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Spacewalkers set to troubleshoot space station's ammonia coolant leak

On Saturday NASA will try to fix the leak that released a stream of white frozen flakes into space. The crew on the International Space Station is not in danger and the space station is continuing to operate normally. NBC's Brian Williams reports.

By Miriam Kramer

Astronauts on the International Space Station are gearing up to perform an emergency spacewalk Saturday to hunt for an ammonia leak in the orbiting laboratory's cooling system.

NASA astronauts Tom Marshburn and Chris Cassidy are planning to spend more than six hours outside the station to find, and possibly repair, the ammonia coolant leak.

The spacewalk comes just two days after the six-man crew of the space station noticed frozen flakes from an ammonia leak on one of the eight winglike solar arrays responsible for supplying power to the station. Planning a space station spacewalk repair in such a short time frame is unprecedented, NASA officials said. [Infographic: How the Space Station's Cooling System Works]

It also comes just two days before Marshburn and two crewmates, station commander Chris Hadfield of Canada and Russian cosmonaut Roman Romanenko, are due to return home. Monday's departure will not be affected by the spacewalk, NASA officials said.

The space station crew is in no danger, and the pump has been turned off in order to slow the rate of the leak, mission managers said. The leak is on the space station's P6 truss, at the leftmost side of the outpost's football field-length main truss.

NASA's space station program manager, Mike Suffredini, said the spacewalk's "objective is to get a look at the leak."

Spacewalk repair on tap
A team of NASA officials gave the go-ahead late Friday for the spacewalk to begin at 8:15 a.m. ET Saturday. The plan calls for Cassidy and Marshburn to float outside of the station to inspect the leaking loop. Then they'll try to replace an ammonia coolant pump that station engineers suspect may be the source of the leak.

Marshburn and Cassidy have both conducted three spacewalks — two of them together — during their 2009 mission on the space shuttle Endeavour. This spacewalk is expected to take a little more than six hours. "The crew is very familiar in this area," Norm Knight, NASA chief flight director, said during a briefing on Friday. This type of repair, however, is unprecedented in the space station's history, he added.

Usually spacewalks are planned months in advance, but this is the first time a space station crew has been expected to do a spacewalk on such short notice, Knight said.

If this spacewalk doesn't correct the leak, the space station can still function using seven of its eight solar arrays, Suffredini said. However, managing the space station's power requirements over the long term would prove to be more challenging.

NASA says that a radiator leak on the power system of the International Space Station, 200 miles above Earth, is serious but not life-threatening. Engineers are working to re-route electronics to avoid the leak and as of now, there are no emergency plans to evacuate the crew of six, including two American astronauts.

Cooling system history
This wouldn't be the first spacewalk undertaken to repair a coolant leak.

Last year, NASA's Sunita Williams and Japanese spaceflier Akihiko Hoshide went a spacewalk to troubleshoot a leak in a coolant loop. That leak was in the same loop as the current leak, but engineers don't yet know if the two leaks are related.

Hadfield, Marshburn and Cassidy are part of the station's Expedition 35 crew, along with Russian cosmonauts Pavel Vinogradov, Alexander Misurkin and Romanenko. On May 28, three new crew members are expected to launch from Kazakhstan to join Vinogradov, Misurkin and Cassidy on the International Space Station. The spacewalk would not affect that schedule, NASA said.

Follow Miriam Kramer on Twitter and Google+. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook  and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

Copyright 2013 Space.com, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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The Book of Trogool

The basic carrot: usage statistics

BMC Bioinformatics published this article describing a “data publishing framework” for biodiversity data.

Stripped to its essentials, this article is about carrots for data sharing. Acknowledging that cultural inertia (some of it well-founded) militates against spontaneous data sharing, the authors suggest a way forward.

I’m calling this one out because it has implications for storage-system design. The authors want three things for their public data: persistent identifiers, citation mechanisms, and data usage information.

(For once, I feel good about institutional repositories: they swing two out of three at the minimum, and some manage all three!)

Persistent identifiers seem simple but aren’t, necessarily. For example, does a constantly-changing dataset get a persistent identifier? How does that identifier know what it’s identifying, in that case? Should a persistent identifier be just a URL? What if the domain name goes away or changes? (This is not an idle concern; the University of Illinois, for example, just changed its top-level domain, and the institutional repository I run is eventually going to lose its separate domain entirely.) What, exactly, gets a persistent identifier? The entire dataset? Files within it? Should a query performable on that dataset also be persistently identifiable? How does that work, exactly? And when does something get its persistent identifier? As soon as it hits the system? Or after it’s done and blessed, if it ever is?

Anyway. All of this needs to be hashed out (so to speak). It’s not optional, system designers.

Once that’s sorted out, citation isn’t actually a huge hurdle from where I’m sitting. It’s not a technical problem; it’s kicking the style manuals into acknowledging data and making citation formats for it.

Usage, now, that’s a hurdle. It, too, is utterly necessary for cultural reasons, however. The culture of academia looks kindly on impact measurements, even hopelessly faulty ones. Somehow or other, research impact has to be measured for researchers’ careers to advance. Data are no exception.

(In my professional neck of the woods, systems designers ignored the need for usage documentation entirely too long, which has made my life as an IR manager extraordinarily difficult. I make this post in hopes of avoiding the same mistake in this new arena.)

What counts as a “use” exactly? How does “use” get harmonized over different kinds of access schemes? How does an API “use” compare with an entire download?

I don’t know. I encourage systems designers not to get too hung up on such questions. Record all accesses and make the best decisions you can right now about how to present them. Yes, you’ll have to rewrite the event-analysis code, probably more than once, so comment it well.

Do not, however, wait until you have all the answers to write an analyzer. If you do that, you’re strangling the open-data movement in its crib. BMC Bioinformatics explains why.

  1. #1 Chris Rusbridge
    November 18, 2009

    You’re very right that persistent identifiers for data will not be simple. A lot of work needs to be done to address some of the issues you identify, and others. I’ve been invited to the launch of something called DataCite at the BL in December (not sure I can go), which I hope will take this seriously.

    On the more detailed questions of URL persistence you mention, there is no real substitute for institutional commitment. There is just no other way. Any reorganisation is likely to break existing URLs, many website redesigns do that. It MUST be part of the spec that this be dealt with, up-front, as part of the design process. The actual solution is dead simple if put in place before hand, and sometimes really messy if left until later (effectively you have to build a redirect table, or a redirect algorithm). It can be done; the URL has been working since 1005, despite being moved around half a dozen times by my UKOLN colleagues! It can be ignored, as OCLC did when taking in the RLG resources, to their shame, which meant that all links to, including all links to RLG Diginews, the publication addressing digital preservation! Likewis when CURL became RLUK. All these could have been cheaply and simply avoided beforehand, but become expensive and difficult (and embarrassing) later.

  2. #2 Dorothea Salo
    November 18, 2009

    Absolutely agreed on all counts, Chris. Thanks for the tip about DataCite; I’ll keep my eye on it!

    I’m not worried at all about my upcoming IR move, because we have had a redirection infrastructure in place all along. All I have to do when the IR’s subdomain goes away is redirect a bunch of handles, which should pose no difficulty whatever.

    As with many issues surrounding data management, the sooner this is addressed, the easier it becomes!

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Nature News has an interesting article by Philip Ball about a dancing cockatoo named Snowball:

Aniruddh Patel of the Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, California, and his colleagues say that Snowball’s ability to shake his stuff is much more than a cute curiosity. It could shed light on the biological bases of rhythm perception, and might even hold implications for the use of music in treating neurodegenerative disease.

Below is a film clip of Snowball getting his groove on.

  1. #1 carolyn13
    June 26, 2008

    I’ve been too busy to comment much, (new grandbaby!)but your blog has really rocked this week. There have been so many intriguing posts, but this one and the itch were my favorites. Great work, Mo.

  2. #2 Don Moyer
    June 27, 2008

    I once watched a cockatoo at the Lincoln Park Zoo here work for about 15 minutes trimming a twig about a foot long. It was very purposeful with frequent inspections of the work. But, what was the purpose? Finally the cockatoo was satisfied with the work and proceeded to use the twig to scratch its back!

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As previously mentioned, I’m watching a little bit of Fringe in order to be able to talk sensibly about it later this week. I watch the Season 1 finale last night, and its treatment of parallel universes is about what I’d expect for tv, but being the obsessive dork I am, I got distracted from the big picture by a silly side issue.

There’s a running joke for the first bit of the episodes about Walter trying to find various pieces of scientific equipment, only to find that Peter has appropriated them for some sort of personal project. One of these items is an electron microscope (presumably an SEM, though the prop they dragged out later looked more like the TEM we used to have in the basement). Later, it’s revealed that the secret project is a device to digitize some of Walter’s old vinyl LP records, using the electron microscope to read the pattern in the grooves.

The device is used for a fairly ridiculous bit of magic CSI technobabble, but my immediate reaction was “Why would you need an electron microscope for that? That’s ridiculous overkill.”

But then again, part of being a physicist is always checking your immediate reactions, and this is an easy one to test quantitatively. So, would you really need an electron microscope to digitize an old LP?

The key question here is what resolution you would need to be able to faithfully reproduce the bumps in the record’s grooves, and work out the sound frequency. If the smallest bumps you would expect are small enough, then an electron microscope might be a reasonable choice for a readout device. So, how small are those bumps?

Well, the highest frequency of sound audible to humans is around 20 kHz. This is outside the bandwidth of a typical LP system (which is why, annoying audiophiles notwithstanding, CD’s are a better medium for music than LP’s), but good enough to put an upper limit on the resolution. So, if you imagined making a record that was just a steady 20kHz tone for the full playing time (it would not shock me to learn that some avant-garde composer tried this), the needle would be going over a peak every 0.00005 s.

How far does the record move in that time? Well, the rotation speed is 33-1/3 revolutions per minute, which we convert to the more scientific units of 3.5 radians per second. Multiply by 0.00005 seconds, and you find that the record turns through an angle of 0.000175 radians per oscillation of our 20kHz tone.

That doesn’t get us a size, yet, because the linear distance covered will depend on the radius at which we’re looking. A point on the outer edge of the record is moving considerably faster than a point in by the label. That means that the wave peaks will be spaced more widely at the outer edge than in toward the center. Since we’re looking for the smallest possible feature size that you might want to resolve, we want the inner edge, which has a radius of at least 5cm. Multiplying 0.000175 radians by 0.05m gives us a feature size of 0.00000875 m, or 8.75 microns.

Now, this is pretty small– roughly a tenth the thickness of a human hair– and people do use electron microscopes to take pictures of things at this scale. But this is also well within the resolution of an optical microscope, and remember, this is the absolute smallest feature you could possibly imagine needing to detect on a record. The vast majority of the sounds we care about would involve much, much larger features.

So, a little bit of math basically confirms my initial reaction: you could use an electron microscope to do it, but it would be massive overkill. It’d be much easier, and much cheaper, to use a laser or something to scan the grooves with conventional optics.

(This is the point where you remind me that I’m complaining about technical details of an episode whose premise involved people with drug-induced psychic powers blowing themselves up. To say nothing of creepy assassins trying to move between parallel universes. Which is true, as far as it goes, but this is how my brain works, and I can’t help it.)

  1. #1 Oded
    August 1, 2011

    What you found is the minimal distance between a groove and a peak for an interesting audio signal on the track (actually, the distance you found is twice this of course). CD’s store 44,000 numbers for each second, so this would give your 4 microns number for resolution of this scale.

    Don’t you also need to know the height difference between the groove and the peak? The range of each of those 44,000 numbers in a CD is 0 to 65,536. How much of this is really necessary for good audio quality is debatable, but this is at least an upper limit for what you would need to perfectly record your vinyl to a digital CD.

    I don’t know how high the peaks are for vinyl. Even if they are 1cm (they are obviously way smaller than this), then you need resolution of 1cm/65536 = 150nm, which you would need electron microscopes to see…

  2. #2 Zack
    August 1, 2011

    If you search for “laser turntable”, it sounds like there are a small number of commercial products that read vinyl recordings with a diode laser and an optical microscope. It apparently works well enough for the Library of Congress to be using it to digitize its collection of old monaural phonographs: In that context, ideal sound quality may be less of a concern than avoiding damage to the originals, though. I can’t figure out how good the sound quality actually is, because there’s all kinds of audiophile woo confusing the issue. I get the distinct impression that retrieving both tracks of a stereo recording is still experimental.

  3. #3 non-annoying audiophile
    August 1, 2011

    Biggest problem with optical reading of phono records is that dirt that a stylus would ignore or almost ignore (simply brushing it aside, because its mass is very low) is read by light as if it were a feature of the music. One thing SEMs ARE good for is showing how much dirt adheres to groove walls even after very careful cleaning.

  4. #4 Walt Garage
    August 1, 2011

    Funny and sad but true story from the early days of CDs. Local radio station has just started playing tracks from CD (in between prank phone calls and other important stuff). DJ says let’s test this out – I’ll play a track from vinyl and the same track from CD, you call in and tell me which is which based on the sound quality! (At the time, I was driving a Renault Alliance with crappy little speakers, so I thought that this probably was not a great way to test the fidelity of either recording system!)

    So, he takes 10 calls and five of them say that the first recording was CD and five of them say the SECOND recording was the CD and the DJ says “There you have it folks, proof that the CD sounds better”.

    Sadly, that DJ was replaced by Howard Stern and so I have to look back at him fondly as a time when they actually played SOME music on the radio……

  5. #5 Walt Garage
    August 1, 2011

    I have a CD recording device on my stereo and I can record directly from vinyl to CD. You’d think someone could have mentioned that to Peter.

    FWIW, I thought the most recent season of Fringe was better than the first.

  6. #6 Juice
    August 1, 2011

    I’d like to point out that you’d never fit an LP (or any typical size vinyl record) into a TEM.

  7. #7 BrokenDrum
    August 1, 2011

    Surely this misses the point in a multitude of other ways. I mean to say, all the information that an LP actually outputs as sound *has to go through the cable to the speakers*. Why would a sensible person not just attach a high-quality recording device to that cable, and be done with it?

  8. #8 Dunc
    August 2, 2011

    He’s going to have fantastic fun trying to figure out how to apply the correct RIAA de-emphasis curve to the resulting data…

    And Oded is right – amplitude is as important to music as frequency. This is where a well-engineered vinyl record can outshine CD, as it doesn’t have a hard limit – the (practical) maximum amplitude an LP can record is more a function of the skill of the cutting engineer than the limits of the technology. (Notice that the notorious “brick wall” compression is entirely a “feature” of the CD age…) Of course, you need a pre-amp with sufficient headroom, but given the nature of the RIAA equalisation curve, you really need that anyway.

    [Fun fact: most of the noise you hear in a cheap vinyl playback system is actually the result of the intermodulation of ultrasonic overload products in the pre-amp. The vast majority of surface noise on a vinyl record should all be well beyond human hearing (assuming a theoretically perfect playback system), but it can be very high amplitude (compared to the actual signal) and a poor implementation of the RIAA de-emphasis curve only makes the problem worse.]

    There’s also the question of whether you need enough additional data to be able to tell a sine wave from a square wave… Square waves are great for fucking up amplifiers – unless the amp is perfectly damped (they never are), a square wave can easily result in some HF oscillation on the leading edge, again resulting in HF overload and audible intermodulation products. So, while I doubt you can hear the difference between a square wave and a sine wave at 20kHz as reproduced by a theoretically perfect amplifier, there’s a good chance that you might be able to hear the difference when they’re reproduced by a real amplifier.

    Finally: why the hell would you want to digitise your LPs anyway? Talk about sucking all the fun out of it!

  9. #9 Rick Pikul
    August 2, 2011

    While you may not need an electron microscope to digitize an LP, we may also have to consider something all too common with technical types: The “because we can” effect, where you do something in a difficult or unusual way simply to prove it possible or as an exercise in problem solving.

    It reminds me of a thread that occurred once on the Scary Devil Monastery where all sorts of, (often bizarre and complicated), ways to measure the contents of a remote coffee pot were proposed. This led someone to ask, “why not just point a webcam at it?” and several people responding to the effect of, “you’re missing the point.”

  10. #10 Dunc
    August 3, 2011

    Rick – the really funny thing is, the first webcam was invented for exactly that purpose.

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Record and share sound, climate, heart rate and other data!

AirCasting is a platform for recording, mapping, and sharing health and environmental data using your smartphone. Each AirCasting session lets you capture real-world measurements, annotate the data to tell your story, and share it via the CrowdMap.

Using the AirCasting Android app, AirCasters can record, map, and share: (o) sound levels recorded by their phone microphone; (o) temperature, humidity, CO and NO2 gas concentrations recorded by the Arduino-powered AirCasting Air Monitor, and; (o) heart rate measurements recorded by the Zephyr HxM.

Using AirCasting Luminescence, these sensor streams can also be represented using LED lights.

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SC Johnson Family Economics Blog
Friday, September 9, 2011

Harvest Chili Recipe | Family Economics

By Erin

Harvest ChiliChili season is finally here! There are so many reasons why I love a nice, warm bowl of chili. I love the warmth and coziness that I feel inside while enjoying a bowl, or two.There are thousands of possible ways to make it and it really doesn’t matter how you make it -- just toss it all in and let it simmer for a bit.

Chili also reminds me of home and autumn. There are so many great memories I have of family and friends enjoying bowl after bowl of our favorite chili.

One of my favorites is the harvest chili because the recipe is so timely. Each of the vegetables found in the chili are at peak season for early fall and can be found in farmer’s markets for reasonable and inexpensive prices. Or better yet, they can be grown from the garden in your own backyard.

Now let’s bring a little taste of summer into your next bowl of warm chili this fall:

•    1 pound ground beef
•    1 tablespoon onion, minced
•    2 garlic cloves, crushed
•    28-ounce can of tomatoes, crushed
•    1 cup water
•    15-ounce can of red kidney beans
•    1 green pepper, seeded and diced
•    1 red pepper, seeded and diced
•    2 medium zucchini, diced
•    1 hot pepper, seeded and chopped (chipotle, jalapeno, etc.)
•    2 tablespoon chili powder
•    Salt and pepper (as much as needed, depending on your preference)

1.    In a large saucepan or dutch oven, brown the ground beef with the minced onion and crushed garlic. Drain and return it to the pan.

2.    Stir in the crushed tomatoes, one cup of hot water, drained red kidney beans, diced green pepper, diced red pepper, diced zucchini and the chopped hot pepper.

3.    Stir in the chili powder and salt and pepper to taste. Simmer over low heat for 15 to 20 minutes, or until it’s ready to serve. If you plan to simmer longer than 20 minutes, cover the pan until it’s time to eat.

4.    Serve the harvest chili with a side of whole grain bread.

What is it that you love about chili? Is it the warmth, the comfort or the ease in preparing and cooking? I’d love to her your thoughts and some of your favorite chili recipes!

1 Comment so far

Post a comment

On Monday, September 26, 2011, Emily from Boston wrote

Could you also make this using fresh tomatoes instead of canned? Still tryign to find ways to use up those tomatoes from the garden! Looks great though!

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hello SD experts

I am newly trained SAP-BW/BI consultant.I am going to start one new project soon where I need to work with data coming to SAP-BW system from SAP-SD system...I got information from my collegues that I need to have knowledge in Sales data flow in R/3 system....

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Carlos Zambrano tosses three-hitter as Marlins win 7th straight

HOUSTON -- Carlos Zambrano has a new team and a new attitude, and on Monday night, he displayed the dazzling pitching that has been overshadowed in recent years by tantrums and suspensions.

Zambrano pitched a three-hitter for his first win of the season, and Giancarlo Stanton extended his hitting streak to 10 games with a two-run homer, leading the Miami Marlins to their seventh straight win with a 4-0 victory over the Houston Astros.

The three-time All-Star had pitched well this season after a trade from the Cubs, entering the game with a 2.53 ERA in five starts, but had yet to get a win. Zambrano said he didn't get upset in that span thanks to a life-changing, religious experience he had in Venezuela last season when he was suspended after he was ejected from a game, cleaned out his locker and talked about retiring.

"Now I'm pitching smiling because God is in my heart," he said. "When God is in your heart ... nothing is frustrating, nothing can bother you."

Stanton's homer into the Crawford Boxes in left field put Miami up 2-0 in the fourth inning, and gives him six home runs and 12 RBIs during his streak. Logan Morrison walked with one out before Stanton went deep.

John Buck extended the lead to 3-0 when he sent the first pitch of the fifth inning into the right-field stands. Hanley Ramirez added a solo shot, which bounced off the train tracks above the left-center field wall, in the ninth inning to make it 4-0.

It was the first complete game and first shutout for Zambrano since a two-hit shutout against San Francisco on Sept. 25, 2009.

The Marlins didn't know what to expect when Zambrano joined the team, but he quickly made a great impression.

"So many people gave up on him for one reason or another," Buck said. "But since he's walked in here, he's been nothing but awesome from every way you can think of it ... to see him pitch so well and benefit on the field is cool because he's been through a lot, he's endured a lot and he's kind of a favorite in this clubhouse."

He's also been helped by the support of manager Ozzie Guillen and his new teammates.

"I think these guys welcomed me with a lot of patience and a lot of love, and that's what everybody needs," Zambrano said.

Zambrano (1-2), whose only no-hitter came against the Astros, struck out a season-best nine and never allowed a batter past first base. He walked one and hit two batters while improving to 10-4 in 19 appearances at Minute Maid Park.

Guillen had an easy answer to why Zambrano was so good Monday.

"Strikes, strikes," he said. "Everything was under control. The split finger was effective, his fastball was coming out of his hands very well and command. When Carlos commands, it is very good."

Brian Bogusevic singled to left field with no outs in the ninth inning, but Miami turned its third double play of the game on a grounder by Jordan Schafer. Zambrano then struck out Jose Altuve to end it.

Houston starter Wandy Rodriguez (3-3) gave up a season-high four earned runs in eight-plus innings. He entered the game having won three straight and had allowed just three runs combined in those starts.

"Anytime guys start hitting Wandy, you are surprised," Houston manager Brad Mills said. "Whether they are home runs or whatever, he's been throwing the ball so well, and to give up three in one game, that's surprising."

Zambrano hit Schafer on the right leg with a pitch in the sixth inning. Schafer fell to his knees writhing in pain before getting up and walking gingerly to first base while talking with Mills and a trainer. Schafer said after the game that he was sore but OK.

Altuve grounded into a double play to get Zambrano out of that inning. He sailed through the next two frames, retiring six in a row with two strikeouts, to reach the ninth.

Zambrano plunked Altuve on the left elbow with one out in the first inning. But J.D. Martinez struck out and was called for batter's interference to put Altuve out and end the inning.

Houston's first hit came when Travis Buck singled to start the third inning, but Zambrano faced the minimum in that inning thanks to a double play before a flyout by Rodriguez.

Game notes
Guillen became annoyed in his pregame chat with reporters when a Houston reporter asked him whether the uproar over his comments about Fidel Castro, for which he was suspended five games, had died down in the past month. He told the reporter to "grow up" while including a couple of curse words. ... Guillen said he's hoping Heath Bell, who was demoted from the closer's role last week, can return to that role in the future. "We're a better ball club if Bell is our closer," he said. "That's no doubt, and we need him to be our closer."... RHP Aneury Rodriguez will be recalled from Triple-A Oklahoma City on Tuesday to start against Miami's Anibal Sanchez.


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Tag:A.J. Burnett
Posted on: March 2, 2012 1:12 pm

Don't tell Homer Bailey pitchers shouldn't hit

GOODYEAR, Ariz. -- Let the debate begin anew over whether it's time for the National League to adopt the designated hitter.

Pittsburgh's A.J. Burnett is out two to three months with a broken orbital bone suffered while bunting in the batting cage. And while he waits for the healing to begin, plenty of folks are chiming in, using him as Exhibit A for those who think it's time pitchers stopped batting altogether.

That's all well and good. But don't tell that to Reds pitcher Homer Bailey. The Cincinnati right-hander batted .282 with a .300 on-base percentage in 45 plate appearances last summer. He knocked home two runners.

"I think pitchers should hit in both leagues," Bailey says.

As for Burnett's injury ... hogwash, says Bailey.

"You have position players that foul balls off their feet and get hurt," Bailey says. "It's just a freak deal. You could have a position player do the same thing.

"Typically, pitchers are better bunters."

He's right. As ever, there remains no reason why pitchers should be such non-athletes that they're hopeless cases at the plate. Pitchers who can handle a bat, even to get a bunt down, help themselves. That's an advantage. Why take that advantage away?

"If it's that much of a problem," Bailey said of Burnett and the idea of pitchers injuring themselves batting, "then how come position players get hurt fouling balls off of their legs? They suffer torn hamstrings running to first, or torn knees.

"Look at what happened to Ryan Howard last year."

Howard this spring continues rehabbing the Achilles he tore during the last play of the Phillies' NLCS against St. Louis.

Sunblock Day? Nah. Jackets needed Friday morning as the temperature continues to struggle to get past 60 and a stiff wind blows.

Likes: Copies of USA Today's daily crossword puzzle and Sudoku puzzle stacked on a table in the middle of the Cincinnati clubhouse and several Reds stopping by to pick one up to work it. Those Reds, they're thinkers. ... Eric Davis in Reds camp, as usual, as an alumni coach. He loves everything about it, but don't tell him that the players keep him young. "I look younger than most of these guys in here," Davis says, and he's right. ... The jerk salmon at Jimmy Buffett's Margaritaville restaurant in Glendale. Surprisingly tasty. ... Heard a tune by The Hollies in a restaurant the other day, which reminded me of how unappreciated The Hollies are today. So much good stuff -- Bus Stop, Carrie Anne, Just One Look, (Long Cool Woman) In a Black Dress, On a Carousel, Under My Umbrella, The Air That I Breathe. They're celebrating their 50th anniversary this year, too, just like the Beach Boys and the Rolling Stones. ... The burgers at Five Guys. ... Learning that the Monkees actually have a direct link to David Bowie. Turns out, the latter's real name was Davy Jones. Yep, same as the Monkees' legend who passed away this week. So as an aspiring musician in the 1960s, knowing he couldn't be known as Davy Jones, he became David Bowie.

Dislikes: The photo cameras at red lights and, especially, the ones designed to catch speeders. They had a bunch of those on the freeways in Arizona a couple of years ago, but they're gone now. Someone told me one of the problems was the gun-toters here periodically would shoot the cameras on the freeways to put them out of operation. No idea whether that's true. But I sure like to think it is.

Rock 'n' Roll Lyric of the Day:

"If you don't eat your meat
"You can't have any pudding
"How can you have any pudding
"If you don't eat your meat?"

-- Pink Floyd, Another Brick in the Wall

Posted on: February 17, 2012 2:09 pm
Edited on: February 17, 2012 5:47 pm

Burnett needs to be more steely in Steel City

The Pirates, spurned by free agents Edwin Jackson and Roy Oswalt this winter, need pitching. The Yankees, bastion for tabloid headlines run amok, need less chaos and fewer knuckleheads.

Call the deal sending A.J. Burnett to Pittsburgh a win-win for both clubs.

Talks for this trade have been so interminable that they've made Best Picture Oscar nominee Tree of Life seem rapid-fire. But the deal finally is moving from the on-deck circle to completion: Colleague Jon Heyman reports that the Pirates have agreed to pay $13 million of the remaining $33 million on Burnett's deal, and that two low-level minor-leaguers will move from Pittsburgh to New York: right-hander Diego Moreno, 25, and outfielder Exicardo Cayones, 20.

Only losers in this trade are the New York tabloids ("After Yankees ace flops, here comes joker" read one classic headline as Burnett followed CC Sabathia in the playoffs against the Tigers last October).

It wasn't official, but Burnett's departure papers from the Yanks' rotation were punched on that dramatic Friday evening last month when general manager Brian Cashman deftly moved to acquire Michael Pineda from Seattle and sign free agent Hiroki Kuroda. The moves were stellar and stealth, immediately adding depth and talent that has been lacking from Joe Girardi's rotation for at least the past couple of years.

That wasn't supposed to be the case with Burnett, who donated his arm to the Bronx cause (and, apparently, his brain to science) when he signed the six-year $82.5 million deal before the 2009 season. For that, the Yankees got 34 victories from him over three seasons, and a clutch (and pivotal) Game 2 win in the 2009 World Series against Philadelphia.

But more often than not, it was the Land of 1,000 Headaches with A.J. as the Yankees spend inordinate amounts of time over the past two seasons trying to fix him like a broken-down sports car on the side of the road. Who knows how many man-hours pitching coach Larry Rothschild invested in him alone last season? And just think how much quality time Rothschild now will have available for Sabathia, Kuroda, Pineda, Ivan Nova, Phil Hughes and others.

And for his part there's a good chance that, away from the New York spotlight and howling masses, Burnett can put some of the pieces back together again and help the Pirates. For one thing, he won't be freaking out about whether yet another potent AL East lineup will bash his brains in every fifth day. Facing St. Louis without Albert Pujols, Milwaukee without Prince Fielder and the Astros without anybody in the NL Central might be just what the shrink, er, doctor ordered.

Look, Burnett is a nice guy, a well-meaning guy and a hard-worker. But there historically has been a disconnect between his million-dollar arm and his brain. He was great at times, but always inconsistent, in Florida. He was at his best in Toronto when he was trying to emulate Roy Halladay and Doc's incredible work habits. He's a classic second-fiddle guy, needing to play Robin to someone else's Batman, even he's had the arm of Superman.

Pittsburgh, which has now suffered losing seasons dating back to Pie Traynor (or something like that), happily showed some signs of bounceback last year, especially early. At the All-Star break, the Bucs were in the thick of the NL Central race. But a pitching staff that owned a 3.17 ERA on July 25 fell apart thereafter. Not enough stamina or talent to last. No staying power.

Manager Clint Hurdle has some pieces in James McDonald, Jeff Karstens and Charlie Morton. GM Neal Huntington acquired Erik Bedard over the winter, which is worth a shot. Problem for the Pirates is, in their current state, their most folks' 10th or 11th choice on the free agent market. Jackson signed with the Nationals. Oswalt remains unsigned, scouring high and low for another landing spot.

Which is why focusing on a trade, and Burnett specifically, maybe isn't the first choice for the contenders out there but is the perfect move right now for Huntington. As maddeningly inconsistent as he's been, Burnett did throw 190 1/3 innings for the Yanks last summer, 186 2/3 before that and 207 innings in 2009.

Pittsburgh can use that. And Burnett can use a low-key place -- at least, a place lower key than Yankee Stadium -- as he reaches out to recapture lost glory for a team doing the same.

Here's hoping he does. Pittsburgh can really use it. And, from Burnett, the Yankees no longer need it.
Posted on: January 13, 2012 9:40 pm

Savvy Yankees hit home run with Pineda, Kuroda

Their winter hibernation just ended. And just like that, the New York Yankees made themselves into AL East favorites.

Adding Michael Pineda from Seattle has all the earmarks of acquiring a young CC Sabathia or, ahem, Felix Hernandez -- the ace the Mariners wouldn't trade.

Adding Hiroki Kuroda on a one-year, $10 million deal adds the kind of rotation depth they could only dream of last summer -- and, presumably, a right-hander with more staying power than Bartolo Colon had.

"Wow," one scout said Friday night. "They've been laying in the weeds. They hadn't done anything."

Yes. Hadn't.

Though the Yankees gave up a consensus future star in young slugger-to-be Jesus Montero, exactly the kind of young bat the Mariners need and a great move for them, Pineda and Kuroda join CC Sabathia, Ivan Nova, Phil Hughes, A.J. Burnett and maybe even Freddy Garcia in giving the Yankees the talent, depth and clout their rotation needs to take them deep into October.

Just a few days after meeting with the representatives for free agent Edwin Jackson, the Yankees became the talk of the industry on what had been a slow Friday night with their stealth move for Pineda, who, at 22, already is within sight of becoming an ace.

"He's got that kind of stuff," a scout who spent part of last summer focusing on AL West clubs said Friday night. "If you wanted to be conservative, he's a No. 2. He's got velocity, he came up with a slider that got better and better last year and he throws strikes. When he gives up a home run or a hard-hit ball, it does not chase him out of the strike zone.

"He's got that rare combination of stuff and control. He's young, he's not afraid, he's big, he's still growing and he's got makeup. He's a prize.

"And the Yankees will have, what, five years of control over him? He's the kind of guy you build around. Holy cow."

The Mariners were worried about rushing him too quickly last summer when they installed him into their rotation coming out of spring training. He pretty much immediately showed them, no sweat.

By season's end, over 28 starts, he struck out 173 hitters while walking just 55 over 171 innings. His average fastball was clocked at 94.7 m.p.h., according to FanGraphs.

What's notable about that? The fastballs of only three other AL starters checked in higher: Texas' Alexi Ogando, Detroit's Justin Verlander and Tampa Bay's David Price.

Kuroda? He turns 37 next month. But he gave the Dodgers 202 innings in 2011, going 13-16 with a 3.07 ERA. He's a competitor with fierce pride.

"Solid No. 3," the scout said. "He throws strikes, he's got good stuff, a crisp fastball that's deceptive and he throws harder than people think. He's at 90 to 94 with sink down in the zone, a crisp breaking ball and a good split.

"He's got out pitches. I'd love to have Kuroda."

Now the Yankees do. And Pineda. And Sabathia and Nova and Hughes and Burnett. ...

And as they search for a hitter, for now, they've still got 6-8 right-hander Dellin Betances and lefty Manny Banuelos, who opened many eyes last spring.

"Hanging onto Betances and Banuelos [and with Pineda on board], they've got three young-gun studs who should pitch for them for a long time," the scout said. "And Nova's not that old and Hughes isn't that old.

"They've got the makings of a young, under-control staff."

Yeah, sure, why not? On a night on which the Yankees proved they're not sleeping through the winter, why not add to their opponents' misery just a little bit more?
Posted on: November 1, 2011 3:42 pm

Yanks winter: "Pitching, pitching, pitching"

On Monday, the Yankees re-jiggered CC Sabathia's contract before his opt-out window closed.

On Tuesday, they held a conference call with Brian Cashman, fresh off of signing a thee-year deal to remain as the club's general manager.

Don't expect Albert Pujols or Prince Fielder by Wednesday or Thursday.

"I don't anticipate a bat being of need at all," Cashman said on the call Tuesday afternoon.

As for what the Yankees will focus on, here's a hint:

"Pitching, pitching, pitching," Cashman said.

Offense, the GM said, is "not a problem with this club at all, despite what happened with Detroit." The Yankees ranked second in the American League in both runs scored and on-base percentage and third in slugging percentage this summer and, despite Tigers pitching shutting the Yankees down earlier this month, Cashman said he thinks New York has enough sticks to contend again in 2012.

While he maintains that "that doesn't mean I'm not open-minded, realistically, offense is not something we're focusing on." Improving the depth in both the rotation and the bullpen? Now you're talking.

With Mariano Rivera, David Robertson, Rafael Soriano and a post-surgery Joba Chamberlain on the horizon, Cashman called the New York bullpen "one of the strongest in the game." He would like to add another lefty to team with Boone Logan, if possible.

The free agent pitching market, led by C.J. Wilson, Mark Buehrle and Edwin Jackson, is not too strong. Japanese pitcher Yu Darvish is expected to be posted by the Nippon Ham Fighters.

All of this is why Cashman's time the past few days was monopolized by making sure that Sabathia did not become a free agent.

"We all know what CC brings to the table," Cashman said. "Pitching in front of the rotation, he he's created a great atmosphere in the clubhouse, he's one of our team leaders, he's influential in the community ... regarding all aspects of what you want the team to be, he's a major, major piece.

"You're comfortable every time he takes the ball."

His continued presence also allows the Yankees to approach free agency differently this winter because they can play from a position of relative strength.

"Securing CC allows us to be very open-minded and conservative in our approach," Cashman said. "We're in position now to take out time, explore and digest, pursue things at our own pace and not be over-reacting because we're vulnerable."

Some other Cashman thoughts heading into the winter:

-- On Alex Rodriguez's health: "I don't have any health concerns with Alex." Cashman said time will heal his sprained thumb, and it already has helped his surgically repaired knee.

-- On the club's interest in Jorge Posada: "He's been one of the best catchers in Yankees history, he's a borderline Hall of Famer and he's a free agent. That's something we'll have discussions on in the short term. It's not something I'm prepared to talk to you about today. He's been part of a lot of special moments here. He's created a lot of special moments."

-- On whether he feels more in control as GM with a three-year deal: "I don't think it's healthy to feel like you're in control. ... If you feel like you're in control, you've probably very vulnerable to some severe disappointments coming down the line."

-- He called catcher Russell Martin "Thurman Munson-like" in what he meant to the 2011 Yankees both on the field and in the clubhouse. Will that translate into a multi-year contract for the former Dodger, whom the Yankees control for one more year? Cashman said the Yankees right now enjoy the flexibility to go one more year with Martin, or "more than one if we find common ground."

-- He said the club will not consider moving A.J. Burnett to the bullpen. "If he is with us, without a doubt he is in the rotation," Cashman said. Cryptic? Maybe. The GM said "it would be hard to replace his innings. But I'm open-minded if anybody wants to approach us on anybody on the roster who does not have a no-trade clause. The worst that can happen is I say no. I'm open to creatively listening to anything anybody has to offer."

-- The biggest thing, Cashman said, is, like always, he has to improve the club's talent. He noted that the club "did not play to the best of our ability" against Detroit, and "part of that was under our control and part of that is what the Tigers put forth." With 97 wins, the Yankees were one of the best teams in baseball, Cashman said, "but October is a lot different. That's not an excuse. October is a lot different from April to September. You saw it with the crowning of the world championship team in St. Louis. They finished in the money the last day of the season, and then they ran the table. ... Is there a way to make it better? I'd like to think so. That's my job. I don't think all of our answers are in the clubhouse. Not at all. But I think some of the answers are in our clubhouse."

Posted on: November 1, 2011 3:34 pm
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Posted on: October 4, 2011 11:47 pm

Yanks turn A.J. loose, clobber Tigers in Game 4

DETROIT -- The scariest sentence of the summer for Yankees fans turned into the most surprising sentence of the year.

From "The season depends on A.J. Burnett" to "Good Lord above, look who saved the day!" in 81 pitches on a gorgeous night at Comerica Park for everything and everyone but the Tigers.

Mark it down. Burnett rides in on a white horse. The Yankees blast Detroit 10-1. This Division Series is headed back to New York even-steven at two games apiece, with the winner Thursday spraying champagne.

All hail A.J.

Maybe it was his 2009 World Series victory frozen in time inside of his laptop that spurred him. Perhaps it was getting kicked one too many times while he was down, getting taunted one too many times in public, getting spurned one too many times from the Yankees' brass.

Whatever it was, after a wobbly first inning in which he loaded the bases with walks -- including an intentional pass to Miguel Cabrera -- Burnett was, dare we say it, ace-like. He lasted 5 2/3 innings, the perfect amount for a bullpen that includes Rafael Soriano, David Robertson and Mariano Rivera.

And the thing is, after New York's six-run eighth, the latter two weren't even needed.

"You can't count me out," Burnett had said on the eve of his latest make-or-break start. "I'm going to bring everything I've got and just let A.J. loose out there."

Good thing for him, they let Curtis Granderson loose, too. That bases-loaded first inning? Two out, and Don Kelly smoked a screaming liner dead ahead to center field. Granderson broke in at first, then quickly recovered, scrambled back and made a leaping stab that ended the inning.

It was a spectacular catch made possible by an initial misread. Bottom line, it saved Burnett at least two runs and possibly an inside-the-park grand slam.

Granderson would make another sensational catch to end the sixth. But, by then, the Yankees led 4-1 and thanks to Burnett, they were out of the rough.

"I've been proving people wrong my whole career, it seems like," Burnett had said on Monday evening. "People are entitled to their opinion.

"Obviously, I give them reasons here and there do doubt."

In Game 4, Burnett gave them reasons neither here nor there to doubt. The dude was stellar, just in the nick of time.

Tuesday was a very, very good night for the Yankees also in that the blowout allowed Robertson and Rivera to watch idly from the bullpen and maybe get some crucial rest for what should be a terrific final act to what has been a riveting series.
Posted on: February 14, 2011 7:37 pm

Stuff my editors whacked from the column

CLEARWATER, Fla. -- Outtakes from a day with a Phillies' rotation that is moving into history's on-deck circle (maybe):

-- It bears repeating, because Cliff Lee mentioned it a couple of times Monday: He signed with the Phillies, he said, because "it was really about what team gave me the best chance to win world championships over the life of the contract."

He did not say he signed with Philly because it was best for his family. He did not say his wife loved it there. He did not say he signed to be close to Philly cheesesteak sandwich heaven (though he did allow, "I like Philly cheesesteaks. But that had nothing to do with me coming back to Philly.").

"I think Philadelphia fans should feel real proud about that," Phillies general manager Ruben Amaro said, referring not to the scrumptious sandwiches, but to Lee's feeling that Philadelphia can become Titletown. "I think things really started rolling as far as putting us back on the map, so to speak, when Jim Thome came here [in 2003].

"Ed [Wade, former Phillies GM] did a fantastic job bringing Jim here.. I think it legitimized what we were trying to do."

-- Lee's decision to bypass the Yankees and Texas reinforces what has been becoming fact these past few years: Philadelphia has become a destination for ace pitchers. Lee by choice, Roy Halladay waving no-trade powers to land with the Phillies and Roy Oswalt doing the same.

Which is very interesting, given that Citizens Bank Park has earned a unanimous reputation for being a hitter's haven.

"It's kind of a testament to the fans' support, and to winning, too," Amaro said. "It's a testament to the faith that our ownership group has in the front office to make these moves. It's a testament to all in our organization creating an atmosphere where Philadelphia has become a place where people like to go, from the guards who watch the cars in the players' lot to the people who take care of the wives' lounge, the medical staff.

"We make a concerted effort to build relationships here."

-- Manager Charlie Manuel opted to pass when asked which of his Murderers' Row rotation members would get the opening day start.

"We've got a chance to have a special club," Manuel said. "We've got a guy who threw two no-hitters and won a Cy Young [Roy Halladay] last year, and the other three guys standing there are tremendous pitchers.

"We're going to have a No. 1 starter going every day, so it doesn't really matter."

Of the Phillies' quintet, Cole Hamels is the only one never to have started on opening day. Halladay did it in Toronto and in Philadelphia last year, Lee's done it, Oswalt did it plenty in Houston and Joe Blanton did it in Oakland.

"The real good part of it is, it doesn't matter who you pick, it doesn't faze the other guys," pitching coach Rich Dubee said. "I don't think any of them has a big enough ego to say 'I have to have the ball on opening day.'

"They all want the ball 33 to 35 times."

Sunblock Day? It was perfect. High right around 70 degrees.

Likes: Great line from Yankees' starter CC Sabathia, that he lost a bunch of weight over the winter because he "stopped eating Capt'n Crunch." I would have picked A.J. Burnett as the Captain Crunch eater of that group. ... Phillies pitching prospect Justin DeFratus, who pitched in the Arizona Fall League last year, taking it all in early Monday morning before the first workout for pitchers and catchers. "It's been crazy here so far," DeFratus said ... Philadelphia GM Ruben Amaro wearing a baseball cap with the final scoreboard line score from Halladay's playoff no-hitter against Cincinnati stitched onto the front. ... Arcade Fire winning a Grammy for best album for The Suburbs. Excellent. Great performances, too. ... Winter's Bone.

Dislikes: Getting to the gate for your flight at 6 a.m. and hearing the attendant say, "Sorry, this flight is delayed until at least 10." ... Missed Bob Dylan on the Grammy's Sunday night because of a too-long travel day.

Rock 'N' Roll Lyric of the Day:

"Kids wanna be so hard
"But in my dreams we're still screamin' and runnin' through the yard
"And all of the walls that they built in the '70s finally fall
"And all of the houses they build in the '70s finally fall
"Meant nothin' at all
"Meant nothin' at all
"It meant nothin'
"Sometimes I can't believe it
"I'm movin' past the feeling
"Sometimes I can't believe it
"I'm movin' past the feeling and into the night
"So can you understand?
"Why I want a daughter while I'm still young
"I wanna hold her hand
"And show her some beauty
"Before this damage is done"

-- Arcade Fire, The Suburbs

Posted on: July 9, 2010 1:22 pm
Edited on: July 9, 2010 4:20 pm

Yanks trying to finish Lee deal, others involved

The Yankees, with baseball's best record, are deep in discussions with the Seattle Mariners to acquire ace left-hander Cliff Lee, the most sought-after starting pitcher on the market this month, according to CBSSports.com sources.

However, sources cautioned that the deal is not done and there were indications Friday afternoon that the Mariners were continuing to shop Lee. One major-league source told CBSSports.com that, among other teams, the Texas Rangers are continuing full throttle attempting to acquire Lee.

It is believed that Minnesota, which held a conference call involving it's top baseball people at midday Friday, is continuing to push hard as well.

Meanwhile, the Yankees and Mariners were discussing the framework of a deal that would send one of New York's top prospects, catcher Jesus Montero, minor-league infielder David Adams and a third prospect to the Mariners for Lee. The New York Post's Joel Sherman first reported the names early this morning.

The deal was not yet finished as of midday Friday, but sources say the Yankees were aggressively trying to move it toward the finish line. Among the pressure points: Lee is scheduled to start tonight's game in Seattle against the Yankees.

Lee's 2.34 ERA currently leads the American League. He also leads the league with five complete games. If they acquire him, the Yankees would add a tremendous insurance policy to a rotation that already ranks third in the AL with a 3.79 ERA.

Along with CC Sabathia, Phil Hughes and Andy Pettitte, Lee would give the Yankees a fourth starter who has been named to Tuesday's All-Star Game. A.J. Burnett and Javier Vazquez would be the only odd men out, and that could go literally for Vazquez: The Yankees would need to clear room in their rotation and they appear moving along in talks to spin him off in a separate trade elsewhere.

The move also would add depth to a rotation that could need it down the stretch, even as dominating as its been so far: Hughes has worked 94 innings so far this season and, at 24 and as they work to ensure his long-term health, the Yankees really prefer he doesn't exceed much more than 170 innings pitched this season. That could become an issue in September and October.

Montero, just 20, was named as the top prospect in the Yankees' organization last winter by Baseball America. The Mariners are seeking good, young hitters, among other things, and catching is among the organizational areas they need to improve. If the Yankees can pull this off, they'll block Minnesota -- which could offer catching prospect Wilson Ramos -- among several other interested clubs.

Bottom line is, it appears as if the bewitching hour has arrived for anybody and everybody who was in -- or wanted to be in -- the Lee talks. Minnesota, Texas, the Mets, Cincinnati, Tampa Bay ... the list is lengthy.

If the Yankees can acquire Lee, it will reunite him and Sabathia, the pillars of Cleveland rotations that allowed the Indians to contend earlier this decade.

It also will give both he and they a test run together as Lee, owed about $4.5 million the rest of this season, heads toward free agency. Translation: The Daddy Rich Yankees likely will have an advantage in re-signing him, if and when the time comes.

The views expressed in this blog are solely those of the author and do not reflect the views of CBS Sports or CBSSports.com


text:
Let’s Clean and Green Donation

8. يوليو 2014

Two volunteer projects were executed by Cub and Beaver Scouts of Izumi Group 4 on June 8, 2014.

First project is “Cleaning the Community” which is conducted regularly three times a year (June, September and December) and this time we cleaned the area around our Scout House (Hirai, Nouka and Ishiguro district).

Second project is conducted after “Cleaning the Community” project, which is “Green Donation.” This “Green Donation” is nationwide activity in Japan during this season before summer.

Cubs and Beavers, with support of Scouts and Venture, stand at entrance of community store and called for donation with loud and vivid voice. This donation from community people is sent to the Green Foundation where it will be used for planting three and conserving of natural environment.

（Reported on behalf of Izumi Group 4）

التعليقات (1)

Great job!!!


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About the author

A picture named daveTiny.jpgDave Winer, 56, is a visiting scholar at NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute and editor of the Scripting News weblog. He pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software; former contributing editor at Wired Magazine, research fellow at Harvard Law School, entrepreneur, and investor in web media companies. A native New Yorker, he received a Master's in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, a Bachelor's in Mathematics from Tulane University and currently lives in New York City.

"The protoblogger." - NY Times.

"The father of modern-day content distribution." - PC World.

"Dave was in a hurry. He had big ideas." -- Harvard.

"Dave Winer is one of the most important figures in the evolution of online media." -- Nieman Journalism Lab.

10 inventors of Internet technologies you may not have heard of. -- Royal Pingdom.

One of BusinessWeek's 25 Most Influential People on the Web.

"Helped popularize blogging, podcasting and RSS." - Time.

"The father of blogging and RSS." - BBC.

"RSS was born in 1997 out of the confluence of Dave Winer's 'Really Simple Syndication' technology, used to push out blog updates, and Netscape's 'Rich Site Summary', which allowed users to create custom Netscape home pages with regularly updated data flows." - Tim O'Reilly.

8/2/11: Who I Am.

Contact me

scriptingnews1mail at gmail dot com.

My sites
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My 40 most-recent links, ranked by number of clicks.

My bike

People are always asking about my bike.

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April 2010

Mar   May

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FYI: You're soaking in it. :-)

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Dave Winer's weblog, started in April 1997, bootstrapped the blogging revolution.

Compromising with Facebook Permalink.

A picture named wimpy.gifI love flow, so there's a temptation to put a Facebook "Like" button on every Scripting News story, but I'm resisting the temptation for the same reason I never used Feedburner to host my RSS feeds. They were offering a benefit, but I didn't want to cede all that power to them or trust them not to sell out to a big company that I don't trust. Or (as with Facebook and Google) be a company that I don't trust.

So perhaps there's a compromise? Let me implement my own Like feature and have it connect up to Facebook through a feed. And let it connect up to Facebook's competitors just as easily. I'm sure the smart guys at Facebook could figure out how to do this, perhaps they already have? I'm willing to do a little extra work to keep the web independent of any one company.

Update: Facebook is trying to be more than the identity system for the web. They are trying to be the identity system for everything. There's no limit because they've (correctly) understood that the web can and in many ways does model our reality. Yelp has pages that represent restaurants. IMDB pages rep movies. None of these things had identity until now. Which leads to the second update.

Update: You gotta wonder if this is enough to shake both Google and Twitter from their megalomania. In retrospect, what a mistake it was for Twitter to get so aggressive with developers last week. Had they realized how cornered they were, they would have gone the other way, surrendered to the developers, completely and unconditionally, even begged for terms. "How can we all work together to keep what we need to be open, open?" I haven't heard anything from Google in the last few years that wasn't utterly menacing. Let's see if they can quickly learn how to get along with creative people who don't work at big tech companies.

How to (really) turn off Mac screen? Permalink.

A picture named imac.gifPretty sure there's no way to really turn off the Mac screen.

I now live in a small one-bedroom apartment. My desk, and main computer, are in the bedroom. So the fact that the computer turns the screen back on at apparently random times is not only a waste of energy, it's a wake-up call.

I have the Energy Saver preference set to turn the screen off after 15 minutes of no use. That does happen, but the screen just comes back on. I've tried quitting all the apps, thinking it might be one of them that is asking for the screen to be re-lit, but it makes no difference.

Okay, so I thought -- let's just put the computer to sleep using the Sleep command in the Apple menu. It doesn't help. It just wakes up, on its own. When it wakes up, the monitor turns on, full brightness.

I've tried running the Brightness Control app. The computer ignores the fact that the monitor is turned down. When it wakes up it turns the monitor up to full brightness.

I did a search and read various threads with comments from Mac users with the same problem.

In the old days the monitor had an on-off switch. When you turned it off, it stayed off until you turned it back on.

So when people say Macs "just work" -- you gotta wonder.

© Copyright 1997-2011 Dave Winer. Last build: 12/12/2011; 1:44:58 PM. "It's even worse than it appears."

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Connecting Tampa

Where are WE headed Tampa? college graduates cluster, some cities are left behind

Check out this article in the NY times.  There are many conversations about cities and the "Brain Drain" and as this community bids farewell to our finest minds, shipping them to other cites to bolster OTHER metro's economy, maybe we can pause and wonder, WHAT ARE WE DOING ABOUT IT?

Here is a quote from the article:

“There’s a relentless cycle in which knowledge breeds knowledge, but the flip side is that many places are left out,” said Alan Berube, a senior fellow at Brookings who conducted the analysis using census data from the American Community Survey.

Check out the article and please share YOUR thoughts? where are we going? what is our future?  how can we become a MAGNET for Knowledge instead of a manufacturer and distributor? Where do we go from here?

Want to know where our METRO ranks?

Click here to see where Tampa ranks in the top one hundred Metros,  (keep scrolling down you will find us ranked #75).  by contrast Baltimore, yes Baltimore the setting for The WIRE  is ranked, #14, and our good chum, Charlotte #28. (source NY times).

here is a in interesting graphic depicting the numbers:

Read article here or below:

DAYTON, Ohio — As cities like this one try to reinvent themselves after losing large swaths of their manufacturing sectors, they are discovering that one of the most critical ingredients for a successful transformation — college graduates — is in perilously short supply.

Ty William Wright for The New York Times

Kelley Shomaker, 23, is moving to the Charlotte, N.C., area to take a teaching position.

Readers’ Comments

Just 24 percent of the adult residents of metropolitan Dayton have four-year degrees, well below the average of 32 percent for American metro areas, and about half the rate of Washington, the country’s most educated metro area, according to a Brookings Institution analysis. Like many Rust Belt cities, it is a captive of its rich manufacturing past, when well-paying jobs were plentiful and landing one without a college degree was easy.

Educational attainment lagged as a result, even as it became more critical to success in the national economy. “We were so wealthy for so long that we got complacent,” said Jane L. Dockery, associate director of the Center for Urban and Public Affairs at Wright State University here. “We saw the writing on the wall, but we didn’t act.”

Dayton sits on one side of a growing divide among American cities, in which a small number of metro areas vacuum up a large number of college graduates, and the rest struggle to keep those they have.

The winners are metro areas like Raleigh, N.C., San Francisco and Stamf... where more than 40 percent of the adult residents have college degrees. The Raleigh area has a booming technology sector and several major research universities; San Francisco has been a magnet for college graduates for decades; and metropolitan Stamford draws highly educated workers from white-collar professions in New York like finance.

Metro areas like Bakersfield, Calif., Lakeland, Fla., and Youngstown, Ohio, where less than a fifth of the adult residents have college degrees, are being left behind. The divide shows signs of widening as college graduates gravitate to places with many other college graduates and the atmosphere that creates.

“This is one of the most important developments in the recent economic history of this country,” said Enrico Moretti, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, who recently published a book on the topic, “The New Geography of Jobs.”

The recession amplified the trend. Metro areas where more than one in three adults were college-educated had an average unemployment rate of 7.5 percent earlier this year, compared with 10.5 percent for cities where less than one in six adults had a college degree, according to Edward Glaeser, an economist at Harvard and the author of “Triumph of the City.”

Historically, most American cities have had relatively similar shares of college graduates, in part because fewer people went to college. In 1970, the difference between the most educated and least educated cities, in terms of the portion of residents with four-year degrees, was 16 percentage points, and nearly all metro areas were within 5 points of the average. Today the spread is double that, and only half of all metro areas are within 5 points of the average, the Brookings research shows.

“There’s a relentless cycle in which knowledge breeds knowledge, but the flip side is that many places are left out,” said Alan Berube, a senior fellow at Brookings who conducted the analysis using census data from the American Community Survey.

Dayton lost about 1 percent of its college-educated 25- to 34-year-olds between 2000 and 2009 at a time when that group grew by 13 percent nationally, said Joe Cortright, senior policy adviser for CEOs for Cities, an economic development group. In Columbus, Ohio, about 70 miles away, the same group grew by 25 percent.

In a pattern that is part education, part family background, college graduates tend to have longer life expectancies, higher household incomes, lower divorce rates and fewer single-parent families than those with less education, and cities where they cluster tend to exhibit those patterns more strongly. Montgomery County, where Dayton is located, has a premature death rate that is more than double that of Fairfax County, Va., the highly educated Washington suburb, according to Bridget Catlin, a University of Wisconsin researcher.

Now, Dayton is racing to produce, attract and retain college graduates as a badly needed food for its hungry economy. But it is a painstaking process. Kate Geiger, who lost her job at General Motors in 2008, said she would never forget the feeling of sitting in a college classroom for the first time after 24 years on the factory floor.

“I am this 44-year-old, old-school union girl,” she said, “and here I am with all these 18-year-old kids who have grown up with computers.”

Retaining graduates is hard when a city has fewer to begin with, because college graduates, like migratory birds, tend to flock to places with many other college graduates. Kelley Shomaker, 23, who graduated from the University of Dayton this year, said she searched for work in Dayton but ultimately received an offer from Rock Hill, S.C., a suburb of Charlotte, N.C. In August, she and two friends will set off for that city to start teaching careers there.

Ty William Wright for The New York Times

Laid off, Kate Geiger went to college in her 40s.

Charlotte, once a city with very little education, now has a population that is more than a third college graduates. Ms. Shomaker estimated that 60 percent of her friends were moving to other cities.

Dayton’s past was rich, but by the 2000s the city was in trouble. It lost half of its manufacturing jobs in 12 years, according to Richard Stock, an economist at the University of Dayton. When the city’s last Fortune 500 company, National Cash Register, left in 2009, residents were jolted into action.

“Our premise is you have to change people’s mind-set,” said Thomas Lasley, the former dean of education at the University of Dayton, who runs Learn to Earn, the city’s effort to increase its share of college graduates. “We have to go from one where people think of themselves as being in a high-school-attending culture to being in a college-attending culture.”

One effort has shown marked success. The Dayton Early College Academy, which opened in 2003 as a public high school, focuses on preparing low-income students for college. It sends 97 percent of its graduates to college, the vast majority to four-year programs.

One of the graduates, Francei Brown, plans to attend Morehouse College in Atlanta in the fall. His father, who for years cobbled together part-time jobs fixing cars and doing plumbing and roofing, even in the worst weather, was resolute about college for his son.

“He said, ‘I want you to have a job where, if it’s cold outside, you’ll be warm inside,’ ” Mr. Brown said.

Dayton has used internships as a glue to keep recent graduates, and the city found through a recent survey that graduates were twice as likely to stay if they had done an internship at a local business. One of them, Richard Kaiser, who graduated from Wright State University, stayed in Dayton because it was cheaper and seemed faster to advance in a career, a choice he does not regret. Friends who moved to Chicago, he said, “ended up sitting at home and drinking cheap beer and playing video games every night.”

 Dayton may be struggling to find a second act, but it has strengths that many industrial cities lack. Wright-Patterson Air Force Base is a major employer in the area. Lexis-Nexis, the research company, has a large operation here. And the city has an above average share of people with some college — those who have a two-year degree or who have taken some classes but have no degree.

Steven Lee Johnson, president of Sinclair Community College here, argues that the paradigm may be changing to one in which students take bundles of courses instead of spending four years on obscure academic topics. The approach has been popular among students here, who tend to have children and busy lives (about a tenth of students at Sinclair are displaced workers).

“There’s a concern among employers that a degree is not specific enough,” he said. “What will count is competencies — very concrete things that you have achieved.”

Even so, those with four-year degrees still tend to have the biggest impact on economic development, Mr. Cortright argues.

Ms. Geiger, the former G.M. employee, graduated with an associate degree in graphic design and is now working on a Web site and planning events for a Harley-Davidson shop.

The job does not pay very well, and she compares it to “new shoes that don’t really fit right yet.” But she loves the freedom of not having to clock in and out. “It’s so strange to find that there is life after G.M.,” she said.

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Monday, April 20, 2009

Free Ice Cream

As a connoisseur of free food, I wanted to provide the following public service announcement. Tuesday, April 21st (that's tomorrow!) is Free Cone Day at Ben & Jerry’s. Free scoops will be served from noon to 8:00pm at participating "Scoop Shops." Visit the Ben & Jerry’s website for locations and more information.

If you’re counting calories, don’t worry; there are no calories in free ice cream! Besides you can burn the calories cheering for the Penguins on Tuesday night.

lacochran said...

"there are no calories in free ice cream"

I think I love you.

Nick said...

Sweat! I hope the line is not as long as free ice cream if you voted day in November!

Captain Easychord said...

my local neighborhood ben and jerry's closed for the winter on november 1... I think it was just to get out of the election day ice cream bonanza... (they were open the previous winter!)

Sean said...

lacochran - I get that a lot! :)

Nick - I didn't make it to Ben & Jerry's so I can't confirm or deny the length of the lines.

Captain - I wonder if they made the decision to close on November 1 back in the summer or on October 30.


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Beth Mowins gets NFL announcer chance during Raiders preseason

NAPA, Calif. - Beth Mowins has spent her accomplished career as a play-by-play announcer trying to tell the story, not be it...

Tiger misses 3rd straight cut in major

...wasn't clear what he meant by global.Woods is expected to start the 2015-16 season at the Frys.com Open in October in Napa, California. He is playing an exhibition with Matt Kuchar in Mexico. He hinted at a golf course design opportunity in India...

Golf | Sports
Sang-moon hangs on to win PGA Tour opener

NAPA, Calif. - Bae Sang-moon built a big lead and was steady enough on the back...shots over Steven Bowditch, who closed with a 67 on a dry, hot day in the Napa Valley.The only drama came from the 28-year-old South Korean, who was...

Golf | Sports
Sang-moon takes 4-shot lead into final round

NAPA, Calif. - Bae Sang-moon took the lead early and expanded it late Saturday in the Frys.com Open, closing with three big putts...

Golf | Sports
Wine of the Week: 2003 Blackstone Merlot, Napa Valley

NAME: 2003 Blackstone Merlot, Napa Valley CHARACTERISTICS: This wine is aged in American and...Blackstone makes three tiers of wine: California, Sonoma and Napa Valley, with Napa Valley being the premium. The growing region for Napa has...

Wine of the Week: Harrison 2000 Claret Napa Valley

NAME: Harrison 2000 Claret Napa Valley TASTING NOTES: From the time the cork is released, aromas...Pritchard Hill off the beaten path to passers-by, this is one of Napa Valley's premier family-owned and operated wineries. With a total...

Wine of the Week: Cenay 2003 RB 90, A Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon

NAME: Cenay 2003 RB 90, A Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon CHARACTERISTICS: This is a massive 100 percent Cabernet Sauvignon from Gerald Rowland of American Canyon, Napa County, Calif. The aroma is of ripe boysenberries and violets with...

Napa Valley winemaker Charles Wagner dies

Charles F. "Charlie" Wagner, the force behind the legendary Caymus Vineyards Cabernet Sauvignons and one of the Napa Valley's crustiest characters, died in his sleep Wednesday at his home in Rutherford, Calif. He was 89. Wagner was a bridge...

Napa Valley vintner is king of his wine castle

...fact that Tuscany's castles were agricultural centers as well as defensive fortifications. Sattui has been making wine in the Napa Valley since the '70s when he started the V. Sattui Winery in St. Helena. The winery is named after his great-grandfather...

Wallace holds off Gordon for NAPA 500 win

...would have been Earnhardt's 50th birthday by taking a flag-waving victory lap following his dominating performance in the NAPA Auto Parts 500. After holding off two-time California Speedway winner Jeff Gordon in a 19-lap shootout at the end of the...


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Coeur d'Alene mulls options for Nev. mine

JUNEAU - Idaho-based Coeur d'Alene Mines Corp. said last week it...still has value. In January, Coeur d'Alene bought a mine in Mexico that has not begun production yet. Coeur d'Alene is the parent company of Coeur...
Two Wash. men shot outside Idaho bar

COEUR D'ALENE, Idaho - Police in northern Idaho said two Washington state men were shot in Coeur d'Alene early Sunday morning, and a third man...25-year-old Adam M. Johnson of Coeur d'Alene to the ground and held him until police...
N. Idaho tech high school hoping for faster start

COEUR D'ALENE, Idaho - Supporters of a planned professional...superintendent Jerry Keene told the Coeur d'Alene Press he's hoping construction of...not 2012. Voters in the Post Falls, Coeur d'Alene and Lakeland school districts in August...
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Kensington Mine continues to grow

The president and CEO of Coeur d'Alene Mines Corp., along with the general...Kensington's future reserves. Coeur d'Alene president and CEO Mitchell Krebs...totaled 169,680 ounces of gold.Coeur d'Alene Mines Corp. trades under the...
Hecla appoints general counsel

COEUR D'ALENE, Idaho - Hecla Mining Company, owner of Greens Creek Mine near Juneau...counsel vice president late last month. Sienko is based in Hecla's Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, office. He has more than 15 years of experience in corporate...
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Idaho man fails to sell 'Hand of God' rock

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Tennessee Code Annotated

Title 2: Elections

Chapter 10: Campaign Finances

Part 2: Registry of Election Finance

TCA 2-10-206: Registry of election finance -- Duties.

(a)  The duties of the registry include the following:

     (1)  Develop prescribed forms for statements that are required to be filed under the laws pursuant to § 2-10-205, with the objective of making the disclosure statements as simple and understandable as possible for both the person filing the disclosure statement and the average citizen of the state of Tennessee;

     (2)  Develop a filing, coding and cross-indexing system;

     (3)  Make each report filed available for public inspection and copying during regular office hours at the expense of any person requesting copies of the same;

     (4)  Review all filed statements to ensure compliance with the respective disclosure laws. Statements filed with the registry for more than two (2) years shall be deemed to be sufficient, absent a showing of fraud or the existence of an ongoing investigation related to the statement;

     (5)  Prepare and publish a manual for all candidates and committees, describing the requirements of the law, including uniform methods of bookkeeping and reporting and requirements as to reporting dates and the length of time that candidates and committees are required to keep any records pursuant to the provisions of this part;

     (6)  Provide an annual report to the governor and the general assembly concerning the administration and enforcement of the disclosure law by January 15 of each year that includes recommendations by the registry or a statement that the registry makes no recommendations;

     (7)  Investigate any alleged violation upon sworn complaint or upon its own motion. If the registry investigates the records of any selected candidate, it may also investigate the records of all other candidates running for the same office in the same district or other appropriate geographic area;

     (8)  Preserve all reports or statements for five (5) years from the date of filing, absent any pending investigation by the registry of election finance or any other law enforcement agency, or absent any administrative or court proceeding;

     (9)  Notify all candidates for state public office in a state election of the requirements for filing any required disclosure statement fourteen (14) days before any fixed deadline provided for such filing; and

     (10)  Conduct audits.

(b)  The registry shall notify each member of the general assembly by sending notice to the member's home address and the member's legislative office address in Nashville.

History: [Acts 1989, ch. 585, § 6; 1991, ch. 519, § 15; 2006 (1st Ex. Sess.), ch. 1, § 11.]


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Search Week in Review for March 5, 2011

Here's a recap of this week's columns and news stories for the week of Feb. 27 to March 5, as reported by Search Engine Watch, as well as search news and tips from around the web.

Search Engine Optimization

The Difference Between Black Hat SEO and Bad SEO by Mark Jackson
The safest way to build up trust/links for your website is to create good, unique, resourceful/helpful content, promote via social channels, and try to win links the "white hat" way.

The Canonical Tag Can Save You from the Duplicate Content Monster by Ray "Catfish" Comstock
How the very useful rel="canonical" tag solves many common SEO problems that exist around duplicate content issues.

Why Google's Panda Algorithm Update Dropped Sites by Danny Goodwin
Google's Matt Cutts and Amit Singhal have revealed some more about what is officially known as the Google Panda update, Google's latest algorithm update. There has been much speculation about why sites were dropped and others were promoted.

Really Google? Penalizing Good Sites To Get Some Bad Ones by Frank Watson
The results are in and more than the handful of "low-quality sites" have been swept from Google's search rankings. Many innocent sites that may have a few flaws -- the ones a natural site would have if not worked over hard by an SEO -- have fallen through the cracks.

Let Google Know How the Algorithm Change Affected Your Site by Danny Goodwin
In what is the closest Google has come to admitting some sites have been unfairly punished in the SERPs, Google has created a thread, "Think you're affected by the recent algorithm change? Post here." in Webmaster Central.

Mahalo,, Article Aggregators Hardest Hit By Google Update by Frank Watson
The impact of Google's latest search ranking algorithm update is starting to show. While Mahalo is getting a bunch of the press, the ezine article aggregators seem to be the ones most heavily hit -- along with some of the business directory sites.

SEM Basics

5 Steps for Crafting an Effective B2B SEO Blogging Strategy by Derek Edmond
Organizational methods that will help B2B companies achieve success with their blogging strategies.

Search Advertising

Yahoo-Bing Search Alliance: 3 Key Findings All Search Marketers Must Know by Matt Lawson
Is it a good time to buy in the combined Yahoo-Bing marketplace? A paid search study examines how paid search ads are performing.

AdWords Call Metrics Now Offers Deeper Call Reports by Danny Goodwin
Google AdWords now shows more detailed reports on every call your campaign has received with call metrics enabled. This includes the call's start time, end time, duration, status (missed or received), and area code.

Google AdWords: Ad Preview Marries Ad Diagnostics by Brent Rangen
Google has incorporated a diagnostic tool within the preview feature. The diagnostic tool is integrated within the AdWords dashboard under the campaigns tab and also in the keyword research tool.

Analytics & ROI

Lifting Conversion Through Curation and Badging by Stephen Cobb
Badges call attention to specific items on a web page. Curation determines which items to badge. Here's why curation with badges boosts conversion rates.

The Lost Art of Web Analytics: Breaking Bad News Gently to Win Support by Garry Przyklenk
A swelling head and lack of audience can be a big problem for job security. Keep the following approaches in mind when breaking bad news.

Adobe & Conductor Team-Up to Monitor SEO ROI Alongside PPC by Jonathan Allen
Adobe SearchCenter has been updated to integrate organic search data, such that ROI from SEO campaigns can be measured directly alongside PPC data in a single interface.

Social Media Marketing

B2-Believe: Targeting Decision Makers Using #LinkedIn by Lauren Litwinka
How to leverage LinkedIn's PPC platform to identify the B2B target audience of your dreams, and qualify that audience by way of LinkedIn organic search. Added bonus: serious Facebook targeting goodies.

Separating Trend from Fad with QR Codes in Social Media by Jason Cormier
A common challenge in the world of social media marketing is separating trends from fads. Today, I'm proclaiming "trend" regarding the use of Quick Response (QR) codes for social media.

Google AdSense No Longer Facebook Approved Advertising Option by Danny Goodwin
Facebook's list of preferred advertisers went into effect Monday, and Google AdSense isn't on the list. This new list prohibits developers from making revenue from their Facebook applications via AdSense. Say Retailers Listing 60% More Products on Facebook by Jonathan Allen
SortPrice, a shopping app that enables online retailers to deliver an e-commerce experience directly through Facebook has posted data that suggests that F-commerce is a trend that retailers are embracing.

Facebook February Frenzy: Page & Profile Update Summary by Brent Rangen
With so many Facebook updates in one month, what would be better than having one all-inclusive post summarizing the updates you need to know about?

Facebook CEO Gets Own Comic Book - But Not A Superhero by Frank Watson
Seems Mark Zuckerberg, CEO and creator of Facebook, will be getting his own comic book. Bluewater Productions will be producing the comic written by Jerome Maida.

Link Building

21-Day Link Builder Relationship Challenge by Jeremy Bencken
As link builders, we must give in order to receive. Here are three general categories of relationship-building "gives" that will help you create a worthy relationship foundation and attract an unfair share of links.

Resource Page Cocitation Analysis for Authority Link Builders (and Other Content Marketers) by Garrett French
By using this six-step process, link builders can determine what's in demand and the quality and characteristics of the most link-worthy content for their vertical.

Local & Mobile Search

Mobile Growing Faster Than Predicted, says Google's Schmidt by Danny Goodwin
In a keynote at the Interactive Advertising Bureau's annual leadership meeting, Eric Schmidt said mobile is taking off faster than predicted.

Google Acquires Security Firm Zynamics Same Day Android Apps Hit by Malware by Danny Goodwin
Google acquired German software company Zynamics, a company that specializes in reverse-engineering and analysis tools. Seems like the acquisition came just in time, because only a few hours later, 21 free apps were pulled from the Android Marketplace due to malware.

Google AdSense Gets a New Mobile Interface by Thom Craver
Google AdSense announced a new mobile interface for those using mobile phones and other devices. Starting now, mobile user get a very different version of AdSense, instead of the standard "desktop" interface.

SMB Search Marketing

Twitter Plans to Offer Ad Placement for Small Businesses by Brent Rangen
Twitter is looking to offer more opportunities for small to mid level businesses.

International Search

5 Money-Saving Strategies for Localized Websites by Christian Arno
How microsites, subdomains, duplication, post-edited machine translation, and competing in foreign markets will increase your ROI and save you more money.

Dear European Commission: Please Don't Ruin PPC by Duncan Parry
While reading and answering the questions in the two documents my agency has received, I feel a growing unease that the bureaucrats who will ultimately pass judgment on Google may do more damage than good.

Navigating Search in China by Adaline Lau
With Google's presence sliding in China, state-owned search engines want to have a go in a Baidu-centric landscape.

St. David's Day Celebrated With Google UK Doodle by Thom Craver
Google UK users woke up to a new Google Doodle honoring Saint David's Day. St. David is the patron saint of Wales.

Google Doodle Toasts Chinese Poet Li Bai by Danny Goodwin
Famous Tang Dynasty romantic poet Li Bai, born on Feb. 28, 701, was the subject of a Doodle on Google Hong Kong.

Japanese Doll Festival Google Doodle by Danny Goodwin
Today the Japanese are celebrating the annual Japanese Doll Festival, a tradition during which families -- especially those with young daughters -- pray for the happiness and healthy growth of girls. Google Japan is likewise celebrating, having posted a special Doodle.

The Search Industry

Who is Behind the Successful PR Campaign Poking Holes in Google's Search Quality? by Greg Jarboe
It appears someone has launched a successful PR campaign poking holes in Google's search quality.

StatCounter: Bing Bigger Than Yahoo Globally; Still a Blip vs. Google by Danny Goodwin
Bing overtook Yahoo globally for the first time in January, and further expanded its lead in February, StatCounter announced today.

Google News

Is Google Reaching Out To Sites With Analytics To Replace AdSense Losses? by Frank Watson
So I got an email from Google today asking me to sign my sites up for AdSense, the interesting thing is it came from AdSense but was addressed to me as a Google Analytics user.

Google: New Nav Bar is For Your Privacy by Thom Craver
The new navigation bar, which we reported on earlier this month, is more about managing your identity and privacy online than integrating social or tracking you, according to Google.

Google Restoring Gmail Accounts After Buggy Update by Danny Goodwin
Google apologized last night for a bug that deleted e-mails and contacts for about 40,000 Gmail users. All the data will be restored soon.

Customize Your Google News by Thom Craver
Google News users are familiar with the color-coded categories on the left side bar. These categories include Top Stories, World, Business, Sports, etc. Now, Google News is giving you the ability to customize your categories based on a search query.

Google is Cheating, Copying Facebook's Profile Design by Danny Goodwin
By now, you may have read Google's recent post, "Decide what the world sees when it searches for you," and seen the various reactions and comments around the web today. However you define copying, the bottom line is, these new Google social profiles sure do look an awful lot like Facebook profile pages.

Google Cloud Connect Extends Itself Directly Into MS Office by Thom Craver
Do you like the coolness of simultaneous document editing Google offers, but really need all the features in Microsoft Office? Now you can have both.

Error! Error! Google's New Fail Page Features Broken Googlebot by Danny Goodwin
Google is serving a new custom 404 page when you stumble across a page that doesn't exist. It tells you: "404. That's an error. The requested URL was not found on this server. That's all we know." Also, Googlebot is in pieces, no doubt symbolic of a broken link.

Bing News

Bing Announces Live Deals - Available on Your Desktop and Phone by Brent Rangen
What's always hot on the web? No matter where you are or how small a city it, what are users usually looking for? The answer is coupons.

New on Bing: Flight Auto Suggest & Natural Language Shopping Search by Brent Rangen
Bing unveiled a nice little feature for searchers looking to travel. Auto-suggest results, built off of their price prediction algorithm, shows instant price ranges for flight prices.

Google ITA Acquisition Will Not Leave Kayak Paddling Upstream by Frank Watson
Kayak has partnered with Bing to help them with travel search results.

Yahoo News

Blekko News

DuckDuckGo News

Video Marketing

SES Conference & Expo

10 Reasons Why You Can't Miss #SESNY by Mike Grehan
SES New York brings the answers you're looking for. Join us for 75+ sessions, featuring 120 speakers, dozens of express clinics, theatre presentations and networking opportunities.

Run, Don't Walk, to SES New York 2011 by Greg Jarboe
Google's Eric Schmidt says mobile is growing faster than predicted. There were more updates than you can shake a stick at during the Facebook February Frenzy. And to top things off, Google is shaking up the SERPs with their latest algorithm update.

3 Ways To Get More Followers Via #SESuk Tweetwall by Jonathan Allen
So SES London was a blast wasn't it? More parties than any single year and a new venue slap bang in the heart of London should have given you plenty of opportunities to network with the buzzing search marketing industry in the UK.

Search Week in Review 2011 Archives

Feb. 26 | Feb. 19 | Feb. 12 | Feb. 5
Jan. 29 | Jan. 22 | Jan. 15 | Jan. 8

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Tag Archives: designers interviews

Fashion Chat: Nicola Formichetti

I wasn’t sure what to expect when meeting Nicola Formicetti. The superstar stylist and creative director of Mugler came to The Bay for a public appearance, which included a mini-exhibition of vintage Thierry Mugler couture. While I was very excited … Continue reading

Posted in Fashion Chat | Tagged , , , | 12 Comments