Property acquisition is a steady asset in any economy. Find below some of the common facts which have made buying investment property the wise investment for people looking to make big money in any climate.
1. No investment at the moment offers the constancy, simplicity and brilliant returns offered by buy to let property investment.
2. Even though the returns offered by the stock market can be significant, many experienced investors have discovered investing in shares to be an impulsive and dangerous place. This is exclusively seen by the non-skilled investor due to the numerous outside factors which can significantly impact a financial asset. Additionally, the key Stock Markets have been underperforming generally, and many looking for a safe investment vehicle are now having a look at property investment for investing in as a different option preference than other kinds of investment.
3. No other asset allows you to make an investment with someone elses cash - meaning the lending institutions - and pay back the debt with other peoples funds i.e. by using the rent payment income from tenants.
4. Buying property specifically for investment purposes allows you to cut off the emotion from the purchase and treat the purchase of property entirely as something purchased for money only. The investment property can mean using re-assignable contract option and trading at sizable gain well before the purchase completion stage while not being left open to no release penalty. Also can produce a reliable rental income, and also provide high cash appreciation.
5. If you are lucky enough to have a property that has gone up in value, you can have the benefit of raising cash through equity release. There is no guarantee that states property will increase in price constantly, it may normally be assumed and accepted that a well looked after property situated in a high demand area will escalate in value.
1. Some of the most richest people in the world mentioned on the list of richest people by The Times made their money as a result of investing in property.
2. A house that may have been worth just a measly 4000 pounds around 30 years ago is worth considerably more at 225000 pounds today.
3. The nature of stocks and shares is volatile, as with the .com crash. But property however is a historically steady asset.
Money makers are mindful of the fast that cash that can be generated is dependant upon the market in which we invest and, if selected in a popular area, investing in property can give excellent returns in comparison to other forms of asset. Like Egypt propert here, as an example, in the last 10 years the UK has seen regular price rises of 11.2 percent per annum up to the point the market took a downturn, while for people set to buy international property, annual have benefited from much bigger returns seen.
There are numerous well known factors to be analyzed and investment growth outlook are always a crucial element when evaluating your specific investment strategy.


The problem of the study is to determine whether a planned listening program in grade three would improve the scores obtained on the Otis Mental Ability Tests. The basic assumption is that giving the subjects to be tested the opportunity to develop more adequate listening skills would increase the accuracy with which they follow directions on the verbal section of the Otis test. If the scores on that section were improved sufficiently the overall scores (I.Q. scores) would be improved. The purposes of the study are (1) to reveal, through survey of the literature, the need for development of listening skills; (2) to survey the literature pertinent to listening; (3) to survey the literature pertinent to listening as it relates to intelligence; and (4) to provide a classroom program for the purpose of measuring listening skills as they relate to intelligence. The terms hearing, auding and listening are defined. A classification of the various types of listening is also given. Use in the classroom program was made of the Otis Quick Scoring Mental Ability Tests: Alpha Short Form, an audiometer test of the aural sense of the seven teen participants, the Listening Skill Builder Program from the Science Research Association Laboratory Ic. A survey of the classroom conditions which may influence listening was made in order that the proper consideration and attention could be given the conditions. Listening skill development activities were coordinated with the regularly scheduled class experiences in reading, mathematics, language and spelling. Games to aid in the development of listening skill s were played. Two major limitations of the study are the small number of participants, seventeen third grade students, and the test-retest method of measurement. The following generalizations are drawn from Chapter II. (1) The field of listening has so recently been explored that, as yet, the material available on the subject is limited. (2) While listening is an essential component of oral communication and is important in the acquisition of ideas, it is often poorly done. (3) Listening is complex, subtle, difficult to measure, and is easily influenced by physical and emotional factors. (4) Although different testing measures were used, different correlations made and the resultant coefficients differed; the majority of writers cited agreed that there appears to be a correlation between listening and intelligence. Chapter III is the source of the following generalizations. (1) The subjects appeared, to the writer, to exhibit mental, physical and emotional maturity commensurate with other students in Concordia of the same age. (2) The progress charted by student s during the Listening Skill Builder exercises did not show consistent increases in the number of correct responses throughout the program. (3) After the program of nine weeks duration, some individuals increased their scores on the second administration of the Otis tests, There was, however, no significant change in the total scores. The class mean was the same score, Ill, on both testing dates, (4) As no significant change was made in the scores obtained on the tests, it can be assumed that the hypothesis as set forth in this study, that a planned listening program in grade three would improve the scores obtained on the Otis Mental Ability Tests, is null. However, the sample of seventeen scores was a very limiting factor. A broader range of scores would have provided a more adequate sample. From the study the following recommendations are offered: When conducting a study of this nature, use of an achievement test is recommended in lieu of an intelligence test. Further and more intensive study should be undertaken in the area of listening. Listening is essential for intelligent communication and is an effective tool for learning. Yet, as pointed out by Wilt, Rankin, and others, it has been neglected in the class room. Therefore, this writer recommends that the listening element of the language arts program be given more careful consideration and attention in the elementary school particularly in the primary grades.
Jagger, Lois J., "A Study to Determine Whether a Planned Listening Program in Grade Three Will Improve the Scores Obtained on the Otis Mental Ability Tests" (1966). Master's Theses. 989.


What is a Currency Option Bond?
A currency option bond is a security that offers returns in multiple currencies. The holder of a currency option bond can choose the currency in which they would like to be paid. The feature extends to both the coupon payments and the principal paymentPrincipal PaymentA principal payment is a payment towards the total principal amount of a loan that is owed. In other words, a principal payment is a payment made on a loan that reduces the remaining loan amount due..
An American manufacturer issues a 5-year USD/GBP bond. Each bond is issued at $100 and is repaid $100 or £80. The annual coupon is $5 or £4. The currency option bond gives the bondholder the right to receive the principal and interest payments in either USD or GBP.
The USD depreciates against the GBP from $1 = £0.80 to $1 = £0.75. An investor holding the 5% USD/GBP bond specified above would prefer to receive his interest payments in GBP. An investor would rather receive £4 (which is now worth $5.55) than $5. If the exchange rate remains unchanged until maturity, the investor would ask to be reimbursed £80 (worth $106.67).
The USD appreciates against the GBP from $1 = £0.80 to $1 = £0.85. An investor holding the 5% USD/GBP bond specified above would prefer to receive his interest payments in USD. An investor would rather receive $5 than £4 (which is now worth $4.71). If this exchange rate remains unchanged until maturity, the investor would ask to be reimbursed $100.
A currency option bond allows investors to hedge against exchange rate risk. To compensate for the reduced risk, the interest rateInterest RateAn interest rate refers to the amount charged by a lender to a borrower for any form of debt given, generally expressed as a percentage of the principal. The asset borrowed can be in the form of cash, large assets such as vehicle or building, or just consumer goods. on a currency option bond is always lower than the interest rate on any of the single currency bonds that make up the currency option bond. For example, the American manufacturer analyzed in the example above must be paying an interest rate greater than 5% on both its 5-year USD bond and its 5-year GBP bond.
An investor sacrifices the higher return of a single currency bond but gains the ability to hedge against exchange rate risk. In practice, the currency option bonds available to retail investors come with short maturity durations (usually limited to a few months).
The value of a 5-year 5% USD/GBP bond at $1 = £0.80 depends on the value of a straight 5-year 5% USD bond and the value of an option to swap a 5-year 5% GBP bond at a fixed exchange rate of $1 = £0.80.
The value of a 5-year 5% USD/GBP bond at $1 = £0.80 is the sum of the value of a straight bond and the value of a currency option.
An American manufacturer issues a 1-year 5% USD/GBP currency option bond at $1 = £0.80. The bond is sold for $100 and pays an interest of $5 or £4. The current exchange rate is $1 = £0.80. If the USD appreciates, an investor would prefer the principal to be reimbursed in USD, and if the USD depreciates, an investor would prefer the principal to be reimbursed in GBP.
A 1-year USD bond provides a return of 8% and a 1-year GBP bond gives a return of 9%. A 1-year put USD at $1 = £0.80 is priced at $0.01. The currency option bond specified can be replicated by a straight 1-year USD bond redeemed at $100 with a 5% interest rate plus an option to exchange $105 for £84.
Callable BondCallable BondA callable bond (redeemable bond) is a type of bond that provides the issuer of the bond with the right, but not the obligation, to redeem the bond before its maturity date. The callable bond is a bond with an embedded call option. These bonds generally come with certain restrictions on the call option.
Forex Trading – How to Trade the Forex MarketForex Trading - How to Trade the Forex MarketForex trading allows users to capitalize on appreciation and depreciation of different currencies. Forex trading involves buying and selling currency pairs based on each currency's relative value to the other currency that makes up the pair.


"Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me." How about three times? The Democrats have responded to Republican criticism that they are burdening future generations with debt by making great effort to reduce deficits; this often entailed capping social expenditures. The following Republican administrations then used the slack created by the lower deficits to pay for huge tax benefits to the rich and to balloon the deficit. And then the GOP demanded that the next Democratic administration cut the deficits! We are about to witness another round of this same sequence. It's time for the Democrats to recognize it, and to respond to the GOP's crocodile tears about deficit is a fool's errand.
Jimmy Carter's first budget had an inflation-adjusted deficit of $218 billion. Carter acknowledged that the deficit was too high, and soberly informed the American people that "reducing the deficit will require difficult and unpleasant decisions. We must face a time of national austerity. Hard choices are necessary if we want to avoid consequences that are even worse." Carter only reduced the deficit slightly; his final budget had a deficit of $208 billion. However, to achieve that modest reduction, he reduced the size of the Federal workforce, and vetoed a public works bill that had passed through both Houses of Congress (I served as a Senior Advisor to the Carter White House. My suggestions for a bold agenda for rebuilding the economy and the society did not fare better than many other ideas, because Carter rejected suggested policies that involved increased expenditures).
Next, Ronald Reagan came into office, having campaigned against "out-of-control debt." Once in office, he implemented major income tax cuts as well as deep cuts to estate taxes and corporate taxes. His first budget had a deficit of $318 billion, and the deficits would only grow larger: in FY 1983, the deficit ballooned to $500 billion. The deficit in his final budget was his smallest - at $295 billion - but this was still quite a bit larger than the one Carter had left behind.
Reagan then passed the torch to George H.W. Bush, who continued his predecessor's legacy of growing the national debt. His first budget contained a deficit of $405 billion and his final budget contained a deficit of $423 billion.
Then Bill Clinton became president. Facing a national debt that had increased by more than $2.5 trillion (in nominal terms) during 12 years of Republican control of the White House, Clinton promised to tackle the deficit and to "end welfare as we know it." He agreed to cut food stamps, eliminate the Aid to Families With Dependent Children program and to impose a five-year lifetime limit on receiving welfare aid. The effect on the budget was impressive. The deficit shrunk in each of Clinton's first four budgets, and each of his last four budgets contained a budget surplus. Clinton's final budget contained a $172 billion surplus.
President George W. Bush quickly moved to introduce a massive tax cut. The surpluses of the Clinton years were quickly reversed: Bush Jr.'s first budget had a deficit of $210 billion. His final budget contained a deficit of $1.58 trillion (the first time in US history that the US ran a 13-digit budget deficit).
President Obama came into office, promising to clean up the fiscal mess made by the previous administration. His first budget director, Peter Orszag, said the country faced a "serious" and "unsustainable" deficit problem. And so, President Obama began to trim away at the deficit, held at fiscal gunpoint by Congressional Republicans who would only allow spending cuts - and not tax increases - to be part of the solution. Obama managed to reduce the deficit from $1.42 trillion in his first budget to $441 billion (projected) in the current fiscal year.
Now comes Donald J. Trump. It is far from clear what he will do and what the Republican-dominated Congress will let him do. However, one thing you can safely bet on: he will introduce another tax cut that will largely benefit the rich and corporations, and he will balloon the deficit.
The lessons for the Democrats is to get the voters to see who causes deficits, show them that some deficits are beneficial (when the economy is weak, for example). Worry about deficits if they grow disproportionately during a period of high economic growth. And best to leave the task of reducing the deficits to a future Republican administration.
N.B. All figures are taken from Office of Management and Budget and are inflation-adjusted unless otherwise noted. I sounded the same alarm here in 2010.
Amitai Etzioni is a University Professor and Professor of International Affairs at The George Washington University. His latest book, Foreign Policy: Thinking Outside the Box, was recently published by Routledge.


Three Indians, who won the inaugural NYC BigApps competition hosted by mayor Michael Bloomberg earlier this year, rang the ceremonial closing bell at the Nasdaq on Monday.
Archana Patchirajan, Puneet Mehta and Sonpreet Bhatia won the NYC BigApps Competition award, for inventing most useful, inventive, appealing, effective, and commercially viable application for delivering information from the City of New York.
They created MyCityWay apps on the mobile device that provides information for over 50 resource categories in the city - including restaurants, nightlife, hotels, traffic, public transport, safety and green efforts.
Image: (From L- R) Puneet Mehta, Sonpreet Bhatia and Archana Patchirajan - the co founders of MyCityWay.
The application was a big hit in the city-wide competition, following which the trio have now founded their own company, MyCityWay.
"As a startup company, we are delighted to be building a product that will enable the creation of smarter cities - cities that allow active interaction with residents and visitors through our apps," said the company co-founder and partner, Patchirajan.
MyCityWay has gained presence in 10 cities, including Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington, DC and London, and plans to expand in over 40 cities in the next 4 months, according to the founder group.
"We are being contacted by different cities to build similar one-stop apps to help locals and tourists alike," said Sonpreet Bhatia.
"Police departments from a couple of cities are seeking our help to include relevant safety tips from them within our city based apps," she added.
MyCityWay apps are currently made for Apple and Google mobile platforms and are currently available for downloads for iPhones, iPads and all Android-based phones.
"You can easily plan your vacation in New York city using the application on a flight in offline mode," said Puneet Mehta.
All the three co-founders, who have now quit their jobs to focus on their new venture, moved to the US about this decade. Patchirajan moved to the US in 2004, and has held senior technology roles with Wall Street firms before taking up this new venture.
Similarly, Bhatia moved to the US in 1999 and has worked as a vice president with Merrill Lynch. Mehta migrated to the US in 2000 and worked in senior technology roles with Wall Street firms before his tenure as senior vice president with Citigroup.
Image: The trio in front of the Nasdaq building in New York.
What is card cloning? How can you be safe?
College dropout makes low-cost flying car, more!


This has been an exceptionally frustrating semester for me. If possible, I try not to make a major issue out of student behavior during class. However, this semester there has been so much rude behavior in many of my classes that I have felt no choice but to step in and try to put a new calm to the environment for the good of the class as a whole.
There is one student in particular who has been on my mind lately for constant illogical, irrelevant, and irreverent comments before, during, after, and outside of class. This student has about a 33% attendance record. I would say the student shows up to class maybe 1 out of 3 days a week, and when in class often times argues that the pace of the class is too fast, sleeps during about 80% of the class, and then afterwards tries to set up an appointment with me for tutoring on the missed material.
I have another class immediately after this class, and so I never have time to talk to this student for the length of time it would take to get through all of the circular arguments that always arise. So, I ask the student to e-mail me with a time to set up an appointment to discuss what to do. However, from this particular student's perspective, I come off as an uncaring instructor because I never stay after class to address student concerns.
Usually I wouldn't let this bother me, especially coming from an argumentative student with a poor attendance record who sleeps through class. However, the other day before class, my students were sitting out in the hallway. This student was actually early for once. The scene was the way it has been before almost every class this semester. The instructor who teaches in the room before me always holds the students over by at least 2 minutes. I never say anything because I understand that it is a calculus class and sometimes the extra time is needed to explain the more complex problems.
But then my student pipes up with, "Well, the only reason this instructor holds her students over is because she cares about them!" Wow. I knew it was a direct attack on me and the fact that this student actually believes that I am an uncaring instructor because I never hold the class after. I want to reiterate, I have another class immediately after this class, and so I must walk to another building within an 8 minute period. With 2 minutes to pack up, 4 minutes to walk to the other building, and 2 minutes to unpack, that leaves me no time to chat. Does this really make me uncaring?
In fact, this is the only student who gives me any trouble about this issue at all. When needed, some of the other students who don't have another class immediately after have even offered to erase the board for me so that I would have more time to walk to my next class. Those students make me feel good. So, to these students, I applaud you for your respect, understanding, and compassion toward me. I really appreciate it. But this student, the one with the awful complaints, makes me feel heart-broken.
Here's an example of why: The day that this student made the comment, we were reviewing material for the final exam. A week beforehand, I had given the students a review sheet and asked them complete it at home. One student came back and asked me to do a problem for the entire class. I did. So, on the day of the actual review, I didn't want to do the same problem again because I had already done it once the the week before. This student went off the handle and said, 'If you actually cared about your students, you would take the time to review the problem whether you have done it in class already or not!' By the way, within 5 minutes of this disruption, the student was sound asleep in the back of the class.
Now here's the kicker — the student not only fell asleep during class, but also left about two minutes early. And ironically, after all of the complaints about not holding students over, right when it was time to leave, one student said, 'Well, I really was hoping we would have gotten to #29 today." So, since I knew it was a short problem, I actually took kept the class over and did the problem anyway. But this student didn't see that because the student slept through the class and left early. Although I'm not sure that seeing this would have improved this student's perception of me anyway. But all I know is that I have tried my best.
However, the problem is that this one student could potentially ruin my career (or at least make my life miserable) by complaining to the right person at the right time. And I know exactly what will happen, someone will be called in to investigate the complaint against me, I will have to sit it hours upon hours of meetings and possibly fill out lots of statements and reports. It has happened to me in the past and it took 3 months to clear the complaints against me. And then all of this extra work to try to defend myself against one student's unwarranted complaints takes a toll on me and I become a miserable, uncaring wretch. Personally, I find this a little ironic.
So, my question is, 'What can we as educators do to reach out to these students?' The students with a high truancy rate who sleep during class, and then complain that the instructor was the reason that they couldn't and didn't learn the material. What can we do?
This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged Ramblings on May 1, 2011 by Jon Oaks.


This protocol uses a combination of questions from the Wave 1 Adult and Wave 2 Youth Population Assessment of Tobacco and Health (PATH) Survey instruments. Collectively, the questions are used to measure consumer exposure to tobacco-product advertisements, which have been proven to increase the appeal of and demand for tobacco products.
Although questions from both the Youth and Adult Population Assessment of Tobacco and Health (PATH) questionnaires are included in this protocol, the Working Group (WG) believes questions 1-4 may be asked of all respondents. Question 5 should not be asked of youth respondents.
In order to answer question 5, investigators will need to determine whether or not the respondent is not an experimental current user. To do so, the WG is recommending that investigators add the Smoking Status - Adult measure. If the respondent has ever smoked but has not smoked 100 cigarettes in their lifetime and does not smoke every day or some days, then they are eligible to complete question 5.
For Question 3, the WG recommends sharing the below list of tobacco products with the respondent to aide in their response.
1. In the past 30 days, how often did you visit a convenience store, small market, or liquor store?
2. In the past 30 days, when you visited convenience stores, small markets, or liquor stores, how often did you see ads for e-cigarettes?
ASK: Respondents who have visited a store or market.
3. In the past 30 days, when you visited convenience stores, small markets, or liquor stores, how often did you see ads for tobacco products?
ASK: Ask respondents who have visited a store or market.
4. The next questions are about things you may have seen inside or outside shops or stores where people can buy tobacco products. In the past 30 days, have you seen cigarette or other tobacco packages being displayed, including on shelves or on the counter?
5. Since you quit using tobacco, has there been a time when seeing a tobacco product display or other signs that tobacco is sold there, has given you an urge to buy tobacco?
National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Population Assessment of Tobacco and Health (PATH) Study, PATH Wave 2 Youth Extended Interview, 2014, Marketing, Advertising, and Promotion, Items R02_YX0182, R02_YX0183, R02_YX0178.
National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Population Assessment of Tobacco and Health (PATH) Study, PATH Wave 1 Adult Extended Interview, 2013, Industry, Advertising, and Promotion Section, Items AX0205, AX0212.
Instrument used to assess tobacco product advertising exposure at the point of sale, including signs, displays, shelving units, and functional items such as trashcans and ashtrays.
The purpose is to measure consumer exposure to tobacco product advertisements, which have been proven to increase the appeal of and demand for tobacco products.


Fans present at the premiere of the highly anticipated second installment movie, “Alien Covenant,” praised the film. The second offering after its predecessor, "Prometheus," received a very positive reception from fans and viewers based on the reactions gathered after the premiere screening.
Alien Covenant has even surpassed the horror that fans got from its prequel “Prometheus.” Reactions of fans on social media after the premiere night of the movie are overwhelming. However, there is a hole in the movie plot itself.
“The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” featured scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson. The scientist is contesting apremise by Ridley Scott in the film. The movie revolves around a group of space explorers; launching their expedition to a place, about which they have no prior information. Talking within the bounds and standard of real space exploration, it is nonsensical to send human beings to an unknown planet without sending robots first.
In reality, space missions do not work like that. It is for a simple reason that if there is something bad happens, like killing and other unforeseen incidents, it will be the robots first that will encounter it.
This is also to prevent sacrificing any human life because of an untoward incident.
The scene in the movie where people are being sent to a new planet to start a new civilization is acceptable by science. This was already proven through genetic research that only about twelve families started the early civilization in North and South America. Therefore, this part is not hard to incorporate to reality since with just a few people a new generation can be established.
However, there is some kind of stereotyping, that if ever a movie plot is on space, by intention or not, something bad really happens.
Will the inconsistencies affect the movie?
A plot hole can be a major factor for movie critics but fans of this franchise were in much ecstasy to see “Alien Covenant” debuts. This is despite the comments disclosed by legit movie critics.
Most of the feedback from those who have seen the premier commended the amazing performance shown by the lead actor, Michael Frassbender. Moreover, quite a number lauded the intensity of horror that they are looking was shown in the movie. A feat the previous installment failed to give to the moviegoers.
Aside from the cast and characters, several others commended the remarkable visual effects, especially when experienced in IMAX.
Ridley Scott has been acclaimed for its alien movies for thirty-eight years now. After “Prometheus” in 2012, Scott this year introduced to the Alien fans the sequel of the movie. “Alien Covenant” is showing this coming May 12.


Summary: An estimated 1.5 million people are expected to join Pope Francis on September 27 for a celebration of the Mass at the culmination of the World Meeting of Families in Philadelphia. The massive gathering, plus the pope’s participation in the Festival of Families the day before, which is expected to draw close to 750,000 people, has led to the coining of the term “Popeapocalypse”.
Universities are closing, pilgrims are staking sleeping plots in the Philadelphia Zoo, the mass transit system is holding a lottery for train tickets and women expecting to give birth in the area are looking at traveling to other cities -- all in anticipation of Pope Francis's visit.
There is no other religious, entertainment or political leader alive today who could garner anywhere near the kind of response inspired by the pope -- a fact that leaves some people scratching their heads and wondering: why? Why does the pope matter so much?
As the head of the Roman Catholic Church, the pope occupies a position that no other religious leader can match. Most major religions do not have a hierarchical structure that clearly acknowledges one leader who embodies the tradition like the pope does for Catholicism. The pope is the head of a cohesive, transnational organization that has been in existence for close to two thousand years. The church has a chain of command from the Vatican all the way to the local parish that is capable of transmitting information, ideology and material goods throughout the world.
Contrast this with other religions that are mostly fragmented among many different sects, and leaders among them. And even among those that do have existing hierarchies, such as the Anglican Communion, the numbers do not compare to the estimated 1.2 billion Roman Catholics.
Aside from political and diplomatic power, the soft inspirational power of the pope is even more impressive. For a large section of humanity, the Catholic Church has for millennia been their conduit to the Divine, and has provided answers to the questions of how to live a moral and meaningful life.
As the head of the Roman Catholic Church the pope's authority is linked back to Saint Peter, one of Jesus’s disciples who is considered by the Roman Catholic Church to be the first pope. Papal pronouncements hold serious weight and the pope has great influence on how Catholics understand what is holy -- for instance he plays the central role in the process of declaring saints and shrines. The pope also is the highest representation of the Catholic Church to other faith traditions, whether to other religions, other Christian denominations or the secular world.
Not only are papal pronouncements and activities conveyed through Catholic channels, they are also the subject of media interest and are covered closely. When the pope speaks about the Christian Gospel, as he does on Wednesdays and Sundays in St. Peter’s Square, through Encyclicals and in less formal settings, he often relates the religious and spiritual message not only to personal morality and salvation, but also to societal issues and political life. This frequently involves taking positions on controversial debates in countries around the world and within broader world events.
Francis has already become one of the most remarkable figures of the 21st century. From the very beginning, when he eschewed the Apostolic Palace for a simple boarding house, traded in the pope’s Mercedes popemobile for a Hyundai, and declared how he wished for a poor church and church for the poor, Francis has made headlines with his -- to some -- surprising words and deeds.
He has gone on to use his platform to especially highlight the plight of immigrants, the homeless, the poor, Middle East peace, the persecution of Christians and most recently took on the moral question of the environment his encyclical, "Laudato Si."
Francis will be the first pope to address the U.S. Congress, which will be sure to pose challenges to political figures on both sides of the aisle. It seems likely that the pope’s visit and his words will be referenced within the presidential primaries and general election. It has hard to point to another figure who has been as direct about issues such as the environment, economics, and immigration than Pope Francis.
Within the Vatican, Francis has been active in trying to reform and "clean up" the Curia as well as the Vatican Bank, which helps fund the work of the church. His effectiveness in these efforts, as well as the most pressing work on repairing the damage of lives from clergy sexual abuse, have been closely watched. While many are concerned at the slow pace of reform, it appears that, under Francis, the church is setting up appropriate structures and beginning to move in the right direction, most prominently within the bank.
As mentioned above, the pope has pretty much absolute power over the hierarchy of the church. Part of his responsibilities are to appoint new Cardinals who will eventually vote for the next pope, as well as appoint and replace bishops and archbishops who provide leadership to Catholics in countries around the world. Francis has used this power to increase the presence and power of the global south by appointing cardinals from some of the poorest regions of the world. He has also shuffled the roles of leading Catholic clergy in the United States and elevated some of the more moderate figures among the Catholic leadership as well as swiftly removing Bishop Tebartz-van Elst (Bishop Bling) in Germany for overly extravagant expenditures.
However, it is the pope’s offline presence that really shows how much he really matters.
In one-on-one meetings, or in front of three million in Rio, Francis's humble, warm, pastoral spirit has resonated with Catholics and non-Catholics alike. In this world where religious and non-religious alike are hungry for a sense of connection, a desire for the articulation of inequality, and inspiration to work for a more compassionate, peaceful and just world, the Pope's words and deeds matter.


Terry Pratchett's dying wish that all his unfinished work would be destroyed has been carried out thanks to a steamroller and a hard drive. Is it possible another novelist may be allowed to pick up the master fantasy writer's mantle?
News that Sir Terry Pratchett’s long-term assistant Rob Wilkins had carried out the late author’s last wishes by using a six-and-a-half ton vintage steamroller to crush the hard drive containing his unfinished works – thought to include up to ten incomplete novels – brought up conflicting emotions. First, happiness that a great man’s dying wishes had been respected rather than ignored for grubby commercial reasons and, secondly, sadness that this looks like the final goodbye to Discworld, a place fans have enjoyed for 41 novels and more than 30 years. Pratchett’s daughter Rhianna has already announced that no further works or books of unfinished work would be authorised for publication.
But is it such a bad thing when new authors pick up the baton when well-loved novelists pass away? If it hadn’t been for JRR Tolkien's son Christopher editing his father’s notes and fragments of ideas we would never had had the posthumous work The Silmarillion – and arguably Peter Jackson would have struggled to stretch The Hobbit over three films.
Anthony Horowitz, the creator of Foyle’s War, has done follow-on books in the Sherlock Holmes oeuvre as well as a James Bond novel – Trigger Mortis – published in 2015. And EF Benson’s celebrated six-part series of Mapp And Lucia novels have been added to by at least two other writers – Tom Holt and Guy Fraser-Sampson. The latter actually slotted the first of his novels Major Benjy between Benson’s third and fourth.
In Dune, published in 1965, Frank Herbert wrote what is widely considered to be one of the greatest sci-fi novels of all time along with its five sequels until he died in 1986. In 1999 his son Brian along with collaborator Kevin J Anderson published the first of 15 (and counting) prequels and sequels. It has to be said that father Frank must have left a whole lot of notes.
Even the classics aren’t immune – the late, great crime writer PD James wrote a sequel (her last novel) to Jane Austen’s Pride And Prejudice entitled Death Comes To Pemberley in 2011 – though she did describe it as a pastiche. Many of the above works are more or less successful, but what they share is that not one of them diminishes the originals.
All this suggests that Pratchett’s world of imagination should not be preserved in literary aspic. Indeed, his novels themselves changed beyond recognition over the decades, having started as knockabout fantasy fiction in the early works such as The Colour Of Magic and The Light Fantastic to sophisticated satires of tropes from Shakespeare fairy tales and religion in works such as Wyrd Sisters, Hogfather and Small Gods to his later works which are almost Dickensian in their social commentary, such as Snuff and Raising Steam. Indeed, the Discworld itself develops from a familiar Lord Of The Rings-esque medievalism to a steampunk world of railways and goblins.
And in such of breadth of work there are some storylines that cry out to be extended. Take the character Susan Sto Helit, death’s human-with-a-supernatural-twist granddaughter. Last seen in Thief Of Time, she is ripe to be rediscovered. While Granny Weatherwax may have died in the posthumous novel The Shepherd’s Crown there is potential to spin any number of stories about this wonderful witch. There is even an argument to say we haven’t even seen enough of Pratchett’s original anti-hero, the inept wizard Rincewind.
So while we respect the author’s last wishes, please let there be life for Discworld even after death.


I've been reading "A Great and Shining Road," by John Williams. It tells the story of the development of the transcontinental railroad, and has much detail in the beginning about the development of rail transportation in the U.S., as it started on the east coast.
The parallels to the last decade of development of fiber networks is remarkable. There was fierce opposition to the railroads from the entrenched canal and toll road owners and operators. It was difficult to get financing for the newfangled railroads because wealthy investors did not want to take any risks; they wanted to stick with the tried and true "old" transportation systems.
Fiber is the transportation system of the 21st century, but it is still seen as a risky investment by many. How is it a transportation system? Here is just one example: music. Music used to require physical roads to deliver records/CDs to customers. Today, music is *transported* by fiber networks directly to customers.
If you substitute the cable and phone companies for the toll road/canal owners of the railroad era, there is an amazing overlap in the issues of economic development, entrenched interests, investment capital, and community infrastructure.
In the end, railroads unleashed a long period of rapid economic growth, but the railroad visionaries had to overcome resistance from many sectors of the government and the economy.


The TERM BREAKER setting specifies the algorithm to use for breaking strings into terms. The choices are GENERIC for storing terms, or NGRAM for storing n-grams. For GENERIC, you can use the built-in term breaker algorithm, or an external term breaker.
GENERIC text index Performance of GENERIC text indexes can be faster than NGRAM text indexes. However, you cannot perform fuzzy searches on GENERIC text indexes.
When building a GENERIC text index using the built-in algorithm, groups of alphanumeric characters appearing between non-alphanumeric characters are processed as terms by the database server, and have positions assigned to them.
When building a GENERIC text index using a term breaker external library, terms and their positions are defined by the external library.
Once the terms have been identified by the term breaker, any term that exceeds the term length restrictions or that is found in the stoplist, is counted but not inserted in the text index.
NGRAM text index An n-gram is a group of characters of length n where n is the value of MAXIMUM TERM LENGTH.
When building an NGRAM text index, the database server treats as a term any group of alphanumeric characters between non-alphanumeric characters. Once the terms are defined, the database server breaks the terms into n-grams. In doing so, terms shorter than n, and n-grams that are in the stoplist, are discarded.
For example, for an NGRAM text index with MAXIMUM TERM LENGTH 3, the string 'my red table' is represented in the text index as the following n-grams: red tab abl ble.
For n-grams, the positional information of the n-grams is stored, not the positional information for the original terms.
When parsing a CONTAINS query, the database server extracts keywords and special characters from the query string and then applies the term breaker algorithm to the remaining terms. For example, if the query string is 'ab_cd* AND b*', the * and the keyword AND are extracted, and the character strings ab_cd and b are given to the term breaker algorithm to parse separately.
GENERIC text index When querying a GENERIC text index, terms in the query string are processed in the same manner as if they were being indexed. Matching is performed by comparing query terms to terms in the text index.
NGRAM text index When querying an NGRAM text index, terms in the query string are processed in the same manner as if they were being indexed. Matching is performed by comparing n-grams from the query terms to n-grams from the indexed terms.
If not defined, the default for TERM BREAKER is taken from the setting in the default text configuration object. If a term breaker is not defined in the default text configuration object, the internal term breaker is used.


Watt's Up?: Why do I measure voltage to earth ground on a power supply with a floating output?
Occasionally, one of our power supply users contacts us with a question about voltages measured from one of the power supply output terminals to earth ground (same as chassis ground). All of our power supply outputs are floating with respect to earth ground. See my previous post about this here. In that post, I stated that neither output terminal is connected to earth ground. To be more specific, no output terminal is connected directly to earth ground. We do have internal components, mainly resistors and capacitors, connected from each output terminal to earth ground. These components, especially the caps to ground, help mitigate issues with RFI (radio-frequency interference) and ESD (electrostatic discharge). They help prevent our power supplies from being susceptible to externally generated RFI and ESD, and also help to reduce or eliminate any internally generated RFI from being conducted to wires connected to the output terminals thereby reducing RFI emissions.
So even though our outputs are considered floating with respect to earth ground, there frequently is a DC path from at least one of our output terminals to earth ground. It is typically a very high value resistor, such as several megohms, but could be as low as 0.5 MΩ. This resistor acts as a bleed resistor to discharge any RFI or ESD caps to earth ground that could be charged to a high float voltage.
As an example of a power supply with a resistor to earth ground, the Keysight N6743A has 511 kΩ (~0.5 M) from the minus output terminal to earth ground. This resistor was responsible for the voltage measurements to earth ground observed and questioned by one of our power supply users. He was using this power supply in the configuration shown in Figure 1 and measured 9.7 Vdc from his common reference point to earth ground (again, same as chassis ground).
He understandably did not expect to measure any stable voltage between these points given that the output terminals are floating from earth ground. But once we explained the high impedance DC path from the minus output terminal to earth ground inside each power supply (see Figure 2), and the 10 MΩ input impedance of his DMM, the measurement made sense. The input impedance of the voltmeter (DMM) must be considered to accurately calculate the measured voltage. This is especially true when high impedance resistors are in the circuit to be measured.
Figure 3 shows the equivalent circuit which is just a resistor divider accounting for the 9.7 V measurement. (The exact calculation results in 9.751 V.) Notice that the voltage of the 28 V power supply does not impact this particular voltage measurement (but its resistor to ground does). If the user had measured the voltage from the plus output of the 28 V power supply to earth ground, both the 28 V supply and 20 V supply would have contributed to his measurement which calculates out to be 37.05 V (if you check this yourself, don’t forget to move the 10 MΩ resistor accounting for the different placement of the DMM impedance).
I don't understand how 9.7V Came kindly explain it.
This is a basic application of nodal analysis using Kirchhoff's Voltage Law. 511 K in parallel with 10 M yields 486.2 K. 486.2 K in series with the other 511 K yields 997.2 K. 20 V across 997.2 K yields a current of ~20 uA. 20 uA through the parallel combination of 486.2 K yields 9.7 V.
If you want to learn how to successfully write a SAT essay, all you need to do is to visit this page. Good luck!


to reach your destination. The plan will also include a tentative schedule giving you an idea of when you can expect to reach your goal.
Elements of the Plan. To start your advocacy plan, write out a short statement of the problem. Although this may seem repetitious if you have followed the problem definition recommendations discussed earlier in this chapter, writing a statement of the problem in your plan will help you focus your thinking and it will be a helpful reminder if you get stuck or sidetracked.
Next, decide what you would like to achieve as the ideal solution to your problem and write it down. The need for good record keeping takes on greater significance following brain injury. One of the greatest barriers to successful advocacy is being unclear about what you are trying to accomplish. Impairments caused by brain injuries compromise your ability to understand and be understood. If you are unsure of your goal, talk to friends, relatives, professional advocates and service providers to get ideas. Make notes of such discussion for later reference, a tape recorder is also handy during such discussions.
Be realistic about the options available to you. Your goals should be well considered and well researched. Such precautions will assure that your goals are reasonable and do-able. Remember, it is impossible to turn back the hands of time, what is done can not be undone. Consequently, your goals, while based on past actions, should be forward looking.
Although it is critical to decide on an ideal solution, it is important to realize you may not reach this goal. It may necessary to make some compromises. In other words, you may not get everything you ask for. To prepare yourself for that possibility, try to see the outcome of your efforts as continuum ranging from getting everything you want, various combinations of some of what you want, and including the possibility of getting nothing.
Decide on some compromise solutions that are acceptable although not ideal. Later, if compromise is reached, you will still achieve an acceptable solution and the other party will probably feel that they have accomplished something by causing you to accept a solution that addresses their needs too. You probably will also be perceived more favorably if you show a willingness to work out a solution with the other party than if you insist on only one outcome.
The next step in developing your advocacy plan is to list all of the information you need to reach your desired outcome. Divide this list into two sections -- one labeled "Information I already have" and the other labeled "Information I need to obtain."
Review the notes you took and material you collected during the information gathering stage. List laws, rules, regulations, and policies that support your point of view and write down references or citations. In addition, list philosophical, ethical, moral, humanitarian, logical and political reasons for your desired changes. List any facts that need to be established (e.g., that a handicap does exist, that you have been abused or neglected). Add to your list any information that will help show that the change you desire is needed.
Try to put yourself in the other party's place and attempt to discover how the changes you want could benefit them, also. Think of as many reasons as you possibly can and then look back at your list, and decide which are most likely to be effective in influencing the other party. Discuss your ideas with friends and family, have them suggest ideas too. Mark the most effective arguments and plan to use these first, but save the others for possible use later.
Note all types of information you still need to get and allow opportunities to gather this information when developing your plan.
Next, think about the other party. What are their needs, their priorities? What arguments do you expect them to make? Write down these arguments on your plan and then think about what you will say or do in response to these arguments. Write down ideas on how you will respond.
Next, write down a step-by-step plan for how you will approach the other party and argue your point of view. This could involve a sequence of telephone calls, a letter and one or more informal meetings, with a follow-up letter summarizing agreements reached. The method you select will depend on your situation.
You will want to identify the name, telephone number and mailing address of the person you will be dealing with and perhaps some notes on where he or she fits into your life. Such a list might identify a: family member, loved one or friend; human service agency; medical and legal firm; your employer or school. When the problem involves business, career, or human services agencies: understanding the chain of command will help identify further steps you can take if a solution is not reached. When the problem involves family, friends and loved ones it becomes important to identify influential parties who could be enlisted as allies.
As you work out your step-by-step action plan, jot down the date you expect to take each step. These dates will be approximate since you cannot control the action of the other party but the dates will help you retain your sense of purpose and direction. Whenever you request something from the other party such as: a meeting; an appointment; a change in behavior; a status report on your case or your relationship; specify when you would like a response to your request. Two weeks is a reasonable time within which to expect a response to most requests. It is certainly sufficient time to expect an acknowledgment of your request including a commitment to respond by a specified alternate date.
Finally, think about what you will do if your plan is not successful. There are almost always further steps you can take to resolve your problem. Such a list might include dealing with others further up the chain of command, and asking for a formal hearing. When such strategies breakdown you might consider asking for outside help. Another option might include mobilizing and terminating the relationship.
Working out a detailed advocacy plan is a lot of work but it will help you be more effective and it will increase your confidence. You will develop your own short cuts and time savers as you gain experience. At the beginning, however, we do not recommend trying to proceed without a plan.


I bumped into a friend of mine recently - we've known each other for 25 years - she asked me what I was up to.
I told her I was making a programme about the menopause.
Her reaction was extraordinary - she grabbed my arm and said "Oh Thank God someone's talking about it at last - mine's driving me mad".
She then opened her work bag and showed me the mini-desk fan she carries with her at all times in case of a hot flush - and the box of tablets she carries to keep the symptoms at bay.
I had absolutely no idea she'd been going through it and was sad to hear she'd been trying to cope with it on the quiet.
Yet it's probably pretty typical of how most women deal with the menopause.
But with more women aged 50 and over in the workplace than ever (3.5 million) - this isn't just a taboo which needs to be broken, it's an occupational health issue.
This week a set of workplace guidelines is being published by the Royal College of Physicians, in order to alert employers to consider what some of their female employees may be going through.
We've made an ITV Tonight programme about this inevitable fact of a woman's life to coincide with this - and did our own survey of menopausal women to shed some light on their experience.
Worryingly, a quarter of the women we asked said they'd considered leaving work because of their menopause: and half said the symptoms had made their work life worse.
Insomnia, anxiety and of course the hot flushes all contributed. Of course not everyone endures these symptoms - some sail through it and very happily come out of the other side.
But if workforces are to remain diverse and keep their women on board as they age - this appears to be an issue worth addressing.
We've spoken to dozens of women for the programme - including those whose workplace are already helping them.
One nurse we interviewed had been allowed to wear a uniform of made of a different fabric to help with her with her hot flushes: we also spoke to one senior detective who had been able to change her career plans and working hours to adapt to the fact her sleep patterns had altered so drastically: otherwise she would have had to give up work altogether.
Menopause: What are the common symptoms?
She works for West Midlands Police, a force which runs a monthly (sorry but that did make me smile) menopause clinic and support group, with a specialist GP on hand.
But the main thing we found was just how relieved women were to simply talk about it.
There's not much we don't discuss openly in society these days - but for complex reasons (including societal pressure on women to remain looking young) - the menopause is one of the last taboos.
We're hoping this programme might make it easier to break.


With the help of the "text wrap" it is only possible to adjust a path manually. In InDesign, I often use the transparency information of the image (alpha channels) to let the text flow directly around an extracted object. This doesn't seem to be possible in APub.
Do the developers plan to implement this functionality for psd- and afphoto-files?
I don't understand how alpha channel information is being used in that example. I initially thought that you meant that the text flow was being affected by the drop shadow, but it doesn't seem to be that, as the text is sometimes outside the shadow and sometimes within it.
This is an example from InDesign. There I placed a psd file. InDesign can interpret the transparency of the cut sheet (clipping path options). In addition, I have defined an offset. The shadows have no influence.
You shouldn't look at this too mathematically. Many things influence the result, such as word lengths and hyphenation rules. In addition, the paragraph orientation (here justification) has an influence on the result.
The concrete example was also not important for me. What is important is that this possibility exists in InDesign. I think that would be a very useful functionality in APub. Often transparency and channels have already been created during image processing. It would be nice if you could also use them during layout.
Often transparency and channels have already been created during image processing. It would be nice if you could also use them during layout.
Sorry - I'm missing something!
In APub I have a text box. I put an image with a transparent background on top of it. I hit "Edit wrap outline", the text flows around the shape of the image. I can then adjust the offset etc in the wrap settings. - How is this different?
In APub I have a text box. I put an image on a transparent background on top of it. I hit "Edit wrap outline", the text flows around the shape of the image. I can then adjust the offset etc in the wrap settings. - How is this different?
If you already have selections and/or transparent areas in an image editing program, you don't have to do that again in APub.
In an image editing program you usually have better possibilities to cut out objects.
The transparency information is part of the image. They are available after each placement in the layout. However, if you make the path directly in the layout, this path is unique, and you may have to repeat the work several times.
Thanks for the explanation. I'm afraid I still can't really see what APub isn't doing that you can do in InDesign!
Here I've just dropped a picture with a transparent background (done in AP) on top of a text box and hit the "Edit wrap outline" button. The text then wraps itself around the image.
Isn't that all you're doing in InDesign?


England Euro 2016 squad: What next for Theo Walcott and other notable omissions?
With just 26 days remaining before England begin their Euro 2016 campaign against Group B rivals Russia in Marseille and warm-up clashes against Turkey, Australia and Portugal on the horizon, Roy Hodgson confirmed a provisional squad for the tournament at Wembley Stadium earlier on Monday (16 May). Having given himself an extra four days to assess the condition of any injury concerns, the experienced boss named a 26-man travelling party to be pruned to 23 before the official Uefa deadline later this month.
In keeping with Hodgson's rather conservative reputation, the announcement was hardly littered with shocks and curveballs that nobody saw coming. The inclusions of Fabian Delph, Andros Townsend and talented young Manchester United striker Marcus Rashford certainly raised a few eyebrows, as have the identities of the biggest casualties.
The most notable absentee from the squad was Walcott, who has 43 senior international caps to his name but was passed over in favour of Newcastle United winger Andros Townsend due chiefly to a lack of regular first-team football. It has been yet another frustrating domestic campaign for the 27-year-old, featuring just 15 Premier League starts and only five top-flight goals amid yet more endless debate over his most effective position.
With West Ham having been tenatively linked with a £20m ($28.7m) summer swoop for his services, it is hard to argue against the notion that the time has come for Walcott to continue his increasingly stagnant career elsewhere. His international future may depend on it.
One exclusion that caught many off-guard was the decision to leave out Phil Jagielka. The Everton captain has been a regular fixture in the squad over recent years and is still at the top of a pack of worryingly thin pool of viable English central defenders. However, he failed to retain his place as Hodgson opted for only three specialist centre-backs in the knowledge that both Eric Dier and Ryan Bertrand can be deployed in the position if required.
It will be seen as a risky move by some, with Dier having flourished in a holding midfield role at Tottenham Hotspur and Bertrand far more comfortable in his natural position at left-back. There can also be legitimate question marks over whether John Stones is more worthy of a place than his Everton teammate after a difficult season under Roberto Martinez in which the defence was roundly criticised. Despite his experience, obvious leadership qualities and professionalism, it is difficult to see how 33-year-old Jagielka can work his way back into contention at this stage of his career. If he does, it sadly probably says more about the lack of options available to Hodgson and his eventual successor.
One name that seems to have flown slightly under the radar today amid debate over the presence and possible demotions of Delph and Danny Drinkwater is that of Michael Carrick. The composed Manchester United midfielder's career has been something of a paradox, consistently lauded for his impact at club level but often cruelly dismissed and disregarded as not good enough to hold down a regular place for England.
Many would consider it a travesty that he has earned just only 33 more caps since making his debut against Mexico in 2001 and has only made one solitary appearance for his country at a major tournament, despite routinely being hailed as their best passer. Much like Jagielka, this feels like the end of the road for Carrick at international level and he is likely to face a sizable decision over his domestic future this summer with his current contract at Manchester United due to expire and no sign of an imminent extension.
With Harry Kane claiming the Premier League's Golden Boot award, Daniel Sturridge notching five goal in his last eight, Jamie Vardy spearheading Leicester City to one of the greatest feats in the history of team sport and Wayne Rooney retaining his importance to Hodgson as captain and leading scorer, competition for places in the final third is at its highest level for many years.
But that has not stopped the clamour for one or two older faces to rejoin the party. Perhaps the strongest of these calls was for Jermain Defoe, who defied his advancing years to dispatch 18 goals in all competitions for Sunderland and guide the Black Cats to yet another escape from relegation. Kane and Vardy are the only top-flight Englishmen to have outscored the 33-year-old this term, yet his hopes of a Three Lions swansong seems to have been dashed.
West Ham have often captured the imagination during cult hero Slaven Bilic's first season in charge and a number of the English contingent can feel rightfully miffed about their respective snubs. While Mark Noble, Michail Antonio and perhaps Andy Carroll may have been worthy of significant discussion, Cresswell should be most aggrieved after a stellar year in which he has demonstrated quality and consistency in equal measure.
The international retirement of long-term incumbent Ashley Cole before the 2014 World Cup blew the regular left-back role right open and it now appears to be up for grabs again with Leighton Baines having regressed to the point where he is no longer in the squad. No-one is disputing that Bertrand and Danny Rose were worthy of their respective places, but few complaints would have been registered if Cresswell was chosen ahead of either. At 26, time is on his side, although the return of Manchester United left-back Luke Shaw next season following a double leg fracture poses another significant threat to any England ambition.


From Inner to Outer: Digression: Books I'm Reviewing—Douglas Coupland's "Worst. Person. Ever."
Digression: Books I'm Reviewing—Douglas Coupland's "Worst. Person. Ever."
Aside from books (Herbert, Tolkien, Asimov, er, John Wyndham, Franklin W. Dixon, Enid Blyton's Secret Seven series, and Helter Skelter) and comics (Flash, Justice League, Green Lantern, etc., basically anything with super-villains and super-powers), I read and re-read stacks of Cracked and Mad Magazine as a child.
While I can't remember much about individual issues now, one random set of cartoon panels has stuck in memory. The "Before" shows the cast and crew on the set of a comic film breaking up with laughter. The "After" depicts a cinema audience of that same production completely stone-faced at the supposedly funny antics on screen.
I bring that up because my response to Worst. Person. Ever. mirrors those patrons in the Mad Magazine cartoon (despite the fact that the novel's presumed starting point, a story called "Survivor" that Coupland published in 2009, is both cynical and despairing but also terrifically funny).
If nothing else, the crazy division of opinion about the novel indicates the subjective nature of taste and humour. Ditto for the perennial Big Question: "What constitutes a good novel?"
The review in the Independent, for example, concludes that the novel "reads like a failed experiment; a misjudged one-off," while the Guardian's reviewer notes: "Novels are no longer about thinking, they're just vortices of cliche. The race is now on to write the Worst. Book. Ever. And this may be it." More locally, these final words at the Winnipeg Review: "Perhaps the novel would be better, or at least more entertaining, if it were read in spurts, or portioned out as a series of ribald vignettes to mull over. Like Raymond Gunt himself, Worst. Person. Ever. can bring many a horrified chuckle to a person’s lips. Also, like Gunt, a little goes a long way." The Globe reviewer, in contrast, refers to Coupland as an "ideas man," and finds the novel brilliantly insightful. At the Quill and Quire reviewer sees a winning books that's "flashy, loud, a bit unsettling, and screamingly fun."
My review appears in The National Post.


Malware (malicious software) is a general term used to describe hostile, intrusive or annoying software or program code. Malware includes viruses, tracking software, "bots", trojans, etc.
Doesn't anti-virus software detect and eliminate malware?
No. No software is completely effective against malware, and anti-virus software tends to concentrate on viruses but not other forms of malware. The least harmful malware packages may only track the web pages a user contacts; the more serious may steal personal information or log-in information as it is typed. Malware infections are often picked up by accessing infected websites. In the past, avoiding unknown web sites was a reasonably effective practice for avoiding infections.
Am I safe if I avoid unknown web sites?
No. Recently, malware's ability to infect machines has significantly increased through a process called "malvertizing". An innocent user may access a legitimate website. If that website flashes ads, which many do, an infected ad that appears while the primary website is being viewed can infect the machine as if the user had clicked directly on the ad itself. Since many sites flash rotating ads from third parties, one person might be infected because a particular ad flashed when s/he was accessing the site, while a few seconds later another person might not see the ad and not be infected. This new approach to infection is a powerful tool for malware dispersal and is resulting in many more malware infections.
Recent warnings have been issued by agencies tracking malicious software that malware designed to steal credit card numbers and passwords is being distributed in this way. We have found some infections like this on campus, but have no way to systematically scan for and detect this software, as it changes constantly. Some institutions, including school districts, have lost hundreds of thousands of dollars overnight when such malware-infected machines are used for online banking. Protection is no longer found in simply avoiding unknown websites.


Linear regression is an iterative algorithm, as many algorithms are in machine learning. It is simple, but it is very useful.
In this article, we will go through the intuition of linear regression and a straightforward implementation of the algorithm. This article is adapted from this booklet, in which you can find the mathematics behind the algorithm as well as detailed explanation and implementation details.
Linear regression is a simple yet useful learning algorithm that can be seen as a statistical or an optimization problem. For simple regression, there are optimal analytical solutions; however, for high dimensions problems, there are not. Regression fits a function to a data set, so what we are trying to do is to find a representative function and fit it to our data set. Learning takes place as finding the best possible (local optimum) values of the function parameters. Linearity refers to the fact that we are trying to fit either a straight line or a polynomial function (polynomial regression).
Let's go through an example, given a set of house sizes and house prices such that the data set is (x, y) where x is the house size and y is the house price. The task is to estimate the house price given a house size. If we regard the house size and the target price as continuous, we can model the situation as a regression problem. Because we want to fit a linear function to the data or approximate the output as a linear function of the output, this can be modeled as a linear regression problem. The data set has holes, meaning that it does not contain the size and price of every single house so the task is to estimate the target price given an arbitrary house size.
The model pipeline, as a supervised learning problem, is training set > learning algorithm > hypothesis. The training set is fed into the learning algorithm which outputs a function, conventionally called the hypothesis and denoted by h. h is a function mapping from input to output or features to output. The first task when solving this problem is to decide what representation of h should be used. For linear regression, we use a linear function. For polynomial regression, we use a polynomial function.
The main idea is, given a set of input vectors and output labels, to minimize the average difference, error, between the correct output labels and the actual labels. One way to do this is by using the mean square error, MSE, as a measure of the error. We need to minimize the MSE so that we find a good straight line or a polynomial fit for our data set. We do this by using the gradient descent algorithm.
The algorithm is iterative, as many others are in machine learning. At each iteration, we measure the error, we make changes to the parameters in order to minimize the error, and we carry on until we reach a small predefined threshold or a predefined number of iterations.
In the case of linear regression, parameters are either the slope and y-intercept for a straight line or the polynomial coefficients if we are using a polynomial function.


Mom: I loved your book, and now my 9-year old son is reading it, and enjoying all your puns and bad jokes (not to mention the science!).
Son: The figure on page 61 seems to imply that every time the sun, moon and/or earth line up, there should be either a solar or lunar eclipse. Can this figure be redrawn to show what actually happens when they line up? Why doesn't an eclipse happen every time they're in line?
I don't have my copy of the book with me, but keep in mind that the actual orbit is three-dimensional, and it's tilted relative to the ecliptic - the plane of earth's orbit around the sun. If we figure that the paper represents the ecliptic and the earth and sun both sit "in" the paper, then the moon will spend about half it's time above the paper and half it's time below the paper.
An eclipse only occurs when the moon crosses the plane of the earth's orbit at the same time as it crosses the line between the earth and the sun.
I can't think of a real easy way to draw that with a single diagram, but does it make sense the way I've described it?
Thanks for the description. The discussion has spawned some debate here, which is a good thing, and some interesting experiments to try. How about changing the entry angle of the sun's light in the diagram, so that the two-dimensional representation does not look like the earth and moon are constantly in same elliptic as the sun?
An eclipse does happen every time they're in line. It's just that they're not in a line every month.
I took a look at the diagram, and I'm afraid that it can't be fixed that way. It's an illustration that is trying to explain the phases of the moon--if you were to use it as an accurate depiction of the Earth-moon-Sun system, you could also conclude that the moon had half the radius of the Earth (it has a quarter) and it was only four or five Earth radiuses away (it's actually sixty).
Also, the plane of the moon's orbit does appear to be tilted in the illustration, but it is probably more than is actual--and the orientation changes over the years, so that sometimes it lines up, and sometimes it does not.


For the tl;dr: Docker FDW is a thing. Star it, hack it, try it out. File bugs, be happy. If you want to see what it's like to read, there's some example SQL down below.
The question is first, what the heck is a PostgreSQL Foreign Data Wrapper? PostgreSQL Foreign Data Wrappers are plugins that allow C libraries to provide an adaptor for PostgreSQL to talk to an external database.
Some folks have used this to wrap stuff like MongoDB, which I always found to be hilarous (and an epic hack).
During my time at PyGotham, I saw a talk from Wes Chow about something called Multicorn. He was showing off some really neat plugins, such as the git revision history of CPython, and parsed logfiles from some stuff over at Chartbeat. This basically blew my mind.
If you're interested in some of these, there are a bunch in the Multicorn VCS repo, such as the gitfdw example.
All throughout the talk I was coming up with all sorts of things that I wanted to do -- this whole library is basically exactly what I've been dreaming about for years. I've always wanted to provide a SQL-like interface into querying API data, joining data cross-API using common crosswalks, such as using Capitol Words to query for Legislators, and use the bioguide ids to JOIN against the congress api to get their Twitter account names.
My first shot was to Multicorn the new Open Civic Data API I was working on, chuckled and put it aside as a really awesome hack.
It wasn't until tianon connected the dots for me and suggested a Docker FDW did I get really excited. Cue a few hours of hacking, and I'm proud to say -- here's Docker FDW.
This lets us ask all sorts of really interesting questions out of the API, and might even help folks writing webapps avoid adding too much Docker-aware logic. Abstractions can be fun!
The only stumbling block you might find (at least on Debian and Ubuntu) is that you'll need a Multicorn `.deb`. It's currently undergoing an official Debianization from the Postgres team, but in the meantime I put the source and binary up on my people.debian.org. Feel free to use that while the Debian PostgreSQL team prepares the upload to unstable.
So, now let's pop open a psql session. Create a database (I called mine dockerfdw, but it can be anything), and let's create some tables.
Before we create the tables, we need to let PostgreSQL know where our objects are. This takes a name for the server, and the Python importable path to our FDW.
Now that we have the server in place, we can tell PostgreSQL to create a table backed by the FDW by creating a foreign table. I won't go too much into the syntax here, but you might also note that we pass in some options - these are passed to the constructor of the FDW, letting us set stuff like the Docker host.
And, now that we have tables in place, we can try to learn something about the Docker containers. Let's start with something fun - a join from containers to images, showing all image tag names, the container names and the ip of the container (if it has one!).
This will do a stop + kill after a 10 second hang behind the scenes. It's actually a lot of fun to spawn up a container and terminate it from PostgreSQL.
Spawning containers works too - this is still very immature and not super practical, but I figure while I'm showing off, I might as well go all the way.
Success! This is just a taste of what's to come, so please feel free to hack on Docker FDW, tweet me @paultag, file bugs / feature requests. It's currently a bit of a hack, and it's something that I think has long-term potential after some work goes into making sure that this is a rock solid interface to the Docker API.


It was only a matter of time until Google moved on from Cardboard and started taking virtual reality seriously. Say hello to the Daydream View, the company's first mobile VR headset. Much like Samsung's Gear VR, it's powered by Android. But the big difference is that this $79 headset will work across a wide variety of Android phones that support Google's Daydream platform; it won't just be stuck on Samsung's hardware. It also stands out from the competition with a more comfortable design made from cloth instead of plastic. There's a lot riding on this headset and Daydream in general, but can Google really compete with VR companies that have been developing hardware for years? For the most part, it turns out it can.
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Hooking up a phone to the Daydream View is also simpler than using any other headset I've seen. You just need to open up the front latch, drop the phone in with the screen facing the lenses and then close everything up and secure it with an elastic band on the top. It might look a bit clunky, but it's fairly secure. After that, tighten the headband, slip the Daydream View over your head, and readjust as necessary. Instead of using Velcro straps, Google's headset relies on a band that's more like a messenger bag strap. It's fairly comfortable, but adjusting it is a bit tougher than simply dealing with Velcro.
Keeping the theme of comfort going, the eyepiece is also made out of a soft and cushiony material. Best of all, you can actually remove the eyepiece for hand-washing. Which is a good thing: Based on my experiences with other headsets, you can bet it's going to get sweaty and grimy quickly. Since it's relying on fabric on top of a plastic frame, the Daydream View comes in at a featherlight 220 grams (0.48 pounds). The Gear VR, on the other hand, weighs 345 grams (0.76 pounds).
Another way Google aims to differentiate itself is with the Daydream View's motion controller. Like a vastly simplified version of HTC's and Oculus's remotes, you use it to navigate around Daydream's interface, play games and interact with apps. The motion tracking is generally pretty accurate, though I noticed some issues as its battery life drained down. The remote's simple layout -- touchpad on top, an app-specific button in the middle, a home button on the bottom, and volume controls on the sides -- also makes it easy to use while your eyes are covered. It charges over USB-C too, which is a nice touch, since your Daydream device will likely charge that way as well.
Speaking of compatible phones, for now you can choose from Google's Pixel or Pixel XL to power the Daydream View. Other manufacturers are currently working on their own entries, though there's nothing you can actually buy yet. Google says Daydream phones will generally offer high-resolution displays (you can bet they'll likely be AMOLED, since that works best for VR); "high-fidelity sensors" for head tracking; and "ultra smooth" graphics. You'll also want to pay attention to resolution differences between Daydream devices. The Pixel XL has a 1440p (2K) display, for example, while the smaller Pixel has a less impressive 1080p display. In general, the more pixels you can stuff into a screen, the sharper your VR experience will be.
I tested the Daydream View with the Pixel XL, likely because Google wanted to show off its VR headset in the best possible light. Since the XL is such a large phone, though, it sticks out a bit when it's attached to the Daydream View. It still fit just fine, but the setup looks a bit unpolished. (Then again, the Gear VR looks even worse with a phone plugged in.) On the bright side, the Daydream View's single elastic band did a fine job of holding the Pixel XL in place, even when I shook the headset like crazy.
Once you launch the Daydream app and slap the phone into a headset, you're presented with a fairly typical home screen. It features recently used apps and your own shortcuts up front, and a button on the bottom of the screen leads to your entire library. At launch, Google has a handful of its own VR apps to explore: With YouTube VR, you can view normal videos on a flat or curved plane, or dive right into immersive 360-degree videos. Street View lets you take virtual strolls around famous locations. And Play Movies allows you to use the Daydream View like your own personal home theater. Third-party apps include the Wall Street Journal, Star Chart VR and games like Mekorama and Hunters Gate.
If it isn't abundantly clear by now, Daydream View is going squarely against the $100 Gear VR. I'm still a big fan of that headset, and if you're a Samsung phone owner, it's your only option. But moving forward, the mobile VR landscape is going to get more complicated. If you want the freedom to choose between different phones, rather than just Samsung's, then you're better off investing in the Daydream ecosystem.
Daydream's big problem at the moment is its small selection of apps. There simply isn't that much available on Google Play for the platform yet. Google says that's going to change by year's end, though, with the addition of Netflix, Hulu, and the New York Times, along with plenty of other apps. This is one area where the Gear VR has a big head start, since it's been around for years and has a lot of content help from Oculus and Facebook. Still, Google is flexing its brand muscle a bit; it already has an exclusive VR experience for Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, the upcoming film set in the Harry Potter universe.
While the Daydream View doesn't completely reinvent mobile VR, it's a solid first step for Google. It's ideal for testing the waters of virtual reality without being locked into Samsung's ecosystem. But its success depends on more Daydream phones being released, consumers being willing to pay for a headset and developers jumping on the platform.