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A Reality Check for IBM's AI Ambitions
IBM, number 39 on our list of the 50 Smartest Companies, overhyped its Watson machine-learning system, but the company still could have the best access to the kind of data needed to make medicine much smarter.
by David H. Freedman
Leonard Greco
Paul Tang was with his wife in the hospital just after her knee replacement surgery, a procedure performed on about 700,000 people in the U.S. every year. The surgeon came by, and Tang, who is himself a primary-care physician, asked when he expected her to be back at her normal routines, given his experience with patients like her. The surgeon kept giving vague non-answers. "Finally it hit me," says Tang. "He didn't know." Tang would soon learn that most physicians don't know how their patients do in the ordinary measures of life back at home and at work—the measures that most matter to patients.
Tang still sees patients as a physician, but he's also chief health transformation officer for IBM's Watson Health (see "50 Smartest Companies 2017.") That's the business group developing health-care applications for Watson, the machine-learning system that IBM is essentially betting its future on. Watson could deliver information that physicians are not getting now, says Tang. It could tell a doctor, for instance, how long it took for patients similar to Tang's wife to be walking without pain, or climbing stairs. It could even help analyze images and tissue samples and determine the best treatments for any given patient.
It's because of possibilities like this that health care is one of the hottest segments of the market for machine-learning technologies. Research firm CB Insights counts at least 106 startups that have sprung up since 2013 and are still in business.
None of those companies has garnered anywhere near the attention that Watson has, thanks to its victory on the television quiz show Jeopardy! in 2011 and zealous marketing by IBM ever since. But lately, much of the press for Watson has been bad. A heavily promoted collaboration with the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston fell apart this year. As IBM's revenue has swooned and its stock price has seesawed, analysts have been questioning when Watson will actually deliver much value. "Watson is a joke," Chamath Palihapitiya, an influential tech investor who founded the VC firm Social Capital, said on CNBC in May.
However, most of the criticism of Watson, even from M.D. Anderson, doesn't seem rooted in any particular flaw in the technology. Instead, it's a reaction to IBM's overly optimistic claims of how far along Watson would be by now. In fact, it still seems likely that Watson Health will be a leader in applying AI to health care's woes. If Watson has not, as of yet, accomplished a great deal along those lines, one big reason is that it needs certain types of data to be "trained." And in many cases such data is in very short supply or difficult to access. That's not a problem unique to Watson. It's a catch-22 facing the entire field of machine learning for health care.
Though the problem of missing and inaccessible data may slow Watson down, it may hurt IBM's competitors more. That's because the best bet for getting the data lies in close partnerships with large health-care organizations that tend to be technologically conservative. And one thing IBM still does very well in comparison to startups, or even giant rivals like Apple and Google, is gain the trust of executives and IT managers at big organizations. The specific problems with the M.D. Anderson project notwithstanding, IBM has a crucial advantage. It's getting Watson inside a wide range of medical centers, health-care administration groups, and life-science companies, all of which are positioned to provide the critical data needed to shape AI's future in medicine.
Unrealistic timelines
The breakup with M.D. Anderson seemed to show IBM choking on its own hype about Watson.
The cancer center and IBM partnered in 2012. The goal was for Watson to read data about any patient's symptoms, gene sequence, and pathology reports, combine it with physicians' notes on the patient and relevant journal articles, and then help doctors come up with diagnoses and treatments. But IBM and M.D. Anderson both overinflated expectations for the technology. IBM claimed in 2013 that "a new era of computing has emerged" and gave Forbes the impression that Watson "now tackles clinical trials" and would be in use with patients in just a matter of months. In 2015, the Washington Post quoted an IBM Watson manager describing how Watson was busy establishing a "collective intelligence model between machine and man." The Post said that the computer system was "training alongside doctors to do what they can't."
"Health care has been an embarrassingly late adopter of technology," says Manish Kohli, a physician and health-care informatics expert with the Cleveland Clinic.
In February of this year, the University of Texas, which runs M.D. Anderson, announced it had shuttered the project, leaving the medical center out $39 million in payments to IBM—for a project originally contracted at $2.4 million. After four years it had not produced a tool for use with patients that was ready to go beyond pilot tests. M.D. Anderson wouldn't comment to me about Watson specifically, but it appears that the problems stemmed mainly from internal struggles over how the project was managed and funded.
That's not to say IBM has no troubles with Watson. Indeed, they're larger than what any one implementation reveals.
To understand what's slowing the progress, you have to understand how machine-learning systems like Watson are trained. Watson "learns" by continually rejiggering its internal processing routines in order to produce the highest possible percentage of correct answers on some set of problems, such as which radiological images reveal cancer. The correct answers have to be already known, so that the system can be told when it gets something right and when it gets something wrong. The more training problems the system can chew through, the better its hit rate gets.
That's relatively simple when it comes to training the system to identify malignancies in x-rays. But for potentially groundbreaking puzzles that go well beyond what humans already do, like detecting the relationships between gene variations and disease, Watson has a chicken-and-egg problem: how does it train on data that no experts have already sifted through and properly organized? "If you're teaching a self-driving car, anyone can label a tree or a sign so the system can learn to recognize it," says Thomas Fuchs, a computational pathologist at Memorial Sloan-Kettering, a cancer center in New York. "But in a specialized domain in medicine, you might need experts trained for decades to properly label the information you feed to the computer."
Some version of that stumbling block emerges in every domain in which IBM hopes to have Watson contribute—as it does for any company's machine-learning solution. To train Watson to go through giant pools of data and pull out the few pieces of information important to a single patient, someone has to do it by hand first, for thousands and thousands of cases. To recognize genes linked to disease, Watson needs thousands of records of patients who have specific diseases and whose DNA has been analyzed. But those gene-and-patient-record combinations can be hard to come by. In many cases, the data simply doesn't exist in the right format—or in any form at all. Or the data may be scattered throughout dozens of different systems, and difficult to work with.
Consider, for example, the goal of improving primary care by placing better data at the fingertips of clinicians. When doctors miss chances to treat relatively minor concerns during a routine primary-care visit, before a more advanced problem sends patients to an emergency room or a specialist, their health suffers and costs explode. "About one-third of every dollar spent on health is probably unnecessary," says Anil Jain, IBM Watson Health's chief medical officer, who is also a practicing primary-care physician. Machine learning is widely recognized as an opportunity to address that problem.
To really help doctors get better outcomes for patients, however, Watson will need to find correlations between what it reads in health records and what Tang calls "all the social determinants of health." Those factors include whether patients are drug-free, avoiding the wrong foods, breathing clean air, and on and on. But Tang concedes that today almost no hospitals or medical practices get that data reliably for a significant percentage of patients. Part of the problem is that hospitals have been slow to take up modern, data-driven practices. "Health care has been an embarrassingly late adopter of technology," says Manish Kohli, a physician and health-care informatics expert with the Cleveland Clinic.
Where the data does exist, IBM has often simply gone out and bought it. It has acquired companies such as Truven Health Analytics, Explorys, and Phytel, all of which were active in dealing with large data sets across hospitals and patient populations. And even after the demise of the M.D. Anderson deal, IBM has some critical partnerships that further its access to patient data.
One of them is with Atrius Health, a network of nearly 900 mostly primary-care physicians throughout the Boston area. The partnership aims to develop and test a Watson-based system capable of pulling out nuggets of information critical to an individual patient from an ocean of notes, records, and articles. "Seeking all the relevant information is an onerous job for primary-care physicians as things exist today," says Atrius's chief medical officer, Joe Kimura. Electronic health records may have made the problem even worse, he adds, because the advent of such systems has enormously increased the amount of data generated in each visit, without providing a standard format to allow easy retrieval.
Critically, many of the most important notes in patient records are sentences that a conventional IT system can't make sense of. But Watson can apply the natural-language-processing skills developed for Jeopardy! in order to extract meaning from them. Ideally, it could then suggest ways physicians can help patients avoid the need for extensive care. "Why should we focus only on making sure we've done as good a job as possible with patients who break a hip," asks Kimura, "when we can try to predict which patients are at risk for falls and help them not break the hip at all? We need to push our care upstream."
A leukemia doctor at M.D. Anderson, Courtney DiNardo, used IBM's Watson system while consulting with a patient in 2013.
IBM announced in 2015 that Watson's diagnostic capabilities would be boosted by data obtained from Merge Healthcare, a medical imaging management company that IBM bought for about $1 billion.
Watson Health is also partnering with the Central New York Care Collaborative, a state-government-funded agency that works with some 2,000 health-care providers in six counties. The partnership is intended to support the goal of a 25 percent reduction in emergency room admissions and hospital readmissions, when patients who have been discharged from a hospital have to return to address related problems. It also provides potential access to vast amounts of patient data.
There are other ways to get such data. One of Google's sister companies is trying to get it directly from patients themselves. Verily Life Sciences, a health-care division of Alphabet, is partnering with Duke and Stanford to develop a highly structured health database on some 10,000 volunteers. The database will be filled with information not only from their clinical visits but also from wearable health-monitoring devices. That could be a promising leap in data access, though it could take a decade or more to produce highly usable results.
Fuchs's group at Memorial Sloan-Kettering hopes to train an AI system to read tissue-stain slides, a process that will require a large library of digitally annotated slides with confirmed diagnoses and other critical data. So the group is gearing up to produce 40,000 such slides a month on its own. "That's far more than anyone else," Fuchs says. "It's an enormous task because of all the variability in biology."
Even M.D. Anderson, despite the fate of the Watson project, is continuing a large program that began around the same time, focused on gathering 1,700 types of clinical data on every patient who walks in its doors. Andy Futreal, the scientist who runs the program, says combining that patient information with research data will be crucial for the sorts of capabilities that systems like Watson could provide. "Once we have the data in place, now you can get into the business of AI machine learning uncovering those factors dictating who does and who doesn't do well with different treatments," says Futreal.
IBM, for its part, continues to rack up data from partnerships. For cancer diagnosis and care alone, the company has partnered with Memorial Sloan-Kettering, the Mayo Clinic, the Harvard- and MIT-affiliated Broad Institute, and medical-test giant Quest Diagnostics. The Memorial Sloan-Kettering collaboration has already produced a system that sifts through journal literature to inform treatment decisions, and it has been rolled out to the Jupiter Medical Center in Florida and a hospital chain in India. On the drug-discovery front, Watson Health is working with the Barrow Neurological Institute, where Watson helped find five genes linked to ALS that had never before been associated with the disease, and with the Ontario Brain Institute, where Watson identified 21 promising potential drug candidates.
Will Watson eventually make a difference in improving health outcomes and lowering costs? Probably, says Stephen Kraus, a partner at the VC firm Bessemer Venture Partners who focuses on health care and has invested in AI health-care startups. "It's all for real," says Kraus. "This isn't about putting out vaporware in order to boost stock prices." But Kraus joins most experts in cautioning against unrealistic timelines or promises—some of which have come from IBM itself. "This is hard," he says. "It's not happening today, and it might not be happening in five years. And it's not going to replace doctors."
TaggedArtificial Intelligence
David H. Freedman


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Royal Institute of Philosophy events
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Philosophy Research Seminar - Dr Wesley Buckwalter (Manchester)
15:10 - 16:50 05 February 2020
*Title: The Replication Crisis and Philosophy *Abstract: The replication crisis is perceived by many as one of the most significant threats to the reliability of research in cognitive science. Though news of the replication crisis has been dominated by social psychology, all signs indicate that it likely extends to several other fields. This..
Philosophy Research Seminar - Olly Spinney (Manchester)
*Title: Bipolarity, Logical Truth, and the General Form of the Proposition *Abstract: Wittgenstein was, in his early period, committed to the principle of 'bipolarity'. The principle states that it is constitutive of something's possessing a sense that it be capable of truth and capable of falsehood. Commitment to the principle, therefo..
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Metallica Is Making An Illustrated Children's Book
Fans Are Drawing Amazing Art Inspired By Halle Bailey's Casting As Ariel In 'The Little Mermaid'
This Blind Veteran's Soulful Performance On 'America's Got Talent' Was A Crowd Favorite
Disney Is Launching A New Kids' TV Show About Dinosaurs
The whole family will love this!
Bridget Sharkey 2019-01-08
Bridget Sharkey · January 8, 2019
Here is something kids and adults of all ages can agree upon: Dinosaurs are really cool.
Disney will tap into this universal dino-love by bringing a new show to Disney Junior viewers this month — on Jan. 18, to be exact.
The animated series "Gigantosaurus" is based on the book by Jonny Duddle. The story is similar to the "Boy Who Cried Wolf," except this time, four dinosaur pals are on a hunt for the big, bad Gigantosaurus.
And, yes, for those who are wondering, Giganotosaurus is indeed the name of a real dinosaur. It was larger than the Tyrannosaurus rex…and it was faster. Yikes!
But don't let those facts scare you. The series "Gigantosaurus" will be a feel-good program in which friendship between four young dinos (Rocky, Bill, Tiny and Mazu) is the focus, along with themes of independence, curiosity, problem-solving and kindness. The dinosaurs will be voiced by Dylan Schombing ("Sharp Objects, "The Slap"), Benjamin Jacobson ("Nina's World) and Áine Sunderland ("My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic").
Disney Junior offered a sneak peek at the new series on their YouTube Channel:
It looks like these dino friends will be going on adventures that could take them anywhere. And if you're hoping for hints about the show's plots, you're unlikely to get any from the book's author and illustrator. When Duddle explained the inspiration behind the stories he creates in an interview, he made it sound like he just lets his imagination run wild.
"My picture books evolve over many months, or sometimes years, with the words and pictures feeding each other until an idea becomes more solid," he said. "I only illustrate my own picture books, so the writing is intimately connected to the artwork and a book idea might stem from a single sketch or a single sentence."
Check out a quick clip of the "Gigantosaurus" theme song (which you might be hearing on repeat soon if your kids like the show) below:
Check. It. Out! It's the #Gigantosaurus theme song. Don't miss the premiere January 18 at 9a on #DisneyChannel! pic.twitter.com/dNKpq7rurq
— Disney Junior (@DisneyJunior) January 2, 2019
The show will air on Disney Channel at 9 a.m. on Jan. 18. You can also watch it on the DisneyNOW app or via cable alternatives like SlingTV.
Tags:2019 tvbooksdinosaursdisneyDisney JuniorGigantosauruskidsnew TV showstelevision
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A look at the biggest movies coming out in 2019


Radio Bristol presents the Farm & Fun Time variety show, live from the Birthplace of Country Music Museum with the award-winning bluegrass group Flatt Lonesome and the old-time acoustics of Uncle Shuffelo & His Haint Hollow Hootenanny.
From the moment of their brilliant self-titled debut in 2013, it's been clear that Flatt Lonesome is, as the title of its third album a Runaway Train. Multiple IBMA, SPBGMA, and Dove nominations and awards, top charting songs, Billboard charting albums, countless media appearances (including becoming familiar faces on the legendary Grand Ole Opry stage), and a demanding tour schedule all combine in testimony to the phenomenon that is Flatt Lonesome.
Uncle Shuffelo & His Haint Hollow Hootenanny is a seven-piece, old-time string band from Rover, Tennessee with a mission to relieve stress, give off good vibes, and cause a general feeling of well-being in all people, while promoting the awesomeness of old-time music. They can be counted on to deliver a high-energy performance influenced by Uncle Dave Macon, Grandpa Jones, The Carter Family, and other old-time greats.


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The Quill Weather Vane of Swarthmore College
By Steve | December 1, 2005
When I traveled to Louisville in 2005 to shut down the old family home after my father's death, I had no idea of the depth and complexity of the history I was about to inherit. Suddenly I was the lone curator of artifacts spanning centuries… families, Quakers, Swarthmore, GE, the 1930s modeling scene in New York, Star sailing, railroads of the late 1800s, ice cube trays, and tonnage. So much tonnage.
One of the things I loosely classed as "eBayable" was a six-foot copper quill weather vane that had been hanging on the den wall all my life. People collect such things… so I knew it would find a home but be a pain to ship.
One day I noticed an ancient Swarthmore campus photo… with my quill atop Parrish Hall! I started digging, and discovered that this was a precious piece of campus history, thought lost since the 1930s. Apparently my dad had rescued it from the scrap heap during renovation in 1936, unable to resist. Hey, it might come in handy someday…
Ever since my infancy, this copper weather vane had hung over the the couch where I read, studied, listened to music, and talked on the phone. It is an iconic image of my childhood.
Knowing how my father would have felt about what to do next, I abandoned plans to eBay the quill and contacted the college. They were ecstatic, and we agreed on a token price as well as plans for an alumnus to come pick it up. This article in the Swarthmore College Bulletin came out at the end of 2005, and tells the story. (A PDF of the full issue is here.)
A Piece of Parrish's Past Returns
by Susan Clarey
Swarthmore College Bulletin
NEARLY 70 YEARS AFTER ITS DEPARTURE from atop Parrish Hall, a 19th-century weather vane has come home.
Typical of architectural ornamentation in the late 1800s, the copper weather vane is 6 feet long and shaped like a quill. Although an exact date has not been established, it was installed sometime between 1882, when Parrish was rebuilt after the 1881 fire, and 1893, when its photo appears in The Halcyon.
The weather vane registered the changing winds on campus for decades. During a renovation of Parrish in the mid-1930s, however, it had apparently reached the end of its useful life. It was scrapped—and then plucked from the trash heap by the late Edward Roberts '36, according to a letter later written by Roberts to his father, Chester. At the time, Chester Roberts was the College's superintendent in charge of the physical plant. Edward's mother, Abby Hall Roberts, graduated from Swarthmore in 1890 and went on to become secretary and treasurer of Phi Beta Kappa, Epsilon Chapter of Pennsylvania. An engineering major, Edward Roberts grew up down the street from the College in a house on the corner of College Avenue and Chester Road.
After graduation, Roberts and the weather vane made their way from Swarthmore to Jeffersontown, Ky., near Louisville, where he went to work for General Electric. When Roberts died in July, his son Steven offered the weather vane to the College for a sum considerably less than its $5,000 appraised value. The College welcomed the return of this piece of Swarthmore history and persuaded Roger '60 and Diane Marshall Shott '61 of nearby Anchorage, Ky., to store the weather vane in their barn until shipment back to Swarthmore could be arranged in the fall.
After undergoing minor repairs, the weather vane will be prominently displayed in the newly renovated Parrish Hall.
The den was my office during the six-month project to shut down the family home, and this photo was taken in the summer of 2005, about when I contacted Swarthmore about the quill. That's me in the blue shorts, holding a glass insulator; my guest is old friend Dave Aton.
Posted in Historical Documents and tagged Swarthmore
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On 31 October starting at 2:00 pm CET (9:00 AM EST), the ETCBC will livestream the main program of ETCBC≥40: Celebrating 40 Years of Bible and Computer. The event features presentations by researchers and guests of the ETCBC, beginning with a special presentation by Eep Talstra and finishing with presentations that feature the latest work at the center. See the links below for the livestream and program information!
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Please join us for a fun filled afternoon to help PTO raise money to support Christ the King Montessori School. The raised money will go towards needed materials for classrooms.
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Glucagon-Like Peptide-1 and its Cardiovascular Effects.
Recently, the crucial role of GLP-1 in cardiovascular disease has been suggested by both preclinical and clinical studies. In vivo and in vitro studies have demonstrated cardio-protective effects of GLP-1 by activating cell survival signal pathways, which have greatly reduced ischemia/reperfusion injury and also cardiac dysfunction in various congestive heart failure animal models. Clinically, beneficial effects of GLP-1 have been shown in patients with myocardial infarction, hypertension, and heart failure, and 2 classes of incretin enhancers, GLP-1 receptor agonists and DPP-4 inhibitors, are currently available for the treatment of type 2 diabetes mellitus. In this review, we will summarize the role of incretins in various cardiovascular events such as hypertension and heart failure and postprandial lipoprotein secretion, and discuss their molecular mechanisms and potentials as a new therapeutic as well as preventive drug type for reducing cardiovascular events in both diabetic and nondiabetic patients.
15464327 - Ultrasound energy improves myocardial perfusion in the presence of coronary occlusion.
17090767 - Systolic and diastolic heart failure in the community.
Aab Cardiovascular Research Institute, University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry, 601 Elmwood Ave, Box CVRI, Rochester, NY, 14642, USA, kyung-sun_heo@urmc.rochester.edu.
Previous Document: Characterization of mammary cancer stem cells in the MMTV-PyMT mouse model.


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Jerusalem Post Opinion Op-EdContributors
A positive media message for the New Year
Media Comment: Israel's Hebrew print scene seems to be changing. We now will have two post-Zionist-oriented papers and two Zionist-oriented ones.
By YISRAEL MEDAD, ELI POLLAK
Ma'ariv R370
(photo credit: Reuters/Nir Elias)
It was The New Yorker's Abbott J. Liebling, who also wrote the "Wayward Press" media critique column, that famously asserted that "Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one."
Journalist Jack Shafer's 2004 reference to Liebling as having "portrayed the press as a comic circus populated with evil clowns, union-busting lions, and crookeder than usual carnies performing inside a tent that could go up in flames at any moment" should be just as famous.
One has to admit there is a certain contradiction between the idea that a truly democratic society is dependent on a free unfettered press and the reality that that same press, which is expected to confront, criticize, investigate and face down political, cultural and economic power, needs financial support to exist. Without financial investment and profits, the private-sector media collapses.
This past week, we learned that the Discount Investment Group headed by Nochi Dankner will be selling the Ma'ariv daily newspaper to Hirsch Media head Shlomo Ben-Tzvi, who also publishes the Makor Rishon newspaper.
Ben-Tzvi founded a cable television channel a decade ago, Tchelet, but it ceased broadcasting three years later.
He later purchased Hatzofe, the National Religious Party's newspaper for seven decades and Nekuda, the intellectual monthly of the Council of Jewish Communities in Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip, which existed for 30 years. They were "merged" into the weekly Makor Rishon, which became a daily in 2007 with Ben-Tzvi becoming editor-in-chief.
During the years 2006-7, he pioneered with Sheldon Adelson the concept of a free daily paper, Israeli, but it closed, amid litigation.
One immediate challenge faced by the presumed new owner is the fate of Ma'ariv's staff. It is expected that no more than 20 percent of those currently employed will be retained. But the more important issue for the new owner and his editorial management are the attempts already being made to deny the new Ma'ariv-Makor Rishon professional legitimacy.
Already, the radical anti-Zionist +972 web site has employed such epithets as "ultra-rightist" and "extremely conservative," but nevertheless had to admit that Makor Rishon has "a reputation for high-quality reporting and analysis."
The Associated Press, reflecting input from the biased local Israeli press, described publisher Ben-Tzvi as "hardline religious."
In a September 9 column in Haaretz, Peace Now's Yariv Oppenheimer launched a political assault. Ben-Tzvi, he wrote, in collusion with Dankner, a crass financier, was planning "to make Ma'ariv the mouthpiece representing a one-dimensional world view." Oppenheimer sees its journalists becoming "servants of a clear political agenda" forced to dictate "a one-sided, right-wing, nationalreligious political ideology."
That Haaretz and Yediot Aharonot have been mouthing a one-sided, left-wing, professionally unethical opposition to Binyamin Netanyahu is a fact Oppenheimer conveniently ignores.
An Haaretz editorial had a different line, claiming that "the current owner [Dankner]... bought the paper to promote his economic and personal agenda, [but that] the purchase of Ma'ariv by a professional publisher who understands the media business is the right move."
The objection raised by the editorial was that the concentration of media outlets into the hands of a few individuals is harmful to democracy in itself.
THE PRESS scene today, in an open and robustly democratic Israel, with four newspapers in Hebrew – Yediot, Ma'ariv/Makor Rishon, Israel Hayom and Haaretz – differs, paradoxically, from that of the early days of the state when a much more hegemonic Mapai-led government heavy-handedly dominated public discourse.
Even The Jerusalem Post was visited at times by Moshe Sharrett, who "assisted" in the composition of its editorials.
Party organs such as Herut, HaBoker, Davar, Al HaMishmar, the afore-mentioned Hatzofe and others are no more. The haredi (ultra-Orthodox) community still manages to maintain several competing organs.
Ma'ariv, until the 1980s, was considered a bastion of Zionist Revisionism, sympathetic to the Herut party's nationalist outlook but not its mouthpiece, before veering to the Left. Moshe Zak, Uri Keisari, Shmuel Schnitzer, Shalom Rosenfeld and Aryeh Dissenchik, all former members of the Betar youth movement, were its backbone.
Dosh, its outstanding caricaturist, drew cartoons for the Lehi underground broadsheet. In the 1960s, Geulah Cohen and Moshe Shamir joined the paper.
Oppenheimer and others need not overexcite themselves.
The paper could said to be returning to its roots.
Another aspect is that the break-off of Ma'ariv from Yediot Aharonot early in 1948 was a precursor to the "private economic and marketing interest vs. the interest of public responsibility" conflict, which is perhaps again being perhaps out today.
Yehudah Mozes and Azriel Carlebach had a falling out and Ma'ariv became a paper of journalists, owned by them, rather than being a commercial money-making venture.
IN 1920, Nikolai Lenin was quoted as saying: "Why should freedom of speech and freedom of the press be allowed? ...Ideas are much more fatal things than guns.
Why should any man be allowed to buy a printing press and disseminate pernicious opinion calculated to embarrass the government?" The denigration of the sale of Ma'ariv by far-left figures, whose less-than-honest concern for pluralism and democracy is merely a facade, is nothing more than reconstituted Leninism.
Shafer, quoted above, had another observation: "The press-critic racket has been dominated by liberals and leftists whose critiques have usually owed more to their political mind-sets than to the media they consume."
But it is not the "press-critic racket" here that they dominate but, as had been highlighted in our columns, too much of the mainstream media, and not only the privately-owned press but the state broadcasting systems including the IBA's television and radio outlets, the IDF's Army Radio and much of the Second Radio and Television Authority networks that are either too lax in enforcing their ethical obligations or actively pursue ideological agendas by exploiting their microphones and cameras.
In a 2004 book published in Israel, Our Story: The National Narrative in the Israeli Press, author Ya'acov Yadgar's thesis was that between 1967 and 2000 the championing of a national narrative by the press underwent extensive alteration, from the exclusivist Israeli- Jewish identity formulation to one more universal, humanist and peace-oriented. His study also asserts that the journalists exhibited patterns of extreme mobilization in the furtherance of this change.
This selling and buying of Ma'ariv might very well break the stranglehold Israel's elite leftist camp possesses, which is not only political but also cultural. As detailed in the studies of Haifa University's Dr. Eli Avraham, for example, in his 2002 book The Hidden Israel, the Left has consistently marginalized significant elements of Israel's society.
Israel's Hebrew print scene seems to be changing. We now will have two post-Zionist-oriented papers and two Zionist-oriented ones. This seems to be an optimistic message for the New Year. Israeli is maturing, and even its media is no longer monolithic.
The authors are, respectively, vice chairman and chairman of Israel's Media Watch www.imw.org.il.


If you are looking to be near it all, Tarrytown may be for you. Tarrytown lends itself as one of Austin's most exclusive areas—large homes on large lots. Not only are residents close to downtown Austin and theUniversity of Texas, they also enjoy their proximity to Lake Austin. Families can enjoy Reed Park and Pool or a day on the lake. Residents also enjoy restaurants, such as, Fabi and Rosi and Hula Hut.Mozart's is popular among the coffee crowd and offers its patrons a lakeside environment. Tarrytown's homes range from the $200s to a crowning $15m.


Friday I was going to stay up late to work on things but I didn't. I went to bed around midnight.
To make a long story short, I played with my new Canon camcorder. Saturday I installed my new hard-drive on my laptop. It took a few hours to install it using the recovery CD.
I just finished running memtest86, to check for memory errors, on my new RAM I ordered.
I am going to upgrade my PC's at home, probably next weekend, can't wait hope anything goes okay.


A fortnight prior to the great event of the canonisation of Saint Teresa, Don Bosco High School & Junior College, Naigaon began its efforts to make each & every child aware of, & appreciate this event. Posters on boards in the corridors & in every class carried the pictures, of this 'Saint of the gutters' along with her most famous quotes & good work.
Special assemblies were held replete with speeches & power point presentations on her life & works. Subjects like Personality Development and Value Education were used to propagate the importance of the values Mother Teresa portrayed all through her life. All through these days the main board in the lobby displayed simple but meaningful Mother Teresa quotations. Students were also urged to view the canonisation 'live' on TV by the Principal & the Manager.
Project work in some classes were based on the life and good work of this great Saint who the world knew always as our beloved 'Mother Teresa'.


Forged Brass Flare Fittings for OD sized soft roll copper tubing. These fittings are suitable for water, oil and all gaseous fuels these fittings come in multiple sizes so be sure to choose the right size flare fitting for the OD sized copper that you are using. Just remember forged brass fittings is the only type of brass fitting that may be used in propane or natural gas applications. COMES IN PACKAGE OF FIVE.


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December 5, 2019 by Amy Stone
Women's Narratives on Film Create Something Far from a Feel-Good Zionist Experience
The Other Israel Film Festival is not meant to be a feel good Zionist experience. In its 13th year at Manhattan's Marlene Meyerson JCC, the eight days of films about minorities and women opened with "Advocate," the documentary on crusading lawyer Lea Tsemel. After nearly 50 years, no longer a foul-mouthed babe in micro minis, Tsemel's still defending Palestinian political prisoners. She sardonically jokes that she's never won a case, but continues to play her advantages as a woman and a Jew. The festival closed with the even darker narrative "Screwdriver." It's the relentlessly hopeless tale of a West Bank man welcomed back as a hero by the media, his friends and family after years in an Israeli prison, taking the rap for an attempted murder. His loving family, opportunity for employment, and attractiveness to women can't save him.
The mid-November festival was punctuated by Gaza rockets fired deep into Israel, Benny Gantz unable to form a cabinet, and the U.S. reversing its 40-year-policy, giving Israel the go-ahead on settlements in the West Bank.
In this environment, female filmmakers represent a spirit of persistence and the hope embodied by creativity itself. At its simplest, the short "Girl on a Bike," the first film by young Palestinian Israeli Dekra Zohir Makalda, is the nine-minute hint of change in an Arab village. A teenager, head covered, just wants to ride her bicycle, circling her family-approved suitor almost as if she's rounding him up. When he refuses to support her bike riding, she leaves him in the dust, saying, "Who do you think you are? My father?" She's a new generation.
The four-minute "Arabic Friday," directed by Gal Rosenbluth, zeroes in on the cultural dominance of Hebrew as the language of the Jewish State. A young Israeli couple – Jewish woman, Palestinian man – agree to speak only Arabic one day a week. Miscommunication and anger follow. Rosenbluth and her real life Palestinian boyfriend are developing a rom-com TV series about a couple much like themselves. Describing themselves via Skype as the "confused generation," hopefully they'll be mining the complexities of gender and race in Israel's macho society where the woman is the second sex but as the Jew wields power.
Then there's the triumph of determination. Emmanuelle Mayer, 39, spent 10 years filming "A Fish Tale," the documentary of a couple from Ghana living in Israel. Johnny wants to bring the skills of Israel's modern fish farming back to Africa. Thérèse, after more than a decade in Israel, has become an independent woman and sees no future for herself or her children back home. When Israel forces foreign workers to leave, crisis ensues.
A FISH TALE TRAILER eng from Emmanuela Mayer on Vimeo.
Interviewed in a Chelsea, Manhattan, café, Mayer said she began working on "zero budget, never knowing if anyone would see it, it was a story I had to tell," even though "Israeli society is not so interested in hearing stories of black people." In fact, the film won the Audience Award at this year's Jerusalem Film Festival.
Mayer, whose family moved from France to Israel when she was three, is one of some dozen successful Israeli women cinematographers. Currently six months pregnant, she worked into her eighth month during her first pregnancy, shooting a TV series about female pilots. She "insisted on getting hired when pregnant. They just had to pay more insurance" to cover a pregnant cinematographer. Her initial connection to Johnny in "A Fish Tale" was teaching him how to use a video camera.
In New York, Emmanuelle Mayer, director of "A Fish Tale," with her mother, Josiane Mayer, with baby in production inside.
Photo credit: Amy Stone
Film can start change. "A Fish Tale" changed the thinking of Carole Zabar, who created the OIFF and continues to fund it through the JCC's Carole Zabar Center for Film, which is directed by Isaac Zablocki. After seeing "A Fish Tale," she now feels foreign workers should be allowed into Israel even if, as non-Jews, they can never become Israeli citizens. "Israel letting in 50,000 foreign workers without a plan for them really made me ponder how to conceive of a solution."
And what about the solution that eludes life for Palestinians? Would that Mira Awad's new Israeli TV series "Muna" could be progress, not escapism. Definitely heartening: Awad, a Palestinian Israeli woman, has created her own TV series. She stars as one hot Palestinian Israeli photographer, involved with a Jewish boyfriend, taunting her apolitical Palestinian assistant. She's in her Tel Aviv bubble until Israeli's 2014 military operation in Gaza escalates.
Awad came to fame as Israel's first Arab finalist in the Eurovision Song Contest then played a major role in the sitcom "Arab Labor." She uses "Muna" to dig into subplots of abuse and conflict within families. And that's just in the first two episodes screened at the OIFF. Early on, when Awad wanted to talk about her music, the media just wanted to tell the story of the Arab girl from the village emancipated in Tel Aviv. She realized, "If I didn't take control of the narrative, they'd keep telling [their version of] my story." Now 44, she's using her TV series to tell "the story of coexistence, the importance of having diversity of narrative – women's rights, children's rights. It's a tactic. It's all storytelling tactics." And women have long been the storytellers of the tribe.
Over the eight days of the festival, we kept seeing multiple generations of women using whatever tactics work to push for change. Cue the strong women in their 70s – Lea Tsemel and Carole Zabar. And younger women — Emmanuelle Mayer and Mira Awad. And, hopefully, much younger women – like the recent college graduate Dekra Zohir Makalda, the Palestinian Israeli making her first film.
Tags: Advocate, Leah Tsemel, Other Israel Film Festival
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Q: Doing a practice grabbing info from a file in matplotlib So i am new to matplotlib and i was using a youtube video and the recreate its code and see if that works for me. The code is below,
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

x=[]
y=[]
readFile = open('attempt2.txt', 'r')
sepFile= readFile.read().split('/n')
readFile.close()

for batman in sepFile:
    xAndy = batman.split(',')
    x.append(int(xAndy[0]))
    y.append(int(xAndy[1]))

print x
print y

plt.plot(x,y)

plt.title('attempt 2')
plt.xlabel('attempt 2 x')
plt.ylabel('attempt 2 y')

plt.show()

When i run this code,the error says:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "attempt_2.py", line 13, in <module>
y.append(int(xAndy[1]))
ValueError: invalid literal for int() with base 10: '5\n2'

I am not sure what i am doing wrong and what this error means. Any help would be appreciated.

A: You made the very easily-overlooked error of mistaking the \ and / characters. The file-reading line should look like sepFile = readFile.read().split('\n'), as it is \n and not /n that ends a line.

A: so i figured out what was happening, there were some empty lines at the end of the data and i just had to make a modification to the len of the xAndY
for plotpair in sepFile:
xandy = plotpair.split(',')
if len(xandy)>1:
    x.append(int(float(xandy[0])))
    y.append(int(float(xandy[1])))

This took care of the problem

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


text:
#ifndef __ARCH_MACHINE_TIMER_H
#define __ARCH_MACHINE_TIMER_H

#include <config.h>
#include <arch/model/statedata.h>
#include <plat/machine.h>

BOOT_CODE uint32_t tsc_init(void);

#endif /* __ARCH_MACHINE_TIMER_H */

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


text:
"Ulster and Unionism - Not a Failed Political Entity" - Speech to the 2000 Ulster Unionist Council AGM
Over the last few days the media have been given their favourite story - Ulster Unionist division, infighting and back-stabbing! Well we have had many votes. Now, let that be an end to it. I accept the result, let every-one else here accept the result. Who benefits from this division? Two groups benefit - Republicans and Paisleyites.
The DUP know that divided parties do not win. Without any credible policies of their own, they know they cannot beat us on the merits. They have been going through the motions of opposing the Agreement, while assiduously pursing every benefit they can gain under it. Even their own supporters can see through this pretence and are turning on them. Their only hope is to weaken and divide us.
They do not spend much time attacking republicans, but they spend a lot of time attacking us.
As for republicans, they are on the ropes. They thought they could manoeuvre their way through the Agreement and dodge decommissioning. In hindsight, it is clear that Pat Doherty gave the game away when he said that if, "come the end of January" there was no decommissioning, then no-one would bring the institutions down and that the British and Irish governments would not act.
He was been proved wrong. This party was ready to act. Our government intervened to suspend. Proving clearly that British sovereignty over Northern Ireland is undiminished and can be exercised against Dublin's wishes. And have republicans obtained any comfort since? In truth very little. Even Bill Clinton, in whom they had invested so much hope, told them last Friday to stop playing games on the guns issue.
As always the republican's chief hope is that unionism will volunteer for the blame and let them off the hook. We have shown again today that we are not going to fall for that one.
Both republicans and Paisleyites want us to think we are losing. That things are always getting worse. Of course there are problems. But don't forget our successes.
This talks process began in 1996. We began under the shadow of the Anglo-Irish Agreement and the Frameworks document. What were republicans saying then?
They said that there would be no internal settlement – that there would be no return to Stormont – that the Unionist veto would be smashed - that there would be powerful free standing cross-border bodies. On each one of those points the republicans were worsted.
Look at it with their eyes. The Guardian, a good friend to republicans said yesterday,
"Unionism has won a string of extraordinary victories. It has persuaded its mortal enemy, republicanism, to accept the partition of Ireland as a political fact. The fact that Sinn Fein has elected members sitting in both an Assembly and Executive for the province is a historic achievement for unionism. Also the Republic of Ireland has removed the two articles of its constitution which staked a claim on the north and which served as a constant offence to unionism. That claim has been rescinded. Above all, republicanism has accepted that there can be no move towards its dream of a united Ireland unless the people of the province, including its unionist majority want it. All told, it is a remarkable record – judged in Unionism's own terms."
The former IRA hunger striker and Belfast IRA commander, Brendan Hughes agrees with the Guardian. In a recent interview he said,
"The things we cherished such as a thirty two county democratic socialist republic are no longer mentioned. No real change has occurred. A few republicans have slotted themselves into comfortable positions and left the rest of us behind."
He then posed the question that must haunt Adams and McGuinniss,
"Think of all the lives that could have been saved had we accepted the 1975 truce. We fought on and for what? – what we rejected in 1975."
Actually the position for republicans is worse than Hughes realises. He harks back to Sunningdale. But in constitutional terms what we now have is better than Sunningdale. Its Council of Ireland was an embryonic government of all Ireland, without the accountability to Stormont now written into the Belfast Agreement, and without the current recognition by Dublin of Northern Ireland's legitimacy.
We must never forget our gains, while dealing with the continuing problems. Chief of these is the failure of Sinn Fein to discharge their obligations with regard to guns and to demonstrate their commitment to exclusively peaceful means.
In December we put them to the test. They failed that test.
Do we then sit back and use their failure as an excuse for doing nothing?
It is not in our interest to do so. The Unionist interest is in making Northern Ireland work. It is not in our interest to let it appear that this is a failed political entity. Of course we would like SDLP to proceed without them. That is not going to happen this side of May 22.
What are the republicans' tactics now? In a speech two weeks after suspension Adams talked of the British and Irish elections expected next year. He talked of strengthening their position electorally, and then negotiating a new agreement.
His objective may be to come back after elections when he hopes to have replaced SDLP as the largest nationalist party in Ulster and perhaps hold the balance of power in Dublin.
There is no point sitting back waiting for that to happen. The obvious course is to go after the republicans and again pin them into a corner. To keep ramming home the lesson that it is their fault. That way we limit their scope for growth and encourage moderate nationalism.
We also must prepare for the return of devolution. There are lessons to be learned, even from our 10 week spell in office. First may I pay tribute to the work of the Ulster Unionist Ministers and Junior Minister who made a creditable start and given more time would have achieved much more.
Reg Empey worked hard to refocus the Department of Enterprise, Trade, and Investment. He worked hard with Ministers in London to secure major support for Harland and Wolff's bid for the Queen Mary. Both Reg and I have fully supported bids by Northern Ireland Companies to secure major contracts in the aerospace and electronics sectors. Decisions are due soon and I hope we will have good news.
At the DoE, Sam Foster began to set challenging targets for reductions in road deaths and to start the long overdue review of the planning service and local government. Michael McGimpsey had the difficult task of organising one of the completely new Departments at Culture, Arts and Leisure. He is determined to ensure that our Unionist culture is recognised alongside other cultures and the first result of this will be a celebration of the bi-centenary of the Act of Union.
The aggressive actions of Sinn Fein, particularly Barbara de Bruin caused much offence. But do not assume that she had won the fight over the Jubilee. She announced a new hospital when she did not have the money with which to build it. Any budget to provide for such would have had to come before the Assembly as a whole and be passed on a cross-community basis. There will obviously be a struggle between the Committees and Ministers, but the first skirmish will not determine the outcome of that war.
Actually de Bruin's actions backfired. With SDLP support, at the last meeting of the Executive, we adopted a Ministerial Code which requires all Ministers to bring contentious decisions to the Executive for a collective decision. Where appropriate, decisions will require a cross-community consent therefore giving our Ministers a say across the board.
All this would be easier if the DUP turned up to the only Assembly committee they are boycotting. Typically in their flight from responsibility they boycott the most important committee. And there would be no problem if unionists had a majority in the Executive, which they would have, if it were not for the 8 wasted seats held by the McCartneyites and others.
There will be no shortage of future political battles to fight. For the republicans politics is a continuation of the struggle by other means. We cannot avoid these problems. But we must never doubt our capacity to cope with them. I believe that this party, and only this party has the ability to carry the unionist cause to success.
During the suspension of the Institutions we must use the available time to develop policy positions on important issues across all the Departments. Issues like the privatisation of Belfast Port, the eleven-plus, the crisis in agriculture, the review of public administration – and many others – require us to have clearly thought out positions. To achieve this I have asked Glengall Street to relaunch the policy committees involving representatives from the constituency associations, Parliamentary spokesmen and our chief Assembly Spokesmen. These need to start work quickly and I would ask for your full support and participation.
I have also asked Jim Speers to convene a working group to prepare for a review of local government. It is clear that the SDLP have already done extensive work on this issue, as on many others and we must be prepared. We must ensure that if and when we resume government we do so with our programme of government clearly thought out, and in a position to drive the administration forward.
We must also complete the process of modernisation - modernisation of our structures, and modernisation of our campaigning methods. We must broaden our base in membership. We must encourage more people to come into front line politics – as office-holders, as councillors as Assembly members and MPs.
One of the good aspects of the Assembly gave us the chance to put some good people before the public. But the line up could be strengthened. Obviously we need more women in prominent positions.
We must prepare for the local government and Westminster elections.
Some fear elections. Because they have come to believe their enemies propaganda. Look at the latest local government by election where Avril Swann had an excellent result. Remember opinion poll after poll has shown that at least 75% of Ulster Unionist voters support the Agreement, even more want things to work. A positive approach will win. As Avril's campaign showed there are many of a unionist background who will come out in response to a positive campaign, but stay at home for a negative campaign.
This party prides itself on achievement. We are the people who built Northern Ireland. We are the people who want it to succeed. We know the importance of building for the future. There is no need for a backward inward-looking defensive attitude.
We know we can do it. So, let us go forward together and let us win together.
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During the event four sheep were sheered, using tradition sheering techniques, in Saint Leonard's Churchyard.
Meanwhile traditional summer fayre stalls, wool working demonstrations, children's workshops and refreshments were available to the community in Loftus Town Hall.
The Wool Fayre also raised income for our two churches, with Saint Leonard's Church making £417 profit and Saint Helen's Church making just over £100 in profit. Funds were also raised by other community groups for other charities and organisations.


Download "Office of the Academic Affairs"
2011-2012 Graduate and Professional School Outcomes This report represents graduates from the August 2011, December 2011 and May 2012 graduating classes. All three classes were surveyed three times each.
Fall Westchester Campus 861 Bedford Road OPENHOUSE. October 24, :00 a.m. 2:00 p.m.
UDC s Vision 2020 Plan: How Much Progress Has Been Made?


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5 hockey books, Wayne Gretzky, Ron MacLean, Pat Quinn etc.


text:
← So, How Was Your Day?
Flanny's Best of 2014 Masterpost →
Gilmore Girls for the First Time: The Epic Conclusion
Posted on December 18, 2014 by collin0truckasaurus
I did it. I made it to the top of the mountain. I came, I saw, I watched the whole series. We have a lot to cover so let's get right into it! Big SPOILERS below the fold!
The second half of this season had some fun moments, but overall I thought it wasn't quite as great. Mostly I found myself annoyed at choices that characters were making, up to and including yelling, "Grow Up!!!" at Lorelai about a million times. Let's break this down into major events:
Rory & Dean: Redux a.k.a. Rory & Dean: Part Barf
If it wasn't clear before, this makes it absolutely clear: Rory makes terrible decisions and has terrible taste in men. Married Dean and (still a virgin temporarily!) Rory sleep together and start up a romance, thus officially ending Dean's super sad marriage. Rory is a cheater and should be ashamed of herself. She can lie to herself all she wants, but Lorelai is right about all of this – he wasn't separated from Wassername and he had no immediate plans to be! Dean comes off especially bad this time around because of course he wants to fight Jess when he shows back up (even his anger issues are boring!) but then he tries to fight Luke for basically being from Stars Hollow? Just garbage all around. Let's move on!
Rory quits Yale!
This is getting ahead a little bit to explain it, but Logan's family doesn't like Rory because she's a career woman, so his father gives her an internship out of guilt (probably), and then he tells her she can't cut it as a journalist. She flips out and quits Yale because the only reason you should go to an Ivy League school for free is if you know exactly what you want to do for a career and everyone you've ever talked to agrees that you'll be great at it. I didn't know 20 year-olds could throw tantrums, but Rory really nailed it. The whole time I kept thinking, "Do you know how lucky you are??" This is where Lorelai should have taken a page out of Mrs. Kim's book and yelled, "This is not the daughter I raised!!" First of all, most people have no idea what they want to do when they grow up and a huge number of people go to school to find out. Take some electives, join some clubs, talk to people other than Paris and Logan, and get over yourself! Second, ONE person said something kind of mean. So take the criticism or get inspired to prove him wrong, or something! Don't just roll over and admit defeat! It all comes down to me yelling "Grow up!" at Rory. The other thing that bugged me most about it was that Logan's family essentially didn't like her because she wanted a real job and wasn't going to be a country club wife and then the next thing she does is quit school (her career) and becomes a country club wife. This tells you exactly what's happening if nothing else will:
They're basically wearing the same jacket. Rory is becoming Emily. However, the redeeming quality of this whole storyline was when Emily told off Logan's mom and called her trashy. Classic. Rory decides to go back to Yale basically because Jess (whom she kisses! Cheater!!) tells her she's not being herself. While it's true, it's just another instance of Rory letting the men in her life define her.
Side note: I loved how Emily decorated the pool house for Rory. It's probably the only time I'd agree with Emily's choices.
Rory & Lorelai Fight!
Ugh. This story. This whole fight could have been avoided if Lorelai had acted like a grown up. Don't get me wrong, she was right, Rory shouldn't have quit Yale, but she made it a fight because of how she reacted. She made it even worse by not telling Rory she got engaged to Luke! That, in my mind, was almost unforgivable because it was just petty. I think it was natural that they were going to have a big fight sooner or later, but I still felt like Lorelai should have been the adult in the situation. What was she even trying to do when she stopped by Rory picking up trash on the side of the road??
Rory & Logan: A Love Story!
So Rory and Logan met when he was badgering her friend Marty about needing to work as a bartender ("He needs a JOB! How quaint!"), so I pretty much instantly hated him. Then when Emily & Richard flipped their shit about Logan's family and how great they all were, I kind of doubly hated him. He was just the quintessential entitled rich kid who had everything handed to him. Let's not forget that Rory was kind of into him before things were over with Dean (no surprise, CHEATER!). All that said, he was better looking than the guys in Stars Hollow and had some very charming moments. I appreciated that he knew what the right thing to do was (like when Richard was in the hospital) and took Rory's side against his dad. My biggest issue with Rory & Logan was the thing he did over and over where he acted like a dick to Rory, she got pissed, and he acted like she was in the wrong for getting pissed ("So I slept with like 5 of my sister's friends, what's the big DEAL???"). Then, to make matters worse, she was such a pushover with him that she eventually agreed with him! Some of the stuff he did was pretty typical for a guy that age, but he never seemed to grow up. I was pretty glad when Rory said no to his proposal, mostly because of how poorly timed it was. At Emily & Richard's house? In front of a bunch of strangers? She didn't even seem that sad when it was over.
Side note: how great was it when she told the priest that she's already taken Logan to the Bone Zone? Then when Emily & Richard freaked out about it!
Lorelai & Luke: A Love Story! a.k.a. Lorelai Barfs all over her life: Christopher Edition!
Oh boy, where do we even start? I think this whole story would be more believable (or tolerable) if Lorelai were 22-26, but she's a decade older than that! I know I complained before that Luke was not dreamy enough, but I liked him a lot better once he and Lorelai were actually together, probably because he smiled more. He was great to her and the fact that she freaked out and forced him to elope one night or lose her forever was never fair. She told him that postponing the wedding was okay and by the time she made that weird demand, I don't even think they had gotten to their original wedding date. The guy just found out he has a 12-year-old daughter, cut him some freaking slack!! Sleeping with Chris that night was a childish move. Telling Luke about it was even more childish. Getting back together with Chris was lazy (come on, Lorelai, maybe go to a singles event in a nearby city!) and eloping with him in France was impulsively immature ("we had sex and he paid a lot for the restaurant to open early! Totes worth marrying, omg!"). Don't get me wrong, Christopher is just as immature (the "let's make a baby right NOW or else!" conversation pretty much proves that) and I kind of think they deserve each other. But once they broke up, I knew they'd get her back with Luke even though if Luke were a believably written character, I don't think he'd ever be able to trust her re. Christopher again. You could make the case that she had her chance with him and it didn't work, but if I were him I'd always wonder about her feelings for him. I was also very disappointed we would never get to see their wedding (where Rory inevitably cheats on whomever she's with with Jess).
Lane & Band Guy: What's his name again?
Oh Lane. Remember Adam Brody? Do you remember him? Because this guy you chose is a sad comparison to Adam Brody. I'm so sorry that you had bad sex once and ended up with two kids immediately. Poor thing didn't even get to have fun with it! I'm glad the relationship with her mom got better (again, shout out to Mrs. Kim killing it with "This is not the daughter I raised!" and sending her kid's band on tour!) and it really seems like she was happy at the end of the story. Her husband does have his charms and he clearly loves her, so Mazel Tov!
Other Loose Ends:
One thing that became much more apparent in the 2nd half of the series is how often people throw money at problems. I had real classist issues with Logan and the world Rory started to inhabit (I guess it comes with the territory at Yale but also she chose to be a part of that world), but I think my real issue was a storytelling one in that any time Rory or Lorelai had a real problem, someone comes in with a big pile of money and it's just taken care of. Richard had that money he invested at Lorelai's birth that she used to pay back Emily and Richard, then Christopher inherits a bunch of money that just takes care of Rory's tuition forever (right when she's having issues with her grandparents!), and when she gets kicked out of Paris' apartment, Logan just offers up his place (with him in it, to be fair) and Rory's money problems just cease to exist. They almost dealt with this the ONE episode when Paris finds out she's broke (actually with some great comedic work and lots of Marx jokes) and she made a lot of really great points and then they literally never mention her money issues again. Money problems don't just magically go away, most people have to get a job and work extra to pay for school, housing, food, etc. Sometimes I felt this was lazy writing and sometimes it was just a product of the privileged world Rory was born into. It also bummed me out because clearly Lorelai was trying to keep Rory away from this by moving away and working to earn everything she has and Rory just fell back into the easy life. When the judge gave Rory extra community service to make an example of her and her privileged life, I was on board. Emily & Richard acted like it was some assault to nature and Logan probably deserved it more than Rory did (Rory's was a first offense after all), but it's not like she had to serve jail time. It was probably really good for her to do some real manual labor.
I loved Luke's daughter – so smart and funny and awkward! I thought it was kind of a weird plot twist, but the character herself was so great!
Lorelai should definitely put a spa into the inn, even if just the option to have a masseuse come to one's room. If I'm going to a bed and breakfast, you'd better believe I'm booking the one where I can get a massage!
As for the rest of Stars Hollow, I still think Taylor needs to get punched a couple of times. I was amazed that Sookie & Jackson didn't have a bigger fight when she got pregnant a third time.
I'm happy I watched the series, finally, I just wanted so much more for some of these characters! Also, it's fun to watch it now, knowing that Rory will be on Obama's campaign trail all the way to the White House!
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15 Responses to Gilmore Girls for the First Time: The Epic Conclusion
Theresa Couchman says:
Yeah, I've kind of blocked out a lot of the last half of the series. It started becoming more and more obvious that the writers were just throwing in drama for the sake of drama, and what had been charming quirkiness turned into irritating, unrealistic childishness in a lot of the characters. I still love Gilmore Girls 4 EVA, but I wish it had ended either sooner or stronger.
I do have to say though–as infuriating as Rory quitting Yale was, as a teenage overachiever who burned out pretty hard once I hit college, it did feel at least somewhat realistic to me. It wouldn't have taken much to get me to quit back then, because I was already so overwhelmed and unprepared and miserable. (It would still have been a terrible decision, though.)
collin0truckasaurus says:
Agree that they were just throwing in drama. If they always wanted Lorelai to end up with Luke, why have them split up, her get with Chris, then get back together? It just makes you annoyed with the characters, and there are fun things they can do to create drama inside the L/L relationship – fun wedding! baby maybe! living together! It just would have been so much more real and satisfying.
Sota says:
At what point was it that Amy Sherman Palladino left? Maybe we would have felt better about the ending if she had been the one to close out storylines and the show had ended when she left.
catweazle says:
She was only gone for the last season by which time she had already kind of torpedoed Rory as a character and really bungled the Luke/Lorelai relationship. But even she wouldn't have produced the mess that is season 7.
welcometocostcoiloveyou says:
I've always wondered what the last season would have been like if Sherman Palladino had stayed on. I've seen message board posts that blame her for the disaster of the last season, saying that she sabotaged the show by leaving a mess that no one could clean up.
I completely hate that Lorelai went running to Christopher because Luke was dealing with his own issues. It was perfectly ok for Lorelai to postpone their wedding because of a fight with Rory, but Luke wants to deal with some stuff? How dare he! Ugh.
I would like to believe that Sherman Palladino had a plan. And I doubt that plan would have been for Lorelai and Christopher to elope in Paris. Ugh again.
I also heard that Sherman Palladino always knew what the last 4 words of the show were going to be. As far as I know, she has never revealed those words. What are they Amy?
I've of course seen things online about people wanting a movie. I don't really care about that. I would however fully support a redo of the last season with the original writers.
I am in the middle of my re-watching…and its been super fun. I love this show and yes there are like a million things that are the worst (barf that dean thing noted above. ugh) but still. Its just such a nice enjoyable viewing…unlike some of the other shows I watch like GOT or any of the cop shows which tend to be more stressful.
I was super disappointed that Jon Hamm didn't make a more exciting appearance. He would have been a very interesting guy for Lorelai to date….you know if he had been given a personality.
I think Lorelai and Christopher just always had a super childish and twisted relationship and there was nothing that was ever going to change that. Its wretched that she slept with him and he told Luke and yet it is perfectly in keeping with the characters they both were since the beginning. Those two have revertigo (Marshall Eriksen's word?) everytime they are together.
The Christopher and Lorelai relationship reminded me of a lot of people I know in real life who are perennially in relationships with people they don't really connect with. It goes something like: Two people who are kind of boring together are in a relationship. They break up like you would expect them to. Then they keep getting back together over and over; I can only assume because they hate being alone and they'd rather settle for a dissatisfying relationship.
So, in that sense, I guess the mind-boggingly stupid Christopher/Lorelai break up/make up story line is actually kind of realistic. But I don't want that kind of realism in my entertainment. I want to see true love and happiness, not "I'm going to settle for you because I don't think I can do better". That Lorelai attracts the attention of every attractive single man in Connecticut makes her settling for Christopher that much more dumb.
Whoever took over the show in season 7 sure had some weird ideas about acceptable pregnancy plotlines. I loved that Toast article about fictional characters who should have gotten abortions because it was so right about Lane. I love Lane and Zack even though Zack is kind of an idiot and nobody can quite fill the shoes of Dave Rygalski. Hep Alien 4ever.
Rory is so frustrating in the later seasons and I just do not understand the decision to make her date Logan for SO MANY SEASONS when she could have had a perfectly nice relationship with Marty or someone like him. I think a lot of my hatred of Logan comes from the fact that when those seasons were airing I was in a similar situation of being a non-rich person at a preppy east coast school full of overprivileged shitbags and never in a million years would I let a Logan anywhere near me. I was glad that Rory ended up single though I think it would have been nice for her to have another go with the kinder gentler Philadelphia edition of Jess.
neverabadidea says:
Ok, I swear I'm going to read this but right now I am listening to Serial. So very quickly hear are 2 things I've noticed in my rewatch:
1. Zach and Lane are the best. Just the best.
2. I know Logan is the worst, but in rewatching I feel like he's a very accurate portrayal of dudes I've met in their early 20s. I kind of like that Rory has to deal with a realistic crappy relationship instead of finding her perfect man when she's only 20. It just feels more authentic. In high school I hated it but now I'm like "yep, this kind of thing totally happens." You fall for a guy and think you can change him but he ends up being a bit of a shithead.
I think #2 is incredibly accurate. Because, come on, we've all dated that guy, probably at that age. I'm sure there's a college-aged version of that girl that every dude has dated. Also I really liked that she kind of resisted him and then insisted that he didn't really want a relationship and that she was okay with that. But still, at some point she was better off alone than putting up with that shit. Of course then she probably would've had to get a job to pay for an apartment…
As I've mentioned before, Lorelai annoyed me basically from the beginning, especially since she's much harder on her parents than they usually deserve. One of the only things that deserved such severe blowback was Emily trying to torpedo Luke and Lorelai's relationship. Most of the rest was either not that bad or was the type of thing many parents attempt with their adult children, but that the adult children can easily ignore since they're *adults* and they don't have to do what their parents tell them. Duh. It kind of felt like Lorelai never really matured past 16, at least in regards to how she deals with her family, parents and child.
But the absolute worst to my mind was when Rory was going through a real crisis, prompting her to drop out, and Lorelai's way of handling this was to refuse to talk to her daughter for several months. I guess it makes sense since that's Lorelai's solution to every problem, but if there was a time when her daughter needed her, it was then. Like I said: 16-year-old mentality.
I've seen most episodes of the Gilmore Girls multiple times. Lorelai and Rory didn't bother me the first time I saw the show, but on repeat viewings, I find the main Gilmores more and more annoying. I love the show, but considering the character flaws of Lorelai and Rory, it's somewhat surprising that everyone in their lives wants their love and attention.
Not sure how many of you are watching Jane the Virgin, but there are enough similarities between Emily-Lorelai-Rory and the three generations of Villanueva ladies that I think Gilmore Girls fans would appreciate the way the family interacts and the story lines between them.


This package provides OpenGL bindings for OCaml. There is a module for GL, Glu and Glut, and also some small image loader modules for different image file formats.
The names of the functions are the same than in the C API.
This package provides test files and demonstration samples from the Red-Book converted to OCaml.


text:
A legend among motorbikes
7 Oct, 2005 12:15 AM 11 minutes to read
Roger Donaldson. Herald picture / Mark Mitchell
By: Russell Baillie
Back in his younger days - before he helped kick-start the New Zealand film industry - Roger Donaldson rode an Indian motorcycle.
No, it wasn't the world's fastest. Though it was probably West Auckland's riskiest.
"My Indian was attached to a sidecar and I used to live at the top of the Waitakeres. Mike Smith, my partner [in then company Aardvark Films], we both had motorbikes. We'd hoon off down the hill from near the TV mast to town where we had our business.
"On one particular corner the motorbike and sidecar parted company. The way I remembered it Mike headed off into the bush," he laughs at the memory down the line from Los Angeles.
Or there was that time when he came a cropper riding off-road in the ranges.
"One day it bucked me off and the handlebars pinned me in the mud like I was Christ on the cross. It took me some time to get out from underneath it."
Donaldson, who has long been claimed as one of ours despite being Australian-born (he came here in his 20s to escape a looming career as a geologist), doesn't ride much any more.
He thought it best to hang up the gloves and helmet after his last bike, a 900cc Honda with only 19km on the clock launched itself skyward when he overdid the throttle. He found himself surfing the bike on its side to a halt.
Still, it meant when filming the motorcycle scenes of his dream project The World's Fastest Indian, he knew the physics.
"Motorbikes are just exhilarating. They are dangerous, stupid and a hell of a lot of fun."
Donaldson's motorcycle madness of 35 years ago led, eventually, to The World's Fastest Indian. It's a feature about Burt Munro, mechanical genius, speed demon, Southlander, crazy old bugger. It stars Anthony Hopkins as Munro and Invercargill as Invercargill.
It's the first film Donaldson has made in New Zealand since 1981's Smash Palace. "It's probably got a lot more in common with Smash Palace than any of my other movies."
Like the Bruno Lawrence drama, TWFI is also a film about a solitary rascal who spends too much time in his garage.
But as the film shows, Burt Munro also struck out for the big wide world.
During the 1960s he made frequent trips to the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah to race his "Munro Special" Indian Scout against the clock.
In 1967 he rode it to an official American Motorcycle Association 1000cc class record of 183.586mph (295.453km/h).
There's anecdotal proof - though no official recognition, as land speed attempts had to be sustained over a mile and averaged from two runs north and south - that the bike had briefly topped the magic 200mph (322km/h) mark the previous year.
Which is impressive enough. But here's some more numbers. In 1967, Munro was 67 years old. He had a dicky ticker. His Indian Scout, when it was new in 1920, had a top speed of 55mph (88km/h). He souped it up a bit over the years as he raced it. Then he souped it up some more.
No, Munro didn't break any world records. But he won the respect of his fellow speed demons and remains the fastest pensioner on two wheels.
Having shifted from photography to film in the late 60s and early 70s, Donaldson made a documentary about Munro, Offerings to the God of Speed, which screened on New Zealand television in 1973.
While making the doco, Donaldson took Munro back to Bonneville in 1971 for a one unsuccessful last attempt on the 200mph mark. Ever since, he's harboured an idea that there was also a feature in the exploits of the legendary motorcyclist, who died in 1978.
Now, 34 years later with the The World's Fastest Indian about to go out into the world, Donaldson has been restoring the original doco, which Hopkins watched every morning on the shoot as a guide to Munro's accent. It will possibly be an extra on the eventual DVD.
"I just felt it was a piece of my history and it's a piece of this movie's history. So I want to make sure it's been preserved, so I have gone and preserved it.
"I always thought that I never really did justice to the subject, I guess that's why I became obsessed with making this movie about Burt."
It wasn't just Munro's thirst for speed as a motorcyclist, or his ability as a backyard mechanic to constantly rebuild a bike that was already a museum piece, that fascinated Donaldson.
It was that he kept his dream of going faster and faster at an age when most folks are supposed to be slowing down.
"Why I was intrigued with the idea of making a film about this guy's life was when I met him he was in his 70s and he had such a positive outlook on life. He did have heart problems, he wasn't in the greatest of health, but he did feel like many old people feel - like an 18-year-old guy trapped in a 72-year-old body. And I remember my grandmother telling me exactly the same thing and I think that is how a lot of old people feel but few of them act on it.
"Burt just wasn't prepared to give up. He wanted to keep going and that is something that really intrigued me about the guy."
But how to make a feature out of Munro's DIY high-speed life and find a dramatic structure to it puzzled Donaldson for years.
"It was one of those things that when I started I always thought it was a good idea but I never could feel that I had the script right."
Donaldson kept chipping away at the screenplay as his career shifted offshore, having first established himself as a feature director on the likes of Sleeping Dogs and Smash Palace.
His first Hollywood feature was The Bounty, starring Hopkins as Captain Bligh. The relatively inexperienced director and Hopkins famously clashed during the 1983 shoot. But they became firm friends years later.
After finishing his 2003 CIA spy thriller The Recruit, Donaldson realised he either had to get the Munro movie off its blocks or scrap the idea after 30 years of tinkering.
With a script and some money finally in place, Donaldson realised he needed a bankable name up front. He called Hopkins to ask if he was interested in putting on a helmet and bending his lilting Welsh vowels into Munro's Southland burr. The star said yes. Hannibal was to become a human cannonball.
Based on the script, the film had earlier attracted a Japanese investor as well as backing from the New Zealand Film Commission - whose establishment in the late 70s was part-prompted by the success of Donaldson's Sleeping Dogs - and the New Zealand Film Production Fund.
But to get the film started on time - with only a limited number of months in the year to be able to film at Bonneville and any delays meaning Hopkins might be unavailable - meant both Donaldson and producer Gary Hannam were forced to put in their own cash.
"Initially we had to put up a lot of our own money to get it rolling and make it like we were going to make it or people weren't going to take us seriously.
"But I've always had this theory that moviemaking is a gamble. I've often thought that the movies that were the most successful were the biggest gambles."
But there's something more than just his own millions at stake for Donaldson. He wanted to make a movie that strived for things that helming a decade-plus of Hollywood genre flicks could never reach.
"I knew what I wanted to get out of it. It was an uplifting story that had a sort of poignant side to it and it could be amusing. Those are the sort of movies I really enjoy - a movie that just takes me along for the ride and sucks me in. Movies like My Life As a Dog or Billy Elliott, I've always had a soft spot for those sorts of movies.
"Someone pointed out to me the other night, it's a hell of a lot harder to make a film about something that's positive than it is to make films about the dark side of life. I think that's true."
Donaldson turns 60 this year which, given the film's contemplation of age and mortality, makes one wonder how the movie might have turned out had he made it nearer the beginning of his career.
"Ah well, it never really changed about what it was going to be. I mean in this movie there is a lot of my father and I know there is a lot of Tony's father in the movie just because it is embracing those older men in your life that you have always been influenced by. So fathers and grandfathers figure in both our calculations of how we put this picture together.
"My Dad is still alive but when I started wanting to make this film my grandfather was still alive. I always had somebody in my life that this character reminded me of."
Donaldson remembers that after years of falling out over his chosen career, his father came over from his hometown of Ballarat for the premiere of Sleeping Dogs.
"I caught him out on the street after it had opened telling people they should go and see this movie because it was really great. I never expected my Dad to say that. It helped heal those wounds that often exist between fathers and sons."
Yet there's little mention of Munro's own family in the film - he and his wife Beryl divorced in the late 1940s.
Munro's Invercargill-based son John confirms his father's motorcycle obsession contributed to the split. But having visited the Bonneville set himself and been impressed at Donaldson's efforts at period accuracy he says he and his sisters aren't concerned that Donaldson's portrait leaves the family out of the picture.
The film focuses on one trip to race at Bonneville, complete with wide-eyed adventures as he crossed the American hinterland. In reality, Munro was a frequent visitor to the track throughout the 60s.
But Donaldson says TWFI is truthful to the spirit of Burt Munro. He's had to strip much historic detail away to make the film evoke that.
"It's my impression of him. It's a collection. Some of the stuff in it is incredibly accurate. Other stuff in it is complete fantasy. But in my mind it all fits into the spirit of what he was."
And in capturing Burt striking out alone in America, Donaldson says, the film reflects his own feelings about going there and what he left behind in New Zealand.
"There is much of my experience of coming to America in the film as [well as] witnessing Burt's and listening to his stories.
"In the distance I have put between myself and New Zealand by coming to America, I see in Burt Munro something that I think embodies the spirit of New Zealand really. That can-do attitude - that you can make do on a shoestring, that you are not intimidated by the world. You can go out there and take it on head-first.
"But also because it's so isolated you don't really know what you are in for until you get out in the big wide world and that is a bit of a surprise as well."
Donaldson says he's been heartened by the reaction to the film at the Toronto Film Festival, where it got a standing ovation last month, indicating it should find a ready international audience.
Here, there's already an air of expectation around Donaldson's film, which suggests it's a surefire hit. And when it opens this week with a premiere in Invercargill, it could be the start of an Indian summer.
* LOWDOWN
WHO: Burt Munro, speed demon and New Zealand motorcycling legend
BORN: March 25, 1899, Edendale, Southland
DIED: January 11, 1978, Invercargill
MOTORCYLE OF CHOICE: Indian Munro Special based on a 1920 bike he modified throughout his career, though he also ran a Velocette
TOP SPEED: Officially 183.586mph (295.453km/h) at Bonneville in 1967. Unofficially, he may have bettered 200mph (322km/h) the previous year
FURTHER READING: Burt Munro - Legend of Speed by George Begg available from www.burtmunro.co.nz
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text:
Hannibal Industries Promotes Employee-Owner Dean Bender to GM; Taps Industry Vet Jessie Swanson to Fill Sales Role
Today Hannibal Industries, Inc. announces the promotion of Dean Bender to General Manager of Hannibal Industries Houston manufacturing facility, and the addition of Jessie Swanson as sales rep to its Material Handling Products sales team. Bender is a Hannibal employee-owner that brings over 40-years of material handling industry experience, knowledge and professionalism to Hannibal and its customers.
Following the promotion of Dean Bender to General Manager of its Houston facility, Hannibal knew it had big shoes to fill. With extensive experience across multiple facets of the material handling industry, Swanson has worked on manufacturing and distribution side, material handling as well as on life trucks and dynamic storage.
Hannibals Executive Vice President Steve Rogers says, When Hannibal elected to promote Dean Bender from his territory sales position to General Manager of our Houston manufacturing plant, we knew it would be a challenge to replace Deans many years of experience and expertise. With the addition of Jessie, we feel that the level of service to our existing customers will remain at the highest level as Jessie also brings a skill set which will allow Hannibal to broaden our current market reach.
Jessie has officially joined Hannibal on March 1st and is serving Hannibals distribution base in Northern California, Oregon and Washington while participating in select special assignments on a national level.
For additional information on Hannibal, please visit: http://www.hannibalindustries.com, on Twitter @HannibalRack, on the Hannibal Rack YouTube channel and on LinkedIn.
About Hannibal Industries, Inc.
Hannibal Industries, Inc., headquartered in the Los Angeles metro area, is a pallet rack and steel tube manufacturer with a diverse product line that enables the company to offer material handling products to the most massive operations in the world. This employee-owned company is the largest U.S. manufacturer of steel pallet rack west of the Mississippi River.
The companys industry leading product offering includes TubeRack, Structural Pallet Rack, Roll-Formed Selective Pallet Rack, Hybrid Systems, Cantilever Systems, Pushback Systems, Pallet Flow Systems, Case Flow Systems, Drive-In Systems and shelving. Engineering and design services offered by the company include: system design; seismic engineering; permit administration; in-house installation and custom fabrication. A true innovator, Hannibal Industries was awarded a patent in 2006 for a pallet rack system adjustable safety restraint, and a patent for its TubeRack in 2015.
Hannibal Industries Media Relations/
Master Plan Communications,
Debs Choi
Maxfield


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