text:
The Significance of Structural Design in Civil Engineering
Civil engineering is one of the most sought-after engineering disciplines, and perhaps one of the oldest ones too. The potential of infrastructure developments and advancements has led to the sizeable demand for civil engineers across all subsectors. As a result, civil engineering is emerging as a promising professional discipline with a wide range of applications and opportunities available across different industrial sectors.
Civil engineers basically deal with the designing, construction, and maintenance of the physical structures and built environments. One particular aspect of civil engineering that holds significant value when it comes to determining the potential of a civil engineer is structural design. The more a civil engineer is sound with the concept of structural design, the more impactful will be the physical built and sustainability of the structures built by him/her.
What is Structural Design?
Structural designing is fundamental to the civil engineering discipline as it deals directly with the structural strength and integrity of buildings or structures. It includes planning, designing, and structural analysis of large structures like skyscrapers, bridges, tunnels, towers, and even off-shore structures like oil rigs. Civil engineers are required to use structural design to ensure the safety and stability of the structure before they add in some creative designs into a structure for visual appeal.
Structural designing is based on applying the principles of physical laws and mathematics into building structures. With empirical research and analysis, civil engineers have to use structural design to analyze the structural design of the building and the strength of different materials used to determine its safety and economical specifications. Structural design ensures that the planned structure will be sufficiently strong enough to bear its intended load and withstand possible environmental conditions.
Ensures Build & Design of the Structure
Structural designing provide all the crucial information about foundations, walls, floors, roof types, steep beams, material quality, and more to ensure that the structure is built to be safe and sound. It is essential for civil engineers to work with design aesthetics and build structures that can withstand its loads and pressures without leading to any mishaps. Indeed, building a structure without considering the structural design of it always remains under the high risk of collapsing under its own weight or due to the environmental pressures. Structural designing is hence crucial to construction projects as it directly impacts the safety and durability of the structures.
Provides Analysis of the Structure
Civil engineers are required to perform a thorough and detailed analysis of the structure with respect to the principles of the structural design. This helps to ensure that the new structure meets up all the necessary safety criteria and design codes. Moreover, when an in-depth analysis of the structure is made, it helps bring out information about the load that the building is capable of bearing, the wind velocity it can withstand, and the overall utility and capability of the building under different environmental conditions. For instance, knowing the accurate estimation of the magnitude of tremors a skyscraper can withstand and the safe weight maximums on bridges can surely help prevent any catastrophes in future.
Helps Ensure Efficient Material Management
Structural designing is also interlinked with ensuring the efficient use of construction materials and resources. Civil engineers have to determine the optimal material grade to ensure safety and operational use of the structures without any unnecessary costs.
Structural designing is all-important for engineers to assist them at all phases of their projects. With rigorous structural testing, evaluations, and inspections, structural designing plays a significant role in satisfying the operational safety, practical functioning, and budgetary resources of the project while ensuring that all structural elements remain stable and safe.
We, at the Indore Institute of Science & Technology, one among the top civil engineering colleges in MP, understand the crucial role that structural designing and other such facets play in deciding the overall capabilities of engineers in the modern world. We hence offer engineering programs where high focus is laid on not only imparting the students with industry-centric academic learning but also ample hands-on experience and practical exposure. We, at IIST, aim at producing such skilled engineers for the nation who can be relied upon for delivering nothing less than the best. The state-of-the-art infrastructure and highly experienced faculty at IIST help to ensure that we bring out the most technically competent engineers for the future.


Underinsured Struggle To Afford Health Care Improved medicines and treatments are increasing life expectancy for people with cystic fibrosis. But insurance doesn't pay for enough of those medical costs, leaving families affected by the disease to struggle with the financial consequences.
Cailyn Fowler, 13, leads a pretty normal life. But it all depends on her getting good health care.
Jason and Stacy Hunnewell are struggling to pay the bills for treating their 8-year-old daughter Abbie (center) for cystic fibrosis.
You may know cystic fibrosis as a killer of teens and young adults. But that isn't necessarily true anymore, as medicines and treatments keep improving and life expectancy keeps going up. The average life span for someone with the disease is now into the late 30s.
But even though 99 percent of people with cystic fibrosis have health insurance, more and more of them are "underinsured." They have insurance, but it doesn't pay for enough of those expensive treatments.
That's a big worry for Cindy and Randy Fowler of South Paris, Maine. Their 13-year-old daughter Cailyn has cystic fibrosis.
A defective gene causes her body to make very thick and sticky mucus that clogs her lungs. Cailyn takes about eight medications, vitamins and supplements a day and spends a couple of hours each day getting treatment that involves putting on a bulky vibrating vest that shakes her lungs and loosens the mucus.
Even with all that daily care, Cailyn gets lung infections that require hospital stays. She just spent three weeks in the hospital getting treatment — after spending a week in the hospital in August right before school began.
And yet Cailyn goes to school, she has a cute boyfriend, and she just finished her first year on the cross-country team. She is proud that at every meet, although she didn't finish near the top, she improved her time over each previous contest. She leads a pretty normal life. It all depends on her getting good health care.
Randy Fowler gets health insurance through his maintenance job at a propane gas company. That insurance pays for most of Cailyn's care. But every year, the Fowlers say, there's still as much as $50,000 or more that's not covered by the family's health insurance — bills for Cailyn's medications, medical equipment and multiple trips to the hospital.
The state Medicaid program pays for all of that — at least for now.
Cailyn's disease makes it hard for her to digest food and to keep her weight up, so now she has a 1-inch piece of clear plastic tubing on her stomach. It's a feeding tube called a G-tube.
At night, while Cailyn sleeps, she gets nutritional supplements through that tube. But that tube pokes out of her shirts. She has to take extra care of it, to make sure the skin around it doesn't get infected. The feeding tube makes her self-conscious, and it's Cailyn's goal to get rid of it by next summer.
But before the tube can come out, Cailyn needs to gain five pounds. That's no easy task. She lost some weight during her recent hospitalization. If she can regain it, it will be a good sign — because it will mean she's healthy.
Still, for kids with disabilities and their families, things are rarely that simple.
In Cailyn's case, needing that feeding tube qualifies her for health insurance through Maine's Medicaid program. If the tube comes out, Cailyn's mother knows her family will almost certainly lose that supplemental insurance.
"When she does have it taken out, I don't know what it will do with her health insurance," Cindy Fowler says. "I mean, of course we want her to have it taken out. I mean, that's the main thing. But we'll just have to deal with that, you know, when it comes to that. We'll do what we have to do."
Not long ago, people with cystic fibrosis died young. Now, with new drugs and treatments, the average life expectancy has doubled to 37, and it keeps growing.
"We have patients living into their 50s and 60s at this point," says Bob Beall, president and chief executive officer of the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. "You know, this should be a time of great hopefulness in terms of the patients and their future."
But a new survey by Beall's group finds that, all over the country, patients are struggling to pay for that life-extending health care. Some report that their insurers used to charge a small co-pay for each prescription — maybe around $25. Now they make the patient pay for 20 percent of a drug's entire cost. Some of the newer cystic fibrosis medications cost $20,000 or $30,000 a year.
One result is that 1 in 4 patients say they skip some of those drugs, and 1 of 5 say they skip some of their important visits to the doctor.
Beall says many others go deep into debt.
"We've heard of people having to sell their houses," he says. "People go into bankruptcy, people borrow from relatives, they take two jobs. They're desperate. They love their children; they want to make sure they're providing the best care. You do what you have to do to make sure that they can afford the drugs."
Another Maine family is also struggling with insurance problems. For the Hunnewells, in Hollis, Maine, it started with what should have been good news: Jason Hunnewell got promoted to foreman. He works for a company installing natural gas lines.
But he was surprised when he found out that put him over the income limit for the state health program that supplemented the insurance he got from his job. That state insurance paid for a lot of his daughter's expensive care.
Now the family's medical bills are piling up, and Jason worries that he's about to lose the house where he lives with his wife and four children, including Abbie, who has cystic fibrosis. Last year, 8-year-old Abbie spent more time in the hospital and sick at home than she did in school.
"Abbie's condition hasn't changed," notes Jason Hunnewell, "but they're saying, because we're willing to put in the extra time or work, that now because of their guidelines we no longer qualify. What do you do? Do you pull back on work? Do you tell them at work: 'Don't give me a raise. Don't give me a promotion, 'cause it's going to hurt me'?"
A sympathetic caseworker told Jason and his wife Stacy they could get back that supplemental coverage — if Jason worked less, or if Stacy stopped the part-time billing work she does for a nearby hospital.
Or, there was one other really desperate thing they could do.
"She said if we were to divorce," Stacy says — "Separate, legally separate," Jason adds, "so they could go on Stacy's income alone. So some oddball things, you know. Just, just not advice you'd expect to hear. You're always told growing up: 'Do your best. Work hard.' And we're being told the opposite. You know, it was just very disheartening to hear."
Stacy Hunnewell has lovingly decorated the family's house in country-style decor, with barn stars, primitive art and stencils on the walls with words like "hope" and "dreams."
Stacy says the family was able to buy the house two years ago because, at that time, Abbie had just gotten on the state's supplemental health insurance program. It helped cover Abbie's 13 expensive medications, her hospitalizations and other health care.
"You know, having that program allowed us to say, 'OK, now we go out on our own and purchase our own home, we have that security now, we can do that,' " Stacy says. "And, you know, when we bought this home, we bought it thinking we would have that program. We got this house like everybody does — you have a budget, you know, a family budget, you have to live within your budget. And everything was good."
But shortly after they moved in, Jason got his promotion, and because he was earning more, Abbie no longer qualified for the supplemental state insurance. Because the Hunnewells are paying thousands of dollars in medical bills now, they're behind on their mortgage. They worry that they're about to get kicked out of the house, so Jason takes on extra work. Some weeks, he works 70 or 80 hours putting down pipe. He doesn't get to see Abbie much these days.
This year, when the ground freezes in Maine, he'll probably leave his family behind and go to a state where he can find work installing natural gas lines.
It's the only chance he has to hold on to this house for his family and to make sure he can keep his daughter healthy.
In some versions of this story, we mistakenly said that a "G-tube" was used for "intravenous feeding." In fact, such a tube is used for delivering food directly into the stomach.


text:
Cash award for cancer detection device
A device using light to detect, diagnose and monitor cancer is one step closer, with news of a cash award for two St Andrews scientists.
The Scottish Enterprise funding will help develop 'ground- breaking' research into technology which will produce more effective screening techniques for the disease.
Dr Mike MacDonald and Professor Kishan Dholakia have been awarded the funding through the Proof of Concept Fund, which supports leading-edge technologies in Scotland's academic institutions, and aims to help export innovation from the lab into ground-breaking Scottish businesses.
The researchers, both from the University's School of Physics and Astronomy, have been awarded funding to develop a piece of equipment which can be used to sort and analyse biological matter, such as cells, in a non- invasive way using optical sorting techniques. The optical sorting machine has the potential to be a low-cost 'lab on a chip' device for use in hospitals. Its wide range of ability – potentially from the macro-molecular scale upwards – is not presently available from any existing machine in the marketplace.
They said: "Non-invasive techniques for analysing biological matter are key to clinicians and bio-researchers, yet the availability of such equipment providing this ability remains well below demand."
"The technology we are developing has a relatively simple approach which will allow it to be integrated into existing laboratory equipment – such as microscopes – found in any research or large hospital laboratory."
The St Andrews' scientists are part of 26 commercially-focused research projects benefiting from £4.6m of support from the internationally-acclaimed Proof of Concept Fund backed by Scottish Enterprise and the Scottish Executive.
The awards, announced yesterday (Thursday 1st July 2004) by Deputy Enterprise Minister Lewis Macdonald, will be shared between nine universities, a college of art, a research institute and a NHS establishment.
On announcing the awards, Deputy Enterprise Minister Lewis Macdonald said: "Today is a celebration of Scottish innovation at its very best. The global potential of each of today's winning projects is huge and the economic returns we can expect as a nation are significant.
For further information about the projects, please contact Professor Kishan Dholakia on 01334 463184 or [email protected] or Dr Mike MacDonald on 01334 463165 or [email protected]
About The Proof of Concept Fund
The Proof of Concept Fund was launched by the Scottish Executive and implemented by Scottish Enterprise in 1999 as a three year 11m fund – but its success led to this being extended to a 33m fund over six years.
It awards grants to assist the pre- commercialisation of leading-edge technologies emerging from Scotland's universities, research institutes and NHS Trusts. Its goal is to help researchers take their ideas and inventions out of the lab and develop them commercially into ground-breaking Scottish businesses.
Further information on the projects supported by the Fund can be found at http://scottish- enterprise.com/proofofconceptfund
Issued by Beattie Media On behalf of the University of St Andrews Contact Gayle Cook on 01334 467227, mobile 07900 050103, or email [email protected] Ref: POC 2004 Awards release 010704.doc View the latest University news at http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk
cancer Kishan Dholakia Mike MacDonald optical physics School of Physics and Astronomy

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
Report on the Hilton Shark Bay
Sameh | 10 February، 2020 | Sharm el-Sheikh hotels
The shark bay Hilton hotel is considered one of the best 4-star hotels in Sharm El Sheikh. It features bright views of the Red Sea beach, and is surrounded by young palm trees from all places.
It is one of the best hotels that suit the family and family atmosphere, as there are water sports and fun activities, and it is considered one of the finest hotels in the Hilton Sharm El-Sheikh chain.
In the report we will get to know the Hilton Sharks Bay Hotel and start with the most important features that the hotel offers.
The most important features offered by the Hilton Shark Bay
The hotel offers a variety of modern and modern rooms that keep pace with the features of progress and sophistication, and each room has private air conditioning, flat-screen TV and refrigerator.
The hotel has 7 outdoor swimming pools with large spaces for relaxing on chairs under beach umbrellas. It features a gym equipped with the latest fitness equipment, with the ability to body massage in the massage room.
The hotel also includes a lot of sports and recreational games such as: table tennis, tennis ball, golf, billiards, surfing, diving, snorkeling and darts.
You can also enjoy family and entertainment services, the hotel includes mini games for children, and you can safely leave your babies because of the babysitting service.
The Shark Bay Hilton Hotel offers about 13 restaurants and bars serving delicious food and exotic cocktail juices, and includes types of food: African, American, Italian, German, Russian, local, and Asian.
Rooms available inside the Shark's Bay Hilton hotel
King room with an area of 28 square meters.
Twin room area of 28 square meters.
King Plus room, 28 square meters.
Twin room Plus area of 28 square meters.
Family room with garden view, 34 sq m.
Family room with pool or sea view 34 sq.m.
Deluxe twin room area of 41 square meters.
Deluxe King Room 41 sq.m.
Family suite with an area of 53 square meters.
Deluxe Family Room with Pool View 60 sq.m. Diamond Suite with Pool View 64 m².
Prices for Hilton Shark Bay
Hilton Sharks Bay hotel rates start at $ 93 and vary according to the season's rooms and suites for two.
As for prices outside the tourist season, prices start from $ 49.
Summary of Arab visitor ratings
The Shark Bay Hilton hotel has received good reviews on amenities, location, cleanliness, staff, facilities.
The Hilton Sharks Sharm El Sheikh website
The hotel is located in Shark Bay in Sharm El Sheikh, and it is characterized by the presence of many wonderful tourist places near it where there is Soho Square 700 meters, and Sharm El Sheikh Airport is 5 km, and the Ghibli Racecourse is 7 km.
You can also reach Naba Tourist Bay at a distance of 11 km, and you can shop at the Mercato Mall, which is 15 km away. There is also the wonderful Naama Bay 17 km, which is one of the most beautiful attractions in Sharm El Sheikh.
For more details about the Hilton Sharks Bay Sharm El Sheikh hotel and the price offers you can read in Bukking.
Articles you may also be interested in in Sharm El-Sheikh:
Sharm El Sheikh hotels: the best 5 residential areas in Sharm El Sheikh
List of 10 of the best recommended Sharm El Sheikh hotels
The best 4 hotel apartments in Sharm El Sheikh
5 best tourist places in Sharm El Sheikh
The best 4 of Sharm El Sheikh restaurants
The 6 best Sharm El Sheikh markets are recommended
Report on the Hilton Dreams Sharm El-Sheikh hotel
Report on the Hilton Sharm El-Sheikh waterfalls


text:
Q: How to format Scrapy exports I currently store my scraped data in an item to export in .csv format:
item = HobbyItem()
item['name'] = user.getName()
item['hobbies'] = user.getHobbies()

The item is declared as follows:
name = scrapy.Field()
hobbies = scrapy.Field()

This results in a csv format as follows:
name,hobbies
Tim, [['tennis'],['squash'],['music']]
Bob, [['rugby'],['polo']]

What I actually want is this:
name,hobbies
Tim, 'tennis'
Tim, 'squash'
Tim, 'music'
Bob, 'rugby'
Bob, 'polo'

Does anybody know how I can modify the output to achieve this?

A: You did not let enough code or explanation for me to be sure that this will work in your particular code but
Try :
for element in user.getHobbies():
    item['name'] = user.getName()
    item['hobbies'] = element[0]

This will create 1 element per hobby, using getName multiple times

A: name = user.getName()
for hobby in user.getHobbies():
    if hobby:
        item = HobbyItem()
        item['name'] = name
        item['hobbies'] = hobby[0]
        yield item

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


LOCAL MSP Christine Grahame has joined the fight to save a three-dimensional map of Scotland, created in the Borders by Polish students in the 1970s.
Conceived by Polish military commander, General Stanislaw Maczek and his wartime companions as a permanent reminder of their part in Scotland's defence and of the country's wartime hospitality to Polish forces engaged in the fight against Hitler's Third Reich, the map is in the grounds of the Barony Castle Hotel at Eddleston.
During the war, the hotel was used as a headquarters and later a staff training college for the exiled Polish forces.
Known as the Great Polish Map of Scotland, it was designed and built as a labour of love by a group of young Polish geographers from the Jagellionian University of Krakow in 1975.
This was at the request of General Maczek, former wartime commander of the 1st Armoured Division, and local war veteran, Jan Tomasik.
The map was set in a sea of real water and fitted with water springs to allow the rivers to actually flow.
However, over the intervening decades it fell into a state of dereliction. Then, four years ago, the Mapa Scotland group was set up to raise funds to restore the map to its former glory.
Ms Grahame this week informed TheSouthern she was writing to the Polish Consular General and the Parliament's Cabinet Secretary for Culture and External Affairs to try to secure support for Mapa Scotland.
"I feel it has a significant role to play in our history given that it commemorates the vital role of Polish forces in the defence of Scotland in the Second World War, and is a token of thanks to the people of Scotland for the hospitality and friendship given to the Polish people, not only during the war years but also in the decades that followed," explained Ms Grahame.
She believes the 50m x 40m, three-dimensional outdoor 1:10,000 scale model of Scotland, is a remarkable example of topographic landscape modelling of a complete country, with a design and layout involving pioneering survey and construction techniques with dynamic representation of major river basins using a gravity-driven water supply.
And she has lodged a motion in the Scottish Parliament urging support for the project.
Estate agents Savills is selling the Barony Castle Hotel on behalf of owners, De Vere, for just under £2million. Savills confirmed to TheSouthern this week that the property was now under offer.
Keith Burns, secretary of Mapa Scotland, says the project cannot proceed until the property is sold. "However, we're confident that once the new owners – whoever they may be – are announced, they will recognise the commercial spin-off benefits from our project," Mr Burns told us this week.
He welcomed the support of Ms Grahame, and added that Mapa Scotland's formal application to have the map listed had now been lodged with Historic Scotland.
Mapa Scotland is looking to raise £50,000 to pay for the materials which the physical restoration of the map will require, while the group itself has all the labour and technical skills needed within its own ranks.
And Mr Burns says another application, this time to the Guinness Book of Records, could soon be in the offing.
He said: "A young Polish couple from Dundee recently brought an item of interest that was on the web to my attention.
"It was a claim from a group in Canada that a three-dimensional model of British Columbia was the largest three-dimensional model in the world.
"However, the actual land mass area of the Polish map is actually 2.83 times larger than the Canadian model.


text:
module Codec
  # is there a better way to do this?
  class StringWriter

    def initialize(str = "")
      @str = str
    end

    def write(value)
      @str << value
    end

    def to_s()
      return @str
    end

  end

  class EOF < Exception; end

  class Encoder

    def initialize(out)
      @out = out
      @bits = []
    end

    attr_reader(:out)

    def encode(type, value)
      send(type, value)
    end

    def bit(b)
      @bits << b
    end

    def octet(o)
      pack("C", o)
    end

    def short(s)
      pack("n", s)
    end

    def long(l)
      pack("N", l)
    end

    def longlong(l)
      lower = l & 0xffffffff
      upper = (l & ~0xffffffff) >> 32
      long(upper)
      long(lower)
    end

    def timestamp(l)
      longlong(l)
    end

    def shortstr(s)
      # shortstr is actually octetstr
      octet(s.length)
      write(s)
    end

    def longstr(s)
      case s
      when Hash
        table(s)
      else
        long(s.length)
        write(s)
      end
    end

    def table(t)
      t = {} if t.nil?
      enc = Encoder.new(StringWriter.new())
      t.each {|key, value|
        enc.shortstr(key)
        # I offer this chicken to the gods of polymorphism. May they
        # choke on it.
        case value
        when String
          type = :longstr
          desc = "S"
        when Numeric
          type = :long
          desc = "I"
        else
          raise Exception.new("unknown table value: #{value.class}")
        end
        enc.write(desc)
        enc.encode(type, value)
      }
      longstr(enc.out.to_s())
    end

    def write(str)
      flushbits()
      @out.write(str)
#      puts "OUT #{str.inspect()}"
    end

    def pack(fmt, *args)
      write(args.pack(fmt))
    end

    def flush()
      flushbits()
    end

    private

    def flushbits()
      if @bits.empty? then return end

      bytes = []
      index = 0
      @bits.each {|b|
        bytes << 0 if index == 0
        if b then bytes[-1] |= 1 << index end
        index = (index + 1) % 8
      }
      @bits.clear()
      bytes.each {|b|
        octet(b)
      }
    end

  end

  class StringReader

    def initialize(str)
      @str = str
      @index = 0
    end

    def read(n)
      result = @str[@index, n]
      @index += result.length
      return result
    end

  end

  class Decoder

    def initialize(_in)
      @in = _in
      @bits = []
    end

    def decode(type)
      return send(type)
    end

    def bit()
      if @bits.empty?
        byte = octet()
        7.downto(0) {|i|
          @bits << (byte[i] == 1)
        }
      end
      return @bits.pop()
    end

    def octet()
      return unpack("C", 1)
    end

    def short()
      return unpack("n", 2)
    end

    def long()
      return unpack("N", 4)
    end

    def longlong()
      upper = long()
      lower = long()
      return upper << 32 | lower
    end

    def timestamp()
      return longlong()
    end

    def shortstr()
      # shortstr is actually octetstr
      return read(octet())
    end

    def longstr()
      return read(long())
    end

    def table()
      dec = Decoder.new(StringReader.new(longstr()))
      result = {}
      while true
        begin
          key = dec.shortstr()
        rescue EOF
          break
        end
        desc = dec.read(1)
        case desc
        when "S"
          value = dec.longstr()
        when "I"
          value = dec.long()
        else
          raise Exception.new("unrecognized descriminator: #{desc.inspect()}")
        end
        result[key] = value
      end
      return result
    end

    def read(n)
      return "" if n == 0
      result = @in.read(n)
      if result.nil? or result.empty?
        raise EOF.new()
      else
#        puts " IN #{result.inspect()}"
        return result
      end
    end

    def unpack(fmt, size)
      result = read(size).unpack(fmt)
      if result.length == 1
        return result[0]
      else
        return result
      end
    end

  end

end

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


Double your space with this metal trundle unit. Simply tuck it under your daybed and add a mattress to roll it out for your overnight guests.
The Grinch hates Christmas and wants to stop it from coming, so he forms a devious plan to impersonate Santy Clause" and to steal the Whos' Christmas presents. Come Christmas morning, the Grinch is in for a shocking surprise.
The sharp, fine-edge knives in this 12-piece set are made out of high quality, satin-finished German stainless steel and are one-piece precision stamped for lasting use.
The sharp, fine-edge knives in this 3-piece starter set are made out of high quality German stainless steel and are one-piece precision stamped for lasting use.
The knives in this 6-piece knife block set are made out of high quality German stainless steel and boast one-piece traditional forged construction for durability. Each piece features a full bolster for added weight, comfort and safety.
This heated cat bed has a 4-watt dual thermostat heating unit buried deep within its thick, super soft, polyfill pillow base. It warms the surface 10-15 degrees above ambient air temperature to equal your cat's normal body temperature when in use.
This kitty sill features a bolster covered with an attractive poly/cotton blend kitty print. Sleeping surface is lined with soft velvety microfleece and cover can be removed for machine washing.
This cozy, self-warming nuzzle nest is perfect for cats or small dogs that prefer a warm spot to sleep and laze around in.
We all love a little dish now and then, so spread some around at your next celebration. Filled with LOVE (it says so right in the center) and practical pizzazz, this fresh and fabulous tray is a perfect addition to parties and gathering.
The Garden Blossom table lamp boasts a classic French antique design that will fill any room with graceful beauty and timeless style.


Brenda began her career as a Realtor, because it was and expansion of her love and experience in Interior Design. She has been a licensed Realtor since 1999 and has held real estate license's in the states of Georgia, Virginia, Kentucky, and South Carolina. Her experience from having licenses in multiple states, gives her experience required to handle challenges in diverse markets along with geographic changes.
She has is a member of the National, State, and local Chapters of the Association of REALTORS®, work on National levels.
I confirm that I worked with Brenda Daly in the buying or selling of this property.


The Denver Metro area has experienced more drastic weather changes this year than we have in many years. Please read on for current insect and disease information and tips to care for your trees and lawns throughout this hot period that we have been experiencing.
Japanese Beetles have begun to fly! If you see any on your property, please call us as soon as possible.
I would like to give you all an update on our Mountain High Helps Charity. For those of you that don't know, we have partnered with the Children's Diabetes Foundation (CDF) and agreed to match donations from $1 to $500. They have currently received $6,923 which we matched, and our employees have donated $2,000 for a grand total of $15,846 so far this year. Thank you all for making this such a success. If anyone would like more information on how you can help, please click on the Mountain High Helps logo to the right.
From all of us at Mountain High Tree, we would like to wish you and your families a very safe and happy 4th of July weekend.
It is only July, and 2016 has already been an interesting season. The cool and wet May has produced lots of foliar and vascular diseases. We have seen cedar-apple rust for the first time in a few years. Oak leaf blister has been evident all over the Denver Metro area. Fireblight in Apples, Crabapples, and Pears got started early, and is now making many of our wonderful ornamental trees rather unsightly.
If that wasn't enough, the abnormally high temperatures of June gave rise to massive insect populations of aphids, mites, leaf hoppers, and scale. We are now concerned that the ample moisture of April and May, combined with the high temps of June, will result in high populations of Japanese beetle showing up throughout July and August. We have already had our first reports of a few early Japanese beetle adults seen in Cherry Hills Village and Englewood.
It will be important to use all our available tools to deal with Japanese beetles this season. Good monitoring will be vital to identify problem plants and areas. Soil treatments later in the summer will help to reduce the over-wintering population of grubs in the soil. These insects are difficult to control, and have massive appetites. Japanese beetles have a taste for so many plant species that landscapes can quickly be overtaken by a hungry population.
There are a few things home owners can do and should know about their lawns as the heat of summer gets into high gear. The transition from cooler spring weather to hot summer weather has been a quick change over this year. This leads to extra stress on the lawn.
Keeping blades sharp will allow the tips of the grass to heal more rapidly and prevent moisture loss and stress. A lawn cut with a dull blade will lose almost double the water as a yard cut with a very sharp blade.Mowing height adjustment is probably the most important practice to prepare lawns for hot weather. Mow at heights of at least 2½ to 3 inches. If in doubt, set the mower as high as it will go. Lawns maintained at higher levels usually develop deeper roots and dry out more slowly than closely mowed turf. Lawn growth will slow as the weather gets drier and hotter.
Water lawns deeply, applying about 1 to 1½ inches per application, depending on site variables. Water early in the day or during the evening, but while the sun is still up if at all possible.Most lawns in our area consist of cool-season grasses such as Kentucky bluegrass, perennial rye grass, and fine fescue. These grasses naturally slow down their growing patterns as the temperatures head into the nineties. A yard that is not properly watered may go dormant in the heat of summer. If something happens such as a watering issue while on vacation and the lawn goes dormant, let it stay dormant until cooler weather returns. Do not allow lawns to turn brown and then water them back to a green condition over and over, as this depletes energy reserves and stresses the plants.Please note, a dormant yard during the summer is a prime target for insects and fungi. The more stress a yard is under the easier it is for pests to get established and do damage before anyone notices, since a dormant yard is already brown in appearance.Mountain High's Lawn Department is always available to help with lawn care needs and we are strongly recommending Revive treatments as the drought situation continues.
Eric was born in Cincinnati, Ohio where he began work in the landscape field. His 9 years of experience include working for a garden center, a tree company, commercial lawn maintenance, and residential/ commercial landscaping. He graduated from the Ohio State University with a Bachelor of Science in Landscape Architecture in August of 2016, and left Ohio in pursuit of a lifelong dream to move to Colorado. He had never been here before, but has found it is everything, and more, than what he had imagined. While in Colorado he has spent his winters sharpening his skills in the powder in hopes to one day take a trip to Alaska, and drop in from a helicopter. He says, "I had never dreamed Colorado could get any better, and then the mountains turned green." He spends every weekend exploring the wilderness far and near. His favorite hobbies include fabrication, photography, and music. He has an interest in all genres, and says he especially enjoyed the CO Symphony's performance of David Bowie. He says he has found the perfect career for him at Mountain High. He really enjoys having the chance to meet different people, study the native plants, and to paint a living aesthetic with the available palette. What really draws Eric to this career path is the opportunity to still get his hands dirty sweating out the summer sun in beautiful Colorado.
It is important to make your irrigation efforts as efficient as possible. Water that runs off the surface and into the drains and street has no benefit to your landscape. It can be helpful to implement "interval irrigation" to improve the results of your watering. Interval irrigation uses shorter irrigation system run times and more frequent cycles to improve soil saturation. For example, if you have a 15 run time, you can turn that into two cycles running nearly back to back of 8 and 7 minutes respectively. This allows the soil to absorb the water, and with the 2nd cycle it can penetrate deeper into the soil. This will decrease the amount of water that runs off the soil surface.
The crew were wonderful. They did a great job and were pleasant, cheerful and hard workers. The trees look better than I expected.
"Consistently does a fine job on our trees!
On time, professional, very genuine and honest.
Everyone was friendly, professional and didn't try to sell unneeded services.
Quality service and exceptional value – I highly recommend this company!
The men who trimmed the tree did a fantastic job. The guy in the bucket was awesome!
The crew showed outstanding technical skills.
Top-notch work on a very complex job.
Wess was very knowledgeable and spent time explaining all he was doing. Very professional, prompt, knowledgeable and kind.
Everything is looking good in the Springs and we are busier than ever. There are no new issues to report, so we thought we would give you a list of things to do this weekend. Our best to all of you and your families for a safe and happy 4th of July weekend.
The biggest show in town will be the Colorado Springs Philharmonic Fabulous Fourth summer concert at Memorial Park. This free event is fun for the entire family.
When: July 4, 2016. Food vendors available for various costs.
It's time to fly with Adventures Out West's 5th Annual 4th of July Flag Flying Festival! Start your 4th of July with a little adventure and a lot of patriotism. Show your American pride by flying the Red, White, and Blue. Must supply your own flag (max size 5'x7′). Souvenir T-Shirt. Zips start at 8:30 am and 10:30 am – course is open 2 hours per session.
The Manitou Springs Volunteer Fire Department is proud to display the Fourth of July Fireworks again this year. Get one of the best seats in the house in Downtown Manitou Springs, and enjoy the magnificent views. Fireworks will be shot off from Higginbotham Flats.
If you have any pruning, removal, plant health or lawn care needs and would like a free estimate, please click the link below. Your local experts are here for you!


 Best Price on Casona Colonial Guesthouse in León + Reviews!
Casona Colonial Guesthouse in León has a garden and a terrace. All rooms have a TV with cable channels and a private bathroom. Staff on site can arrange airport transportation. At the guesthouse, rooms contain a closet. Free WiFi is accessible to all guests, while certain rooms here will provide you with a patio. Staff at Casona Colonial Guesthouse are available to give advice at the 24-hour front desk. The nearest airport is Augusto C. Sandino Airport, 65 miles from the accommodation.


This April, well-known Romanian TV news presenter Anca Serea will give birth to her fifth child.
Anca Serea was first married to Romanian businessman Filip Poplingher. They had two children together: David (born in 1991) and Sarah (1997). In 2010, when the children were 9, respectively, 3 years old, her husband passed away with leukemia. "We have fought the disease for three years. It was a very sad story. He was a perfectly healthy man. He was 36. He had been a professional swimmer before", Anca Serea said.
Anca Serea remarried Romanian singer and music producer Adrian Sînă. They have had Noah, in 2012, and Ava-Stephanie (in 2014). Now she is pregnant again and due to give birth in April.
I can feel he's a boy. He will be welcome. I can't wait to hold him in my arms. We thought to keep him in our room in the first months. The children reacted very well, Sarah would have liked to have a sister. David was very honest and told us there are contraceptive methods. If it is a boy, his name will be a biblical one: Petru (Peter) or Moise (Moses), and if it is a girl, her name will be Leila or Ana.
The doctor keeps telling me there is a 70% chance to be a boy. I shall have a natural birth, as good God has left it. We, as women, are very strong. The first pregnancy was the toughest, with David. Then pain subsided. We have always said we wanted more little children.
I respect the opinion of the people who visit, read and comment on my social media posts and on my website. About my private life, I can say that I am a truly faithful Christian, I believe in God and I live with the desire to please Him. I believe in His power, because He shows Himself to me in all the things He sends me. If I were a member of a different denomination, I would not dare to comment on somebody else's religion. Everybody is free to live as they please. People know the church where we have had our marriage ceremony, where we have baptized our children and where we go and take the Holy Communion.


text:
Q: Compile for froyo a project that contains an xml for honeycomb I have an application that uses the new features of honeycomb for the PreferenceActivity.
I'm using for example the settings_header
  <header
        android:summary="summary"
        android:fragment="MyFragment"
        android:title="title"/>

the problem is that I need to compile the same code for sdk 2.3. with the compatibility. For sdk 2.3 I need to go back to the old xml for settings.
What can I do? In some way I want to hide (not to get compiled) the new settings_headers xml file when I do not need it otherwise the precompiler complains because it does not understand the new  tag.
I tried to move the resources in an external lib to import the lib only on honeycomb but it looks like they are not exported.
So the question is: how to use the new feature withs sdk 3.0 and go back to the old style on sdk 2.3 without having two separated project sources?

A: I would go with different "xml-folders" for the different versions.
So in your case you would create another xml-folder called "xml-v11", under the res-folder of your project, and in this folder you are free to use all the new features of honeycomb like the "<header />"-tag you mentioned.
Cheers
L0rdAli3n


Bettiscombe Map: Printable Bettiscombe street map, Dorset, England. Handy interactive street map of Bettiscombe in Dorset. Google road map Bettiscombe UK.
This zoomed in map of central Bettiscombe makes it easy to find roads and streets in Bettiscombe, Dorset. Zoom out (-) to view wider areas around Bettiscombe. Locate Bettiscombe attractions, Bettiscombe facilities, Bettiscombe businesses, Bettiscombe accommodation and Bettiscombe services. Using the zoom in feature (+) on this Bettiscombe map will provide you with even more stuff in Bettiscombe.
Dorset Places: Bovington, Dean, Benville Lane, Salwayash, Buckhorn Weston, Stoke Abbott, Stoke Abbott, Overcombe, Turners Puddle, Twyford, Marshalsea, East Creech, Deanland, Edmondsham, Pilsdon, Turnworth, South Bowood, Holdenhurst, Upwey, Portesham, Waytown, Briantspuddle, Chilfrome, Fifehead Neville, Boscombe, Drimpton, Stourpaine, Compton Abbas, Ryall, Poole, Pilsdon, Lyme Regis, Mudeford, Winton, Milton Abbas, Fontmell Magna, Holditch, Oborne, Sutton Holms, Farnham.


Unroll pizza crust into a lightly greased 15x10x1-in. baking pan; flatten dough and build up edges slightly. Bake at 400° for 7 minutes. Brush dough with 3 tablespoons Buffalo wing sauce. Combine cheddar and mozzarella cheeses; sprinkle a third over the crust. Set aside.
In a large skillet, cook the chicken, garlic salt, pepper and chili powder in butter until chicken is no longer pink. Add the remaining wing sauce; cook and stir over medium heat 5 minutes longer.
Spoon over pizza. Sprinkle with oregano and remaining cheese.
Bake until crust is golden brown and cheese is melted, 18-20 minutes. Serve with celery and blue cheese dressing.
Freeze option: Bake pizza crust as directed; cool. Top with all the ingredients as directed and securely wrap and freeze unbaked pizza. To use, unwrap pizza; bake as directed, increasing time as necessary.
Nutrition Facts: 1 serving (2 each) equals 958 calories, 38 g fat (20 g saturated fat), 218 mg cholesterol, 3,563 mg sodium, 74 g carbohydrate, 3 g fiber, 76 g protein.
Being from Buffalo you know you're going to put your spin on: Homemade crust definitely or buy from deli.Just make the regular wing sauce in large skillet:1 stick margarine or butter1 large chopped fresh chicken breastFranks Hot Sauce...to your taste but no less than 1/2 Cup3 stalks celery dicedBlue cheese crumblesBlue cheese dressingHeat butter in skillet on medium and add chopped chicken and when it turns white add Franks Hot Sauce. Cook until reduced enough for topping pizza dough. Spread on crust and top with diced celery and top with blue cheese crumbles. You can put on mottzarella which will cool the heat but I suggest out of the oven to just drizzle with blue cheese dressing.Bake at 350 degrees 20-30 minutes depending on oven and crust thickness.Better make two...one is not enough. This is when beer goes best with pizza. Thanks Buffalo for the beginnings of all these great recipes!
"Fantastic - Husband, son & grandson thought so too. Made for SuperBowl. My husband snuck two pieces to put away for the next day! He said this is company worthy!"
I used Morningstar Farms veggie "chicken" strips and Spicy Garlic wing sauce from Buffalo Wild Wings. If was very good!
Fantastic! I added diced onions to the chicken while cooking. Husband and teen boys loved it!
Very good! Not too spicy, but it has just enough to make it delicious! I make a homemade crust with it, and there are never any leftovers.
My husband LOVES buffalo stuff so I made him this pizza & he asks for it all of the time! I make a homemade crust for it though instead of the refrigerator crust & it turns out scrumptious!
This was a wonderful recipe that my family raved about.
great recipe, im a college student and am always looking for quick and easy meals to try, and i love how easy and delicious this recipe is!!!
Wow, this was so good! easy and I wouldn't change a thing!
Home run! My guys loved this recipe. Perfect for watching a football game and a ice cold beer or soda! The spices on the chicken were perfect. I decided to use 6 tablespoons of dressing as the sauce on the pizza crust rather than the buffalo sauce. Otherwise, I followed the recipe as listed. Can't wait to make it again!


text:
Q: Using Java ServiceLoader results NoSuchElementException error My class DoFindMiddleService extends the abstract class DoFindMiddle.
Here is the DoFindMiddle class:
public abstract class DoFindMiddle<T extends Comparable<T>> {
   public abstract ListItem<T> findMiddle(ListItem<T> paramListItem);
   public static <D extends Comparable<D>> DoFindMiddle<D> newInstance() {
     return (DoFindMiddle)ServiceLoader.load(DoFindMiddle.class).iterator().next();
   }
}

Here is the first part of DoFindMiddleService class:
package com.nng.interview.homework.applicant.kovacskalman;

import com.nng.interview.homework.exercise.DoFindMiddle;
import java.util.Iterator;
import java.util.ServiceConfigurationError;
import java.util.ServiceLoader;

public class DoFindMiddleService<T extends Comparable<T>> extends DoFindMiddle<T> {

public static DoFindMiddle service;
public volatile ServiceLoader<DoFindMiddleService> loader;
public DoFindMiddleService() {
    loader = ServiceLoader.load(DoFindMiddleService.class);
}
public static synchronized DoFindMiddle getInstance() {
    if (service == null) {
        service = new DoFindMiddleService();
    }
    return service;
}
public String getDefinition(String word) {
    String definition = null;

    try {
        Iterator<DoFindMiddleService> dictionaries = loader.iterator();
        while (definition == null && dictionaries.hasNext()) {
            DoFindMiddleService d = dictionaries.next();
            definition = d.getDefinition(word);
        }
    } catch (ServiceConfigurationError serviceError) {
        definition = null;
        serviceError.printStackTrace();

    }
    return definition;
}

.....
}

If I try the following in the Unit test:
final DoFindMiddle<Integer> instance = new DoFindMiddleService();

Then it is working. But when I try in the Unit test:
final DoFindMiddle<Integer> instance = DoFindMiddle.newInstance();

Then it results NoSuchElementException error.
What can be my fault?
My pom.xml is the following:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0 http://maven.apache.org/xsd/maven-4.0.0.xsd">
    <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>
    <groupId>com.nng.interview.homework.applicant</groupId>
    <name>Kovács Kálmán</name>
    <artifactId>kovacskalman</artifactId>
    <version>1.0</version>
    <packaging>jar</packaging>
    <build>
        <plugins>
            <plugin>
                <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
                <artifactId>maven-compiler-plugin</artifactId>
                <version>2.3.2</version>
                <configuration>
                    <source>1.7</source>
                    <target>1.7</target>
                    <archive>
                        <manifest>
                            <addClasspath>true</addClasspath>
                        </manifest>
                    </archive>
                </configuration>
            </plugin>
        </plugins>
    </build>
    <dependencies>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>com.nng.interview.homework</groupId>
            <artifactId>comnnginterviewhomework</artifactId>
            <version>1.0.2</version>
        </dependency>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>junit</groupId>
            <artifactId>junit</artifactId>
            <version>4.10</version>
            <scope>test</scope>
            <exclusions>
                <exclusion>
                    <groupId>org.hamcrest</groupId>
                    <artifactId>hamcrest-core</artifactId>
                </exclusion>
            </exclusions>
        </dependency>
    </dependencies>
    <properties>
        <project.build.sourceEncoding>UTF-8</project.build.sourceEncoding>
        <maven.compiler.source>1.7</maven.compiler.source>
        <maven.compiler.target>1.7</maven.compiler.target>
    </properties>
</project>

When I try to execute I got this error:
d:\kovacskalman>mvn exec:java -Dexec.mainClass="com.nng.interview.homework.appli
cant.kovacskalman.App"
[INFO] Scanning for projects...
[INFO]
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Building Kovacs Kalman 1.0
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO]
[INFO] --- exec-maven-plugin:1.3.2:java (default-cli) @ kovacskalman ---
[WARNING] Warning: killAfter is now deprecated. Do you need it ? Please comment
on MEXEC-6.
[WARNING]
java.lang.reflect.InvocationTargetException
        at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method)
        at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.
java:57)
        at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAcces
sorImpl.java:43)
        at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:606)
        at org.codehaus.mojo.exec.ExecJavaMojo$1.run(ExecJavaMojo.java:293)
        at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:744)
Caused by: java.util.NoSuchElementException
        at java.util.ServiceLoader$LazyIterator.next(ServiceLoader.java:357)
        at java.util.ServiceLoader$1.next(ServiceLoader.java:445)
        at com.nng.interview.homework.exercise.DoFindMiddle.newInstance(DoFindMi
ddle.java:52)
        at com.nng.interview.homework.applicant.kovacskalman.App.<init>(App.java
:9)
        at com.nng.interview.homework.applicant.kovacskalman.App.main(App.java:1
3)
        ... 6 more
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] BUILD FAILURE
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Total time: 2.076 s
[INFO] Finished at: 2014-11-01T15:19:51+01:00
[INFO] Final Memory: 9M/96M

A: I have to put inside the jar META-INF/services/com.nng.interview.homework.exercise.DoFindMiddle
named file, which contains only one row:
com.nng.interview.homework.applicant.kovacskalman.DoFindMiddleService    # Standard service provider
Let see the Jar file specification Service Provider part:
https://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/technotes/guides/jar/jar.html#Service_Provider

A: According to the javadoc, iterator() does that :

 Lazily loads the available providers of this loader's service.

According to your exception, the iterator is empty, that means no implementation has been found.
Is DoFindMiddleService in your classpath ?


Frequently I use personal experience to explore and develop creative solutions to inform and better enlighten people about complex themes and issues connected with mental health and other social concerns. I found from conveying personal perspective it resulted in stronger more emotive and relatable pieces of design. I have found by using my design expertise and Injecting a social consciousness into projects, positive and progressive change is possible.


Depending on age, personality type, values, family and financial circumstances, individual reactions may range from mild, moderate to severe. The most common reaction to job loss is physical shock accompanied by some of the classic symptoms associated with grief; disbelief, disappointment, anger, denial which may lead to becoming withdrawn, low of self-esteem, not confidence, and a feeling of 'why me?' This is particularly true when an individual had no prior warning or sense that they would lose their job.
Stress reactions to job loss vary. They may include: Upset this may be crying quietly or openly Becoming withdrawn Breakdown Pretending nothing has happened, even to the extent of concealing it from partner/spouse/family/friends Depression Anxiety When it comes to materialisation of distress, there are no gender differences. While men tend to initially display macho mannerism, their physical and emotional reactions are exactly the same as those of women - anger, despair, rage, grief, sense of loss, inadequacy, low self-esteem, and in extreme cases, suicidal or suicide.
Job loss, like any other form of major loss can have many of the emotions akin to those of bereavement. So, while well-meaning friends (we may even have said it ourselves) might advise not getting to upset about it, we shouldn't be surprised by the growing body of some academic researcher to suggest that unemployment should be treated as serious psychological crisis.
UK Government also announced an initiative where people made redundant can be referred to therapists through a network linking Jobcentre, GP surgeries and NHS services.
Much of the therapy on offer is based on what's called the Kubler-Ross model. Dr Elisabeth Kuber-Ross (1969) pioneered methods in the support and counselling of personal trauma, griefs and grieving, associated with death an dying. She also dramatically improved the understanding and practices in relation to bereavement and hospice care. The Kubler-Ross model is the five stages of grief which (Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance) are transferable to varying degrees and in different ways, to personal change and emotional upset resulting form factors others than deaths or dying. We can often clearly observe similar reaction to those who loss the job or undergoing redundancy.
However, while one school of thought claims financial pressure remain the trigger of being depressed in redundancy, as so money and what it buys us in principal of being employed -- another body of opinion argues that the so-called 'latent' benefits of employment are more important. It is when we are losing the sense of identity, feeling isolated and losing social contact that we have from workplace are more to blame for this.
In previous recessions it was generally assumed that working women who lost their jobs would simply, and quietly happy revert to being a housewife whereas men found it much tougher, but again , in this current economic situation, it has become trickier to generalise. However, stats suggests that in three quarters of dual-income household, men are still the bigger earners. Probably, it is more likely men seem to struggle more to adapt when got redundant.
"Loss the job makes everything stop suddenly, that's my experience anyway., so my advice to others is to use the time you're given constructively to talk to people who can give perspective. My first reaction when I lost a job was shock. I was working in the Public Health Sector and because of so-called 'cutting the budget', my contract was terminated prematurely. I was upset and feeling humiliated. However, I told myself, that I still had some savings and I could use the time off to go back to see my family back in Indonesia, then I decided to go back to university to study a part-time master's in Psychological Therapies, a subject that related to my counselling work. But when I returned from seeing my family and paid half of my tuition fees, I started to regret my decisions - I spent a lots of money and felt guilty - how am I going to pay the rest of my tuition fees? Am I going to get myself in debt or homeless?
I then decided to sign on, and that was horrible. I had to go to a my local Jobcentre and some people were ranting and shouting in reception and security guards at every corner. It was like being in a lunatic room. The whole process was depressing! In fact, the Jobcentre provided my motivation - I didn't want to go back there!
as well as studying my part-time Master.
Here some tips to cope when you loss a job or being made redundant. The process may take a while but if you approach your situation in the right way with support and a level head, you'll come out the other side. You may even find redundancy is the best thing that's ever happened to you.
Above all, keep it real when you are out of work.


To the chase… It took me a long time to find this, but someone's made a guide for building Ubuntu 14.04 from scratch for the Utilite. But better still, they've included a dropbox location to fetch images from.
Here's the URL to the build guide.
Here's the URL to the download directory.


It is a great pleasure, in fact an honor, to be here again, in this extraordinary place, in this amphitheater and on these grounds that I think all of us would agree constitute sacred space of a very special sort. I think that one of the most important aspects of this week's theme is that it does not limit sacred space to purely spiritual, religious space; the mission this week, as I understand it, is to go far beyond this to inquire as to what makes space in every realm of life sacred, or what gives it the potential to become sacred. Ken Burns has talked of battlefields and Elizabeth Barlow Rogers of landscapes, and I will try to be more general and talk of architecture in a broader way, although I will say a lot about purely religious space, about space created with the conscious intention of making it spiritual, or sacred, and about the difficulty of doing this in the modern age.
It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to talk about sacred space without talking about time. One of the most important things about any sacred space is the way in which it transcends our normal sense of time, and by that I don't mean that it has no connection to a time, but only that shows us with absolute clarity what the meaning of the word "timeless" is. Let's take Chautauqua itself as an example. It represents its time, absolutely, and could not have been built at another time—it is a great fallacy to believe that "timeless" means having no time, the way "stateless" means having no country—yet even as this place remains firmly planted in the nineteenth century it connects to all other times, and feels a natural part of them. That is timelessness—being of a time, and yet also feeling right in every other time. Chautauqua is of the nineteenth century, and yet we cherish it as something that is much more than a relic. We perceive it as a vital force in our own time. That, we might say, is one of the key components of the sacred, though it is hardly enough by itself, or everything timeless would also be sacred.
My task this morning is to try and say a few words about the idea of sacred space and how it connects to architecture in general, and to modern architecture in particular, and of course to think a certain amount about how architecture connects to the spiritual in the first place. Some of this, by the way, is what I've tried to do in Why Architecture Matters, which is an attempt to get underneath history and styles and get to the essence of how we experience buildings, of how they feel, and how they affect us. That book is about much more than sacred space, of course, and about much more than space, period, since it gets into every aspect of what makes a building, and how we perceive buildings. I'm mentioning it now not to give myself a plug, though I do indeed hope that all of you rush out and buy it, but because it does deal a lot with the question of space, and about the close connections between space and the aura of the sacred, about which I'll say more shortly. The book also deals with another idea that has some relevance to Chautauqua, which is the question of style, and how little, I believe that style actually means in terms of our larger perceptions of architecture—the book makes the argument that scale and shape and texture and materials and light and plan and mass and volume all mean much more than the notion of style, which is in many ways a system of pigeonholing buildings and creating false and misleading distinctions. Whatever it is that makes Chautauqua sacred—or not sacred—isn't the Victorian detailing on the houses, or the classicism of the Hall of Philosophy, or the Art Deco touches on Norton Hall.
Chautauqua is an eclectic mix of buildings of different styles and periods, which makes it very much like a traditional town or city outside these gates, although here there is a very different balance between public space and private space than there is in traditional towns; the overwhelming feeling is of public space being far and away the more important side of the equation. Most towns do not have places like the Amphitheater and Bestor Plaza at their center. The pride of place given to public space, like the sense of transcending time, is one of the other things that helps to make Chautauqua sacred, although it, too, is not enough in and of itself. Another notable thing about Chautauqua's campus is the absence of much here that we could call modern, which is striking enough to make me want to ask whether there is an inherent contradiction between the idea of modernism and the sacred.
In the Ethical Culture Society in New York, a building at Sixty-fourth Street and Central Park West that some of you may know—it was erected early in the twentieth century in a vaguely Art Nouveau, Viennese Secessionist style—there is engraved over the proscenium arch the words, "The place where people meet to seek the highest is holy ground," a phrase that might be an apt description of the intentions of Chautauqua, although in this case these words were chosen by a humanist congregation that wanted its building to avoid traditional religious references. The phrase, "the place where people meet to seek the highest is holy ground," while it might well describe Chautauqua, also accurately sums up what has often seemed like the attitude of modernism toward sacred—the idea that a building would acquire its spiritual quality by how profoundly it represented human aspiration, not because it showed the glory of God. After all, how could a place built by human beings truly reflect the glory of God? What the makers of Ethical Culture were saying, in effect, was that it was far wiser to be modest and to celebrate what men and women could do than to pretend, as the architects of the ornate Baroque churches did, that they could evoke the spiritual by creating overwhelming grandeur. Better the attitude of the nineteenth-century Shakers than of the sixteenth-century Europeans, they were telling us.
Now, I suppose that Ethical Culture phrase could be taken to mean that any place where people come together in healthy, positive fellowship is holy, no matter what it looked like. Perhaps this was in Mies van der Rohe's mind when he designed his boxy brick chapel at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, a building that seems almost to celebrate its conventional identity. Indeed, it is so plain looking that it bears a distinct resemblance to the campus's boiler plant nearby. The one difference, of course, is that the boiler plant has a smokestack, which led the architectural historian Charles Jencks to observe that a visitor were brought to the campus and shown these two buildings and then asked which one was the chapel he would almost surely say the boiler plant, since it is the building that appears to reach heavenward.
More often, however, there have been different aspirations on the part of modern architects—not necessarily skyward, but hardly indifferent to the notion that the sacred did not require special expression. Frank Lloyd Wright, for example, in his great Unity Temple in Oak Park, Illinois, finished just over a century ago, certainly did not want the space to be just any place. He had very clear ideas of exactly how that holy ground, if I can use that phrase again, would be formed, and if it was not to be like the space of a traditional church, it would hardly be a neutral or a conventional space, either. It was very Wrightian, taking many of the ideas he had been exploring in his houses to a new scale and, I think, to a new degree of intensity, not just in the complex route by which you move into this space, and now I actually regret not bringing a power point, since it would give me a chance to show you how you enter Wright's sanctuary by going into a low entrance, moving down and under, and then rising into it—what a wonderful thing, when you think of it, to come into a religious space by ascending to it—but also by the extraordinary way in which Wright balanced natural light and artificial light, openness and enclosure, solid and void, light and dark, horizontal and vertical, and also the balance between a sense of clear order and a sense of mystery.
The architectural historian Neil Levine has called the processional movement into Unity Temple "a progression toward reason and light. The power of reason, not mystical faith, is responsible for this sense of serenity and peace," he has written. Let's think about that for a moment. "The power of reason, not mystical faith…." But the very idea of rationality, of course, contradicts religion. Modern architecture, as everyone knows, often made claims to being utterly and totally rational, a claim that, if true, would make modernism altogether incompatible with the qualities of sacred, or religious, space. Of course, as everyone knows, thankfully modernism was not always true to its claims, and not nearly as rational as it pretended to be. Indeed, to come back one more time to Wright's Unity Temple, I think the greatness of that sanctuary space, the great power of this space, takes us beyond reason; while we can see it rationally and understand it rationally, there is something more going on.
Now, Ronchamp is nothing like Unity Temple at all, although both of them rank among the great religious structures of modern times. But they also bring us to an important paradox that it's hard not to think about when we talk about sacred space in modern architecture, or indeed in any architecture, which is the fact that in the realm of the sacred, architecture, the discipline most dependent on materiality, indeed the ultimate expression of materiality, must try to express what is not material, what cannot ever be material. In the quest to create sacred space, architecture is in a way working against itself, struggling to use the material to express what transcends the material, using the physical to express the transcendent.
It should be no surprise, then, that we tend to start, as Le Corbusier did in his description of Ronchamp, with the idea of space, not structure. Space is intuitively less rational, and it is obviously less material. No one ever talks of sacred structure. We may study Gothic cathedrals as works of structure, but when we talk of them in sacred terms, we talk about things far less tangible—we talk of space, and light. Even though the word "space" was not part of the standard architectural parlance until the 19th century, what we now use that term to connote, of course, has been there throughout the history of architecture. The creation of sacred architecture was very much the creation of sacred space. But the fact that the term was not in common use until relatively recent times is of more than passing significance, I think, because it reminds us that the creators of much of the space we hold most sacred were not thinking of themselves as makers of space, at least not primarily. For much of history, that concept was too abstract. As Vincent Scully has shown in looking at sacred space made by the Native Americans and the ancient Greeks, space was the product of a design process that had its basis in ritual and metaphor—they weren't crafting space as such, even though what they did yielded space that today we do not hesitate to think of us powerfully spiritual.
Another way to get at this might be to say that you can contemplate the idea of God, but you cannot engineer the physical reality of God. The architects of the Gothic cathedrals, of course, were engineers who used structural systems to create otherworldly, far-from-rational effects. The physical structure of any Gothic cathedral is measurable, describable, and we can analyze it down to the last stone. Yet as every one of us knows, it evokes feelings beyond the measurable, beyond the rational—and if it does so for us today, imagine how it looked to people in the Middle Ages. The genius of the Gothic is the way its structure exists to bring us to a place that, for all intents and purposes, defies the very essence of structure. The great cathedrals celebrate God by becoming ephemeral, light, rising toward heaven in a way that makes us feel awe.
I would be tempted to say that this is in fact a good definition of sacred space – the use of material forms to evoke feelings that go beyond the material, and which cannot be measured. I think it may also describe a kind of space I haven't talked much about – sacred spaces like simple Quaker meeting houses, which are not complex and that seem, at least superficially, not at all "ineffable" – they are often symmetrical and relatively unadorned, and seem very easy to understand. They could not be more different from the space we are in now, which is at once larger, more complex, and more intricate. Yet somehow these utterly simple spaces can evoke profound thought and transcendent feeling, too, as does a Japanese temple or a Zen garden, outwardly simple and by all appearances rational, yet capable of evoking feelings of equivalent mystery. In a way the Quaker meetinghouse is the most amazing of all, because we cannot even see that something startling and otherworldly is going on. It does not even seem unusual or exotic, unlike a Gothic cathedral, where you know instantly that you are in a special and unusual place. But is that necessary? Do we need to feel instantly that architecture is establishing a connection between the everyday and the sacred?
Let me go beyond this to pose a deeper question, which is whether architecture can in itself actually create the sacred in the first place. Maybe we should ask whether the users of a building and their activities do—in other words, do we confer the quality of sanctity upon spaces, or do certain spaces confer sanctity upon us? Perhaps what is sacred is simply what we choose to sanctify. I think of small Protestant and Jewish congregations in many cities whose synagogues are essentially storefronts or leftover urban spaces, or of similarly improvised Islamic places of worship in Western cities, or of rural churches that are roadside boxes, or even of those new mega-churches that plenty of people, myself included, have derided as looking like shopping centers, but that obviously perform a sacred function for many people, and inspire in them feelings of transcendence. Those of us here this morning may well think that these mega-churches look more like big box warehouses, and compared to Chautauqua, they do. But they bring plenty of people to feelings of deep religious passion, even if we might think they look like a Wal-Mart.
Let me mention again that line inscribed in the Ethical Culture Society in New York, the words "The Place Where People Meet to Seek the Highest is Holy Ground"—since that, for many people, is the very point. It may be no accident that Ethical Culture emerged in large part out of Judaism's reform movement, since the Jewish tradition has never been particularly architecturally centered, or at least not so much as Christianity. There have been many elaborate and beautiful synagogues built over time, but they have almost always tended to follow the local vernacular, and however elaborate they may be, they share the desire to express the idea of the book, in the form of the Torah scrolls, as the primary sacred element. Whatever form space takes in a synagogue, it is never supposed to overshadow the sanctity of the word.
I think this notion – that however elaborate the building, it do nothing to suggest that physical structure takes precedence over the importance of the written word – is a pretty consistent theme in synagogue architecture, even though there are many remarkable synagogues that might appear to do otherwise, including one designed by Frank Lloyd Wright outside of Philadelphia toward the end of his career, Beth Sholom Synagogue, where I had the honor of speaking last year as part of the commemoration of the building's fiftieth anniversary. I do have to say that the last couple of years have been unusual ones for me so far as religious structures are concerned, in that in the same week that I gave that talk at Wright's synagogue I also had the privilege of speaking in Trinity Church, Henry Hobson Richardson's great Episcopal church in Boston. And the previous year I spoke at Unity Temple. So it's been a rather humbling time for me so far as encounters with great religious structures are concerned.
And while I am on the subject of encounters with great religious structures, not too long ago I was in Prague, where I visited Josef Plecnik's Cathedral of the Sacred Heart, which I must say is one of the most amazing buildings I have ever seen in my life—now once again I wish I had slides, because this is an unusual building that most of you probably don't know—but in any event this building, wonderful as it is, could not be described as containing ineffable space. The interior of this church, though hardly simple, has little mystery about it. It was intended by Plecnik to be flexible; it is based on a grid. I mention this church, however, to make another point, which is that I felt a certain disconnect there between those who worshiped in it – and by chance, I visited during Mass – and those who came to see its architecture. I sensed that these two groups of people experienced the building in quite different ways, and were moved by different things. I would almost be tempted to say that the worshipers were moved in spite of the architecture, and the architectural pilgrims because of it.
To the former group, this staggering and stunning work was largely a container, made potent not by its form so much as by the rituals that go on within it as well as by certain iconic objects contained inside it, statues and paintings that were not designed by the architect and in some cases were even put there over his objection, rather like the way apparently a traditional cross was installed in a church Richard Meier designed for Rome after the building had been finished and the users of the building decided that the architect was safely back home in New York. Now to the other group, not the worshipers but the seekers of architectural experience, the religious rituals may have mattered even less than the architecture mattered to the worshipers. It is Plecnik's astonishing form, his slab of a bell tower, his merger of classicism and modernism into something at once rich and bombastic, that give this church its magnetic allure to architectural pilgrims. So what makes a space sacred can differ hugely depending on who is doing the experiencing.
This is true in plenty of cases—those of you who have gone to Rome to see the great Baroque churches may feel in Sant'Ivo or San Carlino a similar disconnect between those who come to worship Borromini and those who come to worship God, and I have to say that most of the time, the former group seems clearly to the latter. At Ronchamp or at Louis Kahn's Unitarian Church in Rochester, New York, or Unity Temple, it is also often the case that architectural pilgrims can seem to dominate. There is nothing wrong with this, and obviously there are plenty of people who belong to both groups and have both deep architectural and deep religious experiences when they visit great sacred space. Not all who are attracted by architecture do so solely because they – or the architect – have substituted aesthetic appeal for the aura of the sacred. It is not wholly a zero-sum game.
My point, though, is only to note that even when these experiences, the aesthetic and the sacred, co-exist, architects tend to assume that the power of the experience come wholly from the architecture. I think this is architectural hubris. While great architecture surely can and often does enhance religious experience—I think we can take that as a given—architecture by itself is not particularly likely to create it. When I spoke at Trinity Church I remember observing that the qualities of that room that give it its great architectural power, its shape and the force of this vaulted ceiling, and the color and the decoration, the things that combine in such remarkable balance to confer an air of sanctity, are not necessarily the things that make space sacred for the worshipers for whom it was, at least ostensibly, created. It may do this, of course, but it is often the case people find that religious space is transcendent at least as much because of what they bring to it, not because of what the architect has done with it.
This is not to minimize the potential of architecture to create a sense of awe, and the aura of the sacred. As I've now said multiple times, we surely see it realized here, all around us in this room. And it continues to be something we seek in new architecture, recognizing that to continue to aspire to the sacred is itself significant – since, as the German architect Rudolf Schwartz wrote, the quest for the sacred is itself sacred. And often in our time, the quest has been successful.
The ability of architecture to create the sacred, and not merely to enclose it, so to speak – that is to say, the ability of architecture to create a sense of awe, regardless of whether one comes to it with the rituals of religious practice in mind, is borne out, paradoxically, by non-religious buildings, since they are places to whom no one brings an expectation of ritual or a predisposition to religious experience. Where in the realm of sacred space are we to place, say, Jefferson's Lawn at the University of Virginia, or Sir John Soane's breakfast room, or, to move to the twentieth century, Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House? I can think of few more sublime places than the Farnsworth House, even though it is not by any normal measure a sacred space. But there, architecture is transcendent, as surely as in the chapels of Tadao Ando. And what are we to make of the fact that while Unity Temple's extraordinary space surely possesses a sacred aura, so, too, does Fallingwater, perhaps just as much of it. So do so many of Wright's other houses, and so does the Guggenheim Museum. And we might say the same of Louis Kahn—is there a difference between the sacred space of his Unitarian Church and the space of his Kimbell Art Museum, or his British Art Center, or his courtyard overlooking the Pacific at the Salk Institute? In these cases, and they stand for many others, you might say that the aesthetic has reached such intensity and risen to such heights that it becomes indistinguishable from the sacred.
We have in our culture conflated the aesthetic and the sacred, which is why, I suppose, that the art museum seems to have replaced the cathedral in our culture. We have no sense of commonality of faith as motivated the cultures that built the great sacred space of earlier eras, and it is no accident that we have made the art museum the most intense arena of architectural expression today. For all that commercial skyscrapers have come to represent cultural symbols in one sense, we now use art museums as emblems of our aspirations with far more conviction, I think. Still, I'm not entirely sure that means that we have simply substituted the aesthetic for the sacred – or, to use the architect Faribaz Sahba's formulation, that we have chosen to be attracted to the beautiful rather than to the divine, and therefore to have our hearts – or our eyes – satisfied instead of our souls. I am not sure it is so simple, in part because the connections between art and religion, between art and the soul, are far deeper and more interdependent, not to say ambiguous, than these formulations would suggest. I would hope that our failings are not quite so clear-cut as merely the elevation of the aesthetic over the spiritual, leading us to make the aesthetic sacred.
We also need to keep in mind that our time is altogether different from any other in terms of what architecture can do to create the aura of the sacred. Richardson's Trinity Church in Boston, which I referred to a moment ago, was in its time a radical building, an extraordinary work of sculpted space and decorated surface and directed light. So was Ronchamp, and so were many other twentieth century attempts to create sacred space. The very strangeness of Ronchamp's shape seemed appropriate as a way to pull away from the rational and to suggest an unseen, spiritual power. Though the space within Ronchamp is as beautiful and as moving as ever, to the visitor today it is surely no longer as strange. Technology has now brings within the reach of every architect shapes and forms that could barely be imagined before. If you have a computer, you can, it seems, make any kind of space, like Frederick Keisler, the architect who was famous long ago for creating what he called the "endless house," with space that seemed to twist and turn in on itself. Technology has made the ineffable migrate from the spiritual to the secular sphere. Fifty years ago, when Ronchamp was new, unusual space, complex space—what we have called mysterious space—was in and of itself a way in which a modern architect could signify the sacred. Today, that is much less so, and not only because of our culture's secular and aesthetic leanings. It is also because technology has made unusual, complex space and unusual shapes so commonplace. Technology, we might say, has debased the currency of ineffable space.
This has been happening gradually for a while—some time after Kiesler did his most interesting work there was Eero Saarinen, who was a shaper of space that had many of the qualities we associate with the ineffable, even though his most potent spaces were not his religious ones but places like the TWA Terminal, striking in its time and now looking rather tame. But today, thanks to technology, we can and often do make spaces like TWA and many of them are far richer and more complex. It would seem inevitable, given the technology that is available to us, that what constitutes our sense of truly ineffable space would have to change in an age in which every airport aspires to being Ronchamp, when swooping roofs and curving walls are commonplace, when the Los Angeles Philharmonic plays at Frank Gehry's Walt Disney Hall and Chicagoans listen to concerts at Gehry's Pritzker pavilion in Millennium Park, both of which are far more complex forms than Ronchamp. I might mention here, parenthetically, that of the two significant public buildings put up in the last few years in downtown Los Angeles, Walt Disney Hall by Gehry and the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, a boxy building of tan-colored stone by the Spanish architect Rafael Moneo, it is Gehry's concert hall that seems to have more of the qualities we associate with the sacred. The cathedral is more conventional as a shape, the concert hall more unusual, harder to grasp, more mysterious even, and perhaps more promising, in a way, of transcendence.
It is an aura of mystery, as I said earlier, that characterizes Gothic cathedrals, and so much other great ecclesiastical architecture. Mystery is what distinguishes, say, the great English churches of Sir Christopher Wren from the, to my mind, even greater churches of the English Baroque architect Nicholas Hawksmoor—one represents the height of the rational, but the other carries it beyond the rational. Brilliant and magnificent as Wren is, we can analyze and understand it – Wren's wonderful St. Stephen Walbrook in the City of London is logic raised to its highest, most glorious potential. But go next door to Hawksmoor's St. Mary Woolnoth, or a short distance away to Christ Church Spitalfields, and you experience much more unusual space, startling, perhaps a bit terrifying, and compelling in a whole different way. One is the earth, perfected, and it holds forth the promise of enlightenment. The other is also ordered, but its order calls up in us a sense that there is something we will never fully understand, that we will never entirely grasp – that we can never truly know. That is the ineffable; that is the sacred. It is the moment where architecture reaches its highest, where material form takes us to a non-material realm. In the profound joining of the rational and the unexplainable, Hawksmoor – or Borromini before him or Kahn or Ando after him – unite the aesthetic and the sacred, and make of them not distinct realms but one inseparable thing. These architects have taken the material, taken elements of the physical world, and put them together in such a way as to take us away from the physical world.
It is a wonderful paradox, really, because the greatest sacred spaces also represent the material world at its most material—in its most intensely physical, even sensuous, so you might think it would push us away from the spiritual, because it makes us think so completely of the world of sensory experience. And yet, of course, the opposite thing happens when we are in one of these great buildings, we move away from the material world, not closer to it. Such is the great achievement of sacred space when architecture can create it: the way the physical things that make up this architecture take us into the realm of the non-physical.
Let me say one more word before I conclude about the other kind of sacred space, the sacred space that is not created by what architects have done to shape it, but by what people have done with it, or by what has happened in it—the category that I think we would agree Chautauqua belongs in. We confer an aura of the sacred on battlefields, as Ken Burns has told us, and on places like the Mall in Washington, in part because of extraordinary things like the March on Washington and the Vietnam war demonstrations and the Obama inauguration that have happened there, but also because of the physical form of the place, which is very much the town square, the common, of the entire nation, and is surrounded by symbols like the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument, which have their own aura of the sacred.
And then there is Ground Zero, in New York City, which achieved the aura of the sacred for reasons more like a battlefield than for anything about its physical form. It is sixteen acres in the middle of our most important city, but extraordinary and terrible things happened there that make it, in the minds of many, like Gettysburg forever a sacred place, if only to honor those who so tragically died there. I mention it now in part because it is back in the news, and in part because it reveals how difficult and complex the whole business of sacred space actually is. It's in the news, as all of you know, in part because some progress is finally being made on building there once again, both on the memorial to those who died and the new buildings that will replace the twin towers of the World Trade Center. But the other reason it is back in the news is because of the proposal, which so many people found troubling, to build a cultural center for the Islamic community on a site a couple of blocks away. This seemed, to some people, to violate the very essence of this sacred space, as if Islam, whose radical adherents created the tragic events, were flaunting this connection in the face of those who suffered—as if they were saying that the site still belonged to them, as it did on September 11th.
It is easy to see how it appeared that way, and there is no doubt that it would have been easier all around if this plan had never been proposed. And I find it odd that the people objecting to it were indifferent to the fact that this project is proposed by moderate Islamic factions, and led by a cleric who has been outspoken in his opposition to the radical Islamic factions behind terrorism. But in any event, the idea that it should be forbidden, that something like this merely by being allowed to exist violates the sacred nature of Ground Zero, is wrong on many counts, including the fact that it violates the very principles of freedom and openness that our country was created to sustain. In the same way that I found it regrettable, perhaps even repugnant, that many of the families of those who died managed to push away the so-called Freedom Center, which was to have been a new museum, and the Drawing Center, a cultural institution, because they would not commit to exhibitions that would be limited to September 11th or would only present the events of Ground Zero in a particular way, the idea of banning this center is a very strange thing to do in the name of freedom.
But there is also the point, maybe more relevant to us this morning, that this proposed center wasn't within the sixteen acres of Ground Zero, but two blocks away. The supposed offense was that it was too close, that it was within the aura of Ground Zero. I agree that sacred space has an aura, and I wouldn't want billboards next to the battlefield of Gettysburg any more than you do, but this isn't the same thing. This is the middle of a city, and the ongoing life of this complicated, diverse, energetic, frustrating and creative city needs to go on—sustaining our urban life on this piece of land, in fact, is the most important way to respond to the terrible attacks of nine years ago. This is the sacred in the middle of the profane, we might say, although I think it is better to think of it as the sacred in the middle of real life.
And that is the greatest lesson of Ground Zero and this whole painful controversy: that what makes Ground Zero sacred, in the end, is not only those who died there, although we are honor bound to respect them in every way we can. It is also the way in which Ground Zero, for all its sacred quality, is not a thing apart. It is a thing amidst, a thing amid ongoing life. And as such, it teaches us something crucial about sacred space, which is how much of its meaning can come from how it connects to the rest of life. Perhaps the most important thing sacred space can do isn't to transport us to a new and different world. Perhaps its real gift is to be able to show us that the spiritual is right here, hidden in the rational world we know. The lesson of Ground Zero is like the lesson of Chautauqua, which in turn is like the lesson of all sacred architecture, all sacred space: that we need only look about us, and feel with a new intensity the space and light and solid and void, and the sound and the quiet, and listen to the presence of the past, and from there look into ourselves. And then we will find the transcendent.


LA CROSSE CO., Wis. (WEAU) -- In 2017, 73 percent of children younger than two received all their early childhood vaccinations statewide, according to the Wisconsin Department of Health Services.
But in the western region of Wisconsin, only 69 percent of children were fully covered, the lowest in the state.
"There are these non-vaccination hotspots throughout the country and they tend to follow states which allow personal exemptions to immunizations upon school entry and both Wisconsin and Minnesota are two of the 18 states," said Dr. Rajiv Naik, Pediatrics Section Head at Gundersen Health System - Onalaska Campus.
There are seven sets of early childhood vaccinations, such as MMR and polio, that go into full coverage.
All of which health officials say are important.
"Our infants are born with immune systems that can fight most germs, in fact they're exposed to thousands of germs daily," says La Crosse County Health Department Public Health Nurse Bryany Weigel. "However there are some viruses and bacteria that their immune systems can't handle alone. Vaccines can help protect their bodies and fight off and provide long lasting protection from those viruses and bacteria."
In Eau Claire County, 74 percent of all children younger than 24 months were fully vaccinated in 2017.
In La Crosse County that number was 78 percent.
But in Vernon County, it's a statewide low at 44 percent.
Doctors attribute the low numbers to the spread of misinformation about vaccinations.
This week, Gundersen Health System announced it received a $120,000 grant that will be used to improve immunization rates across the region.
"What we really want to do is really train and help health care providers learn how to council families on the real benefits of the immunizations to dispell these myths," said Naik.
At Gundersen, the immunization rate is 84 percent organization-wide, which Naik hopes moves to 90 percent following this grant.


Getting a great website designed and built is only part of the solution for your company's online presence, one of the most important additions to consider is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Search Engine Optimisation is the process of improving your website's visibility in search engines such as Google or Bing, via the "organic" (free) search results. To help our customers achieve this we have developed a number of packages, which will help boost your website rankings in the major search engines.
How High SEO Take You In The Rankings?
Many businesses are promised 'Page 1 Rankings' in un-achievable timeframes. Becoming No. 1 in a search engine is not easy, but there is a lot that can be done to increase your website's visibility and ranking, helping it climb to a higher page position.
At Deeper Blue, we can offer your business a cost effective service to help ensure your business receives the support it deserves. Our SEO packages are designed to suit your requirements and budget. Our Search Engine specialists will work with you every step of the way to ensure we provide a real-time solution that is measurable for your aims and objectives.
One Important Thing to Consider!
SEO isn't an instant marketing solution. It takes time to take effect but it can help build solid and stable results. SEO should be seen as an important long-term factor for the growth of your business.
Working with DeeperBlue makes the process for creating and implementing an SEO strategy simple and cost-effective. We take a strategic approach with proper guidance and a strong message, so your company engages with its target audience.