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The issue of biotechnological inventions in many respects represents a significant challenge to jurisprudence. [ 1 ] The commissariats in the European Patent Convention 2000 ( EPC ) and the Biotech Directive are missing in pull offing this challenge, in visible radiation of the fact that they are obscure and ca n’t be utilized to reject indecorous promotions.
This note will critically analyze the statement by looking deep into patent Torahs and their reading by European Patent Office ( EPO ) . First, this text will specify “Biotechnology” and label the commissariats of EPC and the Biotech Directive covering with biotechnology. Furthermore the text will discourse briefly how morality influences the patent rights that are granted to biotech innovations. Furthermore some instances demoing the uncertainnesss and contentions ( arouses out while construing and enforcing commissariats of EPC and The directive ) will besides be highlight, turn outing the commissariats of EPC and bio directive are ill-defined and non even able to place weather an innovation is immoral.
To be patentable, biotechnological innovations have to run into the same standard as those in any other field of engineering. Patents can merely be granted for innovations that are new, involve an imaginative measure and are susceptible of industrial application [ TM1 ] . A specific legal definition of freshness has developed over the old ages, with “ new ” significance “ made available to the public [ TM2 ] “ . This means, for illustration, that a human cistron, which existed before but was “ concealed ” from the populace in the sense of holding no recognized being, can be patented when it is isolated from its environment or when it is produced by agencies of a proficient procedure and every bit long as its industrial application is disclosed in the patent application [ TM3 ] . All other demands of patentability must besides be fulfilled [ TM4 ] .
Basically biological procedures for the production of workss and animate beings, [ 8 ] i.e. classical genteelness consisting crossing and choice.
Second, the reading of the works and carnal assortments exclusion may be debatable. The footing of this exclusion was that, under the International Convention for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants ( UPOV ) , another method exists besides patenting through which to obtain legal protection for works assortments. The Convention declared that works assortments were entitled either to a particular rubric of protection or to a patent, but non both. [ 25 ] Unlike workss, nevertheless, animate beings do non hold protection outside the range of the EC patent system, under the UPOV or any other convention.
On the other manus, beside all these fortunes, in Europe, a argument on biotechnology patents started in the late eightiess with the purpose of clear uping the differentiation between what is patentable and what is non, and harmonizing EU member provinces ‘ Torahs in this country. This led to the acceptance on 6 July 1998 of EU Directive 98/44/EC on the legal protection of biotechnological innovations. The directive has been implemented by all EU member provinces. Equally early as 1999, the EPC undertaking provinces decided to integrate the directive as secondary statute law into the Implementing Regulations to the EPC. Together with the EPC articles on substantial patent jurisprudence, these regulations now provide the footing for make up one’s minding on the patentability of biotechnology applications at the EPO.
However, the patent system has become another sphere for the runs of the Green Party, environmental groups, and animate being rights militants to seek to modulate scientific discipline and engineering. [ 49 ] In fact, biological patents have been granted routinely since the 1800s, [ 50 ] but ethical concerns did non come in the kingdom of the patent system until familial technology blossomed. Public concern over patenting biotechnology may reflect a public reaction to the range and edification of familial technology involved in biotechnology due to misperceptions and baseless fearof familial technology. This is illustrated by a series of determinations in the Europe. In 1970, the German Supreme Court allowed a life being to be patented in the Red Dove instance. [ 51 ] That instance preceded the development of familial technology and was non followed by any important public contention. [ 52 ] However, following the coming of familial technology the 1980 United States Supreme Court keeping in Chakrabarty, which paralleled the Red Dove determination in rule by keeping genetically engineered bacteriums to be patentable, was followed by a public argument over the morality of patenting living affair. [ 53 ] Then, in 1987 the United States Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences determined in Ex Parte Allen that higher life signifiers, such as oysters, were patentable. [ 54 ] That determination triggered significantly more controversy [ 55 ] than a typical Board determination. ” [ 56 ] Finally, the 1987 PTO determination to let genetically engineered animate beings such as the Onco-mouse to be patented stirred enormous contention. [ 57 ] This litany indicates that argument over patenting biotechnology has sharpened with the edification and usage of biotechnology despite the fact that the underlying scientific rules and patent processs remain the same.
There is a distinguishable dearth of instance jurisprudence that discusses ethical issues as a obviation to patentability. This is the instance even in the EPO determinations despite the being of Article 53 ( a ) , which explicitly allows a consideration of moralss for patentability. The EPO Guidelines indicate that Article 53 ( a ) is to be invoked merely in “ rare and utmost instances ” [ 58 ] and is aimed at forestalling utmost state of affairss such as public violences and condemnable behaviour [ 59 ] The deficiency of treatment prior to HARVARD/Onco-mouse may bespeak that moralss were by and large non considered in patenting determinations. In fact, the Examining Division ab initio stated in HARVARD/Onco-mouse that it does non see patent jurisprudence an appropriate legislative tool and hence declined to govern under Article 53 ( a ) . ” [ 60 ] To a limited extent, the EPO Guidelines on Article 53 ( a ) and the instances are lighting on the function moralss should play in the country of patentability. Ethical motives have been considered sing the usefulness demand that all patentable innovations must run into in both the EC and the United States. The issue is whether ethical issues render an innovation “ useless ” harmonizing to statutory demands for patentability. [ 61 ] In the United States, tribunals historically have been loath to deny patents based entirely on ethical concerns [ 62 ] and see an innovation patentable so long as it has some moral usage. [ 63 ] The drafters of the EPO Guidelines seem to agree in this consequence. The Guidelines province that a patent may be granted if an innovation has both an violative and non-offensive usage. [ 64 ] The Guidelines set forth as an illustration a procedure for interrupting unfastened safes ; that is a procedure that may be violative if used by burglars, but which is potentially non-offensive and really utile if used by a locksmith in an exigency. [ 65 ] Enforcing barriers to biotechnological patents will non forestall the progress of familial technology or turn to the ethical issues raised by scientific promotion. These issues will prevail regardless of whether patents are granted. [ 66 ] Furthermore, even if the EC ignores the field of biotechnology, its international rivals will non. [ 67 ] As the United States Supreme Court stated, “ The grant or denial of patents on microorganisms is non likely to set an terminal to familial research nevertheless whether claims are patentable may find whether research attempts are accelerated by the hope of wages or slowed by privation of inducements. ” [ 68 ] In Germany a particular Commission of Inquiry on the Opportunities and Risks of Genetic Technology echoed these penetrations and stated that the types of “ unfavorable judgment of familial technology are frequently at the same time or chiefly unfavorable judgments of over-arching schemes which have developed independently of familial technology affecting basic jobs of industrialisation. ” [ 69 ] The Directive enacted by the EC because it recognizes the possible ethical concerns and the world of scientific advancement. [ 70 ] The international rivals of the EC are capitalising on biotechnology and encouraging scientific invention by leting biotechnological patents to publish under systems more indulgent than the EPC. The Directing Begins to turn to the EC spread in protection for biotechnological innovations, which are important to the commercial and international fight of the EC, by mandating unvarying legal protection. Although the range of protection for biotechnological innovations under the EPC and the directive is limited, transition of the Directive was still a necessary measure to take in contracting the spread between the EC and its international rivals. Whether the Directive will accomplish its ends remains to be seen. However, the history of the European Onco-mouse has shown that the current mentality for biotechnological inventions will stay black if no action is taken.The Onco-mouse presently stands entirely in an country of unequal and cloudy protection for biotechnology inventions. Without immediate action on the portion of the Commission and member provinces, the EC will stand entirely in its ethical argument as other states at the same time commercialize biotechnology and pull off ethical concerns associated with biotechnological innovations.


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Ornamental oregano sounds like a mistake. Anyone who has ever grown Greek Oregano, or any other culinary oregano, will tell you it is pretty plain Jane. But, there are oreganos that are drop dead gorgeous. These include Dwarf Pink Saso Oregano, Dittany of Crete, Hopley's Purple, Kent Beauty Oregano, Marshall's Memory Oregano, Rosenkuppel Oregano and Showy Pink Oregano.
Some of these like Dwarf Pink, Hopley's Purple, Rosenkuppel, Marshall's Memory and Showy Pink have flower heads similar to Greek Oregano except instead of plain white they are dunked in rich colors of pink and purple.
Others like Dittany of Crete, and Kent Beauty have, not only the tiny colorful flowers, but also large colorful bracts that run from chartreuse to pink and are reminiscent of hops.
All of these oregano flowers are excellent for drying. They bloom for a long time in summer and can be cut at will. The tiny individual flowers are delicate, so be gentle when you cut and bunch. They will remain with the bracts if treated tenderly. Cut enough flower stems to make a small bouquet and arrange it before you bundle it so it is attractive. Twist tie it near the flowers leaving the long stems below. It only takes a day or two of hanging upside down to dry.
If the flowers are grouped very tightly so they support each other, they can be stuck in a dry vase to dry. By leaving the stems long, arrangements can be made later and stems trimmed to fit the need. Use sharp shears or the blooms will fall. Large arrangements can be made in the field with other flowers like Baby's Breath, Statice and Powis Castle Artemisa.
Dwarf Pink, Hopley's Purple, Kent Beauty and Showy Pink are hardy to about Zone 5, while Dittany of Crete is hardy from about zone 8. All of these oreganos die back to the ground in most areas over winter. They emerge fresh each spring and usually flower in the summer. After flowering, it is important to cut them back to the ground. Like all Oreganos, these plants like full sun and good drainage. Good drainage is especially important in areas with heavy winter rains. They all do well in containers.
Ornamental oreganos have no taste, although Dittany has been used for medicinal purposes. It is odd that their beauty denies them flavor while flavor denies culinary oreganos beauty.
Ornamental Oreganos make a great addition to our Crafter's Herb Garden Six Pack.

industry_corpus2: Agriculture & Fisheries


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Welcome back to the SEO basics series on our digital marketing blog. Today I’ll be taking a look at the very essence of SEO, keyword research, and why you need to get this right above everything else. Right, no time to dilly dally – let’s crack on!
Knowing which keywords to get your site to rank for is the first and most important step of SEO. This is because by targeting the right keywords you will receive the right kind of traffic to your website – traffic that will result in brand interest, leads and ultimately sales. In order to do this effectively, you will want to spend a healthy amount of time doing thorough keyword research.
In a nutshell, keyword research is the means of finding out what people are typing into a search engine when they have a query or request. Once you gain this insight, you can not only see which the most popular search phrases are, but also shifts in demand and gaps in your market.
To this effect, keywords can be used not just to push a sale, but also in various forms of content marketing which can foster brand interest and loyalty.
The question you should always be asking yourself is: how valuable is this keyword to my website? A lot of this depends on the content of your site, as you will want your landing pages to be as relevant to a user’s search request as possible. This also depends on what the users’ intent is – they may be trying to gain information, share/connect with other people or buy/sell a product online.
Let’s take an example – a searcher who types in ‘Madagascan grey parrot’ into Google will most likely be after some sort information on this bird species, whereas a user who types ‘parrot for sale clapham’ clearly wants to make a purchase. As a keyword research service, we need to make sure that your webpage is ranking in the right place at the right time for that user – and that they are happy with what they find when come across your page.
As you can see, these highly competitive keywords, some of which may be searched for millions of times per month, make up the fat head and chunky middle of the search demand graph. But ignore the long tail keywords at your peril! Even though these may be searched for only a handful of times per month, they are usually much more specific to a request, my previous example ‘parrot for sale clapham’ falling into this category. The long tail also contains an incredibly vast range of keyword combinations, due to the fact we, as searchers, use a wide variety of phrases to search for similar things. Keep track of as many of these combinations as realistically possible…change in market demands mean new and different keywords are being produced every day.
Hopefully that has given you more of a clear overview as to what keyword research is and why it’s so vital to your online business. In my next blog I’ll go through the steps of performing effective keyword research, so stay tuned!
If you have any queries about SEO, no matter how ‘long-tail’ they may be, please drop me a line at james@passiondigital.co.uk and I’ll gladly get back to you.

industry_corpus2: Computing & Telecommunications


text: © Arto Salo, 2015. This publication is copyrighted. You may download, display and print it for your own personal use. Commercial use is prohibited.

industry_corpus2: Others


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When you require Builders within the area - make SRJ Wattridge your first and only choice. We are an award winning, experienced, family run business with extensive knowledge and ability in most aspects of building and landscaping.
We undertake a range of excellent services including Builders .
For more information on the services we can provide, please do not hesitate to get in touch with us and we will be more than happy to discuss all your needs and requirements. Call us today for Builders in the area.

industry_corpus2: Real Estate & Construction


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Before Tinder, there were pie suppers.
My affection for the pomp and spectacle of old-timey courting rituals runs deep: I was weaned from birth on the booming male vocals and corn-covered fields of Oklahoma. I swooned over and pined after the rugged, color-coordinated mountain men of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.
They can sing, dance and plow a field? Count me in.
While I’ve yet to achieve my dream of singing Bless Your Beautiful Hide while gazing love-drunk into the eyes of a strapping man, the revival of pie supper culture might just provide me with the opportunity.
At first blush, the concept of a pie supper seems almost laughably simple: Women from a community prepare their signature pies (from apple butter to chocolate pudding) to be raffled off for charity as a social event. Beginning in the 1900s and continuing in rural hamlets through the mid-1960s, pie suppers provided a way for schools to raise much-needed pocket change for new books and volunteer fire departments to buy proper flame-dousing equipment.
“I had a pie supper … made $57.50 and bought books and pictures,” said Stella E. McLain from Higginsville, Missouri in the 1915 Missouri State Teachers Association Bulletin.
An upcoming pie supper was often the topic of sewing circles and feed store chatter for months prior to the night in question, offering an excuse for farming families – so often spread out and isolated – to gather together, gossip and give back simultaneously.
Single men would bid on the eligible ladies’ boxes, and the winner of each box would share the snacks inside with the gal.
On closer inspection, though, pie suppers are more than just a form of antiquated altruism, possessing soap opera-levels of nuance and intrigue festering beneath the surface.
Pie suppers are a sugary spin-off from the “box socials” popularized in England in the late 1800s, which found their way to America by the turn of the 20th century. The premise of the basic box supper was two-fold. First, women were asked to fill a box (or basket) with enough delectable goodies for two people to share as a lunch, then decorate it with elaborate ribbons, bows and doo-dads. The boxes crafted by “single” and “married” women were separated on two tables. “Married” boxes were primarily an excuse for the spoken-for women to peacock in front of other wives.
At the other table, single men would bid on the eligible ladies’ boxes, and the winner of each box would share the snacks inside with the gal who assembled the creation. Box socials (and, eventually, pie suppers) were the ultimate grab-and-go blind date with a feel-good charity kicker.
Boxes of pies at pie supper in Muskogee County, Oklahoma.
The girl delivered her pie to the person who bid highest in Muskogee County, Oklahoma.
Males gathered for pie auction at the school house in Muskogee County, Oklahoma.
Another shot from pie supper in Muskogee County, Oklahoma when everyone was eating pies after the auction ended.
While the fundraiser was the stated goal, pie suppers were ripe with courting rituals: lovelorn boys would try for months to secretly learn which girl crafted which pie, praying for a shot to share a slice with his beloved after successfully bidding on her sugary concoction. Other romance-tinged prizes were often awards to attendees, including a “beauty cake” given to the unwed girl who received the most community votes (although the school teacher frequently took the cake – literally – as a show of good will).
Today, it’s not hard to imagine pie suppers coming back into vogue as a playful way to meet that special someone. Better yet, why not swap gender roles in the creation of a 21st century pie supper, with lads crafting their best tarts and galettes for the ladies to fuss over?
When the great pie supper resurgence takes place, I’ll be waiting patiently with my caramel apple pie – ready to hobnob with my neighbors, sashay into a line dance and bat my eyes as a prospective beau.


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With video growing so rapidly, it’s no surprise that respondents from our 2018 State of Captioning survey reported increased budgets since the previous year. In 2017, 16% of organizations reported an annual captioning budget over $10,000 compared with 32% of organizations in 2018. However, while budgets may have increased, the majority of respondents still reported budget as their biggest barrier to captioning video content, with 58% in 2017, and 64% in 2018. How is this the case?
If we look back at the sheer amount of video produced in 2018, we see that 29% of organizations reported publishing more than 500 hours of video content annually, compared to 17% in 2017. It seems fair to say then, that increasing the budget slightly doesn’t begin to meet the captioning needs of the increased amount of video content being produced. As video continues to increase, it will be difficult for organizations to find the funding needed to make the increased amount of content accessible. This blog post offers tips on how to make the most of the budget you have, and maximize the amount of content you can make accessible.
As video increases, so will the need to caption your videos. Thinking long-term can help to save you money down the road. Many organizations, particularly with few hours of content, try DIY captions or a low-cost vendor to start. Many later realize – after spending a lot of time and money on in-house cleanup and review – they should not have cut corners at the beginning.
There is certainly a wide range of prices and accuracy levels across captioning vendors. While the low-cost option may sound ideal, you may be sacrificing accuracy, which can result in more work and additional costs in the future. Finding a captioning solution that is cost-effective and offers high-quality captions will be the most scalable option.
In addition to planning ahead when it comes to caption quality, there are a number of other ways you can save money by planning for the future.
For example, if you have a lot of content that needs to be captioned, some vendors will offer bulk discounts. 3Play Media offers bulk discounts, as well as discounted extended turnaround options for files you don’t need back right away. Having a slew of video files you need captioned, and submitting them far enough in advance to take advantage of these discounts can save you a significant amount of money – and a headache!
While budget is a limiting factor, there are several funding resources, including grants and awards, that can be applied to closed captioning. Some of these are only applicable to institutions of higher learning, however there are additional ways to fund captions for other various content and organizations, as well.
Grants: There are several federally funded grants in the US that you may qualify for. Visit the Federal Register for information about captioning grants and applications from the U.S. Department of Education Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services. Additionally, there may be other local grants you qualify for, such as the Distance Education Captioning and Transcription grant (DECT) for California Community Colleges.
Tax credits: If your organization or business provides captions as an accommodation for employees who are Deaf or hard of hearing, you may qualify for federal tax credits. The IRS provides detailed information about qualifying for federal tax credits.
Crowdfunding: Even if you are not eligible for grants or credits, there are other ways to raise funds for captioning. People have created crowdfunding campaigns for much crazier things than captioning, so why not give it a try?
Private funding: Closed captions for broadcast are often funded by private institutions, so why shouldn’t online video captions? Consider asking for funding from private foundations, corporations, and individuals to help increase your captioning efforts.
You can’t always control your budget, but you certainly can try to make the most of what you have. Respondents from the 2018 State of Captioning see their captioning needs increasing next year, in 2019. Although budgets may increase as well, as we continue on this trajectory, budgets will likely still fall short in comparison to the amount of content. Following theses tips and getting creative can help to get more for your money.

industry_corpus2: Film & Entertainment


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A highly therapeutic formula that, along with daily breast massage, will support breast health and vitality. It is cell-protective, lymph cleansing, and anti-carcinogenic. The carrier oils have been specifically selected to be soothing and nourishing for tender breast tissue. Pomegranate seed oil is especially recommended for breast health, evening primrose oil balances the hormones, and red raspberry seed oil is very high in anti-oxidants and omega 3 & 6 fatty acids. Available in 1 oz and 2 oz.
Use: For daily use. Refer to www.breasthealthproject.com for information on breast health and massage.
Ingredients: organic olive oil (Olea europaea) infused with calendula blossoms (Calendula officinalis), organic pomegranate seed oil (Punica Granatum) (CO2 extract), organic evening primrose oil (Oenothera biennis), red raspberry seed oil (Rubus idaeus), essential oils of organic pink grapefruit (Cistrus paradisi), organic helichrysum (Helichrysum italicum), sandalwood (Santalum austrocaledonicum), Turkish rose absolute (Rosa damascena), organic cypress (Cupressus sempervirens) and vitamin E oil.

industry_corpus2: Health & Medicine


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Does REACH apply to the sales and use of conveyor belts?
Our society is becoming increasingly ‘green’ and environmentally-aware by separating wastes and manufacturing cars which use less fuel.
The number of regulations and laws in respect to the environment is also growing. One of the laws that Habasit works to comply with is the European REACH regulation, which came into force in June 2007.
REACH stands for Registration, Evaluation, Authorization and Restriction of CHemicals. It was established to minimize the health and environmental risks in connection with the everyday use of chemicals in industry. The question is, how does REACH apply to the sales and use of conveyor belts?
REACH is a European regulation and obliges all EU manufacturers and EU importers of chemicals to register the substances contained in their products and raw materials at the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA). All manufacturers of conveyor belts must comply with this law.
But what about the conveyor belts that have been manufactured using substances from the SVHC list which are already stored or installed in a number of our locations? According to the REACH regulation, there are no restrictions in the use of a product containing SVHC. However, when selling such a product, we are obliged to mention this on an attached document, for example the packing note. Should the conveyor belt be resold, then the retailer is in his turn obliged to mention this to his customer.
But what if a SVHC contained in a conveyor belt will be included in the Annex XIV authorisation list, i.e. requires authorisation to be manufactured or used. The restriction on manufacturing and use is valid for the SVHC only but not for articles (e.g. conveyor belts). This means REACH does not set a deadline for selling products produced before the sunset date (deadline) of the contained SVHC. By complying with the REACH regulation, we make a contribution to a cleaner and greener world. Who can be against that?
Markus Hilfiker is a Regulatory Officer at Habasit and has been with the company for the last two decades. He specializes in the knowledge and implementation of product and application related regulations and is responsible for the safe use of chemicals at our Reinach location. He is fluent in both German and English.

industry_corpus2: Petrochemicals


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2011 | DJ the S – Video game music remixed!
Here you can listen to and download all the songs from 2011. If something’s not right, like a download has the wrong file or the description doesn’t fit the song, or a song is even missing completely, please tell me, so I can fix it.
2011’s X-Mas mix focused on Shiver Star (Kirby 64), but also included Beloved Tomboyish Daughter (Touhou 6) and Crystal Cave (Yoshi’s Island).
2011’s first Halloween mix focused on the Paper Mario enemies Tubba Blubba and Doopliss.
An odd remix of General Guy’s theme from Paper Mario with a little bit of Guile’s theme to make it stand out. March on!
Can’t let you do that, Star Fox! Have a Star Wolf remix.
A Monkey Island remix with both the Main Theme and evil LeChuck’s Theme! Sounds a bit exotic with that percussion. And those adventurous strings. Doesn’t it sound a bit like Pirates of the…nah.
A remix of Vampire Killer from Castlevania and Dance of Illusions from Castlevania 64. Now have at you!
A remix of the Boss Battle Theme from Final Fantasy IV featuring Last Battle from Cave Story. It aged very well in my opinion.
This remix features the boss themes Dharmanyo and Ghost Attack as well as I am Impact from Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon. I’d suggest the version on the album Wrath of the Underlings Vol. 1 though.
Another medley including lots of references from different franchises. Most notably it includes U.N. Owen was her and Last Battle from Cave Story.
An epic final boss medley featuring many different franchises. They should be popular enough for long-time fans to figure out. Although long-time fans probably already know the song in the first place…?
Here’s an exciting mix. This one focuses on MegaMari’s (Touhou x MegaMan doujin game) Intro/Final Boss Theme and adds some Touhou and Mega Man references as well.
A somewhat odd medley of the PC-98 era. Featuring the most catchy and memorable tunes (in my opinion, of course)!
Sakuya’s stage theme meets her boss theme. It’s rather calm, it has something quite special to it.
Shinki’s theme from Touhou 5: Mystic Square meets Ancient Temple from Touhou 7: Perfect Cherry Blossom. A mysterious and yet upbeat song.
A remix of Rumia’s Stage theme, a rather laid-back mix.
The Extra Beat version of Darkness Beyond adds some extra percussion to to the song along with some other slight changes, which makes it sound a little bit more alive.
Although this mix focuses on Parsee’s theme, Green-Eyed Jealousy, the Invisible Full Moon parts are probably the best part of it.
Walk like an Egyptian! This song makes Jiang-Shi turn into mummies, featuring Rigid Paradise and two hidden Egyptian-themed songs. The icons should be hint enough, but I think you would have been able to figure it out without them too!
A remix experimenting with some more technified old-school toms, featuring U.N. Owen was her, Septette for the Dead Princess and Flowering Night.
A remix of the infamous Forest Maze from Super Mario RPG. Also includes two Touhou references.
Have some Fever, have some Chill? Dr. Mario cures it with just on pill! …that saying was lame even for my standards…anyway, this is a rather different song. It doesn’t have a lot of melody, even though it includes the famous Super Mario Bros. theme at some point.
Have some Luigi’s Mansion. Obviously, we have an arranged Main Theme with a little surprise in between.
Ultimate Atomic Buster, time for Zangief to show who’s the Red Cyclone here!
Samus had to deal with a lot of enemies, this medley gives the spotlight to a select few of them. Also some Norfair/Magmoor Caverns, because that tune is hot (lame pun intended).
A remix of Metal Man’s Stage (Mega Man 2). Level 3 because it was my third attempt.
A remix of Abandoned Memory (Mega Man 10) that also features Wily Stage 1, Quick Man and Flash Man (Mega Man 2).
A rather dreamy Song of Storms remix subtly including some U.N. Owen was her.
Part of a big Ocarina of Time medley called The Legend, this part of the Windmill hut has been extended to be its own song.
Pair Majora’s Mask’s Oath to Order and Stone Tower Temple with Skyward Sword’s Ballad of the Goddess and this is what you get.
Defend the cows! A remix of “They”, the theme that plays when the aliens try to steal the cows in Majora’s Mask.
Masked Dedede’s and King Dedede’s themes in an epic mix, that shows that it’s Dedede’s destiny to show the world what he can do.
Airship battle! Here’s a remix of the Kabula Battle Theme from Kirby Super Star Ultra with some Kirby 64 Mini Boss.
Necrodeus is here and is up to no good. This mix probably displays his personality better than the original. The Latin title translates to “God of Death”.
A mix containing the normal boss, the final boss (Miracle Matter) and the real final boss (Zero 2) themes of Kirby 64 and a special guest.
This remix of Grunty Industries uses a lot of mechanic percussion and synths.

industry_corpus2: Gaming


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I'll be speaking at Utah JUG on Thursday, Oct 21 about CDI, Seam 3 and Arquillian. I'll also get a chance to meet for the first time in person one the Seam 3 community developers, Jason Porter. Jason works on Seam Catch, the exception handling process based on the CDI event bus.
CDI and Seam 3: What's the story and how do I test it?
In the first of this two-part session, Dan will provide an overview of Seam 3, a powerful Open Source development platform for building rich Internet applications in Java EE.
The talk begins with an overview of JSR-299: Contexts and Dependency Injection for Java EE (CDI). CDI is the new core programming model in both Java EE 6 and Seam 3 and therefore the most prominent aspect of this stack. It provides services for managed and enterprise beans that include dependency injection, contextual life cycle management, interceptors and event notification. It also includes an extensible SPI for developing additional portable functionality and customization, a key enabler for Seam 3.
Seam 3 extends the CDI programming model by providing portable enhancements, extensions and integrations that tie together technologies within and beyond the Java EE platform into a full-stack solution, complete with tooling. You'll discover how this stack is used to address common business concerns and then look ahead at what else is on the menu for Seam 3.
After the whirlwind tour of CDI and Seam 3, we'll ask the question "How do I test this stuff?" That's where Arquillian comes in.
Arquillian is a container-oriented testing framework, layered atop TestNG and JUnit, that brings your test to the runtime rather than requiring you to manage the runtime from your test. In doing so, it provides the missing link in enterprise Java development: simple, portable integration tests. We'll walk through example after example until the sun goes down so you can see that Arquillian is the future of enterprise testing, and there's no limit to what you can test with Arquillian in your toolbox.
Want to know what's going on with Seam 3?
Even if given days of preparation to draft a written response, I don't think I could have answered this question more clearly than Pete Muir, lead of the Seam and Weld projects, does in the following interview. This interview was given by Java Magazin author Michael Schütz at JUDCon Berlin 2010.
I pulled out a couple of quotes to highlight here, but there's plenty more where they came from.
I'm a great believer that what makes a good framework developer is really understanding the problems the framework solves.
Think of CDI as the core of Seam 3 - it's the basic programming model for your application components.
Seam 3 is implemented as a set of portable extensions (modules) for JSR-299 that run in any environment which supports JSR-299.
I'll add that I thoroughly enjoy working with the community and seeing the exhilarating impact a great idea can have on the group.
We also moderate a social bookmarking group where anyone can link to a #CDI extension.
Coming up, we'll start to see GWT really take its place as a first-class option for writing your view layer. The GWT integration for Seam 3 will focus heavily on integration with Errai.
A lot of pieces had to come together for Seam 3 to take shape. Those pieces are finally aligning and, now that the source has been switched over to Git at github.com, things are going to get heavy.


text: Largest fireworks assortment and lowest prices! Bottle rockets, firecrackers, M-80s, novelties and giant displays, all available at huge savings! You'll have a blast shopping with their friendly staff. They love serving tourists and locals, offering the best variety, great prices and tremendous service!

industry_corpus2: Travel & Geography


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Our property management team operate different to what you may be used to.
Unlike typical agencies, EVERYONE on our team will be able to assist you. That means no more waiting for that ONE property manager to get back from lunch!


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Although it is quite a short demo it gets different every time you play it .
Besides getting a free Pokemon you can transfer to the full version ,you also get heal balls, heart scales and Pokeballs.These are also all transferable to your full version come November 21st.
The most interesting thing about the demo was a look at the new mega evolutions for Hoenn’s starters.
You also get a taste of what real flying around the world is like.
The demo is pretty limited to what you can do once you play it about 10 times but it is a nice early look at the remake. Pokemon Heart Gold was my first game for the 3DS and I was not disappointed. I ordered Alpha Sapphire since ruby was my original. November 21st can’t get here soon enough!


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Upon finishing their second trimester, green cohort's Alice and Sophia began to reflect on their time in Southeast Asia. Our student Anna gets candid with them about their adventures in Cambodia, Thailand and India.
Why did you join Winterline this year?
What has been your favorite place we have traveled to in the second trimester and why?
Alice and Anna celebrating Holi, the Festival of Colors, in India.
What has been the greatest challenge during second trimester for you personally?
What has been the greatest reward during this trimester for you?
What advice/words of wisdom would you give someone who is contemplating taking a gap year with Winterline?
Anna, Alice, and Sophia having lunch together in Asia.
Is there anything you wish you had known before going into this trimester?
Last question… What experience or expedition has been the most fun for you, during second trimester?
To learn more about our students be sure to check out the rest of our blog. We upload new posts three times a week!

industry_corpus2: Subject Education


text: The Kings Dance is also a story. Every step in it is a chapter in the narrative of humankind. The Kings, long ago, became the people in their kingdoms. Through us, they rule. This is the word for “Community” and “Conflict”.

industry_corpus2: Literature & Emotions


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How do presidents and their advisors make war and peace decisions on military intervention, escalation, de-escalation, and termination of conflicts? Why do they often make sub-optimal decisions? Why do important policy goals, plans, and aspirations frequently result in inaction? The leading concept of group dynamics, Groupthink, offers one explanation—cohesive policy-making groups, such as advisors to the President, often make sub-optimal decisions due to their desire for uniformity over dissent, while ignoring important limitations of chosen policies, overestimating the odds for success and failing to consider other relevant policy options or possibilities. But presidential advisory groups are often fragmented and divisive. We thus introduce Polythink, a group decision-making dynamic whereby different members in a decision-making unit espouse a plurality of opinions and offer divergent policy prescriptions, which can result in intragroup conflict, a disjointed decision-making process, and decision paralysis and inaction as each group member pushes for his or her preferred policy direction.
In The Polythink Syndrome, we analyze U.S. national security and foreign policy decisions such as the pre-9/11 national security choices, the decisions to enter into and withdraw from Afghanistan and Iraq, the crisis over the Iranian nuclear program (analyzed from both the American and the Israeli perspectives), the summer 2012 UN Security Council debate on the civil war in Syria, decisions in the 2013–14 Israeli–Palestinian peace negotiations, and the 2014 U.S. decision to attack ISIS. We illuminate the prevalence of Polythink, a phenomenon no less problematic or common than Groupthink, demonstrating how otherwise smart, experienced decision makers can engage in flawed decision-making processes that deeply affect the security and welfare of a country. We also discuss how Polythink characterizes many corporate and business decisions and day-to-day decisions and can thus have important implications for group-based decision-making processes outside of the political realm, such as in marketing, R&D, and financial decisions.
Furthermore, we explain how leaders and other decision makers (for example, in business) can transform Destructive Polythink into Productive Polythink, illuminating the potential ways in which this group dynamic may be effectively directed toward sound decisions. By shining a light on Polythink’s symptoms and consequences, and on the factors that lead to Polythink, we seek to offer actionable policy prescriptions for elite decision makers to offset the negative attributes of this phenomenon and engage in more optimal policymaking processes.

industry_corpus2: Politics & Administration


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OBESSU | European School Student Cooperation: a great event in Poland!
European School Student Cooperation: a great event in Poland!
In the first week of March this year, OBESSU held a European cooperation event for 22 students in Gdańsk, Poland. The participants came from Visegrad countries (Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic and Slovakia), and a variety of OBESSUs Member Organisations across Europe.
The six day event covered topics such as democracy, active participation and the role of OBESSU as a European platform for student voice. The week began with discussions about participation of youth in decision making and how to motivate young people to get involved. Following on from that, the participants learned about European institutions and the work of OBESSU within them. The students also attended a day-long conference with local school students, to explore the work of student councils locally and student cooperation on a European level.
The event was a great opportunity for the students to explore how Member, Candidate and Affiliate Organisations of OBESSU can support each other in their work, particularly for the Polish students, who are organised at a city level at the moment. With eight participants from Poland at the event, one of the focuses was to support them and build their capacities for setting up a national school student representative structure for Poland. This is a longer term project with incredible potential for student voice in Poland and in Europe!
As the city of freedom and home of the Solidarność movement, Gdańsk was a very inspirational setting for this international dialogue between students. The event was a great platform to learn, build networks and recognise first hand the benefits of European cooperation and friendship between school student activists.
A concrete outcome of the event will be a resource for school student unions and activists, developed by the participants. This resource, in the form of a publication, will contain information about the work that OBESSU does on a European level to advocate for students' rights within various institutions. The publication will also contain a guide on how to cooperate with other grass roots and national student voice organisations in different countries in Europe, in order to help students to share learning experiences and best practices.
The event was hosted by local schools and the Youth Council of Gdansk, and it was co-funded by the Visegrad fund. The fund assists events that bring together young people from the Visegrad region and promotes its development and cooperation with the rest of Europe.


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Sometimes the course of our lives depends on what we do or don't do in a few seconds, a heartbeat, when we either seize the opportunity, or just miss it. Miss the moment and you never get a chance again.
If we try to measure Now, we find it's always gone, has become part of the past.
I cannot live without reading.
I don't just want to ban The Bomb. I want to ban all bombs, whatever, and all bombers, whoever, and all bombings, whyever. There have to be better ways of saying no and making changes.
Yes, even in your mouse moods you only play with the idea of not being." She cleared her throat again. "Biology, you see. It’s because of biology that we want to live and not to die. And it is because of biology that we come to a time when we want to die and not to live.


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On a recent trip I took to New Zealand, the Auckland airport was closed down and its operations curtailed when the pipeline delivering jet fuel was dug up by accident. It seems impossible that there was such a massive single point of failure for the airport, which is a pretty significant regional hub. One stakeholder said in a radio interview that the cost of laying an additional pipeline wasn’t able to be justified as it would only be used infrequently, if ever.
Surely that is the very definition of back-up?
So instead, hundreds of planes were grounded and delayed, fuel needed to be trucked in, inefficiently and at great expense, and only ten days later was the pipeline repaired and put back into action. This management philosophy, based on the assumption that nothing can go wrong, may have been acceptable a few decades ago, but is way, way out of place in today’s world of rapidly changing requirements and expectations.
Warren Buffett once said at his annual investors’ meeting: ‘Inactivity strikes us as intelligent behaviour.’ And it’s hard to argue with this if it’s conscious, mindful inactivity and a result of a careful evaluation of the situation and a decision that the status quo is the least risky course and the best use of available resources. However, mindless, knee-jerk inactivity, resistance to innovation and improvement, and even a lack of maintenance and monitoring are a different kettle of fish altogether.
‘I’ll think about it.’ In my experience, this response to innovation, a new process or product seldom delivers a decision in a positive way that can drive a business forward. Whether it’s to avoid change, a fear of failure when undertaking something new, the perceived (or real) risk of upsetting the boss, laziness, or the dreaded ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ thinking, the usual outcome is no decision at all!
Most start-ups or other companies setting out to change and improve the way things have always been done for their clients will empathise. Your competition in closing a sale is often not another company offering a similar product or service, instead, it’s the ‘not yet’ or ‘we’re thinking about it’ response.
Or, what I like to think of as the three horsemen of the inertia apocalypse: resistance to getting moving, moving faster, or changing direction. And this unholy trinity coagulates to form a dangerous situation where cost of doing nothing jobs are neglected for another day.
Cost of doing nothing jobs? A strange choice of words perhaps, but I like to think of these as the jobs that cost money but are not directly revenue generating, at least initially. These are the maintenance, optimisation and improvement tasks that will divert time and resources away from elsewhere, but because they are preventive or future-proofing your organisation, it is hard to quantify the cost of not doing them as this is largely opportunistic. Until the situation becomes critical, that is, and they end up costing you big time.
These are also the projects that can shift the paradigm for your organisation, building a foundation for future innovation, growth and success. Hence the danger of not doing them. An example is moving your operations onto the cloud. Neglect to spend the time and money today, and you may find yourself behind tomorrow when your competitors are offering cloud-enabled services and innovations that you simply can’t.
Take my hometown, Cape Town. Like other cities and regions around the world, we are currently at the start of what looks to be a long-term drought situation. All of a sudden, the leaking taps that could have been fixed months and years ago are critical – but people were busy, or would have had to adjust their household budget, or just didn’t know where to find a good plumber. Months and years ago the cost of doing nothing would have been hard to estimate. Today, as water levels drop and water costs rise in the city, the cost of doing nothing is all too apparent.
Step it up a level, and you’ll see the cost of doing nothing has also resulted in the status quo being preserved. While summers get hotter and the winter rainfall season gets shorter, ‘management’ (in other words city officialdom) has continued to rely on large dams in specific catchment areas for our water.
Now, with shifting weather patterns and a growing population, they’ve realised, all too late, that there is a need to change the approach to water management. What worked last year, won’t work next year. The crisis management that is upon us now will come at a price which with more innovative forward planning or attending to some of those cost of doing nothing jobs in a more timely fashion could have been managed more effectively and at a fraction of the future cost. The old adage ‘a stitch in time saves nine’ springs to mind.
In the business world, cost of doing nothing jobs are often also the small steps needed to innovate. Innovation is too often painted as a wide-ranging, paradigm-shifting, big bang event. But it includes the incremental improvements to products, services and processes and asks the question, what is next?
It’s not surprising that an unhealthy attachment to the status quo, and resistance to change, is part of the fabric of most organisations. Companies are often still built to Industrial Revolution specifications. When assembly lines were the heart of an operation, things needed to be repeatable, predictable and risk-free. Similarly, the Waterfall Method worked for hardware design but should never have been transplanted lock, stock and barrel into a software world. Now that the Industrial Revolution era is heading to a close, this type of thinking is becoming increasingly egregious.
The culture of risk-aversion and a steady as she goes approach is exacerbated by tough economic times, cost cutting and management protecting their pensions instead of rocking the boat and challenging the status quo. And this means that cost of doing nothing jobs fall by the wayside until it’s too late as they are the easy targets when looking for costs to cut.
Start-ups don’t have this inability to change, nor an attachment to the way things have always been done. This gives them a window of opportunity to innovate and delight your customers that you simply don’t have.
And while the inertia of its members might be baked into the business model of every gym contract, organisational inertia has reached its sell-by date and may leave you grounded, like it did the planes passing through Auckland.
Have you noticed that problems are solved and decisions are made differently today, especially by millennials? What’s the first thing that they do – and you probably do too, even if you are definitely pre-millennial? They Google it, of course.
Back in my day, pre-Google, we’d probably think about what we’d done before in similar circumstances, perhaps consult whichever was the prevailing canonical guide on the topic – updated at least once a year – and maybe phone a friend. Or, if we were really entering new territory, we’d call in the management consultants, who’d probably do much the same thing, just at a heftier price tag.
The upside of doing business today is that we have research, case studies, discussions, opinions, thought leadership and news related to our decision at our finger tips. The downside, however, is exactly the same. We have so much information, so many takes on a matter, and so many rabbit holes to explore that reaching a decision can be more difficult and time consuming than ever before.
Welcome to analysis paralysis. But supercharged for the digital age.
Today we can’t afford to be hamstrung by inertia. A wait-and-see, ‘nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM’ approach is no longer tenable. We’ll be sidelined by start-ups who have no interest in preserving the status quo, as well as our nimbler traditional competitors, who took the opportunity to act. Meanwhile we’ll still be commissioning one last piece of research and running one more cost-benefit analysis.
Right now, we should all be considering the opportunity cost of doing nothing when figuring out what to do next. Which, I know, is a tough sell in a business world driven by short-term ROI objectives. In the past, cost of doing nothing projects typically related to maintenance type tasks. The equivalent of ensuring you service your car every year, even though it’s running perfectly well today, to avoid costly repairs in a few years’ time when a tiny niggle becomes a catastrophic breakdown. Or, to save every month on fuel, because you’ve kept your car running efficiently.
Today, in business, these projects are more significant. Such as deciding to spend time and money on the automation of manual, repetitive (and probably boring) work, to free up your time to be more strategic. And even reviewing systems that currently work but that could be improved would not be wasted energy to keep you and your business ahead of the curve.
This month and next, I discuss these cost of doing nothing projects elsewhere in this magazine. Happy reading and let me know what you think.
Curtail your short-term ROI mindset. Next quarter’s figures are going to be irrelevant if your business isn’t around next year.
Quantify the cost of doing nothing as a matter of course. It won’t be perfect, but it will be on the agenda.
Decide! Choose a lighthouse project that gives you a toe in the water, then learn and improve.
Spreadsheets: a victim of their own success?
There is so much talk of digital disruption today, that it is easy to forget that one of the most significant disruptors of them all has been sitting quietly on our desktops for the past three decades. Yes, the humble spreadsheet software, most likely Microsoft Excel.
And even though my accounting days go back to the comptometer, I can barely remember a time when spreadsheets were literally that, sheets of paper spread across my desk!
And thank goodness too. I shudder to think what life would be like for accountants and companies without the multiple capabilities that spreadsheets give us. Especially in today’s data-centric world. From rapidly carrying out arithmetic involving multiple rows, columns and tabs of figures, to compiling information from various sources, to running scenarios using different figures, to analysing data thanks to pivot tables and macros, and even running small pieces of software. Spreadsheets really are our data workhorses.
So it’s not surprising that spreadsheets have escaped the finance department and are very often how finance and the rest of the company communicate with each other. It’s quite strange how everyone, whether in actual fact they do or not, is expected to have some level of Excel know-how. Designers don’t expect anyone else to be able to use Photoshop, for instance.
Yet any job title is expected to complete spreadsheet-based expense claim forms, or update a forecast with figures for next year, or apply a new budget, adjusted for a tough economy.
Meanwhile as more non-financial people contribute to the spreadsheet, version control is abandoned, people do things that only make sense to them, including adding up their figures with a calculator and typing final amounts directly into the spreadsheet as plain text. (It happens!) Things happen manually, slowly and errors creep in: the domino effect of a single misplaced comma can be catastrophic, and like a needle in a haystack to track down.
Suddenly your spreadsheet is no longer saving you time or money, or giving you an accurate, up-to-date view on critical business information. But instead is a millstone that is weighing you down and putting you at risk.
● 76% of the spreadsheets used the same 15 functions -- barely scratching the surface of Excel’s capabilities.
● One in ten emails sent either included or referred to spreadsheets, and often errors in and updates to the spreadsheets were the discussion point.
Don’t you think it’s time we stop overburdening the hard-working spreadsheet? And stop demanding, or expecting, non-financial managers to get up to speed with financial thinking: after all, spreadsheets digitise existing finance functions, they don’t necessarily de-mystify them for the rest of the organisation.
The answer isn’t in closing ranks, however. I have long argued that the best way to get the right information as well as buy-in from the company, especially at budget and forecast time, is to decentralise this function to the coalface. And the only way this can happen, is by giving non-financial managers tools that are intuitive and easy to use, and don’t require them to understand what is going on under the hood. It is far more important that they are able to set, and manage their own budgets, with the room to be nimble and responsive to changing market conditions, than it is for them to navigate and understand cumbersome spreadsheets.
The good news is that this frees up the accounts department too. So instead of hunting needles in haystacks, or reverse engineering bizarre ways people have used Excel, we can turn our minds to more strategic, impactful activities.
Perhaps it’s time to give the overworked spreadsheet a helping hand?
Ironically, growth and success can be a double-edged sword for small and medium-sized businesses. On the one hand, you're growing and hitting the milestones, which is a massive achievement, especially in today’s tough economy. On the other, quite quickly things that used to be simple and straightforward acquire added levels of complexity. All of a sudden, as the business owner or FD, you simply can’t be as hands-on and omniscient as you used to be.
It’s pretty daunting giving up some of this control, especially when it comes to something such as expenditure. Expense management, especially in the SME world, is really about procurement and “signing off” on expenditure before the money is spent. As your company grows, this becomes impractical. You as the business owner or manager need to focus on new business and growth strategies, rather than being tied to paperwork.
The only way to proceed is to start empowering the rest of the organisation to take ownership of some of these tasks. And to do this, you need to put the tools and processes in place — such as reporting, which, while reactive, will allow you to spot issues in a timely manner. And most importantly, you need to ensure everyone understands and buys into the big picture, and is able to align their goals with this overall strategy.
For instance, you need to make clear the difference between cutting expenses and managing expenses and tie this to overall company strategy.
A mid-level manager tasked with controlling spending might be wildly successful at that specific metric, when taken in isolation. And this might be wildly unsuccessful for your company as a whole when you consider things holistically.
For instance, collectively your mobile phone bill might be right down, which is great. But it’s not that great that customers are disgruntled because they are not being contacted in a timely manner, and so have taken their business elsewhere. On balance, that mobile phone bill saving suddenly doesn't look so rosy anymore, not when compared to the business you have lost. And your middle manager? Well, they did what you asked them to do, especially if you didn’t provide them with any context.
I’ll admit, this is a pretty simplistic example — although unfortunately still a common enough occurrence. How often, as a customer, have you been inconvenienced to the point of defection through an obvious cost-cutting exercise? But now consider this in the context of the digital disruption the world is going through. Where doing more of the same is no longer going to cut it, and very soon you’ll find you are running to stand still.
It’s a world where, in order to save money and make money in the future, you need to spend money today. Moving to the cloud is the perennial example: without an investment in cloud infrastructure and capabilities today, you won't be able to offer the services and functionality demanded by your customers tomorrow.
In this scenario, being over budget is not necessarily a negative, provided you can explain it in terms of a bigger picture. So expenditure management is not always about minimising costs. Today, more than ever, it is critical to communicate your company strategy, tie it closely to individual goals and targets, and then give your people the tools to enable them to achieve their, and your collective, goals.
There’s no doubt that the last 12 months have got most people muttering, ‘Well, truth is stranger than fiction, after all.’ It’s easy to get caught up in the mass, global Chicken Little, ‘the sky is falling in’ reaction to events such as the Trump election and the Brexit referendum.
We’re used to keeping an eye on the world to spot the trends, shifts, and Netflix series coming our way. But this can sometimes blind us to our unique experience living and doing business in Africa. Operating in change and uncertainty is our status quo. And, without wanting to glamourise the very real challenges Africa faces, the unintended consequence is that we’ve become extraordinarily resilient and adaptable – comfortable with not only riding out tectonic disruptions but also turning them into opportunities.
Here in South Africa we’ve been through a few pretty bumpy few years, to put it mildly. From musical chairs in our finance minister’s office, which wiped out around R500 billion in value from the economy and saw the rand go into free fall at the end of 2015; a yo-yoing petrol price; a 6,6% official inflation rate (many would argue the true inflation rate is double that!); and last but not least, a highly uncertain political landscape. Not to mention that, like the rest of the world, we are facing a massive period of digital disruption as we enter the fourth industrial economy. Change is quite literally our constant.
Today we need to tap into our inherent entrepreneurial savvy more than ever before. At all levels.
Today, these assumptions are pointless! You can’t plan for the amount of disruption that is coming your way. And if you try, you risk baking a panicky, knee-jerk reaction into your numbers. At best, this would be inappropriate and regrettable when the dust settles. At worst, this approach becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Instead, ensure your planning and business strategy is responsive to change by looping in the view from the grass roots of your organisation. Head office might be running around like Chicken Little, but the people on the ground can often see the opportunities, and know where to hustle. That is why you employed them, after all.
Look for the opportunities. We are resilient and uniquely adapted to make things happen, so we should be relishing the potential presented by the turbulence in the world today!
Realise you can’t begin to plan for the amount of disruption you are about to face.
Embrace the hustle like you’ve never done before.
Don’t codify a Chicken Little response – it may just come true.
Look for opportunities and don’t only focus on the threats.
Leverage our adaptability and resilience, the unintended consequence of ‘our normal’.
Well, I hate to say it, but you’ve not only missed the bus, but you’re missing the taxi-on-demand-service and are imminently going to miss the self-driving vehicle. Take Uber — the poster child for the disruption of traditional business, shaking up the centuries-old taxi industry. But, while Uber sorts out its internal culture issues, and figures out its relationship with its drivers, it is already getting a taste of its own medicine. Dubai is about to disrupt the disruptor with the announcement that it is launching driverless drone taxis this year.
So I think we can all agree that change is coming, it is coming fast and it is exponential. I could say: “like nothing we have seen before” but we have, consistently over the last generation. It is just getting faster!
However, operating in this amount of change and uncertainty is par for the course in Africa. And the consequence of our exposure to unrelenting and erratic change is a deep-seated entrepreneurial optimism, which I think is going to stand us in good stead. I’m writing this in the week that my country, South Africa, saw its president survive an eighth vote of no confidence in parliament. This is a reasonable reflection of the lack of confidence the country as a whole is suffering from, compounded by musical chairs in our finance minister’s office; a yo-yo-ing petrol price; and an official 6.6% inflation rate (which many would argue is far from realistic) and constant revelations of mismanagement, corruption and graft. Change is quite literally our constant.
We’ve become extraordinarily resilient and adaptable. Comfortable with not only riding out tectonic shifts, but also turning them into opportunities. With the uncertainty created by Brexit and Trump, the western world is learning the hard way how to challenge existing thought processes and adapt to an environment of continual change and uncertainty. It is not all bad and the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is a more versatile and adaptable management team, with a good dose of entrepreneurial spirit thrown in.
If your normal is change, then you should be well-prepared for making the most of digital disruption by looking for the gaps and the opportunities it presents. Because there are going to be opportunities. Take the arrival of the car at the start of the last century. For sure, businesses died as fewer horses were used: the grain industry faced ruin; and stables, farriers, trainers and other support services that had built up around horse-drawn vehicles saw a massive decline.
But other businesses emerged. Cars needed to be built and these cars needed tyres, fuel stations, etc. Proper roads had to be designed and built, as did road signs, pedestrian crossings and other infrastructure we take for granted.
How is this playing out in our finance world? Consider the automation of accountancy functions. Robots are simply better at doing tasks that are repetitive and rule-based. They are faster and more accurate than we are, and don't get bored or distracted. They are taking over some of the more repetitive functions in our firms, and at our clients, as accountancy software becomes more accessible.
So, as accountants, do we go the same way as the farriers and grain suppliers? Or are we agile enough to adapt to this new normal and look for the opportunities? For instance, with the flood of repetitive work taken care of, can we hone our critical thinking and problem-solving skills on behalf of our clients? Can we use our time analysing and assessing the real-time data we now have at our finger tips to give strategic input to our clients and support their planning and decision-making process? Can we develop our inter-personal skills now that we can leave the back office and interact with the rest of the firm as well as our clients? And can we review a few holy cows, for instance, what impact will blockchain technology have for us and our clients?
We have the opportunity to lead, not follow, the digital disruption. But we need to learn to be adaptive and hone those skills that were not perhaps at the top of the list: interpersonal skills, analysis, and a healthy and open minded view of what the future holds for us and our clients. We can lead or we can follow, but in tomorrow’s world there is little value to be added by being a follower.
Holy cow, the robots are coming!
Back in the day, when I set out on some of my first auditing jobs, I was accompanied by a formidable team of comptometrists. Their fingers were a blur as they entered lines of numbers into their comptometers — for the younger generation who have likely never seen one, this was a huge, key-driven calculator — and added up the trial balances. In those days, the human was the final word in accuracy.
But by the 1990s comptometrists were a thing of the past. We had started trusting computers enough to run the numbers, and what needed double-checking were the systems that governed the computers, not the calculations themselves. And the comptometrists? Well, their role was made obsolete, not in a generation but virtually overnight. They needed to find a new space to apply their existing skills, or, retrain and stay relevant in a changed world.
Thinking about succession planning today, this story keeps playing through my mind. Except today the changes we are experiencing are far more profound and fundamental, not to mention coming at us at an almost exponential rate. Take automation. Repetitive tasks don’t bore robots, they are faster and more accurate, they don't make mistakes and they don't take breaks; put simply they are just better than we are… at the routine tasks. It also means our clients, including small and medium-sized companies, through the use of technology, have the ability to do a lot more self-service accountancy work.
In the same way the internal combustion engine drove (pun intended) the horse and cart off the road, robots, in this case software robots, are going to replace humans in your organisation sooner rather than later — on the factory floor as well as in the office. According to a PwC report, 30% of jobs in the UK are at risk of being replaced by robots and artificial intelligence in the next 15 years.
What does this mean for how we think about succession in our organisations? In the past, this meant ensuring the leadership had understudies waiting in the wings for their time to take the reins.
But today — and I do mean today — succession planning needs to consider what happens to our people when part of their function is taken over by robots. We need to be putting a plan in place for our existing employees, and also hiring people that have the skills to adapt: not only to working with robots, but also to thriving at the functions that robots can’t do. Recruitment policies need to focus on ensuring organisations attract and retain the correct people, not necessarily for the skills they have today but for the ability and potential they have to adapt to the skills they will need tomorrow.
Take strategic client relations. In an ideal world, with the repetitive work items picked up by robots, accountants will have more time to analyse the data, problem solve creatively and engage with your clients to help them grow their businesses. Suddenly an ability to establish trusted inter-personal relationships becomes essential. So that hard-as-nails accountant, the “human calculator”, who previously did incredible work in from the back office, but never ventured out to client meetings, may well become a square peg in a round hole.
This is succession planning today. It’s about considering the functions that software will do for you, and then figuring out how to redeploy staff whose functions have fundamentally changed and they no longer fit. And hiring for the skills and talent-sets that you will need humans for.
It’s in appreciating that some of our holy cows, the things we are the “experts” at, the production of accounts or even, potentially, the double-entry bookkeeping system, might be slain, and choosing to act like Darwin’s finches, adapting to new circumstances and thriving, rather than putting our head in the sand and hoping.
Charles Darwin was right about survival depending on our ability to adapt. And never has this been more true than in the face of the digital revolution we are living through in the twenty-first century. While Darwin might have been speaking about adapting from generation to generation, today it feels like you need to adapt from month to month and day to day.
Look at the taxi industry and Uber. Retail and Amazon. Publishing and Facebook. Hotels and Airbnb.
Frighteningly, even these examples are dating. Amazon has already gone full circle and is expanding its bricks and mortar presence, armed with everything it has learnt about consumer behaviour in the digital world. Uber and its drivers are still figuring out their working relationship, but Dubai has announced it is launching driverless drone taxis this year.
So where does that leave us, the accountants? We’re typically the conservative bastions of caution and risk-aversion in any company. Wielding the double-entry bookkeeping system for the last several centuries, we have, for the most part, kept businesses honest and solvent. But now even the double-entry system is being questioned in the world of blockchain and other decentralised, shared digital ledger systems.
The same thing applies to us, I’m afraid. Adapt or die. But bear in mind that adapting doesn't mean throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Adapting means understanding what needs to change in order to continue delivering value to your clients and your organisation. Look at Darwin’s finches on the Galapagos Islands, which, within one generation evolved larger and stronger beaks to find food during a prolonged drought. The birds adapted fast to their current reality, by optimising a function rather than replacing it all together.
Likewise accountants need to look down the line and start shifting their position today — we are already seeing the impact of some of the changes brought about by digitalisation. Just like with the introduction of the internal combustion engine at the start of the previous century, there will be winners and losers. The “horseless cart” put an ecosystem built up around horse-drawn vehicles out of business, but enabled the growth of entirely new industries to support the automobile.
The same is happening today.
My advice? Step away from the spreadsheets, literally and figuratively. Step out of the shadows and reconnect with your colleagues at the coal face — they are the ones who know where the changes are coming from, can see the impact of these changes, especially the opportunities. Open up the accounting process and empower your colleagues to collaborate with you. By doing so you’ll ensure that they have access to the numbers that impact their view of reality and in turn provide real input and value to your analysis of the numbers. This gives you an accurate picture, and creates buy-in and mutual benefit whether in the planning process or understanding the variances, when looking at actuals. You’ll stay connected and relevant, and by decentralising some of the accounting functions, you’ll free up your own time to be more strategic and adaptable.
With the world changing so fast, the old rules no longer work but the new rules haven’t yet been developed! This makes finance’s custodial role more difficult but even more important than ever before. Stay adaptable and you’ll be able to guide your clients and organisation ethically and prosperously through these opaque days; don’t and you will be one of Darwin’s casualties.
In my May article I suggested that one of the biggest challenges to innovation and business progress is simply finding the time to think, research, experiment and develop new ideas.
The notion of carving out 20% time, à la Google, is a pipe dream for most. So I thought it would be interesting to figure out what is keeping finance people so busy.
To do this we held a snap survey of finance managers and administrators across a range of industries to find out what takes up their time, preventing them creating space for strategic review thinking.
The top three time thieves at budget/forecast time were investigations or enquiries from source, incomplete or incorrect data, and manual processes, while the top three time thieves at month-end reporting time were report compilation, manual processes, and investigations or enquiries from source. The top three time thieves at other times were ad hoc reporting requests, firefighting, and other ad hoc information requests.
Interestingly, but perhaps unsurprisingly, there was no single time thief, which perhaps points to the complexity of the real world today, plus shows that there is not a silver bullet solution – companies need a fix that comprehensively tackles a web of challenges.
Alarmingly, manual processes ranked in the top three for both budget/forecast time and during month-end reporting. Automation of these processes is the key not only to freeing up time in its own right, but it also results in timely, accurate data that you can confidently use for decision-making. In addition automation is the cornerstone for further innovation and new ways of working.
What’s more, it looks like too much time is being spent on report compilation. This is a red flag because if you are spending your time compiling reports, you are not spending it analysing the information therein!
Ad hoc reporting, information requests and firefighting also rank highly, though probably more understandably and, unfortunately, this is not an easy challenge to master. However, ad hoc reporting requests, in particular, are indicative of an un-empowered business that relies too heavily on finance to deliver and explain anything with a number in it. Consider how much time would be created by empowering the non-financial user through removing the frivolous queries, and freeing time for review and analysis.
The survey, though brief, did re-iterate that the key challenges we all face have not changed over the years. However, if we continue the status quo and fail to innovate, our relevance to the business will reduce and the spectre of robot replacement will become a reality.
We are the principal architects of our own reality so it is time to start shaping our future!
There’s no silver bullet for a complex challenge.
Automate, automate, automate – the tools to do so are out there.
If reports are taking up too much time, how can the data be timely?
Empowering the business will redefine our function from bean counting to strategic analyst.
The pace of change is only going to speed up, so start today.
We are the principal architects of our own reality, so it’s time to start shaping our future!
Like the wheel or the printing press, cloud computing is more exciting because of what it enables, rather than for its own sake. Much has already been written about what the cloud allows us to do: from launching new economy businesses such as Netflix and Airbnb, to saving money through processing elasticity, to gaining access to new services and capabilities.
And, despite security still being the number one concern when implementing cloud, we’ve recently been very starkly reminded how cloud-based infrastructure can be more secure than on-premise, thanks to the WannaCry ransomware attack and the unrelated catastrophic systems failure at British Airways. Both of these affected on-premise data.
For us, data security is just one of the many issues we deal with in running our varied businesses. A cloud provider’s business is data and its protection, so they should be better at it than you or me.
Too often we forget that, although the name sounds fluffy and intangible, cloud computing is based on some very real infrastructure, housed in complex, highly secure, and some might say, black box-esque, buildings very possibly located in a different country to you, your customers, and even your cloud provider.
This is where the red flag goes up. Not because sensitive private and personal data is being moved offshore though. Frankly, in terms of access, thanks to increasing bandwidth it is irrelevant whether your data is housed next door or on the opposite side of the planet.
Rather, a perfect storm is brewing as legislation attempts to catch up with technology and the globalisation of digital communications. In the balance is the protection of private and personal data, weighed up against a growing reliance on data, especially encrypted information, to predict and prevent acts of terror, and arrest those responsible.
The cloud spreads data around the globe, creating concerns around the protection of personal information, and as a result, a number of countries are legislating around this issue. In South African, for example, companies are required to comply with the newly legislated Protection of Personal Information (POPI) Act. This law brings us in line with global best practice when it comes to how private data is collected, processed, stored and shared by setting the conditions for how companies can legally handle information. The new law prohibits businesses from transferring personal information to a third party in a foreign country, unless they get consent at the time of gathering the information. So far, so good, if a bit of an administrative headache, especially in time of such rapid change.
However, in response to the recent atrocities and the use made of internet communications by terrorist organisations, there are moves afoot in the US to legislate that data stored by an American company — wherever it is stored in the world — is accessible, unencrypted, by US law enforcement. Or the discussion of reciprocal agreements that allow countries to gain access to information stored in each other’s geographies, or indeed, the newly passed “Snooper’s Charter” in the UK, which mandates onerous and illogical demands for hosting providers to leave backdoors in their encryption for government access. All of these step on or over the line of privacy of one’s data.
Hosting companies that aren’t US or UK organisations will simply move their operations to other countries where these agreements are not in place. But the reality is that the hosting giants are US companies, not to mention that the country contains much of the world’s internet infrastructure.
So where does this leave businesses around the world, wanting to realise the benefits of cloud computing, but also needing to comply with locally legislated laws such as the POPI Act? Are they and their customers simply excluded from the benefits, growth and innovation opportunities presented by the cloud? What is certain is that they will be looking very closely at the implications of their cloud decisions, and where and how their data is stored.
To be sure, the fight against terrorism is vital, but let's not also, in the process, destroy the cloud’s silver lining.
Gartner selects IDU as one of the top 25 Corporate Planning Applications in the 2017 Gartner Market Guide.
Gartner, the world's leading research and advisory company recently published their Market Guide for Corporate Planning Applications. IDU is very proud to have our award-winning Budgeting and Reporting Software idu-Concept recognized amongst the best in the world for providing innovative financial management solutions.
The Gartner Market Guide is independent and insightful, it highlights the rapid development of financial analytics technology, and the considerable opportunities that exists for finance professionals to take advantage of these developments.
IDU has over 300 clients in an ever-increasing global footprint with users across 33 different countries, we are constantly innovating and are rapidly becoming a globally recognised brand. Our Corporate Performance management (CPM) solutions are also available via the cloud using Microsoft Azure as well as Amazon Web Services, the latter has opened the door for smaller and medium sized organisations across the world to access our cutting edge financial management solutions.
IDU streamlines the budgeting and reporting process, frees up financial managers to be more strategic and business to be more agile and responsive, which is essential in a disrupting market.
IDU makes budgeting, forecasting, performance management and reporting tools to simplify financial management. Our flagship product, idu-Concept, provides easy, effective budgeting and financial reporting for medium-sized to large businesses. It is the most widely deployed dedicated budgeting system in South Africa. idu-Concept integrates easily with ERP software, but unlike more cumbersome offerings, idu-Concept can be implemented quickly, requires little or no ongoing consulting fees and reduces budgeting cycles from months to weeks. idu-Concept addresses this establishing a platform of ownership and empowerment that inevitably leads to radical improvement in the effective management control of every business.
Gartner “Market Guide for Corporate Planning Applications” by Christopher Iervolino and John E. Van Decker. Published 24 May 2017.
The Apple iPad is only seven years old this year. Believe it or not, the first one was launched in April 2010, and if you dig a first generation iPad out of the storage cupboard you’ll find it’s probably more useful as a paperweight than anything else – it doesn’t even have a camera! Frighteningly it, and second and third generation iPads, are also unsupported by Apple.
Leaving aside Apple’s rabid upgrade tactics and the notoriously short lifespan of its devices, this is just one indication of how fast technology is changing. Therefore, it’s likely that the decision on whether or not to upgrade your financial system, for instance, is pretty much a done deal. Any argument for a “wait and see” approach has been crushed by the reality that the longer you stay with a legacy system, the further you fall behind your competitors, your customers and your employees.
In the event of a disaster your clapped out old iPad 1 equivalent is going to be harder and more expensive to fix, and the risk of data loss is greater. But you need to go into any systems migration with your eyes wide open. Here are some of the things to watch for.
One of the main factors that can make the difference between a migration project sinking or swimming is the involvement of the end users. Consider the public outcry when a platform such as Facebook or Instagram makes even minor changes to their software.
End users are typically attached to familiar experiences of systems, and this colours their expectations of any upgrades. Plus, they expect systems to be as easy-to-use and intuitive as the consumer apps they use every day. A disconnect here can manifest as resistance to the new system and a loss of time and money for the business.
It is also vital to understand your users’ requirements and deliver on that. In other words, give them what they need to do their jobs well; don’t give them everything merely because it is there in the new ERP system.
Learn from the Google search home page: limit complexity to improve productivity. Do users really need to enter account codes? And for that matter, do they even need to see them? Remember that what a non-financial user of your new system requires can be quite different to that of a finance department user.
Now consider that a financial systems migration is a great opportunity to restructure your company’s chart of accounts (COA). Your business has almost definitely changed to such an extent that your current COA is no longer suitable to today’s reporting requirements.
However, when implementing an updated COA you need to get two things right. You need to create an environment whereby you can provide reasonable comparative information when the account codes are different. And, secondly, you need to figure out how to reproduce historical numbers when the accounts, as well as how they are aggregated, differ to the legacy system.
When mapping historical codes to new ones it is unlikely that there will be a one-to-one relationship from old to new. And when you have a one-to-many or many-to-one relationship, comparative reporting becomes a challenge.
And what about data migration? Decisions need to be made about which data is migrated and how many years to go back. The simple decision is normally to migrate immediate history and maintain a minimum license on the old system to be able to access historical information. But do you really think your old system is going to be a key priority for your previous service provider, especially after you have slashed your contract with them?
Major system migration is never easy and the pitfalls are many, despite what the salesman tells you! However, if you approach challenges with eyes wide open you are better prepared to identify the potential pitfalls and navigate around them.
Ask anyone how they are nowadays, and the answer is likely to be ‘crazy busy’ or something along those lines. Today’s world, designed around convenience and speed, seems to have had the exact opposite effect. We’re trying to cram more and more into the same 24 hours and wearing our ‘busy-ness’ like a badge of honour. Part self-imposed, part a reality of modern life, we’re a bit like the Red Queen in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass — we’ve got to do all the running we can just to stay in one place.
This delivers businesses a massive catch-22. Although we are running as fast as we can, keeping up is no longer good enough. We need to be fundamentally and exponentially change the way we work in order to succeed in the digital economy. For instance: transitioning to cloud computing is critical to enable the services, features, and capabilities demanded by the market today and tomorrow. Things like collaboration, mobility, self-service, real-time data analytics, omni-channel retail and so on. Not to mention the long-term cost savings and efficiencies cloud economics can bring.
But, how are companies supposed to find the time to take a step back and re-engineer their infrastructure and processes to make the shift to the cloud?
The same applies to wider innovation: fundamentally changing how you do things, from small, incremental enhancements to new business models and existential shifts in your organisation. Innovation is a product of a few things: time, money, and being open to failing fast and often. Organisations don’t innovate though, people do, and to do so they need time to think, research, experiment and develop their ideas.
Google’s 20% time is probably the most well-known initiative where companies try to carve out time for employees to innovate away from their day-to-day tasks. The search giant gives staff around a day a week to work on side projects, and the outcomes have included commercial successes such as AdSense and Gmail.
This is not some harebrained internet start-up window dressing, though – like beanbags, hammocks and foosball tables. 3M, the inventor of Scotch Tape and Post-it notes, and the holder of almost 23 000 patents, has offered its employees 15% time to work on passion projects since 1948.
Indeed, the invention of Post-it notes is an illustration of just how long innovation can take: an employee invented the adhesive in 1968 but it was only in 1974 that another 3M employee joined the dots and realised it could be used to create a reusable sticky note. Ditto the development of Gmail. The Google engineer who invented this worked on it for two and a half years before convincing management that it should be launched.
All very well, as are innovation competitions, hackathons and other tactics companies use to foster new ideas. But reality bites. And the reality is that if we are running to standstill, we can’t currently carve 15–20% out of our business day, no matter how vital strategic innovation is.
It reminds me of that cartoon doing the rounds: two cavemen are energetically but not very effectively pushing and pulling a barrow with square wheels. Their friend offers them a set of round wheels. ‘No thanks,’ they say with a wave, ‘we are too busy’.
Something’s got to give. Somehow tired, ineffective and antiquated processes need to be sped up and automated, freeing people to be more strategic and perhaps to come up with the enhancements your company needs to survive.
Take the typical CPM (corporate performance management) processes, for example. In today’s real-time world, it can’t and shouldn’t take more than four weeks to complete a budget, or hours to complete month-end reviews. Bloated timeframes are compounded by manual processes resulting in errors and unnecessary admin. Plus, lack of transparency and collaboration between departments causes confusion and reduced accountability.
Fixing this single process can have a series of positive knock-ons. First, it can save you time. The vital time you need to spend innovating and thinking strategically about your business. But it will also improve the timeliness of your data – giving you and your senior management the real-time financial data to base decisions on. And if, as part of the fix, you have effectively included those at the coalface in the process, your data will be more accurate and relevant. Inclusive management also increases transparency and accountability, resulting in an aligned organisation that manages itself better.
So the flipside to the catch-22 mentioned above – that to keep up effectively, organisations need to slow down to change gear – is that once you have done this, the outcome is not only winning the time you need to innovate, but also gaining the data and other capabilities you need to succeed in a digital world.
CRAN highly recommends idu-Concept for Budgeting, Reporting and Analytics.
CRAN is the Communications Regulatory Authority of Namibia and regulates telecommunication services and networks, broadcasting services, postal services and the use and allocation of radio spectrum.
CRAN uses the Financial Budgeting, Financial Reporting and Analytics Modules of IDU. They purchased the system in April 2014, after looking for a cost effective, online financial management solution, that would allow them to easily administer the system with little ongoing IT support.
“IDU is a user-friendly system with amazing functionalities. The software has really made our work processes more efficient.” Says Maria Moses Manager: Management Accounting at CRAN.
CRAN has found idu-Concept Administrator simple to manage and use, there has been no need for IT or system development skills and very little need for ongoing support. Managing their own system has meant a huge cost saving to their business.
CRAN have been particularly impressed with the Recodes and Accruals functionality within the IDU Reporting modules.
IDU's Recode functionality allows users to request the reallocation of journal entries posted to the general ledger directly from the Financial Reporting Module and the Accruals functionality allows the user to have the ability to create accrual entries at a cost centre level for items that they feel have not been accounted for.

industry_corpus2: Finance & Economics


text:
To borrow a book for your Nook, you will use Adobe Digital Editions software. If you do not already have it on your computer, you will be prompted to download it.
Click on Advanced Search. (upper right).
Choose EPub eBook or PDF eBook from the Formats field.
Click on Download (next to the book cover), choose EPub eBook or PDF eBook.
Click Confirm & Download. A pop-up window will appear.
If prompted, choose Open with Adobe Digital Editions.
The eBook opens in Adobe Digital Editions.
The eBook is now downloaded onto your computer.
Connect the USB cord to your Nook and your computer. Turn on your Nook.
On Adobe Digital Editions screen, click on Library (upper left) or the picture of bookshelves.
Right click on eBook cover.
Choose Copy to Computer/Device and then NOOK.
Disconnect the Nook and enjoy!


text:
Designer Everton's client is a family of four with a two-story home in suburban Connecticut and they needed a new look for their outdated living room. They wanted something fresh, but also functional and kid-friendly.
I have worked with this family before. Since they had a great experience they came back to update their living room. They were tired of the design and wanted something different and fresh, but with two children, still needed it to be functional and family-friendly.
My client was open to all of my suggestions. I helped them choose everything from paint colors to window treatments, and even advised on a new fireplace design. The original fireplace was red brick.
They couldn’t believe it was the same room! It looked just like they envisioned and they couldn’t believe that all the beautiful pieces were theirs to keep! The family couldn’t wait to show off their new room. They also recommended our service to neighbors and family.


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Just felt tremors of an earthquake which was terrifying!
The earthqauake happened just now on 2:45 am PST 11th october 2010. We had an earthquake last month too which was felt in almost half of the country!
Don’t know about official news as yet, but it seems to have intensity of atleast 7 scale!
I hope there are no deaths or big damages to property to people here!
There have been various clamities and natural disasters in the country every month! Flood in august, earthquake in september and now another quake in october!
May Allah protect us and forgive us for our sins! Ameen!
may ALLAH bless us & guide us.. Aameen..
Ye zalzla boht sakat tha may allha forgive me and my friends.zardari sahab ye sub ap ki waja se ho rha hai jo mulk main azab aya hoa hai.is waqat bohat taiz barish ho rhi hai.
Yes it was 5.3 as told by metriological department. the jolts were were extreme. I dont think its 5.3, it seem more than that. more than that of 8th october 2010…….
same terrified tremors felt here in nowshera.the scale may ranges 6 to 6.5 and was realy severe, anyway we hope for no damages/devastations.


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Make it Rain in Russia! Travel to Russia for the opening with Vadim. This will be the beginning of a lot of new adventures seeing the world as we make it Rain all over the world.
Go visit Brazil for my mission and when Rain opens Brazil.