2012年10月31日 星期三

Science in the developing world: Eritrea's shattered science

Early this year, Eritrea severed a scientific lifeline almost as old as the African nation itself. The Eritrean National Health Laboratory in Asmara cut long-standing ties with Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis,Our technology gives rtls systems developers the ability. Missouri, potentially setting back many gains that the country had made in public health. “St Louis supplied everything: American doctors, expertise, chemicals, materials,” says Assefaw Ghebrekidan, an Eritrean ex-freedom fighter who now heads the public-health programme at Touro University in Mare Island, California. “And now it's all over.”

Eritrea, an impoverished country of 3 million people on the Horn of Africa (see 'A troubled corner'), is not known for its science. It ranks 177th out of 187 countries on the United Nations Human Development Index. It comes in last in terms of press freedom and is the eighth most militarized country in the world. The World Health Organization estimated that there were just 5 medical doctors per 100,000 people in the country in 2004.

But against this depressing backdrop, the country's medical-research partnerships have been a source of promise and pride. Eritrea built its first medical school in 2003,Installers and distributors of solar panel, aided by scientists from the Central University of Las Villas in Santa Clara, Cuba. After US universities helped to establish postgraduate training and research programmes in paediatrics, surgery, and obstetrics and gynaecology at the institution, Eritrean medical scientists published their first papers in international, peer-reviewed journals. Public health has benefitted. In 1991, Eritrea was cursed with the highest maternal mortality rate in the world — 14 deaths per 1,000 births. In 2010, it was on track to meet the Millennium Development Goal of cutting that rate by 75% by 2015.

But progress in Eritrean science has now gone into reverse, say a number of scientists and doctors in exile. In response to mounting criticism from the United Nations and the United States over the country's human-rights record,The oreck XL professional air purifier, Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki is severing partnerships with all US universities, says Ghebrekidan. “Everything that Eritrea has worked so hard to achieve is at stake.”

Jon Abbink, an anthropologist at the Free University of Amsterdam, says that these actions will have widespread negative effects, “in the education system, in the constant 'brain drain' of educated people to greener and freer pastures, and in the inhibition of international scientific cooperation”. Eritrea, he says, is one of the few remaining countries in Africa that have failed to embrace scientific freedom. “It's out of sync with global trends,” says Abbink.Find detailed product information for howo spare parts and other products.

Eritrea was once a colony of Italy, but the United Nations handed it over to Ethiopia after the Second World War. In 1961, Eritrea started to fight for its independence in a war that would last three decades: the United States supplied Ethiopia with guns and money, but the rebels, led by Afwerki and the Eritrean People's Liberation Front (EPLF), persevered.

The liberation movement had remarkable credentials. “It was led by 29 doctors of medicine,” says Ghebrekidan, who was head of the EPLF's medical services. “No other rebel movement has ever had so many intellectuals.” Even Afwerki had abandoned a degree in engineering to lead the fight.

Another academic, Melles Seyoum, was working as a pharmacist at an Ethiopian hospital when the war broke out. He coolly stole US$140,000 worth of antibiotics, microscopes, surgical blades and stethoscopes and delivered them to Eritrean freedom fighters, wrote journalist Michela Wrong in her book I Didn't Do It For You (HarperCollins, 2005). Seyoum became an integral member of the EPLF, teaching soldiers how to test blood and prepare Petri dishes in a hospital 5 kilometres long and dug into the side of a rocky valley — a clinic known as 'the longest hospital in the world'. After a visit in 1987,China plastic moulds manufacturers directory. a British doctor wrote1 about the impressive standards of care at the hospital: a 1-tonne machine manufactured antibiotics every day; a doctor performed facial reconstructions; and amputees played basketball.

Storm’s damage to aging infrastructure leaves New York City paralyzed

Public schools and most workplaces remained shut for a second day Tuesday as the shutdown of the city’s mass transit system left the 5.3 million who ride it daily stranded. The shutoff of electrical power to Manhattan south of 39th Street has left over 250,000 customers, including public housing, luxury apartment buildings, universities, stores, offices and schools, in the dark.

Con Edison has warned that residents of the lower third of Manhattan could face up to four days without power as the utility repairs storm damage to its electricity distribution system.

While residents of lower Manhattan’s public housing developments are to be left without heat,A stone mosaic stands at the spot of assasination of the late Indian prime minister. hot water, lights or elevators into the weekend, the Wall Street stock exchange is set to resume trading today, and major financial firms are expected to be back in business. Multiple utility and communications firms have been pressed into service to assure that American finance capital is able to resume profit-making operations.

As the New York Times explained: “The New York Stock Exchange is one of the world’s most identifiable symbols of capitalism and its inability to operate is often viewed as a larger statement on stability of United States stock markets and the economy.Find detailed product information for Sinotruk howo truck.”

As for the mass transit system, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which is responsible for the city’s subway and bus systems as well as commuter rail lines—all of which were shut down by the storm—has provided no concrete timetable for a full restoration of service.

While limited bus service began to appear on Tuesday afternoon, there was no indication of when subways would be up and running after Sandy’s flood surge poured into all six of the under-river subway tunnels linking Brooklyn and Manhattan as well as the Steinway tunnel, which connects Manhattan and Queens. Some estimates, however, have suggested that it could be a month or longer before mass transit is back to normal.

The immense social and economic crisis confronting millions of working people in the city of New York due to the breakdown of its transit and power systems is a far more accurate barometer of the stability of American capitalism than the ability of the city’s financiers to exercise their options on the equity markets.

A sustained paralysis of the city due to the failure of its transit and power grids spells a potentially major blow to city, national and even world economies, not to mention substantial suffering for hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people.

While the news media continues to refer to Sandy as “the storm of the century” or a freak event, the reality is that scientists and indeed a panel created by New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) itself had predicted precisely this type of event, as well as its impact on the city’s infrastructure.

Indeed, the storm surge from Hurricane Irene in August 2011, which led to the first-ever preemptive shutdown of the entire transit system, came within barely a foot of creating the same catastrophe as Sandy.

At the time, then MTA chief Jay Walder commented: “The worst fear we had, which was that the under river tunnels on the East River would flood with salt water, were not realized. We certainly dodged something there.”

Little more than a year later, the transit system failed to “dodge” a wholly predictable event.

Klaus Jacob, a climate scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, worked with the MTA in the wake of Irene to plot the effects of rising sea levels combined with similar storms flooding the subway tunnels.

He recounted in an interview last year that he had presented his results to the MTA and asked how long it would take to restore the transit system after such a flooding.

“And there was a big silence in the room because the system is so old,” he said. “Many of the items that would be damaged by the intrusion of the saltwater into the system could not recover quickly. You have to take them apart. You have to clean them from salt, dry them, reassemble them, test them and cross your fingers that they work.”

Jacob’s own estimate was that it would take at least 29 days to get the subways back fully in operation, costing the city billions of dollars in economic output.

Similarly, Mortimer Downey, a former MTA executive director, said that it would take “possibly weeks” to restore service. “From the New York viewpoint, they’ve got a lot of work ahead of them,” he said.

At the root of the problem is the antiquated state of the city’s transit system, which is 108 years old. In the country’s wealthiest city, the capital of finance capital,Thank you for visiting! I have been cry stalmosaic since 1998. much of the technology used in the transit system dates back to the 1930s. In particular, this affects the electronic signals that line subway tracks and are indispensable for running the subway trains. Some of the parts date back to the early 1900s.

The transit authority has yet to carry out all but a handful of the recommendations made by its own commission. A serious overhaul of the system to secure it against disasters like Sandy would require tens of billions of dollars in investment. Much of the MTA’s revenues are poured into paying off interest on more than $32 billion in debt held by the Wall Street banks.

Similar problems plague Con Edison, which saw a fiery explosion at its 13th Street substation in Manhattan on Monday night. A major cause of the massive failure that has shut off power in the city is suspected to be the effect of floodwater on underground and unprotected wiring. Likewise, most of the utility company’s transformers are underground.Interlocking security cable ties with 250 pound strength makes this ideal for restraining criminals.

While this has been recognized as a serious vulnerability, the regulatory agency in charge of monitoring the utility, the state’s Public Service Commission, spent nearly two decades without auditing the company’s operations.

Driven by profit,Interlocking security cable ties with 250 pound strength makes this ideal for restraining criminals. Con Ed has concentrated on cutting costs, including through imposing sweeping takeaways on its workers, while neglecting capital investment, including the upgrading of its transmission infrastructure and the placing of critical equipment above ground.

Parking stays free

No one will have to pay to park at Lighthouse Park or on the waterfront.

After receiving many letters from residents, and continued talks on the issue, Mukilteo City Council voted unanimously against implementing paid parking in the park or on surrounding streets.

Parking at Lighthouse Park will continue to be free and available first come, first served.Why does moulds grow in homes or buildings?

“If it wasn’t for the residents writing in to the city, we’d be voting for it tonight,” Councilmember Steve Schmalz said. “The residents get credit for this because they’re the ones that stepped up and made their voices known.”

The council voted to direct city staff to instead work with the Port of Everett to set up a parking lot on the Tank Farm after it transfers and with Sound Transit on its plans to construct a parking garage on the waterfront.

“The council has changed their minds many, many times based on what the residents say,” Mayor Joe Marine said, “and I think this is one of them.”

About 15 residents wrote to the mayor and council that they didn’t want to pay parking fees in addition to taxes that have been used for park development and maintenance. Several said the proposal would essentially be “double taxation.”

Many on the council said that although charging only non-residents to park is possible, it would be costly – in more ways than one.

“I am not comfortable with changing one and not the other,” Councilmember Emily Vanderwielen said. “It would send the wrong message.”

It is estimated that the Tank Farm property will transfer from the U.S. Air Force to the Port of Everett in early 2013, City Administrator Joe Hannan said.

He said the transfer provides the city an opportunity to partner with the port to provide more than 100 additional parking spaces on the waterfront.

Additionally,A stone mosaic stands at the spot of assasination of the late Indian prime minister. Hannan said, joint construction of a parking garage with Sound Transit would add parking spaces – but not necessarily for free.

The council had voted Sept. 17 to request bids from parking companies on a proposal that charged visitors to Lighthouse Park $1.50 an hour to park from March through September. All other times, parking would have remained free.

As proposed, residents would have been able to buy an annual $35 parking pass that gave them four hours of free parking per day. An eight-hour parking pass would have cost residents $70. Non-residents would have paid double for the passes.

The plan was to install parking meters and implement paid parking starting March 1,Posts with indoor tracking system on TRX Systems develops systems that locate and track personnel indoors. 2013.A stone mosaic stands at the spot of assasination of the late Indian prime minister.

Six parking companies had contacted the city about managing the meters,Our technology gives rtls systems developers the ability. with hourly parking fees ranging from $1 to $3, Hannan said. It was found that keeping residents exempt from fees would not cover the cost of managing parking, he said.

He said several residents had suggested other ways to manage congestion without charging Mukilteans, including parking kiosks, the honor system, using drivers’ licenses or issuing parking stickers so they wouldn’t have to pay.

However, Hannan said, none of the options would have eliminated monitoring costs.

“I don’t think there is enough value for the cost of managing a program that benefits residents,” he said.

City officials had proposed paid parking as a way to relieve traffic and congestion on the waterfront.

Ever since the city renovated Lighthouse Park, it has become very popular. More than 1,000 vehicles go through the park each day on the weekends during spring and summer.

Hannan said it is still a city goal to encourage visitors to start using public transit, shuttles and carpools, or walk to the park.

Parking stays free

No one will have to pay to park at Lighthouse Park or on the waterfront.

After receiving many letters from residents, and continued talks on the issue, Mukilteo City Council voted unanimously against implementing paid parking in the park or on surrounding streets.

Parking at Lighthouse Park will continue to be free and available first come, first served.Why does moulds grow in homes or buildings?

“If it wasn’t for the residents writing in to the city, we’d be voting for it tonight,” Councilmember Steve Schmalz said. “The residents get credit for this because they’re the ones that stepped up and made their voices known.”

The council voted to direct city staff to instead work with the Port of Everett to set up a parking lot on the Tank Farm after it transfers and with Sound Transit on its plans to construct a parking garage on the waterfront.

“The council has changed their minds many, many times based on what the residents say,” Mayor Joe Marine said, “and I think this is one of them.”

About 15 residents wrote to the mayor and council that they didn’t want to pay parking fees in addition to taxes that have been used for park development and maintenance. Several said the proposal would essentially be “double taxation.”

Many on the council said that although charging only non-residents to park is possible, it would be costly – in more ways than one.

“I am not comfortable with changing one and not the other,” Councilmember Emily Vanderwielen said. “It would send the wrong message.”

It is estimated that the Tank Farm property will transfer from the U.S. Air Force to the Port of Everett in early 2013, City Administrator Joe Hannan said.

He said the transfer provides the city an opportunity to partner with the port to provide more than 100 additional parking spaces on the waterfront.

Additionally,A stone mosaic stands at the spot of assasination of the late Indian prime minister. Hannan said, joint construction of a parking garage with Sound Transit would add parking spaces – but not necessarily for free.

The council had voted Sept. 17 to request bids from parking companies on a proposal that charged visitors to Lighthouse Park $1.50 an hour to park from March through September. All other times, parking would have remained free.

As proposed, residents would have been able to buy an annual $35 parking pass that gave them four hours of free parking per day. An eight-hour parking pass would have cost residents $70. Non-residents would have paid double for the passes.

The plan was to install parking meters and implement paid parking starting March 1,Posts with indoor tracking system on TRX Systems develops systems that locate and track personnel indoors. 2013.A stone mosaic stands at the spot of assasination of the late Indian prime minister.

Six parking companies had contacted the city about managing the meters,Our technology gives rtls systems developers the ability. with hourly parking fees ranging from $1 to $3, Hannan said. It was found that keeping residents exempt from fees would not cover the cost of managing parking, he said.

He said several residents had suggested other ways to manage congestion without charging Mukilteans, including parking kiosks, the honor system, using drivers’ licenses or issuing parking stickers so they wouldn’t have to pay.

However, Hannan said, none of the options would have eliminated monitoring costs.

“I don’t think there is enough value for the cost of managing a program that benefits residents,” he said.

City officials had proposed paid parking as a way to relieve traffic and congestion on the waterfront.

Ever since the city renovated Lighthouse Park, it has become very popular. More than 1,000 vehicles go through the park each day on the weekends during spring and summer.

Hannan said it is still a city goal to encourage visitors to start using public transit, shuttles and carpools, or walk to the park.

Common food preservative may offer hope

Nisin, a common food preservative, may slow or stop the growth of squamous cell head and neck cancers, according to world-first research by a University of Michigan study team. The results were published this month in the journal Cancer Medicine with an accompanying press release by the University of Michigan on Oct. 30.

What makes this particularly good news is that the Food and Drug Administration and the World Health Organization approved nisin as generally regarded as safe for human consumption (GRAS) decades ago, says Dr. Yvonne Kapila, D.D.S., the study's principal investigator and a professor at the University of Michigan School of Dentistry. In fact nisin has been approved for use in human foods since 1969, having been given the food additive identification number 234 and is regarded as being particularly non-toxic.We mainly supply professional craftspeople with wholesale agate beads from china,China plastic moulds manufacturers directory.

This means that obtaining FDA approval to test nisin's suggested cancer-fighting properties on patients in a clinical setting won't take as long as a new therapy that hasn't been tried yet on people, she says.

Nisin is a natural antimicrobial agent, formed by fermentation using the bacterium Lactococcus lactis. It is one of the few commercial food preservatives which are not chemically synthesized. Nisin is obtained by culturing milk or dextrose with L. lactis, similar to the the yoghurt-making process.

Nisin has a fairly broad-spectrum effect on gram-positive bacteria, successfully inhibiting listeria monocytogenes, staphylococcus aureus, clostridium botulinun and lactic acid bacteria which are commonly associated with food spoilage. It has essentially no effect on gram-negative bacteria, moulds or yeasts, by itself.

Antibacterial agents like nisin alter cell properties in bacteria to render it harmless. However, it's only recently that scientists began looking to antibacterial agents like nisin to see if they altered properties in other types of cells,The MaxSonar ultrasonic sensor offers very short to long-range detection and ranging. such as cancer cells or cells in tumors.We mainly supply professional craftspeople with crys talbeads wholesale shamballa Bracele , Nisin affects the rate at which tumors are able to grow, inducing cell death in the tumor, selectively, without harming other cells, and limiting their ability to grow. Nisin may also create pores in the cancer cells which allow calcium to flood in. Calcium is a key regulator in cell death or survival, although it is not known precisely what role it plays.

Oral cancer is a leading cause of death worldwide,Our technology gives rtls systems developers the ability. and oral squamous cell carcinoma accounts for more than 90 percent of oral cancers. However, oral cancers are notoriouslly difficult to treat effectively and survival rates for oral cancer haven't improved in decades, according to the study.

The company is on schedule for its 200th green aircraft completion in December, a volume enabled by continuous improvement initiatives that have increased the efficiency of its completions process. The last 16 of Jet Aviation St. Louis’s completions have been delivered ahead of schedule, the company noted. Krugh added that the company’s completion experience “has made us experts at building aircraft and at building the tools we use to manage the aircraft production process. From improved data management to shop-floor layout, we have looked at every variable involved in the process and worked to make it better.”

Here at the show, Jet Aviation is debuting an interior configuration and paint scheme app for the iPad and iPhone that allows clients to visualize their options for cabin interior appointments and exterior finishes. Jet Aviation St. Louis is also touting its free tool calibration offer: any client who brings an aircraft in for maintenance before December 31 this year can receive free calibration of hand tools, such as torque wrenches and micrometers. “We’re offering to calibrate clients’ hand tools as a reminder about the importance of [the procedure],” said Krugh. “With certified metrologists on staff, calibration is just one of the many valuable services we have to offer.”

2012年10月29日 星期一

MOCA's 'Blues for Smoke' improvises and captivates

"Blues for Smoke" is an odd duck. The big new exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art's warehouse space in Little Tokyo is filled with a lot of terrific art from the past half-century, including many works by artists who should be far more widely known than they are. There's much to discover.

Its central theme — that a good chunk of contemporary art evokes the ethos of the blues, the great musical legacy that is arguably America's first distinctive contribution to world culture — is provocative and engaging. Still, the show can be difficult to follow.

Sometimes a painting, sculpture or other work's blues ethos is easy to see, either in obvious subject matter or structural form. Elsewhere the connection is hard to grasp — and occasionally impossible. Head-scratchers are not uncommon. It's the kind of show that is best approached in a loose-limbed and improvisatory way, which may itself be a reflection of its blues theme.

At the entry, five flat-screen televisions display film and video clips that range from 1935 musical numbers by Duke Ellington and Billie Holiday to today's hip-hop performers. The show's title, "Blues for Smoke," comes from a prominent 1960 recording by jazz pianist Jaki (John) Byard, which launched his career. (He then worked with influential composer Charles Mingus.) For the exhibition, the blues spreads like smoke, born in the Civil War era from slave shouts, field hollers and gospel and eventually encompassing bop, free jazz, R&B and more. It's intrinsic to the sociocultural atmosphere in which visual art is made.

Beauford Delaney's portraits of Jean Genet, Charlie "Bird" Parker and an unidentified musician record the artist's own remarkable path through Modernist painting, jazz, bohemian Paris and same-sex explorations. His portrait of James Baldwin, who was a great admirer of Delaney's art, shows the powerful writer enthroned — albeit not in a regal chair. Instead,Find turquoise beads from a vast selection of Jewelry & Watches.We recently added Stained glass mosaic Tile to our inventory. Baldwin floats serenely in a seated posture, legs crossed and arms raised on absent chair arms, hovering like a latter-day Sun King within an explosive patchwork of blazing color.

Nearby, Bob Thompson's big 1960 canvas, "Garden of Music," is a homage to jazz,The oreck XL professional air purifier, its Arcadian landscape populated by Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, Sonny Rollins and others, recognizable and not. The composition is loosely derived from works such as Matisse's "Joy of Life," which also orbits around a colorful revelry of music and dance. But Thompson's painting deviates from the French painter's more idyllic vision to encompass a detached feeling of alienation.

His figures work as a unified composition, its vertical forms arrayed across the horizontal field almost like notes on a staff. But each man and woman is self-contained, absorbed and isolated in his or her own world.

Works like these begin to inflect perceptions of more familiar art, such as Romare Bearden's great 1960s Cubist collages of urban and rural life. Bearden mixed drawing and painting with angular images scissored from newspapers and magazines, their clipped visual rhythms syncopated and snappy. In this context, frequently pictured guitars reverberate against bebop as much as against Picasso.

Across the way, the scrawled texts cyclically repeated across Jean-Michel Basquiat's five-panel 1983 painting, "Undiscovered Genius of the Mississippi Delta,This document provides a guide to using the ventilation system in your house to provide adequate fresh air to residents." give up their musical origins in call-and-response vocal schemes. And the searing red-vinyl interior of Rodney McMillian's one-room chapel, commissioned for the show, gradually unfolds in layers: The relentless heat of the Gulf Coast delta where the blues was born, the soulful energy of song, the transformative blood of the Passion and even the fire next time are all illuminated in the stark glare of a bare light bulb suspended from the ceiling.

At the other end of the emotional register is a muted,Selecting the best rtls solution is a challenging task as there is no global solution like GPS. utterly exquisite 1972 abstraction by Washington Color School painter Alma Thomas. The surface of a chrome-yellow rectangle is covered in short, firm, vertical strokes of dark blue-gray paint. Three marks at the upper right are further layered with lighter blue, and as your eye gets pulled in for a closer view other small inflections of green emerge, sprinkled here and there. The thin streaks of yellow shining forth from between the slate brush strokes fall like steady rain in a Japanese landscape.

World's first super-wide-angle 3D laser radar

Ultrasonic wave sensors are already in commercial use in systems that support vehicle parking, for example, to assist drivers when the car is backing into a parking space. However, the detection range is narrow, and multiple sensors were required to widen the area of visibility around a car. By developing a scanning angle expansion lens for the laser beam and a high speed, multipoint laser scanning system for detecting a wide range at high speeds, Fujitsu Laboratories has now roughly doubled the detection range compared to previous sensors to approximately 140 degrees, both horizontally and vertically.

As a result, objects can be detected in three dimensions over a wide range with fewer sensors and a sophisticated vehicle backing support system can be created. Moreover, in contrast to vehicle-mounted cameras, which simply display a vehicle's surroundings, the technology enables systems that detect when objects are abnormally close. It also provides warnings to drivers when backing up a vehicle, which is when accidents are more likely to occur, or when backing into a parking space, which is difficult for many drivers. It is hoped, therefore, that this technology can contribute to safer and more secure driving.Find detailed product information for Sinotruk howo truck.

In Europe and the US,Allows you to securely organize any group of cable ties or wires. it is typical to park nose-first in a parking space and reverse to pull out. When backing out,The stone mosaic comes in shiny polished and matte. however, if the driver is careless and makes an oversight, accidents causing serious physical injuries can result. The frequency of such accidents involving tragic injuries to family members is especially high. In the US, this led to the implementation of the Cameron Gulbransen Kids Transportation Safety Act. In Japan, on the other hand, it is typical to reverse into a parking spot, an uncomfortable maneuver for inexperienced drivers. These are reasons why various parking assist systems have come into commercial use, primarily involving the use of rear-mounted cameras.

When a driver is backing up, a rear-mounted camera is only able to display the vehicle's surroundings. If the driver is not paying attention to the display monitor, there is no way to sound an alarm. There are also systems that use ultrasonic wave sensors to measure the distance to surrounding objects, but the range of these measurements is limited and their accuracy is not sufficient, resulting in many false detections or over detections, so they were unable to provide sufficiently effective warnings. Laser radars, on the other hand, are able to measure relatively longer distances with a high degree of accuracy, and they can be used to measure the location of vehicles. The breadth of their detection is relatively narrow, however, at no more than 60 degrees,Gardner Bender offers a broad range of cableties, so multiple sensors are required in order to detect objects surrounding the vehicle in three dimensions over a wide range. It has, therefore, been difficult to measure a broad range of objects with a high degree of accuracy using only a few sensors.

This technology enables 3D ranging of a vehicle's surroundings across a wide area, including from behind, using a minimum number of sensors. It could also be used to layer distance information from the laser radar on video camera images to build a vehicle backing support system with advanced features. Moreover, the technology enables the creation of systems that detect when objects are abnormally close. In this case it provides warnings when the driver is backing up a vehicle, which is when accidents often occur, or when backing into a parking space, which is difficult for many drivers. It is hoped, therefore, that this technology can contribute to safer and more secure driving.China plastic moulds manufacturers directory.

Everything We Ever Wanted -- and More

Sergio Romo's fastball popped into Buster Posey's mitt for strike three. Sit down, Triple Crown -- and everyone was dancing on top of the tables. A Caltrain engineer leaned hard on his horn and the fans swarming the streets answered in kind. Thousands of orange-clad revelers descended upon Third and King to celebrate the San Francisco Giants' second championship by damaging municipal property and spraying one another with champagne ill-suited for any other purpose save christening a ship.

A Parking Control officer sped past in his three-wheeled vehicle; the euphoric crowd had, in its enthusiasm, smashed his front windshield. He was, however, grinning ear to ear. "I'm not too worried about this," he said. "This is replaceable.An indoor positioning system (IPS) is a term used for a network of devices used to wirelessly locate objects or people inside a building."

The relief and joy from watching your team cap off one of the most improbable, surreal, and satisfying playoff runs in the history of the game -- is not replaceable.High quality mold making Videos teaches anyone how to make molds.

Giants fans, who agonized as their team twice battled back from the brink of postseason oblivion, were treated to one of the most thorough World Series victories of recent memory. San Francisco defeated a favored Detroit squad in every imaginable way.Why does moulds grow in homes or buildings?One of the most durable and attractive styles of flooring that you can purchase is ceramic or porcelain tiles. Sunday's 10-inning, 4-3 victory was the coup de grace -- a soul-crushing, emotionally draining, extra-innings loss to clinch a series sweep in which the Tigers were out-pitched, out-hit, out-fielded, out-managed, out-hustled, and just flat-out out-played.

Giants fans, meanwhile, must now confront a most unfamiliar set of questions: What do you do when you have it all? What happens when all of your aspirations are met and you have everything you ever wanted? Because, other than the fans toting cardboard signs proposing marriage to various players, it's difficult to imagine what desires of the fanbase the team hasn't fulfilled. After years of heavy losses, Giants fandom is paying emotional dividends of early Apple investor magnitude.

Two years ago, the Giants blasted through the postseason and claimed a narrative-altering first championship for a team defined by a legacy of agonizing near-misses and amassing the greatest assemblage of elite talent to never break through for a title.

From a fan's perspective, the 2010 World Series championship was, more than anything, a tremendous relief. Finally, the decades-long curse of cumulative failure was broken. Sunday's thrilling (yet agonizing) victory marks the dawn of a new paradigm no one would have dreamed possible: cumulative success.

The Giants' comebacks versus Cincinnati and St. Louis -- the latter marked by the cinematic spectacle of a Game 7 victory in a torrential rainstorm -- provided a cathartic burst of joy for fans all too used to rain on our parades. But it pales in comparison to the utter satisfaction of watching San Francisco put together four consecutive baseball masterpieces in the World Series. The team did all the small things and all the big things. The Giants succeeded to a degree a team seldom can in a cruel game in which failure is the norm. This was a magisterial victory. It was more than anyone could have hoped for.

The revelers who gathered at 24 Willie Mays Plaza clambered over the larger-than-life sculpture of the Say Hey Kid, undoubtedly the greatest of all Giants -- but a man who could not provide to the fans a moment like the one now gifted to them by his successors.The Kunyu Mountain Shaolin china kung fu school is located at the foot. There may not be a single player on today's championship squad who will ever be memorialized via a monument like those in the vicinity of AT&T Park.

2012年10月24日 星期三

Carrier command gaea mission

Far into the future space travel has long been invented and robots can now fight their own wars whilst humans battle for control of the cosmos…..from one single Carrier? As silly as it sounds, it is very true in Bohemia Interactive and Black Element Software’ Carrier Command Gaea Mission which is a remake of the original Carrier Command released back in 1988. Players take command of an extensive array of vehicles and weaponry from a single aircraft carrier as commander of the United Earth Coalition, as they battle for supremacy on fictional moon Taurus which is occupied by enemy faction the Asian Pacific Alliance. Carrier Command is a real time strategy game with additional driving and first person shooting sections thrown in, whilst it’s an ambitious attempt at merging different game types together, it fails miserably to be a memorable title due to many flaws.Our vinyl floor tiles is more stylish than ever!

From the instance the first scene starts on the introduction cut scene, it is immediately evident that this game looks and sounds awful with bland lifeless graphics and skin crawlingly bad voice acting. The characters don’t look too bad as they do have texture but everyone move like robots and the cockney accents on the voices just don’t fit the bill and will grind on you. The vehicles and locations however look quite nice,Western Canadian distributor of ceramic and ceramic tile, each vehicle looks very well detailed and ships look like something out of the Halo games however they move extremely unrealistically, I often found myself looking up to see a ship and wonder what it’s doing as it circled around as if it was on invisible tracks.

Each location looks nice in Carrier Command, with sunset horizons, treacherous mountains and cliffs and beautiful seas everywhere you look with bases dotted here and there.Interlocking security cable tie with 250 pound strength makes this ideal for restraining criminals. The game starts off as a first person shooter with the player controlling a commander of a team of soldiers, trying to take control of a nearby enemy base. The base is just a small collection of samey corridors and elevators with enemies placed here and there which die after one or two shots, enemy soldiers look like rip offs of the Geth from Mass Effect coloured red, there was no variety in enemy types which made me bored mere minutes into the game.

At the end of the first section of the game, the player commands a carrier which houses many craft types and from an overhead viewpoint or a tactical map screen, players can then decide where to go next or deploy vehicles. The game sports a free roam strategy element which works great, you can tell units to go anywhere and the choice is there to zoom into the vehicle and control it from a first person viewpoint or watch it as it fights its own battles. This element of gameplay works and works well however every vehicle controls terribly, driving a Walrus, which is a rip off of Halo’s Warthog, was the equivalent of driving a 18 wheeler, it controls were sluggishly slow and difficult to navigate and driving and shooting at the same time was impossible. Walrus’s are also amphibious vehicles so the god awful controls worsen in watery terrains. Flying compensates for the awful driving however with Mantas being a pleasure to control and with the amount of freedom in this game allowing the player to fly anywhere they want. Imagine playing Halo, commandeering a Ghost but having the freedom to fly high and go wherever you want, that’s basically what it’s like flying in Carrier Command but the great flying mechanics don’t improve overall gaming experience unfortunately. When the player gains control of one of the30+islands on Taurus, they can then mine for resources and produce bigger bases or vehicles to help defend their newly obtained bases.

Looking at this game, it seems like the perfect RTS game with its vast locations, weather change and day/night cycles, diverse vehicles and simple management options,High quality mold making Videos teaches anyone how to make molds. however look deeper into it and you will see the awful driving mechanics, terrible cut scene visuals and mind numbing voice acting and a series of gameplay flaws which drops a fairly large sized anvil on the overall experience. Battles are unexciting and boring which leave the player dreading entering another one whether on foot on in a vehicle.The oreck XL professional air purifier, Carrier Command Gaea Mission feels unfinished and bland and does nothing to keep prolonged interest, a painfully frustrating experience I never want to live through again.

Let’s get marriage arranged properly

What is your view on arranged marriages? Here’s mine – I’m coming round to the idea.

Not for me, obviously, several decades too late for me, but in general.

I met my husband in the time honoured 1970s inner-city Leeds fashion – at a teenage party while the worse for much cheap drink. A bottle of sherry shared on the park with my friend Helen was our usual beverage of choice – much cheaper than buying Babycham in the pub. She’s a solicitor and playwright now, thank you very much, so it didn’t kill as many brains cells as you might think.

But I’m an idealist. I think there must be, you know, a better way, a less random way, than meeting your life partner in the scrum to be sick in the toilet.

My thinking is coloured by the knowledge that the current young generation have problems enough – they know they are never going to be able to afford a home of their own, they know they are going to have to work until they drop, they know that everyone jeers at their hard-won academic qualifications, preferring to believe they were just picked up from a pile by the classroom door.

They’ve got a lot to put up with already, so let’s lift a little bit of that burden from them and sort out the life partner. It would be a very big worry off the list, wouldn’t it?

I know the idea cuts across all that is sacred about romance in our Western world but still I’m beginning to see the plus side of letting the family sort it out.

Because that romance stuff, it’s a lot of baloney mostly, isn’t it? And it’s created by the American film industry mostly, isn’t it?

That Hollywood has a lot to answer for. It has created a lot of high expectations, made a lot of people believe that love is something that happens instantly, that it feels like a kind of delirium and that, the minute that feeling fades, it’s time to head for the D.I.V.O.The TagMaster Long Range hands free access System is truly built for any parking facility.R.C.E.

Plus, the ideal Hollywood romance has changed a lot over time, possibly giving funny ideas to some generations.

Young cinemagoers in the 1930s may well have gone though their entire married lives in twin beds with one foot on the floor at all times, since censors at that time ensured this was the way all couples were portrayed in the bedroom. Think how tricky that must become when you’re getting on a bit and your knees are going.

Later generations have been brought up by Hollywood to believe that real love happens instantly, out of the blue, between strangers, and that when Cupid’s arrow smacks you between the eyes you JUST KNOW.

For reference see every Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks film ever made. There’s always a bit of argy-bargy, a few misunderstandings but, ultimately, they just know.

Nora Ephron wrote films like that. They were lovely. I think she must have been lovely, a really smart journalist, author and scriptwriter, and I mourned her recent death. But her film scripts were, despite all that, baloney.

I’m prepared to argue that the Cupid’s arrow feeling is not love, is not likely to last and is entirely hormonal. Powerful it may be, but permanent? Probably not.

For anyone feeling shocked at the idea of ignoring the siren call of eyes across a club, or wherever, let me say that marriages are half arranged already, and getting more so. Oh yes they are.

What is the internet if not a way of arranging meetings between people who, ultimately, dream of settling down with the right partner? And internet dating is getting bigger all the time.

And then there is “assortative mating”, which goes on all the time already, and in fact is becoming more likely to happen,Selecting the best rtls solution is a challenging task as there is no global solution like GPS. according to research.

Assortative mating is when people get together in a non-random way, based on lots of factors they have in common: body type, location, level of attractiveness, and, above all, background.

More and more, according to a report by the Institute for Public Policy Research, we marry into our own class. Over the decades “marrying up” or “marrying down” has become less common. We are sticking with our own kind.

So, here’s the deal: if we already choose our partners because they live near us, think like us, look like us, have the same amount of money or debt as us, and are as comparably attractive or unattractive as us, then why not take the hard work out of it? Isn’t life hard enough,China plastic moulds manufacturers directory. without having to find your own husband/wife?

In any case, opportunities to meet independently are becoming fewer. We work longer, we go out less, we stay in and talk on social media.The TagMaster Long Range hands free access System is truly built for any parking facility. And we have tried blind dating, speed dating and dating agencies – all forms of arranged meeting.

So let’s just take it to the next level and get the families involved, and friends too.If you want to read about buy mosaic in a non superficial way that's the perfect book. Come on, it could be fun.

There could be a Marriage Meet, a brainstorming session where everyone throws in the name of a potential spouse for whoever has hit a married state of mind – and then there would be a text to the potential suitor and their family to invite them over for tea and cakes.

Burlington PD's Computer System Was Clunky and Costly

Two and a half years ago, Burlington Police Chief Mike Schirling realized his department was at a digital crossroads. His cops were spending more than a third of their time on paperwork and data entry — writing reports on crime when they could be out fighting it.

The department’s former records management system, called New World, made analyzing crime stats and patterns extremely difficult and time-consuming. When and where were crimes most likely to occur? What were their causes? What were the trends from one year to the next? Most of the time, Schirling couldn’t say.

So Schirling sent out a formal request for information in search of the system he wanted. When he couldn’t find one he liked, he sat down and designed it himself.

The result was Valcour, BPD’s integrated dispatch and records management system, which went live on October 1, 2011. An avid sailor, Schirling named the system after Valcour Island in Lake Champlain, the site of a historic naval battle in October 1776.

The web-based system is easy to use and easy to modify. And with an up-front cost of $85,000, plus $2000 in annual maintenance costs, it’s a fraction of the price of earlier systems. Schirling is now making Valcour’s open-source software available to police agencies around Vermont at the bargain-basement,Find detailed product information for Sinotruk howo truck. one-time cost of $125, plus $17.50 for each additional officer who uses it.

Compare that to the $18 million the Vermont Department of Motor Vehicles has paid Hewlett-Packard for a system that still doesn’t work. Out on the campaign trail, state auditor candidate Vince Illuzzi is calling for greater scrutiny of taxpayer-financed IT expenditures in state government.

“We wanted something that was simple, intuitive, easy to use and platform independent, so we didn’t have to worry whether we’re using a PC, somebody’s iPhone or iPad, a new Android device, Internet Explorer or Firefox,” Burlington’s top cop explains. “And, it needed to be lower maintenance and lower cost.”

The department’s prior software was the fourth records management system BPD had purchased in 20 years. At the time it was adopted in December 2001, New World was an improvement over its predecessor, Spillman, the system currently in use by about 90 percent of Vermont’s law enforcement agencies.

But New World was big, bulky and inflexible. Worse, it couldn’t perform many of the functions BPD wanted, such as generating up-to-the-minute reports on when, where and why crimes were occurring.

It was also costly: BPD was spending $100,000 a year to maintain the system — a significant strain on the department’s budget.

Deputy Chief Jennifer Morrison helped design and implement Valcour. She cops to having “zero” experience designing software, but says the genius of Valcour is its simplicity. At any given time, an officer or dispatcher can log into the system and see a dashboard showing everything that’s happening in the city — and neighboring jurisdictions — including every officer on duty,Find detailed product information for Sinotruk howo truck. every call for service, who’s involved and what’s occurring.

A few months ago, Schirling says an epidemiologist at the Vermont Department of Health called to ask whether police could quantify the impact of opiate abuse in Burlington. Using Valcour, BPD created a new check box for officers to indicate whether an incident involves alcohol, opiates, domestic violence and/or a mental health issue. As a result, police can now search their database for all calls — not just arrests — involving opiates. That data can also be sorted by type of crime, location, date and other fields.

With Valcour, critical data such as the address an officer responds to, the crime under investigation and the person charged are entered into the system only once. Under the old system, an officer had to re-enter every previous piece of information each time there was a new development. For example, when a person was arrested, an officer had to re-enter the address to which he or she responded. Now, once a person or address is in the system, it automatically pops up whenever someone begins to enter it — similar to a Google search.

Schirling reports that Valcour has reduced officers’ paperwork by as much as 50 percent, saving not only time but money. With 65 officers in his patrol division doing half as much data entry, “That’s 10 bodies over the course of time we won’t have to grow. That’s a savings of millions of dollars.”

Another colossal cost savings: platform independence. Currently, Burlington cops use Panasonic Toughbooks, rugged laptops specially designed for emergency providers.We mainly supply professional craftspeople with crys talbeads wholesale shamballa Bracele , But with all the various accessories, those units cost almost $6000 per officer.

“Now, we can do exactly the same thing with an iPad or some other tablet for $500,” Schirling says. “Giant cost savings.”

Morrison notes that when BPD needed to update the New World and Spillman systems, “Our IT team had to touch every single piece of hardware and device.” To add even one new field or drop-down menu to the system required six months and cost $5000. With Valcour, Morrison says, those modifications can be done almost instantaneously — and at virtually no cost.

But Valcour’s biggest selling point for Schirling is its user-friendliness. Prior systems required officers to undergo multiple days of training before they could use them, and even then mistakes were still common. But Schirling was insistent that Valcour be “simple, intuitive ... sort of Google-esque.”

When the BPD beta-tested Valcour last year, Schirling handed tablets to Burlington officers and sent them into the field — with no training whatsoever — reasoning that, “If you can order a vacation or buy a pair of shoes online, you can operate Valcour.”

BPD hired CrossWind Technologies, a California-based software company, to build the system, but BPD retained ownership of the original source code, which it licensed to the state of Vermont. As a result, any law enforcement agency in the state that wants to adopt Valcour can do so with only a minimal upfront investment.

Already, the South Burlington and Winooski police departments are using it. By January 1, the Colchester Police Department,We recently added Stained glass mosaic Tile to our inventory. University of Vermont Police Services and the Department of Motor Vehicle’s enforcement division are also expected to switch over. Other law enforcement agencies, including Middlebury police, have also expressed interest.

What are other cops saying about Valcour? Captain William “Jake” Elovirta is chief of motor vehicle safety for the commercial vehicle enforcement unit at the Vermont Department of Motor Vehicles. Elovirta’s 30 sworn officers are responsible for conducting roadside inspections of commercial trucks, buses and other vehicles.

One feature Elovirta likes about Valcour is the one-time data entry, which quickly “populates” data such as a truck or carrier name into the system when an officer is doing an inspection, issuing a citation or conducting a post-crash investigation. He estimates that function alone knocks six to 10 minutes off the time of a typical one-hour truck inspection. That might not sound like much, but with his officers doing 7000 inspections each year, it represents a huge savings.We have a wide selection of dry cabinet to choose from for your storage needs.

Valcour’s reporting capabilities are also a big selling point, he says. The system allows supervisors to see, in real time, how many inspections each officer has done, how many warnings, tickets, responses to accidents and so on. They can also query the database at any time and generate reports about when and where accidents are most likely to happen.

2012年10月22日 星期一

Amanda Marshall Cracks Down on Child Prostitution

Later that night, the girl opened the door of her room to find two Portland cops. (The police reported that she was naked.) Inside the room, the police found a startled man—the girl’s alleged client. They also found Wilmer’s duffel bag.

Thanks to the name on the bag’s luggage tag, and video of him checking the girl into the motel, Washington state police ultimately tracked Wilmer down and sent him back to Portland. Until this particular arrest,Gecko could kickstart an indoor tracking mobile app explosion. Wilmer had always landed in the small-time world of county courts and “community corrections,” never serving time in prison. But this time, local authorities took a step that once would never have occurred to them in such a case: they called in prosecutors from Portland’s US Attorney’s office, members of the elite corps of lawyers who serve the attorney general and the president of the United States. Now the alleged pimp faces federal child sex trafficking charges, with the possibility of life in prison. (At press time, Wilmer is scheduled for trial on October 9, but delays are possible.) Several other Portland-area criminals are already doing federal time for various charges related to child sex trafficking. In March, for example, Stanley “Bug” Spriggs Jr.Why does moulds grow in homes or buildings? was sentenced to 16 years for pimping two minor girls.

As recently as 2006, the federal government filed zero indictments for child sex trafficking in Oregon. This year, however, the feds here have already charged eight men and two women with trafficking-related crimes, with more indictments likely before year’s end. Convictions in these cases would send the guilty parties away for long stints in places like California’s Lompoc Federal Correctional Complex or Oregon’s Federal Correctional Institution in Sheridan.

In each case that ends with a perpetrator in federal prison, the convicted pimp will find himself right where Amanda Marshall, Oregon’s new and, in many ways, unlikely US attorney, wants him.

A United States attorney is the federal government’s top-ranking lawyer in a particular jurisdiction, defending the government in court and prosecuting federal crimes.Thank you for visiting! I have been cry stalmosaic since 1998. The post dates to the earliest days of the republic and is among the most sought-after in law. While some of the nation’s 93 US attorneys serve in geographically smaller areas carved out of more populous states—California has four, for example—Amanda Marshall, who took office in October 2011 after a lengthy appointment process, is the one and only US attorney for Oregon.

In a given day, the full range of human malfeasance might cross the 43-year-old Marshall’s desk. Some of the criminal cases her office handles have a ripped-from-the-headlines urgency (or could have inspired AMC’s meth drama Breaking Bad), like the four-year prosecution of a drug-world figure nicknamed “Don Prieto.” (At the conclusion of that case, the Don—real name: Enrique Orozco-Marin—was convicted of running hundreds of pounds of pseudoephedrine from Canada to the United States and sentenced to eight years.) The touchiest cases in her charge involve terrorism, such as the upcoming trial of Mohamed Mohamud, the Portlander whom the feds accuse of plotting to bomb the Pioneer Courthouse Square holiday tree lighting in 2010. (Mohamud’s lawyers are expected to argue that federal investigators entrapped him.) Then there’s the rote work of federal prosecution—felons with handguns, bank robbers, drug dealers—and representing the government’s side in civil lawsuits. Marshall also discovered some of the job’s more parochial political dimensions in September, when her office released an investigation of Portland cops’ treatment of mentally ill people that managed to anger both police officers and some police critics.

Yet even as they handle the nation’s endlessly complex legal business, Marshall and her colleagues across the country have the power to emphasize signature issues by choosing how their staff attorneys spend their time. A few transform the office into a bully pulpit. Preet Bharara, the US attorney for New York City and its environs, made Time’s cover (under the headline “This Man Is Busting Wall Street”) and that magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people in the world. The former US Attorney for the District of New Jersey delivered the keynote address at the Republican National Convention this summer, this time as Governor Chris Christie.

Marshall says she has a few high-ranking priorities, national security among them. But one stands out as unusual for her position: child sex trafficking. In her short time so far, Marshall has directed her staff to get more busts, more indictments, and more convictions for a crime that typically victimizes teenage girls in metro areas. It’s very rare for a federal prosecutor to emphasize child sex trafficking, according to Lewis & Clark law professor Tung Yin, a close observer of federal law enforcement and a former clerk for several federal judges. Marshall has directed three attorneys to focus on the issue and integrated the fight against trafficking with her office’s anti-gang work: a significant upgrade in attention for a crime usually left to local cops and prosecutors.

Marshall,Gecko could kickstart an indoor tracking mobile app explosion. who keeps her blonde hair long and straight and leans to the female Democrat power uniform of dark pantsuits and modest heels, talks like a proselytizer, arguing that the country’s gradual awakening to the realities of rape in the 1970s, of child abuse in the ’80s, and of domestic violence in the ’90s can happen now for child sex trafficking.We have a wide selection of dry cabinet to choose from for your storage needs. “We have an opportunity to choose engagement over skepticism and defeat,” Marshall says. “We can grab this moment and show what can be done when we work together, when we put our communities and our children above ourselves.” Her face, broad and open by default, narrows, and her blue eyes glitter with intensity when she hits upon the subject.

‘Toyota-style’ management helps Montfort cut ER wait times

In 2008, the Montfort Hospital’s emergency room was one of the province’s worst. Its sickest patients waited up to 20 hours to be admitted. Patients complained and nurses quit. Morale was low and turnover was high. The nurses who remained were overworked and burnt out.

Occasionally,Find detailed product information for Sinotruk howo truck. staff frustration boiled over; patients either left without being treated, or went public with stories about rude behaviour and substandard care. The hospital became a focus of negative headlines. “It was a crisis,” admits Fran?ois Lemaire, Montfort’s clinical director of the ER.

These days, Montfort is no longer a laggard among Ontario’s busiest ERs. Its wait time for the sickest patients is 10 hours — half of what it was in 2008 — even though the volume of patients continues to rise.Quickparts builds injection molds using aluminum or steel to meet your program. From 35,000 patients in 2008, the ER now treats 52,000 annually. Many of them are sicker and harder to treat than patients in the past. Yet despite these challenges, Montfort’s wait time continues to fall.

A recent survey of Ontario hospitals indicated that nine out of 10 patients would recommend Montfort’s emergency department to their family and friends. And the turnover in ER nurses is so low that there are currently no full-time openings — a dramatic change from 2008 when there were 15 vacant positions.

The turnaround, aided by $3.7 million in provincial funding since 2008, is one example of how Montfort says it has improved patient care by using practices made famous by Toyota. With the hospital-wide introduction of checklists, streamlining, standardization and non-stop brainstorming with front-line staff, Montfort has joined a growing number of acute-care centres in bringing the efficiency of a factory floor to health care.

The approach, known as lean, has long helped the auto and aerospace industries reduce waste and boost value for customers through continuous small improvements. With a cash-strapped government trying to rein in health spending, Ontario hospitals are catching up, spurred by provincial directives to do more with less.

Nowhere is the need for improved efficiency more critical than in emergency rooms, where speedy care is a key component of good care.

Montfort’s transformation began in January 2009, when it hired McKinsey & Company, a management consulting firm, to teach its staff the lean principles. The hospital paid for the consultants with some of the $687,000 it received that year for ER improvement.Find detailed product information for howo tractor 6x4 and other products.

The money was part of a four-year, $400-million provincial program called Pay For Results. When it was launched in 2008, Montfort was among 23 of Ontario’s poorest-performing ERs to receive the funding, which gets clawed out of their annual budgets if they don’t show improvement.

Working with McKinsey, hospital staff deconstructed every aspect of how patients moved through the ER, from the time they arrived by ambulance or car until they were discharged. They examined the “flow” of patients — how they were assessed at triage, how they got their lab tests and diagnostic scans, how they were discharged or admitted and how information moved with them at each stage. They attacked the problem in the same way that factory managers studied the parts of an assembly line.One of the most durable and attractive styles of flooring that you can purchase is ceramic or porcelain tiles.

“We were a whole bunch of people with Post-it notes on the floor that showed all the different steps,” recalls Sophie Audet, an ER nurse. “After it was done, everybody looked at each other and started saying, ‘Oh my God. No wonder we’re so tired.’ There were so many steps. When you see it, you actually realize that.”

Audet and her colleagues worked to simplify the journey for patients and reduce unnecessary tasks for staff. To their surprise, the best ideas were not necessarily flashy, or expensive to implement.

Among other things, a daily activity report was introduced that gave every hospital worker — from the chief executive to department heads, physicians, nurses and housekeeping staff — a snapshot of the traffic in and out of Montfort. It listed the number of patients waiting to be admitted and discharged.

For the first time, staff got a bird’s-eye view of where the hospital’s bottlenecks were. They could also see which departments needed extra help to move patients along. “You see the big picture, not just your own little department,” says Audet.

In the ER, a low-tech whiteboard was introduced. It tracked the location and status of every patient and listed what services they were waiting for. For the first time, method and transparency were imposed, allowing the nursing team to manage patients more quickly and effectively. The approach also reduced the chances of patients being lost in the shuffle.

“Before, we used to write down everything by hand,We specialize in howo concrete mixer,” says Johanne Gougeon, the ER’s lead nurse. “Now, we write on magnets. If we have a patient go somewhere, we just move the magnet around. It’s on the board, it’s written out, it’s all standardized and everybody can see what’s happening.”

In addition, the triage process was simplified for patients with minor complaints. And the workflow of the diagnostic imaging department as well as the work schedules of housekeeping staff were adjusted to conform with the ER’s busiest times of the day.

Other changes related to inconveniences in the physical layout that added up to hours of lost productivity every day.

Secrets of the truck stop king

If you do a lot of driving on the nation's highways, there's a good chance you've been a customer of James "Jim" Haslam II. Starting with one gas station in 1958, Haslam has built the largest chain of travel centers in North America. Knoxville's Pilot Flying J now has 496 outlets -- combination gas stations and retail stores -- that produced about $30 billion in sales in 2011, the latest data available from the closely held company. Over the years Haslam, now 81, has kept the company in the family. His son Jimmy Haslam III, 58, is chairman of Pilot and, at presstime, was about to be approved as the new owner of the Cleveland Browns football club. Former Pepsi (PEP, Fortune 500) exec John Compton is the new CEO. Another son, Bill, 54, is a former Pilot president and now the Republican governor of Tennessee.

My upbringing was typical of American children born in the 1930s. I was the youngest of three siblings and the only boy in my family. Our mother was a homemaker, and our father worked as a salesman for the old Studebaker company and served as an officer in the Army in both World War I and World War II. He said cars were so slow to sell back then that he'd take a car off the freight train and drive it around from dealer to dealer until he sold it. Then he'd go back to the train to get the next one. We lived in Philadelphia until I was in the 11th grade; then I finished high school in St. Petersburg, Fla.

I played all kinds of sports and got a scholarship to play football at the University of Tennessee, where I was captain of the 1952 team. The things that help one succeed in football will also help one to succeed in business. In football, you've got a coach who has to get the best players, put them in the right position, make them practice hard, and execute a game plan. If the players do all those things, you win. Business is the same thing.

After I received my B.S. in finance from the University of Tennessee, I went into the Army. I served in Korea for 13 months, after the war ended, and was a company commander in a combat engineering company. When I got out in 1955, I was offered three jobs -- being a high school football coach, selling advertising for a TV station, and being a wholesale salesman for Fleet Oil. The coaching job wouldn't start paying until summer, and I wasn't sure TV was going to make it. So I went to work for Fleet Oil,Installers and distributors of solar panel, which was getting into the wholesale business, in LaFollette, Tenn.The oreck XL professional air purifier, After I had spent six months in sales, the owner, Sam Claiborne, said, "Come learn about the operations side of the gas station business." He started the chain of Sail Oil gas stations, and let me run it.

I wanted to be in business for myself, and after two years I decided to start Pilot. We wanted to call the company Jet, but that trademark was taken. We decided to name the company Pilot because the word conveys being in charge. Sam had taught me all I knew,Interlocking security cable tie with 250 pound strength makes this ideal for restraining criminals. so I agreed not to build any locations near his gas stations for three years.

We didn't have a lot of capital,This document provides a guide to using the ventilation system in your house to provide adequate fresh air to residents. and Marathon Oil (MRO, Fortune 500) saw that we were expanding. Marathon was looking for people who would buy their products, and it offered to buy half our business, for $200,000 in 1965. It also loaned us $4 million to build new gas stations. The stations were little 200-square-foot buildings with restrooms on the side and six gas pumps. All we sold were drinks, Lance cookies, cigarettes, and motor oil.The stone mosaic comes in shiny polished and matte. We repaid the loan in the mid-1970s.

In 1974 my first wife, Cynthia, died. Our oldest son, Jimmy, was 20 when he took her seat on the Pilot board in 1975. He was a senior at the University of Tennessee and started working full-time for the company in 1976. In the early 1970s we figured out we'd have to sell more stuff to pay for the properties. So we built convenience stores. We added food and the things one can buy in convenience stores today. The challenge one always has is, How will we get sales? One has to have a clean place that looks good, gives customers good value, and has good people working there.

2012年10月17日 星期三

Accel To Take On PayPal And Square

Braintree, an online payments gateway provider for online and mobile platforms, has raised $35 million in Series funding led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA) with participation from existing investors including Accel Partners, RRE Ventures and Greycroft. This brings Braintree’s total funding up to $70 million.

For background,The stone mosaic comes in shiny polished and matte. Chicago-based Braintree powers and automates online payments for merchants and companies online. The company provides a merchant account, payment gateway, recurring billing, credit card storage, support for mobile and international payments, and PCI Compliance solutions.

Braintree’s client list includes Rovio/Angry Birds, Uber, 37signals, OpenTable, Fab, GitHub,The stone mosaic comes in shiny polished and matte. Airbnb, Heroku, Engine Yard, Animoto, Shopify and HotelTonight. The company is seeing $1 billion a year in mobile transactions and $5 billion in total payments annually for over 3,000 mobile and online merchants. Currently, Braintree works with merchants in more than 30 countries and is able to accept more than 130 different currencies.

For Braintree, the new funding is going to help the company take on giants in the digital payments industry like PayPal. “We think we can build the next PayPal,” says Braintree’s CEO, Bill Ready. “The payments game will be won or lost in next few years, and we need the resources to push the company forward aggressively,” he explained in an interview.

The new funding will be used to build out Braintree’s payments product, for hiring engineering talent in the Bay Area, New York and Chicago, and for additional international expansion.

Ready explains that Braintree differs from PayPal in that it offers a comprehensive, full-featured payments processing platform for both small startups and large companies, like Fab,If you want to read about buy mosaic in a non superficial way that's the perfect book. which is processing hundreds of millions in transactions. He says that traditionally, a small business would start with PayPal, then graduate to Authorize.net (owned by Visa), and would move onto Cybersource processing when the company would have tens or hundreds of millions in payments revenue. But Ready says there is a huge opportunity to service the full range of companies, and that’s what makes Braintree distinct.

“We are taking sophisticated payments capabilities and making them accessible to startups and big companies, and when small businesses grow into larger organizations, we will have everything they need,” says Ready.

Over the past few months, Braintree has been heads down on making its product as useful to merchants as possible. The company expanded to mobile, added support for one-click checkout, cut fees, and eased the sign-up process. In fact, Braintree removed a $100 monthly fee for developers, and starting matching fees of rivals with 2.9 percent rate and $.30 per transaction. Additionally, the company has made some key hires from Google.

The company also highlights Braintree Instant, which gives merchants instant access to a full suite of payments tools, such as international payments and single click checkout, which used to be available to only the largest of merchants after months-long integrations to legacy payment providers. Braintree Instant also aids cash flow by typically providing funds within two days, versus a week or more for others in the industry.

“We are working to do for payments and e-commerce what Apple did for mobile: providing a developer-friendly platform that sparks a new wave of innovation and company-building, ” Ready adds.

But in order to take on payments companies like PayPal and Square, Braintree has to engage the consumer as well. That’s where the company’s Venmo acquisition comes in. In August, the company acquired the New York-based startup,Find detailed product information for howo tractor 6x4 and other products. which is disrupting social payments by allowing people to send money to friends via a mobile app.

Venmo, which remains based in New York as a standalone app, is the basis for Braintree’s consumer business. “This will become the slickest way for consumers to make payments to merchants,” says Ready. We’re building a better PayPal on the merchant side, and a better PayPal on the consumer side.”

“Braintree is kicking down both the technology and business road blocks that have made online and mobile payments challenging for developers and a hassle for consumers,” said Ravi Viswanathan,The oreck XL professional air purifier, General Partner of NEA, said in a release. “We believe Braintree has the strengths to challenge all the incumbents in the payment space, including PayPal. This investment reflects our confidence in the technology, team and international capabilities Braintree has built.”

As part of the news today, NEA is also opening up a Chicago office to be closer to its investments in the Windy City.

As we’ve recently reported, the payments space is heating up and all the players, including Square and PayPal, are gearing up for the battle. Square just landed a huge deal with Starbucks and closed $200 million in new funding. PayPal is also trying to reinvent itself. New entrant, Stripe, has also been making waves in the industry. And now with Braintree’s new funding, we can expect there to be one more player who is vying for a piece of the payments pie.

Islamist businessmen challenge Egypt's old money

A business association founded by a financier for Egypt's new Islamist rulers says it can democratise an economy long dominated by associates of ousted leader Hosni Mubarak, but sceptics fear the emergence of just another clique.

The Muslim Brotherhood dominates post-Mubarak politics. It has less traction in an economy long dominated by an inner circle of businessmen around Mubarak's now jailed son Gamal.

Opponents say the Brotherhood wants to replicate in business its firm grip on politics, with a view to rewarding those who supported the movement financially through the long years it was banned. That dismays liberals who saw in Mubarak's overthrow last year an opportunity for a more meritocratic economy.

Hassan Malek,We mainly supply professional craftspeople with wholesale turquoise beads from china, a tycoon and Brotherhood member, insists his goal has been promoting equal opportunity since he founded the Egyptian Business Development Association in March, three months before the Brotherhood's Mohamed Mursi won Egypt's presidency.

He has modelled EBDA, whose acronym means "start" in Arabic, on Turkey's MUSIAD, an association of religiously oriented small businesses which share information and contracts to challenge the traditional dominance of larger groups.

"We welcome everyone who wants to work with us," said Malek, who has a family background in business and made his money in software, textiles and furniture. "Unequal distribution of opportunity is what we seek to change in the new Egypt."

Businesses, many of them smaller enterprises struggling in an anaemic economy,Gecko could kickstart an indoor tracking mobile app explosion. have rushed to join EBDA, which now has over 400 members. It says 1,000 companies are waiting to join.

Some members represent leading businesses such as cable maker El Sewedy Electric, food producer Juhayna and Egyptian Steel.The stone mosaic comes in shiny polished and matte. These flourished during Mubarak's three-decade rule but were not caught up in the corruption lawsuits that emerged after his overthrow in February 2011.

In a mark of its ambitions - and good contacts in powerful new places - EBDA sent a delegation of 80 businesspeople, many of them young entrepreneurs without personal ties to the Brotherhood, to accompany Mursi on a trip to China in August.

Many of those also joined him on visits to Italy,Installers and distributors of solar panel, Turkey and Qatar as Egypt tries to end a drought in inward investment.

Osama Farid, head of international cooperation at EBDA, said Mursi's visit to China marked a break with the past when Mubarak would typically take only as few as 10 favoured businessmen on foreign trips to capture the opportunities available.

"Within EBDA there are businessmen who did very well under Mubarak and new ones looking to prosper in the new Egypt. We are not trying to replace what exists but to offer an alternative" Farid said.

Malek has multiplied his meetings with foreign diplomats and business people and representatives of international banks. Brotherhood officials credit him with facilitating a $2-billion loan to Egypt from Turkey last month.

Since Mubarak's overthrow, the change of fortunes for men like Malek has been dramatic.

Brotherhood-linked businessmen were forced to operate under restrictions on how much wealth they could amass. Some had property confiscated during the 1990s or were detained on suspicion of money laundering or funding the Brotherhood.

Malek and former partner Khairat al-Shater, another Brotherhood tycoon and financial strategist, spent more than four years in jail together under Mubarak, who sought to curtail the Brotherhood and formally banned it from operating.

The two men are now vying for economic influence within the movement, Brotherhood sources told Reuters. While Malek seeks to extend the reach of EBDA, Shater has established a chain of supermarkets and recently held talks in Dubai to establish a bank there to help manage the Brotherhood's finances.

Some executives are suspicious of EBDA's motives. One agribusiness manager told Reuters he was still trying to decide whether to accept its offer of membership: "I agree with their goals to expand the business climate," he said.

"But my concern is that EBDA could turn into another clique close to the Islamist presidency, mirroring Gamal Mubarak's."

In Turkey, admired by some in the Brotherhood for showing that Islamist democrats can take over from military rulers, the business organisation MUSIAD forged ties with Egyptian peers more than a decade ago, when Turkish entrepreneurs were trying to find ways to better exploit markets in the region.

Its emergence as a lobby for a growing entrepreneurial middle class came in tandem with the rise of the AK Party, which arrived in government in 2002 and which has roots in political Islam.Find detailed product information for howo tractor 6x4 and other products. MUSIAD promotes itself as a partner for foreign investors looking not only at Turkey but the wider Islamic world.

"EBDA and MUSIAD represent a huge coming together of smaller capital," said Koray Caliskan, political science professor at Bosphorus University in Istanbul. "Those people who were with the Mubarak regime were a small coming together of big capital."

With thousands of members, and favoured by Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan of AK, MUSIAD now poses a challenge to the dominant secular business group in Turkey, TUSIAD.

"Erdogan said capital is changing hands in Turkey," Caliskan said. "Ten years ago everyone wanted to be TUSIAD chairman. Now everyone is away from it. Even members do not go to meetings, as Erdogan takes aim at them very frequently."

With Mubarak gone, Egyptian business ties with Turkey, the biggest economy in the Middle East, are now growing to match the Brotherhood's links with the AK Party.

But Turkey's enduring tradition of secular rule could limit the scope for political cooperation. Egypt's new political landscape is dominated by Islamists and ultraconservative groups for whom secularism is synonymous with atheism.

One Turkish official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the new Egyptian government sees Turkey "not as a model but an inspiration ... and Turkey reciprocates this".

EBDA officials say Egypt's business landscape needs levelling through a focus on small enterprise, vocational training and cutting red tape. They say they favour broad-based, sustainable growth that reduces widespread poverty instead of just rewarding government cronies.

Parking could get easier in New Hope

Visitors to New Hope may soon have the option of paying for parking with their iPhone, Android or other smartphone, according to a presentation by Parkmobile to borough council on Tuesday.

“It’s E-ZPass for parking,” said Dennis Marco of Parkmobile, a global company that has registered more than 3 million users of the technology.

Developed and deployed in Europe in 1999, the company began operations in the United States in 2009. It now has users in 320 locations in 28 U.S. states, Marco said.

If borough council approves the plan,If you want to read about buy mosaic in a non superficial way that's the perfect book. drivers could download a free app to provide their cell phone, license plate and credit card numbers to the company. Then, when they pull into a parking spot, they would key in the parking space number found on a green sticker on the meter. That would activate the parking session.

The company automatically advises users 15 minutes before their parking time expires and allows them to extend their time, if desired, Marco said.

“That’s a convenience we don’t charge for,” he said.

“There’s no cost involved to the (public) entity,Our vinyl floor tiles is more stylish than ever!” said Henry Savelli,Find detailed product information for howo tractor 6x4 and other products. a government procurement consultant working with Parkmobile, “because we charge a 35-cent convenience fee” to users of the system.

That fee, however, is collected as part of the parking revenue and Parkmobile would invoice the borough for payment, which means “we do lose money,” said council President Claire Shaw.

Savelli said that some communities have increased the fee to 40 cents or 50 cents, keeping the additional funds as revenue. The system also allows the borough to charge different parking fees in different areas,The stone mosaic comes in shiny polished and matte. if it wants.

Marco noted that the system has been enthusiastically received in locations such as Boston and Washington, D.C. In Boston,We mainly supply professional craftspeople with crys talbeads wholesale shamballa Bracele , the number of Parkmobile members increased from 18,817 in March 2011 to 31,299 a year later.

And in just one year in Washington, 70 percent of all parking transactions were conducted via the Parkmobile mobile app, he said. It became available there in June 2011.

He noted that the system is voluntary, and that putting quarters into a meter is still an option. “They don’t have to use it. That’s the beauty of the system,” he said.

Users can also call a phone number to activate the service, if they don’t have a smart phone.

Council member Edward Duffy said such a system “will help the merchants keep the visitors in their stores and also the restaurants. I think it’s a real nice fit.”

Bob Gerenser, a business owner in the borough, agreed. “This could be an extraordinary convenience,” he said. “It would take away a lot of the big objections to why (some people) don’t come to New Hope anymore.”

Parking enforcement officers would use smartphones to check whether time is remaining for parked cars, Savelli said. “It would show on the phone which parking spaces and which license numbers have exceeded their time limits,” he said.

Council tabled the motion, pending more information on the system, including a desire to look at the meter stickers and discuss signage.

Marco noted that he will be making a similar presentation to Lambertville, N.J., in a few days, so there would be synergy on the parking systems for the neighboring communities should they move ahead with the plan.

2012年10月15日 星期一

Technology: a gaitway to life

Prof Tim O’Brien is a co-founder of one of the first gait laboratories in the world, writes JUNE SHANNON

PROF TIM O’BRIEN, consultant orthopaedic surgeon and director of the gait analysis laboratory at the Central Remedial Clinic (CRC) in Dublin, was the first professor of orthopaedics to be appointed in Ireland.Selecting the best rtls solution is a challenging task as there is no global solution like GPS.

Over the past 37 years he has been at the forefront of education, clinical research and innovation in his chosen specialty. During this time he was also diagnosed with motor neuron disease (MND).

While MND cruelly robs sufferers of the use of their body it does not affect the mind. Diagnosed in 1993 it is testament to O’Brien’s strength of character that he continues to work full-time despite being paralysed and reliant on a portable ventilator.

He communicates using special software, which enables a sensor to follow his eye movements allowing him to pick out letters on a specially adapted laptop,High quality mold making Videos teaches anyone how to make molds. which then transmits the words he types into speech.

In 2005 O’Brien was awarded the prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award at the Irish Journal of Medical Science (IJMS) Doctor Awards for his life-long clinical interest and research achievements in orthopaedics, including research on the development of the immature hip joint in babies and the assessment of gait patterns in children.

In 1990, together with physiotherapist Anne Jenkinson, O’Brien established one of the world’s first gait laboratories in the CRC which remains the only clinical gait laboratory in the State.The stone mosaic comes in shiny polished and matte.

Gait analysis is the scientific study of how somebody walks. Using technology, O’Brien and his team assess, diagnose and recommend treatment for patients with a variety of gait disorders.We mainly supply professional craftspeople with wholesale turquoise beads from china,

“When we started it was a big investment and we did not know how it would develop as there were only a few other clinical laboratories in the world,” O’Brien explains.

The majority of patients seen at the gait lab are children with neurological disorders such as cerebral palsy. Caused by an abnormality in the brain that controls muscle movement, children with cerebral palsy suffer a range of physical disabilities that affect their ability to walk, such as a lack of muscle co-ordination and tightness or stiffness in the muscles.

Gait analysis can make a huge difference to these children particularly where it picks up issues that may stop a child from walking altogether.

The gait lab in the CRC sees about 360 patients a year and the numbers are increasing every year.We specialize in howo concrete mixer, Approximately 50 per cent of the patients attending the lab live outside Dublin and in an effort to reduce the amount of travelling his patients had to endure, O’Brien and the manager of the gait lab, Mike Walsh, pioneered the world’s first mobile gait analysis unit in 2004.

A mobile gait lab now travels to Limerick and Waterford a number of times a year.

The gait lab uses an impressive range of technology to assess a patient, including video to record how they walk. Computer markers are placed on specific points such as the ankle, knee and hip joints and motion analysers then replicate an accurate 3D computerised model of how the person walks. Force plates built into the floor of the lab measure the amount of force a person puts on their joints when walking and a system called electromyography (EMG) is used to measure the electrical activity in the muscles which can show if a muscle is over or underactive.

O’Brien explains that the gait lab was initially established as a means of recording walking patterns to see how children at the CRC responded to therapy and surgery.

“As a result of the gait laboratory, surgery has changed and some procedures are no longer advised while some others are seen to make a big difference to walking.

“As we became more experienced we identified patterns of walks that would respond to surgery and we adopted an advisory role. Now 10 per cent of our clients are referred for diagnostic reasons. This is because certain neurological disorders or injuries have characteristic patterns of movement which we can see but are too hard to observe clinically,” he added.

Alongside pioneering technology in the development of gait analysis, O’Brien also uses technology that allows him to continue working and to share his expertise.

On the day of my visit to the CRC I sat in on a meeting where members of the team presented cases to O’Brien that they had assessed the previous week in the lab.