Depending on your talents, tenacity and where you want to find work, there are thousands of different ways to earn your keep, that can range from selling shave ice in the West Indies for a few weeks, to guiding travellers through the mountains of China for the rest of your days.
That being said, of course, there are a few tried-and-true jobs that can help both the casual worker and the professional travel with purpose. Check out our top ten.
When it's time to bring in the harvest, farms from Uganda to Peru will hire extra hands in exchange for room and board. Imagine spending your days pulling weeds in Sicily, or picking jackfruit on the eastern Filipino coast while eating (really) fresh, home-cooked meals and hanging out with other hired farmhands. Workdays can last as long as the sun is up and enjoying a couple of days off per week is standard. These jobs are best for people who like working outdoors, don't mind a bit of manual labour and prefer short-term gigs that usually range from one week to a month or so.
Most casual workers looking to schedule gigs in advance gravitate to organic farms like the ones listed by national coordinating bodies under the umbrella of World-Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms (WWOOF). For a modest fee, they will send you a list of accredited farmers looking for help; these workdays last a maximum of six hours.
If you like working with kids and you don't have a criminal record, au pairing could be for you! Lots of families, mostly in European cities, need live-in childcare and will hire foreigners with no experience or training to work as nannies. Most of these jobs are filled by young women (and some men) between 18 and 25 who can babysit and handle a few basic domestic duties. The job is low on manual labour but definitely not for those without experience taking care of kids or doing laundry.
You can expect free room and board in exchange for your services, as well as some pocket money and time off. The best part of the gig is the chance to partake in a meaningful cultural exchange with the family you work for and, if it's not an English-speaking country, there is a great opportunity to pick up another language. Poke around some au pair job sites and negotiate a contract before you book your flight.
These aren't great jobs for wallflowers, but if you can handle a crowd and enjoy customer service, casual work at a festival or other special event can be a great, flexible gig in almost any country. Annual events, like music or cultural festivals, sporting events and trade fairs, hire temporary, short-term workers with little to no qualifications or experience.
Similarly, there are jobs to be had in the seasonal tourism industry, for example, campsites, hotels and catering companies. You could find yourself doing anything from handing out ice cream at a beachside resort to tearing tickets at a desert music festival. In these cases, a little restaurant or customer service experience and, even better, a second language, can go a long way. Salary expectations will vary and you will probably have to arrange your own room and board.
Where to start: Research some possibilities in the region of your choice and contact the event organizers, hotels or campsites by phone, email or snail mail to inquire about any openings.
The possibility of casual work exists at many private hostels around the world. If you ask around, there may be a need for help with cooking, cleaning, general maintenance or night porting duties—basically all the ins and outs of running a hostel. This kind of work is best if you're passing through and need to make some extra money, or if you want to secure a long-term gig at the hostel in question by working your way up. Even better, some hostellers have been known to start their own mini-businesses selling goods or making breakfast, for example, as long as the hostel doesn't already offer these services.
Where to start: Chat withthe hostel manager(s) and see if anything is available.
Some days it feels like everyone and their mother has at least considered teaching English overseas at one time or another. If you're comfortable leading a classroom of children or adults and you're looking for a break from your job or education, trying to travel long-term without saving a fortune beforehand, or just looking for a way to make a living in a non-English speaking country, teaching English makes sense for a lot of reasons. For one, lots of countries, from Georgia to the Philippines, have a demand for English teachers. What's more, being a native speaker of the language means you're already qualified, although having a degree in education or enrolling in a TEFL/TESOL/TESL certificate course can certainly help your job prospects.
Whatever your qualifications, there are lots of ways to approach this job market. You can use an English teacher recruitment company to help you arrange a contract (a good idea for first-timers) or scour job boards and navigate the world of work visas and teaching contracts yourself. Just keep in mind that most contracts should include accommodations, that it's generally better to secure a contract before moving abroad and that placements can range from private to public schools and usually last around one year.
For more information about finding casual work overseas, check out these Verge articles: Working Abroad: A Beginner's Guide , Top 10 Casual Jobs Overseas and How to Find Casual Work Overseas.
While teaching English abroad might be a popular go-to gig for the casual worker (see #5), lots of people also make a career out of it by securing a string of contracts, either in the same place or in entirely different continents. How long you want to work and where is up to you, though it's probably best to make sure your next job is lined up before you run out of money or your visa expires. As you gain work experience, you can potentially increase your salary expectations and make a good living.
Where to start: Check the resources listed in the previous section.
Travelling the world and getting paid to write about it may sound glamorous and exciting, but it does have its downsides. Even if you're aiming to stay in five-star beachside resorts, the tolls of travelling constantly and working on the road can include hours of pitching stories, contacting tourism boards in different time zones, 16-hour red-eye flights, tight deadlines and weeks without a hot shower. That being said, it can also mean seeing more of the world than most people will ever see and getting to share those experiences with an audience of envious readers. If that sounds appealing to you, make sure you can put together a legible sentence and, these days, knowing how to work a camera is essential.
Whether you want to write for guidebooks, newspapers or Verge (hi!), the starting point is the same: travel, write and pitch those stories to websites, newspapers, magazines and guidebooks. The pay won't always be great, so this isn't a field to get into for the money. There are courses you can take to learn the trade, which can be helpful, but most travel writers learn on the road. The most important thing to remember is to do your research and find the unseen angle that no one else has covered.
Resources for Aspiring Travel Writers, So, you want to be a Travel Writer, Confessions of a Guidebook Writer.
Try your hand at travel writing by contributing to the Verge Storyboard. Each week we select an article submitted by our readers, to be published on our Readers' Storyboard. Get published and start building your travel writing resume.
Job opportunities in the field of international development are about as diverse as they get. You can find yourself managing databases for the United Nations, researching papers at a university or, for example, making a contribution with an NGO on the ground. This can mean organizing the distribution of mosquito bed nets in Senegal or helping local partners design sewage treatment systems in India. If you're flexible, open to new challenges and interested in making a difference, but you also understand that you can't save the world in a day, this could be for you. If you're just starting out or working for a smaller NGO, the pay won't be great, but some larger NGOs and governmental organizations—including the UN—offer very competitive salaries.
While it's possible to work or volunteer for an organization like Oxfam or Free the Children without a degree, many who choose to make a career in the field study international development, political science, environmental studies, economics or a particular region like Latin America. Volunteering for a development NGO is also a great way to enter the field and learn more about it before committing.
You can start by contacting an NGO with an office in your area to inquire about volunteer or job openings. If you're already overseas or you're planning to be, keep an eye out for local grassroots organizations that can often accommodate new volunteers or workers. Find out what kinds of skills are needed and how you can contribute.
Where to start: Check out the article in this section on the work of a logistician with Médecins Sans Frontières. You can also read this Verge article that offers a glimpse into the work of humanitarian aid workers, one of many professions in the development field: First on the Ground in Haiti.
Being a travel guide doesn't necessarily involve leading a group of tourists through the must-see celebrity hot spots of Los Angeles. It can also involve using your knowledge of an area to guide inquisitive travellers into a remote region in Madagascar or Peru. It can involve living in tents and jungle hammocks, climbing cliffs and tending to food poisoning. Wherever there are travellers who need a little guidance, there are opportunities to be a travel guide. In order to make this your career, you will need plenty of knowledge, flexibility, an openness to challenges, and an ability to lead and work with people—even if they're cranky, sunburnt and want to stop for bathroom breaks every five minutes.
One particular offshoot of the travel industry that may appeal to you is adventure travel. These guides may require a range of hard skills, such as rock climbing, outdoor survival skills and emergency first aid. In fact, growing interest in the field means there are many outdoor education programmes available at universities and colleges; private companies also offer guide training and specialized skill development. In terms of pay, tour companies generally offer their leaders a daily wage plus a local allowance and tips.
Where to start: Read this Verge article to get a look at the life of an adventure guide: Work in the Outdoor Industry.
It may sound cliché, but in such an increasingly globalized world, almost anyone can take their unique set of skills, education and professional background and carve out a niche in nearly any country. In particular, though, people with certain specializations tend to do better in the international job market than others, especially when you factor in a second language and experience overseas.
For one, a professional background in the health sciences as a doctor, nurse or paramedic (among others) can lead to working for an organization like Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) or other aid organizations.
With a degree in law, you can pursue international human rights and commercial or trade law. The pay, however, tends to be less than if you were practising law in North America, so you have to think of it as a trade-off and a life choice.
With a business degree (or better yet, an MBA), you could work as an international business consultant. This involves travelling to any number of countries for weeks, or maybe even months, at a time to consult with governments, private companies or NGOs on business strategies, banking or investments, just to name a few. In this case, pay ranges quite a bit, but you can expect to make a decent salary depending on whom you work for.
If your background is in the environment, there are also lots of jobs working in national parks or consulting on green projects with NGOs, among others, that can take you far and wide. For job postings in the environmental field, check out stopdodo.com and Working Abroad: A Beginners' Guide.
Where to start: For more information on how to move your job prospects overseas, check out these Verge articles: Working Abroad: A Beginners' Guide, Working Abroad: A Beginners' Guide and Plan to Work Abroad.
Volunteer as an Expat: Close the Gap Between "Tourist" and "Resident"


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The End of the Road!
December 15, 2016 by Sarah
I have finally completed all thirteen novels in Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage – Hooray! For the most part, I've very much enjoyed spending the year with Miriam Henderson. The earlier novels were a complete joy – the descriptive detail and luminous prose were delightful. That said, the going got tough in places, and the novels became increasingly confusing towards the end of the series. As it is, I've been struggling to concentrate recently, and that probably contributed a fair bit to my lack of engagement with the final two volumes in the series.
Dimple Hill
The penultimate novel of the series started off promisingly, with Miriam taking Dr Densley's advice of a rest cure and heading out of the city for the countryside. I've loved all of Dorothy Richardson's descriptions of Miriam's London flânerie, but there has been a fair amount of urban pacing and thinking on this journey so far, so a change of scene was quite welcome. Miriam goes to stay on a farm in Sussex with the Roscorla family. She is befriended by Rachel Mary, falls in love with Richard, and is frowned upon by the matriach, Mrs Roscorla. With all the fresh country air, flirting and fruit-picking going on, it's all very Darling Buds of May but with added Quakerism for good measure. Having spent an inordinate amount of my childhood sitting still in Church meetings, I couldn't bear reading the long description of the Quaker meeting. I started fidgeting about in my seat and had to flick forward for fear of starting to pace my cage like an incarcerated polar bear.
Further flirting on Miriam's part deepens the frown-lines on Mrs Roscorla's forehead, and it is made plain that the 'Friends' will not tolerate such behaviour.
March Moonlight
I already knew that the final novel of Pilgrimage was unfinished, but I found it a very confusing read. First Miriam is in Switzerland, then she is in Brighton, then back at Dimple Hill farm with the Roscorlas. There is a new friend, Jean, who is in love with a Bishop, and another friend Olga, whose misery leads to an untimely death by her own hand. Miriam visits Michael and Amabel, whose marriage has not been happy, until they have a baby, Paul, then everything is alright again.
I can't help wondering why she returned to Dimple Hill, after her behaviour was so clearly disapproved of – that environment would hardly promote the relaxation and recuperation she needs. To exacerbate things, a French ex-monk, Ducorry, has come to stay with the Roscorlas. Miriam is fluent in French so they spend a lot of time together, and he falls in love with Miriam. The feeling seems to be mutual, and rather than feeling trapped by the budding relationship, Miriam feels it is serious enough to need to confess about her affair with Hypo. Alas, he is unforgiving, as are the Roscorlas, who suddenly can no longer spare the room, and she has to head back to Mrs Gay's boarding house in London.
It was an abrupt and uncomfortable ending, leaving Miriam in a state of unrest andwith no certain future. More than ever, I feel I've got to read Dorothy Richardson's biography, if just to find out what happened next. The series of novels may have ended, but it would appear that my pilgrimage has not!
Thanks to Liz at Adventures in reading, writing and working from home for designing this Pilgrimage finisher's medal. It does feel like I've completed a marathon – now where's my complimentary banana and foil blanket?
Tags : Dimple Hill, Dorothy Richardson, March Moonlight, pilgrimage, reading challenge, Virago, Virago Modern Classics, VMC
← Glædelig Jul!
#AW80Books Round-up: Christmas Edition (in that it's hastily organised and I ate fruitcake while putting it together) →
10 thoughts on "The End of the Road!"
madamebibilophile on December 15, 2016 at 7:28 am said:
Congratulations! What an achievement. I'm really going to try and follow in your footsteps next year, and I feel I'm going in fully prepared for the frustrations as well as the joys. Sending you a virtual banana and foil blanket (not as good, I know, but you surely have completed a marathon here!)
Thanks Mme Bibi! It was tough and frustrating at times but I'm so glad I read 'Pilgrimage'. The descriptions are wonderful, and the prose is often sublime. Also, I doubt I'll ever read another work which captures a woman's interior mind so fully. It really is an extraordinary achievement. I look forward to reading your thoughts on it! 🙂
BookerTalk on December 15, 2016 at 10:45 am said:
My supply of bananas has been disrupted by 1 Brexit negotiations 2. Donald Trump's plan for world domination 3 the debate over Theresa May's leather trousers. 4 the reindeers suddenly acquired a craving
I can however send you oceans of kudos for completing this challenge.
Sarah on December 15, 2016 at 4:00 pm said:
Hahaha – brilliant response, and thank you, oceans of kudos will do nicely! 🙂
kaggsysbookishramblings on December 15, 2016 at 12:47 pm said:
Well done! I am lagging behind though I will get there eventually. It's a real undertaking reading these books, and I do think my views on it have changed over the years and with my re-reading. Congrats! 🙂
Wow, I'd forgotten you'd read them before! I've enjoyed the trip but I'm not sure I'd want to do it again. I was dragging my feet at the end, mainly because I knew there'd be no concrete end, so it felt like creeping towards the edge of a cliff. Still, I'm so glad I read it, and that's all thanks to you – I got inspired by your post almost this time last year, and ordered volume one straight after! 🙂
Naomi on December 15, 2016 at 4:18 pm said:
You deserve that "medal"! 🙂
Liz Dexter on December 15, 2016 at 4:53 pm said:
Yay – well done! *passes you a banana and a foil blanket*. I'm not sure it was you for those last volumes, I struggled, too. But we did it!! (it took much longer than my actual marathon!).
It took longer than mine too, which is a feat in itself, and yet I was left with the same disoriented feeling of 'What the hell just happened?' at the end. Thankfully, I had no blisters and was a lot less smelly! 🙂

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


He has developed a trusted reputation over the last 25 years at senior-leadership posts in the fast-paced and high-profile world of motorsports where he delivered dynamic business results and – more importantly to him – nurtured long-standing relationships.
Having led numerous crisis and reputation management efforts over his career, Mike is a go-to resource for those in repair mode, but also those wanting proactive-branding and business-driving strategies.
Mike's experiences in motorsports led him to write the acclaimed book Reputation Shift – 5 High-Performance Truths for Success. The book delivers actionable strategies and step-by-step plans for readers to protect, harness, and strengthen one of their most valuable and precious assets – their reputations!
Mike is a graduate of Elon University where he earned a degree in Corporate Communications and where he was lucky enough to meet his future wife. He, his wife and three children live in Charlotte, North Carolina.
A passion for driving people forward sums up Mike's approach to life. Ever curious, committed, and enthusiastic, he genuinely connects with people to help them reach their personal or professional goals.


text:
Boea rosselensis är en tvåhjärtbladig växtart som beskrevs av Brian Laurence Burtt. Boea rosselensis ingår i släktet Boea och familjen Gesneriaceae. Inga underarter finns listade i Catalogue of Life.

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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


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The home of Welsh rugby has welcomed the head of the 2012 Olympic Games to Cardiff today, just hours before the London Games kicks off with the Olympic football tournament at the Millennium Stadium.
Home of Welsh rugby welcomes Olympic chief
25th July 2012, 11:21 am By Principality Stadium
Lord Coe was met by Stadium Manager Gerry Toms for an exclusive tour of the venue, during the final preparations for the first match of the women's Olympic Football Tournament which takes place at 4pm when Team GB women's team face New Zealand.
The eyes of the world will be on Wales as the tournament gets underway where around 38,000 tickets have already been snapped up for the Millennium Stadium event.
Eleven soccer international matches will take place at the stadium in Cardiff as the world's biggest sporting event takes place in the UK.
The kick off today in Cardiff takes place two days before the official opening ceremony of the London 2012 Games which takes place in London on Friday.
Lord Coe was being joined by a host of other VIP's in Cardiff for the first event of the 2012 games.
Culture Secretary James Hunt and Welsh Secretary Cheryl Gillan are scheduled to be in Cardiff for the opening match.
Mrs Gillan said: "I want the whole country to take this opportunity to showcase everything that's great about Wales and ensure a lasting legacy long after the Games are over."
She said she was "immensely proud" that the games were beginning at the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff. Supporters enjoying the carnival atmosphere in Cardiff for the game were being advised to turn up early at the Millennium Stadium.
Tickets are still available for today's Olympic football action, which also includes New Zealand women's team playing Brazil, according to London 2012 organisers.
Fans can visit the official London 2012 website for further information


I've slowed down with posting here, been working hard recently both on diStorm and real life job. Hopefully I will be able to release diStorm3 soon (matter of weeks for a start). I'm almost finished with coding everything I wanted, though I'm still left with the features you guys asked for and tons of tests since I also changed lots of code and added new AVX instruction set.
This entry was posted on Sunday, December 27th, 2009 at 11:26 pm and is filed under diStorm.	You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.


There's an interesting article posted on QueryTracker's blog today - and it's all about how great stories aren't written...they're re-written.
A large portion of the article focuses on the ability to edit and what it takes to put it all out on the table. Considering I'm in the edit process right now for not just one, but two of my MS's, I found the information in this blog to be invaluable.
I'm lucky to have some amazing beta readers and I'm also fortunate that I love, love, love the editing process (sick and twisted? I know!). However, as the article points out, sometimes you just have to go with your gut.
I find this particularly important, especially when reading and writing is so subjective. I'm dealing with this right now, with some of the feedback from my beta readers - what one found to be a great way to say something, someone else completely disagreed. Where one thought a different path would make the writing stronger, another picked a completely different path.
Only I know every intimate detail of my writing. Every nuance, character flaw, and history of each character. But all of that aside, it's important to take every piece of advice, criticism, and LOL moment my beta readers give me, to heart. Because without them, my writing would suffer. My writing would only have one opinion. And my writing would never get any better.
That doesn't mean you have to make every single change thrown your way - if you did this, your manuscript would never be finished...and ultimately, in the end, you'd be worse off than when you started.
So with that, I leave you with the great blog posted by Danyelle on the QueryTracker site and ask, how does everyone feel about the editing process? What great pieces of advice do you choose to live by, when scraping away at your manuscript? I'd love to hear!


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2576 Little Falls Circle is a $555,000, 3,762 square foot, 5 bedroom, 4.0 bath home on a 0.16 acre lot located in Henderson, NV.
Welcome home!! A dream home in the most desirable area of Henderson! 5 bedroom, with a beautiful pool/spa combo. Master bedroom is so big it's essentially 2 rooms, huge loft and oversize rooms. BRAND NEW floors, gourmet kitchen, upgraded & modern bathrooms. Corner lot with a long drive way to pull up to your 3 car garage. Pictures do not do justice on this home, this is a stop what you're doing and walk into the house type of home!!WELCOME HOME!!
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The hunt for a dream home seems never ending when there are myriad of options available. The most happening city, Bangalore is one of the most prosperous locations where the leaders in the real estate are building their dream projects. To narrow down the list and make this onetime affair less confusing, here is the list of 10 benchmark projects in the city to look out.
Prestige Park Square Constructed over a sprawling area of 15.37 acres in Uttarahalli, South Bangalore, this project will cater 1119 residential units of 1 BHK, 2 BHK, 2.5 BHK and 3 BHK types in the formation of 4 towers. The area of the units will vary from 661 to 1750 square feet.
This is a huge project that covers 81 acres beside Panathur Road. This project will cater total 6500 residential units in the form of huge towers. The units will be of 1 BHK and 2 BHK types. It is a significant part of the Sobha Dream Series.
Situated in Kanakapura Main Road, this project spreads over 48.6 acres of land and will offer 2520 apartments for ownership. The residences are of 2 BHK, 2.5 BHK, 3 BHK, and 4 BHK types. The starting price of the residences will vary from INR 8 Lac.
Sprawling over 65 acres of land, this is a premium township situated in the serene locality of Hebbal. With 2 BHK, 3 BHK, and 3 BHK variants, the project will offer a floor space varying from 1320 to 2790 square feet.
Prestige Jindal City is located in the vicinity of Whitefield – Sarjapur Road. This is a Disney-themed project that will offer 271 villas and 3426 apartments over a land space of 102 acres. The apartment's price will vary from INR 65 Lac and the villas will cost INR 2.68 Crore.
Total 600 units in the form of 10 towers of G+14 configuration on an area of 5.3 acres will be provided here for possession. The units are of 2, 2.5, and 3 BHK types with a floor space ranging from 1023 to 1721 square feet.
Here, 2 and 3 BHK apartments will be catered with a floor space ranging from 1151 to 1668 square feet. Constructed over 7 acres of land, the price will start from INR 45 Lac.
The project is under construction over an area of 18 acres. It will offer 2 BHK and 3 BHK apartments with an area of 1000 to 1900 square feet. The starting price is INR 52 Lac.
Skyscraping G+21 floored 10 towers in this project will cater 1 BHK, 2 BHK, and 2.5 BHK, and 3 BHK apartments. The commercial part of this project will contain 8 multiplexes. It is being developed at the proximity of Mysore Road.
Lounging on an area of 17.75 acres, this project will provide 1608 apartments of 1 BHK, 2 BHK, and 3 BHK variants. The floor space will vary from 685 to 1157 square feet. The price range is expected to vary from INR 34 to 54 Lac.


Marvin Gaye's family didn't score enough in their "Blurred Lines" lawsuit -- now they're going after T.I. and a few record labels to pay up ... on top of the $7.4 million they won last week.
Attaching the record labels could be the first step toward the family's other goal -- getting an injunction to stop distribution of the hit song until Marvin gets a writer's credit ... and, of course, the family gets royalties.
And don't forget ... the family is also still deciding whether to file a separate suit over Pharrell's "Happy."


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What's Wechat China?
Posted by Yuri Khlystov | Jun 30, 2016 | Business and Innovation | 0 |
WeChat China, the chat app, for long has been a bellwether in mobile messaging future. Its purpose is to popularize brands in chats and also to integrate third-party services. Tencent is the company behind WeChat, (also known as Weixin in China), announced its impressive financials at the end of the year, including their application's highest quarterly profit growth for three years.
Among the other items revealed is that WeChat has up to 697 million active users now, worldwide, having added about 200 million to that figure each month. At the point when Tencent initially started WeChat back in January 2011, no one thought that the application was an e-commerce and online networking giant, with over almost a billion clients.
The last half decade saw China's former social media giants get used to living in WeChat's shade. Renren, "China's Facebook," has seen its valuation crumble to a fifth of its 2013 high as users flocked to more feature-rich apps. And Weibo, while hardly obscure, has long since been eclipsed by WeChat's enormous user base. In the year 2010, when messaging applications at the time were novelties, we lived in a world of SMS texts. From Kik to SMS, WeChat China today is such a unique, innovative platform that it's easy to forget that it was originally framed to be
China's answer to Kik.
Companies failed to see that China was the biggest battleground in the mobile revolution. The first version of WeChat released in early 2011, right into the midst of a messaging app revolution. As mobile users grew bored and frustrated by the limitations of SMS, a new kind of app began sprouting throughout the world. Kik, WhatsApp, and Viber all launched in 2010, and the next year saw WeChat, Line, and Facebook Messenger roll onto the global stage. In China, a nascent Xiaomi launched Milao, while many Chinese internet users logged into Twitter aims at Weibo for more than just commenting on the news.
WeChat is the Leader in Chinese Social Media
"WeChat had competition when it launched. [But] Weibo just wasn't very good at interpersonal communication, so it left a giant hole," says William Bao Bean, Managing Director of Chinaccelerator and partner at SOS Ventures. Whichever app managed to exploit that hole in China and grab a hefty market share in 2011 and 2012 would become the incumbent. WeChat was able to outflank its domestic competition by rolling out in-demand features on an insane schedule. Within one year, the app had expanded from its simple text/voice/picture offerings to include video messaging, a "shake" feature to find nearby users (which doubled as one of China's new answers to Tinder), and more.
If that wasn't enough of a leg-up over the local competition like Xiaomi and small startups, WeChat was also able to leverage Tencent's massive QQ user base. While other services required email addresses or phone numbers to log in, WeChat simply needed a QQ account – which hundreds of millions of Chinese people already had. By early 2012, WeChat had 100 million registered users, and China's other messaging apps were already in the dust. But what about the international competition?
WeChat Features
Beyond text messaging, video and voice calling, its services includes games, social network timeline, shopping, branded accounts, and more. Payment is another area and over the past year, Tencent has put considerable focus into its China-based service, WeChat Pay, is used to transfer funds between WeChat users (peer-to-peer) and make online payments with some offline retailers. Tech In Asia tested it out for a day in China. Eventually, they were reasonably impressed, although it seems there's room for improvement. Tencent disclosed that by November 2015, 200 million user cards were attached to the payment service.
Tencent WeChat
Tencent revealed that it banks over RMB300 million, an equivalent of $56M USD, that is charged from WeChatPay bank transactions, almost all was from China. Currently, the service was started in South Africa through its first expansion that was international. Tencent offers it globally to all merchants who can use it to take payment from Chinese tourists.
That is hugely impressive, and it shows WeChat's growing platform might be a significant threat to Alipay, the service by Alibaba's $60 billion-valued payment affiliate. Alipay had not revealed its annual payment or revenue volume since 2013 — when it recorded $519 billion — though that figure will be much higher now. While Alipay is China's top payment option with 500 million users and 200 million credit cards, the mainstream adoption and use of WeChat contribute massively to its success.
WeChat for Chinese and Beyond
Tencent is also dropping fees for transactions that are peer-to-peer, a move that aims at making WeChat a standard platform for transferring money between friends. Another new policy developed by WeChat is that it charges users a small fee for the transfer of certain funds from their WeChat wallet to their bank accounts, this incentivizes them to retain funds in their application wallet account, which will presumably then be spent on or distributed to others via the service.
WeChat makes money through advertising and games. The President Martin Lau revealed that Tencent's does not anticipate WeChatPay to become a profitable business as it subsidizes merchants and other costs. But, the real value, Lau said that WeChatPay is for the benefit of the overall ecosystem empowering future advertisements with one-click purchasing and promotion by users, as well as synergies with financial services like Tencent's online bank or wealth management fund.
The Future of Your WeChat Account
Tencent's primary goal is not only facilitating chatting but also making WeChat platform a gateway into the country's booming service economy, where everything from manicures, food delivery to car washes are all sold online. Smartphones are a crucial entry point to China's online-to-offline sellers.
Other companies have imitated WeChat's success — Alibaba's chairman, in 2013, declared war on Tencent by encouraging the employees to unite and form a Marching Army and kill Tencent's mascot. Alibaba tried, but unsuccessfully it turned out, to challenge WeChat with its Laiwang messenger.
While WeChat claims victory, analysts say it should be watchful of other threats. WeChat banks from advertising. WeChat's app future mostly depends on how it deals with the information explosion on the app. If it continues that way, in a period of about year, WeChat will hit its peak.
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Our household has always been big on handmade gifts. This year I have been busy in the kitchen and the studio creating a number of home crafted items…salted caramel sauce, loaves of cranberry bread and Christmas stollen, several pairs of knitted socks, and an assortment of salves, facial creams, and lip balms.Some members of the family like to wait until the last few days before Christmas before beginning their gift projects. Our son, Noah, is one of these people. He makes up for his 'wait until the last minute' approach however with his talent in woodworking. He pulled down some of the beautiful walnut boards we have been storing in the barn loft to make some pretty sharp looking cutting boards. They are beautiful! I am so glad this tradition of making gifts has been passed forward. Pleased that something offered to a friend or loved one does not require a day of shopping. A gift from the heart, time spent with others, laughter, and love, ….these are the things we cherish and pause for.
Happy Holidays everyone, hope they are filled with wonder and delight!


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Vercel, Netlify, and the new era of serverless PaaS
Developer experience doesn't have to stop at the front end
Vercel CEO: Deployment should be instantaneous
InfoWorld's 2022 Technology of the Year Award winners
Cloud complicates development, but GraphQL and supergraphs offer hope
Application development in the cloud is a complex mess of countless moving parts. GraphQL and supergraphs could make life a whole lot easier for developers.
By Matt Asay
Contributor, InfoWorld |
We live in the golden age of cloud computing. For consumers, it's a wonder. For developers, it's a complete and utter mess.
For all the problems with monolithic application architectures (and there are many), they're relatively straightforward: Take an app server and database and wire them to a browser interface. Simple! By contrast, today's applications depend on an ever-changing array of back-end microservices, first-party and third-party APIs, databases, etc., with an assortment of front-end landing zones for that data (browser, set-top box, mobile app, etc.) Even as React and other front-end frameworks have made front-end development easier, connecting the sometimes bewildering back-end complexity to that front-end experience has gotten harder.
[ Also on InfoWorld: How SQL can unify access to APIs ]
Say a prayer of thanks for GraphQL.
GraphQL, released by Facebook in 2015, serves as a flexible query language for APIs. Unlike SQL, which you'd use to query a relational database, GraphQL allows a developer to query a wide range of data sources, decoupling client (front-end development) from server (back-end development). But as cool as GraphQL is, it's incomplete without a supergraph. As Apollo GraphQL CTO and cofounder Matt DeBergalis writes, the supergraph is "a unified network of a company's data, microservices, and digital capabilities that serves as the 'composition layer' for the whole organization."
CEO and cofounder Geoff Schmidt put it this way in an interview: "The supergraph is a living, breathing thing" that enables enterprises to incrementally adapt their infrastructure to ever-changing requirements. Oh, and to tie that new infrastructure to legacy infrastructure because "there's no such thing as greenfield."
Supergraphs and greenfield myths
Wait, what? Surely a startup or an individual developer doesn't have to deal with technical debt the same way an established enterprise does and can focus on greenfield development? "Technical debt" can be a bit of a loaded term, but let's express it the way RedMonk analyst James Governor did in a recent interview:
Whether you are an individual developer [and] you have learned skills…and now you're trying to build upon that skill to learn a new framework, or whether you're a small enterprise and you have built out certain data infrastructure and are trying to figure out how to build some analytics on it, or whether you're a large enterprise that's having difficulty in hiring people and really wants to build on the skills that you already have, … the constant is that while new technology comes in, it must coexist with and build upon existing skills and existing technology stacks.
Schmidt learned this the hard way.
Schmidt and DeBergalis cofounded Meteor in the early 2010s to provide an end-to-end JavaScript framework—a "really magical platform for building new apps," said Schmidt. Developers seemed to agree. In its day, MeteorJS was one of the most popular projects on GitHub and attracted a healthy community to more than 100 regular meetups. The problem, as Schmidt relates, was that Meteor started from a bad assumption. "When we tried to bring Meteor into the enterprise, Meteor was designed for greenfield development [but] we found that nothing is greenfield in the enterprise."
He continues: "We live in a world where any app you'd want to build draws on a lot of different services and data sources that come from a lot of places. That's what makes the app valuable. It synthesizes all the stuff in the cloud into an experience you can have." Again, whether you're an individual developer, a small startup, or a Fortune 500 behemoth, you depend on a wide array of services outside your firewall, as it were, and all those services make development complicated.
Actually, that's not quite right. As Schmidt points out, the key insight he and DeBergalis had was that the enterprise needed a better way to connect increasingly powerful front-end frameworks (such as MeteorJS or React) to increasingly powerful but complicated back-end services. "Seeing how hard it was to get Meteor into the enterprise, we started to build the Meteor 2 data system," he remembers, "which was called Apollo and was based on all the lessons learned from [helping] enterprises … make the Meteor technology work in complex heterogeneous enterprise environments." They needed a query language for their Apollo supergraph and chose GraphQL.
All this is great. But why should you care?
Supercharging GraphQL
If you're building applications, whether as an individual developer or for a large enterprise, development isn't getting any easier. The way forward is pretty clearly headed toward increased complexity through microservices. Developers embrace that complexity because there is so much to gain from the approach, such as increased agility. They want that future.
But getting to that future can be tricky.
Even GraphQL, for all its potential, has been used by many developers to stitch together individual services. What Apollo is trying to land is a graph of graphs, as it were. Using graphs to pull together an increasingly atomized infrastructure is good, but adding a meta-graph, or a supergraph, has the potential to dramatically improve developers' lives. Why? It's the easiest way to make use of disparate data sources without having "to create these deep, direct, fragile connections to a particular Oracle database or a particular microservice, or to create a whole new REST endpoint that somebody has to maintain," says Schmidt.
Importantly, the supergraph approach can be somewhat piecemeal in nature. Walmart, for example, had to figure out how to integrate the mainframes that run their stores with the microservices that run their online fulfillment. Customers didn't know about this infrastructure problem and may not have even noticed that Walmart had one website for online shopping and one for in-store pickup. But they definitely recognized that reviews available online didn't show up for in-store pickup. And they would have been frustrated by the different product catalogs hosted with each system. Walmart couldn't afford to shut down its mainframes, so it used the Apollo supergraph to essentially combine the two systems.
The supergraph approach "doesn't require a stop-the-world waterfall change," says Schmidt. It helps organizations seamlessly connect their legacy systems with their newer systems. In the case of Walmart, it meant a front-end developer could say, "Show me the reviews on a product," and they'd find those reviews wherever they were, including their mainframe. If later they refactored that mainframe to a microservices-based architecture, nothing would need to change on the front end.
Co-opting the cloud
One interesting thing that emerges from all this: The clouds don't necessarily make things better. AWS, for example, offers AppSync, a great way for an app developer to pull data from DynamoDB and surface it in their mobile app. But what if you want to pull data from DynamoDB, toss in some Azure serverless functions, call some data in your mainframe, plus access data from a Google Cloud service or two? The whole promise of GraphQL and an Apollo-esque supergraph is to tame heterogeneous environments, and that new heterogeneity includes different clouds. It's going to be difficult for any particular cloud to provide the central routing required.
We have needed a declarative, abstract layer, or a supergraph, to help developers tame the mess that is enterprise IT. For a time, we fooled ourselves into thinking that cloud would fix the problem. It didn't. It just extended and further complicated enterprise IT. Thoughts and prayers that a supergraph can help. It just might.
Matt Asay runs partner marketing at MongoDB. The views expressed herein are Matt's and do not reflect those of his employer.


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Q: Manipulating srt files in php I have been trying to modify srt file (to make required adjustment in time). What i would like is to take time advancement/latency and srt files from user and manipulate that srt file with provided time shift. And save a new srt file with modified name in the same path?
How can i achieve this in plain PHP  or Codeigniter.. both will be helpful. Thank you
  00:12:30,332--> 00:12:45,222
  if provided input is 2 second
   then srt file should be modified with
    00:12:32,332 --> 00:12:47:222

A: You can use library like this:
$subtitles = Subtitles::load('subtitles.srt'); // load file
$subtitles->time(2); // add 2 seconds
$subtitles->save('new-subtitles-file.srt');

https://github.com/mantas-done/subtitles

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


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Q: c# application with mysql database I'm developing C# application that interact with MySQL database hosted on free hostingwebsite:
private void Initialize()
{
    server = "ex.exexexex.com:3306";
    database = "1_dotnet";
    uid = "1_dotnet";
    password = "********";
    connectionString = "SERVER=" + server + ";" + "DATABASE=" + database + ";" + "UID=" + uid + ";" + "PASSWORD=" + password + ";";

    connection = new MySqlConnection(connectionString);
}

private bool OpenConnection()
{
    try
    {
        connection.Open();
        return true;
    }
    catch (MySqlException ex)
    {
        MessageBox.Show(ex.Message.ToString());
        return false;
    }
}

But there is an error:

Unable to connect to any of the specified MySQL hosts.

A: I would use the connection string settings in your web.config
<connectionStrings>
    <add name="strConnection" connectionString="Data Source=DATABASE_IP_OR_DOMAIN;userid=MYSQL_LOGIN;password=MYSQL_PASSWORD;database=DATABASE_NAME;Connection Lifetime=0;Connect Timeout=300;pooling='true';Max Pool Size=200" providerName="MySql.Data.MySqlClient"/>
</connectionStrings>

Then in your C# code you can reference your database connection like this
MySqlConnection objConnection = new MySqlConnection(ConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings["strConnection"].ConnectionString);
MySqlCommand cmd = default(MySqlCommand);
objConnection.Open();


text:
STERIPAK -Uncategorized-Federer $106 million salary winnings $100
Federer $106 million salary winnings $100
Chris Wondolowski 20.
Sure I would.
last year also includes 2006 Ford full-size Pickups , 2004 Chevrolet full-size Pickups , 2014 Toyota Camry , 2001 Dodge full-size Pickup , 2014 Toyota Corolla , 2015 Nissan Altima , 2002 Dodge Caravan and 2008 Chevrolet Impala .
Nicolas Lodeiro 16.
Pitchers Barry Zito, Tim Hudson, Mark Buehrle and A.J.
29 Chicago Bears at Green Bay Packers • Dec.
Now, as if he didn't have enough to do – and he already has plenty on his plate – Big Papi has signed a deal to represent Skechers in marketing and promotional efforts.
• MLB's Miami Marlins have hired Kim Ng to be their GM, making her the first woman to hold the position in MLB and likely for any of the major professional men's teams in North American sports.
That said, he also is a funny and fun person.
• The Baseball Hall of Fame has unveiled the list of former players eligible for the Class of 2021, to be voted on by members of the Baseball Writers Assn.
Javier Hernandez 3.
The broadcast team will include host Brian Anderson, analysts Trevor Immelman and Andre Iguodala and reporters Cheyenne Woods and Gary McCord.
Cristian Roldan 25.
Regarding the sale of tickets, Picciani said that the Rio Organizing Committee for the 2016 Games released figures showing that 70% of tickets had been sold.
Jonathan dos Santos 21.
He averaged https://www.amazon.com/dp/B086VCVWYJ 15 points and 8 rebounds last season in 25 minutes per game, and should see a significant uptick in minutes in his second year.
The network will air Capital One's , presented by Autotrader leading up to the event:
Deanna Nolan, Detroit Shock Most Popular WNBA Team Merchandise 1;
10, Reebok will donate one pair of JJ III's, up to $90 in retail value, to https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0866K5FWV Mission of Yahweh in Houston, an organization for women and children that offers shelter and programs focused on ending homelessness and dependency;
According to the https://www.amazon.com/dp/B086V78WYD NewZoo, a San Francisco-based firm that focuses on the category, brands are expected to spend $128 million on eSports sponsorships and another $197 million on advertising around video content in 2016.
6 NBC • Super Bowl LVII State Farm Stadium https://www.amazon.com/dp/B086ZKCCFK AZ Feb.
This is a huge day for our bid, Patrick Ryan, chairman and CEO of Chicago 2016, said in a statement.
11 during which Barry Bonds' No.


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Disney's Encanto: Weekend Morning Movie
Encanto tells the tale of an extraordinary family, the Madrigals, who live hidden in the mountains of Colombia, in a magical house, in a vibrant town, in a wondrous, charmed place called an Encanto. The magic of the Encanto has blessed every child in the family with a unique gift from super strength to the power to heal-every child except one, Mirabel. But when she discovers that the magic surrounding the Encanto is in danger, Mirabel decides that she, the only ordinary Madrigal, might just be her exceptional family's last hope.
Starring Stephanie Beatriz, John Leguizamo, Wilmer Valderrama
Original songs by Lin-Manuel Miranda
Every weekend at 10am - all tickets just £3 each. All films will be rated U or PG.
These screenings run with only 5-10 minutes of trailers and adverts, so please arrive at least 10 minutes early to ensure you get into the screen on time.
BIRTHDAY SHOUT-OUTS
Celebrating a birthday? We can wish your child a happy birthday on the big screen!
Simply email over an image and optional message (standard message says "Happy xth Birthday To...) to projection(at)domeonline.co.uk by the Wednesday before the screening. Photos should be as high a resolution as possible and in a portrait rectangular ratio (we will crop the images to fit).
You must specify in the email which date and film you are coming to see!


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CEO Letter Clients Impact Integrated Capital Financials Team
Being part of RSF Social Finance makes it possible to engage with money in a new way.
Working with RSF puts you at the center of a growing movement to create financial transactions that are direct, transparent, personal, and based on long-term relationships. Whether you are an investor, donor, or social entrepreneur, our purpose is to help deepen your connection with money and unlock the beneficial impact it holds for you and the world.
The big story in 2014: Our success in moving Integrated Capital to the center of what we do.
Background: In collaboration with two generous donors, we launched the RSF Local Initiatives Fund (LIF) in 2012 to meet the growing need for an alternative approach to financing regional food systems. Throughout our history, RSF has had to turn away many impactful organizations that could not yet benefit from a loan, but instead, needed grants or equity-like capital to spur their growth. We have learned that without more flexible capital available, particularly in the early stages of their enterprises, it is extremely difficult for entrepreneurs to build food systems that generate positive social, environmental, and economic change.
The RSF Local Initiatives Fund is a first-of-its-kind philanthropic fund that employs an Integrated Capital approach—one that focuses on the coordinated use of investments, loans, and grants to provide much-needed, flexible capital for entrepreneurs who are building regional food systems and resilient local economies. In the first two years of the LIF pilot, we deployed $2 million to 40 early-stage sustainable food and agriculture enterprises with a focus on technical assistance grants, loan guarantees, convertible notes/equity investments, and place-based Shared Gifting circles; those funds have leveraged well over $10 million in additional financing to date.
In 2014, eleven new donors joined the LIF community, contributing $4.25 million in additional funds. Our objective is for a majority of these funds to "recycle" and be placed into new social enterprises because we anticipate many of the loan guarantees will not be needed (the organizations will be successful in paying back their loans), and some of the equity investments will provide financial returns.
We are moving ahead with what we've learned so far, and have created a template for how these Integrated Capital Funds can be structured. The strong demand from both entrepreneurs and donors has affirmed our feeling that the time for Integrated Capital is now, and that this approach can be applied to other focus areas beyond regional food systems. Stay tuned!
Another significant development in 2014: Inspiration and insights we gained from our study of gift.
On the third Wednesday of each month, RSF staff members gather for a collegial ninety-minute "study group". Essentially, it is a book club that helps us go deeper into the nature of why we're doing what we do. For many years, we focused on Rudolf Steiner's lectures from 1922 on the topic of economics. Last year, we began with Lewis Hyde's The Gift.
The rich conversations from these monthly study groups inspired Kelley Buhles, RSF Director of Philanthropic Services, and her team to develop a new purpose statement for their work. The RSF Philanthropic Services purpose is: To cultivate giving as the source of economic life. Further, Kelley's team has stated their intention to "move the field of philanthropy towards a gift economy."
Of course trusted relationships are the foundation of any highly functioning gift economy. Our hypothesis: If each transaction can become a relationship, then it is possible for a gift economy based on love and mutual respect to emerge.
As idealistic and optimistic as this sounds, we feel there is a shift happening now to support it—from "ego" to "eco", as Otto Scharmer from MIT has described it. We are witnessing the growth of de-centralized networks, relative to centralized institutions, for example.
We hope you will contact us to share your vision of a gift economy.
Our thirtieth year marked a shift for us in how we conceive of our purpose, and our aspirations have become even more bold for the next generation in terms of what we believe is possible.
On behalf of everyone at RSF, I thank you for the many ways we experience your support and engagement.
Don Shaffer
Cris Stainbrook, Founding President, Indian Land Tenure Foundation
The Tanka Fund at the Indian Land Tenure Foundation has received two grants from RSF; $2,500 from the Seed Fund for the production of educational materials and $4,000 from the Windrose Fund for the general program activities.
The Indian Land Tenure Foundation (ILTF) was formed as the result of a four-year community-wide planning process initiated by the Northwest Area Foundation (NWAF) in the late 1990s. I had worked on Indian land issues for several years prior to joining NWAF and when the opportunity came to get back to Indian Country, I took it.
I brought with me an understanding of the scope and scale of the goal the community had set—returning all lands inside the original boundaries of every reservation and important sacred sites outside reservation boundaries to Indian ownership, management, and control. With a progressive board of directors and a creative staff, ILTF has become a hybrid community/operating foundation that makes grants, delivers direct services, invests in Indian Country, develops for-profit businesses, and provides information and technical assistance on land-related issues to individual Indian landowners, tribes, and the federal government.
ILTF invested in Native American Natural Foods (NANF), makers of the Tanka Bar and other buffalo products. Together, they committed to creating and managing the Tanka Fund, aimed at increasing the number of individual Indian buffalo ranchers through provision of technical and financial assistance. NANF's interest in the Tanka Fund is in increasing the amount of Indian-produced buffalo available for the production of NANF's products and getting more buffalo back into the diets of Indian people. ILTF's mission interest in the Tanka Fund relates to recovery of on-reservation land and the ability of individual Indian ranchers to operate viable ranching businesses. Along the way, we will work with partner funds to purchase lands and restore prairie ecosystems. In the end, we hope to return buffalo to a central feature of our Indian communities' diets, economies, and environments and in doing so, truly restore the homelands of our Native nations.
Collaboration with RSF offers the chance to work with funders who understand that it doesn't have to be just the economics or just the environment or just the health or just the culture, etc. These things are all part and parcel of our Indian communities and a weakness in any one area keeps us from being whole as a community and as individuals.
Borrower Story Pine Forest School	Return to Overview
Michael Heffernan, Principal and Executive Director, Pine Forest School
Pine Forest School received a $2.1 million construction loan to expand to its new location in the recently revitalized Fourth Street Corridor where it will be much more centrally located with close proximity to public transportation.
I have spent my career in education. While I was working as a teacher in Ann Arbor, Michigan, my wife and I became very interested in Waldorf education and I had an opportunity to study Waldorf education with two area Waldorf Schools.
When the opportunity came up for us to move to Arizona to help open Pine Forest School (PFS) in 1995, which was to use a methodology inspired by Waldorf education, we seized the moment and moved our family to Flagstaff. It's a great place to live and many families move here to attend PFS, which is one of five public charter schools in Arizona using a curriculum inspired by Waldorf principles.
Pine Forest School has had a long wait list for years, particularly for our preschool and kindergarten classes, and we have been unable to offer more spots at our current location due to space constraints. In addition, our existing site is not accessible by public transportation, which prevents many families from considering our school as an option for their children. Relocating to the Fourth Street Corridor opens up many exciting opportunities for PFS and the community we want to serve. The school will be in a more central location with a neighborhood-like setting where children can walk, bike, or take the bus to school. We are moving the younger grades to the new location first this fall, which will allow us to triple the size of our preschool class from 10 to 30 students and add 15 more spots to our kindergarten class!
When we started to consider this project more seriously a few years ago, we contacted RSF and four to five different banks. The vision and mission of RSF deeply resonated with our board, and we felt like the values that RSF stands for were ones we could completely appreciate. We met with RSF's lending team and fast forward to today, here we are moving into our new campus in August. It has been so wonderful to have a lender with such a personal touch and interest at the heart level for the work we do on a daily basis.
Borrower Story Madécasse	Return to Overview Grantee story Indian Land Tenure Foundation
Tim McCollum & Brett Beach, Co-Founders, Madécasse
In 2014, Madécasse received a $650,000 line of credit to support working capital needs. With the help of RSF's financing, Madécasse was able to double sales quickly and launch new products with Kroger and Whole Foods.
We fell in love with Madagascar when there in the Peace Corps from 1999 to 2001. While exploring ways to make a social impact in the country, we were focused on one of the ironies of African economies: the continent is rich in raw materials, but it rarely reaps the benefits. That's because foreign companies buy up Africa's resources and take them offshore for manufacturing, thus robbing the continent of 95 percent of the value chain. We created Madécasse to upend that model.
Madécasse (pronounced mah-day-KAHS) not only buys cocoa in Madagascar, but also produces and packages chocolate there. When we discovered that Madagascar has some of the last genetically pure cocoa on the planet, we realized that this was how we could make social impact. We knew that by making high-quality chocolate where the cocoa is grown, we could create jobs with above-market wages and provide a much-needed opportunity for locals to develop international business skills. This approach has provided incentives for several educated Malagasy to stay in their country, and created numerous jobs that pay a living wage. And we buy cocoa from 160–200 farmers, most of whom have seen their income jump 60 percent. Madécasse has also helped to preserve 140 hectares of cocoa-growing land, which might otherwise have been deforested for firewood or rice paddies, and partnered with Whole Foods to build a school and wells.
Last year, when we realized we needed additional funding to launch several new products with Kroger and Whole Foods, we approached several banks—and were declined. Not at RSF. They immediately understood our mission and the timing was right. We had met with RSF several years beforehand but at the time we were too small to qualify for a loan. With our sales approaching $4 million, we were at the right stage.
RSF understands the uniqueness of our business model and our funding needs, and they have introduced us to CEOs at larger Fair Trade food companies who were willing to share their experiences. These introductions connected us with talented people who have donated their time to help us avoid mistakes.
Return to Overview Borrower Story Pine Forest School
Investors & Donors
Amie Slate
Amie has a Social Investment Note with RSF's Social Investment Fund. She opened her account in 2002 to better align her savings with her values.
The common ways of working with money in our culture have always seemed off-kilter to me, though I never quite knew why. There was little enough evidence to suggest that another approach was possible. Yet, when I first read about RSF, I knew immediately that this was what I was looking for.
Standard monetary thinking in our culture is based on, and cultivates, pure self-interest. The ideas that lie at the root of this orientation seem incontrovertible to the world at large. But RSF is working with different concepts about life. From these concepts and values, money becomes a fruit of all that is good in human activity on earth. Through profoundly human relationships, money actually becomes a force for good and for brotherhood. RSF has shown in the most down-to-earth, capable, and steady way how these ideas can be put to work with the human being as the key factor. To be able to open an account and participate in such an endeavor was truly an answer to my searching.
The story behind the money I have invested at RSF is that I worked for many years creating visual effects for film in Los Angeles. My RSF account is my life savings. Now, as the film industry in Los Angeles is destabilizing, my savings are making it possible for me to go back to school to study non-profit management and education. That is the path I am following, though I'm not sure exactly where it is leading except to some interesting connections.
Last quarter's RSF report on excess liquidity came while I was studying modern monetary theory and ancient civilizations. In the ancient era of Mesopotamia, the disasters of the day were irregular catastrophic flooding of the Euphrates River. Their solution was large-scale irrigation, which made agriculture and social organization possible. Talk about managing excess liquidity through innovation! RSF is the right innovator for our time by building a human and sustainable basis for the flow of money. I am profoundly grateful that I get to be a part of it through my investments.
Donor Story Ariel Nessel	Return to Overview
Ariel Nessel
Ariel has a Donor Advised Fund at RSF. He opened the account in 2014 to build a relationship with RSF and to partner with a values-aligned, relationship-driven organization for his charitable giving.
I learned about RSF through Birju Pandya, one of RSF's Senior Advisors. He shared with me some of the creative ways that RSF approaches finance and monetary capital, and it made me want to build a bridge with a like-minded institution. There are very few in this world.
What really stood out to me about RSF's work is its commitment to direct, transparent relationships in financial transactions; for example in the quarterly Community Pricing Meetings. RSF connects people to the true value of what our resources can do in the world and puts a face and a name on where we put our money.
My business activities consist mainly of purchasing apartment buildings and giving them green renovations. At a certain point, I realized that I had sufficient financial resources, and it didn't make sense to work just to add more digits to my bank account balance. I decided instead to give away the profits from all my new deals. I've also chosen to invest some of these funds in socially responsible vehicles, and then donate those assets to my DAF at RSF after the investments mature. This allows me to grow my charitable giving while investing in line with my values.
I follow two paths with my giving: harm reduction and joy creation. In service of harm reduction, I give primarily to organizations supporting plant-based eating, which reduces harm to animals, to people, and to the environment. In service of joy creation, I primarily support the work of the Pollination Project, which works with people to ask how they can be of service and how they can express that in the world.
Now that I've learned more about RSF, it is my intention to deepen my relationship by opening a Social Investment Fund, which will allow me to participate in the direct lender-borrower relationship that inspired me initially.
Investor & Donor Story Mark Reed	Return to Overview Investor Story Amie Slate
Mark Reed
Mark opened a Social Investment Fund account at RSF in 2005 to provide capital for the loans RSF makes to social enterprises. In 2011, he opened a Donor Advised Fund and joined a small group that together made investments through a pilot investment portfolio to enterprises in need of alternative types of financing.
I got involved in community development finance after running an after school program and public housing project overseen by Mission Neighborhood Centers in the Mission district of San Francisco. It was located in the Army Street Projects; the place was dreary and run down. Nearby, the Bernal Heights Housing Corporation, a non-profit developer, built brand new, aesthetic, low-income housing.
It was a new idea to me that an independent entity could come into a neighborhood and create high quality housing for the people that were already there. It was inspiring to see how that worked and I was wondering, 'how'd they get the money to do that?' When you're working with people that don't have very much, it's easy to have a mindset that there's not a lot that's possible because nobody has any money. This was a formative experience for me.
I first came to RSF as an investor. I liked the format of an "arm's length" exchange, with a yield, that would deploy my assets in unique and exciting work. Then, I decided to open a Donor Advised Fund at RSF because I had a conviction that there are many good ideas out there that deserve investment, and many of those opportunities are not squarely market rate nor are they purely philanthropic. An example is Corbin Hill Farm. Corbin Hill is trying to sustainably cover its costs by selling products, but it's got a very firm mission to get those products to low income people. That's tougher to live through for an investor because you're probably losing the opportunity to make money in the short term. It's a great use of philanthropic investment capital.
I inherited my wealth from a family business that has always felt a strong connection to its employees and the communities where it works. It was intuitive for me to seek and expect a way to put my liquid assets to work with a similar sense of connectedness. That's what RSF represents, in my eyes.
Return to Overview Donor Story Ariel Nessel
RSF provides social entrepreneurs with catalytic financing to meet their capital needs; and, through a close relationship with us, our borrowers and grantees become part of a larger community working to transform the world and the way it works with money.
Borrower Story Madécasse
Borrower Story Pine Forest School
Grantee story Indian Land Tenure Foundation
RSF works with investors and donors to leverage their financial resources for positive social and ecological impact. Our clients value knowing where those resources are being put to work because with that knowledge, comes an opportunity to develop a deeper connection with money.
Investor Story Amie Slate
Donor Story Ariel Nessel
Investor & Donor Story Mark Reed
2014 Social Impact Assessment Highlights
RSF has developed an innovative approach to impact assessment that recognizes the unique character of our role as a transformative intermediary. We have gathered data indicating how our partners, investors, donors, and borrowers, and our staff and board, have been affected through their work with us. We now have five years of data for staff, four for the borrower audit, three years for donors and investors, and one year for our partner audit.
Integrated Capital Approach
Focus Area: Food & Agriculture
Integrated capital is a first-of-its-kind approach to funding social entrepreneurs who are solving complex social and environmental problems. RSF is uniquely positioned to employ this approach—coordinating the use of investments, loans, and grants to provide much-needed, flexible capital for entrepreneurs—because of our long history of financial innovations and experience with direct lending and philanthropy.
The following demonstrates in aggregate how we applied the integrated capital approach in 2014 across enterprises that are building regional food systems and resilient local economies. The Fair Food example in blue displays how the integrated capital approach was utilized to support one particular organization.
Integrated Capital in Action
In early 2014, RSF provided Fair Food a $100,000 line of credit for working capital. To guarantee the loan, Fair Food requested support from their community members and raised $50,000 in RSF Social Investment Fund accounts. RSF provided an additional $20,000 guarantee from the Local Initiatives Fund. The loan enabled Fair Food to do two things: maintain timely payments to farmers and producers in the long-term, and bridge immediate cash flow needs in the short-term. In September 2014, Fair Food participated in a food and agriculture-focused Shared Gifting Circle and was granted $9,900 for its work training and assisting farmers with Group GAP (Good Agricultural Practices) certification—a cooperative approach to farm food safety that offers an effective and cost efficient means of addressing the needs of small and mid-sized farms.
Overview Operating Funds Financial Highlights
2014 was characterized by growth in many areas: assets, staff, clients, and a deepening sense of the opportunities and importance of our position as a leader in social finance. For the past three years we have focused on building organizational capacity by rounding out all of our teams and providing focused client service, management, and leadership training. The investment in our staff and the value they provide to our clients became very evident in 2014. We increased total assets by 10% to $179 million and grew total revenue by 19% to $24 million. We continued to develop new client relationships and work with our existing clients in new and innovative ways. 1576 investors supported RSF and its social enterprise borrowers by providing $107 million in investment funds, an increase of 5% over 2013. We made $32 million in loans, an increase of 20% over 2013, and $10 million in grants to social and charitable enterprises working across our focus areas of Food & Agriculture, Education & the Arts, and Ecological Stewardship.
The improving economic climate was paralleled by an ever-increasing interest in leveraging financial resources for social and environmental benefit—especially of note in the impact investing world. At the same time, we continued to wrestle with our borrowers outgrowing our capacity to meet their financing needs even as we partnered with other financial organizations to support their success. We have been rethinking the social impact of risk management, as well as forging new links between our current lending and philanthropic programs to leverage our resources in impactful and innovative ways. The need for social finance continues to grow despite the uniquely low interest macroeconomic environment.
One challenge of these circumstances is excess liquidity in the banking system. As a result, most lenders have been forced to become investment managers looking to invest excess cash. We have experienced this with our Social Investment Fund (SIF) and there is a cost to RSF to hold excess SIF funds in this unusual environment, though we made significant progress with this issue in 2014. At the end of 2013, we determined that we needed to increase our base spread by 0.25% (to 4.25%) for the first time since 1991. The increase remained for 2014 as well, and was supported by both our investors and borrowers at each of the four quarterly pricing meetings. We seem to have reached a certain equilibrium between investors, RSF, and borrowers in the Social Investment Fund which will serve us well if and when the economy moves toward an inflationary period. We have maintained competitive rates for our borrowers and investors, and for RSF to remain financially sustainable. We will continue to review our base spread on a quarterly basis, as part of our pricing meeting discussions.
RSF operating revenue is generated from our lending and philanthropic services programs, and also from gifts received. Our existing cost structure will be stable going forward, subject to inflation increases, and we will work with our improved capacity to generate additional revenue, primarily from lending activity. We are focused on increasing our lending portfolio balance by retaining existing borrowers, adding new borrowers, and reducing volatility in the portfolio. We successfully piloted and grew the Local Initiatives Fund through which we implement our integrated capital approach. From the base of gifted funds we were able to leverage grants, loan guarantees, and direct investments to further the development of innovation in local food systems and economies. In 2014, our innovative approach continued to demonstrate leadership in the field of social finance.
Gary Schick
Cash and Cash Equivalents 27,970,438 28,163,515 20,542,469
Restricted Cash 287,983 366,752 429,899
Loans Receivable – Borrower Funds, net 82,775,079 71,906,582 78,443,790
Investments, at fair value 65,899,170 61,411,635 51,811,590
Prepaid Expenses and other Current Assets 2,038,293 1,365,098 994,351
Furniture and Equipment, net 84,109 116,501 94,408
Total Assets $179,055,072 $163,330,083 $152,316,507
Notes Payable – Investor Funds 107,151,996 101,806,773 89,664,637
Notes Payable – Other 3,554,552 0 1,999,702
Other Liabilities 319,447 111,580 242,508
Total Liabilities $111,025,995 $101,918,353 $91,906,847
Reserve Funds 8,788,470 8,674,700 7,855,399
Philanthropic Services Funds 58,492,423 52,942,615 52,849,887
Temporarily Restricted Pledges 875,000
Mark to Mark on Swap Contracts (126,816) (205,585) (295,626)
Total Net Assets $68,029,077 $61,411,730 $60,409,660
Total Liabilities and Net Assets $179,055,072 $163,330,083 $152,316,507
Consolidated Statement of Activities & Changes in net Assets
Revenue, Gains, and Other Support
Fee Income 536,036 879,111 839,036
Net Interest and Investment Income:
Interest Income – Borrower Funds 4,089,559 3,938,714 4,468,071
Investment Income, net 3,105,101 3,190,164 (678,576)
Gifts and Contributions 16,349,481 12,237,053 14,635,328
Total Revenue, Gains and Other Support $24,080,177 $20,245,042 $19,263,859
Grants made from Programs 9,944,273 11,994,989 8,381,981
Personnel Costs 4,681,954 4,410,916 3,956,968
Interest Expense – Investor Funds and Other 452,229 713,487 937,827
Loan Loss Provision, net 300,000 541,889 1,042,830
Other Projects and Program Expenses 153,180 (322,068) 488,077
Supporting Services:
Management and General 1,931,194 1,903,759 1,153,645
Total Expenses $17,462,830 $19,242,972 $15,961,328
Changes in Net Assets 6,617,347 1,002,070 3,302,531
Net Assets at the Beginning of the Year 61,411,730 60,409,660 57,107,129
Net Assets at the End of the Year $68,029,077 $61,411,730 $60,409,660
*2014 financials are unaudited
Overview Announcement Staff Board of Trustees Culture
RSF is committed to supporting our greatest internal resource—the people who work here. We focus on developing the individual capacities of staff and building a strong organizational culture in order to be of deep service to our clients and community.
Katrina Steffek Appointed as RSF's New Chief Operating Officer
In July 2014, RSF appointed Katrina Steffek as Chief Operating Officer. In this role she provides vision and guidance to the Client Development, Social Enterprise Lending Business Development, Philanthropic Services, and Marketing & Communications teams. Her position assures that RSF can continue to develop and deliver on its strategic priorities of client engagement, integrated capital, and field building across all programs.
With this promotion, Katrina became the first woman to hold a C-level position at RSF Social Finance. Since joining RSF in 2004, Katrina has played a key role in leading the annual operational planning and budgeting processes, recruiting and hiring current staff, designing RSF's innovative "people practices" and supporting organizational culture, and working closely with RSF's Board of Trustees. RSF is fortunate to have her serving in this important capacity. Her experience and knowledge of RSF will continue to deepen the collaboration between RSF's staff, board, clients, and partners as we work together to transform the way the world works with money.
"RSF's growth in depth and complexity as a leading social finance organization has also provided opportunities for staff members to take on more leadership responsibility," says RSF President & CEO Don Shaffer. "Katrina has more than demonstrated such leadership and will bring strategic coherence across programs as COO. This shift will also allow Gary Schick, CFO, to focus and deepen his work as the demands for RSF's innovative financing capacities grow."
Alex Haber
Program Manager, Philanthropic Services
Amy Bird
Lending Manager
Anna Lin-Campbell
Senior Administrative Associate, Executive Team
Carmen Poe
Loan Documentation Associate
Catherine Covington
Manager, Client Development
Cres Van Keulen
Dan Dao
Associate, Credit & Portfolio Management
Dave Shong
Lending Counsel
Ellie Lanphier
Program Associate, Philanthropic Services
Ghion Dessie
Jenn Raley Miller
Senior Human Resources Manager
Joe Avenatti
Senior Director, Investments
John Bloom
Vice President, Organizational Culture
Senior Associate, Information Systems
Kate Danaher
Katrina Steffek
Kelley Buhles
Director, Philanthropic Services
Lynne Hoey
Mark Herrera
Senior Manager, Client Development
Megan Mendenhall
Melinda Cheel
Senior Manager, Marketing & Communications
Meredith Storton
Client Development Associate
Natalia Morozova
Nina Maystrovich
Director, Loan Operations & Portfolio Management
Rebecca Newton
Director, Information Systems
Reed Mayfield
Senior Lending Associate
Steven Chai
Loan Servicing Associate
Tammy Childers
Loan Servicing Manager
Ted Levinson
Senior Director, Lending
Tim Green
Senior Counsel, Lending & Compliance
Val Esway
Vickie Yee
Director, Accounting
Jessica Rolph
Jocelyn Romero Demirbag
Mark Finser
Chair of the Board
Mark Censits
Mark Retzloff
Neil Blomquist
Rachael Flug
Ron Alston
Sara Ellis Conant
Siegfried Finser
Building RSF's Culture
Working with finance in a new way begins with working from the heart. How deeply we engage with our clients, our colleagues, and our partners in the field of social finance is our way of leading by example. To accomplish this we work very hard to develop a mindful and heartfelt culture with all staff.
RSF staff members dedicate 10% of their total work time to building our organizational culture and in 2014 spent a combined 7,488 hours on these activities. Our staff have come to understand the value this brings to their day-to-day experience and relationships.
Staff Meetings & Retreats: Weekly staff meetings allow staff to share announcements, team highlights, programmatic accomplishments, trainings, trip reports, and appreciations. Retreats offer staff the opportunity to reflect, dig deeper into RSF's work, engage in team building activities, and plan for the future.
Guest Speakers: RSF hosts guest speakers including current clients, partners, and thought leaders, to educate and inform staff about work that is relevant to the field of social finance.
Study Group: Monthly study groups for staff to read, reflect on, and discuss the writings of Rudolf Steiner and others who influence RSF's work.
Leadership & Personal Transformation Intensive: The intensive helps staff to develop the skills and capacities of observation, contemplative practice, and working with one's authentic voice as inner guide—all in service of stepping more fully into personal leadership in a new way.
Lunchtime Learning Sessions: Informational sessions on topics such financial planning and meeting facilitation training.
Inspired to join our community?
Social Investment Fund PRI Fund
Giving Programs Support RSF
Finance Your Enterprise
Social Enterprise Lending
Cover photo courtesy of Madécasse


Author(s): Eleanor C. Wicks, The Heart Hospital, 16-18 Westmoreland Street, London, W1G 8PH. Perry M. Elliott.
Arrhythmogenic right ventricular cardiomyopathy is an inherited cardiac muscle disease associated with sudden cardiac death, ventricular arrhythmias and cardiac failure. It is primarily a disease of the desmosome, with mutations in desmosomal protein genes identified in approximately 50% of affected individuals. Mutations result in fibrofatty replacement of cardiomyocytes, aneurysm formation and dilatation of the right and often the left ventricle. The clinical diagnosis of ARVC is based upon complex criteria that consider pathology, genetics and clinical presentation. This review describes the application of the revised criteria for ARVC in everyday practice and illustrates the requirement for continued modification to improve their sensitivity and specificity.
Keywords: Arrhythmogenic right ventricular cardiomyopathy/dysplasia, arrhythmias, sudden cardiac death, diagnosis, echocardiography, electrocardiography, genetics, magnetic resonance imaging.
Affiliation:The Heart Hospital, 16-18 Westmoreland Street, London, W1G 8PH.
Keywords:Arrhythmogenic right ventricular cardiomyopathy/dysplasia, arrhythmias, sudden cardiac death, diagnosis, echocardiography, electrocardiography, genetics, magnetic resonance imaging.
Abstract:Arrhythmogenic right ventricular cardiomyopathy is an inherited cardiac muscle disease associated with sudden cardiac death, ventricular arrhythmias and cardiac failure. It is primarily a disease of the desmosome, with mutations in desmosomal protein genes identified in approximately 50% of affected individuals. Mutations result in fibrofatty replacement of cardiomyocytes, aneurysm formation and dilatation of the right and often the left ventricle. The clinical diagnosis of ARVC is based upon complex criteria that consider pathology, genetics and clinical presentation. This review describes the application of the revised criteria for ARVC in everyday practice and illustrates the requirement for continued modification to improve their sensitivity and specificity.


I feel better about where this story is headed.
Oh, also, I mistyped in the blog about updates. The next comic page wouldn't have been Thurs. with the old update schedule anyway. It's behind though, so probably Friday night or Saturday midday.


text:
Arts+CultureNews
27March 2015
TextZing Tsjeng
Why Instagram censored this image of an artist on her period
Rupi Kaur's photograph exploring the taboo around menstruation was taken down by the platform not once, but twice
Rupi Kaur4
When Rupi Kaur decided to make the taboo around menstruation the theme of her university photography project, she probably didn't expect to become ground zero in Instagram's latest censorship war.
The Canadian poet and artist uploaded an image from the visual series to the photo-sharing platform. It depicts her fully clothed with a spot of blood between her legs and on the sheets. Instagram removed it – twice – claiming that her photo violated their terms of service.
"I decided to choose menstruation [as the theme of my project] to try and demystify the stigmas around it," Kaur told Dazed. "And so I developed the series with my sister, Prabh over a weekend. After it was created I decided to share it online, as a part of the project, to see how different medias would embrace/reject it."
While the picture got nothing but love on Tumblr, trolls swarmed her Instagram page, leaving comments like "come over here and let me make your vagina bleed" and "fuck your feminism". The picture was deleted by Instagram barely 24 hours after it went up.
"[Instagram] didn't give me any reason or nor did they contact me beforehand," Kaur explained. "I just went on my Instagram and i got a message that said it had been removed."
"I felt very upset because at this point it wasn't just a project for my school course anymore, it felt like a personal attack on my humanity. But I didn't complain to them directly. I posted the photo again because I wanted my audience to know what kind of censorship was happening here. And so I immediately posted again that same night, and again it was removed the following morning."
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Outraged, Kaur took to social media to call out the censorship. She wrote on Facebook: "Thank you Instagram for providing me with the exact response my work was created to critique... I will not apologize for not feeding the ego and pride of misogynist society that will have my body in underwear but not be okay with a small leak when your pages are filled with countless photos/accounts where women (so many who are underage) are objectified, pornified and treated less than human."
Instagram still refused to explain why the image had been removed. But after Kaur's original post detailing the event was liked by 53,000 people and shared over 12,000 times, the company quickly changed its mind.
It apologised to Kaur, writing in a message: "A member of our team accidentally removed something you posted on Instagram. This was a mistake, and we sincerely apologise for this error."
Another image from Rupi Kaur's visual seriesRupi Kaur
Kaur's original photo has now been restored on Instagram, but it's worth remembering that acts of artistic censorship on Instagram probably happen all the time, out of the public eye – and especially if they involve women's bodies.
But the huge awareness-raising campaign can only mean good things for Kaur. She sent us her proposal for the university project, indicating her ultimate aim for the image series: "By highlighting these distinct moments of the cycle that women go through I will be forcing viewers to look and tackle their fears head on. They will be forced to feel uncomfortable, in hopes that by the end of the visual experience they realize these are just regular normal processes that can't be helped, and they are just as normal as any other bodily process."
Mission accomplished.
You can view Kaur's full photo series and work on her website here.
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