text:
Genealogy databases containing census, military, Social Security death records,and much more.This database is accessible only at the library.
Auto Repair Source: Authoritative and up-to-date service and repair information for thousands of domestic and imported vehicles.
Available through BadgerLink.
BadgerLink
Provides access to over 4000 magazines and journal articles, many in full-text.
Britannica – Elementary – Home Use
Britannica – Elementary – Library Use
Level-appropriate reference articles, journals and magazines, the Web's Best Sites, multimedia, and curriculum content.
Britannica – Middle School – Home Use
Britannica – Middle School – Library Use
Britannica – High School – Home Use
Britannica – High School – Library Use
Business Source Premier – Home Use
Library Use
Consumer Health Complete – Home Use
Consumer Health Complete provides content covering all areas of health and wellness from mainstream medicine to complementary, holistic and integrated medicine.
Consumer Reports Online – Home Use
Consumer Reports Online – Library Use
Product reviews and Ratings on cars, appliances, electronics and more from Consumer Reports.
Cypress Resume
Cypress Resume is the online resume builder that lets you create professional-quality resumes in three quick and simple steps.
Formerly called netLibrary, this is an electronic book collection of nonfiction titles. Titles can be checked-out and downloaded, and read on your computer when you are not connected to the Internet, or can be transferred to your Adobe Digital Editions-compatible eBook Reader device.
Magazines, journals, newspapers, images and reference resources covering education, health, business, science,history and general areas of interest. Student resources found in Kids Search and Student Resource Center.
EBSCOhost – Home Use
EBSCOhost – Library Use
EBSCOhost (Espanol) – a su casa
EBSCOhost (Espanol) – en la biblioteca
Explora for Everyone
Explora for Elementary Schools
Explora for Middle & High Schools
Magazines, journals, newspapers, images and reference resources covering education, health, business, science, history and general areas of interest.
Flipster eMagazines – Home Use
Flipster offers digital access to your favorite magazines: HGTV Magazine, Sports Illustrated, Cosmopolitan, Time and many more! Simply sign in with your library card and browse online magazines by category. View in your browser or using the Flipster app for tablets.
Foundations in Wisconsin
This directory, profiles over 1300 grant making foundations in Wisconsin, offering contact information, total assets, grants paid, and areas of interest. This database is accessible only in Alice Baker Library.
Gale Courses
A wide range of highly interactive, instructor led courses that you can take entirely online through Gale Courses, also known as ed2go. As a library card holder in good standing, you are entitled to these courses at no cost. Courses run for six weeks and new sessions begin every month.
Genealogy databases.
For access from home, click here.
History Reference Center – Home Use
The History Reference Center offers full text from reference books, encyclopedias, periodicals, and non-fiction books. Also includes historical documents; biographies of historical figures; historical photos and maps; and more than 80 hours of historical video library link.
Federal tax forms.
Learning Express – Home Use
Learning Express – In Library Use
Learning Express Library offers practice tests, exercises, skill-building courses, and information needed to achieve results—at school, at work, or in life. The Computer Skills Learning Center includes interactive courses on MicroSoft Access, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, and Word. Looking to land a job? An entire Learning Center is dedicated to help job seekers. Practice tests include SAT and ACT.
Detailed, user-friendly repair guides for all manner of small engines. Available through Badgerlink.
Literary Reference Center – Home Use
Literary Reference Center contains full text of plot summaries, synopses and work overviews, articles/essays of literary criticism, author biographies, literary journals, book reviews, classic and contemporary poems, classic and contemporary short stories, author interviews, and much more.
Morningstar Investment Research Center – Home Use
Morningstar Investment Research Center – Library Use
Use Morningstar Investment Research Center to find stocks or mutual funds, research current or prospective holdings.
Historical newspapers archive from the 1700s – 2000s containing thousands of well-known regional, state, and small local newspapers in the United States and other countries.
Newspaper Source Plus – Home Use
Includes 1,570 full-text newspapers, providing more than 27 million full-text articles. In addition, the database features more than 583,100 television and radio news transcripts, videos & podcasts.
NovelList K-8 – Home Use
NoveList K-8 contains enhanced subject access for over 60,000 fiction titles aimed at the K-8 population. Available through BadgerLink.
Ebsco NoveList Plus – Home Use
NovelistPlus includes over 200,000 fiction and readable nonfiction titles, plus lists of award-winning books, book discussion guides, book talks, recommended reads and more.
Wisconsin's Digital Library through Overdrive is your connection to free library ebooks, audiobooks and videos. All you need is a valid library card and PIN number to get started. Read/listen via your computer or download material to a mobile device.
EASY TO FOLLOW GUIDES for Downloading eBooks and Audiobooks to Kindles, Nooks, Mobile Tablets and more! Click here.
Science Reference Center – In Library Use
Science Reference Center contains full text for hundreds of science encyclopedias, reference books, periodicals, and other sources.
TeachingBooks.net: Includes in-studio movies of authors and illustrators, audio excerpts of book readings, guides to thousands of titles and multimedia resources on children's and young adult literature. Available through BadgerLink.
Use at home
Use at library
Archive of Wisconsin Newspapers: Access to 235 daily and weekly Wisconsin newspapers. Content includes historical newspapers as well as recent papers. Includes Waukesha Freeman, Daily Jefferson County Union, Cambridge News, Lake Mills Leader, Oconomowoc Enterprise, Palmyra Enterprise, Waterloo Courier, Watertown Daily Times, and Whitewater Register. Available through BadgerLink.
Use in Library
WISCAT is Wisconsin's statewide database of the holdings of nearly 1200 state libraries.
Do you need to find materials that are not available in Waukesha County?
Wisconsin Department of Revenue
Wisconsin Department of Revenue forms.
Newspapers Source Plus: Includes 1,570 full-text newspapers, providing more than 27 million full-text articles. In addition, the database features more than 583,100 television and radio news transcripts, videos & podcasts. Available through BadgerLink.
Wisconsin State
Legal reference and links to Wisconsin Statutes and Wisconsin Administrative Code.
U.S. Newsstream: Search the most recent premium U.S. news content, as well as archives which stretch back into the 1980s, featuring newspapers, newswires, blogs, and news sites in active full-text format. Coverage: 1980 – current. Available through BadgerLink.
Use U.S. Newsstream
As part of a national network cooperating with the National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled (NLS), the Wisconsin Talking Book and Braille Library (WTBBL) provides audio books and brailled materials to persons, living in Wisconsin, who cannot see regular print or handle print materials. To access this site click here.
Hoopla: Digital media service that allows you to borrow movies, music, audiobooks, ebooks, comics and TV shows to enjoy on your computer, tablet, or phone – and even your TV!
Use Hoopla


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A Decade of Archives 7: 2006
This is the seventh in a series of posts leading up to this blog's tenth anniversary on August 18. In each post, I look back on one year, sometimes specifically and sometimes generally. All the posts can be found here.
K: There are times when I'd really love to live in your world.
M: It's full of existential crises, but not a lot of headaches.
K: I've already got the existential crises, so it might be a nice change.
M: There's a reason the first album that ever made a strong impression on me was Stop Making Sense.
K: So that's your aesthetic credo?
M: No, I don't have a credo. It's just something I thought of and so I said it. It's probably not even true.
—"A Conversation After Miami Vice"
2006 seems to me an ideal year of The Mumpsimus, not because all of the posts are high quality (they aren't!) but because the diversity of posts covers just about everything I think of as Mumpsimusian. In other years, the balance has been in one particular direction or another, but if anyone were to ask me to sum up the most dominant ideas and concerns of this blog, I'd tell them to roam around in the 2006 archives.
I'm not one for taxonomy, but it's occasionally useful, so let's taxonomize.
2006 began with a contest giveaway of Tim Pratt's first novel, The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl, and continued with at least a little something SFnal every month of the year. Some of the more substantial posts include:
A look at Thomas Disch's collection of essays On SF and his classic story "Descending".
A post on Alice Eleanor Jones's 1955 "housewife heroine" story "Created He Them".
Fredric Jameson praised John Brunner's novel Total Eclipse, so I had to check it out.
Two posts on sex and early science fiction: "Kinsey, Sturgeon, and 'The Sex Opposite'" and "The Gonads are the Very Citadels of Sex" (my single favorite title of all the posts I've written here).
Literary literature of literariness
Some of the writers I most deeply love are some of the highest of high Modernists: Kafka, Joyce, Faulkner, Woolf, Beckett. I don't write about them much, because the last thing the world needs is more writing about these writers. We should just read their works. Occasionally, though, in an attempt to convince people to read their works, I mention them.
2006 was Samuel Beckett's 100th birthday, so of course I had to take note of that auspicious day. (I had marked James Joyce's 124th birthday earlier in the year by quoting the perfect final paragraph of "The Dead", a paragraph I would merrily plagiarize for the ending of a story I wrote sometime around then, "The Lake", which was conceived, for reasons now long forgotten, as a mashup of Joyce and Ray Bradbury.)
I wrote a bit about Kafka and William Gass, a bit about the surrealist Claude Cahun, and a bit about the unclassifiable Bryher. I offered some notes on Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading, a book I was using in a high school class, and which many of the students ended up loving.
I wrote about contemporary writers who, if not necessarily in the high Modernist ilk, seemed to me to be doing worthwhile, interesting work, particularly Rupert Thompson's Divided Kingdom and George Ilsley's ManBug, both for the LitBlog Co-op, and both books that I still hold fond memories of. I also wrote about Laird Hunt's The Exquisite and Laird allowed me to post here his talk on "Nonrealist Fiction" from that year's AWP conference.
Also, I wrote about M.T. Anderson's extraordinary novel Octavian Nothing: Traitor to the Nation; vol. 1: The Pox Party.
Movies & A Play
I wrote about a few movies in 2006: Wong Kar-Wai's 2046, Brokeback Mountain, The New World, Breakfast on Pluto, Cemetery Man, Miami Vice, Werner Herzog's The White Diamond. I also wrote about a play script: Martin McDonagh's The Pillowman. Except for Cemetery Man, I've watched all of those movies again (sometimes many times) since I wrote about them. Miami Vice and The New World would be on any list I made of my top ten films of the century so far. The White Diamond continues to seem to me to be among Herzog's best documentaries. 2046 isn't my favorite of Wong's movies, but I love its grand messiness. I've only watched Brokeback Mountain once since it was in theatres -- I find it so overwhelmingly sad that it's rare I want to watch it, but I also think it's interesting in terms of identity and masculinity. And Breakfast on Pluto continues to be a delight, a movie that, unlike Brokeback Mountain but very much like Mike Leigh's great Happy-Go-Lucky, I can always turn to for a pick-me-up.
I went to Kenya in 2006. I'd long been interested in Africa and African literatures, particularly works from South Africa, Kenya, and Nigeria, but this was my first trip to the continent itself. While I was gone, I had my friend Njihia Mbitiru blog here, and he wrote a wonderful post on Binyavanga Wainaina's marvelous short story "Ships in High Transit".
I sometimes write about writing. After all, I sometimes write, and I sometimes teach writing, so necessarily the topic of writing comes up here. Sometimes I just quote smart people, as in "The Commonplace of Everyday Thought". Sometimes I go out on a limb and pretend to be able to impart wisdom, as in "How to Write Dialogue?" Sometimes I just get all absurdist because I find prescriptive and proscriptive rules annoying, so I create posts like "Rules for Writing".
2006 was a good year for short stories for me, and I published one that remains my most successful and acclaimed: "Blood", which appeared in One Story in October 2006, went on to be honorably mentioned in Best American Short Stories, Best American Mystery Stories, and The Pushcart Prize, and is currently under film option in Switzerland. I hardly mentioned it here at the time, though I did praise One Story, put up a quick link to an interview with me at their website, and mention receiving contributor's copies. The story is one of the few I've written which is not currently available online anywhere, though I'm told One Story is working on making back issue available as e-books, so it's possible it will be more easily accessible soon.
In 2006, I also published a few stories I continue to find of some interest, which is not at all always the case with my fiction. My odd, illustrated tale "The Art of Comedy" appeared at Web Conjunctions. "In Exile", an anti-heroic fantasy story, appeared in Mythic. (It's a story I still very much like, but few other people ever have. Oh well. We all have to have our weird personal favorites.) And a story I wrote with Jeffrey Ford, "Quitting Dreams", was published by Electric Velocipede. It used to be available online, but doesn't seem to be anymore. I might be able to do something about that later this month...
In 2006, I began working on writing a master's thesis at Dartmouth College on Samuel R. Delany. (Parts of that thesis became the introductions to Wesleyan University's Press's reissues of The Jewel-Hinged Jaw and Starboard Wine, as well as an essay on Equinox and Nova for Strange Horizons. The remaining parts of the thesis are too rough and stumbling for general consumption.) The most substantial post is one on the delightful novella Empire Star. I also noted that Chip was interviewed for The Minnesota Review, and I wrote a post called "Loving Delany" that is kind of weird to me now, but also interesting. I wrote it before I knew Chip and before I had totally immersed myself in his work in the way that I have since 2006. Now, there are certainly pieces of his writing that I'd say I love, and the man himself is a person I adore. But I do think one of the reasons I have continued to study his work is that I am able to maintain a certain (fascinated) distance from it. This is something Delany has in common with Coetzee for me — I would unhesitatingly say that they are my two favorite living writers in English, but that just means they are the two writers whose entire body of work I find myself most drawn to think through, writers who offer perspectives quite different from my own, but in a way that is especially productive for my thoughts. There's certainly great pleasure in falling head-over-heels in love with a piece of writing, but for me the longest-lasting relationships with texts don't come from that sort of love — indeed, I grow afraid to revisit such texts because I don't want to diminish the memory of the original, unbridled joy. The writers I return to continually, the writers whose work I write about again and again, are writers toward whom I can maintain fierce interest coupled with a certain emotional autonomy. To me, that's a higher type of respect than sheer, unconditional love.
I hate it when people die. To overcome my sadness at the death of people important to my perception of the world, I sometimes write about them. In 2006, I wrote about Octavia Butler (hadn't read much of her work at the time; now I have; she is one of the Greats), I asked Eric Schaller to write about Stanislaw Lem, I quoted various passages by Gilbert Sorrentino to mark his death, and I was shocked by the death of one of my favorite filmmakers, Robert Altman.
10 years 2006 Africa anniversary books Delany film Kenya metablog Movies Writing
Now on Letterboxd
Zulu by Caryl Férey
A Decade of Archives 10: 2003
Against Silence
Whither the Gay Blockbuster?
Watching the Dark: Zero Dark Thirty
"How Far to Englishman's Bay"
Cuffs, bars, guns, and Shakespeare
Spring Breakers and All
Nightmare Magazine issue 11

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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Kyric McGowan (born November 1, 1999) is an American football wide receiver for the Washington Commanders of the National Football League (NFL). He played college football at Northwestern and Georgia Tech and was signed by the Commanders as an undrafted free agent in .

Early life and education
McGowan was born on November 1, 1999, in Dalton, Georgia, where he grew up. He attended Dalton High School, where he played football, baseball, and track and field. As a senior in football, he was team captain and helped lead the team to the number one Georgia 6-A State ranking. He was an honorable mention all-state honoree and was first-team all-region and all-area.

A three-star recruit, McGowan committed to play college football at Northwestern. In 2017, he was one of 13 true freshmen to see regular season game action, appearing in 11 games and recording five receptions for 51 yards. As a sophomore in 2018, he recorded 16 catches for 283 yards and scored two touchdowns, while playing in all 13 games. As a junior, he was a starter in all nine games in which he appeared, and finished the year with 13 receptions for 102 yards, in addition to 177 rushing yards and one score. In 2020, he appeared in eight matches and made 34 receptions for 366 yards.

Near the end of the 2020 season, McGowan announced that he was going to transfer to Georgia Tech for a super senior season after all players were given an extra year of eligibility due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In his lone season at Georgia Tech, he played in 11 games, 10 as a starter, and tied for the team lead in receptions with 37, while placing third on the team with 467 yards and scoring seven touchdowns. His touchdown total led Georgia Tech and placed eighth in the conference. At the end of the year, he was named academic all-conference.

Professional career
McGowan signed with the Washington Commanders as an undrafted free agent in May 2022. He was waived on August 30, 2022, but re-signed to the practice squad the following day. He was activated from the practice squad for their game against the Green Bay Packers, appearing on 13 combined offensive and special team plays. He signed a reserve/future contract on January 9, 2023.

References

External links
 Washington Commanders bio
 Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets bio
 Northwestern Wildcats bio

1999 births
Living people
American football wide receivers
People from Dalton, Georgia
Northwestern Wildcats football players
Players of American football from Georgia (U.S. state)
Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets football players
Washington Commanders players

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


To bee or not to bee - that is the question. No room for hesitation, your audience will totally be impressed by this charming bee vector character illustrated in a flat cartoon design. This little flying fella is such a workaholic that he will not rest until he makes your project honey sweet.


For a lot of my clients, no kitchen design is complete without an island at its center. The island has become the icon of the modern kitchen—the 21st-century equivalent of the old-fashioned hearth. It's easy to understand why.
First, islands work. Because they can be accessed from all sides like the old kitchen table, they're ideal for a variety of kitchen tasks (see "Function First," below).
Third, islands help kitchens adjust to some of the big changes in American life in the past few decades. In June Cleaver's 1950s kitchen, all the appliances and cabinets were tacked to the walls of a closed-in room. Today's kitchens are not only open to other rooms but they also have to accommodate multiple cooks, kids doing homework, and even party guests.
The phrase I hear most often—true of my own house as well—is "Like it or not, everybody ends up in the kitchen." A well-designed island offers a place for people to congregate while at the same time separating those who are cooking and cleaning from those who are just hanging out.
When planning an island, here are the key points to consider.
Islands have to work to make them earn the space they occupy. Here are the four things islands can do and some design suggestions for each function.
•Clearance for the dishwasher door in the open position.
•Pull-out garbage and compost bins next to the sink.
•Easy access to dish and silverware storage.
•Storage for dish towels, dish soap, etc.
•Dual-height counters to hide dirty dishes from view.
•Refrigerator and cooktop close by.
•Access to compost bin or disposer.
•Prep sink and butcher-block counters are good additions.
•Heat-resistant countertop (stone, tile, metal) for hot pans.
•At least 18 inches of space on either side of cooktop or range.
•Overhead vent hood or downdraft fan (with second exhaust fan in ceiling).
•Raised eating area out of the range of spatters.
•Counter height/width designed for standard-size chairs/stools.
•Softly contoured edge profile is most comfortable for leaning on.
Shoehorning an island into a kitchen that's too small is a mistake. Here are the minimum clearances the author uses between islands and cabinets, as well as minimum sizes for islands with different uses. Remember, these are minimums; it's better to be more generous if your floor plan allows.
You can gain valuable real estate on both the "working" side and the "public" side of an island for storage, always a critical need in kitchens. On the public side, take advantage of shallow cabinets (installed back-to-back, with deeper cabinets facing the kitchen) for serving items—napkins, cutlery, platters, etc.—that don't need to be in the food prep area.
On the working side, make sure there's room to store the things that are needed for the activity the island supports, because an island's strong suit is also its biggest downfall: It's isolated. If it's a cooking island, then pots, pans, and spices should be at hand. The space under cooktops is great for deep drawers for pots and pans. (The temptation is to hang them from an expensive pot rack, which won't hold deeper pots or lids and gets in the way of your view.) If it's a prep island, don't forget storage for knives and small appliances like mixers and food processors (consider pop-ups — platforms that swing out from behind a door in the island base—or appliance garages for these), and convenient access to garbage and compost bins. If the island is going to be dedicated to cleanup, you'll need a place for dish towels, detergent, and brushes.
Undercounter storage space is limited on islands that include a sink and/or major appliances like a dishwasher or oven; you'll have to plan more carefully for those. The same is true for cooktops with downdraft fans, the machinery for which must be stored in the cabinet below. One way around this is to use the ends of the island. Round ends are perfect for lazy Susans, and almost any island end can accommodate open shelving or even a shallow cabinet.
Where you have activity, you need light. For islands, that means dedicated lighting—you can't count on ambient light to illuminate your workspace, and you don't have upper cabinets to hide task lights, as you do elsewhere in the kitchen.
As with most task lighting, you want the light to come straight down onto the island. The most common choice is recessed lighting, which is relatively easy if you have standard-height ceilings but trickier with high ceilings. If the distance from the countertop to the ceiling is greater than 6 feet, you'll need to use fixtures or bulbs specially designed to project light down rather than spread it out.
Another option is pendant lights, which hang from the ceiling. Be careful with these, though. It's easy to end up with them at the wrong height, which can either block your view from the island or blind you with a high-intensity bulb shining directly into your eyes. Whatever type of lighting you choose, make sure it can be dimmed when you don't need maximum illumination for working.
Life would be a lot easier if you could just ignore ventilating an island dedicated to cooking — but you can't. The most common scheme is to install a downdraft fan behind the cooktop; in some cooktops and ranges it's incorporated into the appliance. That solves the visual problem of an overhead hood messing up sight lines. But even the best downdraft fan is not up to the worst cooking odors. If you really want to lose the fried fish smell, include a second exhaust fan mounted in the ceiling. It will also help limit the amount of moisture condensing on the inside of your windows in the winter when you use a tall stockpot.
The other option is an overhead hood that extends up through the ceiling. Because it's exposed on all sides, it must be completely finished (read expensive), and it becomes a dominant element of the design. You can opt for manufactured versions, or get a hood custom-built and finished in just about any material. The big caution here: It's easy for the mass of a hood, placed low enough to be effective, to ruin the joy of having open space above the island.
Dual-height islands can create informal eating areas, hide dirty dishes, protect noncooks from splashes and splatters, and make kitchens more interesting. Here are the dimensions that make them most comfortable, useful, and pleasing.
The height of your island's eating area dictates the type of seating you'll have: A 28- to 30-inch-high counter works best with a chair; a standard-height 36-inch counter is served best by a low stool; and a 42- to 48-inch counter requires a bar stool.
Islands that mimic the rest of the kitchen, typically by using cabinets in the same finish and from the same manufacturer, don't call attention to themselves. Most islands in American kitchens use this scheme.


Application Form – Sport Max HK Co. Ltd.
Please fill in this form to submit the application and we will have Customer Service to contact you for confirmation.
© Copyright Sport Max HK Co. Ltd. 2016. All rights reserved.


Alan Preston was one of the first contemporary New Zealand jewellers to use Pacific influences and expression in his work, and the works he makes today continue to reflect his interest in Pacific adornment.
His knowledge and ability in the cutting of shell enables him to produce beautiful wearable art works, and places his work in the historical context of New Zealand contemporary jewellery.
Using gold and black lipped oyster shell, paua and vau (hibiscus bark fibre) Alan creates breastplates, bangles, necklaces, brooches and earrings. He uses the positive and negative aspects when cutting shell so that often the cut out brooch will also produce a bangle.
Alan Preston also produces works in Tahitian pearls, gold and silver stone and other media. His "Startled Kiwi" brooches have become a true New Zealand icon.
Made in Aotearoa - a retrospective exhibition of Alan's work was one of the inaugural exhibitions in June 2007 at TheNewDowse Art Museum in Lower Hutt.
Alan lives and works in Auckland. He is the inaugural recipient of the Deane Award for Decorative Arts.
A survey of Alan's life and work, Between Tides, by Damian Skinner was published in December 2008 by Godwit.
For more information about Alan, please contact us at the gallery.


After the post on Comstock the other day, I had the chance to review the transcript of the quarterly conference call and wanted to elaborate on a couple of points.
First, Comstock announced back in December that it was moving two operated rigs from the Eagle Ford to the Haynesville. Since then, natural gas prices have dropped and have been hovering in the upper-mid $2/MMBtu range. If gas prices continue to stay low, Comstock might drop one of those two rigs. It wouldn't happen until mid-year when the first lease expires and it wouldn't be until after the company has had a chance to evaluate its first run of drilling with the new completion methods.
"We have had much more time now to gather the data since we did the program in '09 and 2010 and we looked at the data in our Logansport wells and really haven't seen the benefit from the restricted choke program that we saw early. You take a really early time data and project it out and you think you see something and then you get three years of data and go back and look it again and you say, well, it really didn't work out that way. So, we saw very little benefit from the restricted break program and you see a significant benefit to rate of return by going unrestricted, so that's why we're going that way now."
I will be interested to see how that plays out. While Comstock has collected a lot of data from its own wells and from other public information, it has not had the chance to test the success of the enhanced drilling techniques in the Haynesville. Maybe they know something others don't know. Maybe it's something location-specific to the geology they are targeting. We will find out.
Comstock has targeted an all-in cost of $11-13 million to drill and complete the wells. On a sample $12 million job, it works out to around $4 million to drill and $8 million to complete.
Comstock's gas production is not hedged.
If oil gets back to $70 per barrel and gas stays flat, look for Comstock to switch gears and move its operations back to the Eagle Ford to hunt oil.


Headboard, footboard, slats and side rails are included with this stylish full-size, complete panel bed in bright seashell white.
A beautiful horizontal slat motif, charming shaped headboard and decorative moldings give a clean, finished look to this complete full-size panel bed in seashell white. Designed with a feminine touch for the Inspirations By Wendy Bellissimo collection.
Feminine style complete full-size panel bed.
Attractive molding and turned details.
A box spring is needed and not included.


Unholy RPG is a game where you play a human warrior set in an evil and unholy fantasy world. Train your stats, search for valuable weapons and items, maybe create your own items at the workshop, compete for #1 in the hall of fame in a variety of options, learn the market to earn money. Even create your own guild. That way you and your friends can wreak havoc upon this evil world. Become a part of the growing community, So why not register today for free.
LOVE this game. NO attention seekers and everyone is very nice, admin is great. New game so things are still being put into place but if you are looking for a great place to hang out, come join us.
Pretty good game. Very unique in a lot of aspects. If your tired of being forced into a mob or mafia this is a good game.


text:
People and minorities
"Levantine Countries"
Why this website?
Support Orient XXI
Lebanon. The Political Class Saved (provisionally?) by Covid-19
Even before the Covid-19 lockdown, Lebanon was in the grip of a severe economic, financial and social crisis. If the spread of the epidemic seems to be under control, it is to be expected, after the country's recovery, that there will be a tsunami of unemployment and poverty, the consequences of which will undoubtedly be disastrous.
Orient XXI Economy > Societies > Jim Muir > 22 April 2020 > 22 April 2020
Tripoli (Lebanon)
Tripoli, April 17, 2020. — Several hundred people protest, despite the country's coronavirus lockdown
Ibrahim Chalhoub/AFP
In these extraordinary times, Beirut probably looks like almost any other city in the world today. Streets that are normally jammed with hooting vehicles and jostling pedestrians are eerily deserted. A few masked citizens skirt one another warily like survivors from some great toxic disaster. Like everywhere, people are wondering how much their lives will have changed when the crisis has passed. But the Lebanese know for sure that they will be facing an even bigger crisis, and many fear that the country they know will be swept away when the dam is demolished.
The government formed by Hassan Diab in February following the resignation of Saad Hariri in October after the eruption of the nationwide "revolution" was swift to impose tight control measures when Covid-19 began to threaten. And the rules were enforced, somewhat of a novelty in a country with a laisser-faire attitude to life. The results have been medically encouraging. Despite the country's general openness to the world, at the time of writing there were only about 640 confirmed cases, rising at the rate of around a dozen a day, with 21 fatalities. The government in general was given high marks for its handling of the emergency, especially the ministry of health, which launched an effective public information campaign via mobile phone messaging.
Fingers were being crossed that the virus did not make its way into the country's refugee camps and "informal settlements" housing Palestinians since 1948 and Syrians since 2011. Conditions there would be perfect for a viral explosion. There are around 200,000 Palestinians remaining in squalid camps. There are estimated to be around 1.5 m Syrians in Lebanon, but only some 20% of them are in settlements, though the conditions of some of the others crowded in rented flats would be almost as challenging. NGOs administering the refugees have distributed hygiene kits and information leaflets, but have minimised site visits in order to reduce the chances of spreading contagion.
"It's a time bomb"
Behind the semblance of calm and control, the pressures are building up. When the virus struck and the lockdown was ordered, the country was already facing its worst economic crisis ever. Months before Covid-19 raised its head, the World Bank was warning that the proportion of Lebanese living below the poverty line would rise from 30% to 50% in 2020. The impact of the lockdown may make that forecast look optimistic.
"The real crisis will begin as soon as the corona screen is lifted", said a long-term Lebanese observer deeply involved in humanitarian relief. "The economy was already dying, corona will finish it off."
"There is poverty and a feeling of injustice", said an activist in Tripoli, the city in north Lebanon which has been one of the powerhouses of the October 17 "revolution". "People want work. So far, violence is low given the seriousness of the situation. Why are people not breaking into houses? It's a time bomb and I don't know when it will explode."
Amidst widespread predictions of social turbulence when the lockdown is lifted, the government has launched a programme to give the equivalent of around $250 in aid to the neediest Lebanese families to tide them through the closure. Not much of it seems to have reached the grassroots so far, and there are questions about how equitable the distribution will be, given that it is supposed to go through local municipalities and mayors, most of whom are tied to one or other of the sectarian political parties whose depredations are universally blamed for the economic crisis.
In some places, families linked to the parties have received several aid parcels, while those without affiliations have been given nothing. The central bank (Banque du Liban, BdL) also authorised the commercial banks to extend interest-free loans to companies in a bid to stave off unemployment, though some businesses were reluctant to take on more debt.
World Bank to the rescue
Aware of the obvious dangers, the World Bank has been working with the government to finalise a two-year, $500 m-dollar "social safety net" whereby an estimated 200,000 of the most vulnerable Lebanese families would be given the same kind of rechargeable credit cards that were given to Syrian refugees. But it may be a race against time. The scheme will take at least another two or three months to activate—it needs approval by the government, the World Bank Board, and finally the Lebanese parliament. And the funding is not yet fully agreed. Half is supposed to come from bilateral donors and half from World Bank soft loans.
Such a safety net will clearly be vital given the certainty of mass unemployment and inflation, with prices already soaring because of the de facto devaluation of the Lebanese currency by 50%. It will be all the more necessary if the government is able to press ahead with its proposed and long-awaited "Reform Program," the 41st draught of which was leaked on 7 April. While avowedly a Lebanese document, it was clearly constructed with the IMF and other international financial institutions in mind, because the country desperately needs a $10-$15 bn foreign cash injection over the next five years if its financial system is not to collapse completely. Reforms mean pain and the poor would be the first to feel it.
A recession of at least 14% in 2020
And pain is certainly on the way. The reform plan foresees for 2020 recession of at least 14% and inflation of 25%, and those figures may well be optimistic. "The Lebanese people are faced with several years of economic hardships", the plan comments drily, prescribing a five-year freeze on state salaries and reform of the generous pension schemes enjoyed by military and political retirees, among other drastic steps, including restructuring the banking sector and a "transitory exceptional contribution from large depositors"—in other words, a haircut for the big account holders, sparing the 90% of depositors with smaller holdings.
"Reform plans are never popular, but the process has to be gone through, the level of debt is so high", World Bank regional director Saroj Kumar Jha told Orient XXI. Lebanon's debts had reached a world-beating 176% of GDP by the end of 2019. "Poverty will go up, imports and exports down, jobs will be lost. What's the alternative? There has to be a credible, comprehensive, realistic plan. We welcome the plan that was leaked. It has all the elements of a good plan. It's a good initiative, to build consensus."
But if there was a near-consensus among the political class of sectarian leaders whose competitive greed and corruption have bankrupted the country, it was that the reform plan was monstrous and would not pass. Former Prime Minister Saad Hariri, the Sunni leader who resigned just 12 days into the October "revolution" and refused to designate participants in the new government, called it an "economic suicide plan". The speaker of Parliament, Shiite leader Nabih Berri, declared that "the appropriation of people's deposits shall not pass". President Michel Aoun and Samir Geagea of the Lebanese Forces party, both Maronite Christian leaders, were equally adamant in rejection, as was the Druze chief Walid Joumblatt.
Lebanese failures and debt restructuring
The BdL and the commercial banks, collectively discredited and blamed for the financial crisis for which ultimate responsibility lay with the voracious and incompetent politicians, were also dismayed at what they saw as a further blow to Lebanon once-sacrosanct spinal cord. Already, the government's decision, announced on 7 April, to default on its $1.2 bn Eurobond commitment—for the first time ever—had caused huge reputational damage to the banking sector, and that was followed by a decision to default and seek restructuring on all its external debts, amounting to some $31 bn.
The BdL was aghast at these "hard defaults": it had the cash, and had long planned to meet all its debt obligations. "Countries which default without having a convincing programme go into very, very bad experiences", said one senior official. The decision seems to have been taken for largely populist reasons, though dark suspicions were voiced by some activists that the Iranian-backed Shiite movement Hezbollah, which along with its allies nominated the "technocrat" ministers in the new government, wanted to cripple a financial system that has bowed to US pressures to curb its financial activities.
So the government found itself apparently up against a brick wall in formulating a reform plan without which IMF sign-off and desperately needed international funding would simply not happen. And with or without a plan, there was some question about whether the Americans would back financial aid to a government they regard as dominated by Hezbollah.
What about the revolution?
All of this underscores the fact that the sectarian powers-that-be who brought about the crisis through decades of corruption and heedless incompetence remain the powers-that-be. When the "revolution" erupted in October, it swiftly adopted the slogan "kullun yaani kullun"—everybody means everybody, you all have to go. But in the event, only Saad Hariri's government stood down. This left in place the Maronite President Michel Aoun, whose son-in-law Jebran Bassil, head of Aoun's Free Patriotic Movement, is the most influential string-puller in the land; and the parliament under Nabih Berri, for many the country's most toxic symbol of corruption. This ensured that the new "technocrat" government could achieve nothing without a near-consensus of all the sectarian chiefs, including Hariri, who remains the pre-eminent Sunni leader in the sectarian fray.
The early phases of the revolution—a massive and impressive, spontaneous across-the board uprising—put these leaders on the back foot. For the first time, they were being publicly named and called out. Red lines had been crossed. Nothing was sacred any more.
Even Hezbollah was bewildered. Fighting Israel was one thing, but facing angry masses whose slogans struck a chord among its own historically deprived constituency was something else. It badly damaged its image by allowing followers to go to the protest camp in downtown Beirut, along with fellow-Shiite adherents of Nabih Berri, to beat up demonstrators and set fire to their tents. Hezbollah was against the revolution because it threatened its controlling stake in the sectarian power-sharing deal. It saw it as part of a US-inspired regional pushback against Iranian influence. It wanted Hariri to stay. But he went.
But by the time the coronavirus lockdown came in March, the revolution had dwindled to a hard core. Its goals and grievances continued to command theoretical support from a broad section of the populace, but few now joined demonstrations which earlier had brought hundreds of thousands onto the streets in a joyful celebration of non-sectarian togetherness. By now, many were plunged into financial worry, spending hours queueing in banks to withdraw only a small amount of cash from their own accounts to meet their monthly bills. Others were put off by the mounting violence, with banks being attacked, and riot police resorting increasingly to tear gas, rubber bullets and water cannons to disperse protestors. Many also believed that "kullun yaani kullun" was unrealistic, and that the new government should at least be given a chance.
Powers that regroup
The lockdown provided the government with a political breathing space and an opportunity to show assertive, authoritative leadership. But for the "revolution" it was a disaster—and a godsend for the sectarian leaders it denounced.
The lockdown meant no more rallies, demonstrations, protests outside ministries or other targets, or physical planning meetings. The thawra (revolution) kept up a token presence at its downtown protest camp in Martyr's Square, Beirut, with well-spaced and sparsely occupied tents. But on the evening of 27 March the police moved in, with orders not to disband but to destroy the structures. On 7th April the army and intelligence did the same thing at midnight in Nour Square, the protest centre in Tripoli. "They're using the corona curfew as cover, said an activist. Nobody was moving anyway so I don't see how destroying the tents helps, there was no activity."
The actions implied that the powers-that-be had caught their breath and regrouped after being thrown off balance by the thawra. "It seems as though the political class has seen the coronavirus as a kind of saviour for them, said Nasser Yassin, acting director of the Issam Faris Institute at the American University of Beirut. The government are trying to act as technocrats, but those behind them, the people holding the strings of power, are acting as though it's business as usual."
And indeed, in many parts of the country, the established sectarian parties were out reasserting themselves after their temporary setback. Given the state's historic deficiencies, there was ample scope for the parties to fill the vacuum, organising and distributing aid, sanitising streets and facilities, setting up Covid clinics, etc. Hezbollah, well versed in the arts of winning hearts and minds, was very much to the fore, deploying a 25,000 strong volunteer force, doubtless with an eye to repairing the PR damage done by its followers' behaviour towards the protestors. In the Shouf mountains, Walid Joumblatt's Progressive Socialist Party resurged; he even spoke of buying tractors so the area could become self-sufficient.
A Christian TV station reported that no fewer than 84 Covid quarantine centres had been set up and financed by the political parties.
So the thawra will have a mountain to climb when the lockdown is finally lifted. Its activists have not been idle. They have been engaged in numerous on-line discussion and planning groups, and in some areas, like the southern city of Sidon, they have been able to help coordinate relief activities.
The momentum they have lost could be hugely boosted by a new wave of angry and impoverished unemployed when the restrictions end—or people might be so overwhelmed by the struggle for daily survival that they will have no time and energy for revolt.
"I fear the after will be terrible, said Ghassan Salhab, film-maker turned activist. But then, who foresaw the 17th of October?"
Jim Muir
Middle East correspondent, based in Beirut.
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text:
Homegrown Hate
Why White Nationalists and Militant Islamists Are Waging War against the United States
Sara Kamali
By Sara Kamali
CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title, 2022
To better understand current events and threats, this book outlines the organizations and beliefs of domestic terrorists in the United States and how to counter their attacks on American democracy.
Who are the American citizens—White nationalists and militant Islamists—perpetrating acts of terrorism against their own country? What are their grievances and why do they hate? How can this transnational peril be effectively addressed?
Homegrown Hate is a groundbreaking and deeply researched work that directly compares White nationalists and militant Islamists in the United States. In this timely book, scholar and holistic justice activist Sara Kamali examines these Americans' self-described beliefs, grievances, and rationales for violence, and details their organizational structures within a transnational context. She presents compelling insight into the most pressing threat to homeland security not only in the United States, but in nations across the globe: citizens who are targeting their homeland according to their respective narratives of victimhood. She also explains the hate behind the headlines and provides the tools to counter this hate from within, cogently offering hope in uncertain and divisive times. Innovative and engaging, this is an indispensable resource for all who cherish equity and justice in the United States and around the world.
Sara Kamali is the founder and director of Kamali Consulting, a firm that supports organizations to center equity and to create a culture of belonging in their policies, practices, and programs. She is also a holistic justice activist and a scholar of systemic inequities, White nationalism, and militant Islamism. Her scholarship and activism address how interlocking institutions of power oppress the many while maintaining systems of privilege for a select few.


text:
Q: Looking for an easy templating solution with ruby I am looking for a simple templating solution for ruby, i.e. something that will let me write php-like or jsp-like templates (html with embedded code tags), but in ruby.
jsp is no good for me, because most hosting services (I'm on dreamhost) don't support it on their default package, and it's a little cumbersome to set up.
php is easy to get up and running, but I hate the syntax, and I miss all the greatness of ruby.
erb seems to be close to what I'm looking for, but how do I set up the server (htaccess file etc) to serve it?
P.S. Please do not suggest Ruby On Rails. It's a huge overkill for what I'm doing.

A: You can find pretty neat tutorial about how to set up all the server stuff for serving html with eruby over here.

A: ERB is built into the language as part of its core.  In case you don't know what it is, it's the template engine behind Ruby on Rails that comes with Ruby.  (So don't attribute it to Rails.)  It is powerful enough for any purpose you have in mind.
I have used ERB on my own to make a script that took an RSS feed and output the articles into an html file.  So don't complain that it is heavyweight ... because it was slower to download the articles and parse them through the XML parser than it was to output the html.

A: if your webserver has rack you should check out waves. It's a minimal framework that will let you do erb or erubis templated with minimal overhead.

A: I would recommend Sinatra.rb with erb or haml.
for small sites hosting you can use heroku for free.

A: To add something to the first answer, if you have performance issues with ERB, then you can try Erubis.  It is a very fast and compatible version of ERB.

A: ok, I get it. Thanks.
ERB is the way to go for me. The configuration script for dreamhost is here, if you're interested:

A: ERB is the obvious choice, but I've grown to like Haml & Sass too. They're extremely terse.
If what you're looking for is a microframework, Sinatra is nice and easy, and supports multiple templating languages, including ERB and Haml.

A: Using template engines require you to write HTML code in an outer file, and if you are concerned that introducing a framework if overkill, then so is erb. It doesn't work as part of the program execution, but you need to run that against your erb file. You might want to look into the dom gem that I have developed. Using this gem, you can generate HTML strings directly within Ruby script like this:
require "dom"
["foo".dom(:span, class: "bold"), "bar"].dom(:div).dom(:body).dom(:html)
# => "
foobar
"

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


Welcome in Puerto Maldonado. Visit Inkaterra Butterfly House near the airport, conveniently check-in, and then reach the boarding wharf in only 15 minutes. Begin to experience the enchantment of the rainforest, as you take the 45-minute boat ride along the Madre de Dios River, to arrive at Inkaterra Reserva Amazonica lodge. After a short briefing, settle into your beautiful cabaña and enjoy your lunch in the dining room. Take a siesta, share a refreshing tea time and get ready for the afternoon excursion. After gathering with your Inkaterra Interpreter, choose from the 14 different excursions available at the Inkaterra lodge. On your first day, we recommend a guided walk along the Trail system, into the Inkaterra Reserva Amazonica natural area, where you will discover the Amazon Basin. This trail offers an excellent introduction to the forest environment, winding past impressive trees such as the staggeringly tall kapok, and the strangely beautiful strangler fig, offering excellent opportunities for birdwatching and observing exotic insects.
We also recommend on the first night our Twilight River excursion - a guided afternoon boat ride on the Madre de Dios river. Witness the transformation from a diurnal to a nocturnal world: animals and birds of the daytime give way to species specially adapted to the night. As you enjoy their paradise, you will learn about their habits, while you search for nightjars, owls, capybaras and up to three different caiman species. Enjoy dinner served in the main dining room from 7:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. After dinner, you may retire early to your own cabaña, or share your experience of life in the rainforest with other guests and interpreters, as you listen to the intriguing sounds of the jungle at night. Dinner starts at 7:30 p.m.
Rest in bed or rise early - the choice is yours. Breakfast begins at 5:30 a.m., for those who want to avoid the heat, and enjoy nature at its fullest. A full buffet breakfast is served from 5:30 a.m. to 9:30 a.m. This morning you may visit the Lake Sandoval excursion into the Tambopata National Reserve. Glide in a wooden canoe, across a beautiful, mirror-like oxbow lake that is home to the endangered giant river otter, as well as red howler monkeys, red-bellied macaws, anacondas, side-neck turtles and black caimans. Return to the Inkaterra lodge for lunch. After lunch, consider the remarkable Inkaterra Canopy Walkway. Ascending the first tower, 29 meters above the forest ground, you begin your encounter with the treetop realm. For more than a quarter of a mile, you will literally walk through the rainforest canopy on a suspension bridge network linking eight observation platforms. During this hour-and-a-half expedition, be on the lookout for colorful toucans, woodpeckers, trogons, monkeys, and sloths. If you wish you may extend your excursion and appreciate the sunset from one of the towers. The excursion finishes by returning to the lodge. Once at the lodge, enjoy the daily nature presentation in the Ecomedia Center. Dinner starts at 7:30 p.m.
Enjoy a trip to Gamitana Creek, located 25 minutes by boat from the Inkaterra lodge. For one and a half hours, explore the rainforest along the banks of a winding, dark-water creek that is home to many piranha, caiman, turtles and birds, until the Sanipanga landing point. Navigate your way back downstream, appreciating the abundant flora and fauna along the way. You will return to Gamitana Farm to do a short guided tour to see how local farmers raise fruits and vegetables. Return to the lodge for lunch. After lunch, enjoy the Native Experience excursion, located 25 minutes by boat from the lodge. Visit an indigenous Southeastern Amazon family, where you will learn about their customs, traditional daily living, basic hunting skills, farming and food preparation. You will also have the opportunity to produce banana flour that the local communities consume. Return to the lodge to enjoy lunch. Then consider the Rainforest by Night excursion through the Inkaterra Ecological Reserve at night for an approximately 2-hour excursion. Biological activity differs greatly between night and day in the Amazonian ecosystem. Venture into the forest and experience the mystery of the animal activity that awakens in the rainforest after dark, enhancing animal resources to create new adaptation mechanisms. Listen to nocturnal forest sounds and spot species that only emerge at night. Return to the lodge.
Enjoy the Hacienda Concepcion excursion, with over 200 different plant species, and learn about the uses and benefits of traditional topical flora. This is followed by a 30-minute canoe trip to look for turtles, sun grebes, nightjars and exotic herons. Return to the Inkaterra lodge for a lunch. After lunch, you may enjoy a visit to the Wetlands excursion, where you will have the opportunity to admire the transition of the forest eco system from dry to marshlands, and observe the various species of amphibians, reptiles, serpents, birds and mammals. On your final night, savour the tranquillity of the Inkaterra Reserva Amazonica lodge.
Mandatory field Please complete the following question to ensure delivery* Please calculate 2 plus 6. Please calculate 2 plus 6.


We're sharing with friends & teachers!
These are SO cute and they look delicious, too!! How creative!! Everyone will love them!
They look fantastic! Just wanna eat em up! Thank you for sharing.
Those are so darn cute and very clever.
Those look fun! I want to go and make some right now! Visiting from Running with Glitter link party!


He's off on an adventure!
The backside is mostly blue with circles, except for strips of coordinating fabrics on the top.
Love this quilt! Found your blog because we are contacts through flickr... your quilts are so inspiring!
Ah! I love this one!
I love this quilt! It's lovely!


text:
The Media will Try to Anoint Donald Trump Today
By Leon H. Wolf | Apr 26, 2016 9:00 AM ET
Today, voters from an area of the country that has no thought or hope of giving Republicans any electoral votes in November will go to the polls. They come from an area that has for years enacted failed economic policies that have caused the region to systematically hemorrhage both population and jobs to other areas of the country – areas like Texas. They come from an area of the country where loudmouthed liberalism is the order of the day.
And so, of course, they will vote for Donald Trump. I would expect that he will either sweep the delegates today or come very close to doing so. As you watch the returns roll in they are going to tell you that Trump has turned a corner, and he is ready to put this election away.
When you hear this rhetoric, use your brain and your critical thinking skills to evaluate whether what they are saying is true. If you had predicted, way back in February, that the GOP primary was going to still be competitive at the end of April, then you would have circled this day as a likely sweep for Donald Trump. The only thing that would have been surprising is if Trump did not clear 50% in any of the states that are voting today, given the geographic and cultural territory. Anything less would have been counted as a total loss. April 26th has always been a necessary day for Donald Trump.
So if and when he wins today, all he is doing is meeting expectations. He's really doing nothing more surprising than Cruz winning Texas (or Nebraska, which he will doubtless do next month) by a huge margin. Nothing at all has changed for Trump and there is no evidence that he has "righted the ship."
In fact, in polls outside of his backyard in the Northeast, he remains stubbornly stuck at 40% or below. He stands a good chance of winning some of these states because John Kasich is a delusional, narcissistic idiot, but 60% of the Republican party (at least) rejects the idea of Trump as the nominee, and that has not changed.
Nor has Trump's delegate math changed as a result of today. The key states remaining on this calendar are still Indiana and California. Trump can't win without getting about 150 of the 224 delegates that those two states have on offer, and they are both still very competitive.
So why will the media do this? Well, because they obviously want Trump to win. Trump has been a ratings bonanza for all the networks, including MSNBC and CNN. Having Trump around to talk about through November would probably lead to a record setting year for the networks. Cruz is less exciting (and less likely to lose to Hillary in historic fashion), so they have a direct pecuniary interest in Trump winning the nomination. And so they are going to help it happen in any way they can.
Expect John King to do everything but place a bejeweled crown on a wax dummy of Donald Trump tonight, and don't be deceived. They have done this every step of the way in this race. They did it after Trump won New Hampshire. They did it even more loudly after South Carolina and even more loudly than that after Nevada. They said the race was over after Super Tuesday. They said Trump had officially put the race away after Michigan. They said there's no way this would go to a contested convention after he won Florida.
At every step of the way, the media has tried to actively paint the narrative that the GOP primary is over and the voters should get in line behind Trump. The only problem is, GOP voters keep refusing to do so, and they will keep refusing to do so after today.
Maybe, after all is said and done, Trump will be able to parlay 40% of the GOP primary vote into 50% of the delegates and win the nomination – after all the system is "rigged," but in his favor. But we're a long way from that point and Trump has a lot of difficult work ahead if he's going to get there.
Reporter Who Joe Biden Yelled at Does Not Go Quietly Into the Night
The Word Is in: Americans Savage Biden's Press Conference and His New Elections Narrative
Joe Biden Proposes His Legislative 'Plan B' — and Joe Manchin Promptly Nukes It
Here's How We Know Glenn Youngkin Is Already Winning
HOT TAKES: Hillary Clinton and Others on Left Melt Down Over Losing Filibuster Vote
DC Comics Is Killing off the Justice League, and I Hope They Stay Dead This Time
Brandon Morse
Trump Issues Statement After a DA in Georgia Requests Grand Jury in Criminal Probe Against Him
Joe Biden and the Democrats Are Willingly Driving off a Cliff ... Splat
CNN Editor Announces Crack Team to 'Cover Misinformation'
Mike Miller
Media and Leftist Activists Furious Over Parents Now Pushing for 'Curriculum Transparency' In Schools
The Woke Mob Has Gotten to Mars, Incorporated—Hands off My M&Ms, You Fascists
Jennifer Oliver O'Connell
The Today Show Cornered Kamala Harris...And Things Quickly Went Off the Rails
Jake Tapper didn't let Jen Psaki spin Biden's way out of what he said about possibility of illegitimate midterm elections
Is America Heading for a Systems Collapse?
Copyright ©2022 RedState.com/Salem Media. All Rights Reserved.


Cincinnati - Michelle R. Maertz, 50, of Cincinnati, Ohio, passed on 10/2/2018 in Cincinnati. Michelle had bile duct cancer for 18 months prior to succumbing to the disease. She was born on 9/29/1968, in Cincinnati to Ann L. (Feuchter) Corsmeier and the late Richard C. Corsmeier. Michelle is survived by her mother, Ann L. Corsmeier of Eastgate; her son, Brandon Maertz of Reading; brother and sister-in-law, Richard J. and Kelleen M. Corsmeier of Anderson Township; her sister and brother-in-law, Patricia M. and Kevin K. Charleson of Palm Harbor, Florida; and several cousins, nieces, and nephews.
A life celebration will be held on 10/13 from 1-3 PM at Sharon Woods Hummingbird Hill Shelter. In lieu of flowers, contributions may be made to .
"Michelle, was a smart person who knw everything about electronics. Michelle had a difficult life. She suffered..."


It's long been known that, in certain concentrations, the compounds could be dangerous if they got into water or if people breathed dust or ate food that contained them. Tests showed they accumulated in the blood of chemical factory workers and residents living nearby, and studies linked some of the chemicals to cancers and birth defects.
Now two new analyses of drinking water data and the science used to analyze it make clear the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Defense have downplayed the public threat posed by these chemicals. Far more people have likely been exposed to dangerous levels of them than has previously been reported because contamination from them is more widespread than has ever been officially acknowledged.
Moreover, ProPublica has found, the government's understatement of the threat appears to be no accident.
The EPA and the Department of Defense calibrated water tests to exclude some harmful levels of contamination and only register especially high concentrations of chemicals, according to the vice president of one testing company. Several prominent scientists told ProPublica the DOD chose to use tests that would identify only a handful of chemicals rather than more advanced tests that the agencies' own scientists had helped develop which could potentially identify the presence of hundreds of additional compounds.
The first analysis, contained in an EPA contractor's PowerPoint presentation, shows that one chemical -- the PFAS most understood to cause harm -- is 24 times more prevalent in public drinking water than the EPA has reported. Based on this, the Environmental Working Group, an advocacy organization whose scientists have studied PFAS pollution, has estimated that as many as 110 million Americans are now at risk of being exposed to PFAS chemicals.
In the second analysis, ProPublica compared how the military checks for and measures PFAS-related contamination to what's identified by more advanced tests. We found that the military relied on tests which are not capable of detecting all the PFAS chemicals it believed to be present. Even then, it underreported its results, sharing only a small part if its data. We also found that the military's own research programs had retested several of those defense sites using more advanced testing technology and identified significantly more pollution than what the military reported to Congress.
Even before the troubling new information about PFAS chemicals emerged, the government had acknowledged problems relating to them were spreading. Past EPA water testing, however incomplete, identified drinking water contamination across 33 states that Harvard researchers estimated affected some 6 million people. The military suspected drinking water at more than 660 U.S. defense sites where firefighting foam was used could be contaminated; earlier this year, it announced it had confirmed contamination in 36 drinking water systems and in 90 groundwater sites on or near its facilities.
In written responses to questions, the EPA did not directly address whether it had understated contamination from PFAS chemicals. The agency said it had confidence in its current testing procedures and had set detection limits at appropriate levels. It also stated that it is taking steps towards regulating some PFAS compounds and registering them as "hazardous substances," a classification that triggers additional oversight under waste and pollution laws.
The Department of Defense also responded to questions in writing, defending its testing methods as the best available and calling it difficult to fully assess risks from PFAS because the EPA has not regulated these chemicals. A DOD spokeswoman said the Pentagon's research group has a program underway aimed at enhancing the test methods and detecting more PFAS compounds, but suggested that no alternatives were ready for use. She did not answer questions about why the agency reported contamination levels for only two chemicals to Congress when it would have had data on many more, stating only that the Pentagon "is committed to protecting human health and the environment."
"Widespread contamination may be harming the health of millions or even tens of millions of Americans and the government is intentionally covering up some of the evidence," said Erik Olson, a senior director for health, food and agriculture initiatives at the Natural Resources Defense Council, in an interview. The EPA and Defense Department "have done all they can to sort of drag their feet and avoid meaningful regulatory action in making significant investment in cleanups."
In May, a Politico report revealed that the EPA and the White House, along with the Defense Department, had pressured a division of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to withhold a health study expected to warn that people exposed to PFAS chemicals face greater health risks than were previously understood. That report was quietly released in mid-June and, indeed, estimated safe levels of exposure are seven to 10 times smaller than what the EPA has said.
Such a determination could spur stricter limits on exposure than the EPA appears to have considered. Paired with an emerging realization that testing by the EPA and DOD hasn't captured the true extent of contamination, the government could be forced to reconceive its approach to these compounds, said David Sedlak, the director of the Institute for Environmental Science and Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, who helped develop one of the most advanced commercial tests for PFAS substances.
"Not talking about it isn't going to make the problem go away," Sedlak said. "And because these compounds are forever -- they aren't going to degrade on their own -- eventually there is going to be a day of reckoning."
The PFAS compounds might not exist if weren't for a lab accident in 1938, when a frozen block of refrigerant turned into an extraordinarily slippery white, waxy mass. A decade later DuPont was manufacturing it as Teflon. 3M developed its own version, the molecularly similar PFOA in 1954, when a chemist inadvertently spilled a mixture of chemicals on her shoe and found the stain was impervious to soap or water. They called it Scotchgard.
These products work, in part, because the chemicals they contain are made up of some of the strongest and most resilient molecular bonds in existence, thanks to a unique structure that keeps them from breaking down. There are thousands of variations, all characterized by extremely strong daisy chains of carbon and fluorine molecules and differentiated mostly by the length of their "tails" -- the string of carbon molecules that can be anywhere from two to 14 units long.
In the mid-1970s, with the use of the chemicals proliferating, Dupont and 3M began privately testing the blood of their plant workers and others. The companies had grown increasingly concerned about the toxicity of PFAS compounds, learning that they "bio-accumulate" in food and people and that they could cause harm. But it wasn't until 2000, when 3M pulled Scotchgard from the market, that the EPA began to investigate PFAS's potential damage to human health and the environment, and soon after, that the blood tests became public.
At first, the EPA took steps that suggested it would quickly get to the bottom of the problem. Citing the spread of contaminants in water supplies in Minnesota and Ohio, in 2002 the agency launched a "priority review" of some PFAS compounds. It wrote then that exposure can "result in a variety of effects including developmental/reproductive toxicity, liver toxicity and cancer."
By 2003, the EPA launched its first draft risk assessment for PFOA, typically a substantial step towards establishing strict regulatory standards that limit a chemical's use and mandate its cleanup. When the draft was released in early 2005, it said that while the epidemiological evidence remained inconclusive, rats tested with PFOA were more likely to develop liver and pancreatic cancers, and there were worrisome signs that workers in plants that manufactured PFOA had a higher risk of dying of prostate cancer.
The question was then -- and remains today -- how much exposure to PFAS chemicals would make people seriously ill?
In 2009, the agency attempted an answer, issuing "provisional" voluntary guidelines for safe levels of the chemicals in drinking water. This meant that for the first time, the government offered a precise, scientific measure for how much of the compounds was too much. But it didn't mandate those limits, or create a regulation enforceable by law. And even those limits -- it would later become clear -- proved too loose.
Meanwhile, other instances of water contamination -- in Minnesota and Alabama -- heightened concerns. One study of 60,000 residents in West Virginia and Ohio exposed to high levels of PFOS and PFOA from a DuPont manufacturing plant and an Army airfield showed they had high rates of thyroid malfunction, testicular and kidney cancers and preeclampsia. The study was completed as part of a roughly $107 million settlement of a lawsuit against DuPont. Studies on animals also linked the chemicals to structural birth defects and dramatic changes in hormone levels.
In 2013, with concern rising over the ubiquity of PFAS compounds, the EPA decided it would test for some of the chemicals in public drinking water systems. The agency regulates chemicals under the Safe Drinking Water Act and adds new substances to the list based on tests showing they're widespread enough to pose a national threat. Listing a chemical for such testing is often a step toward creating enforceable regulations for it.
Yet even this standard remains voluntary and unenforceable. Until there's a true limit on the concentration of PFAS compounds allowable in drinking water, soil and groundwater -- and the classification of PFAS as a hazardous substance -- the EPA can't hold water utilities, companies or other polluters to account. It also can't compel the Department of Defense to adhere to the standard or clean up contamination.
This spring the Pentagon reported to Congress that 564 of the 2,445 off-base public and private drinking water systems that it had tested contained PFOS or PFOA above the EPA's advisory limits. It also announced that groundwater at 90 out of 410 military bases where it tested contained dangerous levels of these two chemicals. A staggering 61 percent of groundwater wells tested exceeded the EPA's threshold for safety, according to the presentation Maureen Sullivan, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for environment, safety and occupational health, gave to Congress in March. Attending to the problem, several news outlets have reported, would cost the Pentagon at least $2 billion.
In presenting its liabilities to Congress, the Defense Department took an important step in wrestling with a troublesome issue, much as the EPA had in undertaking national data collection.
To identify PFAS compounds in drinking water, the EPA uses a lab test called "Method 537," which separates microscopic molecules so they can be more easily seen. It's not the most sophisticated test available, but scientists have used it enough to give them -- and regulators -- extraordinary confidence in its results. This is the test the EPA chose in 2013, when it directed its labs across the country to test water samples to evaluate emerging PFAS chemical contaminants to help determine whether they should be regulated.
The agency also set detection thresholds for the six PFAS compounds included as much as 16 times higher than what the test was sensitive enough to detect -- so high that only the most extreme cases of contamination were reflected in the federal drinking water dataset.
Indeed, according to a recent presentation by Andrew Eaton, vice president of Eurofins Eaton Analytical, the largest drinking water test lab in the country, which handled testing of more than 10,000 samples from 1,100 public water systems -- about 30 percent of the EPA's water samples overall -- vast amounts of detected contamination was ignored by design.
Through its federal water quality reporting, the EPA has said publicly that PFOA was detected in just 1 percent of water samples across the nation. But when Eaton recently went back and reanalyzed the data the EPA didn't want, he found PFOA was in nearly 24 percent of the samples his company tested.
Another chemical, PFBS, is considered a sentinel because in situations where it is a component of contamination also containing PFAS and PFOA, it travels further and faster in water and shows up months or years ahead in places where PFOA or PFOS are ultimately detected. The EPA has reported that PFBS was found in less than one-tenth of 1 percent of all its water samples -- not even one in 100. Eaton's re-analysis detected the sentinel chemical in nearly one out of eight of samples.
"It basically says the plume is on its way, that's the leading indicator... PFOS and PFOA is likely on the way to your house," said Jennifer Field, a professor of environmental and molecular toxicology at Oregon State University. Field is a leading expert on test methods for PFAS compounds. The Department of Defense helps fund her research. "If you are on the hydrological flow path it's a matter of time and distance."
But the government is far from certain that lower levels of PFAS compounds than those that count as contamination by the EPA's definition aren't health threats. The EPA has repeatedly lowered how much exposure to PFAS compounds it considers acceptable. And when the CDC finally released its health analysis for PFAS compounds in June, it called for limits of one compound to be 10 times lower than the EPA's current threshold, and another to be seven times lower. Such a standard would be more in line with some states, which already have tougher limits in place. New Jersey, for example, has set its exposure limit for PFOA at roughly one-fifth of what the EPA prescribes.
The EPA's testing protocol -- which only certifies the 537 test, with its limitations -- also hasn't kept up with fast-evolving science around PFAS chemicals. Researchers have identified new forms of the chemicals and, potentially, new dangers from these variants.
In 2016, Field and several other researchers -- as part of a Defense Department research program examining water samples from 15 defense sites where firefighting foam was used (researchers declined to name them) -- identified 40 new families of PFAS chemicals, consisting of some 240 compounds they'd never seen before.
"You're starting to get this idea that more complex chemistry was used at these sites than was picked up in the tests, and that's kind of the punchline," said Field, of the firefighting foam sites in particular. "There is more mass down there, there are more species and in higher concentrations than what you see."
Method 537, as a rule, is not capable of detecting these additional compounds. Yet when the Pentagon launched its own water testing program at U.S. bases in 2016, it chose to use the EPA's outdated testing process, even though a test capable of detecting the presence of dozens of additional PFAS compounds was available. That test, called the Top Assay, was even developed with Defense Department support.
Instead, the Defense Department relied exclusively on the 537 test and then, when it reported its findings to Congress this past March, it offered only the results for PFOS and PFOA and not the other 12 compounds the test process identifies, because that's what Congress had asked for. Indeed, according to one memorandum from the Department of the Navy, the armed services were explicitly instructed to withhold their extra data -- at least for the time being -- because it was "not being used to make decisions."
"If you were going to spend $200 million testing DoD sites across the country, wouldn't you want to test for all of the chemicals you know you used?" asked Jane Williams, executive director of California Communities Against Toxics, who has been active on chemical cleanup issues at Defense sites.
"It's almost like a deliberate thing, where you're going to tell people their water is safe to drink, and you know that you have a gap in your testing and you know that you haven't found all of the chemicals in the water."
Many of the variants with shorter "tails" -- or shorter chains of molecules than the test methods can detect -- "are likely to break through systems designed to capture" them, Field and others wrote in a 2017 paper published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology. They are also more likely to elude the water treatment methods the EPA and the Department of Defense are using to clean water identified as contaminated.
When Field retested water samples at several U.S. defense sites using the most advanced testing available, she found that many of these obscure additional chemicals were nearly uniformly present -- and in huge numbers. At one site, for example, where PFOS was detected at 78,000 parts per trillion, another obscure PFAS compound was present at nearly three times that concentration.
Based on Eaton's higher-resolution detection rates, scientists at the Environmental Working Group, an advocacy organization that researches the dangers of PFAS compounds, have generated new estimates of contamination linked to the chemicals.


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Q: c# - byte array to png file In my code I load a 32-bit-depth PNG file (1 pixel 4 byte) into a byte array like this:
//Pick a file
OpenFileDialog FileValaszto = new OpenFileDialog();
FileValaszto.ShowDialog();

//Create BitmapImage
BeolvasottKep = new BitmapImage(new Uri(FileValaszto.FileName));

//Create byte array
stride = BeolvasottKep.PixelWidth * 4;
int size = BeolvasottKep.PixelHeight * stride;
MyPixelsArray = new byte[size];
BeolvasottKep.CopyPixels(pixels, stride, 0);

After I finish manipulating the pixels in "MyPixelsArray" I  would like to save its data back into a new PNG image file. Only I can't...
I spent more than a day searching the net but there is no solution to this exact problem. Any help would be highly appreciated. Thanks!

A: Not tested but might work.
Try it i hope it help you
 //Pick a file
        OpenFileDialog FileValaszto = new OpenFileDialog();
         FileValaszto .ShowDialog();

        //Create BitmapImage
        BeolvasottKep = new BitmapImage(new Uri(FileValaszto.FileName));

        //Create byte array
        stride = BeolvasottKep.PixelWidth * 4;
        int size = BeolvasottKep.PixelHeight * stride;

        MemoryStream ms = new System.IO.MemoryStream(stride);
        Image i = Image.FromStream(ms);


text:
Home > News Room
U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights Withdraws 2011 Dear Colleague Letter: Highlights for Campus Leaders
Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos announced Sept. 22 that she was rescinding the 2011 and 2014 guidelines issued by the Obama administration on Title IX campus sexual assault, issuing a Dear Colleague letter and Q&A document to help institutions navigate the issue while a review is conducted. The Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights (OCR) will use the Q&A to assess institutions' compliance with Title IX while a formal rulemaking process is launched to develop a new policy that "responds to the concerns of stakeholders and that aligns with the purpose of Title IX to achieve fair access to educational benefits."
This issue brief unpacks the interim guidance and what it means for campuses and students. Some expectations remain the same, while others have been changed to give institutions more flexibility. For example, the Q&A grants institutions the ability to set their own standards for misconduct findings, to pursue informal resolutions such as mediation and to establish an appeals process for disciplinary sanctions. It also includes language dealing with protections for accused students.
/news-room/Documents/Issue-Brief-Title-IX-QA-2017.pdf U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights Withdraws 2011 Dear Colleague Letter: Highlights for Campus Leaders (PDF) 1 MB
Q&A on Campus Sexual Misconduct
Department of Education Office for Civil Rights (Sept. 22, 2017)
More on Law and the Courts
Statement by ACE President Ted Mitchell on Ninth Circuit DACA Ruling
We applaud the unanimous decision keeping the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy in force. However, it also underscores the unacceptable legal and political limbo in which Dreamers continue to find themselves.
ACE Encourages 2018 Voter Participation, Updates Campus Political Campaign Activities Issue Brief
With the 2018 midterm elections in full swing, download a copy of ACE's updated issue brief on political campaign activities on campus, and read about the efforts of the Your Vote, Your Voice initiative.
ACE Calls on Senate to Ask Kavanaugh About Race-conscious Admissions Policies
As the Senate Judiciary Committee began its consideration of Brett Kavanaugh to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, ACE President Ted Mitchell called on the committee to query the nominee about his views on the issue.
ACE, Higher Education Groups Submit Brief in Support of Restoring Net Neutrality Rules
ACE and 19 other higher education associations submitted a brief Aug. 27 to the Federal Communications Commission in a case that seeks to reverse the FCC's repeal of net neutrality.
ACE, Other Higher Education Groups Submit Brief Opposing Challenge to "Harvard Model" of Admissions
ACE and 36 other higher education groups have submitted an amicus brief opposing the challenge to the "Harvard model" of holistic admissions review and the use of race as one factor in reviewing applicants.


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Bentham Science Publishers is a company that publishes scientific, technical, and medical journals and e-books. It publishes over 100 subscription-based academic journals and around 40 open access journals.

As of 2021, 40 Bentham Science journals have received JCR impact factors, and they are a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics. Bentham Open, its open access division, has received criticism for questionable peer-review practices as well as invitation spam; it was listed as a "potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open access publisher" in Jeffrey Beall's list of predatory publishers, before the list went defunct.

History
Bentham was incorporated in 1994 by Atta-ur-Rahman and his friend Matthew Honan as a private business entity at the Sharjah Airport International Free Trade Zone in the United Arab Emirates. An investigative profile from Sujag notes the publisher to have operated out of Pakistan — for the first six years, from the premises of International Center for Chemical and Biological Sciences and then, from private residential blocks at Karachi — in reality, under the banner of a tax-exempt proxy firm, owned by Rahman's sons.

As of 2022, the publisher, publishes more than 100 subscription-based journals, indexed in Scopus, Chemical Abstracts, MEDLINE, EMBASE, etc. Bentham Open Access published more than 150 peer-reviewed, free-to-view online journals under Bentham Open, which has since reduced to a roster of 39 open access journals.

Criticism of Bentham Open
Bentham Open journals claim to employ peer review; however, a fake paper that was generated using SCIgen in 2009 was accepted for publication, though it was never officially published and the publisher has since contended that the acceptance was a play-along to catch the author. The author, a graduate student at Cornell University, was motivated into the submission after being bombarded with unsolicited invitations to publish in Bentham's journals and offers to serve in their editorial boards for topics beyond his expertise. In consequence, some editors quit the collaboration with Bentham. In 2013, the now-discontinued The Open Bioactive Compounds Journal again accepted a blatantly bogus paper submitted as part of the Who's Afraid of Peer Review? sting.

Bentham Open has been accused of spamming scientists to become members of the editorial boards of its journals since 2008. In a 2017 study of invitation spam by publishers, Bentham Open was noted to be a habitual offender.

In 2009, the Bentham Open Science journal The Open Chemical Physics Journal had published a study contending dust from the World Trade Center attacks contained "active nanothermite", a well known 9/11 conspiracy theory. Following publication, the journal's editor-in-chief Marie-Paule Pileni claimed the article to have been published without their authorization, and resigned. In a July 2009 review of Bentham Open for The Charleston Advisor, Jeffrey Beall accused Bentham Open of exploiting the Open Access model to make quick money, and rejected that they employed any meaningful peer-review. Beall had since added Bentham Open to his list of "Potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers".

See also
 Category: Bentham Science Publishers academic journals

Notes

References

External links

Book publishing companies of the United Arab Emirates
Academic publishing companies
Publishing companies established in 1994
Mass media in Sharjah (city)
Companies based in the Emirate of Sharjah
Open access publishers

Emirati companies established in 1994
Bentham Open academic journals


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