Busier lifestyles, longer working hours and a hectic home life have led to many couples spending less time together but according to NITB there are so many new activities to try, places to explore and skills to learn, there is no better time to make a Date NIght in Northern Ireland with your loved one.
“With so many demands on our attention nowadays, couples find it increasingly difficult to capture quality time together,” said Pauline Gormley, NITB’s Destination PR Officer.
“It’s the perfect time of year for couples to discover something new about your local region or learn a new skill together,” she continued.
“There is so much to do on a Date NIght in Northern Ireland to suit all types of couples from canoeing to cooking and pottery making to burlesque dancing.
“Whatever your taste may be, and whether you only have a few hours to spare or a full weekend, there will be an activity or place for you and your loved one to enjoy quality time together,” she added.
To help get you started, NITB has put together some suggestions to suit all different types of Date NIghts:
Couples with a sense of adventure can canoe to a deserted island, build your own shelter and cook your dinner over an open fire in the ‘Become Bear Grylls’ adventure package with Four Elements Adventure in Omagh. The guides will ensure you get to the island safely before giving you materials, tools and ideas for you to build your own outdoor shelter before its time to cook and chow down.
Discover another side of Northern Ireland by exploring the underwater world with Aquaholics. Meet your guide in the dive centre in Portstewart to be fitted out with diving equipment before being led to the water’s edge where the adventure will begin.
Learn how to negotiate the urban landscape during an Urban Mountain Biking course with Far and Wild in Co. Londonderry. If you’ve ever struggled with kerbs or you’re too nervous to try a set of steps then this fun-filled session is perfect and you’ll get to see the sights of the walled city on your journey.
Go navigating in the Mourne Mountains with Tollymore National Outdoor Centre and learn how to map read, route plan and use the required equipment. This course is for those people that are new to hill walking and want a gentle introduction to the basic skills and equipment.
Discover the mystical waterways of Northern Ireland on a one day beginner’s canoe course with your partner at Life Adventure Centre in Annalong. With the aid of skilled coaches you will enjoy a guided trip of the local area and develop the basics of canoeing.
There is no better place to learn how to cook than Belle Isle Cookery School, the ultimate destination for food lovers. Discover the delights of cooking modern cuisine in the stunning Lakelands of Fermanagh. The school offers many classes in different cuisines including Italian, Chinese and Thai as well as traditional Irish food. A four-week diploma programme as well as one day courses and evening demonstrations are all available at Belle Isle.
Nestled in the heart of Belfast city centre is the Belfast Cookery School which offers a range of courses for everyone including those donning an apron for the first time. The school has 16 fully equipped, individual cooking stations with many different courses on offer including a seafood master class, Thai cookery, bread making and family baking classes.
The James Street South Cookery School in Belfast opened its doors in 2011 and is the perfect place to learn how to entertain effortlessly. The classes are suited to all skill levels and cover a wide range of cuisines including fish, Italian, curry and French bistro food.
Learn how to make delicious three course dinners at the Orange Tree House Cookery School in Newtownards. Designed with both the experienced cook and beginners in mind, the classes are informal and the menu can be easily recreated in your own home.
Why not learn a new skill together at The Crescent Arts Centre in Belfast which offers a wide range of beginner and advanced language classes in Italian, French, Japanese and Russian. As well as languages, the centre has a full programme of various classes and workshops such as Burlesque dancing, African drumming, singing for adults and graffiti workshops.
If you are aged 50 plus and want to find an enjoyable way to get active together then why not join the Body Wisdom classes by the Echo Echo Dance Theatre Company in Co. Londonderry. The movement style is very relaxed and exploratory and each participant will follow their own imagination to create movement.
If you love photography then why not brush up on your technical and practical skills with a photography courses at Belfast Exposed. The courses are open to people from all backgrounds and levels and include introductory photography, portrait photography, street photography and one to one tuition.
Expand your minds together and join the Linen Hall Library’s reading group to debate and discuss the chosen title for the month. Admission is free and the group meets on the last Thursday of each month.
When it comes to picture perfect scenery you are spoilt for choice in Northern Ireland. Escape with your loved one to Tyrone on a painting break with artist and tutor Dermot Cavanagh who teaches all levels of artistic ability. Develop your painting skills during a one, two or three day course and learn how to create a splendid watercolour.
Get a real hands-on creative experience with Ballydougan Pottery at the picturesque Bloomvale House in Craigavon. Learn how to paint a pot, hand-build with clay or throw on the Potter’s Wheel with a range of classes to suit individual needs.
The Island Arts Centre in Lisburn runs various courses throughout the year for anyone interested in arts and crafts. There’s sure to be something for all in its wide variety of classes including dressmaking, painting, pottery and textile art classes.
Thursday, January 31, 2013
Calling coyotes in rugged Verdigre canyons
I had almost given up three different times. I had used every predator-calling trick in my book. My legs had fallen asleep a long time ago. The tingling was beginning to drive me crazy. And yet I had hung in there. My companions, Gary Howey and Bill Christensen, both of Hartington, Neb., were hunkered down in front of another cedar tree to my left. I knew they must be wondering why I had not called an end to this fruitless stand.
But the land we had permission to hunt upon was not very large. At best we had two, maybe three, stands to cover it all. Patience, when calling predators, can be a virtue.
We were at the edge of a cornfield and the elevation gave us a good view of what was below. To our left was a large ravine choked with trees which were in the process of being strangled by invasive cedars. The ravine played out into the cornfield and a grassy hill splayed across a hundred yards to the next ravine on the right. That was where the movement was.
My gun, nestled on my bipod, somehow, had slowly reached my shoulder and I ducked behind the scope and picked up the animal. It was the ugliest looking coyote I had ever seen. It was heavily infested with mange and had lost at least 90 percent of its fur. It had a tail, but it was simply bones covered with dark skin.
Through the scope, I watched the animal walk across the base of the hill toward the ravine on our right. I thought it would simply duck into that ravine and disappear forever. But, it was looking right at me from time to time.
As it trotted in, it dropped out of sight below a small ridge in the cornfield. It's always a nervous time when that happens. But I knew where it should appear and I waited.
Within seconds the coyote crested the little ridge and continued to lope in, its tongue lolling out the side of its mouth. It was less than a hundred yards out now and I had it in the scope. It was trotting so slowly that I thought Gary or Bill would shoot. Nothing. It was really close now, almost too close. Maybe they were waiting for me to stop it. I took a breath to do a bark, but the coyote stopped and quartered away from me, looking directly at Bill and Gary.
The coyote flinched. It's that little move they make just before they turn and run. They crouch just a little, and then they turn and are gone.
I had already taken up most of the trigger pull on the .243. It was more a matter of will that the gun should go off. And it did. The crosshairs of the scope centered just behind the front leg. The 58-grain ballistic tip left the barrel at 3,750 feet per second and smacked that pathetic facade of a coyote.
"We didn't see him until he was right on top of us," Gary said. "He saw us move and that's why he stopped. I saw you looking through your scope and I thought, 'That looks serious,' so I knew something was out there."
I stepped it off. One hundred feet. The animal had almost no hair. It's face and neck had not yet been ravaged by the burrowing parasitic mites that cause this disease. I was amazed the animal had lived through the recent cold weather. Coyotes in this bad of shape die of the disease, usually a pathetic death of exposure to the elements.
You don't want to handle coyotes showing symptoms of mange. It's very contagious for the coyotes, but humans can pick it up too, although it is not as serious. Usually a rash for a few days and then it's gone.
Our next calling area consisted of several tree-filled canyons emptying out onto the flood plain of the Niobrara River. It would have been a great spot if the wind had been out of the north, but the southeast wind complicated things.
Colorful works by some of local artist collective hob’art’s hardest hitters are currently on display in their exhibit “Archeology of Color.”
The show, which opened Jan. 13, focuses not just on color, but on how each artist approaches it, said curator Willie Baez.
“Some people use their senses to work on whatever project they’re working on and their colors are spontaneous like children when they paint, they just paint, they’re not worried about anything,” says Baez. “But because we’re grown and more intelligent, some feel that intellectuality comes into play all the time.”
Some of the most spontaneous artists in the show are Liz Cohen and Ibou Ndoye, who both create paintings inspired by the native art of various non-Western countries.
“Liz is more child-like in her world of creativity and is in love with primal things. She loves African art, South American art and the simplicity of it,” explained Baez. “Ibou is also a spontaneous guy. He mostly uses primary colors and rarely does any mixing.”
The curator says that most abstract painters are more spontaneous because they’re not concerned with form or realism. One exception would be Meredeth Turshen.
“When I first saw her painting, I didn’t think it was a landscape, but she said it has to do with sunlight . . . she was looking out a window in Paris, saw fields and then started painting. The act was really spontaneous, but she did think of where to put the color and what exactly she was painting,” said Baez. “She told me, ‘I intentionally did this. I didn’t do it in a trance.’ ”
In between the two extremes are photographers like Don Sichler, who looks for his colors on the street.
“He finds colorful mirages or images on the street in water, puddles, and uses that to color his photographs,” said Baez. “It’s a little more spontaneous and not really thought about. He just sees them, catches the light, and boom!”
Other participating artists include Pauline Chernichaw, Constance Ftera, Janet Kolstein, Roslyn Rose, Starr Tucker-Ortega, Tom Egan, Ann Kinney, Erich Heinemann and Howard Berelson.
But the land we had permission to hunt upon was not very large. At best we had two, maybe three, stands to cover it all. Patience, when calling predators, can be a virtue.
We were at the edge of a cornfield and the elevation gave us a good view of what was below. To our left was a large ravine choked with trees which were in the process of being strangled by invasive cedars. The ravine played out into the cornfield and a grassy hill splayed across a hundred yards to the next ravine on the right. That was where the movement was.
My gun, nestled on my bipod, somehow, had slowly reached my shoulder and I ducked behind the scope and picked up the animal. It was the ugliest looking coyote I had ever seen. It was heavily infested with mange and had lost at least 90 percent of its fur. It had a tail, but it was simply bones covered with dark skin.
Through the scope, I watched the animal walk across the base of the hill toward the ravine on our right. I thought it would simply duck into that ravine and disappear forever. But, it was looking right at me from time to time.
As it trotted in, it dropped out of sight below a small ridge in the cornfield. It's always a nervous time when that happens. But I knew where it should appear and I waited.
Within seconds the coyote crested the little ridge and continued to lope in, its tongue lolling out the side of its mouth. It was less than a hundred yards out now and I had it in the scope. It was trotting so slowly that I thought Gary or Bill would shoot. Nothing. It was really close now, almost too close. Maybe they were waiting for me to stop it. I took a breath to do a bark, but the coyote stopped and quartered away from me, looking directly at Bill and Gary.
The coyote flinched. It's that little move they make just before they turn and run. They crouch just a little, and then they turn and are gone.
I had already taken up most of the trigger pull on the .243. It was more a matter of will that the gun should go off. And it did. The crosshairs of the scope centered just behind the front leg. The 58-grain ballistic tip left the barrel at 3,750 feet per second and smacked that pathetic facade of a coyote.
"We didn't see him until he was right on top of us," Gary said. "He saw us move and that's why he stopped. I saw you looking through your scope and I thought, 'That looks serious,' so I knew something was out there."
I stepped it off. One hundred feet. The animal had almost no hair. It's face and neck had not yet been ravaged by the burrowing parasitic mites that cause this disease. I was amazed the animal had lived through the recent cold weather. Coyotes in this bad of shape die of the disease, usually a pathetic death of exposure to the elements.
You don't want to handle coyotes showing symptoms of mange. It's very contagious for the coyotes, but humans can pick it up too, although it is not as serious. Usually a rash for a few days and then it's gone.
Our next calling area consisted of several tree-filled canyons emptying out onto the flood plain of the Niobrara River. It would have been a great spot if the wind had been out of the north, but the southeast wind complicated things.
Colorful works by some of local artist collective hob’art’s hardest hitters are currently on display in their exhibit “Archeology of Color.”
The show, which opened Jan. 13, focuses not just on color, but on how each artist approaches it, said curator Willie Baez.
“Some people use their senses to work on whatever project they’re working on and their colors are spontaneous like children when they paint, they just paint, they’re not worried about anything,” says Baez. “But because we’re grown and more intelligent, some feel that intellectuality comes into play all the time.”
Some of the most spontaneous artists in the show are Liz Cohen and Ibou Ndoye, who both create paintings inspired by the native art of various non-Western countries.
“Liz is more child-like in her world of creativity and is in love with primal things. She loves African art, South American art and the simplicity of it,” explained Baez. “Ibou is also a spontaneous guy. He mostly uses primary colors and rarely does any mixing.”
The curator says that most abstract painters are more spontaneous because they’re not concerned with form or realism. One exception would be Meredeth Turshen.
“When I first saw her painting, I didn’t think it was a landscape, but she said it has to do with sunlight . . . she was looking out a window in Paris, saw fields and then started painting. The act was really spontaneous, but she did think of where to put the color and what exactly she was painting,” said Baez. “She told me, ‘I intentionally did this. I didn’t do it in a trance.’ ”
In between the two extremes are photographers like Don Sichler, who looks for his colors on the street.
“He finds colorful mirages or images on the street in water, puddles, and uses that to color his photographs,” said Baez. “It’s a little more spontaneous and not really thought about. He just sees them, catches the light, and boom!”
Other participating artists include Pauline Chernichaw, Constance Ftera, Janet Kolstein, Roslyn Rose, Starr Tucker-Ortega, Tom Egan, Ann Kinney, Erich Heinemann and Howard Berelson.
Tuesday, January 29, 2013
Has Obama administration gone wobbly on Syria?’
Syria, chemical weapons and the United States. If nothing else, President Barack Obama last month was emphatic. “I want to make it absolutely clear to Assad,” Obama declared at the National Defense University in early December, “….The world is watching. The use of chemical weapons is…totally unacceptable….[T]here will be consequences and you will be held accountable.”
But what a difference a New Year makes. At a January 10 news conference, the administration’s senior security officials, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Joint Chiefs of Staff head Martin E. Dempsey, recoiled: Consequences won’t involve the Pentagon. Better wait to secure the arsenal after Syrian President Bashar al-Assad falls, Panetta said. Dempsey stated: “Preventing the use of chemical weapons would be almost unachievable.” The result, as Panetta explained: “We’re not working on options that involve boots on the ground.”
Assad must have smiled. Washington had gone wobbly on chemical weapons. With the deterrent value of the president’s remarks in question – and one unconfirmed report that Syria used a chemical agent in Homs on December 23 – the chemical specter remains. This raises the key question: Would Obama really stand by if the Syrian government gassed thousands of its citizens?
Before we answer, let’s hit the pause button for a reality check: Are chemical weapons really more heinous than the bombs that have already killed some 60,000 Syrians. This continuing mayhem has not justified military intervention so far. Why would chemical weapons be different?
Lift the pause button and one suspects it would be hard for the U.S. government to turn a blind eye to a Halabja on steroids – Halabja being the last case where an Arab regime (Iraq in 1988) killed thousands of its people in a chemical attack.
But the tug to save lives is countered by another specter: Quashing Assad’s chemical capacity could plunge the U.S. into a new military quagmire.
Obama clearly has the authority to act. If he wishes to use force, under the 1973 War Powers Resolution, he can do so for at least 60 days without congressional approval.
But to avoid Congress now would be a mistake. The flummoxed administration needs another set of eyes to determine what is in the national interest. Congress can do this, assuming it can act with independence and reverse the legacy of deferring to the executive branch on matters of war and peace. Granting presidents, for example, broad authority to use military force without proper vetting – as the Gulf of Tonkin and Iraq war resolutions illustrated – ill-served the country.
To this end, Congress should reconvene the hearings begun last session. This time, however, it must press for details about the administration’s assumptions about intervening or not. In addition, all the hearings should be public – not secret, as the administration prefers. This will give the American people confidence in the decision-making.
Congress should mold its findings into a joint House and Senate resolution – still plausible on national security issues even as legislators divide on budgetary matters – unblemished by executive branch drum-beating or quaking.
If Congress does this, it won’t just be addressing the Syrian challenge. It will finally begin to right the imbalance of power between the executive and lawmakers that for too long has dominated American war deciding.
This will begin to fulfill what the War Powers Resolution intended – to “insure that the collective judgment of both the Congress and the president will apply to the introduction of United States Armed Forces into hostilities.”
Bowlsby gave the typical conference realignment double-talk by saying that the Big 12 feels, “very good about where we are”, but not failing to mention that, “we’d be unwise to be oblivious to all that is going on around us. We need to be constantly vigilant”. That is about as close as us Big 12 supporters are going to get to having Bowlsby guarantee that the Big 12 will expand prior to 2014, though he did mention that staying at 10 members or allying with other conferences without adding teams were possibilities.
Though it might seem like the most pressing matter, conference composition was not the number one item on the agenda for the meetings. Rather, the primary focus of the ADs was to discuss the future of Big 12 bowl tie-ins.
The conference has to do so because the Cotton Bowl, which currently has the first pick of non BCS bound Big 12 teams come bowl season, is set to become part of the rotation of semifinal game sites once the new playoff system comes into effect in 2014. Bowlsby stated that once the host bowls are finalized over the next few months, the Big 12 will want to reach out to different bowls in order to secure spots for its members in prestigious games. He went on to say that both the Alamo Bowl and the Meineke Bowl (it is the friggin’ Texas Bowl people, COME ON!) have, “expressed a desire to move up and-or maintain a high level of association” with the Big 12.
Other potential sites for future Big 12 bowl engagements include games played in Florida. Siting the fact that the majority of the nation’s recruits come out of Texas, Florida, and California, Bowlsby expressed that the Big 12 desires to have a strong presence in all three states during bowl season. They already have Cali ties due to their involvement with the Holiday Bowl.
But what a difference a New Year makes. At a January 10 news conference, the administration’s senior security officials, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Joint Chiefs of Staff head Martin E. Dempsey, recoiled: Consequences won’t involve the Pentagon. Better wait to secure the arsenal after Syrian President Bashar al-Assad falls, Panetta said. Dempsey stated: “Preventing the use of chemical weapons would be almost unachievable.” The result, as Panetta explained: “We’re not working on options that involve boots on the ground.”
Assad must have smiled. Washington had gone wobbly on chemical weapons. With the deterrent value of the president’s remarks in question – and one unconfirmed report that Syria used a chemical agent in Homs on December 23 – the chemical specter remains. This raises the key question: Would Obama really stand by if the Syrian government gassed thousands of its citizens?
Before we answer, let’s hit the pause button for a reality check: Are chemical weapons really more heinous than the bombs that have already killed some 60,000 Syrians. This continuing mayhem has not justified military intervention so far. Why would chemical weapons be different?
Lift the pause button and one suspects it would be hard for the U.S. government to turn a blind eye to a Halabja on steroids – Halabja being the last case where an Arab regime (Iraq in 1988) killed thousands of its people in a chemical attack.
But the tug to save lives is countered by another specter: Quashing Assad’s chemical capacity could plunge the U.S. into a new military quagmire.
Obama clearly has the authority to act. If he wishes to use force, under the 1973 War Powers Resolution, he can do so for at least 60 days without congressional approval.
But to avoid Congress now would be a mistake. The flummoxed administration needs another set of eyes to determine what is in the national interest. Congress can do this, assuming it can act with independence and reverse the legacy of deferring to the executive branch on matters of war and peace. Granting presidents, for example, broad authority to use military force without proper vetting – as the Gulf of Tonkin and Iraq war resolutions illustrated – ill-served the country.
To this end, Congress should reconvene the hearings begun last session. This time, however, it must press for details about the administration’s assumptions about intervening or not. In addition, all the hearings should be public – not secret, as the administration prefers. This will give the American people confidence in the decision-making.
Congress should mold its findings into a joint House and Senate resolution – still plausible on national security issues even as legislators divide on budgetary matters – unblemished by executive branch drum-beating or quaking.
If Congress does this, it won’t just be addressing the Syrian challenge. It will finally begin to right the imbalance of power between the executive and lawmakers that for too long has dominated American war deciding.
This will begin to fulfill what the War Powers Resolution intended – to “insure that the collective judgment of both the Congress and the president will apply to the introduction of United States Armed Forces into hostilities.”
Bowlsby gave the typical conference realignment double-talk by saying that the Big 12 feels, “very good about where we are”, but not failing to mention that, “we’d be unwise to be oblivious to all that is going on around us. We need to be constantly vigilant”. That is about as close as us Big 12 supporters are going to get to having Bowlsby guarantee that the Big 12 will expand prior to 2014, though he did mention that staying at 10 members or allying with other conferences without adding teams were possibilities.
Though it might seem like the most pressing matter, conference composition was not the number one item on the agenda for the meetings. Rather, the primary focus of the ADs was to discuss the future of Big 12 bowl tie-ins.
The conference has to do so because the Cotton Bowl, which currently has the first pick of non BCS bound Big 12 teams come bowl season, is set to become part of the rotation of semifinal game sites once the new playoff system comes into effect in 2014. Bowlsby stated that once the host bowls are finalized over the next few months, the Big 12 will want to reach out to different bowls in order to secure spots for its members in prestigious games. He went on to say that both the Alamo Bowl and the Meineke Bowl (it is the friggin’ Texas Bowl people, COME ON!) have, “expressed a desire to move up and-or maintain a high level of association” with the Big 12.
Other potential sites for future Big 12 bowl engagements include games played in Florida. Siting the fact that the majority of the nation’s recruits come out of Texas, Florida, and California, Bowlsby expressed that the Big 12 desires to have a strong presence in all three states during bowl season. They already have Cali ties due to their involvement with the Holiday Bowl.
The Nardi shows Formula Vee’s rich history
“The Nardi” has a special place in the hearts of Volkswagen motorsports fans, but few know the full story of the first-ever Formula Vee car.
It all started in Florida in the mid-1950s, when Miami hardware-store owner Hubert Brundage decided he wanted to create a Formula Junior car using standard Volkswagen parts.
Unable to do the work himself, Brundage commissioned famed racecar driver, engineer and designer Enrico Nardi to build his car for him. Brundage shipped a brand-new 1958 113 VW Beetle to Torino, Italy -- and Nardi went to work.
The designer took the car apart, separating the engine, transmission and suspension. He then created the tube-like, one-seat racecar that is recognized as today’s Formula Vee car.
“It was a beautiful car,” Brundage’s son Jan said. “It was very different from anything else that was out at the time.”
It was not only very different, but, as Formula Jr. cars were steadily rising in cost and becoming obsolete, Brundage’s new car gave him an idea.
Brundage thought that his Nardi-made car could be easily and inexpensively reproduced, making more cost-effective race cars.
“So he sold it,” Jan said. “He didn’t do it to make a profit. He did it to help make better racecars.”
Brundage “sold” his Nardi to Bill Duckworth and George Smith for $1, with the knowledge that they were going to try to reproduce the aluminum-bodied car to make 10-20 fiberglass-bodied cars. The new cars, all using components of the VW Beetle, were to start a new racing series in central Florida (that would later become Formula Vee).
Duckworth and Smith -- who later started the racecar-building company Formcar Constructors in Orlando, Fla. -- used the Nardi as the mold for fiberglass-bodied cars. After four years, they sold 500 or so cars. The cars sold as kits for $1,000, ready-mades for $2,400. Smith, who was involved in the administration of the Sports Car Club of America (SCCA), talked to the club’s sanctioning body and pitched a new series, which would become Formula Vee. After much discussion, the idea took off, and Formula Vee cars became a very popular way to break into formula racing.
Duckworth and Smith then retired from their business and sold the Nardi. For years that was the logical ending to the birth for Formula Vee.
Years later, in the early 1970s, after the senior Brundage had died, Jan Brundage was reading the classified section of Autoweek and he saw an ad for an “aluminum-bodied Nardi.”
“My mouth just dropped,” he said. “I knew it was my dad’s car. It was so coincidental, because I never read the classifieds. I just happened to see it.”
Brundage knew that there was only one aluminum Nardi ever made, and he knew that he had to have it.
“I called the guy and he wanted $1,400. I didn’t even hesitate. I told him the check was in the mail.”
Actually, Brundage sent a friend up to Ohio to check the car out before buying it. It turned out that it was the Nardi. Brundage, who felt that the car was a big part of his family’s history, bought the car and put it in storage.
“I just wanted to have it,” he said. “I never really wanted to do much more with it.”
However, Brundage had no idea how important the Formula Vee series would prove to be to the people who participated in it. As time went by, former drivers started having Formula Vee reunions and get-togethers. Brundage even went to one in the mid-80s, and saw the how much people still loved the old Formula Vee cars.
Sure this would probably help, and guaranteeing future salaries for Pro Bowl players is something that Rodney Harrison brought up recently. It might make things better on some level, but it wouldn’t eliminate the fact that the game is an exhibition. You can’t get any closer to winning a Super Bowl – the ultimate goal for all players – with what you do in the Pro Bowl. It’s a game that takes place after the season with nothing on the line, aside from the future health of the player as you so astutely pointed out. That inherently removes the competitive nature of the contest. Things can be done to tweak that issue, but it will never be solved. Personally, I watched the bulk of the Pro Bowl the other night and thought it was pretty entertaining as compared to similar all-star games and exhibitions. I have no problem if it were left alone and played the way it is today moving forward. I also would have no problem if they never played another Pro Bowl again.
While I haven’t yet gotten enough into the pre-draft process to assess all the available talent and which positions are likely early-round targets, both needs you bring up are worthy of consideration. Though there is hope that Tavon Wilson might develop into more of a strong safety type player, I have my doubts. If not, that’s a major need next to McCourty or Gregory. At receiver an outside option who can beat coverage and make plays down the field would be a huge get. But those types of guys usually go very high in the draft. Early reports are that this isn’t the most blue chip of wide receiver draft classes, so maybe an elite guy will slide to late in the first with no real consensus top targets at the position. But I will say that adding a true playmaker – something the Patriots need at more than a few positions – at both safety and wide receiver would be a big boost to this team’s playoff chances moving forward.
It all started in Florida in the mid-1950s, when Miami hardware-store owner Hubert Brundage decided he wanted to create a Formula Junior car using standard Volkswagen parts.
Unable to do the work himself, Brundage commissioned famed racecar driver, engineer and designer Enrico Nardi to build his car for him. Brundage shipped a brand-new 1958 113 VW Beetle to Torino, Italy -- and Nardi went to work.
The designer took the car apart, separating the engine, transmission and suspension. He then created the tube-like, one-seat racecar that is recognized as today’s Formula Vee car.
“It was a beautiful car,” Brundage’s son Jan said. “It was very different from anything else that was out at the time.”
It was not only very different, but, as Formula Jr. cars were steadily rising in cost and becoming obsolete, Brundage’s new car gave him an idea.
Brundage thought that his Nardi-made car could be easily and inexpensively reproduced, making more cost-effective race cars.
“So he sold it,” Jan said. “He didn’t do it to make a profit. He did it to help make better racecars.”
Brundage “sold” his Nardi to Bill Duckworth and George Smith for $1, with the knowledge that they were going to try to reproduce the aluminum-bodied car to make 10-20 fiberglass-bodied cars. The new cars, all using components of the VW Beetle, were to start a new racing series in central Florida (that would later become Formula Vee).
Duckworth and Smith -- who later started the racecar-building company Formcar Constructors in Orlando, Fla. -- used the Nardi as the mold for fiberglass-bodied cars. After four years, they sold 500 or so cars. The cars sold as kits for $1,000, ready-mades for $2,400. Smith, who was involved in the administration of the Sports Car Club of America (SCCA), talked to the club’s sanctioning body and pitched a new series, which would become Formula Vee. After much discussion, the idea took off, and Formula Vee cars became a very popular way to break into formula racing.
Duckworth and Smith then retired from their business and sold the Nardi. For years that was the logical ending to the birth for Formula Vee.
Years later, in the early 1970s, after the senior Brundage had died, Jan Brundage was reading the classified section of Autoweek and he saw an ad for an “aluminum-bodied Nardi.”
“My mouth just dropped,” he said. “I knew it was my dad’s car. It was so coincidental, because I never read the classifieds. I just happened to see it.”
Brundage knew that there was only one aluminum Nardi ever made, and he knew that he had to have it.
“I called the guy and he wanted $1,400. I didn’t even hesitate. I told him the check was in the mail.”
Actually, Brundage sent a friend up to Ohio to check the car out before buying it. It turned out that it was the Nardi. Brundage, who felt that the car was a big part of his family’s history, bought the car and put it in storage.
“I just wanted to have it,” he said. “I never really wanted to do much more with it.”
However, Brundage had no idea how important the Formula Vee series would prove to be to the people who participated in it. As time went by, former drivers started having Formula Vee reunions and get-togethers. Brundage even went to one in the mid-80s, and saw the how much people still loved the old Formula Vee cars.
Sure this would probably help, and guaranteeing future salaries for Pro Bowl players is something that Rodney Harrison brought up recently. It might make things better on some level, but it wouldn’t eliminate the fact that the game is an exhibition. You can’t get any closer to winning a Super Bowl – the ultimate goal for all players – with what you do in the Pro Bowl. It’s a game that takes place after the season with nothing on the line, aside from the future health of the player as you so astutely pointed out. That inherently removes the competitive nature of the contest. Things can be done to tweak that issue, but it will never be solved. Personally, I watched the bulk of the Pro Bowl the other night and thought it was pretty entertaining as compared to similar all-star games and exhibitions. I have no problem if it were left alone and played the way it is today moving forward. I also would have no problem if they never played another Pro Bowl again.
While I haven’t yet gotten enough into the pre-draft process to assess all the available talent and which positions are likely early-round targets, both needs you bring up are worthy of consideration. Though there is hope that Tavon Wilson might develop into more of a strong safety type player, I have my doubts. If not, that’s a major need next to McCourty or Gregory. At receiver an outside option who can beat coverage and make plays down the field would be a huge get. But those types of guys usually go very high in the draft. Early reports are that this isn’t the most blue chip of wide receiver draft classes, so maybe an elite guy will slide to late in the first with no real consensus top targets at the position. But I will say that adding a true playmaker – something the Patriots need at more than a few positions – at both safety and wide receiver would be a big boost to this team’s playoff chances moving forward.
Sunday, January 27, 2013
Urges Saucy Public Radio Campaign
Mention public radio to a teenager today and you might get an eye roll. Why listen to the radio when you can plug in to all things digital? But if those teenagers were born into a public radio-loving family, they might be persuaded to keep listening, even through their teenage years.
At least that’s the punch line for a new ad campaign from WBEZ, the Chicago public radio station, that begins on Friday. The campaign, called “2032 Membership Drive,” encourages Chicagoans to, well, “hook up” with other Chicagoans and procreate.
A tag line on one ad sums it up succinctly: “We Want Listeners Tomorrow. Go Make Babies Today.” Other ads read: “Do It. For Chicago.” and “Interesting People Make Interesting People.”
“Most public radio marketing and advertising is very nice and polite,” said Daniel Ash, the vice president for corporate sponsorship, marketing, membership and partnerships at Chicago Public Media, which owns the station.
This campaign, he said, is meant to playfully encourage listeners in their 20s and 30s to “make babies” so that by 2032, the station will have a slew of teenage listeners.
Torey Malatia, the chief executive of Chicago Public Media, said the station has a strong audience among 25- to 49-year-olds, but “as you get lower than that, 18 plus, you see the weakening of any kind of interest or loyalty.”
The campaign, which cost $400,000, was created by the digital agency Xi Chicago, part of BBDO and Proximity Worldwide. Its debut in the city will include billboards and ads on taxi tops, bridges, subways and buses.
Some ads will ask famous Chicagoans, like the chef Rick Bayless and the musician Jon Langford, to make babies.
The campaign will also include a Facebook application that will help users determine how interesting they are and what type of WBEZ content might appeal to them.
Rick Hamann, the group creative director at Xi Chicago, said the campaign tested well with the intended audience. “All of them got the joke,” he said. “They really appreciated that WBEZ was making an irreverent request.”
Ah, it's that time of year again. Time to welcome all those who come to the desert seeking its warmth, its mayonnaise- and jalape?o-slathered hot dogs, and its gargantuan array of "Old West" souvenirs - quite possibly the largest assortment ever seen this side of China.
Which means our potholes, roadside construction sites and three-light intersections are now inundated with motorists who have no clue as to this town's rules of the road. But enough about the locals.
Today's missive - or survival guide, if you will - is aimed at all you good folk who may not know a chimichanga from a Chihuahua, but you know, by gum, how to thread a 40-foot motor home into the last parking slot over at the Casino del Moola.
With that in mind, let's review some of the more common types of motorists you're likely to encounter during your stay:
The Clinger: This is the guy, or gal, whose front grille is irresistibly drawn to your rear bumper. You're tooling along when all of a sudden you notice a giant grille in your rearview mirror, one so close that you can actually determine the sex of its affixed insects. Solution: Adjust your mirror upward so that it reflects only blue sky, dirigibles floating above used-car lots or the extreme top of the speed camera you just blew by in an effort to shake The Clinger.
Hokey-Pokey Speedster: Here's a motorist who likes to maintain a constant speed somewhere between 5 and 85 miles per hour. Sometimes known to hold the dual title of Lane Changer, this driver will often cut right in front of you, then sloooow way down, perhaps to admire the many wind-blown tissues, dead lizards and other assorted wonderments to be found along our highways and byways. One thing that's consistent, however, is this driver's sudden need to speed through any and all yellow lights, leaving you, of course, waiting on red. Solution: See The Clinger, above.
The Hesitation Stopper: Stymied by road construction dating back to the Geronimo Era, this motorist must contend with four-way stops at many of our torn-up intersections. Trouble is, Hesitation Stopper hasn't a clue as to who's on first, electing instead to either: 1) Proceed without delay; 2) Nudge his car with a series of playful spurts just slightly into the intersection; or, 3) Remain frozen in place until someone behind him thoughtfully blows a horn. Solution: Drive only between the hours of 3 a.m. and 5 a.m., when traffic - and construction - is lightest.
The Sharer: Anxious to impart his or her tastes in music, politics or, perhaps fittingly, car commercials, The Sharer enjoys cranking down the windows and cranking up his or her state-of-the-art audio system. What better way to delve into Tucson's rich stew of cultural, ideological or commercial idiosyncrasies, even as your temporal lobes begin to throb. Don't agree? Try earplugs.
Red Arrow Runner: Tucson, as you may have noted by now, has many intersections with lagging left-turn lights timed to turn from red to green. For Red Arrow Runner, however, red is merely a primary color as he or she - often in numbers - scoots through the intersection long after the light or arrow has again gone red. Solution: never assume, just because you now have a green light, that it is actually safe to enter such an intersection. Wait until the last Red Arrow Runner gets through - or the sound of screeching brakes and crunching metal ensues.
The Yielder: Rare to nonexistent these days, this is the motorist who actually knows what "Yield" means - other than what bad girls do on the first date. This same driver may also take part in a quaint little ritual known as Proper Signaling. If you spot such an exotic creature, give thanks. It could be the highlight of your visit - at least on Tucson's mean streets.
At least that’s the punch line for a new ad campaign from WBEZ, the Chicago public radio station, that begins on Friday. The campaign, called “2032 Membership Drive,” encourages Chicagoans to, well, “hook up” with other Chicagoans and procreate.
A tag line on one ad sums it up succinctly: “We Want Listeners Tomorrow. Go Make Babies Today.” Other ads read: “Do It. For Chicago.” and “Interesting People Make Interesting People.”
“Most public radio marketing and advertising is very nice and polite,” said Daniel Ash, the vice president for corporate sponsorship, marketing, membership and partnerships at Chicago Public Media, which owns the station.
This campaign, he said, is meant to playfully encourage listeners in their 20s and 30s to “make babies” so that by 2032, the station will have a slew of teenage listeners.
Torey Malatia, the chief executive of Chicago Public Media, said the station has a strong audience among 25- to 49-year-olds, but “as you get lower than that, 18 plus, you see the weakening of any kind of interest or loyalty.”
The campaign, which cost $400,000, was created by the digital agency Xi Chicago, part of BBDO and Proximity Worldwide. Its debut in the city will include billboards and ads on taxi tops, bridges, subways and buses.
Some ads will ask famous Chicagoans, like the chef Rick Bayless and the musician Jon Langford, to make babies.
The campaign will also include a Facebook application that will help users determine how interesting they are and what type of WBEZ content might appeal to them.
Rick Hamann, the group creative director at Xi Chicago, said the campaign tested well with the intended audience. “All of them got the joke,” he said. “They really appreciated that WBEZ was making an irreverent request.”
Ah, it's that time of year again. Time to welcome all those who come to the desert seeking its warmth, its mayonnaise- and jalape?o-slathered hot dogs, and its gargantuan array of "Old West" souvenirs - quite possibly the largest assortment ever seen this side of China.
Which means our potholes, roadside construction sites and three-light intersections are now inundated with motorists who have no clue as to this town's rules of the road. But enough about the locals.
Today's missive - or survival guide, if you will - is aimed at all you good folk who may not know a chimichanga from a Chihuahua, but you know, by gum, how to thread a 40-foot motor home into the last parking slot over at the Casino del Moola.
With that in mind, let's review some of the more common types of motorists you're likely to encounter during your stay:
The Clinger: This is the guy, or gal, whose front grille is irresistibly drawn to your rear bumper. You're tooling along when all of a sudden you notice a giant grille in your rearview mirror, one so close that you can actually determine the sex of its affixed insects. Solution: Adjust your mirror upward so that it reflects only blue sky, dirigibles floating above used-car lots or the extreme top of the speed camera you just blew by in an effort to shake The Clinger.
Hokey-Pokey Speedster: Here's a motorist who likes to maintain a constant speed somewhere between 5 and 85 miles per hour. Sometimes known to hold the dual title of Lane Changer, this driver will often cut right in front of you, then sloooow way down, perhaps to admire the many wind-blown tissues, dead lizards and other assorted wonderments to be found along our highways and byways. One thing that's consistent, however, is this driver's sudden need to speed through any and all yellow lights, leaving you, of course, waiting on red. Solution: See The Clinger, above.
The Hesitation Stopper: Stymied by road construction dating back to the Geronimo Era, this motorist must contend with four-way stops at many of our torn-up intersections. Trouble is, Hesitation Stopper hasn't a clue as to who's on first, electing instead to either: 1) Proceed without delay; 2) Nudge his car with a series of playful spurts just slightly into the intersection; or, 3) Remain frozen in place until someone behind him thoughtfully blows a horn. Solution: Drive only between the hours of 3 a.m. and 5 a.m., when traffic - and construction - is lightest.
The Sharer: Anxious to impart his or her tastes in music, politics or, perhaps fittingly, car commercials, The Sharer enjoys cranking down the windows and cranking up his or her state-of-the-art audio system. What better way to delve into Tucson's rich stew of cultural, ideological or commercial idiosyncrasies, even as your temporal lobes begin to throb. Don't agree? Try earplugs.
Red Arrow Runner: Tucson, as you may have noted by now, has many intersections with lagging left-turn lights timed to turn from red to green. For Red Arrow Runner, however, red is merely a primary color as he or she - often in numbers - scoots through the intersection long after the light or arrow has again gone red. Solution: never assume, just because you now have a green light, that it is actually safe to enter such an intersection. Wait until the last Red Arrow Runner gets through - or the sound of screeching brakes and crunching metal ensues.
The Yielder: Rare to nonexistent these days, this is the motorist who actually knows what "Yield" means - other than what bad girls do on the first date. This same driver may also take part in a quaint little ritual known as Proper Signaling. If you spot such an exotic creature, give thanks. It could be the highlight of your visit - at least on Tucson's mean streets.
Narcissism Keeps It From Seeing Itself As A Platform Not A Product
All of Facebook‘s recent actions betray two underlying beliefs that I can’t help but think are related. The first is that Facebook still believes itself to be a maker of products as opposed to a maintainer of a platform, despite considerable evidence to the contrary. The second, and more pernicious, is that its users are objects to be manipulated in programmatic ways.
Both of these beliefs are deeply ingrained in the DNA of the company and—since this is an identity proof—in the mind of its founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. It is very understandable why the company and Zuckerberg continue to think this way. The Facebook product has been so successful that it is the world’s largest social network (at least) by a factor of two. (See my story from yesterday about whether or not Google is starting to catch up.) Zuckerberg is a brilliant product engineer who understood intuitively how to remove barriers to make sharing of social information easier. The corollary to making a faster, more enjoyable user experience on the front end is the vast data model he and his engineers built for processing all of the resulting data on the backend.
If you look at the API documentation for the “user object” on Facebook, you see that it now has 39 attributes ranging from name, gender and age-range to sexual preference, political views and favorite athletes, as well as 44 potential connections to external content like Facebook pages managed, apps, games, photos and videos of the user and their friends. When you put all of this together, it is a large “categorical sort” that helps to filter people and their interests.
But as Devin Coldewey writes on TechCrunch today, “Facebook’s conception of each of its users is an endless series of nested categories. Zuckerberg’s joke slide showing a galaxy of pull-down filter boxes was more revealing than they let on.” (Does he mean the image below?) The fact is, that if you are a programmer, you can’t help but think of users as objects. That’s the way you do it in code.
All of Facebook‘s recent actions betray two underlying beliefs that I can’t help but think are related. The first is that Facebook still believes itself to be a maker of products as opposed to a maintainer of a platform, despite considerable evidence to the contrary. The second, and more pernicious, is that its users are objects to be manipulated in programmatic ways.
Both of these beliefs are deeply ingrained in the DNA of the company and—since this is an identity proof—in the mind of its founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. It is very understandable why the company and Zuckerberg continue to think this way. The Facebook product has been so successful that it is the world’s largest social network (at least) by a factor of two. (See my story from yesterday about whether or not Google is starting to catch up.) Zuckerberg is a brilliant product engineer who understood intuitively how to remove barriers to make sharing of social information easier. The corollary to making a faster, more enjoyable user experience on the front end is the vast data model he and his engineers built for processing all of the resulting data on the backend.
If you look at the API documentation for the “user object” on Facebook, you see that it now has 39 attributes ranging from name, gender and age-range to sexual preference, political views and favorite athletes, as well as 44 potential connections to external content like Facebook pages managed, apps, games, photos and videos of the user and their friends. When you put all of this together, it is a large “categorical sort” that helps to filter people and their interests.
But as Devin Coldewey writes on TechCrunch today, “Facebook’s conception of each of its users is an endless series of nested categories. Zuckerberg’s joke slide showing a galaxy of pull-down filter boxes was more revealing than they let on.” (Does he mean the image below?) The fact is, that if you are a programmer, you can’t help but think of users as objects. That’s the way you do it in code.
The departure of employees may force Wall Street to consider a wider range of people for positions. Heidrick & Struggles' Boehmner gave a presentation to a group of young professionals in Davos about his biggest challenge recruiting for big banks these days: getting executives to think creatively when filling positions.
In the presentation - called "Hiring an oddball" - Boehmner described how hard it is to get bank executives to hire creative and "quirky" leaders who do not "fit in" with the prototypical suited-up Wall Street mold, but who could help revolutionize the industry.
Instead, those quirky types are sought by Silicon Valley, and they may be happier there. Many prefer the laid back atmosphere, not to mention the challenges of building a business, and the promise of lucrative rewards at companies like Google , Facebook and smaller startups, Boehmner said.
"Banks are not getting top-level talent out of universities anymore, so in 10 to 15 years, there could be a big problem when it comes to leadership at the senior level of these firms," Boehmner said. "They're seeing big gaps in talent."
Boehmner said he performed a search for a technology position at a major investment bank, calling on candidates from Silicon Valley who might be lured to New York with mega-paychecks. He was denied by everyone he approached, he said.
On the flip side, Heidrick & Struggles also did a search for a mobile-payments company on the West Coast that was looking for someone with financial expertise but offered just one-quarter of the pay. In that case, "we got tons of applicants," said Boehmner.
Both of these beliefs are deeply ingrained in the DNA of the company and—since this is an identity proof—in the mind of its founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. It is very understandable why the company and Zuckerberg continue to think this way. The Facebook product has been so successful that it is the world’s largest social network (at least) by a factor of two. (See my story from yesterday about whether or not Google is starting to catch up.) Zuckerberg is a brilliant product engineer who understood intuitively how to remove barriers to make sharing of social information easier. The corollary to making a faster, more enjoyable user experience on the front end is the vast data model he and his engineers built for processing all of the resulting data on the backend.
If you look at the API documentation for the “user object” on Facebook, you see that it now has 39 attributes ranging from name, gender and age-range to sexual preference, political views and favorite athletes, as well as 44 potential connections to external content like Facebook pages managed, apps, games, photos and videos of the user and their friends. When you put all of this together, it is a large “categorical sort” that helps to filter people and their interests.
But as Devin Coldewey writes on TechCrunch today, “Facebook’s conception of each of its users is an endless series of nested categories. Zuckerberg’s joke slide showing a galaxy of pull-down filter boxes was more revealing than they let on.” (Does he mean the image below?) The fact is, that if you are a programmer, you can’t help but think of users as objects. That’s the way you do it in code.
All of Facebook‘s recent actions betray two underlying beliefs that I can’t help but think are related. The first is that Facebook still believes itself to be a maker of products as opposed to a maintainer of a platform, despite considerable evidence to the contrary. The second, and more pernicious, is that its users are objects to be manipulated in programmatic ways.
Both of these beliefs are deeply ingrained in the DNA of the company and—since this is an identity proof—in the mind of its founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. It is very understandable why the company and Zuckerberg continue to think this way. The Facebook product has been so successful that it is the world’s largest social network (at least) by a factor of two. (See my story from yesterday about whether or not Google is starting to catch up.) Zuckerberg is a brilliant product engineer who understood intuitively how to remove barriers to make sharing of social information easier. The corollary to making a faster, more enjoyable user experience on the front end is the vast data model he and his engineers built for processing all of the resulting data on the backend.
If you look at the API documentation for the “user object” on Facebook, you see that it now has 39 attributes ranging from name, gender and age-range to sexual preference, political views and favorite athletes, as well as 44 potential connections to external content like Facebook pages managed, apps, games, photos and videos of the user and their friends. When you put all of this together, it is a large “categorical sort” that helps to filter people and their interests.
But as Devin Coldewey writes on TechCrunch today, “Facebook’s conception of each of its users is an endless series of nested categories. Zuckerberg’s joke slide showing a galaxy of pull-down filter boxes was more revealing than they let on.” (Does he mean the image below?) The fact is, that if you are a programmer, you can’t help but think of users as objects. That’s the way you do it in code.
The departure of employees may force Wall Street to consider a wider range of people for positions. Heidrick & Struggles' Boehmner gave a presentation to a group of young professionals in Davos about his biggest challenge recruiting for big banks these days: getting executives to think creatively when filling positions.
In the presentation - called "Hiring an oddball" - Boehmner described how hard it is to get bank executives to hire creative and "quirky" leaders who do not "fit in" with the prototypical suited-up Wall Street mold, but who could help revolutionize the industry.
Instead, those quirky types are sought by Silicon Valley, and they may be happier there. Many prefer the laid back atmosphere, not to mention the challenges of building a business, and the promise of lucrative rewards at companies like Google , Facebook and smaller startups, Boehmner said.
"Banks are not getting top-level talent out of universities anymore, so in 10 to 15 years, there could be a big problem when it comes to leadership at the senior level of these firms," Boehmner said. "They're seeing big gaps in talent."
Boehmner said he performed a search for a technology position at a major investment bank, calling on candidates from Silicon Valley who might be lured to New York with mega-paychecks. He was denied by everyone he approached, he said.
On the flip side, Heidrick & Struggles also did a search for a mobile-payments company on the West Coast that was looking for someone with financial expertise but offered just one-quarter of the pay. In that case, "we got tons of applicants," said Boehmner.
Monday, January 21, 2013
'Index' Fingers at Sundance's New Frontier
For nearly a decade, Sundance's New Frontier exhibition has showcased projects that push the boundaries of film. "Our job is to stay abreast of innovations in storytelling," says New Frontier curator Shari Frilot. "As the media landscape changes, it's profoundly affecting how we tell our stories." As new technologies open fresh pathways for artistic expression and audience interaction, New Frontier projects explore the boundaries of what’s possible.
"Pulse Index," Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s 2013 New Frontier installation, uses digital sensors to invite audience participation. Projected on three walls, "Pulse Index" surrounds viewers with floor-to-ceiling photographs of fingerprints, each contributed by a person who visited the installation. The prints pulsate to the rhythm of the most recent participant's heartbeat, giving the installation an organic, low-key vibe. Audience members can add their own fingerprints by placing an index finger inside a custom-built sensor equipped with a digital microscope. As the sensor projects the new fingerprint on the wall, the oldest print is pushed off, creating, in Lozano-Hemmer’s words, an ever-changing “memento-mori.”
"Pulse Index" relies on its audience members' biological data -- heartbeats and fingerprints -- to create an aesthetic experience. While data seems like an unlikely starting point for a creative project, "Pulse Index" is part of a growing class of new media work that tells stories using statistics. As computers become increasingly capable of capturing, storing, and processing large data sets, artists and engineers are exploring how to best communicate that data, often in increasingly beautiful ways. The growing field of "data visualization" -- creating images that showcase quantitative information -- has advocates in fields as diverse as biology, mathematics, and design. Many of these visualizations use existing data sets. Aaron Koblin’s evocative "Flight Patterns" (2006) draws on Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) flight tracking data to show the ebbs and flows of American travel over a 24-hour period. Other visualizations create their own data banks. Each day, Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar’s "We Feel Fine" (2006-present) scours the Internet for sentences belonging with the words "I feel." The program stores these snippets and sorts them by emotion, location, and known demographics -- making it possible to see an image expressing how male New Yorkers felt last March, for instance.
While "We Feel Fine" engages with emotion in a cognitive way -- quantifying how many people "feel" a certain way at a given point -- "Pulse Index" uses quantitative data to create an emotional effect. Built using the heartbeats and fingerprints of recent visitors, some of whom may still be in the room, the piece has an immediacy and emotional intimacy that’s hard to quantify. The fingerprints, some stretched as large as floor-to-ceiling, bathe the room in a warm, welcoming light. Standing in the middle of "Pulse Index," surrounded by the softly glowing fingerprints of visitors who came before, it’s hard not to feel part of a spontaneous community.
Born in Mexico and based in Montreal, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer has built a career at the intersection of art and technology. A self-described "electronic artist," Lozano-Hemmer has been tinkering with technological installations since 1992. His work makes him as welcome in scientific strongholds as the art world. Next year, in addition to mounting a solo show at Istanbul’s Borusan Foundation, Lozano-Hemmer give a keynote at June’s Eyeo Festival, a techie Mecca. In Spring 2014, he will be a visiting artist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
"Rafael takes technology, disassembles it, and reconstructs it in a playful manner," said Julie Bourgeois, Lozano-Hemmer’s production manager. She describes "Pulse Index" as his poetic take on search and surveillance technology. Far less invasive than real-world tracking technology, "Pulse Index" personalizes the experience of fingerprinting, giving its audience power over the technology designed to track them.
In this way, "Pulse Index" has an element of wish fulfillment. Unlike government fingerprinting technology, "Pulse Index" has built-in ephemerality. The piece holds 10,925 fingerprints at a time, and the addition of each new print replaces an old one. As visitors cycle through the gallery, the piece changes, reflecting the makeup of its audience.
Visitor interaction is central to "Pulse Index"; Bourgeois calls it a "crowdsourced installation." The piece is participatory by design, exploring possible ways technology can engage audiences in the act of creation. Assembled from images of fingerprints submitted by on-site visitors, the piece is literally animated by its audience. "It’s interactive," said Bourgeois. "Without people, the artwork doesn’t exist."
Remember the time you liked Nickleback’s page on Facebook when you were all of 16? Or when you liked Chetan Bhagat enough to follow his page updates? You may not, but Facebook remembers all your likes, dislikes and check-ins. All of the data, the simple page likes have all been brought back by Facebook, packaged in a fancy, shiny new avatar called Graph Search.
What Graph Search does is simple. You can figure out what your friends like, where they dined last evening, TV shows your friends of friends have been watching or even single people who share the same interests as you without having to leave Facebook. Once you have Graph Search, simply through a string of keywords, you can find out information that you need on a more social level on the social networking website itself.
Excited yet? Or does this sound plain creepy? We took Facebook’s Graph Search for a spin to see what exactly it can do, or not. The first time you start using Graph Search, you will feel like a kid in a candy shop. There is just so much you would like to search for. Funny things your friends like, or maybe figure out great places to go or which movie to rent tonight but don’t know where to start.
I started off by searching for friends who stay in my city. ‘My friends who live in Mumbai, Maharashtra, India’ threw up results of more than a hundred friends. Friends' details were stacked one above the other on the left, along with additional details like where they work, the music they listen to and mutual friends. Facebook understands that I will probably need to fine tune the list and bring it down to maybe friends in Mumbai who hail from New Delhi. Graph Search is equipped with a refine tool situated on the right that helps you filter down your search to the hometown, gender, relationship status and even the school or college attended by your friends in Mumbai. Very stalkerish, right?
Relationship status has been something of a Facebook speciality. Ever since the feature’s debut, it has generally been considered to be somewhat of a status symbol to display one’s relationship status on the profile. The feature made an appearance on Facebook before it did on any other social networking website and searching for your single friends has never been this easy. What’s better is that you can refine the search with your likes and dislikes.
I left it to Graph Search to suggest single male friends who liked Metallica and let it work its magic. Poor, naive Facebook, with no intimation about why I suddenly felt the need to find ‘single males’ with the same taste in music, threw up results of siblings. Lesson no. 1: Graph Search is in beta. It has a long way to go with becoming more intuitive.
Tweaking some parameters, I asked Facebook to suggest friends of friends who lived in my city and liked Metallica. Not surprisingly, profiles of over a thousand men showed up. I opened up the refine tool further. To my surprise, the tool can help you get very, very specific with criteria likes school they attended, pages they are admins of, people you have interacted via comments earlier and whether or not they are friends with a particular friend.
"Pulse Index," Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s 2013 New Frontier installation, uses digital sensors to invite audience participation. Projected on three walls, "Pulse Index" surrounds viewers with floor-to-ceiling photographs of fingerprints, each contributed by a person who visited the installation. The prints pulsate to the rhythm of the most recent participant's heartbeat, giving the installation an organic, low-key vibe. Audience members can add their own fingerprints by placing an index finger inside a custom-built sensor equipped with a digital microscope. As the sensor projects the new fingerprint on the wall, the oldest print is pushed off, creating, in Lozano-Hemmer’s words, an ever-changing “memento-mori.”
"Pulse Index" relies on its audience members' biological data -- heartbeats and fingerprints -- to create an aesthetic experience. While data seems like an unlikely starting point for a creative project, "Pulse Index" is part of a growing class of new media work that tells stories using statistics. As computers become increasingly capable of capturing, storing, and processing large data sets, artists and engineers are exploring how to best communicate that data, often in increasingly beautiful ways. The growing field of "data visualization" -- creating images that showcase quantitative information -- has advocates in fields as diverse as biology, mathematics, and design. Many of these visualizations use existing data sets. Aaron Koblin’s evocative "Flight Patterns" (2006) draws on Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) flight tracking data to show the ebbs and flows of American travel over a 24-hour period. Other visualizations create their own data banks. Each day, Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar’s "We Feel Fine" (2006-present) scours the Internet for sentences belonging with the words "I feel." The program stores these snippets and sorts them by emotion, location, and known demographics -- making it possible to see an image expressing how male New Yorkers felt last March, for instance.
While "We Feel Fine" engages with emotion in a cognitive way -- quantifying how many people "feel" a certain way at a given point -- "Pulse Index" uses quantitative data to create an emotional effect. Built using the heartbeats and fingerprints of recent visitors, some of whom may still be in the room, the piece has an immediacy and emotional intimacy that’s hard to quantify. The fingerprints, some stretched as large as floor-to-ceiling, bathe the room in a warm, welcoming light. Standing in the middle of "Pulse Index," surrounded by the softly glowing fingerprints of visitors who came before, it’s hard not to feel part of a spontaneous community.
Born in Mexico and based in Montreal, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer has built a career at the intersection of art and technology. A self-described "electronic artist," Lozano-Hemmer has been tinkering with technological installations since 1992. His work makes him as welcome in scientific strongholds as the art world. Next year, in addition to mounting a solo show at Istanbul’s Borusan Foundation, Lozano-Hemmer give a keynote at June’s Eyeo Festival, a techie Mecca. In Spring 2014, he will be a visiting artist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
"Rafael takes technology, disassembles it, and reconstructs it in a playful manner," said Julie Bourgeois, Lozano-Hemmer’s production manager. She describes "Pulse Index" as his poetic take on search and surveillance technology. Far less invasive than real-world tracking technology, "Pulse Index" personalizes the experience of fingerprinting, giving its audience power over the technology designed to track them.
In this way, "Pulse Index" has an element of wish fulfillment. Unlike government fingerprinting technology, "Pulse Index" has built-in ephemerality. The piece holds 10,925 fingerprints at a time, and the addition of each new print replaces an old one. As visitors cycle through the gallery, the piece changes, reflecting the makeup of its audience.
Visitor interaction is central to "Pulse Index"; Bourgeois calls it a "crowdsourced installation." The piece is participatory by design, exploring possible ways technology can engage audiences in the act of creation. Assembled from images of fingerprints submitted by on-site visitors, the piece is literally animated by its audience. "It’s interactive," said Bourgeois. "Without people, the artwork doesn’t exist."
Remember the time you liked Nickleback’s page on Facebook when you were all of 16? Or when you liked Chetan Bhagat enough to follow his page updates? You may not, but Facebook remembers all your likes, dislikes and check-ins. All of the data, the simple page likes have all been brought back by Facebook, packaged in a fancy, shiny new avatar called Graph Search.
What Graph Search does is simple. You can figure out what your friends like, where they dined last evening, TV shows your friends of friends have been watching or even single people who share the same interests as you without having to leave Facebook. Once you have Graph Search, simply through a string of keywords, you can find out information that you need on a more social level on the social networking website itself.
Excited yet? Or does this sound plain creepy? We took Facebook’s Graph Search for a spin to see what exactly it can do, or not. The first time you start using Graph Search, you will feel like a kid in a candy shop. There is just so much you would like to search for. Funny things your friends like, or maybe figure out great places to go or which movie to rent tonight but don’t know where to start.
I started off by searching for friends who stay in my city. ‘My friends who live in Mumbai, Maharashtra, India’ threw up results of more than a hundred friends. Friends' details were stacked one above the other on the left, along with additional details like where they work, the music they listen to and mutual friends. Facebook understands that I will probably need to fine tune the list and bring it down to maybe friends in Mumbai who hail from New Delhi. Graph Search is equipped with a refine tool situated on the right that helps you filter down your search to the hometown, gender, relationship status and even the school or college attended by your friends in Mumbai. Very stalkerish, right?
Relationship status has been something of a Facebook speciality. Ever since the feature’s debut, it has generally been considered to be somewhat of a status symbol to display one’s relationship status on the profile. The feature made an appearance on Facebook before it did on any other social networking website and searching for your single friends has never been this easy. What’s better is that you can refine the search with your likes and dislikes.
I left it to Graph Search to suggest single male friends who liked Metallica and let it work its magic. Poor, naive Facebook, with no intimation about why I suddenly felt the need to find ‘single males’ with the same taste in music, threw up results of siblings. Lesson no. 1: Graph Search is in beta. It has a long way to go with becoming more intuitive.
Tweaking some parameters, I asked Facebook to suggest friends of friends who lived in my city and liked Metallica. Not surprisingly, profiles of over a thousand men showed up. I opened up the refine tool further. To my surprise, the tool can help you get very, very specific with criteria likes school they attended, pages they are admins of, people you have interacted via comments earlier and whether or not they are friends with a particular friend.
'Index' Fingers at Sundance's New Frontier
For nearly a decade, Sundance's New Frontier exhibition has showcased projects that push the boundaries of film. "Our job is to stay abreast of innovations in storytelling," says New Frontier curator Shari Frilot. "As the media landscape changes, it's profoundly affecting how we tell our stories." As new technologies open fresh pathways for artistic expression and audience interaction, New Frontier projects explore the boundaries of what’s possible.
"Pulse Index," Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s 2013 New Frontier installation, uses digital sensors to invite audience participation. Projected on three walls, "Pulse Index" surrounds viewers with floor-to-ceiling photographs of fingerprints, each contributed by a person who visited the installation. The prints pulsate to the rhythm of the most recent participant's heartbeat, giving the installation an organic, low-key vibe. Audience members can add their own fingerprints by placing an index finger inside a custom-built sensor equipped with a digital microscope. As the sensor projects the new fingerprint on the wall, the oldest print is pushed off, creating, in Lozano-Hemmer’s words, an ever-changing “memento-mori.”
"Pulse Index" relies on its audience members' biological data -- heartbeats and fingerprints -- to create an aesthetic experience. While data seems like an unlikely starting point for a creative project, "Pulse Index" is part of a growing class of new media work that tells stories using statistics. As computers become increasingly capable of capturing, storing, and processing large data sets, artists and engineers are exploring how to best communicate that data, often in increasingly beautiful ways. The growing field of "data visualization" -- creating images that showcase quantitative information -- has advocates in fields as diverse as biology, mathematics, and design. Many of these visualizations use existing data sets. Aaron Koblin’s evocative "Flight Patterns" (2006) draws on Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) flight tracking data to show the ebbs and flows of American travel over a 24-hour period. Other visualizations create their own data banks. Each day, Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar’s "We Feel Fine" (2006-present) scours the Internet for sentences belonging with the words "I feel." The program stores these snippets and sorts them by emotion, location, and known demographics -- making it possible to see an image expressing how male New Yorkers felt last March, for instance.
While "We Feel Fine" engages with emotion in a cognitive way -- quantifying how many people "feel" a certain way at a given point -- "Pulse Index" uses quantitative data to create an emotional effect. Built using the heartbeats and fingerprints of recent visitors, some of whom may still be in the room, the piece has an immediacy and emotional intimacy that’s hard to quantify. The fingerprints, some stretched as large as floor-to-ceiling, bathe the room in a warm, welcoming light. Standing in the middle of "Pulse Index," surrounded by the softly glowing fingerprints of visitors who came before, it’s hard not to feel part of a spontaneous community.
Born in Mexico and based in Montreal, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer has built a career at the intersection of art and technology. A self-described "electronic artist," Lozano-Hemmer has been tinkering with technological installations since 1992. His work makes him as welcome in scientific strongholds as the art world. Next year, in addition to mounting a solo show at Istanbul’s Borusan Foundation, Lozano-Hemmer give a keynote at June’s Eyeo Festival, a techie Mecca. In Spring 2014, he will be a visiting artist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
"Rafael takes technology, disassembles it, and reconstructs it in a playful manner," said Julie Bourgeois, Lozano-Hemmer’s production manager. She describes "Pulse Index" as his poetic take on search and surveillance technology. Far less invasive than real-world tracking technology, "Pulse Index" personalizes the experience of fingerprinting, giving its audience power over the technology designed to track them.
In this way, "Pulse Index" has an element of wish fulfillment. Unlike government fingerprinting technology, "Pulse Index" has built-in ephemerality. The piece holds 10,925 fingerprints at a time, and the addition of each new print replaces an old one. As visitors cycle through the gallery, the piece changes, reflecting the makeup of its audience.
Visitor interaction is central to "Pulse Index"; Bourgeois calls it a "crowdsourced installation." The piece is participatory by design, exploring possible ways technology can engage audiences in the act of creation. Assembled from images of fingerprints submitted by on-site visitors, the piece is literally animated by its audience. "It’s interactive," said Bourgeois. "Without people, the artwork doesn’t exist."
Remember the time you liked Nickleback’s page on Facebook when you were all of 16? Or when you liked Chetan Bhagat enough to follow his page updates? You may not, but Facebook remembers all your likes, dislikes and check-ins. All of the data, the simple page likes have all been brought back by Facebook, packaged in a fancy, shiny new avatar called Graph Search.
What Graph Search does is simple. You can figure out what your friends like, where they dined last evening, TV shows your friends of friends have been watching or even single people who share the same interests as you without having to leave Facebook. Once you have Graph Search, simply through a string of keywords, you can find out information that you need on a more social level on the social networking website itself.
Excited yet? Or does this sound plain creepy? We took Facebook’s Graph Search for a spin to see what exactly it can do, or not. The first time you start using Graph Search, you will feel like a kid in a candy shop. There is just so much you would like to search for. Funny things your friends like, or maybe figure out great places to go or which movie to rent tonight but don’t know where to start.
I started off by searching for friends who stay in my city. ‘My friends who live in Mumbai, Maharashtra, India’ threw up results of more than a hundred friends. Friends' details were stacked one above the other on the left, along with additional details like where they work, the music they listen to and mutual friends. Facebook understands that I will probably need to fine tune the list and bring it down to maybe friends in Mumbai who hail from New Delhi. Graph Search is equipped with a refine tool situated on the right that helps you filter down your search to the hometown, gender, relationship status and even the school or college attended by your friends in Mumbai. Very stalkerish, right?
Relationship status has been something of a Facebook speciality. Ever since the feature’s debut, it has generally been considered to be somewhat of a status symbol to display one’s relationship status on the profile. The feature made an appearance on Facebook before it did on any other social networking website and searching for your single friends has never been this easy. What’s better is that you can refine the search with your likes and dislikes.
I left it to Graph Search to suggest single male friends who liked Metallica and let it work its magic. Poor, naive Facebook, with no intimation about why I suddenly felt the need to find ‘single males’ with the same taste in music, threw up results of siblings. Lesson no. 1: Graph Search is in beta. It has a long way to go with becoming more intuitive.
Tweaking some parameters, I asked Facebook to suggest friends of friends who lived in my city and liked Metallica. Not surprisingly, profiles of over a thousand men showed up. I opened up the refine tool further. To my surprise, the tool can help you get very, very specific with criteria likes school they attended, pages they are admins of, people you have interacted via comments earlier and whether or not they are friends with a particular friend.
"Pulse Index," Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s 2013 New Frontier installation, uses digital sensors to invite audience participation. Projected on three walls, "Pulse Index" surrounds viewers with floor-to-ceiling photographs of fingerprints, each contributed by a person who visited the installation. The prints pulsate to the rhythm of the most recent participant's heartbeat, giving the installation an organic, low-key vibe. Audience members can add their own fingerprints by placing an index finger inside a custom-built sensor equipped with a digital microscope. As the sensor projects the new fingerprint on the wall, the oldest print is pushed off, creating, in Lozano-Hemmer’s words, an ever-changing “memento-mori.”
"Pulse Index" relies on its audience members' biological data -- heartbeats and fingerprints -- to create an aesthetic experience. While data seems like an unlikely starting point for a creative project, "Pulse Index" is part of a growing class of new media work that tells stories using statistics. As computers become increasingly capable of capturing, storing, and processing large data sets, artists and engineers are exploring how to best communicate that data, often in increasingly beautiful ways. The growing field of "data visualization" -- creating images that showcase quantitative information -- has advocates in fields as diverse as biology, mathematics, and design. Many of these visualizations use existing data sets. Aaron Koblin’s evocative "Flight Patterns" (2006) draws on Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) flight tracking data to show the ebbs and flows of American travel over a 24-hour period. Other visualizations create their own data banks. Each day, Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar’s "We Feel Fine" (2006-present) scours the Internet for sentences belonging with the words "I feel." The program stores these snippets and sorts them by emotion, location, and known demographics -- making it possible to see an image expressing how male New Yorkers felt last March, for instance.
While "We Feel Fine" engages with emotion in a cognitive way -- quantifying how many people "feel" a certain way at a given point -- "Pulse Index" uses quantitative data to create an emotional effect. Built using the heartbeats and fingerprints of recent visitors, some of whom may still be in the room, the piece has an immediacy and emotional intimacy that’s hard to quantify. The fingerprints, some stretched as large as floor-to-ceiling, bathe the room in a warm, welcoming light. Standing in the middle of "Pulse Index," surrounded by the softly glowing fingerprints of visitors who came before, it’s hard not to feel part of a spontaneous community.
Born in Mexico and based in Montreal, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer has built a career at the intersection of art and technology. A self-described "electronic artist," Lozano-Hemmer has been tinkering with technological installations since 1992. His work makes him as welcome in scientific strongholds as the art world. Next year, in addition to mounting a solo show at Istanbul’s Borusan Foundation, Lozano-Hemmer give a keynote at June’s Eyeo Festival, a techie Mecca. In Spring 2014, he will be a visiting artist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
"Rafael takes technology, disassembles it, and reconstructs it in a playful manner," said Julie Bourgeois, Lozano-Hemmer’s production manager. She describes "Pulse Index" as his poetic take on search and surveillance technology. Far less invasive than real-world tracking technology, "Pulse Index" personalizes the experience of fingerprinting, giving its audience power over the technology designed to track them.
In this way, "Pulse Index" has an element of wish fulfillment. Unlike government fingerprinting technology, "Pulse Index" has built-in ephemerality. The piece holds 10,925 fingerprints at a time, and the addition of each new print replaces an old one. As visitors cycle through the gallery, the piece changes, reflecting the makeup of its audience.
Visitor interaction is central to "Pulse Index"; Bourgeois calls it a "crowdsourced installation." The piece is participatory by design, exploring possible ways technology can engage audiences in the act of creation. Assembled from images of fingerprints submitted by on-site visitors, the piece is literally animated by its audience. "It’s interactive," said Bourgeois. "Without people, the artwork doesn’t exist."
Remember the time you liked Nickleback’s page on Facebook when you were all of 16? Or when you liked Chetan Bhagat enough to follow his page updates? You may not, but Facebook remembers all your likes, dislikes and check-ins. All of the data, the simple page likes have all been brought back by Facebook, packaged in a fancy, shiny new avatar called Graph Search.
What Graph Search does is simple. You can figure out what your friends like, where they dined last evening, TV shows your friends of friends have been watching or even single people who share the same interests as you without having to leave Facebook. Once you have Graph Search, simply through a string of keywords, you can find out information that you need on a more social level on the social networking website itself.
Excited yet? Or does this sound plain creepy? We took Facebook’s Graph Search for a spin to see what exactly it can do, or not. The first time you start using Graph Search, you will feel like a kid in a candy shop. There is just so much you would like to search for. Funny things your friends like, or maybe figure out great places to go or which movie to rent tonight but don’t know where to start.
I started off by searching for friends who stay in my city. ‘My friends who live in Mumbai, Maharashtra, India’ threw up results of more than a hundred friends. Friends' details were stacked one above the other on the left, along with additional details like where they work, the music they listen to and mutual friends. Facebook understands that I will probably need to fine tune the list and bring it down to maybe friends in Mumbai who hail from New Delhi. Graph Search is equipped with a refine tool situated on the right that helps you filter down your search to the hometown, gender, relationship status and even the school or college attended by your friends in Mumbai. Very stalkerish, right?
Relationship status has been something of a Facebook speciality. Ever since the feature’s debut, it has generally been considered to be somewhat of a status symbol to display one’s relationship status on the profile. The feature made an appearance on Facebook before it did on any other social networking website and searching for your single friends has never been this easy. What’s better is that you can refine the search with your likes and dislikes.
I left it to Graph Search to suggest single male friends who liked Metallica and let it work its magic. Poor, naive Facebook, with no intimation about why I suddenly felt the need to find ‘single males’ with the same taste in music, threw up results of siblings. Lesson no. 1: Graph Search is in beta. It has a long way to go with becoming more intuitive.
Tweaking some parameters, I asked Facebook to suggest friends of friends who lived in my city and liked Metallica. Not surprisingly, profiles of over a thousand men showed up. I opened up the refine tool further. To my surprise, the tool can help you get very, very specific with criteria likes school they attended, pages they are admins of, people you have interacted via comments earlier and whether or not they are friends with a particular friend.
Visions of our moody Sun
“It’s not enough to observe the Sun’s magnetic field throughout the course of a day. You need to to be able to observe it several times an hour in order to understand what causes a solar explosion, for example. So what we need is a very large telescope, that would provide us with detailed imagery four to five times more precise than what we have now,” says Bernard Gelly, an astrophysicist at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS).
That’s the aim of the scientists working on an EU-backed project to develop a new solar telescope, that would help them better understand some of the Sun’s elusive physical and chemical processes.
“The quality of the pictures we get from the Sun is disturbed by the Earth’s atmosphere. Very often, we just don’t see clearly enough. That’s why the future European Solar Telescope will have what we call “an adaptative optics system” that will correct, in real-time, the deformations caused by the atmosphere,” says Manuel Collados, coordinator at the European Solar Telescope project at the Canarias Astrophysics Institute.
Researchers hope the new telescope, combined with existing ones already orbiting the Earth, will help forecast more accurately the Sun’s dangerous spats.
“We currently know what regions of the Sun are more likely to develop those sudden, huge eruptions and bursts of energy. We are even able to determine whether those eruptions will happen in one, two or three days. What we are currently unable to tell is when exactly they are going to take place, and how violent they are going to be,” adds Manuel Collados.
“The Sun produces energy through a reaction known as “nuclear fusion”. We think that this source of energy could one day become the answer to the energy crisis here on Earth,” says Héctor Socas Navarro, astrophysicist at the Canarias Astrophysics Institute.
“In principle, it is a clean source of energy, non polluting, and virtually unlimited. Major research projects are currently underway to try and reproduce that same energy source in reactors. If successful, this research could provide a vital solution to the current energy problems faced by humankind.”
"We're in a steady incline on our sales and listings, and that's really what we want," Jones said. "We want it to be a steadfast but slow growth; we don't want a spike and then a drop off the map. We're very encouraged this year. People were buying and selling all year long, even through the holidays."
Terri Covington, broker and owner of Covington Real Estate in Belton, said 2012 was a good year, even if it had its downtime.
"For our office, our sales have been up quite a bit from (2011)," Covington said. "The year in itself, we had a pretty good spring and then in the summer it was real flat, but it picked up back in the fall."
While experiencing some drastic changes, the market in Texas didn't experience the severe drops that parts of the nation did during the economic crisis, Jones said. According to the National Association of Realtors website, Texas has outpaced the rest of the nation.
"We never had the huge bust like California, Florida, Arizona, Ohio – a lot of states had a tough time," Jones said. "We fell, but not like them. Now we continue again to slowly rise."
Not only has Texas's real estate market done well, but, specifically, the market in Central Texas has stayed strong, which Jones attributes to location and strong economy.
"We have such a strong economy because of our marketplace," Jones said. "Our job market is good, we have industry, Scott & White is the biggest employer in the area."
She went on to say that because our area includes Temple, Belton, Killeen and Fort Hood that we have a little more stability in the job market than other places.
Location is another contributing factor to the stability of our market.
"I-35 has a great deal to do with it," she said. "That's how we get so much business to move here. Our prices are attractive even to the rest of the state. We're attractively priced in an attractive location."
All being said, both Covington and Jones are looking forward to what 2013 will bring. While rises and falls are always expected in real estate, both are optimistic about the year overall.
"I believe we're going to have a good year in sales," Jones said. "Things will be changing the most this year. I believe it is not longer just a buyer's market. We were there for several years. And sellers are not going to pay as many concessions as in the past. There's not going to be drastic reductions in sale prices. We have to educate the public to that. That will make, as we even out, both sides participate in the market more."
As with many others who look at the developments happening now and planned for the future, Covington said her optimism stems from the influx of business to the community.
"I feel like we're going to have a positive year (in 2013)," she said. "I don't see how we can't have a positive year with the amount of business that we've seen coming in and the excitement that is going on in our area. This is a great place and everybody seems to be recognizing that."
That’s the aim of the scientists working on an EU-backed project to develop a new solar telescope, that would help them better understand some of the Sun’s elusive physical and chemical processes.
“The quality of the pictures we get from the Sun is disturbed by the Earth’s atmosphere. Very often, we just don’t see clearly enough. That’s why the future European Solar Telescope will have what we call “an adaptative optics system” that will correct, in real-time, the deformations caused by the atmosphere,” says Manuel Collados, coordinator at the European Solar Telescope project at the Canarias Astrophysics Institute.
Researchers hope the new telescope, combined with existing ones already orbiting the Earth, will help forecast more accurately the Sun’s dangerous spats.
“We currently know what regions of the Sun are more likely to develop those sudden, huge eruptions and bursts of energy. We are even able to determine whether those eruptions will happen in one, two or three days. What we are currently unable to tell is when exactly they are going to take place, and how violent they are going to be,” adds Manuel Collados.
“The Sun produces energy through a reaction known as “nuclear fusion”. We think that this source of energy could one day become the answer to the energy crisis here on Earth,” says Héctor Socas Navarro, astrophysicist at the Canarias Astrophysics Institute.
“In principle, it is a clean source of energy, non polluting, and virtually unlimited. Major research projects are currently underway to try and reproduce that same energy source in reactors. If successful, this research could provide a vital solution to the current energy problems faced by humankind.”
"We're in a steady incline on our sales and listings, and that's really what we want," Jones said. "We want it to be a steadfast but slow growth; we don't want a spike and then a drop off the map. We're very encouraged this year. People were buying and selling all year long, even through the holidays."
Terri Covington, broker and owner of Covington Real Estate in Belton, said 2012 was a good year, even if it had its downtime.
"For our office, our sales have been up quite a bit from (2011)," Covington said. "The year in itself, we had a pretty good spring and then in the summer it was real flat, but it picked up back in the fall."
While experiencing some drastic changes, the market in Texas didn't experience the severe drops that parts of the nation did during the economic crisis, Jones said. According to the National Association of Realtors website, Texas has outpaced the rest of the nation.
"We never had the huge bust like California, Florida, Arizona, Ohio – a lot of states had a tough time," Jones said. "We fell, but not like them. Now we continue again to slowly rise."
Not only has Texas's real estate market done well, but, specifically, the market in Central Texas has stayed strong, which Jones attributes to location and strong economy.
"We have such a strong economy because of our marketplace," Jones said. "Our job market is good, we have industry, Scott & White is the biggest employer in the area."
She went on to say that because our area includes Temple, Belton, Killeen and Fort Hood that we have a little more stability in the job market than other places.
Location is another contributing factor to the stability of our market.
"I-35 has a great deal to do with it," she said. "That's how we get so much business to move here. Our prices are attractive even to the rest of the state. We're attractively priced in an attractive location."
All being said, both Covington and Jones are looking forward to what 2013 will bring. While rises and falls are always expected in real estate, both are optimistic about the year overall.
"I believe we're going to have a good year in sales," Jones said. "Things will be changing the most this year. I believe it is not longer just a buyer's market. We were there for several years. And sellers are not going to pay as many concessions as in the past. There's not going to be drastic reductions in sale prices. We have to educate the public to that. That will make, as we even out, both sides participate in the market more."
As with many others who look at the developments happening now and planned for the future, Covington said her optimism stems from the influx of business to the community.
"I feel like we're going to have a positive year (in 2013)," she said. "I don't see how we can't have a positive year with the amount of business that we've seen coming in and the excitement that is going on in our area. This is a great place and everybody seems to be recognizing that."
Thursday, January 17, 2013
Confessions and pointers of a luxury hotel employee
But first a brief dissertation on what I like to call the “insider” novel, which has been around for centuries. One of the first is “Moll Flanders.” In which Daniel DeFoe gets inside the life of a prostitute and con artist to tell readers what goes on in the life of Moll. Tons of such novels have followed. Think of Arthur Haley, who wrote of the innerworkings of a luxury hostelry in “Hotel,” as well as a wintry slide on the runways of Minneapolis’ Wold Chamberlain in “Airport.”
Speaking of Minnesota, Sinclair Lewis made a living writing insider novels which he painstakingly researched. We learn about med school and doctors in “Arrowsmith,” the theatrical world in “Bethel Merriday,” real estate agent in “Babbitt,” evangelicals in “Elmer Gantry” and more on hotels in “Work of Art.”
More recently, a spate of non-fiction books has appeared, in which employees and former employees lay down their aprons and talk about what it’s like to be a chef, a waiter, a stewardess. Anthony Bourdain made it big a few years back telling readers how to deal with New York restaurants, based on his experiences running a famous New York Bistro.Then came …Steve Dublanica, who wrote “Waiter Rant,” about what irritates and/or pleases New York waiters.
As a former hotel employee I jumped at today’s book, “Heads on Beds,” whose author went to work parking cars at a luxury hotel in New Orleans because, having earned his college degree in philosophy, there were no other jobs open to him.The auto valet works hard at his new job — taught by the blacks and Hispanics he works with. He learns fast and is promoted to front desk clerk and on to a management position in “housekeeping.”
Along the way, he tells readers of his adventures and misadventures with two bit customers who should know better, cunning employees who give him good advice that he doesn’t take. One elderly car parker tells him not take a promotion to “management” . “Try to get on as a bellman. They’re the ones who make the real money.”
Not all hotel customers are awful, just some of them. One famous actor checks into his suite and tells the old black housekeeper not to bother cleaning his suite. The suite is fine, he says, you just sit down for an hour and listen to me play the piano.
As with any insider non-fiction, there are lots of tips for readers about beating the system. If you know the system, argues author Tomsky, you can beat it. Sometimes, he says, it’s cheaper to go with a luxury suite than a standard room. Just make sure you drink all the drinks provided and eat the complimentary meals. After a day or two, the extra tariff will begin to pay for itself.
My favorite technique comes in the chapter about the overpriced minibar in your room. He says if you get a charge on your bill and you haven’t used it, call and refuse to pay. They’ll cancel the charge because they have no way of knowing if you’ve used it. Same goes for if you HAVE used the mini bar. Just tell them you haven’t and they’ll erase the charge. His most egregious example deals with how to rob your mini bar. When you check in make sure you get a non-smoking room. When you get to the room, light up a cigarette and smoke it in the room. Then open the mini-bar and put everything in it in your suitcase. Then call the desk and say you got a smoking room and demand that you and your suitcase be moved.
As a “new theatre fit-out in an existing new shell,” McCall confirms that Spotlight Theatres and its Front Street Bistro are indeed an “anchor for a new mixed-use retail entertainment district. The main project goal was to integrate a theatre and restaurant into one cohesive environment for moviegoers and diners alike, but also to provide an independent experience for those wishing to dine only or those just wanting go to and see a movie. The upscale finishes and sophisticated aesthetics complement the fine dining and sleek bar environment.” Discussing the “sleek, sophisticated and diverse” restaurant “offering upscale food at reasonable prices and a happy-hour scene that is already causing a buzz,” the food expert of The Hartford Courant set the scene further. “Huge glass windows on two sides of the restaurant offer diners and those at the bar a close view of the Front Street area and the boulevard where city traffic and the science center, convention center and insurance buildings provide a cityscape that makes you feel as though you are right in the middle of the best the city offers. Décor is beige and black, simple, clean and modern, with the restaurant and bar separated from the movie theatre operation by the main foyer.” And the very center of that operation is equally on view for all to admire. JKR Partners created what McCall describes as “the open jewel box highlighting the theatre’s digital equipment with a glowing ceiling and floor that are visible from the main promenade.”
Already “known for its pure and balanced acoustics,” as press notes trumpeted, nowadays guests are treated to “plush, new ergonomic seating from renowned French manufacturers Quinette Gallay, as well as added legroom and improved sightlines.” In the process, capacity was reduced to 361 from some 400 seats originally, and the color scheme taken to a rich red velvet from a somewhat more orange-hued velour. The “European styling” of the “elegantly transformed space” included fresh paints and “luxurious” new carpeting. To improve overall circulation, the auditorium doors were relocated to the center, creating “a grand entrance with a dramatic overall perspective.” All the while, a new cross aisle provides “unobstructed views from handicapped-accessible seating areas.” Last but certainly not least, technical upgrades brought improved sound and lighting, and digital-cinema capabilities, of course.
In their official announcement of the deal, real estate brokerage Transwestern lauded Maya Cinemas for “developing a chain of megaplex movie theatres, focused on providing high-quality moviegoing experiences in new and redevelopment market areas…in particular, Latino-centric, family-oriented communities in underserved urban and rural areas.” The fact that Maya Cinemas offers “first-run Hollywood movies and Spanish-language films, with an emphasis on state-of-the-art technology and superior customer service” certainly qualified Century Plaza 16 for our focus on diversified communities.
But Pittsburg is also exemplary for additional “Class of 2012” trends, including the revitalization of older cinema facilities, economic impact and technology excellence. Thanks to David Nelson, the Pittsburg City Journal blogger, we have a first-rate moviegoer’s perspective of what Maya Cinemas 16 means to the community. Under the headline “…And What a Treat It Is,” Nelson writes, “If you haven’t attended our ‘brand new’ movie center…you’re in for a delightful experience.” He also gives due credit to the “old” Brenden cinema, “which gave us such pleasure, leading to this new generation of local entertainment.” The “personal eyewitness” account of his first visit to the cinema covers everything from “no problem with parking” before approaching “the beautifully refurbished and festive outside” and entering “a wide open lobby,” to enjoying “huge decorative medallions inlaid to great effect” into the floor. For Nelson, another integral part of “a very attractive presentation to the eye” was “a large snack counter and the usual array of goodies for sale.” Moviegoers on Yelp, who were all as generally smitten by their experiences, also noted the Coca-Cola Freestyle machines and the special toppings. Francisco Z. and his kids gave “5 Stars for sure they have tapatio for your popcorn HECK yea!!!”
Speaking of Minnesota, Sinclair Lewis made a living writing insider novels which he painstakingly researched. We learn about med school and doctors in “Arrowsmith,” the theatrical world in “Bethel Merriday,” real estate agent in “Babbitt,” evangelicals in “Elmer Gantry” and more on hotels in “Work of Art.”
More recently, a spate of non-fiction books has appeared, in which employees and former employees lay down their aprons and talk about what it’s like to be a chef, a waiter, a stewardess. Anthony Bourdain made it big a few years back telling readers how to deal with New York restaurants, based on his experiences running a famous New York Bistro.Then came …Steve Dublanica, who wrote “Waiter Rant,” about what irritates and/or pleases New York waiters.
As a former hotel employee I jumped at today’s book, “Heads on Beds,” whose author went to work parking cars at a luxury hotel in New Orleans because, having earned his college degree in philosophy, there were no other jobs open to him.The auto valet works hard at his new job — taught by the blacks and Hispanics he works with. He learns fast and is promoted to front desk clerk and on to a management position in “housekeeping.”
Along the way, he tells readers of his adventures and misadventures with two bit customers who should know better, cunning employees who give him good advice that he doesn’t take. One elderly car parker tells him not take a promotion to “management” . “Try to get on as a bellman. They’re the ones who make the real money.”
Not all hotel customers are awful, just some of them. One famous actor checks into his suite and tells the old black housekeeper not to bother cleaning his suite. The suite is fine, he says, you just sit down for an hour and listen to me play the piano.
As with any insider non-fiction, there are lots of tips for readers about beating the system. If you know the system, argues author Tomsky, you can beat it. Sometimes, he says, it’s cheaper to go with a luxury suite than a standard room. Just make sure you drink all the drinks provided and eat the complimentary meals. After a day or two, the extra tariff will begin to pay for itself.
My favorite technique comes in the chapter about the overpriced minibar in your room. He says if you get a charge on your bill and you haven’t used it, call and refuse to pay. They’ll cancel the charge because they have no way of knowing if you’ve used it. Same goes for if you HAVE used the mini bar. Just tell them you haven’t and they’ll erase the charge. His most egregious example deals with how to rob your mini bar. When you check in make sure you get a non-smoking room. When you get to the room, light up a cigarette and smoke it in the room. Then open the mini-bar and put everything in it in your suitcase. Then call the desk and say you got a smoking room and demand that you and your suitcase be moved.
As a “new theatre fit-out in an existing new shell,” McCall confirms that Spotlight Theatres and its Front Street Bistro are indeed an “anchor for a new mixed-use retail entertainment district. The main project goal was to integrate a theatre and restaurant into one cohesive environment for moviegoers and diners alike, but also to provide an independent experience for those wishing to dine only or those just wanting go to and see a movie. The upscale finishes and sophisticated aesthetics complement the fine dining and sleek bar environment.” Discussing the “sleek, sophisticated and diverse” restaurant “offering upscale food at reasonable prices and a happy-hour scene that is already causing a buzz,” the food expert of The Hartford Courant set the scene further. “Huge glass windows on two sides of the restaurant offer diners and those at the bar a close view of the Front Street area and the boulevard where city traffic and the science center, convention center and insurance buildings provide a cityscape that makes you feel as though you are right in the middle of the best the city offers. Décor is beige and black, simple, clean and modern, with the restaurant and bar separated from the movie theatre operation by the main foyer.” And the very center of that operation is equally on view for all to admire. JKR Partners created what McCall describes as “the open jewel box highlighting the theatre’s digital equipment with a glowing ceiling and floor that are visible from the main promenade.”
Already “known for its pure and balanced acoustics,” as press notes trumpeted, nowadays guests are treated to “plush, new ergonomic seating from renowned French manufacturers Quinette Gallay, as well as added legroom and improved sightlines.” In the process, capacity was reduced to 361 from some 400 seats originally, and the color scheme taken to a rich red velvet from a somewhat more orange-hued velour. The “European styling” of the “elegantly transformed space” included fresh paints and “luxurious” new carpeting. To improve overall circulation, the auditorium doors were relocated to the center, creating “a grand entrance with a dramatic overall perspective.” All the while, a new cross aisle provides “unobstructed views from handicapped-accessible seating areas.” Last but certainly not least, technical upgrades brought improved sound and lighting, and digital-cinema capabilities, of course.
In their official announcement of the deal, real estate brokerage Transwestern lauded Maya Cinemas for “developing a chain of megaplex movie theatres, focused on providing high-quality moviegoing experiences in new and redevelopment market areas…in particular, Latino-centric, family-oriented communities in underserved urban and rural areas.” The fact that Maya Cinemas offers “first-run Hollywood movies and Spanish-language films, with an emphasis on state-of-the-art technology and superior customer service” certainly qualified Century Plaza 16 for our focus on diversified communities.
But Pittsburg is also exemplary for additional “Class of 2012” trends, including the revitalization of older cinema facilities, economic impact and technology excellence. Thanks to David Nelson, the Pittsburg City Journal blogger, we have a first-rate moviegoer’s perspective of what Maya Cinemas 16 means to the community. Under the headline “…And What a Treat It Is,” Nelson writes, “If you haven’t attended our ‘brand new’ movie center…you’re in for a delightful experience.” He also gives due credit to the “old” Brenden cinema, “which gave us such pleasure, leading to this new generation of local entertainment.” The “personal eyewitness” account of his first visit to the cinema covers everything from “no problem with parking” before approaching “the beautifully refurbished and festive outside” and entering “a wide open lobby,” to enjoying “huge decorative medallions inlaid to great effect” into the floor. For Nelson, another integral part of “a very attractive presentation to the eye” was “a large snack counter and the usual array of goodies for sale.” Moviegoers on Yelp, who were all as generally smitten by their experiences, also noted the Coca-Cola Freestyle machines and the special toppings. Francisco Z. and his kids gave “5 Stars for sure they have tapatio for your popcorn HECK yea!!!”
2012 Patent Filings Rank Xerox Among the World's Top Innovators
The 2012 tally includes patents from Xerox and its wholly-owned subsidiaries, including the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), A Xerox Company. Xerox's joint venture in Japan, Fuji Xerox Co. Ltd., received 686 U.S. patents in 2012. When combined, the Xerox group garnered 1,900 U.S. patents, which would have placed Xerox in the top 10 on the IFI Patent Intelligence list worldwide. This issuance is up almost 300 patents over last year - an increase of more than 17 percent.
"Patents are an important measure of our continued investment in innovation but more importantly, it's the people behind the patents who turn these inventions into powerful solutions for our clients," said Sophie Vandebroek, Xerox chief technology officer and president of the Xerox Innovation Group. "We're tapping into the creativity and customer-focus of our scientists and engineers to apply innovation in ways that not only advance our document technology but also simplify complex business processes through Xerox's diverse services in industries such as healthcare, finance, customer care and transportation."
Recently issued patents in the services space include U.S. Patent 8,315,946, which describes the e-Childcare solution that enables Human Services agencies to subsidize child care services while reducing fraud, paperwork, and payment processing overhead to save taxpayer money. US Patent 8,234,237 describes a workflow management system that notes when data is missing from a scanned document, and returns the document to the workflow when the data is provided. U.S Patent 8,195,474 describes a system that scans the databases of a large number of print servers to create a profile of the customer's needs, generating a list of the most useful marketing portals for the account. U.S. Patent 8,190,469 describes elements of the software that runs the PocketPEOTM handheld parking citation device.
Xerox's prolific researchers have filed over 60,000 patents around the world since 1930. The company recently recognized 12 scientists for reaching personal patent milestones, which in total represent 1,550 patents over the past few years. In addition to the National Medal of Technology, the highest honor awarded by the President of the United States, Xerox has received a number of innovation awards including being named to Thomson Reuters' 2012 listing of the World's 100 Most Innovative Companies.
During a media conference on Thursday afternoon, NHS interim president and CEO Sue Matthews outlined a plan to save $10 million, and said the organization is working with staff to realize the other $3 million in savings. Despite being “one of the most efficient hospitals in Ontario” — falling within the 25th percentile for administrative and support expense, the NHS is looking for further efficiencies to try and bring operational costs down - a task she says is happening at other hospitals right across the province, she said. Starting with patient care as the No. 1 priority, she said the NHS senior team has undertaken a lengthy process to review what it can do to improve the bottom line.
“We have to be financially sustainable. It’s not an option for us,” Matthews told reporters at the NHS Ontario Street site. “In light of the economic downturn we have a zero per cent increase of funding for hospitals, despite inflation, which means a negative impact for us.”
That, she said, has spawned the search for the $13 million in savings. It will be a long-term challenge, she said, noting the NHS and other hospitals will “always be in the process” to find further efficiencies.
The hospital, she explained, has to have its savings plan in place by the end of the fiscal year — March 31. The current operational budget is $430 million, and that number will swell by $50-60 million once the new St. Catharines hospital is completely up and running. That means they’ve looked aggressively to find the savings without affecting patient care.
“When we’re looking at ways to save, the first thing we look at is trying to generate revenue rather than savings,” she said, noting there will be a parking rate hike coming. In addition to revenues, they then went into looking at everything from administration and support, program efficiencies, and utilization management, with program consolidation and changes considered a last resort.
Matthews said the hospital has already removed some administrative support, managerial and executive positions in the last year. There were about a dozen employees in total cut, said NHS vice-president of human resources Terry McMahon.
However, more could be coming, Matthews cautioned.
“We don’t know the final number of individuals who will leave the organization in this process,” she said. “This is a very lengthy process, and in the past it takes up to a year sometimes for the process to land. I do know it’s a stressful time for staff... we feel very much for them affected by this and will do everything we can to minimize the impact.”
“There could be some, but the whole approach is let’s look at moving some, early retirements, and minimize it,” he said. “Back in 2009 when we were doing the HIP (hospital improvement plan) that was a similar approach and at the end of the day there were very few (employees) who got laid off.”
There’s been a flurry of new hires relating to services at the new hospital, and Matthews said those positions aren’t in jeopardy.
The NHS is also not filling the equivalent of 12 full-time positions, in addition to reassigning workers to some of the 120 vacancies the organization has. While some part-time staff may be reduced, there will also be the redistribution of hours, and the hospital will also look at providing early retirement or voluntary exit options. They are attempting to avoid layoffs by working closely with the unions, and Matthews said while nurses may move positions, there will be no nurse layoffs.
Some actions underway at this point, accounting for the $10 million in savings, include the parking revenue hike — for visitors and staff, decentralzing the nursing scheduling office ($1 million), centralized food delivery, up to six weeks of closures of operating rooms throughout the year, product standardization ($1 million), consolidation of mental health to the new St. Catharines site ($1 million), lab efficiencies, administrative and support reductions ($1 million), clinical efficiencies and consolidations ($1.8 million) and a group of other much smaller initiatives that equate to about $2.2 million in savings.
“$10 million is not enough ... we are challenging our staff to help us find the additional $3 million,” said Matthews. “Come up with, in addition to the $10 million in savings, savings in sick time and overtime.”
The NHS, she said, has “significantly high overtime” created by some staffing challenges and some of the vacancies, and they want to work with staff to decrease that in addition to the sick time. They’re also putting a focus on infection control by examining specific assessments of what needs to be done in the event of a breakout, but noted cleaning staff numbers aren’t expected to change.
The deficit woes are nothing new for the NHS. The organization struggles with this each year and achieved savings over the last few years, said Matthews, and they’re working hard to fulfill its objectives.
“We’ve committed to be transparent so the public knows, but we also committed to have a balanced budget and we haven’t to date. We have to do that and we have to be aggressive,” she said. “If we don’t... it’s only going to get worse.”
"Patents are an important measure of our continued investment in innovation but more importantly, it's the people behind the patents who turn these inventions into powerful solutions for our clients," said Sophie Vandebroek, Xerox chief technology officer and president of the Xerox Innovation Group. "We're tapping into the creativity and customer-focus of our scientists and engineers to apply innovation in ways that not only advance our document technology but also simplify complex business processes through Xerox's diverse services in industries such as healthcare, finance, customer care and transportation."
Recently issued patents in the services space include U.S. Patent 8,315,946, which describes the e-Childcare solution that enables Human Services agencies to subsidize child care services while reducing fraud, paperwork, and payment processing overhead to save taxpayer money. US Patent 8,234,237 describes a workflow management system that notes when data is missing from a scanned document, and returns the document to the workflow when the data is provided. U.S Patent 8,195,474 describes a system that scans the databases of a large number of print servers to create a profile of the customer's needs, generating a list of the most useful marketing portals for the account. U.S. Patent 8,190,469 describes elements of the software that runs the PocketPEOTM handheld parking citation device.
Xerox's prolific researchers have filed over 60,000 patents around the world since 1930. The company recently recognized 12 scientists for reaching personal patent milestones, which in total represent 1,550 patents over the past few years. In addition to the National Medal of Technology, the highest honor awarded by the President of the United States, Xerox has received a number of innovation awards including being named to Thomson Reuters' 2012 listing of the World's 100 Most Innovative Companies.
During a media conference on Thursday afternoon, NHS interim president and CEO Sue Matthews outlined a plan to save $10 million, and said the organization is working with staff to realize the other $3 million in savings. Despite being “one of the most efficient hospitals in Ontario” — falling within the 25th percentile for administrative and support expense, the NHS is looking for further efficiencies to try and bring operational costs down - a task she says is happening at other hospitals right across the province, she said. Starting with patient care as the No. 1 priority, she said the NHS senior team has undertaken a lengthy process to review what it can do to improve the bottom line.
“We have to be financially sustainable. It’s not an option for us,” Matthews told reporters at the NHS Ontario Street site. “In light of the economic downturn we have a zero per cent increase of funding for hospitals, despite inflation, which means a negative impact for us.”
That, she said, has spawned the search for the $13 million in savings. It will be a long-term challenge, she said, noting the NHS and other hospitals will “always be in the process” to find further efficiencies.
The hospital, she explained, has to have its savings plan in place by the end of the fiscal year — March 31. The current operational budget is $430 million, and that number will swell by $50-60 million once the new St. Catharines hospital is completely up and running. That means they’ve looked aggressively to find the savings without affecting patient care.
“When we’re looking at ways to save, the first thing we look at is trying to generate revenue rather than savings,” she said, noting there will be a parking rate hike coming. In addition to revenues, they then went into looking at everything from administration and support, program efficiencies, and utilization management, with program consolidation and changes considered a last resort.
Matthews said the hospital has already removed some administrative support, managerial and executive positions in the last year. There were about a dozen employees in total cut, said NHS vice-president of human resources Terry McMahon.
However, more could be coming, Matthews cautioned.
“We don’t know the final number of individuals who will leave the organization in this process,” she said. “This is a very lengthy process, and in the past it takes up to a year sometimes for the process to land. I do know it’s a stressful time for staff... we feel very much for them affected by this and will do everything we can to minimize the impact.”
“There could be some, but the whole approach is let’s look at moving some, early retirements, and minimize it,” he said. “Back in 2009 when we were doing the HIP (hospital improvement plan) that was a similar approach and at the end of the day there were very few (employees) who got laid off.”
There’s been a flurry of new hires relating to services at the new hospital, and Matthews said those positions aren’t in jeopardy.
The NHS is also not filling the equivalent of 12 full-time positions, in addition to reassigning workers to some of the 120 vacancies the organization has. While some part-time staff may be reduced, there will also be the redistribution of hours, and the hospital will also look at providing early retirement or voluntary exit options. They are attempting to avoid layoffs by working closely with the unions, and Matthews said while nurses may move positions, there will be no nurse layoffs.
Some actions underway at this point, accounting for the $10 million in savings, include the parking revenue hike — for visitors and staff, decentralzing the nursing scheduling office ($1 million), centralized food delivery, up to six weeks of closures of operating rooms throughout the year, product standardization ($1 million), consolidation of mental health to the new St. Catharines site ($1 million), lab efficiencies, administrative and support reductions ($1 million), clinical efficiencies and consolidations ($1.8 million) and a group of other much smaller initiatives that equate to about $2.2 million in savings.
“$10 million is not enough ... we are challenging our staff to help us find the additional $3 million,” said Matthews. “Come up with, in addition to the $10 million in savings, savings in sick time and overtime.”
The NHS, she said, has “significantly high overtime” created by some staffing challenges and some of the vacancies, and they want to work with staff to decrease that in addition to the sick time. They’re also putting a focus on infection control by examining specific assessments of what needs to be done in the event of a breakout, but noted cleaning staff numbers aren’t expected to change.
The deficit woes are nothing new for the NHS. The organization struggles with this each year and achieved savings over the last few years, said Matthews, and they’re working hard to fulfill its objectives.
“We’ve committed to be transparent so the public knows, but we also committed to have a balanced budget and we haven’t to date. We have to do that and we have to be aggressive,” she said. “If we don’t... it’s only going to get worse.”
Tuesday, January 15, 2013
New library director takes over
On his first day on the job, Spencer Watts settled into a chair in his office and pronounced himself pleased with what he had seen so far.
“It’s a good system,” the new East Baton Rouge Parish Library director said of the 1.9-million-item, 540-employee system he took over on Monday. “It’s not perfect, there are always things we can do better.”
Watts, who spent the morning at the city-parish Human Resources department filling out forms and completing a drug and alcohol screen, said he was ready to get to work.
“We have major construction projects,” he said first when asked about his priorities. “I want to make sure those stay on track.”
Watts, who left the top job at the Mobile public library system in Alabama, was hired partly on the basis of his experience in overseeing library construction.
The East Baton Rouge Parish library system has four branches under construction or in the design phase: the Fairwood Branch Library on Old Hammond Highway, a new main library on Goodwood, the Rouzan branch library on Perkins, and the River Center Branch Library downtown.
The latter two have both engendered their share of controversy — Rouzan because of its association with developer Tommy Spinosa and the $21 million River Center branch library, which critics, including some on the Metro Council, have decried as excessively expensive.
Watts also said he plans to “work hard” to rebuild any broken relations from the departure of former Director David Farrar, who resigned in December 2011 after information became public about a 15-year-old Alabama criminal case in which he was accused of sexual abuse and impersonating a police officer.
“I am a totally different individual,” Watts said. “This is a new chapter.”
Watts said he plans to focus on becoming familiar with the parish’s library system, with its approximately 542 budgeted employees and $44 million budget, both more than double what he oversaw in Mobile.
“It’s a process,” Watts said. “It will be weeks before I have a good handle on it like I want to.”
Since he accepted the job, Watts said, East Baton Rouge Parish Library staff have sent him the minutes and video recordings of the Library Board of Control meetings so that he could begin to familiarize himself with the system.
One of the first non-construction projects Watts will oversee is the installation of a Radio-Frequency Identity tag system.
Watts, who oversaw the installation of a similar system in Mobile, said the system will save time on check-in and check-out, because items will not have to be individually scanned.
The system will also make it far easier to locate lost items, he said.
The library system has budgeted $1.2 million for the project, which will be split between equipment costs and paying a contractor to physically tag each of the library’s inventory 1.9 million items, said Assistant Library Director Mary Stein, who championed the RFID project last year, said.
Watts, who with his wife has been in Baton Rouge less than two weeks, said he had a positive initial impression of the city.
In addition to new class schedules, University of Alabama students are adjusting to campus parking changes upon their return from the holiday break, as various roads and portions of parking lots have been closed.
An initiative known as the Campus Master Plan, which was approved by the Board of Trustees in November, includes plans for a new 750-space parking deck near Riverside Residence Hall and adjustments to various parking lots and streets.
The Riverside parking deck began construction while students were away over the holiday and upon return, residents noticed that the construction had taken up precious parking spaces.
UA’s Housing and Residential Department emailed residents on Jan. 11, informing them the construction removed roughly 290 spaces on the west side of the Riverside East Yellow Residential surface lot. The emailed also stated 190 new spaces were available on the east side of the lot to “offset this loss of parking.”
Despite these accommodations, less parking is available for the 22,454 parking permits that were sold in fall 2012, said UA spokeswoman Cathy Andreen, and some students often find themselves hard-pressed locating an available spot.
Leah Horn, a freshman majoring in communicative disorders, enjoys the protected parking of the Ferguson Deck but has noticed a general decrease in available spaces.
“It has become a lot harder to find a spot in that deck because so many people who normally park elsewhere have had to move because of the construction,” Horn said. “I feel that it might have been wiser to wait until the summer since it affects a large number of students.”
Although parking is currently limited, the Riverside parking deck will eventually provide more parking for the rapidly increasing number of students who live and drive on campus.
“Parking in the Riverside lot has definitely been a problem,” Matthew Warren, a freshman majoring in aerospace engineering, said. “The addition of the new deck will definitely help.”
Other changes made to parking spaces on campus include the closing of the South Rose Reserve lot, the SEC Reserve lot and the northern half of the South Ferguson lot. Barnwell lot is now only available to those with an orange residential parking pass.
In addition to the several parking lots undergoing adjustments, 7th Avenue and Margaret Drive have also been changed.
Seventh Avenue is now closed to through traffic and parking due to construction in the area. A new gate has been installed where Margaret Drive connects to Capstone Drive behind Gorgas Library.
Access to the gate is only available for faculty, staff and those with a UA disability permit. The gate can be opened by swiping an ACT card or purchasing an RFID tag for $10 to open it remotely. The gate will go up at 4:30 p.m. every weekday and will remain closed until 6 a.m. It will be open around the clock on weekends.
Along with the new gate, two spaces to the right of Margaret Drive have been converted to a turn-around area. Chris D’Esposito, assistant director of parking services, said the gate was constructed to create a cleaner flow of traffic.
“It’s a good system,” the new East Baton Rouge Parish Library director said of the 1.9-million-item, 540-employee system he took over on Monday. “It’s not perfect, there are always things we can do better.”
Watts, who spent the morning at the city-parish Human Resources department filling out forms and completing a drug and alcohol screen, said he was ready to get to work.
“We have major construction projects,” he said first when asked about his priorities. “I want to make sure those stay on track.”
Watts, who left the top job at the Mobile public library system in Alabama, was hired partly on the basis of his experience in overseeing library construction.
The East Baton Rouge Parish library system has four branches under construction or in the design phase: the Fairwood Branch Library on Old Hammond Highway, a new main library on Goodwood, the Rouzan branch library on Perkins, and the River Center Branch Library downtown.
The latter two have both engendered their share of controversy — Rouzan because of its association with developer Tommy Spinosa and the $21 million River Center branch library, which critics, including some on the Metro Council, have decried as excessively expensive.
Watts also said he plans to “work hard” to rebuild any broken relations from the departure of former Director David Farrar, who resigned in December 2011 after information became public about a 15-year-old Alabama criminal case in which he was accused of sexual abuse and impersonating a police officer.
“I am a totally different individual,” Watts said. “This is a new chapter.”
Watts said he plans to focus on becoming familiar with the parish’s library system, with its approximately 542 budgeted employees and $44 million budget, both more than double what he oversaw in Mobile.
“It’s a process,” Watts said. “It will be weeks before I have a good handle on it like I want to.”
Since he accepted the job, Watts said, East Baton Rouge Parish Library staff have sent him the minutes and video recordings of the Library Board of Control meetings so that he could begin to familiarize himself with the system.
One of the first non-construction projects Watts will oversee is the installation of a Radio-Frequency Identity tag system.
Watts, who oversaw the installation of a similar system in Mobile, said the system will save time on check-in and check-out, because items will not have to be individually scanned.
The system will also make it far easier to locate lost items, he said.
The library system has budgeted $1.2 million for the project, which will be split between equipment costs and paying a contractor to physically tag each of the library’s inventory 1.9 million items, said Assistant Library Director Mary Stein, who championed the RFID project last year, said.
Watts, who with his wife has been in Baton Rouge less than two weeks, said he had a positive initial impression of the city.
In addition to new class schedules, University of Alabama students are adjusting to campus parking changes upon their return from the holiday break, as various roads and portions of parking lots have been closed.
An initiative known as the Campus Master Plan, which was approved by the Board of Trustees in November, includes plans for a new 750-space parking deck near Riverside Residence Hall and adjustments to various parking lots and streets.
The Riverside parking deck began construction while students were away over the holiday and upon return, residents noticed that the construction had taken up precious parking spaces.
UA’s Housing and Residential Department emailed residents on Jan. 11, informing them the construction removed roughly 290 spaces on the west side of the Riverside East Yellow Residential surface lot. The emailed also stated 190 new spaces were available on the east side of the lot to “offset this loss of parking.”
Despite these accommodations, less parking is available for the 22,454 parking permits that were sold in fall 2012, said UA spokeswoman Cathy Andreen, and some students often find themselves hard-pressed locating an available spot.
Leah Horn, a freshman majoring in communicative disorders, enjoys the protected parking of the Ferguson Deck but has noticed a general decrease in available spaces.
“It has become a lot harder to find a spot in that deck because so many people who normally park elsewhere have had to move because of the construction,” Horn said. “I feel that it might have been wiser to wait until the summer since it affects a large number of students.”
Although parking is currently limited, the Riverside parking deck will eventually provide more parking for the rapidly increasing number of students who live and drive on campus.
“Parking in the Riverside lot has definitely been a problem,” Matthew Warren, a freshman majoring in aerospace engineering, said. “The addition of the new deck will definitely help.”
Other changes made to parking spaces on campus include the closing of the South Rose Reserve lot, the SEC Reserve lot and the northern half of the South Ferguson lot. Barnwell lot is now only available to those with an orange residential parking pass.
In addition to the several parking lots undergoing adjustments, 7th Avenue and Margaret Drive have also been changed.
Seventh Avenue is now closed to through traffic and parking due to construction in the area. A new gate has been installed where Margaret Drive connects to Capstone Drive behind Gorgas Library.
Access to the gate is only available for faculty, staff and those with a UA disability permit. The gate can be opened by swiping an ACT card or purchasing an RFID tag for $10 to open it remotely. The gate will go up at 4:30 p.m. every weekday and will remain closed until 6 a.m. It will be open around the clock on weekends.
Along with the new gate, two spaces to the right of Margaret Drive have been converted to a turn-around area. Chris D’Esposito, assistant director of parking services, said the gate was constructed to create a cleaner flow of traffic.
SUNY to boost online offerings
State University of New York Chancellor Nancy Zimpher presented her plans for the 64-campus system in her third State of the University address on Tuesday, including an expansion of online education and increased efforts to battle student debt.
For the first time, SUNY students will be able to complete a bachelor’s degree online, Zimpher announced. Three degrees in high-demand fields like information technology and health care will launch this fall, and seven more will be available in fall 2014.
Additionally, students will be able to take online courses from any other SUNY college while earning credit and paying tuition to their home campuses.
“No institution in America – not even the for-profits – will be able to match the number of offerings and the quality of instruction,” Zimpher said. “In three years, we will enroll 100,000 degree-seeking students in Open SUNY, making us the largest public online provider of education in the nation.”
SUNY Board of Trustees Chairman H. Carl McCall said after the speech Tuesday that Zimpher’s initiatives will improve students’ success from birth through college and their careers.
“It’s a very ambitious plan, but SUNY has to be ambitious,” McCall said. “We are a leader in public higher education, and the chancellor’s outline today of how we’re going to continue to play this leadership role was very significant.”
As part of SUNY’s online efforts, top professors will begin to provide “massive open online courses.” Many of the country’s most prestigious universities present such courses, which are online for free with the aim of extending access to education. Generally, these courses are not credit bearing.
The system will develop a system of assessing higher-learning experiences, so students who’ve taken some courses, such as free courses online from accredited institutions, can get credit for their work.
SUNY will also focus on providing experiential education to students -- even those enrolled only in online courses -- helping them to secure internships, research or volunteer opportunities during their studies. These experiences will be recorded on an extracurricular transcript and be designated on their diplomas.
“When you provide the access and the opportunity, you’ve got to be sure that you also provide the support, and that’s what the chancellor was saying,” Cliff Wood, Rockland Community College president, said after the speech. “We have to be sure that we build in all of these structures to give students the full chance to be successful, whether it’s through giving them credit for the experiences they’ve had, giving them experiential education -- all of those things that she said we need to do better.”
With money saved in recent years through shared services, SUNY has begun offering required courses more often. Increased course availability coupled with access to other campuses’ online courses will lead to more students graduating early, Zimpher said.
“We are committed to the idea that students should have the choice to graduate in three years,” she said during the speech. “We believe that by 2015, 25 percent of SUNY students will be able to do this.”
Binghamton University President Harvey Stenger, who attended the speech, said 100 students annually are already graduating from Binghamton University within three years. It has an enrollment of about 12,000 students.
“It allows students to reduce their student loans. It reduces their tuition because they’re only paying three years of tuition instead of four,” Stenger said. “The students can stay and get their master’s degree in an accelerated fashion and have a little extra value at the same time.”
Teams have acted upon these issues, offering all sorts of concession and apparel deals, but the fair-weather fan isn’t going to spend time researching these things as they would research pricing out travel and lodging for a vacation. A $1,000 expense is worth studying. A $150 night out? Not so much.
Especially when you can lift your head from the laptop and look up to see an NBA game, likely in full high definition on a receiver your cable company gave you at an ever-cheapening rate, flickering for free on your local affiliate. You don’t even have to shell out nearly $200 for NBA League Pass to watch that same random midweek game, coming to you live or paused by choice with varying camera angles and impressive production values. Should your team’s high scorer limp off to the locker room during the contest, you’re probably better off at home anyway – because all the NBA news you’d ever need is yours immediately, just for the price of a computer and Internet connection. Updates come quicker in the living room.
You can quibble about the style of play all you want, but if you enjoy the game, you enjoy the game – and it’s much easier to enjoy regional NBA basketball for free than it is to check in on the local high school or college team on TV. To say nothing of the fact that even the most basic of cable or dish packages will allow you to see nationally televised games nearly every day of the week, often two times a night.
The fears that baseball owners expressed in the 1930s regarding radio airplay of games, possibly cutting into their attendance figures, might be finally realized. There’s no comparing sitting in the warm sunshine of a slow-as-molasses (but still enjoyable, in person) baseball game with huddling around a scratchy RCA radio dial. Basketball’s an indoor sport, though. A winter sport that is easy to follow on television. The experience isn’t nearly the same. There is nothing like taking in a live NBA game with your eyes acting as your own producer in the truck, but the TV experience ain’t half bad.
And even at half-cost, fans aren’t showing up. You can blame the lockout or slow-paced coaching or losing records or the economy all you want; these are all significant factors behind the lacking attendance. Even in the shadiest of shacks, though, with the most minimal of electronic setups, NBA basketball can still be a fantastic thing.
For the first time, SUNY students will be able to complete a bachelor’s degree online, Zimpher announced. Three degrees in high-demand fields like information technology and health care will launch this fall, and seven more will be available in fall 2014.
Additionally, students will be able to take online courses from any other SUNY college while earning credit and paying tuition to their home campuses.
“No institution in America – not even the for-profits – will be able to match the number of offerings and the quality of instruction,” Zimpher said. “In three years, we will enroll 100,000 degree-seeking students in Open SUNY, making us the largest public online provider of education in the nation.”
SUNY Board of Trustees Chairman H. Carl McCall said after the speech Tuesday that Zimpher’s initiatives will improve students’ success from birth through college and their careers.
“It’s a very ambitious plan, but SUNY has to be ambitious,” McCall said. “We are a leader in public higher education, and the chancellor’s outline today of how we’re going to continue to play this leadership role was very significant.”
As part of SUNY’s online efforts, top professors will begin to provide “massive open online courses.” Many of the country’s most prestigious universities present such courses, which are online for free with the aim of extending access to education. Generally, these courses are not credit bearing.
The system will develop a system of assessing higher-learning experiences, so students who’ve taken some courses, such as free courses online from accredited institutions, can get credit for their work.
SUNY will also focus on providing experiential education to students -- even those enrolled only in online courses -- helping them to secure internships, research or volunteer opportunities during their studies. These experiences will be recorded on an extracurricular transcript and be designated on their diplomas.
“When you provide the access and the opportunity, you’ve got to be sure that you also provide the support, and that’s what the chancellor was saying,” Cliff Wood, Rockland Community College president, said after the speech. “We have to be sure that we build in all of these structures to give students the full chance to be successful, whether it’s through giving them credit for the experiences they’ve had, giving them experiential education -- all of those things that she said we need to do better.”
With money saved in recent years through shared services, SUNY has begun offering required courses more often. Increased course availability coupled with access to other campuses’ online courses will lead to more students graduating early, Zimpher said.
“We are committed to the idea that students should have the choice to graduate in three years,” she said during the speech. “We believe that by 2015, 25 percent of SUNY students will be able to do this.”
Binghamton University President Harvey Stenger, who attended the speech, said 100 students annually are already graduating from Binghamton University within three years. It has an enrollment of about 12,000 students.
“It allows students to reduce their student loans. It reduces their tuition because they’re only paying three years of tuition instead of four,” Stenger said. “The students can stay and get their master’s degree in an accelerated fashion and have a little extra value at the same time.”
Teams have acted upon these issues, offering all sorts of concession and apparel deals, but the fair-weather fan isn’t going to spend time researching these things as they would research pricing out travel and lodging for a vacation. A $1,000 expense is worth studying. A $150 night out? Not so much.
Especially when you can lift your head from the laptop and look up to see an NBA game, likely in full high definition on a receiver your cable company gave you at an ever-cheapening rate, flickering for free on your local affiliate. You don’t even have to shell out nearly $200 for NBA League Pass to watch that same random midweek game, coming to you live or paused by choice with varying camera angles and impressive production values. Should your team’s high scorer limp off to the locker room during the contest, you’re probably better off at home anyway – because all the NBA news you’d ever need is yours immediately, just for the price of a computer and Internet connection. Updates come quicker in the living room.
You can quibble about the style of play all you want, but if you enjoy the game, you enjoy the game – and it’s much easier to enjoy regional NBA basketball for free than it is to check in on the local high school or college team on TV. To say nothing of the fact that even the most basic of cable or dish packages will allow you to see nationally televised games nearly every day of the week, often two times a night.
The fears that baseball owners expressed in the 1930s regarding radio airplay of games, possibly cutting into their attendance figures, might be finally realized. There’s no comparing sitting in the warm sunshine of a slow-as-molasses (but still enjoyable, in person) baseball game with huddling around a scratchy RCA radio dial. Basketball’s an indoor sport, though. A winter sport that is easy to follow on television. The experience isn’t nearly the same. There is nothing like taking in a live NBA game with your eyes acting as your own producer in the truck, but the TV experience ain’t half bad.
And even at half-cost, fans aren’t showing up. You can blame the lockout or slow-paced coaching or losing records or the economy all you want; these are all significant factors behind the lacking attendance. Even in the shadiest of shacks, though, with the most minimal of electronic setups, NBA basketball can still be a fantastic thing.
Sunday, January 13, 2013
Officials hash out merger proposal
After the pomp and circumstance of the legislative session’s first day ended, Rio Grande Valley lawmakers began deliberating about what language should be included in the UT System’s bill to establish a long-sought medical school, their No. 1 priority for the 140-day session.
While broad support exists among local lawmakers for the merger of the University of Texas at Brownsville and the University of Texas-Pan American, divisions persist regarding the structure, financing and location of the medical school.
The negotiations over the entire proposal’s components will test the delegation’s regional cooperation at a time when they must gain statewide support for a measure that requires the backing of two-thirds of the Legislature.
Valley lawmakers met for several hours Wednesday, but no final agreement emerged from the discussions.
But there is “nothing insurmountable” in any disagreements about the universities’ merger and the medical school’s creation, said state Rep. Rene Oliveira, D-Brownsville, the dean of the Valley’s House delegation who will file the bill and guide it through the legislative process. Oliveira, however, insisted that they not let regional rivalries sink the proposal, comparing it to cutting a pie when the flour hasn’t been made.
“We all have concerns and want to fight for our districts but that fight can come another day,” Oliveira said Friday. “There’s nothing to divide right now. We have to create something and then figure out what’s next.”
UT System Chancellor Francisco G. Cigarroa unveiled Dec. 6 the proposal to merge UTB and UTPA into a new, unnamed university, along with plans to fund the South Texas medical school. The UT Board of Regents unanimously approved the merger then, but the plan requires approval from two-thirds of the Legislature, which also will consider new medical school spending requests.
As a new higher education institution, the university would be eligible for Permanent University Funding — an endowment grown through revenues from state-owned land — and would match UT’s other regional universities in student population, research expenditures and endowments. Beyond creating the new university with locations across the Valley, regents also approved $100 million in funding for the next decade to develop a South Texas medical school.
The starting point for Valley lawmakers when they met this week was a UT-drafted bill that abolished the existing universities and created a new one with access to the Permanent University Funding, or PUF. But the bill also deferred to legislation passed in 2009 authorizing the creation of the South Texas medical school with its main campus and administrative offices in Cameron County.
That rankled Hidalgo County legislators, who felt they would not be given a fair shake from the start. Oliveira said he promised his House colleagues this past week that the existing law for the Cameron County-based school would be struck from the books, adding that the medical school’s location should be a “rational, business-based decision by the UT System.”
Longoria and other Hidalgo County legislators believe that Valley taxpayers will eventually have to pay a portion of the bill. Officials from both UTPA and the UT System, however, said they did not view a taxing entity as essential to the funding of the medical school and would not ask local leaders to pursue one.
“If they want to find ways to raise money locally, that’s a local decision. It’s not a UT decision anymore than it was a UT decision in Austin,” said Dr. Kenneth Shine, the vice chancellor for health affairs at the UT System.
In Travis County, where voters approved a property tax increase for a medical school in November, the board of regents told local leaders they would only put up $30 million toward $65 million needed for the school. Elected officials turned to local taxpayers to bridge the gap.
For the Rio Grande Valley, UT is seeking assistance from the state Legislature to the tune of $20 million annually — an option the system did not pursue for Austin, Shine said. The regents also agreed to put up $100 million over 10 years for the South Texas medical school with additional money to come from the Permanent University Fund.
Even if those funds were not available, Shine said, the Valley is not nearly as property wealthy as Central Texas. Hidalgo and Cameron counties have total taxable property valued at close to $43 billion, compared to more than $98 billion in Travis County.
But proponents of a local taxing district say adding a nickel to the tax levy on each $100 in property valuations would generate more than $13.6 million annually in Hidalgo alone.
With Texas struggling to fund essential state services, it’s unrealistic to expect state lawmakers to budget $20 million for the Valley’s medical school when those elsewhere are supported locally, said , listing Austin, El Paso and San Antonio as other areas that pay part of their medical schools’ costs.
Add in the persistent propensity for the Valley’s cities to compete with one another, and it’s resulted in sensitive negotiations — even as area lawmakers promote the need for regional cooperation in Austin. With Valley lawmakers coalescing behind the merger of the universities, the looming question is whether they can find common ground on the medical school.
UTPA President Robert Nelsen said the Valley’s lawmakers understand that the merger will require a “regional approach” but conceded “there are still concerns about how you finance it all.”
Nelsen said he did not see a taxing district as necessary given the support of the regents, expected legislative funding and savings from the university merger. He added that research at the new medical school and university will also generate significant revenue.
While broad support exists among local lawmakers for the merger of the University of Texas at Brownsville and the University of Texas-Pan American, divisions persist regarding the structure, financing and location of the medical school.
The negotiations over the entire proposal’s components will test the delegation’s regional cooperation at a time when they must gain statewide support for a measure that requires the backing of two-thirds of the Legislature.
Valley lawmakers met for several hours Wednesday, but no final agreement emerged from the discussions.
But there is “nothing insurmountable” in any disagreements about the universities’ merger and the medical school’s creation, said state Rep. Rene Oliveira, D-Brownsville, the dean of the Valley’s House delegation who will file the bill and guide it through the legislative process. Oliveira, however, insisted that they not let regional rivalries sink the proposal, comparing it to cutting a pie when the flour hasn’t been made.
“We all have concerns and want to fight for our districts but that fight can come another day,” Oliveira said Friday. “There’s nothing to divide right now. We have to create something and then figure out what’s next.”
UT System Chancellor Francisco G. Cigarroa unveiled Dec. 6 the proposal to merge UTB and UTPA into a new, unnamed university, along with plans to fund the South Texas medical school. The UT Board of Regents unanimously approved the merger then, but the plan requires approval from two-thirds of the Legislature, which also will consider new medical school spending requests.
As a new higher education institution, the university would be eligible for Permanent University Funding — an endowment grown through revenues from state-owned land — and would match UT’s other regional universities in student population, research expenditures and endowments. Beyond creating the new university with locations across the Valley, regents also approved $100 million in funding for the next decade to develop a South Texas medical school.
The starting point for Valley lawmakers when they met this week was a UT-drafted bill that abolished the existing universities and created a new one with access to the Permanent University Funding, or PUF. But the bill also deferred to legislation passed in 2009 authorizing the creation of the South Texas medical school with its main campus and administrative offices in Cameron County.
That rankled Hidalgo County legislators, who felt they would not be given a fair shake from the start. Oliveira said he promised his House colleagues this past week that the existing law for the Cameron County-based school would be struck from the books, adding that the medical school’s location should be a “rational, business-based decision by the UT System.”
Longoria and other Hidalgo County legislators believe that Valley taxpayers will eventually have to pay a portion of the bill. Officials from both UTPA and the UT System, however, said they did not view a taxing entity as essential to the funding of the medical school and would not ask local leaders to pursue one.
“If they want to find ways to raise money locally, that’s a local decision. It’s not a UT decision anymore than it was a UT decision in Austin,” said Dr. Kenneth Shine, the vice chancellor for health affairs at the UT System.
In Travis County, where voters approved a property tax increase for a medical school in November, the board of regents told local leaders they would only put up $30 million toward $65 million needed for the school. Elected officials turned to local taxpayers to bridge the gap.
For the Rio Grande Valley, UT is seeking assistance from the state Legislature to the tune of $20 million annually — an option the system did not pursue for Austin, Shine said. The regents also agreed to put up $100 million over 10 years for the South Texas medical school with additional money to come from the Permanent University Fund.
Even if those funds were not available, Shine said, the Valley is not nearly as property wealthy as Central Texas. Hidalgo and Cameron counties have total taxable property valued at close to $43 billion, compared to more than $98 billion in Travis County.
But proponents of a local taxing district say adding a nickel to the tax levy on each $100 in property valuations would generate more than $13.6 million annually in Hidalgo alone.
With Texas struggling to fund essential state services, it’s unrealistic to expect state lawmakers to budget $20 million for the Valley’s medical school when those elsewhere are supported locally, said , listing Austin, El Paso and San Antonio as other areas that pay part of their medical schools’ costs.
Add in the persistent propensity for the Valley’s cities to compete with one another, and it’s resulted in sensitive negotiations — even as area lawmakers promote the need for regional cooperation in Austin. With Valley lawmakers coalescing behind the merger of the universities, the looming question is whether they can find common ground on the medical school.
UTPA President Robert Nelsen said the Valley’s lawmakers understand that the merger will require a “regional approach” but conceded “there are still concerns about how you finance it all.”
Nelsen said he did not see a taxing district as necessary given the support of the regents, expected legislative funding and savings from the university merger. He added that research at the new medical school and university will also generate significant revenue.
oups unite in bid to save riverside pub
GrCommunity organisations fighting to save a historic riverside pub have joined forces in “unprecedented number” to oppose a planning appeal.
The defunct Penny Ferry in Chesterton, which has a long association with rowers along the River Cam, was saved from demolition by councillors in July following a campaign supported by heritage groups and 557 residents.
Planning permission had previously been granted on appeal for construction of five houses on the site. But since then the roads around Water Street have become part of a conservation area, meaning that separate consent was needed to flatten the closed pub which had been called the Penny Ferry but was more recently named the Pike and Eel.
The owners of the former Pike and Eel then lodged an appeal against the refusal of conservation area demolition consent.
Lynette Gilbert, chairman of the Riverside Area Residents Association (RARA), said: “The Penny Ferry is an iconic location steeped in history with the rowing community of Cambridge.
“An unprecendented number of groups have now come together to oppose the owners’ appeal against the refusal of demolition. I can’t remember the last time so many groups got together.
“The pub is of great benefit to the community and in such a good location.”
Among the groups opposing the demolition are the Old Chesterton Residents Association, RARA and the Fen Estate and Nuffield Road Residents Association.
Other organisations include Friends of Stourbridge Common, Save Our Green Spaces, Cambridge Past, Present and Future, the Campaign for Real Ale (Camra), Chesterton Community Association, Cam Conservators and the Cambridgeshire Rowing Association.
In July, members of the north area committee said the pub, which has been closed for a number of years, made an important contribution to the character of the neighbourhood because of its history, its role in the community and its setting across the Cam from Stourbridge Common.
Alistair Cook, of the Camra Cambridge and District branch, said: “Our view is this is fantastic location for a pub and is good for walkers and rowers along the river. I have spoken to many landlords across the city who have backed our view.”
As founder and chief executive of Ruby Restaurant Group, Doug Cavanaugh oversees a chain of 37 Ruby's Diner restaurants in six states, including eateries at five airports. His first Ruby's Diner, which opened in 1982, was a renovated bait shop on Balboa Pier in Newport Beach that had been slated for demolition. The Irvine company celebrated its 30-year anniversary in December.
Cavanaugh, 56, was born and raised in Los Angeles, where he lived until he was 12, before moving to Tustin, where his mother still lives in his childhood home. He has fond memories of Los Angeles. He often biked past the oil fields near Baldwin Hills and watched cars race at the Ascot Park speedway in Gardena. "I grew up in L.A. in the golden age," he says. "When the streetlights came on, it was time to come home."
The summer they moved to Orange County, Cavanaugh's family stayed in a motel near Disneyland while their house was being built. Cavanaugh spent nearly every day at Disneyland that summer, and says the theme park's rigorous attention to detail and focus on providing a unique experience left an impression. "I got my MBA in Disney at the age of 12," he jokes. "I've really tried to bring those principles to Ruby's."
What he didn't glean from "The happiest place on Earth," Cavanaugh says he learned from his father, who ran a real estate and construction business. "My dad was a classic entrepreneur, a hardworking guy," he says. Cavanaugh would drive with his father to construction sites or sit beside him at meetings. His first job, at the age of 8, was sterilizing copper pipes for the construction crews, for which he was paid 50 cents an hour, as he remembers it. "And I was happy to get it."
In high school, he formed a business of his own, scrubbing down boats with a school buddy at Newport Harbor — though, he admits, it was really to meet girls. When he graduated with a marketing degree from USC in 1979, Cavanaugh was looking for his next big venture.
It came to him on Mother's Day of 1980, as he and some of his friends were flipping through The Times as they sat in a hot tub. There in the real estate pages was an advertisement for nine acres of oceanfront property on Nantucket Island, complete with cottages, a restaurant and a pool. They flew out east to investigate, and within months Cavanaugh had opened his first restaurant, the Summer House, with his partners. "It was really intoxicating because it clicked very quickly," Cavanaugh says.
He received a crash course in the restaurant business from a partner, his ex-girlfriend's mother. He developed recipes, culled ingredients and tended bar. Soon, patrons were flying private jets in from New York City just for dinner. "It was instant gratification.... You knew exactly how well you did that day," says Cavanaugh, and he instantly fell in love with the restaurant business.
He saw the building one day jogging on the beach near the Balboa Pier. It stood abandoned with a huge redwood tub in the center that once held bait. "It was in terrible shape; it was about ready to fall down," Cavanaugh says.
The bait shop was constructed in 1940 in the "streamline modern" style, something Cavanaugh says screamed "diner." When he approached the city originally, officials dismissed him as young and inexperienced. In 1982, he sold his stake in the Nantucket restaurant and returned. "I didn't make a dime. But I got my education," Cavanaugh says. "I now viewed myself as this worldly restaurateur of 26."
Cavanaugh and his new partner, junior high buddy Ralph Kosmides, pleaded with the city to let them restore the building, which leaders had planned to tear down. This time, the city relented. Cavanaugh and Kosmides embarked on a "stick-by-stick" restoration of the place, doing much of the work themselves. They pored over literature about '40s diners and scoured antique shops for vintage Coca-Cola signs, cigarette machines and red vinyl booths until the 45-seat diner was just right. Customers often mistakenly think the restaurant has been around since the 1940s.
The defunct Penny Ferry in Chesterton, which has a long association with rowers along the River Cam, was saved from demolition by councillors in July following a campaign supported by heritage groups and 557 residents.
Planning permission had previously been granted on appeal for construction of five houses on the site. But since then the roads around Water Street have become part of a conservation area, meaning that separate consent was needed to flatten the closed pub which had been called the Penny Ferry but was more recently named the Pike and Eel.
The owners of the former Pike and Eel then lodged an appeal against the refusal of conservation area demolition consent.
Lynette Gilbert, chairman of the Riverside Area Residents Association (RARA), said: “The Penny Ferry is an iconic location steeped in history with the rowing community of Cambridge.
“An unprecendented number of groups have now come together to oppose the owners’ appeal against the refusal of demolition. I can’t remember the last time so many groups got together.
“The pub is of great benefit to the community and in such a good location.”
Among the groups opposing the demolition are the Old Chesterton Residents Association, RARA and the Fen Estate and Nuffield Road Residents Association.
Other organisations include Friends of Stourbridge Common, Save Our Green Spaces, Cambridge Past, Present and Future, the Campaign for Real Ale (Camra), Chesterton Community Association, Cam Conservators and the Cambridgeshire Rowing Association.
In July, members of the north area committee said the pub, which has been closed for a number of years, made an important contribution to the character of the neighbourhood because of its history, its role in the community and its setting across the Cam from Stourbridge Common.
Alistair Cook, of the Camra Cambridge and District branch, said: “Our view is this is fantastic location for a pub and is good for walkers and rowers along the river. I have spoken to many landlords across the city who have backed our view.”
As founder and chief executive of Ruby Restaurant Group, Doug Cavanaugh oversees a chain of 37 Ruby's Diner restaurants in six states, including eateries at five airports. His first Ruby's Diner, which opened in 1982, was a renovated bait shop on Balboa Pier in Newport Beach that had been slated for demolition. The Irvine company celebrated its 30-year anniversary in December.
Cavanaugh, 56, was born and raised in Los Angeles, where he lived until he was 12, before moving to Tustin, where his mother still lives in his childhood home. He has fond memories of Los Angeles. He often biked past the oil fields near Baldwin Hills and watched cars race at the Ascot Park speedway in Gardena. "I grew up in L.A. in the golden age," he says. "When the streetlights came on, it was time to come home."
The summer they moved to Orange County, Cavanaugh's family stayed in a motel near Disneyland while their house was being built. Cavanaugh spent nearly every day at Disneyland that summer, and says the theme park's rigorous attention to detail and focus on providing a unique experience left an impression. "I got my MBA in Disney at the age of 12," he jokes. "I've really tried to bring those principles to Ruby's."
What he didn't glean from "The happiest place on Earth," Cavanaugh says he learned from his father, who ran a real estate and construction business. "My dad was a classic entrepreneur, a hardworking guy," he says. Cavanaugh would drive with his father to construction sites or sit beside him at meetings. His first job, at the age of 8, was sterilizing copper pipes for the construction crews, for which he was paid 50 cents an hour, as he remembers it. "And I was happy to get it."
In high school, he formed a business of his own, scrubbing down boats with a school buddy at Newport Harbor — though, he admits, it was really to meet girls. When he graduated with a marketing degree from USC in 1979, Cavanaugh was looking for his next big venture.
It came to him on Mother's Day of 1980, as he and some of his friends were flipping through The Times as they sat in a hot tub. There in the real estate pages was an advertisement for nine acres of oceanfront property on Nantucket Island, complete with cottages, a restaurant and a pool. They flew out east to investigate, and within months Cavanaugh had opened his first restaurant, the Summer House, with his partners. "It was really intoxicating because it clicked very quickly," Cavanaugh says.
He received a crash course in the restaurant business from a partner, his ex-girlfriend's mother. He developed recipes, culled ingredients and tended bar. Soon, patrons were flying private jets in from New York City just for dinner. "It was instant gratification.... You knew exactly how well you did that day," says Cavanaugh, and he instantly fell in love with the restaurant business.
He saw the building one day jogging on the beach near the Balboa Pier. It stood abandoned with a huge redwood tub in the center that once held bait. "It was in terrible shape; it was about ready to fall down," Cavanaugh says.
The bait shop was constructed in 1940 in the "streamline modern" style, something Cavanaugh says screamed "diner." When he approached the city originally, officials dismissed him as young and inexperienced. In 1982, he sold his stake in the Nantucket restaurant and returned. "I didn't make a dime. But I got my education," Cavanaugh says. "I now viewed myself as this worldly restaurateur of 26."
Cavanaugh and his new partner, junior high buddy Ralph Kosmides, pleaded with the city to let them restore the building, which leaders had planned to tear down. This time, the city relented. Cavanaugh and Kosmides embarked on a "stick-by-stick" restoration of the place, doing much of the work themselves. They pored over literature about '40s diners and scoured antique shops for vintage Coca-Cola signs, cigarette machines and red vinyl booths until the 45-seat diner was just right. Customers often mistakenly think the restaurant has been around since the 1940s.
Thursday, January 10, 2013
School officials back enhanced safety protocols
Many of the School Committee members and approximately 20 parents who attended a recent presentation by the Police Department on enhanced safety protocols came away impressed, but they would like the department to drop the use of the ALICE acronym, which stands for Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter and Evacuate.
Committee member Robert Golledge said the acronym “bears distraction and takes away from the added improvements of enhanced safety options and evacuation.”
“You are on the right track, though,” said Golledge, directing his comments to Police Chief Ken Berkowitz and CHS School Resource Officer Chip Yeaton, who led the 90-minute presentation at CHS on Tuesday night.
Created by former teacher and SWAT officer Greg Crane of Burleson, Texas, ALICE is an “active resistance model” that utilizes environmental design, technology, communication, and human action to improve one’s survival chances when faced with an immediate danger.
Both the chief and Yeaton said that while they like the ALICE program, they also like other programs and can easily adopt the best features of all programs to enhance school security.
“ALICE is one of many programs out there and there are others out there,” said Yeaton. “We don’t want to get hung up on terminology. You can call it the ‘Chip’ program if you like.”
Regardless of its final name, Yeaton has been working for months to overhaul the current protocol, which consists of an alert and lockdown only and is used in school systems across the country. For the past several years, students and staff have been instructed to lock their classroom doors, turn off the lights, and hide in a far corner of the room while remaining calm and quiet.
A program like ALICE, on the other hand, teaches a variety of survival methods, or “response options,” that are designed to help mitigate casualty rates in the event of a real-life attack.
Some of the more controversial strategies fall under the “counter” component of the program and are to be used only as a last resort, such as when a shooter has breached a locked door and entered a classroom. The preferred option, according to ALICE advocates, is to run when it is safe to do so, and Yeaton has said that the new training will emphasize this method whenever possible.
The “inform” component, meanwhile, advises school administrators to monitor the attacker using surveillance cameras and to provide specific, real-time information about his or her location in the school using the building’s PA system. This has the effect of confusing or frustrating the intruder, while also providing valuable information to students and staff.
School Superintendent Jeff Granatino said teacher and staff training on safety protocols will continue and he will plan for a general information session for parents with the chief at a later date.
Granatino said what he has heard from the staff is that they like having options that enhance safety. “What we want is that the staff is trained appropriately and that options are given,” he said.
School officials also agreed that instruction should be age-appropriate, noting that what is taught to high school students should be different than what is presented to elementary students.
Some of the parents in attendance expressed concerns over the “counter” component in particular. Suzanne Hegland pointed to the recent tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut, noting that some who rushed the intruder were gunned down. “Rushing an armed person is not optimal,” she said.
Chief Berkowitz disputed this assertion and said, “I never said it was optimal to rush a gunman, but what I am saying is we need to change the mindset. You don’t want to wait, do nothing, and hope for a rescue. The cavalry may not be coming.”
The other major new development that came out of Tuesday night’s meeting was the announcement by Berkowitz that he will be asking for more funding in next year’s town budget to add more officers to the School Resource Officer program. School Committee member Reuki Schutt said she, for one, would stand up at town meeting and support the chief on his budget request.
However, Berkowitz said adding more officers is not a cure-all for safety protocols, although he said the success that Yeaton has had at the high school should be duplicated in the other schools throughout the district.
As for the new safety measures, School Committee Chairman John Bonnanzio said the committee is satisfied with the Police Department’s efforts and said the committee will not be taking a vote or making a policy decision on this matter. He said the committee may want updates from the superintendent on the progress of the training sessions.
Gimmie, a startup that began with rewards for mobile gamers, has just shifted its focus to Asian markets by relocating to Singapore and taking funding from a government agency there. The company said today that it took 639,000 Singaporean dollars ($522,000) in funding from a group led by WaveMaker Labs in partnership with the Singapore National Research Foundation. Also participating in the round is Jakarta-based venture firm Ideosource.
The company pivoted both its product and its location. The company used to be based in Silicon Valley and had raised $200,000 from mobile incubator Tandem. Originally it let gamers earn special points that could be redeemed for discounts on products like iPad cases and pillows.
But now it’s more of a white-label solution that big platforms like MOL Friendster use for giving users localized rewards. Gimmie creates custom campaigns for big publishers in Asia to give rewards like discounts on local restaurants or Uniqlo gift cards. Publishers get an online dashboard to manage their programs and they can also use the platform to create incentivized surveys for data collection .
“I felt an opportunity based on what I was hearing. Nothing was being addressed for the Asian market and we had some strategic advantages because of the personal connections I have. At the same time, there were many companies trying to do the same thing with rewards in the U.S.,” Ng said. “I had to basically go against the wishes of our stakeholders.”
Many larger companies like Kiip and Tapjoy experiment with various forms of offering virtual or real-world rewards to mobile gamers.
“I want to be the market leader,” Ng said. “I don’t want to be one of many companies trying to do the same thing.” Ng took funding from a government-tied entity because he felt it would provide the company with more connections to the local market. He also said they were a more reputable funding source compared to many of the upstart firms and funds in the region.
Ng said the company will be enabling others to resell the platform and launching new product features for different types of mobile devices in one to two months. They’re currently looking for publishers in Asia with large numbers of users.
Committee member Robert Golledge said the acronym “bears distraction and takes away from the added improvements of enhanced safety options and evacuation.”
“You are on the right track, though,” said Golledge, directing his comments to Police Chief Ken Berkowitz and CHS School Resource Officer Chip Yeaton, who led the 90-minute presentation at CHS on Tuesday night.
Created by former teacher and SWAT officer Greg Crane of Burleson, Texas, ALICE is an “active resistance model” that utilizes environmental design, technology, communication, and human action to improve one’s survival chances when faced with an immediate danger.
Both the chief and Yeaton said that while they like the ALICE program, they also like other programs and can easily adopt the best features of all programs to enhance school security.
“ALICE is one of many programs out there and there are others out there,” said Yeaton. “We don’t want to get hung up on terminology. You can call it the ‘Chip’ program if you like.”
Regardless of its final name, Yeaton has been working for months to overhaul the current protocol, which consists of an alert and lockdown only and is used in school systems across the country. For the past several years, students and staff have been instructed to lock their classroom doors, turn off the lights, and hide in a far corner of the room while remaining calm and quiet.
A program like ALICE, on the other hand, teaches a variety of survival methods, or “response options,” that are designed to help mitigate casualty rates in the event of a real-life attack.
Some of the more controversial strategies fall under the “counter” component of the program and are to be used only as a last resort, such as when a shooter has breached a locked door and entered a classroom. The preferred option, according to ALICE advocates, is to run when it is safe to do so, and Yeaton has said that the new training will emphasize this method whenever possible.
The “inform” component, meanwhile, advises school administrators to monitor the attacker using surveillance cameras and to provide specific, real-time information about his or her location in the school using the building’s PA system. This has the effect of confusing or frustrating the intruder, while also providing valuable information to students and staff.
School Superintendent Jeff Granatino said teacher and staff training on safety protocols will continue and he will plan for a general information session for parents with the chief at a later date.
Granatino said what he has heard from the staff is that they like having options that enhance safety. “What we want is that the staff is trained appropriately and that options are given,” he said.
School officials also agreed that instruction should be age-appropriate, noting that what is taught to high school students should be different than what is presented to elementary students.
Some of the parents in attendance expressed concerns over the “counter” component in particular. Suzanne Hegland pointed to the recent tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut, noting that some who rushed the intruder were gunned down. “Rushing an armed person is not optimal,” she said.
Chief Berkowitz disputed this assertion and said, “I never said it was optimal to rush a gunman, but what I am saying is we need to change the mindset. You don’t want to wait, do nothing, and hope for a rescue. The cavalry may not be coming.”
The other major new development that came out of Tuesday night’s meeting was the announcement by Berkowitz that he will be asking for more funding in next year’s town budget to add more officers to the School Resource Officer program. School Committee member Reuki Schutt said she, for one, would stand up at town meeting and support the chief on his budget request.
However, Berkowitz said adding more officers is not a cure-all for safety protocols, although he said the success that Yeaton has had at the high school should be duplicated in the other schools throughout the district.
As for the new safety measures, School Committee Chairman John Bonnanzio said the committee is satisfied with the Police Department’s efforts and said the committee will not be taking a vote or making a policy decision on this matter. He said the committee may want updates from the superintendent on the progress of the training sessions.
Gimmie, a startup that began with rewards for mobile gamers, has just shifted its focus to Asian markets by relocating to Singapore and taking funding from a government agency there. The company said today that it took 639,000 Singaporean dollars ($522,000) in funding from a group led by WaveMaker Labs in partnership with the Singapore National Research Foundation. Also participating in the round is Jakarta-based venture firm Ideosource.
The company pivoted both its product and its location. The company used to be based in Silicon Valley and had raised $200,000 from mobile incubator Tandem. Originally it let gamers earn special points that could be redeemed for discounts on products like iPad cases and pillows.
But now it’s more of a white-label solution that big platforms like MOL Friendster use for giving users localized rewards. Gimmie creates custom campaigns for big publishers in Asia to give rewards like discounts on local restaurants or Uniqlo gift cards. Publishers get an online dashboard to manage their programs and they can also use the platform to create incentivized surveys for data collection .
“I felt an opportunity based on what I was hearing. Nothing was being addressed for the Asian market and we had some strategic advantages because of the personal connections I have. At the same time, there were many companies trying to do the same thing with rewards in the U.S.,” Ng said. “I had to basically go against the wishes of our stakeholders.”
Many larger companies like Kiip and Tapjoy experiment with various forms of offering virtual or real-world rewards to mobile gamers.
“I want to be the market leader,” Ng said. “I don’t want to be one of many companies trying to do the same thing.” Ng took funding from a government-tied entity because he felt it would provide the company with more connections to the local market. He also said they were a more reputable funding source compared to many of the upstart firms and funds in the region.
Ng said the company will be enabling others to resell the platform and launching new product features for different types of mobile devices in one to two months. They’re currently looking for publishers in Asia with large numbers of users.
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