Reflections is a first person narrative exploration game with an ambitious concept. The game boasts that everything can be interacted with and whatever players choose to pick up, view, and move around will affect the outcome of the story. Not only does player choice decide what the character does with their life, but also what happens in their relationships.

Players begin the game ready to leave home to go to college, and must pack the last of their things into a box by the front door. This is where the most interesting mechanic in Reflections becomes clear, as the world in which the player is dropped into is grey and colourless. Anything picked up, read or played with, is then filled with bright colour, showing what choices have been made.

Players know when they’ve done everything in a room as a little guitar strum plays and the entire room is decorated. This mechanic is cute, pretty and highly satisfying. It’s like the game is reminding the player to appreciate all of the small things in life. Everything will always be there around you, but unless you stop to notice them, the world might as well be in black and white.

After around half-an-hour, the game moves on ten years. Section two is about exploring where you have led the character, from the choices made in the first section. The new areas change up the gameplay a bit, with new environments and characters to interact with. As player exploration and discovery is tantamount to the experience of Reflections, you’ll have to find out exactly what these places are for yourself. Another half-hour goes by before the final section gives a text summary of the characters life, based on whether or not you picked up a photo, or if you played darts instead.

Despite each playthrough being short, clocking in at around an hour, the Path Progress, showing what outcomes have been achieved, tempts further exploration into the game. Unfortunately, players must always traverse the beginning environment in order to reach the different story branches. This repetition can make Reflections feel slow and a little monotonous after a couple of playthroughs, particularly if you can’t find the one thing you should have done differently to change the story. The game might benefit from the option to start in the different locations to stop the first level from becoming too dry.

Another problem is that other characters that you can interact with have only a few lines of text, at specific story moments. Meanwhile, the player character apparently just stares at them until they’re finished, before walking away, which feels awkward. There is no way of starting a conversation or keeping one going, an odd choice for a game based entirely on interaction.

The game is currently in Early Access, and it appears that the developers have lots of plans for what they are going to be adding to the game, which makes it a little hard to judge at this stage. If all goes to plan, then there will be more story sections, characters to interact with, and things to do in general, which will give extra breadth to the game and its story. The ending will also be changed from a few paragraphs of text to a new interactive environment, which will add more player agency.

Interestingly, Reflections has Oculus Rift compatibility. Although I could not test this, due to not owning the hardware, I imagine the game to be a great setting for the technology. The Oculus would allow for a more realistic and engaging experience with the world that you have to interact with.

Reflections currently has a lot of potential. The experience could become something very personal and special from additions content, and giving more obvious signs as to what interactions lead to specific life choices from the character. If the developers work hard and fulfil that potential, then it will definitely be worth checking out on its release. However, if little changes, then it’ll simply be stuck as an attempt at an ambitious concept.

Reflections is currently available in Early Access on Steam, with the full version coming in the next few months for PC, PS4 and Xbox One.

This preview was originally part of the GamersFTW site (and went up on the 03th July 2015), the servers of which have been taken down. It now appears on GabsTannerReviews out of respect for the developers/publishers that gave me a copy to preview.


Can you tell me more about your business?

After being open for a couple years - we closed our physical studio, and went exclusively mobile!! That means that bring the party to you - we provide the artist, the paints, the canvases, and the brushes - you provide the talent and the fun - you don’t need any prior experience in painting, either!

How can I participate?

Click on the Calendar link to see our current paintings events we've already committed to - then pick an open date! Our smaller, private events allow you to enjoy your evening with your friends and/or family. All painting sessions are intended for people of all ages and skill levels, with a relaxed attitude and the openness to give yourself permission to experiment.

I still have questions - can I contact you?

Yes - we'll be sure to answer any question you might have - please see our Contact page.


by Braiden Quinlan, FWCB Class of 2017

This past summer I had an amazing opportunity to work on an urban/suburban black bear study in Asheville, NC. This project was in its third and final field season under the direction of Nick Gould (PhD student, FWCB) and is a joint effort between North Carolina State University and the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission. This five-year study is designed to examine the population ecology of an urban/s
uburban bear population. The study largely examines the spatial ecology of black bears in urban habitats and hopes to investigate questions such as whether or not the city of Asheville functions as a source or sink for American black bears; and whether these urban/suburban bears are vulnerable to the legal harvest.

During my time on this project, I served as a volunteer research technician.  There were multiple responsibilities that had to be completed on a day-to-day basis. Twice per day, bear traps had to be checked – once in the morning and again in the evening. During my time on the project, we had a maximum of 12 traps set in and around the city limits of Asheville. While checking traps, I would use an assortment of locally donated pastries, cakes, donuts, and frosting as bait to lure the bears into the traps. As the bait was not specific solely to bears, we captured some bycatch such as raccoons and opossums. In the case of either raccoon or opossum captures, the protocol was to immediately release the animals unharmed.

When we were fortunate enough to capture a bear in one of our culvert traps, we would visually assess their weight to anesthetize them with a drug combination of telazol, ketamine, and xylazine. This drug combination is very forgiving, meaning that it is difficult to administer too much drug to cause ill effects. Typically we had approximately 60 minutes to complete the workup.
Once immobilized, we monitor the bears’ vital signs (heart rate, pulse, temperature) throughout the process to ensure a stable condition for the animal.

Because this is a movement-based ecology study, the bears must be able to be tracked (i.e., followed through time and space) as well as individually identified. To accomplish this, we fit Vectronic GPS collars on the bears that would transmit the bears’ location every hour while the bear was outside the city limits of Asheville, and every fifteen minutes when the bear was inside the city limits. Once the GPS collar and identifying marks (i.e., matching ear tags, lip tattoo, and PIT (Passive Integrated Transponder tag) were attached to the bear, we took morphometric measurements and collected multiple biological samples. Some of the measurements included: weight (lbs), total length (tip of nose to base of tail), front/hind paw width and length, canine length and width, and numerous others, if time permitted. Biological samples included tissue
(ear punches), fecal collection, rectal and nasal swabs, tick collection, blood, and a premolar tooth that is used to age the bear. Over time bears either lose their collars, or we retrieve intentionally detonated collars, making it important to have other means for identifying individuals were they to be captured again or show up as a mortality in the future.

My other (office/data) responsibilities included entering various data ranging from trap site locations and the type of bait used to examining the most recent GPS locations for all the actively collared bears to assess/determine movements out of the study area as well as to identify any potentially missing bears. The rule of thumb was that if a bear had not sent data in three days one of the crew would have to locate the bear, or its collar.
There were typically three reasons why a collar would not send data: an emergency/low battery mode indicating battery failure, a mortality mode (collar was stationary for more than 12 hours) indicating either a deceased bear or a “dropped” collar, or the bear was in a location that had poor ability to communicate with the iridium satellites. Regardless of the cause, it was up to me to locate the bear/collar and determine the reason for the unsuccessful transmission of data.

While tracking a bear, I would begin by looking at the animals most recent locations on a google earth map and beginning my vehicle search as close to that location as possible. The GPS collars emit a VHF radio signal (each collar has its own frequency), and I was equipped with a telemetry receiver and an omnidirectional antenna mounted on the roof of the work truck. As the truck got closer to the collar, the signal would become louder indicating I was closing in on the bears’ location. If the collar was in a low battery mode, or in mortality, I would try to retrieve it on foot. To determine the direction the signal was coming from on foot, I would use a Yagi antennae.
On several occasions, I spent hours tracking a bear that had a collar that was in low battery mode, attempting to get close enough to use a separate receiver that allowed us to “detonate” or to remotely release the collar from the bear. Various other jobs that I had during my “down” time was cleaning the immobilizing darts used to tranquilize the bears, categorizing and processing the samples, sorting through photos from camera traps set at different trap locations, and occasionally collecting a vehicle-killed bear.

My experience taught me about the scientific process in a hands-on way, and I learned more about field work and acquired many useful skills associated with it than I thought would be possible in just one month. While I was there, I was part of at least twelve new bear captures and was involved in many recaptures. The days were some of the longest days I have ever had (generally 13 hour days), but they were also some of the most memorable – in the best way. Overall, my experiences in Asheville were some of the best of my life.


DIY Wellies with eyes!

Yesterday was a horrible wet, windy day, and although we did get out, most of it was spent inside.
Windy weather tends to make Mini-M a bit rampage-y and her attention span drops to about three milliseconds (or at least that's what it feels like!).

In an effort to distract her for a while with something new, I made some sticky eyes (with some blank labels, a blue Sharpie and a pair of scissors) for her wellies - since she was toddling around the living room clutching them and shouting foot.

It took me about a minute, and after I stuck them on and she wore them, it entertained her for about ten, so I'm counting that as a success.

I love the jaunty expression it gives them!

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How long does it take for an issue to reach a resolution?

When an issue is first raised, a seller has 3 days to respond and acknowledge it. Following that, both the buyer and seller have up to 7 days to work on a resolution for the issue.

Anytime throughout the 7 days, a seller is able to offer resolution for the issue. If a buyer were to accept the resolution, the case will be considered resolved.

However, if a seller does not respond by the 3rd day of an issue being raised, or there is no agreed resolution between the users by the 7th day, the issue will automatically be escalated to Carousell for review and a decision will be provided within 7 days.

For more information, read our Escalations and Resolutions policy here.

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Canterbury to Totton distance by car and plane

What is the Canterbury to Totton distance? To answer the question and find out how far is Canterbury from Totton you need to check out the map below and look up the table. Driving distance from Canterbury to Totton is 0 miles or 0 km by car. Check out straight line distance if you are taking the flight. How long does it take to get from Canterbury to Totton? Approximate time of driving is .

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To get to your destination, please, use the map with marked route for your trip. To see more distances you can use mileage calculator box at the top of the page. Go to weather in Totton today and tomorrow to find out about conditions for your upcoming trip.

See the return route - Distance from Totton to Canterbury

How far is Canterbury from Totton?

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Jacquard shirt

Long jacquard shirt with a crew neck, small side slits at the bottom of the garment and a straight fit that flares slightly at the hem. Spun with a lightweight metallic thread to add a hint of shimmer. Front placket with concealed buttons.

Fabric: 63% polyester, 37% metallised fiber; Lining: 100% cotton.

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Product code:  9191059106001 - COTTAGE

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Enjoyable and Effective Quizzes for Learning and Quick Revision

Multiplication and Division by 10, 100 etc & Adding and Subtracting Decimals

Multiplication and Division by 10, 100 etc

We are all able to multiply and divide by powers of ten easier than any other numbers as the digits being dealt with remain in the same order. Children often struggle to come to terms with this and still work out '1 x ...' or try to find the position of each digit when they could just write the digits out from start to finish in one go.

When we were taught the normal way tended to be to refer to moving the decimal point. For various reasons this has changed in recent years and we now refer to keeping the decimal point in the same place but moving the numbers.

To multiply by 10, 100, 1000 etc we move the digits to the left by however many zeroes there are in the number we are multiplying by. This will automatically make the number larger.

For example:

The digits stay in the same order and, with the decimal point staying where it is, they all move three places to the right. It will be three places because 1000 has three zeroes.

The answer, therefore, is 9809.1

With division, the same rules apply but instead of moving to the left, we move the digits to the right. This will automatically make the number smaller.

Keep the numbers in the same order and that includes any zeroes. 10 000 has four zeroes so we move the digits four places to the right.

The answer, therefore, is 0.0070035

The easiest technique is to find the position of the first digit and simply write the remaining ones after it.

Adding and Subtracting Decimals

The concept is simple when it's all about adding money, but get children to add and subtract decimals out of context and they can't see how easy it is!

Let's start with the following:

The column addition method is straightforward enough and applies to decimals as well as whole numbers. The danger for the child is that they will ignore the decimal points or not line them up accurately. If the decimal point is written in when the first number is written on the page, immediately write in the second decimal point exactly underneath the first.

At this point you may want to put a zero under the two, just to avoid confusion. With addition, though, it isn't essential. After this, simply carry out a normal addition sum and insert the decimal point under the others.

I always encourage children to estimate the answer when dealing with decimals and place value - get them to imagine what the approximate answer will be. In this case, they should think 'just under 4' as an appropriate guess and the answer confirms this. If they get an answer which is way off the mark, they must be prepared to redo the sum.

Subtraction works in the same way.

In this case we should really put a zero in under the two to make things more concrete. We can then move along the line of digits, subtracting each as we go. 2 - 0 = 2; 9 - 6 = 3; 8 - 1 = 7; 4 - 0 = 4.

Again, estimate in advance to avoid any wildly wrong answers sneaking through.

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Valerie Metraux
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I am a Communication specialist.

My taste for writing and for meeting people allows me to easily share ideas in a clear and creative way.

Born in Geneva, I have been invested in the local life since my childhood. There is a lot to discover in the region and I like gathering people around common values and activities.

I also love languages and can speak French, English, Italian, Russian and  German and particularily enjoy exchanging with different cultures. There is always something new to learn from them, and it helps in opening our minds.

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Lonely Young Star Found In The "Middle Of Nowhere"

An artist's impression of the young star. NASA/JPL-Caltech

Astronomers have discovered a lonely star undergoing a curious growth spurt in the Milky Way, challenging many ideas on how stars are formed. It is more than 1,000 light-years from the nearest stars we can see.

The object is called CX330, and it’s believed to be a very active young star with strong emissions (from X-ray to infrared) that's surrounded by a lot of warm dust. Its location is surprising, since we don’t expect to find young stars isolated from gas clouds.

CX330 was first discovered as an X-ray source, with further observations revealing a visible light counterpart. According to the research, published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, CX330 resembles a class of variable stars called FU Orionis, which tend to go through intense jumps in luminosity as material from the protoplanetary disk falls onto the star.

Lead author Dr Chris Britt, from Texas Tech University, and colleagues looked at infrared data for the region and discovered that not only is the star shrouded by dust, but it has become a few hundred times brighter in a matter of years.

The team thought a nova, a stellar collision, or an extragalactic source might explain this curious behavior, but all those hypotheses didn’t quite cut it.

This lonely star is more compact, hotter, and probably more massive than other FU Orionis stars, and it probably heats up its disk of material more quickly.

"The disk has probably heated to the point where the gas in the disk has become ionized, leading to a rapid increase in how fast the material falls onto the star," said Professor Thomas Maccarone, a study co-author also at Texas Tech.

While the increase in luminosity can be easily explained, its place in the galaxy remains puzzling, being more than 1,000 light-years away from the closest region of star formation. The star is very young (less than 1 million years old) and it is still eating through its disk, which suggests it must have formed near its present position.

The team suggests that CX330 formed in a small turbulent cloud that reached a critical density that only allowed one star to form. CX330 is an incredibly intense and isolated object, and it might represent the first example of a new population of stars never seen before.

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Publications by Marco Del Tutto

The Pandora multi-algorithm approach to automated pattern recognition of cosmic-ray muon and neutrino events in the MicroBooNE detector.

The European physical journal. C, Particles and fields 78 (2018) 82-

R Acciarri, C Adams, R An, J Anthony, J Asaadi, M Auger, L Bagby, S Balasubramanian, B Baller, C Barnes, G Barr, M Bass, F Bay, M Bishai, A Blake, T Bolton, L Camilleri, D Caratelli, B Carls, R Castillo Fernandez, F Cavanna, H Chen, E Church, D Cianci, E Cohen, GH Collin, JM Conrad, M Convery, JI Crespo-Anadón, M Del Tutto, D Devitt, S Dytman, B Eberly, A Ereditato, L Escudero Sanchez, J Esquivel, AA Fadeeva, BT Fleming, W Foreman, AP Furmanski, D Garcia-Gamez, GT Garvey, V Genty, D Goeldi, S Gollapinni, N Graf, E Gramellini, H Greenlee, R Grosso, R Guenette, A Hackenburg, P Hamilton, O Hen, J Hewes, C Hill, J Ho, G Horton-Smith, A Hourlier, E-C Huang, C James, J Jan de Vries, C-M Jen, L Jiang, RA Johnson, J Joshi, H Jostlein, D Kaleko, G Karagiorgi, W Ketchum, B Kirby, M Kirby, T Kobilarcik, I Kreslo, A Laube, Y Li, A Lister, BR Littlejohn, S Lockwitz, D Lorca, WC Louis, M Luethi, B Lundberg, X Luo, A Marchionni, C Mariani, J Marshall, DA Martinez Caicedo, V Meddage, T Miceli, GB Mills, J Moon, M Mooney, CD Moore, J Mousseau, R Murrells, D Naples, P Nienaber, J Nowak, O Palamara, V Paolone, V Papavassiliou, SF Pate, Z Pavlovic, E Piasetzky, D Porzio, G Pulliam, X Qian, JL Raaf, A Rafique, L Rochester, C Rudolf von Rohr, B Russell, DW Schmitz, A Schukraft, W Seligman, MH Shaevitz, J Sinclair, A Smith, EL Snider, M Soderberg, S Söldner-Rembold, SR Soleti, P Spentzouris, J Spitz, J St John, T Strauss, AM Szelc, N Tagg, K Terao, M Thomson, M Toups, Y-T Tsai, S Tufanli, T Usher, W Van De Pontseele, RG Van de Water, B Viren, M Weber, DA Wickremasinghe, S Wolbers, T Wongjirad, K Woodruff, T Yang, L Yates, GP Zeller, J Zennamo, C Zhang

The development and operation of liquid-argon time-projection chambers for neutrino physics has created a need for new approaches to pattern recognition in order to fully exploit the imaging capabilities offered by this technology. Whereas the human brain can excel at identifying features in the recorded events, it is a significant challenge to develop an automated, algorithmic solution. The Pandora Software Development Kit provides functionality to aid the design and implementation of pattern-recognition algorithms. It promotes the use of a multi-algorithm approach to pattern recognition, in which individual algorithms each address a specific task in a particular topology. Many tens of algorithms then carefully build up a picture of the event and, together, provide a robust automated pattern-recognition solution. This paper describes details of the chain of over one hundred Pandora algorithms and tools used to reconstruct cosmic-ray muon and neutrino events in the MicroBooNE detector. Metrics that assess the current pattern-recognition performance are presented for simulated MicroBooNE events, using a selection of final-state event topologies.

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What are some misconceptions the West have about India?

Almost all of what Westerners "know" about India always came through evangelists and Brits. Most westerners fail to realize that almost all of what they "know" about India still comes through these same propagandists, adversarial distortionists, manipulators, etc. Christian academics, sensationalist media, biased BBC, NYT, etc. Then, with this misinformation, Westerners, and their smaller media houses, play chinese whishpers among themselves. So, the biggest misconception is when Westerners think they know anything about India, or, that they can know anything properly.

In reality, almost all of what they know is distorted, questionable, and, they have no proper sources for India. Almost whole of what they have is propaganda, passed off as "information" or "knowledge".

What are the best part time jobs for a student?

Following jobs can be done as a Part Time Priority basis -Librarian :If you're the kind of person who loves (and this will vary by position) helping people find information, suggesting books, talking about books, teaching research techniques, organizing and classifying things, you'll likely really enjoy working as a librarian, and that's worth a lot.

What happens after drinking hot water?

Hot water and it's benefitsIf you drink it first thing in morning , all your internal organs get activated .It helps in the excretion process very effectively .After meal , it helps in digestion.Increase BMR basal metabolic rate .It assist with nasal and throat congestion.Minimise the effect of mensuration cramps .It prevents

Is not eating enough calories causing an underactive thyroid?

There are more likely causes of an underactive thyroid, but if you severely limit your calorie intake, the chance that you lack dietary iodine to make thyroxine in your thyroid is quite possible. Iodine is commonly added to table salt to avoid this, how much salt do you eat?)Either way, your diet is probably


Howdy, Stranger!

Supported by

Posterior mean same as unstandardized B

Hi JASP team,
I'm a bit new with Bayesian statistics. But I was wondering why my posterior mean for a predictor variable (in the Bayesian linear regression) has the same value as the unstandardized beta (in the frequentist linear regression) for that same predictor?
My second question is about the plot of the posterior distribution. A small horizontal line with a value on the left and on the right of that line is presented above the posterior distribution (so not the grey line). I was wondering what these two values from that line represent. They are not similar to the credible intervals. My guess is that these values represent the 2 standard deviations above and below the posterior mean of that variable. Is that correct or do they represent something different?
Hope you can give me an answer to these questions.
If you would like that I add the relevant output, let me know!

  • I've forwarded your question to Don (who implemented this analysis).

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Buckminster Fuller, fully Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller

Fuller, fully Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller

American Systems Theorist, Engineer, Architect, Futurist, Visionary, Designer and Author

Author Quotes

Our power is in our ability to decide.

Our little Spaceship Earth is only eight thousand miles in diameter, which is almost a negligible dimension in the great vastness of space… Spaceship Earth was so extraordinarily well invented and designed that to our knowledge humans have been on board it for two million years not even knowing that they were on board a ship.

On personal integrity hangs humanity's fate.

On first priority in design consideration is the full realization of individual potential.

Nature does have manure and she does have roots as well as blossoms, and you can't hate the manure and blame the roots for not being blossoms.

My biggest hope that we're going to make it here is that this thinking is being manifested and really employed by the young world. Will they be going fast enough to overcome the initiatives of the bureaucracies and the fears operative in those bureaucracies? It's a very touch and go question.

Most of my advances were by mistake. You uncover what is when you get rid of what isn't.

Man knows so much and does so little.

Man is going to be displaced altogether as a specialist by the computer. Man himself is being forced to reestablish, employ, and enjoy his innate comprehensivity. Coping with the totality of Spaceship Earth and universe is ahead for all of us.

Love is omni-inclusive, progressively exquisite, understanding and tender and compassionately attuned to other than self.

Love is metaphysical gravity.

Looking back at the wake of my ship one day in 1917, I became interested in its beautiful white path. I said to myself, That path is white because of the different refractions of light by the bubbles of water-H20 (not H0). The bubbles are beautiful little spheres. I wonder how many bubbles I am looking at stretching miles astern. I began to make calculations of how many bubbles there were per cubic foot of water. I began to find that in calculating the ship's white wake I was dealing in quintillions to the fourth power times quintillions to the fourth power or some such fantastically absurd number of bubbles. And nature was making those bubbles in sublimely swift ease! Any time one looks carefully at a bubble, one is impressed with the beauty of its structure, its’ beautiful sphericity glinting with the colors of the spectrum. It is ephemeral-elegantly conceived, beautifully manufactured and readily broken. Inasmuch as the kind of mathematics I had learned of in school required the use of the XYZ coordinate system and the necessity of employing in calculating the spheres, I wondered, to how many decimal places does nature carry out before she decides the computation can't be concluded? Next I wondered, to how many arbitrary decimal places does nature carry out the transcendental irrational before she decides to say it's a bad job and call it off? If nature uses she has to do what we call fudging of her design which means improvising, compromisingly. I thought sympathetically of nature's having to make all those myriad frustrating decisions each time she made a bubble. I didn't see how she managed to formulate the wake of every ship while managing the rest of the universe if she had to make all those decisions. So I said to myself, I don't think nature uses. I think she has some other mathematical way of coordinating her undertakings.

Life is the spirit incarnate in time.

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Fuller, fully Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller
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Communication skills training courses singapore 4d,wilderness survival course sydney groupon,communication skills training agenda - PDF Books

The goal of this course is to equip Christians with the communication skills and instructional methods to enhance the learning and application of knowledge. Sales Training Courses - Helping You Deliver Your Sales Results The complete range of sales training - catering for core skills through to advanced sales professionals. As your customers expect more and the difference between your own and your competitors' products and services becomes less, your ability to build and maintain strong customer relationships is key to winning and retaining business.
Our internationally renowned sales programmes range from core through to advanced level and are designed to deliver immediate and lasting results.
Our sales know-how is underpinned by regular research into buyers' views of salespeople. In order to listen effectively we are obliged to concentrate on what the other person has to say.
A person who feels the need to talk will always be concentrating on what they need to say next and miss potentially valuable information. External distractions from personal life (fears, uncertainty, anxiety, financial problems etc) can disrupt your attention. In some cases it is difficult to listen attentively when the other party is not expressing themselves clearly. Paraphrasing takes place when someone repeats something written or spoken using different words, or in a simpler and shorter form that makes the original meaning clearer.
Paraphrasing what the other party has said shows that you have listened and understood to the point that you can articulate this back to the other person.
If you are uncertain about something that has just been said it is perfectly acceptable to seek clarification by asking for a repetition. Would it be possible for you to repeat that last segment so I can fully understand your point? In a selling situation a good way of building rapport is to actively listen to what the other party has to say. Motivational Quotes Every great man, every successful man, no matter what the field of endeavor, has known the magic that lies in these words: every adversity has the seed of an equivalent or greater benefit.
Our goal is to bring you closer to all things related to human error management and event prevention for individuals and for high reliability organizations.
Human Performance Tools, LLC is offering affordable human performance improvement training for any and all industries looking to reduce human error and prevent events caused by them. Principles of human performance are the foundation blocks for the behaviors described and promoted in the handbook.
Human performance improvement (HPI) as addressed in this training is not a program such as Six Sigma, Total Quality Management, etc. The principles and practices of human performance improvement are universally applicable regardless of the industry or agency you work.
The material has been distributed into 6 separate training courses, 4 levels for Individual Contributors and Teams, and 2 levels for Management. Each attendee walks away with a Certificate of Completion for the associated level of training, a reference book and a PDF electronic copy of the slides. I encourage you to do your research – Average human performance improvement training sessions cost anywhere from $225 per seat up to about $400 per seat for a full day of professional training, and certain vendors even go over $4000 for 5 days of error prevention training per seat! James is able to reduce much of the overhead and can offer courses to the public for a fraction of the cost.
James Newman is the founder of Human Performance Tools, LLC (HPT) whose primary mission is to aid companies in their quest to become event-free due to human error through Human Performance Improvement methodologies.
James is a multi award-winning training designer and has also recently been presenting to Pharmaceutical and Energy Industries. How to Use a Commercial Coffee Machine How to Correctly Tamper Coffee Differences Between Coffee and Tea Top 5 Barista Mistakes How Commercial Coffee Machines Work Coffee and Alzheimer’s Disease Is Coffee an Aphrodisiac?
If you’ve chosen to start your career as a barista, you’ll be pleased to know the world consumes over 2 billion cups of coffee per day!
A barista is described as someone that gets paid to operate a commercial espresso machine in order to prepare and serve enjoyable coffee beverages. If you are seeking work in a cafe or restaurant where coffee beverages are served, not only learning the basics of the barista craft is essential, but also how to apply it in a high pressure environment without sacrificing on quality delivered to the customer.
Barista training courses can offer a wide array of choices and training modules, for that reason it is important to understand what the essential skills are to acquire in order to get a job before paying for more than what you need. Just remember that learning the art of coffee making is a very hands on exercise, so its essential that your training provider teaches you in a very practical learning environment. A Barista job description may vary depending on the size and location of the operation as well as the demographic of people they serve, for example Spanish communication ability is sometimes preferred.
If you are considering becoming a successful barista, then you need to know how to act like a professional barista. Instead, having outstanding interpersonal skills is more important because they are what will influence how you act as a barista.
When you open your mouth to verbally communicate with anyone, be very considerate as to how you express yourself. Keeping clean will make a positive statement to your customers on how you value cleanliness personally and in your work. To state the obvious, a barista has to be friendly because positive interaction with customers is a must.

There are no formal qualifications to become a barista, although completing basic to advanced training will certainly offer you a greater chance of getting hired. Amazon has some great resources to help you on your journey to becoming a succesful barista. This 40 hour course prepares the student to take and pass the FCC GROL Element 1 and Element 3 exams to earn the FCC General Radio Operator License.
Element 1 provides a review of the terminology, operating procedures and regulations for maritime applications. Element 3 reviews basic electricity and electronics principles and components, types of radio waves and radio wave propagation, practical communications circuits, decibel power calculations, antennas types, and all terminology and definitions related to these items.
The GROL allows the holder to operate, maintain or install certain classes of United States licensed radio and television transmitters under authority of the Federal Communications Commission.
Sales people need the right mix of skills and processes to enable them to do their job effectively.
All our sales programmes are available as ready-to-roll, open courses and, worldwide, as made-to-measure, in-company courses, customised to your specific business and development needs. Our sales processes and models have been developed and refined with over 65 years of field testing. Early in life we were taught to listen and learn at school but still many of us in our fast paced life have not mastered this concept. This is extremely difficult because we are also taught that we should have the right to express our own opinions and are often so focused on the message that we want to convey that we totally miss the other persons point. In this situation you will need to double your concentration levels to ensure that the little voice inside us all does not compete for the voice that we should be listening to. A great way to demonstrate to the other party that you are listening effectively is to paraphrase what you have just heard. It also has the added advantage of being able to check your level of understanding and therefore minimising any potential misunderstandings later in the discussion. If what you have to say is important your brain will remind you at some stage in the dialogue and your chance to speak will come. This should build trust and empathy and demonstrate that you have good listening and communication skills.
Only when you have fully understood what the other party is saying can you look to build an offer that will match their communicated needs. Too many sales people spend too much time talking and not enough time listening and this is crucial, particularly in my experience of export sales where linguistic and cultural issues also come into play and should also be appreciated and considered. The training content is sourced straight from the collaboration efforts of the Department of Energy (DOE) and the Institute of Nuclear Power Operators (INPO).
This translates to positive results in all parts of your organization, and at an individual level. The Institute of Nuclear Power Operators (INPO) and the Department of Energy (DOE) came together a few years ago and developed a manual that addresses the roles of individuals, leaders, and the organization in improving performance, as well as practical methods that people can employ in their day-to-day lives. This training brings that content alive in the classroom employing an expert instructor with a vast array of technical hands-on human performance experience in nuclear power plants around the United States.
Rather, it is a set of concepts and principles associated with a performance model that illustrates the organizational context of human performance.
Students will engage in a dynamic learning environment using activities, videos, and real-life examples that will encourage demonstration, practice, and behavior changes.
Besides years of technical training as a Nuclear Instrument Technician, James’ college background highlights Nuclear Engineering and Workforce Education Development. They in no way reflect the views or opinions of my employer (past, current or future), affiliated projects, or publishers. Therefore experienced baristas are typically in high demand and have great potential to find a job. If you know of a barista training institution that we don’t have listed, please contact us! Interaction with customers, scheduling orders and pulling a great shot of coffee are an essential part of the role.
Also one of the great parts about learning how to be a barista, is that in almost any part of the world you may be, there’s usually demand for someone that knows a thing or two about how to make a great cup of coffee. However, specific training may be required by the business that hires you so it might be worthwhile having a discussion with your manager or potential manager for guidance if this is possible.
If your only option is online training, it might be worthwhile to buy your own coffee machine to practice with at home.
Knowing this is crucial to your success because you need to establish a good relationship with your customers, your managers and your co-workers.
As you prepare drinks for your customers, let them see how 100% sanitary the whole process of preparing their drinks is. The fast and efficient way you handle peak customer traffic will determine how professional you are. Never take any more steps than you should, this way you will save a lot of time and energy. When you are not busy, avoid leaning over the counters or on any equipment because that creates an impression of laziness on your part. It’s also less boring throughout quiet periods to organize your work area as neatly as possible.

To help you prepare for your future interviews, on the right hand sidebar you’ll find our free Barista Interview Tips guide, be sure to check it out.
This includes equipment testing and inspection requirements, call frequency use, distress call signals, order and priority of calls, station log responsibilities, identification of phonetic alphabet, and all terminology and definitions related to these items.
The license also conveys all of the operating authority of the Marine Radio Operator Permit.
You guys were great and I really loved hearing Richard teach – felt it was a true honor to be in his class.
These courses address all sales areas and help you, whatever your experience, achieve the best results you can. The content of many of our sales development programmes is also endorsed by the Institute of Sales & Marketing Management (UK).
Once you have prejudged a situation you put up barriers and filters to stop any information reaching you that you have already discounted.
Attempt to remove all your barriers and filters so that when you are listening you are getting the raw data for you to process. After contacting the Department of Energy and their Liaison to INPO, I have been directly authorized to use the content within these human performance manuals as my basis for these training sessions.
Nobody wants to be the person singled out for an error, especially when anyone given the same situation would have made the same mistake.
The model contends that human performance is a system that comprises a network of elements that work together to produce repeatable outcomes. He also holds a training certification from the Institute of Nuclear Power Operators (INPO). This means training can be very useful in increasing your chances of getting or staying hired! A barista can lift the reputation of any coffee business through the level of energy and professionalism they project to customers.
Outstanding technical skills are simply not enough to lead to a successful career as a barista. If you overemphasize them you will definitely be making a certain impression on people and in some cases it is neither a positive one nor a professional one.
Put out a beautiful latte and avoid any instance in your drink preparation where you practice unsanitary things because as soon as the customer suspects that, they will not take the drink nor are they likely to return.
There will indeed be peak customer traffic and you will be required to sustain it till the end. It is best to always stand upright with your head high and your back straight when not busy. Customers will always ask for your advice and recommendations about some drinks or what to try.
The GROL is required to operate and repair aircraft, ship and other radio communications equipment.
Listening is a vital component of communication: what is the key message that the other party is trying to communicate? Worse still your prejudgement may actually be unwarranted and you have therefore missed an opportunity to build a rapport and empathy with the other party and learn something new. These courses are designed with teaching students how to predict, prevent, and correct human error within the framework of the systems they work within. He has worked directly with the following power and delivery companies supporting a role in a Human Performance Improvement: Dominion, Entergy, TVA, Wolf Creek Nuclear Operating Corporation, Westar Energy, ITC Holdings, NV Energy, and NRG. Remember that there will always be people including your co-workers and your customers who will take slight offense when you speak to them in your slang or your accent. Let it be obvious that you take your personal hygiene very seriously because they will trust that the drink you hand them is 100% clean. Remember that a coffee shop needs constant cleaning in order to maintain high hygiene standards.
Since you are knowledgeable already, you will have to give as much information as possible and make the customers understand.
Earning the license demonstrates evidence of the student’s knowledge and skills in the field of radio and electronic communication.
Human error is not random; it is systematically connected to features of people’s tools, the tasks they perform, and the operating environment in which they work.
Work on your accent if it is too heavy because eventually it will go away if you are determined.
Look around the room, wipe down the tables, pick up any litter, clean the back of the coffee or espresso machine and do just about anything positive to keep busy.
This course requires pre-course knowledge of the basic algebra, geometry and trig math concepts used for calculating A.C. Maintain a generic quality in all your mannerisms and speech so that people can associate positive characteristics with you.

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Lt / En
Parallel Progressions 3: etc.
Curators: Renata Dubinskaite, Virginija Januškevičiūtė
XII.11 - III.9
A new project entitled 'Parallel Progressions 3: etc.' starts on December 11th, 2002. From then on the cellar of the Contemporary Art Centre becomes an unpredictable space where the artworks of the youngest or the least known artists of Lithuania as well as untypical works of already famous ones appear, disappear, move to other places, change themselves and each other without any timetable. This migration of names, works and ideas is open to the variety of art fields, topics, genres, forms, expression or volume and functions as a stimulation of constant changes and manifold discussions. Experiments of display taking place during the whole project allow for testing the different possibilities of the same artwork while its size, place in space, technical means of transmission, lighting, relation to neighbouring works or other features change. Freedom to change and vary creates many different exhibitions in the same exhibition and suggests always-new ways of talking and perceiving, involvement and ignoring, activity and passivity. The subtitle of the project 'etc.' declares continuity and variation, refuses to claim the constancy of signification and significance in general. The 'etc.' principal that unites artists and works into constantly open polylogue does not retouch the ambitions of separate participants and exhibits. This project aims to encourage the liberating, playful, flexible, reflexive model of participation in the artistic activity and its perceiving.
Laura Garbštienė
Artūras Bumšteinas
Linas Jablonskis
AIKAS Herbarium: Plant Writing in Situated Ecologies
Susitikimas su menininke Beatriče Mockevičiūte
Beatričės Mockevičiūtės parodos „Asukas“ atidarymas ir knygos pristatymas
Launch of BILL 2. A Talk by Julie Peeters


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July 29-August 12

For more information:

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  1. Thesis and Dissertation Roundtable

    July 17 @ 5:30 pm - 6:45 pm

“Students Just Don’t Get It”

June 5th, 2015 by wrightcenter

"Students Just Don't Get It" – Yet!

The Role of Feedback in Student Learning

By Kathi R. Griffin with valuable feedback from Christopher Peace, Graduate Assistant

We often hear faculty say, "Students just don't get it." If we add the word "yet" to the comment, we might then ask, "What can I do?"

Feedback does not have to mean more work. As faculty, we may balk at the idea of doing anything differently, or we may think giving feedback would require doing more work. Actually, it involves work that is more focused, more intentional. In addition, feedback may be understood as evaluation, which can actually prevent students from "getting it." When we offer students timely "feedback," it can help them take responsibility for their learning, and as students move toward "getting it," grading time can actually be reduced and more rewarding.

What is feedback? Feedback is information that allows students to adjust their writing, speaking, or research in response to a real audience. Thus feedback helps students develop more control over their work and take more responsibility for their work. It can also help build their confidence in their ability to "get it."

How does feedback work? Feedback that reports to students what is and/or is not happening in a paper or speech involves students in their learning by making them responsible for what is there. From facing complex challenges and solving complex problems to acquiring mastery, students need to learn to use feedback–not just how to follow directions or answer questions "correctly." The challenge for faculty is two-fold: to think of assessment in terms of guidance rather than grades, and to design programs, courses, and assignments with deliberate systems of feedback loops that actively move students toward learning objectives.

Feedback is essential to active learning. Courses and assignments that create opportunities for feedback make it possible for students to engage with peers, to reflect on their process, to give effective feedback to each other–with minimal intervention by instructors. In other words, well designed assignments and activities can free up instructors to provide purposeful feedback and guidance–when needed.

For students, responding to feedback is a critical skill that can only be learned through doing and can only become instinctive through practice and guidance. If students have been used to completing tasks and getting evaluated, they may initially need to learn what feedback is and how to use it before they can develop new habits of thinking, which takes some time.

For faculty, giving feedback may require new approaches at first, or it may require helping students learn to use feedback. For example,

  • In peer writing groups, students may not yet know how to respond to each other beyond correcting grammar.
  • In the sciences, students may not yet know how to use error margins to improve their methodology or the overall design of an experiment.
  • When writing, students may use spell-check but may not yet know the word they need or even how to choose the word they need.
  • When preparing a speech, students may fear feedback or take it as negative criticism rather than as information that could help them improve their performance.

In each instance, faculty can teach students how to give and receive feedback, thus help students move closer to "getting it." With practice, students can gain mastery, which cannot be achieved in the first or even fortieth attempt.

What happens when feedback is only evaluative? Evaluation alone, or summative assessment, can short-circuit learning. Without feedback students often struggle to understand what they did wrong–or even what they may have done right. It does not have the same power that feedback in process, or formative assessment, does to help students "get it." Seeking a grade (or pleasing an instructor) may also undermine students' overall professional growth. For example, if students wait for feedback until they are giving a presentation in a high stakes situation, such as for a grade or at a conference, then they have no opportunity to improve their performance. When students are given or seek feedback in the process of developing a presentation, paper, or idea, they have time to think about what changes they might make and why.

When students learn to seek feedback in the process of developing a speech, paper, or idea, they can learn what is working or not working and make more informed choices about their direction, which is what we do all the time as professionals.

Feedback in the RWC is focused on students and their goals. Tutors are not instructors, so they cannot evaluate students' work, but they can ask critical questions, offer valuable feedback, and  talk with students about how to incorporate feedback in their projects. In the RWC tutors ask students about what they are working on, where they are in their process, and what they want to work on during the tutorial session.

Feedback can take many forms, such as summarizing back what was read or heard, but it most often takes the form of critical questions about the student's purpose, audience, and genre that can help students fill in missing information or smooth out confusing sentences. Feedback in the form of questions encourages students to think about their ideas, goals, and processes. As students engage in intellectual conversations about their work, they begin to develop critical habits of mind as they make choices about their work.

Feedback from instructors is more often described as formative assessment, as it provides students with information to help them meet the goals of a particular class exercise or assignment, course objective, or educational objective. As instructors, we can get impatient when students don't "get it" quickly enough, or when they don't yet seem to act on our feedback. Within a context that includes clearly stated objectives and a range of opportunities for frequent feedback, students will be more able to "get it" in our classrooms and in our programs.

Feedback, formative assessment, and evaluation together help students "get it":

  • Feedback tells students whether or not they are on course.
  • Formative assessment can tell students the most likely ways to achieve their goals.
  • Evaluation tells students whether or not they have been successful.

Without feedback and formative assessment, however, evaluation makes little difference in student learning.

Our aim, therefore, must be to engage students in ways that better equip them to "get it."

Posted in News


Posts Tagged ‘Chocolate Dessert’

Bring On The Chocolate Cake!

CakeWhen it involves celebrating, food plays a vital and cross-cultural part. While it might consist associated with different cuisine based on where a person go, the dinner around that families as well as friends collect unites the planet on typical ground. Different food involves mean various things – a vacation meal, the weekly preferred, or a household recipe. But with regards to celebrating sweetly — especially in the USA – absolutely nothing beats the chocolate dessert.

For dark chocolate cake enthusiasts the choices are because unique since the people on their own – dark chocolate cake frosted along with vanilla topping, chocolate topping, whip lotion, you title it. Each family might have a unique recipe passed down from era to generation or perhaps a favorite bakery in which the chocolate cake cannot be missed. Today’s ever-increasing recognition of dark chocolate cake might surely happen to be a shock to people who first tried its development.

The producing of cakes inside a general character began soon after flour had been discovered. The formula then was a smaller amount sweet than it’s today — displaying more of the bread-like high quality. Initially, put into the flour, had been milk as well as yeast; honey or even dried fresh fruit were put into sweeten the actual mixture. These days, eggs are generally used instead of yeast, as well as, of program, sugar is becoming our sweetener of preference. Making cake before the Industrial Trend was an elaborate and expensive process. But using the advent of produced in higher quantities ingredients; cake producing became inexpensive and possible for all amounts of bakers.

Chocolate cake was initially seen in the USA, the recipe that was submitted to some Dallas, TX newspaper within 1957. This specific recipe required Baker’s German’s fairly sweet Chocolate that is how the actual chocolate dessert received its name. The reaction to the imprinted recipe had been immediate as well as astounding.

These days, the variations for this original formula number to the thousands, with households adding their very own special additions through the years. The advent from the boxed dark chocolate cake offers given aspire to elementary bakers almost everywhere whose just responsibility would be to add egg cell and essential oil and make. Even nevertheless, the majority of delicious associated with chocolate dessert is what originates within the homes in our families.

And whether or not the recipe requires icing, nut products, or a number of other elements, the reality remains which chocolate cake is equally as popular because ever, starring within birthday events and celebrations around the world.


Music Heard On Far Side Of The Moon By Apollo 10 Crew

NASA astronautsThere have historically been many stories associated with the various NASA missions to the moon and a majority of these that could raise eyebrows have been locked away, to avoid raising conspiracy theories or outrageous ideas regarding the serious topic of space exploration.

However, as NASA has allowed some of the information to be revealed, the one tale about ‘space music’ has caught quite a bit of attention.

The Apollo 10 crew was required to orbit the far side of the moon as part of the mission. This orbit takes them out of radio communication with earth for nearing one hour. During their orbit on the far side of the moon the crew described hearing strange audio sounds similar to music.

One of the astronauts indicated, “It sounds like, you know, outer space-type music,” one of the astronauts had said. “You hear that? That whistling sound? Whooooooooo! Well, that sure is weird music!”

The astronauts actually debated over whether or not they should even send a report back to NASA as to what they experienced. This was only two months before the Apollo 11 mission was scheduled and they didn’t want to jeopardize future missions.

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However, as the various strange stories are now being released, the television series “NASA’s Unexplained Files” on the Science Channel included this as part of their programming.

Astronaut Al Worden was a part of the 1971 Apollo 15 mission and stated, “Logic tells me that if there was something recorded on there, then there was something there.”

The recordings that occurred during the Apollo 10 mission may not have been immediately heard by the earth crew, but none the less, the transcripts and the recordings were held until 2008.

Prior to that, they were listed as classified and were not made available to anyone outside of NASA. Even then, once additional transcripts were released, they were included with a large volume of data and recordings and anyone that was interested had to delve through years of transcripts to find anything that was outside of the normally expected information.

The recordings themselves include the sounds of the ‘space music’ and it apparently only occurred as they passed around the dark side of the moon. The ‘music’ continued for most of their duration on the dark side and over the course of an hour the astronauts repeatedly mentioned hearing this music.

As with everything that is a bit odd or different regarding space missions, NASA will not make any additional comments on the situation.

However, the television show has offered a few reasonable explanations for the ‘space music’ including charged particles causing radio communication interference, which did occur with the Cassini spacecraft as it neared Saturn.

The noises were also explained as a possible error in radio communications between the two lunar space crafts.


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Splunk integration setup

Splunk integration setup

Setup procedures for the ServiceNow Security Operations add-on for Splunk include downloading the add-on file in Splunk, installing the add-on, and setting up the ServiceNow instance where security incidents and events are created.

Required role

Before performing Splunk integration setup procedures, be sure to define an integration user with the sn_si.integration_user and sn_si.analyst roles on your ServiceNow instance. Additionally, in order to perform imports, you need the import_transformer role to obtain read and write permission to the security tables. The sn_si.integration_user role should be defined with the import_transformer portion of the role.


Twisted tales of spinning and blogging

Elephantdentistry’s main themes might seem a strange mix. They include (1) what’s going on with internet and social media industries, politics and practices,  (2) experts, (3) living metaphors and catching them in the wild (fun with language), (4) feminism, (5) music and (6) Mosul. Here I’m getting most of these twisted together so let’s see how that works.

I caught three new living metaphors in the wild when I was in Wales recently, visiting the National Wool Museum. I tried a hands-on exhibit, picking up a handful of wool and following the instructions to pull and twist simultaneously until eventually I’d spun a yarn. Nearby was a painting of wool gatherers, women who would follow the drovers taking sheep to market and dart from hedge to hedge to collect scraps of wool. They would then sell their bags of wool to eke out their desperately poor livings. You could see how the scattering of wool and movement of the gatherers made sense of the metaphor, as it’s not a task that involves following a straight line. You would need to keep constantly turning, moving and switching your focus of attention. Hard work, and once you realise the point of all that apparent distraction it’s obvious that wool gatherers have had a bad press. Raw wool is indeed very woolly: it’s fuzzy, breaks apart easily and has no fixed shape.

The name overstated what the museum really was and did. It’s in an old textile mill, formerly Cambrian Mills, near Newcastle Emlyn not far from the mid-west coast, and most of the exhibits were about the mill itself, its owners, the machinery and the weaving industry, so there was almost nothing on knitting. (I make up for that later.) The mill used to produce blankets, shawls and woven wool cloth used for miners’ shirts and soldiers’ uniforms. Most of the textile exhibits were of shawls and blankets. When they were taken off the looms, large pieces of cloth had to be washed and then stretched out on tenterhooks, on tenters, in tenter fields. There the cloth would be left hanging, waiting until it was ready. We saw a tenter, with hooks, in a park displaying information about the area’s traditional crafts.Tenterhooks2

Before  machinery and mills, spinning used the older technologies of spindles and wheels and was largely women’s work carried out at home as  ‘cottage industry’. It took tedious, long hours to earn much of a living and so telling stories was intricately associated with the work of busy hands that didn’t require much mental engagement. Weaving was another cottage industry.

Now being able to work virtually and from home, according to some optimistic commentators, has brought in satisfying new cottage industries, once again involving women fitting in somewhat creative, but low paid work (even if paid at all) alongside domestic and family commitments. It’s also handy when there’s no other work available.

That’s the positive story being spun. Some experts disagree and have a bleaker but more informed analysis.

When I started researching women’s online practices years ago I remember being struck by the growth of knitblogs – blogs about knitting. It happened long before blogs were as common as they are now, and back then few of those blogs seemed to be commercial. Now I would guess most of them are a means to try and make money, one way or another.

I’ll get on to what Stephanie Taylor has to say about creativity, home working and precarity, but first I’m not dissing woolly creativity although I do still wonder about knitted cupcakes. I know they can be used as pincushions or given away but that doesn’t explain their ubiquity. The museum had a three-tier knitted cake, which is fair enough as they are the Wool Museum, but the cafe also had knitted cupcakes and they apparently sold well. Their very pointlessness seems to be the point – you can neither eat them nor wear them, so knitters can express a creative impulse without anyone giving or taking offence because nobody wants to eat cakes or wear handknits. This, on the other hand, is extraordinary and needs no excuse. It is the giant cardigan on display in Cardigan Castle marking 900 years of the town’s history.  Cardigan4

The cardigan for Cardigan was created by around 200 knitters, including  schoolchildren and other volunteers alongside the two artists behind the project. It’s amazing. My photos can’t give you the sheer scale of it.

Even more impressive and with another woolly play  on words are the wool churches created as part of the Wolly Spires project. These are models of the beautiful Lincolnshire churches built out of the wealth of the medieval wool trade, intricately knitted to represent all the details of their stone decorations and graceful architecture. Community groups worked on these too. It took 8 years for the  teams to knit 6 churches.

They’re currently on display until mid January at the 20-21 Visual Arts Gallery in Scunthorpe so if you’ve ever wanted to visit Scunny, there’s a good reason.

These geographically-based communities of knitters are not anything like the virtual community I came across. I first found knitblogs around 15 years ago when I was researching  internet ‘beginners’ and specifically the various online literacy practices (what they read,  what they wrote and how) that women were developing for themselves. That was a time before the big social media corporations, so for most people there were websites, email and not much else . Internet access was still fairly limited and there was already a significant gender gap in the UK. But I was struck by the fact that a lot of web designers were women. There seemed to be a connection between that and a sudden flourishing of knitblogs, i.e. blogs about knitting. Pixels and stitches made up colour patterns on screen or in wool. Designers needed to understand and create sets of instructions written in a specialised language. Both web design and knitting could involve home-based creativity, whether for pleasure or money. Back then, knitblogs were more about personal creativity and sharing stories about life as well as creations or wips (works in progress). They needed more technical online skills than blogging requires now.  Those very personal blogs still exist, but knitblogs are now mostly about selling patterns or getting income through ads, which brings me back to Stephanie Taylor.

Taylor is one of the authors of an article on gender and creative labour, along with Bridget Conor and Rosalind Gill. Their research into the cultural and creative industries showed  there were vast inequalities and pretty terrible conditions of work, hidden behind myths about the wonders of creativity. Work was often informal and precarious. People, women especially, coped with a ‘bulimic’ pattern of alternatively long hours and super-intense periods of work  or nothing at all coming in. Stephanie Taylor has also analysed a more general phenomenon she calls the ‘new mystique’ of working for oneself, and how it traps women seeking to combine work and childcare into long hours and low pay. She discusses the language used to describe this type of home-based self-employment, including the term ‘cottage industry’ being revived by journalists, and picks up on the parallels between what’s going on in the fields of creative work and what’s happening with the growth of self-employment. They have precariousness, long hours and low pay in common as the price of apparent flexibility. Boundaries between work and home life disappear. We’re back in the world of the poor spinners.

Amidst a burgeoning social media economy, genres of self-enterprise have emerged that enable women to profit from creative activities located within the domestic sphere, including mommy blogging, lifestyle blogging, and craft micro-economies.

That link between working on websites such as blogs and creative crafts reappears in research by Brooke Erin Duffy & Urszula Pruchniewska. Catch Duffy (quoted above) being interviewed here. She has some sharp things to say about women working as social media editors. The title of her new book, out this year, nails the issue: (Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love, subtitled Gender, Social Media, and Aspirational Work.

Drawing on interviews and fieldwork, Duffy offers fascinating insights into the work and lives of fashion bloggers, beauty vloggers, and designers. She connects the activities of these women to larger shifts in unpaid and gendered labor…

A tiny handful have lucrative careers but there’s a vast gap between them and the rest who make little or nothing.

Alongside these aspirational bloggers, there’s a secondary industry offering training and support. This blog makes nothing and luckily doesn’t have to try to earn anything, but I’ve participated in three training courses so far to get to know more about the blogging subculture. Most of the other participants were women, and even if they’d been sent by an employer in order to start up and run a company blog, they had ambitions to do with promoting their own creative outputs. The aspirations of some bloggers reminded me of a woman learning to use the internet for the first time in a class I ran in Peckham Library who told me hopefully back in about 2000  ‘You can make money out of this, you know’. I met some realistic and genuinely helpful trainers, but also one who suggested that any blog potentially had a substantial worldwide audience and could bring in regular income through adverts. Content, or a reason to blog apart from providing ad space, was irrelevant. Learn the techniques of the clickbaiters. Ten top tips for rescuing knitting disasters. The seven things you need to know about improving your blog.

Here’s some more from the hardworking knitters of Cardigan, Cardigan2and finally a link to Mosul. The Welsh weavers had their own traditional textile patterns and the mechanical looms in the mill could produce more complex patterns or more cheaply, cloth with a simple stripe. Wool used to be vital to Mosul’s economy, although cotton was more important to the textile industry. According to Sarah Shields, writing about the nineteenth century,

Mosul’s fabrics were mostly cottons woven in traditional patterns to appeal to the regional populations. The coarse cotton calicos (ham, cit) used for garments were bleached or dyed red or blue. One of the city’s specialties was alaca, a striped fabric used for zibun, the robes men wore. Weavers prepared women’s cloaks (izar) in assorted qualities, and special looms were employed for the wool and cotton blend abaya over garments. These textiles, as well as towels and headgear, were exported into the mountains, to Persia, Baghdad, Bitlis, Siirt, and as far away as Trabzon.

Did you know that the English word muslin for a lightly woven delicate cotton fabric derives from ‘Mosul linen’? It was thought to have been invented there first.

Twisted tales of spinning and blogging

The Devil’s Interval and Yair Dalal

I heard that the blues musician Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil at a crossroads in return for his guitar-playing genius, that Paganini was the devil’s violinist and the devil himself is a fiddle player. That was reported as fact to a folklore researcher and quoted in his article The Devil and the Fiddle in 1943. He was told:

I grew up in Chicago and Aurora. And one of the earliest things I can remember about my fiddle, that my old uncle told me ‘the Devil was in the fiddle’. He was my guardian and he wouldn’t let me take lessons.

I can play The Devil Among the Tailors on the violin, but I didn’t know about the Devil’s Interval until yesterday’s event with Yair Dalal performing Iraqi Jewish music on violin and oud. He explained that one of the pieces he was about to play featured the Devil’s Interval (Diabolus in Musica), or tritones. Traditionally it is shunned in Western classical music but it features in heavy metal, at least according to an article linking Black Sabbath, medieval theology and the tritone.  Yair told us that it’s used unflinchingly in Iraqi maqam, the traditional musical system which is about much more than Arabic musical scales and is also about form, melody and rhythm – but not harmony which doesn’t feature.

Yair Dalal

I’ve blogged previously about Iraqi Jewish music but yesterday I learned a lot more. Yair was in conversation with Sara Manasseh, who directs the Rivers of Babylon ensemble. I was their violinist for a few years in the band’s early days and it’s great to know they are still going and have recorded many more CDs since. Sara is an ethnomusicologist and her comprehensive book, Shbahoth – Songs of Praise in the Babylonian Jewish Tradition has the words and music for some of the songs Yair performed.

It also has words and music for the song from the Mosul tradition that I introduced to the band. There’s even a credit to my late father Menashe.

Eliahu Eliahu (2)

Yair played some of his own compositions, traditional works by medieval poets such as Ibn-Gabirol, and twentieth century songs by Saleh Al-Kuwaity. Al-Kuwaity composed around 800 songs but after most of the Jewish community, including the musicians who made up the radio orchestra, left Iraq in the early 1950s their names were removed from their works. That’s now changing and knowledge of Iraq’s popular music history is being revived. Yair explained that most musicians in Iraq had been Jewish, so when the Jews left the musicians felt a heavy responsibility. They stayed in Baghdad until the last possible moment in order to record their music so it wouldn’t be lost.

I can remember going to a talk Sara gave many years ago where she played examples of traditional songs, and someone in the audience rudely asked if the performers had any training. I guess if you’re only used to a few simple genres of Western music and flinch at anything unfamiliar you might assume there was nothing complex, difficult or refined about these strange sounds and that they’re merely uncouth. Luckily audiences have mostly changed from those days. Yair’s training, he told us, when he was a young man living and working in the desert involved overnight five hour journeys each way, and then two solid days of study and rehearsal before going back to his home and work. He did that for years. He is from an Iraqi Jewish family although he was born in a transition camp in northern Israel, and grew up in an area where there were many Iraqi Jewish musicians who were constantly performing, at a time when their music was out of fashion in Isaeli society generally.

The Baghdad Bandstand clips on YouTube are a great way to see and hear some celebrated Iraqi musicians jamming, chatting and explaining what they’re playing – not in English but there are subtitles.  If you’re in London you may also be able to get to Yair Dalal’s masterclass on Monday 11th September at SOAS, or to East meets West A Concert for Peace, on September 27. Or you can listen to a younger generation of musicians reviving the old songs and putting them to new beats.

The rock musician Dudu Tassa is a grandson of the other al-Kuwaity (or al-Kuwaiti) brother. Dudu Tassa and the Kuwaitis have been touring and recording songs from his relatives’ back catalogue and it seems that through their versions this music, originally from Baghdad, is getting popular back in Iraq once again after a long interval.

The Devil’s Interval and Yair Dalal

Statues, memorials and dead poets

Poetry has its own memorial politics.

Irina Ratushinskaya

here where for three hundred hours I had to wait

Statues, memorials and dead poets

The shadow works of Raphael and Hella

Colour and Line

Oak gall ink and Mosul

Oak galls

The shadow works of Raphael and Hella

A Brexit amulet and the Medieval Cairo Genizah

Amulets are still everywhere. You might have noticed them in cabs dangling from rear mirrors, behind the serving counter in a takeaway, and worn as necklaces or rings. They go back thousands of years. I didn’t know what an amulet was until I read Edith Nesbit’s The story of the amulet, and even then I didn’t connect the object in that children’s story – Egyptian, and solid – with a pendant I was given as a child. I lost it long ago (probably stolen in a burglary) but it was a tiny hinged gold box, in the shape of two tablets of stone with Hebrew letters representing the ten commandments. I thought it was a locket and it was always empty. I couldn’t think why it was a box or what anyone would put inside it.

An eye, a blue stone, or a hand (often with an eye or blue stone inside) meant to ward off the Evil Eye are typical amulet symbols.

eye amulethand eye 2hand and eye

But the supreme magical power of an amulet was always meant to come from mystical words, especially the secret names of God, and the names of angels and demons. An amulet could be a scrap of paper or parchment, with charms and spells written around it in an intricate pattern. Amulet writing, like the selling of pardons in medieval Christianity, was once a lucrative trade.

L0043622 Hebrew Manuscript amulet for the protection...from the plague A pendant for carrying round an amulet needed to be hollow, like this:

amulet bottle

My favourite items in an amazing exhibition I went to a couple of weeks ago were the amulets. Discarded History: The Genizah of Medieval Cairo is in Cambridge University Library, free and on until early October. The Genizah was a store of old documents in the attic of the ancient Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo. Ben Ezra was also known as the synagogue of the Palestinians or the synagogue of the Jerusalemites. There was also a separate synagogue in Fustat (now known as Old Cairo) for the Babylonian community. Documents of all kinds, not only religious texts but letters, marriage contracts, lists, legal decisions, medical writings, charitable appeals, accounts, charms and even children’s alphabet books couldn’t be destroyed because they might contain the name of God or other holy words and letters. The store was eventually dispersed and bought up by collectors, so now teams of researchers in several universities are working on conserving, restoring and translating them. Cambridge has around 200,000 documents and they are an immense resource for historians, as they range across many countries and communities and hundreds of years.  Most of the texts on display are around a thousand years old and were written in Judeo-Arabic (Arabic language written in Hebrew letters) or Hebrew. In the middle ages, most of the world’s Jewish population lived in Islamic lands and children learned to write Arabic using Hebrew letters. There are translations of all the documents, and the exhibition guide also notes the languages they are in.

The tiny ‘Scorpion amulets’ in the exhibition, intended to protect their buyers against scorpion bites,  were from Egypt, 11th or 12th century. The curators wonderfully describe the language of these scraps of paper as ‘Hebrew, Aramaic and gibberish’. Carrying an amulet was normal practice even though amulets, and their writers, were condemned by Maimonides who wrote a diatribe against them. (There’s a signed letter from Maimonides in the exhibition.)

Scorpions scare me a lot. My father told me that in his youth in Mosul he had known of a five year old child who died of a scorpion bite. They can be deadly. It strikes me that the danger we face now is totally different, but there are people who say that it can be warded off through the right, powerful words. Yesterday I heard a pro-Brexit economist explaining that the economy was not in any trouble, and that he didn’t expect any damage to the economy as long as people said the right positive things about Brexit. So words are what we need, not actual plans, which is a relief if you read this month’s briefing by three Sussex professors,  A Food Brexit: time to get real. If it wasn’t for the sheer, charming, magical power of positive language we would be heading for trouble.

Inspired by the Scorpion amulets I’ve created a Brexit amulet. It has names of power with a little gibberish thrown in for good measure. If we all wear one of these, nothing could possibly go wrong, could it? That’s pretty much the pro-Brexit economists’ plan actualised: the power of positive words.  Seriously, I recommend reading and sharing the briefing on what might happen to the UK’s food supply in future, given that the government currently has no plan. As the authors put it,

The implications of Brexit for food are potentially enormous. This verdict applies, whether there is a ‘hard’ or ‘soft’ Brexit. The UK food system, consumer tastes and prices have been thoroughly Europeanised. This will be impossible to cut out or back by March 2019 without enormous consequences. The UK food system faces real challenges on food security.

Scarier than a scorpion.

A Brexit amulet and the Medieval Cairo Genizah

Keeping music alive

I was once told by police to stop playing or next time our instruments would be confiscated. It’s a trivial story in the scheme of things. We were in Amsterdam in around 1980 in a city centre spot where busking wasn’t allowed, so next time we got the train to Gouda and played there instead. There were two of us, calling ourselves Cafe Music, and mostly we busked in York.

Songhoy Boys had experiences a world away from that. The band was formed by musicians from Mali at a time when Islamists were banning music completely and threatening musicians’ livelihoods and even their existence. I went to their fantastic London gig a week ago. The evening started with flying ants, downpours and extra heavy security but the musicians told us what security meant for them these days: they miss a lot of gigs and a lot of flights. They get sent to the back of a long line, or taken into small rooms for questioning, for being African, Black, and (most of them) Muslim. They also told any Malians in the audience that they needed to go back home and help rebuild their country. Here’s the stage at Somerset House, underneath the rainbow flag that was still flying to celebrate Pride week. So much for extremist religious censorship.

Rainbow flag

I wrote about Songhoy Boys briefly in my last post and mentioned a film they appeared in. Here’s a roundup of a few documentary films and a few notable musicians,  on the theme of music and survival. There’s also a book by Andy Morgan, Music, Culture and Conflict in Mali, available from Freemuse. Did you know that March 3rd is Music Freedom Day? That’s one of many things I learned from Freemuse, an organisation set up to defend access to music as a human right around the world.

They Will Have To Kill Us First is about musicians in Mali dealing with, surviving and defying the Islamist attempt to ban music completely. At the end there is a very moving free concert in Timbuktu, staged at a time when the local people were still living in great fear. The filming of the concert is extraordinary. It focuses on the audience arriving nervously and then gradually appearing less afraid, responding to the musicians, dancing and having fun.

The documentary On The Banks of the Tigris follows Majid Shokor’s quest to rediscover the music of his childhood. He had been forced to flee Iraq and had settled in Australia, and was eventually astonished to find out that there were famous Iraqi musicians living there. They were Jews, unlike Majid, and had also been forced into exile. The film follows him as he interviews Iraqi Jewish musicians in Israel and other countries, and also follows his return to Iraq where he investigates how much is known about the origins of music that has been relabelled as ‘traditional’ but was in fact composed by Iraqi Jews. Most musicians in Iraq up until 1950 were Jewish, and much popular Arabic music was composed by some prolific Jewish composers such as al-Kuwaity, but that had to be concealed. On the other side, the musicians in exile felt the loss of their audiences and professions, and struggled to keep and pass on their own musical traditions. There’s a review article here.

Rock in the Red Zone is about young musicians in the border town of Sderot, whose inhabitants were originally refugees from North Africa and the Middle East. Children growing up under constant rocket fire from a few miles away in Gaza were becoming extremely traumatized, and composing and performing became less an escape and more a way for them to to try to deal with their stress, anxieties and emotions. The town’s people as a whole felt forgotten and abandoned. The music studio which nurtured young musicians was in an underground bunker and the film is punctuated by sirens and rocket attacks. The film director’s own story of getting to know local people and eventually marrying one of the musicians gets intertwined along the way, so there’s not as much about the actual music as I’d have liked.

They Will Have To Kill Us First - Khaira

Khaira Arby stars with Songhoy Blues in the film and was the force behind the extraordinary free concert in Timbuktu arranged in defiance of the jihadists. She has an amazing voice. Here she is in a clip on YouTube. Enjoy.

Songhoy Blues again

They Will Have To Kill Us First - Songhoy Blues

A big shout out to Hwages

This is the famous hiphoppy video featuring three bowling, skateboarding, Trump-dissing women from Saudi Arabia. A podcast on Freemuse gives some background. There are no live music venues in Saudia Arabia and for women to sing in public is of course forbidden, but there are also 19 million YouTube downloads a day so unofficially music isn’t exactly being excluded from life. Freemuse has a Let Women Sing campaign going.

Yair Dalal

The oud player Yair Dalal will be performing in September as part of the Sephardi Voices season. He appeared in On The Banks of the Tigris and is one of the artists trying to preserve what his website calls the ‘Babylonian musical heritage’ and teaching younger musicians.

Moshe Habusha

Anothe oud player of Iraqi heritage, but this time performing music from the sacred rather than secular repertoire.  I saw him perform live once in Kiryat Ata, northern Israel, in a synagogue built by and for the Jewish community from Mosul. It involved a short and scary road trip as I was driving my father (who was not convinced his daughter could drive anyway) in a hire car on a strange road in the dark with everything – controls, traffic – on the wrong side. I didn’t know the route and was worried there might be nowhere to park. My father told me there will be plenty of space, these are poor people, they don’t have cars. He was right.

When the musicians arrived I recognised the routine the violinist was going through untangling wires to attach a pickup to his instrument, as I was used to dealing with the same mess. There was another familiar routine when the concert began. The women around me in the gallery started throwing down sweets (hard candy type), as happens with Mizrachi barmitzvahs. It’s a tradition the musicians could do without as they were ducking and starting to protest. It was also pretty frustrating trying to listen as another ladies’ gallery tradition, which I’ve always assumed was a reaction to being excluded from the main part of the synagogue and service, is talking amongst yourselves all the way through. Although it was hard to hear properly I did get to buy some bootleg cassettes afterwards, all now unplayable. You can hear bits of tracks from his CDs on Amazon. I think he has a great voice but if you prefer oud instrumental music, there’s some of that too.

Moshe Habusha Yaarat Davash

Linguistic note: the album you can stream is called Yaarat Davash and on the cover the artist’s name is given as Moshe Havusha. That’s the influence of modern Hebrew but that ‘v’ sound was unknown in the Hebrew spoken by Iraqi Jews. Instead the consonantal sound would either be ‘b’ or ‘w’. If you listen to the title track you can hear the musicians actually sing ‘dabash’ and not ‘davash’. Moshe Habusha himself is a lot younger than anyone in the old photo above – I assume it’s of a previous era back in Baghdad.

I feel I’ve now expiated my old sin of carrying around cases with Musician’s Union ‘Keep music live’ stickers on them, when I never joined the union as I didn’t earn much from music. It was a mild act of hypcrisy compared with the crimes of denying to musicians the right to perform and to everyone else their rights to enjoyment and participation.

Keeping music alive

Mosul, music and citizens in an age of terror

The final liberation of Mosul from IS is being regularly announced now and one of these days it will actually be true.  Three years ago IS used the ancient and highly symbolic al-Nuri mosque to declare its  so-called caliphate. A few days ago they blew up the mosque, before it could be recaptured, and have taken to sending out teenage girls as suicide bombers from their last few hold-outs in the old city. Around a million people from the Mosul area have been forced to flee for their lives. It’s unimaginable. It’s as if a city the size of Birmingham had been occupied by a death cult that destroyed its concert halls and libraries, murdered, raped and tortured entire communities and banned everything human, all artistic endeavours, everything that didn’t conform to their own ultra ‘pure’ version of religious conformity.

I’ve posted about Mosul’s history before in this blog, and here I want to commemorate three things: Mosul’s one time diversity from the days when culturally and religiously plural societies were a normal feature of the entire area, music from Mosul, and ordinary citizens choosing to keep track of events in Mosul and communicate to the rest of the world. Those citizen experts are anything but ordinary.

Joel Wing

You might have caught Joel Wing being interviewed on BBC radio news recently. He is an expert on what’s happening in Iraq but his background is extraordinary. He runs the Musings on Iraq blog and updates it constantly with news about what’s happening in Iraq, currently mostly the battle to retake Mosul. Joel Wing’s blog has become fairly well known and his expertise is trusted by a lot of journalists and analysts.  It turns out he’s a history teacher from Oakland, California who decided back in 2008 that since the US was involved in Iraq people ought to know what was happening, and became an expert through sheer continuous dedication and hard work. He collates news from English and Arabic language sources and presents clear summaries, along with reminders via Twitter of what happened on the same date in past years going back to at least 1991 (the war following Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait). His latest post, as I’m writing this, tells us that Iraqi officials are going to announce final victory today over IS in Mosul, but they’ve made similar impatient announcements before and it’s unlikely that IS will be totally defeated today. Plenty of commentators including Wing are pointing out that ridding Mosul of IS presence won’t mean that IS is finished. Controlling cities or large stretches of territory is  only one of their strategies and they’ll continue to spread their ideology, hatred and violence – predominantly towards other Muslims – by other means.

Also today, there are estimates that it will cost a billion dollars to rebuild Mosul but as for repairing the harm done to the people of the city, especially children who have lived through three years of terror, there are no estimates. It will take a long time. UNHCR and UNICEF, Save the Children and no doubt lots of other NGOs are launching appeals.

The Mosul Eye and Mosul music

The Mosul Eye blog is heartbreakingly optimistic. It was set up by an Iraqi historian based in Mosul who has planned reconciliation events, a bring-a-book festival to help restore Mosul’s libraries, and an astonishing violin recital among the ruins to make the point that music can now return to the city in the face of terror. Like the Taliban and the jihadists who took over in Mali, IS banned music and threatened the lives of musicians. The Mosul Eye blogger arranged for a few Mosuli musicians to return and play in one of the ancient Nineveh sites IS tried to destroy. You can hear Ameen Mukdad, the violinist, here with explosions and gunfire in the background.

I played on a track on the Rivers of Babylon Treasures CD, Eliyyahu Eliyahu,  which is in the Mosul tradition of Iraqi Jewish music going back at least eighty years but probably much further. It’s the only existing recording as far as I know. It took me a long while to work out that some of the notes don’t exist in Western musical scales because they’re the notes in between those other notes. I recorded my father singing it when he was in his 80s and that’s when I realised I had transposed some of the tune into a more familiar sounding key in my memory, and had to flatten the notes back to where they should go. I always thought of the song as wistful, and about hoping for a better future when the prophet Elijah eventually shows up.

Next week I’m going to see Songhoy Blues again, a band formed by Malian musicians in exile. They played in London in 2015 alongside the showing of a film, They will have to kill us first,  about musicians daring to return to Timbuktu to give a free concert and inspire local people to hope for a return to normality. Their new album is called Resistance.

Old Mosul communities

This photo is of a Christian monastery near Mosul, St Elijah’s or Mar Elias

It was the oldest Christian monastery in Iraq, dating back to around 600 CE. It was destroyed by IS probably in 2014. Mosul used to have the highest proportion of churches of anywhere in Iraq – Catholic, Chaldean, Assyrian, Syrian Orthodox, and probably others I don’t know about. My father remembered going inside churches as a child and seeing what he described as ‘big dolls’ (statues presumably). At one time there were at least twenty churches, not to mention the five synagogues and nearby Yezidi shrines. It’s an understatement to say that communities didn’t always live amicably together in the past but even so, Mosul’s long history is one of many diverse groups living side by side, including many Kurds. From the 1970s the Ba’athists started a Stalinist-style deportation campaign, removing Kurds from northern Iraq and dumping them in southern deserts. It’s estimated that 300,000 may have been killed. This transfer policy also involved settling Ba’athist supporters in the north.

This news story describes Muslims in a liberated area of Mosul helping to rebuild a destroyed Chaldaean church as a gesture of solidarity, but it’s not certain that Christians will feel safe enough to return.  Kurdistan is now seeking a referendum on independence. Relations with the government in Baghdad are pretty tense and although Kurds have taken in hundreds of thousands of refugees, and have lost many of their own fighters. it’s been without much help from Baghdad. There’s an all-party parliamentary group on Kurdistan with a  website here  and there was a Commons debate on Tuesday which discussed the medical and psychological help needed following Mosul’s liberation and what the UK can do –  the proceedings are now available. The Kurdish referendum issue is going to be fraught.

I’ve been recommending experts in this blog (see here and here ) as well as occasionally writing about Mosul. If you’re interested in following news from Iraq, I’d recommend Joel Wing as a real expert, of the responsible citizen type.

[Blog housekeeping note: the menu in the top righthand corner shows up OK on some devices and platforms but not others. If you can’t see a menu of links to previous posts try expanding the set of lines at the top and they should turn into a menu. I’ve been trying to find out how to fix that and make them more visible but it seems a general WordPress design problem.]

Mosul, music and citizens in an age of terror