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Review: Natalie Prass and Stella Donnelly dance through the chaos at the Turf Club
by Colleen Cowie · September 22, 2018
Natalie Prass Stella Donnelly Turf Club Contributors Add a comment
The Turf Club (Illustration by Allegra Lockstadt for MPR)
After writing material for her sophomore album, Natalie Prass decided to scrap it all and start from scratch. In light of the 2016 election, Prass felt that she needed to create a body of work that reflected the world unfolding around her. The result is The Future and the Past, a sharp departure from her dreamy and melancholic full-length debut. Prass and her band brought this fresh, danceable repertoire of songs to the Turf Club last night, joined by Stella Donnelly.
Stella Donnelly, a singer-songwriter from Perth, Australia, kicked off the night with a solo set. Although Donnelly stepped on stage with only a guitar in hand, her set sent ripples through the audience as she sung about uncomfortable family gatherings, workplace misunderstandings, and awkward Tinder dates.
Donnelly nodded to her days working as a server at a pub, first with the song "You Owe Me," in which she demands her due pay from her boss (turns out she just mixed up the pay periods and was a week off schedule). She also dedicated the song "Mechanical Bull" to the bar staff at Turf Club, reminiscing about the demands of working a sometimes thankless job.
She played a few unreleased songs, such as "Season's Greetings," but also pulled material from Thrush Metal, her debut album from April 2017. Donnelly explained that when she released the album, she only expected to sell 30 copies (for her parents and their "28 friends"). She named the album Thrush Metal as a joke, and decided to fill the album's cover with a portrait of herself with noodles falling out of her mouth. Now she is touring the U.S. with Natalie Prass.
One of the songs on Thrush Metal is "Boys Will Be Boys," which Donnelly wrote after a friend opened up to her about experiencing sexual assault. "Why was she all alone, wearing her shirt that low? They said, 'Boys will be boys'; deaf to the word no," Donnelly sang in the song's chorus.
Throughout her set, Donnelly wielded her voice with precision, crescendoing from soft whispers to belted notes with skill, leaving trails of quivering vibrato at the end of her phrases. She performed a live fade-out at the end of one of her songs ("This one's a fade-out," she alerted the audience) and rolled her eyes at some of the lines that characters in her songs delivered. Her stage banter was quick and witty, and Donnelly often added lines in the middle of songs, creating running-commentary for herself and blurring the lines between where her songs started and ended.
Damn. @stelladonnelly is absolutely fantastic. Razor sharp wit and absolutely hilarious stage banter. Can't wait for her to come back. pic.twitter.com/0OuXBiW6mN
— kyle matteson (@solace) September 22, 2018
Natalie Prass opened her set with the first track on The Future and the Past, "Oh My." The song sets the tone for the album: it is infectiously funky, dance-inducing, and layered with sharp commentary on today's social and political climates. "Seems like everyday we're losing when we chose to read the news yeah, oh my," Prass sang on top of a steady R&B groove.
The band's attire nodded to the album's artwork; Prass donned a matching yellow circle skirt and button-up blouse and the rest of her band wore head-to-toe electric blue outfits. The majority of their set included songs from The Future and the Past, but the band also threw in a few songs from Prass's debut self-titled album, including "Bird of Prey." (Prass also stopped by The Current to record a session.)
Instead of playing the song faithfully to its 2015 recording, the band put a fresh spin on it, soaking the lovelorn lyrics with the funk, R&B, and jazz influence of Prass's newer songs. The song tells the story of someone running away from a controlling relationship. However, when reframed within the confidence and groove of Prass' contemporary style, the song took on an almost mocking tone. "You don't own me," Prass seemed to say through her unhindered dance moves and uptempo arrangement.
Prass dedicated the song "Sisters" to Donnelly. Prass requested pink lights onstage for the song, which goes out to all the "nasty women," "bad girls," and "ones held down."
4 songs in and this show has already far exceeded my high expectations. pic.twitter.com/Xkggsbg27n
As the night went on, Prass's set seemed to teeter somewhere between chaos and control. She swayed along to the beat of each song and accentuated the rhythm with crisp arm motions that mimicked the choreography of a seasoned flight attendant. Later in the same song, she would abandon any fragment of precision, tossing her head and surrendering her body to the ebbs and flows of the rhythm section.
Many of her songs contain multiple modulations, keeping the listener uncertain of which key center they will land in next. The verse of "Hot For the Mountain" contains a particularly unsettling interval, a tritone, which is known for being so unnerving that it earned the nickname "the devil's interval" and is rumored to have been banned from Renaissance church music.
However, at the end of each unsettling passage, Prass rewarded her audience with an infectious, hip-shaking groove. Her songs bubbled to catastrophic climaxes, like the shrieking guitar solo at the end of "Ship Go Down," but Prass always shimmied her way out of the chaos, and the crowd willfully bobbed along with her.
Prass introduced "Never Too Late" as one of her current favorites from the new album (she says she's "always wanted to write a yacht rock song"). She explained that the song is about "keeping love in your heart and forgiving people." "Sometimes you can't," she admitted, "but during these four minutes we will."
That statement seemed to capture the sentiment of the night; that other people's actions are out of your control — sometimes you find yourself in unsettling or uncertain circumstances. Sometimes you find yourself in the midst of chaos, of hate, of a divide that seems insurmountable. But instead of letting fear overwhelm you, you can open your arms and dance through the storm.
Colleen Cowie runs the blog Pass The Mic.
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Zimbabwe Power Sharing Process Snags on Issue of Western Sanctions
ZANU-PF has declared that it will make no further concessions until sanctions are lifted, demanding that the MDC exercise its supposed influence with Europe and the United States to achieve this
Nearly a year after the formation of a national unity government in Zimbabwe based on the 2008 Global Political Agreement, talks on resolving outstanding issues troubling power sharing have come to a virtual standstill.
The impasse centers on the Western travel and financial restrictions aimed at President Robert Mugabe and his ZANU-PF inner circle.
ZANU-PF has declared that it will make no further concessions until sanctions are lifted, demanding that the Movement for Democratic Change exert its supposed influence with Europe and the United States to achieve this.
But Washington, London and Brussels have given no sign of backing down, with British officials insisting this week that the only way sanctions can be lifted is if all parties to the GPA implement the agreement in full.
For views and insights on how the targeted sanctions have taken center stage in power-sharing and Zimbabwe's re-engagement with the West, VOA Studio 7 reporter Sandra Nyaira turned to political analyst and University of Zimbabwe professor John Makumbe and ZANU-PF Chief Whip Joram Gumbo.
Gumbo said Western sanctions are impeding progress by the government as it tries to improve the lives of ordinary Zimbabweans. Makumbe noted that the sanctions only affect about 200 people, mostly senior ZANU-PF figures.
Interview With John Makumbe & Joram Gumbo

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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This topic provides you with support for MiFiD II compliance using the X_TRADER® platform.
The rules affect Direct Electronic Access (DEA), algorithmic trading, high frequency trading (HFT) and market making and introduce very specific transaction reporting requirements.
MiFID II defines algorithmic trading as trading in financial instruments where a computer algorithm automatically determines individual parameters of orders, such as whether to initiate the order, the timing, price or quantity of the order, or how to manage the order after its submission, with limited or no human intervention.
MiFID II defines DEA as an arrangement where a trading venue member, participant or client permits a person to use their trading code to electronically transmit orders relating to a financial instrument directly to the trading venue.
TT is adding fields to each of its Gateways to support new fields that each exchange is adding to its API specification to comply with MiFID II.
MiFID II mandates two different standards for timestamping, one for HFT and one for non-HFT. TT is adopting the more stringent standard across the board by enhancing its timestamping on each Gateway to provide microsecond-level precision synchronized to global GPS on each order action.
As many TT customers use Gateway Audit Files for compliance purposes, TT is adding fields to each Gateway's Audit File to capture the relevant MiFID II data.
Customer Defaults is a feature in X_TRADER that allows users to populate certain fields for order actions that are routed to certain exchanges. TT is enhancing Customer Defaults to add support for MiFID II-related fields.
TT is adding columns in several windows of X_TRADER to display the new fields.
New FIX tags for MIFID II will be normalized across exchanges as much as possible following the FIX extensions proposed by the FIX Trading Community's MIFID II Working Groups.
TT is adding FIX tags to allow customers to populate the appropriate fields for FIX order routing to each exchange and to receive the tags on FIX Drop Copy.
Administrators can administer Customer Defaults for X_TRADER users and can lock them down such that end users cannot override their values. TT is adding support for the new MiFID II-related fields in TTUS as well as in X_TRADER.
Account Defaults is a feature in TTUS that dictates how certain FIX tags are populated in FIX Adapter. TT is adding support for the new MiFID II-related fields to Account Defaults in TTUS.


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… some (models) are useful
As someone who writes a lot of models — many for applied questions in conservation management (e.g., harvest quotas, eradication targets, minimum viable population sizes, etc.), and supervises people writing even more of them, I've had many different experiences with their uptake and implementation by management authorities.
Some of those experiences have involved catastrophic failures to influence any management or policy. One particularly painful memory relates to a model we wrote to assist with optimising approaches to eradicate (or at least, reduce the densities of) feral animals in Kakadu National Park. We even wrote the bloody thing in Visual Basic (horrible coding language) so people could run the module in Excel. As far as I'm aware, no one ever used it.
Others have been accepted more readily, such as a shark-harvest model, which (I think, but have no evidence to support) has been used to justify fishing quotas, and one we've done recently for the eradication of feral pigs on Kangaroo Island (as yet unpublished) has led directly to increased funding to the agency responsible for the programme.
According to Altmetrics (and the online tool I developed to get paper-level Altmetric information quickly), only 3 of the 16 of what I'd call my most 'applied modelling' papers have been cited in policy documents:
Tags: conservation, ecology, environment, extinction, mathematics, modelling, science
Categories : conservation, conservation biology, ecology, economics, environmental economics, environmental policy, exploitation, extinction, fisheries, harvest, invasive species, investment, management, mathematics, minimum viable population, modelling, mvp, planning, population dynamics, population viability analysis, PVA, research, science, species distribution model
I'm pleased to announce the publication of a paper led by Kathryn Venning (KV) that was derived from her Honours work in the lab. Although she's well into her PhD on an entirely different topic, I'm overjoyed that she persevered and saw this work to publication.
Here, killa, killa, killa, killa …
As you probably already know, feral cats are a huge problem in Australia. The are probably the primary reason Australia leads the world in mammal extinctions in particular, and largely the reason so many re-introduction attempts of threatened marsupials fail miserably only after a few years.
Feral cats occupy every habitat in the country, from the high tropics to the deserts, and from the mountains to the sea. They adapt to the cold just as easily as they adapt to the extreme heat, and they can eat just about anything that moves, from invertebrates to the carcases of much larger animals that they scavenge.
Cats are Australia's bane, but you can't help but be at least a little impressed with their resilience.
Still, we have to try our best to get rid of them where we can, or at least reduce their densities to the point where their ecological damage is limited.
Typically, the only efficient and cost-effective way to do that is via lethal control, but by using various means. These can include direct shooting, trapping, aerial poison-baiting, and a new 'smart' method of targeted poison delivery via a prototype device known as a Felixer™. The latter are particularly useful for passive control in areas where ground-shooting access is difficult.
A live Felixer™ deployed on Kangaroo Island (photo: CJA Bradshaw 2020)
A few years back the federal government committed what might seem like a sizeable amount of money to 'eradicate' cats from Australia. Yeah, good luck with that, although the money has been allocated to several places where cat reduction and perhaps even eradication is feasible. Namely, on islands.
Tags: Australia, control, ecological restoration, eradication, feral cats, invasive species, Predation, restoration
Categories : alien species, Australia, cat, conservation, conservation biology, decline, demography, ecology, economics, environmental economics, extinction, harvest, human-wildlife conflict, invasive species, investment, mammal, management, modelling, planning, population dynamics, population viability analysis, predation, predator, research, restoration, South Australia, southern Australia, threatened species
The biggest and slowest don't always bite it first
For many years I've been interested in modelling the extinction dynamics of megafauna. Apart from co-authoring a few demographically simplified (or largely demographically free) models about how megafauna species could have gone extinct, I have never really tried to capture the full nuances of long-extinct species within a fully structured demographic framework.
But how do you get the life-history data of an extinct animal that was never directly measured. Surely, things like survival, reproductive output, longevity and even environmental carrying capacity are impossible to discern, and aren't these necessary for a stage-structured demographic model?
Thylacine mum & joey. Nellie Pease & CABAH
The answer to the first part of that question "it's possible", and to the second, it's "yes". The most important bit of information we palaeo modellers need to construct something that's ecologically plausible for an extinct species is an estimate of body mass. Thankfully, palaeontologists are very good at estimating the mass of the things they dig up (with the associated caveats, of course). From such estimates, we can reconstruct everything from equilibrium densities, maximum rate of population growth, age at first breeding, and longevity.
But it's more complicated than that, of course. In Australia anyway, we're largely dealing with marsupials (and some monotremes), and they have a rather different life-history mode than most placentals. We therefore have to 'correct' the life-history estimates derived from living placental species. Thankfully, evolutionary biologists and ecologists have ways to do that too.
The Pleistocene kangaroo Procoptodon goliah, the largest and most heavily built of the short-faced kangaroos, was the largest and most heavily built kangaroo known. It had an unusually short, flat face and forwardly directed
eyes, with a single large toe on each foot (reduced from the more normal count of four). Each forelimb had two long, clawed fingers that would have been used to bring leafy branches within reach.
So with a battery of ecological, demographic, and evolutionary tools, we can now create reasonable stochastic-demographic models for long-gone species, like wombat-like creatures as big as cars, birds more than two metres tall, and lizards more than seven metres long that once roamed the Australian continent.
Ancient clues, in the shape of fossils and archaeological evidence of varying quality scattered across Australia, have formed the basis of several hypotheses about the fate of megafauna that vanished during a peak about 42,000 years ago from the ancient continent of Sahul, comprising mainland Australia, Tasmania, New Guinea and neighbouring islands.
There is a growing consensus that multiple factors were at play, including climate change, the impact of people on the environment, and access to freshwater sources.
Just published in the open-access journal eLife, our latest CABAH paper applies these approaches to assess how susceptible different species were to extinction – and what it means for the survival of species today.
Using various characteristics such as body size, weight, lifespan, survival rate, and fertility, we (Chris Johnson, John Llewelyn, Vera Weisbecker, Giovanni Strona, Frédérik Saltré & me) created population simulation models to predict the likelihood of these species surviving under different types of environmental disturbance.
Simulations included everything from increasing droughts to increasing hunting pressure to see which species of 13 extinct megafauna (genera: Diprotodon, Palorchestes, Zygomaturus, Phascolonus, Procoptodon, Sthenurus, Protemnodon, Simosthenurus, Metasthenurus, Genyornis, Thylacoleo, Thylacinus, Megalibgwilia), as well as 8 comparative species still alive today (Vombatus, Osphranter, Notamacropus, Dromaius, Alectura, Sarcophilus, Dasyurus, Tachyglossus), had the highest chances of surviving.
We compared the results to what we know about the timing of extinction for different megafauna species derived from dated fossil records. We expected to confirm that the most extinction-prone species were the first species to go extinct – but that wasn't necessarily the case.
While we did find that slower-growing species with lower fertility, like the rhino-sized wombat relative Diprotodon, were generally more susceptible to extinction than more-fecund species like the marsupial 'tiger' thylacine, the relative susceptibility rank across species did not match the timing of their extinctions recorded in the fossil record.
Indeed, we found no clear relationship between a species' inherent vulnerability to extinction — such as being slower and heavier and/or slower to reproduce — and the timing of its extinction in the fossil record.
In fact, we found that most of the living species used for comparison — such as short-beaked echidnas, emus, brush turkeys, and common wombats — were more susceptible on average than their now-extinct counterparts.
Tags: Alectura, brush turkey, Dasyurus, demographic model, Diprotodon, Dromaius, echidna, emu, extinction, Genyornis, Kangaroo, megafauna, Megalibgwilia, Metasthenurus, model, Notamacropus, Osphranter, Palorchestes, Phascolonus, Procoptodon, Protemnodon, Sahul, Sarcophilus, short-faced kangaroo, Simosthenurus, Sthenurus, Tachyglossus, Tasmanian devil, Thylacine, Thylacinus, Thylacoleo, Vombatus, wallaby, wombat, Zygomaturus
Categories : Australia, birds, climate change, conservation, decline, demography, ecology, evolution, exploitation, extinction, extinction debt, extinction vortex, harvest, kangaroo, mammal, mathematics, minimum viable population, modelling, population dynamics, population viability analysis, predator, PVA, research
Need to predict population trends, but can't code? No problem
Yes, yes. I know. Another R Shiny app.
However, this time I've strayed from my recent bibliometric musings and developed something that's more compatible with the core of my main research and interests.
Welcome to LeslieMatrixShiny!
Over the years I've taught many students the basics of population modelling, with the cohort-based approaches dominating the curriculum. Of these, the simpler 'Leslie' (age-classified) matrix models are both the easiest to understand and for which data can often be obtained without too many dramas.
But unless you're willing to sit down and learn the code, they can be daunting to the novice.
Sure, there are plenty of software alternatives out there, such as Bob Lacy's Vortex (a free individual-based model available for PCs only), Resit Akçakaya & co's RAMAS Metapop ($; PC only), Stéphane Legendre's Unified Life Models (ULM; open-source; all platforms), and Charles Todd's Essential (open-source; PC only) to name a few. If you're already an avid R user and already into population modelling, you might be familiar with the population-modelling packages popdemo, OptiPopd, or sPop. I'm sure there are still other good resources out there of which I'm not aware.
But, even to install the relevant software or invoke particular packages in R takes a bit of time and learning. It's probably safe to assume that many people find the prospect daunting.
It's for this reason that I turned my newly acquired R Shiny skills to matrix population models so that even complete coding novices can run their own stochastic population models.
I call the app LeslieMatrixShiny.
Tags: age-classifed matrix, conservation applications, conservation software, conservation tools, Leslie matrix, mathematics, modelling, population modelling, population trends, populations, statistics
Categories : conservation, demography, extinction, mathematics, minimum viable population, modelling, population dynamics, population viability analysis, software
New journal: Frontiers in Conservation Science
Several months ago, Daniel Blumstein of UCLA approached me with an offer — fancy leading a Special Section in a new Frontiers journal dedicated to conservation science?
I admit that my gut reaction was a visceral 'no', both in terms of the extra time it would require, as well as my autonomous reflex of 'not another journal, please'.
I had, for example, spent a good deal of blood, sweat, and tears helping to launch Conservation Letters when I acted as Senior Editor for the first 3.5 years of its existence (I can't believe that it has been nearly a decade since I left the journal). While certainly an educational and reputational boost, I can't claim that the experience was always a pleasant one — as has been said many times before, the fastest way to make enemies is to become an editor.
But then Dan explained what he had in mind for Frontiers in Conservation Science, and the more I spoke with him, the more I started to think that it wasn't a bad idea after all for me to join.
Tags: biodiversity, conservation, Frontiers in Conservation Science, multidisciplinary, Scientific journal
Categories : biodiversity, climate change, conservation, conservation biology, conservation ecology, decline, development, ecology, economics, ecosystem, ecosystem services, environmental policy, environmental science, extinction, genetic diversity, genetics, habitat loss, human overpopulation, human-wildlife conflict, impact, implementation, invasive species, investment, management, population viability analysis, poverty, prioritisation, research, restoration, science, scientific publishing, scientific writing, sustainability, threatened species, translocation
First Australians arrived in large groups using complex technologies
One of the most ancient peopling events of the great diaspora of anatomically modern humans out of Africa more than 50,000 years ago — human arrival in the great continent of Sahul (New Guinea, mainland Australia & Tasmania joined during periods of low sea level) — remains mysterious. The entry routes taken, whether migration was directed or accidental, and just how many people were needed to ensure population viability are shrouded by the mists of time. This prompted us to build stochastic, age-structured human population-dynamics models incorporating hunter-gatherer demographic rates and palaeoecological reconstructions of environmental carrying capacity to predict the founding population necessary to survive the initial peopling of late-Pleistocene Sahul.
As ecological modellers, we are often asked by other scientists to attempt to render the highly complex mechanisms of entire ecosystems tractable for virtual manipulation and hypothesis testing through the inevitable simplification that is 'a model'. When we work with scientists studying long-since-disappeared ecosystems, the challenges multiply.
Add some multidisciplinary data and concepts into the mix, and the complexity can quickly escalate.
We do have, however, some powerful tools in our modelling toolbox, so as the Modelling Node for the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage (CABAH), our role is to link disparate fields like palaeontology, archaeology, geochronology, climatology, and genetics together with mathematical 'glue' to answer the big questions regarding Australia's ancient past.
This is how we tackled one of these big questions: just how did the first anatomically modern Homo sapiens make it to the continent and survive?
At that time, Australia was part of the giant continent of Sahul that connected New Guinea, mainland Australia, and Tasmania at times of lower sea level. In fact, throughout most of last ~ 126,000 years (late Pleistocene and much of the Holocene), Sahul was the dominant landmass in the region (see this handy online tool for how the coastline of Sahul changed over this period).
Categories : Australia, climate change, connectivity, demography, ecology, genetics, invasive species, mathematics, minimum viable population, modelling, mvp, population dynamics, population viability analysis, societies
Why populations can't be saved by a single breeding pair
© Reuters/Thomas Mukoya
I published this last week on The Conversation, and now reproducing it here for CB.com readers.
Two days ago, the last male northern white rhino (Ceratotherium simum cottoni) died. His passing leaves two surviving members of his subspecies: both females who are unable to bear calves.
Even though it might not be quite the end of the northern white rhino because of the possibility of implanting frozen embryos in their southern cousins (C. simum simum), in practical terms, it nevertheless represents the end of a long decline for the subspecies. It also raises the question: how many individuals does a species need to persist?
Fiction writers have enthusiastically embraced this question, most often in the post-apocalypse genre. It's a notion with a long past; the Adam and Eve myth is of course based on a single breeding pair populating the entire world, as is the case described in the Ragnarok, the final battle of the gods in Norse mythology.
This idea dovetails neatly with the image of Noah's animals marching "two by two" into the Ark. But the science of "minimum viable populations" tells us a different story.
No inbreeding, please
The global gold standard used to assess the extinction risk of any species is the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Adam and Eve, apocalypse, de-extinction, extinction, inbreeding, inbreeding depression, Ragnarok, repopulating
Categories : Africa, Allee effect, cloning, conservation, conservation biology, decline, DNA, exploitation, extinction, extinction debt, extinction vortex, genetic diversity, genetics, inbreeding depression, living dead, minimum viable population, mvp, poaching, population dynamics, population viability analysis, PVA, recovery, threatened species
Predicting sustainable shark harvests when stock assessments are lacking
© Andrew Fox
I love it when a good collaboration bears fruit, and our latest paper is a good demonstration of that principle.
It all started a few years ago with an ARC Linkage Project grant we received to examine how the whaler shark fishing industry in Australia might manage its stocks better.
As I'm sure many are aware, sharks around the world aren't doing terribly well (surprise, surprise — yet another taxon suffering at the hands of humankind). And while some populations ('stocks', in the dissociative parlance of the fishing industry) are doing better than others, and some countries have a better track record in managing these stocks than others, the overall outlook is grim.
One of the main reasons sharks tend to fair worse than bony fishes (teleosts) for the same fishing effort is their 'slow' life histories. It doesn't take an advanced quantitative ecology degree to understand that growing slowly, breeding late, and producing few offspring is a good indication that a species can't handle too much killing before populations start to dwindle. As is the case for most large shark species, I tend to think of them in a life-history sense as similar to large terrestrial mammals.
Now, you'd figure that a taxon with intrinsic susceptibility to fishing would have heaps of good data with which managers could monitor catches and quotas so that declines could be avoided. However, the reality is generally the inverse, with many populations having poor information regarding vital rates (e.g., survival, fertility), age structure, density feedback characteristics, and even simple estimates of abundance. Without such key information, management tends to be ad hoc and often not very effective. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: bronze whaler sharks, bronze whalers, bronzies, Carchcarinus brachyurus, chondrichthyan, commercial fishing, copper shark, demographic model, fishing, global sensitivity analysis, Latin hypercube, sustainable fisheries
Categories : Australia, conservation, environmental policy, exploitation, fish, fisheries, genetics, harvest, management, marine, ocean, population dynamics, population viability analysis, shark
Four decades of fragmentation
I've recently read perhaps the most comprehensive treatise of forest fragmentation research ever compiled, and I personally view this rather readable and succinct review by Bill Laurance and colleagues as something every ecology and conservation student should read.
The 'Biological Dynamics of Forest Fragments Project' (BDFFP) is unquestionably one of the most important landscape-scale experiments ever conceived and implemented, now having run 38 years since its inception in 1979. Indeed, it was way ahead of its time.
Experimental studies in ecology are comparatively rare, namely because it is difficult, expensive, and challenging in the extreme to manipulate entire ecosystems to test specific hypotheses relating to the response of biodiversity to environmental change. Thus, we ecologists tend to rely more on mensurative designs that use existing variation in the landscape (or over time) to infer mechanisms of community change. Of course, such experiments have to be large to be meaningful, which is one reason why the 1000 km2 BDFFP has been so successful as the gold standard for determining the effects of forest fragmentation on biodiversity.
And successful it has been. A quick search for 'BDFFP' in the Web of Knowledge database identifies > 40 peer-reviewed articles and a slew of books and book chapters arising from the project, some of which are highly cited classics in conservation ecology (e.g., doi:10.1046/j.1523-1739.2002.01025.x cited > 900 times; doi:10.1073/pnas.2336195100 cited > 200 times; doi:10.1016/j.biocon.2010.09.021 cited > 400 times; and doi:10.1111/j.1461-0248.2009.01294.x cited nearly 600 times). In fact, if we are to claim any ecological 'laws' at all, our understanding of fragmentation on biodiversity could be labelled as one of the few, thanks principally to the BDFFP. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Amazon, BDFFP, Biological Dynamics of Forest Fragments Project, Brazil, edge effects, extinction, extirpation, fragmentation, rarity, South America, synergies
Categories : Allee effect, Amazon, anthropocene, biodiversity, biowealth, carbon, climate change, community ecology, connectivity, conservation, conservation biology, conservation ecology, decline, deforestation, demography, development, drought, ecosystem, ecosystem function, endemic, endemism, environmental policy, exploitation, extinction, extinction debt, fire, flood, fragmentation, habitat loss, invasive species, logging, management, metapopulation, monitoring, population dynamics, population viability analysis, protected area, recovery, research, reserve, South America, tropical
Two new postdoctoral positions in ecological network & vegetation modelling announced
With the official start of the new ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage (CABAH) in July, I am pleased to announce two new CABAH-funded postdoctoral positions (a.k.a. Research Associates) in my global ecology lab at Flinders University in Adelaide (Flinders Modelling Node).
One of these positions is a little different, and represents something of an experiment. The Research Associate in Palaeo-Vegetation Modelling is being restricted to women candidates; in other words, we're only accepting applications from women for this one. In a quest to improve the gender balance in my lab and in universities in general, this is a step in the right direction.
The project itself is not overly prescribed, but we would like something along the following lines of inquiry: Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: CABAH, Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage, ecological networks, employment, Flinders University, gender, gender balance, job, jobs, mathematics, modelling, models, postdoctoral fellowship, STEM, vegetation, women in stem, women-only
Categories : Australia, biodiversity, biogeography, bottom-up ecology, climate change, community ecology, conservation, ecology, ecosystem, ecosystem function, extinction, extinction debt, Flinders University, function, genetics, harvest, jobs, mathematics, meso-predator release, minimum viable population, modelling, palaeo-ecology, population dynamics, population viability analysis, predation, predator, top-down ecology
Sensitive numbers
A sensitive parameter
You couldn't really do ecology if you didn't know how to construct even the most basic mathematical model — even a simple regression is a model (the non-random relationship of some variable to another). The good thing about even these simple models is that it is fairly straightforward to interpret the 'strength' of the relationship, in other words, how much variation in one thing can be explained by variation in another. Provided the relationship is real (not random), and provided there is at least some indirect causation implied (i.e., it is not just a spurious coincidence), then there are many simple statistics that quantify this strength — in the case of our simple regression, the coefficient of determination (R2) statistic is a usually a good approximation of this.
In the case of more complex multivariate correlation models, then sometimes the coefficient of determination is insufficient, in which case you might need to rely on statistics such as the proportion of deviance explained, or the marginal and/or conditional variance explained.
When you go beyond this correlative model approach and start constructing more mechanistic models that emulate ecological phenomena from the bottom-up, things get a little more complicated when it comes to quantifying the strength of relationships. Perhaps the most well-known category of such mechanistic models is the humble population viability analysis, abbreviated to PVA§.
Let's take the simple case of a four-parameter population model we could use to project population size over the next 10 years for an endangered species that we're introducing to a new habitat. We'll assume that we have the following information: the size of the founding (introduced) population (n), the juvenile survival rate (Sj, proportion juveniles surviving from birth to the first year), the adult survival rate (Sa, the annual rate of surviving adults to year 1 to maximum longevity), and the fertility rate of mature females (m, number of offspring born per female per reproductive cycle). Each one of these parameters has an associated uncertainty (ε) that combines both measurement error and environmental variation.
If we just took the mean value of each of these three demographic rates (survivals and fertility) and project a founding population of n = 10 individuals for 1o years into the future, we would have a single, deterministic estimate of the average outcome of introducing 10 individuals. As we already know, however, the variability, or stochasticity, is more important than the average outcome, because uncertainty in the parameter values (ε) will mean that a non-negligible number of model iterations will result in the extinction of the introduced population. This is something that most conservationists will obviously want to minimise.
So each time we run an iteration of the model, and generally for each breeding interval (most often 1 year at a time), we choose (based on some random-sampling regime) a different value for each parameter. This will give us a distribution of outcomes after the 10-year projection. Let's say we did 1000 iterations like this; taking the number of times that the population went extinct over these iterations would provide us with an estimate of the population's extinction probability over that interval. Of course, we would probably also vary the size of the founding population (say, between 10 and 100), to see at what point the extinction probability became acceptably low for managers (i.e., as close to zero as possible), but not unacceptably high that it would be too laborious or expensive to introduce that many individuals. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: ecological models, emulator, extinction risk, global sensitivity analysis, iterations, perturbation analysis, population viability analysis, PVA, sensitivity analysis, simulation
Categories : bottom-up ecology, conservation, conservation biology, conservation ecology, demography, extinction, investment, management, mathematics, modelling, mvp, population dynamics, population viability analysis, PVA
Outright bans of trophy hunting could do more harm than good
In July 2015 an American dentist shot and killed a male lion called 'Cecil' with a hunting bow and arrow, an act that sparked a storm of social media outrage. Cecil was a favourite of tourists visiting Hwange National Park in Zimbabwe, and so the allegation that he was lured out of the Park to neighbouring farmland added considerable fuel to the flames of condemnation. Several other aspects of the hunt, such as baiting close to national park boundaries, were allegedly done illegally and against the spirit and ethical norms of a managed trophy hunt.
In May 2015, a Texan legally shot a critically endangered black rhino in Namibia, which also generated considerable online ire. The backlash ensued even though the male rhino was considered 'surplus' to Namibia's black rhino populations, and the US$350,000 generated from the managed hunt was to be re-invested in conservation. Together, these two incidents have triggered vociferous appeals to ban trophy hunting throughout Africa.
These highly politicized events are but a small component of a large industry in Africa worth > US$215 million per year that 'sells' iconic animals to (mainly foreign) hunters as a means of generating otherwise scarce funds. While to most people this might seem like an abhorrent way to generate money, we argue in a new paper that sustainable-use activities, such as trophy hunting, can be an important tool in the conservationist's toolbox. Conserving biodiversity can be expensive, so generating money is a central preoccupation of many environmental NGOs, conservation-minded individuals, government agencies and scientists. Making money for conservation in Africa is even more challenging, and so we argue that trophy hunting should and could fill some of that gap. Read the rest of this entry »
Comments : 13 Comments »
Tags: Africa, animal ethics, Big Five, canned hunting, Cecil, Cecil the Lion, conservation, land use, lion, safari, safari hunting, trophy hunting
Categories : Africa, agriculture, animal welfare, biodiversity, buffalo, conservation, corruption, decline, economics, environmental policy, exploitation, extinction, genetic diversity, governance, habitat loss, harvest, inbreeding depression, management, minimum viable population, mvp, poaching, population viability analysis, poverty, predator, preservationist, protected area, reserve, sustainability, threatened species, tourism
Avoiding genetic rescue not justified on genetic grounds
Genetics to the rescue!
I had the pleasure today of reading a new paper by one of the greatest living conservation geneticists, Dick Frankham. As some of CB readers might remember, I've also published some papers with Dick over the last few years, with the most recent challenging the very basis for the IUCN Red List category thresholds (i.e., in general, they're too small).
Dick's latest paper in Molecular Ecology is a meta-analysis designed to test whether there are any genetic grounds for NOT attempting genetic rescue for inbreeding-depressed populations. I suppose a few definitions are in order here. Genetic rescue is the process, either natural or facilitated, where inbred populations (i.e., in a conservation sense, those comprising too many individuals bonking their close relatives because the population in question is small) receive genes from another population such that their overall genetic diversity increases. In the context of conservation genetics, 'inbreeding depression' simply means reduced biological fitness (fertility, survival, longevity, etc.) resulting from parents being too closely related.
Seems like an important thing to avoid, so why not attempt to facilitate gene flow among populations such that those with inbreeding depression can be 'rescued'? In applied conservation, there are many reasons given for not attempting genetic rescue: Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: conservation, genetic rescue, Genetics, inbreeding, inbreeding depression, outbreeding, outbreeding depression, outcrossing
Categories : captive breeding, connectivity, conservation, demography, DNA, extinction, genetic diversity, genetics, introgression, management, metapopulation, minimum viable population, population dynamics, population viability analysis, PVA, recovery
We generally ignore the big issues
I've had a good week at Stanford University with Paul Ehrlich where we've been putting the final touches1 on our book. It's been taking a while to put together, but we're both pretty happy with the result, which should be published by The University of Chicago Press within the first quarter of 2015.
It has indeed been a pleasure and a privilege to work with one of the greatest thinkers of our age, and let me tell you that at 82, he's still a force with which to be reckoned. While I won't divulge much of our discussions here given they'll appear soon-ish in the book, I did want to raise one subject that I think we all need to think about a little more.
The issue is what we, as ecologists (I'm including conservation scientists here), choose to study and contemplate in our professional life.
I'm just as guilty as most of the rest of you, but I argue that our discipline is caught in a rut of irrelevancy on the grander scale. We spend a lot of time refining the basics of what we essentially already know pretty well. While there will be an eternity of processes to understand, species to describe, and relationships to measure, can our discipline really afford to avoid the biggest issues while biodiversity (and our society included) are flushed down the drain?
Tags: agriculture, ecological society, ecology, electricity, energy, food supply, human overpopulation, navel gazing, Population, sustainability
Categories : agriculture, anthropocene, biodiversity, carbon, carbon trading, climate change, conference, conservation, conservation biology, economics, ecosystem, environmental policy, extinction, food, human overpopulation, planning, population viability analysis, protected area, PVA, research, reserve, science, threatened species
50/500 or 100/1000 debate not about time frame
As you might recall, Dick Frankham, Barry Brook and I recently wrote a review in Biological Conservation challenging the status quo regarding the famous 50/500 'rule' in conservation management (effective population size [Ne] = 50 to avoid inbreeding depression in the short-term, and Ne = 500 to retain the ability to evolve in perpetuity). Well, it inevitably led to some comments arising in the same journal, but we were only permitted by Biological Conservation to respond to one of them. In our opinion, the other comment was just as problematic, and only further muddied the waters, so it too required a response. In a first for me, we have therefore decided to publish our response on the arXiv pre-print server as well as here on ConservationBytes.com.
50/500 or 100/1000 debate is not about the time frame – Reply to Rosenfeld
cite as: Frankham, R, Bradshaw CJA, Brook BW. 2014. 50/500 or 100/1000 debate is not about the time frame – Reply to Rosenfeld. arXiv: 1406.6424 [q-bio.PE] 25 June 2014.
The Letter from Rosenfeld (2014) in response to Jamieson and Allendorf (2012) and Frankham et al. (2014) and related papers is misleading in places and requires clarification and correction, as follows: Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: 50/500 rule, conservation target, evolutionary potential, Genetics, inbreeding, management, minimum viable population size, MVP, population genetics, recovery
Categories : biodiversity, conservation, conservation biology, decline, ecological triage, extinction, extinction debt, extinction vortex, genetic diversity, genetics, management, minimum viable population, MPA, population viability analysis, PVA, recovery, restoration, synergies, threatened species
We're sorry, but 50/500 is still too few
Some of you who are familiar with my colleagues' and my work will know that we have been investigating the minimum viable population size concept for years (see references at the end of this post). Little did I know when I started this line of scientific inquiry that it would end up creating more than a few adversaries.
It might be a philosophical perspective that people adopt when refusing to believe that there is any such thing as a 'minimum' number of individuals in a population required to guarantee a high (i.e., almost assured) probability of persistence. I'm not sure. For whatever reason though, there have been some fierce opponents to the concept, or any application of it.
Yet a sizeable chunk of quantitative conservation ecology develops – in various forms – population viability analyses to estimate the probability that a population (or entire species) will go extinct. When the probability is unacceptably high, then various management approaches can be employed (and modelled) to improve the population's fate. The flip side of such an analysis is, of course, seeing at what population size the probability of extinction becomes negligible.
'Negligible' is a subjective term in itself, just like the word 'very' can mean different things to different people. This is why we looked into standardising the criteria for 'negligible' for minimum viable population sizes, almost exactly what the near universally accepted IUCN Red List attempts to do with its various (categorical) extinction risk categories.
But most reasonable people are likely to agree that < 1 % chance of going extinct over many generations (40, in the case of our suggestion) is an acceptable target. I'd feel pretty safe personally if my own family's probability of surviving was > 99 % over the next 40 generations.
Some people, however, baulk at the notion of making generalisations in ecology (funny – I was always under the impression that was exactly what we were supposed to be doing as scientists – finding how things worked in most situations, such that the mechanisms become clearer and clearer – call me a dreamer).
So when we were attacked in several high-profile journals, it came as something of a surprise. The latest lashing came in the form of a Trends in Ecology and Evolution article. We wrote a (necessarily short) response to that article, identifying its inaccuracies and contradictions, but we were unable to expand completely on the inadequacies of that article. However, I'm happy to say that now we have, and we have expanded our commentary on that paper into a broader review. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: 50/500 rule, conservation, extinction, Genetics, inbreeding, inbreeding depression, management, minimum viable population size, mvl, population viability analysis, PVA
Categories : conservation, conservation biology, demography, DNA, ecological triage, extinction, genetic diversity, genetics, inbreeding depression, management, modelling, population dynamics, population viability analysis, PVA, threatened species
Cleaning up the rubbish: Australian megafauna extinctions
A few weeks ago I wrote a post about how to run the perfect scientific workshop, which most of you thought was a good set of tips (bizarrely, one person was quite upset with the message; I saved him the embarrassment of looking stupid online and refrained from publishing his comment).
As I mentioned at the end of post, the stimulus for the topic was a particularly wonderful workshop 12 of us attended at beautiful Linnaeus Estate on the northern coast of New South Wales (see Point 5 in the 'workshop tips' post).
But why did a group of ecological modellers (me, Barry Brook, Salvador Herrando-Pérez, Fréd Saltré, Chris Johnson, Nick Beeton), geneticists, palaeontologists (Gav Prideaux), fossil dating specialists (Dizzy Gillespie, Bert Roberts, Zenobia Jacobs) and palaeo-climatologists (Michael Bird, Chris Turney [in absentia]) get together in the first place? Hint: it wasn't just the for the beautiful beach and good wine.
I hate to say it – mainly because it deserves as little attention as possible – but the main reason is that we needed to clean up a bit of rubbish. The rubbish in question being the latest bit of excrescence growing on that accumulating heap produced by a certain team of palaeontologists promulgating their 'it's all about the climate or nothing' broken record.
Tags: Ancient DNA, Australasia, Australia, climate change, Extinctions, Fossil, hunting, megafauna, over-exploitation, Sahul
Categories : Australia, climate change, conservation, disease, DNA, exploitation, extinction, genetics, harvest, mathematics, metapopulation, minimum viable population, modelling, population dynamics, population viability analysis, South America, synergies
Don't blame it on the dingo
Our postdoc, Tom Prowse, has just had one of the slickest set of reviews I've ever seen, followed by a quick acceptance of what I think is a pretty sexy paper. Earlier this year his paper in Journal of Animal Ecology showed that thylacine (the badly named 'Tasmanian tiger') was most likely not the victim of some unobserved mystery disease, but instead succumbed to what many large predators have/will: human beings. His latest effort now online in Ecology shows that the thylacine and devil extinctions on the Australian mainland were similarly the result of humans and not the scapegoat dingo. But I'll let him explain:
'Regime shifts' can occur in ecosystems when sometimes even a single component is added or changed. Such additions, of say a new predator, or changes such as a rise in temperature, can fundamentally alter core ecosystem functions and processes, causing the ecosystem to switch to some alternative stable state.
Some of the most striking examples of ecological regime shifts are the mass extinctions of large mammals ('megafauna') during human prehistory. In Australia, human arrival and subsequent hunting pressure is implicated in the rapid extinction of about 50 mammal species by around 45 thousand years ago. The ensuing alternative stable state was comprised of a reduced diversity of predators, dominated by humans and two native marsupial predators ‑ the thylacine (also known as the marsupial 'tiger' or 'wolf') and the devil (which is now restricted to Tasmania and threatened by a debilitating, infectious cancer).
Both thylacines and devils lasted on mainland Australia for over 40 thousand years following the arrival of humans. However, a second regime shift resulted in the extinction of both these predators by about 3 thousand years ago, which was coincidentally just after dingoes were introduced to Australia. Dingoes are descended from early domestic dogs and were introduced to northern Australia from Asia by ancient traders approximately 4 thousand years ago. Today, they are Australia's only top predator remaining, other than invasive European foxes and feral cats. Since the earliest days of European settlement, dingoes have been persecuted because they prey on livestock. During the 1880s, 5614 km of 'dingo fence' was constructed to protect south-east Australia's grazing rangelands from dingo incursions. The fence is maintained to this day, and dingoes are poisoned and shot both inside and outside this barrier, despite mounting evidence that these predators play a key role in maintaining native ecosystems, largely by suppressing invasive predators.
Perhaps because the public perception of dingoes as 'sheep-killers' is so firmly entrenched, it has been commonly assumed that dingoes killed off the thylacines and devils on mainland Australia. People who support this view also point out that thylacines and devils persisted on the island of Tasmania, which was never colonised by dingoes (although thylacines went extinct there too in the early 1900s). To date, most discussion of the mainland thylacine and devil extinctions has focused on the possibility that dingoes disrupted the system by 'exploitation competition' (eating the same prey), 'interference competition' (wasting the native predators' precious munching time), as well as 'direct predation' (dingoes actually eating devils and thylacines). Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Australia, dingo, ecology, regime shift, simulations, Tasmania, Tasmanian devil, Tasmanian tiger, Thylacine
Categories : Australia, climate change, conservation, decline, demography, dingo, exploitation, extinction, harvest, invasive species, mammal, mathematics, modelling, population dynamics, population viability analysis, predator, synergies, trophic cascades
Saving world's most threatened cat requires climate adaptation
© CSIC Andalusia Audiovisual Bank/H. Garrido
The Iberian lynx is the world's most threatened cat, with recent counts estimating only 250 individuals surviving in the wild. Recent declines of Iberian lynx have been associated with sharp regional reductions in the abundance of its main prey, the European rabbit, caused mainly by myxomatosis virus and rabbit haemorrhagic disease. At present, only two Iberian lynx populations persist in the wild compared with nine in the 1990s.
Over €90 million has been spent since 1994 to mitigate the extinction risk of this charismatic animal, mainly through habitat management, reduction of human-caused mortality and, more recently, translocation. Although lynx abundance might have increased in the last ten years in response to intensive management, a new study published in Nature Climate Change warns that the ongoing conservation strategies could buy just a few decades before the species goes extinct.
The study led by Damien Fordham from The Environment Institute (The University of Adelaide) and Miguel Araújo from the Integrative Biogeography and Global Change Group (Spanish Research Council) shows that climate change could lead to a rapid and severe decrease in lynx abundance in coming decades, and probably result in its extinction in the wild within 50 years. Current management efforts could be futile if they do not take into account the combined effects of climate change, land use and prey abundance on population dynamics of the Iberian Lynx.
Tags: climate change, European rabbit, Iberian Lynx, Nature Climate Change, Portugal, Spain, Trophic interactions
Categories : biodiversity, climate change, conservation, mammal, management, metapopulation, modelling, population dynamics, population viability analysis, threatened species
Given the popularity of certain prescriptive posts on ConservationBytes.com, I thought it prudent to compile a list of software that my lab and I have found particularly useful over the years. This list is not meant to be comprehensive, but it will give you a taste for what's out there. I don't list the plethora of conservation genetics software that is available (generally given my lack of experience with it), but if this is your chosen area, I'd suggest starting with Dick Frankham's excellent book, An Introduction to Conservation Genetics.
1. R: If you haven't yet loaded the open-source R programming language on your machine, do it now. It is the single-most-useful bit of statistical and programming software available to anyone anywhere in the sciences. Don't worry if you're not a fully fledged programmer – there are now enough people using and developing sophisticated 'libraries' (packages of functions) that there's pretty much an application for everything these days. We tend to use R to the exclusion of almost any other statistical software because it makes you learn the technique rather than just blindly pressing the 'go' button. You could also stop right here – with R, you can do pretty much everything else that the software listed below does; however, you have to be an exceedingly clever programmer and have a lot of spare time. R can also sometimes get bogged down with too much filled RAM, in which case other, compiled languages such as PYTHON and C# are useful.
2. VORTEX/OUTBREAK/META-MODEL MANAGER, etc.: This suite of individual-based projection software was designed by Bob Lacy & Phil Miller initially to determine the viability of small (usually captive) populations. The original VORTEX has grown into a multi-purpose, powerful and sophisticated population viability analysis package that now links to its cousin applications like OUTBREAK (the only off-the-shelf epidemiological software in existence) via the 'command centre' META-MODEL MANAGER (see an examples here and here from our lab). There are other add-ons that make almost any population projection and hindcasting application possible. And it's all free! (warning: currently unavailable for Mac, although I've been pestering Bob to do a Mac version).
3. RAMAS: RAMAS is the go-to application for spatial population modelling. Developed by the extremely clever Resit Akçakaya, this is one of the only tools that incorporates spatial meta-population aspects with formal, cohort-based demographic models. It's also very useful in a climate-change context when you have projections of changing habitat suitability as the base layer onto which meta-population dynamics can be modelled. It's not free, but it's worth purchasing. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: ARC/GIS, C#, Geographic information system, GIS, MAGICC/SCENGEN, MARK, Marxan, meta-model manager, Outbreak, population viability analysis, Python, R, RAMAS, Vortex, WINBUGS
Categories : climate change, conservation, conservation biology, disease, extinction, genetics, management, mathematics, metapopulation, minimum viable population, population dynamics, population viability analysis, protected area, PVA, research, reserve, software


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A cleverly designed utility room can turn mundane chores into meaningful experiences. Whether you're on your third load of laundry or cleaning mud off of precious little paws, you and your family deserve a beautiful and functional space that makes your routine smoother and more enjoyable. Discover the freshest ways to upgrade your utility room to make the hub of your home feel more calm, sophisticated and balanced.
Despite our best efforts, the utility room is the one place where an impressive collection of clutter winds up. Such a mashup of dirty laundry, cleaning supplies, kid's gear and pet supplies can make organization a challenge. To manage this chaos, make your storage options more dynamic and varied so that every type of item has a place to live, other than your floors or surfaces. When these work spaces are clear, your mind will be too.
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The tale of Heathcliff and Cathy's ungovernable love and suffering, and the havoc that their passion wreaks on the families of the Earnshaws and the Lintons, shocked the book's first readers, with even Emily's sister Charlotte wondering "whether it is right or advisable to create beings like Heathcliff".
I have wanted to read this book for years, since I was at school, but somehow never got around to it until now. I guess for that reason I really wanted to like it, so much. Unfortunately I can't say I did. I found the story slow to progress and to read (whether this is to do with writing style or because I wasn't to bothered about reading it I am not sure). I can't say I really liked any of the characters, maybe Cathy was ok, but I don't really feel I knew her. Heathcliff was just mean and self serving. Catherine (Jnr) was spoilt, self-centred and seemed to think she was worth more than anyone else. I quite liked Hareton, although he was a bit rough initially I always had the impression that underneath all he was a genuinely nice person. I can kind of see how the writing can be seen as good writing. The descriptions were good, and in fact it was reading the first description of Heathcliff which made me want to read the book (wow it must be almost 10 years ago, and I still remember), although I found the descriptions of the moors a bit lacking. I think if you've ever been through the moors though you'll agree that the atmosphere is quite possibly impossible to but in to words. I did however find that in the last 20-30 pages the story did pick up, it became more plot driven I think (I know I have criticised writing for this in the past, but I didn't feel it undermined writing quality her). Strangely although I had been looking forward to being able to to read something different I wanted the book to continue when I actually had.
Yep–I felt much the same way about this one. I read it years ago and thought I might like it more when I recently re-read it. No such luck.


text:
Susanna im Bade (auch Susanna und die Ältesten) ist ein Akt von Jacopo Tintoretto aus der Zeit um 1555/56. Er befindet sich im Besitz des Kunsthistorischen Museums in  Wien.

Beschreibung
Das Ölgemälde stellt eine Szene aus der biblischen Erzählung der Susanna im Bade dar. Susanna befindet sich im Garten ihres Ehemannes und bereitet sich auf ein Bad vor. Sie sitzt völlig nackt rechts im Bild auf einem Stein unterhalb eines Baumes und betrachtet sich im Spiegel, der an einer zwischen zwei Bäumen angelegten blühenden Rosenhecke lehnt. Der Stamm des vorderen Baumes erstreckt sich ähnlich einer Linie über die gesamte Höhe des Bildes und teilt dieses in zwei Abschnitte: einen linken, der nur etwa 20 Prozent der Bildfläche bedeckt, und einen deutlich größeren rechten, der rund 80 Prozent beansprucht. Auf Teile von Susannas Gesicht und Körper fällt Sonnenlicht, was von Tintoretto als Chiaroscuro-Effekt ausgearbeitet ist. Die junge Frau beugt sich leicht nach vorn und zieht dabei mit den Armen ihr rechtes Bein an den Oberkörper heran. In der rechten Hand hält sie ein leichtes weißes, mit Spitze und Goldfransen gesäumtes Tuch, das ihr rechtes Bein umspielt. Susannas linker Fuß ist bis zur Wade ins Wasser getaucht. Ihr blondes Haar ist aufwändig geflochten, am linken Ohr hängt ein Ring mit weißer Perle, und an den Handgelenken trägt sie je einen Armreif. Neben dem Spiegel liegt der Schmuck, den sie abgelegt hat, zwei goldene Ringe, die Perlenkette, Haarnadel, Haarkamm sowie ein weißes Salbgefäß. Hinter Susanna ist ihr kostbar besticktes rotes Kleid zu erkennen, das zu den weißen Elementen einen farblichen Kontrast bildet.

Zwei alte Männer kommen – von Susanna unbemerkt – als Voyeure von beiden Seiten der Rosenwand hervor. Einer der Männer schaut im Hintergrund um die Rosenhecke. Der zweite, ein Glatzkopf mit weißem Bart, gekleidet in ein grelles, lachsrotes Gewand, kriecht am Boden hinter dem Gitter hervor. Die Wangen rot erhitzt, hält er den lüsternen Blick fest auf die Wasserfläche, in der sich wohl Susannas Unterkörper spiegelt.

Auf einem Ast rechts über Susanna sitzt eine Elster, dahinter sieht man einen Holunderstrauch. Im Fluss rechts hinter dem stehenden Älteren schwimmt eine Entenfamilie. Der enge Gartenbereich mit dem Badebecken wird außer von der Rosenhecke auch mit einem Holzzaun abgegrenzt. Die Pfosten des Eingangsbereichs sind als Kariatydhermen ausgebildet. Durch den Eingang öffnet sich der Blick in eine weitläufige Gartenlandschaft mit Fluss, Wiesen und Wald. Am Flussufer im Hintergrund sind ein Hirsch und eine Hirschkuh zu sehen. Bei genauer Betrachtung erkennt man am äußeren linken Bildrand zwischen einigen Baumstämmen die Umrisse einer von Wasser umgebenen Stadt, bei der es sich höchstwahrscheinlich um die Lagunenstadt Venedig – Tintorettos Heimat – handelt.

Die drei Figuren sind in eine Dreieckskomposition eingebunden, deren Spitze leicht aus der Mittelachse des Bildes nach rechts gerückt ist.

Deutung

In der biblischen Erzählung lauern die beiden Ältesten Susanna im Garten ihres Mannes auf und unternehmen den Versuch, sie zu erpressen, sich ihnen hinzugeben. Sie weigert sich, worauf die Männer sie vor Gericht des Ehebruchs bezichtigen und einen Schuldspruch mit Todesurteil erreichen, bis schließlich der Prophet Daniel die Wahrheit aufdeckt und Susannas Unschuld beweist. Die Ältesten werden hingerichtet.

Tintoretto wählt für seine Darstellung des Sujets eine Szene, in der Susanna dermaßen in ihr Spiegelbild vertieft scheint, dass sie die beiden auflauernden, voyeuristischen und verleumderischen Alten nicht merkt. Außerdem rückt der Künstler den Akt der Susanna mittels der Chiaroscuro-Technik so markant ins Blickfeld, dass der Betrachter selbst zum Voyeur wird.

Um die in der biblischen Erzählung enthaltene moralische Botschaft zu verdeutlichen, bedient sich Tintoretto der Tier- und Farbsymbolik. Die Elster steht für die bevorstehende Verleumdung, die Enten für Treue, die Rosen für Lust. Das Weiß der Hollerblüten sowie der Gegenstände neben Susanna steht für Unschuld und Reinheit. Das rote Gewand des Ältesten signalisiert Gefahr und Wollust. Der Hirsch steht für Begierde und Wollust, sein Geweih kann jedoch ebenso als christliches Symbol für das Kreuz gedeutet werden. Demnach könnte der Hirsch hier auch den Propheten Daniel darstellen, der im Zuge des Gerichtsprozesses beharrlich nach der Wahrheit forscht, um Susannas Unschuld zu beweisen.

Der vordere Baumstamm teilt das Gemälde in zwei Teile, die man als zwei Szenen deuten könnte. Die umrissartige Darstellung von Venedig im kleineren linken Bildteil legt die Interpretation nahe, dass die badende Susanna im größeren rechten Teil sinnbildlich für die Lagunenstadt Venedig steht. Außerdem kann der Hirsch als Zeichen für Begierde in Verbindung mit den politischen Ereignissen zur Entstehungszeit von Tintorettos Gemälde gebracht werden: Um die Mitte des 16. Jahrhunderts wird Venedig von außen durch die Osmanen unter Süleyman I. bedroht, denn seit der Seeschlacht von Preveza ist die osmanische Flotte die führende Seemacht im Mittelmeer. Süleymans Herrschaft dehnt sich sogar bis ins Gebiet des einstigen Babylon aus, wo sich die von Tintoretto dargestellte biblische Erzählung zuträgt. Demnach stünden die beiden alten Männer im Gemälde sinnbildlich für die Osmanen, die das schöne, reiche Venedig begehren.

Mit Susanna als personifizierte Darstellung von Venedig sowie dem Hirsch als Symbol für Wollust könnte das Bild auch als versteckte Kritik an der venezianischen Gesellschaft zu Tintorettos Zeit interpretiert werden. Die zahlreichen Prostituierten der Stadt wurden nämlich zu den Sündenböcken von Geschlechtskrankheiten wie der Syphilis gemacht, die Venedig in Form von todbringenden Epidemien heimsuchten. Sowohl in der biblischen Erzählung als auch im Bild Tintorettos gilt Susanna als unschuldig. Im übertragenen Sinne könnte dies bedeuten, dass  Tintoretto nicht die Prostituierten von Venedig anprangert, sondern die Männer, die – trotz drohender Ansteckung beharrlich ihrer Wollust frönend – deren Dienste in Anspruch nehmen, die Schuld an Geschlechtskrankheiten jedoch auf die Frauen abwälzen.

Geschichte
Tintorettos Susanna im Bade von 1555/56 ist eines von mehreren Werken zum selben Sujet aus dem Atelier des Künstlers. Je eines der Bilder ist im Louvre, im Museo del Prado sowie in der NGA Washington ausgestellt.

Literatur
 Tom Nichols: Tintoretto – Tradition and Identity, S. 91–94. Reaktion Books, London 1999. ISBN 1861891202. Buchvorschau auf Google (englisch)
 Herbert Willems (Herausgeber): Theatralisierung der Gesellschaft, Band 1, Kapitel Zeigen und Verbergen von Thomas Schwietring, S. 267–268. Springer-Verlag, 2009. ISBN 3531149229. Buchvorschau auf Google.
 Christina Leisering: Susanna und der Sündenfall der Ältesten. LIT Verlag, Wien 2008. ISBN 978-3-8258-1203-4. Buchvorschau auf Google
 Sigrid Dittrich & Lothar Dittrich: Lexikon der Tiersymbole. Tiere als Sinnbild in der Malerei des 14.–17. Jahrhunderts.  Michael Imhof Verlag, 2005. ISBN 3937251189.

Weblinks
 Jacopo Robusti, genannt Tintoretto – Susanna im Bade.  Artikel von Karl Schütz auf der Webseite Capella-Academica.

Einzelnachweise

Historiengemälde (Altes Testament)
Museumsbestand (Kunsthistorisches Museum)
Gemälde (16. Jahrhundert)
Jacopo Tintoretto
Gemälde (Altes Testament)
Weiblicher Akt
Buch Daniel

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


This number is generated on the basis of l--l.net content analysis. Do all UI elements fit the mobile viewport? Are all links and buttons located not too close to each other? The algorithm tries to answer these questions and give an estimated score.
• Description tag could contain more content. We detected that this tag contains 5 characters and this is a small volume for a description.
Website is marked as "not safe" if any part of its content has images or text that could be related to explicit "not family safe" material. Neighboring such websites could be a dangerous sign for any webmaster who cares about SEO traffic. Often "non family safe" websites use tedious link building methods. It is not a secret that Google may apply sanctions because of low quality mass link building and if a server is full of websites that are potentially could be banned then sanctions could be applied to the whole server. If l--l.net is found on this server theoretically it may be banned as well as all other websites on this server's IP.


Fennel is a plant where the succulent leaf base, feathery leaves and seeds are all eaten. On our farm we harvest it before it goes to seed. It has an anise or licorice taste to it. The leaf base is similar to celery in texture while the top feathery part of the leaves are similar in texture to dill. The similarity of textures let it act as a substitute for celery or dill in recipes, however the flavor will be quite different.
Store fennel in a well sealed plastic bag in the refrigerator for up to 2 weeks.
Can be baked, steamed or sautéed.
Quarter succulent base, drizzle with olive oil and bake at 350 until tender (about 30 minutes).
Use feathery leaves to season baked or broiled fish.
Add to your favorite soups or stews.


text:
Q: Incrementing iTunes Connect version number from a version that never shipped I have an app in iTunes Connect, that I have been TestFlight beta testing. It's labelled as version 0.1. I'm now ready to submit to the App Store, but I'd like it to ship as version 1.0. However I can't see anywhere to create a new version.
Am I missing something? Or will I need to submit as 0.1 and then increment to 1.0 in my next update?

A: *

*In iTunesConnect go to My Apps –> [Your app]

*Scroll down to General App Information

*Under Version Number, change it.

As simple as that.
Hope it helps :)

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


Jessica Central is an unofficial fan site dedicated to the very talented actress Jessica Parker Kennedy. All images, articles, videos, etc. are copyright to their respective owners and no copyright infringement is intended. Please contact us if you have any questions or if you would like certain content or images removed. This is a 100% non-profit fan website made by a fan for fans. We have no affiliation or contact with Jessica Parker Kennedy or her management.


text:
Faxion Online closing the doors of heaven and hell
J. Olivetti|08.25.11
J. Olivetti
In this article: all-points-bulletin, apb, closing, closure, disney, faxion, faxion-online, heaven, hell, pvp, short-lived, store, utv, UTV-Ignition, utv-true-games
It may not have had a long life, but Faxion Online's certainly was memorable. The PvP-centric MMO with the unique heaven-and-hell theme has announced that it is closing its doors within the month, following rumors that the entire team had been laid off.
In a brief statement posted on the forums, players were notified of the game's closure, which will occur in a couple quick stages. This week, players will not be able to register for the game, download it, or use the store, while the servers will be powered down within 30 days from today.
"We're eternally grateful for all the support, feedback, and competition our players have provided through thick and thin," the announcement stated. "Faxion's development was a Herculean effort that some said was impossible given the timeframe and resources we had, and we're proud to have delivered a PvP-driven experience that people could enjoy. Alas, all good things must come to an end."
Faxion Online launched on May 26th this year, making this one of the quickest demises of an MMO since last year's All Points Bulletin. We at Massively wish the best for Faxion's staff in the coming months.
Opera launches a dedicated crypto browser


text:
Q: Wifi driver not working after last Ubuntu 20.04 update Did last Ubuntu update changed something for Broadcom WiFi?
In September I had to disable "Secure boot" in BIOS to make it working. Now it does not work at all.
*-network UNCLAIMED
       description: Network controller
       product: BCM43142 802.11b/g/n
       vendor: Broadcom Inc. and subsidiaries
       physical id: 0
       bus info: pci@0000:08:00.0
       version: 01
       width: 64 bits
       clock: 33MHz
       capabilities: pm msi pciexpress cap_list
       configuration: latency=0
       resources: memory:b5500000-b5507fff


text:
Ведемейер () — немецкая фамилия. Известные носители:

 Ведемейер, Альберт Коади (1897—1989) — американский генерал.
 Ведемейер, Антон Иванович (1765-1806) — генерал-майор. Георгиевский кавалер; премьер-майор; № 1060 (545); 15 сентября 1794.
 Ведемейер, Николай Александрович (1812—1888) — генерал-лейтенант, генерал-адъютант.
 Ведемейер, Пётр Александрович (1794—1863) — генерал от инфантерии.


text:
State Theatre Company Review: Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Who: State Theatre Company South Australia
What: Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Where: Dunstan Playhouse
When: 27 Jan – 6 Feb 2022
Link: Click here
Jimi Bani, Rashidi Edward and Susan Prior in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? for State Theatre Company South Australia
"George: Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Martha: I am, George. I am."
Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf shocked audiences at the time it was released on Broadway in 1962. Some labelled it 'perverse' and 'dirty minded' because of the profanity and hateful dialogue between the characters. Yet, it was a huge success commercially and touted as marking a new era in American drama, and it has had continued to have success in theatres for the last 60 years because of the themes Albee explores, like 'reality versus illusion' and 'the American Dream' which remain relevant to many aspects of American society today.
Subsequently, there is great potential for director Margaret Harvey, through her approach to colour and cultural conscious casting, as well as the opportunity to bring the themes of Albee's writing into the modern Australian context. All four actors have been purposefully cast to be racially diverse, all non-white except Martha, played by Susan Prior. This cleverly added layers to the dialogue and created unspoken tensions between the characters.
As the only non-white person, in the context of this performance Martha's character's position is strikingly more crucial. Prior plays the boisterous and dominating Martha, the daughter of "daddy's" university where both her husband George (Jimi Bani) and newly appointed Nick (Rashidi Edward) are tenured, placing her in prime position to manipulate and take advantage of them both. Through such intentional casting, Harvey has captured the tacit tension about class, age, gender, and sexuality between these characters.
Rashidi Edward, Susan Prior, Margaret Harvey, Juanita Navas-Nguyen and Jimi Bani for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? State Theatre Company South Australia
However, considering the characters are paired as two married couples, I wish I felt a deeper sense of connection and familiarity of these relationships on stage between them. For example, although George and Martha's lines denoted believable snipes and jabs of a long-term marriage, at times it felt like merely reciting lines between actors on stage.
The main platform on the stage was minimal, with white angular bench seats, a distinctive sculptural mask in a display case in the middle of the room and surrounded by plastic panelling that was progressively removed throughout the performance. In addition, the platform base was surrounded by a water moat, the imagery of which was reminiscent of a mausoleum if not for the backdrop which was distractingly chaotic – with variations of the play's title repeatedly scrawled in white chalk all over.
I must commend the way tension was built throughout the performance, as we progress through the acts, we witness the characters become more unhinged. They lose the filters of formality and cordial niceties you wear as a host or guest. It becomes strangely understandable to witness Nick and Honey allow themselves to become entrenched in the intimate drama of Martha and George, despite being able to leave the party at any stage of the night.
Juanita Navas-Nguyen in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? for State Theatre Company South Australia
In addition, the stage lighting was fabulous. It was notable the way it would artfully fade or lower to denote different environments or change the atmosphere between the house and garden scenes. It was cleverly used to influence the mood on stage and a truly redeeming quality of the show.
As a warning for theatre goers, it is a marathon to get through this performance, with three acts and a runtime of 3 hours and 15 minutes. You need to be the kind of person who has the stamina to forget the outside world and allow yourself to be raptured by the stage. It is an excellent opportunity to get out of isolation, I thoroughly enjoyed the experience of heading back to the theatre. The staff were diligent in creating a COVID safe environment, ensuring that everyone had the relevant check-ins, vaccination passports, and hand sanitiser stations galore. See you there!
Collage Adelaide January 29, 2022 January 29, 2022 #featured, Adelaide, dunstan playhouse, featured, South Australia, State Theatre Company
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Next Next post: Adelaide Fringe 2022: SAM x Electric Dreams present Night Lab: Bedtime Stories


Thoughts engender healing, while a lot of thought component is not within our reach to handle and create. Thoughts owe their existence to opportunities, which are endless in time and space. Thoughts can be formed from telepathic interactions and other means of soul communication between beings. Karma, the deeds and their nature, contributes to thoughts in a very significant way. Thoughts can be understood as multidimensional energy beings with a life of their own. They last for the time they are meant to last for, and this is also determined by the truthfulness, the purity of intent and associated feelings that travels with them.
Thoughts are a means of communication just like any other, like talking, writing, or using gestures. Those who attain spiritual awareness, after having worked for several years meditating, and following their soul path, tend to be able to observe and manage their thoughts very carefully, since they are aware of the potential the thought can have, and the manifestation, the thought is capable of bringing about. Thoughts can also relate to our past, derive from our incomplete actions, and the clairvoyance capability of the person. At any given time, the thoughts in the mind can help determine the voids in the past, and the incomplete actions, the energy patterns that continue to exist in a person's energy body, and hence from this opportunity, can be determined the path the person is likely to take in the future, and the actions, she or he might perform to balance energy arising from the incoming thoughts.
Actions are a level next after thoughts or rather above thoughts. They are more tangible, more concrete, stronger as entities, and hence more irreversible so to say. Actions have to be managed and monitored more carefully than thoughts, since they are likely to have higher impact in generating karmic influence, and manifestation. There is an element of 'irreversible-ness' in thoughts, but less in actions, since actions are kind of thoughts implemented, or thoughts 'acted upon'. So a lot more care is needed in dealing with one's and other people's actions.
It is interesting to have discovered how health situations can relate to our thoughts and actions. According to the studies in the spiritual sciences, we are much beyond and much more than a mere physical body. The physical body is at the lowest vibration, next comes the etheric body which is like the life energy to the physical body. And we also have an astral body, mind body and the causal body. Astral body is the energy body, where we can perform energy healing. Mind body transcends time and space, and participates in telepathic communication. Causal body relates to past karmas, memories, and soul level vibrations.
Healing can happen at all levels and this is determined by the techniques used for healing. Sometimes, the ailment begins on a body other than the physical body and it takes its own time to affect the physical body or be seen at the physical level. While treatment and healing is important to be done at the physical level, it is also necessary to try and get to the root cause of the ailment by working on other bodies of the individual. And then there is a possibility of healing the ailment at the root level to never allow it to surface again at the physical level.
Yoga creates a circuit, a path for the inner energy to flow freely, and in the right manner so as to engender healing, and one of the goals of healing is the unification of conscious mind with the super consciousness, or the universal mind. Hence the name Yoga, or the union, as it interprets in Sanskrit language. Yoga can be practised as a set of defined physical postures, for energy balancing, and it also refers to the techniques of meditation, pranayama, sound healing, and several healing techniques. It essentially refers to the method of unification of mind with the higher mind, and the method can be physical postures, or mediation, or energy work. The end result is the same, unification.
Feelings can play a pivotal role in healing process and experiencing life as a whole. While the feelings of anger, jealousy, hatred, each carry a different message, they are coded for their own purpose, in the human system of body and mind. On the other hand, feelings of love, affection, and care provide solace, and contentment to the mind and the soul. Emotional Intelligence is the key behind handling feelings, as they contribute a lot to the healing process, in empowering the healing process, and making it work better based on the intent associated. The world we see with closed eyes is as real as the world we encounter with open eyes.
There exists a lot of universe beyond the five senses that we use quite often to deal with the world, and essentially with ourselves. Yoga, meditation and healing provide a path, and means to visit that part of the real world with comfort and ease, without any doubts or questions. Understanding both these worlds, and interpreting them instinctively and intuiting can lead to increased life awareness and handling of life events better. The places of worship have a healing energy associated with them, they almost become like the energy base centres or healing centres and whoever comes in the vicinity of these centres, gets the benefit if she or he is ready for it, and believes in it. Belief and Faith, help remove blocks in the pathways of healing, that of the mind, body or soul.
The process of healing is so multi-dimensional, and nature has provided us with so much support and means to help us find one of the many of healing methods. If followed sincerely and religiously, one or more of the ways can be sufficient for complete healing of the being, while it depends on the Karma of the entities associated, and how deep rooted the ailment is. But what spiritual sciences say is that all can be healed, and there is nothing that cannot be. Love as energy is one of the greatest ways of healing the self as well as others. The purer the love, the more power it has, as long as it is unconditional and given without any expectations in return. Blessings have power too, and yet one who gives or receives blessings has to be sure there are no conditions or expectations associated, which if exist, might lead to creating Karma which will take it course of time and space to be cleared.
Karma is generated every fraction of a second, if we were to measure it against time, but then it runs on many other dimensions and not just time. Time is just one of the factors. Spiritualists aim to get 'Karma Free' and also try their best not to generate Karma, or rather Bad Karma, if you will. Buddha sat under a tree meditating for years and years, to attain Nirvana, moving towards Moksha, seeking freedom from life and death. Enlightenment, if interpreted as white light, appears to be a matrix of energies, emanating and moving towards light where light is the source and light, the destination. And we often end up saying, "Love and Light", as being part of healing session for self as well as others. In light, all identities disappear, all personalities disappear, and its soul and energy that remains.
Healing is an ongoing process, while it works on chronic energy patterns within the system; it also works on the day to day energy interactions, and hence works on past, present, and thus the future. It is beyond time and space, and should preferably be done without any constraints in the mind to make make it whole and complete. Omnipresence, for a soul, is normal and natural. It not only enables presence at multiple places in longitude and latitude but also makes possible interaction with entities at multiple places, in order for soul completion to continue to happen, gradually or sometimes rapidly moving towards its objective of achieving salvation or freedom. Every relationship is created by spiritual laws of attraction, and it lives till the interaction is whole and complete for highest good. Water causes healing, water can be used as the sole source for healing, and it responds to energy very well.
With Karma and its intricacies understood to some extent, the means to heal are several and the doors to the destination are many. God continues to create several opportunities for the beings to connect with Him for higher guidance and direction enlightenment or soul awakening, He makes His presence felt from time to time, in so many ways, and we tend to address such situations as a 'co-incidence' or 'by change happening', with nature at its creative best behind the scenes. We are audience to a huge drama, a drama of reality so to say, where God makes us performs and project at the same time. Karmic transactions are created, chain reaction ensues, one thing leads to another, and another to another, and humans limited by their potential to memorize, can trace things back in a limited way, to a limited set of events, happening within limited time and space. And hence then arises the need and opportunity to surrender, listen to the inner self, and connect with the higher guidance, through the process of healing, to be able to see, hear, sense without the interference of the five senses. God then smiles a blessing.
Sandeep Khurana is a California based Music Composer, TV Producer and Owner of the Audio Label SK Infinity. His accomplishments in the field of music are considerable; his creations continue to influence and benefit the lives of many around the globe. A versatile composer with a distinctive style, Sandeep has composed for more than 60 albums and numerous productions in the genres of Western Classical Symphony Music, Romance, New Age Music, Trance, Indian Classical, World Music and Film Music. His line-up of popular new age lifestyle albums on Relaxation through Music, Sound Yoga, Guided Meditations, Chakra Healing, Reiki Music now figures in iTunes Top 100 New Age Music charts; more than 250,000 people in more than 50 countries are subscribed to his music, apart from the music he provides to Films, and TV industry. His music has been part of reality shows on STAR TV and Channel V. He has also directed short films, and produced educational videos on Yoga & Alternative Healing that have been aired on TV Channels in California and Florida.
With a degree in Computer Engineering from the Delhi College of Engineering, followed by a career working at prominent positions in top IT companies in India, Singapore and US, Sandeep Khurana decided to give his dream a chance. He earned a Diploma in Film Direction, Production and TV Journalism from Asian Academy of Films and TV and studied classical music at Ali Akbar Khan College of Music, California. In 2004 he launched "SK Infinity", his initiative to produce meaningful music and films for people across the globe. Sandeep's signature sounds are mystical, with inspiring folk influences, ensemble rhythms, with subtle use of modal harmonies and western symphonies. A lot of his new age compositions blend nature sounds with lilting music captivating listeners by their melodious richness and simplicity.


'Publish calendar' via context menu in the calendar list works.
Doesn't the Lightning 'Publish' entry corresponds to 'Publish Selection' entry in Sunbird? That means it will only work if you have at least one event selected?
The 'Publish' entry is also disabled if I select a event in the calendar view.
I don't think that this constitutes a blocker.
This bug could be fixed / workarounded by removing disabled attribute during e.g. ltnOnLoad(event) but I had problems finding how this attribute got there in the first place... ?
I'm no longer seeing this after the checkin of bug 456385. Please reopen, if you're still seeing this. Marking FIXED.