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Hwayobi with Sleepy of Untouchable - Kiss Kiss Kiss

To Koreans and K-pop fans who know the ins and outs of what I'm talking about here, please note that compared to you I know very little - I only got addicted to the mainstream side of things in April of this year. Although I've done my research to the best of my ability and with what I can actually read, the internet isn't exactly a comprehensive encyclopedia with everything about the artists listed in one place and I can't read Korean (Google Translate isn't of much help either) so there are a lot of important pages I'm missing out on. Any corrections and clarifications are very welcome, please comment so I can further develop this review.

In Korea, everyone has some form of rapping in some random song - SHINee, DBSK, f(x), Brown Eyed Girls, Super Junior, 2PM, After School, 4 Minute, Rain and countless others all make provisions for chanting/rapping. It's kinda like dancing so that makes it dance AND rap OR rot and die in Korea. What a standard.

Back to what I was saying. Rapping isn't reserved for Hip-Hop acts or predominantly Hip-Hop songs - heck, even The Brown Eyed Girls' How Come had a rap part and that was on the techno side! Which is why back then I was a little annoyed by the oftentimes cheap rapping by G-Dragon and the like.

For the longest time, my only foray into what people actually call Korean R&B/Hip-Hop was via YG - I got my fill of Se7en, Big Bang and 2NE1 from the talent company and thought that that was enough. Until I realized that they were more on the pop side and were probably as familiar with Korean R&B as people from SM and JYP were.

Recently I gave these Hip-Hop people a chance and what I heard surprised even me! The rapping on a lot of the songs I heard was tasteful and didn't sound like they knew absolutely nothing about what rapping was - these people had a sense of rhythm, a good way of delivering the words and the over-all rapping was tasteful. Which brings me to this song.

Hwayobi, from what I've been reading on her, is a well-respected pop/R&B singer in her late 20's. Her debut album was released in 2000 and although she doesn't get as much press attention as all these girl groups, boybands and major solo artists from holy trinity talent companies (I have yet to find out if she actually belongs to a talent company), the girl has one heck of a voice. Think Duffy with an even deeper, more beautiful timbre and you have Hwayobi. I haven't heard her hit big, high notes with a full voice yet but who cares - she isn't a ballad singer and she isn't in a girl group, I happen to think she has a nice range.

Now the guy. Hwayobi's dating the guy, which explains the video. Anyway, he's part of a Hip-Hop duo called Untouchable and they've been around for a while now. There's not much info about them online (will have to dig more) but they look very proficient. See one of their singles here. The guy, who's credited as Sleepy (his real name's Kim Sung Won), raps on this song but on the other song by Untouchable that I linked you to, HE SINGS. And might I add that he's pretty good. Not anywhere near Jaejoong DBSK's vocals but cut the guy some slack, he's a rapper.

Now that you have basic background on them, on to the song.

Kiss Kiss Kiss is very light and sweet - mix that with Hwayobi's voice that sounds very smooth and clean yet has passion and conviction and you have a very, very good R&B number. The hook is catchy but not like a pop song where it hits you over the head and doesn't let you breathe, this one's laid-back but not lazy. The rapping gives it a different dimension and like I said, as long as you rap tastefully and it compliments the song, I don't mind at all.

I like the trumpets that sporadically appear in the background and I like the arrangement of this song - the production is outstanding as well. The songs's a good example of how to properly use the obvious auto-tune and not over do it but I do think that Hwayobi's voice when auto-tuned sounds very good.

So there. I'm still pretty much grazing the surface of the genre with this song and I know very little but when I started the K-pop special back in May I was like this for the mainstream pop - absolutely clueless. Over the next few weeks I might be pouring all my attention into hunting down the gems in Korean Hip-Hop so if I ever feature any others, you know I've been looking.

  1. i'm intruiged by korean hip hop! Bring it on!

  2. Hahah. Listened to the supposed legends and I'm not too into them. Will graze the surface of the genre while this special is going on and get back to it maybe early next year at the earliest - I have my year-end special to worry about after this! Hahah.

  3. Wow, only this year! Though I only got into the media of K-Pop in January so I can understand.

    Hm, never heard of this song but I will have a look at it.

  4. Here's an earlier Untouchable song featuring Hwayobi which I really like too

  5. i love hwayobi - booty call
    first i watch on youtube, never get tired ...
    im not music expert but love this song very much

  6. i love hwayobi - booty call
    hwayobi - can you tell me
    first i watch on youtube, never get tired ...
    im not music expert but love this song very much

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Large Military-Grade Drones Could Soon Be Flying Over Your Backyard

Above Photo: General Atomics is conducting a test flight of its SkyGuardian drone over San Diego sometime this year.JARED RODRIGUEZ / TRUTHOUT

As the U.S. military and defense contractors eye a potential drone war with Iran as tensions with the country remain elevated, the defense industry is also preparing to test-fly domestic versions of its combat drones over major American cities in an effort to fully integrate military-grade drones into civil airspace alongside commercial air traffic in the coming years.

That’s right, those robotic killing machines used for counterterrorism strikes in the Middle East are coming home — and could eventually be used to surveil large protests and communities of color throughout the U.S.

The Poway-based defense contractor General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, Inc., will test-fly its SkyGuardian drone, outfitted with a 79-foot wingspan and advanced surveillance capabilities of more than 2,000 feet, over San Diego, California, sometime this year.

The SkyGuardian, also known as the MQ-9B or Predator B, is an advanced version of the Predator military drone used overseas in the war on terror but designed to be compliant with regulations for U.S. airspace. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) granted the drone experimental certification in October 2018, according to a spokesperson for the agency’s drone integration office.

According to the San Diego Union-Tribune, General Atomics did not disclose a date or flight paths for the drone but said it will be used for “mapping of critical infrastructure” in the region and displaying the drone’s civilian capabilities. The version the company intends to test-fly will not be weaponized, although the company advertises a weaponized version on its website.

The test flight “could open the skies to a multitude of missions that could be carried out using large (drones), including broader support for first responders contending with natural disasters such as floods and forest fires,” a General Atomics spokesperson told the Union-Tribune. The company did not respond to Truthout’s request for comment.

General Atomics’s initiative is being planned without any real involvement from the city or the FAA. According to the Union-Tribune, no city official is overseeing the test flight, and the FAA’s Unmanned Aircraft Systems Integration Office (UASIO) told Truthout last year that while, “The UASIO is engaged in internal FAA discussions to approve the proposed concept of operations for the SkyGuardian over portions of San Diego, … this demonstration is not part of any UASIO project.”

The head of the branch within San Diego’s Economic Development Corporation supporting General Atomics’s upcoming test flight has assured the public that the effort is not intended to create an atmosphere of mistrust, and that it is not the defense contractor’s intention to sell military-grade drones to law enforcement agencies.

But an article by Defense One points out that General Atomics officials want the SkyGuardian to freely fly in American skies by 2025, and one of the drone’s biggest selling points is its FAA stamp of approval coupled with its intelligence-gathering, surveillance and reconnaissance abilities — including signals intelligence. Larger drones may appeal to police departments over smaller, more common quadcopters, as they can stay in the air for days — in SkyGuardian’s case, up to 40 hours.

In fact, SkyGuardian’s endurance represents a dramatic advantage for police departments as a replacement for human-piloted helicopters, which are limited by how long the pilot can stay in the air. Using SkyGuardian, police would be able to silently monitor suspects or protests for up to 40 hours and stream high-resolution video to police from more than 2,000 feet above.

“What large drones actually make possible is true persistent aerial surveillance, because they’re likely to drive down the cost…. It’s much more expensive to do it with a manned airplane where you actually have to pay a trained pilot, and you have to switch pilots every so often,” says Jeramie Scott, the director of the Domestic Surveillance Project at the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC).

Scott points to the persistent aerial surveillance that was conducted by a private company — Persistent Surveillance Systems — in Baltimore in the aftermath of the Freddie Gray protests in which military-grade surveillance equipment originally developed to track roadside bombs in Iraq was attached to small Cessna airplanes.

Now, military-grade drone integration in civilian airspace is rapidly advancing without substantial public debate regarding the privacy and civil liberties implications of normalizing military surveillance technologies over American cities.

Military Drones Come Home

The Pentagon and defense industry have long sought unfettered access for their drones in civil airspace, and began working with the FAA to integrate large military-grade drones into U.S. skies after President Obama signed the 2012 FAA Modernization and Reform Act into law.

Since then, the goal has been to develop adequate “detect-and-avoid” technology to prevent midair collisions, making military drones safe to fly alongside commercial air traffic in the National Airspace System (NAS). Defense contractors have jumped into the fray, with General Atomics leading the way in designing a large drone that could pass the FAA’s civil certification standards.

While much focus has centered on the FAA’s integration of smaller drones for civilian and commercial use into the NAS, the Pentagon’s plans to fly hundreds of larger drones, including General Atomics’s Global Hawks as well as MQ-1 Predators and MQ-9 Reapers, has largely escaped public scrutiny. In fact, the 2012 Modernization Act never specifically mentions military drones. Still, the conference report on the bill laid out that the FAA was directed to work with the Defense Department “to certify and develop flight standards for military unmanned aerial systems and to integrate these systems into the NAS.”

According to a spokesperson for the FAA’s drone integration office, the agency does not require civil certification of aircraft used for public operations in the U.S., instead looking to the public aircraft operator, such as the Air Force, to ensure the aircraft used is airworthy. Still, the FAA doesn’t allow the military to fly large drones in the NAS without a special permit called a Certificate of Waiver or Authorization (COA). The FAA approved General Atomics’s SkyGuardian drone, however, under civil experimental certification for a private company.

There have been some exceptions. Unarmed Predator drones have long had special permission to patrol the nation’s borders. Likewise, the California Air National Guard already uses Predator-class drones on wildfire missions, where their advanced capabilities can help firefighters track where wildfires might spread and target their hottest spots.

The 2012 law also directed the FAA to select six test sites to conduct integration research, and in late 2013, the FAA announced state programs in Alaska, Nevada, New York, North Dakota, Texas and Virginia. The agency later added a seventh program in New Mexico in 2016.

While the seven test programs are affiliated with state universities to research and test commercial and civilian drone applications, the programs have all, at one point or another, been run by retired military officers and some have operated on military sites, according to Barry Summers, a North Carolina-based researcher studying military drone integration. Those sites include testing of “non-FAA” drone operations at Area 51 in Nevada.

Since the 2012 Act, advancements in ground-based and airborne detect-and-avoid technologies, as well as an integrated traffic management system have seen major breakthroughs, leading legislators in the House to specifically include collision-testing and risk-assessment provisions for military-grade drones operating in civil airspace when drafting the 2018 FAA Act. However, those safety provisions were later stripped out of the version passed by the Senate, and President Trump signed the bill into law in October 2018. That same month, the FAA’s Phoenix Manufacturing Inspection Office granted General Atomics’s SkyGuardian experimental certification.

In 2019, the FAA approved 639 public COAs for drone flights in the NAS operated by government entities, and 10 civil COAs, according to the integration office. The agency did not differentiate how many of those waivers were for large, military-grade drones. Moreover, it does not track the number of COAs it issues for test flights, such as the upcoming SkyGuardian flight over San Diego.

Most recently, the FAA announced the introduction of a new rule last month that would allow the agency, as well as local and state law enforcement and federal security, to be able to remotely identify drones. The new rule comes as residents in five counties in Northeast Colorado continue to spot large drones flying in grid-like formations in the evenings. Their operator, however, still remains a mystery.

SkyGuardian, the U.S. and Iran

Retired Air Force colonels and other ex-military officials have largely led the think tank responsible for advising the FAA’s drone integration efforts — the Alliance for System Safety of UAS through Research Excellence (ASSURE) at the FAA’s Center of Excellence for Unmanned Aircraft Systems. Congress established the Center of Excellence in 2014 to coordinate the research efforts of the agency’s seven drone test sites.

From September 2014 until June 2016, retired Air Force Major Gen. James Poss, the former assistant deputy chief of staff of U.S. Air Force Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance, led the FAA’s ASSURE as executive director. During his time at the Air Force, Poss oversaw the development and deployment of the most advanced drone surveillance technology in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Poss now runs his own intelligence and drone consulting firm. He argues that the U.S. and its Western allies should gear up with the SkyGuardian in order to have an edge in a potential drone war with Iran. In an op-ed he penned for Inside Unmanned Systems, he writes:

“the SkyGuardian meets British and American civil aviation airworthiness standards, meaning it can fly integrated with even civilian manned aircraft. It has a much longer range, adverse-weather features and carries the MBDA Brimstone missile — another weapon that can ripple fire against multiple moving targets. All these changes have given the [Royal Air Force] a drone force that would be better suited for maritime combat than American MQ-9s in a prolonged contest with Iran.”

He explained his argument further, telling Truthout that while civil certification is not necessarily needed for combat, the navigation fitout that is required for flying in civilian airspace is superior, and that the drone gives Western allies an advantage when it comes to using the drone in domestic training exercises.

“The reason so many people including myself are pushing civil certification for large drones is first and foremost safety. Once we get these rules written down and once we figure out how to fly these things, everything is going to be an order of magnitude safer,” Poss says.

For drone-integration researcher Summers, however, advancing military-grade drone integration is not just about safety issues related to opening American skies to drones, but is also “about expanding American drone technology worldwide.” General Atomics, which manufactured the MQ-9 Reaper that carried out the targeted assassination of Iranian Gen. Qassim Suleimani, wants its SkyGuardian “to be essentially the drone of choice for all American allies,” Summers says.

Indeed, the U.K. Ministry of Defense decided to purchase 16 SkyGuardian model drones, renamed “Protectors,” in April 2016, and Australia has already followed suit.

No Privacy Debate in Sight

Domestic military drone integration is advancing on both sides of the Atlantic in a trend that should have privacy experts and technologists on alert.

According to EPIC’s Scott, who was heavily involved in pushing the FAA to adopt the remote ID rule that is now in the works, there isn’t yet a legal precedent for military-grade drones flying over civilian areas and private residences. In fact, there is almost no expectation of privacy in backyards and fenced-in land — as they are considered open areas, as established by the 1989 Supreme Court case Florida v. Riley. Moreover, the only legal restriction that applies to police helicopters — a rule against flying so low as to constitute a “home invasion” — wouldn’t apply to drones flying at 2,000 feet.

Scott also warns about the ways in which large drones can be combined with other emerging surveillance technologies, such as facial recognition, automated license plate readers and StingRay cellphone tracking devices — all technology widely used by domestic law enforcement agencies that originated with the military.

“Although I may go out in public and necessarily expose myself to public view to some degree while I’m at a specific location, we don’t have the expectation that your travels in the public space in their entirety would be collected and potentially analyzed,” Scott says. “Since there are no rules in place, it opens aerial surveillance up to a lot of potential abuse from a privacy and civil liberties front. So obviously law enforcement may use it for their purposes, but you can also have companies who are going to collect a bunch of data and decide what to do with it later.”

In fact, such surveillance capabilities are very much a part of what’s being studied at the FAA’s seven test sites. According to a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report released January 9, GAO officials surveyed one user of the FAA’s test site in New York, who told them that the “test site had tested communication equipment and detect-and-avoid capabilities on large [drones] that they manufacture and sell to other entities for conducting surveillance activities, such as drug interdiction.”

Another potential threat is the possibility of the military using large drones to conduct routine surveillance operations over civilian areas under homeland security justifications. In fact, the military has already been conducting large drone operations over urban or urban-adjacent areas for years.

Still, Poss says, routine military operations over civilian airspace are less likely since, according to him, the airspace is difficult to get into and it’s less safe for military operations. “We’ve got our own airspace,” he says. Further, he says, civil certification isn’t required for military operations anyway since they can just fly under a COA.

“The problem isn’t that there is military involvement [with drone integration] to a certain degree because of their expertise with large drones,” says Scott. “The larger issue is that there isn’t that counterbalance at all in any way with other experts — privacy advocates, for instance — to raise potential issues and risks as the FAA works toward integration of drones in the national airspace.”

Indeed, the FAA has largely passed the buck on privacy issues, as a spokesperson from the drone integration office told Truthout that, “The FAA’s mission is to provide the safest, most efficient aerospace system in the world, and does not include regulating privacy.”

While large domestic drones will eventually provide many benefits to society, including large, commercial passenger operations and improved firefighting and other disaster response efforts, integration is moving forward with little to no public involvement.

“These powerful surveillance tools were developed to track our adversaries overseas. What will this do to the psyche of a free society, knowing that an eye in the sky is making a permanent record of your every move?” Summers tells Truthout. “This is a watershed moment in our right to not be under constant government surveillance. At the very least, there should be a robust public debate.”

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SQL Saturday Indianapolis: Everyone remembers their first time (recap)

Note: If you attended my talk and you’re looking for my code examples, you can find them over on GitHub. Also, please leave comments! I’d love to hear what you thought.

Way back when

In May of 2014, I was seated in the main room of the Catalyst Ranch in Chicago, reviewing some findings of one of my production servers with Kendra Little. I was in town for one of Brent Ozar Unlimited’s SQL Server Performance Troubleshooting classes, expanding my skill set. While she reviewed my troubled servers and provided insight, the conversation drifted over to how someone can get more involved with the SQL community. I mentioned to her that I wanted to start speaking at some point in the future.

“You should!” she said, enthusiastically. She then gave me a rundown of how to prepare topics, directed me to towards PASS, and wished me luck.

Flash forward to this past Saturday

Almost a year and three months later, there I was: standing in front of a group of about 60 or so people. I was in Indianapolis for SQL Saturday #402 and this time, I was speaking. For me, this was a milestone: I am used to speaking locally to small-ish groups, but this was a huge opportunity to take my contributions to the SQL community to the next level. When the session was all said and done, and the room applauded… I was overwhelmed, really. My feedback was all positive as well.

Truth be told, I wasn’t sure when or if I would have ever seen myself standing up there. I had made the decision earlier this year to make it a personal goal to go out and get involved in the greater SQL Server community; it started with registering my blog back in January of this year. From there, I sought out and obtained a board position on the local Columbus PASS chapter, spoke at the local chapter meeting a couple months ago, and helped plan and pull off a local SQL Saturday here in Columbus. It was like a whirlwind; I kept finding opportunities to get out there and volunteer and be part of the community the more and more I looked. And it’s been such a blessing and journey and I can’t wait to continue it.

As for my topic, PowerShell and SQL Server still is a tricky subject to teach. But I had some awesome people in attendance, such as Ben Miller, Pat Phalen, and David Maxwell who were there to give me great feedback on my session. Afterwards, Pat came up to me and told me about how when he presents he takes a “Reading Rainbow” approach vs. “A Sesame Street” approach. When I asked what he meant, he said that a lot of speakers will focus on “how” to do something (Sesame Street), while he explains “why” you should be doing something (Reading Rainbow). And I’d like to think that in my session, I took a similar stance. My goal wasn’t to teach a room full of people how to use PowerShell; I can’t do that in an hour. Instead, I wanted to show off demos and get people excited about what’s possible with SQL Server and PowerShell. And in that, I think I succeeded. I had one attendee say that I convinced him. To me, there’s no higher compliment.

Nobody is perfect

That said, I learned a lot this weekend. Both good and bad. Here’s a quick run-down of things, in no particular order of importance:

  1. My abstract needs work. While people were generally pleased with my session, I heard from more than one person that what I presented and how I presented it didn’t match up well.
  2. Every speaker is like a peer supporter. I had the pleasure of attending a lot of great sessions from a lot of great and well-known members of the community, but then they turned right around and attended me session. I was humbled, really.
  3. Presenting on a Surface Pro 3 tablet is a pain in the butt. The extra resolution doesn’t translate well to secondary “monitors” when presenting.
  4. No matter how hard you prepare, the mish-mash of resolutions of projectors will almost ensure that your demos won’t look right. Best to get in the room as quick as you can and get set up.
  5. I need to get better with ZoomIt for magnifying my screen when simple font size increases won’t cut it.
  6. There is a Chipotle in Richmond, Indiana. It’s right about half-way between there and Columbus. Makes a great place to stop, in both directions.
  7. Not enough people use twitter. The speakers all advocate it, but in my session and the others I attended, very few people raised their hands when asked if they were on twitter. They should be!

All told, this was an amazing weekend and experience for me. I can’t wait to do it again in a couple weeks in Louisville. As for all the people I need to thank, no one needs more thanks than Hope Foley and the awesome Indy PASS crew for putting on a great event. I hope I was able to add the value they were looking for, because that was a fantastic event all around!


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Become a Photographer

With “cameras” in nearly everyone’s pocket, there are more “photographers” than ever. You, however, post fewer pictures than most. You care about the little things like styling and lighting. You take dozens of shots in hopes of getting that one perfect frame. You spend hours cropping and editing before you deem a photo worthy of putting it out there. Photography is your passion, Make it your career.

Application Deadline: February 24th, 2020

Photographers are picture-makers, not picture-takers. They create the images we pin, post and share. Visions that the rest of us try to mimic every time we slap a filter on hastily-taken selfie. They are immersed in the ever-evolving technology of their craft, but know that the latest gadgets are tools and nothing more. A visionary by definition, a photographer needs to be as much of a storyteller as any writer. Their tales are told with light and shadow, color and texture. They capture perfect moments in time with sublime composition, whether shot on the latest digital Hasselblad or a 2-year-old iPhone 6.

Let me know if you have questions or would like to visit and see our classes in action.
Kristin Tidwell
Admissions Coordinator
Student Work
Details & Dates
What kind of background do I need to have?
Our students are like snowflakes, no two are alike. Are you a lawyer who is bursting with creativity and needs to get out of that large law firm? Did you just graduate with a 4-year degree and realize that you really need a portfolio to get your dream job? Have you always been creative and wanted a career rather than be a starving artist? Then this school is for you!
How long is the program and what are the application deadlines?

This is a two year (eight quarter) diploma program with the primary purpose of developing a professional portfolio through classes and real-world experience to gain the skills needed for an entry level position in advertising. Each quarter is 10 weeks in length with an additional studio/critique week to finalize your projects for the final evaluation and exhibit. Your training covers everything you need to know for a career as an art director. Courses are practical. Instructors are all top advertising professionals: art directors, creative directors, videographers… They teach you the skills they use everyday at the agencies where they work.

  • Spring- February 24th, 2020 – Classes Start April 6, 2020
  • Summer- May 25th, 2020 – Classes Start June 6, 2020
  • Winter- August 24th, 2020 – Classes Start October 5, 2020
What are some of the courses I'll take?
No tests. No books. You learn by doing. Your instructors are all industry professionals who teach you what they do everyday at their jobs at the top agencies in Atlanta. All of your courses are practical and will help you develop a portfolio which is what you need to get a job as an art director. Here are some of the courses in the art direction program.

VIDEO STORYTELLING: An introduction to the camera (DSLR), software (Adobe Premiere & After Effects), and workflow of video production. The student will produce short films of both the narrative and expository form and acquire a familiarity with common production techniques (e.g., green screen, stop motion, keyframe animation). Students are required to produce several projects which are suitable for submission to video contests, but exercise materials are provided to the students to guarantee sufficient time is spent with the software so they gain the skill and confidence with the post production process.

LIGHT STALKERS: The fundamentals of studio lights: the use of trellises, reflectors, soft and hard lights.

Shooting in a variety of locations, indoors and outdoors. How to control light when you can’t control light. Digital advantages and disadvantages.

DOCUMENTARY: Using the contrasting environments of sea, swamp and mountains, students will learn to tell a story through their photography.

Is there an amazing internship program?
We have an unbelievable internship program. Students can spend the second half of their two year program studying and interning in up to four other cities where we have programs. Through partnerships the school has with agencies all over the world, students can get hands-on experience and build their network of industry contacts at companies including Ogivly, BBDO, R/GA, Facebook, Y&R, Saatchi, Droga5 and BBH.
What are the starting salaries?
Average starting salaries run from $40,000 to $60,000. Miami Ad School @ Portfolio Center has a rigorous job placement program. After graduation attend Portfolio Review where you can expect a dozen interviews in a day. Graduates have the opportunity to attend school sponsored Portfolio Reviews in New York, San Francisco, Miami and Atlanta. Our Job Leads for Life program supplies our graduates with a continuous source of job leads. Hundreds of companies contact us each year looking for creative talent from all skill levels. We are a resource for our grads throughout their careers.
How do I tell Mom and Dad?
Remind them that one day you might have to take care of them, which will be much easier to do if you’re directing commercials for Coca-Cola or branding Nike’s new product line than it will be if you end up chucking your soul-sucking middle-management job to make pottery.
What is tuition?
Tuition for each quarter is $4,850 per quarter/ $19,400 a year/ $38,800 total tuition cost for the 2-year program. Tuition is based on the quarter system. It takes eight quarters (24 months) for completion of the art direction program. Financial aid is available for U.S. Citizens.
Gainful Employment
Federal regulations require colleges and universities to report information about the success of students who enroll in educational programs that lead to gainful employment in recognized fields.

The gainful employment information posted at the links below is in compliance with U.S. Department of Education requirements, and in a format prescribed and provided by that agency. Content includes general program information, estimated costs, on-time completion rates, placement rates, median debt at the time of program completion, and related occupational information.

Your education is an important and substantial investment in your future. That’s why we want you to have comprehensive and specific information about our programs so that you can determine what’s best for you and your career goals.

Included Information:

  • Total tuition and fees for the program, including estimated book and supply costs and estimated costs of off-campus room and board.
  • Graduate Placement Information.
  • Median debt concerning the program, broken down by financing type.
  • The names of the occupations for which the program prepares students, accompanied by links to a federal government site which contains occupational profiles and potential income, sometime after graduation (we do not guarantee placement or salary).

Photography Gainful Employment

Application Deadline: January 27th

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Documents to download

The UK is committed to targets under international biodiversity agreements
to value, conserve and restore biodiversity, which is the variety of life on
earth ranging from genes to ecosystems.

The four UK nations will each develop new 10-year biodiversity strategies in
response to the post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework that will be agreed
at the 15th Conference of the Parties to the Convention of Biological Diversity
(CBD) in October 2021. The Environment Bill, which also contains biodiversity
commitments, was announced in the Queen’s speech and has been carried
over from the previous Parliamentary session; its progress will continue this

One of the ways in which it will be possible to determine success against
biodiversity targets will be through the use of biodiversity indicators, which
are designed to summarise and communicate trends in complex biodiversity
monitoring data.

Individual indicators monitor specific aspects of biodiversity, such as
genetic diversity or the change in abundance of a group of species. Multiple
indicators (sometimes called suites of indicators) can be used to assess and
infer information about the state of biodiversity as a whole.

Various suites of indicators have been developed at the UK and devolved
levels. The complex nature of biodiversity itself along with the availability,
volume, quality and breadth of the underlying biodiversity monitoring data,
has led to diversified approaches to the development and application of
biodiversity indicators between nations.

The representation of species, habitats and facets of biodiversity in headline
biodiversity indicators at the UK and country level varies between the suites
of indicators.

POSTnotes are based on literature reviews and interviews with a range of stakeholders and are externally peer-reviewed. POST would like to thank interviewees and peer reviewers for kindly giving up their time during the preparation of this briefing, including:

Dr Abigail McQuatters-Gollop, University of Plymotuh

Dr Amy Molotoks, Stockholm Environment Institute – York

Andy Nisbet, Natural England

Jane Lusardi, Natural England

Professor Andy Purvis, Natural History Museum*

Caryn Le Roux, Welsh Government

Sara Lloyd-Mackay, Welsh Government

Steve Sopde, Welsh Government*

Dr Christopher Lynam, Cefas

Dave Johnston, Natural Resources Wales*

David O’Brien, NatureScot*

Dr Emily Dennis, Butterfly Conservation

Dr James Williams, Joint Nature Conservation Committee (JNCC)*

Christine Holleran, Defra

Dr Jasmin Godbold, University of Southampton

Professor Martin Solan, University of Southampton

Jemilah Vanderpump, Defra

Dr Katherine Boughey, Bat conservation Trust

Mark Preston, DAERA Northern Ireland

Ken Bradley, DAERA Northern Ireland

Richard Gray, DAERA Northern Ireland

Matthew Bird, The Scottish Government

Dr Nick Isaac, UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology

Dr Oliver Pescott, UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology

Dr Nisha Owen, On The Edge Conservation

Dr Prue Addison, Berks, Bucks, and Oxon Wildlife Trust

Professor Richard Gregory, Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB)*

Professor Steve Ormerod, Cardiff University

Dr Josie Jackson, Cardiff University*

Dr Tim Newbold, University College London

* denotes people and organisations who acted as external reviewers of the briefing.

Documents to download

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It may surprise you that despite spending most of my career as a public school administrator, I was actually an anthropology major in college. Yes, that’s right, I majored in anthropology and am not ashamed to admit that I’m an archaeology geek. I loved the semesters I spent studying the Mesoamerican cultures and their histories. So, when I realized our cruise last summer was stopping close enough for me to get a firsthand look at the ruins of Chichén Itzá, Mexico, I was super stoked. After all, it is one of the seven wonders of the world.

Progresso, Mexico, rainbow

A rainbow in Progresso, Mexico, provided foreshadowing to the mix of showers and sun we’d have today.

Our ship docked near Progresso, Mexico, on a gorgeous June morning. When we looked out the window of our stateroom, we saw a beautiful rainbow in the distance, with tropical showers scattered all around. Something told me this was going to be an amazing day. And it was.

The trip from the port to Chichén Itzá is about two hours down a modern highway. We rolled along, passing in and out of rain showers while our guide explained local culture and history to us. This, along with the lush, green scenery and the excitement of being someplace new, helped the time pass quickly and soon enough we pulled into the entrance of Chichén Itzá where the van driver gave us each a bottle of water and an umbrella that could be used to block both rain and sun.

Chichén Itzá tour guide, Mexico

Our tour guide for the day knew a great deal about the history and culture at Chichén Itzá.

Let me just say that Chichén Itzá is a pretty busy place. When you walk in, there are people everywhere trying to sell you those cute, seemingly irresistible trinkets that you want to buy but know you don’t have any place to put them in your house if you do.

Because we had a guide, we moved pretty quickly past the mass of souvenir vendors and into a clearing near the center of the archaeological site. There, I had my first look at the pyramid that dominates the site and is considered one of the seven wonders of the world and the first one of those I’d seen with my own eyes.

Chichén Itzá main pyramid, Mexico

“El Castillo,” the main pyramid at Chichén Itzá, is considered one of the seven wonders of the world.

Seeing it, I could understand why it has earned that designation. Look at the two people standing in front of it in the picture below–it will give you some sense of just how huge this pyramid is.

Chichén Itzá, base of main pyramid, Mexico

Serpents’ heads guard the bottom of the steps of the main pyramid at Chichén Itzá.

We walked through the ruins with our guide, stopping to look at the playing field of the sacred ball game. This game, a sort of combination of soccer and basketball in which players tried to get a solid rubber ball through a vertical stone hoop without using their hands, often lasted for days before someone scored a point and ended the game. The guide told us that the winning team won a prize unlike anything given to winners today. They won the privilege of being sacrificed to the gods.

Sacred ball game court, Chichén Itzá, Mexico

The court used to play the sacred ball game at Chichén Itzá. the goal was to get a solid rubber ball through the stone hoop suspended high up on the right side of this photo.

We wandered some more, stopping to look at bas-relief carving in the stone. Archaeologists have used carvings like these to help them get a better understanding of the ancient culture.

Chichén Itzá hieroglyphs, Mexico

These hieroglyphs help archaeologists understand what took place in Chichén Itzá.

At the conclusion of the guided portion of our tour, we had some time to walk the site by ourselves and explore the ruins. As we walked, I thought of the generations of people who once lived and worked in this ancient city.

Chichén Itzá, Mexico

A view across the archaeological site at Chichén Itzá, Mexico.

I imagined the effort needed to build a massive stone pyramid, and thought of the amount of precise math needed to to align that pyramid just so it could be used as a calendar more accurate than the one we use today. I thought of the laughter and tears and children running that once filled the streets here. And I marveled that for all that we know about this place, there is so much more we don’t begin to understand.

As we drove away, I felt satisfaction that I’d finally visited but still had a yearning to know more about the people who once lived in Chichén Itzá. It’s what will bring me back again, someday.


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10 Reasons Indigenous Students Should Consider Syracuse University

Are you looking for a college or university with a strong Indigenous community? Syracuse University is consistently recognized as an institution that leads the nation in Indigenous academic programs and student support services.

Read on to discover a few of the reasons why Admissions Counselor and Native American Liaison Tammy Bluewolf-Kennedy believes Syracuse might be a great fit for you!

Students celebrate Indigenous Peoples' Day on campus.
Students celebrate Indigenous Peoples’ Day on campus.
  1. Syracuse University sits on Onondaga Nation ancestral homelands in the heart of Haudenosaunee territory with several Haudenosaunee communities nearby to provide support and ceremony.
  2. The University’s adoption of and commitment to the Haudenosaunee Promise Scholarship, Honor Scholarship and Indigenous Pathways Grant help make a Syracuse education affordable for Indigenous students.

    The Haudenosaunee flag flies next to the Syracuse University flag on the Quad.
    The Haudenosaunee flag flies next to the Syracuse University flag on the Quad.
  3. The University community shows respect and value for its partnership with the Onondaga Nation through adoption of a Land Acknowledgement that is read before all major events and by flying the Haudenosaunee Confederacy flag on campus.
  4. Take part in Syracuse’s Native Student Program, which offers a home away from home for students and whose dedicated Indigenous faculty and staff, including Assistant Director of the Native Student Program, Office of Multicultural Affairs Regina Jones, are present to mentor and support you through your academic career.
  5. Syracuse officially recognizes Indigenous Peoples’ Day and Native Heritage Month with special events, speakers and presentations that celebrate Indigenous cultures and traditions.
  6. Students, no matter what they are studying, can pursue an academic minor in Native American and Indigenous Studies or a certificate in Iroquois Linguistics.
  7. Seeking counseling or group therapy? Request to work with an Indigenous counselor through Syracuse’s Barnes Center at the Arch, who provides culturally appropriate mental health support.
  8. Join a tight-knit community of Indigenous students who hail from across North and South America and pursue leadership experience through student groups like Indigenous Students at Syracuse (ISAS).
  9. Request to live in the Indigenous Living Learning Community (LLC) in Haven Hall and attend Indigenous festivals, campus lectures and social activities with fellow LLC students.
  10. Graduates become part of Syracuse’s Ongwehonwe Alumni Association, an ever-growing group of Indigenous Orange alumni!

Q&A with Maris Jacobs ’19

Students at the early orientation sponsored by the University's Native Students Program.
Students at the early orientation sponsored by the University’s Native Students Program.

Did you know that Syracuse University’s picturesque campus sits on over 720 acres of ancestral Onondaga land? The Onondaga Nation are the Firekeepers of the Haudenosanuee Confederacy, which is made up of six Indigenous nations: the Mohawk, Oneida, Tuscarora, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca.

In addition to the land acknowledgement read at the start of official University events, Syracuse also pays tribute to the Onondaga Nation and the Haudenosaunee people through the Haudenosaunee Promise Scholarship, Native Students Program (NSP), and Native American and Indigenous Studies minor. Learn more about these programs and more from Maris Jacobs ’19, below!

Meet Maris Jacobs ‘19
Hometown: Kahnawà:ke Mohawk Territory (just outside of Montreal, Quebec)
Major: Communication and Rhetorical Studies with a minor in Nutrition

Maris Jacobs '19. Photo courtesy of Maris Jacobs.
Maris Jacobs ’19. Photo courtesy of Maris Jacobs.

Why did you choose to attend Syracuse?
I knew very little about Syracuse before I was admitted! I knew of two other girls from my hometown studying at Syracuse who applied after learning about the Haudenosaunee Promise Scholarship. Looking back, the Native Student Program (NSP), Indigenous Living Learning Community (ILLC), and Indigenous Students at Syracuse organization (ISAS) were what made my time at Syracuse meaningful. In them I found a community of people I could depend on when I needed help and also felt like I had found a place I was meant to be!

What was your transition to life at Syracuse like?
I was anticipating a slow start to making connections and friends, but the ILLC and NSP made it much easier on myself and my family. It’s very easy to feel alone in a place you don’t know surrounded by thousands of strangers. I’m thankful that SU had programs that helped me find a living situation that I was comfortable with.

I also attended NSP’s early orientation program along with all the other freshmen who were staying on the ILLC floor in Haven Hall. I got to know everyone I’d be living with as well as some of the staff. By the end of orientation, I felt like we had been friends our whole lives. It was exactly what I needed.

What were you involved with on campus?
Throughout my time at Syracuse I was actively involved in NSP and ISAS! I also studied abroad in Florence, Italy during a six-week summer program.

ISAS is a way for students to become more involved on campus through a community that recognizes the importance of maintaining an Indigenous presence at Syracuse. We plan and organize events for Indigenous Peoples Day, Native Heritage Month, and host speakers and special guests that the entire University community can enjoy, as well.

Students tabling on the quad in recognition of Indigenous Peoples' Day.
Students tabling on the quad in recognition of Indigenous Peoples’ Day.

The longer I participated in ISAS, the more I felt I could contribute, and I eventually held the role of president. Some of my responsibilities were to organize meetings, execute ideas and ensure that we got as many people involved in our programs and events as possible. I started to take on more responsibility in my junior year because I loved being a part of planning and brainstorming activities. I just wanted to see things keep improving and my role as president was all about how I could turn the input of others into something we could all share together.

What was a typical day like for you on campus?
In between classes, you could almost always find me at 113 Euclid Avenue, home of the NSP. The shared office and lounge space for the NSP is where lots of students would stop to take a breather during the day. It became my home base for most of my time spent at Syracuse. If I wasn’t taking a nap or catching up on homework, I was eating PB&J sandwiches and telling stories with friends!

So much of our ISAS’ programming is run out of 113 Euclid and it is important that it’s a place we can use to feel ourselves. NSP and ISAS’ Fall Connections, Identity Series, beading club, planning committees, guest speakers, and meeting are all held here, and it is also where the office of Regina Jones, advisor/director of NSP is located. Regina, along with Tammy Bluewolf-Kennedy, our Native liaison in the Office of Admissions, are two great members of the Indigenous faculty and staff on campus who are continuously enhancing our programs! They have been amazing resources and really helped me be successful at Syracuse.

What advice would you give to prospective Indigenous students regarding attending Syracuse?

Students celebrating at the Native Students' Program/Haudenosaunee Promise graduation ceremony. Photo courtesy of Maris Jacobs '19.
Students celebrating at the Native Students’ Program/Haudenosaunee Promise graduation ceremony. Photo courtesy of Maris Jacobs ’19.

I would encourage all students to stop by 113 Euclid for a visit with Regina and a chance to meet other Indigenous students. When I started my journey at SU, I had no intention of becoming president of anything. My involvement in ISAS was something that grew out of friendship and a desire to feel like part of a community. You won’t regret the bonds you will make with other students like you. By the end of your time at Syracuse, you will have a whole network of people behind you whether they are students, faculty, or staff.


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Current News Regulation - What is it Good For?

Should the FBI Be Able to Wiretap the Internet?

There is currently a government task force that is working on proposed legislation that would give the FBI the ability to ‘wiretap’ data. This is very different from what is available today. Today, ISPs are required to comply with the ability to turn over electronic records by a series of laws referred to as CALEA, which is from the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act. Under a CALEA an ISP might turn over emails or a list of the web sites that a given customer has visited. ISPs generally retain such data for 60 – 90 days for all customers and it is then automatically deleted unless law enforcement requests it. But CALEA requests generally are for historical data and are not ‘wiretaps’ when it comes to data usage. This new proposal would give law enforcement live access to a customer’s data in the same way that phones have been historically wiretapped. And this is a law with teeth. The proposal includes a $25,000 per day fine for companies who aren’t wiretap capable, with those fines doubling after 90 days for non-compliance.  There are a number of issues with this idea.

It Goes Against the Direction of the Industry

The business world is rapidly heading to the cloud with data. There is a long list of benefits of using the cloud and businesses get it. But before a business will send sensitive data out of their control into the cloud they generally encrypt it (or they should). Companies are not going to put sensitive financial data, trade secrets and things like legal correspondence into the cloud if there is any chance that other parties can somehow crack and read the data. The whole point of encryption is that only the parties involved can unencrypt it.

It seems like the FBI law would forbid this kind of encryption. This would have a ton of ramifications on the industry. Businesses are going to refuse to put sensitive information into the cloud if it can’t be encrypted. This means that they will probably continue to use company-specific LAN storage rather than the more efficient cloud. Further, company lawyers are going to advise companies to not use the cloud if everything there can be wiretapped. Today a subpoena is required to get information that a company keeps on their own servers. But a wiretap at an ISP could be done without the knowledge of the person or company being investigated. No corporate attorney is going to agree to let a company expose themselves to being investigated through the back door just to gain the advantages of using a cloud service.

The FBI’s idea will also put all of the companies that supply encryption out of business. There are a number of businesses that sell encryption to cell phones such as Cryptocat, Silent Circle, Red Phone and Wickr. There are many software packages that can be used to encrypt data files such as Folder Lock, SensiGuard, Safehouse, SecureIT, Cryptoforge and many others. And almost every maker of carrier class transmission equipment, servers and related software has an encryption product.

It’s Costly

One of the biggest issues with the proposed bill is that it casts a far wider net of companies who must comply with a wiretap than who must comply today with CALEA. Today CALEA applies to the companies that supply a basic data pipe to a customer, to whoever is the physical ISP. This may be a telephone company, cable company, wireless ISP or cellular provider. But every firm who must meet CALEA today is a carrier of some sort. They have a physical hub where they perform ISP functions. These hubs are the sort of places where CALEA makes sense.

But the proposed law would impose a more complex obligation on other web-based platforms like Facebook, Google, Yahoo and AOL. Those are all big companies and one might assume that they can all afford to do this, and you might be right. But the same requirements would apply to much smaller firms and start-ups who store and or process customer data. It’s going to be technically challenging for a web-based platform to give live access to data. They just are not configured that way. And the cost to design a system to enable that is going to be costly and inefficient.

The cost of compliance will deter future small start-ups. And if you don’t think that is true, let me give you a real life example of when CALEA costs became an issue for a small carrier. It is very difficult for a small ISP to comply with CALEA on their own, so there are companies who sell CALEA compliance. If you get a CALEA request they overnight you a black box that rides next to your core servers and captures the data that law enforcement wants. This kind of service costs about $600 per month. I have a small City client who wanted to become an ISP just to serve themselves, some other local government agencies and some non-profits. Since they were facility-based using their own servers then CALEA applied to them. They almost decided against doing this since the CALEA fees ate up most of the monthly savings they were trying to bring to their town. I know that is a very tiny dollar example, but I foresee the new requirement to be much more costly than CALEA. Small firms will have a very difficult time creating the ability of live data wiretaps and this is going to stifle small web firms.

It Goes Against the Basic Premise of the Internet

The main premise of the Internet is that it is a decentralized network. The wiretap proposal relies on some of centralized hub in order to implement a wiretap. There has to be a place where you can guarantee that the data the government wants to see will flow. That is a whole lot harder than it sounds and it would end up resulting in some fundamental changes in the way that Internet traffic flows. And that could be the costliest impact of all.

The traffic on the Internet keeps growing at nearly exponential rates. Carriers have been able to keep up with the bandwidth demands because they have upgraded the networks to be more and more efficient over time. This change would go in the opposite direction and would make the network more inefficient.

I fully understand and appreciate the needs of law enforcement. But this could be one of the biggest unfunded mandates ever if it ends up impeding the efficiency of the Internet. The Internet is now a fundamental part of everyday life and is a lifeline for most businesses.

It just seems like a colossally bad idea to me to impose a costly change on everybody that is intended to only catch a few bad guys. Particularly when the smart criminals will avoid these wiretaps. They will find a black market way to self-encrypt their data or they will avoid the web altogether. So this is really just a proposal to catch the dumb criminals. It seems like too great a cost for such a paltry goal.


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After the Revolution: Chapters Eighteen, Nineteen, and Twenty

Manage episode 297671946 series 2273705
By iHeartRadio. Discovered by Player FM and our community — copyright is owned by the publisher, not Player FM, and audio is streamed directly from their servers. Hit the Subscribe button to track updates in Player FM, or paste the feed URL into other podcast apps.

This week's chapters from Robert's fiction podcast, "After the Revolution."

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409 episodes


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The Bek and Siri Show

Manage series 2856887
By Team Sirius Tri Club, Siri Lindley, and Rebekah Keat. Discovered by Player FM and our community — copyright is owned by the publisher, not Player FM, and audio is streamed directly from their servers. Hit the Subscribe button to track updates in Player FM, or paste the feed URL into other podcast apps.
At Team Sirius Tri Club it's not just swim, bike, run, it's about who you become. Swim, bike, run, triathlon and life advice from Siri Lindley and Rebekah Keat. Bek and Siri have more than 40 years of experience racing and coaching at the highest level.

88 episodes


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Home Again

Published on: 2008-3-9

Home | Archive

Home Again

Back home after one more round of running-after-doctors at Vellore.

And, some good news for the Free Software community:

Kerala is all set to become the first state in the country to completely banish Microsoft and allow only GNU/Linux free software to be used in the mandatory IT test at the state SSLC examinations that half a million students will appear for from next week.

Read more

Mon Mar 10 19:59:15 2008

Great news! Kidos to Achu Maman :)


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In February 2019, Joe Biden paid the University of Delaware a visit to celebrate the renaming of its public policy school in his honor. Biden, a famously middling student, feigned sheepishness over his alma mater’s tribute and suggested the honor really belonged to his sister and perennial political adviser, Valerie. “She graduated with honors,” Biden explained. “I graduated.”

But Biden had no doubts about the brilliance of the man seated next to him on the stage: Jon Meacham, a Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer who has spent the last two decades pounding out bestselling accounts of American presidents such as Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, and George H.W. Bush. “You tend to find genius in those with whom you agree,” Biden said in a very loose paraphrase of Ralph Waldo Emerson. “I think he’s a genius.” Meacham, sporting a black suit and wide cornflower tie nearly identical to the vice president’s, gave a hearty laugh through his wide and toothy grin, the faintest of blushes spreading across his face.

To mark the occasion, Biden had invited Meacham to Newark, Delaware, for a conversation about the biographer’s recent volume, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels, a 416-page meditation on how enlightened political leaders, propelled by a civic-minded citizenry, have rescued America at its darkest hours. Meacham had just finished explaining that the country’s soul “is not all good or all bad” but rather an abiding conflict between “our better angels” and “our worst instincts.” Biden’s praise came in response to Meacham’s assertion that politicians are far more often “mirrors of who we are,” rather than “molders” of it. “That’s an uncomfortable truth,” Meacham said, an oblique reference to the white supremacist who at the time was behind the Resolute Desk.

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But history proves not all is lost, Meacham explained. “If we realize that we’ve come through, in this journey to make a more perfect union, storm and strife, and that that’s far more the rule and not the exception,” he said, “that history gives us an orienting capacity.”

Two months before Biden announced his third run for the presidency, the intellectual underpinnings of the campaign were already in place. His ensuing candidacy was an exercise in moving Meacham’s thesis from the page to the stump. Biden cribbed Meacham’s book title for his campaign framing, a “battle for the soul of the nation.” Meacham occasionally weighed in on the narrative and thematic elements of Biden’s major speeches. He even made a five-minute appearance at the Democratic National Convention over the summer to endorse Biden and define the stakes of the election on the terms he presented in his book.

As the Biden candidacy gave way to the Biden presidency, Meacham lingered on as a sort of historical and spiritual adviser to a White House beset by crisis. Biden has an agenda that reflects the center of his party, not the center of the nation, but he remains a staunch institutionalist who insists on bringing the country together through leadership that, in Lincoln’s words and Meacham’s assessment, appeals to the “better angels of our nature.” The question now facing the Presidency According to Jon Meacham is what to do when all those better angels are crushed beneath America’s institutions.

Meacham grew up on a Civil War battlefield in Chattanooga, an upbringing he credits with granting him both a “tactile” and Faulknerian sense of the past—which is to say it’s not even past. After graduating from Sewanee—salutatorian, besting both Joe and Valerie—he took a job at the Chattanooga Times before racing up the rungs of national political journalism at Washington Monthly and Newsweek, where he became managing editor at 29 and editor-in-chief at 37. Meacham began moonlighting as a biographer in the early 2000s, tackling the relationship between Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill as his first subject. In 2009, he won a Pulitzer for a biography of Andrew Jackson. The following year, when a then-hobbled Washington Post sold the wobbling Newsweek, Meacham departed journalism altogether.

In 2004, a media columnist called Meacham “the oldest 34-year-old journalist in the world,” a superlative intended to convey “stature, not advancing age.” But there is a decidedly old-timey vibe to Meacham, who describes himself as some combination of “white,” “Southern,” “Episcopalian,” and “boring.” He has voted for presidents of both parties and has suggested he will again. At 51, Meacham is closer in age to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez than he is to the nearly octogenarian president, though if you’d been in the audience at that University of Delaware event two years ago, you’d have been hard-pressed to believe it. Maybe it was the matching outfits and Meacham’s prematurely white hair, neatly parted and swept to the side. Maybe it was the choice of subject: long-dead American presidents, a topic typically favored by the History Channel Dad set.

Meacham often calls himself a biographer, a subtle but meaningful styling that has the effect of distinguishing him from a historian, a trade that’s subject to rigorous peer review and an imperative to arrive at novel conclusions. Indeed, of the dozen or so prominent American historians I asked to speak with about Meacham’s work, most declined, professing a lack of familiarity with his output. (“Haven’t read The Soul of America,” one wrote me, “though someone gave it to me long ago and it sits on my shelf.”) His work is blurbed largely by fellow former journalists who have similarly crossed the threshold to history-writing, Pulitzer Prize–winning, airport-bookstore glory: Doris Kearns Goodwin, Walter Isaacson, and David McCullough. “These books sell like crazy—and they don’t have to be original,” David Waldstreicher, an American historian at the City University of New York, tells me. “If you have a narrative flair, this is an easy kind of history to write.”

“Founders chic”—that’s what Waldstreicher calls the genre. The dawn of the 21st century brought with it a vogue for doorstop biographies about the men who allegedly made America. McCullough on John Adams. Isaacson on Ben Franklin. Ron Chernow on Alexander Hamilton. The phenomenon was not new—the 1820s and 1880s saw a similar burst of founderphilia—but it was shaped by the political moment. A president disgraced by a sex scandal had been succeeded by another who owed the office to a politically brokered victory and had dragged the country into a terrible and misbegotten war.

A thousand points of light reading: Jon Meacham speaks about his George H.W. Bush biography in 2015.

David J. Phillip/AP

The Flawed Giant School of history—the coinage is Jill Abramson’s, from her review of Meacham’s 2012 book about Jefferson—also mirrored an intellectual stirring in the academy. In 1993, political scientist Rogers Smith wrote of American political culture “as the often conflictual and contradictory product of multiple political traditions.” It was a response to the consensus history of the postwar midcentury, which downplayed social and class conflict in favor of a story of America defined by continuities in its liberal, democratic culture. A generation of Cold War–era historians, gazing out over the ruins of Europe, reimagined the nation’s founding as an undying oath sworn to grand principles of popular consent and equal rights for all. Smith and like-minded contemporaries maintained that that was only part of the story.

They sought to square the consensus paradigm with the more radical historiography that had grown out of it and ultimately challenged it in the 1960s. “American Revolutionary leaders embraced more radical ideas than they were actually willing to implement,” Smith explains. “They began talking about inalienable human rights and asserting all men, at least, are created equal. At the same time, they were practicing these systems of domination over people of color and women.” America, in other words, has a yin and yang, a light and dark, capable of enlightened egalitarianism alongside Native expropriation and slavery, all at the same time. The country itself was a flawed giant.

Here was a story Meacham could tell, full of almost religious ambivalences but with a certainty underlying them all that good would win out. He gravitated toward subjects that highlight America’s warring impulses, framing the country’s best traditions as its truest traditions. Thomas Jefferson owned slaves and “defined human rights for a new age.” Andrew Jackson’s presidency was “marked by both democratic triumphs and racist tragedies.” George H.W. Bush opposed the Civil Rights Act as a Senate candidate in 1964, “only to vote for open housing in Congress four years later.” Meacham thus renounces Great Men hagiography but supplants it with a hagiography of the country itself. If Meacham’s subjects are imperfect leaders, they are redeemed through their dedication to the more perfect union. It’s a secular hymn, sung in harmony with Cold War liberalism and written in the key of Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s “vital center.”

At one point during their conversation at the University of Delaware, Biden asked Meacham, “What is the most important attribute for a president to have?” Meacham answered without hesitation: “It’s all about temperament and vision.” The presidents remembered most fondly, Meacham explained, are the ones who “reached beyond their base of support” and have done so in a way that has surprised us: Abraham Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation, Lyndon Johnson and the Civil Rights Act, Ronald Reagan playing with children alongside Gorbachev in Red Square. The biographies consistently praise those seeming apostasies, as well as the art of the compromise and the importance of a sound character.

The formula both flatters and flattens the American experience. Meacham is strict in his mission to evaluate his subjects only by the standards of their eras. “He is not a man of our time but of his own, formed by the historical realities of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He must be seen in that context,” Meacham writes of Jefferson in the introduction to his 2012 volume, seemingly less an injunction to historicize than an attempt to narrow the terrain of judgment. “It is also true, however, that many of his concerns were universal. His was a particular life of perennial significance.”

In enjoining readers to grade on a moral curve, Meacham assumes we’ve advanced along its arc, as if the past four years weren’t a convincing argument otherwise. The result is a historical view that places Jefferson, an enabler of slavery, and Jackson, an adamant defender of it, on equal footing with another Meacham subject, John Lewis, who dedicated his life to fighting the institution’s legacy—all of them great patriots because they served with nothing but their country’s best interests at heart, particulars and outcomes be damned. Lost on Meacham is the possibility that those very interests might have been built on the subordination of certain classes of people. You won’t find a ton of structural explanations for the state of America in his writings—save, perhaps, for the fact that the American structure of government places a premium on compromise. Presidents may not be “molders,” but in Meacham’s work you’ll still find a country shaped by their rhetoric and ideals. By way of explaining historical and contemporary political developments, he’ll quote Heraclitus: “Character is destiny.”

It’s easy to see how a politician like Biden plugs into a Meachamian worldview. “Meacham can evoke that liberal era in which Biden came of age,” says Sean Wilentz, a historian at Princeton University. “It’s memory and politics and spirit.” The president also is a devout Roman Catholic who finds resonance in the Episcopalian Meacham’s homiletic histories.

Biden began routinely singing Meacham’s praises on the 2007 campaign trail during his second unsuccessful run for the presidency. Meacham’s second book, American Gospel, had debuted that year and told the story of America’s “public religion,” born of the founders’ Christianity and nurtured in the promise of individual liberty. Biden delighted in Meacham’s notion that religion “shapes the life of a nation without strangling it,” as the then-senator said at an event in San Francisco in 2007. “There is this notion that we are a spiritual nation—to pretend we’re not, I think, is to deny reality,” Biden explained. “I think they”—Americans—“want to look to their leaders and get the feeling that they think there’s something bigger than they are.”

Biden studied American Gospel like scripture, carrying around laminated sheets of his favorite passages as he campaigned with Barack Obama in 2008. His interest kicked off a friendship with Meacham, and the two would have “periodic, spirited conversations” on American history. When The Soul of America was published in 2018, Biden called up the biographer to read key passages aloud to him. “He’s very interested in, how does the country come out of a crisis stronger, not weaker?” Meacham told the New York Times last summer. “He wants to know, what does history tell us about American renewal?” (Meacham, who does not discuss his relationship with the president, declined an interview request for this story.)

Biden’s interest was unsurprising: Like American Gospel, the later book soars above partisan conflict, championing a civic Christianity and orienting American history around certain core national values. And if that other book had been an inspiration for Biden, The Soul of America was a blueprint. Just as Meacham framed Soul of America against Trump’s “very fine people on both sides,” so would Biden frame his campaign. He kicked off his 2020 campaign with a video invoking the memory of 2017’s far-right violence in Charlottesville, where Meacham’s prologue opens.

Meacham weighed in on Biden’s speech when he accepted the Democratic nomination, as well as his first remarks as president-elect, both of which underscored his mission to “restore the soul of America.” He also had a hand in the speech Biden delivered in Gettysburg last October, using the platform of a sacred Civil War battlefield to promise he would “be a president for all America.” The New York Times reported that Meacham would offer edits and at times write whole drafts. In a conversation with students at Vanderbilt University after the election, Meacham downgraded his influence. “I was part of conversations and contributed to the process that led to a couple big speeches,” he said, rejecting insinuations that he was “in any way the sole author.” Regardless, Meacham lost his MSNBC contributor contract for not disclosing his advisory role with the campaign.

Meacham’s thematic gestures and his pronouncements on the importance of leadership tap into a well of sentiment that, for all its banality, remains politically potent—Joe Biden’s successful candidacy is proof of that. Fluency in American sentimentalese seems at least outwardly preferable to the previous president’s surly ahistoricism, but both offer an impoverished vocabulary for clarifying a crisis.

What happened in the US Capitol on January 6, for example, wasn’t some failure of moral suasion. It was a violent attempt to overthrow a multiracial would-be democracy, enabled in many ways by that democracy’s own constituent parts. The attack suggested a different set of national continuities than the ones envisioned by Meacham. Racist sabotage, antidemocratic terror, whiteness fighting to retain its prerogatives—here was the soul of America, inscribed in the institutions to which Biden swears allegiance.

There are greater tests ahead for Biden, requiring a major course correction. In his review of Soul of America, Wilentz dings Meacham for ending the book with an uplifting account of the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts without any discussion of how the modern-day Republican Party came to be: White backlash, Nixon’s Southern Strategy, and Reagan’s racist dog whistles “received extremely short shrift” in his view. “Absent that central explanation,” Wilentz writes, “this book cannot adequately address and measure what’s gone so wrong with the American soul.” Meacham can’t see the crisis for what it is because he won’t see America for what it is—not a flawed giant of a country, shambling toward its appointment with greatness, so much as a country that became a giant because of its flaws.

There’s evidence already Biden is aware of the limitations of his campaign rhetoric. He pushed his $1.9 trillion COVID relief package through the simple-majority budget reconciliation process, not regular order as he’d hoped, and he has suggested he’ll do the same for his infrastructure and jobs proposal. His White House is defining bipartisanship by the popularity of the relief measures across voters of both parties, not by the stubbornness of the federal lawmakers who belong to them. “I haven’t been able to unite the Congress, but I’ve united the country,” Biden said during his first press conference last week. He’s shown an openness to restoring the talking filibuster—a gateway to diminishing its power without abolishing it altogether.

In early March, Meacham organized a meeting of historians in the White House’s East Room. The list of attendees included such Meacham blurbers as Doris Kearns Goodwin and Walter Isaacson, as well as a handful of scholars from Ivy League universities. The two-hour conversation dabbled in the Greats—Lincoln, FDR, LBJ—and spanned topics such as “the elasticity of presidential power” and “the limits of going bigger and faster than the public might anticipate or stomach,” according to Axios. “I’m no FDR, but…” Biden reportedly said to Goodwin at one point. The implication, at least to Axios, was that he’d really like to be. Initial reporting suggested that those present encouraged the president to ditch bipartisanship and the filibuster; a source familiar with the meeting rejects that characterization and insists the conversation was far more mundane.

Whatever the particulars, the meeting suggested a different sort of infrastructure in need of some repair: our mythmaking. In the room were some of the people who had shaped the story that Biden now desperately needed to escape—the one about compromise and character, about a country impelled toward its destiny by the working out of differences among competing factions. New stories were needed, visions of bigness, of care at a national scale and beyond, of a capacity to dismantle the institutions that legitimate harm and exploitation. These things are part of the country’s political tradition, too. Biden’s presidency will be measured by the extent to which he can supplant the lessons of his muse with a new old story about the soul of America.

Note: This piece has been updated to reflect historians’ findings on Thomas Jefferson’s complicated relationship to the institution of slavery. On the one hand, Jefferson never publicly defended slavery and wrote of it as an unjust inheritance from the British colonies. On the other, he did not dismantle the institution as president and once chided an acquaintance for not having “invested in negroes.”

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7 Tips to Survive Cadaver Lab

For all of you SPT's that are about to start PT school this month, this summer, or even this upcoming fall, this blog is for you! As physical therapists, we are the HUMAN BODY MOVEMENT EXPERTS! Therefore, we basically have to know everything about our body and how it moves.

With PT starting around the corner, that means CADAVER LAB! This is an awesome opportunity to learn about the human body and see how special it really is. We want to give you a few tips on how to survive the cadaver lab:

1. You’re not the only one freaked out: Others in your class are just as nervous as you are about the experience. Knowing that you’re not the only one experiencing these emotions should give you some sense of comfort. It's sobering experience, but remember, each person chose to donate their body to science. They want you to learn from them!

2. Watch video dissections: Having an idea of what you will be working with will accustom you to what you will experience come the first day of lab. Watching videos or looking at cadaver pictures will desensitize you and lessen the anxiety of your first cadaver experience. Watching videos ahead of time might also get you ahead of the day's dissection!

3. You’ll get over it….Quickly: After the first day of dissection, I was surprised at how quickly I became desensitized to the experience as a whole. Before you know it, you will be reflecting the rectus femoris without batting an eyelash.

4. Clothes: Wear clothing you don’t care about. Lab could get messy and you don’t want formaldehyde on your new jeans. Designate a pair of scrubs ONLY for the cadaver lab. Wear an old pair of gym shoes you're planning on getting rid of. Even wear an old pair of socks, sports bra, undershirt, shorts, you name it. You really don't want to keep any of the clothes after you finish cadaver lab.

5. Smell:  Use Vicks Vapor Rub under your nose to avoid bad smells. Lotion your hands with a pleasant scent and use non latex gloves to avoid any lingering scents on your hands for the rest of the day. Washing your hands with lemons or mouth wash is also a great way to reduce odors.

6. Know your strengths: Defer tasks to group members who have more strength in a certain area. For example, if one of your group members has a more steady hand, let them dissect the delicate structures.

7. Stay clean: Keep yourself, your instruments, and your station as clean as possible after lab. Keep the donor hydrated as well to reduce the risk for mold and for an overall better lab experience. Don't forget to wipe down the cadaver tank after each session too!

Good luck with your human anatomy and physiology cadaver lab, wherever that is in your journey as a SPT! Don't forget, this is an awesome experience for you to really dive in and learn about the body.

Thank You For Your Attention!

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text: A new report released today by Oil Change International, Rainforest Action Network, BankTrack, Indigenous Environmental Network, Reclaim Finance, and Sierra Club, and endorsed by over 300 organizations around the world, reveals that 60 global banks have provided USD $3.8 trillion to fossil fuel companies in the five years since the adoption of the Paris Agreement (2016-2020).