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Cyberwarfare / Nation-State Attacks , Events , Fraud Management & Cybercrime
LogRhythm's Ross Brewer Talks GDPR, Cybercrime and Critical Defenses Mathew J. Schwartz (euroinfosec) • July 3, 2018
Credit Eligible
Ross Brewer, Vice President and Managing Director, EMEA, LogRhythm
More must be done to address the U.K.'s critical national infrastructure, which includes everything from utilities, transportation and financial services to telecommunications, defense and healthcare.
See Also: A Guide to Passwordless Anywhere
"It's partly austerity, and it's partly what's happening in the global economy, but we've really seen an underinvestment, specifically in the critical national infrastructure," says LogRhythm's Ross Brewer. "We've seen some massive outages in the healthcare industry, we've seen some massive outages in the airline industry, and I think this underinvestment has increased the risks."
In a video interview at the recent Infosecurity Europe conference in London, Brewer discusses:
The state of information in the UK's critical national infrastructure;
One year after WannaCry: Lessons learned but ongoing challenges with seeing the big picture;
The effect of the EU's General Data Protection Regulation, especially on the healthcare sector;
Case study: Steps an NHS trust has taken to better protect its critical patient data.
Brewer directs LogRhythm's EMEA business operations including sales, channel development, and administration. Previously, he was vice president and managing director of EMEA for LogLogic, held senior management and sales positions in Europe for systems and security management vendor NetIQ and security vendor PentaSafe - acquired by NetIQ - and launched Symantec's operations in New Zealand.
Incident & Breach Response
Infosecurity Europe Conference
Legacy Infrastructure Security
Cryptojacking Displaces Ransomware as Top Malware Threat
Mathew J. Schwartz
Executive Editor, DataBreachToday & Europe, ISMG
Schwartz is an award-winning journalist with two decades of experience in magazines, newspapers and electronic media. He has covered the information security and privacy sector throughout his career. Before joining Information Security Media Group in 2014, where he now serves as the executive editor, DataBreachToday and for European news coverage, Schwartz was the information security beat reporter for InformationWeek and a frequent contributor to DarkReading, among other publications. He lives in Scotland.
Reduce Complexity and Enhance Performance with Modern Solutions for Modern Environments
Steps to Get Ahead of Insider Threats
Comparing US State Privacy Laws
The Guide to Consumer vs. Employee Privacy Rights
The Ultimate Guide to Privacy Program Automation
Comprehensive United States Privacy Laws
Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity & Risk Monitoring: Elections Infrastructure
Stronger Security Through Context-aware Change Management: A Case Study
SaaS Protection Buyer's Guide
Infographic I NGINX 101
Risk Management Framework: Learn from NIST
90 minutes · Premium OnDemand
From heightened risks to increased regulations, senior leaders at all levels are pressured to improve their organizations' risk management capabilities. But no one is showing them how - until now.
Learn the fundamentals of developing a risk management program from the man who wrote the book on the topic: Ron Ross, computer scientist for the National Institute of Standards and Technology. In an exclusive presentation, Ross, lead author of NIST Special Publication 800-37 - the bible of risk assessment and management - will share his unique insights on how to:
Understand the current cyber threats to all public and private sector organizations;
Develop a multi-tiered risk management approach built upon governance, processes and information systems;
Implement NIST's risk management framework, from defining risks to selecting, implementing and monitoring information security controls.
Ron Ross
Sr. Computer Scientist & Information Security Researcher, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)
https://ddos.inforisktoday.com/austerity-bites-critical-national-infrastructure-security-a-11159


The Department of Finance at BI Norwegian Business School is seeking applicants for full-time, tenure-track faculty positions at all levels: Assistant, Associate, or Full Professor.
JOB QUALIFICATIONS: Applicants should have or be close to completing a Ph.D. in Finance or Economics with a Finance emphasis. We are seeking candidates who will produce high quality research in finance. Applicants for associate or full professor must have a strong record of scholarly publications.
APPLICATION PROCEDURE: Applications should include a cover letter, curriculum vitae, and a job market paper. Please submit these at: financerecruiting@bi.no. Junior candidates should include contact information of at least three references who will submit letters of recommendation. Department representatives will be interviewing candidates at the ASSA meetings in Atlanta, January 4-6, 2019.
DEADLINE: Please submit these at: financerecruiting@bi.no by Friday, November 21, 2018.
ABOUT THE SCHOOL: BI Norwegian Business School is a private institution with attractive teaching loads and competitive salaries. Qualified candidates may be eligible for matching salary grants from Norges Bank through its Norwegian Finance Initiative (NFI). The school offers courses at the undergraduate, MSc, MBA, and executive levels and has a doctoral program in Finance. BI currently has more than 20,000 students enrolled in all of its programs.
ABOUT THE DEPARTMENT OF FINANCE: The department has a strong emphasis on research and its faculty members regularly publish in leading journals. The topics span all major fields of Finance, including asset pricing, corporate finance, household finance, macro-finance, and market microstructure. The department is ranked 10th in Europe and 2nd among the Nordic countries, based on top-Finance publications from 2005 to 2016 and 2013 to 2017 (U of Texas Dallas rankings).
BI Norwegian Business School is an equal opportunity employer.


SLUMP. Data General Corp. said this week it will eliminate 1,300 jobs worldwide. More: The company, based in Westboro, Mass., said it expects to post a loss in the second quarter. The layoffs: More than 1,000 workers and managers in the United States and 250 overseas. California-based Hewlett- Packard Co. also announced that it will close most of its U.S. facilities during the Fourth of July week and ask 84,000 workers to take either paid vacation or unpaid leave. Impetus in both cases: Sagging sales, doubts about the health of the U.S. economy.


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Q: Adding Hadoop dependencies to standalone Flink cluster I want to create a Apache Flink standalone cluster with serveral taskmanagers. I would like to use HDFS and Hive. Therefore i have to add some Hadoop dependencies.
After reading the documentation, the recommended way is to set the HADOOP_CLASSPATH env variable. But how do i have to add the hadoop files? Should i download the source files in some directory like /opt/hadoop ont the taskmanagers and set the variable to this path?
I only know the old but deprecated way downloading a Uber-Jar with the dependencies and place it under the /lib folder.

A: Normally you'd do the standard Hadoop installation, since you (for HDFS) need Node Managers running on every server (with appropriate configuration), plus the NameNode running on your master server.
So then you can do something like this on the master server where you're submitting your Flink workflow:
export HADOOP_CLASSPATH=`hadoop classpath`
export HADOOP_CONF_DIR=/etc/hadoop/conf

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


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Vitro Software Clients
Vitro Software works with a number of private and public healthcare organisations worldwide, all of whom we are proud to be associated with.
RSS Europe
RSS Asia Pacific
RSS Global
Not for Profit (4) Private Hospital (3) Public Hospital (3) Detainee Management (1) Hospice (1) Pharmaceutical Company (1) Mental Health (1) Cancer Screening (1)
Bendigo Health public hospital, a 653 bed high acuity teaching hospital in Victoria, Australia provides health care across the entire lifespan from pre-natal and newborn babies to the aged, their families and carers.
"It's really fast, all we have to do is swipe, it's very readily available, we can access even when a patient is down having a scan and we can still access information while we are on the ward and if we do transport the patient down we can access it from the computers down there. When you are working with other nurses for patients that you are not looking after you can easily access their information, it just makes the processes and tasks of a nurse really efficient." Chloe Gloury, Registered Nurse at Bendigo Health
Click View More to READ CASE STUDY
Calvary Health Hospital Group, including Public and Private Hospitals serves communities and individuals through more than 20 health, aged and community care services throughout New South Wales, Australian Capital Territory, Victoria, Tasmania, South Australia and the Northern Territory.
"Given the time if you talk about 6 months from 'woe' to 'go' in terms of getting to the point of implementation it was amazing and I'm not aware of any other site or service that has introduced any form of electronic record that have been able to achieve that. I'm very proud of the work that we've done but also very proud of the work that we've done collaboratively with Sláinte Healthcare." Shannon Thompson - Director of Clinical Services
Cork University Hospital (CUH) is the largest university teaching hospital in Ireland and is the only Level 1 Trauma centre in the country due to the presence of over 40 different medical and surgical specialties on the campus.
CUH has 25,500 inpatient admissions, 27,000 day cases, and 58,000 emergency cases (A&E) annually, making it one of the busiest hospitals in the country. Cork University Hospital with 800 beds is the largest hospital in Ireland and this will increase further to 1,000 beds with the opening of an €85m Cardiac / Renal centre in 2010.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Having sold wine for over 14 years I was very impressed with Vina Ulmo Sauvignon Blanc.
So much so It could be mistaken for a New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc in both style and quality but without the £8+ price tag.
If you can find it, Buy in a case as is often sells out at M&S.
I have been enthusing (and drinking) this lovely wine for 6 years but recently have never been able to buy it in-store – is it still available or should I give up trying? I see that its out of stock on-line too. M&S …can you buy in bigger quantities?


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Gerald C. Sterns
Location Oakland, United States
Sterns & Walkers: Founder, Since 1981/04 (Web)
University of California, Hastings College of Law: JD, 1957/04 – 1959/04
Practice areas Aviation, Personal Injury, Ethics & Professional Responsibility, Defective Products
Memberships Bar Association of San Francisco, Alameda County Bar Association
More about me Gerald Sterns currently focuses his practice on plaintiff's litigation referrals on major aviation, products liability, and other catastrophic claims, both nationally and internationally. In a state containing more than 200,000 attorneys, Gerald Sterns was named by California Lawyer magazine as one of the top 25 attorneys in the state. Mr. Sterns has been selected for inclusion to Northern California SuperLawyers, and has been listed in Best Attorneys in America since its inception. He is a 35-year Fellow in the International Academy of Trial Attorneys, an organization limited to 500 of the top trial attorneys worldwide as selected by peer review and judicial endorsement. Mr. Sterns' 35-plus years of courtroom experience have helped him become one of the few aviation attorneys whose wins against major airlines have been affirmed by the United States Supreme Court.
Prior to opening his own practice in 1977, Mr. Sterns was the Aviation partner in the San Francisco law firm of Walkup, Downing & Sterns. Mr. Sterns has authored numerous articles and professional papers, and has been a speaker or panelist on numerous professional programs, both in the U.S. and abroad. He has served for 17 years on the faculty at San Francisco Law School, and has been interviewed on a number of television and radio programs, including 60 Minutes, 20/20, Wolf Blitzer, Fox News, CNN, BBC, and numerous other television news programs worldwide.
Gerald Sterns has also been honored in print. From The Last Nine Minutes of Flight 981, a best-selling book about the DC-10 Turkish Airlines crash: "Sterns ambled into court a living expression of the California Legal System. He had been trained in it. He believed in it. And he applied it with deadly effectiveness."
Sterns, G. 2007, Coffee, Tea or Handcuffs, San Diego Union Tribune, United States.
Sterns, G. 1994, "Air Crash Cases in the United States," 45-46 Netherlands Juristenblad 1109, United States.


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Dione Song, Chief Commercial Officer of Love, Bonito (Picture Credits: High Net Worth )
If you ran one of the most successful e-commerce shops in Singapore, the last thing on your mind might be to open a brick and mortar store. But that's what Love, Bonito has done. And Dione Song, Chief Commercial Officer, reveals to us that the store is working out very well for them.
After seven years of operating mostly online, Love, Bonito's first flagship store opened in November last year. "It's done amazingly well," Song says. "Our operating margins are healthy and the feedback from our landlords is that we're one of the most productive stores when it comes to fashion."
Despite the rise of e-commerce, retail sales in Singapore for apparel and footwear have risen. The latest data from the Singapore Department of Statistics shows that sales increased by 5% year-on-year in March.
Meet Dione Song, Love, Bonito's first C-suite hire and spinning vortex
Meeting Song is like being drawn into a spinning vortex, albeit a friendly one. She spoke rapidly for the length of our interview without seeming to tire, jumping effortlessly from one topic to the next. Her energy apparently extends into the wee hours, as the self-confessed workaholic professes she zaps off emails at 3 AM.
Song joined Love, Bonito as its first C-suite hire in May 2018, after years spent in Sephora and Zalora. As Love, Bonito's Chief Commercial Officer, Song spends her days overseeing a mishmash of teams, from operations to marketing to technology.
Why the Love, Bonito flagship store?
Love, Bonito 's first flagship store located in #02-16/21 at 313@Somerset (Picture Credits: Love, Bonito )
"We saw the need to have a tangible space to connect and better understand and serve our customers," Song says. Love, Bonito had tested and experimented with pop-up stores successfully before taking the leap to go offline. "Conversion rates were way better when people touched our products offline."
Another reason was customer feedback. Love, Bonito's customers kept asking if there was somewhere they could try its items. "The flagship store is a good place to try out stuff," Song says. "You can use one fitting session to get a good gauge of your sizing."
What makes the flagship store successful?
Song thinks there are a few reasons why the flagship store works. For one, the assortment is slightly different from the Love, Bonito online store, and there are constant launches.
For another, the store gives people a reason to go back. The flagship store holds events like styling workshops, and the store has a feedback wall for customers to leave their thoughts.
"It's a different retail experience, almost like a community meet-up point," Song says. It's this kind of transformation that she believes the retail store has to undergo to survive.
How can retail stores thrive in the age of e-commerce?
""Retail has to become something more - An experiential point with a reason for people to go back.""
— Dione Song
"Retailers are distributing products, but retail has to become something more," Song says. "An experiential point with a reason for people to go back. It's not just selling a product, because e-commerce on a mobile app can do that so much better."
The magic phrase in that paragraph is 'a reason for people to go back.' But how?
"Retail has to offer an experience, something unique, or something exclusive," Song says. "You can also win with an extra touch. What we're doing now is have more Love, Bonito stylists at the store. They're not just selling products, they're giving our customers suggestions on how to dress better. Without that something more, there's no reason to go back."
Song is certain that technology will play a big part in retail's transformation. But technology that's actually useful, not a gimmick, like magic mirrors. "Why do you need augmented reality on you when the fitting room is just there?"
Technology has to improve the buying process. Song imagines, for example, a way to save to your account the items you've tried in the fitting room. If you shop online later, you can recall what you tried earlier in the store.
What people get wrong about e-commerce
"People think of e-commerce as where you get worse quality or cheap things," Song says. "So there's always a credibility and trust issue." It's why the flagship store and an omnichannel strategy matters. When people touch and feel the product, they get that even though Love, Bonito is affordable, that doesn't mean it's bad quality."
When it comes to the business side of things, Song thinks there's a misconception that e-commerce sites are cheap to run. "When you run a small site, it might be okay. But when you're running a big site, you're competing against a lot of the big guys. It means a lot of marketing investment to drive people to your website."
And when you up your game, the barrier of entry gets higher. "If you want to play with data," Song says, "you need to have the technical know-how to do things like retargeting, monitoring customer repurchase rates, and so on."
The key challenges Love, Bonito is facing
And data is something that Love, Bonito wants to expand into. "We used a simpler shopping platform in the past," Song says. "As we scale, there's a need to improve the platform. A key challenge is growing our engineering and product team. The more we want to do customizations and omnichannel integrations, the more we need to grow an in-house team."
Song confides that Love, Bonito's in-house tech team is entirely new. Not too long ago, it was just a team of one!
The secret of that vitality
""I came here with a very focused goal of building a legacy brand. Something that can last through the years. It's time that we see a Singaporean retail group do well in Asia.""
— Dione Sibg
Before we end our interview, we just have to know — where does she get her energy from? Song laughs and attempts an answer.
"I don't know, but I came here with a very focused goal of building a legacy brand. Something that can last through the years. It's not something we're only building for Singapore but also for overseas. I haven't seen any big local retail companies being successful except for Charles and Keith. And we should see more of that. It's time that we see a Singaporean retail group do well in Asia."
Newer PostLalamove's Blake Larson on Company culture and their 4 values
Older PostWhy E-Commerce is not enough


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Q: Determine that elements in range placed in contiguous memory Suppose I write template function that processes a range of elements.
template <typename Iter>
void func(Iter first, Iter last);

In this function I want to call some low-level c-function that expects to get contiguous buffer and it's size. Generic way to do this stuff is to copy my range to contiguous container and then call c-function.
template <typename Iter>
void func(Iter first, Iter last)
{
    typedef typename iterator_traits<Iter>::value_type value_type;
    vector<value_type> buf(first, last);
    c_func((void*) buf.data(), buf.size() * sizeof(value_type));
}

But if iterators are already point to some contiguous memory space extra copying will be performed.
So the question is, is there a way to determine are iterators point to contiguous memory space and if it is how can I specialize my function for this case.

A: At the moment there is no direct way to determine if an iterator is used for contiguous memory. There is a proposal to add an iterator refinement (see e.g. n3884) but without something like that and a way to detect the property being added for the different iterators you'll have a hard time determining this trait.
The key problem requiring implementer support is that the name if iterator types is not specified. As a result, you can't create a traits applicable to all known to be contiguous iterator types. Since the iterator types for std::vector<T> and std::array<T> can be identical and T* I don't think you can even create a portable specialization.
What you could do, however, is to test in a trait whether an iterator type matches one of the known iterator types for its value type. For example:
template <typename T, typename It>
struct test_iterator
    : std::integral_constant<bool,
        std::is_same<T*, It>::value
        || std::is_same<typename std::vector<T>::iterator, It>::value
        || std::is_same<std::string::iterator, It>::value
        || std::is_same<std::wstring::iterator, It>::value
        > {
};
template <typename It>
struct is_contiguous
    : std::integral_constant<bool,
           test_iterator<typename std::iterator_traits<It>::value_type,
                         It>::value> {
};

[I haven't tried to compile the code, i.e., it is probably littered with small typos; the general approach should work, though]
To add, e.g., std::array<T, N> you'd need some way to figure out the dimension in a static way. I guess, that won't be viable. It may also be necessary to test the various const_iterators.


Khaite's 'Delia' crepe shirt is the type of piece that can take you from the office to dinner without you having to change. It's detailed with contrast stitching and has side slits that make tucking really easy. Wear yours with tailored pants or jeans - our stylists think black works best.


The wine is comprised of 78 percent Cabernet Sauvignon, 16 percent Merlot, 3 percent Cabernet Franc and 3 percent Petit Verdot. The Cabernet Franc gives it body to stand up to the rich meat. The Merlot and Petite Verdot bond to enhance the soft French oak and the foam that completes this dish. The wine's dark fruit are very forward yet balanced and will deliver a long, memorable finish.Henry Hagen, one of Napa Valley's pioneer winemakers, established Cedar Knoll Vineyard in 1891. The vineyards survived the wine country's phylioxera infestation in the 1890s, but Prohibition was fatal. The winery fell into disrepair and the vineyards lay untended for 80 years until the Palmaz family purchased the property. Today, the vineyards are burgeoning, the restored Hagen house is a family home again and the winery has been reinvented.
At the winery at Palmaz Vineyards (palmazvineyards.com) and at The Firehouse (firehouseoldsac.com).
Chef Deneb's cherry chocolate duck. This is a house-made confit of Sonoma saveur artisan duck leg pan seared with a dark cherry glaze and almond milk foam, polenta cake and chili-chocolate mole paint.
Mario Ortiz is the general manager and sommelier at The Firehouse in Old Sacramento.


text:
Role-Model-In-Chief: Understanding a Michelle Obama Effect
Christina S. Haynes, Ray Block
Because of the national conversation about her status as a role model, the former First Lady of the United States (FLOTUS) presents an opportunity to analyze an Obama effect - particularly, the idea that Michelle Obama's prominence as a political figure can influence, among other things, citizens' impressions of black women in America. Using evidence from the 2011 Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation/Washington Post survey, we demonstrate that Michelle Obama's status as a role model operates as a moderated mediator: it transmits the effect of the former FLOTUS' media activities to respondents' racial attitudes, and the degree to which role model status functions as a mediating variable differs by race (and, to a lesser degree, by gender). Thus, our research provides both a theoretical and an empirical contribution to the Obama-effect literature.
Politics and Gender
https://doi.org/10.1017/S1743923X18000533
10.1017/S1743923X18000533
Dive into the research topics of 'Role-Model-In-Chief: Understanding a Michelle Obama Effect'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.
role model Social Sciences 100%
conversation Social Sciences 24%
citizen Social Sciences 19%
literature Social Sciences 13%
Haynes, C. S., & Block, R. (2019). Role-Model-In-Chief: Understanding a Michelle Obama Effect. Politics and Gender, 15(3), 365-402. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1743923X18000533
Haynes, Christina S. ; Block, Ray. / Role-Model-In-Chief : Understanding a Michelle Obama Effect. In: Politics and Gender. 2019 ; Vol. 15, No. 3. pp. 365-402.
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title = "Role-Model-In-Chief: Understanding a Michelle Obama Effect",
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author = "Haynes, {Christina S.} and Ray Block",
note = "Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} The Women and Politics Research Section of the American Political Science Association 2019.",
doi = "10.1017/S1743923X18000533",
journal = "Politics & Gender",
publisher = "Cambridge University Press",
Haynes, CS & Block, R 2019, 'Role-Model-In-Chief: Understanding a Michelle Obama Effect', Politics and Gender, vol. 15, no. 3, pp. 365-402. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1743923X18000533
Role-Model-In-Chief : Understanding a Michelle Obama Effect. / Haynes, Christina S.; Block, Ray.
In: Politics and Gender, Vol. 15, No. 3, 01.09.2019, p. 365-402.
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T2 - Understanding a Michelle Obama Effect
AU - Haynes, Christina S.
AU - Block, Ray
N1 - Publisher Copyright: © The Women and Politics Research Section of the American Political Science Association 2019.
N2 - Because of the national conversation about her status as a role model, the former First Lady of the United States (FLOTUS) presents an opportunity to analyze an Obama effect - particularly, the idea that Michelle Obama's prominence as a political figure can influence, among other things, citizens' impressions of black women in America. Using evidence from the 2011 Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation/Washington Post survey, we demonstrate that Michelle Obama's status as a role model operates as a moderated mediator: it transmits the effect of the former FLOTUS' media activities to respondents' racial attitudes, and the degree to which role model status functions as a mediating variable differs by race (and, to a lesser degree, by gender). Thus, our research provides both a theoretical and an empirical contribution to the Obama-effect literature.
AB - Because of the national conversation about her status as a role model, the former First Lady of the United States (FLOTUS) presents an opportunity to analyze an Obama effect - particularly, the idea that Michelle Obama's prominence as a political figure can influence, among other things, citizens' impressions of black women in America. Using evidence from the 2011 Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation/Washington Post survey, we demonstrate that Michelle Obama's status as a role model operates as a moderated mediator: it transmits the effect of the former FLOTUS' media activities to respondents' racial attitudes, and the degree to which role model status functions as a mediating variable differs by race (and, to a lesser degree, by gender). Thus, our research provides both a theoretical and an empirical contribution to the Obama-effect literature.
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Haynes CS, Block R. Role-Model-In-Chief: Understanding a Michelle Obama Effect. Politics and Gender. 2019 Sep 1;15(3):365-402. doi: 10.1017/S1743923X18000533


If you wish to undertake a PhD at Regent's, it is important to identify key staff who have detailed knowledge of your chosen subject area, and will be able to help you and ultimately supervise you to successful completion.
For detailed information on each staff member please visit their online profile.
Comparative strategic management practice in areas of inter-disciplinary business management and integrative requirements of business processes and functional activities, the innovation and entrepreneurship practices of managers in corporate organisations and establishing how best practice performance and measurement can be conducted and disseminated, areas of strategic deployment for management development including quality and productivity management, gender issues relating to women in management, developments in SME managerial capability and the management of technology.
International marketing, transnational consumer behaviour, transnational marketing strategies, segmentation, mobile consumers; ethnic marketing, remittances, digital piracy, marketing of business schools in Britain, transnational mobility, migration, ethnic segregation and labour markets, conflict.
Relationship marketing, marketing communication, direct and digital marketing, political marketing.
Emerging markets finance, oil and gas trade management, the effect of various types of derivatives uses on organisations' risks profiles. I am also interested in non-conventional banking such as Islamic Banking and whether its current application is an alternative to conventional banking or just an extension of it.
Entrepreneurial Marketing; Interplay between Marketing, Entrepreneurship, & Ethnicity; SME Beliefs and Attitudes; Measurement of Implicit Entrepreneurial Cognition; Retailing in Emerging Economies.
Microfinance; banking regulation; liquidity and treasury management of banks; risk management; interbank market; credit guarantee institutions and SME finance; banking in developing countries; and environmental finance.
Macroeconomics, performance (efficiency, productivity and growth) studies with applications to various private and public sectors producers of goods and services, industrial economics, military expenditure, econometrics, panel data analysis, labour studies, income inequality, globalisation, foreign direct investment, innovation, information and communication technology.
Macroeconomics focusing on money and capital markets, market imperfections and asymmetric information, economics of security, fiscally induced migration, FDI.
Entrepreneurship education, employability and family business.
Time-series analysis, modelling non-stationary time series, cointegration and exogeneity, market structure and competition analysis, energy market efficiency, price analysis, arbitrage and market equilibrium study.
Mathematical theory of distributions which determine the market pricing of jump risk, term risk, and tail risk (popularly known as black swan risk); the empirical application of the pricing theory to credit derivatives, the dynamic term structure of the yield curve, the dynamic properties of the forward volatility curve, with ultimate aim the definition of the trading, investing and risk management strategies that these instruments affect; research extension to the use of pricing theory to the finding of better measures for the control of macro-prudential risk, when applied in VaR (Value at risk) and other portfolio models by the banks and the central policy authorities.
Adult second language acquisition, teacher education and teacher development in higher education. Intercultural communication, internationalisation of the curriculum and transnational studies.
Psychotherapy Integration, the therapeutic relationship, and organisation theory and the use of psychotherapy theory in understanding organisational behaviour. The effective provision of psychotherapy and counselling in the community – clinical outcomes and measures and community access to psychological therapies. Advanced integrative practice.
The various interfaces between counselling psychology and professional practice, death/dying, and digital age technologies, bereavement in the digital era.
The psychology of smell and taste, especially the effect of ambient olfactory stimulation of mood, cognition, psychophysiology and social behaviour; the psychology of humour; individual differences in learning style and perception of others; perceptions and misperceptions of psychological science.
Religion and politics, anti-parliamentary and elitist ideas in British culture, and the intellectual origins of fascism.
Revolutions as an international phenomenon, Middle Eastern affairs and US foreign policy, international negotiations.
The field of migration and refugee studies, including the politics of asylum, asylum and immigration policy, theories of migration and forced migration, researching refugees, especially participatory methodologies. Discourses surrounding the integration and settlement of new migrants in Britain and the EU.
Psychosexual therapy, case studies in couple and family therapy, qualitative research methods, in particular discourse analysis and narrative analysis.
International relations, nationalism, identity, human rights, humanitarian interventions, European studies, media and popular culture.
Social emotional functioning in eating disorders, emotional recognition and regulation, social anhedonia and work and social functioning in people with eating disorders, as well as people who are in recovery from the illness. Eye contact and non-verbal communication in people with eating disorders.
Social and Forensic Psychology, with a particular interest in antisocial youth. Mainstream adolescents, exploring the factors affecting antisocial and pro-social behaviours and tendencies. How the experiences of adolescents can predict antisocial behaviour and cooperation with authorities. Social perception of vigilante behaviour and vigilante tendencies among adolescents. Educational Psychology, student engagement and experience.


Phenom chair and ottoman being used in a home environment.
Phenom chair with coffee table being used in an office environment.
Phenom chair and coffee table in a collaborative work space.
Professional work as an in-house designer for Godrej & Boyce Mfg. Co. Ltd, Mumbai, India.
Phenom is a multipurpose lounge / breakout zone chair. Phenom finds its inspiration from one of the most interesting structures in geometry, the pyramid. This whole range of chair, ottoman and coffee table is inspired by the pyramid. The four legs of the Phenom chair bend inward to meet at the apex under the seat, forming a pyramidal structure in negative space. The apex is formed closer to the front leg, making the rear rods take the longer reach, to provide stability and overall visual balance. The upper structure complements the understructure as its inspiration is from the silhouette of the Sphinx.
Engineering Industrial design support during engineering and tooling phase to make sure the design intent is not lost.
Marketing Support to marketing in project positioning and conveying the story for design.
In the study phase, we had observed that corporate offices used single seater sofas extensively in their lounge areas. It was inferred that this was more to do with style qoutient than the price of it. We decided to make a solution that would give the customers, the best of both worlds - style at an economical price. Hence, the idea of Phenom was born, to make use of available processes to keep the cost down, and make something really desirable. This product has been very well received in the market.
The above is my professional work as an in-house designer for Godrej & Boyce Mfg. Co. Ltd, Mumbai, India and the design rights belong to the same company.


CA Clase are proud to announce that we are now a Commercial Marine distribution partner for FLIR, specialists in thermal imaging systems. This appointment compliments our existing range of products, providing the missing link to ensuring we provide the most outstanding complete system for our clients.
Our existing range includes products from KVH, providing the ability to stream video from your vessel via the GOST gateway, allowing full operation of the FLIR camera. GOST provide the remote access to the FLIR camera system and NAUTICOMP monitors provide exclusive connectivity to FLIR, which a number of the cameras require.
With FLIR our primary focus is on their M-Series range, which includes the M-400 and M-400XR.
The M-Series pan/tilt re-defines maritime multi-sensor system design, drawing on FLIR's 25 years of experience in building combat-proven airborne and maritime thermal imagers for militaries, Coast Guards, and governmental agencies around the world. If you want to use a tougher, better-performing FLIR, you'll have to join the Special Forces.
With up to 640×480 thermal imaging, M-Series cameras provide four-times the thermal resolution and more than twice the range performance compared to other systems. M-Series cameras let you see more – and see farther – than ever before. Even in the dead of night.
Proprietary, patent-pending, image enhancement algorithms called Digital Detail Enhancement (DDE) let all of FLIR's front-line products see more in the most challenging conditions.
The M400's advanced 640 x 480 sensor delivers crisp thermal video images in total darkness and lowlight conditions. An integrated HD colour visible camera and tight-beam LED spotlight augment target identification for added safety. M400 has a continuous optical thermal zoom lens (up to 4×) that allows operators to see other vessels and targets at longer ranges. Active gyro-stabilisation ensures a steady image, plus radar tracking keeps potentially dangerous targets in view at all times.
FLIR Systems Inc. designs, develops, manufactures, markets, and distributes technologies that enhance perception and awareness. FLIR bring innovative sensing solutions into daily life through their thermal imaging systems, visible-light imaging systems, locator systems, measurement and diagnostic systems, and advanced threat detection systems. Their products improve the way people interact with the world around them, enhance public safety and well-being, increase energy efficiency and enable healthy and entertained communities.
Please visit www.caclase.co.uk for further information.


Many people who are new to medical cannabis are under the impression that they have to smoke it to experience its benefits. While smoking is one way to administer medical cannabis, cannabis oils have been used by medical patients for many years as a safe and effective non-inhalation alternative.
How do you create a world-class patient experience for medical cannabis users? You hire the best and brightest researchers and educators in the industry.
On October 17, 2018 the Cannabis Act came into effect, changing how cannabis is regulated in Canada. We've created a list of questions to address the ways in which you might be impacted.
Dr. Jonathan Simone, PhD joins Aphria as the Company's Director of Research and Clinical Studies.
The power of the medical market is its ability to legitimize cannabis for a broad cross-section of patients, while providing a solid rationale for further research and clinical studies. Eliminating the medical market would suddenly delegitimize the very real medical benefits and applications patients experience today.


We ordered the Clayton Vanilla units as they matched our kitchen doors and blinds. Also, we could use a reduced depth unit for a bookcase in the kitchen corner (actually a larder unit) but with the end panel and cornice it is exactly the same as the other units. The same principle applied to boxing in ugly pipework in the toilet and hiding untidy shoes. Both have before and after pictures attached.
We made use of the pull out larder unit in our utility next to the kitchen, so we have three rooms with the same units - kitchen, utility and toilet. We also ordered extra shelves so that these would also match in the utility. The bins are now built in and the maximum use is made of the corner space with the Le Mans and Magic Corner units. Beautiful engineering!
The quality, range and service from DIY kitchens is much better than the usual suspects on the high street. We made a couple of visits to the showroom to double check our ideas and their expertise was evident. Their input improved our design. All the staff are very helpful. Then there is the very substantial saving. It is an excellent business model where everyone wins.
Everyone says the kitchen is now so much bigger. It is of course the same but the design is so much more modern and spacious.
Order a Clayton Vanilla door sample pack Pack contains x 1 355mm x 297mm 'Clayton Vanilla' door. Fully refundable when placing a full kitchen order. There's no risk to you, we'll collect and refund the samples once you have finished with them.


text:
Exclusive: Welling teen who bagged 25 GCSEs wants to be chef
Kate Nelson
kate.nelson@archant.co.uk
KateNelson999
George Whitelock has 25 GCSEs
A child prodigy who scored 25 GCSEs breaking his school's record now has his hopes set on becoming a world class chef.
Falconwood Harris Academy student George Whitelock, 17, of Coton Road, Welling, became the star pupil when he scored 15 A*s, four As and six Bs in his exams this year.
But the teen is now leaving the world of academia behind to follow his dreams of becoming a top chef in Paris.
He said: "I was predicted lots but I wasn't really expecting to get so many so obviously I was really happy. All my teachers were congratualating me because it's the best results the school has ever had. My class mates said 'well done' too but some of them were a bit envious because they didn't get many."
The youngest of three siblings, Mr Whitelock said the secret to his success is his dedication. He added: "I was revising every night for an hour or so. It was just determination, not giving up. I had to work really hard for French, staying behind one night a week at school. I'm not a genius, I don't want to blow my own horn. I'm not a geek though either- I have a good social life.
"The only down side can be the high expectations. It's not necessarily other people it's yourself. You feel like you have to do well all the time. Like when I got the Bs I was hoping to do better believe it or not."
Mr Whitelock, who has won competitions judged by Jean Christophe Novelli and cooked with Antony Worrall Thompson is not hoping to move to Paris to become a pastry chef.
He said: "I'm a dessert man. I went on a French exchange in Year 9 and stayed with a family in Paris. I'm going to Westminster Catering College now. When I cooked with Antony Worrall Thompson I was working 14-hour shifts. I know it will be hard work but it's what I want to do."


In Beverly Hills they just demolished the 1961 Friar's Club. In Chicago the big preservation issue is Bertrand Goldberg's 1975 Prentice Women's Hospital. Yet for many people, the idea of preserving buildings of the Recent Past is anathema. Often the dividing line is a generational one: our historic preservation students in their 20s and 30s have been excited about 1960s and 1970s architecture for a long time. Many people in their 50s and 60s are not.
There is an old saw that you don't want to preserve something you saw built, but that is certainly not true for me. I got a camera when I was eight and took pictures of the not-yet-complete John Hancock tower in Chicago, and just over 20 years later there I was in front of it helping with a press conference to save a 21-year old building, already an icon of its city.
We had similar consternation when we discussed the Modernism and Recent Past efforts at the National Trust. Most accept the great architectural moments of Modernism, such as the Trust sites Philip Johnson's Glass House and the Farnsworth House by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Even the legendary John Lautner's architecture in Los Angeles is more widely understood, and you would find few in Chicago who did not think Goldberg's 1965 Marina City was a landmark.
But the effort to save the Huntington Hartford Building on Columbus Circle in Manhattan was rife with contradiction: many hated the building since it arrived in 1962 and still hated it when they proposed to reclad the façade (which they did).
I bet you know what I am going to say next: it was always like this. The sliding window that is the Recent Past has always been a preservation problem. No in the field even liked Victorian architecture in the 1950s and 1960s. The first surveys of places like Charleston and Brooklyn pretty much stopped in the 1860s. There were Georgian societies in England and America but no Victorian societies and even in 1961 the experts thought it quite nutty that Greenwich Village residents wanted to save a building as ugly as Calvert Vaux's Victorian Gothic Jefferson Market Courthouse.
Modernity itself can include a vast swath of history. Steve Kelley once brought Wessel de Jonge, one of the founders of DOCOMOMO, the first international organization for the preservation of Modernism, to my house, an 1872 Italianate. In the basement de Jonge looked up at the floor joists and asked with great enthusiasm whether he was looking at a balloon frame (which he was), because for him Brasilia began with some two-by-fours and nails in 1830s Chicago.
When people decry such Brutalist landmarks as the Boston City Hall, they are recalling widespread reaction against the buildings when they were built, often combined with rue at what they displaced. The 1960s are especially tricky because American culture went through its fastest evolution ever during that decade and the pace of change in the landscape was literally shocking. About faces were common: In Chicago's Old Town people were in support of urban renewal efforts from 1956 to 1966 and then quite suddenly in 1967 they turned against renewal and started trying to save the existing fabric of the neighborhood.
This lovely 1961 bank in Chicago was denied landmark status because it was the Modernist outlier in a thematic designation of neighborhood banks. The prejudice against is often stronger than the sentiment in favor.
Brutalism, which emerged in the 1950s, has the double challenge of a bad label (it comes from the French for raw concrete, beton brut) and an aesthetic insistence that can be perceived as a kind of formal bullying.
But Victorian had an even worse rep for even longer, its demonization beginning in the 1910s as crisper Progressive Era styles supplanted it and reaching an apogee in the 1930s when cartoonist Charles Addams successfully married Victorian Second Empire style to ghoulish antisocial and murderous behavior. And Halloween. With the exception of a brief flicker of acceptance courtesy Disney's 1954 Lady and the Tramp, Victorian remained anathema until the 1970s and the arrival of the Painted Lady in San Francisco.
Heck, the Prairie Style went out of fashion after less than two decades, and its practitioners were forced into uncomfortable Georgian and Tudor outfits through the 1920s. We can watch the current attempt to repair the PostModern Thompson Center in Chicago, barely 25 years old, and recall that it was so reviled its architect did not erect a major building in his home city for almost 20 years.
But the most revelatory thing that has happened in my life is that I have witnessed buildings – their architecture and design – change without changing at all. There are buildings I saw built or knew shortly after they were built in Oak Park and when I looked at them in the 1970s and 1980s I knew they were ugly. But then in the late 1990s they were no longer ugly. By the early 2000s they were becoming beautiful, and of course nothing had changed about them.
Our appreciation of the past is a sliding window. Like the act of conserving our built environment, it is not a standard or a rule or a fixed canon, but a process, wherein a culture and generations of people examine themselves and determine what elements of the past are important at that moment in time.
This blog has occasionally taken issue with technology, especially when that technology seems designed not to facilitate a solution but simply to move product. But technology and desire, as Apple have shown us time and again, are fiercely interpenetrated, and often the hype of a technological advance like the iPod, iPhone or iPad is actually matched by category-creating performance. Suddenly we have a need we never had before.
Now the moralists and ideologists will fret that the new technology will transform us so much we will lose our moral or ideological compass, unless we can maintain control over the technology. That is the meme driving fantasies from H.G. Wells through the Terminator and the Matrix. If that idea makes you feel better, go ahead and have it. But it is wrong. Of course the technology changes us, it always has.
Most of our "traditional" culture from harvest festivals to religious holidays is based on agricultural civilization, which is to say a human society completely and utterly transformed by the technology of sedentary crop cultivation. A whole slew of domestic traditions and artifacts from the bowl of fruit on the table, the breadbox, the garden bed and even the domesticated dog are relics of the technology of agriculture and how it changed the way we live, interact, and think. Even many of our current cultural clashes derive from the clash of sedentary cultures with surviving migratory societies in places like Mongolia and Arabia.
Even more apparent in our 21st century physical everyday are the legacies of the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment, which is to say, respectable middle-class culture caused by the mass production of goods and services. The reason there is a lawn in front of my house (and a lawn mower in the shed), a dining room, a living room or parlor and bedrooms is a result of an entire moral universe crafted in no small part by industrialization and urbanization. If those room-sized artifacts seem suburban rather than urban, that is exactly the point: there is no need – no possibility – of the conceptualization of a suburban ideal in the absence of industrial urbanization. You need to be confronted by the technology that is the city before you can possibly desire a suburb as respite.
Even the artifacts within the home are evidence of the spread of this ideal and the emergence of a consumer marketing-driven technological advances. The ideal requires cultivation in the form of a piano, which industry transforms into the mass-market parlor organ, which eventually becomes the Victorola and then the HDTV. Each transforms our behavior, preparing the soil for the next new crop.
Now, in the 19th and 20th centuries as the suburban ideal spread and middle-class values took over, most of the artifacts and performances we now recognize as "traditional" in holidays were invented, which is why Dickens' a Christmas Carol is so effective: it takes us back to the time our modern idea of Christmas began. The rise of middle-class living and ongoing technological revolutions in the domestic realm also meant that conditions enjoyed by a minority in 1900 – running water, water closets, kitchens, automobiles – were enjoyed by the majority in 2000. The tradition of having a stove in your kitchen, a bathroom in your house or a garage of any kind emerged in the last four generations.
Of course, the great game-changer today is "social networking," the Facebook phenomenon. I have colleagues I have worked with since the days of typewriters and carbon copies who now longer telephone me or even email me – they simply send me a message on Facebook. I admit I got addicted to it two years ago when I was trying to find a certain song from a movie and one minute later I had the entire soundtrack – while I was on vacation in Mexico. The other night I chatted with a friend in Holland and my kids can visit their cousins in Far West Texas on Skype almost anytime they want. Last week we had houseguests from Japan so I got out the Japanese phrasebooks we used there five years ago but the kids simply carried a laptop around and let Google translate do the talking. I can lament all of the pre-Internet skills I learned that are no longer necessary, but History won't be listening.
Why didn't the moralists and ideologists convince us we didn't need telephones and radios? God knows they tried, they always do. They fail. I read an article yesterday about the relative moralities (ooh – that is a fun phrase right there!!) of conservatives, liberals and libertarians, which had a nice analysis of that topic but then plopped an unexamined idea – Progress – at the end.
The moral question gets asked and re-answered with every technological and societal shift – that is why all ideologies are wrong, because they presuppose a static reality that never is or was – there is only historical and contingent reality. Part of that reality, is of course, a deep human desire for constants.
There are two constants: Humans have a deep seething desire to innovate and a deep seething desire to keep things as they are. And both are always true.
The world is quite rapidly becoming a single place with a single, albeit multifaceted and sometimes contradictory culture. Yet the culture shock is alive and well and modes of apprehending the world often remain bound in the tunnelvisions of particular cultures.
When we plan our School of the Art Institute of Chicago student study trips to the Weishan Heritage Valley in Yunnan, China, we account for culture shock in the pacing and length of the trip, because sometimes you just gotta have a Starbucks or a Snickers bar no matter how much you desire to broaden yourself.
But what got me thinking about this is all the hoo-haa about 2012 and the end of the world in the Mayan calendar. This is a pop culture meme here in the West, but of course it is based on a thousand-year old (and largely vanished) society. And this meme is MASSIVELY misinterpreting the meaning of 2012 to the Mayans by looking at it from an entirely modern Western point of view.
Precolumbian Mesoamerican societies, like the Hinduized societies of India and Southeast Asia, had a circular view of time. You have all seen the Aztec calendar: it is a circle. If you analyze the measurements of Angkor Wat in Cambodia, you realize the building is a deliberate – and literal – attempt by Suryavarman II to communicate the fact that he was ushering in a new golden era – a kirta yuga. This golden era exists within a circular conception of time – Vishnu is the pivot between which the devas and asuras churn the sea of milk to create the world, a theme repeated through the generations of temples at Angkor. In the Shaivite tradition, Lord Shiva has a dance of death and destruction – the world ends and it begins again. Time is circular.
Now, in the West, despite a dominant mystery religion that promised destruction and rebirth (Christianity), the West went with a singular story of destruction and rebirth rather than an ongoing cycle. The stewards of that tradition in the middle ages got obsessed with measuring time and invented clocks for prayers and by the time we hit the Renaissance we had decided that time is unidirectional, linear, and (this is the big leap) progressive. By the late 18th century this areligious concept had become gospel and monks like Malthus could measure and project the future with astonishing dexterity. About 122 years ago we further decided that this carefully measured time should be consistent from place to place so we would know whether or not the trains were running on time.
Our Western conception of history and our Western conception of a progressive future are two sides of a singular worldview. Without placing judgement on the value of that linear concept of time versus circular conceptions of time, you can already see the BIG DUMB in those who think the world is ending in 2012 because they are basically looking at a round peg from a square hole: the idea that the world ends in 2012 is not the Mayan idea at all but the Western concept of linear time misapprehending the Mayan.
and up to the ideas we have absorbed into our field in the last 15 years – namely that each culture must define the aspects of its physical and performative culture that it values and it must further (this was the genius of the 1999 Burra Charter) define the process of how that conservation takes place within that cultural context.
What conservation is cannot be defined in one way across cultures because it is OF culture.
Heritage conservation is a brilliant field because it abjures the one-size-fits-all solution for the particularized, individualized solution. There is no alienation of the commodity because every resource is different in history and social/cultural context. You avoid the absurdity of the 2012 confusion because the context is not fixed by preconceptions but must slide with the resource. There are no categories and no categorical solutions, but rather a process that allows each problem to be self-defined and solved in a manner without strict precedent.
You are currently browsing the Time Tells blog archives for January, 2011.


The Alamo Onyx retractable pen features an extra-large 270 degree imprint.
Additional features include secure-rite, German anti-fraud ink in your choice of medium point Blue or Black and a co-molded soft grip that goes all the way to the tip for comfortable writing.
Choose from 31 opaque, metallic, translucent, and fluorescent clip options: Opaque Black, Opaque Reflex Blue, Opaque Red (PMS 485) , Opaque Green (PMS 348), Opaque Purple (PMS 2602), Opaque Pink (PMS 213). Opaque Orange (PMS 021), Opaque Process Blue, Opaque Yellow (PMS 123), Opaque Lime Green (PMS 376), Opaque White, Opaque Neon Green (PMS 802), Opaque Neon Orange (PMS 804), Opaque Neon Pink (PMS 806), Opaque Pastel Gray (PMS 430), Opaque Pastel Blue (PMS 2985),Opaque Pastel Pink (PMS 230), Opaque Turquoise (PMS 3265), Opaque Pastel Purple (PMS 264), Translucent Black, Translucent Reflex Blue, Translucent Red (PMS 485), Translucent Green (PMS 348), Translucent Purple (PMS 2602),Translucent Pink (PMS 213), Translucent Orange (PMS 021), Translucent Process Blue, Metallic Silver (PMS 877), Metallic Reflex Blue, Metallic Red (485), and Metallic Gold (PMS 871).
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Thanks to our generous donors, we are pleased to offer all of our First Time Four Day Students a $50 discount, on top of other savings. You will see this discount applied automatically at checkout.
Please meet at the Wallace Building auditorium located at Grand Avenue and East 9th Street by 12:45 p.m. on Monday. A TeenPact staff member will meet and direct you to the classroom. All students should eat lunch prior to class.
Public parking is available one block west of the Wallace Building on the corner of Pennsylvania Avenue. Street parking is available on East 9th Street, Des Moines Street, and Lyon Street.
For students staying at Willowbrook Bible Camp, please deliver your luggage to the camp between 11:00 a.m. and 12:00 p.m. Please do not bring any luggage with you to the Wallace Building.
Click here for a map to the Wallace Building.
NOTE: Because no luggage is permissible at the Capitol, all students must check in at camp and drop off luggage prior to arriving at the class.
A sack lunch if you do not wish to purchase catered lunch online.
We are pleased to offer catered lunches to all students and chaperones at the Four Day Class. If you are staying at the Residential Camp throughout the week, your lunches will be provided at no additional charge. If you are commuting to the class from home each day, you can purchase lunch online at time of registration. If you are commuting from home and do not wish to purchase catered lunch, you are welcome to bring your own lunch from home.
On Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, TeenPact offers Evening Sessions at Willowbrook Bible Camp that give students the opportunity to relax and fellowship with like-minded peers in a more casual environment. Students play games, participate in small groups, enjoy a time of worship, and are challenged by a message from the Class Director. Parents and non-camp students are invited as well and if interested in attending, please contact Melanie Edwards to make dinner reservations for just $7 per person per evening.
Please meet at the Republican Party of Iowa Building by 9:45 a.m. on Friday. A TeenPact staff member will meet and direct you to the classroom.
Click here for a map to the State Capitol.
We are pleased to offer catered lunches to all students at the Political Communication Workshop for just $7 per person. Please select your lunch options accordingly at time of registration. If you are a Four Day Student staying at the residential camp on Thursday night, your lunch will be provided at no additional charge.
Students attending the Four Day Class are encouraged to stay at the Willowbrook Bible Camp. This is an integral part of the TeenPact experience, allowing students to combine the academic emphasis at the capitol with a spiritual focus on relationships with God and one another. Staying at the camp gives students the opportunity to relax and fellowship with like-minded peers in a more casual environment. Students play games, participate in small groups, enjoy a time of worship, and are challenged by a message from the Class Director.
Lodging, transportation, breakfasts, and dinners are included in the price of the residential camp fee of $185 for three nights or $230 for four nights. To reserve your slot at the camp, please register online. Students who are not able to stay at camp may join us for dinner and evening events. Please make your dinner reservation for just $7 per person per evening by emailing Melanie Edwards.
All students and chaperones staying at the camp should drop off and pick up luggage at the camp prior to arriving at the Capitol on Monday.
Click here for a map to Willowbrook Bible Camp.
On Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, TeenPact offers Evening Sessions at camp that give students the opportunity to relax and fellowship with like-minded peers in a more casual environment. Students play games, participate in small groups, enjoy a time of worship, and are challenged by a message from the Class Director. Evening Sessions are an integral part of the TeenPact experience, allowing students to combine the academic emphasis in class with a spiritual focus on students' relationships with God and one another. Parents and non-camp students are invited as well. If interested, please contact Melanie Edwards to make dinner reservations.
We encourage parents to come and enjoy the week as chaperones and assist with student transportation at a discounted rate of $140 for three nights or $180 for four nights. We can't do TeenPact without your help! This is a wonderful opportunity for adults to experience TeenPact as well. Often parents find they enjoy their week at TeenPact as much as their students! To reserve your place at the camp, please register online.
Please meet in the rotunda of the Iowa State Capitol by 9:45 a.m. on Friday. A TeenPact staff member will meet and direct you to the classroom.


We offer a full line of conveyors - stacking conveyors, stationary conveyors, radial conveyors, field conveyors, jump systems and long overlands. Our modular components allow for flexibility and easy future expansion.
For portable operations, KREATOR stackable conveyors make a difference. Our stackable conveyors can pack up to 480 feet of conveying power in a single truckload, perfect for portable operations always on the move. For additional on-site portability, 3-pack conveyors are configured to be towed away in loads containing up to 3, 70 foot long wheel mounted conveyors. These conveyors can also be configured with rollers for an additional roll-on / roll-off capability, providing a whole new level of portability.
For semi-mobile or in-pit portability, KREATOR jump conveyors are the ideal solution and available in skid mount or dolly axle configurations.
We've engineered overland conveyors ideal for all types of operations. Channel or lattice frame overland conveyors are available to cover longer distances, eliminating the need for haul trucks.
Providing material to and taking material away from your processing equipment at a productive rate is vital to your profitability. Load and unload railcars, trucks or ships and move massive loads of material throughout your operation in no time with our material handling systems. From tripper systems to loading or unloading, we have the right design, components, installation and support for your application.
We started our business in the custom market completing installations across the country. We pride ourselves on working with clients to solve problems where only a custom solution will work. There are times when the catalogue just doesn't cut it. Our knowledgeable, experienced staff are here for those times.
Our radial conveyors offer the most versatile material handling solutions available today. Available in standard sizes up to 42" x 150', these conveyors partner seamlessly with our full line of portable and stationary crushing, screening and material handling equipment. Incredibly easy to set up, KREATOR radial conveyors will have you moving material in no time.
If you need it, chances are we carry it.


text:
Enhancer hijacking determines extrachromosomal circular MYCN amplicon architecture in neuroblastoma
Helmsauer, K. and Valieva, M.E. and Ali, S. and Chamorro Gonzalez, R. and Schöpflin, R. and Röefzaad, C. and Bei, Y. and Dorado Garcia, H. and Rodriguez-Fos, E. and Puiggròs, M. and Kasack, K. and Haase, K. and Keskeny, C. and Chen, C.Y. and Kuschel, L.P. and Euskirchen, P. and Heinrich, V. and Robson, M.I. and Rosswog, C. and Toedling, J. and Szymansky, A. and Hertwig, F. and Fischer, M. and Torrents, D. and Eggert, A. and Schulte, J.H. and Mundlos, S. and Henssen, A.G. and Koche, R.P.
MYCN amplification drives one in six cases of neuroblastoma. The supernumerary gene copies are commonly found on highly rearranged, extrachromosomal circular DNA (ecDNA). The exact amplicon structure has not been described thus far and the functional relevance of its rearrangements is unknown. Here, we analyze the MYCN amplicon structure using short-read and Nanopore sequencing and its chromatin landscape using ChIP-seq, ATAC-seq and Hi-C. This reveals two distinct classes of amplicons which explain the regulatory requirements for MYCN overexpression. The first class always co-amplifies a proximal enhancer driven by the noradrenergic core regulatory circuit (CRC). The second class of MYCN amplicons is characterized by high structural complexity, lacks key local enhancers, and instead contains distal chromosomal fragments harboring CRC-driven enhancers. Thus, ectopic enhancer hijacking can compensate for the loss of local gene regulatory elements and explains a large component of the structural diversity observed in MYCN amplification.
Acetylation, Base Sequence, Circular DNA, DNA Methylation, Genetic Enhancer Elements, Genetic Epigenesis, Histones, Human Chromosomes, Kaplan-Meier Estimate, Lysine, N-Myc Proto-Oncogene Protein, Nanopore Sequencing, Neuroblastoma, Tumor Cell Line


I recently completed my reading of Dr. Atul Gawande's book Better. My only regret is that I did not read it sooner, as in the first time it became available. And this book is hardly just for those in the medical profession. It is perfect for anyone looking to become, shall we say "Better." I know you will not be disappointed if you decide to pick up or download a copy to read for yourself.
What I want to share with you and focus on today is Dr. Gawande's final chapter of the book, or more appropriately the "Afterword." Dr. Gawande, who trained to become a prominent endocrine surgeon, is also a staff writer for the New Yorker, a keynote speaker, father, husband, and philanthropist. In this final section of the book he suggests ways that one can make things "better" for others without necessarily following the status quo.
While his anecdotes pertain to being a physician, you can easily replace such thinking with almost any occupation that deals with helping people. From being a teacher to a car salesman, or a stay at home mom or dad to a pastor. It works for all of us. Only 8 and 1/2 pages describing only 5 things that all of us can surely learn from.
If anything we can make our own lives more enriched, balanced, and most of all we can become grateful for both what we have been given and that which we have been FORTUNATE to work for. Yes, that is right. We have been FORTUNATE to have worked for things in our lives. It is one thing to be given things, but to struggle through the attainment of the things we consider to be a success puts us on another level.


Anyone can start a business online, but few people create businesses that generate millions of dollars per year in revenue. Even fewer will create and build a business online that provides over $1 million dollars in annual net income. The sad fact is that according to the Huffington Post, over 90% of online businesses fail in the first 120 days*. That's an alarming statistic that you should be aware of.
At a basic level, it takes just three things to build a business with the potential to generate millions of dollars in revenue annually, and provide the owners with $1 million a year or more in spendable, personal income.
It also takes the same three things you need to drive a car successfully, without crashing and burning out on the road. I will help teach you these three principals by explaining these three things in the context of driving a car: The Gas Pedal, The Steering Wheel, and The Dashboard.
The speed at which your business grows is determined by how many new customers you are adding to your business every day, every week, every month, and every year. Your customer acquisition process is the "gas pedal" that determines the speed with which your business grows. How adept you are at putting new customers into your business will determine your growth rate.
The gas pedal determines how fast your car goes. While there are many other factors determining whether or not you get to your destination, the gas pedal provides the speed for getting there.
Otherwise, it's like going down the highway at 10 mph where you risk getting passed by everyone else trying to go the same place you're trying to get to. You're going to get there, but not nearly as quickly. If you invest the time and money in building a proven, optimized customer acquisition and sales systems for your business, you will have the opportunity to build a million-dollar business and get there faster. Think of this as your advertising, sales and marketing process.
The steering wheel in your car is what helps you use your speed and momentum, and direct it towards your desired destination. Similarly, the steering wheel in your business is your ability to maximize your customer value by increasing: 1) The average sale value per transaction in your business and 2) the frequency with which your customers come back to buy from your business. Think of this as your testing, optimizing and upselling process.
Many business owners equate marketing with simply generating new customer traffic into their businesses. Its true new customer acquisition is your gas pedal, and it determines the speed at which your business propels itself to its destination. But you can't safely steer around a corner if you're just flying down the road at 70 or 80 mph… and if you aren't steering your business, you are not very likely to arrive at your destination safely, if at all.
For example, if you don't know your numbers and aren't optimizing your advertising and marketing process, and instead just throwing more money at growing your business, you might find out that you're actually going out of business.
What happens when you throw gas on a fire? It burns more quickly, and in a sudden burst of energy it's all gone. Whereas, giving more gas to a finely tuned business engine can increase your speed and get you there faster in a more controlled way.
To do this, you need to maximize the value of each customer by increasing the average purchase your customers make (for examples using 1-click upsell offers, order form bump offers, follow up email offers, etc.) and also by increasing the frequency with which they buy from you (for example by offering recurring monthly subscription services, memberships, and other continuity offers).
McDonald's is famous for increasing a customer's average purchase with its Value Meal. Instead of somebody walking in and just getting a hamburger and a drink, if they order a Value Meal, McDonald's increases their average purchase by asking 'do you want fries with that?' or offering you a 'super-size'.
Simply adding $.79 to the purchase price may not sound like a lot, but it added a 20-percent increase to each sale and billions of dollars to their bottom line. If you can increase the revenue of each sale by 20 percent in your business, you can potentially create a significant increase in profit for your business and that can mean the difference between success and failure. With rising advertising costs, it's imperative to have effective strategies for increasing your bottom line.
How can you sell more to the customers you already have? What other products and services can you offer them? Are there impulse items (cheat sheets, templates, top 10 lists, PDF's etc.) you can easily add to an existing purchase to increase the initial order value? Are there medium to higher priced up-sales, downsells or cross-sell products or services you can offer to them at the point of purchase? This is when they are most likely to buy again after just purchasing.
Do you have or can create big-ticket items some of your customers can buy? A certain percentage of your customers will also buy more expensive, high-end products. Are you offering those to your customers as part of your mix of products and services? If not, you could be leaving a lot of money on the table.
Next is increasing the frequency with which your customers are buying from you. Are you communicating regularly with your customers? Do you have an email list of customers who have bought from you in the past and can you offer them a 'rewards' program or incentive for repeat sales? Are you sending your customers information and following up with them regularly by email or social media to make sure you stay on their minds?
If you're speeding down the road and don't know where you are going, how likely is it you're going to get to your destination?
Consider this scary scenario: Nothing looks familiar, you make a turn, you don't know how fast you're going, you don't know how many miles you've gone, you don't know if you're any closer to your destination, it's getting dark, and you don't have any way of telling where you are. You're driving your car down the road, you're able to steer it well, but you have no idea where you are going, where you are, or how fast you're going!
You have to capture information about your business, so you are able to track how well you are getting to your destination. You may have a finance degree from a university, and be able to create an income statement and a balance sheet to tell you how much cash is in the bank and whether or not you made a profit last month. But those financial statements are looking at the past. This is like driving your car and only looking in the rearview mirror.
You can't get to your destination if all you are doing is looking behind you so you need forward looking indicators, telling you in real time how your business is doing.
Average New Customers (ANC): This is your speedometer. Business owners need to track their new customer acquisition all the time. How many customers did you get today, this week, and this month? Compare this to your new customer acquisition goals, so you will know how fast you are traveling toward your target. This tells you exactly how quickly you're reaching your goals. Without new customers, you won't go very far.
Average Customer Value (ACV): This gives you information about one of your important metrics that over time helps you know whether or not you're growing. If you're able to continually increase your average customer value (ACV) in relation to your cost to acquire a customer (CAC), then you're growing in the right direction.
Average Customer Frequency (ACF): This is another important gauge of how well you are steering your business. How often your customers are coming back and buying from you? Tracking this information is like having a "service engine" light on your dashboard. It gives you a warning if a customer hasn't come back to you in a while, so you can follow up with your customer and find out why or try to fix that problem with a customer re-engagement offer.
It's important to know if a customer has found a new company to buy from, if they had a bad experience, or if they have simply lost track of you. If you have a significant number of customers who haven't purchased from you in a while, that's an important warning sign you are steering off the road. If you pay attention to this warning, you can steer around issues you need to fix within your business.
The best way to monitor these three elements these days is with technology. What makes running a business enjoyable, similar to air-conditioning in your car, is a set of business systems to operate your business without your daily and direct supervision.
These kinds of systems also empower employees to run the business without direct daily supervision and allow the business owners to enjoy a stress-free lifestyle, without being permanently tied to their business. Running a business without these type of feedback systems can be extremely dangerous not to mention stressful.
This is similar to driving a car without air conditioning on a hot day. You'll still get there but it will be a miserable ride. Running a business is much like driving a car in the sense that once you learn how to do it, it's a skill you will have forever and can do without thinking about it.
Experienced drivers can drive for 30 minutes and then suddenly realize they haven't even been thinking anything about driving. Maybe you've done this too. You've been stopping at lights, changing lanes, making turns, and travelling for miles and then realize that you haven't been thinking about driving because it's now second nature.
You're experienced at regulating the speed of the car, knowing how to safely steer around other cars on the road, watching the gauges and monitoring your speed, and even have the A/C on to make sure you are comfortable. You can adjust all of those things at any time without giving it a second thought, because you have learned to trust your car's indicators and dashboards.
You also know there are predictable outcomes when you do certain things. A specific action by you creates a known outcome. You as the driver know all you have to do is push a certain button, and the window will predictably go up or down without having to take your hands off the steering wheel and temporarily being distracted from driving by having to manually turn a knob or handle by hand.
Automation is key here as it is with any online business. Experienced business owners who know how to create million-dollar businesses, are like experienced drivers. They understand how to effectively use the gas pedal of their businesses; the marketing of the business - and how necessary it is to generate new customers.
They can increase the new customer flow if they need to accelerate a little bit; they can back off when they are going too fast. They keep the flow going because they understand how it works, and they know what is necessary to achieve their goals.
The most successful and experienced business owners know how to handle the steering wheels of their businesses like a seasoned race car driver. They know watching the average sale value and the frequency of sales are critical factors of running a business. When the average customer value gets off track, they know they need to make some changes.
If customers aren't coming back frequently enough, they know they need to correct their steering. These business owners keep an eye on their dashboards and the information they need to know to succeed, and you can too. Not only can you… You must if you're going to achieve sustainable success in your business.
There's no better feeling in business than knowing that every $1 you spend or invest into your business will result in $2, $3, or $5 in return. If you know your numbers, and how changing these variables here will result in bottom line revenue improvements for your business, you have control of your financial future.


INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. – An inmate at the Marion County Jail tested positive for hepatitis A, leading officials to scrub the facility.
According to the Marion County Sheriff's Office, the issue was discovered on Thursday, Jan. 31. The case did not originate from the jail, investigators said. The sheriff's office characterized hepatitis A as a "growing problem" in Marion County.
The jail is working with the Marion County Board of Health to provide vaccinations and deep cleaning of the facility to prevent further spread of the virus.
Hepatitis A is a contagious liver infection that can last from a few weeks to a few months. Symptoms appear within two to six weeks after infection and include stomach pain, fever, nausea, vomiting, loss of appetite, joint pain, fatigue, dark urine and jaundice.
You can learn more from the Indiana State Department of Health.


text:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
                    "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">

  <link rel="stylesheet" href="../common/styles.css" />

My Chat Application

      Status:

      Your ID:

      <textarea id="message"></textarea>
      <button id="send_chat_btn">Send</button>

    <link rel="stylesheet" href="//code.jquery.com/qunit/qunit-1.17.1.css" type="text/css" media="screen" />

QUnit example

test markup, will be hidden

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


text:
Événements
 Le 14 octobre, Hélène Roger-Viollet (1901-1985) et son mari Jean Fisher créent au 6 rue de Seine à Paris la « Documentation photographique générale Roger-Viollet », sur la base initiale du fonds photographique constitué par le père d'Hélène, Henri Roger-Viollet (1869-1946).

Prix et récompenses
 x

Grandes expositions

Livres parus en 1938

Naissances
 2 janvier :
 David Bailey, photographe de mode et de portrait britannique.
 Stanislav Tereba, photographe tchèque de l'Associated Press, lauréat du World Press Photo of the Year 1959.
 10 janvier : Josef Koudelka, photographe français d'origine tchèque, membre de l'agence Magnum.
 28 février : John Bulmer, photographe anglais, connu pour ses reportages dans les cités minières de l'Angleterre et du Nord de la France.
 6 mars : Joel Meyerowitz, photographe américain.
 2 avril : Martine Franck, photographe belge de l'agence Magnum, épouse d'Henri Cartier-Bresson. († )
 4 avril : Johan van der Keuken, photographe et réalisateur néerlandais. († )
 2 juin : Sabrina Michaud,  photographe française.
 11 juin : Jacques Hoden, photographe et pilote automobile français.
 26 juin : Win Labuda (Winfried Gerhard Labudda)  inventeur, chercheur, scientifique, photographe et chef d'entreprise allemand.
 30 juillet : Terry O'Neill, photographe britannique, connu pour ses clichés de stars.
 4 août : Burk Uzzle, photographe américain, membre de l'agence Magnum.
 25 août : Boris Mikhaïlov, photographe ukrainien.
 29 août : Hermann Nitsch, artiste contemporain et photographe autrichien, cofondateur du mouvement  Actionnisme viennois (Wiener Aktionismus).
 25 septembre: Daniel Cande, photographe français, connu pour ses photographies de spectacle.
 2 octobre : Hans Silvester, photographe allemand.
 7 octobre : Walther Grunwald, architecte et photographe allemand.
 10 octobre : Daidō Moriyama (森山大道), photographe japonais.
  : Kim Ki-Chan (김기찬), photographe coréen, spécialisé dans les scènes de rue en noir et blanc. († )

date inconnue
 Edith Hollant, photographe haïtienne.
 Bernard Perrine
 Barbara Gluck
 Nil Yalter

Principaux décès
 5 février : Ernest Clair-Guyot, peintre, illustrateur, lithographe et photographe français. (° ).
 3 mars : Charles Spindler, peintre, illustrateur, ébéniste, écrivain et photographe français. (° )
 8 mars : Richard N. Speaight, photographe portraitiste anglais, photographe officiel de la maison royale britannique, membre de la Professional photographer's association de Londres. (° )
 19 avril : Mario Gabinio, photographe et alpiniste italien, actif dans la région du Piémont. (° )
 25 novembre : Émile Billiotte, photographe français. (° )

 Date inconnue
 Domenico Anderson, photographe italien. (° )

Notes et références

Chronologie de la photographie
Photographie

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


Thank you for visiting my website. The paintings you will see depict the varied beauty found in our state of Florida.
I believe that Florida has a mood of its own set by the different times of day and the light it produces. From sunrise to sunset, the light softens the horizon or brightens the side of a pine tree with highlights. This is what I see, this is what I paint and this is what I want to share with you.


text:
Q: Best way to go about reading a website? I'm trying to create a program that grabs data from a website x amount of times and I'm looking for a way to go about doing so without huge delays in the process.
Currently I use the following code, and it's rather slow (even though it is only grabbing 4 peoples' names, I'm expecting to do about 100 at a time):
$skills = array(
    "overall", "attack", "defense", "strength", "constitution", "ranged",
    "prayer", "magic", "cooking", "woodcutting", "fletching", "fishing",
    "firemaking", "crafting", "smithing", "mining", "herblore", "agility",
    "thieving", "slayer", "farming", "runecrafting", "hunter", "construction",
    "summoning", "dungeoneering"
);

$participants = array("Zezima", "Allar", "Foot", "Arma150", "Green098", "Skiller 703", "Quuxx");//explode("\r\n", $_POST['names']);

$skill = isset($_GET['skill']) ? array_search($skills, $_GET['skill']) : 0;

display($participants, $skills, array_search($_GET['skill'], $skills));

function getAllStats($participants) {
    $stats = array();
    for ($i = 0; $i < count($participants); $i++) {
        $stats[] = getStats($participants[$i]);
    }
    return $stats;
}

function display($participants, $skills, $stat) {
    $all = getAllStats($participants);
    for ($i = 0; $i < count($participants); $i++) {
        $rank = getSkillData($all[$i], 0, $stat);
        $level = getSkillData($all[$i], 1, $stat);
        $experience = getSkillData($all[$i], 3, $stat);
    }
}

function getStats($username) {
    $curl = curl_init("http://hiscore.runescape.com/index_lite.ws?player=" . $username);
    curl_setopt ($curl, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, $timeout);
    curl_setopt ($curl, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, sprintf("Mozilla/%d.0", rand(4, 5)));
    curl_setopt ($curl, CURLOPT_HEADER, (int) $header);
    curl_setopt ($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
    curl_setopt ($curl, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, 0);
    curl_setopt ($curl, CURLOPT_VERBOSE, 1);
    $httpCode = curl_getinfo($curl, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE);
    $output = curl_exec($curl);
    curl_close ($curl);
    if (strstr($output, "<title>")) {
        return false;
    }
    return $output;
}

function getSkillData($stats, $row, $skill) {
    $stats = explode("\n", $stats);
    $levels = explode(",", $stats[$skill]);
    return $levels[$row];
}

When I benchmarked this it took about 5 seconds, which isn't too bad, but imagine if I was doing this 93 more times.  I understand it won't be instant, but I'd like to shoot for under 30 seconds.  I know it's possible because I've seen websites which do something similar and they act within a 30 second time period.
I've read about using caching the data but that won't work because, simply, it will be old.  I'm using a database (further on, I haven't gotten to that part yet) to store old data and retrieve new data which will be real time (what you see below).
Is there a way to achieve doing something like this without massive delays (and possibly overloading the server I am reading from)?
P.S: The website I am reading from is just text, it doesn't have any HTML to parse, which should reduce the loading time.  Here's an example of what a page looks like (they're all the same, just different numbers):
69,2496,1285458634 10982,99,33055154 6608,99,30955066 6978,99,40342518 12092,99,36496288 13247,99,21606979 2812,99,13977759 926,99,36988378 415,99,153324269 329,99,59553081 472,99,40595060 2703,99,28297122 281,99,36937100 1017,99,19418910 276,99,27539259 792,99,34289312 3040,99,16675156 82,99,39712827 80,99,104504543 2386,99,21236188 655,99,28714439 852,99,30069730 29,99,200000000 3366,99,15332729 2216,99,15836767 154,120,200000000 -1,-1 -1,-1 -1,-1 -1,-1 -1,-1 30086,2183 54640,1225 89164,1028 123432,1455 -1,-1 -1,-1
My previous benchmark with this method vs. curl_multi_exec:
function getTime() {
    $timer = explode(' ', microtime());
    $timer = $timer[1] + $timer[0];
    return $timer;
}

function benchmarkFunctions() {
    $start = getTime();
    old_f();
    $end = getTime();
    echo 'function old_f() took ' . round($end - $start, 4) . ' seconds to complete

';
    $startt = getTime();
    new_f();
    $endd = getTime();
    echo 'function new_f() took ' . round($endd - $startt, 4) . ' seconds to complete';
}

function old_f() {
    $test = array("A E T", "Ts Danne", "Funkymunky11", "Fast993", "Fast99Three", "Jeba", "Quuxx");
    getAllStats($test);
}

function new_f() {
    $test = array("A E T", "Ts Danne", "Funkymunky11", "Fast993", "Fast99Three", "Jeba", "Quuxx");
    $curl_arr = array();
    $master = curl_multi_init();

    $amt = count($test);
    for ($i = 0; $i < $amt; $i++) {
        $curl_arr[$i] = curl_init('http://hiscore.runescape.com/index_lite.ws?player=' . $test[$i]);
        curl_setopt($curl_arr[$i], CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
        curl_multi_add_handle($master, $curl_arr[$i]);
    }

    do {
        curl_multi_exec($master, $running);
    } while ($running > 0);

    for ($i = 0; $i < $amt; $i++) {
        $results = curl_exec($curl_arr[$i]);
    }
}

A: When you are doing a bunch of network requests like this, you are at the mercy of the network and the remote server regarding how much time they take to respond.
Because of this, the best way to make all of your requests complete in the shortest amount of time is probably to do them all at once. Spawn a new thread for each one. For the size of the data you're working with it's probably quite possible to do literally all at once, but if that's a problem then maybe try 20 or so at once.
EDIT: I just realized you're using PHP which doesn't have threads. Well, probably a poor choice of language, for starters. But you might be able to emulate threads by forking new processes. This might be a wreck, though, if PHP is running inside the web server process, since it would clone the whole server. I'll look into whether PHP offers some sort of asynchronous web requests that could give a similar effect.
EDIT 2:
Here is a page discussing how to launch an HTTP request in the background with PHP:
http://w-shadow.com/blog/2007/10/16/how-to-run-a-php-script-in-the-background/
However, this is "fire and forget," it doesn't let you pick up the response to your request and do something with it. One approach you could take with this, though, would be to use this method fire off many requests to a different page on your own server, and have each one of those pages make a single request to the remote server. (Or, each worker request could process a batch of requests if you don't want to put start too many requests at once.)
You would still need a way to assemble all the results, and a way to detect when the whole procedure is complete so you can display the results. I would probably use either the database or the filesystem to coordinate between the different processes.
(Again, choosing a more powerful language for this task would probably be helpful. In the realm of languages similar to PHP, I know Perl would handle this problem very easily with "use threads", and I imagine Python or Ruby would as well.)
EDIT 3:
Another solution, this one using the UNIX shell to get around PHP's limitations by doing the work in separate processes. You can do a command something like this:
echo '$urlList' | xargs -P 10 -r -n1 wget

You would probably want to play with the wget options a bit, such as specifying the output file explicitly, but this is the generally idea. In place of wget you could also use curl, or even just call a PHP script that's designed to be run from the command line if you want complete control over the job of fetching the pages.
Again, with this solution you still have the problem of recognizing when the job is done so you can show the results.
I got this idea for this approach from this page:
http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/3269/parallel-file-downloading-with-wget

A: Since you are making multiple requests to the same host, you can re-use the curl handle and if the site supports keep-alive requests, it could speed up your process a good bit over many requests.
You can change your function like this:
function getStats($username) {
    static $curl = null;

    if ($curl == null) {
        $curl = curl_init();
    }

    curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_URL, "http://hiscore.runescape.com/index_lite.ws?player=" . $username);
    curl_setopt ($curl, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array('Connection: Keep-Alive'));

    //...

    // remove curl_close($curl)
}

Doing this will make it so you don't have to close and re-establish the socket for every user request.  It will use the same connection for all the requests.

A: You can reuse curl connections.  Also, I changed your code to check the httpCode instead of using strstr.  Should be quicker.
Also, you can setup curl to do it in parallel, which I've never tried.  See http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.curl-multi-exec.php
An improved getStats() with reused curl handle.
function getStats(&$curl,$username) {
    curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_URL, "http://hiscore.runescape.com/index_lite.ws?player=" . $username);
    $output = curl_exec($curl);
    if (curl_getinfo($curl, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE)!='200') {
        return null;
    }
    return $output;
}

Usage:
$participants = array("Zezima", "Allar", "Foot", "Arma150", "Green098", "Skiller 703", "Quuxx");

$curl = curl_init();
curl_setopt ($curl, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 0); //dangerous! will wait indefinitely
curl_setopt ($curl, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, sprintf("Mozilla/%d.0", rand(4, 5)));
curl_setopt ($curl, CURLOPT_HEADER, false);
curl_setopt ($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt ($curl, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, 0);
curl_setopt ($curl, CURLOPT_VERBOSE, 1);
//try:
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array(
    'Connection: Keep-Alive',
    'Keep-Alive: 300'
));

header('Content-type:text/plain');
foreach($participants as &$user) {
    $stats =  getStats($curl, $user);
    if($stats!==null) {
        echo $stats."\r\n";
    }
}

curl_close($curl);

A: curl is a very good way to read the content of the website - I suppose your problem is because of the time require to download ONE page. If you can get all the 100 pages in parallel then you would probably have it all processed in under 10 seconds.
In order to avoid working with threads, locks, semaphores, and all the challenging stuff on threads, read this article and find out a way to make your application parallel almost for free.