Ryan Howard nearly decapitated Phillies media relations folks Greg Casterioto and Kevin Gregg last Saturday when he ripped a foul ball through an open press box window. The ball flew between the two, and hit the back wall on the fly. The ball not only put a hole in the dry wall, which is about 20 feet behind the press box windows, but it hit so hard that it left impressions of its seams on the wall.
Howard stopped into the press box today and signed his handy work.
But the killings Saturday of Lesley Enriquez, who worked at the U.S. Consulate and was four months pregnant; her husband, Arthur Redelfs, a corrections officer in El Paso, Texas; and Jorge Alberto Salcido Ceniceros, whose wife worked at the consulate, brought the murderous mayhem even closer to home in United States than perhaps it has ever been.
Two of the victims were U.S. citizens; one of them a U.S. government employee. The apparently coordinated attacks took place in broad daylight as the three were leaving a consulate children’s party. Three children were with them when the two separate assaults took place.
Now, the international investigation has expanded to both sides of the border in the search for clues about the killers as well as their motives.
Two things come to mind, if this indeed proves to be a truly unprovoked Drug Cartel murder of innocents:
If this was some orchestrated killing there is at least one drug cartel in operating in Mexico and the US that have no fear of US Federal reach and that does not bode well for our border states.
If the first point is true, then this helps confirm what we all know: our drug war is a losing one and the cartels actively thought to murder targets that would involve both governments. Why? As a crude warning? As retaliation for some law enforcement operation? If this was a consulate children’s party, they could have murdered more people.
We need to change our drug policy so that we can properly focus our resources, reduce incarceration rates and provide law enforcement some breathing room to operate.
Tim Berners-Lee, credited with creating the World Wide Web, discusses the increasing uses of Open Data for communities, professionals, non-profit and governments. The Day Open Data went World Wide.
Now what caught my attention in this talk was when Berners-Lee mentioned the Zanesville, Ohio case (2:08 minutes in), where county commissioners found that the installation of running water service was red lined based on ethnicity and income of neighborhoods. I remember hearing and/or reading this story, but I had no idea that the attorney for the black/bi-racial residents used a mash-up map of the ethnically segregated neighborhoods and the public water system to illustrate the discriminatory practices.
ZANESVILLE, Ohio — In most black and biracial households perched atop the catacomb of abandoned mine shafts beneath Coal Run Road, water is a precious commodity imported by truck and dumped into cisterns.
Meanwhile, nearly all of the whites who live in the vicinity need only flick a faucet to produce an endless flow, courtesy of the waterlines that feed their homes.
The disparity is the result of “unlawful discriminatory practice,” the Ohio Civil Rights Commission has ruled.
Blacks do not have public water service because of racial discrimination by the city of Zanesville, Muskingum County commissioners, Washington Township trustees and the East Muskingum Water Authority, the commission found in its June 12 ruling.
[…]
“Prejudice is alive and well,” said Jim Hill.
Like others, he plunks quarters into a pump at the city water-treatment plant to fill the truck-mounted 550-gallon tank that feeds the cistern at the home he shares with his mother.
“Water is not a luxury, it’s a necessity,” said the 48-year-old Hill, who is disabled. “I think it is very cold-hearted of the people in power to deny these people water. I can’t believe people can act that way these days.”
Kathleen Hill, 89, who has lived in her bright yellow house since 1967, said of her son: “I’d be in big trouble without him to fetch the water.”
Waterlines serve the homes of 30 of the 34 white families who live along Coal Run Road, Langan Lane and Russell, Wallwork and Thomas streets.
Meanwhile, 23 of the 27 nonwhite households on the same streets must haul water, arrange delivery or pump it from wells prone to sulfur contamination from coal-mining residue.
County and township officials deny the charge of racism as well as responsibility for the lack of water service to black homes.
The county is in the process of taking over the East Muskingum Water Authority. The city serves some areas outside its borders
The archives, at C-SpanVideo.org, cover 23 years of history and five presidential administrations and are sure to provide new fodder for pundits and politicians alike. The network will formally announce the completion of the C-Span Video Library on Wednesday.
Having free online access to the more than 160,000 hours of C-Span footage is “like being able to Google political history using the ‘I Feel Lucky’ button every time,” said Rachel Maddow, the liberal MSNBC host.
The severity of the injury has prompted speculation that Beckham’s career could be over, but before the operation the former England captain’s spokesman insisted: “This is not the end of his playing career as has been suggested.
“Even if David does miss the World Cup, he is aiming to play [with LA Galaxy] towards the end of the Major League Soccer season.”
England coach Fabio Capello, who has yet to finalise his squad for the World Cup, said Beckham would be a loss for the finals in South Africa.
“David is a great professional and has worked very hard to be ready for the World Cup, so missing it will be a big blow,” he said.
In 2006, Beckham suffered an Achilles injury during England’s World Cup quarter-final defeat by Portugal but recovered in time to play for Real Madrid in their first game of the Spanish season eight weeks later.
AC Milan coach Leonardo commented: “Beckham’s injury makes us feel terrible. He understood immediately that he had torn his Achilles tendon.
Tons of bloggers have posted these two segments from 60 minutes. The plain talk explanations are worth reposting.
The first talks about how Dr. Michael Burry got richer on Credit Default Swaps of CDOs…and AIG jumped in on the CDS party at the behest of Goldman Sachs.
Lewis maintains its stupidity, more than corruption. I am not so sure of that. Government regulation should be used to make sure markets properly penalize the stupid and the corrupt.
Lewis explains things very well, but he is no raging populist. “You Should stop and say this shouldn’t be done” – Michael Lewis on the Wall Street Banks who bought CDS from AIG on overrated CDOs filled with junk mortgages that were bought with funds levered 20, 30 or 40 to 1. He still assumes some sort of conscience can push through group think and convince people that they should somehow blow up a system that pays them 10s of millions in bonuses just for showing up.
Earlier this evening, NPR critic Linda Holmes (@nprmonkeysee) tweeted thusly: “I would sit here and watch five more hours of Winning Time, ESPN’s 30 For 30 airing tonight. At least five more hours.”
That pretty much says it all, doesn’t it? Dan Klores’ documentary about the heated mid-‘90s rivalry between the New York Knicks and the Indiana Pacers—made possible by Michael Jordan’s brief, ignominious sojourn into minor league baseball—has been the most hotly anticipated in the 30 For 30 lineup so far, and it more than lived up to the hype.
It was an excellent sports documentary. It pulled you back to that time, when Ewing, Miller and other NBA Hall of Famers had a brief time to step out of Jordan’s shadow and make a run for the NBA championship only to run into Hakeem Olajuwon’s Houston Rockets. I am not sure the rivalry would have been as brutal had it not been for the urgency created by Jordan retirement #1.
While tuitions are ever increasing and out-pacing any growth in GDP or median income, here is what is happening to faculty salaries. From Inside Higher-Ed:
The percentage of faculty members receiving no salary increase this year is 21.2 percent, while 32.6 percent had their salaries reduced, with a median decrease (among those who saw a decrease) of 3 percent.
Faculty members at private doctorate-granting institutions were the only ones to see a real increase in average salary — 1.7 percent.
The 32.6 percent figure for faculty seeing their salaries reduced is significantly larger than the 8.3 percent decline reported in CUPA-HR’s survey of administrators’ salaries. However, the median decrease for faculty members (3 percent) was about half the size of the median decrease for those administrators who saw a decline (6 percent).
The median increase for those faculty members who received a raise was 3 percent, the same as for administrators who received a raise this year.
Disciplinary gaps remain significant. The disciplines with the top salary medians (across ranks, public and private) are law, business and engineering. At the assistant professor level, those three fields have median salaries of between $75,000 and $86,000. (Medical school professors’ generally high salaries are not analyzed separately but are part of a broader “health professions” category.) The three lowest fields for assistant professor are visual and performing arts, English language and literature and history — and those three have median salaries of between $51,000 and $52,000.
The league plans to upload the archives’ collection of 3,000 DVDs in what Mr. Malamud calls an “experiment in crowd-sourced digitization.”
Armed with nothing but a DVD duplicator and a YouTube account, the volunteers have copied and uploaded, among other video clips, an address by John F. Kennedy; a silent film about the Communist “red scare”; a training video on farming; and a Disney film for World War II soldiers about how to avoid malaria, in Spanish. So far, nothing elusive has emerged — but the project is in its infancy.
“It’s a cornucopia of information,” said Justin Grimes, another league volunteer.
The league is a small demonstration that volunteers can sometimes achieve what bureaucracies can’t or won’t. The government’s 10-year broadband plan, to be submitted to Congress this week, will include a vision for Video.gov, a proposed home for video from federal agencies. The proposal is sure to be cheered by people who want the government to put more materials online. But Mr. Malamud and his volunteers are not waiting.
Mr. Malamud, who spends most of his time pushing for broader access to legal documents online, had already uploaded 1,300 videos from other government sources, like the Federal Aviation Administration and National Technical Information Service. But “the motherlode is the archives,” he said.
To put those DVDs online, he needed volunteers, and he found them at CopyNight, a monthly gathering of copyright law enthusiasts that he visited at a restaurant near Union Station last December. (CopyNight members are generally supportive of relaxations to copyright laws.) Mr. Malamud raised the idea a month later.
So they insist that the two plans have nothing in common — but the only real difference they can point to is that Massachusetts didn’t fund its plan in part out of Medicare savings.
Of course, it couldn’t. But think about this a bit more: Republicans are saying that what makes Obamacare a socialist takeover, whereas Romneycare wasn’t, is the fact that unlike Romney’s plan, Obama’s plan cuts government spending.
but I doubt Jenny McCarthy thinks this is relevant.
The federal “vaccines court” ruled Friday in three separate cases that the mercury-containing preservative thimerosal does not cause autism, a finding that supports the broad scientific consensus on the matter but that greatly disappointed parents who are convinced that their child’s illness was caused by vaccines
It has been reported that Wyclef Jean is paying his mistress, Zakiya Khatou-Chevassus, 105k in salary through Yele Haiti.
According to Yele Haiti’s 2008 tax return, which was posted this week by the Smoking Gun, the charity paid Khatou-Chevassus $105,000 as an independent contractor in 2008 for “program development.” That amounts to roughly one-third of all the money Yele spent that year on management and general expenses.
So what did she do for that money? Khatou-Chevassus is currently listed on Yele’s web site as the organization’s vice president. But according to five sources familiar with Yele’s operations, in 2008 she served as Jean’s personal assistant—working on his commercial endeavors as well as his charitable ones—and was involved romantically with the former Fugees star.
…full text feeds actually does lead to more page views, though understanding why is a little more involved. Full text feeds makes the reading process much easier. It means it’s that much more likely that someone reads the full piece and actually understands what’s being said — which makes it much, much, much more likely that they’ll then forward it on to someone else, or blog about it themselves, or post it to Digg or Reddit or Slashdot or Fark or any other such thing — and that generates more traffic and interest and page views from new readers, who we hope subscribe to the RSS feed and become regular readers as well. The whole idea is that by making it easier and easier for anyone to read and fully grasp our content, the more likely they are to spread it via word of mouth, and that tends to lead to much greater adoption than by limiting what we give to our readers and begging them to come to our site if they want to read more than a sentence or two. So, while many people claim that partial feeds are needed to increase page views where ads are hosted, our experience has shown that full text feeds actually do a great deal to increase actual page views on the site by encouraging more usage.
Salon, Freakonomics and other blogs have all been dumped from my Google Reader subscriptions because they truncated their feeds to a blurb. I often read articles on my phone or page quickly through them in Google Reader. I don’t want to sit and jump between tabs and then jump to another tab to read an article. Figure out inline adverts for your RSS feed and give me an entire article. As a note here, I am currently trying to find ways to keep my videos so that they actually continue to appear in feed reader displays so that my posts that do contain video make sense.
Where publishing abstracts to your RSS feed make sense is when a large amount of mid to high resolution images are the norm for your blog, website, publication. Even then, auto-thumbnailing may make the most sense.
