text:
Two World Industries Men: the full-length Marc McKee / Sean Cliver interview

Portraits drawn for the occasion by the ever-awesome Rocco empire teenage runaway Brian Lotti. Go buy a Telegraph board!

What were your first attempts at drawing?
Sean Cliver : Mostly crude copies of John James Audubon bird paintings and Star Wars robots. I couldn’t get the hang of human anatomy yet, so birds and boxy robots were much more easy to draw crappy and somewhat get away with.

Marc McKee: I guess the earliest stuff I was into drawing was probably dinosaurs. I used to be really into dinosaurs, even to the point of memorizing all their names and what they meant, and what geological era they lived in. Also, my dad used to work at a bank and he would bring home all the different bills for me to copy. I would try to copy them in pencil actual size and then trace over the pencil in pen, tying to emulate the engraved look of the note. That was probably around when I was like 6. I think a big part of it was like as a kid I was really impressed about seeing the different denominations, especially the larger notes and the 2-dollar bill, which was rare and had Thomas Jefferson on it who I really liked. Then Star Wars came out I think when I was 8, so from then on it was all about trying to draw X-wing fighters and the Star Wars logo.

When was your first ‘provocative’ drawing that you can remember? Or was it Rocco who forced you for all of them?
SC: Probably a bunch of wide-open beaver shots that I copied directly from looking at my friend’s brother’s porn mag stash. When I was 16 or 17, I was into making small press/mini-comix and tried to contribute some of these naked girl drawings to a zine made by this guy Brad Foster in Texas. For a second there he was confused, because legally he couldn’t sell me the zine, as I wasn’t an adult, but there wasn’t anything that said I couldn’t contribute to it. I think he wound up using one of them that didn’t look exactly like a photo copied out of Hustler.

MMK: In first grade I remember I found a small book on Picasso that my parents had. There were some paintings of naked women in it that I copied and showed to my friends at school. My teacher said something about it to my mom after they had a parent teacher conference or something ‘cause I remember her asking me why I was drawing pictures of naked ladies. I always liked drawing stuff just to try to get a reaction. In junior high we had an art class and for part of the class we had to do calligraphy. So me and my friends wrote all these stupid sayings in calligraphy that were like, “A friend with weed is a friend indeed” and “I don’t go to high school, I go to school high”—stuff like that, all in fancy calligraphy. We put them all up on the wall and thought it was fucking hilarious. Also in that class I remember the teacher asking me take down another one of the drawings I had done that was up on the wall since school was having an open house and all the parents were coming in. The drawing was like a scene from hell with like a bunch of demons tormenting all these people that were naked and covered in blood. By that time listening to Heavy Metal had really started to have an effect on me.

What year did you decide to make a living off drawing/design?
SC: I don’t know if I ever really made the conscious decision to, it just happened. I started doing designs for local punk bands at five or ten bucks a pop in high school. Then a local t-shirt printer/bootlegger, started hiring me to draw up designs and screen-print in the basement. All of this helped fund my commercial art program tuition after I graduated in 1987.

MMK: I guess that would be 1988.

Did you start with skateboard graphics right away?
SC: No, the idea of that seemed somewhat far-fetched—I was living in Wisconsin, which is pretty much the Ukraine when it comes to the California skate scene—so I was went to a tech school in Madison to be a “commercial artist.” I’m not sure where that would’ve led me, but I had a flare for technical design then and probably would’ve ended up doing renderings of nuts and bolts for a machine shop. Maybe marker-comps at an advertising agency, if I was lucky. Luckily, I was luckier than that, and won the great Powell-Peralta art contest in 1988.

MMK: No, the first real steady work I had was in that year when I started doing graphics for this BMX bike company called Bully Bikes. It was started by R.L. Osborn, who was one of the legendary founders of freestyle bike riding, so to me it was like a dream job since up until that time I was really into BMX and freestyle riding. It was through R.L. that I met Steve and Rodney. They were all roommates at the time.

Marc McKee’s entry that earned him the second place in the annual BMX Action Magazine’s drawing contest (1985)

What was your first skateboard graphic and when? For what company?
SC: My first complete graphic of my own design was Ray Barbee’s first board for Powell-Peralta. Prior to that I did some last minute ghost work on one of VCJ’s leftovers for the minimalist Tony Hawk Street model in 1989.

MMK: The first skateboard graphic I ever drew—not for any company, but just for myself—was on this old Variflex Vectra board that my friend gave me back around 1984. The original graphic on the board was this lame 80s pattern that looked like it was out of the movie Tron. I spray-painted the whole board yellow and painted a copy of the first Iron Maiden album cover on the top in black and white and covered it with clear griptape. It was pretty cool except for the fact that I didn’t know that the graphic was supposed to go on the bottom of the board. The first graphic I did for an actual skate company was the Mike Vallely Animal Farm board for World Industries, back in April or May of 1989.

Did it take a few drafts before getting it right? Were you trying to fit in the mold of your predecessor(s) at said company?
SC: I probably would’ve instantly tried to conform to VCJ’s line work (I did just that on my second board design for Steve Saiz), but the ragdoll concept didn’t’ necessarily lend itself to a 15th century woodcut style. So I kind of had to freeball it with my own crude cartoon style. It eventually panned out, although the first sketch was pretty laughable. It probably took three more drafts before it approached the final design.

MMK: Not really, the graphic pretty much ended up looking exactly the way I first drew it— except for one thing…. Originally there were two horses fucking behind the barn in the middle of the graphic. You could just barely see their heads popping out from behind the barn, but you could tell they were doing it doggy-style, and I think the male horse was like sweating with big smile on his face. When we showed the graphic to Mike he told us to take that part out. I completely forgot about that until I read his interview in Sean’s book where he talks about it. The girl horse is still on the graphic, but the male horse is gone. That would be funny to draw the horse back in to show how it used to look….

When did you guys meet each other for the first time?
SC: I think it was in 1990? I used to go down to visit Rocco with Per Welinder, when he worked in the marketing department at Powell. Rocco would take us out on his boat The Guppy and we’d spend the weekend on Catalina Island. I’m pretty sure I first met Marc on one of these trips. Later, in 1991, Marc and I went out to Catalina with JT and Jef Hartsel, when Walter Sims commandeered the boat while Rocco was off in Europe on a skate tour. Rocco later found out about Hartsel and JT being on the boat and flipped out … something about how The Guppy could be impounded if any pot was found onboard.

MMK: Probably around 1989 or 90. I’m pretty sure that I met Cliver before he got fired from Powell and came to work at World, but I can’t really remember.

Were you friends right away?
SC: We got along fine, I think. Similar personality types: quiet, sarcastic, cynical, socially inept, and we could both listen to one Danzig, Metallica, Nirvana, or Led Zeppelin CD for a solid week straight. Certainly made for an easy-going art room that no one else wanted to be in aside from us.

Did you inspire/fuel each other at all in terms of ideas?
SC: It was just a kick in the ass in general to work alongside Marc. He’d already set an incredible bar in terms of graphics for World, Blind, and 101, so I did the best I could to keep up. He by far was the better and more prolific artist, though. Nine times out of ten someone will say they loved the [fill in the blank] board I did, when it was actually done by Marc.

MMK: I think we mostly worked on our own and developed our own ideas. One thing though is when Sean first came to work at World I have to say I definitely felt the heat—I know that sounds dumb, but I guess what I mean is that I knew he was a really good artist and it really hit me that I was no longer the only artist at the company so I better not get too complacent. Like the first graphic he did for us—the Claudia Schiffer graphic for Blind— I was pretty amazed at how he created the finished line art entirely with an X-acto knife on a piece of black photographic paper. No pens or ink or anything. He did the whole thing by cutting into the top black layer of the paper and peeling away the parts to create the white highlights. Another thing I was really kind of blown away by was how he did all of his conceptual sketches in ink. It was like totally different from how I would do everything in pencil at first, with like a million erasures and corrections before I actually got something that looked decent.

What were your first non-PC graphics?
SC: There wasn’t much I’d done at Powell that could be construed as such, aside from the “Liberty and Justice for Some” generic board in 1991. The top graphic was the best on that one; it featured the reproduction of an actual pre-Civil War era slavery handbill. Once I got to World, though, it was probably the 101 Adam McNatt Charles Manson Brown board.

MMK: Probably the Randy Colvin Censorship board was the first. There were some non-PC elements in a lot of the other boards we came out with before that, but I think that was the first board where it was like the main theme. The graphic was of a naked women masturbating that I based off of a Penthouse centerfold. She was also wearing a pearl necklace—I thought that was a nice touch. The boards came in sealed black bags, each with a “warning” sticker that said Warning: Censorship is Weak As Fuck.

Did you have a total freedom on World? Did you ever get a no-no for any graphics there?
SC: Yeah, pretty much. There was really only a “no no” if it sucked balls as an idea, like a lot of the simple logo rip-offs that the riders wanted. Well, aside from the graphic I’d started for Ron Bertino when he got on Blind. It was supposed to feature a “Fresh” Freddy Krueger that was meant to spoof the “horror” and “dope” Plan B graphics of Danny Way and Sal Barbier, respectively, but it soon got blown out of proportion, people thought I was making fun of Mike Ternasky, and the next thing I knew I was getting threatened in the workplace. That was the end of the Fresh Freddy graphic.

MMK: In the early years of the company there was definitely total freedom to do whatever we wanted. During that time there weren’t any graphics that ever got rejected because they were too gnarly. That changed though after a few years, probably around 1993. By that time though Big Brother was fully up and running, so we kind of shifted a lot of the controversial material over into the magazine.

Was there a kind of pride in getting cease and desists at all? Were you, like, counting them?
Marc nabbed most of those back then, but I think Sanrio filed a claim for the Blind Guy Mariano “Bye Bye Kitty” board I did. It was never anything I aspired to, but it was fun to see all the legal mumbo-jumbo they used in those letters.

MMK: Yeah, I guess so. I mean we would put the letters up on the wall after we got them so I guess there definitely was. I don’t think the number of cease and desists were like as much you might you think though since we actually got away with copyright infringement most of the time. Overall I think we probably got around maybe 10 letters at most combined, and that would include the one we got from Nintendo for the Super Mario graphic that Andy Jenkins did. Of the ones for graphics I did, there were letters from Disney, Burger King, Dr. Seuss, and The Church of Scientology. I know Sean got one from Hello Kitty over the graphic he did for Prime, but I don’t really know of any others.

Did Rocco have a say/influence on the topics at all? How about Natas?
SC: Yeah, Rocco would chime in with an idea every now and then, or way to up a graphic in its humor/impact, but I can’t think of any offhand. Natas always had good ideas, like most of the ultra-violent ones I did in 1992 all came from his basic direction: the Gabriel Rodriguez Driller Killer, Eric Koston’s Day at the Zoo, Gabriel’s Penalizer, et al. The only graphic of mine that I can remember Rocco killing was this drawing of a skinless nude woman I started to work on in late 1994. World was beginning to lose its stranglehold on the industry and no longer ruled the shops with an iron fist. So I turned around and sold it to Toy Machine for an Ed Templeton pro model instead.

MMK: Working with Rocco was great since he really wasn’t too hands on with the specific details of the graphics. It was more like he would have ideas and it would be up to us to fill in the details. I’ve worked with a lot of other people over the years and a lot of times working on graphics things can really get bogged down in little details like “what angle the logo is on the board,” or things like that. Steve didn’t really work that way. Most of the graphics we made didn’t even have the company name in the artwork. I think that’s one thing that makes the graphics of that time more like fine art. He was more about developing the main idea and letting it go from there—like for example, “Let’s do a board with a naked chick on it—people will fuckin’ hate it! And from that point it was like “Okay, go!” and the graphic was done start to finish with no meetings or reviews at all during the process. Not even any concept sketches. It was more about the basic idea, and if Steve was stoked on the idea then there really wasn’t any need to see any preliminary sketches or whatever. I think a big part of it was that he was just really fucking stoked about getting the product out there as fast as possible. One of the ways Rocco really got World off the ground was that there was always a big push to have new shit coming out all the time. All of our product runs were relatively small, and stuff that had just come out a few months before he always rushed to replace with new product. That was definitely a new thing in the skateboard industry at that time.

With Natas things were different, but definitely in a good way. Natas is like an artist himself, so in addition to providing us with concepts, he would also have a lot of ideas on how the of graphics would look aesthetically. Another thing, I don’t know if you’ve seen the profile on Natas from On Video, but in one section they show the interior of his parents’ house, and there are just like all these cool pieces of sculpture and artwork everywhere that you can tell just really must have had a huge influence on him when he was growing up. Like working with him, even though we were like only 20 years old at the time, he already had a really broad knowledge of like the whole art world. So he would bring in ideas from that realm, and also from comic books too. I guess one example would be this one graphic that I did for his board for 101 that was of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. It was his idea—the way he described it was like, “I think it’d be funny to draw the photo of the Space Shuttle explosion like a Ray Lichtenstein….” Lichtenstein was one of the leading artists of the Pop Art movement in the 50s and 60s, and he was famous for painting these huge canvases that looked like they were panels from a comic book. One canvas he did showed a fighter jet blowing up another plane, with these huge comic book letters by the explosion spelling out “WHAAM!”  In a way the artwork kind of makes a reference to the brutality of war by showing the scene like a page out of a comic book. That was the idea for the Challenger board, which is basically making fun of how 7 people died tragically with the word “BOOM!” written real big next to the explosion. Fucked up, but also really fucking funny.

Were there pros that were bummed at any of your designs at all?
SC: I think Chico Brenes might have been a bit bummed on his Nude Beach board—with good reason, of course. I mean, what 17-year-old kid would be stoked about having naked old dudes and ladies with saggy boobs and dusty old 70s bushes on the bottom of his pro model skateboard? But that one had to be done. By that time, boards were being run in small amounts of like 300 with only one printing before a new graphic was up, so after a point all the riders really cared about was getting a check to cash to pay for their Honda Civic.

MMK: I originally made the Jason Lee Burger King board for Mike V, and that did not go over well. I guess it goes without saying that Mike would not be down with having that kind of graphic, even though the intention was for it to be ironic since it was well known that he was a vegan. In hindsight I think he was right to turn down the graphic since it’s clearly a salute to cow-eating…. Then, when the ad came out with Jason eating a Whopper in front of Burger King—with a shaved head like Mike had at the time—that definitely came across as a vibe. Not cool.

Another board I did for Mike I know for a fact he has gone on record as saying it was his most hated graphic ever. It was the elephant mini board I did for him directly following the Animal Farm board, and I have to say it’s not one of my favorites either. Maybe it’s not good to dwell on it, but I think it’s obvious looking at the graphic that the baby elephant on the board is intended to symbolize him, and the fact that he’s shown wearing a clown hat and clown make-up makes it pretty fucking outrageous. Also, and I didn’t really notice this until much later, I fucking drew the back truck of the skateboard in the graphic backwards, with the pivot cup towards the inside of the board and the bushings facing the tail. I have to say that is pretty fucking retarded. At least I was able to work together with Mike though on his last graphic for World which came out pretty good. It showed a snake leaving a burning city. I actually went through one major revision of the graphic after I first showed it to Mike. I ended up completely redrawing the lower half with the big snake. On the first version I had a whole bunch of snakes leaving the city instead of just one. Mike explained that there should only be one snake, and that he was the snake. It was his last board before leaving to ride for TV (or was it Blue?) so I think it’s obvious that the burning city was World Industries. It was a pretty good description of World at the time too since shit was really about to hit the fan.

What’s the board that you did that cause the biggest uproar, you think?
SC: For me it was the Blind Claudia Schiffer board, but that’s because it was mainly an insider-industry thing. I’d taken the half-finished idea/artwork for Adam McNatt’s first pro model immediately after I was laid off from Powell-Peralta in 1991 and Rocco convinced me to finish it up for Blind and produce it before Powell had a chance to due to their formal production/marketing schedules. Of course this made for a really awkward time when I ran into George Powell a few months later, and that was the last exchange I had with him up until Disposable: A History of Skateboard Art was released in 2004.

MMK: That would probably be the never completed “Fresh Freddy Krueger” graphic Sean did for Ronnie Bertino for when he was on Blind…. Rocco stopped him from finishing the graphic halfway through since the Plan B riders had seen it and thought it was a diss on Mike Ternasky—which it was pretty much was. I mean it wasn’t specifically a caricature of Mike, but it definitely was making fun of all the “dope” hip-hop style and horror-based graphics that Plan B had been coming out with and that me and Sean thought were ridiculous. There was a lot friction in the company after Mike T. started Plan B with Rocco and Steve’s focus began to shift somewhat from World and Blind to Plan B. I think it was actually the main cause of the Gonz leaving Blind. I specifically remember riding in the backseat of Rocco’s Honda wagon—Sean was sitting shotgun—and Steve yelling at both of us to stop fucking with Mike and Plan B. Ever since it started Plan B was a huge success and at that time, around 1993 or 94 it was what was without a doubt keeping our company in business. So with that one graphic—I’m not sure, but I may have initially suggested the idea to Sean—we could have really fucked ourselves over….

Marc, what was the whole Lynch Mob controversy about? can you talk about today?
MMK: I think that was just a rumor that some of the riders came up with for fun. In the early 90s Ice Cube had a group that he produced called “Da Lench Mob.” I had recently made a graphic for Jovontae Turner for  World that was jokingly called “The Napping Negro.” It was one of a series of graphics on the subject of racial stereotypes. The concept behind the graphic was that it was a piece of racist memorabilia intended as a “collector’s piece” for all the white people that are nostalgic for the past. There was a full-page ad written by Rocco explaining it all that ran in Thrasher magazine. Anyway, even though it was satirical, it was still a pretty offensive image with the fat lips and watermelon and everything, so I guess some of the team riders started a rumor that Ice Cube had seen the graphic, and was going to have the Lench Mob retaliate. Even though it was all made-up, I thought it was an interesting story, so I made a follow-up graphic showing the Lench Mob in front of a group of hanged bodies. That graphic is kind of really over the top, and I’m not sure I would ever do anything like that again.

Was there ever any idea you had that you never dared to actually do? why?
There’s this one idea for a serial killer-oriented board that I keep thinking about doing, but ever since I had a kid of my own I’ve never been able to get it past the sketch stage. Funny the things that can get to you once you have a kid of your own.

MMK: Not really. Well, I guess I kind of stood in the way of having the cover of Lovechild come out the way Steve really wanted. The first draft of the cover had a black man and a white woman holding the baby zebra like it was their kid. The concept was from the song Lovechild by Diana Ross about a mixed race couple, except the song didn’t really talk about them having a zebra as a kid. For some reason I decided I didn’t really want the cover to come out that way, so I took the couple out of the drawing. I think by the time the video came out was after we had released all the board graphics covering all the racial stereotypes, so I guess I was kind of over the whole subject by then.

Recently I’ve been going back and forth about this new graphic that I can’t decide if I’m going to do or not that shows a security guard with a NO SKATEBOARDING sign shoved up his ass. I made a rough sketch of it and I wanted to do it for the last graphic and final graphic I did for World Industries last year (in 2007 another company bought World Industries from Dwindle), but it wasn’t really something that the new owners of World, or any of the riders wanted to come out with.

If it was all to do-over again, what topics would you pick today to provoke? Do you think they are the same than say in 1992?
SC: I don’t know if I ever set out to intentionally do provocative stuff… I just like concepts that make me laugh or would just be funny to actually see printed and produced. Kind of like that Nude Beach board. No kid in his right mind would walk into a skate shop and go, “Yes, THAT’S the board I want to ride!” So the fact that it came out still makes me giggle to this day. But I guess it is fun to press the buttons on social consciousness every once in a while.

MMK: I’m not really sure. I think the difference now is that I really don’t think I’d be able to come out with graphics that are anywhere near as offensive, and also have the best pro skaters of the time want to put their names on any them. I think that was one of the really legendary things about World and all of its sub-brands back in the day. Not only were we putting out extremely controversial graphics, but we had the top skaters putting their names on the boards and riding them. I think it would be hard to have that same combination today. It’s kind of a sign that skateboarding has changed. When World was doing all the crazy shit skateboarding was at a really low point in popularity.

Even Rocco moved away from that approach while he was still actively managing World. After only 2 or 3 short years it was like we couldn’t just keep putting out raw shit with the expectation that shops would buy into it regardless. By then there were just too many other options with all the other new companies that had come into being. Also, I think the riders were getting tired of all the raw shit and wanted to move on to different things.

Who do you think carries the same deliberately provocative artwork in the skateboarding today? Do you think doing a brand the way World used to be would be possible these days?
SC: World broke down so many “taboo” barriers in the early 90s that to do anything in that vein now you tend to get jaded reactions. For instance, soon after Supreme released the two boards that I’d done for them in an intentionally “early 90s” style, another artist in skateboarding—Matt French—posted this up on a skateboard forum: “The 90’s called to say those envelopes have already been pushed.” So it goes. At least I had a finger or two involved with those original pokings. There’s always room for expansion in the provocation department—artists like Banksy are doing just fine—but as for a company like World Industries at it was then? No. Not to romanticize or get poetically nostalgic, but World was just about the most fucked up and fun place imaginable. Very few company owners have the right combination of juvenility, wherewithal, and lack of common business sense to allow something like that to continue, and it’s amazing that Rocco was able to let it go on for as long as it did.

MMK: Definitely Todd Bratrud with the stuff he’s done for Consolidated and Enjoi and Anti-Hero. That stuff has the same vibe as the old World stuff. I guess it would be possible, but the only reason I say that is because I basically think anything is possible. I think it’s extremely unlikely to happen.

If you made it that far, I guess you deserve a little treat : here are two sketches from a Sean Cliver sketchbook that ended up never being used for a French magazine article I did about him in 1999.

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Le boardnographe du phonographe

This is an archive for my eponymous monthly page in Skateboarder mag. Plus a few extras few and far between, whenever I get a chance...
Absolutely shameless, unrated boardnography, exposed! -minus the Ebay guilt. Enjoy the visite...

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Memory Screened Inc. and subsidiaries' CEO

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Session 80 Expanded

Session 80:
A Bitter Defeat

3rd – 4th Day of Reaping CY 623

Location: Outside ChatholdWorld Map
Map Tab Color: Light Blue

Gortakka leads the party’s next attack, yelling out, “Tell my mom I did good!” and charges the dragon, hitting the dragon for a moderate amount of damage. The dragon looks at Castiel stating, “You’re brave, but I’ve never tasted angel before.” and unloads a flurry flows on the angel, landing several blows to the angel, and two critical hits with its wings for a huge amount of damage. The first wing strikes the angel, square in the chest, while the other wing lands on the angel’s leg. As Castiel gets an up close look at the dragon, he notices that instead of treasure simply being imbedded on the dragon’s scales, the dragon appears to be actually wearing the random treasure. As the angel nearly dies, the angel’s contingency triggers, keeping the angel from dying while the dragon yells out, “Mmm, Mmm you taste good!”

Damiano uses his image to cast a force cage beneath Gortakka, then moves his image to be just under 100 feet under the dragon and Gobbo continues to fly up into the air. Mistress Valuna dimension doors into the force cage beneath Gortakka, then Castiel quickly casts a heal upon himself and swings at the dragon, but is unable to land any blow on the dragon. Ferreal quickly teleports to be 40 feet above the dragon, then casts a mage’s disjunction just behind the dragon’s right wing, causing all of the dragon’s spells to wink out, but none of his items wink out. Gortakka moves 5 feet down to be on the force cage, then starts to attack the dragon, striking with two attacks for a moderate amount of damage, then loses his grip on his weapon, dropping it onto the top of the force cage.

The dragon, being angered by Ferreal dispelling all of his spells, turns his attention on him and unleashes all of his attacks on the wizard, hitting with nearly all of his attacks, ripping the wizard to shreds, triggering several of the wizards contingencies which does save the wizard, and finally the casts a quickened disintegrate on the wizard, causing the body of Ferreal to turn to dust in the wind, while his items fall to the ground. The dragon Roars you will never get my treasure!!

Damiano moves his illusion closer to the dragon, then quickly casts cold ice strike on the dragon, then prepares to cast another spell, should the dragon attack the party. The blue ray flies at the dragon, he looks concerned for a moment; however the spell fizzles before it hits the dragon, unable to overcome its spell resistance. Gobbo continues to fly up as Mistress Valuna gives the dragon an evil eye, hexing the dragon, and then cackling at the dragon.

Castiel starts to attack the dragon again, with very powerful blows, striking with several of his blows for a moderate amount of damage, saying “I’m not finished yet!” Gortakka, hearing Mistress Valuna cackling, readies himself to attack the dragon then remembers that he dropped his weapon. As Gortakka reaches down to grab his weapon, the dragon takes the chance to attack the gnoll, hitting for a moderate amount of damage and causing Damiano to casts a fog cloud to attempt to save the Gnoll, but the dragon is unaffected by the cloud. Gortakka finally having got his weapon back takes a swing at the dragon, but the fog blocks his vision slightly, causing him to miss.

The dragon flies backward slightly then disappears from the party’s sight, having cast time stop, to those that are close and can figure out what he was doing and when the dragon pops back into existence just in front of Damiano, it appears a little healthier, quicker and an elder air elemental appears in the case with Mistress Valuna. The dragon looks at Damiano saying, “You don’t smell right to me.” then looks up at Gobbo saying, “You smell like a normal goblin. You want to join my side?” The shear impressiveness of the dragon nearly in his face strikes Gobbo dumbstruck for a short while. Mistress Valuna, noticing the dragon a long ways away and an air elemental in the case with her, defensively casts unwilling shield on the elemental, but it is able to resist the effects. Mistress Valuna then swiftly casts dimensional door, ending up to be 500 feet above the dragon. From this height, Mistress Valuna notices several different, pulsating nodules, on the dragon’s head, reminiscent of an ilithid’s tenticles.

Castiel dives at the dragon like a hawk at its prey, so that he’s a short ways above the dragon and quickly casts heal upon himself along the way. Damiano taunts the dragon saying, “Pitiful dragon, too scared to face our warriors. I dismiss you.” He then he quickly casts a cold ice strike, which is unable to overcome his damage resistance, which opens himself to an attack from the dragon, which chomps down on him. Damiano then turns from the dragon and casts a greater teleport, ending up standing upon the force cage. Gortakka turns to Damiano and calls out, “Hey you! Teleport me onto that dragon, I can’t fly that fast.” He punctuates this by showing Damiano the silver end of his weapon, to which Damiano sighs and says, “Very well.” and then Gortakka downs a potion of cure critical wounds.

The air elemental reaches out of the cage and strikes at Damiano for a moderate amount of damage. The dragon quickly teleports up to be 70 feet above Castiel, then breaths fire down on the angel, burning him for a large amount of damage, finally he ascends up to be another 30 feet above Castiel. Gobbo continues to fly up towards the dragon, while Mistress Valuna attempts to cast a spell on the dragon, but is unable to affect the dragon, so she flies away from the dragon as far as she can and quickly restores her protection from fire.

Castiel charges up towards the dragon, opening himself up to an attack from the dragon, which lands a critically powerful blow to the angel’s chest, nearly killing the angel, who still manages to continue on to attack the dragon, but is unable to land a blow on the dragon and finally quickly heals himself of much of the damage he sustained. Damiano defensively casts teleport as he grabs Gortakka and the two ends up 500 feet above the ground and much above the dragon, much to Gortakka dismay. Gortakka charges down at the dragon, flanking the dragon with Castiel, but is unable to land a hit on the dragon.

The dragon laughs as the gnoll arrives, then says to Castiel, “You’ve put up a good fight, so I’m not going to desecrate your corpse. I will burn your corpse, so I don’t have to worry about you coming back.” The dragon then unloads all of his attacks on the angel, missing with several, but landing a critical hit to the angel’s arm, tearing the angel apart and causing the angel’s body to fall to the ground after a glorious blast of light. Tsk, Tsk angel no treasure for you! S79.1.jpg Gobbo flies back, away from the dragon, then ascends higher up, while the dragon looks at him and says, “Goblin, are you going to serve me or I am going to kill you. I can fly faster than you.”

Mistress Valuna flies forward toward the dragon and attempts to cast another spell, but is unable to overcome the dragon’s spell resistance. Damiano moves down towards the dragon and quickly casts a cold ice strike on the dragon, but still is unable to overcome its spell resistance, then teleports to be just below his force cage and where Ferreal items possibly fell to. Gortakka unleashes another batch of attacks at the dragon, hitting with most of his attacks, but landing with several blows and one being a critical hit to the dragon, dealing a large amount of damage to the dragon.

The dragon quickly dispels Gortakka fly effect, S79.3.jpg causing the gnoll to float past him and attacks him as it falls past him, then the dragon flies over to Mistress Valuna and bites at a vital part of Mistress Valuna, landing a huge hit on her, but doesn’t manage to kill her. Gobbo, seeing his mistress get injured, launches a volley of frost bombs at the dragon, dealing a huge amount of damage to the dragon. Mistress Valuna, seeing no other options other than death, teleport away from the fight and back to Castle Black and Damiano looks around briefly to see if he can see any of Ferreal items, brings his image back to be just below the dragon, then quickly casts another cold ice strike, but is unable to overcome the dragon’s spell resistance.

The dragon, looking incredibly hurt and incredibly angry, looks around and then disappears. (to sleep with his treasure)

The remaining party gathers what few items they can from their fallen party members then gather around Damiano and teleport back to Castle Black. Upon returning, the party is unable to find Mistress Valuna and Drexella, looking as angry as the dragon, orders the party to come with her.

Upon entering the room, they find Entil-zha put in stocks and Sir Aegon looking rather angry as well, holding a club which he is beating on his palm. Sir Aegon angrily tells the party that he was going to strike the location soon, after many months of planning and now the party has made it impossible for them to strike it. He informs the party that Mistress Valuna quit and has surrendered the rod of resurrection, which he promptly uses to bring Castiel and Ferreal back to life. Sir Aegon admonishes the party relentlessly, impressing the party with the importance of the work that the party does.

He further tells the party that the number of demons has doubled, according to the few scouts that have returned from the area. Damiano asks Sir Aegon what their next move will be and he states that the party needs leadership and inquires how the party could mess this mission up this much. Castiel gives Sir Aegon a breakdown of what happened during the mission, giving a detailed breakdown of what occurred. Drexella expresses her outrage at losing her daughter and having to trust another, which she is not thrilled about. Damiano attempts to spin the failure as more of a fact finding mission, however Drexella is displeased by this and quickly cuts Damiano off.

Gobbo finds out that Mistress Valuna has left to another plane and will not be coming back for him. Finally, Drexella orders the party to leave her and return to the following morning. Gortakka commends Castiel on his attack and apologies for not fighting as well as he normally does. The party discusses the idea of returning to the keep and getting the treasure to help the war effort, but due to the party’s alerting the enemies it would be difficult to impossible to complete the task and decide to remain at the castle and return as ordered the next day.

Sir Aegon instructs the party that they might be split up or assigned to other groups, because their membership in the group is under review. Sir Aegon commends Castiel, Damiano, and Ferreal that their potential usefulness is a positive and will be useful in the future. He then inquires with Ferreal and Castiel if they would continue with the organization, which they both agree to continue on in the organization. He then informs the party that they have one week to consider their future with the party and should they not return, they would not hold it against anyone. He did warn the party that should they join with the enemy, they would not hesitate to dispatch of them.

The party goes about their business and considers their options for the next week. What will they choose? Will they stay or will they go?

Mo cheader 1 previous   small

Mo cheader 1   next a small.

Session 80 Expanded

A Manifestation of Chaos Leonidas300

warcinfo:
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software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2015-35
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for August 2015
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf


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Google’s Chrome Browser: Part One

I’m busy reading the comic book tutorial about Google’s Death To Microsoft browser called Chrome.

A few things immediately (I’m only on page six of it):

1) Google gets Serious, Very Serious, Geek Cred for having the comic book done by Scott McCloud. Damn, that is just genius.

2) McCloud’s work is absolutely fantastic.

3) McCloud must have a spy camera on me:

Oh, that’s me every damned day!

More later.

Explore posts in the same categories: Books - Nonfiction, eBooks, Tech - Other, Writers - Living, Writing

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Black Sheep Sunday – Harrison Musgrove (Part 1)

I have recently started using the British Newspaper archive on Find My Past. I decided to begin with my ancestors from Kendal and surrounding areas as I have some family names that might be fairly easy to trace if they appear in the local papers.

As I suspected I found some stories pretty quickly.

In fact my 2x great grandfather, Harrison Musgrove, appears several times during a period of over twenty years.

So for my first foray into “black sheep’ territory I have decided to serialise Harrison Musgrove’s exploits over the next few weeks.

The first story comes from the Kendal Mercury on Saturday 11 September 1841 and is transcribed below:-

Police Office, Wednesday – (Before John Wakefield, Esquire). – Three boys, named Harrison Musgrove, William Musgrove, and James Thompson, were placed at the Bar by PC’s Hodgson and Brunskill, charged with stealing from the shop of Mr Court, confectioner, Highgate, a quantity of biscuits, loaf sugar, etc. It appeared that Thompson, who is the eldest, opened the shop door and let in Harrison Musgrove, who was without shoes, whilst he himself watched through the window ready to sound a retreat should Mr Court come into the shop, and William Musgrove waited on the other side of the street to give the signal should any policeman make his appearance. Unluckily for the young thieves Mr Court stepped into the shop and caught Harrison behind the counter; the others fled, but were subsequently taken. Harrison Musgrove and Thompson were committed for trial at the sessions, and William Musgrove admitted as evidence.

Well it seems to me that poor Harrison was badly let down here on three counts.

  • Firstly – James Thompson didn’t do a very good job as a “look out” and failed to sound  the retreat quickly enough.
  • Secondly – the other two accomplices scarpered at the first sign of trouble.
  • Thirdly – his brother William (about six years older) is going to give evidence as a witness.

Next week – a report of the trial. Guilty or not guilty – punishment or no punishment. You’ll just have to wait and see.

Kendal Mercury Sep 1841

  1. Thanks for this reminder Mike. Have a subscription so will see if I can find some info in Leeds/ Scarborough newspapers, re: my musician grandfather and (dancer?) grandmother :-) whooo hooo…

      1. Great to get you reply Mike which is extremely timely because I’ve just completed nominations for the “Blog of the Year 2012 Award” and am delighted to include you in the nominations. For details please go to: Hope this gets you through. It’s now 4.30am here in South Australia and seems I’m mis-typing this link :-( Meant to say I enjoyed this post, as I have much of your work and am sorry for not providing more feedback since subscribing.

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October 25, 2011

Smith sits down with Kelly

Fort Wayne (Ind.) Bishop Luers 2013 linebacker Jaylon Smith is no stranger to college football games, but Saturday was his first opportunity to witness a game in Notre Dame Stadium and the atmosphere exceeded his expecations.

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June 1, 2006

Canes putting on full court press for Creer

Earlier this month, Tatum, Texas, running back Lennon Creer had the Canes as his frontrunner and was hoping to make a decision sometime this month.

Now he says "I'm not sure when I'll decide."

And he says the Canes are no longer a clear leader.

"I'm kind of open," he says.

That's despite UM putting its best effort forth.

Creer recently spoke with coaches Larry Coker and Rich Olson.

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June 13, 2012

Blue-chip forward 'still wide open'

Marcus Lee was already considered one of the top five forward prospects on the west coast, and following a standout performance at the Oakland EYBL in late May, the Antioch (Calif.) Deer Valley has seen his recruiting stock take off to new heights.

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Archive for January 2009

Morecambe Bay.

with one comment

Societies are global, from the earliest time travellers went from region to region, across the globe in search of better lives, goods and trade. In doing so brought back tales of faraway places, exotic people and strange customs, or so the Romans thought when meeting early Britons.

Britain is, lest we forget, a nation of immigrants, from Celts passing through, Roman settlers, various Germanic tribes and the proto-French conquerors. All that even before the 12th century. Later on the British Empire further expanded globalisation through slaughter, theft, commerce and even slavery.

The English language is an another example of globalisation, peppered with foreign words, complete with peculiar grammar structure, inconsistent spelling and non-phonetic pronunciation.

Britain, along with other European countries is multi-ethnic and whilst some might want to think of themselves as somehow “Anglo-Saxon” and deserving of special treatment, that is an illusion. (Ask yourself where that Saxon comes from? Modern day Germany and Denmark ! How ever so British.)

So the xenophobic slogans employed in the recent strikes are worrying, but worse is our inability to remember those who once harvested cockles in Morecambe Bay, five years ago.

Twenty three of them killed by criminal negligence.

Further compounded by a vague apathy to them, as people, they were immigrants from China, part of globalisation. People seeking work, to better themselves, to live to enjoy life, as we all do.

Dave Tang’s comments at the Speccy are surprisingly good:

“As a Chinese Anglophile, I have recently become incensed by the way in which some of my compatriots, though illegal, are being treated in this country that I love. I am hugely saddened by the fifth anniversary of the Morecambe Bay incident (on 5 February), in which 23 illegal Chinese cockle-pickers drowned. They were forced to do a filthy job and they died a foul death. It has made me think how wrongly complacent the British are about the Chinese population. We Chinese have this reputation of being reticent, rather inscrutable, but minding our own business, excelling in our professions, and beavering away making money. It’s not a bad reputation and so as an ethnic group the Chinese do not cause any worry, still less alarm.”

So remember those deaths on Morecambe Bay, five years ago and ask why such indifference to their fate?

Written by modernityblog

31/01/2009 at 16:25

Posted in Uncategorized

Mean While Else Where?

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Wen Jiabao is visiting the UK to deliver a Rede lecture and will surely have an opportunity to glad-hand some of New Labour’s finest, in around of mutually advantageous discussions, one dictatorship’s club to another set of control freaks?

But I doubt the topic of the missing 1,000 Tibetans will come up, Gordon Brown is unlikely to mention the human right’s of poor Tibetans lest he offend China’s PM and ruin business relations.

AI reported in December 2008 that:

“Tibetan former monk Nami Jhaba was detained by police on 19 April 2008, and has been held incommunicado since then. Police recently returned some of his possessions to his family, and he is therefore believed to be in danger of torture and other ill-treatment.”

Widespread protests are expected:

“The UK government has made some critical statements about China, but not as much as campaigners would like.

Last week, it published its four-year strategy on China, which said: “We will be candid and honest should we disagree – on issues such as human rights, for example.”

But activists say the situation within China is not improving.

The Amnesty International website has once again been blocked inside mainland China, as are sites collecting signatures for Charter 08, a petition by academics and human rights activists calling for legal and political reform.

Search terms such as ‘freedom’, ‘human rights’, and ‘Tibet’ are filtered to censor websites.

Internet users have allegedly been imprisoned after unfair trials, often on vaguely defined charges such as subversion or leaking state secrets.

“Chinese people have as much right to free speech and access to information as everyone else, and their government should respect this,” Ms Allen added.

“This includes making up their own minds about what we are saying on the Amnesty website.”

Defence lawyers, journalists, HIV/Aids activists, workers’ rights activists, villagers protesting against land seizures, and relatives of people killed or disabled during the crackdown on the 1989 pro-democracy movement are also regularly imprisoned.

China also retains the questionable distinction of executing more people per year than any other country in the world. In 2007, at least 470 people were killed, although with real figures a closely held secret, that number is liable to be far higher.

2009 sees a resurgent activist movement build on the demonstrations which took place around the world following the torch relay before the Olympic Games last year.

It is the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, the 60th anniversary of the foundation of the Chinese Republic and the 50th anniversary of the 1959 Tibetan uprising.

Free Tibet activists, who are organising the vast majority of protests this weekend, say the situation in the region remains grave.

Many areas of Tibet still remain under de facto martial law with an open military presence in many Tibetan towns.

The whereabouts of 1,000 Tibetans detained on charges relating to protests still remain unaccounted for by the Chinese government. “

Go on, be a bit radical or even revolutionary, follow it all at Free Tibet.

Written by modernityblog

31/01/2009 at 01:48

Posted in Uncategorized

When He’s Good He’s Great.

leave a comment »

Was reading Bob from Brockley’s demolishment of Henry Siegman’s cheap arguments on Hamas:

“First, for all its failings, Hamas brought Gaza to a level of law and order unknown in recent years, and did so without the large sums of money that donors showered on the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority. It eliminated the gangs and warlords who terrorised Gaza under Fatah’s rule. Non-observant Muslims, Christians and other minorities have more religious freedom under Hamas rule than they would have in Saudi Arabia, for example, or under many other Arab regimes.”

[Bob’s reply]:

‘ If we were to accept what Siegman says here as true, the argument would have the same structure as the following argument: “The notion that Germany under Hitler murdered its Jews is a lie because in fact Hitler made the trains run on time and in any event Stalin killed more people.” Or: “The claim that the My Lai massacre was a war crime is a lie because the American occupation made lots of Vietnamese people rich and anyway Pol Pot did some worse things.” Or “A chicken is not a bird because it’s really a farm animal and anyway a duck is more of a bird than a chicken.”

Quite simply, the extent to which Hamas brought Gaza law and order and religious tolerance is irrelevant to the question of whether it used this orderly and tolerant haven as a launching-pad for rockets. The extent to which the Wahhabi monarchy is a theocratic dictatorship is irrelevant to the question of Hamas’ responsibility for the attempted mass slaughter of Israeli citizens. ‘

It is very good (wish I had written it), read on.

Bernard Avishai is worth a read too:

“Palestine is not Hamas and Israel is not its settlers, though the trends are not encouraging. Poll after poll shows that a majority of Palestinians still want a two-state solution with Israel, while surrendering to the logic of violent struggle. Palestinian elites still look forward to cooperation with Israelis on advanced businesses, higher education, construction, and tourism; they may even have some affection for Israelis; they know that their economic dignity and secular life depend on staving off Hamas. And a majority of Israelis still want peace with Palestine, skeptical as they may be of Palestinian political institutions. Israeli elites are raging against Hamas, but are still stirred by globalization and know that West Bank business infrastructure cannot development with 500 checkpoints. They know their own economic growth and cultural vitality depend on peace; their children, many of whom are leaving the country, hate guarding and paying for settlements.

Yet both sides’ leaders, no matter who they are, cannot break out of a now impossible bind. They cannot imagine prompting a near-term fight with their own rejectionists, which means wide-scale civil disobedience, even civil war, for a long-term negotiation that would be hostage to the first atrocity. Peace advocates are exhausted, increasingly cynical, overwhelmed by military professionals and insurgent militias depicting their own actions as preempting the other side in a fight-to-the-finish. Hamas and Israeli rightists do not oppose a peace deal the way Republicans oppose Keynes. They have killed their own leaders to get their way. And this–not just a stalled “peacemaking process”–is where America comes in.

(H/T: Charles Lenchner )

Update 2:
cabalamat’s got a characteristically intelligent grasp of the situation.

Written by modernityblog

27/01/2009 at 20:06

Posted in Uncategorized

Support Dave Olser.

with 3 comments

Dave Osler’s blog and livelihood are being threatened by a libel action brought by that Tory crank, Johanna Kaschke.

I urge all readers to support Dave Osler.

For more details see my previous post, Libelled By A Tory

PS: Ms. Kaschke, if you’re annoyed at my coverage of events, Sue Me!

Update: Tendence Coatsey have expressed their support nicely.

Written by modernityblog

27/01/2009 at 18:52

Posted in Uncategorized

Move Over Barry Norman.

leave a comment »

Darren presents one of the best films reviews I have read in ages, it cuts through the crap surrounding the new film, Valkyrie.

A must see.

Written by modernityblog

26/01/2009 at 03:58

Posted in Uncategorized

BBC – Broadcast It.

with 2 comments

The BBC should broadcast the DEC appeal for Gaza and stop trying to find reasons not to do it. Arse covering is not a pretty sight, particularly when the BBC management try to do it.

BBC – Broadcast it!

Written by modernityblog

24/01/2009 at 20:48

Posted in Uncategorized

CiF’s Percentages.

with 4 comments

Whilst for a period of time I read Cif avidly, nowadays I think it is more an exercise for sociology students than those interested in current affairs or politics.

By that I mean, the type of reaction that CiF articles provoke is probably more interesting than the content of those posts themselves.

So it was when I sampled a piece by Uri Dromi, which had some 401 comments yesterday and 46 deletions, around 11%.

I was curious many “This comment has been removed by a moderator. Replies may also be deleted. “ would occur on such an article discussing “Britain’s broadcasters for refusing to air an emergency appeal for Gaza by Britain’s Disasters Emergency Committee.”

Would that too provoke an energetic response? If so, I was guess that anywhere between 10-25% of posts would be “moderated”.

Counting them using Firefox’s search revealed 55 comments, 7 moderated, 12%.

I would have prefer a larger sampling, but no doubt one will appear shortly.

Written by modernityblog

24/01/2009 at 15:47

Posted in Uncategorized

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An open-source, federated content repository

ModeShape 3.0.0.CR3 is available

We released our second candidate release (CR) of ModeShape 3.0 last week, and the community discovered a few more issues with our AS7 integration, backup/restore, and query processing. Although the changes were relatively isolated, we still wanted to give the community a chance to test these fixes before we cut the final release.

So, ModeShape 3.0.0.CR3 is available immediate in the JBoss Maven repository (you can follow our instructions for using ModeShape in your Maven application) and on our downloads page (which include a kit that install ModeShape as a service within JBoss AS7.1.1.Final). Check out our documentationrelease notesJavaDoc, and our code on GitHub; use our forums or IRC channel to ask questions, and log any issues in our JIRA.

We’re pleased with this candidate release, and we believe that we’ll be able to release the final release next week. So please give this latest release a spin and let us know what you think. As with earlier beta releases, this release passes 100% of the JSR-283 TCK tests with all JCR features that were available in ModeShape 2.x. (Note that we won’t officially certify until 3.0.0.Final, but you can run the TCK tests yourself by downloading our source and running “mvn -s settings.xml clean install -Pjcr-tck”.)

As always, we couldn’t do this without all the help from our community members. Well done, and keep up the great work!

Filed under: jcr, news, releases

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ModeShape is

a lightweight, fast, pluggable, open-source JCR repository that federates and unifies content from multiple systems, including files systems, databases, data grids, other repositories, etc.

Use the JCR API to access the information you already have, or use it like a conventional JCR system (just with more ways to persist your content).

ModeShape used to be 'JBoss DNA'. It's the same project, same community, same license, and same software.

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Full Name preetibanu
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Blog Comments & Posts

How to Carve Out Marketing Strategies by Mining Your Competitors' Backlinks
Blog Post: August 13, 2013
  • the curve out marketting we can find the websites from our competitors backlinks. this should be invalid backlinks are out of bounce backlinks. we can easily find out that. for examble  before i mentioned my company competitor site backlinks. one is the bounce link. another one is a out marketting links.


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Archive for the 'Civil Rights' Category

Monkey Clip

This week’s Monkey Clip is dedicated to all the closet racists hiding out there in the Shire blogsphere.

The Week Ahead

The week ahead will go down in history as one of the momentous of our time

It’s the week when:

George W Bush is consigned to the history books and will be remembered as the worst US President ever
Barack Obama becomes the first African American President of America
Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown saddles future generations with yet more debt
Kaka joins Manchester City and becomes the first £100 million pound footballer
Mr Monkey’s Blog reaches the 100,000 hits milestone in record time
The long awaited list of ‘Monkey Suspects’ is published
Graham Glitter aka Curly has an ape free day and doesn’t post or comment about the borough’s premier blogger Mr Monkey
The Fat Mackem Hobbit admits he’s obssesed with all things ape and that he’ll do anything to feed off Mr Monkey’s success
and David Miliband spends a day in his constituency; watch out for him on Ocean Road.

Happy Birthday Dr King

Mr Monkey couldn’t end today without wishing one of the 20th century’s greatest visionaries and civil rights leaders, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr a happy birthday.

Today would have been Dr King’s 80th birthday and in just five days time, Dr. King’s dream will finally be realized when America inugurates it’s first African-American president, Barack Obama and most people accept that the struggles and hardships that Dr. King endured cleared the path for Obama’s historic presidency.

Happy birthday Dr King – this is for you CLICK HERE

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MSDN Library

A Developer's Perspective on WinFS: Part 1

Shawn Wildermuth

March 2004

Applies to:
   PDC 2003 Developer Preview

Summary: Explains how WinFS defines types of objects that can be stored and examines the WinFS API. Using WinFS to store data in a cohesive data store, not just a file system, systems and users can store rich metadata about a myriad of objects. (15 printed pages)

UPDATE: In spite of what may be stated in this content, "WinFS" is not a feature that will come with the Longhorn Operating System. However, "WinFS" will be available on the Windows platform at some future date, which is why this article continues to be provided for your information.

Redmond, We Have a Problem . . . Don't We?
The WinFS Type System
Working with the WinFS Objects

There is so much to talk about in the next version of the Windows operating system, code-named "Longhorn," that the new storage subsystem, code-named "WinFS," may have escaped your notice. Of all the changes in Longhorn, WinFS may represent the biggest fundamental change. Richard Grimes does a great job in his recent MSDN Magazine article describing how WinFS will change the user experience. What you need to know next is how it affects you, the developer.

Redmond, We Have a Problem . . . Don't We?

Users create a lot of data. They write documents, they store their photos, they rip their CDs, and they get a lot of e-mail. Many users feel information overload just from their own data creation. A variety of technologists have been thinking about a better way to store and manage data for many years. Storing data is fine, but managing that data is the real trick.

Users are only part of the problem though. Developers have the same sorts of issues with data. They write a myriad of different applications, from simple personal applications to full-fledged enterprise applications. Whenever developers start to gather any sort of data (which is almost always), they must figure out how to store it.

The Data Conundrum

Since developing applications usually involves creating, storing, or making sense of data, the problem of data storage usually rears its ugly head. There are several typical routes that developers take:

  • File System: Application data is serialized into a binary or text file and saved in the file system.
  • Database: Application data is broken up into its parts and stored in a database. Code is often hand crafted to make this data easier to deal with (for example, business objects) and database server code is often required to make the solution work.
  • Registry: Applications take the approach of saving data in the registry where the data is small or only configuration-based.

While all of these solutions have been working fine in Windows application development for years now, the work to build the infrastructure to make these solutions work has always been a grind in most development shops. Many third-party developers have attempted to solve the solution by generating business objects or class libraries to automate this system.

In addition to the problem of building the specific infrastructure, each of these typical solutions implies a storage structure. Database data is usually relational, registry is hierarchical, and file storage can be anything from relational (serialized tables, for example) and hierarchical (for example, XML), to free-form bits of data (a Microsoft Word document, for example). Integrating an application's specific data with other user data is troublesome at best and further exacerbates the problem of data storage.

The Data Integration Problem

Data integration solutions must first try to make sense of all the different places applications can store information. Let's look at a typical example:

I am writing an application, I need access to the user's Contact List, Documents folder, and Music Folder. To access each of these data stores, I have to deal with three different APIs to get that data (MAPI to access Contacts, System.IO for the Documents folder, and the Windows Media Player SDK to find all the music for a user). It would be better if we had a consistent API for users' data.

But that is not the worst part of the problem. If my application wants to tie its data and these external pieces together, it will need code that not only establishes the relationship between the objects, but deals with changes to that data and handles data synchronization problems such as orphaned data.

Can WinFS Help?

The WinFS storage system technology will change the way that the user experiences an operating system. The core concept behind WinFS is that by storing data in a cohesive data store, not just a file system, systems and users can store rich metadata about a myriad of objects. In addition, these objects in WinFS will be able to be related to each other in fundamental ways. As a developer you can take advantage of this richness.

WinFS has a rich data model for storing data of all sorts of different structures. It does not require relational storage (even though it utilizes some relational database technology under the covers), or hierarchical storage (like LDAP data stores do), but allows developers to create their data structures and let WinFS store the data without ever requiring them to understand or make sense of the actual storage modality.

The WinFS Type System

WinFS is all about defining types of objects that can be stored. Definition of those types involves several different primitive types of the WinFS type system: Items, NestedTypes, ScalarTypes, and Relationships. These four primitive types represent all the data that can be stored within WinFS. Let's take the example of Bob:

Figure 1. Bob and his WinFS data

In WinFS, Bob and his data are represented by these four primitive types as depicted in Figure 2:

Figure 2. Bob's WinFS elements

Each of these primitive types has a very specific job:

  • Item: A fundamental object within WinFS.
  • ScalarType: An atomic piece of information that can be stored about a particular item.
  • NestedType: A structured set of information that can be stored within an item or another NestedType.
  • Relationship: A link between two items.

Understanding Items

The basic object that can be stored is the Item object (represented in the WinFS API as the Item class). Any object that is represented as an atomic unit (like users, files, folders, images, and so forth) is represented by an Item in WinFS.

Items themselves are not stored, but the Item type is specialized for different types of objects. For example, Figure 3 shows a simplified display of how Files, Documents, and Contacts are all inherited from the Item type:

Figure 3. Item specialization

Each of these WinFS types is a specialization of the base Item type. These specializations add new pieces of information specific to the type of object it represents. For example, a File has a timestamp and last accessed time; a Document has the author of the document; and a Person has the first and last name of the Person. This hierarchy continues to specialize as new types of objects are created to be stored in WinFS. This can be seen in Figure 4:

Figure 4. Extending the specializations

For example, the Photo class consists of an Image, a Document, and an Item. While a Photo is a document, and therefore has an author, and last date changed, it is also an Image. Being an Image, it will need to store data like color depth, image size, and format. Lastly, the Photo needs even more data that the Image type has. It wants to store the type of camera it was taken with, the time the photo was taken, and whether a flash was used.

Item Structure

Each WinFS object that specializes (or inherits from) the Item primitive defines the actual fields that will be stored as part of the object. For example, a Contact object defines that a contact includes a name, one or more addresses, and other contact information. The base Item object only knows how to take that information and store it in WinFS. WinFS accomplishes this with NestedTypes and ScalarTypes. For example, here is a depiction of a contact in WinFS:

Figure 5. Our friend Bob

Bob contains a number of pieces of information about him. He is male; he has one personal address, a home address, and the data associated with that address. As we saw earlier, these objects are stored as primitive types:

Figure 6. WinFS primitive types

Even though these are based on primitive types, they are specialized for the data that will reside in them:

Figure 7. WinFS storage classes

WinFS stores Bob as a Person and his gender as a ScalarType of the Person class. The Person class has a NestedCollection to hold a set of personal addresses. The Address within that collection is a NestedType that contains the component parts of the address. Each of these component parts is a ScalarType. This is the real structure of a person (though simplified). The use of ScalarTypes and NestedTypes allowed the structure of a Person to be defined.

ScalarTypes and NestedTypes work together to define the schema for a particular Item in the WinFS store based on the following simple rules:

  • Items may contain ScalarTypes, NestedTypes, and collections of either of these.
  • Nested Types may contain ScalarTypes, NestedTypes, and collections of either of these.
  • Scalar Types support only a specific set of types:
    "WinFS" scalar types Managed SQL type CLR type
    Bigint SqlInt64 Int64
    Int SqlInt32 Int32
    Smallint SqlInt16 Int16
    Tinyint SqlByte Byte
    Bit SqlBoolean Boolean
    Decimal SqlDecimal Decimal
    Money SqlMoney Decimal
    float SqlDouble Double
    real SqlSingle Single
    datetime SqlDateTime DateTime
    char SqlString String
    varchar SqlString String
    nchar SqlString String
    nvarchar SqlString String
    varbinary SqlBinary Byte[]
    image SqlBinary Byte[]
    Uniqueidentifier SqlGuid Guid
    Text SqlString String
    Ntext SqlString String

Relationships in WinFS

The final primitive type you need to understand is the Relationship. A relationship is simply a mapping between two Items in WinFS, a Source and a Target. Note that in the PDC 2003 build of Longhorn, Relationships are called Links. In future releases of Longhorn what were called Links are now called Relationships.

Relationships are bidirectional but imply that there is a hierarchy of sorts, with Sources being above Targets. There are three types of relationships in WinFS:

  • Holding relationships: Relationships that impart a lifetime management role for the Target of the relationship.
  • Reference relationships: Relationships that are a linkage between two Items, without the lifetime management role.
  • Embedding relationships: Relationships that model an object linkage between a parent object that embeds a child object. This is not supported in the PDC 2003 release of WinFS.

Holding relationships

Holding relationships dictate a lifetime on the Target portion of the relationship. For example, a relationship between a File and a Folder is usually a holding relationship. If the Folder is deleted, the File will also be deleted if no other holding relationships exist.

Lifetime management is how WinFS knows when an object can be removed from the data store. Unlike a database where you can orphan objects pretty easily, WinFS will delete an item when all of its holding relationships are deleted. This deserves some clarification.

For example, we have a Folder called One and a file called test.txt and we create a holding relationship between them:

Figure 8. A Folder and a file

At this point if we delete the folder or the relationship, the file will be deleted because there will be no holding relationship to keep it alive. If we add a new folder called Two and add another holding relationship between the new folder and the test.txt file we get a single file with two relationships:

Figure 9. One file, two holding relationships

At this point we can remove the holding relationship between Folder One and the file, and since there is at least one holding relationship, the file will still exist.

Figure 10. One file, one holding relationship left

But if you remove Folder Two's holding relationship to the file, it will be deleted. This is a powerful tool for storing objects that need to exist in a number of different places

Reference relationships

Reference relationships are different than holding relationships because they can still be navigated like holding relationships, but do not have any lifetime management to them.

If we create a third Folder called Three and create a reference relationship our picture will look something like this (note that the dashed line represents a reference relationship):

Figure 11. One holding relationship, one reference relationship, one file

If we were to delete the relationship between Folder Two and the file, the file would deleted. We would still have a reference relationship, but that is not enough to preserve the lifetime of the file.

Working with the WinFS Objects

First of all, we need to figure out how to use the WinFS API. The entire WinFS API is in the System.Storage namespace and its sub-namespaces. These namespaces exist within a couple of assemblies that must be referenced: System.Storage.dll and System.Storage.Schemas.dll. System.Storage.dll assembly is the base assembly that contains all the core functionality. The System.Storage.Schemas.dll assembly contains all the built-in schemas for WinFS. This includes a range of classes for the built-in schemas. For example: System.Storage.Contact.Contact, System.Storage.Contact.Person, System.Storage.File.Folder, and so on.

In addition to adding the WinFS assemblies, you will need to make a reference to WinCorLib.dll. This assembly contains some base functionality that WinFS takes advantage of.

While all three of these assemblies are registered in the GAC (global assembly cache), they are a bit fickle at this point about showing up correctly in Visual Studio .NET, so it is likely that at some point you'll need to find them by hand. The locations of these assemblies will probably change as the Longhorn project continues, but at this point they exist in the following places:

  • WinFS assemblies: \Windows\Microsoft.NET\Windows\v6.x directory.
  • WinCorLib assembly: \Windows\Microsoft.NET\Avalon directory.

Now that we have the references, our code needs to have access to the namespaces themselves:

using System.Storage;
using System.Storage.Contact;

The System.Storage namespace is almost always needed when you do WinFS development. Each built-in schema has its own namespace set up as a child of the System.Storage namespace. For example, all the File classes exist in the System.Storage.Files namespace and the Contact classes exist in the System.Storage.Contact namespace. You can look at the Longhorn SDK for an exhaustive list, but for this example we want to use the Contact schema.

Now that you have the assemblies referenced, you will need to understand how WinFS deals with storage before we can actually work with WinFS objects:

Figure 12. WinFS structure

To start out, each machine has a single instance of WinFS. This instance is simply a service that manages and maintains the WinFS. Within a single machine, data is broken up into different logical units called stores. To begin with, each machine has a default store (called the DefaultStore). Even though many stores can exist on a particular machine, I will use only the DefaultStore for the purposes of this article.

Every store has its own schema container. This means that each store can have its own unique schema for Item storage. In most cases there will be a commonality of schemas across schema.

The key concept to understand about stores is that as you manipulate WinFS objects, you must understand which store the WinFS objects are contained in. Much like drives or shares in NTFS, WinFS objects are containers that can store Items. Before you can get, find, or read WinFS objects, you must know what store you expect them to exist in.

You can access stores by using the UNC syntax:

The first thing we need to do in all WinFS applications is tell WinFS where we want to work. This means we need to tell the WinFS API which store we want to use. To do this, we use an ItemContext object. An ItemContext is used to represent the root for WinFS operations. It represents three different operational ideas:

  • Store and scope: The part of a store to work against. For example, \\machinename\DefaultStore\SomeFolder would work only on objects that exist within SomeFolder in the default store.
  • Transaction boundary: A logical container for a single transactional piece of work. This will be explained later in the text.
  • Working object cache: As objects are opened and manipulated, the ItemContext is the boundary for what objects are cached in memory for performance improvements.

The idea of an ItemContext may seem a bit overwhelming at first, but in the simple case you will simply want to use the default ItemContext (which is the DefaultStore on the local machine):

// Open the default Context (\\machinename\DefaultStore)
ItemContext ctx = ItemContext.Open();

If you simply open an ItemContext by calling its static Open method with no parameters you get the default context, which is the default store on the local machine. Once you have an ItemContext you are ready to start opening objects in the store.

After the ItemContext is set up, you can get objects by finding Items of a particular type. You can think of WinFS objects being stored like rows in a table as seen in Figure 13:

Figure 13. Objects in rows

All objects of a certain WinFS Type are stored together. For example, we can ask the Person class to find all the Person objects (within the ItemContext) by simply calling:

// Find all People in the Default Store
FindResult results = Person.FindAll(ctx);

WinFS Item classes support finding Items in the data store of their type. They do this with static methods that support finding all, some, or just one Item. For example, our code asks the Person class to get all the Persons (People?) in our ItemContext. The result of the FindAll method is a FindResult object. You will get very familiar with this class since it is used for almost all access to objects in WinFS. The FindResult class is a simple container for the results. It supports enumerating through the results. At the present time, this class is a little sparse. Enumeration is about all you will be able to do with the FindResult class. But that is usually all you really want. So this is how we would use the results:

// Add them to the ArrayList
ArrayList personList = new ArrayList();
foreach (Person person in results)

For this simple example, we can just iterate through the FindResult to save our Person objects in an easy array. The Items that WinFS returns to you are completely strongly typed. In other words, to get at different pieces of information about a specific Item, you simply use the properties of the class. For example:

// Get the current person
Person person = personList[0] as Person;

// Get a Scalar Type (works if the BirthDate exists)
DateTime birthDate = person.BirthDate;

// Get a NestedType (works if the PrimaryAddress and PostalCode exists)
string zip = person.PrimaryAddress.PostalCode;

You can retrieve information about Items by simply calling their properties. Since the classes are strongly typed, it is almost straightforward to get at the data. Unfortunately, much of the data in strongly-typed classes return their values in OptionalValue objects.

What are OptionalValue objects? The OptionalValue structure is a new addition to the .NET Framework in the Visual Studio 2005 (formerly code-named "Whidbey") release. This structure is meant to allow objects to store optional values in a meaningful way. The OptionalValue structure is a generic type that simply wraps the .NET Type of ScalarType. The structure allows all the properties and methods of the .NET Type to be exposed while keeping type safety in the API.

The OptionalValue structure adds two properties and one method that allow for the data to be optional. Before you attempt to use the data, you need to use one of the following properties or method to see whether the data actually exists:

  • HasValue Property: This returns a Boolean true value if the OptionalValue has an actual value.
  • Value Property: This returns the appropriate value that is stored in the structure, if one exists. You should only call this if HasValue is true.
  • GetValueOrDefault() Method: This returns the value or an appropriate default. This usually means a null for all reference types (including strings) and an appropriate default for value types (int's default value is zero, for example).

Since the ScalarTypes are really made up of OptionalValue structures, our code would be more robust if we wrote it as:

// Get a Scalar Type (or the default)
DateTime birthDate = person.BirthDate.GetDefaultOrValue();

// Or

// Get the Scalar Type (only if it has a value)
DateTime birthDate;
if (person.BirthDate.HasValue) birthDate = person.BirthDate.Value;

When working with NestedTypes within an Item, you will often need to determine whether the object exists by checking for a null reference. To be more robust we could have written the zip code property like so:

// Get a NestedType
string zip;
if (person.PrimaryAddress != null)
  if (person.PrimaryAddress.PostalCode.HasValue)
    zip = person.PrimaryAddress.PostalCode.Value;

We can look at objects individually using this code, but how do we make connections between the different objects inside of WinFS?

Using Relationships in WinFS API

We can take our relationship example from earlier and write WinFS API code to show how these relationships work. Let's look at a little example:

// Create a folder
Folder one = new Folder(root, "FirstFolder");
one.DisplayName = "First Folder";

// Create an array of bytes that will
// be the contents of our file
byte[] body = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes("My Test File");

// Create a new file in the first folder
File file = new File(one, "test.txt");

file.Stream = body;
file.StreamSize = body.Length;

// Save everything

This code creates a folder off the root of our ItemContext. It then creates a new file and stores it in the folder. When we create the File object, we specify a parent object (the first folder). When we save the file, it creates a holding relationship between the two Items. Next we can add another folder and add the file to the new folder:

// Create another folder
Folder two = new Folder(root, "SecondFolder");
two.DisplayName = "Second Folder";

// Add a link to the second folder (and name the link with the file name)
two.Members.Add(file, true, "test.txt");

// Save everything

All is hunky-dory at this point. We have a file and if we inspect either of the folders the file is shown in both places (but only exists once in WinFS). Now we have one file with two folders. For fun, we can remove the file from the first folder:

// Remove the file from the first folder

// Save Everything

The file is still good because Folder Two still has a holding relationship. But what if we remove it from Folder Two's members?

// Remove the file from the other folder
// This will cause the file to be deleted because
// no one has a holding relationship any longer

// Save Everything

WinFS will delete the file for us because it does not have any holding relationships any longer. This is a powerful tool for storing objects that need to exist in a number of difference places. Imagine we want one folder to store annual reports by year, and another folder to categorize by company. We still only need one annual report, but we can store it in these categorization folders.

Suppose we go back to where we still have one holding relationship for our file (see Figure 10) and add a new Folder, but create a reference relationship instead:

// Create another folder
Folder three = new Folder(root, "ThirdFolder");
three.DisplayName = "Third Folder";

// Add a link to the second folder (and name the link with the file name)
three.Members.Add(file, false, "test.txt");

// Save everything

When we now remove Folder Two again, the file is still removed because the only relationship left is a nonholding relationship. It is not enough to preserve the file's life. Folder Three is left with an orphaned relationship, but that is expected in reference relationships.

I hope you have come to the end of this article with a better understanding of what makes up WinFS. Understanding the differences between Items, NestedTypes, ScalarTypes, and Relationships will put you well on your way to getting prepared to use WinFS in your first Longhorn application. In our next article, A Developer's Perspective on WinFS: Part 2 we will delve into how to change and find WinFS objects.

© 2015 Microsoft


text:
Robert Foster

Professor Emeritus, Music Education & Music Therapy
Emphasis: Instrumental Music Education
Primary office:

M.Ed. The University of Houston; B.M. The University of Texas

Robert E. Foster, Professor of Music Education and Music Therapy at the University of Kansas, where he served as Director of Bands for 31 years beginning in 1971. He is also the conductor and musical director of the award winning Lawrence City Band. His KU Symphonic Band performed at numerous national and regional conventions, including performances and clinics for Music Educators National Conference, the American Bandmasters Association, College Band Directors National Association, and others. He continues an active career as a guest conductor, adjudicator, author, composer, arranger, and editor, and has conducted or adjudicated in 37 different states, Canada, Mexico, Japan, Singapore, and throughout Europe. Foster is President of the John Philip Sousa Foundation, and is former President of the American Bandmasters Association, the National Band Association, the Southwest Division of the College Band Directors National Association, and the Big Twelve Conference Band Directors Association. He also served as Chairman of the North American Band Directors Coordinating Committee.

Foster has been actively involved in the promotion and performances of music by John Philip Sousa, and he worked with the Instrumentalist magazine as guest editor to produce their Sousa Sesquicentennial issue in November 2004. In 1988 he was selected as the Kansas Bandmasters Association Bandmaster of the year. In 1989 his KU Marching Band was the 7th band to be awarded the Sudler Trophy for Intercollegiate Marching Bands. In 2001 he was awarded the Kappa Kappa Psi Distinguished Service to Music Award. In 2006 he was inducted into the National Band Association Hall of Fame for Distinguished Conductors. In 2007 he was presented an Award of Distinction from the Women Band Directors International organization for exceptional support toward women in the band movement. He was selected as the recipient of the 2010 International Phi Beta Mu Outstanding Bandmaster Award. He has written several books, including: Multiple-Option Marching Band Techniques, and Championship Auxiliary Units, published by Alfred Publishing Co. ; Practical Hints For Playing the Cornet or Trumpet, published by Belwin Publishing Co.; and My First Arban, book I and book II (a method book for brass instruments), published by Carl Fischer, Inc. He has written numerous articles for The Instrumentalist magazine as well as for other band/music publications, and has several hundred publications of music for bands or for band instruments. He is editor of the "Authenticated Fillmore Editions" of band works by Henry Fillmore, published by Carl Fischer, and he serves as Educational Consultant to Wingert-Jones Music Publications.

In June 2013, Meredith Music Publications released Foster's book on band history “Wind Bands of the World: Chronicle of a Cherished Tradition." Meredith Music Publications had the following to say about Foster’s impressive new work, “This engaging text presents a comprehensive history of the wind band from its earliest days to today. The author’s narrative describes the development of instruments, musicians, composers, conductors, and the music itself, tracing in chronological order, virtually every aspect of the growth of bands that has led to today’s outstanding ensembles. A must read for musicians and for those interested in music and history.” In October 2013 the KU School of Music officially named the large rehearsal room in Murphy Hall "The Robert E. Foster Rehearsal Room."

Foster retired from the University in May 2015.

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Research Projects

Dr. Newman is a recipient of the Jerger Career Award for Research in Audiology by the American Academy of Audiology. This award is given to an individual who has made a significant contribution to audiology literature. Both Drs. Newman and Sandridge are recipients of the Research Award given by the Ohio Academy of Audiology. The latter award is received by individuals who have made significant contributions to audiology research and for mentoring other colleagues and students in conducting research.

Following is a brief summary highlighting some of the research completed or currently underway in the Audiology Research Laboratory.

  • Longitudinal benefits from and satisfaction with the BAHA hearing system for patients with acquired unilateral sensorineural hearing loss.
  • Relationship between expectations and satisfaction for Baha implant system in patients with single-sided deafness.
  • Development of cochlear implant test materials: Application of reverberation treatments simulating everyday listening environments.
  • The Tinnitus Functional Index: A new clinical measure for chronic, bothersome tinnitus.
  • The reliability and validity of a screening tool to identify otologic functional impairments in the elderly (SOFIE).
  • Self-efficacy and hearing aid satisfaction: Age and gender effects.
  • Spoken language outcomes in children with cochlear implants.
  • Multi-center Neuromonics study evaluating long-term benefits for patients with tinnitus.
  • Pediatric cochlear implant listening and spoken language outcomes.
  • Benefits associated with pediatric bilateral cochlear implants.
  • Reduced hearing handicap following cochlear implantation in adults.
Facial Plastic & Reconstructive Surgery
  1. Novel tyramine linked hyaluronic acid (HA) derivatives in facial soft tissue reconstruction

    Collaborator: Anthony Calabro, PhD Dept of BME. CCF Lerner Institute

    Current research is ongoing on the use of cross-linked HA as a long tern soft tissue replacement. This is presently funded by an RPC grant (# 7550, P.I. Daniel S. Alam, MD). Based on preliminary in vitro and in vivo data, the findings of this project could represent a new paradigm in soft tissue reconstruction. We have submitted for a resident research award for long-term study and funding for our research resident who plans to dedicate his research year to this project. The initial data has been received with enormous interest from our national academy which published the abstract not only at the national meeting but because of it’s potential merit, included it into a newsletter sent to all of the members of the society of facial plastic surgeons nationally.

  2. Three-dimensional flow analysis of the nasal valve based on fine cut CT data.

    Collaborator: Marc Goodin, PhD Dept of BME. CCF Lerner Institute.

    With the utilization of flow dynamics models used presently in cardiology to study vessel flow, the section is pursuing the development of a model of flow limitation in nasal respiration. This will allow preoperative CT scans to predict and guide surgery for the improvement of nasal breathing. Compilation of data from presently existing CT scans from sinus patients has allowed the construction of a preliminary model.

  3. Novel surgical techniques

    Application of novel techniques to longstanding surgical problems in facial plastic surgery:

    • TMJ reconstruction in patients with composite reconstructions of the jaw: First reported use of alloderm based TMJ reconstruction with a fibula free flap bony construct.
    • Midfacial Suspension for patients with long standing facial paralysis: Use of a minimally invasive novel suture suspension technique to rehabilitate patients with long standing facial paralysis and facial droop.
    • Intranasal microplating for correction of cartilaginous nasal deformities: Novel approach to the management of posttraumatic nasal deformities
    • Serratus/Rib free flap reconstruction of head and neck defects: largest clinical series and report of the long term success of this flap in head and neck reconstruction
Head & Neck

Research remains a vital pillar in the Head and Neck Section’s activities. Staff members have published 10 peer-reviewed articles in the past year, and have eight articles or book chapters in press. Dr. Strome’s laboratory has developed promising advances in understanding mechanisms to improve tolerance and new drugs that may reduce the immunosuppression needed for laryngeal and parathyroid transplantation. We continue with IRB approved clinical trials in several areas:

  1. Human parathyroid allograft transplantation
  2. Development of squamous cell carcinoma cell lines as a first step in developing an active immunotherapy protocol. Dr. Shu has successfully generated two human SCCa cell lines in the past year.
  3. NIH funded, multi-institutional study comparing thyroplasty and reinnervation for management of a unilateral vocal fold immobility. We have begun to enter patients on this trial with success.
  4. Management of otolaryngologic manifestations of patients with Wegener’s granulomatosis.
  5. The effect of adjuvant Iressa therapy on patients with advanced head and neck cancer. This trial continues to accrue patients and it's to early to report results.
  6. In conjunction with the Section of Endocrinology and Metabolism, we are collaborating in efforts to identify a blood marker for thyroid cancer using molecular detection of TSHr by peripheral blood RT-PCR analysis.

In clinical research, we have reported and published our success in:

  1. Applying selective neck dissection in patients with irradiated neck, which has minimized the surgical morbidity of these patients.
  2. The indications and utility of postoperative irradiation for patients with adenoid cystic carcinoma of salivary glands.

The Otology Section also is recognized for excellence in clinical and basic science research in adult sensorineural hearing loss (SHL). Dr. Hughes is Cleveland Clinic's principal investigator in a NIH-funded, five-year, multicenter study of intratympanic steroid treatment for sudden SHL. In autoimmune SHL, Dr. Hughes is co-investigator in an NIH grant submitted March 1st by Vincent Tuohy PhD of the Lerner Research Institute.

Research Fellow Hyun-Min Park MD from Seoul, Korea assists Dr. Tuohy in the laboratory this year. Dr. Tuohy’s and Dr. Hughes’ combined work exemplifies the type of translational research encouraged by Cleveland Clinic.

Pediatric ENT

Dr. Krakovitz has taken the helm from Dr. Koltai for the subcontract on the grant awarded to the BIOMEC Corporation on ultrasonic detection of middle ear effusion. This project has received continued support through the NIH through a small business innovation research grant totaling $1,420,922 of direct costs.

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