- Introduce your pets indoors in controlled situations. Keep your dogs on a leash and do not tolerate any aggressive behaviour. If you are introducing a cat to a dog, do not allow the dog to chase or corner the cat - even if it's out of playfulness or curiosity.

- Be especially careful when introducing dogs or cats to caged animals. Dogs and cats can live in harmony with rabbies, guinea pigs, birds, etc... but please introduce them under strictly controlled supervision. Keep in mind that cats are very agile, so placing a cage high up on a shelf doesn't necessarily protect the caged pet. Don't take any chances - one mistake could be fatal to your caged pet.

- Give them time. Do not try to force your pets together; allow them to adjust at their own pace. Give all your pets - particularly the new one - time to gain confidence and decide when to face his or her new housemates.

Visit  for more pet tips


Função: Marketing Operacional

Tipo de Emprego: Tempo Integral

Localização: Shanghai - Shanghai

País: China

To contribute to a country’s brand growth managing interactive and CRM campaigns in line with the international brand positioning.
l Implement internet campaigns on new product launches and pillar products, conveying the advertising creative and product information into an impactful internet campaign
l Design CRM business plans to build long-term relationships with identified high-value consumers. Grow the consumer CRM database
l Propose interactive campaigns, briefing and managing external agencies if necessary
l Lobby for and defend interactive and CRM budgets and manage project budgets. Set clear KPIs to ensure campaign assessment
l Define and monitor KPIs to optimise the ROI of actions that have been implemented
l Optimise web content and services promotion
l Analyse brand’s and competitors’ interactive activity to make recommendations to management
l Ensure integration of interactive and CRM strategies with other departments (Marketing, Sales, Communication…)
l Ensure respect of legislation regarding Internet user's privacy


Posts Tagged ‘Telos’

The design debate: why evolution succeeds where the teleological argument fails – Part 4

September 19, 2011 1 comment

Criticisms of Evolution

Despite the tremendous strength of evolution theory, there are those that contest the its validity as an explanation for living things. But to start, it is important to note that this challenge tends not come from mainstream biologists, but rather from a minority of biologically educated scientists, as well as from theologians and writers. Their arguments typically come in one of two forms.

The first common objection is that biological structures are too improbably complex to have ever arisen by chance. Evolution, it is argued, depends upon luck because the process that generates variation in living things – mutation – occurs randomly. Thus, creationists argue that evolution cannot be responsible for the ordered and complex nature of living things. A classic thought experiment used to support this stance is the smashed watch analogy. This is conducted by imagining a watch (an object with all the characteristics of design) that has been completely disassembled, with its parts scrambled inside a bag. No matter how much you shake the bag, the random process of bumping these pieces into one another will never cause them to re-assemble into the orderly form of that complex watch. Thus, proponents of creationism argue that order cannot come from randomness, and evolution (which they call a random process) cannot have produced ordered, complex life.

I am willing to accept the former assertion; it does seem unlikely that a random, chaotic force could ever produce an ordered and complex object. However, I dispute the subsequent claim that this impossibility applies to evolution. I think that this criticism is indicative of a misunderstanding about how evolution operates. There is certainly a random component to evolution; mutations do tend to occur regardless of how they might affect an organism or its descendants. But it is inaccurate to say that evolution itself is a random process, because mutation is only a part of the picture. The other part of the equation, natural selection, is decidedly non-random, and it provides a directional agent that acts on the consequences of random mutation. Like a ratchet, selection ensures that evolution will tend to develop traits towards more adaptive, and often more complex, forms. While it is certainly unlikely that a random process such as mutation could ever result in the sudden composition of an entire watch, this feat is made feasible by natural selection, which guides this process of assembly one step at a time.

In this issue, my defense of evolution gains support from a computer program made to test whether or not evolution can, in fact, assemble a functional watch (see for a much fuller account than I can provide here). This computer simulation began with the disassembled parts of a watch – gears, hands, a ratchet, and a spring – which were themselves mutable in order to allow for variation. A genetic algorithm was introduced which randomly combined these pieces and selected for whichever combinations were most effective at telling time. These successful variants were then replicated, with mutation, into the subsequent generation. In its very first generation, these simulated watch-organisms were indeed very simple. The products of chance alone, the best were mere pendulums consisting of a gear attached to the end of a hand. But as each subsequent generation passed, selection was allowed to operate. And after approximately 800 generations, this computer simulation had given rise to a functional watch comprised of 14 interconnected pieces, and with hands able to tell time accurately to the sub-second. This computer simulation demonstrates that though mutation is random, and therefore unlikely to produce purposive, ordered complexity, the same is not true of evolution as a whole. Selection, by acting on variation, ratchets this process forward, and allows evolution to act, quite literally in this case, as a blind watchmaker.

The second prototypical argument made against evolution is that of irreducible complexity. The basis of this objection is that, in addition to being complex, biological structures are comprised of interacting parts that depend on one another to function. According to evolutionary theory, biological structures evolve one step at a time, with each step being more adaptive than the previous. But if the parts of a structure are interdependent in their overall function, then they are useless until the entire structure has been formed. So how can such structures have evolved? According to proponents of intelligent design, they must not have, and the presence of irreducibly complex surely refutes evolution.

Perhaps the most famously cited example of an irreducibly complex structure is the eye. Creationist Jonathan Sarfati, for instance, has insisted that its many complex parts, such as the lens, iris, and transparent humor, each rely on one another to produce vision, and thus the eye could not have evolved one part at a time. This claim, however, is simply untrue. The fact of the matter is that the evolution of the eye is well understood by biologists today. Over the past two decades, numerous biologists have studied the origin of the vertebrate eye, and have been successful in mapping out its evolution via several functional, intermediate stages (see for the details of this interesting research). With this evidence in hand, modern science has been able to debunk the notion that the eye is irreducibly complex.

Of course, proponents of intelligent design have pointed to other biological phenomena, too, as cases of irreducible complexity. Michael Behe, for instance, insisted that the blood clotting pathway, and the system of proteins that power the bacterial flagellum, are both irreducibly complex. However, plausible evolutionary pathways for the evolution of both of these have been proposed. And given the success of modern biology in resolving similar questions, I see no reason to doubt that definite answers about the evolution of these two phenomena will soon be found.

As the argument over the irreducible complexity of the eye demonstrates, creationists have tended to prey upon gaps in the knowledge of current biology. They insist that whenever our current biological understanding is unable to completely explain a phenomenon, it is evidence that God must have done it. The trouble with this sort of argument is also the resounding strength of scientific progress: it never stands still. Biologists are continually explaining more and more about the natural world in natural terms; the gaps in our knowledge are constantly closing.

For reasons such as this, the creationist arguments of irreducible complexity and of the inability of evolution to produce order have been rejected by the scientific community at large – and rightfully so. These arguments do not shed any real doubt on the ability of evolution to explain the ordered complexity of living things, and they do not breathe any new life into the teleological argument. Evolution has succeeded, while the teleological argument has failed.

Evolution as the Designer

Bearing these facts in mind, I believe that recognizing evolution as the designing force behind life is valuable, first and foremost, because the truth is important. The very point of scientific investigation is to gain a better understanding of the phenomena we observe around us. We are only doing this properly if our attempts lead us to form accurate beliefs about the natural world. The fact that both evidence and logic point to evolution as an incontrovertible explanation for the ordered complexity of life ought to therefore be enough for it to garner our acceptance.

This aside, I believe that accepting evolution is important because it informs us about the nature of living things. As Jean-Paul Sartre illustrated with his paper-knife analogy, the purpose of an object is derived from the intention of its creator. When a paper-knife was created by a human designer, it was intended to be used for opening letters. Consequently, such is the purpose of this item. But as reason and biological evidence instructs us, this analogy does not apply to living things. The order and complexity that we see in life is the not the product of deliberate design, but is instead the result of evolution, a natural process that operates without intention. As a result, we cannot derive any purpose from the mindless natural forces that are responsible for our “design”.

This is not a scientific principle, mind you, but I think it is a valuable philosophical lesson. By supplanting the teleological argument, evolutionary theory refutes the notion of telos. It reveals to us the absence of a pre-determined end or cosmological goal for living things. And thus, I believe evolution instructs us that purpose and direction in life is our own to make.

References and Further Reading

(2011, April 5). Evolution IS a Blind Watchmaker [Video file]. Retrieved from

Behe, Michael. Darwin’s Black Box. New York: The Free Press, 1996.

Bergman, Jerry. 2005 “Are ‘defective’ knee joints evidence for Darwinism?” Papers 19 (1): 107-112.

Dawkins, Richard. “Creationism: God’s Gift to the Ignorant.” The Times May 2005.

Dawkins, Richard. “Introduction: the Illusion of Design.” Natural History Nov. 2005.

Dawkins, Richard. The Blind Watchmaker. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1986.

Dawkins, Richard. The God Delusion. Toronto: Bantam Books, 2006.

Dawkins, Richard. The Greatest Show on Earth. Toronto: Free Press, 2009.

“Evolution of the Eye.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia, 28 03 2011. Web. Retrieved 4 April 2011, from

Fernald, Russell. 1997. “The evolution of eyes”. Brain and Behavioural Evolution 50 (4): 253–59.

Hume, David. “Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.” Online Reader. Project Gutenberg, 20 Jun. 2009. Web. Retrieved 29 Mar 2011, from

“Irreducible Complexity.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia, 29 03 2011. Web. Retrieved 26 Mar 2011, from

“Intelligent Design.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia, 29 03 2011. Web. Retrieved 28 Mar 2011, from

Lloyd, Geoffrey. Early Greek Science: Thales to Aristotle. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1970.

Lloyd, Geoffrey. Greek Science After Aristotle. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1973.

Sarfati, Jonathan. “Irreducible Complexity.” Refuting Evolution 2000. Web. Retrieved April 5 2011, from

Sartre, Jean-Paul. “Existentialism Is a Humanism.” Existentialism from Dostoyevsky to Sartre 1989. Web. Retrieved 7 Apr 2011 from

“Summa Theologica.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia, 29 03 2011. Web. Retrieved 3 April 2011, from

“Teleological Argument.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia, 28 03 2011. Web. Retrieved Mar 30 2011, from

“Watchmaker Analogy.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia, 08 03 2011. Web. Retrieved Mar 29, 2011, from

September 4, 2011 5 comments

Evolution as an Alternative to Design

August 25, 2011 1 comment

The Formalized Teleological Argument

Refutations of the Argument

The design debate: why evolution succeeds where the teleological argument fails – Part 1

August 22, 2011 Leave a comment

(References to be included with the final part of this essay)

Numerous efforts have been made over the course of history to prove the existence of a supernatural creator. The most enduring of these attempts has also been the most formidable: it is the argument from design. Also known as the teleological argument, this line of reasoning holds that the order and purpose of the natural world indicates that it was designed, and that this design necessitates the existence of a designer. The purpose of my essay is to assert that this argument, in all of its historical forms, fails. My goal is to use a combination of both reason and biological evidence to explain why the argument from design is flawed, and to assert that evolution provides a superior explanation for the apparent design of living things. In addition, I will argue that recognizing evolution as the shaping force behind life is not only factually correct, but is essential to accurately understanding life as a phenomenon.

But before I begin, I should clarify the scope of my discussion. Many forms of the argument from design have appeared over the course of the past two-and-a-half millennia, and thus I cannot hope to touch on all, or even most, of them. In this essay, I endeavour to dissect and refute some of the most famous and prototypical examples of the argument from design, in order to demonstrate why teleology in general is an ineffective proof of the existence of a creator. As teleological arguments all share a common line of reasoning, they therefore succeed or fail for similar reasons, and my criticisms can carry over to those particular variants of the argument that I do not have room to discuss here. I should also point out that alternative forms of the teleological argument have been made in both chemistry and physics. My counter-arguments make use of biological evidence, and thus my criticisms are not intended to address the argument from design as applied to these other scientific fields. Rather, my discussion of the teleological argument from this point forward is aimed specifically at how it concerns living things.

Ancient Science and Teleology

I begin my analysis of the argument from design with an examination of its origins. The first formalized versions of the teleological argument come from the scholastic period in the early second millennium, but seeds of the idea can be traced back to Ancient Greece. As with so many other intellectual endeavours, the Greeks pioneered inquiry into causation. They were concerned with understanding telos, a Greek word that can be defined as “the end of a goal-oriented process”, or more succinctly as “purpose”. And it is from their discussions on the causes of natural phenomena that we get the root of the term teleology.

The Greek preoccupation with understanding telos was especially prevalent in their biology, as is evidenced most clearly by the writings of Aristotle in the fourth century BC. In his work “On the Generation of Animals,” Aristotle proposed that living things had four causes. The material cause referred to the substance and physical matter comprising an organism. The formal cause was its shape and form, what biologists today would refer to as morphology. The efficient cause, a subject akin to modern developmental biology, concerned the proximate force responsible for this form. Lastly, and to Aristotle most importantly, the final cause was the purpose behind a living thing – its telos.

Aristotle’s treatment of his four causes illustrates an important fact: he and his contemporaries perceived life as being goal-oriented. It was a conclusion that he drew from relatively simple observations of the natural world. All around himself, Aristotle noticed that living things appeared to have purpose and direction. Plants, for instance, constantly grew taller and wider in pursuit of sunlight. Animals, on the other hand, routinely sought out food and mates in predictable ways. From observations such as these, Aristotle concluded that living things had direction; they acted with purpose, and towards specific ends. What’s more, Aristotle recognized that organisms each possessed traits that made them remarkably well suited for these endeavours. Plants possessed thin, broad leaves that enabled them to more efficiently capture light. Similarly, predators were equipped with sharp fangs and vicious claws, helping them to more readily catch their prey. Noticing this, Aristotle believed that there was order to the natural world, because living things and their characteristics were not random or haphazard in nature. Rather, the natural world appeared to have purpose and direction, a notion encapsulated by the Greek term telos, and one that Aristotle was among the first note.

Telos was also a phenomenon that Aristotle felt compelled to explain. But of course, he had to do so without the tools and understanding afforded by modern biological science. Arguably the father of scientific biology, Aristotle did his work in a near void of previous knowledge about the origins or workings of living things. As a result, Aristotle was ill-equipped to explain the direction and order of the natural world in natural terms. Instead, he had to invent supernatural forces in order to do so.

Thus, Aristotle posited the existence of a Prime Mover. In his work “Metaphysics,” he described this as “self-thinking thought,” a sort of God-like force that was responsible for the change and motion that occurred in the cosmos. Aristotle was not a creationist in any literal sense – he did not believe that the universe or anything in it was the product of deliberate design. But rather, he believed that his supernatural Prime Mover was responsible for providing the direction and order that was inherent in living things.

Aristotle’s belief that a rational force was behind the cosmos was later built upon by Cicero, a Roman writer and philosopher who lived in the first century BC. Inheriting many of his ideas from the Greeks, Cicero added his famous timepiece analogy to the discussion of telos. He compared life to a sundial or a water-clock in his work “On the Nature of the Gods,” and argued that living things, just like a timepiece, appear to have a purpose and an intelligence behind them. As with Aristotle, Cicero was not a strict creationist; he did not think that an intelligent God had deliberately designed the universe. Rather, Cicero believed that his analogy demonstrated something subtler: that just like a timepiece, life was too orderly and rational to be the product of a chaotic universe. Instead, he concluded that the cosmos was guided by divine reason, and that some sort of pervasive intelligence provided its direction and order.

As these two cases indicate, pre-cursive versions of the argument from design were present in the thoughts and writings of ancient thinkers. These examples also illustrate an important point about the origin of these ideas. In the ancient world, the absence of an effective biological account for the telos of living things required the invention of supernatural, intelligent forces as an alternative explanation.


Conditionality meta-analysis data

    R data
 Source: .Rmd/.md

The paper

One paper from my graduate work asked most generally ~ “How much does the variation in magnitudes and signs of species interaction outcomes vary?”. More specifically, we wanted to know if variation differed among species interaction classes (mutualism, competition, predation), and among various “gradients” (space, time, etc.). To answer this question, we used a meta-analysis approach (rather than e.g., a field experiment). We published the paper recently.

p.s. I really really wish we would have put it in an open access journal…

The data

Anyway, I’m here to talk about the data. We didn’t get the data up with the paper, but it is up on Figshare now. The files there are the following:

Please do play with the data, publish some papers, etc, etc. It took 6 of us about 4 years to collect this data; we skimmed through ~11,000 papers on the first pass (aka. skimming through abstracts in Google Scholar and Web of Science), then decided on nearly 500 papers to get data from, and narrowed down to 247 papers for the publication mentioned above. Now, there was no funding for this, so it was sort of done in between other projects, but still, it was simply A LOT of tables to digitize, and graphs to extract data points from. Anyway, hopefully you will find this data useful :p

I think this dataset would be a great introduction to the potential power of EML (Ecological Metadata Langauge). At rOpenSci, one of our team Carl Boettiger, along with Claas-Thido Pfaff, Duncan Temple Lang, Karthik Ram, and Matt Jones, have created an R client for EML, to parse EML files and to create and publish them.

What is EML?/Why EML?

A demonstration is in order…

Example using EML with this dataset

Install EML

install.packages("RHTMLForms", repos = "", type="source")
install_github("ropensci/EML", build=FALSE, dependencies=c("DEPENDS", "IMPORTS"))

Load EML

Prepare metadata

# dataset
prelim_dat <- read.csv("conditionality_data_prelim.csv")
# variable descriptions for each column
prelim_vars <- read.csv("variables_prelim.csv", stringsAsFactors = FALSE)

Get column definitions in a vector

col_defs <- prelim_vars$description

Create unit definitions for each column

unit_defs <- list(
  c(unit = "number",
    bounds = c(0, Inf)),
  c(unit = "number",
    bounds = c(0, Inf)),
  "independent replicates",
  c(unit = "number",
    bounds = c(0, Inf)),

  ... <CUTOFF>

Write an EML file

          unit.defs = unit_defs,
          col.defs = col_defs,
          creator = "Scott Chamberlain",
          contact = "",
          file = "conditionality_data_prelim_eml.xml")
## [1] "conditionality_data_prelim_eml.xml"

Validate the EML file

## EML specific tests XML specific tests
##               TRUE               TRUE

Read data and metadata

gg <- eml_read("conditionality_data_prelim_eml.xml")
eml_get(gg, "contact")
## [1] ""
eml_get(gg, "citation_info")
## Chamberlain S (2014-10-06). _metadata_.
dat <- eml_get(gg, "data.frame")
##   order i indrep avg author_last  finit_1 finit_2 finit_abv co_author
## 1     1 1      a   1      Devall margaret       s        ms     Thein
## 2     2 1      a   2      Devall margaret       s        ms     Thein
## 3     3 1      a   3      Devall margaret       s        ms     Thein
## 4     4 1      a   4      Devall margaret       s        ms     Thein
## 5     5 1      a   5      Devall margaret       s        ms     Thein
## 6     6 1      a   6      Devall margaret       s        ms     Thein
##   sinit_1
## 1 leonard
## 2 leonard
## 3 leonard
## 4 leonard
## 5 leonard
## 6 leonard

We can also use the EML package to publish the data, here to Figshare.

First, install rfigshare

Then publish using eml_publish()

figid <- eml_publish(
            file = "conditionality_data_prelim_eml.xml",
            description = "EML file for Chamberlain, S.A., J.A. Rudgers, and J.L. Bronstein. 2014. How context-dependent are species interactions. Ecology Letters",
            categories = "Ecology",
            tags = "EML",
            destination = "figshare",
            visibility = "public",
            title = "condionality data, EML")

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Are You a Legal Professional?

Straight Voting

straight voting n

: a system of voting for corporate directors in which each shareholder may cast one vote for each share of stock owned for each seat in contention compare cumulative voting


ToC P 1 2 3 4 M

Art of Cueing: Preliminaries

From a cue receiver's viewpoint, Cued Speech is a lip- or speechreading supplement. Handshapes and hand placements provide extra information about the consonants and vowels being uttered so that a spoken message can be understood completely, even though it is not heard.

Cued Speech is a phonemic system; it is based on the sounds that make up words in a given language. English uses about forty phonemes, but other languages may use more or less (Cue systems have been worked out for 52 languages). Phonemes are categorized into two broad categories, consonants and vowels. Consonant are cued with handshapes and vowels with hand placements. Eight handshapes and four placements are sufficient to represent the twenty-five consonants and fifteen vowels that occur in English because cues are used in conjunction with speechreading; cues need only distinguish between phonemes that look the same on the lips. An entire utterance is cued by mentally dividing it into consonant-vowel pairs and then forming the consonant's handshape while moving the hand to the vowel's placement for each pair. All cues occur while speaking (or at least mouthing).  The net result is that a cue reader sees a unique visual pattern -- a combination of handshape, placement and mouth shape -- for each sound component in the utterance.

The Eight Handshapes
1 Index finger extended
2 Index and middle fingers extended
3 Middle, ring and pinkie fingers extended
4 All fingers extended, thumb down
5 All fingers extended, thumb up
6 Index finger extended, thumb up
7 Index and middle fingers extended, thumb up
8 Index and middle fingers spread
The Four Placements
Mouth corner
Chin tip
Throat at bottom of adam's apple
Side, four inches to side of chin tip

Learning to Cue

Cueing is relatively easy to learn; it requires about twenty hours to memorize the system at which point anything that can be spoken can be cued, albeit slowly. It is best to learn from a certified instructor in a face-to-face setting. Classes are offered at cue camps, workshops, and in Cued Speech centers at a variety of places and times throughout the year.  It is much easier to follow a demonstration than read a wordy explanation.  Additionally, misunderstandings can be nipped in the bud before they become bad habits difficult to correct later.

Learning to cue is like learning to take shorthand or to type. After the basic system is learned, regular practice is required to develop speed and fluency. You must, over time, develop the ability to automatically translate your internal representations for words as sounds into manual patterns. Surprisingly, the hardest part will be identifying the sounds you actually produce when you speak.  We're more accustomed to dividing words into letters for spelling than into phonemes and this often leads us astray. Consider the classic reporter's questions: who? what? when? where? and why?  Although they all begin with WH, who does not begin with the same sound as the others; it begins with the same sound as how. When we cue these words, therefore, who and how begin with the same handshape cue while what, when, where and why will begin with another handshape.

Proficiency, the second stage after learning the basic system, generally takes a few months depending on how often you cue. At this stage, the cues come automatically for simple and commonly used words and phrases. You'll be able to cue at perhaps half your normal speaking rate. Talking slowly is frustrating, but there is a silver lining: your deaf or hard of hearing partner will find you easier to understand.

Fluency is the ultimate stage. Your hands will generate cues as you speak as quickly as you like and with no conscious effort. Of course this requires constant practice and improvements are possible over a lifetime.

On Pronunciation

In this document, pronunciations will generally be described by phoneme sequences enclosed in slashes. Each phoneme is described by one or two letters.  Our codes for the vowel phonemes in American English Cued Speech:
/a/ as in at /ah/ as in mom /aw/ as in tall /ay/ as in say /e/ as in Ted
/ee/ as in tree /i/ as in it /ie/ as in aisle /oe/ as in toe /oi/ as in toy
/oo/ as in look /ou/ as out /ue/ as in blue /uh/ as in but /ur/ as in herd
Our codes for the consonants:
/b/ as in bat /ch/ as in chop /d/ as in dog /f/ as in fate /g/ as in guest
/h/ as in heat /j/ as in Jill /k/ as in kite /l/ as in loose /m/ as in moist
/n/ as in nook /ng/ as in sang /p/ as in pout /r/ as in red /s/ as in such
/sh/ as in sure /t/ as in tap /th/ as in thin /TH/ as in they /v/ as in vet
/w/ as in wet /wh/ as in whip /y/ as in you /z/ as in zoo /zh/ as in beige
A few may be unfamiliar: The phonemic transcriptions in this document are descriptive, not prescriptive.  They describe how the authors say these words, not how you should pronounce them.  You should always cue what you say.  It is vital that your cues match what your mouth is doing since only the cues and lips together add up to a complete message.  Think how distracting and irritating dubbed movies are: peoples' lips do one thing while the soundtrack does another.  For a cue reader, mismatched lips and cues are at best distracting and at worst turn your message into gibberish.

Cueing what you say is not always easy because your pronunciation varies depending on many factors: where you grew up, how your parents spoke, how much TV you watch, who your friends are, etc. In addition, everyone alters their speech when talking to friends, a boss, a child, etc., when speaking quickly, when angry, sad or excited, or to emphasize a word or phrase. For example, when speaking deliberately between might be pronounced /b ee t w ee n/, but in a conversation it would more likely be pronounced /b i t w een/ or /b uh t w ee n/.  Our brains normally filter out these variations in pronunciations; just the word between is perceived. In cueing, however, the cues must always match the lips so you need to become aware of the actual sounds you produce.

You can practice hearing the variations in speech sounds by listening to other people.  You will soon discover that no two people pronounce everything the same way.  Dialects or regional accents are systematic variations in pronunciations shared by groups of people.  Vowels differ the most. For example, hot might be pronounced /h ah t/ or /h aw t/. The /r/ phoneme is also highly variable. It appears at the ends of some words in parts of New Hampshire, /b uh n a n er/ for banana, disappears at the ends of words in parts of Massachusetts, /c ah/ for car, and, for some Midwesterners, appears again in the middle of words such as /w oe r sh/ for wash. Even the number of syllables in a word can change. You might say /h ee uh/ or /h i r/ for here.  There is no right, correct or best dialect. How drab the world would be without Mel Gibson's Australian twang, Sean Connery's Scottish lilt, the Southern drawl, or even Valley-girl speak. Cue your dialect!

People often ask, if everyone cues words differently, won't cue receivers be confused? Not any more than a hearing person would be by an accent, which is to say hardly at all. This is one of the strengths of cueing; the receiver gets access to the complete phonological content of speech. They can understand, appreciate and adapt to different dialects just as a hearing person can.

ToC P 1 2 3 4 M

© 1998-2001 J. Frisbie


Tuesday, January 3, 2017

Book Review: "Trekonomics" by Manu Saadia

Manu Saadia first encountered Star Trek as a child in Paris.  The utopia it presented caught his imagination then and helped shape his thinking about how the world can be good.  In college he studied economic history and as an adult he sought an accounting of how economics works in Star Trek.  When he didn't find such a book he decided to write one himself.

Manu Saadia divides Star Trek into two sections.  The first part includes the original series and the movies up to Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.  This first part assumes an economic model more like our current experience.  In Star Trek IV that changes when Kirk says the Federation doesn't have money.  The book mostly focuses on the second section because getting rid of money is a much more interesting economic situation.

The book then covers several different parts of the economy.  Chapter one explores getting rid of money.  Chapter two goes into how work works in Star Trek.  Chapter three discusses the replicator and through it how capital works.  Chapter four considers natural limits.  Chapter five gets into the problems of free riding and negative externalities.  Chapter six steps back from Star Trek and gets into the roots of Star Trek in earlier science fiction.  Chapter seven returns to thinking about work and extends that into the way people in the Federation think about everything.  Chapter eight uses the Ferengi to consider how the Federation's economy interacts with capitalism elsewhere in the galaxy.  Chapter nine asks whether we can move towards Star Trek's economic system in the real world.  The book then concludes with a reflection on the meaning of "Live Long and Prosper".

This is an interesting book.  It is one of the best books exploring the problems and concerns of post scarcity.  It also points out the ways we're already approaching post scarcity in several fields.

Monday, December 19, 2016

Book Review: "Every Heart a Doorway" by Seanan McGuire

Nancy is a teen that found a door in her cellar that lead to the Halls of the Dead.  She was there until the Lord of the Dead told her she had to return to the world of the living until she was sure.  Her parents were quite upset that she wasn't the girl they remembered so they sent her to Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Children in the hope they could get her back.  What they didn't know is that Eleanor West's Home is a boarding school for the children who wandered into portal worlds and want to go back to those worlds.

This is an interesting little story set in an intriguing world.  The plot is the weakest part of the story, basically a series of murders that drive the character interactions.  The characters, on the other hand, are interesting and complicated.  Each one reflects the world they travelled to.  The interactions between the characters are enjoyable.  The universe is also quite complicated with each portal world classified on several dimensions.  The main two are Nonsense/Logic and Virtue/Wicked.  As mentioned all of the students want to return to their world, which adds an interesting tension to the conversations since they all know how unlikely it is they can return.

Overall I do recommend reading it.  Just bear in mind that it isn't your usual fantasy novel.

Sunday, December 18, 2016

Book Review: "The Angel's Command" by Brian Jacques

This is a story about a boy, Ben, and his dog, Ned.  They were saved from the Flying Dutchman by the angel who cursed that ship to sail forever.  In the process Ben and Ned were enchanted so they don't age and can communicate telepathically.  They are required to travel the world helping the people they meet.

This novel is split into two books.  The first book, La Petite Marie, tells how Ben and Ned take ship with a pirate crew in Brazil following the angel's instructions.  They go through a number of trials as the pirate captain guides his ship to France where he intends to retire.  The second book, The Razan, picks up at the end of the first.  It takes Ben and Ned along the French Pyrenees joining a teenage thief girl and a young male portraitist with the magic power that his portraits always show people as they really are.  The trio is promptly recruited by an old comte to attempt the rescue of his nephew from a band of particularly evil brigands.

The novel shows most of the good features that can be found in the Redwall stories.  The characters and settings are vivid.  The bad guys are clearly evil and deserve their misfortune.  The good guys are clearly good, though they are sometimes playfully tricky.  The main things this story doesn't have that the Redwall series has are riddles and character driven plots.

Overall this novel isn't as good as any of the stories set in Redwall that I've read.  Still it is a decent, straightforward story and might be good to read with a kid.

Friday, December 9, 2016

News 12/9/2016

Well, I'm in the Honolulu airport again. I'll be visiting with Mom, Paupau, and Mary for the weekend.

I know it has been a while since I last posted. The weeks have a tendency to blend into each other. The weather is the usual. Occasionally it gets cold enough at night that I'll get out a heavy blanket. Sometimes it also gets silly hot for the islands. In the upper 80s usually with no trades so it is humid, too. Recently the temps have been great and I've seen rain every night and often during the day. I've even seen a couple of days that were completely overcast.

Over the summer I know folks saw reports of the time we had two hurricanes pass by the islands in one week. They caused trouble on the Big Island, but both were far enough away that they only made Honolulu hot and humid. We had a storm earlier in the year, Tropical Storm Darcy Darby, that caused the first thunderstorm I've noticed in the islands. Then it headed out to sea and turned into a tropical depression.

Work continues to go well. The projects are interesting though the requirements and design processes take longer than I'd like. We've just finished a larger project that had all five of the C# developers on it. It was mostly a SQL/SSIS project but it did include some interesting automated integration testing. Now we're working on housekeeping, bug fixes, and small enhancements.

I'm working on bug fixes for one of our earlier projects. One great thing is that I've been able to go through and refactor the code. Bringing it closer to current standards, applying some good practices highlighted by Microsoft's static code analysis, and making it easier to understand what the code is doing.

The plan for Christmas is that I'm flying back to Chicago. I'll get in the Friday before and spend Christmas weekend in Indy. Then I'll be back in Chicago until I fly out that Thursday.

Friday, April 29, 2016

I'm at the airport again. I'm on my way to Kona for the weekend. Mom has the timeshare and Aunt Judy is with her so I'm flying over to visit.

Work has been going well. We finally got the design signed off, which is good since we're only a week and a half from finishing the development work. It looks like we'll finish on schedule.

Outside of work things have mostly been quiet. Last weekend Mom, Paupau, and Mary flew in. I took Friday off and we went up to the Pali Lookout and Kaneohe. It's an area Mom hadn't explored, so we had a good time. We spent the rest of the weekend at the Hilton there in Waikiki.

I tried a standup paddleboard on Sunday. I fell into the lagoon a couple of times and never did get properly standing. Still I had fun and will try it again sometime. Perhaps when I'm able to get a lesson or at least some pointers. That hour also reminded me how much I enjoyed kayaking last time I had the chance.

I'm still getting out about every other weekend. On the downside I'm way behind my goal for the month, so I'm not going to make it to 10k words.

Saturday, April 9, 2016

It has been about three weeks since I wrote my last news post.  Life has mostly been fairly quiet for me.

At work the application we deployed is working well and the performance is acceptable to the users, though I would like it to be faster.  They like the app well enough that the next project adds a feature to it.  We've got six weeks to do all of the development and unit test the new feature.  Then it will go into system test for two weeks.

Camp NaNo is running this month.  I saw a set of prompts shortly before the first and decided I'd like to write a bunch of short pieces using them.  I'll call it a success if I can write 10k words, but I'd like to finish all 100 prompts.  Doing that will take a little more than 25k words.  The writer's group I connected with in November isn't running write in's this month, which I know will make it a more challenging month than last November.  I'm a couple hundred words behind for the 10k at the moment and I'll try to catch up tonight and tomorrow.

I've been getting out every other weekend.  The writer's group usually gets together at a cafe on second Saturdays.  This Saturday was a miss, but I went and did some writing.  When I left the cafe I passed a used book and games store.  The book section wasn't well organized, but I found several good books at a really good value.  After lunch I heard the sound of bagpipes coming from the park.

It turns out the 35th Annual Hawaiian Scottish Festival and Highland Games is today and tomorrow.  I saw a hammer throw and a caber toss.  The caber toss is the event where they toss a log end over end.  It turns out the log only needs to go end over end once and then the toss is scored based on how straight the log is after it lands compared to the direction it was tossed.

News - delayed post from ~3/14

I'm about to go do laundry and put together a news post.  Then I discovered that I hadn't posted this news when I put it together about three weeks ago.  I'm off to watch the laundry and I intend to publish whatever I write while waiting later this evening.

Since I last wrote I’ve mostly been doing well.  There was a weekend when I caught a nasty cold.  I came down with it on a Friday.  The same Friday the project we were working on was scheduled to go live.  Between my going home sick at lunch and some unexpected security questions that afternoon it was a rough rollout.  Since then the app is getting positive reviews from the users and we haven’t had any bug reports.  We have seen a question about an enhancement and one action is just slow enough that we might be asked to look into optimizing it.  This would be a little tricky since we already know that a major contributor are 3rd party webservices.

The weather here in Honolulu is as pleasant as ever.  We have had two cold fronts come through.  The firsts was a month or two ago.  It pushed the temperature down into the mid 60s for most of a week.  Then last week the second pushed the temperature down into the low 70s.  It is slowly returning to the normal low to mid 80s.

A couple of weeks ago I commented on Facebook that the Eddie was on.  This is a surf contest that is only held when the waves in Waimea Bay come in clean and consistently 40ft tall or more.  I heard that the tallest wave was something like 55ft tall.  For those that have seen Ecolab’s Naperville building, imagine a wave about as tall as the building with lifeguards on jet skis coming in ahead of it telling everyone to move away from the beach and the stream.  It is a competition that hasn’t been held since 2009, so a bunch of people took the day off from work to go up to the North Shore to see it.  It is probably just as well.  The city had lane closures on the North Shore on account of the surf coming over the highway.

That reminds me, one thing I hadn’t noticed before moving to Hawaii is that Honolulu has a consolidated city/county government like Indianapolis.  The entire island of Oahu is Honolulu but, like Indy, the neighborhoods all have their own names.  I live in Makiki.  The office is in Ala Moana.  Manoa is just over the ridge from where I live.  Downtown and Chinatown are both west of me.  Ala Moana and at least the part of Makiki I live in are both part of the old Korea moku, think Korea town.  Each of the neighborhoods has its own personality.  The neighborhoods don’t necessarily have their own unique climates, but it varies considerably in a short distance.

In the year I’ve lived here it seems that Makiki doesn’t get much in the way of rain.  There have been a handful of times I’ve wanted an umbrella and only once have I wanted a car on account of the weather.  Manoa is only a mile or two from where I live and I’ve noticed that Manoa gets rain much more regularly.  When Makiki gets rain Ala Moana generally seems to get at least some of the rain, though it is often lighter.  The other nice thing about the weather is that unless the wind is from the south it is basically always sunny even when it rains and the rain seldom lasts long.  The sun and rain mix means I’ve seen dozens of rainbows.  Twice, I even saw rainbows that looked like they came down to the ground near me.  Once the end of the rainbow was just up the street at a corner.  The other time it came down in the local park where people often walk their dogs.

For the New Year’s resolutions, writing daily isn’t happening and writing weekly has been a struggle.  The key challenge is taking the computer where I will want to write rather than leave it on the desk where I play video games.  Getting out on the weekends has gone better.  Last weekend I joined a writer’s group that meets monthly to socialize.


RL.3: Key Ideas and Details

11th-12th GradesRL.11-12.3 Analyze the impact of the author’s choices regarding how to develop and relate elements of a story or drama (e.g., where a story is set, how the action is ordered, how the characters are introduced and developed).
9th-10th GradesRL.9-10.3 Analyze how complex characters (e.g., those with multiple or conflicting motivations) develop over the course of a text, interact with other characters, and advance the plot or develop the theme.
8th GradeRL.8.3 Analyze how particular lines of dialogue or incidents in a story or drama propel the action, reveal aspects of a character, or provoke a decision.
7th GradeRL.7.3 Analyze how particular elements of a story or drama interact (e.g., how setting shapes the characters or plot).
5th GradeRL.5.3 Compare and contrast two or more characters, settings, or events in a story or drama, drawing on specific details in the text (e.g., how characters interact).
4th GradeRL.4.3 Describe in depth a character, setting, or event in a story or drama, drawing on specific details in the text (e.g., a character’s thoughts, words, or actions).
2nd GradeRL.2.3 Describe how characters in a story respond to major events and challenges.
1st GradeRL.1.3 Describe characters, settings, and major events in a story, using key details.
KindergartenRL.K.3 With prompting and support, identify characters, settings, and major events in a story.

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Author: Daphne Groothuijse

Category: Cooking

Regular price: $6.99

Deal price: $0.99

Deal starts: January 10, 2016

Deal ends: December 16, 2015

Book description
This book will make you a real superfood smoothie specialist. You will learn the benefits of popular superfoods and of fruits and herbs. Focus is given to baby smoothies, kids, teens, pregnant women and the elderly. We show you how to create great tasting smoothies, which detoxify your body and make you lose a lot of weight. You do not want to miss the chapter about green smoothies, as they are fantastically healthy. With the basic recipes of nuts, hemp and sesame milk, you will learn to make your own healthy and creamy, base milks. The 114 delicious recipes in this book are 100% raw, vegan and gluten free.In the blink of an eye you will be able to make the freshest, tastiest and healthiest super food smoothies. Flavours that complement each other have been chosen, from real and extensive testing & tasting. You will learn what the benefits of various superfoods are to you and how you can enjoy them in everyday life. You will be surprised by all the delicious tasting superfood smoothies that are ready to be made by you, so that you will feel more alive and thrive. Soon, you will find that your energy level goes up and you will experience other great benefits of smoothies, like more clarity to your mind and just generally feeling better!

This book will give you a simple answer to the question: How do I use superfoods in my daily diet? Superfoods are often sold in the shape of (freeze-dried) powders. As you can imagine perhaps, eating powders alone is not an easy thing to do. A tasty smoothie is what you put your superfood (powders) into and is therefore, one of the fastest and easiest ways to get the good nutrients into your body, to quickly address any shortages. The only tools you need for making these great tasting and nutritious smoothies are a blender, a knife and a cutting board. Of course, you will need the ingredients but also your creativity: Make sure you have the necessary ingredients in your fridge and cupboards ready; fruits, superfoods, sweeteners, herbs and/or green vegetables, melons the list is almost endless.

Why Superfood Smoothies?
- One smoothie is loaded with nutrition that your body needs.
- Nutrition in smoothies is easily absorbed.
- You will enjoy more radiant skin and shinier hair.
- A fast food that is healthy.
- Cleanse your body with green smoothies.
- When used regularly, your energy levels will rise and your weight will reduce, quickly and safely.

In the back of the book, the first appendix is a glossary. In part 3 consecutively superfoods, herbs and fruits, including their health effects have been described. Furthermore you will find many practical tips in this book, such as ‘How to open a fresh coconut?’ or ‘What goes first or last in the blender?’ and many more. In the handy Recipe Index, you will find the recipes listed alphabetically (mentioned by name), the main ingredients and the superfoods with the corresponding page number.

What are superfoods?
Superfood is a generic name for a high-quality food with extra high levels of nutrients, antioxidants and/or phytonutrients. In addition to the enormously high nutritional values, superfoods have many other features that are good for our health. Most superfoods that are offered in the store are organic, raw, and they are often harvested in areas where the soil is not exhausted. Raw foodies (people who eat only unprocessed and unheated food) have been eating superfoods for years due to this reason. There are different types of superfoods, such as algae, mushrooms, wild herbs, fruit, seeds, foods with some good fatty acids, germs and grasses. Superfoods are not always exotics. Ordinary foods like broccoli, ginger, garlic and turmeric, are also classified as superfoods.


Quetzaltenango, also commonly known by its indigenous name, Xelajú [ʃelaˈχu], or more commonly, Xela [ˈʃela], is the second largest city of Guatemala.[1] It is both the capital of Quetzaltenango Department and the municipal seat of Quetzaltenango municipality.

It has an estimated population of 224,703. The population is about 61% indigenous or Amerindian, 34% Mestizo or ladino and 5% European. Quetzaltenango is located in a mountain valley at an elevation of 2,330 meters (7,640 feet) above sea level at its lowest part. It may reach above 2,400 meters within the city.

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Six ways to harness the value in data to quantifiably improve your business outcomes.

1 Expect the Unexpected

Few things in business are certain. The value of preemptively diagnosing and resolving an issue before costly failures occur is significant. Traditionally, developing and maintaining systems to help prepare for the unexpected have been cost-prohibitive except for the most mission critical or high-frequency business processes. No longer.

Anomaly detection (or outlier detection) identifies items in a dataset that do not fit with the others. Because they don’t require human input, these algorithms are a cost-effcient way to monitor for the unexpected. Simply add a dataset, and quickly identify the data that looks suspicious and warrants further investigation. And if you have or collect labels for known anomalies, the system can continuously adapt and improve.

Use nD to effciently identify issues in an ad hoc dataset or build a real-time monitoring center at scale. Improve algorithms to minimize false positives and create an accurate, effective detection system. With nD, you’ll be prepared for the unexpected.

2 Categorize Everything

Data is uniquely capable of telling a story about your business operations without predefined boundaries or assumptions. The recent wave of big, Internet of Things (IoT) and public data has created datasets unlike any you’ve seen before. The key is unlocking the value in time to act.

A category allows your domain experts to leverage smart data visualization to quickly slice and dice a dataset to gain insight, and ultimately to assign appropriate actions to a given situation. But what happens when there are no categories or the right categories have not been explicitly added? Clustering is the identification of inherently similar rows within a dataset, accelerating your journey to insight and action.

nD helps you quickly identify implicit categories and aggregate them into new explicit categories for discovery and decision-making. Use nD to uncover groups of transactions, events, people and things that can be leveraged to quantifiably improve your business outcomes.

3 Embrace Uncertainty

The right data allows your team to estimate the probability of future events and thereby improve business outcomes. Once they find an anomaly, they can determine the probable root causes, and given past categorizations they can determine whether new transactions, events, people and things belong to a category in real time.

Classification models use past data to estimate these probabilities. Operationalizing this knowledge must account for the predicted likelihood of the event, as well as any penalties associated with getting it wrong. Not everyone is comfortable making decisions based on what is likely, and not every decision can be made without certainty. But those who embrace the uncertainty, where they can, will gain a significant competitive advantage.

nD empowers your team to efficiently build classification models, apply them to new data and use the insights to get a leg up on the competition. Whether conducting a one-off diagnosis or building a real-time diagnostics center at scale, nD is right for the job.

4 Relate Actions to Outcomes

Hindsight is 20/20. In some cases, time sheds light on the relationships between factors and outcomes, and in others additional variables emerge that weren’t initially available. In either case, imagine if your business experts had the ability to explore the impact of their decisions before committing to them?

Modern nonlinear regression models are able to estimate downstream dependent variables based on upstream independent variable, through even the most complex business and physical processes. Arm your team to estimate business outcomes before and as they act.

The powerful, self-service nD web portal empowers your team members to build and deploy powerful regression models, and scale up to embed key models into your own real-time production applications.

5 Know Where You're Headed

What if you were able to predict the trajectory a dynamic process would take in the future, and plan your actions accordingly? Predicting outcomes – whether a few minutes, hours, days, weeks or months into the future – allows your team to make real-time decisions and sequence deliberate actions that will support your desired business results.

Predictive models use information from the past to understand dynamics in the system and forecast the future. Predicting the “when” of future values gives your team the opportunity to know exactly what path they are on and prepare, adjust and invest accordingly. Adding forecasts for markets, demand, costs and inventory makes operations and planning initiatives truly adaptive.

nD can withstand the volume, variety, velocity and veracity of big data. With nD, your team can create operational intelligence and adaptive planning applications, ensuring you’re always one step ahead.

6 Improve Continuously

Missteps, errors, anomalies. If your systems and operations are truly data-driven, these aren’t purely negative occurrences, but part of the cycle of improvement. Machine learning algorithms are adaptive in nature, continuously learning to improve accuracy. Results and options can be reevaluated in milliseconds, making machine learning a crucial and exceptionally effective tool to support decisions no matter how complex and high frequency the process.

Optimization systems leverage the full capabilities of anomaly detection, clustering, classification, estimation and prediction to robustly maximize your business objectives. You quantify your objectives, any operating constraints and the levers that can be manipulated; and the optimizer’s job is to determine a valid set of adjustments for your
current situation. You simply make the adjustments and repeat.

nD is the ultimate analytics platform to support a data-driven organization. nD offers an end-to-end environment to collaborate on visualization, analytic and machine learning applications; and build a rapid, iterative, and experiment-driven culture.


The Nutritionist World Blog

MMR, Chicken Pox and Hib Vaccinations

There are several different vaccinations that your child will be offered at different ages. Deciding on whether or not you will vaccinate your child is not a decision you should make in the doctor..Read More >>

Polio Vaccinations

Polio is a viral disease that can damage the central nervous system causing paralysis. The severity of this disease can range from mild to serious, depending on the muscles that are affected. Pri..Read More >>

Vaccinations: DTap or DTP

Vaccinations have become controversial. For the next couple of blogs we will be learning a little more about different vaccinations because whether you are in favor of or against vaccinations, you..Read More >>

Helpful and Harmful Additives

Most things you buy from the supermarket, besides produce, has additives. An additive is a substance that does not occur naturally in a food. Most additives found in food today are used as preserva..Read More >>

Good Nutrition for a Long and Healthy Life

While aging is an inevitable fact of life, how you age can be affected by several everyday things. If you want to get older and feel physically younger you need to help your body stay strong. The b..Read More >>

Lactation Consultants and Nutrition

There are several protein and non-protein nitrogen compounds that are found in mature breast milk that provide a growing infant with many of the important building blocks of life and good health. ..Read More >>

Dark Leafy Green Vegetables

More than one thousand plants have leaves we can eat but how many do we actually eat? If we have just five servings a day, we cut our risk of developing diabetes by 20 percent. Several studies ha..Read More >>

Nutrition and Fibromyalgia

Fibromyalgia is a common condition that is characterized by chronic pain and stiffness in various different muscles, tendons, and ligaments. This condition is also often associated with extreme fa..Read More >>

Celiac Disease

Celiac disease is a gluten-sensitive digestive disorder that is caused by intolerance to the protein, gliadin, which is found in gluten- a component of wheat that gives flour its smooth, elastic fo..Read More >>

Nutritional Eating for Two

When I was pregnant a great excuse I would use for my indulgence in extra servings of food was that I was “eating for two.” There were times when my hunger was more than usual and the ..Read More >>


West Seattle's premier music venue.

PUNDAMONIUM: The Seattle Pun Slam!

Pundamonium is a pun slam. That's a kind of contest. It's hosted by Erika Ellefson.

One by one, 10 contestants have two minutes each to make puns based on prompts they have received ahead of time. Each contestant is immediately judged by five audience judges. They rank each punner on a scale of 1 to 10.

Then they all do it again, only this time contestants get their prompts on stage and only have 30 second to think and another two minutes to make puns.

The top four contestants go head to head in a final pun-off.

Want to compete? Just show up! It's first come, first served.

Doors at 7:00, puns at 8:00!


HeavyTopspin.com | Twitter

tennisabstract.com beta

2016 Australian Open R128: Agnieszka Radwanska vs Christina Mchale

Agnieszka Radwanska d. Christina Mchale 6-2 6-3

Use the links below to see dozens of tables displaying detailed data on every aspect of this match. For further context, tour and player averages are visible for most cells when you move your cursor over them. These figures are based on other charted matches, including 809 WTA matches, 527 WTA matches on hard, 51 Agnieszka Radwanska matches (39 on hard), and 5 Christina Mchale matches (3 on hard). The more charted matches in the database, the more valuable this project becomes. Please try charting a match yourself.

| |
| |
Agnieszka Radwanska: | | | |
Christina Mchale: | | | |
This match was charted by jeffsackmann.
Find out how to chart matches yourself | Main Menu


New Season Saint Laurent In Stores

Paolo Giacomelli and Roberta Paolucci are the power duo behind the Italian jewelry brand,Iosselliani. Paolo began his career creating runway accessories for famous turn-of-the-century designers; Antonio Marras, Alessandro dell’Aqua, Kenzo, Missoni, Romeo Gigli, Fiorucci.

Iosselliani combine hand-carved crystals in uncommon arrangements to create their unique jewellery line. Uniting luxurious materials with traditional jewellery techniques, their designs possess an unconventional feel. The necklaces, earrings and bracelets here have been created using the most vibrant turquoise, piercing tigers eye, bright green jasper, rhinestones and Swarovski crystals.

For all enquiries, including orders and returns, customer care, press and media and general enquiries, please contact:

T: (61-8) 9481 8886


AIS - Best Practices & Skillset

The AIS solution methodologies and quick development cycles require a broad skillset. Within our current staff we use and subscribe to the following languages and methodologies.

Agile / Lean software development defines smart business and software development methodologies based on iterative and incremental development, where requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing, cross-functional teams.  Some of us at UVU call it Wagile because some of the old timers are still pushing Waterfall procedures in the software development world.  "SD Times" Management is key in Agile success...   A Sprinkle of Agile a dash of Lean ...

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used to describe the presentation semantics (the look and formatting) of a document written in a markup language.

Documentation is critical in our environment.  To ensure stability to the University and security for our clients, and as an operational standard we document within our code and maintain documentation on systems built, services offered,  involved resources and dependent systems.

Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all gratis open standards.

Foundation Systems High Performance Application Language (FSHPAL) Is a programming language / database system developed for high performance and high security. It is primarily used in pharmacy systems worldwide.

HTML is a standard for structuring and presenting content on the World Wide Web.

PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor is a widely used, general-purpose scripting language that was originally designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages

Scripting Languages... Winbatch, Powershell and JRB Utilities are scripting and automation tools we use frequently.

SQL, MySQL, MsSql, Oracle... are relational database management systems (RDBMS) that provide multi-user access to a number of databases. The SQL phrase stands for Structured Query Language.

S.W.O.T. Analysis - is a strategic planning method used to evaluate the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats involved in a project or in a business and has been adopted bu the UVU OIT areas as a tool for internal analysis and improvement. NOV 2010 SWOT


Sentence Examples with the word transparent substance

If the powder of a transparent substance is immersed in a liquid of the same refractive index, the mixture becomes transparent and a measurement of the refractive index of the liquid gives the refractivity of the powder.

The polarizing angle varies from one transparent substance to another, and Sir David Brewster in 1815 enunciated the law that the tangent of the polarizing angle is equal to the refractive index of the substance.


Car PartsBuick PartsBuick Drum Brake Wheel Cylinder

Buick Drum Brake Wheel Cylinder

As the name suggests, the Buick drum brake wheel cylinder is used on drum brakes that today can only be found on the rear of your car. There are two drum brake wheel cylinders on a Buick, one near each of the rear wheels on the brake backing plates mounted on the rear end. The drum brake wheel cylinder is the part that applies the pressure to the shoes of the braking system in the drums. It is similar to the brake calipers as compared to its function, but not in its appearance. The hydraulic fluid enters the drum brake wheel cylinder and pushes out against two pistons that are situated at opposing ends of the cylinders. There are also two rubber grommets or seals that help to trap the brake fluid in the brake system on the outside of the pistons in the cylinder. It is these seals that are the most common culprits to the drum brake wheel cylinders needing to be replaced. When brake fluid is noticed on or near the rear wheel of your Buick, this is generally the source. Today most of the Buick drum brake wheel cylinders are replaced with rebuilt parts by your technician. The rebuilt parts are reconditioned at an alternate shop and not performed at the time of the brake job on your vehicle. This is the most common practice so the time required to complete the brake job on your car is the smallest allotment possible. Time saving processes like this is why a brake job on your Buick and most other makes of cars can be completed in an hour or less. This way your car can be out of the shop and back with you at the wheel as quickly as possible so you can travel to your destination in a safe and effective manner.


Sitting - Travel - Office

Best underwear for long hours of sitting or sedentary activities except air travel (see separate category). When you must remain seated for long periods of time, it's useful to have supportive underwear, specially one that has been designed with ergonomic principles.

Please note, however, that they are not intended to prevent any of the possible negative consequences of sitting for a long period of time.

Confused with so many options? Check the "compare" boxes of up to 4 products on this page, and then click the compare button at the bottom to see a detailed comparison of features.


Robert J Teunisse

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BACKGROUND The aims were to determine the prevalence of the Charles Bonnet syndrome (CBS) in low-vision patients and analyse possible associated ophthalmic and sociodemographic factors. METHOD A semi-structured interview on visual hallucinations was given to 300 adult low-vision patients and 200 elderly general ophthalmic patients. Positive cases were(More)
BACKGROUND Charles Bonnet's Syndrome (CBS), characterised by the presence of complex visual hallucinations in psychologically normal people, was considered for a long time to be rare. Systematic research on CBS has been limited. However, it has been realised that CBS occurs frequently in elderly, visually handicapped patients, and we have been able to study(More)
The Charles Bonnet syndrome (CBS) is characterized by the presence of complex visual hallucinations in psychologically normal people. The syndrome occurs predominantly in the visually handicapped elderly. Little is known about its etiology and pathogenesis. The aim of this study was to examine the associations of CBS with psychological and social(More)
A group of 14 patients with isolated visual hallucinations who met the criteria proposed by Gold and Rabins for Charles Bonnet syndrome (with the exception of the criterion "hallucinations are stereotyped") underwent psychiatric, neurologic, and ophthalmologic tests. Additional common characteristics of the hallucinations included the absence of personal(More)
BACKGROUND Little is known about the effects of depression on the mortality rates of elderly subjects with dementia. METHODS Logistic regression analysis, adjusting for possible confounders, was used to study the associations between GMS-AGECAT derived syndrome and symptom measures and 12-month mortality rates in a cohort of 73 elderly subjects who met(More)
OBJECTIVE To assess the prevalence of musical hallucinations in patients referred for audiometric testing and to analyze associations with age, sex, degree of hearing loss, asymmetrical hearing loss, and tinnitus. METHODS Patients referred for audiometric testing underwent a semi-structured interview on tinnitus and musical hallucinations. RESULTS Out(More)
In two patients, women aged 85 and 80 years, who suffered from visual hallucinations involving living creatures, cars and buildings, Charles Bonnet syndrome was diagnosed. Both were worried that these signs were an indication of a severe psychiatric condition. In diagnosing the Charles Bonnet syndrome the following criteria can be used: presence of complex(More)


As companies look to maximize their visibility in a world that is increasingly mobile, many organizations are looking to develop mobile apps to grow their businesses going forward.

To find out if a traditional adapted app approach is really the best way forward, we reached out to Malcolm Ross, vice president of Product at business process management software company Appian for his insights.

Wireless Week: Why do you think so many organizations gravitate toward the “mobile app” strategy? Is it a misguided attempt to cash in on the growing role of smartphones in people’s lives?

Malcom Ross: Unfortunately for many, an organization's “mobile app” strategy is being driven from the bottom up. Demand from their employees, partners and customers are forcing organizations to create a more compelling mobile experience for both their internal and externally facing applications.

Organizations have seen the success mobile apps have had at the consumer level, and try to apply this approach to business. They see the speed and simplicity of their favorite Android or iPhone apps and what the same experience for business.

The issue business falls into with this approach is that these are not “agile apps.” Going mobile is not just porting a legacy application to a mobile device, but rather evolving applications continuously to be ready for the latest mobile devices of today and the unforeseen devices of the future. It is also rethinking your applications and business operations in a mobile centric world. For example, removing process steps that were only there for the benefit of a desktop application, and thinking how mobile changes how your employees, partners and customers interact.

WW: How does a more agile mobile app strategy improve odds for success long-term? What can companies do to jumpstart this?

Ross: Organizations typically approach app development one by one; building each app to address a specific business need and moving on to the next. This approach is flawed as each application must continue to evolve as mobile platforms change. The one by one mobile app strategy will quickly lead to applications whose life is only as long as the latest mobile device, which is sometimes less than a year. Yet, that is a heavy burden to ask of a development team, to both develop new mobile applications while also updating prior applications to the latest mobile devices.

As business continues to develop in the digital age, organizations must rethink their approach to custom application development starting with the platforms they build upon. Organizations must leverage a low-code and flexible cloud-based application platforms, where you can easily express the intent of your application and let the platform evolve the mobile app to the latest mobile devices. This keeps your business focused on the meaningful aspects of your work, such as process optimization and customer experience, while letting the platform evolve your applications. These modern application platforms evolve continuously and are often available in the cloud, further taking away the burden of server upgrades and maintenance.

WW: What defines a mobile enterprise strategy?

Ross: First, a mobile enterprise strategy recognizes mobile devices as a strategic differentiator to an organization’s business.

Second, a mobile enterprise strategy is focused on the future of devices, not the past. The lifespan of mobile devices is growing increasingly short, with cheaper, more powerful and nearly disposable devices. Organizations must be constantly asking themselves how new mobile technologies will change their business models and how they can adapt to be ready for the change.

Finally, organizations must make investments in platforms which allows them to quickly try out new ideas with mobile devices. Some mobile devices, like Google Glass, might have looked promising, but we know now that making a major bet of time and resources on that platform would have been a mistake. A term called “Fail Fast” is often used to describe this type of investment. Using agile methodologies with modern application platforms allow organizations to try new mobile concepts without letting a failures break the business.

WW: What do you see as the future of mobile enterprise technology?

Ross: Today’s fast-paced business environment demands a better ways to build and deploy smarter apps. In the age of the Internet of Things (IoT), the demands of the business and consumers alike will only intensify with each new smart device introduced to market. There will continue to be a cry for IT to develop applications on the latest mobile innovations and continuously adapt the business to new technology.

To keep up with this demand, organizations need to simplify how they develop, roll out, and maintain mobile applications. Developing on a low-code application platform allows the business to stay ahead of the IoT as more and more devices become available.

The words of the Greek philosopher Heraclitus still ring true today, that “The only thing constant is change.” As we have seen over the past decade the speed of technological change is only getting faster. Organizations must be prepared to move at the same speed or be left in the dust.


Earnings Surprise

Business / Taxes / Earnings Surprise: When a company's earnings report either exceeds or fails to meet analysts' estimates, it's called an earnings surprise. An upside surprise occurs when a company reports higher earnings than analysts predicted and usually triggers an increase in the stock price. A negative surprise, on the other hand, occurs when a company fails to meet expectations and often causes the stock's price to fall. Companies try hard to avoid negative surprises since even a small deviation can create a big stir.

Other Words for Earnings

Other Words for Surprise

Surprise Adverb Synonyms: take or catch unawares, catch red-handed or in the act or in flagrante delicto, catch napping or off guard, discover
Surprise Noun Synonyms: shock, astonishment, amazement, stupefaction, wonder, incredulity
Surprise Adjective Synonyms: shock, astound, astonish, amaze, disconcert, nonplus, dumbfound or dumfound, stagger, take aback, strike, hit, floor, bowl over, flabbergast, rock or set (someone) back on his or her or their heels, knock (someone) for six, kno

Earnings Yield

Business / Finance / Earnings Yield: Positive or negative differences from the consensus forecast of earnings by institutions such as First Call or IBES Negative earnings surprises generally have a greater adverse effect on stock prices MORE

Normalized Earnings

Pre-Disability Earnings


Eclipse 3.7 Plug-in Migration Guide

This guide covers migrating Eclipse 3.6 plug-ins to Eclipse 3.7.

One of the goals of Eclipse 3.7 was to move Eclipse forward while remaining compatible with previous versions to the greatest extent possible. That is, plug-ins written against the Eclipse 3.6 APIs should continue to work in 3.7 in spite of any API changes.

The key kinds of compatibility are API contract compatibility and binary compatibility. API contract compatibility means that valid use of 3.6 APIs remains valid for 3.7, so there is no need to revisit working code. Binary compatibility means that the API method signatures, etc. did not change in ways that would cause existing compiled ("binary") code to no longer link and run with the new 3.7 libraries.

While every effort was made to avoid breakage, there are a few areas of incompatibility or new APIs that should be adopted by clients. This document describes those areas and provides instructions for migrating 3.6 plug-ins to 3.7.