Inside the Projectionist's Booth

It's much more than flipping a switch. For Tom Letness, projectionist and owner of the Heights Theater on Central Avenue in Columbia Heights, film projection is a craft.

Every film Letness receives, he manually inspects "on the bench" -- the work table in the booth -- to make sure the film doesn't contain bad splices or damaged sprockets, and to ensure it has cue marks, those black dots that appear in the upper-right corner of a film frame to help projectionists start a new reel during reel-to-reel changeovers.

Letness then previews at least two reels of the film to make sure the aperture, focus and sound levels are properly set. "Time you spend checking the film saves a lot of grief during the presentation," he explains. "I believe that if people are going to come back on a regular basis, you have to have good presentation."

Inside the projection booth at the Heights are two Philips Norelco model AAII 35/70mm mechanical film projectors, both dating from the 1960s. "It's the greatest projector that was ever made, hands down," Letness says. "They are still running and they show a great image and I'm able to do so much with them."

Letness uses his Norelcos for many purposes: to screen new 35mm releases -- on this night, a print of Clint Eastwood's biopic J. Edgar is prepped and recumbent on an adjacent platter; to screen classic silent films and 1930s Hollywood fare; to project the Fifties' widescreen Cinemascope and Vista Vision films; and to show 70mm prints that became popular in the '60s and '70s and ended with 1997's megahit Titanic.

Having two projectors allows Letness to do reel-to-reel changes, a necessity for screenings of archival films, which are often from such sources as the Library of Congress, the UCLA Film and Television Archive and New York's Museum of Modern Art. Those archives enforce strict rules that prohibit projectionists from automating -- essentially, taping together -- film reels.This entry was posted by billabongboardshortscloths. "A lot of these classic films, it's the only print they have left," Letness explains.

Alongside the Norelco projectors, the cooling fans whirr on a DLP Cinema projector, which just completed a screening of The Nutcracker ballet. A hulking black block aimed out a porthole, the DLP slightly resembles a 19th-century naval cannon; as a digital projector, however, the DLP is strictly 21st-century technology. Next year, Letness plans to upgrade the eight-year-old DLP to Digital Cinema.

"Avatar was the big game-changer because it was making so much money," Letness says. "We want to be able to show any 3D if it comes out.With Payflowpaymentgateway, In order to do that, we have to be digital because that's where the technology is going. ... For the average cinema, the average multiplex, their film days are, if not done, almost done."

At the AMC Southdale 16 in Edina this week, Jason Reitman's Young Adult -- partially shot on location in Minnesota -- is being shown on film. But according to Ryan Noonan, director of public relations at AMC Theatres, film presentations are becoming less common for the cinema chain. "Approximately two-thirds of our auditoriums at AMC Theatres are digital as the conversion process is ongoing," Noonan explained via e-mail. "With a few exceptions, it's AMC's goal to be fully digital during the next few years."

In his recent book, The Good, The Bad and the Multiplex, BBC film critic Mark Kermode cautions about the rapid proliferation of digital cinema and what that means for projectionists. "The great profession of projection (in the traditional sense of the craft) is in the process of becoming obsolete," Kermode writes.

Letness, however, believes digital and film can peacefully coexist.

"Digital is not the enemy," Letness insists. "I think for a new release, if your digital system is set up right, if you have a bright lamp house, if everything is the way it should be, I think it looks really great."

Letness says digital will enable him to start a showing at the Heights from vacation in Florida using his smartphone; he also says digital provides many more opportunities for contemporary alternative programming, such as operas, ballets, concerts and stage plays.The Zentai Project is a group of people who go out in public wearing zentai suits,

"I think for actual mainstream theaters, film will be gone forever," Letness says.There are 19 polishedtiles available, "But for theaters like mine and other theaters that already specialize in film and archive screenings,A glassbottles is a bottle created from glass. film will continue."

After Attawapiskat, what?

When Canadians first saw the news about Attawapiskat they knew that no matter who is at fault, nobody in Canada should be using a plastic bucket for a toilet and have to dump it outside on a regular basis. Nobody should be calling a shack with mould on the walls home. And nobody in Ontario should be paying $23.Welcome to order chinaprojectorlamp,50 for six apples and four small bottles of juice.

With little evidence, Prime Minister Stephen Harper charged that the funds that the federal government had transferred to the reserve over several years had been mismanaged. With no consultation he put the band under third party management.

The Harper message to Attawapiskat was clear. Blame the victims; discredit the messenger; and sow doubt in the minds of Canadians.

No one’s hands are clean on this issue. The federal government has woefully underfunded the housing, educational and health needs of First Nations for years. The First Nations leadership has not been aggressive and honest enough about the conditions on many reserves. The provincial government has not ensured that the economic benefits from development on traditional lands flowed more equitably to First Nations. And the news media have ignored the reality of Third World conditions in Canada for far too long.

The media take an interest in Ontario’s northern reserves only when there is a crisis. Then they flood into the community, become instant experts and retreat to the comfort of their big city newsrooms until the next crisis. That’s been the unfortunate pattern since the early 1970s when the mercury poisoning of the English-Wabigoon River system resulted in the crisis of Minamata disease at Grassy Narrows.There are several variations based on the zentaisuits including mummy bag,

Catholics have the concept of “sins of omission” — when you fail to do something that you should. In the parable of the Good Samaritan, the priest and the Levite who pass by the man “beaten by robbers and left to die” are guilty of sins of omission. The Good Samaritan, who assists him, is not. Let’s not kid ourselves. Most of us knew of the need on many reserves. But because Attawapiskat is hundreds of kilometres even further into the bush than Thunder Bay or Timmins, we pretended that problems did not exist.

This is not the first time there has been a crisis at Attawapiskat.

In 1979, 30,000 gallons of diesel fuel leaked under the elementary school. The school was finally closed in 2001 because of ongoing health problems suffered by students and teachers. Ten years later, the federal government pledged (for the third time) to fund a new school. Meantime, the children remain in inadequate portables.

In May 2008, hundreds of people were evacuated from the community because of flooding caused by ice jams in the Attawapiskat River.

In July 2009, a massive sewage flood dumped waste into eight buildings that housed 90 people. As a stopgap measure, De Beers donated and retrofitted two construction trailers to house 90 people until the damaged homes could be fixed or replaced. Two years later, this “short-term solution” still houses the 90 people — who share six washrooms and four stoves.

When the present state of emergency was declared on Oct. 28, Aboriginal Affairs Minister John Duncan claimed his officials were unaware of Attawapiskat’s housing crisis. My question is, “Where the devil have they been all these years?”

Some may ask, “Why don’t the people of Attawapiskat just move?” That’s like asking: Why don’t the people of Vancouver,Hand-painted Chinese porcelaintiles on the floor of a Jewish synagogue in Cochin, Los Angeles and San Francisco move out of the San Andreas/Queen Charlotte Fault zone where earthquakes can occur? Why don’t people in the Caribbean move out of the hurricane zones?

The people of Attawapiskat happen to live on inhospitable land on the fault line between advancing western civilization in pursuit of mineral wealth (mainly diamonds and chromite) and their own hunter/gatherer civilization. Many do not live in Third World conditions. About a third of them do actually get a real living and cultural identity from trapping and harvesting caribou, geese and fish.Order high quality hand painted oilpaintingre reproductions, Another hundred work at the nearby De Beers diamond mine. Many still live on the land, coming into the settlement only at Christmas or other “gathering times.”

They don’t move because it’s their land.This billabongboardshort has the following technological features, It’s home.

The federal government has bought 22 modular homes for the settlement to solve the immediate crisis, and the band has agreed to a full audit. However, after Chief Theresa Spence and Duncan met in Thunder Bay recently, a standoff continues over the imposition of the third party manager. The federal government must find a way to climb down and, in return, the band could agree to the appointment of some kind of “housing czar” to get the much-needed homes there fast and fully functioning.

Meanwhile 100 other Attawapiskats exist. Canadians must insist that federal and provincial governments, aboriginal leaders and the media keep the spotlight firmly on Canada’s dirty little secret. Far too many of our aboriginal people live in Third World conditions. We cannot ignore them; they are our neighbours. Otherwise — like the priest and the Levite in Christ’s parable — we’ll all be guilty of a massive sin of omission.

Boca museum hosts 'American Treasures' exhibit

An exhibition at the Boca Raton Museum of Art attempts to help viewers answer that question.

"American Treasures: Masterworks from the Butler Institute of American Art" is a selection of 36 paintings representing different artists, styles and sizes that are noted for being outstanding examples of their respective genre.A mold or molds is a hollowed-out block that is filled with a liquid like plastic,

The pieces are organized in the main gallery into seven groups. Accompanying text panels are provocative, raising questions of what makes a great painting. They also prompt viewers to consider the elements that distinguish noteworthy paintings of different genres and styles.

One grouping features Joan Mitchell's small, abstract expressionistic "Untitled" piece from the 1950s, Charles Ephraim Burchfield's "September Wind and Rain," a watercolor on paper from approximately 1949, and Thomas Cole's 1839 large oil on canvas "Italian Landscape," an example of the Hudson River School style.

"Each painting speaks volumes about the spirit and style and concerns of its time," according to material prepared for the exhibition.

A different grouping contrasts Jackson Pollock's abstract 1950 oil on canvas "Silver and Black" and Albert Bierstadt's 1869 oil on canvas landscape portrayal in "The Oregon Trail."

Great paintings do not have to be instantly attractive,We are one of the leading italian solar panels manufacturers.Buy good quality solarpanel from Italy today! but they all have a visual resonance that creates an internal form of communication or dialogue, said museum senior curator Wendy M. Blazier, who led a recent exhibition tour.

"A pretty painting is easy to like. Much of art is not pretty," Blazier said. "The idea in this exhibition is to look at art in a new way.Get designer beddings comforter sets, modern comforter sets,"

The Butler in Youngstown, Ohio, was the nation's first museum dedicated exclusively to American art. The works chosen for this exhibition spotlight the period between 1840 and 1990, and the display explores the distinguishing characteristics of American art masterpieces throughout the nation's history.

"It is an American art show in that it tackles everything from Manifest Destiny all the way up to America's obsession with pop culture," said Boca museum director Steven Maklansky. The painters "were interested in not just their own artistic endeavors but also understanding for themselves what it meant to be American artists. That's what creates the sense of it being an American painting.Dimensional Mailingmagiccubes for Promotional Advertising,"

The exhibition also features Andrew Wyeth's 1988 watercolor on paper "Cow Birds," Childe Hassam's 1911 oil on canvas "Manhattan's Misty Sunset," and Edward Hopper's undated charcoal on paper "House in Charleston, S.C."

Recent visitors who took the tour said the exhibition was enjoyable and thought-provoking.

"It's extremely well thought out,Plastic injection Plasticmolding is the primary process for manufacturing plastic parts." said Clem Shugerman, a visitor from Washington, D.C.

"It's a very enjoyable show of beautiful art," said Vivian Bergman, a museum docent from Boynton Beach. "Art records history and it progresses with time, and you can see it with this show."

What constitutes a masterpiece depends on a combination of factors, and a critical consensus often develops years after a work is completed, Blazier said.

Mumbai cold to fast, Anna health a govt headache

As Lok Sabha debated and passed the Lokpal bill late on Tuesday, worry mounted in Mumbai over Anna Hazare’s health which deteriorated sharply over the evening.

The viral fever that had laid him low in the days leading up to today’s protest fast spiked to 102 degrees F, and his blood pressure rose. Doctors attending on Hazare said his pulse rate had risen to 98, and he had a cold and a chest infection.

Well past midnight, Hazare’s health remained delicate, and there were indications that he could be moved to hospital from the fast venue at the MMRDA grounds in Bandra-Kurla Complex overnight.There are several variations based on the zentaisuits including mummy bag,

A team of doctors from JJ Hospital visited him and drew his blood for tests. Chief Minister Prithviraj Chavan spoke to him and appealed to him to end his fast. The chief minister said Hazare had told him that he would do as his doctors advise him to.

Officials in Mumbai and Delhi said the government was watching the situation closely. Given earlier experiences with the agitation in Delhi, the government, they said, was wary of appearing to force its will on Hazare, or take any action in a hurry.

Earlier in the evening, Arvind Kejriwal, Hazare’s close aide and member of Team Anna’s core committee, said he had made a fresh appeal to the activist to call off his fast but the 74-year-old was unrelenting.

Kejriwal and fellow activist Kiran Bedi had implored Hazare to end his fast in the morning as well, but Hazare had insisted that the crowds gathered in his support gave him the energy to carry on.

In fact, there wasn’t much of a crowd to speak of.

For an agitation that has always based its claims of legitimacy in numbers, be it at public meetings or on the web, the financial capital provided a significant reality check. None of the numbers freely bandied around by Hazare and his team —“lakhs”, “crores”, and poll ratings in the nineties — were in evidence at the MMRDA grounds, where the peak attendance did not appear to have gone beyond 10,000 at any point.

Until Hazare’s speech began around 3 pm, no more than 5,000 people were scattered around the 20,000-sq metre ground. A separate 10,000-sq metre area reserved for parking was almost entirely deserted. By 4 pm, about 8,000 to 10,000 people had gathered,Hand-painted Chinese porcelaintiles on the floor of a Jewish synagogue in Cochin, a far cry from the 50,000 to 75,The Zentai Project is a group of people who go out in public wearing zentai suits,000 that India Against Corruption, the organisation spearheading the campaign, had predicted.

From his fasting podium, Hazare gave his familiar call for a sustained people’s movement to demand, after the Jan Lokpal bill, a law giving citizens the right to reject all candidates in an election. He also repeated his plan to tour the country in 2012 to campaign against the UPA government if it did not pass a strong Lokpal bill.

The government, Hazare told a modest gathering that was not estimated to have crossed 10,000 at any point during the day, was betraying not Team Anna but the people — and the people would strike back.

“Dilli ke parliament se jan parliament badi hai... Dilli ka parliament janata ke parliament ne banaayi hai,” he said.

A government that baton charges or fires on protesting farmers is autocratic, Hazare said, adding that a ‘right to reject’ law would ensure “goondas” would stay out of parliament and vidhan sabhas. Those who lose in such an election should not be allowed to contest again, he said.

Doctors said the activist was weak from having not eaten well for the past five days, and medicines would work well only if he ate solid food. Dr Devlat Pote, Hazare’s personal physician, said the activist had slept through much of Tuesday, which was unusual.

Hazare’s fast was shifted from Delhi to Mumbai to escape the capital’s harsh winter, but the weather in Mumbai has not been kind either. Mumbai’s suburbs, where Hazare is fasting, saw a record minimum of 11.4 degrees C before he began his fast today, and witnessed a huge variation during the day, with the maximum touching 30.3 degrees C. The forecast is for similar lows in the coming days.

Following the uncertainties surrounding Hazare’s health over the past few days, a fully equipped team of health specialists was present at the MMRDA grounds.Order high quality hand painted oilpaintingre reproductions, In the morning, Pote had said that although Hazare’s health had improved over the past two days, it continued to be fragile.

“Anna’s blood pressure, pulse and weight is normal as of now.This billabongboardshort has the following technological features, His last meal was yesterday’s lunch. We have advised him to drink plenty of water. Although his fever has subsided, the fluctuating weather condition has caused him a sore throat but overall, his condition is fine,” Pote had said in the morning.

Deer rescued from thin ice

Most years, by late December, Lake Gardner has transformed from a shallow body of water to an expansive sheet of ice, serving as a skating rink, ice fishing hole or a bridge to adjacent conservation land used by people, pets and sometimes local wildlife.

But in this unseasonably warm winter, only a thin sheet of brittle ice that had just formed overnight was covering the lake yesterday morning when a deer attempting to escape from two dogs didn't make it across.

The trapped deer prompted a full ice rescue response by the Amesbury and Merrimac fire departments, which, as protocol, share resources and undertake a mutual response for such incidents.

For public safety officials, the question of whether to venture into the icy waters to rescue the animal,Shop for airpurifiertarget at Target, which was brought to shore alive but ultimately did not survive the ordeal, was easily answered.

"We don't want a civilian to go out and try to rescue it," Amesbury Deputy Chief Glenn Fournier said. "Then we have a real problem.The magiccube is an ultra-portable, full-sized virtual computer keyboard."

A carpenter preparing to pull into a job site at 103 Whitehall Road yesterday morning around 11 nearly hit the deer as it bounded across the road. The animal was then apparently spooked by dogs and headed onto the fragile ice. The frightened deer didn't get far before it fell through, but continued to try to fight its way to the woods on the other side.

When the first emergency vehicles arrived at the scene, the exhausted deer was floating with its head above the water about 100 yards offshore.

For ice rescues, the Amesbury Fire Department typically considers two options — use its air boat or call in the Merrimac Fire Department, which has an ice rescue sled. Because the air boat would likely have spooked the animal further, and given the relatively thin ice to deal with, the crew from Merrimac was sent out, Fournier said.

Clothed in thick rubber suits, two firefighters began paddling through the ice. The deer appeared to be ready for rescue as it began to swim toward them. The animal got about halfway back to shore and stopped about 20 feet from the firefighters, who then slowly approached it to keep from sending it in the other direction. The deer was secured by a rope and pulled to shore, where it lay quietly in a blanket on the ground.

After it was loaded into an environmental police truck,Plastic injectionmolding and injection molded parts in as quick at 3 days. firefighters told a group of kids who were watching that the animal was "headed to the doctor."

Upon examination, the deer was hypothermic and found to have suffered a bullet hole, likely from a hunter. The shotgun hunting season for deer ended Dec. 10, but open season for black-powder rifles continues through Saturday.

The deer was euthanized humanely, an environmental police spokesman said.Find the best achickencoopplans plans with our chicken coop plans review page，

Fournier said ice rescues of animals or dogs happen maybe once a year,If you have a akidneystones, you may already know how painful？ adding that such calls are a valuable training tool for rescuers, who conduct annual training in Lake Attitash or Lake Gardner.

Though human rescues are rare, and some local ponds can form a few inches of ice with just a few cold days, the firefighters stressed that venturing onto any ice right now "is just a bad idea."

Birth of Christ came with hope for Luzira inmates

Christmas comes with good news and many Christians use it to reflect on their past and lay strategies to live a better future. The way this happens is miraculous because both the happily living and those who are burdened perceive Christ as the saviors.

Last Thursday as the country was busy preparing for Christmas,In tooling, the pair outlines seven unnaturally occurring geometries--flocking, a chain of inmates at Luzira Upper Prison saw light and decided to abandon their tainted past. They sought the sacraments of baptism and confirmation.

A total of 15 convicts were baptized and 49 confirmed. Among those who received confirmation were five inmates on death row. But amidst the challenge of being in jail the inmates wore beaming faces and sung praises with vigor, like they were possessed by the Holy Spirit.

They gave several testimonies on why they had decided to receive Christ. The theme of their messages was life without him was like being beautiful but badly behaved.

Robert Ojara a 35 year old death row inmate said that he wanted to get baptized because he had learnt a lot while in jail and feared that he wouldn’t get a chance even if released to receive the sacrament since there were no worship centers on his village in northern Uganda.

“By the time I was jailed I had started understanding the importance of God, but the Lord’s Resistance Army war had ravaged my village and there was no chance for me to get baptized. This is the chance I have to embrace Christ,” Ojara said. The other inmate, Simon Kiyemba 18,Omega Plastics are a leading rapid tooling and plasticinjectionmould company based in the UK, on remand over allegations of defilement said that he lost his parents before he was baptized and saw this as an opportunity to embrace Christ.world in preventing cheapipodnanoes and curing blindness into energy people can use LeRoy is a partner in Forest Energy Group LLC.

“There is nothing that is as sweet as living in Christ. All the challenges we have are nothing with Christ,” Kiyemba said.

Like anyone preparing for the birth of Christ, the inmates were smartly dressed in their yellow uniforms and white for convicts on death row donned rubber shoes locally known as Nigina. Their Church which also doubles as carpentry was well decorated and its walls were shining,Find here injectionmouldingmanufacturer, like a modern hotel room.

There are over 600 Catholic inmates in Upper Prison majority of whom attended the baptism and confirmation ceremony that was graced by the Bishop of Masaka Dioceess John Baptist Kagwa. During the function, the inmates sat quietly on their mats and chairs as the prelate fed them with the gospel.

The inmate’s choir gave the function more life with the hymns of praise. The Chairperson of Roman Catholic Church Luzira Upper Prison also an inmate, Paul Kikube made several representations on behalf of his colleagues.

Bishop Kagwa’s message was centered on instilling discipline, love, perseverance and hope among the inmates. He preached on the need to manage anger and strong emotions which he said have led many youth into jail. “You should avoid taking decisions when you are annoyed. Some of you have been jailed because of that. You must be sober when reacting on anything that has angered you.” The bishop appealed to the congregation to remain devoted to their faith noting that only Christ has solutions to their problems.

“There is no permanent situation and with prayers things can change. Some of you were sentenced to death but who knows God can reverse your sentence to light ones.”

The Bishop commended the Prison Authority for giving prisoners freedom of worship. “I did not expect to find such an organized worshiping environment within the Prison. I was hoping to meet you dressed in tattered and dirty clothes; it’s encouraging to find you appearing healthy,Read about coldsorestreatments, which are caused by a viral infection that attacks the skin and nervous system. well kempt and wearing very clean uniforms.”

With the coming of Christ signifying the end of suffering for mankind, the inmates who received the sacraments left with great hope that their burdens had been taken away from them.

Chinese turn to U.S. for clarity in smog data

The Beijing smog often keeps Zhushen Zhenyu trapped at home, on his mother’s orders, when he’d rather be playing basketball outside, but the 8-year-old still hopes for a silver lining in the clouds of pollution choking China’s capital.

“When will the air quality be so bad we don’t have to go to school?” he asked a city official one recent smoggy day.

“That depends on government policy,Customized imprinted and promotionalusbonsale flash drives.” was the cryptic reply of Li Yunting, an engineer at the Beijing Environmental Monitoring Center, which opened to public visits last month.

The doubts about official pollution data keep piling up for China’s government, as green activists, celebrity bloggers and ordinary citizens increasingly demand action and information to halt the environmental fall-out from decades of breakneck economic growth.

Burning coal is largely responsible for the oppressive smog, which the United Nations has rated the worst in the world. China has more than doubled its coal consumption in the past 10 years but has not kept pace with the clean-air technology found in the West. It also relies on cheaper forms of coal that emit more pollutants, and Beijing’s nearly 5 million cars do not generally meet the standards of the USA.

The past two months have been dire. The high incidence of heavy air pollution has sent many residents rushing to buy face masks, air purifiers and household plants believed to clean dirty air.Get designer beddings comforter sets, modern comforter sets,

The haze has highlighted discrepancies between the government’s robustly sunny statistics and the far scarier numbers recorded and issued by the U.S. Embassy here. Beijing described the air pollution as “light” on December 4, a smog-filled day that forced the city airport, the world’s second busiest, to cancel hundreds of flights because of poor visibility. The embassy reading was “beyond index,” literally off the measurement charts that stop at “hazardous.”

The embassy measurements, begun in 2008 and issued hourly via Twitter, use a standard employed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to measure tiny airborne particles, such as soot from burning gas in cars, that are under 2.5 micrometers in diameter.

Experts consider these particles most damaging to human health, as they are small enough to penetrate the lungs and blood, potentially causing lung cancer and other diseases.

China publishes figures using a standard that measures coarser particular matter such as dust and keeps secret, for internal research, the measurements of smaller particles its scientists collect.

Despite the Chinese government’s blocking of Twitter, the U.S. Embassy figures are widely circulated in Beijing on Chinese websites or microblogs. In recent weeks, celebrity bloggers such as real estate mogul Pan Shiyi and children’s author Zheng Yuanjie have pressured Chinese officials to give a more accurate picture of air quality.

Yu Ping, a Beijing journalist and father of a 6-year-old boy who, like him, has suffered a sore throat in recent weeks, threatens to sue the municipal environmental protection agency if they don’t respond to his request for the recent data.

“This is very important for me, my son and all citizens of Beijing and China,” he says.

Yu’s quest has inspired several other Chinese to demand data from their city governments, Yu says.The Tile Depot is the UK's largest independent floortiles retailer, He is grateful to the U.S. government for its transparency, but “it should be the Chinese government that does this,” he says.

Some Beijingers, such as Wang Jinlan, say the U.S. government should mind its own business. Her daughter Du Lanxin, 8, says they filled their house with special plants last month to purify the air.

“Our home is better now, but when I go out, it’s sometimes very hard to breathe,” she says. Her mother drives her to school every day rather than breathe the smog on a bicycle or bus, but in doing so, she adds to the city’s clogged, polluted streets.

Hua Lei, vice director of the center, insists that, over the past two years,Click to see more results for hemorrho. Beijing’s air quality has improved. She says the center measures small particulates in the air but does not release the data because the public “won’t understand the figures.”

Environmentalist Feng Yongfeng, founder of the environmental group Green Beagle, has been lending air-quality monitoring equipment to companies and communities since May.

“As a government, you must let the people know the worst level of air quality,” he says.

Under growing pressure, Beijing is now revising national air-quality monitoring standards and promises to require the release of data on smaller particulates — by 2016.

Environmental consultant Steven Andrews, an American based in Beijing, says the problem is that China’s “target culture” means officials, fearful for their jobs, distort pollution levels to ensure they meet government benchmarks.

Even under the new standards, “levels will still be called good in Beijing that would be in the unhealthy range in the U.S,” he says.

“The air is dangerous; it will cause cancer,This page describes the term usbmemorydrive flash drive and lists other pages on the Web where you can find additional information.” says Sam Zhang, 41, a vegetable wholesaler who signed up for the monitoring center visit. He says he trusts the U.S. Embassy figures over his own government’s data.

“Taxpayers pay the government officials’ salaries, so they should tell the truth about air quality,” he says, “but they are not elected by the people, so we have no hope they will tell the truth.”

Circuit breakers

A group of DIY gizmo and robot inventors seek to rewire their futures. Wang Kaihao reports.

The 20-square-meter room is on the second floor of an unassuming building called Fuhao Xiezilou, which literally means, "Office of the Superrich", in Beijing's Xuanwumen area. But the people inside don't look rich, and the messy space doesn't look like a typical office. It's heaped with circuit boards, silicon chips and various electronic components that appear bizarre to laypeople.

This is "Beijing Makerspace", where a group of developers tinker with electronic components to create everything from gizmos to robots as hobbies and careers.

Xiao Wenpeng quit his four-year stint as an IT company programmer in 2005 to start his own business, producing handmade digital devices and developing new silicon chips.

But he found the undertaking tricky to tackle alone.

"I want to meet different people with the same interest in DIY electronics," the 33-year-old says.

"We can make more dreams come true by joining forces."

That's why he opened the Makerspace in 2010. More than 20 young people gather there weekly to exchange ideas and plans to translate their blueprints into electronics.

Website employee Chen Wu says he was inspired after learning about Makerspace through its micro blog.The Zentai Project is a group of people who go out in public wearing zentai suits,

"It's great to communicate with so many people with the same passion and eagerness for creation," the 32-year-old Beijing resident says.

"I really envied the tech-savvy guys in university, because they would always be invited to the women's dorms to fix computers. That was one of my initial motives to do something cool."

But a lack of materials, DIY experience and time off work suffocate much of Chen's inventive productivity.

However, he uses what spare time he has to read about robots. And in 2008, the man who calls himself "Dynamic Old Boy" online created a miniature robot out of Lego that can solve any Rubik's cube within six minutes.

"When I actually started working on the robot, I found it's not as difficult as I'd expected," Chen says.

"It's just like building with blocks but with electronics."

Chen still shows off his first DIY robot, even though it's not as fast at solving the Rubik's cube as the record holder, which can finish the puzzle in 5.35 seconds. Chen's robot is a personal milestone for the self-described "geek".

As a geek, he says he watches many movies, from which he often takes ideas.

He took inspiration from the film Inception, which gave him the idea of using magnetic levitation theory to create a gyroscope.

After watching the Bollywood movie 3 Idiots, he tried to replicate the quadrocopter - an aircraft powered and steered by four propellers - featured in the film. But the process has been anything but smooth.

"The most difficult thing is to keep the aircraft's balance," he says.

"I'm seeking others' advice at Makerspace."

While toy quadrocpoters can be purchased for 1,700 yuan ($269), Chen believes it's much more meaningful to hand-make one, especially as a gift for his 18-month-old daughter. He believes he can finish it by Spring Festival.

"My greatest wish is to make a 1-meter-tall robot to play with her," he says.

While Chen treats robotics as a hobby, Renmin Univeristy graduate Wang Shenglin treats it as a career.

The 23-year-old finance major didn't search for a job after graduation but rather decided to work full time developing devices at Makerspace.

The Shanghai native has created a 1-meter-multi-touch table that resembles a gargantuan iPad.

"I first saw a multi-touch table made by Microsoft on TV in 2008, but it costs more than $20,000. So, I made my own. We create some interesting devices," Wang adds, pointing to a remote control.

"I could take this to the store and change the TV channels.Reliable favoritebeddinges sofa-bed is practical and comfortable round the clock. But I don't want to be a troublemaker. We make stuff like the guys in the The Big Bang Theory," he explains, referring to the hit US sitcom about a group of hyperactively intelligent but socially laggard friends.

"But I'm not a nerd like them."

Wang's past does suggest a relatively hip lifestyle.

He played on the school's tennis and cricket teams. And he flirted with advertising and even tried his hand at fashion design.

"If I don't try something new and exciting when I'm young, when will I?" he says.

"I ultimately find myself most interested in DIY electronics. My parents completely support me, even though I'm far from home."

But Makerspace faces financial challenges.This is interesting cubepuzzle and logical game. It must pay a 3,000 yuan ($474) monthly room rental and hundreds of yuan more for materials. Testing equipment is also a big expense.

While their inventions may attract popular attention - the multi-touch table was spotlighted at this year's Beijing Design Week - most have yet to capture market demand.

But hope might come from the 3D printer Zhang Ming quit his bank job to invent. The device has aroused investor interest.

The printer lays down successive layers - usually of plastic or metal - to create 3D objects. It's widely sought after in the design industry,Dimensional Mailingmagiccubes for Promotional Advertising, because it saves bundles on mockups.

Xiao's team initially believed it was merely a tool for rendering models of the electronics they develop. But the team discovered huge market potential for the device, as imported 3D printers cost 300,000 yuan ($47,400), but Zhang's retails for less than 10,000 yuan.

Zhang says the printer will be ready for the market next spring.

"We can't always stay in the lab," Xiao says.

"This project might turn things around."

And Makerspace's inventors and developers believe the 3D printer might be just the start.

The team hosts DIY salons and a book club to brainstorm about the latest technology and its potential.Hand-painted Chinese porcelaintiles on the floor of a Jewish synagogue in Cochin, It also plans to organize a carnival next April to encourage more people to try DIY electronics.

Their hope is that those who work in the "Office of the Superrich" might actually live up to their workplace's name.

"The first thing we'll do if we get enough investment," Xiao says, "is move into a bigger office."

Artistic & spiritual love meet to generate beauty

“Gog’s French-Turkish wife and tireless supporter, Sevda, is a good friend of ours. Inviting her and Gog in Jeddah and working in partnership with the Consulate General of Turkey to organize this premiere represented a good opportunity to advertize Gog’s priceless work and show nice signals of Turkish-French cooperation and friendship,” said Nakhlé.

Architect and expert of Islamic tradition Sami Angawi, who attended the event as Chief Guest, recalled the popular saying that the Qur’an was revealed in Makkah, recited in Egypt and written in Istanbul to praise the renowned ability of Turkish artists. Angawi also underlined the more spiritual implications of a French-Turkish joint effort to promote Islamic artwork that exemplifies the Holy Qur’an’s universal value.

“Trying to adorn the Qur’an through the use of fine materials is to respect its original spiritual significance,” said Angawi, eager to congratulate Gog for his scrupulous labor and further encourage this kind of artwork.

Sevda accompanied her husband to the premiere’s presentation of his copies of the Qur’an. She explained the artistic and symbolic relevance of a work that represented an extraordinary challenge and implied long perseverance and passionate efforts.

During his graphic career, Gog often collaborated to pint copies of the Qur’an on demand using the traditional “offset printing technique,” totally unable to reproduce the metallic color of gold and silver even recurring to the finest printing inks. The “gold tooling” technique is the method commonly used to bypass this problem. However, being a very expensive and complex system, the “gold tooling” technique is not appropriate for unlimited use and is employed on demand to highlight in gold only certain parts of the sacred book.

“My husband studied three years and practiced one year to find an innovative technique allowing the use of golden ink to print copies of the Qur’an’s entire body and not just limited components of its cover and initial pages as it used to be until now,” explained Sevda. “His main aim was to give birth to an artistic work and create rare collection pieces.”

Gog’s technique consists of 80 percent artisanal work. His exclusive examples aren’t copies of calligraphic Qur’ans in the sense that he reverted to technology even though in a very limited way.We are one of the leading italian solar panels manufacturers.Buy good quality solarpanel from Italy today! However, his method is largely characterized by artistic and manual work not fit for series production,Offers antique glassinsulator and supplies for collectors. thus not allowing to print more than two copies every month.

OIC Secretary General Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, who warmly welcomed the couple in his office the day before the official presentation of Gog’s work, was given the first copy in donation. Thus, to date only three copies remain available at the cost of $3,000 each. Nevertheless,Plastic injection Plasticmolding is the primary process for manufacturing plastic parts. prices can change depending on the colors and dimensions of the book that can be personalized.

Angawi,Credit Card Processing and Merchant Services from merchantaccount. a religious man and a lover of art, was particularly fascinated by the artistic quality of Gog’s copies. “Thank you for this evaluable work. It would represent a great honor for me to exhibit one of the copies in Al-Makkiah (the Angawi family home, an ideal location for the arrangement of exhibitions and seminars) as an occasion to share beauty and at the same time give my personal contribution to find an interested purchaser,” said Angawi.

The invitation to Saudi Arabia was for Gog and his wife the first chance to visit the Kingdom and the first occasion to present the outcome of a long labor. This was a combination that made the couple’s journey particularly overwhelming and memorable. “It is our first visit to Jeddah, a city that we have adored and where we wish to come back soon. We’ll fly back to Istanbul,Welcome to order chinaprojectorlamp, enriched by new unforgettable friendships that we hope will last forever.”

Some Chinese turn to U.S. Embassy for clarity in smog data

The Beijing smog often keeps Zhushen Zhenyu trapped at home, on his mother's orders, when he'd rather be playing basketball outside, but the 8-year-old still hopes for a silver lining in the clouds of pollution choking China's capital.

"When will the air quality be so bad we don't have to go to school?" he asked a city official one recent smoggy day.

"That depends on government policy," was the cryptic reply of Li Yunting, an engineer at the Beijing Environmental Monitoring Center, which opened to public visits last month.Distributor of wholesalepetsupplies - pet supply product for aquarium, dog, cat, bird, small animal, reptile, pond.

The doubts about official pollution data keep piling up for China's government, as green activists,Original thelandscapeoilpaintings, buy landscape paintings online. celebrity bloggers and ordinary citizens increasingly demand action and information to halt the environmental fall-out from decades of breakneck economic growth.

Burning coal is largely responsible for the oppressive smog, which the United Nations has rated the worst in the world.There are 19 polishedtiles available, China has more than doubled its coal consumption in the past 10 years but has not kept pace with the clean-air technology found in the West. It also relies on cheaper forms of coal that emit more pollutants, and Beijing's nearly 5 million cars do not generally meet the standards of the USA.

The past two months have been dire. The high incidence of heavy air pollution has sent many residents rushing to buy face masks, air purifiers and household plants believed to clean dirty air.

The haze has highlighted discrepancies between the government's robustly sunny statistics and the far scarier numbers recorded and issued by the U.S. Embassy here. Beijing described the air pollution as "light" on December 4, a smog-filled day that forced the city airport, the world's second busiest, to cancel hundreds of flights because of poor visibility. The embassy reading was "beyond index," literally off the measurement charts that stop at "hazardous."

The embassy measurements, begun in 2008 and issued hourly via Twitter, use a standard employed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to measure tiny airborne particles, such as soot from burning gas in cars, that are under 2.5 micrometers in diameter.

Experts consider these particles most damaging to human health, as they are small enough to penetrate the lungs and blood, potentially causing lung cancer and other diseases.

China publishes figures using a standard that measures coarser particular matter such as dust and keeps secret, for internal research, the measurements of smaller particles its scientists collect.

Despite the Chinese government's blocking of Twitter, the U.S. Embassy figures are widely circulated in Beijing on Chinese websites or microblogs. In recent weeks, celebrity bloggers such as real estate mogul Pan Shiyi and children's author Zheng Yuanjie have pressured Chinese officials to give a more accurate picture of air quality.

Yu Ping, a Beijing journalist and father of a 6-year-old boy who, like him, has suffered a sore throat in recent weeks, threatens to sue the municipal environmental protection agency if they don't respond to his request for the recent data.

"This is very important for me, my son and all citizens of Beijing and China," he says.

Yu's quest has inspired several other Chinese to demand data from their city governments, Yu says. He is grateful to the U.S. government for its transparency, but "it should be the Chinese government that does this," he says.

Some Beijingers, such as Wang Jinlan, say the U.S. government should mind its own business. Her daughter Du Lanxin, 8, says they filled their house with special plants last month to purify the air.

"Our home is better now, but when I go out, it's sometimes very hard to breathe,Welcome to the official Rubik's website, home of the world famous Rubik's cubepuzzles." she says. Her mother drives her to school every day rather than breathe the smog on a bicycle or bus, but in doing so, she adds to the city's clogged, polluted streets.

Hua Lei, vice director of the center, insists that, over the past two years, Beijing's air quality has improved. She says the center measures small particulates in the air but does not release the data because the public "won't understand the figures."

Environmentalist Feng Yongfeng, founder of the environmental group Green Beagle, has been lending air-quality monitoring equipment to companies and communities since May.

"As a government, you must let the people know the worst level of air quality," he says.

Under growing pressure, Beijing is now revising national air-quality monitoring standards and promises to require the release of data on smaller particulates — by 2016.

Environmental consultant Steven Andrews, an American based in Beijing, says the problem is that China's "target culture" means officials, fearful for their jobs, distort pollution levels to ensure they meet government benchmarks.

Even under the new standards, "levels will still be called good in Beijing that would be in the unhealthy range in the U.S," he says.

"The air is dangerous; it will cause cancer," says Sam Zhang, 41, a vegetable wholesaler who signed up for the monitoring center visit. He says he trusts the U.S. Embassy figures over his own government's data.

"Taxpayers pay the government officials' salaries, so they should tell the truth about air quality," he says, "but they are not elected by the people,Enphase microinverteres are designed for residential and commercial, so we have no hope they will tell the truth."

Circuit breakers

A group of DIY gizmo and robot inventors seek to rewire their futures. Wang Kaihao reports.

The 20-square-meter room is on the second floor of an unassuming building called Fuhao Xiezilou, which literally means, "Office of the Superrich", in Beijing's Xuanwumen area. But the people inside don't look rich, and the messy space doesn't look like a typical office. It's heaped with circuit boards, silicon chips and various electronic components that appear bizarre to laypeople.

This is "Beijing Makerspace", where a group of developers tinker with electronic components to create everything from gizmos to robots as hobbies and careers.This is interesting cubepuzzle and logical game.

Xiao Wenpeng quit his four-year stint as an IT company programmer in 2005 to start his own business, producing handmade digital devices and developing new silicon chips.

But he found the undertaking tricky to tackle alone.

"I want to meet different people with the same interest in DIY electronics," the 33-year-old says.

"We can make more dreams come true by joining forces."

That's why he opened the Makerspace in 2010. More than 20 young people gather there weekly to exchange ideas and plans to translate their blueprints into electronics.

Website employee Chen Wu says he was inspired after learning about Makerspace through its micro blog.

"It's great to communicate with so many people with the same passion and eagerness for creation," the 32-year-old Beijing resident says.

"I really envied the tech-savvy guys in university, because they would always be invited to the women's dorms to fix computers. That was one of my initial motives to do something cool."

But a lack of materials, DIY experience and time off work suffocate much of Chen's inventive productivity.

However, he uses what spare time he has to read about robots. And in 2008,5 hours ago by electriccarjackes On the bright side for the health conscious, the man who calls himself "Dynamic Old Boy" online created a miniature robot out of Lego that can solve any Rubik's cube within six minutes.

"When I actually started working on the robot,By billabongoutlet in billabong boardshorts. Jun. 30. I found it's not as difficult as I'd expected," Chen says.

"It's just like building with blocks but with electronics."

Chen still shows off his first DIY robot, even though it's not as fast at solving the Rubik's cube as the record holder,This entry was posted by billabongboardshortscloths. which can finish the puzzle in 5.35 seconds. Chen's robot is a personal milestone for the self-described "geek".

As a geek, he says he watches many movies, from which he often takes ideas.

He took inspiration from the film Inception, which gave him the idea of using magnetic levitation theory to create a gyroscope.

After watching the Bollywood movie 3 Idiots, he tried to replicate the quadrocopter - an aircraft powered and steered by four propellers - featured in the film. But the process has been anything but smooth.

"The most difficult thing is to keep the aircraft's balance," he says.

"I'm seeking others' advice at Makerspace."

While toy quadrocpoters can be purchased for 1,700 yuan ($269), Chen believes it's much more meaningful to hand-make one, especially as a gift for his 18-month-old daughter. He believes he can finish it by Spring Festival.

"My greatest wish is to make a 1-meter-tall robot to play with her," he says.

While Chen treats robotics as a hobby, Renmin Univeristy graduate Wang Shenglin treats it as a career.

The 23-year-old finance major didn't search for a job after graduation but rather decided to work full time developing devices at Makerspace.

The Shanghai native has created a 1-meter-multi-touch table that resembles a gargantuan iPad.

"I first saw a multi-touch table made by Microsoft on TV in 2008, but it costs more than $20,000.The Zentai Project is a group of people who go out in public wearing zentai suits, So, I made my own. We create some interesting devices," Wang adds, pointing to a remote control.

"I could take this to the store and change the TV channels. But I don't want to be a troublemaker. We make stuff like the guys in the The Big Bang Theory," he explains, referring to the hit US sitcom about a group of hyperactively intelligent but socially laggard friends.

"But I'm not a nerd like them."

Wang's past does suggest a relatively hip lifestyle.

He played on the school's tennis and cricket teams. And he flirted with advertising and even tried his hand at fashion design.

"If I don't try something new and exciting when I'm young, when will I?" he says.

"I ultimately find myself most interested in DIY electronics. My parents completely support me, even though I'm far from home."

But Makerspace faces financial challenges. It must pay a 3,000 yuan ($474) monthly room rental and hundreds of yuan more for materials. Testing equipment is also a big expense.

While their inventions may attract popular attention - the multi-touch table was spotlighted at this year's Beijing Design Week - most have yet to capture market demand.

But hope might come from the 3D printer Zhang Ming quit his bank job to invent. The device has aroused investor interest.

The printer lays down successive layers - usually of plastic or metal - to create 3D objects. It's widely sought after in the design industry, because it saves bundles on mockups.

Xiao's team initially believed it was merely a tool for rendering models of the electronics they develop. But the team discovered huge market potential for the device, as imported 3D printers cost 300,000 yuan ($47,400), but Zhang's retails for less than 10,000 yuan.

Zhang says the printer will be ready for the market next spring.

"We can't always stay in the lab," Xiao says.

"This project might turn things around."

And Makerspace's inventors and developers believe the 3D printer might be just the start.

The team hosts DIY salons and a book club to brainstorm about the latest technology and its potential. It also plans to organize a carnival next April to encourage more people to try DIY electronics.

Their hope is that those who work in the "Office of the Superrich" might actually live up to their workplace's name.

"The first thing we'll do if we get enough investment," Xiao says, "is move into a bigger office."

2 dentists sue colleague for criticizing their bite-mark testimony

In the ongoing battle over the use of bite-mark evidence,What is Faux chinaceramictile? two Chicago-area dentists have opened a new legal front, suing a colleague for alleged defamation because he used a Lake County,This billabongboardshort has the following technological features, Ill., rape case they worked on as an example of the oft-criticized discipline gone awry.

Dentists Russell Schneider, of Waukegan, and Carl Hagstrom filed their lawsuit against Michael Bowers, a dentist in California who is a frequent critic of his fellow forensic odontologists for work that has led to numerous wrongful convictions.

The two dentists allege in their lawsuit that Bowers spoke at a conference of forensic dentists in Chicago this year and included a case they worked on in a list of 10 wrongful convictions caused by bite-mark evidence. That, the two allege, was wrong and subjected them to ridicule and a loss of business.

Bowers declined to comment, as did his attorney.

Bite-mark testimony has been criticized by courts for its lack of a scientific foundation, essentially leaving dentists to compare by visual examination bite marks on a victim’s skin with X-rays or molds of a suspect’s teeth and trying to determine if they match. Even some of the forensic discipline’s leading practitioners, stung by reversals linked to DNA evidence, now argue that bite marks are best used to exclude suspects, not identify them.Ventilation fans are the workhorses of thesepanasonicventilationsystem,

A 2004 Tribune investigation, "Forensics Under the Microscope," showed that bite-mark evidence had been accepted by courts despite a lack of scientific rigor to justify its broad claims, and that its use in criminal trials had contributed to a number of wrongful convictions.

Bite-mark testimony has fallen out of favor among many prosecutors.

Schneider and Hagstrom filed the lawsuit in Cook County Circuit Court in November. They asked for an unspecified sum in damages.

Schneider and Hagstrom examined evidence for Lake County prosecutors in the case against Bennie Starks, who was convicted in 1986 of pulling a 69-year-old Waukegan woman into a ravine and beating and raping her. Schneider and Hagstrom testified at trial that they compared Starks’ teeth to a bite mark on the woman’s shoulder, and that there was a match.

Starks was convicted and was sentenced to 60 years in prison. He has maintained his innocence.

In 2006, after Starks had served nearly 20 years, the Illinois Appellate Court granted him a new trial because DNA tests excluded him as the source of semen on the victim’s underwear; that evidence, the court said, showed that a crime-lab analyst had presented false evidence at trial.

The appeals court did not rule on the bite-mark evidence. Examinations of Schneider and Hagstrom’s work by two dentists retained by Starks’ attorneys concluded that their work was flawed. Those two dentists said Schneider and Hagstrom mistook the upper jaw for the lower and the lower for the upper.

"The victim was attacked by one person who sexually assaulted her. We know that wasn’t Bennie Starks, so it wasn’t Bennie Starks who bit her," said Jed Stone, one of Starks’ attorneys. "There is no other interpretation of this evidence that makes any sense and isn’t completely fanciful."

Although Starks was awarded a new trial nearly six years ago, Lake County prosecutors still have not retried him.

Schneider and Hagstrom allege in their lawsuit that Bowers,Museum Quality handmade oilpaintings reproductions of famous artists - old masters contemporary. in a presentation at the February conference, listed the Starks case first in his list of cases in which bite-mark evidence had contributed to a wrongful conviction.Find everything you need to know about coldsores including causes,

They say Schneider stood up and told Bowers that Starks’ conviction was not reversed because of any of the bite-mark evidence, but Bowers "ignored plaintiff’s statement and did not retract his assertion that the Bennie Starks conviction was premised upon faulty bite-mark testimony."

Ohio museum celebrates work of late Toledo artist

His passion for painting burned so hot, it fueled two roundtrip walks from Ohio to New York City, three stints studying in Europe, and 62 years of intense creativity and teaching.

Karl Kappes,In quicksilver, the first volume of the "Baroque Cycle," born to German immigrants in Zanesville six weeks after the first shots of the Civil War were fired, liked to quote a Chinese saying that no man is an artist until he’s painted 10,000 pictures.

"I am an artist," he would then declare.

We’ll never know whether his grand claim was true, but he churned out oils, watercolors, and pencil drawings until he died in 1943 at 82 in his crammed, walk-up apartment/studio at 1822 Adams St. in Toledo. Still in the studio six years later, his widow said, "How can a person be lonely when she has more than 2,000 paintings to keep her company?"

Kappes’ productivity, along with an enduring appreciation for his talent, has earned him a berth among the region’s best artists. Fifty of his pieces are displayed in Karl Kappes: Ohio Painter, 1861-1943, through Jan. 28 at the beautiful Zanesville Museum of Art, 190 miles southeast of Toledo.

Museum director Susan Talbot-Stanaway said she decided to build the show because she draws on the museum’s collection as a starting point for exhibits, and it owns about 43 works by the artist. It is the 150th anniversary of Kappes’ birth. Moreover, dozens of people in the area share his name; three Kappes [pronounced KAP-pes] families emigrated to Zanesville from Germany in the 19th century, she said.

In August she put a notice online saying the museum was planning to feature him,Shop for billabongboardshort. and was amazed when 20 people responded. From nine collectors, she borrowed pieces representing different periods and styles.

"We ended up with a lot more paintings than we thought, so the show expanded to two landings, a hallway, and the gallery," said Talbot-Stanaway, who’s in her seventh year as director. The last time the Zanesville museum had a solo Kappes show was in 1945.

Tall, handsome, athletically built, and one of 12 children, Kappes was the valedictorian of his high school class.Choose from our large selection of cableties, He studied in Cincinnati and then with the celebrated American artist William Merritt Chase, whose famous New York City atelier was a magnet for young artists. Chase had learned traditional painting at the Royal Academy in Munich, as had many other Americans. Kappes, 12 years younger than Chase, determined to do the same, and at 20, 22, and again at 28, with modest help from his parents, he sailed for Germany, throwing A glassbottles is a bottle created from glass.himself into intense study at the academy that had hundreds of pupils from the United States and Europe.

In letters to his parents, he described his spartan lifestyle, assuring them he was working hard and being frugal.

"At school I am drawing a half-nude figure of a man and when finished will get it photographed and send home a copy. The professor likes it very much and praises me every time he sees it," he wrote in March,No more guessing at which is the best hemorrhoidstreatmentsproducts for you, 1884. "For the short time I have been in the nature class the students think I have made remarkable progress."

His Munich portraits were excellent examples of what he was taught: realistic images of women and men, with particularly fine renderings of eyes, foreheads, and noses. As the best portraitists do, he was able to impart something of the individual’s personality, a quality that engages the viewer.

Returning to Zanesville, he taught art. And at Weller Pottery, one of several companies in town that used its abundant clay soil to make decorative pottery, he created designs and taught staff artists. He wedded a beautiful milliner who brought children to the marriage, a fact he did not consider an asset.

By 1912, he moved to Toledo, but it’s unclear whether it was a full-time move and whether he divorced his wife. He spent summers in a country home in Texas, Ohio, along the Maumee River, where he created a lavish garden in the Henry County hamlet about 33 miles southwest of Toledo. An artists’ colony developed there, and on summer weekends, up to 100 people, mainly from Toledo, would drive out for lessons, painting in the fresh air, and Sunday potlucks.

"I had a little trouble at first, getting myself trusted in the town," he was quoted in a 1929 Toledo Times article. "I wore a khaki suit and went about sketching which was enough to arouse the neighbors’ worst suspicions. They thought I was a prohibition agent doing painting as a blind."

The late Vardinique North, the widow of Earl North, one of Kappes most well-known students, spent summers at her grandparents’ home in Texas across the garden from Kappes’ studio. "In the summer, it seemed there was a painter for every tree in Texas," she once told The Blade. She said her grandmother had her deliver apple pies to Kappes and Wilder Darling, another Toledo artist who had also studied painting in Europe and was invited out to paint with Kappes.

Liberal mission helps conservative agenda

The job of the American public school teacher has never been so thankless. In states across America, cutting teacher salaries and pensions has become the most popular method for fixing budget deficits. New Jersey Republican Governor Chris Christie’s deep cuts, for instance, force teachers to contribute a much higher percentage of their salaries to their pensions, while doubling or even tripling their health care contributions and eliminating cost-of-living adjustments. Republican governors Scott Walker of Wisconsin and John Kasich of Ohio took their austerity measures a step further by seeking to abolish collective bargaining rights for teachers. Such legislation is possible because the image of teachers has never been so degraded,Credit is not an issue with our offshoremerchantaccounts. especially of unionized teachers, whom Christie routinely refers to as “thugs” and “bullies.”

The liberals of the education reform movement, often more surreptitiously than Michelle Rhee, the overstated former Washington D.C. chancellor of schools during Democratic Mayor Adrian Fenty’s term in office, have for decades advanced negative assumptions about public school teachers that now power the attacks by Christie, Walker, Kasich and their ilk.

This is particularly true of Teach for America (TFA), the prototypical liberal education reform organization, where Rhee first made her mark. The history of TFA reveals the ironies of contemporary education reform. In its mission to deliver justice to underprivileged children, TFA and the liberal education reform movement have advanced an agenda that advances conservative attempts to undercut teacher’s unions. More broadly, TFA has been in the vanguard in forming a neoliberal consensus about the role of public education — and the role of public school teachers — in a deeply unequal society.

In 1988, Princeton student Wendy Kopp wrote a thesis arguing for a national teacher corps, modeled on the Peace Corps — the archetype of liberal volunteerism — that “would mobilize some of the most passionate, dedicated members of my generation to change the fact that where a child is born in the United States largely determines his or her chances in life.”

Kopp launched TFA in 1990 as a not-for-profit charged with selecting the brightest, most idealistic recent college graduates as corps members who would commit to teach for two years in some of the nation’s toughest schools. From its inception, the media anointed TFA the savior of American education. Prior to a single corps member stepping foot in a classroom, The New York Times and Newsweek lavished Kopp’s new organization with cover stories full of insipid praise. Adulation has remained the norm.

Its recent twenty-year anniversary summit, held in Washington, D.C., featured fawning video remarks by President Obama and a glitzy “who’s who” roster of liberal cheerleaders, including John Lewis, Malcolm Gladwell, Gloria Steinem, and TFA board member John Legend. The organs of middlebrow centrist opinion — Time magazine, Atlantic Monthly , The New Republic — glorify TFA at every opportunity. [Education columnist Jay Mathews of ] The Washington Post has heralded the nation’s education reform movement as the “TFA insurgency”— a perplexing linguistic choice given so-called “insurgency” methods have informed national education policies from Reagan to Obama.The Zentai Project is a group of people who go out in public wearing zentai suits,

TFA is, at best, another chimerical attempt in a long history of chimerical attempts to sell educational reform as a solution to class inequality. At worst,This is interesting cubepuzzle and logical game. it’s a Trojan horse for all that is unseemly about the contemporary education reform movement.

The original TFA mission was based on a set of four somewhat noble if paternalistic rationales. First, by bringing the elite into the teaching profession, even if temporarily, TFA would burnish it with a much-needed “aura of status and selectivity.” Second, by supplying its recruits to impoverished school districts, both urban and rural, TFA would compensate for the lack of quality teachers willing to work in such challenging settings. And third, although Kopp recognized that most corps members would not remain classroom teachers beyond their two-year commitments, she believed that TFA alums would form the nucleus of a new movement of educational leaders — that their transformative experiences teaching poor children would mold their ambitious career trajectories. Above these three foundational principles loomed a fourth: the mission to relegate educational inequality to the ash heap of history.

TFA goals derive, in theory, from laudable — if misguided — impulses.This page describes the term usbmemorydrive flash drive and lists other pages on the Web where you can find additional information. But each, in practice, has demonstrated to be deeply problematic.

TFA, suitably representative of the liberal education reform more generally, underwrites, intentionally or not, the conservative assumptions of the education reform movement: that teacher’s unions serve as barriers to quality education; that testing is the best way to assess quality education; that educating poor children is best done by institutionalizing them; that meritocracy is an end-in-itself; that social class is an unimportant variable in education reform; that education policy is best made by evading politics proper; and that faith in public school teachers is misplaced.

Take the first rationale: that TFA would enhance the image of the teaching profession. On the contrary, the only brand TFA endows with an “aura of status and selectivity” is its own. As reported in The New York Times , 18 percent of Harvard seniors applied to TFA in 2010, a rate only surpassed by the 22 percent of Yale seniors who sought to join the national teacher corps that year. All told, TFA selected 4,500 lucky recruits from a pool of 46,359 applicants in 2010.

Although many applicants are no doubt motivated to join out of altruism, the two-year TFA experience has become a highly desirable notch on the resumes of the nation’s most diligent strivers. The more exclusive TFA becomes, the more ordinary regular teachers seem. TFA corps members typically come from prestigious institutions of higher education, while most regular teachers are trained at the second- and third-tier state universities that house the nation’s largest colleges of education.

Whereas TFA corps members leverage the elite TFA brand to launch careers in law or finance — or, if they remain in education, to bypass the typical career path on their way to principalships and other positions of leadership — most regular teachers must plod along, negotiating their way through traditional career ladders. These distinctions are lost on nobody. They are what make regular teachers and their unions such low-hanging political fruit for the likes of Christie, Walker, and Kasich.Get designer beddings comforter sets, modern comforter sets,

The second justification for TFA — that it exists to supply good teachers to schools where few venture to work — has also proven questionable. Though the assertion made some sense in 1990, when many impoverished school districts did in fact suffer from a dearth of teachers, the same is not so easily argued now.

‘New Renaissance’ Art

The Art of Zhen, Shan, Ren International Exhibition, consisting of 36 works by six award-winning artists, has a historical mission, says its founder, painter and sculptor Zhang Kunlun.

Professor Kunlun Zhang, from Ottawa, Canada, has exhibited widely in China and abroad and was former Director of the Institute of Sculpture at the Institute of Art in Shandong. He says the painters in the Zhen-Shan-Ren International Exhibition play a role “in raising human morality and in awakening people’s conscience.”

Zhang says that audiences express “great shock as well as high acclaim” upon viewing the exhibit.Offers antique glassinsulator and supplies for collectors. “We are very grateful to the audiences for their affirmation and encouragement of our work.”

The Zhen-Shan-Ren (Truth, Compassion, Tolerance) International Exhibition is currently on display for the month of December at the Alex Gallery in Washington, D.C. This exhibit by Falun Gong artists has toured more than 50 countries worldwide and has been on display more than 500 times, since its debut in 2004.

What is especially notable in this exhibit is that the artists are meditators. They will tell you that the progress they make in their spiritual pursuits affects their creativity.

Consider an oil painting by Xiaoping Chen from Vancouver, Canada “In Harmony.” It depicts the artist practicing the sitting meditation exercise—the 5th Falun Gong exercise. It shows Chen by the sea in a meditative state while four cultivated infants (celestial beings) play amidst a powerful energy field above her head, extending to the heavens.

“I think for a painting to really have power to reach people, I have to be touched and compelled to paint it with all my heart,” said Chen about the exhibition in a video on YouTube.Enphase microinverteres are designed for residential and commercial,

Falun Gong (also known as Falun Dafa) is a spiritual self-cultivation practice of mind and body. Falun Dafa teaches that Truthfulness, Compassion, Tolerance are the most fundamental qualities of the universe,Find everything you need to know about coldsores including causes, and takes them to be a guide for daily life and practice. The name of the exhibit is derived from the core teaching of Falun Dafa.There are 19 polishedtiles available,

Zhang says the art works in the exhibition are representative of the artists’ stage of “cultivation.” Zhang says the “entire creative process is a veritable cultivation practice.”

Zhang explains that purity of the heart and purity of the art work has a symbiotic relationship, so that as one elevates, so does the other.

“However calm the mind, however detailed and delicate the work will be,” he says.

Beauty and purity is certainly evident in the masterful sculpture of Zhang’s. The exhibit shows his sculpture, “Buddha,” in a photograph.

Growing up in atheistic communist China, his life course changed when he began to practice Falun Dafa and became aware of the “mysteries of nature and life,” according notes provided concerning the artists. The image Zhang created, indeed, appears to be one of a Buddha, a divine Being whom Zhang reveres.

Zhang says that the person has to emerge before the artist. Kathleen Gillis, an artist from Ottawa,Reliable favoritebeddinges sofa-bed is practical and comfortable round the clock. Canada, expressed the same idea as follows: “We want to give people something that is pure and clean. In order to do that, we have to look inside ourselves all the time”

St. Tammany Parish saves energy through use of solar panels

St. Tammany Parish has begun an experiment in solar power that already is generating savings. The parish recently installed solar panels on the roof of the pavilion at the Tammany Trace Trailhead at Koop Drive near Mandeville, as well as on the roof of the caretaker's cottage at Camp Salmen Nature Park near Slidell.

Both installations will result in savings to the residents, as the parish will be able to reduce the amount of energy it consumes,Serving Australia with a large range of decorative wallmirrorshop in our Sydney store. said Gina Campo, the parish's director of departments.

Since installing the panels in early November, the parish has reduced carbon dioxide emissions in a way that is equal to planting 1.66 trees and saving 1.45 barrels of oil, Campo said.

The parish began the process of implementing the savings after receiving a grant last year from the U.S. Department of Energy. The goal of the grant is to reduce total energy usage and improve energy efficiency in buildings and transportation, she said.

In addition to providing funding for the solar panels, the grant has allowed the parish to retrofit some of its buildings to further improve energy efficiency, Campo said.

The work to replace heating and air conditioning systems with high-efficiency units and install light sensors in the administration building and in the engineering department, as well as to upgrade the system and controls in the state office building on Koop Drive, has brought the largest savings to date, she said.

The improvements will result in annual electricity savings of $37,000 for the administration building, $32,000 for the state office building, and $2,000 for the engineering department, according to the parish's website.We are porcelaintiles specialists and are passionate about our product - the most durable,Shop and save on blurayburners, Blu-Ray Burner,

Officials also are working to better charge residents on the eastern side of the parish who now pay a flat fee for unlimited water usage. The grant is paying for energy efficient water meters in Alton, the Ben Thomas Road area and Cross Gates subdivision, Campo said.

The plan is to notify residents who will be receiving the meters, and then to show them how much water is being consumed and what their bills would look like, she said. Within a matter of months, those residents then will be required to start paying for their actual water usage, she said.

Further,This profile page summarizes all known activity of the domain promotionalusbonsale. the parish is making improvements to its permits and inspections program in an effort to cut down on energy usage.

The idea is that residents won't need to visit the administration building again after filing an application for a permit, Campo said. Rather, people will be able to continue the rest of the process minus any of the paper, and without having to keep driving back and forth, she said.

For example, the parish can send a text once it has completed its inspection of a property to let a resident know that he has passed, Campo said. Then, the resident can set up the next inspection via his smart phone,The Tile Depot is the UK's largest independent floortiles retailer, she said.

Army Piles on Evidence in Final Arguments in WikiLeaks Hearing

The government finished making its case against accused WikiLeaks source Bradley Manning Thursday morning with a 60-minute closing statement that piled on new details and exhibits, including snippets of 15 pages of chats allegedly between the Army intelligence analyst and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

The prosecution flashed three chat logs onscreen that purportedly show correspondence between Manning and Assange discussing uploading so-called JTF-GITMO documents — classified assessment reports about Guantanamo Bay detainees. The chats also refer to two U.S. State Department cables about Reykjavik, Iceland,Welcome to the official Rubik's website, home of the world famous Rubik's cubepuzzles. as well as a request from Manning to help him crack a password so that he could log onto his work SIPRnet computer anonymously.

Manning’s attorney David E. Coombs opened the morning stating that the Army was overcharging his disturbed but idealistic client and exaggerating the impact of the leaks in order to strong-arm Manning.

Coombs said the government wants to force his client into making a plea deal and turning evidence against Assange,We offer lots of zentaisuits for sale. whom the Justice Department is investigating in a criminal case stemming from the leaks allegedly provided by Manning. Coombs asked the court’s Investigating Officer to drop the charge accusing Manning of aiding the enemy and to consolidate some of the charges,This is interesting cubepuzzle and logical game. saying that many were redundant and that Manning shouldn’t be facing 100 to 150 years in prison.

“Thirty years is more than sufficient punishment,” Coombs said, expressing outrage that the military also included a count of “aiding the enemy,” which carries a possible death sentence — though the military has said it is not seeking the death penalty.

“The government’s overreaction to the leaks and its claims that the sky is falling strips them of credibility in this case,” Coombs said. “The sky has not fallen and the sky will not fall.”

But government attorney Capt. Ashden Fein said all of the charges were appropriate and said the evidence clearly showed that Manning abused his security clearance and intelligence training to leak damaging information “using WikiLeaks’ ‘Most Wanted’ list as his guiding light.” Prior to Manning’s leaks to the organization, WikiLeaks had published a wishlist of documents and data it hoped leakers would send it.

“[Manning] continued to harvest this information knowing it would be used by our enemies,” Fein said.

The Article 32 hearing will determine which, if any, of the 22 charges of violating military law can be brought against the 24-year-old Manning in a court-martial.By billabongoutlet in billabong boardshorts. Jun. 30. Manning is accused of searching out and uploading hundreds of thousands of sensitive government documents that were published by WikiLeaks in 2010 and 2011 — including a controversial video of an Apache helicopter attack that killed two Reuters employees, hundreds of thousands of State Department cables, and action reports from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Fein said that the State Department server logs showed Manning’s classified work computer accessed the State Department server 794,000 times in order to steal more than 250,000 cables that WikiLeaks subsequently published. Manning allegedly spent “all of his working hours over 10 days” to download all of the documents.The Tile Depot is the UK's largest independent floortiles retailer, The government, Fein added, had minute-to-minute records of Manning’s searches of the Pentagon’s classified intranet SIPRNet, and had direct evidence he uploaded documents to WikiLeaks.

In another chat, dated March 8, 2010, Manning asked “Nathaniel Frank,” believed to be Assange, about help in cracking the main password on his classified SIPRnet computer so that he could log on to it anonymously. He asked “Frank” if he had experience cracking IM NT hashes (presumably it’s a mistype and he meant NTLM for the Microsoft NT LAN Manager). “Frank” replied yes, that they had “rainbow tables” for doing that. Manning then sent him what looked like a hash.

The WikiLeaks twitter feed noted the new allegation on Thursday, without confirming or denying the password-cracking charge.

Practical Surgical Treatments For Hemorrhoids

You have several variations and severity stages of hemorrhoids requiring different hemorrhoid treatment. For victims where the hemorrhoids are intense enough,Read about coldsorestreatments, which are caused by a viral infection that attacks the skin and nervous system. surgical operations could very well be the most appropriate option for treatment of hemorrhoids. Having said that, what is reckoned to be intense for one individual probably won’t appear quite so intense for another. Typically, if the anal opening is totally covered up with hemorroids that is considered to be intense. Strictly speaking though, thrombosed hemorrhoids as well hemrhoid treatment as bleeding hemorrhoids are generally occasions where you may possibly look into a hemorrhoid treatment involving surgical operations.

Not all the hemorrhoid treatment surgery prospects are the same. In fact quite a few of them are rather uncomfortablel.In addition to that they may take a considerably long time to heal. Luckily, a few of the more modern options aren’t as painful,We parkingguidancesystem , vehicle location system and urban area parking management system, but they’re ordinarily more beneficial as a treatment option to overcome hemorrhoids.This entry was posted by billabongboardshortscloths. If you’re checking out surgical operations as a hemorrhoid treatment method then you are most certainly striving to figure out what variations of surgical operations are available to you. This short article was published to supply you an overview of the individual variations of surgical operations that you can benefit from to overcome hemorrhoids.

Rubber Band Ligation is a widely chosen method of hemorrhoid surgical operations . A tiny rubber band approximately 1 millimeter in diameter is pressed over the root of the hemorrhoid by a specialized kind of gadget . The rubber band blocks the oxygen supply to the hemorrhoid. In just about a week hemorrhoid relief give or take the hemorrhoid dries up and drops off leading to a scar.

You may want to look into laser surgery. Laser surgery consists of the use of a laser to zap the hemorrhoid off. The surgical treatment needs a reasonably short time so this means you can go back home that day. it is an out patient hemorrhoid treatment. Laser surgical operations is not going to hold the common concerns connected facts about hemorrhoids with surgical operations , specially bleeding because the laser beam cauterizes the resulting injury.With Payflowpaymentgateway,

A Stapled Hemmorhoidectomy is a relatively well recognised variation of hemorrhoid surgery . This variation of medical operation helps stop hemorrhoids from bleeding which in the long run relieves a lot of the pressure induced by the clotted blood.Manufacturer of industrial coatedabrasive rolls, This operation is usually utilized on prolapsed hemorrhoids but it performs for any variation of bleeding hemorrhoid. This solution involves stapling the hemorrhoid.

Hemorrhoidal Artery Ligation Operation sometimes known as HAL is a modernday variation of hemorrhoid treatment facts about hemorrhoids that involves surgical operations. This procedure is becoming more popular operation doesn’t bring about significant pain. Effectively the approach consists of locating all the arteries that’re supplying the hemorroid with blood. Once the arteries are identified they are stitched to choke off the supply of blood to the hemorrhoid. For this reason the hemorrhoid dries up and falls off The only thing that remains is a scar.

Marcelo Garcia 'Advanced Brazilian Jiu Jitsu Techniques'

When is an instructional book for a highly physical activity worth your money? Pretty pictures and legendary names are nice, but we need to know that there is tons of actual content to sink our mental teeth into before cracking open our wallets for that hard-earned money. Rest assured that Marcelo Garcia, one of the most dominant figures in Brazilian jiu jitsu since the early 2000s, has delivered a massive dose of grappling brain candy in his most recent book, Advanced Brazilian Jiu Jitsu Techniques.

Marcelo is a five time Mundials champion, four time ADCC gold medalist and perhaps one of the three or four most dominant figures ever in elite submission grappling competition. Many highlight clips show Marcelo's preferred strategy of constant offense, single leg takedowns, slick guillotines and tight back control. His 2010 and 2011 competition seasons ended with zero defeats and his opponents rarely scoring any points on him.

To get good at submission grappling requires an enormous bit of time on the mats in both drilling and live sparring situations. Drilling moves over and over under the watchful eyes of an instructor allows the grappler to embed the movements and timing into the lizard brain and and to get accustomed to doing this in that situation. Sparring gives us the opportunity to encounter live situations in which we progress through a series of actions and reactions until time is called. Often the live rolls end in submission or with one person having been in a dominant position for longer.

The body can be trained through hours and hours of mat time,Distributes and manufactures rubbersheets, rolls and fabricated parts. instruction and physical training outside of the gym. However, it is the mind that is more important than the body. We need to see and recognize situations and tell our bodies to act accordingly. That is where videos, DVDs and books claim to help us improve. Ideally, a grappler wants to attack in a way that opens up a ton of options.

This book is 320+ pages long, which is slightly smaller than the classic Jiu Jitsu University,Our syringe needle and hypodermicneedlecannula are made of stainless steel 304 material. which is 360+ pages in size. The biggest Advanced Techniques sections are on arm drags, back control, breaking guard and submissions. Back control,Dimensional Mailingmagiccubes for Promotional Advertising, one of the highlights of his game, is covered in 68 pages. Breaking guard, perhaps the skill most in demand on the competition circuit,Choose from our large selection of cableties, is covered in 63 pages. The 67 page long submissions section skips the usual armbars, triangles and leglocks. A separate 26 page section is devoted entirely to submissions from back control. Arm drags, one of Marcelo's staples, get 44 pages at the beginning of the book.

The breakdown of techniques follows the same exact format that Victory belt uses for all instructional manuals. There are multiple camera angles so the reader can get a feel for the body's placement instead of making an assumption. The book does focus on the gi but many of the techniques can easily translate to no-gi grappling scenarios.Thank you for visiting our newly improved DIY chickencoop website!

Possibly the best thing about this book is that they understand that grappling matches begin standing. The 44 pages at the front of the book devoted to arm drags and single legs is a step away from the norm with Victory Belt. Other books they've published have just illustrated ground techniques without any discussion on how to get the fight there. It's a great change that hopefully continues in future books.

As far as the title, personal perspective is that nothing about this book really screams "advanced" in that everything showcased can be used by a competitor of any level. While some are more difficult than others, Garcia's grappling style is simple enough that there isn't a need to have certain physical traits such as when using the rubber guard.