text:
Pelton mailbag: Is Steph a ‘giant killer’ or just hard to guard?

“I was reading Zach Lowe’s article on the dangerous 1-3 pick-and-roll. He mentions that an advantage Stephen Curry will have when he and Kevin Durant run it is his ability to destroy big men who get switched on him. Now, I have seen countless highlights exemplifying this (The Stifle Tower falling in Game 1 against the Jazz). I was wondering, though, what does the data show on this? Is Steph really a giant killer?”

— Ian Stratton

ESPN Stats & Information has been tracking defensive matchups throughout the playoffs, so I was able to sort Curry’s plays this season into those against perimeter players and those against big men after switches. Curry has been very good against switches, shooting 48.6 percent from the field and averaging 1.13 points per play. But he actually has been better against perimeter players, shooting 50.7 percent and averaging 1.15 points per play.

The samples are pretty small, particularly for switches — just 46 total plays. And I didn’t separate perimeter players into those who were actually primary defenders as opposed to less-favorable defenders who picked up Curry in transition or in a scramble situation. So this is hardly definitive either way, but it’s interesting to note that Curry hasn’t been a giant killer in the playoffs so much as he has just destroyed everyone.

“What are the chances of seeing a comeback from 3-0 within the next 5 to 10 years?”

–Trenton Kim

I don’t know that I have a good way to estimate the chances, but I suspect we will see it at some point. A handful of teams have rallied from 3-0 to force a Game 7, and if you can do that, there’s a decent chance of winning the series. We’ve also seen a number of prominent rallies from a 3-1 deficit recently — most famously in last year’s NBA Finals — and coming back from down 3-0 isn’t dramatically more difficult than that.

I do wonder whether it’s possible for a team in that situation to truly have hope of coming back, given that it’s never happened before. (Teams down 3-1 can at least think of examples of that comeback happening.) But I think if, for example, you had a higher seed go down 3-0 in fluky fashion or an injury that altered the series (think Rajon Rondo getting injured after Game 3 of this year’s Bulls-Celtics quarterfinals series instead of Game 2), then there’s nothing magical about the 3-0 comeback that prevents it from happening.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: Logo

You are commenting using your account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Google+ photo

You are commenting using your Google+ account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s


Content-Type: application/http; msgtype=response

WARC-Identified-Payload-Type: application/xhtml+xml

WARC-Truncated: length

WARC-Type: response

text:
The Cronut: Not Just A Fad

Dominique Ansel has been making cronuts (his croissant-doughnut hybrid) at his bakery since May, and you would think the cronut food fad would have passed by now, but it’s not even close to over.  As of last Friday, August 2nd, the line for cronuts is only getting longer.

Now you can even buy a special t-shirt to support Food Bank for NYC and if you wear it in line to buy your cronut you can buy twice as many, that’s 4 cronuts per person!!! Yes, there is a cap on the number that you can regularly order, and it’s 2 cronuts per person.  Selling out by noon since they were introduced, the website says that if you get there before 6am on a week day, you’ll probably get one

While we here at AMP3 PR don’t quite get the hype, we sure love reading about it, and to each their own. If you want to jump on the Cronut band wagon, just head over to Dominique Ansel Bakery at the crack of dawn to get in line.

Proof that cronuts aren’t going anywhere fast, check out this girl sleeping on the sidewalk in wait, and the line of people wrapping around city blocks:

Screen shot 2013-08-06 at 1.22.53 PM

Screen shot 2013-08-06 at 1.23.07 PM

Tags: ,

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 6th, 2013 at 10:42 am and is filed under Food, Public Relations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Comments are closed.

Subscribe via RSS | Comments (RSS)

Or, subscribe via email:

warcinfo:
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-170-22-195.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2017-43
operator: Common Crawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for October 2017
publisher: Common Crawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf


WARC-Identified-Payload-Type: text/html

text:
429 Kent Avenue

Touring Oosten, Dutch Residences Under Construction at 429 Kent Avenue in Williamsburg

One of the most interesting condominium developments in Brooklyn draws inspiration from a distant land. It’s called Oosten, and it’s the product of Chinese developer XIN Development, Dutch designer Piet Boon, and Brooklyn-based think! architecture and design pllc. You’ll find it under construction at 429 Kent Avenue in Williamsburg and our friend Tectonic sent YIMBY exclusive photos of an inside tour.

Read More

429 Kent Avenue

Exterior Works Wraps Up At Seven-Story, 216-Unit Residential Project At 429 Kent Avenue, South Williamsburg

Earlier this year, YIMBY reported on the topping out of XIN Development’s seven-story, 216-unit residential building under construction at 429 Kent Avenue, located a block from the East River in South Williamsburg. Today, a vast majority of the façade work has been completed, courtesy of Brownstoner. Known as the Oosten, it will include 201 condominiums and 15 townhouse units, as well as a 10,000 square-foot art gallery on the first two floors. Work is also well underway on the 14,000 square-foot inner courtyard. The developer is the U.S. branch of Beijing-based Xinyuan Real Estate Co., and Piet Boon and Think Architecture & Design designed the project. Completion is expected in early 2016.

Fetching more...


text:
How Should Seattle Factor Equity Into Upzone Decision? – Next City

How Should Seattle Factor Equity Into Upzone Decision?

Downtown Seattle (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)

For many, it’s an instinct, a gut feeling they get walking the crane-shadowed streets of cities in hyperdevelopment: New construction brings new money and new residents, and pushes out the old, so curbing housing development in vulnerable areas would stem displacement. But does the data back up the gut?

Last week, as part of the ongoing implementation of the city’s Housing Affordability and Livability Agenda, Seattle released a report that laid out two scenarios. In one, neighborhoods across the city are evenly upzoned for greater density. In the other, neighborhoods with high displacement risk and low opportunity are upzoned to a lesser degree. The report, a draft environmental impact statement for the city’s new inclusionary zoning policy, gets to the heart of an ideological battle playing out in many cities.

Dan Bertolet of the think tank Sightline Institute sums up the two sides this way: “The typical kind of progressive viewpoint on this has been, when someone comes and builds a new expensive building in the neighborhood it leads to gentrification and higher prices and displacement,” he says. “It kind of makes sense because it’s in your face and you see it. And then the other side of the argument is like from a data side, from a more regional perspective, we know that the main cause of raising housing prices and what we call economic displacement,”— in other words, people moving because they can’t afford rent anymore — “is the shortage of housing. So when you look at it from that angle, we need to build a lot more housing, so upzones are good.”

Those in the former camp, including anti-gentrification and displacement activists, may be disappointed by the findings. The environmental impact statement (EIS) is intended to measure the impacts of the city’s Mandatory Housing Affordability program, which would upzone certain neighborhoods to allow greater development, and then require developers in these areas to include a certain number of income-restricted affordable units in new buildings or pay into a fund for the city to build them elsewhere.

The program has already been implemented in the dense University District, South Lake Union and downtown neighborhoods. The EIS examines the impacts on the rest of the neighborhoods slated for inclusion.

Using an index developed as part of a Growth and Equity Analysis included in the Seattle 2035 comprehensive plan, the EIS categorizes all Seattle neighborhoods according to whether they have a high or low displacement risk, and high or low opportunity. High opportunity corresponds to good access to education, transit, parks and other urban amenities. Displacement risk is calculated based on demographic data — the number of low-income and other marginalized people susceptible to housing pressure — and the demand for housing compared to supply.

In the first scenario, decisions about how much to upzone individual neighborhoods would be made irrespective of their displacement risk and access to opportunity. In the second, neighborhoods with high risk and low opportunity would be upzoned to a lesser degree. Under both options, the EIS forecasts that the number of households grew by similar amounts: 95,342 citywide under option one, 95,094 under option two. Option one produced 5,717 units of income-restricted housing; option two, 5,582 units.

Breakdown of where new units would be built under the two scenarios (alternative one was to do nothing)

But did restricting density in high-risk areas stem displacement, as measured by a change in the number of low-income households?

“We actually found that the displacement of low-income households correlated more strongly with high-opportunity areas than it did with high risk displacement areas,” says Geoffrey Wentlandt, senior planning manager at the Office of Planning and Community Development. “And what we actually found is that historically there’s a moderate correlation between the areas that have grown more in terms of adding housing units, and an increase in the percentage of low-income households. So counter to what a lot of people might think and compared to what we’ve seen in the past, areas of Seattle that have grown the most have retained the most low-income households.”

The finding reflects one made last year by California’s Legislative Analyst’s Office: Bay Area communities with the greatest increase in market-rate housing were also seeing the least displacement.

In some ways, this should be intuitive, says Bertolet, as intuitive as the feeling of encroachment when new high-rises replace mom-and-pops. He points to the Central District, Seattle’s poster child of displacement: The historically black neighborhood has until recently seen little new housing development, and yet has seen the percentage of its black population dwindle from 70 percent in the 1960s to less than 20 percent today. It’s so close to downtown, says Bertolet, that regardless of upzoning, it was bound to experience housing pressure. Without new development, demand and prices for what few houses there were skyrocketed fast.

Wentlandt says upzoning should not be the primary tool to try and stem displacement, though. “There’s lots of other tools to mitigate displacement and further equity that are outside the scope of this MHA EIS proposal,” he says, pointing to the city’s Equitable Development Initiative.

Bertolet agrees. Among other strategies, the city should be ensuring local businesses can stay in place, and shoring up community institutions, he says. But despite the data, he’s also cautious of drawing the conclusion that upzoning won’t hurt communities of color, like those in the Central and International Districts, and low-income residents.

He points out that the Bay Area study was later challenged by two researchers who showed that yes, on a regional level building market-rate housing may reduce pressure and stem displacement, but that on a neighborhood level, new luxury buildings signal to wealthy buyers and developers that a neighborhood is ripe for investment, potentially changing the character of a place such that former residents feel unwelcome.

“To me it’s almost more important, the conceptual debate,” Bertolet says. Community groups are insisting that upzoning will harm them, in neighborhoods where residents’ wishes have been ignored for decades. “So the question is, should the city make its policy according to what these community groups are saying? Or should they weigh the best available data that they have, which says, that’s not going to help?” he asks.

He recommends walking a bit of a middle ground: Do upzone high-risk areas, but still concentrate more growth in the wealthier, whiter, less at-risk areas. And then allocate some of the money developers will pay if they don’t build affordable units to support anti-displacement efforts in vulnerable neighborhoods.

Public comment is being accepted on the draft EIS until July 23. Final versions of the Mandatory Housing Affordability plan and its EIS will be released this fall, followed by more public comment and a city council vote summer of next year.

Jen Kinney is a freelance writer and documentary photographer. Her work has also appeared in Philadelphia Magazine, High Country News online, and the Anchorage Press. She is currently a student of radio production at the Salt Institute of Documentary Studies. See her work at

Follow Jen .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

Tags: urban planningseattlezoning


text:
Affairs of the heart – Chapter 11

Chapter 11

Anandi shuffled through his DVD collection n noticed most were action movies…
She gave up n said “I cant decide pick whichever you want”.

Sometime later they were seated on couches in front of the huge LCD TV…Anandi was staring at the screen blankly…he was too distracting to concentrate on movie…The tension was palpalable…sitting alone in a dark room with Shiv, pretty risky
Her hormons acted crazy around him.

She looked at him from corner of her eyes…His jaws were set in a stiff line as if making efforts to be still…was he as affected as her ?
The movie scene changed to a romantic seq…The guy and the gal were kissing passionately on screen…

Oh hell !! She thought…

She shifted uncomfortably …his face was rigid mask…she noticed his jaws twitch a  little…The temptation to touch tht little pulse twitching on his temple was too much…

“I will get some water” she blurted…She needed to get away but she was not sure if her legs would support her..
He simply nodded…She got up and walked past him towards the fridge…her knees which seemed to hav turned to jelly bumped into the sofa and she tripped falling backwards into waiting arms of Shiv…

She was almost in his lap…He was staring at her with an amused smile…
Her throat went dry…this was not wat she had planned.

“I…I  am sorry…I not so klutzy usually”
He said “yes you are but in a good way”.

They had an eyelock and the tension which had been simmering since so long broke through the dam…
He held her face and brought his lips over her taking her in a passionate kiss…
Her arms automatically went around his neck…their tongues entwined they explored the inside of their mouths.
She was quivering with little electric currents running through her…seeing the way he shuddered he was feeing the same urge.
He deepened the kiss devouring her completely…She felt being pushed backwards till her back touched the sofa.
He left her lips and she called out his name in protest.

Her protest immediately turned to pleasure when he started placing kisses down her throat…She arched her back when he nipped the pulse beating at the base of her throat.
It was just like her dream infact much better than the dream…maybe she never woke up this morning and was still dreaming.

The tiny voice in her head did warn her but the current scenario was too heady to listen to it.
As if on impulse her hand glided over his back and reached under his tee.It slowly glided up his bare back…

“God ! wat ur doing to me Anandi!” He whispered…Ah so he IS equally effected tht was quite an ego booster.

His mouth was somewhere near her ears…while his right hand glided up her legs…sliding up her skirt…till it dissapeard under it…It glided over her belly and navel.The other hand slid the straps of her dress from her shoulders…whatever little resolve she had it evaporated.

“Oh I want u so badly Anandi…I want you since the day I first saw you”.

He whispered while caressing her face…It was impossible to resist such gentle assult..they continued the devouring…nipping…kissing…touching…caressing..exploring each moment increased the urgency.

Then he suddenly froze…Anandi opened her when she heard the ringtone of his phone.
Her expression changed from estacy  to annoyance to horrified.

What the hell am I doing ? She thought.
Its about time you realise that...said the miffed tiny voice in her head.

Probably he was going through same termoil coz he immediately withdrew his expression equally disturbed.
He took his phone and went out to talk leaving her alone to ponder over the situation.

Anandi sat up and adjusted her dress which was more like bunched around her waist…
bad choice of dress…she thought.
Will I ever cease embarassing myself…now wat wld he think of me ? She thought.
This is wat happens when you let your hormons do the thinking.
She sighed.

Its dangerous to stay with him she had never felt like this with anyone ever not even Jagadish.Strangly she didnt feel any regret she was terribly attracted so why be ashamed of it she was worried about the fact that did he feel the same ? of course he did…didnt he say he wants u…chided the tiny voice.
Yeah but did he judge her for her misdemenour ?
What was he exactly thinking ?
And wat did they both want from this ?
And worst of all why did tht damm phone call came now !?!

Too many questions…She started pacing around the room wringing her fingures.

To be continued…

This entry was posted in Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: Logo

You are commenting using your account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Google+ photo

You are commenting using your Google+ account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s


text:
Tuesday, August 26, 2014

One final post on this subject and I'm done.

You may have seen this piece by Vox's German Lopez, which quotes several tweets from Demos researcher Sean McElwee purporting to show that The New York Times, over the years, has written nicer things about mass murderers and serial killers than about Mike Brown, the subject of a widely criticized portrait in yesterday's Times.

The tweets are quite devastating. They're also thoroughly misleading.

Here's McElwee comparing the Times coverage of Brown and John Wayne Gacy:

Yes, the Times article on Gacy contains this paragraph:
Before his arrest, most people knew Mr. Gacy as the owner of a prosperous remodeling business, a Democratic precinct captain who threw annual parties for up to 400 guests and who entertained youngsters as Pogo the Clown.
But here's the very next paragraph:
But one by one, prosecutors said later, Mr. Gacy lured young men into his modest ranch house in an unincorporated area near O'Hare International Airport. He handcuffed them, wrapped a rope around their necks and tightened it with a few turns from a wooden stick. The victims strangled themselves while struggling.
No, this wasn't a puff piece. That paragraph is much worse than anything the Times has written about Mike Brown.

Here's McElwee on a Times story about Columbine killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold:

Here's what McElwee doesn't quote from that Times story:
On Monday, they went bowling. And on Tuesday, it seems, they committed mass murder.

Nobody had taken the two youths seriously.

They wore long black coats and hung out with a clique of middle-class suburban teen-agers that called itself the trench coat mafia...

They struck sullen, brooding poses. They talked about Hitler and wore clothes with German insignia. In February they completed a "diversion program" for first-time juvenile offenders, after their arrest for breaking into a van and stealing electronic equipment, the Jefferson County District Attorney said.

The other students, who came to know Mr. Harris and Mr. Klebold from mingling in the hallways and the commons, said the two youths had wanted to portray themselves as rebels or villains. But they were mostly viewed as losers.
Again, not a sympathetic portrait.

McElwee on Timothy McVeigh:

Not quoted from that Times story:
Residents of the Canyon West Mobile Park drew a picture of an arrogant loner who worked as a security guard for a now-defunct trucking company, lived with his pregnant girlfriend, expressed deep anger against the Federal Government and often caused trouble for his neighbors.

"He drank a lot of beer and threw out the cans, and I always had to pick them up," Bob Ragin, owner of the park, was quoted as saying. He said he had frequent fights with Mr. McVeigh, who often wore Army fatigues, over such things as loud rock music coming from his trailer and a dog he kept in violation of his lease.

Another Kingman resident recalled Mr. McVeigh at a shooting range. "Quite frankly, it scared the hell out of me," Jeff Arrowood told the newspaper. He said Mr. McVeigh fired hundreds of rounds at random targets. "He pretty much went crazy, emptying on anything -- trees, rocks, anything there. He just went ballistic."
There's also this:
Federal officials say his far-right political views, his anger and his taste for weapons merged last Monday when he rented a truck in Kansas and filled it with explosives that he set off in Oklahoma City on Wednesday.
And this:
Mr. McVeigh became involved with extreme right-wing political groups off-post. The sergeant said he could not identify the groups, but added, "cults is what I call them."
McElwee on Ted Bundy:

Not quoted from that story:
The killer, who stalked victims in the Pacific Northwest in the mid-1970's terrorized several university communities, selecting coeds for abduction from campuses at night or crowded parks in daytime when their defenses were lowered in familiar settings....

He usually throttled them and then sexually abused and mutilated them before disposing of their bodies in remote areas. If the skeletons were found months or years later there was nearly always evidence of fractured skulls and broken jaws and limbs.

"This kind of mutilation reveals a hatred of the female body," said Dr. David Abrahamsen a New York psychiatrist who is an authority on those who kill people in a series and is author of "The Murdering Mind."
McElwee on "Green River Killer" Gary Leon Ridgway:

Not quoted from that story:
For Gary Leon Ridgway's fellow workers at the Kenworth Truck Company, it was not exactly a bolt out of the blue when the authorities apprehended him at work on Friday and announced he was the prime suspect in the nation's largest case of unsolved serial murders.

They knew that Mr. Ridgway had been questioned by the police about 15 years ago in the so-called Green River killings -- the slayings from 1982 to 1984 of as many as 49 young women, many of them runaways or prostitutes, in the Seattle area. Some of the bodies were dumped in the river south of Seattle that lends the case its name....

Mr. Ridgway had brushes with the law that his co-workers and neighbors apparently did not know about -- the first in 1980, two years before the Green River killings started. A prostitute working near the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport accused him of trying to choke her, but Mr. Ridgway told the police the woman had tried to bite him, and charges against him were dropped.

They also did not know that witnesses had told investigators that Mr. Ridgway had been seen with at least a few of the victims in the Green River case.

Two weeks ago, King County police vice squad members arrested him, charging him with loitering for prostitution, again near the airport. He pleaded guilty last Tuesday.
Only in this tweet is McElwee on somewhat solid ground:

The Times story he quotes does describe Theodore Kaczynski as an eccentric but quiet neighbor. There are no negative details about him.

But it was one of seven Times stories on Kaczynski dated April 5, 1996. This is from one of the other stories:
... in their search, agents said, they discovered that the little home was full of the raw material of lethal bombs.

Inside the cabin, the agents found a partly completed pipe bomb as well as chemicals, wiring and aluminum that could be used to build such bombs, said the F.B.I. affidavit, submitted by Special Agent Donald J. Sachtleben.

There were also notes related to construction of pipe bombs, Mr. Sachtleben's affidavit said, and 10 three-ring binders that "contain page after page of meticulous writings and sketches which I recognize to be diagrams of explosive devices."

Books on bomb manufacturing, written in both English and Spanish, were also found, the affidavit said. (Agents said Mr. Kaczynski understood Spanish.) There were also solid cast ingots, C-cell batteries, electrical wiring and logs of experiments on how different bombs would perform in various weather conditions, the F.B.I. said.
Cherry-picking the most benign paragraphs from a story about a killer and comparing them to the most negative paragraphs in a story about a victim demonstrates nothing. The Times is not nice to the killers McElwee has named. It just seems that way when the quotes are selected McElwee's way.

And, of course, a story about what the neighbors knew regarding a serial killer is going to have less negative detail if it's written just after the killer's capture because serial killers cover their tracks. Ted Kaczynski worked hard to conceal the fact that he was committing atrocities; Mike Brown didn't try nearly as hard to conceal his minor transgressions. So of course, when asked, all the neighbors could say about Kaczynski was that he had a nice garden.

Victor said...

Thanks for the great deconstruction of that, Steve.
It showed the writer's bias.

Victor said...

Thanks for the great deconstruction of that, Steve.
It showed the writer's bias.

Victor said...

Duplicate, again?

tgchicago said...

I tend to agree with you, Steve. What this shows is that when the NYT does a profile, they don't go out of their way to make it all positive or all negative.

The only criticism that strikes me as legitimate is the idea of even doing a profile of a victim. (I believe someone in the comments of the previous thread brought this up). It leads people to conclude that the victim either did or didn't "deserve" it, but the background information is rarely relevant.

Of course people are curious about the backstories of the people involved, but it has little if any true news value.

Roger said...

At least this will revive the Gacy was a Democrat meme.

Thank G-d for Ted Bundy.


text:
Saturday, October 25, 2014

You know that every bad thing that happens anywhere is the fault of liberals who hate America, right? Apparently, according to Rush Limbaugh, liberals who hate America are even responsible for the terrorist attack in Canada by Michael Zehaf-Bibeau:
... That's his preferred name, by the way: Abdul Zehaf. So much for the narrative that he was a recent convert to the religion of peace. He wasn't recent. He'd be a convert to the religion of peace for quite a while now....

He was not a lone wolf in any way, shape, manner, or form.

This then takes us to the hatchet suspect back to New York, and once again we're being told that this guy is a lone wolf, and he's a one-off.

... we already know that his name is Zale Thompson and that he was a strict Muslim who condemned the US and called for attacks on soldiers and police. And I have the posts on Facebook right here in my formerly nicotine-stained fingers to prove it! It dovetails back with exactly what we were talking about yesterday, is how the hell are young people in this country becoming to radicalized?

Who is telling them things that make them want to take action against people in this country and the country at large?

What are they learning?

What are they learning about this country that they end up hating it for?

Who's teaching them this stuff?

And I'm telling you it's the education system. They're not lone wolves. They are members of a radical sect, and they are doing what the radical sect openly says that it's going to do. I believe they have been radicalized by our own anti-America news media. I think they have been radicalized by our education system which features its own, if not anti-America, I don't want to mis-convey something here -- but if you sit in a classroom from kindergarten on up and you have a professor or teacher after teacher that tells you what a rotten place this is because of the way we treated women, the way we treated blacks, slavery, and what we did to the Native Americans and how the poor are getting poorer and the rich are getting richer and the power base is stealing from the poor, what do you do?

If that's all you hear from the first moment of your exposure to formal education, quite likely you're gonna end up filled with rage and hatred. And those who also share those emotions who are recruiting people like you, you might find it attractive to join 'em.
That's right -- a guy who was born in Montreal and lived in Calgary and Alberta committed an attack in Ottawa because he learned in school that America was evil because of slavery.

And terrorism is Canada is also linked to the "Democrat Party":
The five years of pummeling of George W. Bush and the military in this country during the years of Iraq, 2003 to 2008, drove a portion of the Democrat voter base literally insane with rage and hatred. And the hatred didn't confine itself just to George W. Bush. It expanded into just hatred for the country as founded.

This is the kind of chaos and disquietedness and discomfort that the Democrat Party feeds on, and it isn't healthy.
I know Limbaugh would say that he's referring there to the perpetrator of the hatchet attack in New York. But he brought up the Ottawa attack -- I didn't. And there have been three such attacks this week -- two of them in Canada by native-born Canadians. But it's all the fault of "anti-America" media and schools and it's linked to the "Democrat Party." Right. Got it.

Bonus idiocy from Limbaugh, in reference to the New York incident:
At a news conference at a hospital where one officer was being treated for a serious head wound, the commissioner, William Bratton, said that investigators were still trying to confirm the identity of the assailant and to determine a motive.

Naturally, they don't want to jump to any conclusions....
That was Limbaugh broadcasting yesterday. There are no quote marks in the transcript, but he's quoting from a story published the night of the attack. Here's a somewhat less selective quote from that story -- emphasis added:
At a news conference at a hospital where one officer was being treated for a serious head wound, Police Commissioner William Bratton said that investigators were still trying to confirm the identity of the assailant and determine a motive....

Asked if the attack could be related to terrorism, Bratton didn't rule it out. He cited the fatal shooting of a soldier in Canada earlier this week -- what officials there have called a terror attack -- as reason for concern.

"This early on, we really cannot say yes or no to that question," Bratton said.
Limbaugh held forth on this subject yesterday. Also yesterday, Bratton announced his conclusion:
A hatchet attack on New York police officers was a "terrorist act" carried out by a self-radicalized Muslim convert who had been in the military and browsed Al-Qaeda websites, police said Friday.

"This was a terrorist act," police commissioner Bill Bratton told a news conference on Friday, one day after the attack, saying he was "very comfortable" describing it as a "terrorist attack."
Twenty-four hours of due diligence is too much for these wingnut vultures.

Victor said...

You silly Libtard!

Only white men can be "Lone Wolves," or "One-off's!"

All of the rest are either dark American thugs and/or gang members, or EEEEEEBIL MOOOOOOZLIM TERRISTZ!!!

mervis said...

Ken_L said...

I've given up trying to explain to people (not all of them mad conservatives by any means) that if you use your military might to invade other countries and engage in mass killings, quite a lot of people are going to try to retaliate. Indeed lots of Americans would do it if the positions were reversed. But they can't or won't see it. They just get a mulish look and insist that "terrorists" are all deranged fanatics. 'My country right or wrong" has to be one of the most evil maxims ever taught to children.

John Taylor said...

As a Canadian I place the blame squarely on Bush and Cheney. Why aren't they behind bars?

Rollin M said...

Nowhere in his screed does Rush suggest that the wrongs enumerated never happened. The systemic mistreatment of women, blacks, Native Americans, poor, etc. Those wrongs have never filled me with 'rage and hatred' so that I wanted to kill innocent people. It's made me want to get our country to STOP killing or harming innocent people. It seems to me that the ones who have trouble managing their 'rage and hatred' are people like Rush Limbaugh

Aunt Snow said...

What are they learning about this country that they end up hating it for?
Who's teaching them this stuff?

Look in the mirror, Rush.


text:
The Final Heartbreak.

She thought a lot, whether it's right or not. Whether everything she was suffering through was worth it or not. She knew he gave him the happiness no one ever could. But he'd become the reason of her tears more than her smile. She looked at him, like she knew it was her end yet... Continue Reading →

The question that ponders upon every soul on this land at least once, 'Why?' The sad part is, never does anyone ever have the time to actually answer it. and I believe it shall forever remain one of the greatest mysteries to Man. Maybe this could be the reason for us to keep going on.... Continue Reading →

Breathe, It’ll Pass.

 "I go to seek the Great perhaps"  - John Green.   I don't know what I plan on writing here. I don't know if its going to make any sense. I wasn't really sure whether it was a good idea or not. but then i paused and thought, "Ananya, it doesn't matter anyways. Do what you... Continue Reading →

Create a free website or blog at

Up ↑


text:
Binaural Beats for Sleeping!

Breaking Fast asked:

Hahaha love the minion banana song! Great songs! Do you think songs with no singing might work better/relaxing type of music?

(In response to “Music that will guarantee a snooze in seconds!”)

Interestingly, if any of you really want to sleep, an actual catagory of music called “binaural beats” exist. Where the frequency of the stereo audio is so close to each other that they help the brain to relax. It is even used as medicine!

Here is one example of a binaural beat. If you want to listen to more, there are related videos in youtube. Just search “binaural beats”!

What position is the right position?

It’s the question we ask ourselves every night before we snooze. Which position, this time?

Well, there are 6 types of positions and they all affect your body differently.

Whether its on your side, your back or your belly, they all feel great, but wait.. Which is healthy for you? I won’t hold this out till the very end. I’ll be straight to the punch.

The best position is the “Back Sleeping” position. However, it depends upon the person and every position is healthy as long as you keep your head comfortable. If it is twisted, stretched or crunched too much in anyway, it will be difficult to breathe during your sleep and you’ll also experience neck pains once you wake! Ever felt that dreaded neck ache on tuesday mornings? Keep it straight and comfortable!

Now that that’s done, what do side, back or forward positions do?

Stomach Sleeping: Places pressure on your stomach, It might place your head in an uncomfortable position, It also places pressure on your lungs making it difficult to breathe.

Back Sleeping: Flattens out your curves and may give you aches in the morning, it places pressure on the hind of the head; some people experience discomfort on the hind of their heads or hips, however it places NO pressure on internal organs.

Side Sleeping: Is an odd case. By lying on your left, you place pressure on your internal organs, especially your liver and lungs. You also place pressure on knees and twisting pressure on your hips.

But whatever position you enjoy the most, the important thing is to keep your head straightened. At least now you know which position is the right (or better) position!

Happy Snoozing, Day Dwellers!

Sleeptober and Daylight Savings!

Screen shot 2013-10-03 at 12.14.43 AM

We are launching Sleeptober! Throughout this month, we are taking advantage of Sleep Awareness Week (6th – 12th October 2013) by the Sleep Health Foundation and raising awareness of students and your sleep. We always put Sleep last and a little birdy told us that Sleep is not too happy about that. Sleep wants our attention and wants to be the first to be picked for a game. C’mon guys, give Sleep a chance!

Daylight savings begins 6 October at 2am! That’s this Sunday! Move your clocks FORWARD for an extra hour of daylight!

Remember though, like jet lag to a change in time zones when travelling, our bodies also need adjusting to during daylight savings, a sort of “daylight ag” if you will.

How to prepare?

Go to bed an hour earlier. Avoid sugary, caffeinated drinks beforehand and you could even get in a few exercise routines in during the day so you are tired and will easily fall asleep at this earlier time.

Good luck and don’t forget to wind your clocks forward!

No Snooze = Binge Eating?

People with little and no sleep regularly tend to be linked to binge eating. We will be breaking down dense material that will be much easier to understand. Because, let’s face it, we are not all working in the feel of medicine and health.

This report was based on the Swedish Twin Study of Twin Adults: Genes and Environment (STAGE) and published in the International Journal of Eating Disorders.

Summary of report: Disturbed sleep or having difficulty sleeping seemed to be associated with horrible disruptions in your hormones and metabolic systems.

Translation: This pretty much means that for people that tend to sleep less or on uneven rhythms will have health side effects as they don’t have enough energy and their body does function well to repair and maintain itself.

Summary of report: The study found numerous environmental stressors and biological mechanisms that impacted on our behaviour. This included subjects that resorted to eating to overcome possible distresses and deficiencies.

Translation: Many links were found between those who slept less or had disrupted sleeping patterns and their eating habits. As lack of sleep meant one would feel more lethargic, sluggish and irritated, people tended to fill this void and by eating. Futher, because your body naturally feels like it is lacking in energy from your limited sleep, you feel like you need to repair your energy levels and make up for it by eating more.

Launch of No Snooze, You Lose!

Welcome snoozers, one and all to our new blog page!

This is a blog written by students for students!

We all know the nocturnal behaviours of our night time peers and the bizarre sloth-like characteristics of the morning routine.

Here, we will update you on the weird, ugly and wonderful of a uni student’s life and how sleep most always is left out of this equation.

We aim to filter through all the jargon of psychologists, medical and social experts so that us students can understand all the mumbo jumbo of the medical jargon.

We hope to raise awareness of sleep and how a bit of shut eye is more rewarding and sometimes more interesting than that extra hour of WoW or ‘last’ You Tube video you promise to watch.

So watch this space for a bit of fun and sometimes satirical banter.


text:
Skip to content

The Armed Republic of Bannannas: day 7

Well, that escalated quickly…

Category: Benevolent Dictatorship
Civil Rights: Superb
Economy: Strong
Political Freedoms: Rare

The Armed Republic of Bannannas is a tiny, socially progressive nation, notable for its complete absence of social welfare. Its hard-nosed, hard-working, cynical population of 10 million enjoy great individual freedoms in everything except elections, which, where they exist at all, are populist shams for a dictatorship government that has no intention of ever giving up power.

The minute, pro-business government, or what there is of one, devotes most of its attentions to Law & Order, with areas such as Social Equality and Social Welfare receiving almost no funds by comparison. Citizens pay a flat income tax of 5%. A large private sector is led by the Uranium Mining industry, followed by Cheese Exports and Retail.

College students make ends meet by selling their kidneys, a dictator has seized power and outlawed elections, the tenet of free speech is held dear, and scientists regularly clone human beings for research purposes. Crime is pervasive. Bannannas’s national animal is the Ape, and its currency is the Bannanna.

Posted in funnies, Totally pointless.

Tagged with .

0 Responses

Stay in touch with the conversation, subscribe to the RSS feed for comments on this post.

Some HTML is OK

or, reply to this post via trackback.

Please solve the CAPTCHA below in order to fight spamWordPress CAPTCHA


text:
What do I with a very cranky chicken?

We’ve got a problem at Camp Cluck and I’m not sure what to do about it.

Mrs. Beasley, the Wyandotte, has become increasingly aggressive towards me, and this week she pecked David so hard she drew blood.

It’s not unusual for the girls to come running when I go into the run, or for them to peck at my shoes or my legs. But it’s is a gentle peck; I read it as a hello and a request for food.

But Mrs. Beasley has several times actually jumped up to peck me, and she’s been pecking my calves and the backs of my legs really hard. She leaves small bruises.

I don’t know if she’s mad that I’m taking eggs from the nesting box or what. I’ve tried talking to her, petting her, feeding her from my hands, all the same things I did when Aunt  Bea was a little cranky. But to no avail.

So the question becomes What do I do with her?

Can you train away bad behavior in a chicken, the way you would with a puppy? Do I send her to a new home?

Anyone have any experience with cranky chickens?

Visit my new blog, Notes From The Funny Farm, and don’t forget to follow me on Twitter!

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Google+ photo

You are commenting using your Google+ account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s


text:
Nancy Roman

Cutting The Cheese

One of my favorite expressions is “light-hearted”.

I love all that “light-hearted” conveys: happiness that lifts the heart; the weightlessness of joy.

I am light-hearted. I am easily pleased and I don’t worry much. I look for the best in people, and I’m quick to see the humor in everything. It’s what I like best about myself.

My husband is a very serious person. Because he takes so much to heart, he is not light-hearted. He is heavy-hearted. He worries. He analyzes. Then he worries some more.

A few years ago, my husband had a health scare. He recovered completely, and on his final visit to the surgeon, the surgeon gave some personal advice. “Try to enjoy life more. Be more spontaneous,” the doctor said.

It’s been seven years, and although he’s basically a happy person, my husband is still a serious happy person.

And this past year he has experienced another health crisis. Everything has turned out just fine, but the ordeal reminded my husband of his surgeon’s advice.

He has made a determined effort to have more fun. To be spontaneous and light-hearted.

A few days ago I came home from work and he was in the kitchen putting together a little appetizer:  olives and cheese and crackers.

Very spontaneous – especially adding olives.

My husband was particularly pleased with his little snack.

“Did you notice how I cut the cheese?” he asked.

Naturally I snickered a little. It is a proven fact that an adolescent sense of humor never quite goes away.

But I didn’t really see anything special with the cheese.

“Look,” he said. “It’s not all cut up perfectly square like I usually do.”

(Well, that’s certainly true… his cubing is nothing short of obsessive. See It’s Dicey“.)

“I cut the cheese [snicker] free-form,” he explained.

And looking closely, I ascertained that the pieces of cheese were indeed not all perfectly square. Some were slightly trapezoid.

“That’s very spontaneous of you,” I said encouragingly.

“It’s whimsical,” he agreed.

Well, we all have to start someplace.

  1. Starting with whimsical cheese shapes is as good as place as any I think.

  2. Now THAT’s funny! Thanks for the early morning laugh…..(and snicker!).

  3. Baby steps, right? 🙂

  4. Fart jokes will never cease being funny.

  5. Whimsical? As in fanciful, odd, out of the ordinary, weird, peculiar, quaint, fantastic, unusual, capricious, amusing, playful?

    I think he’s quaint. As in charming, old-fashioned, unusual.

    He’s a CATCH. Lucky you.

    • Sometimes it’s not quite as charming in real life. “Whimsical” though, charmed me.

  6. He sounds wonderfully quirky, just like you, only different! May he stay healthy and happy and lighter hearted.

  7. The olives aren’t evenly placed. This is probably a huge step for him.

    • Oh, they probably were perfectly placed – this is just my whimsical interpretation.

  8. Barney

    I was your husband. 2 serious health scares, worried about everything. Somehow light hit dawn, and I learned, or it was beat into me by the universe, that life’s just too damn short. (yup, it’s a cliche, but still true). Woke up one morning, cut the metaphorical chees in less than perfect squares, and lo, the world didn’t end. It was a beginning…

    Thanks for sharing!

  9. Talk to me...I'm your Mother

    I don’t think of myself as serious, but I’ll cop to “intense”. Fun post!

    • “Intense” is a perfect word for my husband. He’s not insane, just intense.

  10. Hello Nancy,

    Your blog is one of my favorites to follow! I noticed that your picture is also quite whimsicial this time. Do you use an IPad for your sketches? Just curious.

    • I draw freehand, and then I scan the drawing and use (like free photoshop) to add background colors, framing, special effects. Glad you like my blog!

  11. I wonder if they could package “whimsical cheese – perfect for acts of spontaneity.” I would certainly buy whimsical cheese.

  12. Adorable. It sounds like your husband has a charming sense of humor, with just a touch of mischief in it. I think there’s hope for him. 🙂

  13. I think we may be married to the same person. Except my husband would have searched for written instructions on cutting the cheese (snicker free), preferably with illustrations. Then he would have made several calls to cheese shops for advice on the best technique for whimsical cheese cutting. He would clearly run out of time for the olives. I don’t have a tattoo, but if I did, it would be of the Yin and the Yang. Maybe made out of cheese…

    • Oh yes, he would definitely make a few phone calls. But NO instructions! My guess he had time for the olives because he’d been at it for an hour.

  14. I think that’s wonderful that he is at least attempting to be whimsical! We could all use a bit more whimsy in our lives!

  15. I laughed out loud when I read “Did you notice how I cut the cheese?” And then I felt an immediate sense of shame for my very adolescent sense of humor. Which was then replaced with absolute relief and vindication that I was not alone there.

  16. I’m relieved that he’s not too serious to snicker over “cut the cheese.”

    • I have to confess…the snicker was all mine.

  17. “slightly trapezoid” — LOVE it!!

  18. hee hee this is a delightfully whimsical post! It sounds like you two are definitely a good match. I sweat the small stuff, but am usually calm in a crisis, and I love to see the humor in just about everything! It’s never hard to find on this blog 🙂

  19. I AM DYING laughing right now. First off…I’m with you with that adolescent mind thing. Stuck at 14 forever. The term, cut the cheese. OH the giggles. Our friends, Leo and Rineke used to come to see us about 2X a year for about 2 decades. Their wit is as silly as ours. Well, they were getting ready to go to a party and I told her that it was imperative that she ask each person she met at this party if they cut the cheese. Why? Because it is a huge honor to be the person to cut the cheese at a party. She didn’t fall for it. Darn. Okay, your husband and the perfect squares…Cracking up.

  20. I left out that Leo and Rineke were from Holland….important point.

  21. cutely funny!!

  22. Tell you husband, “Bravo” for starting somewhere… I’m basically a serious, happy person, so I can relate!

  23. Dor

    This one makes me snicker spontaneously. Actually, I am of the happy serious variety so can identify with your husband and wish I were more like you.

  24. “One small change for cheese, one giant step for Hubby!” I have faith he will continue to grow artistically in his food preparation and actually start to crack himself up!!

  25. Unscripted cheese-cutting is a very good start.

  1. Help Wanted: Translator « notquiteold
  2. A Helping Hand | notquiteold
  3. A Helping Hand | notquiteold

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: Logo

You are commenting using your account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Google+ photo

You are commenting using your Google+ account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this:


text:
TED Talk Thursday – Reshma Saujani: Teach girls bravery, not perfection

TED Talk ThursdaysAccording to TED.com: “We’re raising our girls to be perfect, and we’re raising our boys to be brave, says Reshma Saujani, the founder of Girls Who Code. Saujani has taken up the charge to socialize young girls to take risks and learn to program — two skills they need to move society forward. To truly innovate, we cannot leave behind half of our population, she says. ‘I need each of you to tell every young woman you know to be comfortable with imperfection.'”

“Reshma Saujani walked away from a finance career in 2010 to run for the House of Representatives. Although her Congress bid (and a subsequent shot for the office of New York City Public Advocate) was ultimately unsuccessful, Saujani’s passion for public service was fired up.”

“In 2012, Saujani founded Girls Who Code to stoke excitement for computer science among high-school women. She aims to enroll one million women in the program by 2020 — and tech has stepped in to help: Google and Twitter are backers, and engineers at Facebook, AT&T and others have signed on as mentors.”

Enjoy this thought provoking talk.

Reshma Saujani: Teach girls bravery, not perfection

For those of you not familiar with TED Talks here is a brief summery from www.ted.com: “TED is a small nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design. Since then its scope has become ever broader. Along with two annual conferences — the TED Conference in Long Beach and Palm Springs each spring, and the TEDGlobal conference in Oxford UK each summer — TED includes the award-winning TEDTalks video site, the Open Translation Project and Open TV Project, the inspiring TED Fellows and TEDx programs, and the annual TED Prize”

I look forward to your thoughts and comments!


text:
Registered Agents

A registered agent is an individual or a business entity located at a physical street address in Oregon, whose sole responsibility is to accept legal documents (service of process, lawsuits, liens, subpoenas, etc…) on behalf of the business.  Each corporation shall continuously maintain in this state a registered agent and registered office that may be, but need not be, the same as any of its places of business.

NW EXEC can offer you Oregon registered agent service from our Hillsboro office.  We offer this service for $119 a year, and are the best value in Oregon.  As a matter of fact if you can find a better price, we will match it in order to get your business loyalty.  We specialize in Portland, Oregon businesses but also help businesses from California and Washington cross the State boundaries into Oregon. We are so determined to become your Total Executive Solution that for a limited time only, bundle any other service with your registered agent needs and we will give you 50% off your first year of service.

Registered Agents | Virtual Offices | Corporate Services | Corporate Branding | Web Design | SEO | Mobile Notary | See for yourself:

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: Logo

You are commenting using your account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Google+ photo

You are commenting using your Google+ account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s


text:
News ArchivesRead News

En pointe to tackle Parkinson's disease

Wednesday March 13, 2013

When Peter Linton was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease four years ago, his first thought wasn't to take up ballet.
Lorna Stewart

bbc.co.uk - Ballet helps tackle Parkinson's disease.

When Peter Linton was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease four years ago, his first thought wasn't to take up ballet.

The condition affects Peter's coordination, makes movement slower and less controlled, and gives him difficulties with balance and walking. Ballet, you might think, would be last thing to which he was suited.

But in the rehearsal rooms at the English National Ballet, as the piano thumps out music from the Nutcracker, he lifts his arms ready to dance.

He now he attends weekly ballet classes specifically targeted at people living with Parkinson's to help balance and coordination - and, in the process, he has found a new way to express himself.

"Physical exercises are just that, but music adds a new dimension to what we are doing," he said.

"We're trying to express ourselves, not only in dance but responding to the music. And that I find really quite absorbing."

Finding means of expression is especially important for people living with Parkinson's, because many of their symptoms make communication, both verbal and non-verbal, difficult. Expressive art forms such as dance might offer new hope.

The weekly Dance for Parkinson's classes are being run by the English National Ballet.

"After the class one feels better in several different ways," said Peter.

"First, is the purely physical side - you've had some exercise, sometimes quite vigorous, to loosen the muscles and improve the tone.

"And then comes the music - you've had an hour of very beautiful music, and that adds this emotional dimension. And then are the social things as well - the cup of tea after the class."

Researchers at the University of Roehampton, led by Dr Sara Houston, are measuring the observed changes in patients' physical and emotional well-being.

The study, which will run for two more years, monitors changes in patients' balance and stability, as well as interviewing them about their experiences.

"We are examining the experience that people might have dancing with Parkinson's," Dr Houston told the BBC.

"That experience encompasses changes in physicality, as well as perceptions of what people can do, health and well-being."

Medication limits
There is no cure for Parkinson's, but symptoms can be helped in the short-term by medication.

However, drug treatments become less effective after only a few years, leaving patients to cope as best they can with their worsening symptoms.

It is hoped that benefits seen from the ballet classes will help to slow down the inevitable deterioration faced by patients.

Danielle Jones is the lead dance artist for Dance for Parkinson's. She helped to develop the programme and now teaches the classes.

"It's not like physical therapy, it's about being creative and expressive with movement. We try to improve a feeling of flow, a feeling of grace, and most importantly freedom," she said.

"What I notice in the participants is their confidence to believe in themselves as movers, as dancers - to understand that they are capable of these things.

"So they are able to take risks [in their movements] and do it in a creative and expressive way."

Finding means of expression can be a particular challenge for Parkinson's patients. The disease affects an estimated seven to 10 million people worldwide and research suggests more than three-quarters of patients have difficulties with speech and voice.

"They have difficulty expressing themselves in a number of ways," said Dr Houston.

"Firstly, through speech, which due to Parkinson's often gets slurred or diminishes in loudness.

"And also because of stiffness and slowness of muscles, facial expressions don't work as well so often it's difficult for people with Parkinson's to communicate, and through communication to express themselves."

And the Dance for Parkinson's classes may offer one way for patients to address those difficulties.

Dr Houston's research is revealing just how much dance has to offer above simple exercise and movement.

"People are valuing the dance for its expressive inputs. They perceive it to be something that they can communicate through.

"This extra dimension in dance, which you don't get through other physical activities, the imaginative element, becomes very important to people."

For Peter, who has had a fondness for ballet for more than 40 years, the classes certainly seem to be having positive effects.

"There's no doubt in my mind that doing more exercise does improve the symptoms.

"They'll never get better but at least they won't get worse. And some people tell me that I now look and behave better than I did three years ago."

A ballet dancer's perspective

Jennie Harrington is in her 10th year as a dancer at the English National Ballet. She volunteers at the Dance for Parkinson's classes whenever she can.

"It's lovely to see how people blossom over the course of the class.

"The people that walk in are very different to the people that leave at the end of the class.

"My grandmother suffered from Parkinson's. So for me I was aware of the symptoms and how then our relationship changed.

"I do often think how nice it would have been to have her in a class like this. In some ways it does strengthen my connection with her. I can see now what she went through.

"It's all about making dance accessible. It's lovely when people find as much joy from it as I do."

Recent News

Oct 18 - Brain disconnections may contribute to Parkinson's hallucinations
Oct 18 - Fighting Parkinson's disease through dance
Oct 17 - Scientists Identify Structure of PINK1, Key Parkinson’s-protective Protein
Oct 17 - Diabetes drug cuts Parkinson's risk by 28 percent, study finds
Oct 10 - Advances in Brain Pacemaker Reduces Tremors, Helps Parkinson's Sufferers Live a More Normal Life
Oct 10 - Medical History Could Help Predict Parkinson's Disease Risk Long Before Diagnosis
Oct 3 - Changes in Olfactory Bulb Explain Loss of Smell in Early Stages of Parkinson’s Disease, Study Finds
Oct 3 - Sleep Disturbances May Worsen Motor Symptoms in Parkinson’s Disease, Study Suggests
Sep 12 - Australian Researchers Develop New Diagnostic Tool to Spot Early Signs of Parkinson’s
Sep 11 - GeneFo Webinar to Focus on Using Humor to Manage Parkinson’s Disease
Sep 6 - Parkinson’s and the ‘D’ word
Sep 6 - Compounds in Asthma Drugs Might Be Used as Parkinson’s Treatment
Sep 5 - AstraZeneca Joins Takeda, Berg to Advance Development of Parkinson’s Disease Therapies
Sep 1 - Stem Cell Transplant Trial in Parkinson’s Patients Planned After Test in Japan Succeeds in Monkeys
Sep 1 - Titan to Start Phase 1/2 Study of Subdermal Implant to Deliver Requip to Parkinson’s Patients
Aug 30 - FDA Refuses Acorda’s Inbrija New Drug Application Due to Manufacturing Questions
Aug 23 - Support Groups: Are They for You?
Aug 22 - Internet Visits with Parkinson’s Specialist Can Be as Effective as In-person Visits, Trial Finds
Aug 21 - Cavion’s New CMO to Lead Cav3 Platform Development for Neurological Diseases
Aug 15 - Singing Helps Early-stage Parkinson’s Patients Retain Speech, Respiratory Control, Studies Show


text:
Making the grade

Most schools' grades drop as city releases report cards

The percentage of elementary and middle schools to get A’s on their city-issued report cards fell this year from 84 to 25 percent — a drop precipitated by more students failing the exams and the city grading schools on a curve.

Of the city’s 1,140 elementary and middle schools, 35 percent (396 schools) received B’s, 35 (398 schools) got C’s, 4 percent (49 schools) got D’s and 1 percent (8 schools) got F’s. More schools scored low enough to get failing grades, but their final marks were buoyed by city officials’ decision to limit the amount by which a school’s grade could fall this year.

About 70 percent of schools saw their grades drop this year. Roughly 400 had their grades fall by one letter and about 340 dropped by two letter grades. Only 22 schools went up at least one letter grade.

Last year, students’ inflated scores on the state exams led 84 percent of schools to get A’s, 13 percent to get B’s, and two percent got C’s. Only two schools got F’s.

This year, as a result of the city’s limit on how far scores could fall, schools that got A’s in 2009 could not receive a grade lower than a C. A “B” school last year couldn’t be worse than a “D” this year.

The safety net may confuse parents hoping to use the grades to help them choose were to send their children. On a list of the city’s lowest-scoring schools, only two received F grades and the majority were awarded C’s, raising questions about what it means to be a “C” school this year.

For a handful of schools, the safety net was a saving grace. These schools’ scores in the three assessed categories — performance, environment, and progress — were so low that they would have earned D’s or F’s under normal conditions and could have motivated the city to close them. But because these schools got A’s on their progress reports last year, they couldn’t score lower than a C.

Ross Global Academy is one of these schools. The charter school, which opened in 2006, got an F in all three categories and the lowest overall score of all 1,140 schools. Its final grade this year is a C because in 2009, it was awarded an A.

Schools can face leadership changes or closure if they receive grades of D or F, or if they receive C’s three years running. A Department of Education spokesman said that the city would not change its criteria this year. Schools that would have received D’s or F’s, but whose grades were boosted to C’s, will only be considered for phase-out if they continue to receive low grades in future years.

15 Schools with Lowest Overall Scores

1.     Ross Global Academy Charter School: 0.1, overall grade C
2.     Brooklyn Collegiate: 4.4, overall grade D
3.     P.S. 118 Lorraine Hansberry: 5.1, overall grade C
4.     P.S. 55 Henry Boehm: 5.7, overall grade C
5.     P.S. 107: 6.3 overall grade D
6.     Cornerstone Academy for Social Action: 7.6, overall grade F
7.     Urban Assembly Academy for Civic Engagement: 7.9, overall grade C
8.     School for Environmental Citizenship (K-3): 8.5, overall grade F
9.     P.S. 115 Alexander Humboldt: 9.3, overall grade C
10.  School of Diplomacy: 10.1, overall grade C
11.  Harlem Day Charter School: 10.2, overall grade C
12.  P.S. 193 Alfred Kennedy: 10.9, overall grade C
13.  Institute for Collaborative Education: 11.0, overall grade C
14.  Mott Hall IV: 11.1, overall grade C
15.  Sisulu-Walker Charter School: 11.2, overall grade C

Betsy DeVos

To promote virtual schools, Betsy DeVos cites a graduate who’s far from the norm

U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos spoke to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools in June.

If Betsy Devos is paying any attention to unfolding critiques of virtual charter schools, she didn’t let it show last week when she spoke to free-market policy advocates in Bellevue, Washington.

Just days after Politico published a scathing story about virtual charters’ track record in Pennsylvania, DeVos, the U.S. education secretary, was touting their successes at the Washington Policy Center’s annual dinner.

DeVos’s speech was largely identical in its main points to one she gave at Harvard University last month. But she customized the stories of students who struggled in traditional schools with local examples, and in doing so provided an especially clear example of why she believes in virtual schools.

From the speech:

I also think of Sandeep Thomas. Sandeep grew up impoverished in Bangalore, India and experienced terrible trauma in his youth. He was adopted by a loving couple from New Jersey, but continued to suffer from the unspeakable horrors he witnessed in his early years. He was not able to focus in school, and it took him hours to complete even the simplest assignment.

This changed when his family moved to Washington, where Sandeep was able to enroll in a virtual public school. This option gave him the flexibility to learn in the quiet of his own home and pursue his learning at a pace that was right for him. He ended up graduating high school with a 3.7 GPA, along with having earned well over a year of college credit. Today, he’s working in finance and he is a vocal advocate for expanding options that allow students like him a chance to succeed.

But Thomas — who spoke at a conference of a group DeVos used to chair, Advocates for Children, in 2013 as part of ongoing work lobbying for virtual charters — is hardly representative of online school students.

In Pennsylvania, Politico reported last week, 30,000 students are enrolled in virtual charters with an average 48 percent graduation rate. In Indiana, an online charter school that had gotten a stunning six straight F grades from the state — one of just three schools in that positionis closing. And an Education Week investigation into Colorado’s largest virtual charter school found that not even a quarter of the 4,000 students even log on to do work every day.

The fact that in many states with online charters, large numbers of often needy students have enrolled without advancing has not held DeVos back from supporting the model. (A 2015 study found that students who enrolled in virtual charters in Michigan, Illinois, and Wisconsin did just as well as similar students who stayed in brick-and-mortar schools.) In fact, she appeared to ignore their track records during the confirmation process in January, citing graduation rates provided by a leading charter operator that were far higher — nearly 40 points in one case — than the rates recorded by the schools’ states.

She has long backed the schools, and her former organization has close ties to major virtual school operators, including K12, the one that generated the inflated graduation numbers. In her first week as education secretary, DeVos said, “I expect there will be more virtual schools.”

Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated the location of the dinner.

expansion plans

Here are the next districts where New York City will start offering preschool for 3-year-olds

PHOTO: Christina Veiga
Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña, left, and Mayor Bill de Blasio, center, visited a "Mommy and Me" class in District 27 in Queens, where the city is set to expand 3-K For All.

New York City officials on Tuesday announced which school districts are next in line for free pre-K for 3-year-olds, identifying East Harlem and the eastern neighborhoods of Queens for expansion of the program.

Building on its popular universal pre-K program for 4-year-olds, the city this year began serving even younger students with “3-K For All” in two high-needs school districts. Mayor Bill de Blasio has said he wants to make 3-K available to every family who wants it by 2021.

“Our education system all over the country had it backwards for too long,” de Blasio said at a press conference. “We are recognizing we have to reach kids younger and more deeply if we’re going to be able to give them the foundation they need.”

But making preschool available to all of the city’s 3-year-olds will require an infusion of $700 million from the state or federal governments. In the meantime, de Blasio said the city can afford to expand to eight districts, at a cost of $180 million of city money a year.

Funding isn’t the only obstacle the city faces to make 3-K available universally. De Blasio warned that finding the room for an estimated 60,000 students will be a challenge. Space constraints were a major factor in picking the next districts for expansion, he said.

“I have to tell you, this will take a lot of work,” he said, calling it “even harder” than the breakneck rollout of pre-K for all 4-year-olds. “We’re building something brand new.”

De Blasio, a Democrat who is running for re-election in November, has made expansion of early childhood education a cornerstone of his administration. The city kicked off its efforts this September in District 7 in the South Bronx, and District 23 in Brownsville, Brooklyn. More than 2,000 families applied for those seats, and 84 percent of those living in the pilot districts got an offer for enrollment, according to city figures.

According to the timeline released Thursday, the rollout will continue next school year in District 4 in Manhattan, which includes East Harlem; and District 27 in Queens, which includes Broad Channel, Howard Beach, Ozone Park and Rockaways.

By the 2019 – 2020 school year, the city plans to launch 3-K in the Bronx’s District 9, which includes the Grand Concourse, Highbridge and Morrisania neighborhoods; and District 31, which spans all of Staten Island.

The 2020 – 2021 school year would see the addition of District 19 in Brooklyn, which includes East New York; and District 29 in Queens, which includes Cambria Heights, Hollis, Laurelton, Queens Village, Springfield Gardens and St. Albans.

With all those districts up and running, the city expects to serve 15,000 students.

Admission to the city’s pre-K programs is determined by lottery. Families don’t have to live in the district where 3-K is being offered to apply for a seat, though preference will be given to students who do. With every expansion, the city expects it will take two years for each district to have enough seats for every district family who wants one.


text:
Former Macy's Employees Sue Company For Allegedly Racially Profiling Asian Shoppers

Kimberly Yam

Sales associates at Macy’s flagship store in New York City’s Herald Square were told to “look out for” or “not sell to” customers of Asian descent, four former employees alleged in a recent lawsuit.

The directives were based on a stereotype that opportunistic foreign customers would buy products to resell in Asia, according to a press release from Wigdor LLP, the firm that filed the suit on behalf of the former associates.

The company has said the claims are false.

“Macy’s denies the allegations in the lawsuit filed by the former Herald Square employees,” a spokesperson said in a statement provided to HuffPost. “We are confident that the allegations in this matter will ultimately be found to be without merit.”

The plaintiffs, most of whom identify as Asian-American, alleged that managers told sales associates they should refrain from selling more than one unit of the same product to Asian customers, among other discriminatory instructions. Official store policy allows shoppers to purchase up to six units of a single product.

Employees working in the loss prevention department would allegedly make Asian shoppers uncomfortable by staring them down until their transactions were completed.

The plaintiffs say they were fired after they filed grievances with Macy’s union and brought up the matter to their managers. Wigdor LLP called their terminations “a blatant act of retaliation against those employees who dared to speak up against such unlawful racial profiling.”

Although gray market sales of products for a markup ― a practice referred to as “daigou” in China ― have been documented, experts say the allegations would point to wrongful stereotyping if true. They also argue that the allegations shed light on the poor treatment experienced by immigrants and people of color, who are often profiled as national security and economic threats.

This is hardly the first time Asians have been racially profiled due to rampant stereotypes, said Karin Wang, vice president of programs and communications at the nonprofit Asian Americans Advancing Justice-LA. She highlighted a number of Asian scientists who have wrongfully been accused of espionage, as well as the frequent discrimination that Muslim Americans face.

“Racial profiling is not effective, period, and escalates the danger of using race illegally,” Wang said. “While this may be the latest big headline case, singling out people by race, ethnicity, religion or other protected characteristic is not a new phenomenon.”

  • This article originally appeared on HuffPost.


text:
Friday, August 2, 2013

The Op-ed no one wanted to print

When it comes to the education beat, this guy has one hell of a resume.
John Merrow began his career as an education reporter with National Public Radio in 1974, with the weekly series, “Options in Education.” In 1984, Merrow branched out into public television. He served as host of The Merrow Report, an award-winning documentary series, and currently is the Education Correspondent for PBS NewsHour. Merrow’s work has taken him from community colleges to kindergarten classrooms, from the front lines of teacher protests to policy debates on Capitol Hill. His varied reporting has continually been on the forefront of education journalism.
Of course, all of these qualifications don't necessarily make a person right, but they generally do make a person publishable. That's what makes this story curious, because Merrow can't seem to get anyone to publish the following op-ed. This is the second time in a row that he's found newspapers and magazines reluctant to publish reporting on Micelle Rhee.

As mentioned before, Rhee has gone from feted to indefensible so quickly that it's difficult for most journalists and pundits to cover her current activities without looking comically gullible for swallowing her previous rhetoric. (And journalists don't like looking gullible.)

"Today, too many of America’s children are not getting the quality education they need and deserve. StudentsFirst is helping to change that with common sense reforms that help make sure all students have great schools and great teachers." (StudentsFirst press release, emphasis added)

Michelle Rhee created StudentsFirst after leaving her post as Chancellor of Washington, DC’s Public Schools in the fall of 2010. She announced her intentions on “Oprah” that December: to fix America’s schools by enrolling one million members and raising one billion dollars.[2]

Easily America’s most visible education activist, she has been crisscrossing the country lobbying for change and donating money to candidates whose policies she supports. StudentsFirst claims to have helped pass 110 ‘student-centered policies’ in 18 states.

Because Ms. Rhee is trying to persuade the rest of the country to do as she did in Washington, it’s worth asking what her ‘common sense reforms’ accomplished when she had free rein to do as she wished.

She was definitely in charge. Her boss, a popular new mayor, told his Cabinet that trying to block his Chancellor was a firing offense.  The business community, a public fed up with school failure, and the editorial pages of The Washington Post were enthusiastic supporters. Moreover, she had virtually no opposition: the local school board had been abolished when the Mayor took over, and the teachers union, reeling from its own financial scandals, had an untested rookie president. She knew how lucky she was.

"I’m living what I think education reformers and parents throughout this country have long hoped for, which is, somebody will just come in and do the things that they felt was in the best interest of children and everything else be damned. (Interview, fall 2007)"

She lived that dream for 40 months.  She opened schools on time, added social workers, beefed up art, music and physical education, and dramatically expanded preschool programs.  The latter may represent her greatest success, because children who began their schooling in the expanded preschool program tend to do well on the system’s standardized test in later years.

Ms. Rhee made her school principals sign written guarantees of test score increases. It was “Produce or Else” for teachers too. In her new system, up to 50% of a teacher’s rating was based on test scores, allowing her to fire teachers who didn’t measure up, regardless of tenure.  To date, nearly 600 teachers have been fired, most because of poor performance ratings. She also cut freely elsewhere–closing more than two-dozen schools and firing 15% of her central office staff and 90 principals.

When Ms. Rhee departed in October 2010, her deputy, Kaya Henderson, took over. She has stayed the course for the most part, although test scores now make up–at most–35% of a teacher’s rating score.

Some of the bloom came off the rose in March 2011 when USA Today reported on a rash of ‘wrong-to-right’ erasures on standardized tests and the Chancellor’s reluctance to investigate.  With subsequent tightened test security, Rhee’s dramatic test scores gains have all but disappeared. Consider Aiton Elementary: The year before Ms. Rhee arrived, 18% of Aiton students scored proficient in math and 31% in reading. Scores soared to nearly 60% on her watch, but by 2012 both reading and math scores had plunged more than 40 percentile points.

But it’s not just the test scores that have gone down. Six years after Michelle Rhee rode into town, the public schools seem to be worse off by almost every conceivable measure.

For teachers, DCPS has become a revolving door. Half of all newly hired teachers (both rookies and experienced teachers) leave within two years; by contrast, the national average is understood to be between three and five years. Veterans haven’t stuck around either. After just two years of Rhee’s reforms, 33% of all teachers on the payroll departed; after 4 years, 52% left.

It has been a revolving door for principals as well.  Ms. Rhee appointed 91 principals in her three years as chancellor, 39 of whom no longer held those jobs in August 2010. Some chose to leave; others, on one-year contracts, were fired for not producing quickly enough.  Several schools are reported to have had three principals in three years.

Child psychiatrists have long known that, to succeed, children need stability.  Because many of the District’s children face multiple stresses at home and in their neighborhoods, schools are often that rock. However, in Ms. Rhee’s tumultuous reign, thousands of students attended schools where teachers and principals were essentially interchangeable parts, a situation that must have contributed to the instability rather than alleviating it.

Although Ms. Rhee removed about 100 central office personnel in her first year, the central office today is considerably larger, with more administrators per teachers than any of the districts surrounding DC.  In fact, the surrounding districts reduced their central office staff, while DC’s grew.  The greatest growth in DCPS over the years has been in the number of central office employees making $100,000 or more per year, from 35 when she arrived to 99 at last count.

Per pupil expenditures have gone up sharply, from $13,830 per student to $17,574, an increase of 27%, compared to 10% inflation in the Washington-Baltimore region. So have teacher salaries; DC teachers now earn on average more than their counterparts in nearby districts in Virginia and Maryland.

Enrollment declined on Ms. Rhee’s watch and has continued under Ms. Henderson, as families continue to enroll their children in charter schools or move to the suburbs.  The year before she arrived, DCPS had 52,191 students. In school year 2012-13 it enrolled about 45,000, a loss of roughly 13%.

Even students who have remained seem to be voting with their feet, because truancy in DC is a “crisis” situation, and Washington’s high school graduation rate is the lowest in the nation.  The truancy epidemic may be the most telling data point of all, because if young people in this economy are not going to school, something is very wrong. They are not skipping school to work–because there are no jobs for unskilled youth.

Ms. Rhee and her admirers point to increases on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, an exam given every two years to a sample of students under the tightest possible security.  And while NAEP scores did go up, they rose in roughly the same amount as they had under her two immediate predecessors, and Washington remains at or near the bottom on that national measure.

The most disturbing effect of Ms. Rhee’s reform effort is the widening gap in academic performance between low-income and upper-income students, a meaningful statistic in Washington, where race and income are highly correlated.  On the most recent NAEP test (2011) only about 10% of low-income students in grades 4 and 8 scored ‘proficient’ in reading and math. Since 2007, the performance gap has increased by 29 percentile points in 8th grade reading, by 44 in 4th grade reading, by 45 in 8th grade math, and by 72 in 4th grade math. Although these numbers are also influenced by changes in high- and low-income populations, the gaps are so extreme that is seems clear that low-income students, most of them African-American, generally did not fare well during Ms. Rhee’s time in Washington.

English Language Learners in Washington’s schools are also struggling. Title III of ESEA requires progress on three distinct measures: progress, attainment and what ‘No Child Left Behind’ calls ‘adequate yearly progress.’  DC failed on two out of three last year.

DC doesn’t fare well in national comparisons either.  Between 2005 and 2011, black 8th graders in large urban districts gained five points in reading, while their DCPS counterparts lost two points, according to a study by the DC Institute of Public Policy released this spring. Between 2005 and 2011 in large, urban districts, Hispanic eighth-graders gained six points in reading (from 243 to 249), black eighth-graders gained five points (from 240 to 245), and white eighth-graders gained three points (from 270 to 273). In District of Columbia Public Schools, however, Hispanic eighth-graders’ scores fell 15 points (from 247 to 232), black eighth-graders’ scores fell two points (from 233 to 231), and white eighth-graders’ scores fell 13 points (from 303 to 290).

The states that have adopted her approach, and others now being lobbied, might want to make their own data-driven decisions.

No comments:

Post a Comment