continue sending your GPS location information so that the police will be able to track and rescue you.
Besides the above services, MyDistress also provides you with the location details of all police stations in Selangor complete with routes to get to your selected station. It also comes complete with a list of all the important contact numbers for the Selangor PDRM.
It should be noted that the app respects your privacy and only releases your data and tracks your location when you activate it during an emergency. Otherwise it remains dormant until needed.
Yoav told me that when they started they were focusing on hardware to manage energy consumption (like a thermostat). I’ve personally gone down that road and I can tell you it’s not fun. You get the energy monitor, hook it up, watch the kWh increase and decrease, make a few small changes, get bored and abandon it. The guys at Simple Energy realized that the ”the real problem was not the hardware; but rather, that people just didn’t care.” And why would they? Who’s interested in counting kiloWatts per hour?
To solve this problem they have created a platform that makes saving energy engaging. You can win prizes, compete with friends, post achievements and get boasting rights. In return you also save energy and see your bills go down. As for the impact on the environment? If they could deploy the platform across the US they would be able to take 100 coal-fired power plants completely off the grid!
Of course this solution comes with its challenges. Although the energy companies have all the data, relationships and motives they still have the strongest requirements and a lot of checks in place to mitigate risk. This sometimes can ruin the user experience. Although the users cannot initiate the implementation of the tool, if you work for an energy supplier you should send out an internal memo.
“We’re solving the problem of lack of access to affordable, easily accessible capital for entrepreneurs in developing counties – namely, Kenya to start, and eventually all over the world.”
To achieve this they’ve of course tapped into gaming and use metrics in order to send money directly to the cell phones of borrowers in and around Nairobi. While gaming is usually seen as a leisure activity and sometimes even as a waste of time, Seeds is using the 3 billion hours spent per week playing games worldwide toward a highly productive end that will help people. Whether you are playing their game or a game that uses their API, every in-game purchase you make provides capital to micro loans.
Rachel got interested in micro loans when she read about the effects they’ve had with women around the world while working as a Stock Trader. Working in a sexist environment and having seen what opportunities are available to improve the world she left and went on a global expedition to identify what she could do to help. When she later found out that the average social gamer was a 43-year-old woman, and the biggest purchasers of virtual gold in World of Warcraft are women over 35, she clearly made a connection. The result was Seeds, a startup helping women in a for-profit context.
We’ve all read how micro loans can turn around people’s lives, so start playing and help get people out of poverty.
Imagine being a doctor in an operating theatre. While operating and staying completely sterile, you realize that you need to go over some notes. You now have two options. Option 1, go out of the room, access the information, memorize it, clean up and go back to the room (a process that can take 20 minutes each time you need to look something up!!). Option 2, put touch screens inside the room and risk sterilization. Neither sounds like a good solution to an important problem. Here’s the solution that TedCas has created.
Caitria explained to me that the problem they are solving is three-fold. First of all, large aid organizations can’t manage spontaneous volunteers, accept unsolicited donation items or stay there forever. It’s down to the local organizers to step up and match the resources to the needs, without having any training or tools. They solve this problem by providing a tool-kit specifically for local mutual aid that does not require training.
Secondly, ”all disaster interest is front loaded. People are interested in helping for about a week, then interest declines, and the area has only the resources people dropped off to meet the next five years of recovery needs.”
They solve this problem by putting the system in place ahead of a disaster. This way if an unfortunate disaster happens, everything is set to meet the needs. Lastly, people don’t like to think of and prepare for disasters. The solution this time is the creation of a platform for residents that helps them reduce risk and give clear instructions in an emergency situation.
Wednesday, December 12, 2012
Syria and chemical weapons
Earlier this year, Barack Obama announced that a red line for the United States would be Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s movement, transfer or use of Syria’s ample chemical weapons stockpile. At the time, it appeared the president was looking for an opportunity to sound tough in response to a conflict that he had heretofore chosen to observe from afar. Any prospect for the actual use of those weapons by Assad seemed farfetched.
But as the control of Syria’s terrain has slipped from Assad’s grasp, there are reportedly indications that not only has Assad moved weapons stockpiles, he has ordered precursors for Sarin nerve gas mixed in preparation for their use. As a result, the tough talk Obama embraced earlier has disappeared, as the leader of the free world and his staff contort themselves to explain that when the President earlier warned of “moving” chemical weapons as a “red line,” what he really meant was “proliferate”, not physically move. Ah.
Why would Assad use chemical weapons at this late date given threats from Washington and Europe of intervention? Perhaps he is convinced it is the last step that could decisively win him back Syria and end the civil war that has risked the Assad family’s decades-long hold on power. No matter what, the introduction of the WMD card into the Syrian equation, and Obama’s flip-flopping on what would constitute a casus belli for the United States mean that there are few serious new options to end the fighting that has claimed more than 40,000 Syrians. Rather, it seems likely that the U.S. will continue following the French and British lead, possibly recognizing a government in exile but doing little more to assist in delivering the death blow to Assad.
Are there prospects for a diplomatic solution to the fighting in Syria? In short, no. Either Assad goes to one of the South American proto-dictators that seems ready to welcome him, or he dies. Either way, he’s finished. The real questions that remain in Syria are the aftermath and how much more blood it will take to get there.
Having drawn a line in the sand over the Assad regime’s potential use of chemical weapons, the United States must enforce its policy. Failure to do so would encourage WMD use in Syria and send a signal to other rogue states that the Obama administration is all talk.
The U.S. must mount an active campaign to dissuade the Assad regime from using chemical weapons. This effort should include the credible threat of force should Syria cross the line. The USS Eisenhower strike group and the USS Iwo Jima Amphibious Ready Group, patrolling the waters off Syria, provide ample options to respond to a variety of contingencies. The primary issue is whether Damascus believes the United States will take action.
The Assad regime must believe that the White House is serious about responding to a WMD attack, and also understand the nature and scope of the planned response. For example it would be useful to issue a public or private communiqué to the regime that U.S. military action would target not only the front-line chemical weapons troops, but all leadership nodes in the WMD decision making chain, up to and including President Assad. The United States should also drop leaflets on known chemical weapons sites warning of potential attacks. This would communicate to the regime that we know where they are hiding their weapons, and could also be highly disruptive as gun crews and missile forces desert their posts rather than face certain retribution.
Pre-emptive strikes are another option, but are not optimal. The U.S. would have to answer for whatever contamination resulted from blowing up Syria’s chemical stockpiles. This would be much easier to explain after the Assad regime made a first strike, and had lost it last shreds of legitimacy. After that the U.S. would have a free hand to punish the regime, and should do so vigorously.
Bruce Riedel: Syria has the Arab world’s most lethal arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, hundreds of chemical warheads, dozens of Scud missiles and bombs which can deliver them anywhere in the Levant. Stopping them from falling into terrorist hands should be our top intelligence priority.
Syrian scientists developed an effective chemical weapons program using primarily the nerve agent sarin, a substance 500 times more toxic than cyanide, in the 1980s. Syria mated the nerve agent with Scud missiles and with bombs and artillery shells. When Israel learned of the Syrian program it considered military action to destroy it but concluded the program was too disbursed to be susceptible to air attacks without an unacceptable risk that Syria would respond by firing chemicals into Tel Aviv. Securing all of the arsenal today would require a very large military intervention.
As Syria collapses further into chaos over the next few months the most immediate danger is that al-Qaeda’s Syrian wing, the al-Nusra front, will take control of a military facility with a cache of chemical weapons. They could use them against Assad’s forces, or more likely spirit them into a third country to attack an American target. Jordan foiled an al-Qaeda plot to attack our Embassy in Amman this fall with mortar fire. How well al-Qaeda could maintain and use chemicals is unknown. Chemical weapons in amateur hands can be very dangerous both to the amateur and his enemy. We don’t want to take the chance.
The key to stopping al-Qaeda or Hezbollah gaining control of a cache is good real time actionable intelligence. The CIA and Mossad have had almost two years to ramp up intelligence collection on Syria but it’s a formidable challenge. U.S. and Jordanian commandoes need to be ready to secure any loose bombs.
The heart-wrenching civil war in Syria grinds on, and some commentators are beset by the desire for the United States to do something–anything–to hasten the departure of Bashar al-Assad, and secure Syria’s chemical arsenal.
We’ve seen this movie before, in neighboring Iraq. It ended badly. The better alternative is a regional solution to a regional problem, one that calls on those governments with the most at stake to take responsibility for their own security, and their interests.
The interventionists (many of whom were also great supporters of that earlier war) fail to make a compelling case for potentially putting American lives at risk this time around. The situation in Syria is horrible, but sending in U.S. troops without a clearly defined mission, reasonable expectation of success, or the support of the American people, would be worse.
A narrowly defined mission–for example, helping to ensure that Syria’s chemical weapons don’t leak out of the country–might merit U.S. action, in concert with other nations. We could offer money and material support to Syrians willing to ship out such weapons for safe disposal. Most would accept. Credible threats against those reluctant to cooperate might help seal the deal. After all, such weapons are generally more trouble than they’re worth. Leaders of nation-states with return addresses have been deterred from using such weapons against other states that could retaliate against them, so whoever takes over after Assad should be happy to rid themselves of the hassle.
Meanwhile, any terrorist organization that got its hands on these weapons would have a hard time using them. Unsurprisingly, nearly every terrorist attacks in modern history has utilized mature technologies—conventional explosives—and primitive tactics—blowing up physical things. We would be better served focusing attention and resources on those more credible threats.
The U.S. is increasingly concerned about the potential use of Syria’s chemical weapons against opposition forces and civilians, their lethality should safeguards fail, and concerns about proliferation should they fall into the hands of opposition fighters that include anti-U.S. jihadi groups. However, there may still be ways to maintain current safeguards and prevent proliferation.
Despite warnings that Assad is about to use these weapons, there have been no definitive indicators pointing to aggressive steps to move or deploy chemical weapons. Their use would rob Assad of what little external support he still has in Russia and China. Furthermore, Western states and their regional allies appear to continue to have access to back-channels to communicate their fears and concerns to Damascus.
So far there are signs that the regime understands what is at stake. However, if Assad is more conscious of the current balance of power in the country, he might turn to these weapons as a game-changer. It is in this context that the role of the Syrian military matters. What the role of the military may be should Assad fall is an open question. Today – for better or for worse – the Syrian military remains crucial to maintaining increasingly uncertain safeguards on Syria’s chemical weapons program.
The U.S. and its allies may be seeking Assad’s exit from power, but the experience of de-Baa’thification in Iraq informs a reluctance to dismantle Syria’s military and security apparatus as a potential source of order in any future transition. Clear movements by the military to secure Syria’s chemical weapons in the short term could vindicate this view. Meanwhile, the U.S. and allied states can use existing back-channels to make these expectations very clear to Syrian military commanders. The alternative, should these efforts fail, could be engaging in costly and uncertain military intervention.
Indeed, the chemical weapons threat has raised the stakes, and negotiators need to do everything to dissuade Assad from using them. But if the weapons are used, policymakers need to prepare not only to quickly end their use, but to think past the immediate crisis and plan for the weapons’ ultimate disposal. That could entail several concrete steps.
First, control the skies. The 1988 Iraqi chemical attack that killed thousands in the Kurdish town of Halabja used the full range of chemical weapons, from mustard gas to nerve agents tabun and sarin, delivered in aerial bombs by multiple aircraft. Stopping the aircraft is an important step in removing the largest threats.
Second, resist the urge to bomb. Decision-makers need to think toward the ultimate disposal of Syria’s chemical weapon stocks, their chemical precursors, and supporting infrastructure. American bombing in the first Iraq War destroyed some chemical weapons stocks and damaged others. The Iraqis themselves later disposed of the great bulk of stocks under UNSCOM supervision. But the American bombing made that disposal more difficult and rendered some weapons so unsafe they were simply entombed in bunkers rather than destroyed.
Third, coordinate the clean-up. NATO chemical weapons specialists from the Czech Republic are already on the ground in Jordan. That may help. But unlike the aftermath of the first Iraq War, the current crisis may leave no Syrian regime competent to dispose of chemical weapons. Intervening powers may have to clean up any mess produced by their actions, as well as dispose of the existing weapons stock.
But as the control of Syria’s terrain has slipped from Assad’s grasp, there are reportedly indications that not only has Assad moved weapons stockpiles, he has ordered precursors for Sarin nerve gas mixed in preparation for their use. As a result, the tough talk Obama embraced earlier has disappeared, as the leader of the free world and his staff contort themselves to explain that when the President earlier warned of “moving” chemical weapons as a “red line,” what he really meant was “proliferate”, not physically move. Ah.
Why would Assad use chemical weapons at this late date given threats from Washington and Europe of intervention? Perhaps he is convinced it is the last step that could decisively win him back Syria and end the civil war that has risked the Assad family’s decades-long hold on power. No matter what, the introduction of the WMD card into the Syrian equation, and Obama’s flip-flopping on what would constitute a casus belli for the United States mean that there are few serious new options to end the fighting that has claimed more than 40,000 Syrians. Rather, it seems likely that the U.S. will continue following the French and British lead, possibly recognizing a government in exile but doing little more to assist in delivering the death blow to Assad.
Are there prospects for a diplomatic solution to the fighting in Syria? In short, no. Either Assad goes to one of the South American proto-dictators that seems ready to welcome him, or he dies. Either way, he’s finished. The real questions that remain in Syria are the aftermath and how much more blood it will take to get there.
Having drawn a line in the sand over the Assad regime’s potential use of chemical weapons, the United States must enforce its policy. Failure to do so would encourage WMD use in Syria and send a signal to other rogue states that the Obama administration is all talk.
The U.S. must mount an active campaign to dissuade the Assad regime from using chemical weapons. This effort should include the credible threat of force should Syria cross the line. The USS Eisenhower strike group and the USS Iwo Jima Amphibious Ready Group, patrolling the waters off Syria, provide ample options to respond to a variety of contingencies. The primary issue is whether Damascus believes the United States will take action.
The Assad regime must believe that the White House is serious about responding to a WMD attack, and also understand the nature and scope of the planned response. For example it would be useful to issue a public or private communiqué to the regime that U.S. military action would target not only the front-line chemical weapons troops, but all leadership nodes in the WMD decision making chain, up to and including President Assad. The United States should also drop leaflets on known chemical weapons sites warning of potential attacks. This would communicate to the regime that we know where they are hiding their weapons, and could also be highly disruptive as gun crews and missile forces desert their posts rather than face certain retribution.
Pre-emptive strikes are another option, but are not optimal. The U.S. would have to answer for whatever contamination resulted from blowing up Syria’s chemical stockpiles. This would be much easier to explain after the Assad regime made a first strike, and had lost it last shreds of legitimacy. After that the U.S. would have a free hand to punish the regime, and should do so vigorously.
Bruce Riedel: Syria has the Arab world’s most lethal arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, hundreds of chemical warheads, dozens of Scud missiles and bombs which can deliver them anywhere in the Levant. Stopping them from falling into terrorist hands should be our top intelligence priority.
Syrian scientists developed an effective chemical weapons program using primarily the nerve agent sarin, a substance 500 times more toxic than cyanide, in the 1980s. Syria mated the nerve agent with Scud missiles and with bombs and artillery shells. When Israel learned of the Syrian program it considered military action to destroy it but concluded the program was too disbursed to be susceptible to air attacks without an unacceptable risk that Syria would respond by firing chemicals into Tel Aviv. Securing all of the arsenal today would require a very large military intervention.
As Syria collapses further into chaos over the next few months the most immediate danger is that al-Qaeda’s Syrian wing, the al-Nusra front, will take control of a military facility with a cache of chemical weapons. They could use them against Assad’s forces, or more likely spirit them into a third country to attack an American target. Jordan foiled an al-Qaeda plot to attack our Embassy in Amman this fall with mortar fire. How well al-Qaeda could maintain and use chemicals is unknown. Chemical weapons in amateur hands can be very dangerous both to the amateur and his enemy. We don’t want to take the chance.
The key to stopping al-Qaeda or Hezbollah gaining control of a cache is good real time actionable intelligence. The CIA and Mossad have had almost two years to ramp up intelligence collection on Syria but it’s a formidable challenge. U.S. and Jordanian commandoes need to be ready to secure any loose bombs.
The heart-wrenching civil war in Syria grinds on, and some commentators are beset by the desire for the United States to do something–anything–to hasten the departure of Bashar al-Assad, and secure Syria’s chemical arsenal.
We’ve seen this movie before, in neighboring Iraq. It ended badly. The better alternative is a regional solution to a regional problem, one that calls on those governments with the most at stake to take responsibility for their own security, and their interests.
The interventionists (many of whom were also great supporters of that earlier war) fail to make a compelling case for potentially putting American lives at risk this time around. The situation in Syria is horrible, but sending in U.S. troops without a clearly defined mission, reasonable expectation of success, or the support of the American people, would be worse.
A narrowly defined mission–for example, helping to ensure that Syria’s chemical weapons don’t leak out of the country–might merit U.S. action, in concert with other nations. We could offer money and material support to Syrians willing to ship out such weapons for safe disposal. Most would accept. Credible threats against those reluctant to cooperate might help seal the deal. After all, such weapons are generally more trouble than they’re worth. Leaders of nation-states with return addresses have been deterred from using such weapons against other states that could retaliate against them, so whoever takes over after Assad should be happy to rid themselves of the hassle.
Meanwhile, any terrorist organization that got its hands on these weapons would have a hard time using them. Unsurprisingly, nearly every terrorist attacks in modern history has utilized mature technologies—conventional explosives—and primitive tactics—blowing up physical things. We would be better served focusing attention and resources on those more credible threats.
The U.S. is increasingly concerned about the potential use of Syria’s chemical weapons against opposition forces and civilians, their lethality should safeguards fail, and concerns about proliferation should they fall into the hands of opposition fighters that include anti-U.S. jihadi groups. However, there may still be ways to maintain current safeguards and prevent proliferation.
Despite warnings that Assad is about to use these weapons, there have been no definitive indicators pointing to aggressive steps to move or deploy chemical weapons. Their use would rob Assad of what little external support he still has in Russia and China. Furthermore, Western states and their regional allies appear to continue to have access to back-channels to communicate their fears and concerns to Damascus.
So far there are signs that the regime understands what is at stake. However, if Assad is more conscious of the current balance of power in the country, he might turn to these weapons as a game-changer. It is in this context that the role of the Syrian military matters. What the role of the military may be should Assad fall is an open question. Today – for better or for worse – the Syrian military remains crucial to maintaining increasingly uncertain safeguards on Syria’s chemical weapons program.
The U.S. and its allies may be seeking Assad’s exit from power, but the experience of de-Baa’thification in Iraq informs a reluctance to dismantle Syria’s military and security apparatus as a potential source of order in any future transition. Clear movements by the military to secure Syria’s chemical weapons in the short term could vindicate this view. Meanwhile, the U.S. and allied states can use existing back-channels to make these expectations very clear to Syrian military commanders. The alternative, should these efforts fail, could be engaging in costly and uncertain military intervention.
Indeed, the chemical weapons threat has raised the stakes, and negotiators need to do everything to dissuade Assad from using them. But if the weapons are used, policymakers need to prepare not only to quickly end their use, but to think past the immediate crisis and plan for the weapons’ ultimate disposal. That could entail several concrete steps.
First, control the skies. The 1988 Iraqi chemical attack that killed thousands in the Kurdish town of Halabja used the full range of chemical weapons, from mustard gas to nerve agents tabun and sarin, delivered in aerial bombs by multiple aircraft. Stopping the aircraft is an important step in removing the largest threats.
Second, resist the urge to bomb. Decision-makers need to think toward the ultimate disposal of Syria’s chemical weapon stocks, their chemical precursors, and supporting infrastructure. American bombing in the first Iraq War destroyed some chemical weapons stocks and damaged others. The Iraqis themselves later disposed of the great bulk of stocks under UNSCOM supervision. But the American bombing made that disposal more difficult and rendered some weapons so unsafe they were simply entombed in bunkers rather than destroyed.
Third, coordinate the clean-up. NATO chemical weapons specialists from the Czech Republic are already on the ground in Jordan. That may help. But unlike the aftermath of the first Iraq War, the current crisis may leave no Syrian regime competent to dispose of chemical weapons. Intervening powers may have to clean up any mess produced by their actions, as well as dispose of the existing weapons stock.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)