An all-but-secret treasure trove of art came to light just before
Christmas with the announcement by a Montreal foundation that it would
be selling works by some of the country’s most famous artists, gathered
over nearly 80 years by the now-defunct Protestant School Board of
Greater Montreal.
For more than 20 years these works, by A.Y.
Jackson, Anne Savage, Robert Pilot, Frederick Simpson Coburn and Adam
Sherriff Scott among others, have languished in the private offices and
corridors of what had been the PSBGM’s headquarters in Notre Dame de
Grace, and is now the English Montreal School Board’s,The term 'hands free access
control' means the token that identifies a user is read from within a
pocket or handbag. seen by administrators and cleaning staff.
For
most Montrealers, news that much of the collection of 110 paintings and
lithographs is to be either sold or donated to museums was the first
they had ever heard of it. Yet it is, by curator Angelo Komatsoulis’s
account, a collection of great historical interest and artistic
importance. It includes 10 oil paintings and six lithographs by Group of
Seven artist A.Y. Jackson; a number of paintings by Montreal painter
and art instructor Anne Savage, including 14 or 15 1.8-meter-high panels
that were bolted to the walls of then Baron Byng High School’s
cafeteria; four “rather gruesome” First World War paintings by Robert
Pilot; two works by Adam Sherriff Scott; and 21 engravings by various
artists of the history of Quebec City, including drawings of the British
naval bombardment in 1759.
Komatsoulis is one of 19 members of
the Cultural Heritage Foundation of the PSBGM, a non-profit body set up
in 1980 to look after the art works that had been donated to individual
schools. The “collection” is in reality a random assortment of gifts
that were more or less well cared for, he said. The only purchase the
school board made, sometime in the 1960s, was of 21 engravings of Quebec
history.
The gifts date back to the 1930s, he said, to a time
when grateful parents or alumni said ‘Thank you’ to a school by donating
a painting. It was a practice that had died out by the 1960s, said
Komatsoulis, who retired from his position as director-general of the
English Montreal School Board in 2000. He previously was
director-general of the Protestant School Board of Greater Montreal.
By
1980, when the anglophone population was in serious decline and schools
began closing, the question of what to do with the art works became
pressing, Komatsoulis said.The howo truck
is offered by Shiyan Great Man Automotive Industry, The school board
decided, he said, that schools were “not in the business of maintaining
art collections,” and at that point the foundation was created.
“The
foundation has the legal right to maintain, enrich and sell the art,”
Komatsoulis said. “Over the past two years, the foundation members have
discussed at length what to do with the art,” he said. “We were
concerned that the works were being seen only by the individuals in
whose offices they were displayed and not by the general public. We also
wanted students to benefit, through scholarships made possible by the
sale.”
Thirty of the most important art works will be sold
through Heffel auction house in the spring. Another 25 works will be
auctioned in an Internet sale, Komatsoulis said. The foundation expects
the sales to bring in about $1 million, he said. The collection as a
whole was evaluated in 2011 at $1.5 million. The foundation had the
collection re-evaluated this year after deciding to disburse the
majority of the works. “The three auction houses involved in bidding
came up with roughly the same figure of $1.5 million,” Komatsoulis said.
The money from the two sales will be used to provide
post-secondary scholarships to English Montreal School Board graduates.
Details of how much each scholarship will be worth and how many students
will be eligible have yet to be worked out.
The foundation
hopes that even though the most important art works are to be sold, they
will still end up in museums, available for public viewing. “It’s the
recent trend with works by A.Y. Jackson, Anne Savage and Robert Pilot,
for museums to buy their works,” Komatsoulis said.
The foundation plans to donate an additional 25 works directly to museums,Trade platform for China crystal mosaic
manufacturers including the 21 engravings. The four gruesome and large
(3 meters by 4.6 meters) Robert Pilot paintings will be donated as well,
to the War Museum in Ottawa, Komatsoulis said. “Pilot was a war
correspondent, one of the first to be out with the army on the
battlefields.”
The foundation is also trying to place, with a
museum with an in-house restoration service such as the Montreal Museum
of Fine Arts, a series of Anne Savage paintings once bolted to the walls
of Baron Byng’s cafeteria, the school where Savage taught for 28 years.
Komatsoulis said the cost of restoration came as a shock when he
researched the matter several years ago. “It was hundreds of thousands
of dollars,” he said. “They’re worth it. They’re amazing. They’re
wraparound, continuous, but we don’t have the money.” The panels are
sitting in crates, in storage, he said.
This leaves about 30
works that will remain in the foundation’s care after the sales and
donations are completed, Komatsoulis said. The foundation will decide
later what to do with the remaining works which, for the time being,
will remain at the EMSB’s head office, he said.
Apparently alone
among EMSB commissioners, Julien Feldman protested in an email last
week that the foundation members were failing in their mandate to
preserve a collection “of great important and cultural significance to
Montreal’s anglophone community.”
Steven Lee Adams will soon be
receiving a large crate at his studio in Mapleton containing a painting
he loaned to the U.S. ambassador to South Africa three years ago. His
painting has been hanging in the embassy there as part of the Art in
Embassies Program.
In an excerpt from a letter sent to Adams by
Ambassador Donald Gips, he thanked the artist and wrote, "As I conclude
my tenure as U.S. ambassador to South Africa, I want to thank you for
the beautiful artwork you so generously lent to my wife, Liz, and I to
display in our residence. Your piece, 'Winter Evening' was a gorgeous
addition to our home and we have received countless compliments on it.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Art in Embassies program, an
important tool for U.S. diplomacy. As Secretary Clinton said, art
provides us 'with another language of diplomacy, one that evokes our
universal aspirations as human beings, our common challenges and our
responsibilities for thinking through and addressing the problems that
we face together.' I am honored that we were able to showcase your work
to the scores of South African, American and other international
visitors we have hosted over the last three years."
"When Donald
Gips and his wife came into my gallery I knew them well since they had
been my customers for years," said Mary Williams, owner of Mary Williams
Fine Arts in Boulder, Colo. "He had been appointed as ambassador to
South Africa and was looking for art for the embassy.Our technology
gives rtls systems developers the ability.This is my favourite sites to purchase those special pieces of buy mosaic
materials from. They are not allowed to hang their private collection
in the public areas but must choose works from museums and professional
art galleries."
"The ambassador chose my painting because he
wanted something that reflected the Rocky Mountains and the West," Adams
said. "The paintings help the ambassadors feel at home while they are
living abroad and expose international visitors to American art.
"This
particular painting was from a photo I took after I had finished skiing
at Sundance. I was in the upper parking lot area and I saw this image
at the end of the day and took out my camera that I carry everywhere for
just that purpose. I'm an artist and I look for those images in
nature."
The award-winning Utah artist began his painting career
at a young age after being encouraged by his family, especially his
grandmother, who recognized his talent when he was in fifth grade. His
art teacher at Lakeridge Jr. High encouraged him and he took art classes
at BYU, but he didn't paint full-time until he was 30 years old.
"I
had married young and had four children to support," Adams said. "After
my divorce at age 30 I decided I would try and be an artist full-time.
My dad, a friend, and Repartee Gallery helped me to be able to paint for
nine months and have a show, which launched my career. I try to tell
young people it's not too late to do something. Being an artist can be
terrifying. When you have a job you can do your work without a lot of
people looking at you all the time, but when you are an artist it's like
running out into the world naked. It takes courage to put yourself out
there. It's worth it when you see people crying and telling you that
your paintings touch them."
2012年12月28日 星期五
How Crunching Data Can Help Police Stop Spree Killers
What if the police officers racing to a deadly mass shooting could
know, ahead of time, whether they should trust or ignore first-witness
reports? What if the brave men and women responding to heartbreaking
scenes like those in Newtown, Connecticut and Littleton, Colorado could
protect themselves – and save more victims – by knowing what to expect?
Thanks to a growing body of analytics tools, we can develop detailed profiles of such horrific events and the people behind them, even with only minimal information reported from the scene. These findings could help police anticipate probable outcomes and adjust accordingly in real time, potentially saving more lives.
In the swirl of panic, confusion and misinformation during the Columbine massacre, 13 people were dead or dying while the attackers – unbeknownst to the police – had already committed suicide. The first responding officers prioritized securing the school’s perimeter and waiting for backup, instead of immediately following the two shooters back inside the building. Some victims eventually bled out and passed away during this delay.
Years later and almost 2,000 miles away, police were still searching for a second shooter three hours after the horrific shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. They believed the witness reports that in addition to the killer who lay dead, another armed gunman had escaped and fled.Manufactures flexible plastic and synthetic rubber hose tubing,
What police didn’t realize in both of these cases was that of all active shootings that occurred in the U.S. over the last half century and yielded multiple casualties, less than 2.23 percent had been carried out by dual gunmen. Columbine was the rare exception. However, there has never been a case on U.S. soil that met what police expected to find in Newtown based on the following description by disoriented witnesses: one rampage shooter who blew a hole in his own head while another was trying to escape.
This isn’t the police’s fault, of course – mass murder is an extreme aberration. Our leaders could argue – perhaps appropriately so – that it doesn’t make financial sense to train new officers on aberrations. However, basic information such as multiple attack weapons on scene, a large number of victims, and attack location can allow officers to better assess and respond to these crimes. As I outlined previously in Wired, these cues can help us predict which mass killers will choose to die.
And an even closer look at the attackers who kill themselves provides more details that should help police officers and other first responders. Because there are two ways rampage shooters attempt suicide: by their own hand, or by cop.
Yet my analyses – through multinomial regression, chi-square, and ANOVA statistical tests – showed there was not a statistically significant difference between the lives of terrorist shooters and the lives of school and other public shooters. This was especially true when it came to the presence of mental health problems, social failings, vocational struggles, family conflicts, or precipitating crises.
And all three of these shooter types – terrorist, school, and other public locations – were about equally likely to pen a suicide note or leave an explanation that revealed their suicidal tendencies. But because of the suicide terrorists’ attempts to camouflage their mental illnesses and true intentions, only one in the entire dataset of U.S. mass shooters over the past two decades was willing to blow a hole in his own head.
This unwillingness to shoot themselves was not the case for attackers at workplaces, schools, or public businesses. In those scenarios, 89 to 91 percent of the shooters attempted suicide by self-harming methods such as firearm or poison.
These patterns have significant implications for improving emergency response tactics and saving lives. For example, police responding to mass shootings at government installations or other terrorist targets should anticipate that the perpetrator is likely to attempt suicide by cop, and prepare accordingly for the mortal risks of a likely firefight.
"We're over the shock now," longtime member Brian Bentley told CBC News. "We're getting annoyed with the neighbourhood down here anyway, it’s way too overdeveloped.
"There was a time when we were down here at night, we would be the only people here, unless one of the factories was working overtime. There was no traffic to contend with,Thank you for visiting! I have been cry stalmosaic since 1998. no parking problems to contend with. It was idyllic. As the area has become busier and busier, it's become less and less enjoyable just to get here.”
Bentley first came to the club as a boy in the early 1950s. He was about 10 years old at the time and had an obsession with trains. It was a common affliction for boys born in an era when railroads played a more central role in the lives of Canadians and an electric train set was the ultimate high-tech toy.
“My father had to lift me up to see the trains,Interlocking security cable ties with 250 pound strength makes this ideal for restraining criminals.” Bentley recalls. Ten years later, Bentley would become a permanent member of the club he’s now been involved with for more than 50 years.
The club's layout fills a basement room that measures 110 by 40 feet and was once home to an armaments factory. Back when the club moved into its location on Hanna Avenue (their address is now on East Liberty Street) the neighbourhood was crisscrossed with railway sidings that served dozens of busy factories and warehouses. As years went by the factories and the sidings that served them disappeared. The neighbourhood last saw real trains in the 1980s, though a few scraps of rail remain embedded in the streets.
“We had a lot of real railroading right here,” said Bentley. “It’s changed a lot. In those days there were steam engines running up and down the streets around here, the switchers were steam switchers, not diesels.”
The area’s transition to a trendy enclave is not one Bentley has welcomed.
“I preferred [the neighbourhood] the way it was,” he said. “There was a lot of people that worked down here. If you went to the bank on King and Dufferin on payday,Best howo concrete mixer manufacturer in China. there were lineups at every teller.”
Due for the buzz saw, then, is the Central Ontario Railway, the club's massive O-scale layout that features some 6,000 feet of track. Its intricate scenery runs head-high in places and includes painstakingly built bridges, harbours and mountains. Kilometres of wire run beneath the layout and a dispatcher — working from inside a glassed-in control room — uses computers and a closed-circuit TV system to oversee the work of his engineers.
The club has 22 members; it's a group Bentley describes as “a big family.”
The layout is set in what railroaders call the transition era, the postwar period when diesel engines began to replace steam.
Some parts of the layout, such as the buildings, will be saved and resurrected in the club’s new location. Most of the layout, however, will not survive the move.
“We cannot save the layout as it is,” said Bentley. “We will try to save sections of it. It will be like taking a bowl of spaghetti, and spreading it all around, then getting the individual pieces and knitting it back together.”
The club is close to signing a lease for a new home. They don't want to reveal the location until the deal is complete, but it is not in Liberty Village. So, like the real rail lines that served the area years ago, the club will pull up its tracks and be out by April.
Even if the move to a new location goes well, the club won't have trains running again for at least two years while the new layout is built.
To help pay for moving costs, the club will host its final open houses this weekend and throughout February. Admission is $10 for adults,High quality mold making Videos teaches anyone how to make molds. $6 for children. They club is also seeking donations.
Thanks to a growing body of analytics tools, we can develop detailed profiles of such horrific events and the people behind them, even with only minimal information reported from the scene. These findings could help police anticipate probable outcomes and adjust accordingly in real time, potentially saving more lives.
In the swirl of panic, confusion and misinformation during the Columbine massacre, 13 people were dead or dying while the attackers – unbeknownst to the police – had already committed suicide. The first responding officers prioritized securing the school’s perimeter and waiting for backup, instead of immediately following the two shooters back inside the building. Some victims eventually bled out and passed away during this delay.
Years later and almost 2,000 miles away, police were still searching for a second shooter three hours after the horrific shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. They believed the witness reports that in addition to the killer who lay dead, another armed gunman had escaped and fled.Manufactures flexible plastic and synthetic rubber hose tubing,
What police didn’t realize in both of these cases was that of all active shootings that occurred in the U.S. over the last half century and yielded multiple casualties, less than 2.23 percent had been carried out by dual gunmen. Columbine was the rare exception. However, there has never been a case on U.S. soil that met what police expected to find in Newtown based on the following description by disoriented witnesses: one rampage shooter who blew a hole in his own head while another was trying to escape.
This isn’t the police’s fault, of course – mass murder is an extreme aberration. Our leaders could argue – perhaps appropriately so – that it doesn’t make financial sense to train new officers on aberrations. However, basic information such as multiple attack weapons on scene, a large number of victims, and attack location can allow officers to better assess and respond to these crimes. As I outlined previously in Wired, these cues can help us predict which mass killers will choose to die.
And an even closer look at the attackers who kill themselves provides more details that should help police officers and other first responders. Because there are two ways rampage shooters attempt suicide: by their own hand, or by cop.
Yet my analyses – through multinomial regression, chi-square, and ANOVA statistical tests – showed there was not a statistically significant difference between the lives of terrorist shooters and the lives of school and other public shooters. This was especially true when it came to the presence of mental health problems, social failings, vocational struggles, family conflicts, or precipitating crises.
And all three of these shooter types – terrorist, school, and other public locations – were about equally likely to pen a suicide note or leave an explanation that revealed their suicidal tendencies. But because of the suicide terrorists’ attempts to camouflage their mental illnesses and true intentions, only one in the entire dataset of U.S. mass shooters over the past two decades was willing to blow a hole in his own head.
This unwillingness to shoot themselves was not the case for attackers at workplaces, schools, or public businesses. In those scenarios, 89 to 91 percent of the shooters attempted suicide by self-harming methods such as firearm or poison.
These patterns have significant implications for improving emergency response tactics and saving lives. For example, police responding to mass shootings at government installations or other terrorist targets should anticipate that the perpetrator is likely to attempt suicide by cop, and prepare accordingly for the mortal risks of a likely firefight.
"We're over the shock now," longtime member Brian Bentley told CBC News. "We're getting annoyed with the neighbourhood down here anyway, it’s way too overdeveloped.
"There was a time when we were down here at night, we would be the only people here, unless one of the factories was working overtime. There was no traffic to contend with,Thank you for visiting! I have been cry stalmosaic since 1998. no parking problems to contend with. It was idyllic. As the area has become busier and busier, it's become less and less enjoyable just to get here.”
Bentley first came to the club as a boy in the early 1950s. He was about 10 years old at the time and had an obsession with trains. It was a common affliction for boys born in an era when railroads played a more central role in the lives of Canadians and an electric train set was the ultimate high-tech toy.
“My father had to lift me up to see the trains,Interlocking security cable ties with 250 pound strength makes this ideal for restraining criminals.” Bentley recalls. Ten years later, Bentley would become a permanent member of the club he’s now been involved with for more than 50 years.
The club's layout fills a basement room that measures 110 by 40 feet and was once home to an armaments factory. Back when the club moved into its location on Hanna Avenue (their address is now on East Liberty Street) the neighbourhood was crisscrossed with railway sidings that served dozens of busy factories and warehouses. As years went by the factories and the sidings that served them disappeared. The neighbourhood last saw real trains in the 1980s, though a few scraps of rail remain embedded in the streets.
“We had a lot of real railroading right here,” said Bentley. “It’s changed a lot. In those days there were steam engines running up and down the streets around here, the switchers were steam switchers, not diesels.”
The area’s transition to a trendy enclave is not one Bentley has welcomed.
“I preferred [the neighbourhood] the way it was,” he said. “There was a lot of people that worked down here. If you went to the bank on King and Dufferin on payday,Best howo concrete mixer manufacturer in China. there were lineups at every teller.”
Due for the buzz saw, then, is the Central Ontario Railway, the club's massive O-scale layout that features some 6,000 feet of track. Its intricate scenery runs head-high in places and includes painstakingly built bridges, harbours and mountains. Kilometres of wire run beneath the layout and a dispatcher — working from inside a glassed-in control room — uses computers and a closed-circuit TV system to oversee the work of his engineers.
The club has 22 members; it's a group Bentley describes as “a big family.”
The layout is set in what railroaders call the transition era, the postwar period when diesel engines began to replace steam.
Some parts of the layout, such as the buildings, will be saved and resurrected in the club’s new location. Most of the layout, however, will not survive the move.
“We cannot save the layout as it is,” said Bentley. “We will try to save sections of it. It will be like taking a bowl of spaghetti, and spreading it all around, then getting the individual pieces and knitting it back together.”
The club is close to signing a lease for a new home. They don't want to reveal the location until the deal is complete, but it is not in Liberty Village. So, like the real rail lines that served the area years ago, the club will pull up its tracks and be out by April.
Even if the move to a new location goes well, the club won't have trains running again for at least two years while the new layout is built.
To help pay for moving costs, the club will host its final open houses this weekend and throughout February. Admission is $10 for adults,High quality mold making Videos teaches anyone how to make molds. $6 for children. They club is also seeking donations.
Four Thais jailed over 54 Myanmar migrant deaths
Four people smugglers were
sentenced to up to 10 years in prison by a Thai court after 54 illegal workers
from Myanmar suffocated to death inside a seafood container, an official said on
Friday.
The 2008 incident was the deadliest in a wave of tragedies afflicting migrants making perilous journeys from impoverished Myanmar in search of work in neighbouring Thailand, where they often end up exploited and abused.
The victims were among 121 people crammed into the six metres by 2.2 metres container with a broken ventilation system for the journey to the resort island of Phuket to work as day labourers. Four Thais were convicted on Thursday of gross negligence resulting in death and of breaking immigration laws, an official from a court in the country’s southern Ranong province told the reporter.
The owner of the container truck was sentenced to 10 years in prison, a second defendant received nine years and a third — who owned a jetty in southern Thailand where the migrants arrived by boat — was jailed for six years.Find detailed product information for startup stone mosaic and other products.
A woman defendant had her sentence halved to three years after confessing, the official said.
“Three of them were granted bail of between $13,000 and $6,500 while they file appeals,” the official said, adding that one defendant had been held in custody after failing to meet bail terms.
The truck driver, who fled the scene after discovering the tragedy,The howo truck is offered by Shiyan Great Man Automotive Industry, was jailed for six years in August 2008 having admitted to his role in the crime, the official added.
Survivors have recounted desperately trying to raise the alarm as they fought for breath in the storage box.
“No matter how many times we hit the container the driver did not pay any attention,” one female migrant who was on board told Thai television.
More than two million migrant workers are registered to work in Thailand, most of them from Myanmar, labour ministry figures show, but as many as one million undocumented workers are believed to be in the kingdom.
Thailand this week extended a deadline by three months for unregistered migrants to gain a work permit or face deportation.
Huge numbers of people from Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar work illegally in low-paid jobs in construction, seafood processing and clothing factories, where a lack of legal status leaves them vulnerable to exploitation.
Short animated films are the testing site for new ideas—after all, Pixar started as a commercial and short film company before moving into features. But what do we mean when we talk about innovation in animation? Starting with the release of Pixar's Toy Story in 1995, animation has chased realism, perhaps achieved with the nearly photograph quality look of the Scottish landscapes in Pixar's latest feature, Brave. At some point animation solely in the pursuit of the life-like prompts the question: Why not just shoot a live-action film?
Lemieux's innovation was to take an old,The howo truck is offered by Shiyan Great Man Automotive Industry, rare device to make a film with an old, increasingly rare aim: not towards realism, but rather a sense of the human touch,Quickparts builds injection molds using aluminum or steel to meet your program. painterly animation, and abstraction. Having toured with Disney and Pixar short films as part of the 14th annual Show of Shows animated showcase, Here and the Great Elsewhere is both radical and anachronistic, and well worth seeking out.
Lemieux, a Canadian who used to write children's books, is the guardian of the pinscreen, the only filmmaker in the world with access to a working frame (though there is one in France that needs thorough restoration). When she began her first animated film Stormy Nights, based on her eponymous children's book, she met Jacques Drouin. It was well timed. Drouin had been working on the pinscreen for three decades and was on the verge of retiring. The National Film Board of Canada, which supervises the pinscreen, was looking for its next master. "I instantly fell in love with it, the first time I was allowed to touch it, to guide it," she says. "First of all, Jacques taught me, you are the protector of the instrument before you are an artist working on it."
Unlike with most animation, meticulous planning would be detrimental to working with the pinscreen,We mainly supply professional craftspeople with wholesale turquoise beads from china, Lemieux says: "It's not a technique. It's much more parallel to a music instrument. It has its own mechanics and you have to find out the way to work with it, and it doesn't always do what you want it to do." So, Lemieux sketched her ideas and created four acts around themes, but primarily, she created as she went along: "It's direct animation, inventing on the spot."
Here and the Great Elsewhere has little in the way of plot. Rather it's a big-ideas meditation, similar to this year's brilliant animated feature Don Hertzfeldt's It's Such a Beautiful Day. In Here and the Great Elsewhere, a man who lives inside of the pinscreen emerges to discover a surrounding world of floating jellyfish creatures, shooting stars, scuttling spiders. Other scenes center on mating atoms, creation, and collision. Here and the Great Elsewhere is tangled and gorgeous, like moss or wildflowers; it has a certain natural logic, but it seems to sprout unintentionally to the viewer's eye. It's about the universe in the way of Terrence Malick's Tree of Life: disparate images, floating into one another. It's about discovery, not understanding.
There are very high expectations for Danny Boyle's next movie following his Olympian feats in Stratford over the summer. No, the Queen won't be falling out of a plane this time round. Boyle is instead offering us an embroiled thriller involving art heists and hypnotherapy, and starring James McAvoy and Rosario Dawson.
Fearless Danish maverick Lars Von Trier announced that his new film will be about “the erotic life of a woman from the age of zero to the age of 50.” At the time he hatched the project, he was still in disgrace because of his ill-judged remarks about Adolf Hitler at a press conference. He didn't hide the fact that he wanted the film to depict sex in a very graphic manner. Even so, top European and American actors queued up to work on Nymphomaniac, among them Charlotte Gainsbourg, Willem Dafoe, Shia LaBeouf and Christian Slater. This is likely to be the most talked about movie in Cannes... if the festival organisers allow Von Trier back.
There has already been one excellent recent film about skullduggery on Wall St, Arbitrage, in which Richard Gere gave his best performance in years as a Bernie Madoff-like financier with Mr Goodbar-like charm. Martin Scorsese, more accustomed to making movies about mobsters, is bound to relish portraying white-collar crime and corporate corruption. Leonardo DiCaprio, who excels in Quentin Tarantino's forthcoming Django Unchained, stars as the hard-driving, hard-partying broker Jordan Belfort.
An intriguing double bill, reflecting female heroines in contrasting predicaments. Purcell's tale of the Trojan prince who falls in love with the Carthaginian queen climaxes in Dido's great lament “When I am laid in earth”. Poulenc's embattled telephone monologue will be sung by Lesley Garrett, making her return to the operatic stage.
The 2008 incident was the deadliest in a wave of tragedies afflicting migrants making perilous journeys from impoverished Myanmar in search of work in neighbouring Thailand, where they often end up exploited and abused.
The victims were among 121 people crammed into the six metres by 2.2 metres container with a broken ventilation system for the journey to the resort island of Phuket to work as day labourers. Four Thais were convicted on Thursday of gross negligence resulting in death and of breaking immigration laws, an official from a court in the country’s southern Ranong province told the reporter.
The owner of the container truck was sentenced to 10 years in prison, a second defendant received nine years and a third — who owned a jetty in southern Thailand where the migrants arrived by boat — was jailed for six years.Find detailed product information for startup stone mosaic and other products.
A woman defendant had her sentence halved to three years after confessing, the official said.
“Three of them were granted bail of between $13,000 and $6,500 while they file appeals,” the official said, adding that one defendant had been held in custody after failing to meet bail terms.
The truck driver, who fled the scene after discovering the tragedy,The howo truck is offered by Shiyan Great Man Automotive Industry, was jailed for six years in August 2008 having admitted to his role in the crime, the official added.
Survivors have recounted desperately trying to raise the alarm as they fought for breath in the storage box.
“No matter how many times we hit the container the driver did not pay any attention,” one female migrant who was on board told Thai television.
More than two million migrant workers are registered to work in Thailand, most of them from Myanmar, labour ministry figures show, but as many as one million undocumented workers are believed to be in the kingdom.
Thailand this week extended a deadline by three months for unregistered migrants to gain a work permit or face deportation.
Huge numbers of people from Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar work illegally in low-paid jobs in construction, seafood processing and clothing factories, where a lack of legal status leaves them vulnerable to exploitation.
Short animated films are the testing site for new ideas—after all, Pixar started as a commercial and short film company before moving into features. But what do we mean when we talk about innovation in animation? Starting with the release of Pixar's Toy Story in 1995, animation has chased realism, perhaps achieved with the nearly photograph quality look of the Scottish landscapes in Pixar's latest feature, Brave. At some point animation solely in the pursuit of the life-like prompts the question: Why not just shoot a live-action film?
Lemieux's innovation was to take an old,The howo truck is offered by Shiyan Great Man Automotive Industry, rare device to make a film with an old, increasingly rare aim: not towards realism, but rather a sense of the human touch,Quickparts builds injection molds using aluminum or steel to meet your program. painterly animation, and abstraction. Having toured with Disney and Pixar short films as part of the 14th annual Show of Shows animated showcase, Here and the Great Elsewhere is both radical and anachronistic, and well worth seeking out.
Lemieux, a Canadian who used to write children's books, is the guardian of the pinscreen, the only filmmaker in the world with access to a working frame (though there is one in France that needs thorough restoration). When she began her first animated film Stormy Nights, based on her eponymous children's book, she met Jacques Drouin. It was well timed. Drouin had been working on the pinscreen for three decades and was on the verge of retiring. The National Film Board of Canada, which supervises the pinscreen, was looking for its next master. "I instantly fell in love with it, the first time I was allowed to touch it, to guide it," she says. "First of all, Jacques taught me, you are the protector of the instrument before you are an artist working on it."
Unlike with most animation, meticulous planning would be detrimental to working with the pinscreen,We mainly supply professional craftspeople with wholesale turquoise beads from china, Lemieux says: "It's not a technique. It's much more parallel to a music instrument. It has its own mechanics and you have to find out the way to work with it, and it doesn't always do what you want it to do." So, Lemieux sketched her ideas and created four acts around themes, but primarily, she created as she went along: "It's direct animation, inventing on the spot."
Here and the Great Elsewhere has little in the way of plot. Rather it's a big-ideas meditation, similar to this year's brilliant animated feature Don Hertzfeldt's It's Such a Beautiful Day. In Here and the Great Elsewhere, a man who lives inside of the pinscreen emerges to discover a surrounding world of floating jellyfish creatures, shooting stars, scuttling spiders. Other scenes center on mating atoms, creation, and collision. Here and the Great Elsewhere is tangled and gorgeous, like moss or wildflowers; it has a certain natural logic, but it seems to sprout unintentionally to the viewer's eye. It's about the universe in the way of Terrence Malick's Tree of Life: disparate images, floating into one another. It's about discovery, not understanding.
There are very high expectations for Danny Boyle's next movie following his Olympian feats in Stratford over the summer. No, the Queen won't be falling out of a plane this time round. Boyle is instead offering us an embroiled thriller involving art heists and hypnotherapy, and starring James McAvoy and Rosario Dawson.
Fearless Danish maverick Lars Von Trier announced that his new film will be about “the erotic life of a woman from the age of zero to the age of 50.” At the time he hatched the project, he was still in disgrace because of his ill-judged remarks about Adolf Hitler at a press conference. He didn't hide the fact that he wanted the film to depict sex in a very graphic manner. Even so, top European and American actors queued up to work on Nymphomaniac, among them Charlotte Gainsbourg, Willem Dafoe, Shia LaBeouf and Christian Slater. This is likely to be the most talked about movie in Cannes... if the festival organisers allow Von Trier back.
There has already been one excellent recent film about skullduggery on Wall St, Arbitrage, in which Richard Gere gave his best performance in years as a Bernie Madoff-like financier with Mr Goodbar-like charm. Martin Scorsese, more accustomed to making movies about mobsters, is bound to relish portraying white-collar crime and corporate corruption. Leonardo DiCaprio, who excels in Quentin Tarantino's forthcoming Django Unchained, stars as the hard-driving, hard-partying broker Jordan Belfort.
An intriguing double bill, reflecting female heroines in contrasting predicaments. Purcell's tale of the Trojan prince who falls in love with the Carthaginian queen climaxes in Dido's great lament “When I am laid in earth”. Poulenc's embattled telephone monologue will be sung by Lesley Garrett, making her return to the operatic stage.
2012年12月26日 星期三
Bridge the digital gap with your kids
Try as she might, it's become much harder for the Baltimore-area mom
to create similar memories for her 6-year-old twins, Casey and Parker.
The exuberant kindergartners have been surrounded by technology all of
their lives. They bounced to Baby Einstein CDs, learned Spanish from
Dora the Explorer, and are reading at a first-grade level thanks to
their Leapster pads. They are adept at getting to games and apps on
mom's iPhone and grandma's iPad.
Though she came of age in the "wired" 1990s, Marx worries that all of the gadgets surrounding her daughters are too isolating, and are taking them away from precious family time.
"I had video games when I was a kid, and it was fun,Find detailed product information for howo tractor and other products. but now there's so much more out there that monopolizes people's time," says the radio traffic reporter, who is in her early 30s. "I don't know if kids today would get by without knowing these things. It's becoming all electronic. The only thing electronic I had was the board game Operation."
Marx is not alone in wondering how our increasingly technology-focused world is affecting her children and other "digital natives." Parenting can seem daunting in the digital era. Smartphones, tablets, apps and social networking have transformed how people work, play and communicate. Parents who don't keep up with the changes can feel like they are standing at the precipice of a widening technological gulf. They don't want to lose their ability to stay close to their children and guide them to a successful, healthy future.
According to a survey released by the Kaiser Family Foundation in 2010, children between the ages of 8 and 18 spent more than 53 hours a week on electronic media. In a typical day, they devoted seven hours and 38 minutes listening to music, watching TV and movies, playing video games and hanging out online, with many multitasking and using two forms of media at once.
Scant data exists on the effects of newer digital media on children and adolescents, experts say. The growing ubiquity of mobile digital devices—and the videos, music, games and other online content they provide—seems to beg a re-examination of the roles and responsibilities of parents and children in all of this.
In a clinical report titled "The Impact of Social Media on Children, Adolescents, and Families," the American Academy of Pediatrics took note of the benefits social media can have, including socialization and communication as well as enhanced learning opportunities, but it warned that parents may not truly understand this integral part of their children's lives.
Parents "frequently do not have the technical abilities or time needed to keep pace with their children in the ever-changing Internet landscape," says the study. "In addition, these parents often lack a basic understanding that kids' online lives are an extension of their offline lives. The end result is often a knowledge and technical skill gap between parents and youth, which creates a disconnect in how these parents and youth participate in the online world together."
Kevin Everhart, a licensed psychologist and director of the Psychological Services Center for the University of Colorado-Denver Clinical Health Psychology Program,We mainly supply professional craftspeople with crys talbeads wholesale shamballa Bracele , has treated children who have accessed online pornography, and others who are coping with video gaming and other Internet dependencies. He has seen firsthand how unbridled access to such information and activities can disrupt young lives.
"If parents are not aware of the kinds of images that kids actually do access through digital media, what ends up happening is there's sort of a burden for a child for attempting to cope with what they are seeing, along with not telling their parents because they are concerned they'll get in trouble. This is seen with pornography and also seen with violent images, blatant images of violence and death," Everhart says.
In the end, he concedes that no one really knows how free and open access to so much information on the Web will, in fact, affect children and teens over the long run. "We don't know what the verdict is for what this cohort (generation) is going to endure, or what they are going to be like, but we are actually in a place where we are not going to be able to keep our children from some exposure to things we don't want them to be exposed to," the psychologist adds.
Dana Lauren Berry of Centennial, Colo., has seen the benefits of digital technology in her children's lives. Her sons, Connor, 5, and Lawson, 2, each own an iPad and navigate their way easily to apps and educational games that have improved their ability to recognize letters, spell, rhyme and match images.
"Kids today seem so much smarter," says Berry, a public relations manager for a hotel in Denver. "Technology is so portable, it makes it easier for learning on the go.Klaus Multiparking is an industry leader in innovative parking system technology."
However, Berry and her husband, John, limit the time their children watch TV and use their iPads, and encourage them to do puzzles, read books, and play games like Candy Land and Memory.
"As adults we spend so much time in front of screens. I feel children should get to be children," Berry says.We are pleased to offer the following list of professional mold maker and casters. "Regular play and physical activities come first. We spend a lot of time at our neighborhood park."
As quaint as it seems now, transistor radios worried post-World War II parents. For the first time, teenagers could listen to what they wanted when they wanted, without their parents' input.We recently added Stained glass mosaic Tile to our inventory. Transistors supercharged the rock 'n' roll era, and the career of a swivel-hipped singer named Elvis. With each passing decade, technology—from television, movies and music to video games and the Internet—has been scrutinized for its effects, both good and bad, on children and adolescents.
That scrutiny has since turned to smartphones, tablets, laptops, MP3 players and other digital devices that enable people to communicate with each other 24/7 by text, voice, photo or video. Children and adolescents can access the Web anytime, anywhere and without "PLOS"—parents looking over their shoulders—and they do, sometimes with embarrassing and tragic results.
In addition to peer pressure, substance abuse and teenage pregnancy, families now have to contend with "Facebook depression" when children feel their Web personas don't measure up to the real world, cyber bullying and sexting—the sharing of nude photos and videos via mobile devices.
"The adolescent brain is not fully mature until age 25 or so," says University of New Mexico professor of pediatrics Victor C. Strasburger, author of Children, Adolescents, and the Media. "Our job as parents is to limit the damage."
Though she came of age in the "wired" 1990s, Marx worries that all of the gadgets surrounding her daughters are too isolating, and are taking them away from precious family time.
"I had video games when I was a kid, and it was fun,Find detailed product information for howo tractor and other products. but now there's so much more out there that monopolizes people's time," says the radio traffic reporter, who is in her early 30s. "I don't know if kids today would get by without knowing these things. It's becoming all electronic. The only thing electronic I had was the board game Operation."
Marx is not alone in wondering how our increasingly technology-focused world is affecting her children and other "digital natives." Parenting can seem daunting in the digital era. Smartphones, tablets, apps and social networking have transformed how people work, play and communicate. Parents who don't keep up with the changes can feel like they are standing at the precipice of a widening technological gulf. They don't want to lose their ability to stay close to their children and guide them to a successful, healthy future.
According to a survey released by the Kaiser Family Foundation in 2010, children between the ages of 8 and 18 spent more than 53 hours a week on electronic media. In a typical day, they devoted seven hours and 38 minutes listening to music, watching TV and movies, playing video games and hanging out online, with many multitasking and using two forms of media at once.
Scant data exists on the effects of newer digital media on children and adolescents, experts say. The growing ubiquity of mobile digital devices—and the videos, music, games and other online content they provide—seems to beg a re-examination of the roles and responsibilities of parents and children in all of this.
In a clinical report titled "The Impact of Social Media on Children, Adolescents, and Families," the American Academy of Pediatrics took note of the benefits social media can have, including socialization and communication as well as enhanced learning opportunities, but it warned that parents may not truly understand this integral part of their children's lives.
Parents "frequently do not have the technical abilities or time needed to keep pace with their children in the ever-changing Internet landscape," says the study. "In addition, these parents often lack a basic understanding that kids' online lives are an extension of their offline lives. The end result is often a knowledge and technical skill gap between parents and youth, which creates a disconnect in how these parents and youth participate in the online world together."
Kevin Everhart, a licensed psychologist and director of the Psychological Services Center for the University of Colorado-Denver Clinical Health Psychology Program,We mainly supply professional craftspeople with crys talbeads wholesale shamballa Bracele , has treated children who have accessed online pornography, and others who are coping with video gaming and other Internet dependencies. He has seen firsthand how unbridled access to such information and activities can disrupt young lives.
"If parents are not aware of the kinds of images that kids actually do access through digital media, what ends up happening is there's sort of a burden for a child for attempting to cope with what they are seeing, along with not telling their parents because they are concerned they'll get in trouble. This is seen with pornography and also seen with violent images, blatant images of violence and death," Everhart says.
In the end, he concedes that no one really knows how free and open access to so much information on the Web will, in fact, affect children and teens over the long run. "We don't know what the verdict is for what this cohort (generation) is going to endure, or what they are going to be like, but we are actually in a place where we are not going to be able to keep our children from some exposure to things we don't want them to be exposed to," the psychologist adds.
Dana Lauren Berry of Centennial, Colo., has seen the benefits of digital technology in her children's lives. Her sons, Connor, 5, and Lawson, 2, each own an iPad and navigate their way easily to apps and educational games that have improved their ability to recognize letters, spell, rhyme and match images.
"Kids today seem so much smarter," says Berry, a public relations manager for a hotel in Denver. "Technology is so portable, it makes it easier for learning on the go.Klaus Multiparking is an industry leader in innovative parking system technology."
However, Berry and her husband, John, limit the time their children watch TV and use their iPads, and encourage them to do puzzles, read books, and play games like Candy Land and Memory.
"As adults we spend so much time in front of screens. I feel children should get to be children," Berry says.We are pleased to offer the following list of professional mold maker and casters. "Regular play and physical activities come first. We spend a lot of time at our neighborhood park."
As quaint as it seems now, transistor radios worried post-World War II parents. For the first time, teenagers could listen to what they wanted when they wanted, without their parents' input.We recently added Stained glass mosaic Tile to our inventory. Transistors supercharged the rock 'n' roll era, and the career of a swivel-hipped singer named Elvis. With each passing decade, technology—from television, movies and music to video games and the Internet—has been scrutinized for its effects, both good and bad, on children and adolescents.
That scrutiny has since turned to smartphones, tablets, laptops, MP3 players and other digital devices that enable people to communicate with each other 24/7 by text, voice, photo or video. Children and adolescents can access the Web anytime, anywhere and without "PLOS"—parents looking over their shoulders—and they do, sometimes with embarrassing and tragic results.
In addition to peer pressure, substance abuse and teenage pregnancy, families now have to contend with "Facebook depression" when children feel their Web personas don't measure up to the real world, cyber bullying and sexting—the sharing of nude photos and videos via mobile devices.
"The adolescent brain is not fully mature until age 25 or so," says University of New Mexico professor of pediatrics Victor C. Strasburger, author of Children, Adolescents, and the Media. "Our job as parents is to limit the damage."
Drinking to a Freer Russia
Launched earlier this month, it uses banners, opposition flags and
other paraphernalia in its interiors, while drinks are served by
activists who double as bartenders.
"Putin is a thief," chanted opposition leader and anti-state corruption campaigner Alexei Navalny with the crowd, as "Winter, Go Away," a recent documentary chronicling anti-election fraud protests of the late 2011 and early 2012 was shown on two television screens in the main room, when a reporter visited Svoboda Bar on Sunday.
Sunday's screening gathered only a dozen people, but Moscow opposition leader Ilya Yashin packed the place — with its 70 seats occupied and about 30 standing in the aisles — when he came to speak with St. Petersburg audiences on Saturday.
The club would like to invite the popular Navalny — the only Russian to be named in Time magazine's 2012 list of the world's 100 most influential people — in person, but the activist has been banned from leaving Moscow, being the subject of three criminal investigations opened against him after the protests.
Launched with a huge party on Dec. 7, a year since protests against multiple violations during the Dec. 4, 2011 State Duma elections began, Svoboda Bar is in a way a child of the massive anti-fraud rallies and St. Petersburg's answer to Jean-Jacques and Zavtra, the hangouts for activists and intelligentsia in Moscow.
According to Natalya Gryaznevich, the person in charge of the venue's programs who hosted the meeting with Yashin, the bar is operated by activists from Civic Responsibility, the political movement that emerged in the wake of the anti-fraud protests earlier this year — they work here as bartenders or waiters.We have a wide selection of dry cabinet to choose from for your storage needs.
Andrei Pivovarov, a member of the Russian Opposition's Coordination Council, Andrei Davydov of the Young Socialists of Russia, and Civic Responsibility's Daniil Ken and Mikhail Lukyanov invested their own savings into the bar. Pivovarov is in charge of the practical aspects.
"The people who created this bar have never been into business like this, that's why everything is done sporadically, with input coming from those who know how to do these things, and new ideas emerging along the way," Gryaznevich said. "As I see it, our activities will flow smoothly into the activities of the bar, where we will be holding events, meetings and debates."
One of the reasons for establishing an opposition bar was the reluctance of regular bars and clubs to hold politically themed events stemming from fears that they would be shut down by the authorities. "We need a place for holding our political events," Gryaznevich said.One of the most durable and attractive styles of flooring that you can purchase is ceramic or porcelain tiles. "Every time such an event is being planned, a problem emerges, because the owners are afraid."
So far, no threats or warnings from the authorities have reached the management, although three police vehicles with police officers were parked outside Svoboda Bar during the meeting with Yashin on Saturday, while men looking like counter-extremism Center E operatives were seen at the opening earlier this month.
"There have been no checks so far, but we are ready," Gryaznevich said. "Perhaps the owners who are not involved in politics are easier to intimidate, but they know that it would not scare us off."
Svoboda Bar does not stay away from street protests. It invited the Dec. 15 March of Freedom participants for a free drink after the rally, and offered a free drink in exchange for a police report for participating in an unauthorized rally in a Twitter announcement on Monday.
"We'd like to see more new faces here — people who have not yet taken part in protests," Gryaznevich said. "For an average person interested in politics, it's easier to come to a bar than to a rally, because taking part in a rally is a decision,Our technology gives rtls systems developers the ability. because they might be afraid of being detained even if the rally is authorized or getting their photo taken."
Svoboda Bar's nearest events include a Q&A session with Denis Bilunov, the Moscow-based activist and founder of the new Party of December 5, due on Dec. 28, and a New Year party on Dec. 31. The New Year party will feature the year's political roundup, an election for the year's most odious person, the formulation of a list of laws to be abolished over the next year and an alternative presidential television address due to be filmed by the activists themselves.
The businesses are diversified, ranging from fast-food restaurants like Taco Bell and Krystal hamburgers, to be built at Palm Plaza Shopping Center, along with a new and larger Salvation Army on South street. More campus expansion is also planned at Beacon College in downtown Leesburg, along with new doctors' offices around town and an aerospace company, Wipaire, Inc., that will be built and become Leesburg International Airport's largest facility for up 80 employees.
"It feels great," said Commissioner John Christian. "It's shows Leesburg's economy is growing and we want the business community to know that Leesburg is a business-friendly city and we're welcoming new companies that help us to make Leesburg a strong and vibrant city."
Christian is pleased Wipaire Inc., a leading Minnesota-based aircraft service provider with a global business and more than $30 million in annual sales, chose Leesburg as the site for its new Southeastern service center.
Wipaire plans to begin Feb. 1 by leasing a temporary location at Hangar No. 1 on Airport Boulevard, while the company plans to build a larger facility with up to 20,000 square feet of hangar space and another 10,800 square feet of offices on the airport grounds.
"I hope that Wipaire will energize our airport to be a place where jobs are created, and it will be a foundation for other businesses that may not even be aerospace-related, but also could be a benefit to Leesburg business community," Christian said.
Robert Sargent, public information officer for Leesburg, said it's exciting to see the economy on the rebound in Leesburg.
"For quite a few years there, from 2006 to 2009,Why does moulds grow in homes or buildings? there was not a lot going on as the national recession was really taking its toll and everything just kind of stopped and we had some down time," he said. "We are happy to see the area pick up."
"They're all different and great jobs that will fill a broad gamut of our employment base here in Leesburg," he said. "There's everything from Krystal Hamburgers and Bojangles, to higher-level jobs with mechanics and sales people at Jenkins Volkswagen/Hyundai, and when you have development in this area, it builds momentum."
He equates the development as the opportunity to "improve the tax rolls" and bring more jobs to town.
Bojangles, located near Lake Square Mall, will bring 50 new jobs, while construction crews are working to build fast-food restaurants on the other end of town.
"Taco Bell is going to be relocating from their existing location to a nice, new location right next to Popeye's Fried Chicken, in the Palm Plaza Shopping Center," Sargent said. "That construction is moving right along."
The fast-food Mexican restaurant experienced restricted traffic flow at its current location due road changes the state made at the U.S. High 441 interchange.
"I felt bad for those businesses," said Sargent, who believes the new Taco Bell location will be better for the restaurant.We mainly supply professional craftspeople with crys talbeads wholesale shamballa Bracele , "Here was one business that was looking for a new building and they finally got their stuff in order and it's exciting to have Taco Bell coming in."
"Putin is a thief," chanted opposition leader and anti-state corruption campaigner Alexei Navalny with the crowd, as "Winter, Go Away," a recent documentary chronicling anti-election fraud protests of the late 2011 and early 2012 was shown on two television screens in the main room, when a reporter visited Svoboda Bar on Sunday.
Sunday's screening gathered only a dozen people, but Moscow opposition leader Ilya Yashin packed the place — with its 70 seats occupied and about 30 standing in the aisles — when he came to speak with St. Petersburg audiences on Saturday.
The club would like to invite the popular Navalny — the only Russian to be named in Time magazine's 2012 list of the world's 100 most influential people — in person, but the activist has been banned from leaving Moscow, being the subject of three criminal investigations opened against him after the protests.
Launched with a huge party on Dec. 7, a year since protests against multiple violations during the Dec. 4, 2011 State Duma elections began, Svoboda Bar is in a way a child of the massive anti-fraud rallies and St. Petersburg's answer to Jean-Jacques and Zavtra, the hangouts for activists and intelligentsia in Moscow.
According to Natalya Gryaznevich, the person in charge of the venue's programs who hosted the meeting with Yashin, the bar is operated by activists from Civic Responsibility, the political movement that emerged in the wake of the anti-fraud protests earlier this year — they work here as bartenders or waiters.We have a wide selection of dry cabinet to choose from for your storage needs.
Andrei Pivovarov, a member of the Russian Opposition's Coordination Council, Andrei Davydov of the Young Socialists of Russia, and Civic Responsibility's Daniil Ken and Mikhail Lukyanov invested their own savings into the bar. Pivovarov is in charge of the practical aspects.
"The people who created this bar have never been into business like this, that's why everything is done sporadically, with input coming from those who know how to do these things, and new ideas emerging along the way," Gryaznevich said. "As I see it, our activities will flow smoothly into the activities of the bar, where we will be holding events, meetings and debates."
One of the reasons for establishing an opposition bar was the reluctance of regular bars and clubs to hold politically themed events stemming from fears that they would be shut down by the authorities. "We need a place for holding our political events," Gryaznevich said.One of the most durable and attractive styles of flooring that you can purchase is ceramic or porcelain tiles. "Every time such an event is being planned, a problem emerges, because the owners are afraid."
So far, no threats or warnings from the authorities have reached the management, although three police vehicles with police officers were parked outside Svoboda Bar during the meeting with Yashin on Saturday, while men looking like counter-extremism Center E operatives were seen at the opening earlier this month.
"There have been no checks so far, but we are ready," Gryaznevich said. "Perhaps the owners who are not involved in politics are easier to intimidate, but they know that it would not scare us off."
Svoboda Bar does not stay away from street protests. It invited the Dec. 15 March of Freedom participants for a free drink after the rally, and offered a free drink in exchange for a police report for participating in an unauthorized rally in a Twitter announcement on Monday.
"We'd like to see more new faces here — people who have not yet taken part in protests," Gryaznevich said. "For an average person interested in politics, it's easier to come to a bar than to a rally, because taking part in a rally is a decision,Our technology gives rtls systems developers the ability. because they might be afraid of being detained even if the rally is authorized or getting their photo taken."
Svoboda Bar's nearest events include a Q&A session with Denis Bilunov, the Moscow-based activist and founder of the new Party of December 5, due on Dec. 28, and a New Year party on Dec. 31. The New Year party will feature the year's political roundup, an election for the year's most odious person, the formulation of a list of laws to be abolished over the next year and an alternative presidential television address due to be filmed by the activists themselves.
The businesses are diversified, ranging from fast-food restaurants like Taco Bell and Krystal hamburgers, to be built at Palm Plaza Shopping Center, along with a new and larger Salvation Army on South street. More campus expansion is also planned at Beacon College in downtown Leesburg, along with new doctors' offices around town and an aerospace company, Wipaire, Inc., that will be built and become Leesburg International Airport's largest facility for up 80 employees.
"It feels great," said Commissioner John Christian. "It's shows Leesburg's economy is growing and we want the business community to know that Leesburg is a business-friendly city and we're welcoming new companies that help us to make Leesburg a strong and vibrant city."
Christian is pleased Wipaire Inc., a leading Minnesota-based aircraft service provider with a global business and more than $30 million in annual sales, chose Leesburg as the site for its new Southeastern service center.
Wipaire plans to begin Feb. 1 by leasing a temporary location at Hangar No. 1 on Airport Boulevard, while the company plans to build a larger facility with up to 20,000 square feet of hangar space and another 10,800 square feet of offices on the airport grounds.
"I hope that Wipaire will energize our airport to be a place where jobs are created, and it will be a foundation for other businesses that may not even be aerospace-related, but also could be a benefit to Leesburg business community," Christian said.
Robert Sargent, public information officer for Leesburg, said it's exciting to see the economy on the rebound in Leesburg.
"For quite a few years there, from 2006 to 2009,Why does moulds grow in homes or buildings? there was not a lot going on as the national recession was really taking its toll and everything just kind of stopped and we had some down time," he said. "We are happy to see the area pick up."
"They're all different and great jobs that will fill a broad gamut of our employment base here in Leesburg," he said. "There's everything from Krystal Hamburgers and Bojangles, to higher-level jobs with mechanics and sales people at Jenkins Volkswagen/Hyundai, and when you have development in this area, it builds momentum."
He equates the development as the opportunity to "improve the tax rolls" and bring more jobs to town.
Bojangles, located near Lake Square Mall, will bring 50 new jobs, while construction crews are working to build fast-food restaurants on the other end of town.
"Taco Bell is going to be relocating from their existing location to a nice, new location right next to Popeye's Fried Chicken, in the Palm Plaza Shopping Center," Sargent said. "That construction is moving right along."
The fast-food Mexican restaurant experienced restricted traffic flow at its current location due road changes the state made at the U.S. High 441 interchange.
"I felt bad for those businesses," said Sargent, who believes the new Taco Bell location will be better for the restaurant.We mainly supply professional craftspeople with crys talbeads wholesale shamballa Bracele , "Here was one business that was looking for a new building and they finally got their stuff in order and it's exciting to have Taco Bell coming in."
A White Christmas at home
Peter White could have come home to Nova Scotia for the holidays to
relax with friends and family, and not think about the hectic pace of
his new life in London, England. But the urge to be in front of a
microphone was too strong.
Connecting via Skype from his flat in South London—or “the stabby part of town” as White calls it—the former computer engineer looked forward to doing the rounds this week on a four-city Maritime tour that started Wednesday in his home town of New Glasgow at Captain’s Helm Pub, and wraps up on Saturday at Halifax’s Company House.Posts with indoor tracking system on TRX Systems develops systems that locate and track personnel indoors. The shows also include fellow N.S.-to-London transplant Dave Millett, and are going by the title “How Are Things at Home?” just to let the local fans know they miss them and are thinking of them from across the pond.
“I really do miss the city, living in Halifax was so relaxed, it was possible to be happy,” says White, who was featured in his own Comedy Now special and wrote for This Hour Has 22 Minutes before heading overseas last year. “No one in London is actually happy, you’re on edge all the time. It costs seven pounds just to leave the house and go anywhere, and you constantly feel like you’re working; if you’re not doing something, then you should be.
“If I could live in Halifax and work in London, that would be perfect, but I don’t have that kind of time. Or the Air Miles.”
At the time of our pre-Christmas chat, White had just returned from a two-week tour through Europe, mainly Scandinavia and the Baltic countries, where his self-deprecating, and sometimes geek-centred, material seemed to go over well with audiences that could understand him well enough, even if English wasn’t their first language.
As you might expect, there weren’t going to be any jokes about donairs or Tim Horton’s in these sets; White’s observational material has to be a lot more universal.
“Even when I was touring around Canada, I tried not to have too much location-specific material, because it’s just so temporary,” he explains. “I’d always wanted to get to somewhere else. I’ve been conscious of that for a while.
“To be honest, the rest of Europe the crowds are probably a lot easier than London is. They watch so much American TV that they feel kind of cool watching some American-style comedy. I mean, I’m Canadian, but it’s close enough to them that they get kind of excited about it, whereas London is a bit more standoffish.”
But right now, London is exactly where he wants to be, in the heart of “the biggest live standup scene in the world.” White admits it was a tough go at first,High quality stone mosaic tiles. like starting from the beginning once he first got there, but he’s planning to spend another year or two there, now that he’s got management and has established himself on the U.K. comedy circuit to some degree.
“London’s starting to go well. At least, relative to how it was going. I’m living, anyway,” reasons White, who also spends a lot of time on the road in all kinds of venues, doing the kind of grunt work that serves to shape a seasoned comedian.
“One thing I’ve learned is that a small town anywhere in the world is still a small town, it doesn’t matter where you’re at,” he says. “Recently I played Dumfries in Scotland, and it was like being in a place like Springhill. Everyone there is angry at the world, for no real reason.Quickparts builds injection molds using aluminum or steel to meet your program.
“Then I got on the train to get to Aberdeen; it was noon and, without exaggeration, 65 per cent of the train was in the process of getting hammered. Not just young people, there were 60-year-olds passing around bottles of wine and stuff, it was just a zoo.”
In London, White is part of a cadre of Nova Scotia comedians, like Dartmouth native Jason John Whitehead and Cape Breton’s Nick Beaton, who are getting pushed to the next level by being on a stage every day, sometimes doing three or four sets a night. It’s a much different pace than at home, where typically there’d be one 15-minute set in a night and that’s it, with an occasional 45-minute or hour-long headliner.
White says it’s been a breakthrough for him creatively, getting pushed to become comfortable in whatever situation he finds himself, and hone his act for crowds that are more demanding than the audiences he was used to at home.
“I just did two weeks where none of the audiences were native English speakers,” he says. “You just learn to be a little more physical, a little more excited, to get people into it. Performance-wise, it’s been great. The first six months I was here were terrible writing-wise, because I was showcasing every day, and I spent four months doing the same seven minutes to nobody who cared, which was really frustrating.”
This is probably one of the best apps to use on the roads of Metro Manila. It gives Metro Manila drivers something not available in more popular map apps: voice turn-by-turn street navigation. Just search for your destination and the app will plot a route.We mainly supply professional craftspeople with wholesale agate beads from china, It can calculate arrival times and distance to destination. A useful feature is getting traffic advisories from other users as well as posting your own,giving drivers the chance to avoid traffic jams ahead. Once you deviated from your plotted route, the app can recalculate and suggest a new route. Users also have a choice in route calculation between the fastest or shortest way. The app also has a social media function with the capability to chat with other users on the road and form groups. It also has a safety feature. If you try to type on the keyboard while your car is moving, a voice prompt will remind you to stop your car first. Continued use can earn the user points that can unlock the apps other features. Don’t want a plain arrow to indicate your car on the map? Change it to a Ferrai, a Fiat, a Porsche and a VW Beetle. You can even choose your car color. The app may need some getting used. But once you’ve mastered it, Waze can become indispensable to your driving. The best part of the app? It’s free!
The grand daddy of local traffic apps and probably one of the best apps ever to come out of a government office. It gives the real-time traffic situation on major thoroughfares like EDSA, C5, Quezon Avenue, the Coastal Road and Marcos Highway so you can avoid traffic jams and plot your route better. The app is surprisingly accurate and has saved this driver from jams numerous times.Find detailed product information for howo tractor and other products. It has warnings for ongoing construction sites, traffic accidents, stalled vehicles, school dismisals and other causes of traffic. The app’s FAQ is also pretty extensive with among others rules of the number coding scheme, traffic violations and penalties and contact numbers of accredited towing companies. Plans are afoot to increase the number of covered routes.
Connecting via Skype from his flat in South London—or “the stabby part of town” as White calls it—the former computer engineer looked forward to doing the rounds this week on a four-city Maritime tour that started Wednesday in his home town of New Glasgow at Captain’s Helm Pub, and wraps up on Saturday at Halifax’s Company House.Posts with indoor tracking system on TRX Systems develops systems that locate and track personnel indoors. The shows also include fellow N.S.-to-London transplant Dave Millett, and are going by the title “How Are Things at Home?” just to let the local fans know they miss them and are thinking of them from across the pond.
“I really do miss the city, living in Halifax was so relaxed, it was possible to be happy,” says White, who was featured in his own Comedy Now special and wrote for This Hour Has 22 Minutes before heading overseas last year. “No one in London is actually happy, you’re on edge all the time. It costs seven pounds just to leave the house and go anywhere, and you constantly feel like you’re working; if you’re not doing something, then you should be.
“If I could live in Halifax and work in London, that would be perfect, but I don’t have that kind of time. Or the Air Miles.”
At the time of our pre-Christmas chat, White had just returned from a two-week tour through Europe, mainly Scandinavia and the Baltic countries, where his self-deprecating, and sometimes geek-centred, material seemed to go over well with audiences that could understand him well enough, even if English wasn’t their first language.
As you might expect, there weren’t going to be any jokes about donairs or Tim Horton’s in these sets; White’s observational material has to be a lot more universal.
“Even when I was touring around Canada, I tried not to have too much location-specific material, because it’s just so temporary,” he explains. “I’d always wanted to get to somewhere else. I’ve been conscious of that for a while.
“To be honest, the rest of Europe the crowds are probably a lot easier than London is. They watch so much American TV that they feel kind of cool watching some American-style comedy. I mean, I’m Canadian, but it’s close enough to them that they get kind of excited about it, whereas London is a bit more standoffish.”
But right now, London is exactly where he wants to be, in the heart of “the biggest live standup scene in the world.” White admits it was a tough go at first,High quality stone mosaic tiles. like starting from the beginning once he first got there, but he’s planning to spend another year or two there, now that he’s got management and has established himself on the U.K. comedy circuit to some degree.
“London’s starting to go well. At least, relative to how it was going. I’m living, anyway,” reasons White, who also spends a lot of time on the road in all kinds of venues, doing the kind of grunt work that serves to shape a seasoned comedian.
“One thing I’ve learned is that a small town anywhere in the world is still a small town, it doesn’t matter where you’re at,” he says. “Recently I played Dumfries in Scotland, and it was like being in a place like Springhill. Everyone there is angry at the world, for no real reason.Quickparts builds injection molds using aluminum or steel to meet your program.
“Then I got on the train to get to Aberdeen; it was noon and, without exaggeration, 65 per cent of the train was in the process of getting hammered. Not just young people, there were 60-year-olds passing around bottles of wine and stuff, it was just a zoo.”
In London, White is part of a cadre of Nova Scotia comedians, like Dartmouth native Jason John Whitehead and Cape Breton’s Nick Beaton, who are getting pushed to the next level by being on a stage every day, sometimes doing three or four sets a night. It’s a much different pace than at home, where typically there’d be one 15-minute set in a night and that’s it, with an occasional 45-minute or hour-long headliner.
White says it’s been a breakthrough for him creatively, getting pushed to become comfortable in whatever situation he finds himself, and hone his act for crowds that are more demanding than the audiences he was used to at home.
“I just did two weeks where none of the audiences were native English speakers,” he says. “You just learn to be a little more physical, a little more excited, to get people into it. Performance-wise, it’s been great. The first six months I was here were terrible writing-wise, because I was showcasing every day, and I spent four months doing the same seven minutes to nobody who cared, which was really frustrating.”
This is probably one of the best apps to use on the roads of Metro Manila. It gives Metro Manila drivers something not available in more popular map apps: voice turn-by-turn street navigation. Just search for your destination and the app will plot a route.We mainly supply professional craftspeople with wholesale agate beads from china, It can calculate arrival times and distance to destination. A useful feature is getting traffic advisories from other users as well as posting your own,giving drivers the chance to avoid traffic jams ahead. Once you deviated from your plotted route, the app can recalculate and suggest a new route. Users also have a choice in route calculation between the fastest or shortest way. The app also has a social media function with the capability to chat with other users on the road and form groups. It also has a safety feature. If you try to type on the keyboard while your car is moving, a voice prompt will remind you to stop your car first. Continued use can earn the user points that can unlock the apps other features. Don’t want a plain arrow to indicate your car on the map? Change it to a Ferrai, a Fiat, a Porsche and a VW Beetle. You can even choose your car color. The app may need some getting used. But once you’ve mastered it, Waze can become indispensable to your driving. The best part of the app? It’s free!
The grand daddy of local traffic apps and probably one of the best apps ever to come out of a government office. It gives the real-time traffic situation on major thoroughfares like EDSA, C5, Quezon Avenue, the Coastal Road and Marcos Highway so you can avoid traffic jams and plot your route better. The app is surprisingly accurate and has saved this driver from jams numerous times.Find detailed product information for howo tractor and other products. It has warnings for ongoing construction sites, traffic accidents, stalled vehicles, school dismisals and other causes of traffic. The app’s FAQ is also pretty extensive with among others rules of the number coding scheme, traffic violations and penalties and contact numbers of accredited towing companies. Plans are afoot to increase the number of covered routes.
Orenda Elementary School receives donations of iPads
A generous donation from a local information technology training
company has given one Shenendehowa elementary school a giant nudge into
the computer age.
Pam and Jason Krolak, the owners of New Horizons of Albany, donated 22 iPads to Orenda Elementary School’s two kindergarten classes. The donation was made Dec. 19, a day before Shen’s December break.
New Horizons, they said, is aware of the importance new technology plays in people’s daily lives and through the donation hopes that early exposure to the technology will help inspire children to learn and familiarize them with computers and tablets at an early age.
The new iPads, with their bright green protective cases, will be used by the school’s 36 kindergartners. There were also two iPads for the teachers.
The Krolaks’ daughter Molly, 5,Our technology gives rtls systems developers the ability.Argo Mold limited specialize in Plastic injection mould manufacture, is in kindergarten at Orenda, and the couple has a set of triplets who will be attending the classes in just a few of years.
As part of the official ceremony for accepting the donation, the combined kindergarten classes sang a song of thanks written especially for the Krolaks.
They also were read an appropriate book, Shel Silverstein’s “The Giving Tree.” And the Krolaks received one free night of babysitting.
The couple attended the festive early morning ceremony with the triplets, Brooklyn, Braeden and Amelia. The children are 18 months old. When the students got up to sing songs about the alphabet, the triplets joined right in, moving back and forth and watching the teachers’ instructions.
“This is integrating technology into the classrooms,” Mike Smith said. “It’s a shift from the old mentality of having a computer lab that you went to, that computers were separate. This is right there, in their hands. In the high school, they’re learning molecular biology on tablets.”
"The problem is that the U.N. has no extra resources.The oreck XL professional air purifier, The U.High quality stone mosaic tiles.N. has a contingent of about 115,000 peacekeepers in various countries, but in order to send [a peacekeeping mission] to Syria, [the United Nations] will have to withdraw them from somewhere," said a U.N. official, who spoke anonymously.
Since the start of the conflict in March 2011, more than 500,000 Syrians have been displaced, fleeing to neighboring countries such as Jordan, Turkey, Lebanon and Iraq, the U.N. Human Rights Campaign said in December. The death toll has reached about 40,000 people though independent confirmation has been hard to come by given the Assad government's refusal to allow journalists free access.
The Human Rights Watch in April documented the executions of hundreds of civilians and opposition fighters by Syrian security forces acting alone or with pro-government militia in the provinces of Idlib and Homs since December 2011.
"In a desperate attempt to crush the uprising, Syrian forces have executed people in cold blood, civilians and opposition fighters alike," Ole Solvang, emergencies researcher at Human Rights Watch, said in the news release. "They are doing it in broad daylight and in front of witnesses, evidently not concerned about any accountability for their crimes."
Pietrafasa said that as she researched what kind of apps were useful to kindergartners, she found the Gloversville School District also had some in their classrooms.
“We spent a half day just researching apps,” teacher Kim Smith said.
Pulling out one of the iPads, she demonstrated how a student could hold the device in their hands, press an app and learn interactively how to correctly make the letters of the alphabet.
“Most of the apps have different levels so they can work at their own speed,” Kim Smith said. “That’s what’s good about them, they have that variety. It’ll help with our common core standards.”
Smith said 95 percent of the kindergartners already know how to use touch tablets and smart phones. “It’s only a matter of explaining the games and the apps to them,” she said. “They’ll pick it up quick. It makes learning fun.”
As 2012 comes to a close, cracks were appearing in the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad, with his vice president saying neither side in the civil war can win outright amid the specter of possible chemical warfare and reports the beleaguered leader is positioning himself and his family to flee Damascus for a last stand in his ancestral home of Qardaha.
Qardaha, a village in western Syria, is in the coastal Alawite state, where the Alawite minority sect is dominant and the 47-year-old Assad, who rose to power in 2000 following the death of his father, has many supporters.Trade platform for China crystal mosaic manufacturers
A Russian source who met with Assad a number of times told The Sunday Times of London the president is ready to "fight to his last bullet," and could hold on for many months. The newspaper said Middle Eastern intelligence indicates Assad had moved seven Alawite battalions and one missile battalion, some equipped with chemical munitions, to Alawite territories.
Syrian Vice President Farouq al-Sharaa has called for a "historic settlement" to the 21-month-old conflict, which was officially labeled a civil war in July, the Lebanese newspaper al-Akhbar reported.
"The solution has to be Syrian, but through a historic settlement, which would include the main regional countries, and the members of the U.N. Security Council," al-Akhbar quoted al-Sharaa as saying in mid-December.
"The opposition forces combined cannot decide the battle militarily, meanwhile, what the security forces and the army units are doing will not reach a conclusive end."
It had been believed al-Sharaa defected to Jordan in August, but he later resurfaced in Damascus. Rebels have said they would support an interim government led by him.
"This settlement must include stopping all shapes of violence, and the creation of a national unity government with wide powers," he said.
Opposition forces, who began protesting for a more democratic government during the 2011 Arab Spring, withstood heavy shelling and air raids from forces loyal to Assad throughout the year and managed to take control of areas north and east of Aleppo, as well as the cities of Idlib and Bdama and surrounding areas in northwestern Syria, the Institute for the Study of War reported. In eastern Syria, rebels have taken much of Deir Ez-Zor province, except the capital, which is held by Assad's regime.
Pam and Jason Krolak, the owners of New Horizons of Albany, donated 22 iPads to Orenda Elementary School’s two kindergarten classes. The donation was made Dec. 19, a day before Shen’s December break.
New Horizons, they said, is aware of the importance new technology plays in people’s daily lives and through the donation hopes that early exposure to the technology will help inspire children to learn and familiarize them with computers and tablets at an early age.
The new iPads, with their bright green protective cases, will be used by the school’s 36 kindergartners. There were also two iPads for the teachers.
The Krolaks’ daughter Molly, 5,Our technology gives rtls systems developers the ability.Argo Mold limited specialize in Plastic injection mould manufacture, is in kindergarten at Orenda, and the couple has a set of triplets who will be attending the classes in just a few of years.
As part of the official ceremony for accepting the donation, the combined kindergarten classes sang a song of thanks written especially for the Krolaks.
They also were read an appropriate book, Shel Silverstein’s “The Giving Tree.” And the Krolaks received one free night of babysitting.
The couple attended the festive early morning ceremony with the triplets, Brooklyn, Braeden and Amelia. The children are 18 months old. When the students got up to sing songs about the alphabet, the triplets joined right in, moving back and forth and watching the teachers’ instructions.
“This is integrating technology into the classrooms,” Mike Smith said. “It’s a shift from the old mentality of having a computer lab that you went to, that computers were separate. This is right there, in their hands. In the high school, they’re learning molecular biology on tablets.”
"The problem is that the U.N. has no extra resources.The oreck XL professional air purifier, The U.High quality stone mosaic tiles.N. has a contingent of about 115,000 peacekeepers in various countries, but in order to send [a peacekeeping mission] to Syria, [the United Nations] will have to withdraw them from somewhere," said a U.N. official, who spoke anonymously.
Since the start of the conflict in March 2011, more than 500,000 Syrians have been displaced, fleeing to neighboring countries such as Jordan, Turkey, Lebanon and Iraq, the U.N. Human Rights Campaign said in December. The death toll has reached about 40,000 people though independent confirmation has been hard to come by given the Assad government's refusal to allow journalists free access.
The Human Rights Watch in April documented the executions of hundreds of civilians and opposition fighters by Syrian security forces acting alone or with pro-government militia in the provinces of Idlib and Homs since December 2011.
"In a desperate attempt to crush the uprising, Syrian forces have executed people in cold blood, civilians and opposition fighters alike," Ole Solvang, emergencies researcher at Human Rights Watch, said in the news release. "They are doing it in broad daylight and in front of witnesses, evidently not concerned about any accountability for their crimes."
Pietrafasa said that as she researched what kind of apps were useful to kindergartners, she found the Gloversville School District also had some in their classrooms.
“We spent a half day just researching apps,” teacher Kim Smith said.
Pulling out one of the iPads, she demonstrated how a student could hold the device in their hands, press an app and learn interactively how to correctly make the letters of the alphabet.
“Most of the apps have different levels so they can work at their own speed,” Kim Smith said. “That’s what’s good about them, they have that variety. It’ll help with our common core standards.”
Smith said 95 percent of the kindergartners already know how to use touch tablets and smart phones. “It’s only a matter of explaining the games and the apps to them,” she said. “They’ll pick it up quick. It makes learning fun.”
As 2012 comes to a close, cracks were appearing in the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad, with his vice president saying neither side in the civil war can win outright amid the specter of possible chemical warfare and reports the beleaguered leader is positioning himself and his family to flee Damascus for a last stand in his ancestral home of Qardaha.
Qardaha, a village in western Syria, is in the coastal Alawite state, where the Alawite minority sect is dominant and the 47-year-old Assad, who rose to power in 2000 following the death of his father, has many supporters.Trade platform for China crystal mosaic manufacturers
A Russian source who met with Assad a number of times told The Sunday Times of London the president is ready to "fight to his last bullet," and could hold on for many months. The newspaper said Middle Eastern intelligence indicates Assad had moved seven Alawite battalions and one missile battalion, some equipped with chemical munitions, to Alawite territories.
Syrian Vice President Farouq al-Sharaa has called for a "historic settlement" to the 21-month-old conflict, which was officially labeled a civil war in July, the Lebanese newspaper al-Akhbar reported.
"The solution has to be Syrian, but through a historic settlement, which would include the main regional countries, and the members of the U.N. Security Council," al-Akhbar quoted al-Sharaa as saying in mid-December.
"The opposition forces combined cannot decide the battle militarily, meanwhile, what the security forces and the army units are doing will not reach a conclusive end."
It had been believed al-Sharaa defected to Jordan in August, but he later resurfaced in Damascus. Rebels have said they would support an interim government led by him.
"This settlement must include stopping all shapes of violence, and the creation of a national unity government with wide powers," he said.
Opposition forces, who began protesting for a more democratic government during the 2011 Arab Spring, withstood heavy shelling and air raids from forces loyal to Assad throughout the year and managed to take control of areas north and east of Aleppo, as well as the cities of Idlib and Bdama and surrounding areas in northwestern Syria, the Institute for the Study of War reported. In eastern Syria, rebels have taken much of Deir Ez-Zor province, except the capital, which is held by Assad's regime.
2012年12月24日 星期一
Future of Corporate Tower May Hinge on a New Use
The AT&T Building, a lavish $200 million headquarters with a
seven-story arch at 550 Madison Avenue, was a symbol of a resurgent New
York when it opened in 1983 after a decade of municipal woes and
corporate flight.
The 37-story rose-granite tower, now known as the Sony Building, is on the auction block for as much as $1 billion. About 20 prospective buyers submitted bids last week, hoping to turn the building into condominiums, a luxury hotel, a chic retail arcade or maybe even office space for small, high-end firms. But not a corporate headquarters.
The potential evolution says a lot about a city and a neighborhood where Calvin Klein, Armani, Hermès, Dior and Gucci are paying some of the world’s highest retail rents. On 57th Street,We are pleased to offer the following list of professional mold maker and casters. developers of two projects are vying to build North America’s tallest, most gilded residential tower, with condos selling to princes and billionaires for tens of millions of dollars each.
The Sony Building between 55th and 56th Streets, with its wood-paneled board rooms and sweeping white marble staircase, may be more suited today for tenants like hedge funds, which do not flinch at rents above $120 a square foot.
“This building has the right height and the right location to be a success,” said Mitchell Moss, an urban planner at New York University. “The only question is, what goes inside the building? The underlying appeal of that neighborhood has gotten so strong that it’s too expensive for a corporate headquarters.”
Developers turning in their first-round bids included Vornado Realty Trust, Boston Properties,Find detailed product information for howo tractor and other products. Mitsubishi Trust, Mitsui Fudosan and RXR Realty, according to prospective buyers and to real estate executives. Others bidding were Steven C. Witkoff, Harry B. Macklowe and Edward J. Minskoff, they said.
Nearly all of them have partners — including Canadian pension firms,The howo truck is offered by Shiyan Great Man Automotive Industry, sovereign funds and foreign investors — who view Manhattan as one of the safest markets in the world.
But there is no guarantee that Sony will get the price it wants. More than half the prospective buyers fell short of Sony’s billion-dollar expectation, executives said. A select group of bidders will be invited to submit second bids next month.
Prospective sales this year by two other owners of large commercial properties — the 47-story Worldwide Plaza on Eighth Avenue and the 30-story tower at 11 Madison Avenue — fell flat when offers came in far below the $1.5 billion each had sought.
But the Sony Building may come close. “The demand from the global investment community for assets like this is at the highest level I’ve ever seen,” said Dan Fasulo of Real Capital Analytics, a research firm. “Once it’s shined up and brought up to 2013 standards, it’ll compete for some of the highest rents in Manhattan.”
A Sony representative did not respond to requests for comment on the sale.
When the building was under construction in 1981, New York City was struggling to stave off an economic malaise, the loss of industrial jobs, and long-term decay. AT&T’s headquarters, like the IBM Building under construction a block away and Trump Tower around the corner on Fifth Avenue, offered signs of a renaissance.
But AT&T, which was in the midst of divesting itself of all the regional telephone operating companies, soon leased nearly half of the tower to Sony. The Japanese company eventually bought the building in 2002 for $236 million.
Sony is not the dominant force in consumer electronics that it once was. Last April, the company said it would cut 10,000 jobs. Soon, it put the tower up for sale.
Sony’s real estate broker, Douglas Harmon of Eastdil Secured, gave prospective buyers a 216-page confidential offering memorandum entitled, “The Icon at 550 Madison Avenue.” Sony plans to remain in the building for three years, before moving to a new location.
“The future vacancy provides a blank canvas to maximize the property’s wide spectrum of use and pursue a myriad of office, retail, hospitality, and residential options,Klaus Multiparking is an industry leader in innovative parking system technology.” the offering book said.
Still, with Wall Street’s emphasis on quarterly results, many big companies are no longer looking for expensive homes, so the building probably will not attract a major corporate buyer.
In 2011, Jeffrey L. Bewkes, chief executive of Time Warner, described his company’s plush headquarters at the Time Warner Center as “indulgent.” He laid out plans to save money and consolidate company operations in more efficient, less luxurious space.
Many buyers said the Sony Building, now 30, will have to be gutted, which would cost tens of millions of dollars. They are considering a mix of uses, including hotels and high-end shops.
Mr. Witkoff confirmed that he had submitted a bid, with plans to convert the top of the tower to condominiums. “There’s no way that you can make sense out of this deal if it’s office space,” he said. “In my opinion, the only way it works is if the top goes residential. You’ll get the highest numbers from condominiums.”
Several other bidders envision a similar mix of retail and residential. Executives said another bidder, Mr. Macklowe, favored a luxury retail arcade at the base of the building, with luxury office space for smaller firms. Mr. Macklowe built a similar building at 510 Madison but lost it to his lenders during the recent recession.
That’s what I think is happening here. I think that NORAD is getting a very precise, real-time signal on Santa’s location. Google’s location data is probably not as refined. Complicating matters is the fact that Santa moves very, very fast, He can’t be in two places at once. But he can be in two places almost at once, because he moves so fast.
By the way, there are privacy implications if Google is tracking Santa the way I suspect. My assumption, however, is that Santa has granted all the appropriate sharing permissions required for Google to report on his whereabouts. Santa is well-familiar with the need for privacy,We recently added Stained glass mosaic Tile to our inventory. even having a Santa privacy policy of his own.
Also noteworthy, NORAD seems to be tracking as arriving in locations around 3 hours ahead of Google. For example, NORAD put Santa over Beira, Mozambique at 9pm local time there. Google put Santa over Aktobe, Kazakhstan at Midnight local time there.
It might be that NORAD is somehow projecting Santa’s future location in an effort to help parents trying to usher their kids off to sleep. Personally, I long wished for this type of time-shifting, myself. Or perhaps Santa is moving so fast this year that NORAD’s systems are distorting the location. In the past, he was always spotted passing over particular places around midnight, by NORAD. Alternatively, maybe Google’s systems are lagging behind.
The 37-story rose-granite tower, now known as the Sony Building, is on the auction block for as much as $1 billion. About 20 prospective buyers submitted bids last week, hoping to turn the building into condominiums, a luxury hotel, a chic retail arcade or maybe even office space for small, high-end firms. But not a corporate headquarters.
The potential evolution says a lot about a city and a neighborhood where Calvin Klein, Armani, Hermès, Dior and Gucci are paying some of the world’s highest retail rents. On 57th Street,We are pleased to offer the following list of professional mold maker and casters. developers of two projects are vying to build North America’s tallest, most gilded residential tower, with condos selling to princes and billionaires for tens of millions of dollars each.
The Sony Building between 55th and 56th Streets, with its wood-paneled board rooms and sweeping white marble staircase, may be more suited today for tenants like hedge funds, which do not flinch at rents above $120 a square foot.
“This building has the right height and the right location to be a success,” said Mitchell Moss, an urban planner at New York University. “The only question is, what goes inside the building? The underlying appeal of that neighborhood has gotten so strong that it’s too expensive for a corporate headquarters.”
Developers turning in their first-round bids included Vornado Realty Trust, Boston Properties,Find detailed product information for howo tractor and other products. Mitsubishi Trust, Mitsui Fudosan and RXR Realty, according to prospective buyers and to real estate executives. Others bidding were Steven C. Witkoff, Harry B. Macklowe and Edward J. Minskoff, they said.
Nearly all of them have partners — including Canadian pension firms,The howo truck is offered by Shiyan Great Man Automotive Industry, sovereign funds and foreign investors — who view Manhattan as one of the safest markets in the world.
But there is no guarantee that Sony will get the price it wants. More than half the prospective buyers fell short of Sony’s billion-dollar expectation, executives said. A select group of bidders will be invited to submit second bids next month.
Prospective sales this year by two other owners of large commercial properties — the 47-story Worldwide Plaza on Eighth Avenue and the 30-story tower at 11 Madison Avenue — fell flat when offers came in far below the $1.5 billion each had sought.
But the Sony Building may come close. “The demand from the global investment community for assets like this is at the highest level I’ve ever seen,” said Dan Fasulo of Real Capital Analytics, a research firm. “Once it’s shined up and brought up to 2013 standards, it’ll compete for some of the highest rents in Manhattan.”
A Sony representative did not respond to requests for comment on the sale.
When the building was under construction in 1981, New York City was struggling to stave off an economic malaise, the loss of industrial jobs, and long-term decay. AT&T’s headquarters, like the IBM Building under construction a block away and Trump Tower around the corner on Fifth Avenue, offered signs of a renaissance.
But AT&T, which was in the midst of divesting itself of all the regional telephone operating companies, soon leased nearly half of the tower to Sony. The Japanese company eventually bought the building in 2002 for $236 million.
Sony is not the dominant force in consumer electronics that it once was. Last April, the company said it would cut 10,000 jobs. Soon, it put the tower up for sale.
Sony’s real estate broker, Douglas Harmon of Eastdil Secured, gave prospective buyers a 216-page confidential offering memorandum entitled, “The Icon at 550 Madison Avenue.” Sony plans to remain in the building for three years, before moving to a new location.
“The future vacancy provides a blank canvas to maximize the property’s wide spectrum of use and pursue a myriad of office, retail, hospitality, and residential options,Klaus Multiparking is an industry leader in innovative parking system technology.” the offering book said.
Still, with Wall Street’s emphasis on quarterly results, many big companies are no longer looking for expensive homes, so the building probably will not attract a major corporate buyer.
In 2011, Jeffrey L. Bewkes, chief executive of Time Warner, described his company’s plush headquarters at the Time Warner Center as “indulgent.” He laid out plans to save money and consolidate company operations in more efficient, less luxurious space.
Many buyers said the Sony Building, now 30, will have to be gutted, which would cost tens of millions of dollars. They are considering a mix of uses, including hotels and high-end shops.
Mr. Witkoff confirmed that he had submitted a bid, with plans to convert the top of the tower to condominiums. “There’s no way that you can make sense out of this deal if it’s office space,” he said. “In my opinion, the only way it works is if the top goes residential. You’ll get the highest numbers from condominiums.”
Several other bidders envision a similar mix of retail and residential. Executives said another bidder, Mr. Macklowe, favored a luxury retail arcade at the base of the building, with luxury office space for smaller firms. Mr. Macklowe built a similar building at 510 Madison but lost it to his lenders during the recent recession.
That’s what I think is happening here. I think that NORAD is getting a very precise, real-time signal on Santa’s location. Google’s location data is probably not as refined. Complicating matters is the fact that Santa moves very, very fast, He can’t be in two places at once. But he can be in two places almost at once, because he moves so fast.
By the way, there are privacy implications if Google is tracking Santa the way I suspect. My assumption, however, is that Santa has granted all the appropriate sharing permissions required for Google to report on his whereabouts. Santa is well-familiar with the need for privacy,We recently added Stained glass mosaic Tile to our inventory. even having a Santa privacy policy of his own.
Also noteworthy, NORAD seems to be tracking as arriving in locations around 3 hours ahead of Google. For example, NORAD put Santa over Beira, Mozambique at 9pm local time there. Google put Santa over Aktobe, Kazakhstan at Midnight local time there.
It might be that NORAD is somehow projecting Santa’s future location in an effort to help parents trying to usher their kids off to sleep. Personally, I long wished for this type of time-shifting, myself. Or perhaps Santa is moving so fast this year that NORAD’s systems are distorting the location. In the past, he was always spotted passing over particular places around midnight, by NORAD. Alternatively, maybe Google’s systems are lagging behind.
Egypt liberal objects to charter
One of Egypt's leading opposition figures on Monday pledged continued
resistance to his country's Islamist-oriented constitution even if it
is declared to have passed, contending that the process was
fundamentally illegitimate.
Unofficial tallies say nearly two-thirds voted in favor of the draft constitution,Our technology gives rtls systems developers the ability. but turnout was so low that opponents are arguing that the vote should be discounted.
Hamdeen Sabahi, who placed third in the nation's first free presidential race over the summer, said in an interview with The Associated Press that the majority of Egypt's people are not Islamists.Why does moulds grow in homes or buildings?
He argued that the string of election triumphs by President Mohammed Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood group are the result of unfair electoral practices and key mistakes by the liberal opposition, particularly a lack of unity and organization.
"The Muslim Brotherhood is a minority — this is for sure. They get majority votes because of division within the opposition," he said. "If there is transparency (in voting) and unity among civil groups, then surely the majority will turn from the Brotherhood."
Sabahi said the Islamist groups in the country "for sure have tried to steal" the revolution that toppled authoritarian President Hosni Mubarak neat two years ago — "but we will prevent them."
Sabahi said the National Salvation Front — a union of key opposition forces that coalesced in the fight against the draft constitution — is not calling for civil disobedience in rejection of the Islamist-drafted constitution, but for a new constitution through peaceful means.
The path toward such an outcome appears uncertain at best — especially as Sabahi rejected the notion, somewhat plausible in Egypt, of the military stepping in to undo the inconvenient outcomes of politics.
In a sign of the opposition leadership's efforts to coalesce, Sabahi said the grouping would be led in the interim by Nobel laureate Mohamed ElBaradei, the former head of the Vienna-based United Nations nuclear agency.
No confirmation of that was immediately available from ElBaradei.
In the interview, the silver-maned, charismatic former journalist seemed to embody the frustrations of liberal Egyptians today: While championing the democracy and lauding the 2011 revolution that felled Mubarak, they reject the outcome of that revolution, yet seem at something of a loss to cause a change of course.
Tens of thousands of Egyptians took to the streets weeks before the referendum to demand a new assembly with greater diversity write the charter. Instead, an Islamist-dominated assembly hurriedly passed it before a court could rule on the body's legitimacy, and Morsi himself issued decrees, later rescinded, that gave him near absolute powers to push the constitution to a referendum.
Backers of the Brotherhood and others Islamist parties also rallied in support of the charter, leaving the country split and leading to violent clashes between the two camps that killed 10 outside the presidential palace in Cairo this month. That created the impression that street protests can be conjured up to support either side in the current divide.
But only around 30 percent of eligible voters participated in the referendum on the divisive charter. Of that number, unofficial figures estimate that 64 percent voted in support of it.
Sabahi said the low voter turnout shows people were not convinced by the Brotherhood's slogans — nor with the opposition's.
"This means that the battle for politics is concentrated on survival, food, jobs and prices — daily struggles that are the priority of all Egyptians," he said.
Under such circumstances, he said, it was illogical to enshrine the document as a constitution that can be amended only by supermajorities in parliament.
Critics say the new constitution seeks to entrench Islamic rule in Egypt and that the charter does not sufficiently protect the rights of women and minority groups. Morsi and his supporters say the constitution is needed to restore stability in the country, install an elected parliament, build state institutions and renew investor confidence in the economy.
In a reflection of the complex nuances at play, Sabahi refused to describe the current conflict roiling Egypt as a clash between secularism and theocracy, saying that in the Arab world, religion and public life could never be distinct in accordance with the Western model.
Rather, he said, the issue was preventing the Brotherhood from establishing a "tyranny" as a political movement not unlike that of the previous authoritarian regime.
He likened Morsi to the ousted leader, Mubarak, saying the Brotherhood is after absolute power.
"He (Morsi) reached power democratically, but is not exercising power democratically," he said,High quality stone mosaic tiles. adding that the Brotherhood "wants to establish a system of tyranny in their benefit."
Regarding the fears of theocracy, Sabahi said, "We are against separation of religion and state ... The intellect of the Arab region, and Egypt, is built essentially on religion and specifically the Islamic religion."
Nonetheless, Sabahi said the opposition would continue to fight the constitution,We have a wide selection of dry cabinet to choose from for your storage needs. arguing that the low turnout made it illegitimate.
"From the beginning the National Salvation Front said this constitution does not represent the people," he said. "This constitution is not one of national consensus, but of national division."
He said the NSF would now try to remain united in preparation for possible participation in the upcoming parliamentary elections.
He said the front has no immediate plans to unite under one party, but that as a coalition they could win a majority of seats if electoral laws mandated an end to political proselytizing in mosques and placed a limit on the funds used for political campaigns.
Another key issue for the opposition has been enabling people to vote outside their home district. The absence of this has aided the Islamists, who have the money to bus supporters back home to vote. The opposition, though, has also warned that rigging could be made easier if people vote from any location and point to the current use of Brotherhood-manned buses to transport poor voters.
"I am sure that the non-Islamists are the real majority in Egypt. But the Muslim Brotherhood enjoys strong organization, and the forces that oppose them do not have the same organization or finances," he said.
The Brotherhood emerged as the country's strongest political force after the popular uprising that toppled Mubarak nearly two years ago. They won the most seats in parliament, before it was dissolved by the courts, and won the presidency. Liberal and secular groups have consistently failed to beat the Brotherhood at the polls since.
That was until Sabahi, a charismatic populist, appeared as a surprise presidential contender against Morsi and his rival, Ahmed Shafiq, Mubarak's last prime minister, an ex-military man who lured voters with promises of stability.
Sabahi had a last-minute surge after campaigning on promises to help the poor and harkening back to the nationalist, socialist ideology of Gamel Abdel-Nasser, Egypt's president from 1956 to 1970.
Would Sabahi — known as a fervent opponent of Israel — cancel the landmark 1979 peace treaty if he one day ascended to power?
No,We mainly supply professional craftspeople with crys talbeads wholesale shamballa Bracele , he said. The main issues facing Egypt today are resolving internal problems, especially endemic poverty — and he would not risk that priority issue by courting war with a neighbor.
In contrast to the Brotherhood, which has several offices in every Egyptian governorate, Sabahi spoke from the office of a famous Egyptian movie director, who lent him the space.
Unofficial tallies say nearly two-thirds voted in favor of the draft constitution,Our technology gives rtls systems developers the ability. but turnout was so low that opponents are arguing that the vote should be discounted.
Hamdeen Sabahi, who placed third in the nation's first free presidential race over the summer, said in an interview with The Associated Press that the majority of Egypt's people are not Islamists.Why does moulds grow in homes or buildings?
He argued that the string of election triumphs by President Mohammed Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood group are the result of unfair electoral practices and key mistakes by the liberal opposition, particularly a lack of unity and organization.
"The Muslim Brotherhood is a minority — this is for sure. They get majority votes because of division within the opposition," he said. "If there is transparency (in voting) and unity among civil groups, then surely the majority will turn from the Brotherhood."
Sabahi said the Islamist groups in the country "for sure have tried to steal" the revolution that toppled authoritarian President Hosni Mubarak neat two years ago — "but we will prevent them."
Sabahi said the National Salvation Front — a union of key opposition forces that coalesced in the fight against the draft constitution — is not calling for civil disobedience in rejection of the Islamist-drafted constitution, but for a new constitution through peaceful means.
The path toward such an outcome appears uncertain at best — especially as Sabahi rejected the notion, somewhat plausible in Egypt, of the military stepping in to undo the inconvenient outcomes of politics.
In a sign of the opposition leadership's efforts to coalesce, Sabahi said the grouping would be led in the interim by Nobel laureate Mohamed ElBaradei, the former head of the Vienna-based United Nations nuclear agency.
No confirmation of that was immediately available from ElBaradei.
In the interview, the silver-maned, charismatic former journalist seemed to embody the frustrations of liberal Egyptians today: While championing the democracy and lauding the 2011 revolution that felled Mubarak, they reject the outcome of that revolution, yet seem at something of a loss to cause a change of course.
Tens of thousands of Egyptians took to the streets weeks before the referendum to demand a new assembly with greater diversity write the charter. Instead, an Islamist-dominated assembly hurriedly passed it before a court could rule on the body's legitimacy, and Morsi himself issued decrees, later rescinded, that gave him near absolute powers to push the constitution to a referendum.
Backers of the Brotherhood and others Islamist parties also rallied in support of the charter, leaving the country split and leading to violent clashes between the two camps that killed 10 outside the presidential palace in Cairo this month. That created the impression that street protests can be conjured up to support either side in the current divide.
But only around 30 percent of eligible voters participated in the referendum on the divisive charter. Of that number, unofficial figures estimate that 64 percent voted in support of it.
Sabahi said the low voter turnout shows people were not convinced by the Brotherhood's slogans — nor with the opposition's.
"This means that the battle for politics is concentrated on survival, food, jobs and prices — daily struggles that are the priority of all Egyptians," he said.
Under such circumstances, he said, it was illogical to enshrine the document as a constitution that can be amended only by supermajorities in parliament.
Critics say the new constitution seeks to entrench Islamic rule in Egypt and that the charter does not sufficiently protect the rights of women and minority groups. Morsi and his supporters say the constitution is needed to restore stability in the country, install an elected parliament, build state institutions and renew investor confidence in the economy.
In a reflection of the complex nuances at play, Sabahi refused to describe the current conflict roiling Egypt as a clash between secularism and theocracy, saying that in the Arab world, religion and public life could never be distinct in accordance with the Western model.
Rather, he said, the issue was preventing the Brotherhood from establishing a "tyranny" as a political movement not unlike that of the previous authoritarian regime.
He likened Morsi to the ousted leader, Mubarak, saying the Brotherhood is after absolute power.
"He (Morsi) reached power democratically, but is not exercising power democratically," he said,High quality stone mosaic tiles. adding that the Brotherhood "wants to establish a system of tyranny in their benefit."
Regarding the fears of theocracy, Sabahi said, "We are against separation of religion and state ... The intellect of the Arab region, and Egypt, is built essentially on religion and specifically the Islamic religion."
Nonetheless, Sabahi said the opposition would continue to fight the constitution,We have a wide selection of dry cabinet to choose from for your storage needs. arguing that the low turnout made it illegitimate.
"From the beginning the National Salvation Front said this constitution does not represent the people," he said. "This constitution is not one of national consensus, but of national division."
He said the NSF would now try to remain united in preparation for possible participation in the upcoming parliamentary elections.
He said the front has no immediate plans to unite under one party, but that as a coalition they could win a majority of seats if electoral laws mandated an end to political proselytizing in mosques and placed a limit on the funds used for political campaigns.
Another key issue for the opposition has been enabling people to vote outside their home district. The absence of this has aided the Islamists, who have the money to bus supporters back home to vote. The opposition, though, has also warned that rigging could be made easier if people vote from any location and point to the current use of Brotherhood-manned buses to transport poor voters.
"I am sure that the non-Islamists are the real majority in Egypt. But the Muslim Brotherhood enjoys strong organization, and the forces that oppose them do not have the same organization or finances," he said.
The Brotherhood emerged as the country's strongest political force after the popular uprising that toppled Mubarak nearly two years ago. They won the most seats in parliament, before it was dissolved by the courts, and won the presidency. Liberal and secular groups have consistently failed to beat the Brotherhood at the polls since.
That was until Sabahi, a charismatic populist, appeared as a surprise presidential contender against Morsi and his rival, Ahmed Shafiq, Mubarak's last prime minister, an ex-military man who lured voters with promises of stability.
Sabahi had a last-minute surge after campaigning on promises to help the poor and harkening back to the nationalist, socialist ideology of Gamel Abdel-Nasser, Egypt's president from 1956 to 1970.
Would Sabahi — known as a fervent opponent of Israel — cancel the landmark 1979 peace treaty if he one day ascended to power?
No,We mainly supply professional craftspeople with crys talbeads wholesale shamballa Bracele , he said. The main issues facing Egypt today are resolving internal problems, especially endemic poverty — and he would not risk that priority issue by courting war with a neighbor.
In contrast to the Brotherhood, which has several offices in every Egyptian governorate, Sabahi spoke from the office of a famous Egyptian movie director, who lent him the space.
Rapid evolution marks ship design
The result: Ship designs are more fluid; there are more differences
between ships built from the same basic blueprint, and older ships are
sent into dry dock to be retrofitted with features from newer ships.
Among the features on the last class of ships that seem to be keepers are more elaborate water parks and sports decks, Norwegian's cabins for the solo traveler, spa-linked staterooms, exclusive luxury areas on non-luxury ships, more niche bars and ever-more-specialized restaurants.
"One thing they all have in common is increasing options, especially for dining and drinking," said Carolyn Spencer Brown, editor-in-chief of Cruise Critic. "Norwegian Cruise Line has been the innovator here, and now others are following suit in significant ways. It's recognizing that travelers don't want to be limited to set dining hours.
"Definitely the increasing use of outdoor spaces during the night as well as the day is a really great new innovation, a nice change from the days when people went inside at sundown. Princess Cruises gets a lot of credit for jump-starting this; its Movies Under the Stars has led to other really cool uses, from Celebrity's Lawn Club (where live jazz under the stars is a highlight) to Royal Caribbean's high dive acrobatics and its Central Park."
Ship design changes reflect the lifestyle that passengers have on shore, Del Rio said. Just as homes are bigger than they were a generation or two ago,Quickparts builds injection molds using aluminum or steel to meet your program. his line's ships are bigger and so are staterooms. Dining is healthier and has more of a gourmet flair, the ambience and dress are more casual, and the stateroom has more amenities.
Carnival already has a larger ship with a new design under construction. So do Princess,We mainly supply professional craftspeople with wholesale agate beads from china, Norwegian, Royal Caribbean and Holland America. Not all the old blueprints are being thrown out. In addition to its two new "Project Sunshine" ships on order, Royal Caribbean is negotiating for construction of a third Oasis-class ship, the mega-ship that carries 5,400 passengers, to be delivered in 2016.
"We're always looking at how to improve," said Gus Antorcha, Carnival's senior vice president for guest commerce. "Guests are expecting more. They expect more choices, and they expect more value from their vacation. That has really forced us to think a lot about the product,The term 'hands free access control' means the token that identifies a user is read from within a pocket or handbag. how to keep pace with consumer preferences. With Fun Ship 2.0, that's what we have been doing. We have been focused on improving the dining experience,The term 'hands free access control' means the token that identifies a user is read from within a pocket or handbag. bars, entertainment, and the outer decks."
"Our product is very 'fun in the sun,' " Antorcha said. "Our guests want to be in the pool and in the sun." So Carnival beefed up the experience around the pool deck with Fun Ship 2.0, expanding the water park, adding outdoor seating on a lower deck, bars and eateries, including Guy Fieri's Burger Joint, interactive Hasbro game shows and new entertainment. The line is also retrofitting more than a dozen older ships with some of the amenities.
Or consider the Celebrity Solstice-class ships, a design so popular that most of the line's older ships have been retrofitted - "Solsticized" - with some of its features, including spa staterooms, several new bars and restaurants, and the iLounge, a computer center. Even within the Solstice class, the ships continued to evolve. On the last two, the Corning glass-blowing shop was replaced by the Lawn Club, a grassy area on the top deck with alcoves, and the Lawn Club Grill.
Celebrity wanted more high-end suites on its newest ship, said Harri Kulovaara, executive vice president of Maritime & Newbuilding, so it added a deck. That allowed the company to add 42 suites, including 34 AquaClass spa suites (a new category) and Celebrity's first two-bedroom suite, which also has a glass-enclosed shower cantilevered out from Deck 14 and a tub on the veranda.
But there's not necessarily consensus about the changes. One of next year's two new ships, the Royal Princess, will have a larger, three-deck atrium that will hold a pizzeria, wine bar, coffee bar and other features designed to turn it into the ship's central hangout. Norwegian's new Breakaway, on the other hand, will put its hangout space outside on new promenades that have waterfront restaurant seating intended to increase the passengers' connection with the sea, said Kevin Sheehan, Norwegian's CEO.
The line will continue to build cabins for singles that were introduced on the Norwegian Epic - smaller inside cabins designed for one, with portholes looking out on the corridor and access to a lounge exclusively for guests in those cabins.
"To me, that (solo stateroom) was a very important thing," Sheehan. "As in the rest of the industry ... there is a large market of people who want to travel alone and we didn't have an alternative for them."
Now, he said, Norwegian is adding solo cabins on the Pride of America while it's in dry dock and will add them to other ships, although older ships won't have the lounge.
At the same time, he said, the standard balcony stateroom that debuted on Norwegian Epic has been redesigned after widespread complaints about the bathroom, which had been deconstructed into separate parts - toilet, shower, sink - and offered minimal privacy.
The company has already done away with another feature that debuted on Norwegian Epic, a faux ice skating rink that no one used, but that took a lot of labor to set up and take down every day. Sheehan learned about the problem from a co-worker who didn't recognize him when he spent two weeks posing as a crew member for the CBS reality TV series "Undercover Boss." He immediately got rid of the rink.
In the aftermath of the horrific tragedy in Newtown, Conn., many are calling for a ban on rifles such as the Bushmaster AR-15 assault rifle used in the shootings. I am not a member of the NRA, but I do believe that guns do not kill people per se, people use guns to kill people. If Adam Lanza hadn’t had access to the AR-15 assault rifle he could have used the hand guns he carried to commit his massacre. That does not mean we shouldn’t close the loop hole in gun control by not allowing people to buy guns at trade shows without background checks and registration.
I believe one aspect of recent attacks in the U.S. on innocent people in malls,High quality stone mosaic tiles. a mosque, and movie theater, etc., is partly due to 10 years of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and video games. Hollywood and the 24-hour television news media have graphically highlighted aspects of these wars. The raid on Osama bin Laden was covered in extensive detail, including the White House involvement, and similar actions in recent movies. Years ago this would have been kept secret and certainly the deadly details of who shot when and how. In essence, we properly honor and highlight our military warriors, but at the same time deplore random civilian violence.
I don’t believe it is coincidental that the perpetrators of these crimes have been dressed with military vests and other gear as well as using an assault weapon. In their own minds I suspect they are mimicking combat scenes, but when confronted by law enforcement they take their own lives. Also, many action video games children can play are extremely realistic and gory.
Among the features on the last class of ships that seem to be keepers are more elaborate water parks and sports decks, Norwegian's cabins for the solo traveler, spa-linked staterooms, exclusive luxury areas on non-luxury ships, more niche bars and ever-more-specialized restaurants.
"One thing they all have in common is increasing options, especially for dining and drinking," said Carolyn Spencer Brown, editor-in-chief of Cruise Critic. "Norwegian Cruise Line has been the innovator here, and now others are following suit in significant ways. It's recognizing that travelers don't want to be limited to set dining hours.
"Definitely the increasing use of outdoor spaces during the night as well as the day is a really great new innovation, a nice change from the days when people went inside at sundown. Princess Cruises gets a lot of credit for jump-starting this; its Movies Under the Stars has led to other really cool uses, from Celebrity's Lawn Club (where live jazz under the stars is a highlight) to Royal Caribbean's high dive acrobatics and its Central Park."
Ship design changes reflect the lifestyle that passengers have on shore, Del Rio said. Just as homes are bigger than they were a generation or two ago,Quickparts builds injection molds using aluminum or steel to meet your program. his line's ships are bigger and so are staterooms. Dining is healthier and has more of a gourmet flair, the ambience and dress are more casual, and the stateroom has more amenities.
Carnival already has a larger ship with a new design under construction. So do Princess,We mainly supply professional craftspeople with wholesale agate beads from china, Norwegian, Royal Caribbean and Holland America. Not all the old blueprints are being thrown out. In addition to its two new "Project Sunshine" ships on order, Royal Caribbean is negotiating for construction of a third Oasis-class ship, the mega-ship that carries 5,400 passengers, to be delivered in 2016.
"We're always looking at how to improve," said Gus Antorcha, Carnival's senior vice president for guest commerce. "Guests are expecting more. They expect more choices, and they expect more value from their vacation. That has really forced us to think a lot about the product,The term 'hands free access control' means the token that identifies a user is read from within a pocket or handbag. how to keep pace with consumer preferences. With Fun Ship 2.0, that's what we have been doing. We have been focused on improving the dining experience,The term 'hands free access control' means the token that identifies a user is read from within a pocket or handbag. bars, entertainment, and the outer decks."
"Our product is very 'fun in the sun,' " Antorcha said. "Our guests want to be in the pool and in the sun." So Carnival beefed up the experience around the pool deck with Fun Ship 2.0, expanding the water park, adding outdoor seating on a lower deck, bars and eateries, including Guy Fieri's Burger Joint, interactive Hasbro game shows and new entertainment. The line is also retrofitting more than a dozen older ships with some of the amenities.
Or consider the Celebrity Solstice-class ships, a design so popular that most of the line's older ships have been retrofitted - "Solsticized" - with some of its features, including spa staterooms, several new bars and restaurants, and the iLounge, a computer center. Even within the Solstice class, the ships continued to evolve. On the last two, the Corning glass-blowing shop was replaced by the Lawn Club, a grassy area on the top deck with alcoves, and the Lawn Club Grill.
Celebrity wanted more high-end suites on its newest ship, said Harri Kulovaara, executive vice president of Maritime & Newbuilding, so it added a deck. That allowed the company to add 42 suites, including 34 AquaClass spa suites (a new category) and Celebrity's first two-bedroom suite, which also has a glass-enclosed shower cantilevered out from Deck 14 and a tub on the veranda.
But there's not necessarily consensus about the changes. One of next year's two new ships, the Royal Princess, will have a larger, three-deck atrium that will hold a pizzeria, wine bar, coffee bar and other features designed to turn it into the ship's central hangout. Norwegian's new Breakaway, on the other hand, will put its hangout space outside on new promenades that have waterfront restaurant seating intended to increase the passengers' connection with the sea, said Kevin Sheehan, Norwegian's CEO.
The line will continue to build cabins for singles that were introduced on the Norwegian Epic - smaller inside cabins designed for one, with portholes looking out on the corridor and access to a lounge exclusively for guests in those cabins.
"To me, that (solo stateroom) was a very important thing," Sheehan. "As in the rest of the industry ... there is a large market of people who want to travel alone and we didn't have an alternative for them."
Now, he said, Norwegian is adding solo cabins on the Pride of America while it's in dry dock and will add them to other ships, although older ships won't have the lounge.
At the same time, he said, the standard balcony stateroom that debuted on Norwegian Epic has been redesigned after widespread complaints about the bathroom, which had been deconstructed into separate parts - toilet, shower, sink - and offered minimal privacy.
The company has already done away with another feature that debuted on Norwegian Epic, a faux ice skating rink that no one used, but that took a lot of labor to set up and take down every day. Sheehan learned about the problem from a co-worker who didn't recognize him when he spent two weeks posing as a crew member for the CBS reality TV series "Undercover Boss." He immediately got rid of the rink.
In the aftermath of the horrific tragedy in Newtown, Conn., many are calling for a ban on rifles such as the Bushmaster AR-15 assault rifle used in the shootings. I am not a member of the NRA, but I do believe that guns do not kill people per se, people use guns to kill people. If Adam Lanza hadn’t had access to the AR-15 assault rifle he could have used the hand guns he carried to commit his massacre. That does not mean we shouldn’t close the loop hole in gun control by not allowing people to buy guns at trade shows without background checks and registration.
I believe one aspect of recent attacks in the U.S. on innocent people in malls,High quality stone mosaic tiles. a mosque, and movie theater, etc., is partly due to 10 years of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and video games. Hollywood and the 24-hour television news media have graphically highlighted aspects of these wars. The raid on Osama bin Laden was covered in extensive detail, including the White House involvement, and similar actions in recent movies. Years ago this would have been kept secret and certainly the deadly details of who shot when and how. In essence, we properly honor and highlight our military warriors, but at the same time deplore random civilian violence.
I don’t believe it is coincidental that the perpetrators of these crimes have been dressed with military vests and other gear as well as using an assault weapon. In their own minds I suspect they are mimicking combat scenes, but when confronted by law enforcement they take their own lives. Also, many action video games children can play are extremely realistic and gory.
Farmer tax guides
The Farmer's Tax Guide for use in preparing 2012 income tax returns
is now available through the Pierce County Extension office. This free
publication includes a large amount of useful information, including
explanations and examples that can be used to complete the farm tax
return.Find detailed product information for howo tractor
and other products. The guide begins with a summary that highlights tax
law changes for 2012, as well as a section on what is new for 2013.
Other sections in the guide discuss record keeping systems, accounting
methods, farm income, farm business expenses, soil and water
conservation expenses, depreciation, depletion and amortization, gains
and losses, self-employment tax, employment taxes and a sample return.
Each year the North Dakota Crop Improvement and Seed Association (NDCISA) sponsors six scholarships for the NDSU College of Agriculture. Each scholarship will be for $1000, with three of them going to incoming freshmen and the other three to undergraduates. Scholarship applications and application information is available through the Pierce County Extension office. The application deadline for these scholarships is February 15, 2013.
This time of year homeowners may begin to notice condensation and/or ice forming on their windows. Condensation on windows can lead to problems such as damage to the windows and surrounding walls, as well as the potential for mold development. Despite a homeowner's best efforts to seal up the house in the fall with a fresh bead of caulk around windows and replacing weather stripping around doors, condensation can still occur.
Condensation and ice form on windows when the window surface is below the dew-point for the air near the window, causing some of the moisture in the air to condense on the window. This happens because air has the ability to hold varying amounts of water, depending on temperature. The warmer the air, the more water holding capacity it has. Colder air has less room for water molecules, causing them to stick together. When the heated air in a home comes in contact with cold air next to windows, it cools. The cooler air causes the excess moisture to stick to the window as condensation. This is the same thing that happens on a chilled beverage glass.
Excess moisture in a home can come from a variety of sources. Each person in a house adds 3 pints of water vapor to the air every day just from breathing. Add to this the water from showers, cooking and laundry and it adds up quickly.
If you notice condensation on double- or triple-pane windows, you most likely have too much humidity in your house.The oreck XL professional air purifier, You should strive for relative humidity levels around 40 percent in the winter. Any higher and you risk condensation and mold issues; any lower and the air is too dry. Air that is too dry can cause dry skin and nasal passages,High quality stone mosaic tiles. which could lead to respiratory illness. With a double-pane window, condensation should begin to appear when the outside temperature dips below zero, if the relative humidity level in the house is 40 percent. With triple-glaze windows, condensation should not begin to show until the outside temperatures reach closer to minus 40 F. If humidity levels are considerably higher than 40 percent, you can begin running vent fans in the bathroom and kitchen to reduce these levels. Just make sure the fans vent to the outside. Venting into the attic could cause unseen moisture problems,Argo Mold limited specialize in Plastic injection mould manufacture, including mold growth.
Many people use dehumidifiers, but they generally are ineffective if humidity levels are below 50 percent, which is common in the winter. If condensation is occurring on windows behind draperies, try leaving the drapes open at night.
Newer construction has created homes that are extremely airtight. The owners of these homes may want to invest in an air-to-air exchange system, which brings dry air in from the outside and replaces the warm, moist air in your home. These systems use a heat exchanger to salvage as much as 70 percent of the heat from the indoor air.
Some newer ideas being used involve installing low-volume ventilation fans in areas such as the bathroom. These fans either run continuously or are controlled by a humidistat. When the humidity rises above the desired level, the fan kicks in and runs until the lower level is achieved.
Elegant, exquisite, mysterious, and exotic: these are some of the most common words called to mind when people think of orchids. Unlike other plants with more simple charms, orchids have a reputation as being "intimidating," not only because they are difficult to grow, but also because of the sheer variety of the plant species and the high prices they can command.
To many flower lovers, orchids are like people in that they long for understanding and the right hands to take care of them.
And in the eyes of Alex Sánchez, an orchid curator from the Shanghai Botanical Garden, they are "tolerant and resilient" plants. "Once you start to grow them, it is a hobby you can never quit. It is addictive," Sánchez told the Global Times.
"Before leaving Spain to come to China,Trade platform for China crystal mosaic manufacturers I was the co-owner of a successful, medium-sized advertising agency with a log of big customers. And for more than 20 years I have devoted every minute of my free time to orchids," he told the Global Times.
He developed his love for orchids from his grandfather who was also an orchid hobbyist and he started to grow his own plants at the age of 18.
Back in Spain, Shanchez had his own orchid nursery containing more than 800 different species, and for which he created an automatic watering system.
"Orchids are very clever plants in the sense that they are very adaptive to the environment in which they live," said Sánchez. "And they are able to attract pollinators for reproduction by such methods as scent and mimicry. Some of them give off sweet scents to attract bees, while others produce foul-smelling liquids to lure flies in to help with reproduction," he explained.
Sánchez points out that the key to growing orchids well is to try to duplicate the plant's natural conditions as closely as possible.
For some orchids which are epiphytes - meaning they grow on other objects - and which cling to rough bark or even stone, it is best not to let water accumulate in them, and to keep their roots dry, said Sánchez.
"Ventilation is the most important factor. You can keep an orchid without water for a month, some for three months, as some of them come from places that have very dry seasons. Without water, they can grow, but not flower. Proper ventilation is important in keeping the plant healthy," he added.
"I need to come in every day because, if at any moment the bed for the seeds turns yellow and the seed pod starts to open, then I need to bring them into the laboratory."
The lab is where Sánchez carries out his research and contains several shelves of "baby" orchids in glass bottles.
"Once I get the seeds, I put them in a special medium with certain chemicals, or with food for the seeds to grow into a small plant in the lab. It takes three years before the plant will actually flower. And you need a lot of patience to grow very rare species," he said.
Each year the North Dakota Crop Improvement and Seed Association (NDCISA) sponsors six scholarships for the NDSU College of Agriculture. Each scholarship will be for $1000, with three of them going to incoming freshmen and the other three to undergraduates. Scholarship applications and application information is available through the Pierce County Extension office. The application deadline for these scholarships is February 15, 2013.
This time of year homeowners may begin to notice condensation and/or ice forming on their windows. Condensation on windows can lead to problems such as damage to the windows and surrounding walls, as well as the potential for mold development. Despite a homeowner's best efforts to seal up the house in the fall with a fresh bead of caulk around windows and replacing weather stripping around doors, condensation can still occur.
Condensation and ice form on windows when the window surface is below the dew-point for the air near the window, causing some of the moisture in the air to condense on the window. This happens because air has the ability to hold varying amounts of water, depending on temperature. The warmer the air, the more water holding capacity it has. Colder air has less room for water molecules, causing them to stick together. When the heated air in a home comes in contact with cold air next to windows, it cools. The cooler air causes the excess moisture to stick to the window as condensation. This is the same thing that happens on a chilled beverage glass.
Excess moisture in a home can come from a variety of sources. Each person in a house adds 3 pints of water vapor to the air every day just from breathing. Add to this the water from showers, cooking and laundry and it adds up quickly.
If you notice condensation on double- or triple-pane windows, you most likely have too much humidity in your house.The oreck XL professional air purifier, You should strive for relative humidity levels around 40 percent in the winter. Any higher and you risk condensation and mold issues; any lower and the air is too dry. Air that is too dry can cause dry skin and nasal passages,High quality stone mosaic tiles. which could lead to respiratory illness. With a double-pane window, condensation should begin to appear when the outside temperature dips below zero, if the relative humidity level in the house is 40 percent. With triple-glaze windows, condensation should not begin to show until the outside temperatures reach closer to minus 40 F. If humidity levels are considerably higher than 40 percent, you can begin running vent fans in the bathroom and kitchen to reduce these levels. Just make sure the fans vent to the outside. Venting into the attic could cause unseen moisture problems,Argo Mold limited specialize in Plastic injection mould manufacture, including mold growth.
Many people use dehumidifiers, but they generally are ineffective if humidity levels are below 50 percent, which is common in the winter. If condensation is occurring on windows behind draperies, try leaving the drapes open at night.
Newer construction has created homes that are extremely airtight. The owners of these homes may want to invest in an air-to-air exchange system, which brings dry air in from the outside and replaces the warm, moist air in your home. These systems use a heat exchanger to salvage as much as 70 percent of the heat from the indoor air.
Some newer ideas being used involve installing low-volume ventilation fans in areas such as the bathroom. These fans either run continuously or are controlled by a humidistat. When the humidity rises above the desired level, the fan kicks in and runs until the lower level is achieved.
Elegant, exquisite, mysterious, and exotic: these are some of the most common words called to mind when people think of orchids. Unlike other plants with more simple charms, orchids have a reputation as being "intimidating," not only because they are difficult to grow, but also because of the sheer variety of the plant species and the high prices they can command.
To many flower lovers, orchids are like people in that they long for understanding and the right hands to take care of them.
And in the eyes of Alex Sánchez, an orchid curator from the Shanghai Botanical Garden, they are "tolerant and resilient" plants. "Once you start to grow them, it is a hobby you can never quit. It is addictive," Sánchez told the Global Times.
"Before leaving Spain to come to China,Trade platform for China crystal mosaic manufacturers I was the co-owner of a successful, medium-sized advertising agency with a log of big customers. And for more than 20 years I have devoted every minute of my free time to orchids," he told the Global Times.
He developed his love for orchids from his grandfather who was also an orchid hobbyist and he started to grow his own plants at the age of 18.
Back in Spain, Shanchez had his own orchid nursery containing more than 800 different species, and for which he created an automatic watering system.
"Orchids are very clever plants in the sense that they are very adaptive to the environment in which they live," said Sánchez. "And they are able to attract pollinators for reproduction by such methods as scent and mimicry. Some of them give off sweet scents to attract bees, while others produce foul-smelling liquids to lure flies in to help with reproduction," he explained.
Sánchez points out that the key to growing orchids well is to try to duplicate the plant's natural conditions as closely as possible.
For some orchids which are epiphytes - meaning they grow on other objects - and which cling to rough bark or even stone, it is best not to let water accumulate in them, and to keep their roots dry, said Sánchez.
"Ventilation is the most important factor. You can keep an orchid without water for a month, some for three months, as some of them come from places that have very dry seasons. Without water, they can grow, but not flower. Proper ventilation is important in keeping the plant healthy," he added.
"I need to come in every day because, if at any moment the bed for the seeds turns yellow and the seed pod starts to open, then I need to bring them into the laboratory."
The lab is where Sánchez carries out his research and contains several shelves of "baby" orchids in glass bottles.
"Once I get the seeds, I put them in a special medium with certain chemicals, or with food for the seeds to grow into a small plant in the lab. It takes three years before the plant will actually flower. And you need a lot of patience to grow very rare species," he said.
2012年12月19日 星期三
Why big data means big business for online retailers
The explosive growth of online –
and now omni-channel retailing – has resulted in a tremendous increase in
transactional and shopper data. Retailers see opportunities to use this data not
only to better personalise the shopping experience, but also to influence
merchandising decisions on their sites, and in the case of multi-channel
retailers, at store level.
Retailers that are harnessing the power of big data – companies such as Boots, Marks & Spencer and John Lewis – are seeing their efforts pay off with higher customer spending and improved retention rates.
While retailers are increasingly using data to improve the customer experience, there is still a long way to go before we can say the industry is truly data-driven. Due to the complexity of accessing, integrating and analysing data, as well as the time and cost of implementing data management systems, there is a bottleneck between retailers and this valuable asset. In a study by CEB, it was found that only 11% of retailers look at data to make decisions – let alone use data to drive real-time decision-making.
To thrive in today's business world, companies must adopt not just the technologies and talent to manage big data, but also the organisational culture. A data-driven company is a more meritocratic company,Our technology gives rtls systems developers the ability. allowing numbers and results (instead of someone's rank or tenure) to provide the baseline for decision-making.
Companies such as Amazon and Google thrive on the principle that nobody's idea is above or below being tested. This type of flat hierarchical structure empowers everyone in the organisation to generate and test ideas.Directory ofchina glass mosaic Tile Manufacturers, By using data to not only deliver an exceptional user experience, but also to drive incremental change, organisations will reduce time and costs spent on IT while also encouraging innovation.
Not all data is created equally. What sources of data should you acquire, and how can you get them? Can you ask your customers nicely for it? If so, what should you provide in return for data? You need to be asking yourselves all of these questions.
Securing the most meaningful data upfront will enable you to truly personalise your shoppers' experience. Being transparent with what information is collected, and providing options for how any such data are used, offers customers a sense of control and ownership in exchange for what they've shared.
Once you determine which data matters most for your business, consider and test the available data platforms to understand how you can best analyse and act upon your acquired data. Traditional relational databases may be prohibitively expensive and less suited to the vast majority of unstructured customer data that is generated today – increasingly, cloud-based, open-source, non-relational database systems are enabling in-house analytics teams to perform ad hoc queries on complex data sets to quickly monetise customer data.
Customers don't think in channels – they expect a consistent experience from a retailer, whether they choose to shop in-store, online or by mobile. All retailers, whether multi-channel or not, need to develop a single view of the customer in order to provide this consistency and drive the execution of personalised, relevant marketing campaigns.
Getting this right can be extremely difficult, but becomes much easier when using open-source tools that can more easily integrate unstructured data sets from online transactions, in-store loyalty card activity and a myriad other sources.We mainly supply professional craftspeople with crys talbeads wholesale shamballa Bracele ,
Once a single view has been created, it is possible to tie together the execution of a message between multiple channels and target customers, allowing for personalised campaigns such as banner adverts, emails and website views. Personalisation brings better and more relevant retail experiences for consumers and helps retailers to accelerate shopping decisions through more relevant product exposure.
Data-driven companies such as Amazon and Google never stop testing. Retailers should adopt a robust experimental platform and replace costly IT project expenditures with small, low-cost and easy-to-execute tests. This is only possible if data can be easily accessed for ad hoc queries by the analytics team. By performing constant and ongoing tests of business process design, pricing, offer management,High quality stone mosaic tiles. user interface design and marketing programmes, solutions can be improved incrementally and with a higher success rate.
Most retailers can only allocate the budget and resources for an average of three major IT projects each year,We have a wide selection of dry cabinet to choose from for your storage needs. yet some projects that may not necessarily have the strongest ROI – such as social tool development – make their way on to the roadmap. Testing these innovations before committing to a major implementation will provide an accurate forecast of the results and help retailers steer clear of frivolous IT expenditures.
Amazon has a virtually unlimited budget, yet they test every move they make before implementing it across the site. Take a page from their playbook and add rigorous testing to your decision-making process.
Consumer purchasing decisions are influenced by a variety of external factors, including weather, location and special events. Weather, census and calendar data are just a few samples of data sets that can all be integrated into data management systems so that it becomes possible to more accurately predict customers' needs. By using this data, retailers have the opportunity to be creative when delivering the most relevant product recommendations and promotions to customers. One example of this is highlighted in the results of a study conducted by Lovehoney, which showed that levels of shopping activity were directly proportionate to the level of customer alcohol consumption. This allowed them to target customers between the hours of 4pm and 10pm, at times when they were most relaxed with the purchasing process.
The ability to identify, harness and (crucially) monetise relevant data can create a powerful advantage for retailers, yet many companies are only just starting to come to terms with how to turn data into meaningful customer insight. To become a data-driven organisation, retailers must adopt a culture of innovation, embrace open-source technologies and put data at the heart of every decision they make. Big data is only going to get bigger so there's no better time than the present for retailers to start treating data as their most cherished asset.
Retailers that are harnessing the power of big data – companies such as Boots, Marks & Spencer and John Lewis – are seeing their efforts pay off with higher customer spending and improved retention rates.
While retailers are increasingly using data to improve the customer experience, there is still a long way to go before we can say the industry is truly data-driven. Due to the complexity of accessing, integrating and analysing data, as well as the time and cost of implementing data management systems, there is a bottleneck between retailers and this valuable asset. In a study by CEB, it was found that only 11% of retailers look at data to make decisions – let alone use data to drive real-time decision-making.
To thrive in today's business world, companies must adopt not just the technologies and talent to manage big data, but also the organisational culture. A data-driven company is a more meritocratic company,Our technology gives rtls systems developers the ability. allowing numbers and results (instead of someone's rank or tenure) to provide the baseline for decision-making.
Companies such as Amazon and Google thrive on the principle that nobody's idea is above or below being tested. This type of flat hierarchical structure empowers everyone in the organisation to generate and test ideas.Directory ofchina glass mosaic Tile Manufacturers, By using data to not only deliver an exceptional user experience, but also to drive incremental change, organisations will reduce time and costs spent on IT while also encouraging innovation.
Not all data is created equally. What sources of data should you acquire, and how can you get them? Can you ask your customers nicely for it? If so, what should you provide in return for data? You need to be asking yourselves all of these questions.
Securing the most meaningful data upfront will enable you to truly personalise your shoppers' experience. Being transparent with what information is collected, and providing options for how any such data are used, offers customers a sense of control and ownership in exchange for what they've shared.
Once you determine which data matters most for your business, consider and test the available data platforms to understand how you can best analyse and act upon your acquired data. Traditional relational databases may be prohibitively expensive and less suited to the vast majority of unstructured customer data that is generated today – increasingly, cloud-based, open-source, non-relational database systems are enabling in-house analytics teams to perform ad hoc queries on complex data sets to quickly monetise customer data.
Customers don't think in channels – they expect a consistent experience from a retailer, whether they choose to shop in-store, online or by mobile. All retailers, whether multi-channel or not, need to develop a single view of the customer in order to provide this consistency and drive the execution of personalised, relevant marketing campaigns.
Getting this right can be extremely difficult, but becomes much easier when using open-source tools that can more easily integrate unstructured data sets from online transactions, in-store loyalty card activity and a myriad other sources.We mainly supply professional craftspeople with crys talbeads wholesale shamballa Bracele ,
Once a single view has been created, it is possible to tie together the execution of a message between multiple channels and target customers, allowing for personalised campaigns such as banner adverts, emails and website views. Personalisation brings better and more relevant retail experiences for consumers and helps retailers to accelerate shopping decisions through more relevant product exposure.
Data-driven companies such as Amazon and Google never stop testing. Retailers should adopt a robust experimental platform and replace costly IT project expenditures with small, low-cost and easy-to-execute tests. This is only possible if data can be easily accessed for ad hoc queries by the analytics team. By performing constant and ongoing tests of business process design, pricing, offer management,High quality stone mosaic tiles. user interface design and marketing programmes, solutions can be improved incrementally and with a higher success rate.
Most retailers can only allocate the budget and resources for an average of three major IT projects each year,We have a wide selection of dry cabinet to choose from for your storage needs. yet some projects that may not necessarily have the strongest ROI – such as social tool development – make their way on to the roadmap. Testing these innovations before committing to a major implementation will provide an accurate forecast of the results and help retailers steer clear of frivolous IT expenditures.
Amazon has a virtually unlimited budget, yet they test every move they make before implementing it across the site. Take a page from their playbook and add rigorous testing to your decision-making process.
Consumer purchasing decisions are influenced by a variety of external factors, including weather, location and special events. Weather, census and calendar data are just a few samples of data sets that can all be integrated into data management systems so that it becomes possible to more accurately predict customers' needs. By using this data, retailers have the opportunity to be creative when delivering the most relevant product recommendations and promotions to customers. One example of this is highlighted in the results of a study conducted by Lovehoney, which showed that levels of shopping activity were directly proportionate to the level of customer alcohol consumption. This allowed them to target customers between the hours of 4pm and 10pm, at times when they were most relaxed with the purchasing process.
The ability to identify, harness and (crucially) monetise relevant data can create a powerful advantage for retailers, yet many companies are only just starting to come to terms with how to turn data into meaningful customer insight. To become a data-driven organisation, retailers must adopt a culture of innovation, embrace open-source technologies and put data at the heart of every decision they make. Big data is only going to get bigger so there's no better time than the present for retailers to start treating data as their most cherished asset.
Preventative healthcare in 2030
Over the last few months I have been immersed in the
year 2030. Specifically, asking what some of today's brands might be doing, how
they might have evolved and how they could be successful in a sustainable future
without losing what makes them unique.
Our team at Dragon Rouge was made up of sustainability experts, strategists and designers - exploring six very different brands. Through Brand Futures , we brought to life how easyJet, Argos,Our technology gives rtls systems developers the ability. Morrisons, Rio Tinto, Primark and Bupa could adapt to the challenges ahead, building on three core elements. The starting point for each concept was the brand, what is the brand promise and essence? We then wove in foresight, what can we expect over the coming decades? And insight, what do consumers and customers desire and need, and what barriers do we need to overcome?
For some brands, sustainability seems out of reach and ultimately out of character – like it doesn't really fit, not comfortably anyway. We wanted to show that all kinds of brands can evolve to meet consumer and customer needs in a different, sustainable future and that this can be done without every brand becoming an ill fitting, eco-version of itself. .
To design a credible brand experience and purpose we needed to establish a set of assumptions about what 2030 would be like. A set of eight principles for 2030 emerged from our foresight work, from climate curbing to creating a lasting legacy.
One of the principles focuses on the role of brands in health. On top form predicts that in 2030, brands will be instrumental in keeping society healthy:
The steadily increasing prevalence and cost of lifestyle diseases and mental health illnesses during the 20-teens overwhelmed public healthcare provision and the ability of society to cope. Brands took the opportunity to play a positive role in society by developing healthy products and services and connecting communities and individuals to promote mental and physical well-being. Today, brands are a fundamental part of maintaining high quality of life and reducing the burden on public healthcare.
The Bupa concept challenged us to think about how a brand that is known today for helping people to find health through a broad range of healthcare services, could successfully make a business out of pro-actively advancing the health and well-being of society, which ultimately would lessen people's reliance on the very services it provides.
It didn't take long to work out that the most beneficial service Bupa could provide in future would be keeping people as far from healthcare as possible, reducing the need for visits to the doctor to an absolute minimum. In essence, Bupa could become the global preventive healthcare specialist.
By 2030, Bupa should be known for keeping you one step ahead of healthcare. Its OpenHealth platform keeps you informed of your health status in real-time via a tracker implant and passes on direct, personalised feedback in response to your health status. A low immune system, for example, will trigger suggestions for immunity boosting meals and vitamins.China plastic moulds manufacturers directory. Location tracking warns of bugs in your area you might want to avoid, and if you're managing your weight, OpenHealth can keep you up to speed on practical ways you can integrate exercise into day to day activity.Our technology gives rtls systems developers the ability. All with the intent of keeping you far from the doctor's waiting room. And entrenched in the belief that preventative healthcare should be available to all, much of Bupa's OpenHealth platform is freely accessible globally, until the point of access to healthcare and direct, personalised feedback.
Ultimately the brand foresight and insight approach looks for a win-win-win solution. A win for business and brand – in this case Bupa broadens its reach to the general public, building its reputation as a leading and trusted specialist, and paying customers buy into being and staying healthy, rather than treatment. Through foresight that wholly embraces sustainability challenges, environment and society gain a win – in this case a less intensive per capita healthcare provision (public and private) and more active lifestyles.Manufactures flexible plastic and synthetic rubber hose tubing, And a win for people whose health and wellbeing has been enhanced through the growth and success of a brand that embraced their real need to lead a healthy life, not rely on a reactive healthcare service.
Shell engineers used the full capabilities and advantages of HART Communication to facilitate device configuration, loop testing, startup checks, valve tuning, safety device SIL (Safety Integrity Level) ratings, and real-time centralized device status and diagnostics. The result was a safe and efficient start-up, continued safe and reliable plant operation, real-time daily instrument troubleshooting, and both preventable and predictive ongoing maintenance.
The existing Shell Scotford facilities were already using HART technology successfully but were using only a portion of the full capabilities of the technology. To leverage the full intelligence of their HART-enabled devices, the Shell team decided to broaden the application of HART Communication beyond the use of handheld device configuration.
“Our decision to broaden our application of HART technology beyond the use of handheld device configuration saved us time and money in all phases of this project,” says Andy Bahniuk, Shell Instrumentation Technologist. “With all the HART data available in one centralized control room, staff in operations, maintenance and instrumentation had ready access to this valuable information which ensured total confidence for both the operators and engineers that all devices were functioning properly.”
The Shell team used HART Communication and standard HART methods on the devices for loop function testing and process variable simulation with all testing centralized from one location. In some cases, where a device could not be tested without process present, such as a vortex or ultrasonic flowmeter, testing with device methods provided a perfect substitute. This ensured total confidence for both the operator and engineer that all field devices functioned properly. The procedure confirmed that all critical parameters were loaded successfully, saved 30% of the time normally required, and eliminated the potential for human error.
During control narrative and safety cause-and-effect testing, loop test methods were also used to simulate various process values and to walk through different process scenarios. This testing saved considerable time before the final phase of commissioning and start-up. Some of the critical and complex safety narratives involved more than 15 inputs as well as multiple outputs. Using HART Communication and simulating all these inputs from the control room enabled Shell to test and complete with confidence gaining more than 50% overall time saving during this phase.We are pleased to offer the following list of professional mold maker and casters.
The value and versatility of HART technology during commissioning and start-up activities proved even more critical while trying to achieve a steady-state process condition. HART Communication was used for tuning the smart DVC positioners for optimal process control and valve response time. It also allowed Shell to use the DVC6000 methods to fine tune the positioner to match the controller as well as perform valve calibrations in half the time.
Smart valve positioners also provide the ability to read the digital feedback of the valve position value without any additional hardware. With the information received from the positioner on the control valve, they are able to pass the digital feedback value using the HART fourth variable (QV) through the FDM gateway. This value is used on graphics to show the actual valve position feedback. This has eliminated the need for any external hardware in addition to the valve positioner, saving approximately $2,000 per valve.
Our team at Dragon Rouge was made up of sustainability experts, strategists and designers - exploring six very different brands. Through Brand Futures , we brought to life how easyJet, Argos,Our technology gives rtls systems developers the ability. Morrisons, Rio Tinto, Primark and Bupa could adapt to the challenges ahead, building on three core elements. The starting point for each concept was the brand, what is the brand promise and essence? We then wove in foresight, what can we expect over the coming decades? And insight, what do consumers and customers desire and need, and what barriers do we need to overcome?
For some brands, sustainability seems out of reach and ultimately out of character – like it doesn't really fit, not comfortably anyway. We wanted to show that all kinds of brands can evolve to meet consumer and customer needs in a different, sustainable future and that this can be done without every brand becoming an ill fitting, eco-version of itself. .
To design a credible brand experience and purpose we needed to establish a set of assumptions about what 2030 would be like. A set of eight principles for 2030 emerged from our foresight work, from climate curbing to creating a lasting legacy.
One of the principles focuses on the role of brands in health. On top form predicts that in 2030, brands will be instrumental in keeping society healthy:
The steadily increasing prevalence and cost of lifestyle diseases and mental health illnesses during the 20-teens overwhelmed public healthcare provision and the ability of society to cope. Brands took the opportunity to play a positive role in society by developing healthy products and services and connecting communities and individuals to promote mental and physical well-being. Today, brands are a fundamental part of maintaining high quality of life and reducing the burden on public healthcare.
The Bupa concept challenged us to think about how a brand that is known today for helping people to find health through a broad range of healthcare services, could successfully make a business out of pro-actively advancing the health and well-being of society, which ultimately would lessen people's reliance on the very services it provides.
It didn't take long to work out that the most beneficial service Bupa could provide in future would be keeping people as far from healthcare as possible, reducing the need for visits to the doctor to an absolute minimum. In essence, Bupa could become the global preventive healthcare specialist.
By 2030, Bupa should be known for keeping you one step ahead of healthcare. Its OpenHealth platform keeps you informed of your health status in real-time via a tracker implant and passes on direct, personalised feedback in response to your health status. A low immune system, for example, will trigger suggestions for immunity boosting meals and vitamins.China plastic moulds manufacturers directory. Location tracking warns of bugs in your area you might want to avoid, and if you're managing your weight, OpenHealth can keep you up to speed on practical ways you can integrate exercise into day to day activity.Our technology gives rtls systems developers the ability. All with the intent of keeping you far from the doctor's waiting room. And entrenched in the belief that preventative healthcare should be available to all, much of Bupa's OpenHealth platform is freely accessible globally, until the point of access to healthcare and direct, personalised feedback.
Ultimately the brand foresight and insight approach looks for a win-win-win solution. A win for business and brand – in this case Bupa broadens its reach to the general public, building its reputation as a leading and trusted specialist, and paying customers buy into being and staying healthy, rather than treatment. Through foresight that wholly embraces sustainability challenges, environment and society gain a win – in this case a less intensive per capita healthcare provision (public and private) and more active lifestyles.Manufactures flexible plastic and synthetic rubber hose tubing, And a win for people whose health and wellbeing has been enhanced through the growth and success of a brand that embraced their real need to lead a healthy life, not rely on a reactive healthcare service.
Shell engineers used the full capabilities and advantages of HART Communication to facilitate device configuration, loop testing, startup checks, valve tuning, safety device SIL (Safety Integrity Level) ratings, and real-time centralized device status and diagnostics. The result was a safe and efficient start-up, continued safe and reliable plant operation, real-time daily instrument troubleshooting, and both preventable and predictive ongoing maintenance.
The existing Shell Scotford facilities were already using HART technology successfully but were using only a portion of the full capabilities of the technology. To leverage the full intelligence of their HART-enabled devices, the Shell team decided to broaden the application of HART Communication beyond the use of handheld device configuration.
“Our decision to broaden our application of HART technology beyond the use of handheld device configuration saved us time and money in all phases of this project,” says Andy Bahniuk, Shell Instrumentation Technologist. “With all the HART data available in one centralized control room, staff in operations, maintenance and instrumentation had ready access to this valuable information which ensured total confidence for both the operators and engineers that all devices were functioning properly.”
The Shell team used HART Communication and standard HART methods on the devices for loop function testing and process variable simulation with all testing centralized from one location. In some cases, where a device could not be tested without process present, such as a vortex or ultrasonic flowmeter, testing with device methods provided a perfect substitute. This ensured total confidence for both the operator and engineer that all field devices functioned properly. The procedure confirmed that all critical parameters were loaded successfully, saved 30% of the time normally required, and eliminated the potential for human error.
During control narrative and safety cause-and-effect testing, loop test methods were also used to simulate various process values and to walk through different process scenarios. This testing saved considerable time before the final phase of commissioning and start-up. Some of the critical and complex safety narratives involved more than 15 inputs as well as multiple outputs. Using HART Communication and simulating all these inputs from the control room enabled Shell to test and complete with confidence gaining more than 50% overall time saving during this phase.We are pleased to offer the following list of professional mold maker and casters.
The value and versatility of HART technology during commissioning and start-up activities proved even more critical while trying to achieve a steady-state process condition. HART Communication was used for tuning the smart DVC positioners for optimal process control and valve response time. It also allowed Shell to use the DVC6000 methods to fine tune the positioner to match the controller as well as perform valve calibrations in half the time.
Smart valve positioners also provide the ability to read the digital feedback of the valve position value without any additional hardware. With the information received from the positioner on the control valve, they are able to pass the digital feedback value using the HART fourth variable (QV) through the FDM gateway. This value is used on graphics to show the actual valve position feedback. This has eliminated the need for any external hardware in addition to the valve positioner, saving approximately $2,000 per valve.
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