2012年5月10日 星期四

Your SPLOST dollars at work: the new Effingham jail

The new Effingham County jail,Dimensional Mailing magiccubes for Promotional Advertising, which will be constructed using sales tax money at the current jail site, will be a combination of new construction and renovation of existing space.Welcome to projectorlamp.

County commissioners agreed on May 1 to move forward with detailed plans and financing for the jail, which will have 332 beds. A lease-purchase agreement will be made to pay for the jail out of special-purpose, local-option sales tax dollars. The deal will allow the county to build and start using the new jail while the sales tax dollars are being collected.

When consultants came to the county with a plan in early March, the cost of the project was $17.9 million. They worked with county staff over the next six weeks making changes that brought the price down to the current cost of $16.4 million, which is slightly below the price originally budgeted.

Among the many changes made to save money was keeping the existing wall layout in the sheriff’s office.

Of the 332 beds, 204 will be in a new structure and 128 beds will be in the adjacent state prison. County commissioners have reduced the capacity at the prison so they’ll have more room for county inmates.

Currently, the jail has 130 beds and the county sends its overflow of inmates to other counties, including Screven, Liberty, Bryan and Jefferson, at a cost of about $25 a day. “Housing jailed detainees at outside facilities is a premium expense, one that the county has borne for over a year,” said Adam Kobek, project director for the county.

He said by increasing the size of the jail, the county expects to eliminate the expense of sending inmates elsewhere. “Through housing detainees locally we have more control over other costs, in addition to housing costs, such as transportation and medical expenses,Glass Tile and Glass Mosaics for less at the glassmosaic Outlet.” he said.

Plans call for using the same pre-cast concrete cells that Chatham County is using. Chatham paid for the molds, said county Commissioner Steve Mason. The walls will be “tilt-up concrete walls,” which are poured on the ground and then lifted into place with a crane.Credit Card Processing and Merchant Services from merchantaccountes. The roof will be sloped to avoid leaking problems that the current jail has.

The outside will have a “new skin,” that will make the complex look brand-new and consistent. William “Buddy” Golson, vice president with Rosser International in Atlanta, the design architect for the project, said the walls will be 8-inches thick and the building should last 50 to 75 years, “maybe more.” Site work should begin in late August, with the final design finished by the first of October.

Phase one — the new housing wing, parking and renovation of the existing prison — should be done in a year, said Ryan Price, vice president of contractor Rives E. Worrell. Phase two will be demolishing the two-story part of the existing jail and phase three will be renovating and modernizing the existing sheriff’s building. The entire project should take 22 months.Aeroscout rtls provides a complete solution for wireless asset tracking.

The county is considering installing a video visitation system that would be paid for by inmate user fees. It would save money by requiring less movement of inmates. Plans so far call for the new jail to use the same number of personnel as the old jail.

2012年5月6日 星期日

Compounding the Bill Buckner error

The ball that rolled by Bill Buckner in Game 6 of the 1986 World Series was auctioned Friday. An unidentified buyer forked over a whopping $418,250 to own a piece of history that until just a few years ago represented the touchstone for decades of misery embedded in the broken souls of Red Sox Nation.

“There’s a little roller up along first . . . behind the bag . . . it gets through Buckner! Here comes Knight . .The beddinges sofa bed slipcover is a good , . and the Mets win it!

That was Vin Scully’s call the night of Oct. 25, 1986, at Shea Stadium, when Mookie Wilson sent Bob Stanley’s pitch bouncing Buckner’s way. The first baseman muffed it, the ball skittering down the right-field line, and Ray Knight scooted around from second to score. The Mets subsequently won Game 7, and the Red Sox were denied their first World Series title in 68 years, their dreams put on hold for another 18 Octobers.

The Dallas-based auction house that sold the ball last week did not reveal the buyer’s name, or what he/she intends to do with it. But the previous owner, songwriter Seth Swirsky, who bought it a dozen years earlier for about $64,000, dubbed it an “American culture piece and sounded convinced that we’ll eventually learn the new owner’s identity.

Obviously, other than Buckner, who wouldn’t want their name attached to it?

“Once somebody points out that they have the ball, noted Swirsky to the Associated Press,Aeroscout rtls provides a complete solution for wireless asset tracking. “people will surround them at every party, telling them their experience of where they were.

Like most New Englanders, I don’t need to see the ball again to remember. I was at Shea Stadium, part of the Globe’s expansive reporting contingent.Our porcelaintiles are perfect for entryways or bigger spaces and can also be used outside, Only minutes earlier, when things looked inexplicably ducky for the Sox, I dashed to a stadium pay phone to share the glorious moment with my father.

The Sox had a 5-3 lead in the bottom of the 10th, and my dad, born in 1922, had never seen them win it all. I was only 33 years into the joy ride.

We had gone to Fenway together since 1962, rollicked on its lawn the day the Sox won the 1967 pennant, stood side by side in Section 29 the night Carlton’s Fisk homer rattled off the foul pole to win Game 6 of the 1975 World Series.

Our meeting point in life, in all things, was baseball. Catch in the backyard. The Red Sox. The trips to Fenway. The succession of seasons, mostly fun, all of them failures. The game on the radio on hot summer nights.

Now here they were, at the edge of victory.At Blow mouldengineering we specialize in conceptual prototype design.

“Why’re you calling now? he said flatly, as a man who generally treated the phone with suspicion, an intrusion. “Game’s still on. You’re working, right.?

“Well, yeah, I said, “but, I mean, come on, they’re gonna win. It’s 5-3 and . . .

“Maybe, but it’s not over yet, he said, voice just as flat, edging toward irritation. “We’ll see. Here, talk to your mom.

I didn’t call back until late the next day, not so much to commiserate, but just to hear him once more lament, “What a bunch o’ bums.

He died three years later, and the Sox were still bums, and I know he was OK with that because, honestly, it’s how he knew them, how he liked them. My father was a man who appreciated consistency, dependability, routine, and the Red Sox delivered on all that for every one of his 67 years.

Had one of those years ended with a win, I’m sure he would have enjoyed it, but briefly, and from there it would have been an oddly uncomfortable fit in his life, a tuxedo placed in his closet next to the modest sport jacket for church on Sunday and work pants for the rest of the week.

Largely because of that appreciation in our family for what the Sox always were - infuriating but lovable bums, Sisyphus in red stirrups - I never bought into the whole vilification of Buckner.

Yeah, he booted one, badly, outrageously. He also made it worse later with the excuse-making that his glove malfunctioned and his speculation that Stanley probably wouldn’t have made it to first in time to handle his throw ahead of Wilson.

So rich.Why does moulds grow in homes or buildings? So typically Red Sox. No one succeeded at failing like the Red Sox, which was their charm, their hold. In that sense, Buckner wasn’t a demon, just another tiny tile in a cherished but fractured mosaic.

Stanley, of course, had just seen catcher Rich Gedman mishandle an inside pitch on Wilson, the ball blowing by him and allowing Kevin Mitchell to score from third, only to have Gedman’s boo-boo recorded as Stanley’s wild pitch.

Clearly a passed ball. Gedman’s bad.

Then came Wilson’s ball to first, which began as a high chop, then weirdly flattened, skipped . . . rolled.

Honestly, as I write this now, I am crying with laughter, at the thought of how my father’s eyes must have bugged out as these follies unfolded on TV that night.

Not that anything compares to being one out away from a Series title, but we don’t get that kind of drama and lore a quarter-century later at Fenway. These days, it’s a bland and underperforming lineup, and most of the fan/media focus is on owners, the general manager, front-office employees, and manager. Mercy.

Time for someone to serve up a heapin’ helpin’ of Wade Boggs and the Delta Force. Imagine the fun ol’ Boggsy would have set free in the clubhouse with an iPhone.

The Buckner ball, marked with a tiny “x near one of its stitches by right-field umpire Ed Montague, for years was owned by Mets executive Arthur Richman. Actor Charlie Sheen (“Winning!) bought it in 1992 for nearly $94,000, and Swirsky picked it up on a short hop eight years later at roughly a $30,000 discount.

Swirsky tried to auction it on eBay last October for $1 million, didn’t succeed, then folded it into a much bigger baseball memorabilia auction that last week brought in a total of some $1.2 million.

And though it forever will be known as the Buckner ball, it was signed by Wilson for Richman, and it reads, “To Arthur, the ball won it for us. Mookie Wilson 10/25/86.

It was British poet Alexander Pope who wrote, “To err is human; to forgive divine. In that same piece, “An Essay on Criticism, Pope also penned such memorable phrases as, ‘’A little learning is a dangerous thing and “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.” Not a bad day of writing. Three lines that will live far longer than one man’s gaffe.

Bottom 50 companies outperform once again

For the second year in a row, the "Bottom 50" companies on the Star Tribune 100 ranking of the state's largest public firms outpaced the "Top 50" companies in sales, profits and market value.

Market strategists recognize that smaller companies, which also tend to be more volatile performers, crash faster during a recession and rebound faster early in economic recoveries. Mansco Perry, chief investment officer of the $650 million in endowment funds at Macalester College in St. Paul, said: "[They] come up faster on a percentage basis because it's a relatively smaller market-value base to start with."

That's exactly what happened. The market value of the Bottom 50 rose nearly 19 percent in the 52-week period ended April 13, while the overall Star Tribune 100 index was flat.

Forty-one Bottom 50 companies had revenue increases in 2011, but fewer than half showed at least a 1 percent gain in market value for the 52-week period ended April 13. That makes it tough to generalize because of widely varying profitability and ebbs and flows in market value among different companies.

For example, two of the biggest Bottom 50 companies account for 57 percent of the 2011 profit for the group. They have very different stories.

Techne Corp. (No. 52) develops and sells biotechnology products to the research and pharmaceutical industries.Proxense's advanced handsfreeaccess technology. It is a traditional high-margin operator that booked $112.7 million in profit on sales of $306.6 million. Its market value slipped 11 percent.

"I think Techne is well-positioned,'' said Rick Moulton,Learn all about solarpanel. portfolio manager for Riverbridge Partners. "It's one of those companies that isn't in part of the space that the market craves right now.''

Meanwhile, Two Harbors Investment, a real estate investment trust that went public less than a year ago, raised another $692 million in capital in the first quarter to invest in mortgage-backed securities, residential properties and related assets. It is one of several surging REITs nationally that started investing after the market tanked in 2009.

Two Harbors, which already boasts a market value of $2.2 billion,Where to buy or purchase plasticmoulds for precast and wetcast concrete? joins the Star Tribune 100 at No. 57.

Datalink Corp. jumped out of the Bottom 50 in 2011, moving from No. 53 to No. 49. Sales rose by 29 percent to $380 million last year at the Edina-based developer and manager of electronic data centers. And investors bid up the value of the company by 58 percent.

In April, CEO Paul Lidsky said second-quarter revenue should rise by at least 40 percent to $125 million or more in the current quarter. "Our overall sales pipeline continues to grow and, within that, demand for integrated data centers continues to grow,'' Lidsky told analysts.

Once-bumbling Caribou Coffee, continuing a four-year turnaround under CEO Mike Tattersfield, saw its market value rise by 69 percent in the year ended April 13. Caribou jumped from No. 54 to No. 51.Aeroscout rtls provides a complete solution for wireless asset tracking.

The company, which has shuttered underperforming shops, has seen healthy gains in same-store sales, thanks partly to food offerings, as well as commercial sales tied to Caribou-branded single servings that are made for the Keurig coffee machines of Green Mountain.

But,The beddinges sofa bed slipcover is a good , alas, not every cup is rich, as Caribou's stock price fell last week amid disappointing first-quarter results and a lowered 2012 sales forecast.

Proto Labs is Minnesota's newest public company through an initial public stock offering in February.

2 bodies found at residence

Two unidentified bodies have been found at a Mississippi residence associated with a man suspected of abducting a Tennessee woman and her three young daughters, who are believed to be in "extreme danger," authorities said Saturday.

FBI spokesman Joel Siskovic said the bodies were found late Friday night or early Saturday morning in a residence associated with Adam Mayes, 35.

Mayes is charged in Tennessee with abducting Jo Ann Bain and her daughters. He has been described by authorities as "armed and extremely dangerous.Find the cheapest chickencoop online through and buy the best hen houses and chook pens in Australia."

Siskovic said authorities on the scene were not able to positively identify the bodies. He would not say if the bodies were children.

The missing girls are 8-year-old Kyliyah Bain, 12-year-old Alexandria and 14-year-old Adrienne. They were last seen April 27 in Hardeman County, Tenn., which is about 70 miles east of Memphis. The woman's husband reported her missing and her vehicle was found abandoned.

Authorities were still trying to determine if Jo Ann Bain went with Mayes willingly. He was last seen Tuesday in Guntown, Miss., about 80 miles southeast of Hardeman County, Tenn.

The FBI and U.S.Why does moulds grow in homes or buildings? Marshals Service announced Saturday a reward of up to $50,000 for information that leads to the location of the missing victims and the arrest of Mayes.

Siskovic said the bodies were found in a residence, but it wasn't clear if it was a house, mobile home or apartment. He also wasn't sure if the residence belonged to Mayes or an acquaintance. Siskovic said the bodies were found in Guntown,Find the cheapest chickencoop online through and buy the best hen houses and chook pens in Australia. north of Tupelo. Lee County coroner Carolyn Green said the bodies were found outside Guntown in Union County.

Siskovic said authorities talked to Mayes early on in the investigation, but he fled when they tried to contact him again.Where to buy or purchase plasticmoulds for precast and wetcast concrete? The FBI says they were not immediately aware of Mayes having a criminal record.

Authorities had said that Mayes could be in Mississippi but that he has ties to Arizona, Texas, North Carolina, South Carolina and Florida.

"Information has been developed during the investigation that the children may be in extreme danger. Warrants for kidnapping are being issued for Adam Mayes, who is considered armed and extremely dangerous," Mississippi Department of Public Safety spokesman Warren Strain said in a news release Saturday.

The Mississippi Highway Patrol issued an Amber Alert on Saturday morning, and Tennessee authorities had also issued an alert.

Authorities described Adrienne as a white girl with brown hair and eyes. She's 5 feet 4 inches tall and 129 pounds. Alexandria has brown hair and hazel eyes and is 5 feet tall and 105 pounds.Secured handsfree building and door access solutions with Hands free access by Nedap AVI. Kyliyah has blonde hair and brown eyes and is 4 feet tall and 57 pounds.

2012年5月2日 星期三

MSU students research anti-fungal compounds, mold samples from flood

A tragedy for Minot was also something of a boon for Minot State University associate professor Mikhail Bobylev and his team of student researchers. Bobylev has spent many years researching anti-fungal compounds and last summer's flood produced many different mold samples right here in Minot for Bobylev and his students to combat.

"It was very interesting," Bobylev said, describing how different colors of mold white, green, black,Welcome to projectorlamp. brown grew in different places on the wall of one of the flooded houses where the team collected samples. Student researcher Braden Burckhard, a senior chemistry major from Burlington, said the mold-covered wall resembled a kaleidoscope picture.Dimensional Mailing magiccubes for Promotional Advertising,

The team members painstakingly collected the mold samples from two different locations last October.

Finding suitable buildings to test in presented something of a dilemma for the team,Aeroscout rtls provides a complete solution for wireless asset tracking. since many homeowners began demolition and restoration work on their flooded homes as soon as they could get back into them. Luckily, Burckhard happened to know the owner of a badly flooded house on University Avenue who gave written permission for Bobylev and his students to collect mold samples there. Bobylev and student researchers wore protective gear before they set foot in the flooded homes to protect them from the mold. Bobylev said he even had to use a special camera to take pictures inside the houses, since an ordinary camera would be contaminated by mold and would soon have mold growing in every nook and cranny. The special camera was sealed to prevent mold from entering it and had to be washed off as soon as the team left the house.

Burckhard said he valued the hands-on experience, which took him out of the science lab and out into the field.

"It gave us a chance to provide research to the community," said Burckhard.

Burckhard and fellow students researchers used cotton swabs to collect samples from different mold colonies in the flooded homes and, back at the lab,Glass Tile and Glass Mosaics for less at the glassmosaic Outlet. isolated each sample to prevent them from being infiltrated with other samples of mold or from outside contaminants. Samples of each mold type collected were taken and sent to Home Mold Laboratory in Walled Lake, Minn. The lab identified each type of mold and what illnesses it might produce. For instance, one type of mold the group found was a white mold identified as "acremonium alabamense." The lab indicated that this genus of fungi can produce a number of serious diseases if it grows in a human being, including osteomyelitis, peritonitis, meningitis and endocarditis, among other ailments.Credit Card Processing and Merchant Services from merchantaccountes. It is also a serious allergen, aggravating hay fever and asthma.

Bobylev said the white mold sample and other mold types can be dangerous to humans and animals, though they are most dangerous to people who have compromised immune systems, such as cancer or AIDS.

This is why it's important to wear protective gear when cleaning out a flooded house or collecting samples, like he and the students did. Bobylev said he found one sample in Burckhard's neighbor's house that interested him, since it is a type of mold that might be most commonly found in a warmer environment like Yellowstone Park. The human body provides a perfect incubator for this type of fungus, which thrives in a warm environment, said Bobylev.

In a Green Building Downtown, a Family is Busy Making Organic Soap

The name of Rochester's new business is Moon River Soap Company, but it could have just as easily been called Serendipity. That's because it was a bit of a happy accident that made this soap such a success.

"When I was working on my recipe, I did all the measurement conversion the old-fashioned way, with my head," owner Liz Aprea said. "A year later I discovered a 'soap calculator' on the internet. It turns out my conversions were off and I was using too much oil, but I liked it so I've kept the recipe as is."

Without the mathematical error, Liz said "We probably would have had a very average bar of soap."

Instead, they have a thriving family business that outgrew its original New Baltimore location and moved to Rochester for more space to produce, dry and sell their popular hand-poured olive oil soap. They opened their new doors last week.

"The thing about Rochester is that people here are mostly using organic already, so I only have to explain what makes us different," Liz said.

"I got into organic soaps when I turned 40," Liz said. "We had already gone to organic food but I had not realized all the toxic chemicals in regular soap and how our skin absorbs that into the body. It was counterproductive to eat organic then put chemicals on your skin."

The improvement in her skin was dramatic, Liz said. But it took the arrival of her first grandchild, Jackson, to turn her from a consumer into a producer.

"We were using a trusted baby product on him and it just tore his skin up," Liz said.

Liz decided it was time to stop just buying organic soap and start making her own.

Daughter Sandra explained, "Some natural soaps use plant oil but then add synthetic fragrance — that's the worst, some is similar to rocket fuel!"

Liz began researching organic soap and tinkering with her recipe. Moon River soaps are made with omega-rich olive oil, botanicals and pure essential oils. Rosemary extract and natural vitamin E are the only preservatives. There is no petroleum or artificial or synthetic materials.

With her recipe in place, Liz and her husband Carlos started making and selling soap out of their home using a 15-pound mold.Kitchen floortiles at Great Prices from Topps Tiles. The name Moon River came from the Johnny Mercer song, which Liz loves.

When they couldn't produce enough product to keep the shelves stocked,Proxense's advanced handsfreeaccess technology. they moved into a larger location in New Baltimore in May of 2009 and started using 30-pound molds.

But in less than three years they needed more space and downtown Rochester benefited from their move.

"We are up to 54-pound molds now, the largest by-hand mold. It makes 165 full-sized bars and we make one batch daily," Liz said.

With the larger operation, there has been a distinct division of labor in the family. "This is something we can all do," Liz said.

Husband Carlos is the sole soap maker. He can be seen daily at 10 a.m. making the soap.

"People were always asking to see the soap being made at our old location so when we found this space with the windowed area, it was perfect," Liz said.

Liz now focuses on lotions and balms. Sandra does all the graphic design. And daughter Anna works on bath fizzies,A wireless indoortracking system is described in this paper. bath balms and soap wrappers — although lately she's been on maternity leave working on a sibling for Jackson.

"When we first opened we were just a building with bars of soaps," Sandra said. Now they offer a full line of skin products, including a Moon Baby line that launched last year.

"I listen to what my customers want and I have a long list of things to make," Liz said with a laugh.

"It can be used on dry skin, cuticles, diaper rash and under the eyes for wrinkles. It's very healing," Liz said.

For personal favorites, Liz named the Grapefruit Dead Sea Salts. "I'm a bath girl and I can't live without them!"

Sandra called out the Moon Dog shampoo bar. A super gentle bar soap for dogs — yes, dogs — Sandra uses it on her own hair and said it makes her curly, coarse hair so soft, like no other product has been able to do. "I've never used a better shampoo," she said.

And as for Carlos, the soap guy and incurable romantic after 30 years of marriage: "Other than Liz, what I love best in this store is the soap. It really benefits people."

He can't name a specific soap because he uses them all,I found them to have sharp edges where the injectionmoldes came together while production. claiming all the "ugly" pieces left over after cutting, but said the Mr.Learn all about solarpanel. Wonderful bar was named after him.

Torres, Herman argue for immigrant-friendly cities

A pair of Cleveland-area Latino leaders are calling on their own city and other communities across Ohio to become more immigrant-friendly as a means to shake their Rust Belt past and build a new economy that could lead to more jobs and prosperity in the future.

“There are cities that don’t necessarily have a lot of immigrants, but they see immigrants as an asset not a liability,” Herman said.Welcome to the online guide for do-it-yourself Ceramic tile. “So they start changing their conversation in their policy-making and really the whole ecosystem of how a city operates.”

He cited Dayton as an example of what can be done to put out the welcome mat for an immigrant population, not just well-educated transplants who add to existing engineering and technology professionals in a community. The mayor there started Welcome Dayton to centralize the effort.

“The mayor’s on national TV saying ‘we want immigrants,’” Herman said. “He wants people to buy homes, start small businesses.”

“In many Midwest industrial communities that are struggling with a population decrease, one of the solutions is to actually engage the populations that are moving into the urban core,” echoed Roberto Torres, a Toledo-area native and president of T & R Group LLC, a consulting firm that specializes in Latino and international business development. “The solution is right there before us and that is continued immigration investment in our communities.”

The two men cite Baltimore and Philadelphia as two major U.S. cities actively trying to engage immigrant families as a means of repopulating their communities and reinvigorating their local economies.

Cities such as Chicago have been built with the blood, sweat, and tears of immigrants. According to the U.S. Census, by 2010 Chicago had a population that was 28.9 percent Latino and 5.5 percent Asian; 21.1 percent were foreign born and 35.A Hybrid indoorpositioningsystem for First Responders.3 percent spoke a language other than English at home.

“I think they’re trying to find a way to communicate to the general populous that immigrant families are not a threat, but an opportunity,” said Torres. “I think people confuse the two.”

Many times immigrants are seen as poverty-stricken and a drain on government resources. The immigration battles in Arizona and elsewhere have done nothing to dissuade that popularly-held notion. A U.S. Supreme Court decision expected this summer may deepen that anxiety and apathy toward immigrants, once seen as the backbone of US-America’s promise as a land of opportunity, not as a group who take away jobs and resources from people in the U.Aeroscout rtls provides a complete solution for wireless asset tracking.S. legally.

“We sell the immigrant population short when we say that they’re only low-skilled and manual labor,” said Torres. “Sometimes I think some communities only have a strategy of attracting and recruiting the highly-skilled, technology-inclined population. Neither one of those approaches is the solutions to cities. I think you have to have a combination of the two.

The two men are highly critical of how Cleveland’s efforts have evolved into attracting highly-skilled, high-income immigrants as a means to boost that city’s economy. While it is home to the world-renowned Cleveland Clinic, the pair co-authored an opinion piece in Crain’s Cleveland Business, admonishing city leaders not to forget Latino and other immigrants “as we prepare to demolish thousands of abandoned but inhabitable homes that could house Cleveland's new immigrant families and taxpayers, but instead seem slated to become urban farms.”

“Attracting medical immigrants with high-skilled backgrounds may be good for one institution such as a medical institution or a university, but does that mean those ten individuals are going to be living in our urban core?” wondered Torres. “Or does that mean it’s a boom if you gain for the suburban communities? What does that actually do to benefit our urban core? You need to have both.A wireless indoorpositioning is described in this paper,”

The business consultant pointed to the explosion of Latino population growth in Cleveland and other Ohio cities, sometimes by as much as 200 percent between the 2000 and 2010 census counts. He called Latino immigrants a future economic force, but only a snapshot of the growing influence of immigrants of all nationalities in cities and suburbs alike.

“What that tells you is: ‘therein lies your solution,’” said Torres. “If you’re seeing people actually moving into your community,Learn all about solarpanel. what you want to do is spur an incentive or spur an attitude that embraces continue immigration into that community.”