text:
Fairly Recently: Must- and Should-Reads, and Writings... (October 31, 2019)
MUST OF THE MUSTS
Comment of the Day: Grizzled in Age of the Expert as Policymaker Is Coming To an End https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/10/comment-of-the-day-_grizzled_-in-age-of-the-expert-as-policymaker-is-coming-to-an-end-alas-i-dont-think-its-usual.html: 'Alas, I don't think it's usually possible for non-experts to evaluate expert judgements. The Reinhard and Rogoff example is more the exception than the rule. Consider the case of global warming. Google 'Conversion of a Global Warming Skeptic'. This is a case where is took 18 months of work, which was funded so it could be not only full time but assisted, for a Phd in physics to accumulate enough background to become convinced that the climate scientists had been right all along...
Hoisted from the Archives: _Orlando Letelier (1976): The 'Chicago Boys' in Chile: Economic Freedom's Awful Toll: _ https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/10/orlando-letelier-1976-the-chicago-boys-in-chile-economic-freedoms-awful-toll-hoisted-from-the-archives.html: 'It is nonsensical... that those who inspire, support or finance that economic policy should try to present their advocacy as restricted to "technical consid erations," while pretending to reject the system of terror it requires to succeed...
Hoisted from the Archives: Contra Raghu Rajan: Economic Stimulus Has Not Failed, It Has Not Been Tried (on a Large Enough Scale) https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/10/contra-raghu-rajan-economic-stimulus-has-not-failed-it-has-not-been-tried-on-a-large-enough-scale.html: 'Back in 2007 I would have said that every macroeconomist who has done any homework at all believes that coordinated monetary and fiscal expansion together increase at least the flow of nominal GDP. Now comes the very smart Raghu Rajan to say, apparently, not so...
Weekend Reading: Benjamin Wittes: The Collapse of the President's Defense https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/10/benjamin-wittes-the-collapse-of-the-presidents-defense-weekend-reading.html: 'It was never a strong defense. After all, Trump himself released the smoking gun early in L'Affaire Ukrainienne when the White House published its memo of Trump's call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. That document erased any question as to whether Trump had asked a foreign head of state to "investigate"—a euphemism for digging up dirt on—his political opponents. There was no longer any doubt that he had asked a foreign country to violate the civil liberties of American citizens by way of interfering in the coming presidential campaign. That much we have known for certain for weeks. The clarity of the evidence did not stop the president's allies from trying to fashion some semblance of defense. But the past few days of damaging testimony have stripped away the remaining fig leaves...
Weekend Reading: Milton Friedman (1982): Free Markets and the Generals https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/10/milton-friedman-1982-free-markets-and-the-generals-weekend-reading.html: 'Military juntas in other South American countries have been as authoritarian in the economic sphere as they have been in politics.... None, with the exception of Chile, has supported a fully free market economy as a matter of principle. Chile is an economic miracle. Inflation has been cut from 700% a year in mid-1974 to less than 10% a year. After a difficult transition, the economy boomed, growing an aver age of about 8% a year from 1976 to 1980. Real wages and employment rose rapidly and unemployment fell. Imports and exports surged after export subsidies were eliminated and tariffs were slashed to a flat 10% (except for temporarily higher rates for most automobiles)...
Voltaire: The Presbyterians https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/voltaire-the-works-of-voltaire-vol-xix-philosophical-letters: 'Though the Episcopal and Presbyterian sects are the two prevailing ones in Great Britain, yet all others are very welcome to come and settle in it, and they live very sociably together, though most of their preachers hate one another almost as cordially as a Jansenist damns a Jesuit. Take a view of the Royal Exchange in London, a place more venerable than many courts of justice, where the representatives of all nations meet for the benefit of mankind. There the Jew, the Mahometan, and the Christian transact business together, as though they were all of the same religion, and give the name of Infidels to none but bankrupts; there the Presbyterian confides in the Anabaptist, and the Churchman depends upon the Quaker's word. At the breaking up of this pacific and free assembly, some withdraw to the synagogue, and others to take a glass. This man goes and is baptized in a great tub, in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost; that man has his son's foreskin cut off, and causes a set of Hebrew words—to the meaning of which he himself is an utter stranger—to be mumbled over the infant; others retire to their churches, and there wait the inspiration of heaven with their hats on; and all are satisfied. If one religion only were allowed in England, the government would very possibly become arbitrary; if there were but two, the people would cut one another's throats; but, as there is such a multitude, they all live happy, and in peace...
The fall of the Roman Empire in the west: implications for literature and literary culture: Erich Auerbach: Mimesis: 'Gregory of Tours: "Serious local fighting arose at that time between inhabitants of the region of Tours. For Sicharius, son of the late John, celebrated the feast of the Nativity of Our Lord at the village of Manthelan with Austrighiselus and the other neighbors. And the priest of the place sent a boy over to invite some of the men to come to his house for a drink. When the boy got there, one of those he invited drew his sword and did not refrain from striking at him. He fell down and was dead. Sicharius was friendly with the priest, and when he heard that one of his boys had been murdered, he took his arms and went to the church to wait for Austrighiselus...
But... But... But... There are no hot summer nights in Sausalito!: Wikipedia: Sausalito Summernight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sausalito_Summernight...
Bret Devereaux: War Elephants https://acoup.blog/2019/07/26/collections-war-elephants-part-i-battle-pachyderms/: "Part I (this one) is going to look at how the elephant functioned in battle: how did it work as a weapon-system and why would anyone want to have it? Part II (next week) will then turn and ask the question: if elephants are such awesome weapon systems, why did the Romans defeat and then abandon them (and why did the Chinese never meaningfully adopt them)? Part III (the week after that) turns this question on its head: if elephants were as useless as the Romans thought, why did Indian kings keep using them?...
Wayne E. Lee (2016): Waging War: Conflict, Culture, and Innovation in World History https://books.google.com/?id=hbyYCgAAQBAJ, excerpts: "When in 1996 Lawrence Keeley published War Before Civilization. Keeley made an impassioned plea for reimagining the role of violence in human experience, and he made the striking claim that prestate societies experienced extreme male fatality rates. Keeley's work and additional studies have settled on the somewhat shocking estimates... [that] between 15 and 25% of males and about 5% of females" in human forager societies died from warfare. This per capita rate far exceeds those of later state-based societies. Since Keeley's work, archaeologists and anthropologists have renewed the debate begun by Hobbes and Rousseau. To use the simplest terms, as suggested in a recent review, there are the 'deep rooters', who believe in the long evolutionary history of intergroup violence, and the "inventors", who argue that human conflict emerged more recently because of changes in human social organization...
ProGrowthLiberal: Robert Barro's Misstated Case for Federal Reserve Independence http://econospeak.blogspot.com/2019/08/barros-misstated-case-for-federal.html: "There are two aspects of his case that strike me as silly to say the least starting with his opening sentence: 'In the early 1980s, the chairman of the US Federal Reserve, Paul Volcker, was able to choke off runaway inflation because he was afforded the autonomy necessary to implement steep interest-rate hikes.' This statement glosses over the fact that we had a macroeconomic mess in 1982... an ill-advised fiscal stimulus initiated the moment St. Reagan took office.... To be fair–Barro continues his magical history tour in a reasonable way until we get this absurdity: 'One could infer the normal rate from the average federal funds rate over time. Between January 1986 and August 2008, it was 4.9%, and the average inflation rate was 2.5% (based on the deflator for personal consumption expenditure), meaning that the average real rate was 2.4%'.... Barro seems to be saying the long-run real interest rate has been the same for the last 23 years. There has been a lot of research to suggest otherwise...
Bret Devereaux Elephants Against Wolves https://acoup.blog/2019/08/02/collections-war-elephants-part-ii-elephants-against-wolves/: "The playbook for dealing with elephants was actually fairly simple in concept–Vegetius, a later Roman military writer, manages to sum up the 'best practices' in less than a paragraph (Vegetius 3.24). Ideally, the elephants should be met by light infantry screening troops, whose freedom of movement allows them to avoid the elephant's charge. Those light troops – armed with missile weapons (especially javelins, but also slings) should especially target the mahouts, in an effort to panic the elephants. Ideally, a space is left open for the elephants to flee too, although ancient sources are full of examples where they were simply driven back through the enemy formation. The goal isn't to kill the elephant, but instead to panic the animal and drive it off or–better yet–drive it through the enemy. This latter point is notable: ancient military writer after ancient military writer notes how elephants were often as much a danger to their own troops as to the enemy, especially when wounded or frightened...
Bret Devereaux: Battle Pachyderms https://acoup.blog/2019/07/26/collections-war-elephants-part-i-battle-pachyderms/: "One reading of the (admittedly somewhat poor) evidence suggests that this is how Pyrrhus of Epirus used his elephants–to great effect–against the Romans. It is sometimes argued that Pyrrhus essentially created an 'articulated phalanx' using lighter infantry and elephants to cover gaps–effectively joints–in his main heavy pike phalanx line. This allowed his phalanx–normally a relatively inflexible formation–to pivot...
*Ian Dunt *: "Rory Stewart. Let's find out where he's at https://twitter.com/IanDunt/status/1186677364878663680: Ah, maybe a good place. 'My big beg to the House, and here I am speaking to colleagues who voted for Brexit, is let's please in these very very final stages, do it properly. This is your great founding moment. This is your opportunity to create an enormous constitutional change that can last for 40 years. So do it properly.' Stewart valiantly pointing out that he has backed Brexit deals over and over again. 'I'm not a member of this party anymore. I don't get any bonus points. But in return, people deserve scrutiny. This is a hell of a big document. I know they'll be many voices in the Chamber who say we've been talking about this long enough. We cannot think like this. This is our parliament. We cannot do down our parliament. This was an exercise in regaining the sovereignty of parliament. And if it's about regaining the sovereignty of parliament, then treat parliament with respect. If you are taking back control, then show that you are worthy to exercise that control...
Ian Dunt: "Caroline Lucas, Green https://twitter.com/IanDunt/status/1186680346408042498: 'I want to speak out on behalf of those who do not share this govt's vision of a mean-minded little Britain, with our borders closed and our horizons narrowed. For those like me who are proud to stand up for the precious right to be able to work and study and live and love in 27 other countries, who celebrate the contribution made by the 3 million EU citizens in our country. For those who recognise that imperfect thought it undoubtedly is, the EU remains the greatest international venture for peace, prosperity and freedom in history.' Thank f--- for Caroline Lucas, man. Really...
The Berkeley History Department slavery studies group, plus David Blight on Yale, on how much of what we see as "scientific labor management" from the business side and "deskilling Taylorization" from the labor side has its roots in slaveholding society ideas of the worker as an "instrumentum mutum" in the words of Roman statesman Cato the Elder—merely a "tool that speaks": David Blight, Stephanie Jones-Rogers, Caitlin Rosenthal, and Jennifer D. King: The Business of Brutality: Slavery and the Foundations of Capitalism
David Glasner: What's Wrong with DSGE Models Is Not Representative Agency https://uneasymoney.com/2019/09/16/whats-wrong-with-dsge-models-is-not-representative-agency/: "The completely ad hoc and artificial concept of a representative firm was not well-received by Marshall's contemporaries.... The young Lionel Robbins... subjected the idea to withering criticism.... James Hartley wrote about the short and unhappy life of Marshall's Representative Firm in the Journal of Economic Perspectives. One might have thought that the inauspicious career of Marshall's Representative Firm would have discouraged modern macroeconomists from resurrecting the Representative Firm in the barely disguised form of a Representative Agent in their DSGE models, but the convenience and relative simplicity of solving a DSGE model for a single agent was too enticing to be resisted. Therein lies the difference between the theory of the firm and a macroeconomic theory. The gain in convenience from adopting the Representative Firm was radically reduced by Marshall's Cambridge students and successors who, without the representative firm, provided a more rigorous, more satisfying and more flexible exposition of the industry supply curve and the corresponding partial-equilibrium analysis than Marshall had with it. Providing no advantages of realism, logical coherence, analytical versatility or heuristic intuition, the Representative Firm was unceremoniously expelled from the polite company of economists. However, as a heuristic device for portraying certain properties of an equilibrium state—whose existence is assumed not derived—even a single representative individual or agent proved to be a serviceable device with which to display the defining first-order conditions, the simultaneous equality of marginal rates of substitution in consumption and production with the marginal rate of substitution at market prices.... An excellent example of this heuristic was provided by Jack Hirshleifer in his 1970 textbook Investment, Interest, and Capital.... Here is how Hirshleifer explained what was going on...
The best thing I have yet seen on how industrial organization, concentration, and monopsony drive the conclusion that increases in the minimum wage do not reduce employment in the United States today—or, rather, for which groups of workers minimum wage increases lower and for which raise employment: José Azar, Emiliano Huet-Vaughn, Ioana Marinescu, Bledi Taska, and Till von Wachter: Minimum Wage Employment Effects and Labor Market Concentration: "Why is the employment effect of the minimum wage frequently found to be close to zero? Theory tells us that when wages are below marginal productivity, as with monopsony, employers are able to increase wages without laying off workers, but systematic evidence directly supporting this explanation is lacking. In this paper, we provide empirical support for the monopsony explanation by studying a key low-wage retail sector and using data on labor market concentration that covers the entirety of the United States with fine spatial variation at the occupation-level. We find that more concentrated labor markets–where wages are more likely to be below marginal productivity–experience significantly more positive employment effects from the minimum wage. While increases in the minimum wage are found to significantly decrease employment of workers in low concentration markets, minimum wage-induced employment changes become less negative as labor concentration increases, and are even estimated to be positive in the most highly concentrated markets. Our findings provide direct empirical evidence supporting the monopsony model as an explanation for the near-zero minimum wage employment effect documented in prior work. They suggest the aggregate minimum wage employment effects estimated thus far in the literature may mask heterogeneity across different levels of labor market concentration...
Alice Dreger: Napoleon Chagnon Is Dead https://www.chronicle.com/interactives/20191023-dreger-chagnon: "The peer-reviewed article I ultimately published in Human Nature about the AAA task force is the angriest academic piece I have ever written.... Tierney had misrepresented so much. The chair of the AAA task force knew it too. That was Jane Hill, former president of the AAA. During my research, Sarah Hrdy shared with me a previously confidential message, dated April 15, 2002, in which Hill responded to Hrdy's concerns about the task force's work. 'Burn this message', Hill told Hrdy. 'The book [by Tierney] is just a piece of sleaze, that's all there is to it (some cosmetic language will be used in the report, but we all agree on that). But I think the AAA had to do something because I really think that the future of work by anthropologists with indigenous peoples in Latin America—with a high potential to do good—was put seriously at risk by its accusations, and silence on the part of the AAA would have been interpreted as either assent or cowardice. Whether we're doing the right thing will have to be judged by posterity.'... Of course, the failure of facts in the Darkness case extended beyond academe. If The New Yorker and W.W. Norton had done proper fact-checking, so much mischief would have been avoided. Still, the AAA made it all much worse. The AAA could have done what the National Academy of Sciences, the American Society of Human Genetics, the International Genetic Epidemiology Society, and the Society for Visual Anthropology did: looked at the facts and condemned Tierney. Instead, the AAA thanked Tierney 'for his valuable service.' A kangaroo court. A show trial. That's how many saw the AAA investigation. The AAA membership eventually voted to rescind acceptance of the report. 'It was really amateur hour' at the AAA, Hagen told me...
Matthew Yglesias: Impeachment Protests and Mass Resistance Are Needed to Beat Trump https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/10/18/20905686/resistance-protest-impeachment-rallies-trump: "Watergate is the ur-text for how Americans imagine the defeat of a sitting president, but it shouldn't be how to think about the impeachment of Donald Trump.... A lawless government cannot be constrained by the institutions of the law alone. It is popular mass resistance that creates a crisis point and forces action. And if Democrats want to beat Trump's stonewalling tactics in 2019, they should consider doing it again.... Defeating Nixon... meant winning a series of difficult elite insider games.... Building a consensus that compelled the president to resign was arduous, and the people who did it are rightly proud of their work. But none of this is relevant to contemporary politics, any more than the Senate's unanimous passage of the 1969 National Environmental Policy Act has relevant lessons for contemporary climate politics. Today's Congress is much more partisan and much more ideological, featuring many members who have no personal loyalty to Trump but who can nevertheless be expected to stand by him through thick and thin, thanks to broader partisan and policy objectives. In an extraordinary moment, you need to reach beyond ordinary politics.... The mechanisms through which protest works seem multifaceted, with some of the impact driven by direct personal participation, some driven by witnessing the protest themselves, and some driven by media coverage which serves to rebroadcast key elements of the protest message. The key to it all, however, is that bothering to show up to a march is a moderately costly investment of time and energy. When a bunch of people do that, it serves as a powerful signal to the rest of society that something extraordinary is happening.... The Constitution is in need of defending. And it would be extremely foolish to believe that Republican senators and Federalist Society judges are going to come riding out of the woods in order to do the job...
Is this as insane as it looks? @thetomzone: "Sheryl Sandberg https://twitter.com/thetomzone/status/1186821100518432769: "We Let Politicians Lie in Facebook Ads for the "Discourse", Not the Money...
Seán Clarke and Cath Levett: Canada Election 2019 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/22/canada-election-2019-full-results: 'Justin Trudeau defied worst expectations to keep his job as prime minister. His Liberals are again the largest party, but have lost their majority. Find out where the parties are strongest and who were the winners and losers on the night...
MXCity: Mexico City's Mountains: Every Possible Elevation: 'Mexico City occupies the grand base of a massive bowl formed by the meeting of two mountain ranges... [that] easily reach 5,000 meters.... The Sierra Madre Occidental and... the Sierra Madre Oriental. Mexico City rests at the confluence of the two... [and] the Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt... accounts for... a string of volcanoes... across the central part of Mexico.... Mexico City's mountains aren't always obvious.... But one day, a friend will invite you to the rooftop patio. Perhaps in the east of the city you'll discover that Popocatepetl is right there.... In the south, you may see Ajusco. To the north, friendly Cerro del Chiquihuite has been waving to the exodus leaving the city via Indios Verdes for decades. On a clear day, they can be witnessed from almost any area of Mexico City...
That your grandfather Governor John Buchanan campaigned against federal voting rights acts, raised the poll tax, and established pensions for Confederate veterans—that all that goes unmentioned in the context of "I have shared in the emotional damage imposed by discrimination...", "From that day forward I have shared in the emotional damage imposed by discrimination..." and "'fairness' assumed for me a central normative position..." demonstrates either an absolutely stunning lack of self-awareness or a conscious intellectual judo move to distract attention from the racial politics of the white southern establishment: James Buchanan (2009): Karen Ilse Horn, ed, "Roads to Wisdom: Conversations with Ten Nobel Laureates in Economics" https://delong.typepad.com/document.pdf: "What did the Navy teach you?... I experienced overt discrimination for being a non-Easterner, a nonestablishmentarian. In the whole group of 600 boys, there were only about twenty who were graduates of Yale, Harvard, Princeton—all Ivy League. By the end of this first boot camp period, they had to select midshipman officers. Out of the 20 boys from the establishment universities, 12 or 13 were picked, against a background of a total of 600. It was overtly discriminatory towards those of us who were not members of the establishment... James Buchanan (2009): Better than Plowing: "From that day forward I have shared in the emotional damage imposed by discrimination, in any form, and 'fairness' assumed for me a central normative position decades before I came to discuss principles of justice professionally and philosophically...
Jonathan Sallet: Competitive Edge: Five Building Blocks for Antitrust Success: The Forthcoming FTC Competition Report https://equitablegrowth.org/competitive-edge-five-building-blocks-for-antitrust-success-the-forthcoming-ftc-competition-report/: "Here are five building blocks for successful antitrust enforcement that the FTC should embrace in order to, as its Chairman Joseph Simons said (quoting his predecessor Bob Pitofsky), 'restore the tradition of linking law enforcement with a continuing review of economic conditions to ensure that the laws make sense in light of contemporary competitive conditions'.... Pay attention to growing market concentration.... Business models are evolving... today, multisided business models intersect with other economic trends that include network effects, the aggregation of data, and vertical integration.... Antitrust enforcement protects competition, not just consumers.... Modern economic analysis is up to the challenge.... Congress gave the FTC broader enforcement tools than just the Sherman and Clayton Acts...
Let me highlight this once again: The very sharp Martin Wolf reacts to the Business Roundtable's recognition that it and the corporations of which it consists need to take on a much broader system-stabilization role. In my view, the first thing the Business Roundtable and its fellow travelers need to do is for them to recover control of the political right from the armies of political and media grifters. They need to weigh on on what right-wing politicians ought to stand for. So far they have not: Martin Wolf: Why Rigged Capitalism Is Damaging Liberal Democracy https://www.ft.com/content/5a8ab27e-d470-11e9-8367-807ebd53ab77: "Economies are not delivering for most citizens because of weak competition, feeble productivity growth and tax loopholes.... The US Business Roundtable, which represents the chief executives of 181 of the world's largest companies, abandoned their longstanding view that 'corporations exist principally to serve their shareholders'.... What does—and should—[this] moment mean? The answer needs to start with acknowledgment of the fact that something has gone very wrong. Over the past four decades, and especially in the US, the most important country of all, we have observed an unholy trinity of slowing productivity growth, soaring inequality and huge financial shocks.... The economy [is] not delivering... in large part... [because of] the rise of rentier capitalism.... Market and political power allows privileged individuals and businesses to extract a great deal of such rent from everybody else.... If one listens to the political debates in many countries, notably the US and UK, one would conclude that the disappointment is mainly the fault of imports from China or low-wage immigrants, or both. Foreigners are ideal scapegoats. But the notion that rising inequality and slow productivity growth are due to foreigners is simply false.... Members of the Business Roundtable and their peers have tough questions to ask themselves. They are right: seeking to maximise shareholder value has proved a doubtful guide to managing corporations. But that realisation is the beginning, not the end.... We need a dynamic capitalist economy that gives everybody a justified belief that they can share in the benefits. What we increasingly seem to have instead is an unstable rentier capitalism, weakened competition, feeble productivity growth, high inequality and, not coincidentally, an increasingly degraded democracy. Fixing this is a challenge for us all, but especially for those who run the world's most important businesses...
Matthew Martin: "It doesn't usually get spelled out this way https://twitter.com/hyperplanes/status/1125383936258052097, but the father of Clovis—the first french king—seems to have been a kind of Roman governor https://t.co/xfhgPnx3V0...
I wish to once again flag this: Recession Ready. We are not yet out of time to take steps to keep the next recession from turning into a depression. But the clock is ticking. Here is an issue are in which the sooner we take action, the better. And here we at Equitable Growth and the Hamilton Project have, I think, done a very good job: Equitable Growth: Recession Ready https://equitablegrowth.org/recession-ready-2/: "Economic recessions are inevitable and they are painful, with harsh short-term effects on families and businesses and potentially deep long-term impacts on the economy and society. But we can ameliorate some of the next recession's worst effects and minimize its long-term costs if we adopt smart policies now that will be triggered when its first warning signs appear. Equitable Growth has joined forces with The Hamilton Project to advance a set of specific, evidence-based policy ideas for shortening and easing the impacts of the next recession...
*John Preskill *: Explains 'Quantum Supremacy' https://www.quantamagazine.org/john-preskill-explains-quantum-supremacy-20191002/: 'In the 2012 paper that introduced the term "quantum supremacy," I wondered: "Is controlling large-scale quantum systems merely really, really hard, or is it ridiculously hard? In the former case we might succeed in building large-scale quantum computers after a few decades of very hard work. In the latter case we might not succeed for centuries, if ever." The recent achievement by the Google team bolsters our confidence that quantum computing is merely really, really hard. If that's true, a plethora of quantum technologies are likely to blossom in the decades ahead...
Scott Aaronson: Quantum Supremacy: The Gloves Are Off https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=4372: 'does IBM's analysis mean that "quantum supremacy" hasn't been achieved? No, it doesn't—at least, not under any definition of "quantum supremacy" that I've ever used. The Sycamore chip took about 3 minutes.... three minutes versus 2.5 days is still a quantum speedup by a factor of 1200. But even more relevant, I think, is to compare the number of "elementary operations." Let's generously count a FLOP (floating-point operation) as the equivalent of a quantum gate. Then by my estimate, we're comparing ~5×10^9 quantum gates against ~2×10^20 FLOPs—a quantum speedup by a factor of ~40 billion.... The broader point is that neither party... denies that the top-supercomputers-on-the-planet-level difficulty of classically simulating Google's 53-qubit programmable chip really is coming from the exponential character of the quantum states in that chip, and nothing else...
The Song Dynasty revolution: Doug Jones: A Cycle of Cathay https://logarithmichistory.wordpress.com/2019/10/20/a-cycle-of-cathay-2/: 'Jacques Gernet: "The innovations which make their appearance in East Asia round about the year 1000… form such a coherent and extensive whole that we have to yield to the evidence: at this period, the Chinese world experienced a real transformation.… The analogies [with the European Renaissance] are numerous–the return to the classical tradition, the diffusion of knowledge, the upsurge of science and technology (printing, explosives, advance in seafaring techniques, the clock with escapement…), a new philosophy, and a new view of the world.… There is not a single sector of political, social or economic life in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries which does not show evidence of radical changes in comparison with earlier ages. It is not simply a matter of a change of scale (increase in population, general expansion of production, development of internal and external trade) but of a change of character. Political habits, society, the relations between town and country, and economic patterns are quite different from what they had been.… A new world had been born...
Doug Jones: Empires and Barbarians https://logarithmichistory.wordpress.com/2019/10/20/empires-and-barbarians-5/: 'The fall of Rome involved the disintegration of the Roman state; the collapse of long-distance trade; the disappearance of mass-produced pottery, coinage, and monumental architecture over large areas; declining literacy among commoners and elites; great insecurity of life and property, and demographic collapse. The process was drawn out and played out differently in different regions. In the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East, central government supported by taxation continued; in the West it largely disappeared. The nadir in the West was perhaps the tenth century. We might set the turning point at the battle of Lechfeld (955): a last set of invaders off the steppes, the Magyars, was defeated by the Emperor Otto, and then adopted Christianity, gave up nomadic marauding, and settled down as feudal lords in Hungary.... The overall trend of history is for more complex societies to replace less complex. (Important note: "more complex" is not the same as "nicer.") But the process is an uneven one, in part because military effectiveness is only loosely coupled with social complexity...
I suspect that this will be to the taste of very few people who read this. But I think that this—and Marshall Berman's (1982) All That Is Solid Melts into Air http://books.google.com/?isbn=0860917851—is well worth your attention. One way to approach it is to note that back before 1500 humanity's collective technological and organizational possibilities grew at a proportion rate of something like 0.04% per year. Now they grow at 2% per year. Thus changes in what we can do and how we can organize ourselves to do it that used to happen over a 50-year timespan now take place in one revolution around the sun. Thus "modern" people must continually reinvent and reinvent ourselves in a way very foreign to all of the memory of our past historical experience. What are the consequences of this? Humanist late-twentieth century New York CUNY Marxist took a stab: Marshall Berman (1984): The Signs in the Street: A Response to Perry Anderson https://newleftreview.org/issues/I144/articles/marshall-berman-the-signs-in-the-street-a-response-to-perry-anderson: "'To be modern', as I define it... 'is to experience personal and social life as a maelstrom, to find one's world in perpetual disintegration and renewal, trouble and anguish, ambiguity and contradiction: to be part of a universe in which all that is solid melts into air. To be a modernist is to make oneself somehow at home in this maelstrom... to grasp and confront the world that modernization makes, and to strive to make it our own.' Modernism aims 'to give modern men and women the power to change the world that is changing them, to make them the subjects as well as the objects of modernization.' Anderson is willing to accept this as a vision of 19th-century culture and politics, but he thinks that it is irrelevant to our century, let alone to our day.... I could assail Anderson's reading of modern and contemporary history in plenty of ways, but it wouldn't do anything to advance our common understanding. I want to try something different. Anderson's view of the current horizon is that it's empty, closed; mine is that it's open and crowded with creative possibilities. The best way to defend my vision might be to show what this horizon looks like, what's actually out there as I see it.... A massive black woman gets on, bent under numerous parcels; I give her my seat. Just behind her, her fifteen-or-so-year-old daughter undulates up the aisle, radiant, stunning in the skin-tight pink pants she has just bought.... They continue an argument.... The mother still won't look, but after awhile she lifts her eyes slowly, then shakes her head. 'With that ass,' she says, 'you'll never get out of high school without a baby. And I ain't taking care of no more babies. You're my last baby.' The girl squeezes her mother's arm: 'Don't worry, Mama. We're modern. We know how to take care of ourselves.' The mother sighs, and addresses her packages: 'Modern? Just you take care you don't bring me no modern babies.' Soon I get off, feeling as happy and whole as the girl in the bus. Life is rough in the South Bronx, but the people aren't giving up: modernity is alive and well...
As we hand more and more control over to agencies whee humans are not really in the loop, we are going to find lots of unintended and deleterious consequences. When the Sacklers sicked Purdue Pharma on the world to make themselves some money, did they imagine that it would decide that addicting lots of Americans to oxycontin was a strategy it would follow? Probably not. Corporations with diffused responsibility and everybody looking only at their narrow piece is one way to take humans out of the loop. Algorithmic systems are another: Kris Shaffer: How Algorithms Amplify Our Own Biases and Shape What We See Online https://talkingpointsmemo.com/cafe/algorithms-bias-internet: "The following is an excerpt from Kris Shaffer's book, Data Versus Democracy: How Big Data Algorithms Shape Opinions and Alter the Course of History. It is part of TPM Cafe, TPM's home for opinion and news analysis.... When a user performs a search, the model takes their search terms and any metadata around the search (location, timing, etc.) as inputs, along with data about the user from their profile and activity history, and other information from the platform's database, like content features and the profiles and preferences of other similar users. Based on this data, the model delivers results—filtered and ranked content, according to predictions made about what the user is most likely to engage with...
This is absolutely brilliant, and quite surprising to me. I had imagined that most of discrimination in the aggregate was the result of a thumb placed lightly on the scale over and over and over again. Here Pat and Chris present evidence that, at least in employment, it is very different: that a relatively small proportion of employers really really discriminate massively, and that most follow race-neutral procedures and strategies: Patrick Kline and Christopher Walters: Audits as Evidence: Experiments, Ensembles, and Enforcement https://eml.berkeley.edu//~crwalters/papers/reasonable_doubt.pdf: "We develop tools for utilizing correspondence experiments to detect illegal discrimination by individual employers. Employers violate US employment law if their propensity to contact applicants depends on protected characteristics such as race or sex. We establish identification of higher moments of the causal effects of protected characteristics on callback rates as a function of the number of fictitious applications sent to each job ad. These moments are used to bound the fraction of jobs that illegally discriminate. Applying our results to three experimental datasets, we find evidence of significant employer heterogeneity in discriminatory behavior, with the standard deviation of gaps in job-specific callback probabilities across protected groups averaging roughly twice the mean gap. In a recent experiment manipulating racially distinctive names, we estimate that at least 85% of jobs that contact both of two white applications and neither of two black applications are engaged in illegal discrimination. To assess more carefully the tradeoff between type I and II errors presented by these behavioral patterns, we consider the performance of a series of decision rules for investigating suspicious callback behavior under a simple two-type model that rationalizes the experimental data. Though, in our preferred specification, only 17% of employers are estimated to discriminate on the basis of race, we find that an experiment sending 10 applications to each job would enable accurate detection of 7- 10% of discriminators while falsely accusing fewer than 0.2% of non-discriminators. A minimax decision rule acknowledging partial identification of the joint distribution of callback rates yields higher error rates but more investigations than our baseline two-type model. Our results suggest illegal labor market discrimination can be reliably monitored with relatively small modifications to existing audit designs...
Walter Jon Williams: Reviews Too Late: Money Heist http://www.walterjonwilliams.net/2019/10/reviews-too-late-money-heist/: 'While recovering from surgery I binged, mainly continuing my exploration of Spanish TV with Money Heist (Casa de Papel, "House of Paper") I do like an intricate caper, as my Maijstral books demonstrate, and this is probably the longest caper ever filmed, something like sixteen hours of television originally split into two seasons. (One crime over two seasons!) The series was one of the most-watched in Europe last summer, which attracted the interest of Netflix. When Netflix acquired the series it was re-edited into 22 episodes, and two more seasons were filmed. (I'm halfway through Season Three, and Season Four has yet to be released.) So, whatta we got here? Master criminal El Professor (Álvaro Morte) recruits a group of criminal specialists to take over the Spanish mint, run off a couple billion euros over a week's time, and cleverly vanish along with the cash. To preserve anonymity, each of the team adopts the pseudonym of a city, and the tale is narrated by Tokyo, a young woman with a history of robbing banks, and who recently watched her boyfriend gunned down when a heist she planned went terribly wrong. Tokyo isn't an unreliable narrator, exactly, but she's an unreliable human being, prone to making an impulsive grand gesture at exactly the wrong moment. And in fact El Professor turns out to have made quite a number of mistakes in casting his crime...
Ian Dunt: "Catherine McKinnell https://twitter.com/IanDunt/status/1186640891966115840: 'Every member in this House represents people who voted Leave and Remain. What nobody voted for was a wing and prayer, cake and eat it, blindfold Brexit with no impact assessments on the biggest transformation of our economy in peacetime history...
Justin August: Upgrading to OSX Catalina as an Anaconda User https://medium.com/@justinaugust/upgrading-to-osx-catalina-as-an-anaconda-user-2e71db194764: 'Big news! There's a new MacOS out! It brings lots of nice features. Bad news! If you're a user of the Anaconda distribution for Python, Data Analysis and Jupyter Notebooks you may want to wait. Installing Catalina will disable your Anaconda distribution and move the folder from your root directory to a folder on your desktop called Relocated Items. More details can be found here. My steps for correcting this were...
Alwyn Young (1994): The Tyranny of Numbers: Confronting the Statistical Realities of the East Asian Growth Experience https://www.nber.org/papers/w4680: 'The fundamental role played by factor accumulation in explaining the extraordinary postwar growth of Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan.... While the growth of output per capita in these economies has averaged 6% to 7% per annum over the past two and a half decades, the growth of output per effective worker in the non-agricultural sector of these economies has been only 3% to 4% per annum.... Total factor productivity growth rates... are well within the bounds of those experienced by the OECD and Latin American economies over equally long periods of time. While the growth of output and manufacturing exports in the newly industrializing economies of East Asia is virtually unprecedented, the growth of total factor productivity in these economies is not...
Phoebe Weston: Ancestral Home of All Human Beings Discovered https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/homo-sapiens-origin-humans-botswana-zambezi-river-a9174396.html: 'Vast wetland south of Zambezi river was cradle of all mankind and sustained our ancestors for 70,000 years: Scientists have pinpointed a fertile river valley in northern Botswana as the ancestral home of all human beings: The earliest anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens) arose 200,000 years ago in a vast wetland south of the Zambezi river which was the cradle of all mankind, a new study has revealed. This lush region–which also covered parts of Namibia and Zimbabwe – was home to an enormous lake which sustained our ancestors for 70,000 years, according to the paper published in the journal Nature. Between 110,000 and 130,000 years ago, the climate started to change and fertile corridors opened up out of this valley. For the first time, the population began to disperse–paving the way for modern humans to migrate out of Africa, and ultimately, across the world...
Gary Forsythe: A Critical History of Early Rome: 'By 264 B.C. peninsular Italy was firmly under Roman military control. Its population consisted of three different categories of people. First of all, there were the Roman citizens. They occupied the actual territory of the Roman state, which stretched across central Italy from the Tyrrhenian to the Adriatic, extended southward in a strip down along the Volscian coast to the Bay of Naples, and included northern Campania. According to Roman census figures, which seem to be credible from the early third century B.C. onwards, the adult male Roman population at this time numbered more than a quarter of a million. Secondly, there were the states allied to Rome. In geography and population they formed the largest of the three categories. They were the various Etruscan, Umbrian, Picene, Sabellian, Messapic, and Greek communities of northern and southern Italy, who still exercised local autonomy over their own affairs but were bound to Rome by individual bilateral treaties. Generally speaking, these states were governed by republican constitutions of various configurations, and political power was largely in the hands of local landed elites, who had the same basic social, economic, and political interests and outlook as the Roman aristocracy. The third category of people in Roman Italy were the Latin colonies scattered throughout the peninsula. Since their inhabitants enjoyed Latin status and had Rome as their mother-city, they were closely bound to the Roman state by law, language, culture, and sentiment. Though numerically the smallest of the three categories, their numbers were deployed geographically to best safeguard Roman interests in the lands of the allied communities. Rome held the commanding central position of this legal structure, which integrated all these peoples into a single military organization. Both the Italian allies and the Latin colonies were bound directly to Rome by individual treaties which spelled out their rights and obligations. As long as domestic tranquillity was maintained, Rome was content to allow the allied...
There is no single effect of "automation" on the workforce and the labor market. It is long past time for us to dig deeper, and here is a good piece of spadework: Sotiris Blanas, Gino Gancia, and Tim Lee: How Different Technologies Affect Different Workers https://voxeu.org/article/how-different-technologies-affect-different-workers_: "Since the early 1980s, technology has reduced the demand for low and medium-skill workers, the young, and women, especially in manufacturing industries. The column investigates which technologies have had the largest effect, and on which types of worker. It finds that robots and software raised the demand for high-skill workers, older workers, and men, especially in service industries.... From 1982 to 2005, using data from 30 industries spanning roughly the entire economies of ten high-income countries.... We used the Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOT) and the Occupational Information Network (O*NET) to evaluate which jobs are more prone to automation based on the type of tasks they require.... Industrial robots decrease low-skill employment, while they increase the income shares of high and medium-skill workers, old workers, and men.... In manufacturing, robots lower low-skill, young, and female employment, while in services, they increase medium-skill and male employment. In both sectors, robots increase the income shares of high-skill, old, and male workers. Our results are consistent with the view that robots replace workers who perform routine tasks, especially in sectors where automation is more widespread, such as manufacturing. By contrast, they increase employment and incomes in sectors where automation has started more recently, such as in services, a sector in which new occupations are appearing. Given the industrial and occupational composition of these sectors, that robots are likely to complement engineers, product designers and managers–that is, occupations that are dominated by high-skill, more senior, and male workers. Software has a similar effect to robots, whereas ICT capital is associated with employment gains mostly for medium and low-skill workers...
I have some disagreements with this by the smart Sufi, Mishkin, and Hooper: the evidence for "significant nonlinearity" in the Phillips Curve is that the curve flattens when inflation is low, not that it steepens when labor slack is low. There is simply no "strong evidence" of significant steepening with low labor slack. Yes, you can find specifications with a t-statistic of 2 in which this is the case, but you have to work hard to find such specifications, and your results are fragile. The fact is that in the United States between 1957 and 1988—the first half of the last 60 years—the slope of the simplest-possible adaptive-expectations Phillips Curve was -0.54: each one-percentage point fall in unemployment below the estimated natural rate boosted inflation in the subsequent year by 0.54%-points above its contemporary value. Since 1988—in the second half of the past 60 years—the slope of this simplest-possible Phillips curve has been effectively zero: the estimated regression coefficient has been not -0.54 but only -0.03. The most important observations driving the estimated negative slope of the Phillips Curve in the first half of the past sixty years were 1966, 1973, and 1974—inflation jumping up in times of relatively-low unemployment—and 1975, 1981, and 1982—inflation falling in times of relatively-high unemployment. The most important observations driving the estimated zero slope of the Phillips Curve in the second half of the past sixty years have been 2009-2014: the failure of inflation to fall as the economy took its Great-Recession excursion to a high-unemployment labor market with enormous slack. Yes, if we had analogues of (a) two presidents, Johnson and Nixon, desperate for a persistent high-pressure economy; (b) a Federal Reserve chair like Arthur Burns eager to accommodate presidential demands; (c) the rise of a global monopoly in the economy's key input able to deliver mammoth supply shocks; and (d) a decade of bad luck; then we might see a return to inflation as it was in the (pre-Iran crisis) early and mid-1970s. But is that really the tail risk we should be focused monomaniacally on? And how is it, exactly, that "the difference between national and city/state results in recent decades can be explained by the success that monetary policy has had in quelling inflation and anchoring inflation expectations since the 1980s"? Neither of those two should affect the estimated coefficient. Much more likely is simply that—at the national level and at the city/state level—the Phillips Curve becomes flat when inflation becomes low: Peter Hooper, Frederic S. Mishkin, and Amir Sufi: Prospects for Inflation in a High Pressure Economy: Is the Phillips Curve Dead or Is It Just Hibernating? https://delong.typepad.com/files/phillips-hibernating-1.pdf: "Evidence on whether the Phillips curve is dead, i.e. that its slope has flattened to zero. National data going back to the 1950s and 60s yield strong evidence of negative slopes and significant nonlinearity in those slopes, with slopes much steeper in tight labor markets than in easy labor markets. This evidence of both slope and nonlinearity weakens dramatically based on macro data since the 1980s for the price Phillips curve, but not the wage Phillips curve. However, the endogeneity of monetary policy and the lack of variation of the unemployment gap, which has few episodes of being substantially below zero in this sample period, makes the price Phillips curve estimates from this period less reliable. At the same time, state level and MSA level data since the 1980s yield significant evidence of both negative slope and nonlinearity in the Phillips curve. The difference between national and city/state results in recent decades can be explained by the success that monetary policy has had in quelling inflation and anchoring inflation expectations since the 1980s. We also review the experience of the 1960s, the last time inflation expectations became unanchored, and observe both parallels and differences with today. Our analysis suggests that reports of the death of the Phillips curve may be greatly exaggerated...
Carmen Ye: Why We Need Better Re-Employment Policies For Formerly Incarcerated African American Men: "African American men... 33 percent of the 1.56 million Americans held in state or federal prisons.... When these men are released from prison, what will their employment prospects look like?... Black applicants with no criminal record receive a callback or job offer at the same rate as white applicants with a felony conviction. Yet black applicants without a criminal record were three times as likely to get a callback as those with a record...
IMHO, the late Marty Weitzman's finest work. I would give a testicle or equivalent value to have written this: Marty Weitzman: Prices vs. Quantities https://delong.typepad.com/prices-vs-quantities.pdf: "There is, it seems to me, a rather fundamental reason to believe that quantities are better signals for situations demanding a high degree of coordination. A classical example would be the short run production planning of intermediate industrial materials. Within a large production organization, be it the General Motors Corporation or the Soviet industrial sector as a whole, the need for balancing the output of any intermediate commodity whose production is relatively specialized to this organization and which cannot be effortlessly and instantaneously imported from or exported to a perfectly competitive outside world puts a kink in the benefit function. If it turns out that production of ball bearings of a certain specialized kind (plus reserves) falls short of anticipated internal consumption, far more than the value of the unproduced bearings can be lost. Factors of production and materials that were destined to be combined with the ball bearings and with commodities containing them in higher stages of production must stand idle and are prevented from adding value all along the line. If on the other hand more bearings are produced than were contemplated being consumed, the excess cannot be used immediately and will only go into storage to lose implicit interest over time. Such short run rigidity is essentially due to the limited substitutability, fixed coefficients nature of a technology based on machinery. Other things being equal, the asymmetry between the effects of overproducing and underproducing are more pronounced the further removed from final use is the commodity and the more difficult it is to substitute alternative slack resources or to quickly replenish supplies by emergency imports. The resulting strong curvature in benefits around the planned consumption levels of intermediate materials tends to create a very high comparative advantage for quantity instruments. If this is combined with a cost function that is nearly linear in the relevant range, the advantage of the quantity mode is doubly compounded...
Comment of the Day: Nils in Santa Ana Winds https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/10/comment-of-the-day-_nils_-in-santa-ana-winds-ni-can-reliably-tell-you-that-there-was-a-diablo-wind-on-october-19-and-2.html: 'I can reliably tell you that there was a Diablo wind on October 19 and 20, 1991...
Comment of the Day: Dilbert Dogbert in Santa Ana Winds https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/10/comment-of-the-day-_dilbert-dogbert_-in-santa-ana-winds-back-in-the-mid-50s-i-spent-time-with-my-older-brother-in-sa.html: 'Back in the mid 50's I spent time with my older brother in San Bernadino. His house was near the El Cajon Pass...
Comment of the Day: Adrian: The 1600 Military Revolution and the Islamic World https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/10/adrian-_the-1600-military-revolution-and-the-islamic-world_-since-the-turn-of-the-millennium-there-has-been-a-fast-de.html: 'State of the art is the idea of a Eurasian rather than European gunpowder revolution. But there is still perhaps something different emerging in C17th century Europe. In 1500 the Ottomans are the cutting edge by 1700 they look old fashioned...
Hoisted from the Archives: From Eight Years Ago: The Way the World Looked to Me in the Summer of 2011 https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/10/hoisted-from-the-archives-from-eight-years-ago-how-should-obama-answer-the-stock-markets-wake-up-call.html: 'Back in the summer of 2009, Barack Obama had five economic policy principals on the Treasury Bench...
Hoisted from the Archives: Ricardo's Big Idea, and Its Vicissitudes https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/10/hoisted-from-the-archives-_httpswwwbradford-delongcom201710ricardos-big-idea-and-its-vicissitudes-inet-edinbu.html: 'A problem for Ricardo: The LTV tells him that capitalist production should take place according to absolute advantage, with those living in countries with no absolute advantage left in subsistence agriculture.The doctrine of comparative advantage is Ricardo's way out. For him, the LTV holds within countries. Countries' overall price levels relative to each other rise and fall as a result of specie flows until trade balances. And what is left is international commodity price differentials that follow comparative advantage. Merchants profit from these differentials, and their demand induces specialization...
Note to Self: Industrial Policy in Korea: Readings https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/10/note-to-self-industrial-policy-in-korea-readings-alice-amsden-1989-_asias-next-giant_-chs-1-6-nathan.html...
Worthy Reads: from October 25, 2018 https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/10/fifteen-worthy-reads-for-october-25-2018.html...
#noted #weblogs #2019-10-31
Posted on October 31, 2019 at 09:23 in #noted, #weblogs | Permalink | Comments (0)


A new favorite recipe for pear lovers, this appetizer is incredibly delicious...and can be prepared in a snap! The balsamic glaze is the perfect complement to the sweet pear and salty goat cheese.
Slice pears stem-side-up into 12 quarter-inch width vertical planks. Cut large slices in half lengthwise for a total of 48 slices.
Heat vinegar, butter, and honey in large frying pan over medium heat for 2 to 3 minutes, stirring constantly, until reduced by half, about 2 tablespoons. Add pear slices and continue cooking for 1 minute, turning once.
Place 2 pear slices on each baguette round and top with 1 teaspoon goat cheese. Sprinkle almonds over cheese and garnish with fresh pepper, if desired.
*To toast almonds, place in heavy frying pan and toast over medium heat, stirring constantly, for 1 to 2 minutes or until tan with toasted aroma.


Satcon PowerGate® Plus solar PV inverters boost system power production and maximize the overall profitability of commercial and utility-scale solar PV systems through combination of system intelligence, advanced command and control capabilities, and industrial-grade engineering.
"The project in Rhodes presents unique design challenges that require us to develop a complete solution that can be scaled across 22 distributed locations. Each power plant can directly contribute to the stability of the entire island's power grid. With this in mind, and with the responsibility of providing reliable and cost effective energy for community of the island, we designed a system that will enhance each plant's performance, along with its stability and durability, while reducing the carbon footprint from electricity production on the island throughout the years."
-- Nikos Savouris Project Manager Easy Power S.A.
Easy Power S.A. developed and constructed 2.2 MW of ground-mount solar power plants which generate enough solar energy to supply 1.2% of the electricity demand on the Island of Rhodes, Greece. The installations are owned by EasySolar S.A., RNA Power S.A., and Diachirisi Iliakis Energias S.A. Prior to this installation, the island's power was made entirely by diesel generators which produced up to 194.4 MW during peak demand periods. Rhodes' energy consumption surges during the summer months as the population of the island swells by more than three hundred percent. The solar installations provide critical peak demand support, enhancing grid stability while delivering cost effective renewable energy for the population in addition to supporting the island's year round base load demands.


text:
0191 442 1001 cbrookes@balticpublications.co.uk
Ebbsfleet forward Bingham hails Kutrieb trust
Jan 12, 2021 | Headlines, newsnow
Ebbsfleet United forward Rakish Bingham has praised manager Dennis Kutrieb's approach since his arrival in English football.
The German boss was appointed at the Fleet last summer after enjoying lower-league success in his homeland.
Speaking as part of an in-depth interview with this site, former Hartlepool United and Hamilton Academical man Bingham said:
"He's come in and he's been brilliant, to be fair. I've had two or three conversations where I've sat down with him, and he's just checked on my wellbeing and asked 'how are you finding it, how are you mentally, how's things at home? How have you settled in this team, are you enjoying yourself?' and stuff like that.
"All the lads, he's had conversations with. I think he trusts in us as a team and individuals; he's said many times he's chosen this squad of players. He came in, he looked through each and every one of us as individuals, and he said 'I want him, I want him,' so he's hand-picked basically who he wants to be in this team and this club.
"He puts a lot of trust in us on the pitch to go forth with the plan he sets us out to do, and I think it's great to have a manager that believes in you. On a personal note, he puts big belief into me, and it's nice to have, because you go out on the field and you've got no qualms.
"It's one less thing to worry about, going out and thinking 'oh, is the gaffer having me?' He really does let you know your importance in the team. He just wants me to work hard, as always, and there's been times this season where maybe the goal hasn't fallen for me, and I've played a very good game and I've worked hard, but he's openly said 'I've got no doubt, Raks will start banging them in'.
"It's nice to have a manager that believes in you like that."
Read the full interview with Rakish here
Chippenham sign Torquay midfielder Buse on loan
Chesterfield sign defender Gunning
'We have never borrowed a penny and we certainly would not be looking to start now' – Concord Rangers chairman
Categories Select Category BLOG Chimp Weekly Headlines Chimp Weekly Interview Chimp Weekly More News Chimp Weekly Top Story Headlines Interviews and Features Interviews/Features archive Latest News More News newsnow Top Stories Uncategorised
Editor: Chris Brookes
e: cbrookes@balticpublications.co.uk
HYPoint, Saltmeadows Road, Gateshead, Tyne & Wear. NE8 3DA
© 2021 Baltic Publications Limited

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


In the beautiful rolling hills of the Temecula Valley Wine Country, is a tradition 48 years in the making— vast horizons, majestic surroundings— real moments. Events, Entertainment, Weddings, Equestrian.
A unique outdoor experience unlike any other. Big, yet calming and beautiful. Spectacular 360˚ views at every turn. 242 acres of beauty, perfect for any setting or ocassion. You'll feel it when you're here.
May 23 – 27 and May 30 – June 3.
This high-profile event features some of the country's best Show Jumpers competing for prizes worth over $100,000! Come enjoy the thrill of competition, food, beverages, and the beauty of Galway Downs. Admission/Parking is free for spectators! For more information visit www.jump-nee.com.
Silver Lining Trailer Camp – an easy camping experience with relaxed comfort and authentic style.
Featuring a stunning collection of vintage Airstreams from the golden era of travel trailers.
Decompress in the heart of Temecula's Wine Country. Silver Lining is located at Galway Downs, a serene equestrian ranch that spans over 240 acres and is ideally positioned at the start of the DePortola Wine Trail. The camp is the perfect jump off point for your day of wine tasting.


Want monsters? Want madness? Want some guy called Tom to create it for you? Well, we're not sure about the latter part, but Tom Horn Gaming definitely serves up the goods with its superb new slot, Monster Madness.
If Monsters Inc. is anything to go by, we know that monsters aren't anything to be afraid of anymore. They should be embraced and celebrated as they gear us up for monster wins and scary spins. Tom Horn ran with this idea to present us a future utopia where monsters get up to all sorts of antics.
Across three reels and eight paylines, the scene is set for the monster madness to begin. In the background we see a futuristic landscape, with vehicles whizzing by. To the right of the three by three grid is a double-headed blue monster. And it's cute as heck! It cheers us on as we spin the reels on the Monster Madness slot, watching the different monster symbols pay out to varying degrees. The orange one's our fave, giving us 24 times our bet for three appearances. The green-eyed symbol activates Free Spins and switches things up to a new screen for the bonus round – a nice touch. Even nicer is when we win 200 times our bet!
With a mission to give us an intense gaming experience, Tom Horn certainly starts the year by living up to its name with Monster Madness. Having a cute slot mascot that gets giddy with excitement before landing wins is fun to see. And did we say cute? We think we've found our new favourite slots mascot.


text:
kaipfeiffer
Revue Mondaine - pictures for readers
pictures for readers
Account Created on 5 June 2005 (#7335236) Last updated on 15 April 2008 Gift
Kai Pfeiffer
kaipfeiffer@livejournal.com
an artist drawing pictures for readers (printed, put on a wall, digitally projected ...), writer, musician (EGOBONE, Hyperbolick Soul Cantors, Rudolf Steiner Olde Time Jazz Trio, Flechsig), audiovisual performer, editor of the "avantgarde/alternative" comics anthologies »PLAQUE« and »flitter« (http://www.avant-verlag.de).
comics works divide in fictional stories and comics reportage/essay.
mail "at" kaipfeiffer.com
alan moore, alternative comics, arto lindsay, avantgarde comics, charlemagne palestine, charles mingus, chernobyl, chris ware, coil, comics, current 93, david b., david cronenberg, david lynch, decent suits, drone, eddie campbell, eugene chadbourne, experimental music, field recordings, frémok, gary panter, georges bataille, guido crepax, h. c. artmann, hafler trio, haino keiji, igort, ingmar bergman, jean-luc godard, joann sfar, john zorn, kim ki-duk, kramer's ergot, krazy kat, le dernier cri, louis-ferdinand céline, merzbow, michael gira, michaux, miles davis, momus, nabokov, nicolas mahler, nurse with wound, prince, rainer werner fassbinder, richard youngs, samuel beckett, serge gainsbourg, suehiro maruo, sun city girls, the wire magazine, tower recordings, ulli lust, william burroughs


text:
Home In the news Star in the making
Star in the making
By Juanita Shepherd -
Sally Pottinger is on her way to becoming a country star. Photograph – Aaron Van Rongen.
When Serpentine resident Stuart Pottinger came across a music course one day while online, little did he know it would be the start of his daughter's journey to becoming a professional musician.
Sally Pottinger, 15, has since been accepted into the Australian Academy of Country Music in Tamworth, NSW and has been getting ready to make her way there in the next few weeks.
The Serpentine Jarrahdale Grammar School student said she could not believe it.
"Dad did some recordings on his computer and we sent it all off," she said.
"The academy sent me an email saying that I've been accepted and I thought oh my God."
Sally said her music career started two years ago with guitar lessons and some vocal training.
"My dad received a guitar one Christmas and I wanted to play it so I got music lessons from school and have been playing ever since learning from my music school and using YouTube to learn songs," she said.
"Mum plays the piano and the flute and both my parents are good singers though they won't admit it."
Aside from her father Sally has cited Kasey Chambers, Sunny Cowgirls, Adam Harvey and Beccy Cole as some of her influences.
"Music brings people together," she said.
"I really love it when I play a song people know and they sing along, I also like it when I play one of my songs and the guys at Serpy pub clap and tell me to keep writing songs for them.
"It's such a thrill to play my guitar and sing a song and watch the guy at the bar tapping his foot in time."
Sally has been a regular at the Serpentine Rib and Steakhouse and she has also played at the Byford Markets.
She said she bought her first guitar after getting paid for performing at the opening of the suburb of Whitby some time ago and one day hopes to go to Nashville in America but for now is excited about flying to Tamworth.
"Country music is big over there," she said.
"I can't wait to meet people my age who love the genre just as much as me and learn all sorts of new things about performing with teachers who have exceptional experience."
Mr Pottinger said he is very proud of his daughter.
"The Serpy pub have been fantastic and the guys there like her music and encourage her to learn new songs and keep going," he said.
"I am so proud that Sally has started with music and continued to work so hard to make a hobby into a potential career."
Previous articleSchool secret's out
Next articleRubbish has its rewards
Juanita Shepherd


How to work out length and angle between 2 picked points?
I'm trying to create a little macro that gets the user to click 2 points on the drawing and then draws a bezier curve between the two points. Of course I need to work out all the positions required for the bezier curve: Start point - known Position for first handle - this needs to be worked out relative to the position and angle of the end point. Position for second handle - again needs working out. End Point - known. I'm used to Co Create's ME10 macro language which has functions to work out things such as the length and angle between 2 points so that trig functions can be applied to work out new points relative to known ones. How is this done in Isodraw? Also, how do you prompt the user to pick the start and end points - there is no command line in Isodraw so the only way I've found to do it is to use the message function that required the user to close the message before picking the point, so no use really.
You would likely do this twice, once directly after the first, to allow the selection of the first and then second points. Note that the variables would need to change to say F3 and F4 as to not overwrite your initial coordinates. In regards to prompting, you have only one choice, and that is the message command. I might recommend leaving out the prompt however, as the user likely will assume that selecting the macro Draw_a_bezier (or similar) will prompt for the two points. To determine the math for angles, etcetera, that is not quite as simple as you might hope. I'd recommend the Function section of the macro help from under the menu to get some trig commands.
Thanks Trevor I've got as far as getting the first and second points OK. The problem I have is working out the relationship between them (length betweeen the points and the angle between them) so that I can apply the trig functions properly.
I was never very good at trig unfortunately. I'd think your starting point would be to X and Y differences. Maybe something along the lines of comparing the points. Check if F1 is greater than F3, if so, F1-F3. Otherwise, F3-F1. Do the same with F2 and F4. That will give you the rise and run of your triangle. You should be able to determine your slope from that. As I said, it's not as simple as what you think. If you are still stuck, give a little more detail, specifically with determining handle locations. I can't promise today, but I can see what I can do with it.
My wife, the math major, was kind enough to put together some basic trig functions. Attached is a cheat sheet that should assist you. For reference, the points you gather (F1, F2, F3, and F4) allow you to determine the X and Y coordinates.
Thanks Trevor. I think with this information and the invaluable cheat sheet I should be able to get this done. I used to use trig a lot a few years ago but never knew which one to use and when. My main problem is the transition from ME10 macro language to this one - the syntax is so different and there are far fewer commands in Isodraw to help with drawing related macros. Thanks to your wife for the cheat sheet, it will be a very useful reference. If I get this macro done, I'll probably post it here so people can have a giggle at my coding.
I was a full time programmer for ME10 - CoCreate's 2d CAD system for over 10 years and did macros to effectively add new features (to automate standard drawing tasks), so I thought it would be good to do the same with Isodraw. I'm finding it difficult as the structure of the language is so different and the drawing commands don't seem very flexible. I may have been a little sheltered as the ME10 macro language is superb, intuitive and has lots of drawing functions. Anyway, there are some things that Isodraw does not have functions for that we use quite a lot - for example drawing ribbed pipes (takes ages manually). To start off though, I just wanted to do a very simple macro to draw the elliptical shape representing the end of a cut off bar or pipe (don't know if it has a name). The attached .jpg file shows an example of what I'm trying to do. The idea is to just pick 2 points (the ends of the pipe) and the macro works out the angle of the points and draws the ellipses to suit. It doesn't look like you can draw segments of curves (or can you?) so I'm trying to use bezier curves instead, and need to work out the positions to place the handles so the curves look OK.
I believe you are correct in the use of bezier cures. I'd recommend starting with the "Create bezier" command and then adding by using the "Append bezier segment" command. An example is below. I'll see if I can figure it out, but I have to admit that this is a fairly complex endeavor so it might be a bit before I have enough time to work on this. create bezier curve 100 100 150 100 150 200 200 200 append bezier segment 250 200 250 100 300 100 append bezier segment 350 100 350 200 400 200 append bezier segment 450 200 450 100 500 100 A note for Christian, This is a common issue. At this point, we've been manually creating this effect on our end, but a macro would be beneficial.


text:
Q: How to call the values of a C# enum in F# I'm writing some F# code and I'd like to use an enum value defined in a c# assembly.
For instance, in the c# assembly I've got this code
public enum MyEnum
{
    valueA,
    valueB,
    valueC
}

How do I call MyEnum.valueA in F#? When I just write that, the compiler shouts:

Invalid use of a type name and/or object constructor. If necessary use
  'new' and apply the constructor to its arguments, e.g. 'new
  Type(args)'. The required signature is:  MyEnum()

A: OK... I'm sorry, I've found my problem...
My C# code was actually:
public enum MyEnum
{
    @valueA,
    @valueB,
    @valueC
}

I know, it's weird, but actually it isn't really "my" c# code...
To call it in F#, I have to write:
MyEnum.``valueA``

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


1 March 1999. Thanks to V6.
an international disgrace— the emasculation of the UN by the U.S.
notably France and Russia— used inspectors as spies for their own ends.
been sent into Baghdad last March to set up an automated eavesdropping device.
communications" of Saddam and his elite.
the U.S. objective of overthrowing Saddam Hussein through covert action.
staffing: only international personnel with U.S. clearances could participate.
for a "collection" specialist. "We deployed him to Baghdad in July of 1998,"
and told me he had concerns about what was transpiring.
was not in accordance with what UNSCOM was supposed to be doing."
headquarters prefix, she would not even confirm her position with DSD.
system is very, very limited."
street in the mid '80s and took them to a warehouse on the outskirts of town.
Iraq to foment a coup.
was told via their uplink. "You might as well pack up and go home."
Australia that it wanted to "coordinate" UNSCOM's intelligence gathering.
in Baghdad without his knowledge prior to his resignation in August 1998.
accomplished," the former official says.
1994 memoir, Frost describes the complexities of mounting "special collection"
describing visits to SCS's old College Park headquarters.
one lingers, will threaten arrest.
it happens to be a low-powered signal, it may not travel far enough."
According to two sources familiar with intelligence activity in Iraq, the U.S.
reportedly, included encrypted cell phones.
exchange than encryption algorithms for cell phones," he says.
there is to listen and transmit. That's SCS."
outside world's disarmament experts had to Iraq."
Intelligence (SIGINT) System or "USSS."
SIGINT agencies to be operated jointly with NSA.
NSA's jargon this is called improving "hearability."
handle intercepts from new technologies like the Internet.
stamped with one of the highest security classifications in the U.S.
intelligence community. — W.M. & J.V.
embassies, consulates, and other diplomatic missions.
-1 Joint facility operated with a SIGINT partner.
-2 Joint facility partially operated with a SIGINT partner.
-5 NSA liaison is present.


So I have been blogging a bit too much about department stores and such recently and I should be able to spill the beans as to why soon but I wanted to share a cool experience I just had in a fancy pants department store that made me think there is hope for one of shopping's great institutions.
I am blogging "live" and direct from an iPHONE in an apple store in beautiful downtown Buffalo and I gotta say real quickly that iPHONEs are the real deal. They are smaller/thinner then I imagined and are a real treat to play with……..I would buy one but since I live in Canada and they don't work there I don't have to fight the urge to spend the money.
Anyway my wife and I made the trip south to Buffalo so she could find some work clothes. She exhausted all her options at home and is looking for new trails to blaze. Our first stop was Macy's and two things of note happened (one minor and one major). First thing was I got kicked out of the ladies fitting room because well I am not a lady (even though I am very sensitive). I was in the fitting room because I usually accompany my wife since it make things easier for me to tell her how she looks from the male perspective….and I like to watch her undress and dress etc. Well the sound of a mature male voice in the fitting room caused some of the other ladies to feel……perhaps left out of the fun and complained that I was there.
PLEASE NOTE* I was on a completely closed change room (no curtains) with my wife and no shenanigans were going on. Her and I were talking about her clothing choices and that was it….no lovin' or stuff like that.
SO anyway the cashier lady asked me to step out and I did without making a scene and sat on the "husband" chair outside the fitting room only to be told that if I didn't mind could I wait a little farther away as the lady who complained did not want a confrontation.
Again I did as asked without making a scene since I am "not that guy".
After my wife was done we went to another section to look at different stuff and then we checked out. At the checkout (this is a different employee then the one that asked me to leave the fitting room) the Cashier asked us if we were from Canada (Buffalo is a border city so a big chunk of shoppers could be from either side of the bridge) and did we know about the Macy's International discount.
Ya see Macy's offers an 11% discount to people who can prove they ain't from around these here parts. We gladly accepted the discount and I was very impressed that in two very different incidents (both involving me somehow) that the employees went out of their way to help their customers and offer help and assistance.


Home FPV & UAV RC and Telemetry D2 Licenses Receivers RANGE_RX_25/100KM. Increases range from 25Km to 100Km. In RX D1, D2 or RXLRS (500mW and -110dBm).
RANGE_RX_25/100KM. Increases range from 25Km to 100Km. In RX D1, D2 or RXLRS (500mW and -110dBm).
* License valid for RMD1, RXD2 or RXLRS products that have the license of 25Km of range activated and need to increase the range by 100Km.
Activate this license and you will get 500mW of power and -110dBm of sensitivity, with which it allow you to have a maximum range of 100km.
Maximum RC and Telemetry range: 100Km.
For example: Module RXD2, MAC xxxxxxxxxx.


# Reiki = Rei + Ki ?
'Reiki' is one complete word in its own right.
Imagine someone who has been attempting to teach themself English as second language.
"Antelope? Ant-elope... 'Ant' & 'Elope'!
OK, I know these words. Now, just combine the meanings, and... wow, that was easy!"
"Antelope: .an insect who runs away with their beloved"
* There are several other Japanese words pronounced 'Reiki' which have totally different meanings.
Is protection needed within Reiki?
Though there is no need to look to 'add-ons' adopted-in from other traditions.
And the 'clearer' our Reiki flows ( i.e. the more 'fine-tuned' our Reiki is), the greater the protection it affords us.
"Your Reiki power is like a aura, its a glow, and you are radiating out, and that energy is stronger than what it can penetrate into you ... no darkness can penetrate you"


text:
Renewsable.net
Home Climate On Climate Change, It's Trump vs Markets
On Climate Change, It's Trump vs Markets
Though the Trump administration has taken steps to undo regulations aimed at cutting greenhouse gas emissions, experts say economic forces are helping to push down U.S. emissions anyway.
U.N. climate negotiators will meet in Bonn, Germany, November 6-17. It will be their first gathering since President Donald Trump announced the United States would withdraw from the Paris climate agreement.
Trump considers efforts to fight climate change a barrier to economic growth. Promising to dominate global energy markets and put struggling U.S. coal miners back to work, he has taken a series of steps to roll back regulations aimed at fighting climate change. They include moving to revoke the Clean Power Plan, former President Barack Obama's primary tool for cutting carbon emissions from power plants.
Losing those regulations won't stop the transition in energy sources that's already underway, according to George Washington University Solar Institute Director Amit Ronen.
"We're still going to meet the goals of the Clean Power Plan in most states, even if it's withdrawn," he said, "just because we're substituting so much natural gas and renewables for coal."
Coal-fired power plants — the most climate-polluting source of electricity — are shutting down across the country. More than 500 closed between 2002 and 2016, and additional plants are slated for closure, according to the Department of Energy. Electric utilities are replacing them with cheaper, cleaner natural gas.
And renewable sources, such as wind and solar, are booming. Prices have plummeted. Renewables are beginning to be cost-competitive with fossil fuels.
Solar tariffs
Though electric utilities are choosing natural gas and renewables over coal, the Trump administration may influence energy markets in other ways.
A case before the International Trade Commission will soon give the president the authority to put tariffs on imported solar panels — and nearly all of them are imported.
The case is billed as an effort to help domestic solar manufacturers. While Trump has not embraced renewable energy, he has said he wants to support U.S. manufacturing jobs.
But solar manufacturing is mostly automated. Far more people work in labor-intensive installation. The Solar Energy Industries Association has opposed measures limiting imports, saying it would cost jobs.
The International Trade Commission recommended tariffs smaller than what the plaintiffs asked for. But Trump gets the last word, expected before mid-January.
Even more severe trade restrictions would not extinguish the renewables industry, however.
"[A tariff] certainly adds cost and might stifle solar development," said Rhodium Group analyst John Larsen. "But the overall clean energy picture doesn't get hit too hard."
That's because many states and cities have policies requiring electric utilities to use renewable energy, Larsen noted. They are stepping up their efforts to cut greenhouse gases, even as the federal government is pulling back. If solar dips, wind may fill in the gap.
Subsidizing coal, nuclear
The proposal that could have a bigger impact on electricity markets comes from the Trump administration's Department of Energy.
With so many coal plants shut down and eight nuclear plants on the brink of closure, Secretary Rick Perry said the reliability of the U.S. electric grid is in jeopardy.
Because coal and nuclear plants provide constant power and have their fuel supplies on-site, Perry suggested paying them more than other sources for their electricity.
The proposal has made unusual allies of the natural gas, solar and wind industries. They wrote joint comments opposing it. And critics across the political spectrum have blasted it.
"This has no intellectual depth. It's unprofessional. It's badly thought out," said finance director Tom Sanzillo of the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis.
Sanzillo noted that the Department of Energy study on which Perry based his recommendations does not show that grid reliability is threatened. And Perry himself rejected a similar proposal as governor of Texas, where the growing influx of wind power was pushing coal plants out of business.
Not fast enough
Ultimately, experts say, the Trump administration has limited powers to save the coal industry.
While coal's decline is helping to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, however, experts say they are not falling fast enough to avoid the worst of climate change.
Under the Paris climate agreement, nations agreed to keep global warming below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Former President Obama pledged that the United States would reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 26 percent to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025.
Even the Clean Power Plan, plus other Obama-era regulations, still would have left the United States short of that goal, Larsen said.
"The current U.S. trajectory is not in line with Paris, and the U.S. commitment in Paris wasn't necessarily on track for 2 degrees," he said. "It was a starting point, a down payment.
"Hopefully, other countries step up to the plate to fill in some of that gap. But that's a big if."
The latest report from the U.N. Environment Program says pledged emission cuts worldwide add up to just one-third of what is needed to keep the planet below the 2-degree target.
Steve Baragona
www.voanews.com
Previous articleTax credit would level playing field for renewables
Next articleTata Power announces 30-megawatt solar plant in India
Chad French
S. Korea Has a 20 Mile Solar-Covered Bike Lane in the Middle of the Freeway
Solar June 28, 2017
Roadside Turbines Will Harness Wind From Speeding Cars in India
Former President Jimmy Carter Just Made a Solar Farm to Power Half His City
Scientists Design Catalyst That Mimics Z-Scheme in Photosynthesis
Zimbabwe Planning for 1 Gigawatt of Renewable Energy Capacity by 2025
The South African nation of Zimbabwe is reportedly planning a big push in the renewable energy sector with specific capacity targets and financial support...
Apple's Denmark-based data center gets a new neighbor in the form...
Microsoft inks major wind power deal with Swedish utility firm Vattenfall
Solar energy from these color-changing windows could power your home or...
Netherlands Now Powers Trains Completely on Wind Power
Weekly Top Post
S. Korea Has a 20 Mile Solar-Covered Bike Lane in the...
South Korea has a solar bike highway, designed to generate power from the sun while also shielding cyclists from it. The solar bike road...
A Good Read
Solar197
Autos125
Innovations96
Storage24
Geopolitics18
© 2017 Renewsable - Daily source for Renewable Energy News
Solar Energy Pros And Cons: The True Advantage Of Solar Panels
Solar Jobs Now Outnumber Coal Jobs in Virginia
Wind and Solar Power Advance, but Carbon Refuses to Retreat


#reducenotabuse #useyourlips #closeyourdoortostraws. These hashtags are pledges made by 19 young geography students from RSA Academy, Tipton, at a recent workshop I led in Birmingham, part of Making Places Last, a conference developed with and supported by the RSA Sustainability Network.
These hashtags are pledges made by 19 young geography students from RSA Academy, Tipton, at a recent workshop I led in Birmingham, part of Making Places Last, a conference developed with and supported by the RSA Sustainability Network.
The call to action is clear – stop using single use plastic. On the very same day the word "single-use" was named as the word of 2018, showing an increasing awareness of environmental issues that we are facing all around the globe. And the awareness is already high in these young adults, a generation which has grown up with a recycling bin in the home.
The workshop was aimed at engaging the students in the big environmental challenges that we are facing: climate change, mass extinction and resource use. They were asked to get creative and design a poster, record a video or use any other creative form which could be shared on social media to potentially have an impact beyond friends and family, beyond Birmingham and perhaps even beyond the UK. Because when you put something on social media it has the power to go global in an instant. It was an opportunity to show these teenagers that their voice can and should be heard, they can influence others to act. And this can be a truly powerful thing.
Simon is the creator of #5thingsclear, a hashtag which went viral within a couple of months. One day in June last year he was walking on the beach with his dogs and found a bird with a plastic ring around its neck – nothing could be done for the bird but it made Simon think; no one can pick up all the litter, but if we each pick up just five things, it would make the world a better place, a cleaner place, and less animals would die. #5thingsclear was born.
(Simon's key recommendations for a successful pledge).
With Simon's 5 key recommendations for creating a pledge and equipped with a variety of creative materials, the students set to work. In a short time (the whole workshop was only one hour long) the three groups had created a campaign poster each and presented their thinking to Fellows and other conference delegates.
My favourite hashtag is #reducenotabuse. A simple rhyme and play with words, a call to action for not keeping abusing our planet and the encouragement to reduce resources. Not just recycling but reusing which is the only way we can work our way towards a circular economy and away from a state where we humans use what the Earth can sustainably produce in one year, in just eight months.
Having spent precious time engaging with the students and their teachers for this workshop, I feel hope for the future and a determination on my part; to leave our children and future generations a planet to care for in a way which we have clearly not done.
Ecoed Life aims to raise awareness, educate and inspire people, communities, schools and organisations to action to tackle the big environmental challenges that we are facing. We do this through workshops, engagement activities, CSR and sustainability consulting and by using our own game app – Ecoed.
Carolina will be giving a Friday Conversation at Rawthmells (The Steps) on the 14th December.


text:
CCE Home > Conservatory Home > Instructors & Staff > Instructors > Vanessa Nezamloo
Vanessa Nezamloo
Vanessa holds an AB Speech and Theatre Arts degree and a Masters in Education. She was a former Theatre Arts and Speech Communication teacher at Silliman University in the Philippines. She has directed stage plays such as Into the Woods (a musical comedy fairy tale mashup in two acts), Private Lives, New Yorker in Tondo, Teen Angel, Trysting Place, Women of the Bible Monologues, among others. Vanessa joined the Conservatory of Performing Arts in the spring of 2016 and has taught a variety of theatre classes since then. These include, The Olympians (Stage Combat and Fight Choreography), Creative Drama Studio, Story to Stage, Showtime, and Visual Art 101: Fantasy Worlds. Stage Combat class performances have a wide variety of themes, from medieval black death, to Spanish conquistadores, gladiators, and others. Creative Drama Studio's brainstorming leads them to perform a genre and an original story created by the kids themselves, each story different from other previous classes. A few of the plays she directed for Showtime includes, 1-Act copyrighted plays like 10 Ways to Survive a Zombie Apocalypse, What Happens After Once Upon a Time, Mother Goosed, among others. Most recently, she has directed virtual plays like Do You Read Me?, Virtual Complaint Department, and others. Whenever she has time, Vanessa loves to do anything DIY!


This entry was posted on Dienstag, 29. März 2011 at 8:08 am and is filed under .NET, Events.	You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.


This week I was way too tired to hang around after work and go to Wednesday night's Rhythm Tap II class, so I emailed my teacher to ask if I could come to the Thursday lunchtime installment instead – all good!
I walked in to what is usually used as a rehearsal studio (it has mirrors, black walls, stage style lighting and an upstairs gallery area) and saw all these people milling around, chatting, changing; a couple of theatre-types furiously practising intricate tap steps in full leg warmers and stuff (honestly, it was like Fame when I walked in) and couldn't see our teacher or anyone I recognised. I thought, am I in the right place? Then I spotted some older ladies I knew from level I daytime sitting to the side changing out of their tap shoes – phew! I was in the right place.
After the level one-ers cleared out, it was a class of about 7 students. I think I had been slightly nervous on the way there of a smaller class being quite exposing, but actually it was really good and more laid back. I need to stop being afraid of not getting it right away. After all it's 45 minutes a week. I found 2 particular steps difficult when we learned them last week but after going over them all week (in the kitchen, in the corridor at work, in various larger shops!) I had them down by yesterday. One involves travelling backwards and then changing it to perform it on the spot. The other is a drop-shuffle-ball-change step where you change the shape of the shuffle so it goes around you so that you can travel forwards. I had to remember to begin with a drop-step in front first. It also helped to snap up the second part of the shuffle. I did find this more difficult on the left leg, but there we are!
I realised that this daytime class was a week behind, so I got to repeat week 1 – boom! We filmed the routine we'd learnt and our teacher showed us the next little bit too – this helps because she said to me afterwards that they did a bit more on Wednesday night (being week 2), but I'd be fine.
As it was a small class and we didn't have to exit the studio right away, I got a chance to chat with our teacher afterwards about tap shoes (she has some lovely custom Ruben Sanchez shoes) and find out a bit more about her dancing background which was nice.
Before next Wednesday I'm going to practice the routine as much as possible and watch the video to get a feel for the next bit.