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OSCAR DE LA HOYA'S PROJECT ANGEL FOOD BIRTHDAY FUN!
Ten-time world champion, Hall of Fame boxer, Olympic gold medalist, entrepreneur, and philanthropist Oscar De La Hoya joined us in the Project Angel Food kitchen to celebrate his birthday Friday, Feb. 4, to give back to Los Angeles. He was joined by girlfriend Holly Sonders, influencer, golfer, and former Fox Sports broadcaster.
FUN PHOTOS & OUR INSTAGRAM LIVE ARE BELOW.
De La Hoya was hospitalized with COVID for three days in September and, grateful for his recovery, want to celebrate his 49th birthday with us volunteering.
CEO Richard Ayoub welcomed the couple and says, "We've had some big stars and even royalty in our kitchen, but to see the volunteer and staff light up like this — some even coming in on their days off to wish Oscar a happy birthday is pretty amazing."
The Olympic gold medalist credits his mother, who passed away from breast cancer in 1990, for instilling the importance of giving back to the community in him from a young age, but it is his battle with COVID in September 2021, that Oscar says makes volunteering on his birthday that much more special.
Oscar says, "Being hospitalized by COVID really opened up my eyes and my heart to give back even more. So the fact that I'm here on my birthday really is a blessing and reminds me of how many people there are in need."
Oscar and Holly brought a custom-made birthday cake to share with volunteers and staff. They cut vegetables and put special labels on meals to let clients know Oscar De La Hoya made their meal. He boxed a pinata, posed for photos, signed autographs, and joined Richard for Project Angel Food's Lead with Love Instagram Live series. To see that interview, click here.
His big message to everyone was, "Project Angel Food needs volunteers!" If you want to be like Oscar & Holly and help in the kitchen, email volunteers@angelfood.org. We've posted some of our favorite shots.


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Inside Coronation Street star Andy Whyment's Cheshire home as he poses in the hot tub with wife Nichola
Rainbow Six Extraction Countdown – Release Time & Date
Angels – Another amazing release for the ZX Spectrum by ZOSYA entertainment
ZOSYA (team) entertainment has produced some of the best games of all time, games such as Drift !, Valley of Rains and Travel Through Time Volume 1 that have been featured on Indie Retro News. Well it looks like he hasn't finished with a special team yet. As a result of another headline through Saberman, we have just been told that they will be releasing a top ZX Spectrum game called Angels; The combination of Beat 'em up (odd dimensions) and Vertical scrolling shooter with animated animations, more details and much more!
Video Link To Mobile Users
You are in the 48K mode, you get the full game with one add-on after the third installment. In the 128K movement both of them have two foreign girls serving their sentences on Earth, fighting crime. this game's modified version uses some extras: additional enemy types, various punches, cutscenes, effects, AY game songs, high start and final cut and much more! Then yes if you have ZX Spectrum you owe it to yourself to play this amazing game from ZOSYA fun!
Lies : 1) Source
A mother of three reunited with her cat, who had been missing for eight months, after noticing her meow during a phone call. Rachael Lawrence, of Braintree in Essex, said she "noticed" a bit behind her back when she called a veterinarian to see her other cat Torvi, 11 months old, who needed surgery. The […]
Rainbow Six Extraction is a new way to join a well-known team, but this time you will be engaging in PVE battles with other players to help free people from parasitic alien invaders. The game will be available on multiple platforms, including PlayStation 4/5, Xbox One / Series X&S, PC, and Stadia. If you are […]
Unfortunately, the FBI often goes out of its way to say nothing that would be considered anti-Muslim. NRPLUS AMEMBO STORY T these Nowadays, even if its employees do a good job, the FBI can shoot itself in the foot. Saturday should be considered the most successful in the office. With courage and skill, the organization's […]

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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Getting To Know Tuesday Knight Interview
Celeb NEWS, Empowerment, Interviewz, Music, Uncategorized
1. Where did the name Tuesday Knight come from?
So it's definitely not exciting as it sounds. I use to go by my government name Shane Jackson. I always thought it sounded plain and generic. I mean Jackson is the most common name ever. It doesn't sound too rapper-ish I guess. Before I put my first mixtape I needed a rap name that I was going to stick to. And I couldn't think of anything and it happened to be Tuesday night. I was in the studio with my manager and I was explaining what do you think about the name Tuesday Night? There's a bunch of metaphor ways I can play that name. He was like "yo that's kind of dope." So I just kept Tuesday Night. That's when I chose the right name.
2. Can you describe yourself in three words?
Creative, passionate, and humble.
3. What college did you attend and what was your major?
I graduated from Cornell University and I went The School of Hotel Administration. My degree is in Hotel Administration.
4. How long after working did you realize that you wanted to do music instead?
I was working him in Manhattan at Warner Brothers for 3 1/2 years straight out of college, after I graduated, December 31, 2016.
5. How long have you been writing and rapping?
For fun, I would say I started between 13 and 14 years old. But seriously tried to make it a career I would say, about two years ago.
6. Where did your inspiration for the album come from?
My recent album spoke about the transition from corporate to music. So definitely this album was straight pool of inspiration from my real life. I just want to share the thought process behind my decision. If anybody else is going through this and having to make a hard decision in life, just do what makes you happy and what inspires you. It's basically what the album is about.
7. Do you have a special place for your writing?
No, I never really write down my lyrics either. I just constantly think about my lyrics. Everything is in my head so I could be walking and I can see things. Like nature inspired me to [to write]. I can see something while driving my car and say I can make that a dope line. I'm just constantly fighting constantly thinking things that I can say at a later time throughout my career; where people would say that I'm smart because I went to school and be able to leave a memory. I used to remember everything that the teacher said. I never took notes or anything. I can come up with a rap in my head whenever. I don't know I just have a good memory.
8. Do you have an artist that inspires you? Who?
I always go back to Nas, just because that was my introduction to hip-hop. I was born in the early 90s and it was huge. I have two brothers and we was bumping his music. So I was really brought up on listening to Nas. I knew all of his tracks and I was like 5 or 6 years old. That's what inspired me to start especially my style is the way he told stories in his rhymes. Now is definitely the inspiration for me.
9. What's the difference between the corporate industry and the music industry?
The ability to be creative. Which was what was holding me back from falling in love with the corporate industry. You have a boss to tell you what to do and usually there's only one way to do it. I just tell you do it this way. With rap I can be creative, do things the way I want to do them and how I think they should be done.
10. Where do you see yourself in 5 and 10 years?
Five years from now I just want to be making decent amount of money and music so I don't need another job. I'm real humble I don't care about being a millionaire and all that other stuff. If I could make $120 grand off of writing music even ghostwriting for other people. I would be completely content. Ten years from now I will be 36, I hope to take the rent money which is like entry level money and start investing in other things. Have my own businesses and have a family fortune, to include my family and friends and make sure all our bodies are good.
11. What do you want your legacy to be?
I want my legacy to be, that I was a relatable. I was able to make people feel what I was saying. I just want people to be able to relate to my music. And help them get through certain situations in life through my music. That's what I want my legacy to be.
12. Is there anything that your fans should look forward to seeing from you in the near future?
I'm currently working on two separate mixtapes. 2 to 5 track EP's. There's a day vibe and a night vibe. I've already started working on my next album but who knows how long that's going to take.
August 5, 2017 onpointcelebzalbum, artist, audio, entertainment, EP, feature, future, honesty, interview, knowledge, music, music video, new, new album, new music, new track, new video, news, official video, onpointcelebz, passion, powerful, rap, rapper, response, Tuesday knight, video, youtubeLeave a comment
NEW MUSIC: Drake – Summer Sixteen
Drake's new track "Summer Sixteen", is obviously getting his fans prepared for what he has planned for the new year. He also doesn't fail to mention how his success has grown and how he has now become like Jay ad has a bigger pool than Kanye.
Drake knows what he is capable of and he is letting the world know. Love it! OnPointCeleb!
February 1, 2016 February 2, 2016 onpointcelebz2016, audio, Drake, music, new music, ovo, power, success, summer sixteenLeave a comment
NEW MUSIC: Trey Songz – Slow Motion
OnPointMusic! Trey will be joining Chris Brown on the "Between the Sheets Tour" that will begin January 28 in Hampton, VA. That tour is going to be crazy.
January 14, 2015 January 15, 2015 onpointcelebzaudio, between the sheets tour, chris brown, new music, slow motion, trey songzLeave a comment
NEW MUSIC: Snoop Lion ft. Miley Cyrus – Ashtrays and Heartbreak
Celeb NEWS, Music
Snoop Lion is pining about the past on his latest Reincarnated track, and he brought Miley Cyrus along for the ride. Their duet, off the rapper's April 23 album, made it to the Internet on Wednesday (April 3).
On "Ashtrays and Heartbreaks," Snoop combines his new found Rasta style with Cyrus' pop sound but the actress shows she can get in on the reggae vibe of the jam, too, especially on lines like "fill up all those ashtrays."
Produced by Major Lazer, Ariel Rechtshaid and Dre Skull, the track features additional vocals from Angela Hunte. The legendary drummer for the Police, Stewart Copeland, provides the island-tinged percussion on the tune.
"[Snoop] was really studying Bob Marley," Major Lazer's Diplo explained to MTV News last year. "He likes to have the female backing vocals, and it's a real Marley-esque vibe. We [also] have some West Coast attitude with the production, and I'm really excited about it. It sounds amazing."
But "Ashtrays and Heartbreaks" is hardly the only Snoop/Miley collab the world will get to hear this year. Miley has confirmed that Snoop will also appear on the lead single off her 2013 album release.
"I did a song with Snoop, and it's coming out very, very soon," Miley told Ryan Seacrest last month. "I can finally say I'm going to have a song with Snoop Dogg coming very soon. It's recorded, done. I'm so excited!" While she didn't offer up many details about the song, she did reveal that she was making plans to hang out with him at the time. "He was in Europe when he was recording, but he's here this weekend, so I'm pretty excited. I'm think I'm going to take a bunch of my friends and go hang out."
Are you feeling the track? OnPoint or NOT??? Leave a comment with your opinion. MuaH!
via MTV
April 3, 2013 onpointcelebz2013, ashtrays and heartbreaks, audio, music, new music, snoop lionLeave a comment
OnPointCelebz Interviews Singer Tia Ferrera
Celeb NEWS, Empowerment, Interviewz, Music
OPC: What made you want to pursue a career in the music industry?
T: Wow! I grew up around music. My mom is a professional singer and most of my family members are in the music industry. From being very little I've always been around music. I fell in love with it at a very young age.(Laughing) I feel like there was no other way for me to go.
OPC: How long have you been singing? When did you discover you had the ability to sing?
T: I started off singing at my grandfathers church. He has a very very small church in San Diego California where I was born. Started singing there once he gave me my solo I was like oh yeah (Laughing). This is me, this is what I want to do. I don't want to do anything else in life. I knew pretty early that, that was from watching music videos and all the people I admired, I knew very very early that it was something I wanted to do.
OPC: Who is your #1 inspiration?
T: Mariah Carey
OPC: Who would you love to work with in the industry?
T: Timbaland or Ryan Leslie
OPC: From what you've seen or heard, what makes a professional artist? An ideal superstar?
T: Someone who is very well rounded as far as their gift. Whether they have [tackled] the technical side as well as just being free enough to express themselves. There are people that have master both of those as well as being able to network and run a great business. It seems to me that those are the most successful in the entertainment industry. Their able to balance all of those different areas of their lives and stay on top even though its a lot. Its a lot to try and balance but from what I see the people that are very successful are able to balance all of that.
OPC: What has been your favorite part of your Journey so far?
T: I have to be really honest other people wouldn't say they do it for the feed back [but that's why I do it. I love when someone can relate to my music]. Its just a song in my head until I go in the studio and record it and its just a song until I preform it and its just a song until someone hears it. But if it actually means something to somebody else that the whole reason i do it.
OPC: What song have you gotten the most feed back on?
T: Its weird because for women its this song that I have called 'Its Complicated' and its specifically about how a relationship goes wrong and your like what the heck happen we were doing so well. And I got that from all the people on Facebook land that had a status that said its complicated. I started seeing peoples comments saying what does that mean. And not everyone wants to admit it but everyone has been in that part of their relationship where their like I don't know if were still together or whats happening so I wrote a song about that. From women I get the most feedback about that. And then I have another song that we shot the video for and its called 'Ladies Night'. For a very strange reason a lot of guys (laughing) like that song. Their like I know I'm not supposed to dance to I know its a song for women but I like that song. Its very opposite ends of the spectrum but I love it.
OPC: Do you have a special zone you get in when your writing?
T: I do have a special zone. It depends on what kind of song it is but I specifically try to take myself to a place that I've experienced. When writing a song or singing a song, what ever the subjects about I try to take myself to that place. So if its one of those sad songs I literally take myself to that bad, dark, not so good place. [I start] from there to make the emotion come out.
OPC: What do you want your legacy to be?
T: I hope that when its all send and done. When I'm old and grey and can't do this anymore. I hope that what people just got from me is that I wasn't afraid to go against the green and follow the dream that I've had since I was little. No matter what it cost me or what obstacles I've met. That's what I stand for.
July 31, 2012 April 17, 2018 onpointcelebzartist, audio, entertainment, inspiration, interview, interviews, media, music, news, question, Questions, singer, Tia ferrera, video, womenLeave a comment
Domonique from OnPointCelebz INTERVIEWS Shawnna
Celeb NEWS, Empowerment, Interviewz, Music, Videoz
She is a really pretty girl…Loved the answers she gave…OnPoint!
July 22, 2012 April 17, 2018 onpointcelebzaudio, entertainment, interview, interviews, media, news, Questions, rapper, refine entertainment, shawnna, video, workLeave a comment


Wake up to city and mountain views on the 12th floor of this one bedroom/one bath condo. Spacious open concept living and kitchen area with 9' plus ceilings, central air / heat, and granite kitchen countertops. In addition, the condo INCLUDES ALL FURNISHINGS, including all appliances, and washer/dryer. Master bedroom is off the living room with views of the city and a walk-in closet. The bathroom features a sunken tub with shower and offers plenty of storage. Also included, RARE PRIVATE GARAGE with automatic garage door. With 24 hour security and front desk concierge, this condo is full of amenities. Enjoy the pool/jacuzzi, full gym, clubhouse, BBQ patio area and dog park. Walk to local restaurants and steps from the beach, this condo is ideal for city living.
Listing provided courtesy of Christina Fletcher at Home Smart Realty Group.


Blue & gold macaw depicted in soft pastel on Colourfix card.
Professionally framed with wooden moulding & double mount with low reflective glass (not non reflective - which looks diffused).
Please note it is quite a large & heavy painting and will need to be on a very secure support.


I'm not a big fan of ideas. Sure, ideas are great — some of my best friends are ideas. But managers tend to let our national obsession about having new ideas distract them from the hard work of building good products and successful ventures around what are almost always old ideas. So it was fun to see the great design OXO have at a competitor who claimed to "own" an idea that both had built products around.
The catch phrase of the Republican National Convention, "We Built It," was a staged response to a strategically clipped quote from a speech by President Obama. As part of the government versus business debate, it has hopefully run its course. But as a lesson on innovation, it feels like a missed opportunity.
Across the globe, many of the opportunities for sustainable innovation will be in mature markets like energy, transportation, agriculture, construction and will present very different challenges from those of innovating in information technology, Internet applicaitons, or social media. The differences between driving change in these different conditions is a defining characteristic of each—something that entrepreneurs, investors, and policy makers alike seem to forget.
As the NYT reported, scientists at Facebook and the University of Milan (report posted here) have found that the average number of links connecting one arbitrarily selected person to another was 4.74 (in the U.S., it was just 4.37). So what's news?
The Kauffman Foundation just posted a nice sketchbook talk by CEO Carl Schramm (embedded below), summarizing the good and vital research the company has supported that looks at the role of entrepreneurs in society. These numbers should guide both policy and personal decisions.


Location One-star hotel "Raices Pampeanas" is set in Iguazu. It boasts a convenient location within 5 km from the city center.Hotel features Wi-Fi is available on all property premises. Guests are invited to visit a swimming pool. Smoking is not allowed at the hotel.


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Percy Adlon (Munique, ) é um diretor, produtor e roteirista alemão.

É tido como um dos mais respeitados profissionais do cinema alemão, Adlon trabalhou como ator, antes de se tornar conhecido como produtor de documentários. Em 1981, escreveu e dirigiu sua primeira peça teatral, Celeste, um relato dos últimos dias de Marcel Proust, narrado por sua empregada. Um dos principais expoentes do cinema alemão, o filme Estação Doçura (1985), que narra a história de uma atendente de funerária que seduz um condutor de metrô, o tornou mundialmente conhecido.

Foi também através deste filme, que a atriz alemã Marianne Sägebrecht, ex-artista de cabaré, fez sua estréia no cinema. A partir dali, ela iria estrelar com destaque absoluto em vários filmes do diretor, entre os quais Bagdad Café (1988), primeiro sucesso de Percy em língua inglesa.

É casado com a escritora e produtora Eleonora Adlon.

Ligações externas
 Percy Adlon no IMDb (em inglês)

Adlon
César de melhor filme estrangeiro

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


Professional,and great initiative. Care about People and pt, is the more important in my life. I'm very punctual. I'm sweet person,excellent communication skills,professional and decision- making skills.critical thinker.


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By straightoffthebeach	Uncategorized
Preview 4 – Belgium
For some players being at the World Cup is almost a contractual obligation, and they plod through their games just hoping to avoid injury before pre-season training at their day job starts, or before they've confirmed a move to Manchester City or PSG. If this is particularly true of players that already play – or want to play – for the big European club teams, then it's something most international teams have to deal with, as long as they have at least one recognisable star. Sometimes it's most clear when a team only has one; watching Zlatan Ibrahimovic's exasperation with his mediocre national team-mates is quite often a delight, simply because of the school playground emotional dynamics that seem to result. Watching Portugal is a bit like this, but Ronaldo usually comes across like that kid in the playground with the new boots who never passes, which makes it less entertaining.
For these players club > country, which results in fairly lacklustre games, no rare thing in international football. Dullness also comes from the way the competitions are structured in such a way as to allow for the development of the concept of "the usual suspects" who you "can never write off." These teams are usually the seeds minus the traditional blip (this year it's Switzerland, in 2010 it was South Africa): Germany, Italy, France, Brazil, Argentina, the Netherlands, sometimes Portugal, maybe England at a push. Because of this fairly unaltering hierarchy, though, there are usual suspects at every level, so you also have those teams that seem to always be there but whose only role seems to be to offer the desired cushy second round tie: the Scandinavians, Switzerland, an occasional Balkan state, Japan, South Korea. This also seems the immediate destiny of teams like Ivory Coast and Ghana.
What there aren't much these days are genuinely exciting teams. By that, I mean a group of 11 players who are more than the sum of their parts, who are exciting to watch because of the way they interact with one another. Often they are young and relatively unknown. Germany in 2010 were like this; their victory over England was one of those that is also a "victory for football." Perhaps the team with the most potential for this sort of excitement in 2014 are the Belgians. They're not "usual suspects" in either sense: they're unlikely to win it and they're not always there. This will be the first time they've qualified for a World Cup since 2002, where they reached the round of 16. Their Euros record is even worse: the last one they qualified for was 2000, and that's because they were hosting it. Before that you have to go back to 1984. What this means is that the team that assembles in Belo Horizonte on June 17th for their first game against Algeria will be one that is to all intents and purposes unknown to the world footballing audience.
Of course there are other teams of whom that is true (does anyone know anything about the Hondurans, for instance?) but what marks out the Belgians is the range of talent they can call on: Thibaut Courtois or Simon Mignolet in goal; a choice of Toby Alderweireld, Vincent Kompany, Daniel Van Buyten, Thomas Vermaelen, Jan Vertonghen in defence; Nacer Chadli, Mousa Dembele, Steven Defour, Kevin De Bruyne, Marouane Fellaini (ahem), Adnan Januzaj, Eden Hazard, Kevin Mirallas, Axel Witsel in midfield/attack; Romelu Lukaku up front. By any measure, that is not a bad group of players. If they played in a Liverpool-style attacking formation, a front four of Januzaj, Hazard, Mirallas and Lukaku is pretty mouthwatering.
What should we expect from them though? Perusal of the internet reveals that they have been given the dispiriting moniker "The New Golden Generation", which almost certainly condemns them to suffer from being over-hyped. And how much do they care about the World Cup, given they're all players doing well for their clubs and are still quite young? The fan in me finds it hard not to get carried away by fantasy and imagine a perfectly calibrated team buoyed by a sheer love of the game. Clearly that's not going to be the case, but it does raise an interesting question. In a recent article for the New Yorker, Ian Crouch questioned our conceptions of what athletic success means in a set of reflections initiated by a speech given by Kevin Durant on the occasion of his election as this year's NBA M.V.P. (Most Valuable Player). "Unlike the aggressive, competitive, and sometimes vicious player whom we watch on the court," Crouch wrote, "Durant was open, vulnerable, emotionally brave, and sincere. He reminded everyone not only of his own humanity but also of that of his teammates. They joined him onstage, and he took the time to address each of them, often sharing deeply personal stories." If Crouch saw in Durant's words another criterion of success, an old-fashioned one almost religious in its attention to moral uprightness, he broadens this into a consideration of the place of "the champion" as an alternative gauge of greatness:
The idea of championships as the ultimate expression of athletic success has gained a firm grip on the basketball psyche in recent years, bolstered by former greats … who continue to be held to account for their near-misses and their teams' failures. It has been peddled especially hard by the kinds of sportswriters who often fret about players' so-called legacies. The looming shadow of history seems omnipresent, as if moments no longer matter in real time but only in how they will change the rankings of the best and worst of all time. But this is a myopic kind of fandom, and it confuses what a spectator wants – which is to vicariously win something – with the myriad experiences that a player might hope to accumulate in his career. Durant offered another way: [his team] the Thunder are still alive in the playoffs, but, regardless of what happens, this was his championship moment. And it could be the fans' moment, too—surely as meaningful and as thrilling as getting to see him riding on the back of a float holding a trophy.
The myopia Crouch talks about is precisely the kind that creates labels like "Golden Generation," which are always destined to be disappointing. Not that anyone will say it was a great World Cup because Eden Hazard tears up when talking about how much he loves Axel Witsel, but when it is so difficult to assess what a team might do one response might just be: who cares? If the main question of Belgium is "how good are they?" another version, one I find more exciting – and, yes, more romantic – is: "how good could they be?" Even this question is usually couched in terms of improvement and "player development" and the sort of stuff that makes us think about players' "trophy cabinets" and "medal collections," but when you have teams made up of exciting players with no real pressure or predecessors to live up to (save for the "original" Belgium "Golden Generation," that is), the mind wanders and is allowed space to imagine different scenarios. Personally I'd like them to play exciting attacking football unhindered by worries about winning the tournament, and for them to be a refreshing antidote to the slog-a-thon that almost undoubtedly will accompany England's campaign, or the tired tiki-taka of Spain's. But we'll see. Part of the benefit of imagining different scenarios is it lessens the importance of what actually happens (unless you're Belgian, presumably).
2 thoughts on "Preview 4 – Belgium"
Preview 9 – Colombia | straight off the beach says:
[…] favourites, and with Falcao out they are no-one's dark horses either, with teams like Belgium as the punter's chance […]
Preview 12 – Ecuador | straight off the beach says:
[…] his preview of Belgium, Mark discussed 'those teams that seem to always be there but whose only role seems to be to […]


Police & Crime Commissioners will mean that for the first time you will be able to hold someone to account for policing in Salford and across the region. Michael Winstanley has been selected as the Conservative Candidate for Greater Manchester.
Salford Conservatives were delighted to welcome Conservative Party Vice-Chairman and Pendle MP, Andrew Stephenson, to be guest speaker at our recent event. If you'd like to get involved, visit our events section for more information on upcoming social events.
Salford members joined hundreds of other Conservative Party Conference delegates to help the "Support Our Soldiers" charity to prepare Christmas and New Year care packages for our brave service men and women on the front line in Afghanistan.
Local residents across Salford have raised their concerns after the Labour Council attempted to smuggle out news of their decision to abolish weekly bin collections throughout the City.
Local residents in Worsley and Walkden gave Conservative Police & Crime Commissioner candidate Michael Winstanley a warm welcome as he spoke to residents and delivered literature with local Conservatives on Saturday.
Good news for tenants across the City as Salford receives a large share of the Government's social housing funding pot.
Conservative Police and Crime Commissioner candidate Michael Winstanley has announced his five main priorities that he will work towards as the crime-fighting Police Commissioner for Greater Manchester.
Michael Winstanley has slammed Labour-led Greater Manchester Police Authority for planning a 3 course meal with wine for 100 people at the 5 Star Lowry Hotel on 21st September. The event is to "celebrate" the end of the Police Authority in November when they will be abolished and the functions transfer to the new Police & Crime Commissioner.
Michael Winstanley has been selected by Greater Manchester Conservatives to be their Police & Crime Commissioner Candidate (PCC) in the Election on 15th November. The role of PCC brings democratic accountability to the area of Police and Crime.
Local residents have been left in disbelief after Labour Councillors railroaded through proposals to give a massive pay hike to the City Mayor and his Deputy.
At the July Full Council meeting, plans were approved to pay the new City Mayor a massive £69000, and his Deputy almost £45000 - increases of 80% compared to the allowances paid for the previous leader and Deputy Leader.


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Covid-19: More than 290 000 masks confiscated from smuggler given to Bulgarian Red Cross
Written by The Sofia Globe staff on March 24, 2020 in Bulgaria - Comments Off on Covid-19: More than 290 000 masks confiscated from smuggler given to Bulgarian Red Cross
Bulgaria's Customs Agency has given 294 000 surgical protective masks confiscated from a would-be smuggler to the Bulgarian Red Cross, the agency said on March 24.
The masks were confiscated on March 22 at the Kapitan Andreevo border checkpoint.
They were found when Bulgarian customs officers checked a lorry entering from Turkey.
The driver, a Polish citizen, presented a manifest showing the cargo as mainly textiles. An x-ray check and subsequent physical search of the lorry found 294 000 medical masks in 155 containers that had not been listed in the customs documents.
An agreement has been reached with the offender, the masks have been confiscated for the benefit of the state and released without being subject to import duties, the Customs Agency said.
The face masks remain at the disposal of the Bulgarian Red Cross in the warehouse of the Customs Agency.
The decision was taken in terms of the Transitional and Final Provisions of the State of Emergency Measures Act approved by Bulgaria's Parliament, the statement said.
Earlier on March 24, Bulgaria's Customs Agency said that it had made available more than 158 000 litres of confiscated ethyl alcohol for medical use by health authorities for disinfection in the fight against Covid-19.
(Photo: Customs Agency)


A Florida sheriff says rooms are available and a new retro-neon sign purchased with drug-seized assets features a blinking "vacancy" light.
Flagler County Sheriff Rick Staly has dubbed the county jail the Green Roof Inn. A sign lists the amenities at the facility north of Daytona Beach. There is no privacy, group bathrooms and no meal selection.


A patio enclosure is an investment that will reward your home or business for years to come. It adds significant extra space and value, shelters you from the elements, and transforms any outdoor area into a beautiful and relaxing experience no matter what season it is.
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Python and the Open Source Community
Python versus R. It's a heated debate. We won't solve this raging controversy today, but we will peek into the history of Python, particularly in the open source community surrounding it, and see how it came to be what it is today—a well used and flexible programming language.
Travis Oliphant: Wes McKinney did a great job in creating Pandas . . . not just creating it but organized a community around it, which are two independent steps and both necessary, by the way. A lot of people get confused by open source. They sometimes think you just kind of going to get people together and open source emerges from the foam, but what ends up happening, I've seen this now at least eight, nine different times, both with projects I've had a chance and privilege to interact with, but also other people's projects. It really takes a core set of motivated people, usually not more than three.
Ginette: I'm Ginette.
Curtis: And I'm Curtis.
Ginette: And you are listening to Data Crunch.
Curtis: A podcast about how applied data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence are changing the world.
Ginette: A Vault Analytics production.
Ginette: This episode of Data Crunch is supported by Lightpost Analytics, a company helping bridge the last mile of AI: making data and algorithms understandable and actionable for a non-technical person, like the CEO of your company.
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Here at Data Crunch, we love playing with artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning, so we started a fun new side project. We just launched a new podcast that tests the boundaries of what can be done with Google's cutting-edge deep learning speech generation algorithms. We use surprisingly human-like voices to host the podcast that reads all the unusual Wikipedia articles you haven't had a chance to read yet, like chicken hypnosis, the history of an amusing German conspiracy theory, strange trends in Russian politics, and much more to come. It's worth listening to to hear what this tech sounds like and you'll learn unique and bizarre trivia that you can share at your next dinner party. Search for a podcast called "Griswold the AI Reads Unusual Wikipedia Articles," now found on all your favorite popular podcast platforms.
Curtis: There has been a heated, ongoing debate about which programming language is better when working with machine learning and data analytics: Python or R, and while we won't be wresting that particular question, we will overview a bit of history for both and then dive into significant history behind one of these languages, Python, with a major contributor to the language, a man who significantly influenced the way that data scientists use Python today.
Ginette: As a very short historical background, Python came to the scene in 1991 when Guido Van Rossem developed it. His language has developed a reputation as easy to use because it's syntax is simple, it's versatile, and it has a shallow learning curve. It's also a general purpose language that is used beyond data analysis and great for implementing algorithms for production use. As for R, it followed shortly after Python. In 1995, Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman created it as an easier way to do data analysis, statistics, and graphic models, and it was mainly used in academia and research until more recently. It's specifically aimed at statistics, and it has extensive libraries and a solid community.
As a controversial side note, according to Gregory Piatetsky Shapiro's KDNuggets poll, late last year, Python overtook R in data science and machine learning. Gregory's organization received some sharp criticism for this and defended the claim with a follow-up article. We'll link to them in our shownotes for you to read if you're interested. Now let's chat with Travis Oliphant, former CEO of Anaconda, current CEO of Quansight, and creator of NumPy and SciPy, two packages that were foundational in bringing Python to the forefront of machine learning.
Travis: I'm Travis Oliphant. I've been involved in scientific computing for a long time. I got my start really as a college student loving electromagnetism and applied mathematics. I was really driven by science and math, and then as I went to grad school and start doing medical imaging and studying the problems of how to get information from large data for medicine, I started to uncover the problem of just writing software systems to help make that easy, and that's where I fell in love with Python. It was early language back then, and they had a very nascent array object called Numeric, and I got involved as a graduate student—was supposed to be pursuing my PhD, but I end up delaying that—delayed my PhD to write a bunch of open source software, primarily for the love of writing the software and also for the joy of sharing it with people around the world and having them comment, kind of the community building that allowed for.
It really was an extension of the scientific process for me. It was very similar to the kind of thing I was doing writing papers and writing ideas about how to move medical imaging forward. This is building systems for helping large data science move forward. So I did that, ended up teaching at a university as well. I went back and taught at my alma mater, taught electrical computer engineering, but even then, I found myself drawn more towards helping the software ecosystem grow, and so I started the SciPy project when I was a young graduate student. And that became . . . and then stayed with that. I grew that community, helped it grow until about 2009. About 2005, I realized I needed to write some better array object. There was some activity happening between Numarray and Numeric. A split was happening in the community. People were kind of building up ecosystems on different objects and different systems, and so I wrote NumPy to bring that back together and to have a common way to talk about data in Python, and then that, over the course of three to five years, started to just get adopted everywhere, and then built this huge ecosystem on top of it.
I left academia when I realized I was kind of more suited for entrepreneurship. I really love the idea of helping people build companies and helping create companies. I myself wanted to explore what that was like. And so I end up leaving academia to start at a consulting company and then from there, spun out another company called Anaconda, and then that's now growing, and now I'm back running another consultancy whose goal is to spin out other companies, so it's been a fun journey, but I've been open source the whole way, and then driven by entrepreneurship along the way as well.
Ginette: The open-source space that Travis has heavily contributed to has lava-lamp-like fluidity. It's constantly shifting and re-molding itself as new factors come into play.
Travis: Now what's happened over the past three years is there's been new systems built as well, so we're kind of at an interesting time in the open source ecosystem where for a lot of years, NumPy was kind of at the center of all these of all of these computations, and then as new, you know, huge work has been happening by Google and Facebook and Microsoft and Baidu and other companies, they're sort of grown this space significantly, and they're not always using common APIs either. They're sort of recreating some of the APIs. So it's kind of interesting. It's wonderful technology, but it's also very now not so consistent, and it's becoming a little bit confusing for people to figure out where do they go. Now a lot of those folks, they basically use the terminology of NumPy, you know, the same concepts, and so it's interesting to watch, kind of, names you created, like just pulled out of your hat are now showing up in all these libraries all over the world, because to name to kind of describe the same thing, things like D-type, shape, to describe the underlying capabilities. So it's fun to watch that, but I'm also, I have a growing concern about how do we keep the community together and keep APIs and specifications kind of going forward instead of stepping backward, and then standardization conversations start to come into play, and so it goes from just being about technology to being about communities, and so that's been a fun, a fun transition.
I hesitate to say back a step because definitely there's new capabilities that are available, and the old capabilities are still there too. But in terms of where we go from here, it's a little more fractured, definitely more fractured, and so it's kind of like people . . . you know, when we merged Numeric and Numarray into Numpy, for ten years there was this sort of, "oh, yeah, this is what we do," and it's very clear, and everyone rallied around the same APIs and the same interfaces, and then as this other movement has emerged, it's become, "Oh, well, what do we do now?" I've got to talk to people, for example, the PyMC story. It's a Monte Carlo method for doing probabilistic computing. The idea of probabilistic computing is you can describe your model in relatively high-level computations: I'm going to do this A * B + C, do a function call on the array, and you can describe your model, and then rather than compute it once for a particular set of numbers, you run a bunch of numbers through it, and you kind of build a probabilistic output rather than a single answer, you get a probability distribution of the answers. It can be a lot more realistic. You know, a lot of times when you're trying to predict the future . . . I used to teach inverse problems. I used to teach prediction theory, and I'd always emphasize that it's not always about the single number you get in the future. It's about how certain are you about that number. Given the information you have, how much do you really know about the future? And these methods really help you do that.
And there's one, PyMC3 is built on top of NumPy, on top of a product called Theono, which also leveraged NumPy, and then, they were basically saying what are we going to do with PyMC4? How are we going to do this? We're going to do build on top of NumPy again? Are we going to do TensorFlow? Torch? All of a sudden, it was a big question. They didn't know. And I believe they decided to sit on top of TensorFlow for now . . . that conversation definitely helped me . . . kind of, "We're back. We're back ten years ago to where people are just not not knowing . . ." and that's fine in the sense that's great use code. We don't really care if it's TensorFlow or not. The trouble is, it's that when the developers aren't sharing common interfaces, then we're not moving as quickly together forward. End users can still, hey, they used your library, it's fine for them. But I think about the community of people building together the infrastructure, and we end up doing a lot of repeated cycles, a lot of wasted time together. And there's always going to be some competition. It's like as something becomes more popular, you have more approaches, I mean, computer languages themselves are this. If you think about, there's Python. There's R. There's Node. There's Nim. There's new languages all the time. And it's not that there should only be one language, and it's not like there should be only one way to do this computation, but for common things, you hate to see when you know exactly this is the way to do it, and we kind of have four implementations of exactly the same thing. That's when it starts to get a little bit. Do we really have to do it this way? Can't we cooperate a little better?
Curtis: Travis's aim is to build on open source, and he's figured out how to do that while also fulfilling the basic need of making an income.
Travis: There is definitely a tension between the open-source philanthropic community spirit and then the for-profit I got to . . . I need to sell something, right? And it's not necessarily intrinsic tension. It's just, you can end up focusing on different parts of things. A lot of people in for profit end up so focused on the "How am I going to monetize this? How am I going to make money off this, that it can be very easy to lose sight of the community. What the needs are kind of actually building a community. For me, the way I combine those was the reason I wanted a for-profit company was to make more resources, to create more resources to help create more open source. So the whole reason to put effort into building a profitable company was to drive revenue that could be used to pay people to work on open source, that's what drove me almost entirely,
Now that doesn't necessarily drive everybody who's building a for-profit company. But that was certainly in my mind, and I realized to build open source, you've got to pay people to work on open source. A lot of open source is done by volunteer time. You can get a lot done with volunteers, but in order to get the kind of work done to really accomplish the world's goals especially in machine learning and analytics, you've got to pay people, so how are we going to do this. How are we going to pay people while allowing them to work on open source? That's been a question I've had for decades. So that's what drove me to create Anaconda, and Anaconda's purpose was to find a product that would be built on top of open source. We found one by effectively by solving the packaging problem. By solving the packaging problem, we discovered an opportunity to sell to corporations basically the ability to manage their, their deployment story, and that's that's become Anaconda Enterprise. So it took us a little while to figure that out, we basically started Continuum, and we didn't have Anaconda as a product in mind. We actually kind of had an array server, kind of NumPy server was our idea, kind of like some way to do data online and people could do their computation in the cloud and then have distributed data across the Internet. We kind of had a broad scope of people doing high-level computation and having it distributed to the cloud, more of a data service, data computation service. We explored that for a little while, and it kind of lead us to do some open source projects around that. But then we uncovered almost accidentally, people just needed the stuff installed. That was the biggest problem they were solving, so we ended up kind of . . . any entrepreneurship effort, I'm a big fan of the lean startup kind of a model. A business is a scientific experiment with a market. Your success is measured by are people paying you for something. If you just let that drive your activities along with mixing this, you're sort of experimenting. "Well, hmmm, I think this is what will help people experiment, and it either does or doesn't." So we had about five or six experiments going on at Continuum, and the challenge became that four of them were successful and just degree of success and then we ended up pursuing pretty much the one broad successful company that became Anaconda.
Curtis: While Travis was building Anaconda, he was working on other side projects, such as NumFOCUS, a nonprofit organization that works to improve the health of the Python open-source community, and it funds certain open-source projects.
Travis: The idea of NumFOCUS is to be a central point where communities could trust that it's agenda was only the community health. It had no other agenda but the community health. And I created NumFOCUS with a bunch of other . . . with some other board members. We created this at the same time I was starting Anaconda. And I did it basically because I knew I wanted to build a for profit company—I'm really a big proponent of entrepreneurship and building productive companies that sell things to people—but then I also wanted at the same time just the tighter the stack. The things we were going to be building on are bigger than one company, and so I wanted there to be another organization that we could all participate with and kind of would feel, would have common trust with, and so we built both at the same time, and it was challenging. It's hard to build one organization, so building two, certainly it took time and wasn't as efficient perhaps it could have been, but fortunately, due to the great efforts of a lot of other community members, NumFOCUS has really taken off over the past several years, and it is a great organization for collaborating around. Certainly this kind of activity . . . if we come up with libraries, they could be unifying libraries that they could be fiscally sponsored by NumFOCUS. They could be seen as community library as opposed to just some as opposed to something that was just going to benefit me personally or something.
Ginette: There's an art to building open source projects. Travis explains here what patterns he's seen as open source projects become popular.
Travis: Wes McKinney did a great job in creating Pandas, and not just creating it but organized a community around it, which are two independent steps and both necessary, by the way. A lot of people get confused by open source. They sometimes think they're just kind of going to get people together and open source emerges from the foam, but what ends up happening, I've seen this now at least eight, nine different times, both with projects I've had a chance and privilege to interact with, but also other people's projects. It really takes a core set of motivated people. Usually not more than three. Sometimes only one. You know one to three people, maybe five, but it's sort of a small group of people that end up working closely together and building the core capability, right? And then if they're on to something . . . if they build something a lot of people want, then the next step they have to be able to take is can they bring other people in? And can that one two three people become 7 to 9 and 10 and 15? And then can that take the next stage to 75 and then 80 and hundreds? And that's a journey that definitely takes time. It doesn't happen overnight. It might take you six months to a year. Usually about a year to do initial work on something significant, and then probably another three, two to three years after to build up a community. And that's sort of best case scenarios. And then from there, it starts to grow. So you know, that sort of takes you to a different topic about communities, but I kind of wanted to give you a flavor, but definitely Pandas was a big part of why NumFOCUS became popular and also why Python became popular for data science.
The other two projects that were huge I think were Jupyter. Ipython-notebook became Jupyter and Jupyter is a NumFOCUS sponsored product as well, and then SciKit Learn. SciKit Learn was this venerable sci kit. It's interesting the story of scikit-learn, because I SciPy was started in 2001, Really 1999, when I started writing the first modules of SciPy and then brought them together with Eric Jones and Piarro to bring SciPy to life in 2000, 2001 as a single distribution, and actually SciPy was like a distribution of Python masquerading as a library. The number one problem solving . . . how do you get this stuff, right? Because it had a bunch of different capability inside it, a bunch of different packages. We all kind of pulled it into one name space mistakenly, in retrospect. I mean, at the time, it was the right thing to do because it brought things together made it easier to install, easier to work on. But now with packaging and distribution more solved, it really is better to split them out, and that became obvious to folks around 2004 when we built the SciKits. In 2005 people said, scikits; you need to break this apart and different things, and that's the energy that created SciKit learn. SciKit learn became the first really successful scikit and really overshadowed, SciPy and the tools it was built on, but fantastic. It really hit a core need for machine learning and prediction and it was there at the right time.
Now, SciKit Learn is a very distributed group. It emphasizes the nature of these. SciKit Learn was built before NumFOCUS was created. It's a very distributed group. International Group. Lot of France. Lot of Asia. Lot of the United States. South America. And so SciKit Learn is not yet a fiscally sponsored project of NumFOCUS. It's sort of an affiliated project, but it really has to do with the SciKit Learn Community it so diverse so broad, it's so hard to even get people to agree as to what it should be.
Ginette: SciKit Learn, being the very popular machine learning library it is, has a lot of functions to offer data scientists. In order to understand what's going on with functions in libraries like this, it really helps to understand the concepts behind them. A great place for this is Brilliant.org. Their classes help you understand algorithms, machine learning concepts, computer science basics, probability, computer memory, and many other important concepts in data science topics. The nice thing about Brilliant.org is that you can learn in bite-sized pieces at your own pace. Their courses are entertaining, challenging, and educational, and they go beyond lectures to help you actively learn. It's a great resource.
If you'd like to deeply understand machine learning and data science, give them a try by going to brilliant.org/DataCrunch. They were good enough to sponsor this episode, and using this link lets them know that you came from us, and you can sign up for free, preview courses, and start learning! Also, the first 200 people that go to that link will get 20% off the annual premium subscription. Once again, that's brilliant.org/DataCrunch to understand machine learning!
Curtis: Now that we've heard from our sponsors, let's find out what Travis is doing now. Travis has since moved on from being the CEO of Anaconda and has started a new company called Quansight.
Travis: I'm super excited by Quansight. I left Anaconda, in fact, at Anaconda, we hired some additional help, a new CEO, great leaders who could help carry the vision of Anaconda forward, and then in the process, realized hey, this general problem of just building companies that support open source is still there helping . . . and also realizing after having met a lot of great engineers, there are a lot of great engineers who want to figure out how to take their ideas to market, and I want to help them, and not that I know everything, but after having built a company that's become successful and then having been involved in open source for so long, I feel like I have some ideas I can share with folks, and I just want to help them build their dreams, and I realized that about myself. That's what I really wanted to do.
So I thought, well let's build a company where that's what we do. It's kind of my take on an incubation company. It's very pragmatic. Our dreams are in open source. We can do anything in open source, and we can dream big there, and then for companies, we also dream big, but it's also very pragmatic: How are we going to go market? What product are we going to build? What's the go-to-market playbook look like? What do the sales process looking like? You have to be fairly pragmatic when it comes to getting people to buy things. So what I say to people specifically about Quansight we grow talent, we build technology, and we discover products. Some people look a little unusual, discover products? What do you mean by that? It's really to differentiate building technology, which is about good ideas and the right infrastructure, and products are, What will people buy? What can you sell that people will buy that helps you build your company? To me, that's a discovery process. I'm discovering from the market what its current desires are. How to solve its pain points with products.
Ginette: For you entrepreneurs out there, here's some advice from someone steeped in domain knowledge of what some great areas to innovate and ways to get involved with open source.
Travis: I think my advice currently, and this is just my perspective, is right now the verticals really need a lot of help, like I think there's a lot of people out there trying to platform plays like horizontal plays. They're certainly possible, but there's going to be one out of a hundred successful platform plays, but you're going to have a fifty percent, five out of ten of the vertical solution plays are going to be helpful because there are . . . if you're in finance, you're in oil and gas, you're in consumer products, you're in telemarketing, IoT, there's a number of these industries where they have maybe aging software, they have solution providers providing them something, but it can be displaced by the newer approaches that machine learning enables.
Previously, you had to write a lot of code to build a good model. Now it's about the data and using the data to construct a predictive model that is fairly . . . that that system or predictive model is kind of a generic . . . think of it as a pipeline of array competition. But the key of it that is the weights, the key of it is the data that goes into that model, and really training on that data is the key aspect. So I'd be looking for verticals to help, and I'd be looking for data sources, like specific data sources that are going to help. Be accumulating data . . . I think of these companies that are doing, that are trying to make mortgage prices better. They're disrupting real estate by using data. I really would love to see entrepreneurship in the medical arena. I always caution people about that because it's going to take more money to really make a difference in the medical arena because we have some outdated regulations. You know, regulations that were intended for a different a era that are now weighing down and slowing down the process of innovation in medicine. I hope that that will change in the future, but in the meantime, what that translates to is you need to have more money in order to make a difference there, but verticalization is one of the big stories. I think another interesting story is this decentralization. I think they're going to be some really good startups. If you are set on a horizontal play, I think the decentralized horizontal play is a really interesting area over the next five to ten years where there's going to be a lot of opportunity.
Curtis: We asked Travis what his best piece of advice is, and this is what he had to say.
Travis: My best advice is to be patient. Overnight successes or never overnight. You know, you're seeing the last part of the journey, and every time that journey took a long time typically. Be patient. Figure out something you really love, something that really excites you because it may take you may have to stick with it for five to ten years to make a big difference. Or in my case, twenty years, so you have to love it because you have to enjoy the process, enjoy the journey. I think jumping into open source projects are really, really great ways to contribute to an open source project. Maybe you don't know how to code or your concerned about your ability to code. It's okay. Everyone starts somewhere. Nobody knows everything begin with. Start with a documentation pull request. Start with a test—"hey, here's a test I did for this future I saw was missing." These are always welcome. I don't know a project out there that wouldn't welcome a documentation. Now they might have to coach you on the documentation, the way that the way it spells. They may have to coach you on the test, but that's a great way to get involved. Offer to help. There's a bunch of ways to organize communities. There's the PyData community. There's the Jupyter communities. There's places and kind of meeting people in meetups is a great way to kind of connect and see what the issues are. And as you meet people and explore that, you'll find opportunities. There's so much that needs to be done. The minute you find something needs to be done, connect, reach out, be a part of it, and then enjoy the journey.
Ginette: A huge thank you to Travis Oliphant from Quansight for chatting with us about his insights and perspectives on open source.
As always, you can find all links to attributions in our show notes at datacrunchpodcast.com.
Curtis: And as the final note, we would like to let everyone know that we are celebrating our second birthday this month. Our first episode dropped in October of 2016, so we're super excited to still be doing these episodes. We've learned tons of interesting things, and we hope to continue bringing you interesting interviews and information.
If you are feeling particularly generous today as it is our birthday and want to give us a gift, we would very much appreciate a review on iTunes or anywhere where you listen to your podcasts. It really helps us to know that you are enjoying the show and helps other people find it. So thank you to everyone who has reviewed us, and we very much appreciate it.
lightpostanalytics.com/datacrunch
brilliant.org/DataCrunch
https://www.kdnuggets.com/2015/05/r-vs-python-data-science.html
https://www.kdnuggets.com/2017/09/python-vs-r-data-science-machine-learning.html
https://www.kdnuggets.com/2017/08/python-overtakes-r-leader-analytics-data-science.html
https://www.kdnuggets.com/2018/05/top-tweets-may16-22.html
"Loopster" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
https://www.pexels.com/photo/woman-programming-on-a-notebook-1181359/
Best AI and ML Applications of the Past Month—September 06, 2018 Cutting-Edge Computational Chemistry Enabled by Deep Learning


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TFL Films
LARA won big at the 54th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival
We are extremely happy to share that LARA – the 99th TFL Film – has won no less than 3 awards at the latest edition of Karlovy Vary International Film Festival: the sophomore film by Jan-Ole Gerster, written by Blaž Kutin, won the Special Jury Prize, the Best Actress Award (Corinna Harfouch) and the Ecumenical Jury Award.
The Ecumenical Jury stated: "a well-acted and intelligently directed film of a depressed mother's psychological humiliation of her composer-musician son. The interactions of mother and son dramatically and dynamically capture their alienation, and shows signs of movement toward a positive resolution".
LARA was developed in ScriptLab 2005 and is produced by Schiwago Film and STUDIOCANAL (Germany). Sales are handled by the Munich-based company Beta Cinema.
We would also like to congratulate TFL Alumnus Marko Škop, who was also honoured with the Ecumenical Jury Commendation and the Best Actor Award (Milan Ondrík) for his new feature LET THERE BE LIGHT.


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Academy of St. Martin in the Fields violinist Harvey de Souza reflects on the importance of live music
By Jessica Sensenig
Harvey de Souza's role as principal first violin with London's Academy of St. Martin in the Fields Chamber Ensemble gives him the opportunity to bring live music to cities across the world.
In an interview with the Center for the Performing Arts at Penn State, de Souza explains how his pursuit of a career in music began as his father's dream.
As a boy in Mumbai, India, de Souza grew up listening to many distinguished violinists, including Jascha Heifetz, Yehudi Menuhin, David Oistrakh, and Isaac Stern. His father had a great love for the instrument but never had the opportunity to play, so a young de Souza took up the violin.
"I wasn't willingly drawn into it at first. I wanted to be out in the park playing football, baseball, and cricket with my friends rather than inside practicing." de Souza says with a laugh.
Having the opportunity to study in the United Kingdom and going on to become a professional violinist, de Souza is grateful to have made it as a musician and to have the opportunity to share music with audiences.
De Souza says that classical and live music is important for all generations to experience. As a testament to this belief, de Souza shares a favorite moment for one of the academy's U.S. tours.
"I had the most visceral experience. Coming out of concert, there was a guy who was the most archetypal cowboy, who looked incredible with his hat and his boots. And in a great drawl, he said this was the first time he had ever heard chamber music and went, 'Wow, I had no idea this existed!'" de Souza recalls. "In his 60s, this man was able to connect and recognize that this music was still relevant, which shows that it doesn't matter where you come from. It speaks to you. This music means something to us as human beings."
In regard to younger generations, de Souza discusses how music and arts are typically the first programs to be cut by schools in the United Kingdom and the United States. He considers these occurrences as problems that we must rise above.
"The access [of music] to younger generations is cut off, which causes immense damage. And it's on us to come in and show that it's not inaccessible. And as for the education aspect, [music] gives kids a different dimension to express themselves. There are no complicated words, only sounds."
The Academy of St. Martin in the Fields Chamber Ensemble will end its U.S. tour October 17 at Schwab Auditorium. The concert will include a new commissioned piece by Sally Beamish in addition to works by Johannes Brahms and Felix Mendelssohn.
Excited to return to Penn State with the ensemble, de Souza shares insights on the new Beamish piece, common misconceptions about classical music, and the importance of experiencing live music.
Question: Most of your past and current experience centers on chamber music. Why has chamber music stood out to you?
Harvey de Souza: In a nutshell, most of the repertoire is the most intimate writings of composers. As a musician, always working with colleagues and always having a shared experience is a special opportunity. What we do has to be shared. There's an intimacy in all aspects—from the writing itself to the ensemble setting. Some of the best compositions are from chamber music since composers wrote these pieces for themselves. They were commissioned for symphonies and the like to make a living, but they had an innate desire to write chamber music.
Q: During your performance at Penn State, you will play a new commissioned piece by Beamish, which you premiered at the start of this tour. What is it like to premiere a piece? Is there a different energy or atmosphere surrounding the performance?
De Souza: Absolutely. Number one, there's a certain trepidation. We're conscious that it's a different language for audiences, and we cannot predict how they'll react and if what we've worked on will come across well. Will it work? There's also twice the amount of commitment to pull it off. A premiere is the first time to make it right. It's a learning experience as well, to find what works and what doesn't. It's like that in most live performances, by the second performance you know where you may need to take more time.
Q: Can you talk a little more about Partita and what audiences can expect to hear?
De Souza: We've been working the last few days in London with Sally. Let me first say, it is seriously a great piece. She was telling us why the name Partita, which is inspired by Bach and his violin solos. She connected the dots, saying what she wants to say and tying it in with other works, such as Mendelssohn's Octet, which he based on Handel's Messiah. With the note structures expanding with the language she wants to use, the variety is infinite. She takes us to different sound worlds, which is exciting for an audience to hear. For those who know the connections to the referenced pieces, it can be an eye-opener. On the other hand, it's also great to have an audience without any baggage to see how they will react. With a couple performances under our belts, I think audiences will really take to it. The piece has had very positive feedback and is a great piece to perform!
Q: I saw that you were involved with the Sangat Chamber Music Festival in Mumbai. Can you talk a little bit about what the festival was like and the importance of bringing these types of music opportunities to Mumbai and to young kids?
De Souza: After twenty years, it came to a natural conclusion. It was a wonderful thing. I would invite my friends from all over the world to come all the way to Mumbai to play and teach local kids. Without question, the importance of music comes from its relevance to our lives. Any art form is so critical in our society. There's a great saying: "Art is a reason for existence." Art transcends all things, from cultural divides to economic divides, because it's about the human condition and human emotions. It doesn't matter where you come from, all people have a great need for love and caring for their kids. It's all in this music, and it's what these composers were writing about: life, love, death. That's what makes it great music; it is speaking to the human soul.
Q: The Academy of St Martin in the Fields Chamber Ensemble was created to perform larger chamber works with musicians who are regularly playing together. Do you think this camaraderie and constant working together has had a big part in setting the ensemble apart from the rest?
De Souza: I think so—very much so. For example, I used to play in a string quartet, and when we would play a sextet, we would need to invite two guests. And when you would bring together musicians for an octet, there are always questions about which violinist gets first part. [laughs] There are pros and cons either way. When I came to the academy and spent time playing together with everyone, we would enter the first rehearsal and all speak the same language. You realize that in the little time you had to rehearse, you could go so much further because you had the bases covered. Playing together in orchestra, you understand the blending of sound, and you know each other's insecurities and strengths and are able to build from that.
Q: What would you say is a common misconception about classical music? What would you say to invite and encourage more people to listen?
De Souza: Unequivocally, the most common misconception is that you have to know something about classical music in order to listen to it. This is a complete fallacy. You just need to hear it, and if you're bitten by the bug, you can go further and learn more. But you just need to listen for even one second. If for even one second it makes you cry or laugh … if it makes you feel connected, it's doing its job. Knowing more about it can always come later. Sad to say, I think we [the classical music world] are to blame, marketing it to be elitist, which I believe is a great disservice to classical music. Go back to 300 years—it was the popular music. In churches, choirs were singing these pieces. It was for everybody. And in the present, we have sectioned it off and chopped it up. It is incumbent on us to break down those barriers.
Q: How important is it to hear live music? What makes it special?
De Souza: Live music is a shared experience. With all of these streaming services, we've never had more access. But ask anybody who goes to a live performance, and they'll say what a visceral experience it is. Nothing can replicate that: those two hours in that moment on that very day. It's a totally unique experience and a critical one. I hate to add, but even more so than any other time in history, everyone is staring at screens. And it's universal, not specific to any country. We're isolating ourselves even more, and people are realizing this and how we need to go out and share our lives and experiences. Live music brings us back together. There's no political, social, or economic baggage—those things don't matter. Music doesn't discriminate. We are all just human beings, and live music helps us to remember that all that baggage really doesn't matter.
Jessica Sensenig, a recent Penn State graduate, is a feature writer for the Center for the Performing Arts.
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Sunday Reads: Cold Temps, Cold Tea and Warm Bed
Posted: November 25, 2012 | Author: Minkoff Minx | Filed under: China, Cuba, Diplomacy Nightmares, Egypt, Environment, Environmental Protection, Environmentalists, Foreign Affairs, Gaza, GLBT Rights, Hamas, Israel, Japan, Middle East, morning reads, productivity, psychology, Psychopaths in charge, racism, right wing hate grouups, science, social media, Tea Party activists, the internet | Tags: Climate change, dolphin and whale hunts, Down Syndrome, Mohamed ElBaradei, Mohamed Morsi, Motivation, NASA, NOAA, succession, Twitter and war |28 Comments
It is cold in Banjoville, we are talking low 20's, and living near the river makes the air feel damp and harsh. I've avoided the news this weekend, there is something going around…like when you have a hunch that you are coming down with a cold…but instead of dreading it, you are actually welcoming it. Why? Because it gives you a reason to sleep all day and not have to explain your crappy attitude to your family and friends.
Actually, the yesterday started very well and exciting, but when I opened the fridge and was hit with the leftover turkey fumes, it just drained all the energy out of me.
Anyway, here are some links to get you started this morning. You got your cup of Joe? Mug of tea? (My tea is already cold.) Flask of Southern Comfort? (Some may prefer whiskey or vodka, but I love me some SoCo.)
Juan Cole had an interesting post this past week, If You are 27 or younger, you've never lived through a colder than average month (Bump)
Paul Bump at Grist points out that The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported on global temperatures in October 2012 as follows:
"The average temperature across land and ocean surfaces during October was 14.63°C (58.23°F). This is 0.63°C (1.13°F) above the 20th century average and ties with 2008 as the fifth warmest October on record. The record warmest October occurred in 2003 and the record coldest October occurred in 1912. This is the 332nd consecutive month with an above-average temperature."
He then did a quick calculation, and concluded that if you were born after April, 1985, i.e. if you are 27 or younger, you have never experienced a month with a global average temperature colder than the 20th-century average. (Obviously, you may have experienced a month at lower than local averages, though that would be rare, too; the point is about world averages.)
Cole links to a video from NASA:
One thing that is not cold, is the tension in Egypt. I have a few updates that you may not have read about yet:
Egypt braces for more protests
If Sunday is anything like the last several days in Egypt, it will not be quiet.
Egypt's ElBaradei Calls on President to Rescind Near Absolute Powers
Prominent Egyptian democracy advocate Mohammed ElBaradei has called on Egypt's president to rescind the near absolute powers he has granted himself.
ElBaradei says President Mohamed Morsi must take the action to avoid the possibility of increased turmoil in the country that has recently shed its longtime repressive government.
Nobel laureate ElBaradei addressed crowds that gathered Saturday in Cairo's central square to protest President Morsi's decrees that put him above judicial oversight and protect his Islamist supporters in parliament.
Egypt's highest body of judges, the Supreme Judicial Council, also condemned President Morsi's decree. The judges Saturday called the move "an unprecedented attack" on the independence of the judiciary. Judges in Alexandria have gone on strike, saying they will not return to work until the decree is withdrawn.
Egypt rights groups and ElBaradei denounce Mursi decree
Critics and supporters of Mr Mursi have staged rallies since the decree was announced
Egypt changing
Mursi's gamble
Mursi's 100 days in power
What drove Mursi's outburst?
Foreign policy clues
More than 20 Egyptian rights groups have called on President Mohammed Mursi to withdraw the decree granting himself extensive new powers.
The 22 groups signed an open letter saying the president "has dealt a lethal blow to the Egyptian judiciary".
Meanwhile, in another part of the Middle East:
Cagle Post – Political Cartoons & Commentary – » Middle East crisis social media
Here is an op/ed from Robert Fisk: Netanyahu leads Israel into isolation Go ahead and give that a read.
I've got more news that involves two sides fighting…this time in Japan, between the right-wing Nationalist and the environmentalist: Dueling protests in Tokyo over dolphin and whale hunts
Environmentalists and nationalists held opposing rallies over the issue of Japan's dolphin and whale hunts in a rare showdown in central Tokyo on Saturday, leading to angry scenes.
About 50 anti-whaling activists gathered at a park in the Shibuya shopping district with banners bearing slogans such as "Stop the cruel dolphin hunt!" while across the street about 30 nationalists shouted "Get out of Japan!"
The nationalists accused the environmentalists of undermining Japanese culture and traditions, saying "environmental terrorists" should be sent to slaughter houses.
I can only think of that episode of South Park…Whale Whores:
Stan and his family are spending his birthday at the Denver Aquarium where they will get to swim with the dolphins. Things turn bloody when the Japanese attack, kill all the dolphins and ruin Stan's big day. There seems to be no end to the senseless killing. Stan takes on the cause to save the dolphins from the Japanese.
Down in Cuba, there is quite a stir about a recently elected official: Cuban transsexual elected to public office
Adela Hernandez hailed election triumph as another milestone in gradual shift away from macho attitudes in Caribbean country. Photograph: Ramon Espinosa/AP
A Cuban transsexual has become the first known transgender person to hold public office in the country, winning election as a delegate to the municipal government of Caibarien in the central province of Villa Clara.
Adela Hernandez, 48, hailed her election in a country where gays were persecuted for decades and sent to rural work camps as another milestone in the gradual shift away from macho attitudes in the years since Fidel Castro himself expressed regret over the treatment of people perceived to be different.
Hernandez, who has lived as a female since childhood, served two years in prison in the 1980s for "dangerousness" after her own family denounced her sexuality.
"As time evolves, homophobic people – although they will always exist – are the minority," Hernandez said by phone from her home town. Becoming a delegate "is a great triumph", she added.
This is a big deal in Cuba:
For years after the 1959 Cuban revolution, authorities hounded people of differing sexual orientation and others considered threatening, such as priests, long-haired youths and rock 'n' roll enthusiasts. But there have been notable changes in attitudes toward sexuality.
"I would like to think that discrimination against homosexuals is a problem that is being overcome," Castro told an interviewer some years ago.
Read the rest of Hernandez story at the link.
I've got another transgender, I guess it is more of a cross-dressing story for you. This one is about The 72-year-old Chinese grandfather who models teen-girl clothes I will just post a picture…you can click to see the rest.
18 November 2012 01:09 PM
offbeatchina.com
…and, what is more, looks pretty good doing it. Kate Moss, eat your heart out, the world's newest superpower has a new supermodel to match. But Liu Xianping is not your average clothes horse.
Why does that image remind me of Andy Warhol?
More newsy articles after the jump…
Let's get back to the states, this "Succession" thing is not going away.
Truckin' to Treason: The Hot Air of Secession
A white Ford F-250 pick-up rumbled through town, a Confederate rebel flag on a pole behind the cab; on the rear bumper were a pro-life and three Anti-Obama stickers, two of which could not be revealed in a family newspaper.
I think I have seen that truck driving around Banjoland…anyway, just go read the whole thing. It is good.
From a legal perspective: The Volokh Conspiracy » Public Opinion on Secession That article is also very good.
This next story caught my eye, for obvious reasons: Would I want my daughter 'cured'? The dilemma of a father whose child has Down's Syndrome
Out of America, there is always something new. The latest example of that country's unparalleled contribution to medical progress is the announcement by the University of Washington that its scientists had succeeded in removing the extra copy of chromosome 21 in cell cultures derived from a person with Down's Syndrome. Since it is the possession of three, rather than two, copies of the 21st chromosome that defines Down's Syndrome, it is clear that this breakthrough has startling potential for addressing a condition which is far and away the commonest form of congenital disability.
Again, that is just the first paragraph. My mom was talking about this new scientific possibility last week, go read the rest at the link.
One last article for you this Sunday morning…one that is the absolute opposite of what I feel right now. Three Critical Elements Sustain Motivation: Scientific American
Got motivation? Without it, the long, difficult hours of practice that elevate some people above the rest are excruciating. But where does such stamina come from, and can we have some, too? Psychologists have identified three critical elements that support motivation, all of which you can tweak to your benefit.
I'm sorry, there is no way in my apathetic, lethargic, indifferent mood I can even begin to read about the three key components of motivation…I really don't give two shits about things anyway! Boy, I am tired. (Ah…that is it, the post is over…and I can go back to bed.)
I do hope you all have a wonderful Sunday, please enjoy the last day of this long weekend. So…if you are around, stop and make a comment below, what sort of things have you been reading and thinking about today?
28 Comments on "Sunday Reads: Cold Temps, Cold Tea and Warm Bed"
JJ Lopez Minkoff says:
Here are a couple of stories I wanted to mention:
Bangladesh Fire Kills More Than 100 and Injures Many – NYTimes.com
Some states preserve penmanship despite technology gains POLITICO.com
And this link to a blog post about cursive that I think goes well with the politico one:
Typed On Paper: The Death of Cursive Writing
One more, maybe some of you have seen it…: Casey Anthony Likely Googled 'Foolproof Suffocation': Report
Okay, I'm going back to bed.
RalphB says:
Great post JJ. Hope you are well and have a lovely day.
That Chinese dude reminds me of Andy Warhol as well.
NW Luna says:
This doesn't even take into account higher numbers of hispanic voters. I'd be interested in opinions from Banjoville.
Georgia? swings in 2016
Election Day in the South told a newer and more surprising story: The nation's first black president finished more strongly in the region than any other Democratic nominee in three decades, underscoring a fresh challenge for Republicans who rely on Southern whites as their base of national support.
Obama won Virginia and Florida and narrowly missed victory in North Carolina. But he also polled as well in Georgia as any Democrat since Jimmy Carter, grabbed 44 percent of the vote in deep-red South Carolina and just under that in Mississippi — despite doing no substantive campaigning in any of those states.
The results show a region cleaving apart along new electoral fault lines. In the region's center, clustered along the Mississippi River — where Bill Clinton polled most strongly — the GOP remains largely unchallenged and the voting divide between blacks and whites is deepening. Nearly nine of 10 of white voters in Mississippi, for instance, went for Republican nominee Mitt Romney this year, according to exit polls. About 96 percent of black voters in the state supported Obama.
The pattern is markedly different in the five states that hug the Atlantic coast from Virginia to Florida, which together hold 82 of the South's 160 electoral votes. A combination of a growing black population, urban expansion, oceanfront development and in-migration from other regions has opened up increasing opportunities for Democrats in those states.
"Georgia is an achievable target for Democrats in 2016," said Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed, a frequent Obama surrogate during the campaign. "What you're going to see is the Democratic Party making a drive through the geography from Virginia to Florida."
Ralph, I will respond a bit later, when my head is not so stuffed up. Hope you are enjoying your Sunday evening.
dakinikat says:
I'm watching the Saints … nasty interception … Brees really blew this call and we're all tied up. No happiness in Mudville at the moment.
It's quiet today.
Too quiet. Is that drumming I hear in the distance? 🙂
Yup, it sure is. 😉
As to the down's syndrome news. I knew a guy with Down's who died when he was barely in his twenties from the heart problems that come with this syndrome. Would it be better if he had not been born with this disability? Also I have a daughter with a broken chromosome which is also pretty common if you group all the syndromes together. I doubt if they will be able to fix that in this millenium. We will always have handicapped children but maybe thinking they can cure something will lead to greater knowledge of what the genes do in our bodies.
The Washington Post @washingtonpost
With fewer federal research dollars, drug companies are footing the bill and creating questions of bias: http://wapo.st/10QZZOt
That's what happens when you get government out of research. Makes it easy to guess if the trials reach their endpoints or not.
Uppity Woman says:
JJ sorry to be Off Topic, but Fredster mentioned over at Widdershins that you had a problem with Firefox updating without your permission. So I thought I would post my answer here in case you didn't see it.
You can change the About:config at the url line, or you can go to TOOLS, OPTIONS, ADVANCE, UPDATE tab. You can choose NEVER CHECK FOR UPDATES or…….you can choose to be ASKED if you want the update. Note if you chose ASK, they will haunt you. They claim that there is a security risk to not updating, but frankly, I think that's bulls!t. Just make sure you have a good and current antivirus and firewall program, because if you don't, no browser, current or old, is going to protect you.
In any event, this should take care of the auto update problem from now on.
Thanks so much…I will do that. Really appreciate you posting that, and thanks to Fredster too.
You can also roll back to an older version. I did it back when they came out with the major changes and turned the whole thing into a travesty. There are websites with all the previous versions.
Site of all versions of FF.
http://www.oldapps.com/firefox.php
Oops looks like spam got me.
For sheer gaul, this has to take the cake. A spectacular failure as a CEO criticizes unions for being "rich".
Raw Story: Fiorina: 'It is not fair' that public workers are 'so rich'
Carly Fiorina, who reportedly stood to receive more than $42 million after being ousted at HP in 2005, says that public workers should receive less benefits because "it is not fair" that unions are "so rich."
She can take her $42 million and shove it. WTF, is she whining for — that she's not even more insanely filthy rich?
Why would anyone listen to a greedy incompetent stooge like Fiorina? She did her best to kill HP before they could get rid of her in the first place. Her opinion is worth less than nothing!
JJ, get as much rest as you need — hell, as much as you want. This is a great round-up of interesting stories.
Saw an story when I clicked thru on the Independent story on Down's:
Laszlo, an educational psychologist by profession, had wanted to demonstrate that what we call 'genius' is not a naturally occurring or genetically created phenomenon, but could be achieved by any child, given intensive early tuition on a one-to-one basis.
Laszlo Polgar proceeded to demonstrate his theory: his eldest daughter, Zsuzsa, became a Grandmaster and woman's world champion; and the middle daughter, Zsofia, achieved the title of International Chess Master (one rung below Grandmaster status) before abandoning the game as "not enough for me". But it was the Polgars' youngest child, Judit, who challenged all conventional thinking about the innate superiority of the male mind at chess. Unlike all other girls – or women – she refused to take part in the closed ghetto of female events and would play only in male competitions: in these, having started playing competitively at the age of six, she would chew up and spit out Grandmasters and their egos in a style combining breathtakingly direct aggression with lethal tactical trickery. ….
And when I first started going out with Gusztav he would say, 'My God, you are looking at things with a man's brain'. Well, that's how I live. People say I'm tough and harsh. But the truth is that it's just not acceptable for a woman to be self-confident."
I thought the story illuminates that "male" and "female" ways of thinking and behaving are not dictated by the person's gonads.
I saw that story too Luna, it almost went into the post. Oh, I don't know what is wrong with me, maybe allergies? Yuk.
Does sound yukky. IIRC, there are over 200 different upper respiratory viruses. Mutating all the time, just slightly different forms, so our bodies get exposed to new ones they haven't made antibodies against.
It's not your fault if you get sick.
Greywolf says:
Reminds me a bit of grad school; my advisor occasionally complained that I had a 'male' attitude. I said that since men dominate the field, that should be a good thing, but he disagreed.
It shouldn't be wrong to be different, and gender shouldn't dictate thinking.
"male attitude" LOL! Your advisor must have had a problem with insecurity.
Yeah, I've been told that too. As far back as junior high (if not earlier). I think it had something to do with growing up without TV and the "appropriate" role models, fortunately.
I just read that 10% of Microsoft employees in the USA are hired on a H-1B visa. Then I thought about all those Americans with tech experience who can't find jobs.
Microsoft is so eager to find qualified engineers and programmers for its thousands of vacancies that it has offered to pay a bounty to the government in exchange for extra visas in order to import more foreign workers. …. But the tactic may have backfired. ….
Researchers claim that some companies use the visas to bypass older, more expensive American job seekers. And some economists question contentions by Microsoft and other technology firms about a dearth of domestic high-tech talent. But most troubling to critics is the fact many employers need not prove they are unable to find qualified Americans before turning to foreign hires. [emphasis added]
….Norm Matloff, professor of computer science at the University of California, Davis who has analyzed H-1B visas, argues the guest workers should command premium salaries given their presumed sought-after skills. Yet according to Matloff's research, the foreigners as a group are underpaid compared to American citizens and permanent residents with comparable experience. "The fundamental motivation is cheap labor," Matloff said.
http://seattletimes.com/text/2019758596.html
As someone who worked in that industry for years, I can guarantee the truth of those allegations. Cheap labor is what it's always been about and not a lack of American talent.
Thursday Open Thread skydancingblog.com/2022/01/20/thu… 1 hour ago