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LA JOLLA—Salk Associate Professor Sreekanth Chalasani has been awarded a grant from the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative for developing a way to selectively activate brain, heart, muscle and other cells using ultrasonic waves, which could be a boon to neuroscience research as well as medicine.
Chalasani will receive over $1 million for the first year of the award to expand his groundbreaking technology into mammalian cells. If it works in humans, such a technology could be used for deep brain stimulation—a common treatment in Parkinson’s and depression. It could also be used outside of the brain to act as a pacemaker for a heart or to produce insulin from pancreatic cells.
Chalasani’s new technique, which he calls sonogenetics, has some similarities to the burgeoning use of light (optogenetics) to activate cells in order to better understand the brain, but is less invasive. This method–which uses the same type of waves used in medical sonograms–may have additional advantages over optogenetics particularly when it comes to adapting the technology to human therapeutics. Chalasani first demonstrated the technique on nematodes in 2015, showing that low-intensity ultrasound waves propagating into the worms caused a membrane ion channel called TRP-4 to open and activate cells. His team also added the TRP-4 channel and successfully activated neurons that don’t usually react to ultrasound. With the new grant, Chalsani is developing technology to deliver focused ultrasonic waves to particular regions of the mammalian brain and is also exploring additional ion channels that could be targeted with ultrasound.
“I am very grateful for the support to pursue this research and see whether this technique can work in mammals and translate to humans for medical benefits,” says Chalasani, who is collaborating with additional Salk labs as well as with the University of California, San Diego on the effort.
Every cure has a starting point. The Salk Institute embodies Jonas Salk’s mission to dare to make dreams into reality. Its internationally renowned and award-winning scientists explore the very foundations of life, seeking new understandings in neuroscience, genetics, immunology and more. The Institute is an independent nonprofit organization and architectural landmark: small by choice, intimate by nature and fearless in the face of any challenge. Be it cancer or Alzheimer’s, aging or diabetes, Salk is where cures begin. Learn more at: salk.edu.


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Hamid Ajbar was born in the city of Chefchaouen, Morocco, in a family of musicians. He studied solo singing and violin for over ten years in the conservatories of Chaouen and Tetouan, and finishing at the Conservatory of Music in Rabat, where he graduated top of his class. He won the National Competition for Andalusian Singing in Morocco on three occasions.
He specializes in both classical Andalusian music and Middle Eastern music, and over his long musical career has collaborated with many great artists from Morocco, including Abdelkrim Raïs, Mohamed Bajadoub, Mohamed Briouel, Bennis Abdelfattah and Aïcha Redouane, as well as many renowned artists from the flamenco and early music scenes. These include Paco de Lucía, José Mercé, Carmen Linares, Ana Reverte, Eduardo Paniagua and Luis Delgado. He also did a tour throughout Spain with Turkish neyzen Omar Faruk Tekbilek. He leads and directs CusCus Flamenco, as well as Hamid Ajbar Sufi Ensemble, and has taken part in several festivals and events.
These include the Festival de Tres Culturas from Merida, Mexico, the Festival of Maghrebi Culture in Algiers, Algeria, Festival Andalusiyat Casablanca, Alegria Festival Chefchaouen, the Festival de la Dieta Mediterranea in Tavira, Portugal, the Festival de Música Antigua de Granada MAG, the Islamic Festival of Mertola, Portugal and the Murcia Tres Culturas Festival amongst others.
Aziz Samsaoui was born in Tetouan, Morocco. He studied lute and Andalusian violin at the Conservatory of Music in Tetouan, under the direction of Telemsani, amongst others. He was part of the Youth Orchestra of Andalusian Music of Tetouan for several years, taking part in several festivals on a national level. His artistic career has been marked by collaborations and recordings with various groups, including flamenco and early music as well as classical Andalusian music. These include Al Andaluz Project, Capella de Ministrers, Hamid Ajbar Sufi Ensemble and Veterum Mvsicae.
Aziz Samsaoui has also taken part in notable collaborations with the Philharmonic Orchestra of Malaga, in Eneko Vadillo´s work “Usul,” and also with Cinco Siglos and Alia Musica (Medieval Mudejar and Sephardic music ensemble) At present, he is dedicated to the preservation and diffusion of classical Andalusian music, as well as being the director of the Festival de Musica Antigua de Granada (Early Music Festival, Granada).
Fathi Ben Yakoub was born in Tetouan and studied in the Conservatory of Music in the same city. He studied classic Arab violin under the direction of Mohamed Albunani and Mers. He was p art of the Youth Orchestra of the Conservatory of Classical and Arab Music of Tetouan, taking part in several festivals both on a national and international level.
He received first prize, second prize and an honorary prize in the Royal Competition for Young National Interpreters. His artistic career has been enhanced with collaborations and recordings with several groups of diverse musical styles, and he has collaborated with renowned artists Enrique Morente, Carmen Linares, Arcangel and Michael Nyman amongst others.
Noureddine Acha was born in Tangiers, Morocco. From a very young age he began his studies with the ney and Andalusian sanaa. He studied under the best masters in the Conservatory of Music of Tangiers. He is a very well known musician, and a master in both classical Andalusian and Arab music.
His professional career has led him to take part in several festivals, within Morocco as well as many European countries, including Germany, France, Belgium and Spain, and also other North African countries such as Algeria and Tunisia, as well as Bahrain.
He has played with many renowned musicians, such as Hamid Ajbar, Marouane Hajji, Said Belcadi and Omar Metioui, to name but a few. His versatility makes him very sought after by musicians and singers from Andalusian, Arab and Flamenco groups.
Mouhssine Kouraichi was born in Tetouan, Morocco. He first began his musical studies playing lute and violin. He soon discovered percussion instruments, and continued studying these under the direction of professor Chekara, as well as perfecting his technique by completing several percussion courses.
He is a versatile musician who has played with several musical groups and orchestras in Morocco and Spain, learning from the best percussionists. He has taken part in several festivals and musical events in classical Andalusian music, early music and flamenco fusion.
Khalid Ahaboune was born in the city of Tetouan, Morocco, where he studied percussion for more than six years. He then specialized in Arab percussion instruments, such as the riqq (tambourine), the darbuka (goblet drum), and bendir (frame drum).
He perfected his technique in Egypt, with master percussionist Said the Artist, and also masters the flamenco box drum.
He has played many concerts in several countries, including Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Bangladesh, Italy, France, Portugal and Belgium, and has collaborated with many well known artists, including Omar Faruk Tekbilek.
Fauzia Benedetti was born in Bern, Switzerland, and began studying piano and music theory at the age of ten with jazz pianist and professor Vince Benedetti, also her father.
She learned to sing spiritual Sufi poems at a young age as part of a Sufi Tariqa in England, and also Meknes, Morocco. Whilst living in Zurich, she started studying flute with Regula Schwarzenbach, and continued later in Granada with Professor Lirio Palomar Faubel in the Conservatory of Granada, where she has been living since 1992.
Since living in Granada, she has continued to study classical Andalusian and Arab music, as well as completing several courses in Byzantine, Greek and Turkish modal music with Christos Kanellos Malamas.
Mohamed Babli was born in Aleppo, Syria. He began to learn the Mawlawiya (Mevlevi) Sufi dance (whirling) from the age of twelve, learning from the best Sufi Derviches and frequently participating in the Halaqat az Zikr (circles of Dhikr, or Sufi gatherings). The Mawlawiya is a spiritual dance that was invented by the Sufi master Jalaluddin Rumi, it is a circular dance that is similar to the movement of the planets orbiting the sun. It is done as means of abandoning one´s ego, or nafs, in order to reach a higher spiritual level, and requires great concentration.
Mohamed Babli has continued his turning in many events and festivals both within Spain and in other countries such as Portugal. España como en otros países como Portugal.

industry_corpus2: Film & Entertainment


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Materials include two cabinet photographs of different groups of men. Materials dated approximately 1890-1910.
It is the responsibility of the researcher to obtain any necessary copyright clearances. Permission to publish materials from Cabinet photographs must be obtained from the Supervisor of Reference Services and/or the L. Tom Perry Special Collections Board of Curators.
Initial citation: MSS 8687; Cabinet photographs; Photograph Archives; L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University. Following citations: MSS 8687; LTPSC.
Materials were found in the stacks in 2015.
This finding aid was produced using ArchivesSpace on 2015-05-20 11:04:07 -0600.

industry_corpus2: Subject Education


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With most government departments in the UK facing 20-25% cuts over the next year or so, DFID employees are sheltering behind a funding ringed fence. They must be pinching themselves at their good fortune. But their privileged position also forces them to be as penny-pinching as possible--if not, other departments will do the pinching.
But how sturdy is the fence and are there any gaps through which resources can leak out?
The fence is coming under increased fire. The recent article in the Daily Mail was particularly scathing. These attacks, in turn, generate stock responses about aid's all-conquering properties.
In an era where the aid debate risks becoming ever more polarised we are in need of nuance. But for busy UK policymakers nuance is about as welcome as England having to face Germany in the round of 16 (I suspect this may not hold for German policymakers).
can aid deliver the output or outcome?
can these outputs or outcomes make a long term difference?
can impact be demonstrated in a relatively short time period?
You can see the potential contradictions. It is difficult to show the short term impact of things that can make a long term difference (e.g. investments in innovation in science and technology). Things that aid can deliver (e.g. more children in school) may not make a long term difference (e.g. if class sizes are so large that the average student's ability to learn diminishes). Things that aid can deliver (e.g. stronger health systems) can present problems for the demonstration of impact (e.g. in terms of lives saved).
What can the development community do to make these contradictions more visible but less severe?
The effort required to deliver a convincing answer often dwarfs the effort put into thinking about whether it was the right question to answer in the first place (e.g. why has no-one asked whether conditional cash transfers make sense in sub-Saharan Africa? Most of the effort has been spent on answering if cash transfers have an impact on hunger. Of course they do.). This means consulting with a wide range of stakeholders about the questions worth asking (see "this book fills a much needed gap").
The "randomistas" and even the quasi-experimentalists often answer the question "does it have an impact?", sometimes "for who?", but rarely "why?". This requires innovative issue-driven blends of quant and qual.
It will always be more challenging to evaluate policy changes that generate consequences that are indirect and lagged, for which indicators are not yet developed, and for which all the pathways of change are not yet fully understood. But we must help to expand the set of things that are "evaluable" by developing methods to consider these dimensions.
Your idea of success is probably not the same as mine. Add in experiential, cultural and value differences and the gap may widen. Getting multiple views of success from different stakeholders will help to home in on what really counts and help uncover unintended consequence land mines further down the road.
Most methodologically rigorous analyses--whether quant/qual or some blend--have, by definition, high degrees of internal validity. They are fit for purpose in the context in which they are applied. But by building in more variation and diversity - either within the context or across it by, say, systematic case study meta analyses--we can make plausible guesses about how portable an intervention is and the associated risks of assuming it is.
In short the development research community must nuance the impact debate, not disown it.
If we do the latter, then aid will only be used for things where it is easiest to demonstrate impact and the rest will be wrung out of DFID, despite the ringed fence.
We need to expand the radius of evaluability if we are to help protect the parts of the aid spend that may do the most good.
Last month One.org released their DATA REPORT 2010: Monitoring the G8 Promise to Africa. It just hit my desk today.
G7 commitments on aid to Sub-Saharan Africa have been more than half met. The target increase for 2009 was about $18bn, with actual G7 increases standing at $9.9bn.
investments in agriculture, primary education, malaria, HIV/AIDS and child survival are rated as good, but water and sanitation have lagged behind.
lessons learned: need to engage with new partners (e.g. new non G7 donors); accountability of donors and African governments is key; Africa is "teeming with new opportunity"
The way forward says that no group of countries have put forward a comprehensive and collective plan focused on how to help support the vision of "an Africa driven by its own citizens", but it would have been useful to provide a forum in this report for African voices to say where and how they would like that support to be focused.
This is the last in a series of very useful reports, but I hope the next set will be less about aid and more about development and less about donors and recipients and more about development partners. I also hope it will be led by Africans.
I attended a Panos London Board meeting yesterday. Panos London is an NGO focusing on communication: voice, dialogue, ICT and media in areas such as climate change and public health. It is doing a lot of innovative work and I urge you to check them out.
At the end of the Board meeting I participated in a panel on "From Emails to Firestorm: the role of the Media in Climategate", set up to coincide with the completion of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change meetings in Bonn.
Six months on from Copenhagen I argued that the "climategate" fiasco set up 3 tests of trust for the science community -- and that we failed two of those tests.
First, the trust in the credibility of the science base. This was attacked for sure, and took some hits, but my sense is that it emerged bloodied, not bowed. That's largely because of the multi-sited nature of the IPCC. It's not seen as a rich country club--it brings together perspective from all over the world, and because of that roundedness, it is more resilient to attacks from the media and elsewhere. So I think we passed that test of trust--just about.
I think we failed the second test, however, and that is the test of communication. Science is not easy for most scientists to communicate to nonscientists, and much of the furore could have been prevented and dampened with better communication: why were the data "altered"? What does "altering" mean? What are the uncertainties around the conclusions? Which phenomena can't be attributed to climate change? If you don't agree with me does that mean you are against me? When public opinion is with you these questions seem less important, and when the tide inevitably turns you realise how ill-prepared you are. We need to spend more time and care in dialogue with the media, resisting the temptation to polarise the debate.
Third, we failed the information openness test. By not releasing publicly funded climate data it looked as though something was being covered up. The scientific process is also stymied by this. No-one is covered in glory by this withholding. Scientists (including social scientists) have to realise that they do not own the data--especially when it guides public money spent on public goods. They may have spent a long time getting it into the necessary shape to analyse it, but surely their rights are to first analysis, not lifetime patent. The story cannot be about the withheld data, it must be about what the data say to a range of different researchers.
If there was one thing the research councils and DFID could do to vastly increase the value for money of research they fund and build trust with the media and public, it would be to incentivise open access data.
Today the Royal Society hosted the launch of the STEPS Centre Manifesto on Innovation, Sustainability and Development. STEPS is supported by the ESRC and hosted by IDS and by SPRU at the University of Sussex.
The Manifesto draws on work that STEPS has done over the past 4 years and over the past year it has been co-developed in over 20 roundtables from around the world, a process convened by Adrian Ely of SPRU. The Co-Directors of STEPS are Melissa Leach and Ian Scoones of IDS and Andy Stirling of SPRU.
The starting point for the Manifesto is the massive disconnect between ever expanding volumes of research and development in science and technology (S&T) and the persistence of poverty, social injustice and environmental damage. How can these resources be made to work for goals that go beyond commerce, beyond economic growth and beyond simple private gain?
Direction – often we think that the dominant pathway of innovation is the best one. But often this is simply a reflection of path dependence in investments or a manifestation of the power held by those who support the pathway. In reality there are many candidate pathways if we can only open up spaces for them.
Diversity – this has to be deliberately constructed – otherwise the most powerful will drown out the rest. Diversity is important because it is a hedge against an uncertain future and it can throw up creative and previously unimaginable questions, pathways and options.
Distribution – diversity, yes, but what kind of diversity? The poorest and most marginal are those excluded from choices about which science and technology is prioritized. These voices must enter the debate in ways that give them some chance of influencing the debate.
• Agenda setting—who decides what are the key questions to address through S&T?
• Funding—what are the institutional incentives to align public and private S&T spending towards poverty alleviation, social justice and environment?
• Monitoring, Evaluation and Accountability—measure the effect of S&T on things we really care about, report funding allocated towards development goals, report back to national parliaments on the 3 D impacts of investments in S&T.
Overall, the Manifesto team was commended for its vision, energy and inclusiveness. Many opportunities for influencing were noted (ranging from the UK’s Research Excellence Framework to DFID’s Emerging Technologies funding window to the new Government’s focus on transparency and accountability).
The key question for me was “does the Manifesto action agenda rely on a powerful actor seeing the light?” If it does, how will this happen? Can it be accomplished by mobilizing civil society? Or will the action agenda have to bypass the powerful status quo organizations and rely on change from the emerging voices who are at the margins now?
The STEPS team knows that these kinds of changes don’t come quickly and they were clear that this report is just one moment in a longer process.
The Chair of the ESRC, Alan Gillespie, reminded us how long change processes can take. In reflecting on the original Sussex Manifesto from 1970 he noted that the report called for the UN to establish clear outcome orientated development goals. The MDGs were established 30 years later.
Being born in South Africa I had to find a reason to get a cheesy picture of the World Cup into the blog.
1. What are the economic determinants of World Cup success?
2. What are the economic returns to hosting a World Cup?
On the determinants, some very serious econometrics have been dedicated to this issue (see this one from the International Association of Sports Economists!). Population seems to matter more than GDP/capita and past performance in Cups seems to matter more than the proportion of professional footballers in the population. Being the host country is important for success. Goldman Sachs also get in on the act with their World Cup and Economics Report--they find little correlation between a country's 2009 Growth Environment Score (GES) and FIFA football rankings although improvements in the GES are correlated with improvements in the FIFA rankings. Their picks for the semi finals? England, Argentina, Spain and Brazil.
More important, what are the economic returns? This is more serious but very difficult territory. What has been the infrastructure addition? Is it multi-use? Was it geared towards labour intensive job creation? What has been the increase in tourism? Have football tourists spent more than non-football tourists? What have been the spillovers in terms of kickstarting sport, tourism, and opening up the country to new investments? The evidence is all over the place (where are those systematic reviews when you need them?).
For a country like South Africa, with unemployment rates of about one third, this is no joke. We know that public works projects can have very different impacts on poverty depending on how they are designed (some work I was involved in in the late 90s showed that for 100 public works projects in Western Cape, the ones led by communities were the most cost efficient at transferring resources to the poorest), so it will be interesting to see how many jobs were created and if the differences at the 10 stadium sites and economic hinterlands can be explained by process, institutional and infrastructure design features.
However the most interesting paper I found from a quick look argues that it is the non-economic impacts, especially the internal "psychic income" (estimated using contingent valuation technique) that really matter when economic communities invest in large sports events. Civic pride, identity and a sense of belonging really seem to matter.
the finest, but also one of the economically most long-term effects of the 2006 World Cup."
I hope you enjoy the tournament and the positive image of Africa that it will surely present.
My pick: Spain. Any team that cannot find a regular place for Cesc Fabregas must be seriously good.
Can DFID Leverage Reform in the Multilateral Aid World?
DFID, as part of its review of spending has launched a review of its multilateral aid spend.
Is the UK taxpayer getting value for money from 30 or so global organisations? Let's look at some of the potential criteria.
Transactions costs. Channeling money through multilateral aid agencies may reduce transactions costs for recipients and for bilateral donors. But on the ground, countries still have to deal with 30 or so bilateral donors and 30 or so multilaterals. In addition the UK taxpayer may simply be paying two sets of administrators--in the UK to get the money out and in Washington, Rome and New York to allocate the money.
Ownership. Can multilaterals support government systems better than direct budget support? I'm not sure. And I'm not even sure the best way to find out-who to ask? Civil society in the South? Recipient Governments? The new Aid Watchdog?
Impact. It is harder to demonstrate to donor citizens that their taxes are having a particular effect when resources are pooled in multilaterals. Interesting to note that the main point made by the International Development Select Committee when they reviewed the DFID-World Bank relationship in 2008 was that the World Bank needed to do better on making impact a central part of how it measured its effectiveness.
Credibility. This depends on governance and representation. While the heads of multilateral agencies bypass standard human resource best practice (job and person description, open competition, selected on merit by internals and externals) it is hard for these agencies to lecture on governance. On representation, change seems to be happening very slowly.
Perhaps the multilateral review can incentivise some movement along these lines.
There are lots of people out there who are much more knowledgeable than I am on these global public goods issues. I would love to hear from you.
The events of the past 2-3 years should have re-focused the development community's attention on ethics, faith and morality. The Global Financial Crisis has made a few of us turn our attention again to the values underlying the global economic system. Climate change has highlighted the purpose of consumption int he rich countries, and has forced us to consider tradeoffs between our consumption opportunities and those of future generations.
1. these faith based organisations clearly felt that trust in outsiders is vital if outsiders are going to have any traction, and that being identified as "faith based" is very helpful in establishing such trust quickly--even across faiths.
2. the organisations are actively questioning the very nature of progress. For example, CAFOD, Tearfund and Theos are involved in a project considering Human Flourishing in development which will be launched in the Autumn. Here is one background paper from Bath University on this issue.
3. they feel they have a lot to contribute to the current debate about the effectiveness of aid. Through their strong local connections and trust dividends they think they can contribute a lot to assessing impact--both in terms of defining impact from the recipient perspective and in terms of getting feedback on what is and is not working.
The ideas from this roundtable will be more fully reported back to this group and will influence the Reimagining Development Report due out later in the year.
Social protection refers to a set of interventions that seek to help families protect themselves against shocks, protect the assets they have, and climb out of poverty.
A new report by the Centre for Social Protection argues that, in sub-Saharan Africa, social protection may have lost its way.
Despite lots of donor investment, many African governments remain reluctant to embark on the high recurrent costs of social welfare and the political irreversibility of its introduction.
The report suggests a change in emphasis. Instead of introducing a plethora of pilots that use imported recipes, focus on the objectives of social protection--vulnerability and poverty reduction--and build on existing government initiatives, innovating and experimenting with these as they are strengthened. Importantly, the report recommends that African citizens are more involved in the upstream design and the downstream evaluation of such programmes. It is noteworthy that the biggest global successes in social protection come from Mexico and Brazil and these were home grown ideas, financed by a mix of domestic and external finance.
But the picture is not that simple--it's not as if there are legions of African leaders straining to get their homegrown social protection policies financed. A report released last week from Kofi Annan's African Progress Panel highlights the disconnects between African countries' GDP/capita growth rates and the continent's lack of progress in poverty reduction. This, it is argued, is the result of weak leadership, capacity and governance. This puts a premium on the donors being politically nimble and switched on to the policy process.
Country-led opportunities for strengthening social protection in Africa will not be commonplace. When they arise, the donors must be ready--not to produce their own solutions but to support the reformers working in the countries they are trying to help.

industry_corpus2: Politics & Administration


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Chris Smalling and Romelu Lukaku struck to hand much-changed Manchester United a routine 2-0 Premier League win at Bournemouth.
Smalling’s third strike in six league games means the England defender now boasts more United goals than January’s marquee forward-line signing Alexis Sanchez.
Chile’s former Arsenal striker Sanchez has mustered just two goals in nine league appearances for United, while Smalling has now found the net in three successive away contests.
Belgium striker Lukaku then climed off the bench to seal United’s comfortable victory, as Jose Mourinho’s men hit back from Sunday’s 1-0 home loss to West Brom that handed Manchester City the league title.
Lukaku’s 16th league goal of the season – and his seventh Premier League goal in six meetings with Bournemouth – handed United an armchair ride ahead of Saturday’s FA Cup semi-final clash with Tottenham.
United made seven changes from their galling Old Trafford loss to the league’s basement club West Brom, and strolled to victory on the south coast despite bursts of spirit from Bournemouth.
The Cherries started the night the brighter, but to no avail. Callum Wilson should have done better when clean through, only for Phil Jones to recover just enough to toe away trouble.
Jordon Ibe dragged tamely wide from 20 yards after Wilson had made another threatening incision, but after that, the visitors took control.
Marcus Rashford drew a smart save from Asmir Begovic after picking Nathan Ake’s pocket as United warmed up, and then Mourinho’s men struck.
Matteo Darmian’s slide-rule pass released Jesse Lingard down the inside right, and the England forward’s cutback was buried by Smalling.
Bournemouth crafted the first opening after the break, Ryan Fraser sending Josh King scurrying away down the left flank.
The Norway forward’s teasing ball had Wilson racing to the far post, but the ex-Coventry striker was unable to make contact.
An incensed Wilson raced immediately to remonstrate with referee Graham Scott, arguing ambitiously for unjust impediment from Luke Shaw.
Wilson failed to get the better of Jones next, unable to beat the England defender when all-but clean through. Lys Mousset tangled with Jones in the United box too. But the visitors held firm.
And just when Bournemouth thought they could crank up the pressure, Paul Pogba released that valve.
The France midfielder cantered through Bournemouth’s midfield before threading a fine pass through for Lukaku.
The Belgium hitman steamed onto the ball and buried his first-time shot, to kill the contest with 20 minutes still to play.

industry_corpus2: Sports


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We have with us this evening a German novelist worth reading, a French novelist worth reading and a new American novelist worth reading—and watching. To relieve suspense, it may be as well to say at once that their names are Hermann Sudermann, Pierre de Coulevain and Charles Tenney Jackson, respectively, and that their books are denominated “The Song of Songs” (Huebsch, $1.40), “On the Branch” (Dutton, $1.25) and “The Day of Souls” (Bobbs-Merrill, $1.50).
Sudermann is no stranger to Americans. We know him as the author of “Magda” (“Heimat”), the best play that has come out of Germany since Ibsen opened his famous college of playwriting in the Cafe Luitpold at Munich; and some of us also know him as the author of other excellent plays and of several very bad ones, and as a novelist who has sat under a number of masters and done creditable work, in the manner of each. He is, in brief, in the front rank of living German writers, and saving only Gerhart Hauptmann, there is no other man in that rank.
Extravagant praise? Not at all. I am speaking just now of living German authors. You will find no Goethes and Schillers, nor even Lessings, Klopstocks, Herders and Heines in Germany today, for the Germans are too busy in their factories and shipyards to be producing great literature. But if Sudermann thus falls short of the giants, it is certainly not absurd to compare him to the captains of the second line—to the younger Dumas and Thomas Hardy, D’Annunzio and Pinero, Maeterlinck and George Moore. He is, indeed, a man of rare and splendid talents, a shrewd observer of the human comedy, an acute analyst, an artist with a sure feeling for color and form; and if he had but one thing more, he might easily cross the shadowy line separating the merely respectable from the incomparable. That one thing is an individual, comprehensible and credible philosophy of life, born of a mighty personality—a philosophy which would set off its author in an unmistakable way from all other delvers into motives and all other interpreters of acts.
It goes without saying that such a philosophy is to be found in the writings of every imaginative writer of true genius. We cannot think of Dickens, for example, without recalling his sentimental view of the world, with its cardinal doctrine that all human ills are to be cured by love. And in the same way, we cannot detach Thackeray from his tolerant cynicism, nor Shakespeare from his proud resignationism, nor Milton from his lofty idealism, nor Fielding from his buoyant optimism, his belief in mankind, his firm conviction that the mere being alive is sufficient for happiness. A great writer’s philosophical outlook is the essential part of him—the element that separates him, even more than his facility of expression, from the average man. Unless that outlook be comprehensible and unvarying—unless, by reading him, we can gain it, and the gaining of it helps us, in some measure, to face life with better understanding and greater comfort, his work remains mere yarn spinning and we soon forget it.
In Sudermann a philosophy is lacking. He seems to be eternally flabbergasted by life. An observer of extraordinary shrewdness, he comes swiftly into the breakers when he attempts to interpret his observations. It is not that he is struck by the notion that life is meaningless—for that notion, as the case of Joseph Conrad proves, is not inconsistent with clear thinking—but that he seeks to read hazy, antagonistic and often puerile meanings into it. One too often misses in his novels and plays the passionate earnestness and certainty, the clear, clean-cut logic that one finds in “Germinal,” “Barry Lyndon” and “Anna Karenina.” He is swayed too much by the grotesque literary “movements” which inflame and torture the cognoscienti of the Berlin caf£s. He is alternately idealist and realist, revolutionist and reactionary, pessimist and optimist; and so his writings lose vitality, because there is no dominant master note in them expressive of the man and of the one man only.
This lack is woefully apparent in “The Song of Songs.” The book, to summarize it in a phrase, is a study in feminine eroticism. We are introduced to Lily Czepanek at the period of adolescence, and we follow her closely until the fires of her youth are spent. Lily is no common drab, but a civilized and educated young woman, whose thirst for male caresses is constantly conditioned and ameliorated by other and more complex yearnings. And yet whenever the issue is fairly joined between a man and an idea, it is the man that always wins her. At sixteen she is enamored of a priggish student and makes a vain effort to seduce him. By the time she is eighteen she has become the hunted instead of the huntress, and it is now merely a matter of making her choice. She chooses a doddering colonel of cavalry—a decayed rake—a “connoisseur of women,” as Sudermann calls him. The old fool marries her and carries her off to his castle in West Prussia.
And now begin Lily’s real adventures. She is genuinely fond of the colonel and has a sincere desire to do him honor, but it quickly becomes evident that he is hopelessly deficient as a lover. A younger man volunteers for that exhausting office—an unmoral ex-lieutenant, who fights the colonel gaily when he is found out, and then laughs a light laugh and betakes himself to America, leaving Lily as a keepsake to a rich friend in Berlin. Lily, for a while, avoids the rich friend, saying to herself that she will stick to celibacy and earn a living. But before long we find her in a comfortable flat, paid for by the friend, and by and by strange hats begin to appear in the hall. One of the owners of hats is an earnest and innocent young scholar, and with him Lily falls desperately in love. It is a grand passion at last, and Lily begins to torture herself with the problem that always oppresses contaminated ladies when they fall in love: Shall she tell him everything at once, or wait for him to find out?
She decides upon the former course, and the scholar makes the noble answer that fools always make. He says he believes in her essential purity—that he thinks she has been a victim of circumstances—that he will trust her henceforth. And then, with one leg, as it were, over the altar rail, Lily pours out an alcoholic libation to the kindly gods—and in her liquorish babbling the truth comes out. The scholar, after all, is not altogether asinine. Once it becomes as plain as a pikestaff, he can tell the difference between sins that have sprung from within and sins that have been forced in from without. He now sees Lily for what she really is, and so he goes away, leaving her to her rich friend. Taking warning, she marries that gentleman out of hand. The years are passing, and another such chance may not come again.
As I have said, this story is well written and worth reading, but for all that, there is no firm grip in it. One wonders more than once what Sudermann himself thinks of Lily and her doings. His opinion is never clear; it seems to vary, indeed, from chapter to chapter. In a truly great novel there is no such muddiness. We see everything clearly through one assertive personality. In “The Song of Songs” there are pale reflections of half a dozen personalities. Here and there Sudermann seems to be trying to write like Zola; in other places he is a romanticist; in yet other places he is not far from the sugary sentimentality of Heimburg and Das Gartenlaube. Lily swoons at critical moments, like the heroine of a tale for chambermaids and high school girls. The best writing is in the first chapter, wherein Lily’s home and her father and mother are described. If the rest of the book maintained the standard set there it would be a great novel. As it is, it is merely an uncommonly clever story.
“On the Branch” is half novel and half essay. The author, despite her masculine nom de plume, is a woman, and the history she endeavors to set forth is that of a woman. It is no conventional tale of young love and high hope. Love, indeed, is long since dead when it opens and hope has begun to wither. At our first glimpse of the woman she is probably fifty years old. True enough, we go back a bit into her past, but we review it as she has learned to review it herself—that is to say, somewhat objectively and in the light of the philosophic calm of middle age. The whole story, indeed, has to do with the genesis and development of that serenity which follows the decay of the passions of youth. We see an intelligent, introspective woman slipping into the autumn of life; we follow her, step by step, along the road to contentment.
It is hinted that the story, in great part, is autobiographic. Certainly, an air of reality clings to it. One gathers from it the impression that one has held converse during a pleasant holiday with an oldish woman of agreeable personality—a woman who has thought things out for herself and attained to clear self-expression, and yet one who remains throughout more the woman than the sage.
“The Day of Souls” is the third of our trio of books worth reading. According to “Who’s Who in America,” the author, Charles Tenney Jackson, is a Missourian, who has lived the roaring life of the armed camp and is now a newspaper man in San Francisco. We learn from that same book that “The Day of Souls” was in preparation as far back as the fall of 1907, when the biographies for the 1908-9 edition were prepared. This indicates that Mr. Jackson is a somewhat deliberate and careful workman, which fact, in itself, would be sufficient to separate him from the Oppenheims and the McCutcheons, the Chamberses and the Marion Crawfords. Much more convincing evidence of his differentiation is to be found in the story itself, for it is a story with a beginning, a middle and an end; a story with good writing in it and credible personages; a story showing keen observation and clear thought; a story that leads me to venture the prophecy, publicly and in indelible ink, that Mr. Jackson, if he keeps on writing and avoids religiously the snares of a department store success, will one day write a full-length, first-class novel, and maybe more than one.
Not that “The Day of Souls” is a masterpiece or even an entirely satisfying journeyman piece. Far from it! As a matter of fact, the story wabbles in more than one place, and now and then the probabilities are a bit stretched; but these faults are more than counterbalanced by the virtues that accompany them. The fable itself is not complex. It concerns a young man who finds himself drawn down into the cesspool of moral and social rottenness which underlay the San Francisco that was before the earthquake, and with the manner of his redemption. Not only in scene, but also in method it recalls the Frank Norris of “McTeague.” There are the same picturesque descriptions of the colorful town; there is the same genial humor; the same vein of mysticism crops up occasionally. It is no discredit to follow Frank Norris. If more of our young novelists would study his novels there would be a more hopeful outlook for American letters.
I am not going into a detailed account of Mr. Jackson’s story. The story itself is of much less importance than the way in which it is told. The author is upon the right track. Of all the young Americans whose books have come to me within the past two years, he and another Easterner transplanted to the Coast—to wit, Henry Milner Rideout, author of “Dragon’s Blood” —give the greatest promise. Mr. Jackson is thirty-five years old and Mr. Rideout is thirty-three. By the time they are forty they will be better known.
Now come half a dozen or more books of the sort that smirk at us in the bookshops, from mighty pyramids, for two or three weeks—and then go to join the rose of yesterday. Such books, I take it, do no great harm in the world. They are written, in the main, in a tongue easily understood by anyone who speaks English, and their characters are inoffensive automata whose passions are seldom corrupting and never complex. They make few demands upon the emotions and none whatever upon the powers of ratiocination. In going through them, indeed, one observes that their psychic effect is confined to a feeling of mild irritation, as if some patient slave were tickling one’s Adam’s apple with a feather. It is not painful, that irritation, but it inhibits slumber and wards off introspection, and so the book itself serves a useful purpose, the which purpose is exactly the same as that of pinochle, comic supplements, jig-saw puzzles, crocheting or home drinking. That is to say, it kills time without out raging the body or burdening the mind. A man might wipe out a Sunday afternoon just as effectively by swallowing paregoric and falling snoring to the floor, but that would spoil his appetite for malt liquor in the evening. He might, again, spend the afternoon reading Kant, but that would involve a tedious exercise of the faculty of cognition. So he does neither, but, instead, plays pinochle with the janitor, looks through the Sunday papers, practises the art of mixing gin fizzes or reads a popular novel.
One of the best of these anti-soporifics in the current lot is “Lord Loveland Discovers America,” by those refined and fashionable authors, C. N. and A. M. Williamson (Doubleday, Page, $1.20). The Williamsons, as they say at Lake Mohonk, have a good deal of class to them. Nine times out of ten an automobile is the hero of their fable—an automobile much more human, but hardly more fascinating, than the dashing devil who drives it or the super-beautiful goddess who sits by his side, jogging him affectionately at every water break. Not uncommonly Royalty Itself inhabits the middle distance of the landscape. The air has an aristocratic keenness; no one bothers about Hell; there are excellent victuals three times a day. Altogether, the reader enjoys his glimpse of a richer, cleaner, happier world, and is the better for it.
In the present volume there is a slight variation, for Lord Loveland, when he lands in New York in search of an heiress, falls almost at once into the hands of the Goths and Huns, and so finds himself walking the highways of that pitiless town with a grotesque dress coat upon his back and no money in his pantaloons. Suffering purifies and ennobles Loveland. His heart grows soft; he learns to love; in the end he gains the honest affection of a—but I say no more. No, she is no gilded child of plutocracy, no millioned maid of Pittsburg, all money and freckles, ambition and thumbs. I doubt if the poor girl is worth over $900,000. But she has a heart, and that heart goes out to Loveland.
“Passers-By,” by Anthony Partridge (Little-Brown, $1.50), is a tale of mystery. At the start we behold a beautiful street singer, accompanied by an intelligent monkey and a ferocious hunchback, going down a dark alley in London to sing. Why an alley? Because Fate wills it so. The rear wall of a great hotel looms high on one side, and far up, at an open window, an elegant gentleman smokes a cigarette. What more natural than for him to change his collar, light another cigarette, come downstairs, draw a staggering wallop from the hunchback, and then, after regaining his senses, take the girl to dinner at a sumptuous lobster palace? She goes in her rags, but her beauty benumbs the headwaiter and so she gets all she wants to eat—aye, and to drink!
And now enters the wicked Marquis of Ellingham, a statesman with a past so dark that even his wife hates to think of it. How did he live before he came into his peerage? So far, no one seems to know. But one hears of a sudden the clank of chains and scents the disinfectants of a dungeon. Paris—the police—the Black Fox—Jacques Leblun, the French detective! Again I cease. It wouldn’t be fair to tell you all that happens, and besides, I don’t know. The true way to read a story of mystery is to stop in the middle and then burn the book, or, if the rules forbid fires in the cells, send it back to the warden. Its mystery thus remains an interminable delight, to torture you pleasantly for all eternity. If you read to the end the solution is usually so absurdly simple that you scorn yourself for not having guessed it, or so diabolically complex that you can’t fathom it.
Our next, brethren, is “The Sea of Matrimony,” by Jessie H. Childs (Broadway Pub. Co., $1.50). The voyager upon that tempestuous ocean is Elise Sinclair, a lady far past her nonage. She has been married, indeed, for a good long while before she meets John Maynard, one of nature’s noble men, but as she gazes into his eyes a tidal wave of passion goes roaring through her system.
But nothing worse ensues. “Few women, fortunately,” says the author, “have the polygamous tendency which seems so natural to most men.” And yet it takes three hundred pages to tell the story of Elise’s battle against the magnetism radiated from John Maynard’s eyes. Part of the time she escapes temptation by taking a hand in the amours of her cousin, Winthrop Raymond. Winthrop has an affair with Mary Adams, his stenographer, and it is only her death that saves a scandal. Elise, after attending Mary’s funeral, returns to her own troubles, and for a while it seems certain that she and John will end as fugitives from justice. But deliverance comes to her at last in the form of Hindoo philosophy. The philosopher is a grafter named Mrs. Morse, who has been to India and penetrated to the inmost secrets of psychotherapy. She saves Elise without recourse to drugs or surgery. A few whispered words and Error yields to Truth. The Divine All gobbles those immoral Red Corpuscles. In tune with the Infinite, cleansed of all Earthly Impurity, denaturized by the Word, absorbed in the Eternal Consciousness, the Ether, the Me, the Afflatus, Elise finds that she can look at John, and even touch him, without dizziness or shortness of breath. As we say good-bye to them they are in the doldrums of the sixties, and Elise’s son Henry is about to marry John’s daughter Louise. Thus their Life Currents mingle at last, engulfed by the One.
A masterpiece of fiction! A book of the tenth dimension! How puny sound the philosophical maunderings of Kant, Spencer and Nietzsche, the scientific bombast of Huxley, Haeckel and Weismann, beside such clear statements of Fundamental Truth! Welcome to the synagogue, O subtile Miss Childs! A fair Sir Oliver Lodge come to judgment!
“The Living Mummy,” by Ambrose Pratt (Stokes, $1.50), is a thriller of conventional cut. No doubt the astute reader has already guessed from a glance at the title that the scene is Egypt, that there are archeologists in it, that one of them discovers a remark able mummy and brings the thing to life, and that the resurrected mummy plays the devil. It is even so—and much more! A good deal of quasi-scientific flapdoodle is thrown in for lagniappe, and the English, in the main, is rather better than that of the average Indiana genius.
“Cab No. 44,” by R. F. Foster (Stokes, $1.50), is a yarn of mystery and indistinguishable from any other yarn of mystery. If you like yarns of mystery, you will like this yarn of mystery—which goes without saying. If, on the contrary, you do not like yarns of mystery, you will not like this yarn of mystery—which also goes without saying. It is impossible to say any more, for yarns of mystery are seldom to be judged by the standards made and ordained for ordinary books. A new race of critics should be bred to study them, determine their canons and write about them learnedly. The same critics might devote their idle moments to those allied art forms, the college yell, the Salvation Army hymn, the stump speech, the New Thought essay and the novelized drama.
Which reminds me that two new novelized dramas await examination. They are “The Sins of Society,” by Cecil Raleigh, who also wrote the melodrama upon which it is based (Dillingham, $1.50), and “The Fortune Hunter,” a version of Winchell Smith’s comedy by Louis Joseph Vance (Dodd Mead, $1.50). Of the first it may be said quite frankly that it is villainous. Mr. Raleigh is an English play manufacturer of the fourth class, who has the contract for supplying the annual Drury Lane melodrama. He differs in degree, but not in kind, from Theodore Kremer, Owen Davis and Hal Reid. In the hierarchy of letters his place is not far above that of Sylvanus Cobb and the Duchess. Among dramatists, even Charles Klein and other such platitudinizers are beyond him. He is, in brief, a bad maker of bad plays, and “The Sins of Society” proves that he is a worse maker of worse novels. The story is tawdry, silly, cheap, banal. Its characters are the stuffed dummies of the popular stage. It is written in the strained, ridiculous fashion of a dime novel. The very capitalization is upon an absurd plan, recalling the compositions of blockhead schoolboys. It has no merit that I have been able to find. It is utter and unmitigated balderdash.
Coming after such, “The Fortune Hunter” seems almost good. But the difference between the two is merely one of degree. Both belong to the lowest stratum of printed books—below the works of Marie Corelli and Hall Caine, even below those of the psychical researchers.
“The Seventh Noon” (Small Maynard, $1.50) is a new thriller by Frederick Orin Bartlett, author of “The Web of the Golden Spider.” As literature it scores a zero of diameter equal to the earth’s, but as an antisoporific it has considerable efficacy. The hero, finding life sour to the palate, takes a dose of some mysterious henbane which will kill him in a week, and resolves to devote his last seven days to good deeds. Those good deeds take the form of helping a beautiful maiden in distress—and thereby hangs a galloping tale. Peter Donaldson does not die. Not on your life! The poison shakes him, but doesn’t actually kill him. On the last page he and the maiden are face to face. Her eyes grow moist and she smiles. The joy of it is too much for her. . . .
Mr. Bartlett does not give the name of the poison that Donaldson so rashly swallows. By the aid of a friendly toxicologist I am able to supply that lack. It is a synthetic alkaloid called anticamphotetrahydroquinonsulphobenzoisalicytriacidomanganine.
“The Danger Trail,” by James Oliver Curwood (Bobbs-Merrill, $1.50), need not detain us. It is a tale of love and daring in the Frozen North, with the customary American hero and the orthodox half-breed heroine. As such tales go, it is not a bad one. The fighting begins promptly; there is plenty of it, and the hero faces death like a man. But it cannot be said that the author gets much suspense into the chronicle. When on page twelve John Howland glances out of the window of the Windsor Hotel at Prince Albert and sees in the darkness “a face on which the shimmering moonlight falls,” you know very well that somewhere toward page three hundred that face and John’s face will touch noses pleasantly in a passionate, ante-nuptial buss.
Finally, to make an end of novels, we come to two that are already familiar to you, for both have appeared in the Smart Set as novelettes. One of them is “The Duke’s Price,” by Demetra and Kenneth Brown (Houghton – Mifflin, $1.50), and the other is “The Man Outside,” by Wyndham Martyn (Dodd-Mead, $1.50). The former was printed in the November, 1909, number under the title of “The Romance of an American Duchess,” and the latter in the September, 1909, number, as “John Paget’s Progress.” To each a good deal of new matter has been added. You may here look for me to prove that I am uncompromisingly just, even when dealing with the work of colleagues, by denouncing both stories as bad ones; but the facts in the case rob you of that elevating exhibition, for they enable me to lay my hand on my heart and say that both are good ones.
Of books about spooks there is no end. The eloquent Hyslop, the pious Lodge, the inimitable Garland and a dozen other serpents of unearthly wisdom are on the job day and night, and scarcely a month goes by without its new volume, dripping with amazing syllogisms and epoch-making marvels. The latest is “Eusapia Palladino and Her Phenomena” (Dodge, $2.00), by Hereward Carrington. Carrington is now Eusapia’s manager and press agent, and in consequence the vulgar may be disposed to scoff at his testimonials, but his book should still those sneers, for it shows how cynically he once doubted her and how she brought him into camp. He describes her tricks in great detail, with photographs, diagrams and lists of witnesses, and defies anyone to explain them.
This matter of table tapping and other such buncombe is such an old story that I hesitate to go over it. To the man of what Professor James calls a “tough” mind, the so-called “proofs” of the necromancers are tedious nonsense, but to those with the will to believe they are abundantly convincing. It is all a question of temperament, of training, of mental habit. The man of the first class maintains that the burden of proof is upon the table tappers —that they should come out of their dark rooms and do their tricks under fair test conditions, or forever hold their peace. The man of the second class, on the contrary, holds that all their claims are to be granted until disproved, in the face of the plain fact that it is impossible, as a rule, to disprove them. This last position makes intelligent debate impossible. As for me, I am firmly convinced, after reading Mr. Carrington’s earnest book, that Eusapia is an old girl of deep humor, who must get many a hearty but secret chuckle out of the credulity of those who pay hard cash to see her perform. That sane human beings should still believe that she communes with spirits, after she has been detected so often in unblushing fraud, seems a far more marvelous thing to me than any of the miracles she claims to perform.
Showing how a New York society woman, brought to the edge of the abyss by unhealthful coddling, finds her lost womanhood in the wilderness. A story of fair promise.
A sentimental little story in the Dickens manner, done with un usual skill. If you have tears to shed, you will shed them over the eleven Coleses and the deceitful angel they entertain unawares.
A little book of genuine humor. Such burlesques are common, but never have I encountered one so amusing. The canned reviews on the cover are too modest. It is of chuckles and loud laughs all compact.
An effort by eleven specialists to describe the population, commerce and government of a typical American city—to wit, Providence, R. I. A sound and workmanlike book, of keen interest to every serious student of politics and political economy.
Another of Mr. Barbour’s sentimental stories, bound in lilac cloth and with colored pictures.
A collection of interesting contributions to Ibseniana, with a remarkable painstaking bibliography of Ibsen commentaries and an almost complete record of English and American performances of the Ibsen plays.
Three fantastic stories in one volume, with exquisite decorations in color by Clara Elsene Peck.
The diverting story of a pair of honeymooners who pick up, en route, little Bateese and his “boule dog,” and find it much easier to carry them along than to lose them.
Platitudinous balderdash by a German. Let Drs. Orison Sweet Marden, Charles Wagner, Samuel McComb and the rest of the worry doctors look to their laurels, for here comes a rival with a sure cure.
A new edition of this excellent work, with the few errors of the first edition corrected. It is the most satisfactory one-volume musical reference book in English.
The works of H.L.. Mencken and other American journalists are now freely available at The Archive of American Journalism. Visit our bookstore for single-volume collections–-ideal for research, reference use or casual reading.

industry_corpus2: Literature & Emotions


text:
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industry_corpus2: Gaming


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While playing the role of parent, I find that I trot out old tropes like “apply the rules”, “start with the basics,” and “don’t get ahead of yourself” when helping my kids with their homework.
And I find that I get into some of the same conversations when I have the opportunity to engage with IT leaders around the globe. In business today, the customer sets the pace and the business tries to meet it. Too many business leaders look at technology and think of it as the great equaliser or accelerator. While it can be both, the fact is the deployment of technology can be detrimental if you don’t have the right foundation in place.
For 2019, Forrester predicts that CIOs will focus on providing the proper foundations while taking a measured approach to innovation, where 25 per cent will expand their remit and become true owners of digital business and technology-led innovation, leaving the rest relegated to trusted IT operators.
Yes, the CIO will be counted on for innovation, but Forrester predicts a shift away from the AI/blockchain/tech-of-the-day moonshot to a more methodical approach to innovation that focuses on the customer and revenue while utilising metrics to benchmark and improve.
The issue is not strictly about the size, scope, or complexity of the CIO’s remit; it’s the diversity and interdependency of the mandate that make this hard. The different priorities of refactoring and automating core systems, putting in place a data governance environment, testing AI technically and operationally, and using technology to differentiate customer experiences are not only complex but also highly interdependent. A divide-and-conquer approach won’t work.
In 2019, more CEOs and CIOs will come to terms with the scope and interdependence of this mandate — and the criticality of its success to the very destiny of their companies. They will agree that one executive — the CIO — will lead and orchestrate this vital effort; CIOs will spend the time to build their leadership teams, empowering trusted operators to handle much of the day-today. Arguably the most important outcome of 2019 is that leading CIOs will build a model that translates tech-led innovation into customer value.
To deliver, though, CIOs will need to recognise that their ability to innovate is stunted by a foundation that is anything but flexible or agile. Forrester predicts that growth in back-office technology will accelerate, hitting 5 per cent as CIOs deliver a customer-obsessed operating model that is fast, connected, and insights-driven.
The upshot is that successful CIOs will be seen as rising stars. Forrester predicts that this will create significant movement in the marketplace as these top CIOs are enticed by new opportunities and look for new challenges. Further, there will be a host of CIOs who will flood the market, as a lack of success will have firms looking for folks who can get the job done. All told, that means up to 20 per cent of companies will be looking for a new CIO in 2019.
As you look to 2019, get those details in place for your foundation, and your ability to change the future of your company through technology will surge.
Matt Guarini is vice president, research director at Forrester.

industry_corpus2: Computing & Telecommunications


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industry_corpus2: Petrochemicals


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industry_corpus2: Finance & Economics


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industry_corpus2: Others


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An integral part of any wedding are funny wedding invitations. People who have never encountered a choice of funny wedding invitations can mistakenly find that this is an easy task, but it is not. Yes, the choice of a bouquet and a dress are undoubtedly important components of any wedding, but invitations are the most important moment for your guests.
How to start preparing funny wedding invitations?
The first thing you need to start is compiling a list of guests. When ordering funny wedding invitations, it is better to indicate 10% more, as it often happens that someone forgot to include in the initial list of guests. Send invitations are recommended in advance so that your friends and family have the opportunity to plan their own time. It is best to give funny wedding invitations personally, but if your potential guests are far away, then it is better to do this via mail or delivery service.
How to choose funny wedding invitations?
It will be very cool if your funny wedding invitations match the style of the wedding. Therefore, it is recommended to engage in the selection of invitations after the main wedding style is selected. Thus, funny wedding invitations can be decorated in the style of old documents or modern postcards with a bunch of decorative elements. The style of writing text in wedding invitations can also be different, it can be formal-business style, humorous or creative. The size and form of the invitation is best chosen based on the length of the message text in it.


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» The long overdue story of how R and I met.
The long overdue story of how R and I met.
And so, in a spirit of today is Valentine’s Day, here it finally is – the story of how I met R – whose name is Robby, but I think we’ll stick with R.
Listen, I’m not sure if you’re seeing anyone, or if you want to be, and I’m sorry if this is a little bold of me, but I have this friend in L.A. that I think you’d really like, so let me know the next time you’re on the west coast for work and I’ll introduce you two. Who knows, could make for a fun cross-country romance.
There are people you expect to set you up – a family member, a roommate, a co-worker – and people you don’t. It’s not that I didn’t think this friend could identify a good guy for me, I just didn’t think I was on her radar of people to yenta.
At the time I lived in New York (as did this friend) but was making trips to L.A. for work, but this friend didn’t know that. She also didn’t know that I was very seriously considering moving to L.A. and had already begun the process of finding work out there (here). And she had no idea that I was planning my next trip when she sent the message, that it would be in less than a month and that she would also be in L.A. that same week. It was too many coincidences for even a cynic to ignore.
It wasn’t until months after we met that I found out my friend had barely mentioned me to R before I joined them for a drink in L.A. at The Darkroom. I assumed he’d been prepped to turn on the charm and make a good impression.
In hindsight it’s too easy to say that we hit it off right away, so I’ll just say that I was immediately drawn to him and we spent the rest of the night talking about all those first-date things that you forget immediately and have to awkwardly re-learn throughout the relationship. We were there for three, maybe four hours? And yes, there was kissing.
That was the first night of my week-long trip to L.A. R made a point to take me out on a proper date another night that week, and things went just as well as they had the night we met.
But again, at the time I lived in New York, so my thoughts of what could become of this were minimal. I didn’t know which end was up at the time, and truly the last thing on my mind was starting a long-distance relationship after 1.5 dates.
It was that bizarre yet quiet confidence that I was so attracted to as we got to know each other over phone calls, e-mails, and games of Scrabulous. We didn’t have the chance to get drunk and make stupid early-on dating mistakes. There wasn’t the awkwardness of having to manage the hooking up versus really dating thing. We just slowly got to know each other.
R’s family is from NJ/NY so he came East for the 4th of July and we fit in a NYC date. I went back to L.A. in August to make more progress on my potential move and we saw more of each other then.
R came east again for an annual high school reunion that happened to fall on the week of my birthday, so he was there for the celebration. And by then, I’d decided to move to L.A.
Now here’s the part that R does not enjoy.
I did not intend to move to L.A. with a boyfriend. I was going through a major, major life change that had me in a total tailspin. I’d just left my entire family three thousand miles away. I was switching careers from something stable to something totally unknown. And, and this is his least favorite part, I was planning to play the L.A. field. I write a blog about it for crying out loud, how could I move to a brand new city and totally check myself out of the dating game?
I didn’t put R on the back burner when I got to town, but I was very careful about the amount of time we were spending together those first few weeks. I am a commitment-phobe with a dangerously fierce sense of independence. I wasn’t about to let a guy define my great, L.A. adventure.
The rest is a strangely uncomplicated story for a girl who specializes in complicated stories. I loved being with him, he seemed to love being with me, and so we kept making plans, going on dates, and introducing each other to our individual groups of friends. I tried to keep the level of time spent together reasonable, but it got to the point where it felt ridiculous to deny something that felt more right than any dating situation had before.
We made it official in early October, the night of my housewarming party.
The rest is still a very brief history that I am not embarrassed to call among the greatest surprises of my life. I’ll spare you the details of what makes what we have work, but I will say that a big part of it is how hard we’re both trying to take care of each other and how little effort it actually takes.
“Do you know what I really thought when I was trying to figure out what to do about you?” I said to R the other day.
Happy Valentine’s Day everyone. Spend it celebrating people you love, no matter what their title is in your life. I’ll be spending mine being grateful that I got out of my own way and into something wonderful.
So sweet, Jessie! Have a wonderful Valentine’s Day!
Miss you Jess! Have a WONDERFUL holiday!
Happy Valentine’s Day, R and JR. Nice leap to share the whole thing on the blog. Thanks for the good read.
Thanks for sharing the story! I know your fans have all been wondering where R came from.
Hooray! This is fantastic and just the sort of story I wanted to read today! Happy Valentine’s Day!
Very, very lovely. It’s wonderful when people find each other.
Soooo romantic. I love this entry. I have tears in my eyes.
My favorite part is at the end… you took a risk to avoid the risk of losing him. Soooo sweet and the perfect decision!
That is the sweetest story! Thanks for sharing!!!
YAY! Such an adorable story- I love love. Thanks for sharing the goods…its so easy to focus on the trainwrecks and weirdos in the blogosphere, it is a nice change of pace to see such a cute love story!
love this so much…I also cried like a creep.


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Home / Phil Cannella Retirement Media Inc. Market Watch / Market Watch: Will The Volatility Continue?
Market Watch: Will The Volatility Continue?
U.S. stocks were down in Tuesday afternoon trading, following a day where mixed data drove continued volatility.
The Dow finished slightly down on Monday, marking the ninth consecutive trading session of alternating between gains and losses.
Today, comments from various Federal Reserve presidents and inflation concerns are the focus. San Francisco Fed President John Williams offered an opinion Monday that the central bank should wait “no more than a few months” before pursuing a hike in interest rates. Meanwhile, the consumer price index increased for the first time in months (+0.2%) for February; a considerable jump when compared to a -0.7% decrease in January.
Investors pushed stocks slightly higher based off stronger-than-expected new homes sales figures on Tuesday morning. But in the afternoon, stocks not only lost their gains but declined considerably. Some experts suggested this was the result of continued concerns over an impending interest rate hike.
Oil prices swung wildly around the world, as China’s factory sector saw a dip in activity to the lowest level seen in 11 months.
← Previous Story Market Watch: What Will Drive Stocks This Week?


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Flesh is tender, silky, and oh-so-delicate, and slightly chewy texture of fish cheeks is simply divine.
Our Kukup farms, processes and delivers its premium Dragon Tiger Grouper right here in Pontian. To ensure freshness, we harvest our fish and vacuum-packed within hours of processing.
We sell the best-tasting Dragon Tiger Grouper available. That’s a bold claim, but after one taste we’re pretty sure you’ll agree.
You’ll find our premium Dragon Tiger Grouper fillets and steaks to be mildly sweet and incredibly clean tasting. Thanks to the pristine ocean waters in which we farm our Dragon Tiger Grouper , our products have no muddy or “fishy” taste.
In addition to our clean waters, you can rest assured that we do not use any hormones or antibiotics to encourage the growth of our Dragon Tiger Grouper . We believe that the best way to grow robust, healthy fish is to simply feed them high-quality food and let them swim in a clean, natural environment.
Our Dragon Tiger Grouper eat nothing but top-quality fishmeal food, basically we feed our fish with small fries, which has little or no wet market value, caught from our Pontian shore.That means fish that are tasty and naturally high in heart-healthy and brain-boosting omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids.

industry_corpus2: Agriculture & Fisheries


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Chigger Foot Boys' by Patricia Cumper MBE opens at Tara Arts next month and, as part of this, Strongback Productions are offering free workshops and theatre tickets to 15-22 year olds.
This new play follows the lives of four Jamaican soldiers who fought in World War 1.
Following on from initial workshops, Strongback Productions we are now offering a group of young adults the opportunity to work alongside Patricia Cumper, a historian, a designer and a filmmaker to help create a multimedia exhibition about these heroic young men. This is totally free of charge - they will provide travel expenses to those who are not local to Wandsworth - and participants will also receive free tickets to the press night of the show (Friday, February 24, 2017.
This is an excellent opportunity for young people to learn about film making, theatre and media, as well as providing an insight into an inspiring part of history that is sadly left out of the national curriculum.
Strongback Productions is a new BAME theatre company, working hard to document and celebrate BAME contribution to British cultural life, and to engage and inspire young people both locally and beyond.


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Happy National Trails Day – a perfect day to hit a trail on public lands! There are nearly 60,000 miles of trails that honor our country’s diverse landscape and history, and these provide the public with vital access to the outdoors. Whether you like to walk, hike, ride horseback, or bicycle, there is a trail for you! Check out some awesome trails to #FindYourWay: https://on.doi.gov/2sinOTe.
Photo of the popular Highline Trail at Glacier National Park by Tim Rains, National Park Service.

industry_corpus2: Travel & Geography


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The success of a school is often defined by the success of it’s produce.
Welcome to the Bethany Past Students Association (BPSA). The BPSA is a community which collectively represents the school outside it’s premises, in professional work and social life. The members of this association are often referred to as ‘The BethKnights’. The term BethKnights was derived from the Knights in England that displayed tenacity and ferocity in battle but at the same time wore the highest respect in the core values and loyalty to their country. Our Knights at Bethany come with similar traits that compromise on nothing but the best.
We’re ecstatic to say on behalf of the BPSA that over 10,000 graduates from the Bethany institutions have found great purpose and meaning in life spreading across both professional and personal growth. Every year we’re excited to welcome back many of our own that come to tell us how Bethany has blessed their lives. We are also excited to run this unit in a manner that’s dedicated to keeping the true essence of the school alive beyond just its physical boundaries.
Our goal with this association is to tap into the knowledge base of our alumni so that they may use their talents to inspire a new generation of upcoming stars. We strive to provide the highest standards of support and mentorship to the current students of the school by organizing guest lectures, tutors or even provide scholarships, internships, and job opportunities. Our association works towards the alumni creating and expanding community partnerships to better the academics and social upbringing of all the students at Bethany.
The Bethany Past Students Association is currently headed by Mrs. Harpreet Kaur an alumnus from the batch of 2000. Harpreet is supported by a strong team of over 15 individuals who work together in helping keep the spirit of Bethany alive. They host a wide variety of activities during the year to keep the engagement from the alumni community consistent and strong. On the 25th of Jan every year, the committee gets together to host one of the biggest events held at Bethany that has the biggest turnout of Alumnis. So save the date and join in to meet your favorite teachers and friends.
Our community has only been growing each year with dedicated individuals joining the cause to give back to our Alma Mater. Come join this amazing community that is set out to conquer the world through their tenacity and values.


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The cons: A recessed cabinet isn’t really a wall mounted cupboard. You may require a professional carpenter to set up the cabinet, particularly in the event you’d like to have some power installation from the cabinet. Most recessed cabinet also come with mirror surface that is nowhere near the wall attached counterpart. It is sometimes a serious vision problem for some people.
It is going to also be great to choose a built-in design. The built-in design is more elastic to be combine with your normal bedroom. Let’s say your bedroom has granite backsplash or stone tile backsplash, the black cabinet would make a terrific comparison to the backsplash.
Bedroom wall cabinet with towel bar could be accomplished with a bit DIY idea. In fact you can buy it from hardware store and online shop. But should you want to make it a little more personal, DIY project will probably be ideal for you. Aside from that, it is not the type of difficult job to do and occasionally you should set aside your own time to do things like this.
Is white a monotonous color? It’s not true! As I told you before, white color has so many kinds of kind like super white, Chantilly lace, Tibetan vanilla, Swiss coffee, white dove, simply white and white heron that accessible on many kind of designs of wall cupboard. You’re able to pick the white color that you like!

industry_corpus2: Real Estate & Construction


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Becky Eddy Phillips’ art wavers in leaps and falls between the introspective and intellectual realms, with dialogues in science, domesticity and feminism. Grounding herself firmly in the present, she experiments with installation and performance to represent the primitive within a progressive contemporary plot. Phillips’ imagery is strangely eery, with a feminine edge, as if there were an invisible link to the past lives of the Surrealist women.
Phillips’ paintings are a residual effect of creativity and a choice of how to use time and can explore her common themes of science and the personal, they also address formal visual elements of color, organic structure and seeing and imagining things as they truly are.


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After receiving your first set of hearing aids from a supplier like http://www.HearDenver.org, you may feel some discomfort when you initially begin using them. Getting used to wearing hearing aids takes time, and here are three tips that may help you get used to your new devices faster.
You should expect to take time to get used to wearing your hearing aids. Once you receive them, it is very important for you to commit to wearing them as often as possible. If you need hearing aids, leaving them in the box will not help your hearing problem.
While wearing your hearing aids may feel awkward at first, they should not hurt. If you feel pain, go back to your audiologist to have them refitted. If they are simply uncomfortable, you will need to get used to the feeling, and wearing them daily is the only way to do this.
Depending on the type of hearing aids you have, you may have the option of adjusting the volume. Many hearing aids today are equipped with volume controls that adjust automatically, but there are still some with buttons that allow you to adjust the volume.
Another thing to check is whether your hearing aids have frequency channels. Some hearing aids come with 15 to 20 different channels that you can use. By switching frequency channels, you may come across one that is more comfortable for your hearing needs. If you are not sure how to do this, ask your doctor.
Another way to get used to wearing your hearing aids is to wear them while you spend time with close friends. By doing this, you can ask questions about how loud you are speaking, and they will give you honest answers. This will help you learn how loud to speak, and you will know this by listening to how loud you sound as you speak.
It's a good idea to get used to wearing the hearing aids at home before you go out in public wearing them. While wearing your hearing aids for the first few days, you may begin hearing things you haven't heard in a long time. This may be alarming at first, but you will slowly get used to it.
After wearing your hearing aids for several days, you will begin getting used to them. They will feel more normal and natural to you, and you will also be more familiar with all the new sounds you are hearing. If you experience any problems with your new hearing aids, be sure to visit your doctor soon.

industry_corpus2: Health & Medicine