text:
I note your concern for Senior House, and I understand it. These are scary statistics. “For the MIT Classes of 2008 to 2015, 83.7% of students graduated within four years, and 7.7% have yet to graduate. For residents of Senior House in those same class years, just 59.7% graduated within four years, and 21.1% have yet to graduate.” That’s a compelling statistic, and one that deserves to be examined.
I wish that you had chosen to examine this statistic with members of our direct community. I understand that you feel you are acting in our best interest, but this is a shift that must be made collaboratively. Change will not come from the top down. Senior House wants to excel. We love our dorm, and our culture. The people I have met within Senior House rank among the most brilliant I have ever met. We want to be healthy and happy and to excel in our educations. If those are your goals for Senior House’s community, we should have a lovely time working together. I want to believe that those are your goals. However, it comes as a direct affront to bring our GRTs into a meeting concerning the proposed instituted changes and to simultaneously email not only the Senior House residents, but also our alumni, our parents, and the broader MIT community. This extremely public way of disseminating information does not feel like the beginning of a conversation, but rather a punitive measure. Especially by emailing our parents, Chancellor. I understand that many parents fund their child’s undergraduate education. But Senior House, especially, seems to have a number of strained parent-child relationships. Certainly there are Senior House residents who have been mentally, emotionally, and physically abused by their parents. To address the parents of MIT’s students is to make assumptions about the parent-child relationships that can oftentimes be much more harmful than intended. Please consider the harm that emailing parents can cause before doing so in the future. We are adults, and we deserve to be treated as such.
I understand that these decisions have not been hastily made, but they have in no way engaged the community. From a community standpoint, they feel hastily made. To have decisions instituted upon a group never feels good. To be informed of those decisions during the summer, when few residents are on campus to be actively heard, feels much worse. MIT’s administration has been repeatedly criticized for installing new policies or decisions during the summer when students are not able to be a part of the conversation. If you truly want to not only engage the community but also to make informed decisions, please reconsider the immediate enactment of these new policies.
Now, to address the data.
and to recognize that correlation is not necessarily equal to causation. That is to say, just because there is a direct relationship between two things, one cannot be necessarily said to cause the other.
The data you cite is extremely narrow in scope. It not only focuses upon the MIT Class of 2008 to the MIT Class of 2015 (none of which have been residents in Senior House for the past year), it also only considers students’ first-year-first-semester residence. With the frequency of transfers between MIT dorms, it’s extremely difficult to say that the first-semester-first-year residence is representative of the overall residence of students.
But, even accepting that the (questionable) sample truly represents the population, there are a number of confounding factors. Senior House is known to have a disproportionate number of lower income, racial minority, and LGBTQ students. Each of these demographics alone are shown to have lower graduation rates. Lower income students are shown as the mostly likely demographic to drop out. With these confounding issues, how can this single statistic be used as the reason to move towards action?
And finally, we must consider the use of this data as a measurement of success. MIT has long been a community of inspiring creative thinking and that thinking paves the way to tomorrow’s solutions. As this article addresses, the types of people who are likely to live in Senior House are unlikely to fit in a cookie cutter mold. And that’s actually a highly positive thing. To have highly intelligent, highly creative people is to have thinkers that reshape the world. To use graduation rates as a measurement of success is short sighted. Many people who drop out go on to entrepreneurship or other career paths that would likely be lauded as successful by general society. Taking longer than four years to complete an undergraduate education at MIT (which is repeatedly marked as one of, if not the, most challenging institutes in the world) should not be a mark of shame. Especially because a large number of people who do not complete MIT within four years have not done so because of mental health leaves of absence.
To use this single statistic, that has a number of issues, as a measure of Senior House’s health and success is extremely shortsighted. It fails to consider Senior House’s unique demographic makeup, the high proportion of residents with pre-existing mental health issues, and other, perhaps more “alternative,” metrics of success.
While on the subject of statistics, where is the data that Senior House has a drug problem? And how is this data related to students’ pre-MIT drug use? How is Senior House being determined to have a drug problem?
If we assume that Senior House does have some issues (which I’m still not sure that the above data and claims have verified), how do we go about fixing those problems?
Some might point to separating the residents from one another so as to keep their behavior from compounding. Maybe it hasn’t been said publicly, but it has been implied or passed through the grapevine that MIT struggles to provide the resources necessary to students with pre-existing conditions when those students are all grouped in one place. Namely, Senior House (as an alternative and safe space) tends to attract people who have mental health issues. MIT administrators feel that these students would be easier to assist if they were distributed more evenly throughout the dorms. But to distribute our residents does not better ensure our success. The conversations that can be had with residents who understand your own mental health issues because they too have experienced them are priceless. This support system is more valuable than an administrator will ever be to me. If MIT were to distribute these “problem students,” it might help Senior House’s graduation rate and normalize the dorms’ graduation rates, but it’s hard to say that it would actually benefit the students dealing with the mental health issues. A community of peers that understands and supports one another will always be stronger than a top down approach. We are willing to work with the administration to help with our mental health issues. Again, we want to be healthy, happy, and educated. But the current steps being taken are polarizing.
Give us access to the data. Let us look critically at our own community to determine what our issues are. And let us work with you to fix these issues.
For a very long time, Senior House has advocated for more mental health professionals to support our community. We asked that our Area Director have mental health training. We ask that the instated members to our community have not only the professional training to help us, but also HIPAA protections. To truly support a community that is disproportionately afflicted by mental health issues, give us mental health support and security. Help us create a community that leads towards growth and healing, not towards bureaucratic report systems that instill fear and distrust.
In our incoming house team and live in staff, give us mental health support. Please. We need it. Many of us have mental health issues. We’ve been asking for this support for sometime.
Create the turnaround committee. Let us look at ways to make Senior House excel, together.
But what I ask that you don’t do is to restrict our incoming freshmen. By closing access to a community that hugely supports people with mental health issues, LGBTQ-identifying people, and lower income students, you are robbing the freshman of a safe space and a home. I would not still be attending MIT today if I had not lived in Senior House. As much as I needed Senior House, incoming freshmen will too. To not let students who would otherwise live in Senior House do so is to rob them of a community that supports and celebrates aspects of society that many other communities ignore or demean.
To be LGBTQ, lower income, a racial minority, or mentally unwell should not be stigmatized. As these issues are so implicated with lower graduation rates, please do not make such hasty decisions based on this data that will rob the incoming class of “alternative” MIT students of a safe space. Please reconsider your decision to block the incoming freshman from Senior House.
I ask that you give us time with the new house team and turnaround committee, access to data, and agreed upon quantified metrics of success. I ask that you give us the mental health resources we have been asking for. I ask that you look at the broader scope of “success.” I ask that you allow us to have this conversation over the course of the next year, in person, on campus. And, in the meantime, I ask that you give MIT’s incoming class the opportunity to live within the alternative support space that Senior House is.


text:
place : architecture has been appointed by Lincoln City Council to carry out a study to investigate the causes of overheating in The Terrace Business Centre, and to propose options for remedial work to improve environmental conditions in the building.
Working with specialist energy assessors Greenlite, existing conditions in the building have been modelled using thermal modelling software following a detailed analysis of the building’s fabric, design, services installations and use patterns. Using this modelling data a number of options have been investigated which aim to meet an agreed set of standards for internal environmental comfort. All the options include solutions for reducing the amount of solar gain through windows and the large areas of Reglit glass channel cladding which has been the principal cause of the overheating, along with improving ventilation to the affected spaces.
Combinations of remedial internal insulation in the Reglit cladding, part /complete replacement cladding and brise soleil have been tested, along with both heat recovery mechanical ventilation and new louvred vents and window opening lights.
The building is in an historically sensitive location in Lincoln’s Cultural Quarter near to the new County Museum and the Usher Gallery, and has prominent views to Lincoln Cathedral. The options have been developed following initial consultation with Lincoln City Council planning officers and any preferred options will be developed to detail design stage through consultation with planners and Historic England.
place : architecture is a specialist in sustainable development. Using Passivhaus principles, we employ the latest thinking and leading edge technology to achieve low carbon, sustainable solutions. Find out more about our sustainable development practices.

industry_corpus2: Real Estate & Construction


text:
Syrian Christians have shared how they converted from Islam to Christianity after witnessing the brutality of Islamic extremist groups like ISIS, who carried out barbaric acts in the name of Allah.
Members of the recently-established Church of the Brethren in Kobani — the first local Christian place of worship for decades — shared with NBC News how Christianity appealed to them after living under Sharia law.
Farhad Jasim, 23, who works as a mechanic, converted to Christianity late last year. He told NBC he was jailed by ISIS for six months in early 2016 after the militants discovered he didn't know the basics of Islam. During his time in captivity, he was tortured and forced to read the Quran.
"After I witnessed their brutality with my own eyes, I started to be skeptical about my belief," Jasim said.
After hearing about the Church of the Brethren, which opened in September and is part of a denomination that dates back to 18th-century Germany, Jasim decided to visit: "It didn't take me long to discover that Christianity was the religion I was searching for," he said.
Jasim told the outlet his family has rejected him because of his newfound faith and expressed hope that one day, his loved ones will not only forgive him but embrace Christianity, too.
"If ISIS represents Islam, I don't want to be a Muslim anymore," he said. "Their God is not my God."
Firas, a 47-year-old farmer, told NBC he converted to Christianity after living under ISIS for two years. He recalled how militants would terrorize anyone who didn't adhere to their particular brand of Islam.
"I saw men and young teenagers being whipped on the streets because they were caught smoking. I saw dead bodies of young men being thrown from high buildings for being gay," Firas said. "This was their Islam."
"If heaven is made for ISIS and their belief, I would choose hell for myself instead of being again with them in the same place, even if it's paradise," he added.
While ISIS was driven out of the city, located along the Syrian-Turkish border, over four years ago, converting to Christianity remains taboo — and even dangerous — in the Muslim-majority region. Persecution watchdog Open Doors notes that even in more secure parts of Syria, Christians who have converted from Islam face pressure and discrimination from their communities. Kobani is home to about 300 Christians, according to estimates.
Omar, 38, who serves as church administrator, said that even before ISIS overtook the region, it was strictly forbidden to change religion from Islam to Christianity. But under ISIS, converting to Christianity "wasn't even imaginable," he said, adding: "ISIS would kill you immediately."
"Most of the brothers here converted or come to church as a result of what ISIS did to them and to their families," he said. "No one is forced to convert. Our weapon is the prayer, the spreading of spirit of love, brotherhood and tolerance."
Currently, just 4.6 percent of Syrians are believed to be Christian, according to a report by Aid to the Church in Need. Additionally, about 700,000 Christians are believed to have left Syria since the civil war began in 2011.
In December, President Donald Trump announced that US troops would withdraw from Syria, stating, "We have won against ISIS. We've beaten them and we've beaten them badly. We've taken back the land and now it's time for our troops to come back home."
However, amid concerns that pulling U.S. troops out of Syria will put persecuted Christians, Kurds and other ethnic minorities at risk, Trump later clarified he would send U.S. forces back if ISIS and other terror groups regain their strength.
"The President's made clear that we support Christians, that we support the Kurds," White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders recently told CBN News. "He's made that clear to Turkey, he's made that clear publicly on a number of fronts, and just one of the reasons that the President has been tough on Iran is to make sure that people don't feel threatened. We've supported the safe zones that are going to be very important, and the idea that the President is just stepping away and ignoring any potential problem doesn't understand the fundamental decision that he's made."

industry_corpus2: Others


text: The ancient or 'classical' world begins with the invention of written language, and follows the organization of human culture into governments and societies much like we practice today. Ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome were civilizations that lasted for hundreds — and in Egypt's case thousands of years. They were super powers because they brought law and order to their people, providing a certain amount of peace and stability. Peace and stability leads to a civic life, creating the space for creativity, education and commerce. This in turn grows prosperity and enables building projects, temples, roads and art. Written language, unified law, and centralized government allowed these ancient cultures to thrive on a scale that warped past hunter and gatherer societies and created the foundation on which we create our modern civilization in the west.

industry_corpus2: Subject Education


text: The partnership has expanded to 100 districts across the ten regions of Ghana, and is offered for children in eleven official national languages. The program enhanced the ability of 38,000 teachers in over 7,200 schools to improve reading achievement results for 1.1 million Kindergarten 2 and Primary grades 1 and 2 students during the 2018 – 2019 academic year. USAID piloted a phonics-based, mother tongue approach to early grade reading in 20 under performing schools in the Yendi Municipality.


text:
We have projects installed all over Egypt. From El Gouna to the North Coast. Our installations are professional, trustworthy and follow international standards. These projects have been maintenance-free since delivery.
Among our projects is this beautiful villa in Marassi.
The system consists of full lighting and air conditioning control over the 2-story villa except for three rooms only. Control is made through wall-mount keypads and iPad. Integration was made with the audio/video system through RS232 protocol and overall control was achieved by Bitwise Controller.


text:
This is the Welcome page for the software owner. It dynamically generates the daily Five Element scores and charts. It's easy to see the scores and charts for the past and the future. Also, it provides quick shortcuts to the main components.
As long as the owner name is assigned, every time the Fortune Angel starts this welcome page will display the astrology daily information of the owner.
It displays the daily stem-branch chart and the Harmony Index, which is same to the Love Match score, to check any conflict with people's birth chart. Click on the or buttons or click on the Date button to change the date, the score and day information will update instantly.
You can click on Day, Month or Year to get the Daily, Monthly or Yearly event message.
The Balance Index is a simple way to know people luck. The Balance Index is high means the Five Elements are out of balance. When Five Elements are out of balance, Five Elements move often and faster. When Five Elements crush each other very hard, then something special will happen. Usually, something happening is not what we want. So the higher Balance Index tells us to pay attention on the bad luck. The other way around is the lower Balance Index could bring us the good luck.
Your Row - the your Balance Index from your Birth Chart. The example above shows Your Balance Index is 186. Any Balance Index is higher than 186, then that's a bad luck sign. Any Index is lower than 186 is a good luck sign.
2003-2012 Row - the 10-year major cycle index is 210, which means the luck is poor during 2003 to 2012.
Year 2003 Row - the current year index is 168, which means the luck is great this year. Since 2003 to 2012 is not a good cycle, so year 2003 is the good year in the unlucky 10-year cycle.
Month 8 Row - the current month, September, index is 252, which is not a good month.
Day 17 Row - the current day index is 162, which is a good day. The cycle of day is short. Good luck and back luck go away very soon. If the luck lasts longer, then the previous days must have the same luck.
Sun Row - the total balance Index of 10-year, year, month and day cycle is 206. So the luck on this date is poorer than the date you were born.
Total Row - the total of five element scores from your birth chart and Sum Row.
Five Element cycle chart shows the five element scores in the coming cycle. To change the cycle, just select the radio buttons in the Chart Type frame box.
Simply click on the or buttons to update the cycle chart.
Easy to access the major components from shortcuts.

industry_corpus2: Computing & Telecommunications


text:
Six One-liners in Search of a Play.
“One Slight Hitch”, by Lewis Black, which opened at ACT Theatre, on Thursday night, is the sort of play which makes me feel despair about the contemporary American Theatre scene.
There was about enough material for a 10 minute play and although the program notes wrote about “the playwrighting prowess” of the author, the play actually had so many pitfalls as a play that it is surprising it ever got beyond the workshop phase. Deadly for a comedy, the jokes were all predictable one-liners thrown in randomly. There were the obnoxious boring jokes New Yorkers make about the provinces, contemptuous jokes about Republicans, as well as a lot of contrived gags to make it a very unfunny play. Designed by Robert Dahlstrom, the set was brilliant and very aesthetically pleasing. It spoke of the opulence of the medical profession in the pre-Clinton days and the actors seemed to move around it quite naturally.
The play was set in 1981, but did not deal profoundly with the zeitgeist of the time. For those of us old enough to remember Reagan’s election, it was a time when the baby boomers realized that indeed the 60’s and its cherished progeny the 70’s were completely and irretrievably over. The plot revolves around a 30 ish doctor’s daughter and published writer, Courtney, played by Kimberly Sustad, on the morning of her wedding. Her fiancé, Harper played by John Ulman, is excellent husband material, but the wedding is thwarted by the sudden appearance of her ex-boyfriend, Ryan, played by Shawn Telford, a bohemian slacker.
Unfortunately all the things that differentiate a two-hour play from a ten-minute play were absent: character development, a subplot or even heightened conflict; the most damaging of all was the absence of wit. The writing never rose above TV sit-com level, so I think the script has a great future as a Jennifer Aniston Romantic Comedy.
Another glaring weak point is that the author introduced a subplot about one of the sisters, Melanie, played by Kirsten Potter, who comes on sexually to the ex-boyfriend and announces that he will be her wedding date, but then the whole issue is not resolved and the matter is just dropped. Obviously the bride’s decision to go through with the wedding or ride off into the sunset with the slacker, drove the action, yet Courtney, the bride, had very little time on stage, and her decision did not seem very anguished or important.
Although the director was working with some pretty bad material, he nevertheless had the actors play everything for laughs so that the direction emphasized the weak material rather than compensated for it. There were two scenes which involved some very contrived directing. The gags in these scenes were visual, in one the fiance walks into a room and somehow does not notice his bride passionately kissing her ex even though they are in full view of each other.
In another scene, the sister, who attempts to seduce the ex-boyfriend, comes in after working the night shift in a hospital as a nurse. Instead of looking tired after a long night on the wards, she bounces in with full make-up wearing very high wedgie heels and an over the knee nurses uniform-dress, making her look like she has just come from a Halloween costume party dressed as a slutty nurse. In 1981, women did not wear anything above the knee, and nurses started wearing trousers in the late 60’s. One cannot exactly be a nurse in high heels, without ending up on the ward as a patient with one or two broken ankles. Another unfortunate directorial choice was when the nurse comes in at the end of her night shift ( night shifts in hospitals are usually 11pm -7am) , and helps herself to an ice-cube from an ice bucket already on the drinks table at 7:30 am, even though there are references to a hot summer day which may damage some of the food.
The acting ranged from adequate to inadequate. None of the actors, not even a superb one like R. Hamilton Wright seemed real. Delia, the Momzilla ( mother of the bride) played by Marianne Owen, screeched a lot and her nervousness was repetitive. Katherine Grant-Suttie, as the youngest teenage daughter P.B, had a noticeable lisp and because of her overly sibilant “s” one of the first gags fell flat as she couldn’t pronounce “assistant caterer” well enough to be heard clearly in the back row. I only caught the joke when it was repeated more clearly. John Ulman, as Mr. Excellent Husband Material had a very wooden performance and seemed to be reciting his lines.
However, many people in the audience laughed at the appropriate places, although the people sitting near me seemed to be cringing, and the applause at the end was exuberant.

industry_corpus2: Film & Entertainment


text:
the article focalizes on roland Brival’s conception of “métissage” in his fiction texts:for him, it is synonymous to a new “humanism”. i revisit the theories which have permeate French caribbean literature (negritude, creolity, creolization). they are not synonymous of “métissage”; in fact, Brival’s vision is apart from the “creolity” movement.
Helm, Yolande Aline (2010) "Roland Brival et le métissage:un nouvel humanisme," Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature: Vol. 74 : No. 1 , Article 8.

industry_corpus2: Literature & Emotions


text:
Momentum is shifting bullish as the the EMAs start to cross over and MACD points up. With the way the stock is moving it could push towards and retest its all time high of 9.29.
The 4 hour trendline has been broken. short toward monthly level of 1.27000 could be be reached within the week.
gold had resisted from month res 5 times in the past few months. the potential for a break is very possible.

industry_corpus2: Finance & Economics


text:
Last week week on this day we started our Friday review of what's hot on the web in house and home with Scorsese's Home, FLOR, Best Sofabeds, Domino's Bookcases & What's Hot on the Web and today we're doing it again. So if you missed the week, don't miss this email.
Stay on the pulse with a double shot: blog + email. If you're not signed up, go for it right now (on the upper left nav).


text: The signature grape of Argentina. Spicy and rich, robust and fruity. Very different from the gamey Malbec of Cahors in France - in Argentina it makes gloriously velvety wines, high in alcohol and fruit extract, thriving particularly in Mendoza province. A balance of red and black berry fruits, medium tannins and good acidity give the ageing potential for some long-lived classic red wines.

industry_corpus2: Agriculture & Fisheries


text:
SureCall is a very credible cellular signal booster manufacturer known very well in USA wireless industry. However, in all fairness, we hereby inform again that above video was provided by SureCall. It was not produced by SignalBooster.com.
What are the best ways for increasing Wi-Fi range? Yes. Wi-Fi is great—as long as it’s not slow. There are a number of things to consider: 1) using the latest technology (don’t expect wonderful results with an old router); 2) Find a good spot for the router (don’t put it in the basement when the signals are mostly being used on the first floor); 3) Watch out for competing devices (things like cordless phones and microwaves can interfere with the WiFi signal so keep the router away from them and check the cordless phone’s frequency to consider changing your router’s frequency); 4) Adjust your wireless channel (most routers operate on different channels so find the most efficient one as neighbors may be all using the same one, thus clogging it up); 5) maintain good router security (don’t have an easy password or your neighbors will be “borrowing” your WiFi); 6) get a Wi-Fi booster to boost your signals. I’d argue a booster is your most reliable resource for boosting the Wi-Fi signal (although following the other tips will help overall). A Wi-Fi booster consistently powers up your Wi-Fi signal.
Love reading about cell phone boosters and how they can improve a cell phone’s power, clarity, and reliability. Now what about Wi-Fi? What are the best ways for increasing Wi-Fi range?
It’s got to be tough trying to find the right cell phone booster. I ask people about them and most people have no idea what I’m talking about. I looked at Weboost reviews and Surecall Fusion2go reviews to get an idea what’s out there. Nonetheless, it’s hard to read something like a Weboost rv 4g review unless you see it’s a verified purchase. Unfortunately, there’s not always many out there to peruse. That’s why when I was looking at Weboost home 4g vs. Surecall fusion4home reviews, I was still uncertain. Thanks to CKC Laboratories, I feel more confident when I read the results of comparing the SureCall Fusion2Go 3.0 and the WeBoost Drive 4G-X. An independent tester gives me more confidence concerning the results. Thus, my money is on SureCall.


text:
A newly-approved, genetically modified potato will not be grown commercially in Canada this year.
JR Simplot, the company that created the Innate potato, said Canadian approval came too late for farmers to plant them this season. Health Canada and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency approved the potatoes in late March.
"The late approval did not provide us with enough time to secure commitments from Canadian growers prior to the 2016 planting season," said Doug Cole, Simplot's director of marketing and communications, in an email to CBC News.
Cole said Canadian may still see the potatoes in groceries stores this year.
"It's still possible to export Innate potatoes into Canada," he wrote.
To create the Innate potato, genes from wild and cultivated potatoes were added to a conventional potato.
They resist bruising and black spots. This is a particular advantage for peeled potatoes, because the spuds won't turn brown after peeling.
It is also a big advantage for farmers. Test results showed farmers threw away 15 per cent fewer potatoes due to damage, which the United Potato Growers of Canada called "a big deal."
JR Simplot is continuing to work on improving the Innate. Test plots of Generation 2 Innate potatoes are being grown on P.E.I. this year. In addition to the bruising resistance of the first generation, these potatoes are also resistant to blight.
Growing these potatoes will allow farmers to use less pesticide on their fields.
The company expects U.S. approval of the blight-resistant potatoes by the end of 2016, but expects Canadian approval could take a couple more years.


text:
I earned this certification through my university's IEEE club in November of 2016. I've coded several complete applications for my research lab, as well as improved the speed and reliability of existing measurement programs. Since September 2018 I've worked as an independent contractor for Applied Sonics Inc., developing applications for the novel measurement devices designed by Dr. Wesley Cobb.
In Spring of 2017 I was finally able to secure one of the exclusive 12 spots in Engineering Machine Shop. In addition to teaching me the ins and outs of standard machinist's tools such as the lathe and mill, this course earned me the right to return to the machine shop in my university's new engineering building to work on future projects. I have since produced a variety of aluminum parts for use in my research lab, including the water cooling block (uncapped) and sample holders pictured. More information about how these parts are used is available on the "Physics Research" page.

industry_corpus2: Technology & Research


text:
This is a richly fruity and supple wine, ruby-red colored, with aromas of cassis and herbs, flavors of plum and blackberry on the palate.
The Perrin family, also owners of the famous Château de Beaucastel, search for the most adapted terroirs to produce a fresh and fruity wine. Since 1970, La Vieille Ferme has been producing authentic, honest and tasty wines vintage after vintage.


text:
As you may have noticed, there are several Tatum Private Investigator and Tatum Security Service agencies on the web to choose from, so why choose us? At JMN Investigations & Protective Services, we pride ourselves on providing professional services at competitive industry rates. At JMN Investigations and Protective Services, we control our overhead costs to give you the Client, the best value. In addition, JMN Investigations & Protective Services utilizes only LICENSED AND INSURED PRIVATE INVESTIGATORS and SECURITY COMPANIES. Our preferred partners have been extensively vetted for; experience, subject matter expertise and proper insurance and licensure. We take the fear and uncertainty out of choosing a single source- Risk Management provider.
JMN Investigations & Protective Services is a premier provider of Tatum Security Service and Tatum Private Investigator services, since 1999.
Why put your company at risk with an inexperienced Security Service or Private Investigator? We have remained in business, in part because; we don’t let our clients down! In addition, we have the financial resources to support our operations and keep your business safe. Trust our Tatum Security Service and Tatum Private Investigator to keep your business on track.

industry_corpus2: Law & Justice


text:
In his late writings in the 1980s, Félix Guattari conceptualised the juxtaposition of computer networking and the miniaturization and personalization of technology as a development that, if analysed and used by "minoritary groups" in other than "a dogmatic and programmatic manner", will bring us to a "post-media era" where the mass media are stripped of their hegemonic power.
Félix Guattari delivered a lecture at a conference in Tokyo in November 1985, and again in Paris the following January. Besides criticising the Euro-Asian proponents of postmodern architecture , he also introduced his thesis on "the coming post-mediatic revolution": "The emergence of [the] new practices of subjectivation of a post-media era will be greatly facilitated by a concerted reappropriation of communicational and information technology, assuming that they increasingly allow for: [..] innovative forms of dialogue and collective interactivity; [..] the connection of banks of data through networking; [..] the multiplication to infinity of 'existential operators', permitting access to mutant creative universes." Excerpts from the paper were published in the magazine La Quinzaine littéraire in 1986. The Soft Subversion collection of essays (1996) includes its English translation along with his previously unpublished manuscript "Entering the Post-Media Era". In 1990 followed a short text "Towards a Post-Media Era" about "the junction of television, telematics and informatics", calling for "a post-media era of collective-individual reappropriation and an interactive use of machines of information, communication, intelligence, art and culture"..
Michael Goddard (1996) observes that Guattari’s references to the post-media era are "hermetic"; and while they were greeted by many as an anticipation of the advent of the internet (Guattari was a keen supporter of the French Minitel system), the term seems to be a front for a more complex theory, that starts with a reflection on the independent media and free radios of the 1970s to posit, at the end of the consensual era of mass-media, a post-media era in which the media would be a tool of dissent, revising the relationship between producer and consumer.
Matthew Fuller commented on the text "Entering the Post-Media Era" in his book Media Ecologies (2005): "The stakes [Guattari] assigns to media are rightly perceived as being profoundly political or ethico-aesthetic at all scales. Aligning such political processes with creative powers of invention that demand 'laboratories of thought and experimentation for future forms of subjectivation' also poses a demand for the inventive rigor with which life among media must be taken up."
The Post-Media Lab at the Lüneburg University draws upon Guattari's "concept of social and medial assemblages which unleash new forms of collective expression and experience." In December 2013, the Lab co-published Provocative Alloys: A Post-Media Anthology.
In her book-length essay, A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (1999), the American art critic Rosalind Krauss discusses the work of Marcel Broodthaers along the threads of Conceptual art, television, and poststructuralist theory. She bases her criticism of the Greenbergian concept of medium-specificity on two claims: "First, the specificity of mediums, even modernist ones, must be understood as differential, self-differing, and thus as a layering of conventions never simply collapsed into the physicality of their support. [..] Second, that it is [..] the onset of higher orders of technology -- robot, computer -- which allows us, by rendering older techniques outmoded, to grasp the inner complexity of the mediums those techniques support." And continues, ".. there are a few contemporary artists who have decided not to engage in the international fashion of installation and intermedia work, in which art essentially finds itself complicit with a globalization of the image in the service of capital [perceiving art in the regime of postmodernity, characterized by Fredric Jameson as 'the total saturation of cultural space by the image, whether at the hands of advertising, communications media, or cyberspace']. These same artists have also resisted, as impossible, to retreat into etiolated forms of the traditional mediums -- such as painting and sculpture. Instead, artists such as [Marcel Broodthaers,] James Coleman or William Kentridge have embraced the idea of differential specificity, which is to say the medium as such, which they understand they will now have to reinvent or rearticulate."
The new media theorist Lev Manovich (2000) indentifies the source of the crisis of the concept of medium in modern art (as in its media-based typology: painting, sculpture, drawing) in several points: (1) in the proliferation of new art forms heterogenous in their materiality (assemblage, happening, installation, performance, etc); (2) in the emphasis of artists on "sociological" rather than material difference in case of video as artistic medium as opposed to television as mass medium (distribution mechanisms, size of an audience, space of reception); and (3) in artists' adoption of the same digital tools of production, storage and distribution used by mass media.
In what Manovich headlines "a program for post-media aesthetics", he calls for "a new conceptual system which would replace the old discourse of mediums and which would be able to describe post-digital, post-net culture more adequately". In a fashion similar to the idea of cultural transcoding, ie. applying computing terminology to treating the digitised cultural artefacts, introduced in his book Language of New Media (2001), he proposes to substitute the concept of medium by "new concepts, metaphors and operations of a computer and network era, such as information, data, interface, bandwidth, stream, storage, rip, compress, etc," and apply it to discussion about "the culture of the past" as well. More generally, he proposes "to talk about past media as software", a practise which requires updating the information theory model "author – text – reader (or, sender – message – receiver) by adding two more components to it: [..] software used by the author and by the reader".
The art and media theorist Peter Weibel in his catalogue essay "The Post-Media Condition" (2006) attempts to develop a political and historically rooted argument for art in the "post-media condition" in which "no single medium is dominant any longer; instead, all of the different media influence and determine each other." This condition is portrayed as the conciliatory climax of a struggle spanning the history of arts and sciences ever since the ancient Greece. Greeks and Romans differentiated between the noble "activity of the mind" reserved for the community of free citizens and the "activity of the body" which was "a matter for the unliberated, for wage labourers and craftsmen". The "lower orders" were partially emancipated during the Enlightenment era when "the natural sciences allied themselves with the mechanical arts (techné)" and "[finally promoted] painting, architecture and sculpture [..] to the ranks of the liberal arts." Weibel argues that today applied art and media art are devalued "by [being] regarding as mere exponents of technical reproducibility limited to the horizons of a machine", and their subordinate position towards painting, architecture and sculpture is parallel to that of the mechanical arts in relation to liberal arts earlier. Thus, Weibel offers a support narrative for the to-be final reconciliation of the arts and elevation of the media arts into the arts in a condition in which "all art is post-media art." He says that "no-one can escape from the media" because "the art of the technical media, i.e. art which has been produced with the aid of a device, constitutes the core of our media experience; this media experience has become the norm for all aesthetic experience; hence in art there is no longer anything beyond the media." As the ultimate example, Weibel identifies "the post-media computer, the universal machine, [thanks to which] we can realise the abundance of possibilities which resides in the specificity of the media." The earlier "phase" in which "all of the media, including painting and photography, made a special effort to explore the media-specific idiosyncratic worlds of the respective medium", according to Weibel, within the post-media condition simply turns into the phase of "the mixing of the media." This second phase sees various media intermingling, losing their separate identities and living off one another.
In her recent piece, "The Guarantee of the Medium" (2009), Krauss is relentless in her criticism of the Greenbergian appraisal of the medium-specifity. She drops her notion of "differential specificity," and takes position against the "post-medium condition". She discusses "those few artists who have resisted seductive pretense [of the post-medium condition] to displace the avantgarde's relation to modernism" and who "replaced the traditional supports of the now outmoded aesthetic mediums, such as oil on canvas, plaster on metal armature, or carved image on stone block" by "what needs to be called 'technical supports' for which commercial genres or objects might serve as the backbone (or undergirding) of their practice" (such as "synchronous sound" in the work of Christian Marclay, "investigative journalism" in the work of Sophie Calle, or even "automobile" in case of Ed Ruscha). In her book Under Blue Cup (2011) she expands on this, while identifying the work of the post-medium condition as conceptual art, installation, and relational aesthetics.
Guattari, Félix (1-15 February 1986). "L'impasse post-moderne". La Quinzaine littéraire: 20–21 (French).  Excerpts from a paper Guattari gave in Tokyo in November 1985 and in Paris on 10 January 1986 before the Collège de peinture of the European University of Philosophy.
Guattari, Félix (May/June 1986). "The Postmodern Dead End". Flash Art (128): 40–41. Translation contains three extra paragraphs at the end.
Guattari, Félix (1986). "Postmodern Impasse and Postmedia Transition". Filozof. Istraz (16): 97–102 (Serbo-Croatian).
Guattari, Félix (1996). "The Postmodern Impasse". In Genosko, Gary. The Guattari Reader. Oxford: Blackwell. pp. 109–113.
Guattari, Félix (1996). "Postmodern Deadlock and Post-Media Transition". Soft Subversions: Texts and Interviews 1977-1985. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e). (Pages 291–300 in the 2009 edition of the book).
Guattari, Félix (Spring-Summer 1996). "Vers une ère post-média". Chimères (28): 5–6 (French).
Guattari, Félix (February 2012). "Towards a Post-Media Era". Mute.
Guattari, Félix (1996). "Entering the Post-Media Era". Soft Subversions: Texts and Interviews 1977-1985. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e). Previously unpublished manuscript. (Pages 301–306 in the 2009 edition of the book).
Slater, Howard (28 February 1997). "Post-Media Operators". Break/Flow. Written with Eddie Miller and Flint Michigan. Republished in Datacide 2 (June 1997) ; Read Me! ASCII Culture & The Revenge of Knowledge. Filtered by Nettime, 1999, pp 398-399.
Slater, Howard (22 September 1998). "Post-Media Operators: An Imaginary Address". Break/Flow.
Krauss, Rosalind (1999). A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition. London: Thames & Hudson. pp. 64.
Slater, Howard (August 2000). "Post-Media Operators: 'Sovereign and Vague'". Datacide (7). Republished in An@rchitexts: Voices from the Global Digital Resistance, edited by Joanne Richardson, 2005, pp 194-202 ; and Mute, 8 February 2012 .
Manovich, Lev (2000). Post-Media Aesthetics.  A version in Latvian.
Brea, José Luis (2002). La era postmedia. Acción comunicativa, prácticas (post)artísticas y dispositivos neomediales. Salamanca: Consorcio Salamanca (Spanish).
Weibel, Peter (2006). "The Post-Media Condition". In AAVV. Postmedia Condition. Madrid: Centro Cultural Conde Duque. Mirror.
Krauss, Rosalind (2009). "The Guarantee of the Medium". Collegium (Helsinki: Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies) 5: 139–145.
Krauss, Rosalind E. (2011). Under Blue Cup. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.  Review.
Quaranta, Domenico (2010). "La prospettiva postmediale". Media, New Media, Postmedia. Milan: Postmedia. pp. 139ff (Italian). Spanish translation.
Apprich, Clemens; Slater, Josephine Berry; Iles, Anthony et al., eds. (2013). Provocative Alloys: A Post-Media Anthology. London/Lüneburg: Mute and Post-Media Lab. pp. 159.
Apprich, Clemens; Slater, Josephine Berry; Iles, Anthony; Schultz, Oliver Lerone, eds. (2014). Plants, Androids and Operators: A Post-Media Handbook, London/Lüneburg: Mute and Post-Media Lab. pp. 188.
Goddard, Michael (June 1996). "Felix and Alice in Wonderland. The Encounter between Guattari and Berardi and the Post-Media Era". Generation-online.
Fuller, Matthew (2005). Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, Special Issue on Post-Medium, 2007.  . Incl. an interview with Jacques Rancière.
Pethő, Ágnes, ed. (2012). Film in the Post Media Age. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars. Introduction.
Broeckmann, Andreas (2013f). "'Postmedia' Discourses. A Working Paper".
Apprich, Clemens (2014). "Post-Media". Critical Keywords for the Digital Humanities.
Post-Medium Condition section on the Media in Expanded Field blog, 2016ff.
Media, New Media, Post-Media: What is German Philosophy of Media?, an event with Peter Osborne, Boris Groys, Lorenz Engell, Bernhard Siegert, Éric Alliez. ICA London, May 2011. Podcast.
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On Jan. 3, Yahoo! News published a speech by Chinese President Hu Jintao, delivered at an annual policy meeting of the party’s Central Committee, “Hu: Hostile Forces Seek to Westernize, Split China” (by Gillian Wong, Associated Press).
Hu said his country is in a “cultural war” with the West and that China must battle the “international hostile forces” behind the barrage of foreign culture, which he considers part of a strategic plot of westernizing and dividing China.
The announcement by Shanghai General Motors carried the header: "Joining hands with China Film Group, Cadillac whole-heartedly supports the making of the Birth of a Party."
Of interest in this respect is the involvement of some American business companies in contributing to this Chinese communist propaganda effort.
Cadillac, a division of American General Motors auto company, one of the auto companies which received federal (taxpayers’?) bailout money in 2009 to avoid bankruptcy, committed itself to funding the production of a Chinese Communist Party propaganda film “Birth of a Party,” or “The Great Achievement of the Founding of the Party.” The film commemorates the founding of the Chinese Communist Party, a political organization which has been responsible for the deaths of many millions of human beings whose only crime was that they may have disagreed with the Party.
The participation of the American company, which agreed to pay for the production of the Chinese communist propaganda film with the American taxpayers’ money, is highly unprincipled, immoral, and disloyal and is nothing more than the appeasement of a power hostile to the United States in the name of financial gain.
Well, the Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist-Maoist stuff is still considered sufficiently effective for the total subordination of the brain of every Chinese. China used to be one of the most reliable slave camps for centuries.
On the other hand, many of today’s countries cultivate freedom, not the Chinese slavery. This is what the leaders of China take into account: an old Chinese slave was reliable, in contrast to a modern inhabitant of a free country. Freedom is the worst enemy of a slave society.
Once upon a time every city was a slave city: all of its inhabitants were slaves except, of course, for their owners. But in those days, a slave country knew how to grow and maintain its slaves.
Today the free countries emanate freedom via their international radio, television, the Internet, and via their artists and intellectuals traveling abroad.
China’s rulers realize the force of the social media: China has more than 485 million Internet users, the most of any country in the world, which they consider a danger to their existence.
Recently Chinese officials imposed tighter Internet restrictions on most microblog services as well as strict guidelines for social media sites: the users are required to register with their real names, a move likely to deter many online users. Authorities also have blocked Twitter and Facebook.
Freedom is good for any country in the sense that it expands the human brains, which produce the best science and technology of genius, since genius requires freedom. Well, having deprived itself of freedom, a country perhaps gets rid of creative thoughts as well.
The older generations of the Chinese were deprived of freedom for centuries. That is, in the absence of freedom, the regime deprived them of “dangerous thoughts.” As a result, they may have actually been deprived of unusual, original, valuable brain cells, necessary for creativity.
Current or future Chinese “emperors” may find a “scientific” way to eliminate the creative brain cells from the brains of their slaves without raising any suspicion on the part of their victims, so that the unsuspected victims will have no recourse against the perpetrators.
In this way, no “murder against the people” would have to be committed, and there would be no need to secretly liquidate those who might have otherwise turned out to be “enemies of the people,” just as those other “enemies of the people” who “tell dirty jokes about the only just social system possible” and who have to be mercilessly dealt with by the system.
I am sure that if the slave countries preserve themselves, they will find a way to effectively eliminate with reliable secrecy all those “dangerous speakers and talkers” threatening their power.

industry_corpus2: Politics & Administration


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Cannon Technologies S102800 / S104800 / S106800 cabinets have been designed to house communications, server, electrical and electronic equipment for use in communications, transportation and rail infrastructure projects including GSMR, FTN, TEC, SISS, CIS, CCTV, communications, Networking etc.
The IP65 Enclosure has been based on the principals defined in RT/E/PS/00028 Network Rail Product Specification. The main Trackside equipment housing incorporates an equipment chamber and a separate battery chamber independently accessible.
A 48-volt DC Peltier Solid State Chiller / Heater system with fans for maximum air circulation (see section 5.1.2 bullet point 3 for a full description).
Space above battery compartment for fans required to circulate forced air over the Peltier heat sink.
Lockable hatch for a generator socket and cable entry located in the bottom left-hand corner of the Electrical Chamber door.
Two dual skinned doors, which enclose and support baffles, fans, etc.


text: Bear Creek Golf Course is a 36 hole, daily fee course by Nicklaus Design. It consists of The Bear and The Cub courses. Nicklaus Design created BearCreek in the Heathland tradition. (A Heathland course is an inland links golf course.) The 18 hole, par 71 championship Bear Course measures more than 6800 yards from the championship tees. Nicklaus Design took great care in the creation of the par 59 Cub Course to give it the same feel as The Bear Course.

industry_corpus2: Sports


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In addition to its network of highly skilled investigative reporters, OTR Global's Field Force is a dedicated group of individuals located throughout the U.S. who visit stores and restaurants; interview doctors and store managers; and observe inventory levels, shopping habits, pricing trends and other small factors that can have larger impacts. Projects vary in size, but OTR Global's Field Force can canvass up to 90-plus stores or locations per project.
The OTR Global Field Force is a group of professionals from various walks of life. The group includes retired professionals, builders, technical writers, administrators, retail personnel, teachers, insurance administrators, service workers, real estate agents, artists, graduate students, stay-at-home parents, social workers, and people who make a difference in the work OTR does and in its clients' investment decision-making process.

industry_corpus2: Hospitality & Catering


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I have spoken about this before in a post named Leveraging Your Waiting Room on my old blog. It must have had some validity, because a guy I have a great deal of respect for named Steve Claridge has written a post named Audiology Video Sales Marketing that details his recent experiences in a Veterinary Practice.
It’ a good post with some really good conclusions that are valid for our profession. Have a look at both posts, they may give you some valid ideas for your Practice.
Steve is the designer and owner of www.earmeter.com, an excellent tool for use by our profession. While you are visiting his blog, have a look at the software. Usual disclaimer, I am not connected to earmeter, nor have I been paid or offered inducement to talk about it. I think you can take that as said from now on, if I have in fact been offered inducement by anyone, I’ll clearly let you all know.

industry_corpus2: Health & Medicine


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Looking for ways to be more active in South Carolina? The Move More Blog is the only resource you need to stay active and learn about ways to move more for better health. Know what you're looking for? Try the search term box to look for specific topics and resources.
Identify partners: Begin by bringing together the local partners who have a vested interest in creating a more walkable community, whether that is local government staff, an Eat Smart Move More chapter, an informal walking or running group, neighborhood associations, or senior citizens groups. This should also include potential partners in planning and funding, such as the regional Council of Governments, Metropolitan Planning Organization, SCDOT, and local foundations.
Create a comprehensive pedestrian master plan: The plan should include an assessment of pedestrian needs, recommendations for new or improved pedestrian infrastructure, policies, and programs, and action steps for seeking funding and implementing recommended projects. Once complete, the Plan should be adopted by the local council and the community should identify a municipal department or local advocacy group that will spearhead moving it forward.
Calm the traffic: There are a number of low-cost, easy-to-implement strategies that can have a big impact on the safety and practicality of walking, without requiring large capital projects. Look for opportunities to calm traffic on streets that are already known as walking routes but are not ideal in terms of pedestrian safety and comfort. Traffic calming can be an effective tool for prioritizing pedestrians over cars on neighborhoods streets.
Activate the street: Rather than calming the traffic on busier streets, consider ramping up the pedestrian amenities on lower-volume streets or streets already safe and comfortable for pedestrians. The focus is creating a space that is inviting, interesting, and fun for pedestrians whether through wayfinding signage, creating parklets, installing outdoor art, allowing outdoor café seating, or hosting temporary ‘open streets’ events to encourage play.
Close the gaps: The best way to leverage existing investments is to close the gaps in the existing walking network. The most obvious approach is to identify blocks where sidewalk is missing and could connect two existing sections. But closing the gap can also include: improving the crossing at an difficult intersection between to sections of sidewalks; signing a route to show pedestrians the best way to connect from one trail to another; or identifying bridges (whether creek crossings, overpasses, underpasses, or another form) where no safe pedestrian access is provide and prioritizing improvements to that gap.
Take the long view: Consider focusing on policy changes as a first step, knowing that it will take time to see its impact. Choosing to walk for transportation is inextricably linked to land use planning, which is governed by local policies. If residential areas are planned miles away from institutional and commercial destinations (such as schools, restaurants or grocery stores) or are developed without connections to the destinations that are nearby, citizens will never have a chance to choose walking. Local and County policies can directly impact this; and though it takes time, policy change can be one of the most efficient, and sustainable approaches to transforming a community.
What is walkability? The most basic definition is simply, “the ability to walk.” However, true walkability is so much more than that. It can affect everyday decisions and quality of life in ways you may not even realize.
Last week my husband realized that he often opts not to walk to work because of time, but when considered in the larger context of his schedule, it is actually his most efficient commute choice. For him, walking requires a 25 minute walk at a relatively fast pace. When he drives, the total trip from our driveway to the office door, takes about 15 minutes (parking and traffic included, which many people forget to factor in their estimate of travel time). This means that on the days he walks to work, he spends 50 minutes on his roundtrip commute and gets 50 minutes of moderately vigorous physical activity. Compared to a 30 minute round trip commute with zero physical activity, he has added 20 minutes to his trip but gained 50 minutes of exercise. That’s a pretty good deal!
So if you consider exercise an important part of the week – and particularly if you have a hard time finding the time to exercise like we do – you can easily see the value of walkability, whether it applies to the trip to work, or choosing to walk to the bank, library, school, or park.
But everyday decisions like my husband’s only exist in communities where walking is possible and practical. Communities with optimal walkability embody three main principles: physical access, places to go, and proximity to home.
Physical access is the cornerstone of walkability. In a walkable community, people must have a safe means of traveling somewhere. This means that there must be a physical path marking the entire route where pedestrians are allowed. Without accessible sidewalks and trails, pedestrians are unable to safely walk anywhere.
Physical access may provide a means of getting around, but in order for a community to be truly walkable, there must be an end to that means. Sidewalks with no points of destination aren’t very effective. Instead, trails, paths, and sidewalks should connect residents’ homes with their workplaces, schools, stores, transit stops, culture, and restaurants.
Proximity to home is another key component of walkability. A general rule of thumb is that desirable destinations should be within a half mile of homes for a community to be considered walkable–that’s about a 10-minute walk.
With each of these variables defined, it’s also important to ask why walkability is so important. Our bodies weren’t designed to sit all day. In fact, long periods of sitting have been linked to problems with our muscles, bones, and even brain function. In a culture where work often consumes our lives, it’s no surprise that one of the most common excuses for avoiding exercise is, “I don’t have time.” We wake up, get ready, drive to work, drive home, and then take care of our children. Where does exercise fit into our responsibilities?
According to a study by the AAA Foundation for Driver Safety, American drivers spend an average of 46 minutes driving each day. Imagine living in a community where you are able to walk to work, school, and other activities. Instead of carving out extra time reserved for exercise, walkable communities allow us to incorporate physical activity into routine parts of our day that already exist. It’s no surprise that walkable communities have a lower incidence of obesity and diabetes.
Consider the benefits of walkable communities. Do you think walking is important? Are you interested in making your community more accessible and focusing on walking as a priority? Stay tuned for part 2 of this post where we will share ideas for improving walkability in your community. And in the meantime, check the Health + Planning Toolkit developed by Eat Smart, Move More South Carolina and its partners, to learn how you can help facilitate healthy change where you live.
There are many reasons to be physically active. We may engage in physical activity to improve our health, to connect with friends, to relieve stress or to have fun. In order to be active, South Carolinians need safe, affordable and convenient spaces and places to be active.
Local schools have a variety of outdoor recreational facilities—playgrounds, fields, courts and tracks—where people can engage in physical activity. Being intentional about making schools’ outdoor recreational facilities available for communities to use is an effective, affordable way to promote and support physical activity among citizens. The South Carolina School Boards Association (SCSBA) and the Department of Health and Environmental Control (DHEC) is in full support of schools and school districts allowing the community free access to schools outdoor recreational facilities.
This year, DHEC will be reaching out to schools, school districts and communities to encourage the adoption, implementation and promotion of open community use.
DHEC and Eat Smart Move More South Carolina have developed an open community use playbook, Breaking Physical Activity Barriers Through Open Community Use. The playbook provides guidance to school administrators, teachers and community members interested in adopting and implementing the strategy to increase physical activity. To better understand the current status of open community use, DHEC assessed and published The Status of Open Community Use in South Carolina 2015.
We hope to create communities where being physically active is not only easier but also safe and fun. In years to come, we hope to see more school districts embrace the SCSBA’s open community use model policy and more schools practicing and promoting open community use.
You can find schools in your area that are open for community use at www.letsgosc.org! If your school isn’t listed, contact the principal to find out if open community use is allowed.
Your body is your vehicle, so you have to keep your engine — your heart — running when you work out.
Ideally, fuel up two hours before you exercise by:Hydrating with water.
Eating healthy carbohydrates such as whole-grain cereals (with low-fat or skim milk), whole-wheat toast (without the fatty cream cheese), low-fat or fat-free yogurt, whole grain pasta, brown rice, fruits and vegetables.
If you only have 5-10 minutes before you exercise, eat a piece of fruit such as an apple or banana. “The key is to consume easily digested carbohydrates, so you don’t feel sluggish,” Platt said.
Platt notes that you don’t need to eat during a workout that’s an hour or less. But, for longer, high intensity vigorous workouts, she recommends eating 50-100 calories every half hour of carbohydrates such as raisins, an energy bar or banana.
I am a pediatrician. And I am addicted to geocaching. There, I’ve said it.
So what is geocaching? Geocaching is treasure hunting. Geocaching is spending a beautiful spring afternoon outdoors with your family. Geocaching is exploring areas right in your neighborhood or several hours away that you never knew existed. Geocaching is watching your children figure out how to cross the creek upstream and hike the trail back on the other side to find the treasure that the know is hiding there…somewhere.
Have I got you interested yet? So what actually is geocaching? Geocaching is simply treasure hunting with a GPS-enabled device. There are thousands of geocaches registered at geocaching.com. The geocacher uses the coordinates to navigate to the correct location along with clues that help to pinpoint the location or describe the cache. A cache can be anything from a Tupperware container filled with trinkets for trade to a tiny film canister with a rolled up paper log to sign. There are geocaches in our state parks, in local parks and even in shopping center parking lots. You’ve probably walked past a geocache and not even realized it.
Why is geocaching one of my favorite activities? Hunting for a geocache can be the focal point of a family hike on a beautiful day. My family has found geocaches in state parks all over our beautiful state and far beyond. Some are right off the trails and some require some serious effort to reach. When my children were very young, they would beg to go on a hike and hunt for a geocache. Even now, as college students, they will ask to look up geocaches and go exploring when we are on family trips.
We have hidden travel bugs, small tags which are registered and attached to a tiny toy or stuffed animal and then passed from cache to cache by different geocachers. We get to follow the travel bugs’ adventures as it moves from town to town and state to state.
What is my favorite geocaching experience? On a family ski trip to West Virginia, we went hunting for a geocache that seemed like it must be hidden under several feet of snow. It seemed like it would be absolutely impossible to find. Right before we were about to concede defeat and give up the very cold search, we noticed a metal drainage pipe not far from the coordinate location. Sure enough, there was a tiny microcache hidden inside the pipe. We signed the log and then headed to the ski lodge for some well-deserved hot chocolate.
I have also hidden several caches in the Northeast Columbia area. As the “owner” of the cache, I am notified when a geocacher logs that they have found one of my caches. They can leave me a note describing their search and telling me what, if anything, they left behind. I love reading that a child found one of my caches with their parents and had a great time doing it.
So are you ready to give geocaching a try? Check out geocaching.com. Find a geocache listing near you, head outdoors with a GPS device and explore a whole new world of treasure hunting. If you’re in Columbia, head to Sesquicentennial State Park and look for “Prescription for Parks” or any of the other caches hidden in this beautiful park. I can tell you that you’ll get some great exercise finding them. And you’ll leave the park wanting to find even more. Happy Geocaching, everyone!
American Heart Association recommends at least 150 minutes of moderate exercise or 75 minutes of vigorous exercise per week – or a combination of the two for adults.
But what exactly do moderate and vigorous exercise mean and how do you know if you’re working out at the right intensity?
There are a couple different ways to measure the level of intensity at which you are exercising and that level is based on your individual fitness level and overall health.
A high correlation exists between a person’s perceived exertion rating times 10 and the actual heart rate during physical activity; so a person’s exertion rating may provide a fairly good estimate of the actual heart rate during activity (Borg, 1998). For example, if a person’s rating of perceived exertion (RPE) is 12, then 12 x 10 = 120; so the heart rate should be approximately 120 beats per minute.
Note that this calculation is only an approximation of heart rate, and the actual heart rate can vary quite a bit depending on age and physical condition. The Borg Rating of Perceived Exertion is also the preferred method to assess intensity among those individuals who take medications that affect heart rate or pulse.
During your workout, use the RPE Scale to assign numbers to how you feel. Self-monitoring how hard your body is working can help you adjust the intensity of the activity by speeding up or slowing down your movements.
Through experience of monitoring how your body feels, it will become easier to know when to adjust your intensity.
Moderate-intensity physical activity is defined as – physical activity done on a scale relative to an individual’s personal capacity, moderate-intensity physical activity is usually 11-14 on a scale of 1 to 20.
Vigorous-intensity physical activity is defined as – physical activity done on a scale relative to an individual’s personal capacity, vigorous-intensity physical activity is usually 17-19 on a scale of 1 to 20.
Read more about moderate and vigorous activity on the American Heart Association’s website.
Harbison State Forest is located about 25 minutes northwest of downtown Columbia, and offers several hiking and mountain biking trails. (Use the map to find it!) The Firebreak Trail can be walked for a relaxing stroll through nature, or run for a good cardio workout! This easy-moderate trail starts right at the parking lot and brings you on a loop through the southern half of the park. It’s mostly flat, and features a gradual hill and a muddy dip in elevation around the half way point. I wouldn’t walk this trail in your favorite sneakers; the mud was hard to avoid in some places. At 2-2.5 miles in, there is a small stream that needs to be crossed with the help of some well-placed rocks. It took us about an hour to walk the whole trail at a moderate pace. It’s always smart to bring water and a friend to walk with when going into the woods, especially when trying a trail for the first time. The trail was marked well and the park wasn’t crowded, but we encountered other hikers or mountain bikers about every 15 minutes. This park is pet friendly, but dogs must be kept on leashes. I would definitely recommend this trail to a friend!
When you work out, are you doing too much or not enough? There’s a simple way to know: Your target heart rate helps you hit the bull’s eye. “We don’t want people to over-exercise, and the other extreme is not getting enough exercise,” says Gerald Fletcher, M.D., a cardiologist and professor in the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine in Jacksonville, Fla.
Before you learn how to calculate and monitor your target training heart rate, you have to know your resting heart rate. Your resting heart rate is the number of times your heart beats per minute while it’s at rest. You can check it in the morning after you’ve had a good night’s sleep and before you get out of bed.
This table shows estimated target heart rates for different ages. Your maximum heart rate is about 220 minus your age.
Important Note: A few high blood pressure medications lower the maximum heart rate and thus the target zone rate. If you’re taking such medicine, call your physician to find out if you need to use a lower target heart rate.
So what’s in a number?
If your heart rate is too high, you’re straining. So slow down. If it’s too low, and the intensity feels “light” or “moderate/brisk,” you may want to push yourself to exercise a little harder.
During the first few weeks of working out, aim for the lower ranger of your target zone (50 percent) and gradually build up to the higher range (85 percent). After six months or more, you may be able to exercise comfortably at up to 85 percent of your maximum heart rate.
If you have a heart condition or you’re in cardiac rehab, talk to a healthcare professional about what exercises you can engage in, what your target heart rate should be and whether you need to be monitored during physical activity. This will also help you to choose the types of physical activity that are appropriate for your current fitness level and health goals, because some activities are safer than others.

industry_corpus2: Transportation


text:
The site is located on a hill below the forest, almost at the end of the street. Building activity in this neighbourhood began in the inter-war period, when large villas of several floors were built. In the course of the following years the place became denser as the original gardens were divided into smaller lots, where newer houses of smaller–scale started to appear.
We designed the house as low as possible from the street and as simple as possible in general, especially when it is rather complex since designed for a family of three generations; the house is partially hidden underground and all what was needed is included in one extended form stretching into the narrow garden.
The entrance is situated at the level of the upper floor, where a garage for two cars and the larger apartment with terrace is situated. Smaller apartment is at the lower floor with direct entry to the garden.
For the client – as he mentions – it´s the different spatial quality from the standardized house he lived before. He speaks specifically about the living room upstairs, where the daylight changes in the course of the day and where he especially enjoys sunsets.
We designed the living room as expanding outside – to the exterior, providing both intimate and long-distance views; the largest glazing is leading to the terrace framed by grown trees while the lower glazing next to the dining table has a clear view to the west – Furthermore there´s a window next to the working place, that provides morning sun. This widow is covered by vertical wooden laths that let the sun in, but keep the neighbour´s privacy. There´s also a spatial hierarchy thanks to the slightly tilted roof; where the spaces are lined up from the lowest (double-garage) to the highest (living room) and from there going on to the terrace with no roof at all. In this direction – from the (public) street to the (private) garden – also windows get larger.
For us (architects), it was perhaps the agreement of the client – and his family – to build and live in one house instead of in two. They chose a rather small lot in an existing neighbourhood, so the challenge was to provide all the possible comfort to the client´s family and yet to keep the reasonable size of the house, to keep their privacy so as the neighbour´s.


text:
Hello wonderful Giants, this is episode #54. Our guest today is truly one of a kind. He’s an 11-time world surfing champion. Holds the record as the youngest (at age 20) to win the title and the oldest (at age 39) to win the title as well. A living legend, an inspiration to millions of people, by far the best-known surfer on the planet and chatting with him blew me away.
I of course asked for his key tips for beginner-level surfers – for those that want to start, and there’s just an avalanche of quality insights in this interview – the list goes on.
So If you’re someone that’s interested in hearing the ups, the downs and everything in between – from a world champion, then this episode is for you.
I present to you … the hard-working, super humble, 11-time world champ … Kelly Slater!
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text: Located on the south shore of beautiful Lake Holcombe, in northern Wisconsin, Ted's Timber Lodge, formerly Larry's South Shore Resort, is now open all year long. All cottages are on the waterfront, almost at water level and well spaced to insure privacy. Two and three bedroom cottages are air conditioned and fully equipped with microwave, TV, coffee pot and bedding. There are 3 three bedroom cabins, 8 two bedroom cabins, 1 one bedroom cabin, and 1 loft cabin. Private docks are provided with each cabin. Bar-BQue grills and picnic tables are located near all units for easy outdoor cooking. Playground equipment is available for the children. A bright and spacious, outdoor themed bar and dining area and an unexcelled variety of fishing!


text:
There are worse vices than store-bought coffee. But your daily coffee habit adds up over time, causing a huge drain on your wallet.
With a little clever planning, you can still keep your coffee shop habit without breaking the bank. Here are some tried-and-tested coffee hacks in Singapore that will save you big bucks.
Places like Starbucks give you a small discount if you bring your own mug, tumbler, or thermos for them to top off. This not only adds up to more savings over time, but also helps the environment by conserving resources!
A great way to save money is to order in bulk by buying a pot or a French press., which serves several cups of coffee. This is cheaper than ordering coffee individually, especially if you plan on sticking around for hours. An even better way to save is to go as a group and split the cost of the coffee.
A good credit card should have rewards and privileges that suit your lifestyle. If you’re still searching for a credit card in Singapore, make sure to choose one that gives rebates and discounts for coffee purchases. The Citibank Cash Back Credit Card, for instance, gives 8% cashback at food and beverage outlets.
If there’s a particular coffee shop or coffee chain you frequent, it pays to sign up for their loyalty program. Besides getting a fancy card with your name on it, watch out for exclusive perks like product discounts, free gifts, and complimentary beverages on special occasions like your birthday.
Can’t live without that cup of Starbucks? Stock up on a bag of their store blends and fire up your coffee maker. Brewing your own coffee at home is cheaper than going the store-bought route. To ease yourself into the habit, buy in bulk from your regular shop and find a way to grind your own beans to your preferences.
Getting a regular iced coffee? Ask your barista to lessen the ice in your drink. Too much ice can water down your drink as it melts, diluting its flavor. By asking for just enough ice to keep things cool, you get more coffee for your money.
If you and a co-worker have the same taste in drinks, try ordering the largest size on the menu and splitting it between the two of you. You can save anywhere from a few cents to a few dollars compared to if you bought two separate beverages.
Score a cheap iced latte when you order an espresso over ice in a large cup. Fill up with the free milk on the condiments area on the way out!
At Starbucks, get a “Short” instead of a “Tall”. Not only is it cheaper; short capuccinos contain the same amount of espresso as a tall one.
Give these coffee hacks a try and see the difference it makes to your budget!
15 Free Coffees at Starbucks in Singapore – Available Now!


text: Buy James Milner Men Jersey, 2016 England Soccer Men James Milner Jersey at Official 2016 England Soccer Shop. Buy our Our huge selection of James Milner White Men Jereys ,James Milner White & Red Stripes Men Jerseys and James Milner Grey Men Jerseys, James Milner Authentic Jerseys and James Milner Replica Jerseys, James Milner Home Men Jerseys, James Milner Away Men Jerseys and James Milner Third Away Men Jerseys for 2016 England Soccer fans. Size in XS, S, M, L, XL.


text:
Back in 1999 I contributed a chapter to the book called "Leading Knowledge Management and Learning" in which I wrote a chapter on the Knowledge Manager role I had played in BP's Norway office in the mid 1990s.
As part of that Chapter I included a section called "A week in the life of a Knowledge Manager," reproduced below, which reminds us of how KM worked 20 years ago, when the bulk of our activities were face to face. In many small companies, where face to face interaction is a daily occurrence, most Knowledge Managers will continue to work this way, although the Office Noticeboard would nowadays be replaced by the Department Wiki..
It is quite hard to describe a typical week in the life of a knowledge officer in a small site office like Norway, as no two weeks were ever the same. However, there were many tasks I did on a frequent and regular basis, which accounted for most of my knowledge work. To begin with, I needed an overview of the project activity, so I could make sure each project manager was maximizing their use of knowledge. Every month I would make a round of all the project leaders, and ask them for the details of their active projects, were they still active, or had work ended? Were any new projects underway? I would take all this information, and update the project chart.
All our work was divided into projects, each with a project leader, a team, a defined internal customer, and measurable objectives. At any one time there might be 60 to 100 projects running in the office. The project chart was a useful document that showed at a glance how the activity of the office was arranged, and how it all fell into place as a means of delivering the performance promises that we had made to the management of the group. If a project had finished, and the team leader had not scheduled a Retrospect, then it was time for me to exercise my influencing skills, and persuade him/her to invest the time needed to call the team together to capture and document knowledge they had generated. There might be some new projects starting up. I would go and spend some time with the project leader, and try to identify areas where they could reuse knowledge from previous projects. One good example of this was in the use of summer interns. These bright young people can be a tremendously valuable resource, if they are managed properly. We learned many lessons every summer about the ideal way to manage interns, and the next summer I would seek out the intern supervisors and prompt them to read through the lessons, and apply them to their own intern project.
In some cases there would be other teams in the BP group who done similar projects before. We would schedule a Peer Assist, which was a special type of structured and facilitated knowledge-exchange meeting where people with relevant experience could come in and share what they knew with the project team. For example, one of our discoveries was a gas condensate field (gas condensate is a single-phase reservoir fluid which is problematic to produce) buried very deeply under the northern North Sea. Developing a field such as this is difficult and costly, and it is easy to make wrong decisions and costly mistakes. We had never developed such a field before, but there was a team in Aberdeen who had just completed a similar project. We asked them to visit, and held a two-day Peer Assist where they shared with us all the knowledge and experience they could, and set us on track for a successful development decision. We would probably have two or three Retrospects scheduled per week. These meetings might take anywhere from 20 minutes to three hours depending on the scale of the project. I would act as facilitator for the Retrospect, also taking notes of the meeting. Afterwards I would re-write these notes to extract the knowledge, and write these out as Lessons Learned for the future. Once the meeting participants had agreed that the lessons were valid, I would pin them up on the main notice board for everybody in the office to read, and also update the lessons database. Then perhaps I would spend half a day working on the explanatory manual for the project management system, or doing some work on the Web site, or doing an introductory run-through to the system for someone new to the office. Or perhaps I would be sitting in with the management team at one of the high-level meetings to look at the performance of the office, to look at the risks and opportunities, and decide the ways forward.
Many of my activities were to do with perfecting the PMS system [this was our project management system, which had a strong KM Framework within it], monitoring its use, and prompting, coaching and facilitating people in their KM activities. I am convinced that a role like this is needed, and that without someone playing this role, the system will fall into disuse. Knowledge management is seen as important, but not always recognized as urgent when compared with operational activity. A key part of my role was to give urgency to knowledge management. Occasionally there was resistance from people who felt they were too busy for KM, and this resistance was strongest from people who were new to the office. Most of the people who had experienced the PMS system realized that a short-term investment of time to capture knowledge would lead to long term time savings when the knowledge was re-used. Because the PMS system was run entirely within a single office, we faced no problems of inter-office rivalry, or the "not invented here" syndrome. In fact, at that time there were no other offices in the BP Group running anything similar, so the opportunities to access knowledge from elsewhere were few. Looking back at the Knowledge Manager role in the BP Norway office, one of the things that helped to make it work was where it was positioned on the organisational chart. I was not part of the line management structure; I reported directly to the Business Unit leader, with no direct reports of my own. This meant that I did not influence the staff appraisal system. I could work knowledge issues with the office staff, looking at things that had gone wrong and how they could be improved, as well as looking at things that it gone well and how they could be repeated, without anybody worrying about how this might impact their promotion.
In hindsight, this positioning was crucial. People can have a great reluctance to share a their fears, even to analyze their failures in order to draw out the knowledge, just from a general fear of showing weakness or exposing mistakes which might impact their career. The knowledge manager working with these people has to be in a position of trust. He or she has to be trusted and respected, even liked. You couldn't run a knowledge management system with a CKO or knowledge manager that people didn't know, didn’t respect, didn't trust or didn't like. The exchange of knowledge is predicated on trust. Removing the knowledge manager from the line structure meant that people could be open and honest, without worrying that it might affect their pay grades.
I see knowledge management as something that needs an even-handed application of people, process and technology issues across all aspects of the business, and my advice would be to keep it as a separate function, with the CKO or local Knowledge Manager reporting directly to the leadership.


text: Great Lent. Martyr Eudocia of Heliopolis (152). New Hieromartyr Olga (1937). New Hieromartyrs Basil, Peter, John, Benjamin, Michael priests, New Hieromartyr Antony, Virgin-martyrs Anna, Daria, Eudokia, Martyr Basil, Virgin-martyr Nadezhda (1938). New Hieromartyr Alexander priest (1942). New Hieromartyrs Abbess Antonina of Kizliar (1924), Methodius (1920) and Anastasia Andreyevna, fool-for-Christ. Martyrs Nestor, Tribimius, Marcellus, and Anthony of Perge in Pamphylia (3rd c.). Martyr Antonina of Nicaea in Bithynia (284-305). Virgin Domnina of Syria (450-460). St. Agapius of Vatopedi Skete of Kolitsou, Mt. Athos, and his four companions. St. Martyrius, abbot of Zelenets (Tikhvin) (1603). St. Swidbert, monastic founder on the Rhine River (713). St. David of Wales, bishop (6th c.) (Celtic & British). St. Albinus, bishop of Angers (550).


text:
Jefferson High School is safe but we can do better.
Help us create a safer, healthier school climate.
a possible threat to our school, please report it.


text:
When you think about it, Jews and blacks have a lot in common. Large food portions, Sammy Davis Jr, ummmm... Well, centuries of oppression. There's that.
But Jews can't choose to be black. (Although with the rise of hip-hop, many have tried.) On the other hand, blacks can choose to be Jewish. And not just run-of-the-mill converts like Davis Jr. There are whole religious movements intended to turn blacks into Jews.
Take the Black Hebrew Israelites. One of the founders was William Saunders Crowdy, an ex-slave and Civil War soldier who had "a vision" that not only turned his hair white (not sure if the vision took place at a hairdresser's), but showed him the true path in life: to lead his people to the one, true religion. Judaism, obviously.
And who can argue with that? Judaism is the best! So the more Jews the merrier, right? Right?
Well, apparently Jews — the traditional, run-of-the-mill Jews — are not exactly fans of the Black Israelite movement. For one, the movement teaches that all Jews were once black and that the only true Jews are the black Jews. And... Well... Ummm... We're trying to be INCLUSIVE here, Black Hebrews. Not exactly nice on your part to reject the one group whose help you could have used to legitimize your little sect.
And besides, the name of the church founded by Crowdy (yes, that's right, a church, not a synagogue or a temple)? "Church of God and Saints of Christ." Christ. Honestly, how can we take these guys seriously?
We guess we'll stick with large food portions... And Sammy Davis Jr.


text:
newlispfanclub.alh.net • View topic - newlisp.DLL possible?
Board index ‹ Forum ‹ newLISP and the O.S.
Unix, Linux, OS X, OS/2, Windows, ..?
Added a hpwTreeView for a hierachic view on the pub.
Added a Run-button when CompiledName is set in the pub-source.
When run with a pub-filename as a commandline-parameter the file is displayed on startup.
The neobook-source parser is written in newLISP of course.
RegexBuddy has to be installed and registerd on the developer PC.
Press the wizard-button and edit the selected-regex-string (or create at cursorpos) in RegexBuddy and return with the send-button.
New variable in neobook [NEWLISPDIR] readed from enviroment-var NEWLISPDIR from newLISP-install.
This make it easier to use the separate newLISP distribution directly.
This is a stripped-down version of hpwNewLISP released under open-source to meet the needs of open-source developers in terms of license issues. It supports the essential interfacing to the newLISP.dll with callback support.
The delphi-source(D7) is provided on the download page.
Return to newLISP and the O.S.


text:
ברכות לדוקטורנטית בחוג ללקויות למידה, בהנחייתה של ד"ר אורלי רובינשטיין שזכתה במלגה היוקרתית על שם יובל נאמן של משרד המדע, הטכולוגיה והחלל.
עבודת הדוקטורט שהוגשה למלגה עוסקת באופרציות לא סימבוליות מוערכות, אופרציות סימבוליות מוערכות ומדויקות ויכולת מתמטית.
Numerical representations are thought to rest on two representation systems: symbolic (e.g., Arabic numerals such as “6” or number words such as “SIX”) and non-symbolic approximate (ANS) representation (e.g., a group of dots). The fact that these representations are related is well documented. However, the literature is inconclusive regarding their relationship with mathematical proficiency. ANS is commonly examined by comparison tasks (two arrays of dots are presented and one is required to compare them), but recently some studies have focused on the performance of math operations (i.e., addition, subtraction and multiplication) within the ANS and approximately using symbolic representations.
In the current study I will try to answer and expand the question regarding the relation between the ANS and mathematical proficiency by focusing on three types of mathematical operations: (1) ANS operations (e.g., adding groups of dots and estimating their sum), (2) approximate symbolic operations (e.g., estimating the sum of 37+41), and (3) exact symbolic operations (e.g., 7+8=?). Their relation among themselves and with mathematical proficiency will be examined in five age groups.
This will be the first study to (1) examine these three types of operations (and one of the few that examine approximate symbolic ones) (2) examine their relation to mathematical proficiency, in (3) five different age groups. The outcomes of the current study may potentially enable the generation of new strategies in mathematics education, strategies that will utilize children’s ability to perform approximate mathematical operations in order to encourage the acquisition of mathematical knowledge.


text:
Understated chic is at the heart of this sleek silver-tone stainless steel Michael Kors chronograph. Stainless steel is a timeless style that works with any wardrobe. The shiny and brushed silver links of the strap give this classic a modern update.
Help other Indulge Contemporary Silver Jewellery users shop smarter by writing reviews for products you have purchased.


text: Table Sauces in Chile by Mintel Market Sizes provides you with annual year-end market size data, most recently updated in 2017. This market covers bottled/packaged ambient; tomato ketchup, salad dressing, mayonnaise, mustard, brown, soy and other table sauces. Market value and volume comprises sales through all retail channels including direct to consumer. Market size for Table Sauces in Chile is given in CLP and tonne with a minimum of five years' historical data. Market Forecast is provided for five years. Included with this snapshot is socio-economic data for Chile. Population, Consumer Price Index (CPI), Gross Domestic Product (GDP), Exchange Rates.


text:
Costain is increasing its support for the development of self-healing concrete by enabling a start of field trials on one of its live highway projects.
As one of the main industrial partners of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC)-funded Materials 4 Life research project, Costain has been sponsoring research by Cardiff, Cambridge and Bath Universities into such materials. The aim is to improve the durability of concrete structures.
Self-healing concrete uses a combination of shape memory polymers, microcapsules and microbial healing to reduce or slow down the effects of deterioration due to ageing or damage.
The importance of the research, the progress of which Costain Civil Engineer Oliver Teall presented at the 5th International Conference on Self-Healing Materials at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, this summer, can be seen in the identity of some of its backers, with Highways England and the Welsh Government among those interested in the outcomes of the project.
“We are the only major research group in the UK investigating this, and have been recognised by the international community as a key global player,” said Oliver. “We’re planning to start construction of a trial structure in August on the Heads of the Valleys highways improvement project in South Wales.
“This will give the research team an opportunity to monitor the performance of the material in a real site-based environment and is a key element of the research.
“We’ll be building a full-scale wall structure with a number of concrete panels. Into each panel we will incorporate different combinations of self-healing techniques. These will be loaded to artificially damage them, and then monitored to see how they react and recover over time.
“We plan to start testing at the end of September, running for a minimum of six months. From this trial we should gain an insight into the feasibility of constructing a full-scale structure with these techniques and their early-stage effects on structural properties.
Oliver is currently on secondment to Cardiff University where he is completing a PhD as part of the project. His role includes the co-ordination of the site tests of the material and developing the shape memory polymer system.
Caption: Oliver Teall presents an update on self-healing concrete at the 5th International Conference on Self-Healing Materials at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.


text:
It took us a bit longer than I expected but we were able to get the world generation plugged in and working. The systems we had built before the tile system were integrated very smoothly.
Currently I am working on putting together the art for each type of tile. Right now I have a forest tile complete. The world at the moment, since I only have 1 tile plugged in, is a giant forest. Over the next couple of days I will be putting together the other types of tiles so that in the video update I can run around the world and show off some of the work we have done.
There have been questions about world size and I haven't been able to give a concrete answer. That's mostly because we had an idea in mind for scale, but didn't have it built. Now that we have it built I can answer this question.
Each tile is ~50 meters. The world in the above screenshots is ~2.5 square kilometers. Since the possible worlds generated are random, the scale of the world won't be the same every play through. We have the ability to make the world even larger, but that will depend on how the game plays out once we get to testing.
Give me a couple more days to plug in the art for the other tiles and I will have the video up ASAP.
Robert Moore, BruceP - Chameleon Prime, and 22 more people like this update.
The love and attention being pushed into this is phenomenal. Delays really aren't a concern (to me at least) when there's clearly a lot of thought and work going into both the mechanics and visual approach.
This is looking absolutely fantastic, one of the few kick starters that appears to be looking better and better with each update, and it looks as if its already far surpassed the original prototype. I cant wait man, i look forward to more info.
As always; looks great! Might be fun in the final version to have options to turn on/off tile-types. So that if someone wanted, they could play in a 100% forest world.
@Lokai - We have plans to incorporate a map in game for navigation. I will also give a brief "behind the scenes" as to how the map is created in the upcoming video.
Sounds good, can't wait to see it in motion. Is there some kind of map you have in place to in order to show off how the world will be put together with all of these different randomly generated tiles?

industry_corpus2: Gaming