S&P 500: ‘Blow-off’ Phase in Progress – DailyFX

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To start the week, the S&P 500 was testing the bottom-side of a trend-line running back to the Feb lows from last year; that line in a hurry become right here to down there. The recent advance after a painful chop through much of December and January is looking a lot like a blow-off top in progress. Were not quite in a parabolic state, but it wouldnt take much more of a rally to put it there. With that said, its hard to say when we will see a meaningful, trade-able top, but its possibly on its way to a theatre near you soon. The time-frame of a blow-off isnt isolated to one; there are short-term exhaustions, then macro. For now, we are mostly concerning ourselves with the short-term.

Being a Tommy Top Picker isnt fun and often times expensive, so well wait for momentum to turn on the longs before digging in from the short-side. Buying at this juncture holds poor risk/reward, unless you are buying intra-day dips which have been fruitful with their very shallow occurrences.

Looking upward, where could the market stall? Perhaps the under-side of the November trend-line around the 2060ish mark and climbing. But, again, these market melt-ups can be vicious, and until we see good price action indicating this move has run its full course we have no interest in being a hero here. On any decline from here we will look to the Feb 16 trend-line as the first area of potential support, currently around 2328 and climbing.

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S&P 500: 'Blow-off' Phase in Progress - DailyFX

Lenovo’s data center ambitions remain work in progress following Q3 results – ZDNet

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Lenovo's data center group saw fiscal third quarter revenue fall 20 percent from a year ago and the company is investing in its sales, channel and product groups.

The company, which built its data center group largely be acquiring IBM's commodity server business, said third quarter sales were $1.1 billion, down 20 percent from a year ago. Lenovo said it saw quarter-over-quarter improvements in North America, Latin America and Europe, Middle East and Africa.

However, Lenovo said it needs to build its data center brand, which includes servers, storage, software and services. The company has forged partnership with key enterprise players such as SAP, but lacks the sales and channel infrastructure.

Lenovo added that it is "strengthening our sales teams, investing in the channel, revamping our product lines, building our brand strategy, and adding new partnerships." The company also added to its global accounts team that focuses on Fortune 500 companies.

Overall, Lenovo faced a challenging quarter as all units saw sales stagnate or slide. Lenovo reported operating income of $101 million in the third quarter on revenue of $12.2 billion, down 6 percent from a year ago. CEO Yang Yuanqing said "our PC business remains strong, our Mobile business has made steady progress, and our Data Center business now has a clear improvement plan in place." Yuanqing also noted that it takes time to build the latter two businesses.

The PC and smart devices unit delivered operating income of $431 million on revenue of $8.6 billion. Lenovo said demand in North America was strong as shipments jumped 14 percent from a year ago. Tablet shipments were up 10 percent.

Meanwhile, the mobile unit, which includes Moto and Lenovo smartphones, delivered sales of $2.2 billion, down 23 percent from a year ago. Lenovo shipped 15 million smartphones and said that Moto G shipments were up 12 percent from a year ago due to strength in Latin America and India.

Also: Lenovo enters smart glasses fray, targets business, augmented reality, June availability

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Lenovo's data center ambitions remain work in progress following Q3 results - ZDNet

F-35 Program Makes Significant, Solid Progress, Official Says – Department of Defense

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WASHINGTON, Feb. 16, 2017 Production of the F-35 Lightning II joint strike fighter is on a good trajectory and is a necessary aircraft in the militarys arsenal to battle high-end threats, service leaders told a House Armed Service Committee panel today.

Providing an update on the the F-35 program to the subcommittee on tactical air and land forces were Air Force Lt. Gen. Christopher C. Bogdan, program executive officer, F-35 joint program office; Navy Rear Adm. DeWolfe Chip Miller III, director of air warfare; Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Jon M. Davis, deputy commandant of Marine Corps aviation; and Air Force Maj. Gen. Jerry D. Harris Jr., deputy chief of staff, strategic plans, programs and requirements.

The programs development, production and sustainment have made significant and solid progress, Bogdan said.

The fleet is rapidly expanding and we're flying F-35s in the United States, Italy, Japan and Israel as we speak, he said. The development program is nearing completion within the cost and schedule boundaries put in place in the 2011 rebase line. And the program is also continuing to successfully ramp up production and accelerating a standup of our global enterprise. The general said todays F-35 program is much different than it was five years ago when he became the program executive officer. It now has a fleet of more than 210 airplanes that have surpassed 73,000 flight hours.

Operational, Combat Ready

The weapons system is considered operational and combat ready by the Air Force and Marine Corps, Bogdan said, adding, It is also forward-deployed today in Iwakuni, Japan, for the U.S. Marine Corps and operated in Israel and Italy by those F-35 customers.

The price tag for an F-35A model costs is about $94.5 million today, marking a first in costing less than $100 million, he said.

We believe we are on track to continue reducing the price of the F-35 such that in [fiscal year 2019], with an engine including all fees, the F-35A model will cost between $80 million and $85 million, Bogdan said. As part of this reduction, we have initiated a block buy strategy for our foreign partners and an economic order quantity contracting strategy for the U.S. services.

Driving Down F-35 Costs

The overarching priority is continuing to drive costs down in the F-35 program while delivering full capability to the warfighter, he said.

We will continue to execute this program with integrity, discipline and transparency and I hold myself and my team accountable for the outcomes on this program, Bogdan told the panel. Our team recognizes the great responsibility we've been given to provide the foundation of future U.S. and allied fighter capability for decades to come.

The F-35B and the F-35C remain a top acquisition priority for the Marine Corps, Davis said.

He said he is becoming increasingly convinced the F-35 is a game changer and a war winner, and added the Corps can't get those airplanes in the fleet fast enough to replace our F-18s and our Harriers, which on average are 22 years old.

With the fifth-generation F-35, We're achieving astounding results in the highest threat scenarios and that across the range of military operations fight, with the F-35. It is changing things in a very decisive way, Davis said.

An Acquisition Priority

Along with the Marine Corps and Air Force, the F-35C is a Navy aviation acquisition priority, Miller said.

The F-35C will form the backbone of Navy air combat superiority for decades to come, he said, adding its unique capabilities cant be matched by modernizing the F-35 fourth-generation aircraft.

With the F-35, the carrier strike group of the future will be more lethal, survivable and able to accomplish the entire spectrum of mission sets to include immediate response to high-end threats, the admiral said.

The nation needs the capabilities of the F-35C on its carrier flight decks, Miller said. The aircraft's stealth characteristics, long-range combat identification and ability to penetrate threat envelopes while fusing multiple information sources into a coherent picture will transform the joint coalition view of the battlefield.

Harris said the airplane is doing exactly what the military needs it to do.

The final F-35A fleet is growing and will become a dominant force in our fifth-generation arsenal, deterring potential adversaries and assuring both our allies and our partners at the same time, the general said.

(Follow Terri Moon Cronk on Twitter: @MoonCronkDoD)

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F-35 Program Makes Significant, Solid Progress, Official Says - Department of Defense

Halo Wars 2 Review in Progress – IGN

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We only received Halo Wars 2 a few days ago, which was enough time to complete the campaign but not to get a full sense of its several multiplayer modes, or how they work in a live environment. Below youll see my thoughts on what Ive played so far, and soon Ill update with more thorough impressions of multiplayer and Blitz, plus my final score.

I admire Microsofts attempt to expand its prized Halo series into something that spans beyond an endless procession of first-person shooters, and with Halo Wars 2 (and Halo Wars before it) we get to experience this sci-fi universe from the overhead perspective of a real-time strategy game, which emphasizes the scope of its battles. The controls for a game of this complexity may never quite comfortably fit onto a gamepad, but its an otherwise decent if technically rough game with a couple of ideas to throw at the wall to see if they stick.

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Halo Wars 2 is an attractive-looking real-time strategy game that does a good job of representing the Halo universe in both graphics and sound. And the story - while not as large in scope as a main Halo game - introduces a threatening villain as the leader of a new faction that rises from the ashes of the Covenant, the Banished. On the other side, a relatable new AI character carries some cardboard-cutout co-stars, including the returning Captain Cutter and his three interchangeable Spartans. Occasional CGI cutscenes look fantastic, to the degree that they really make me want to watch that Halo movie that will probably never happen.

The single-player campaigns 12 missions took me roughly eight hours to complete, including restarting a couple of them a few times. The designs are nothing special though they avoid the trap of basic go destroy the enemy base, they lean heavily on hero-focused objectives of leading your Spartans around the map and holdout missions against waves of enemies. Theres enough variety to keep them from feeling repetitive, but only a couple think outside the box of what StarCraft did almost 20 years ago, and the static base management on pre-determined plots doesnt give a lot of flexibility when it comes to build orders. Much of it is in the vein of the campaign as tutorial for multiplayer model, teaching you which units counter what and how to capture the majority of a maps control points to win. Each one does come with a range of side objectives (such as keeping a unit alive, destroying extra bases, or collecting resources from the map) to give them replayability on top of simply turning up the difficulty, though.

Halo Wars 2 feels most limited is in its controls - and that's not surpising.

Where Halo Wars 2 feels most limited is in its controls, and thats not at all surprising. Gamepad controls for an RTS are always going to be clumsy at best, and though I didnt expect it to fully solve this problem, developer Creative Assembly doesnt seem to have done a lot to design around it, either. For example, the speed with which units tend to die in combat isnt very forgiving when you consider how slowly most people are likely to be able to react. Its definitely workable, using a very similar layout to what the first Halo Wars has, with some clever changes like using a double-tap of the right bumper to select all units. But even things like that cant make up for the shortage of buttons and precision on the controller relative to a mouse and keyboard.

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If, for instance, youre trying to get your Warthogs and Scorpion tanks out of range of the anti-vehicle gun of a Hunter before they can inflict real damage and move up your anti-infantry Hellbringer flamethrower units to counter, its tricky to pull off in the heat of battle. You have to select all units on screen using the right bumper, then use the right trigger to cycle through the available unit types which can be a lot in a large army and then you can move that unit type independently. It works, but usually not quickly enough, especially if you have multiple vehicle types to move to safety. Then it might be faster to double-tap a unit with the A button to select all of that type, then hold right-trigger and double-tap one of the other types to select both at once. Good luck with that if youre working with air units.

Most people will likely throw all their units at a target and hope for the best.

That said, its impressive that Creative Assembly was able to pack all the controls you need, with the ability to assign up to four control groups to the d-pad and even queue up move commands, onto a gamepad. The catch is that much of that is accessed by holding the right trigger to change the functions of the rest of the buttons, which means you basically need to learn twice as many controls as you do for most games. Again, its not insurmountable or unusable, but its no picnic. Im sure some people out there will get good enough with these controls to be relatively fast and become competitive with them, but by and large I expect most people will get through the campaign and many multiplayer matches largely by selecting all units on screen and throwing them into battle to fend for themselves.

Seemingly to compensate for the lack of micromanagement dexterity, youre able to turn the tide of many of those battles from above by casting support abilities that can buff your troops or rain down fire and reinforcements on the enemy. Some of these are strikingly powerful when fully upgraded, such as the Archer missiles that destroy a swath of enemies and the extremely useful ODST soldier drops, and using them at the right moment feels great.

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What did not feel great about the campaign was the frequent bugs I encountered when playing on Xbox One (Ive yet to try the PC version), which was much greater than I expected from a Halo game. Ive had crashes, infinite loading screens, five- to 10-second freezes, stuck units, mission events failing to trigger (forcing me to replay the mission) and more. I got through it, but I was surprised to see such technical roughness. Fortunately, thus far the glitches have been limited entirely to the campaign.

Domination gives support powers lots of moments to shine.

Most of Halo Wars 2s long-term appeal is in its multiplayer modes, which are to its credit significantly more diverse and in some ways interesting than you typically see in an RTS. On top of the standard deathmatch mode theres the territory-control Domination style (reminiscent of Relics Company of Heroes and Dawn of War 2 multiplayer) which really gives the support powers a lot of moments to shine. Spotting a bunch of enemy units camped on top of a control point is an excellent time to use a bombardment ability, for example. And because youre given the choice of one of six commander characters (three per side) with different sets of support abilities, you have lots of options there - including some who can temporarily cloak groups of units or create holographic diversions. But again, the base building options feel limited by the predescribed locations and very limited build orders, which means much of the variety is going to be down to which of the handful of maps youre playing on.

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In its own section of the menu, separate from the conventional multiplayer modes, is Blitz a faster, more frantic mode where instead of building bases to produce resources and more troops, you summon soldiers using a deck of cards youve prepared ahead of time. I generally like this kind of randomization because it prevents you from falling into patterns and repeating the same successful tactics over and over again, because you might not have access to the card youd want to use at the moment you want to use it. Improvisation feels good. Alas, I dont think its a great fit for a competitive multiplayer game, because all too often you win or lose based on a combination of your own luck and the enemys, rather than the test of skill on the asymmetrical but level playing field I expect from an RTS.

Blitz's dependence on luck may shorten its long-term appeal.

Blitz is fun, but I think that dependence on luck is going to shorten its long-term appeal. And when that luck extends to giving you random new cards, some of which are unique to the six leaders, in upgrade packs that are also for sale in the store, I worry even more. You cant directly buy the power you want, but you can buy another shot at it. Hopefully the matchmaking system is smart enough not to pair people with crazy-powerful cards in their decks against those with more modest decks, but that remains to be seen.

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Finally, theres a single-player and co-op variant of Blitz called Firefight thats about holding out against ever-increasing waves of enemies as they try to overwhelm you and capture two of three points on the map. Im having some good fun in there, where the randomness is about creating unexpected scenarios without the shame of losing to another human you think you shouldve beaten, and the balance is tweaked so that swarms of enemy units explode easily under my Banished lasers. Thats a very good use for the card mechanic.

I'll keep playing and will have more to say about multiplayer by the time Halo Wars 2 fully launches on February 21 (it's now available for early access with a preorder), so check back then for my final score.

Dan Stapleton is IGN's Reviews Editor. You can follow himon Twitterto hear gaming rants and lots of random Simpsons references.

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CUGNON: Forward progress – Yale Daily News (blog)

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Officials making ‘great progress’ on California dam repairs, remind residents to stay vigilant – Fox News

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Officials in Northern California said Wednesday they are making "great progress" on repairs to the damaged spillways of the nation's tallest dam before new storms hit the area in the next couple of days.

Bill Croyle, the acting director of the California Department of Water Resources, said the lake behind the Oroville Dam continues to drain rapidly, and has dropped nearly 20 feet since overflowing into an emergency spillway Sunday when it reached full capacity.

"We want to keep that rate of release up as we continue to move out of the reservoir to handle wet weather," Croyle said at a news conference.

A series of storms expected Wednesday and later in the week are expected to be smaller than previous ones that filled the reservoir to capacity, according to Croyle. The damaged main spillway "has been stable for a number of days," Croyle said.

Croyle said crews "are still removing more water from the reservoir than we would receive from the storm system coming in."

National Weather Service forecaster Tom Dang told the Associated Press the first two storms were expected to be light. The first could bring 2-3 inches of rain Wednesday followed by an even smaller accumulation from the second storm.

However, the third storm, starting as early as Monday, could be powerful, according to Dang. "There a potential for several inches," he told the AP. "It will be very wet."

The sheriff of Butte County, Kory Honea, reminded residents that while the risk level was reduced to let people back into the area, "this is still an emergency situation."

Honea said that the nearly 200,000 residents allowed to return home should use the time this week before the next set of storms to fully prepare in case another evaluation is needed.

The initial evacuation Sunday was "chaotic," Honea acknowledged.

"People should start planning where they might go and how they might get there to make things more orderly," he said.

There were a number of homes in the evacuation zone that have been burglarized, but arrests have been made, according to Honea.

The sheriff also called on private drone operators to refrain from flying the devices over the dam, which can interfere with repair work.

Dump trucks and helicopters have dropped thousands of tons of rocks and sandbags over the past couple of days to shore up the dam's spillways, and avoid what officials had warned could be a catastrophic failure and flood downstream.

Croyle said teams were working on plans for permanent repairs to the dam's main spillway that could cost as much as $200 million.

Long-term repairs will likely begin after the spring runoff, when crews can close floodgates for an extended period without the lake refilling with melting snow.

President Trump ordered federal authorities to help California recover from severe January storms a disaster declaration that also assists state and local officials with the dam crisis.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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Officials making 'great progress' on California dam repairs, remind residents to stay vigilant - Fox News

5G progress at Ericsson could help enterprises work worldwide – Computerworld

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The Swedish network giant Ericsson will have a lot of prospective 5G equipment to show to gearheads at Mobile World Congress later this month, but the future cloud capabilities it demonstrates may be just as important for a subscribers experience.

In addition to fast broadband speeds, Ericssons technologies for next-generation networks will be able to guarantee enterprises the same type of service around the world and shift applications to the edge of a network to shrink transmission delays, the company said in an MWC preview on Wednesday.

Those concepts arent new, but building the back-end infrastructure to support them much of it defined by software is part of the ongoing move toward true 5G deployments coming around the end of this decade.

On Wednesday, Ericsson highlighted several features of its 5G Core System, which takes advantage of SDN (software-defined networking) and NFV (network functions virtualization) to give mobile operators more flexibility in the services they offer subscribers.

Multinational companies may benefit from what Ericsson called federated network slices. This capability builds on network slicing, a key emerging feature of 5G that will let carriers dedicate different parts of their network capacity to different subscribers and applications. This is the technology that will allow one 5G infrastructure to be both a fast broadband network for smartphones and an efficient, low-power platform for IoT communication, for example.

Federated network slices will put different operators on the same page about what needs special performance and how to deliver it, Ericsson says. If a global company or a traveling employee needs a certain kind of network slice, or the service characteristics of that slice, then every network he or she uses around the world can give that experience.

Ericsson said Germany's Deutsche Telekom and South Korea's SK Telecom demonstrated federated network slicing this week, implementing network slices on each other's networks that were optimized for augmented reality and maintenance services.

With the new technology, subscribers won't have to set up individual agreements with multiple carriers in order to get consistent performance. But the carriers will need to embrace an enhanced cooperation model where they open up their networks to host a partner's services.

Also on Wednesday, Ericsson previewed a distributed cloud capability, which will let carriers move applications and workloads closer to their access networks, the cell towers and small cells that users see and connect with over mobile devices.

By bringing computing resources closer to the edge, a distributed cloud can reduce network latency, an important goal for applications like vehicle control, augmented reality, and real-time face recognition. This technique also cuts down the amount of data that has to traverse the network behind the cells.

Ericsson isnt the only vendor working on back-end features to make 5G more than just a speed boost. For example, earlier this week Nokia announced Multi-access Edge Computing, which uses computing and storage near the edge of a network for low-latency enterprise applications like object tracking and video analytics. It can span private and public networks on licensed and unlicensed spectrum, starting with LTE and Wi-Fi and later evolving to include 5G, said Jane Rygaard, head of Advanced Mobile Solutions marketing at Nokia.

You really benefit from low latency because you have no round-trip through the network, Rygaard said.

Stephen Lawson is a senior U.S. correspondent for the IDG News Service based in San Francisco.

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Commentary: Always something to panic about – Park Rapids Enterprise

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As a result, the computers controlling our banking systems, our hospitals, and our air control system would fail at midnight on Dec. 31, 1999, and our bank accounts would be wiped out, our life support systems would come to a halt and patients would die on the operating table and airliners flying at midnight would crash because air controllers would be unable to communicate with pilots.

Those inclined to panic built shelters where they brought generators, huge quantities of water, a supply of food that would last for years, gold and silver and enough guns and ammo to protect themselves from neighbors who wanted to break in and share in the sanctuary.

Well, computer programmers worked out the conversion from 1999 to 2000 and Jan. 1, 2000, began a happy new year without complications.

I wonder if those who had prepared for the worst still have those generators, AK47s, ammo and pork and beans.

There is always something to panic about for people who are inclined to panic. The result is called "survivalism," which is making of preparations for an expected long-term or complete breakdown of society, also known as THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT (TEOTWAWKI) or WHEN THE S_ _ _ HITS THE FAN (WTSHTS).

Those who do it seem to have two things in common: extreme paranoia and extreme wealth. It's been going on for generations and it's still going on today. Some call themselves "preps" (as in preparation).

One solution is former ICBM silos. There is a broker who sells old missile silos. The preps who buy them worry about events developing and something like the Russian Revolution a total takeover of the government and takeover of private wealth. Some of them have outfitted themselves with private planes and helicopters.

One of the silos is found north of Wichita, Kansas. It is protected by a large, steel gate with a guard dressed in camouflage and carrying an automatic rifle. Inside is a condo survival project, a 15-story luxury apartment complex. The silo cost the developer $300,000 and the construction was completed in December 2012, at a cost of $20 million. The units are selling for $3 million each.

Other preppers believe that survival depends on getting as far away from America as possible. The destination of preference for these doomsayers seems to be New Zealand. There is a real estate broker in Auckland, New Zealand, who specializes in high net-worth clients looking for sanctuary in times of world crises. One client, a U.S. hedge-fund manager, defends his interest: "This is no longer about a handful of freaks worried about the world ending unless I'm one of those freaks."

There is no limit to the possible disasters people worry about: the Bubonic Plague in Europe during the Middle Ages, the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic, the Great Depression, the Global AIDS crisis, the 2014 Ebola outbreak in Africa, a nuclear war started by North Korea, a race war in America, another great flood (one group is building an arc), the U.S. government coming to confiscate our guns, a deliberate move by our Congress to dumb America down, or U.N. black helicopters occupying America to enforce a New World Order. You can think of other examples and so can I.

You can be a survivalist or a prepper if you are sufficiently panicky about real or imagined threats or disasters, but can you afford it? I can't, so I'm hunkering down right here in Detroit Lakes, Minnesota with fresh flashlight batteries, pork and beans, chicken noodle soup, a can opener and lots of good books.

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Commentary: Always something to panic about - Park Rapids Enterprise

Descartes, Nihilist – First Things (blog)

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In her After Writing, Catherine Pickstock argues that the Cartesian Cogito is grounded in a Cartesian ontology, which is in turn related to a Cartesian politics. According to Descartes' Regulae, she says, being is defined as that which is clear and distinct, available to absolute and certain intuitions, and perfectly known and incapable of being doubted.' Existence becomes a simple' or common notion, which, along with unity' and duration,' is univocally common to both corporeal things and to spirits. These distinct and clearly-known objects can be mapped in a comprehensive mathesis, modelled on the abstract and timeless certainty of arithmetic and geometry (623).

This is the background to Descartes's claim that material reality is extensio, an homogenous quantity divided into degrees of motion and mechanical causes, and fully grasped in its givenness.' Qualities like color - inevitable indistinct and hazy - are reduced to abstract spatial quantities (63). Gone in this ontology is any conception (whether Platonic or Christian or some combination of the two) of a depth to material reality, an ungraspable spiritual reality that is beyond our grasp. Descartes drains extension or corporeality itself of all its force and power. Immanentizing reality, or materializing reality, paradoxically end up with the erasure of matter and reality. The secular given' of the universal method is purely formal, articulated only in abstract structures which do not coincide with any actual embodied reality. But what is an immanentized ideal except the nihil, something which vanishes the moment it is posited? (67). Nihilism is a deviation from Cartesian ontology but inherent in it.

Pickstock recognizes here a primitive gesture of purification. Once the thinking thing thinks anything in particular, it is no longer graspable and simple, no longer certain. It gets lost in the uncertainties of actual thought. In its purity the Cartesian subject is modeled on the Cartesian city, a planned urban space with clear lines dividing inside from outside. Descartes commends the ideal of Sparta, since it was devised by a single man and hence all tended to the same end (quoted 58).

Sparta's military is set up for the defense of its own absolute interior, and is also a fitting sign of a metaphysics that, as Derrida realized, was the preservation of interiority, of reason as monadic self-presence, and of the city as a pristine enclosure which must resort to the expulsion of the impure. For in the case of the Cartesian city, the impure is represented as that which bears the traces of time, multiplicity, and difference, in the form of the emergent structures of ancient cities, organic legal systems, and philosophical and pedagogical traditions. To such instances of impurity, Descartes response with a violent gesture of demolition (59).

The Cartesian subject is a Spartan: He reasons best in solitude, according to a method that clears out anything impure that might contaminate his quest for certainty. The Spartan philosopher rejects the diverse books compounded and amassed little by little from the opinions of many different persons.' He relies instead on the simple reasoning which a man of good sense naturally makes. He thus reaches a pure knowledge, purified of history and the complications of language (60).

Whether or not Pickstock has Descartes right I cannot say. But she does show the inner connection between the self-enclosed, self-identical subject and the postmodern nihil-subject. And she implies that the former leads to the latter because of a stoicheic decision of purification that ends up clearing away the contaminants of time, history, language and relation that make the subject a subject in the first place.

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Chefs to Watch for 2017 – Hedonism II, Negril – Jamaica Observer

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Thursday Food

highlights five more chefs who are charged with introducing visitors and locals alike to the best culinary offerings in Jamaica.

This weeks featured chefs are from Hedonism II, Negril

Davey Thomas

Lead cook, Pastafari Italian Restaurant, Hedonism II Resort

At age six, Davey Thomas would study the ingredients as his mother cooked. Then he would try and replicate her cooking to see how his compared. All that practice still did not lead him to a six-burner stove. Actually, he took what he thought was the safe road by becoming an auto mechanic. But the passion for cooking had already taken root and Thomas eventually heeded and enrolled in the Petersfield Vocational Training Centre, where he studied Food Preparation.

I love trying new flavours and taking traditional recipes and adding new stuff. I take pride in my cooking as it reflects on me as an individual; its my pride, he says. Thomas spends a lot of his time surfing the Internet for new ideas and says, No matter what area you are in, you have to have a passion for it, otherwise it makes no sense.

Thomas likes preparing anything with seafood and he continues to hone his skills by cooking at home daily.

Milton Paltie

Garde manger, Hedonism II Resort

An ice-carving genius, says Executive Chef Anthony Miller of Milton Paltie.

Paltie was 14 the first time his aunt asked him to prepare a meal. Having no idea what to cook he enlisted the help of a friend, who added thyme, escallion and butter to the pot. The final result steam fish got rave reviews. To this day his aunt has no idea that he was not the cook.

Briefly sidetracked by carpentry until that income stream slowed, he found himself at Couples Tower Isle, the result of hearing about a vacancy in the stewards department.

When he arrived with a friend the only jobs available were for cooks. Certain that they would not qualify, they got the jobs nevertheless and started in the pantry. After a few months we was awarded Cook 1 (the highest level team member). Every day I was working from 6:00 am to 8:00 pm for about two years. The financial controller asked why I was working those long hours. I told him its not what I was putting in but what I was getting back, and what I was getting back was a salary and experience, so I felt that I was the one winning.

Paltie realised that he could make this his profession after travelling to North America and seeing the respect accorded chefs.

He took certification courses through Johnson and Wales in Kitchen Management, Sanitation and Garde Manger. His true passion, he decided, was fruit, vegetable and ice carving. Its like a painter with his canvas. For me, my canvas is the ice or the produce.

A recipient of many awards, Paltie has copped: the 2002 JCDC silver medal for ice carving and fish platter

2004 Curry Festival gold medal for fruit, vegetable and ice carving

2008 Wow Festival Master Ice Carver

2015 & 2016 Taste of Jamaica gold medalist for the ice carving

2106 Taste of Jamaica silver medal, lamb platter

I think cooking chose me, he tells Thursday Food.

Rashane Reid

Harry San Japanese Restaurant, Hedonism II Resort

Twenty-one-year-old Rashane Reid says, Cooking is in my genes; my father is a chef (in Nantucket) and as a child he always had me in the kitchen. My uncles are restaurateurs and bakers, my grandmothers gizzada, grater and toto cakes were amazing and famous.

As a child I was in awe of my fathers knife skills and knew I wanted to follow suit.

My first culinary expression was a fried egg which I overcooked. I was instructed by my mother to repeat the process until I got it right. To this day I am still fascinated by how many ways a simple egg can be prepared and, also, there is nothing about an egg I cant tell you. My mother continues to be my motivator. A few years ago she had a stroke and I made a promise to always make her proud.

My driving philosophy comes from my favourite book You Can Work Your Own miracle by Napoleon Hill. It says: I am who I am, where I am, because of my daily habits.

Hedonism is Reids first full-time job. He started as a trainee and through dedication and hard work now enters competitions like Taste of Jamaica. Hedonism took me from a baby to a man, and the best part of being a chef is seeing peoples faces when they taste your food. There is a bond between the diner and the chef.

Reids favourite meal to cook is chicken back with pumpkin served with cornmeal dumplings.

Odiane Whitelock

Pastafaria Italian Restaurant, Hedonism II Resort

Odane Whitelocke remembers, as if it were yesterday, the day in 2005 when he decided he wanted to become a chef. My family members had a restaurant and I had started to work in there. I fell in love with it. That same year he enrolled at HEART Petersfield, where the love affair continued.

In 2009, in a quest to further his culinary skills, he attended George Brown College in Toronto, Canada. For me, cooking is an art and I love art. Its an area where I am very confident in my abilities and not afraid to challenge myself through competitions.

In 2015, Whitelocke placed third in the Taste of Jamaica Chef of the Year and in 2016, he placed first in the beef category with a dish he called authentic beef roulade.

Being from a family in which both parents cooked, food and cooking were always a part of his socialisation.

His favourite dish to cook is chicken and beef pasta in Alfredo sauce.

After 12 years his passion has not waned. Indeed, he is fully aware of just how much more there is to learn.

Oshane Powell, cook

Flame Chop House, Hedonism II Resort

At the age of seven Oshane Powell was cooking curried pork. Not that he intended to. But one day his stepfather, the cook in the family, had an emergency. It was left to Oshane to handle dinner. Thankfully, the pork was a hit and a chef was born.

Powell, who studied Food and Nutrition in school, nevertheless went on to work as an auto mechanic but would continue to cook at home for the family. The neighbours would always ask: Who is cooking? as the aroma wafted through the yard.

Deciding to give cooking his full attention, Powell arrived at Hedonism as a trainee and, through hard work and love of art, started fruit and vegetable carving. Using YouTube and cooking shows to practise and improve he eventually ended up cooking in the main kitchen.

In 2016, Chef Anthony Miller entered Powell in the Taste of Jamaica cooking competition. Powell copped the Junior Chef of the Year title with his chicken breast wrapped with sausage and a sweet potato tower, as well as a seafood chowder.

I love food. I am passionate about food, so I am willing to learn everything! he shares with Thursday Food

.

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Chefs to Watch for 2017 - Hedonism II, Negril - Jamaica Observer

Now We Are 40 by Tiffanie Darke review a generation lost to hedonism and irony? – The Guardian

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Admirable aplomb Tiffanie Darke. Photograph: David M Benett/Getty Images

Its no easy task, writing a memoir of an era, constructing a narrative that your entire generation would even recognise, let alone sign up to. There are many people who would disagree on principle, of whom I think I am probably one. Tiffanie Darkes Now We Are 40: Whatever Happened to Generation X? sets itself a bold and daunting task, with a central question that is preoccupying us all: Democratic earthquakes are undermining much of the progress we made and fought to achieve. Or, even more straightforwardly: The political denouement to all of this was starkly illustrated in the Brexit vote. The inclusive, liberal, multicultural society we thought we had built was rejected by just over half the country.

It is, you have to admit, a head-scratcher: to find oneself having to argue, again, that grabbing women by the pussy is unbecoming behaviour for a head of state; that it is functionally impossible for Polish people to have caused the British housing crisis, or for Mexicans to all, or even predominantly, be rapists, or that Muslim children are no more dangerous than other children. How on earth were our values so poorly defended that wed have to go back to square one and argue them all over again? And yet, of Darkes diagnosis, I agree with almost none.

Its a very tricky form in which to ask these questions, moving from chatty personal reminiscence I began to rebel against my mums choice of wardrobe for me; she loved all those 80s bright colours to large statements about society, interspersed with interviewees of varying relevance. Martha Lane Fox makes elegant observations. Eleanor Mills is good at distilling causation for example, porn has changed the way young women see themselves even if you dont always agree. Ben Elliot, founder of the luxury concierge company Quintessentially, is less enlightening. They seem to have been chosen the way you would populate a newspaper feature: whoever will take your call when youre on a deadline.

The social observations are made with the glibness of a futurologist, except they are about the past so it would have been possible to interrogate them a bit more closely, and thereupon discover them to be incorrect. We currently have a female prime minister, Darke writes (leave aside for the time being that this was also true of the 80s). The US voted a black president into the White House and narrowly missed voting in a woman; senior political party members, heads of business and church are now openly gay. Race, sexuality and gender politics have come a long way, thanks to us.

Except no, it wasnt thanks to us; these identity politics battles were fought by the generation before us, by the GLC and the Southall Black Sisters, by Peter Tatchell, by Stuart Hall, by second wave feminism. If Generation X had any defining ideology, it was a sort of hedonistic indolence, a puckish refusal to take anything seriously, the adoption of irony as a creed, an MO and a style statement. While Darke namechecks irony, there is no serious attempt to square these positions that we were the pioneers of inclusivity and multiculturalism on the one hand, and we just wanted to get off our tits and dance to repetitive beat music on the other. Yet the only way to answer todays sense of political homelessness (as Tony Blair described it) is to confront the fact that we didnt build our political home. We thought the home was already built, and anyway, homes were for losers.

If Generation X had any defining ideology, it was a hedonistic indolence, a puckish refusal to take anything seriously

In a chapter entitled Clintons Cigar, Darke describes the process by which, via the internet, restrictions around reporting on authority began to melt, power fell victim to the truth. The US president was undermined, she says, by the new media (the Drudge Report), then the old media (the Washington Post), and was finally hoist on the petard of his own dishonesty. I agree that Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky marked a political turning point, but no further; the deeper relevance is that a billionaire, Richard Mellon Scaife, ploughed untold amounts of money into slinging mud at Clinton, some of which finally stuck.

This pattern has been repeated at key moments since, from the creation of Islamophobia by well-funded thinktanks in the US to the generation of a set of alternative truths about the EU by Arron Banks. Conceivably, it wouldnt have been possible before the internet, but it is far more complex than the creation of transparency by a sudden rush of democratised news. Its a story about wealth infiltrating politics in a completely new way, and might well tell us something about why we no longer recognise our civic terrain. Power falling victim to the truth this aint.

Sexual politics is perhaps the hardest thing of all to generalise about, and one could not, in good faith, ask of a single perspective that it do anything beyond starting a debate. However, lines such as there is a consequence to casual sex, and any girl who thinks she can sleep with as many men as she likes and not beat herself up is lying begin that debate in an unfortunate place, one that has never heard of sex-positive feminism, has no understanding of the importance of female sexuality in driving equality forward in the first place, and doesnt even have the curiosity to ask why, in the 90s, we explicitly retook the words slut and slag as compliments.

When young women today are facing open misogyny unseen since the 1950s, Darkes tepid half-morality isnot enough

When young women today are facing open misogyny unseen since the 50s, this kind of tepid half-morality sleep with whoever you like, so long as its not too many people, because thats dirty is just not robust enough. You need to allow for the possibility that not all girls are the same. As for there always have been and always will be men who take more than is offered, who fail to decode the semantics of when no means no (and, you know what, it is complicated), its certainly complicated the way Darke tells it. Someone goes further than the other person wants them to, allowing something to happen that is unwelcome at the very least.

The syntax is wild. Nobody did anything, one person just allowed something to be done, although was it the person who went further or the person for whom that was too far? And the unwelcome thing, what was that? Did he sneeze in her handbag? Either party, and it is normally the woman as she is usually physically inferior, cannot always be in full control of a physical experience. Wait, what? Does that mean physical inferiority necessitates that one relinquish control? Is it just my triceps that are inferior, or could my reflexes use a little work? I cant figure out whether the mangled language makes these assertions more or less difficult to stomach.

I still applaud the aplomb; aggregating a lifetime is hard enough on ones own account, let alone on everyone elses. But these sure as hell werent the 90s I remember.

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Now We Are 40 by Tiffanie Darke review a generation lost to hedonism and irony? - The Guardian

Arrival – slantmagazine

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Denis Villeneuve is a filmmaker torn between the figurative and the literal, who's drawn to emotional subjects (frequently the death of children) which he dramatizes with a mathematical painter's eye. There's poetry in his films, far more than one's accustomed to finding in mainstream American cinema, but this poetry is often corralled to serve a pat purpose. One senses Villeneuve's consciousness of this constraining tendency and his eagerness to break free of it, such as in Enemy, which strives to be free-wheeling and hallucinatory, achieving these qualities only in fussy dribs and drabs. It's logical in this context, then, that Villeneuve would make a film featuring an artist-type and a rationalist, as they embody the dueling tendencies of his sensibility.

Adapted from Ted Chiang's short story The Story of Your Life, Arrival is about Earth's first encounter with extraterrestrials. At the beginning of the film, 12 half-spherical metal craftswhich suggest the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey if it were shaped like a skinny egghover above major countries, inviting us to discern their intentions. The narrative is set on the American site of contact in Montana, where the United States military has recruited Louise Banks (Amy Adams), a linguist, and Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner), a mathematician, to decode sounds that could be alien speech. A telling bit of dialogue encapsulates how Louise and Ian respectively approach this mind-bending opportunity: Louise claims that language, which is somewhat open to interpretation, is the foundation of civilization, while Ian counters that society owes its existence to theoretically more concrete science. With this contrast between intuition and rationalism established, Louise and Ian venture into a great unknown oft plumbed by science fiction and horror films.

Of course, aliens have been visiting Earth in the movies nearly since the inception of cinema, and mediocre filmmakers, viewing tropes merely as tropes, often forget to evoke the unimaginable awesomeness and terror of actual alien contact. By exhilarating contrast, Villeneuve painstakingly communicates the aliens' alien-ness. Louise and Ian's first exposure to the spaceship isn't tossed off as an inciting incident, but used as fodder for a set piece that suggests a merging of Steven Spielberg's sense of wonder and Stanley Kubrick's propensity for sinister visual symmetry.

Louise and Ian's ascension into the spaceship, where they will speak with the aliens, involves an intoxicatingly immersive procedure that allows audiences to grasp, step by step, the characters' transition from the realm of the mundane to that of the fantastic. Obsessive tracking shots follow a lift that bridges the distance from the ground to the entrance of the craft, which opens every 18 hours when the aliens are ready to convene. (This meeting time is signaled, in the military camp, by an ominous, pulsating horn that's reminiscent of the blaring sound effects from Spielberg's War of the Worlds.)

Louise and Ian enter the ship, lose gravity, and proceed to stroll straight up a bare, surreally vertical passageway that suggests a hallway in a chic museum. Eventually they reach the aliens, who live in a tank of fog and resemble giant, standing squid and sound, poignantly, like whales. It takes only a few of these visits for the wounded, empathetic Louise to broker a huge discovery: that the aliens have a written language, expressed by ink that shoots out of their tendrils, forming floating shapes suggestive of circular Rorschach ink blots.

These details are irresistible, as Arrival's unusually interested in the process of communicationat least for a while. For instance, while Louise is using English as the bedrock of her negotiation with the aliens, the Chinese are utilizing the symbols of Mahjong, a competitive game that colors their dialogues with a degree of conflict that's inherent in the chosen symbology, paralleling a test that Louise proffers to the American military at the beginning of the film. She tells the military to evaluate her rival for this job by asking him for the Sanskrit word for war. The rival produces a word that Louise interprets, presumably more truthfully, as a desire to trade cows. The point is that language shapes our conception of reality and vice versa. (One recalls a plot driving George Orwell's 1984, in which a hunger for freedom is to be destroyed by obliterating the word itself.)

Louise may have an artist's comfort with intuition, but she's also a lonely academic locked in a prison of intellectuality, analyzing life to death from a distance (as Ian says, she's more of a mathematician than she might care to admit). Louise yearns for transcendence, which she correctly discerns as a point of commonality with the aliens she observes. And what the aliens offer Louise and humankind at large is a revolutionary circular language which ushers forth a reality of simultaneity, free of distinctions of past, present, and future. At a stage in her life, Louise lost a daughter to a rare disease, a tragedy which Villeneuve visualizes in woozy, rueful shards of imagery that evoke The Tree of Life. At the film's climax, we realize that the heartbreak of Louise's family isn't in her past, but her now visible future, and she plunges into it anyway, understanding something that's often tough for highly rational introverts to grasp: that ecstasy is impossible without loss.

As staged by Villeneuve and acted by Adams and Renner, this is all quite movingso moving, in fact, that it might take one a little while to discern that Arrival has neatly wedded the pacifist message of Robert Wise's The Day the Earth Stood Still with the three-hanky bombast of any melodrama with a dead child or alienated professional at its center. For all of the film's considerable craftsmanship, one keeps tripping on the pop-cultural derivations and signposts. At times, Villeneuve suggests M. Night Shyamalan without the neurosis and self-consciousness.

Abandoned somewhere in Arrival's third act is the interest in language as the fabric of our reality, as the catalyst for the blossoming of Louise's new existence as she becomes a woman without time, a potential new Billy Pilgrim. The film ends just as it's revving up, then, evading the formidable formalist challenge of breaking the barriers of beginnings and endings, causes and effects. Louise may find freedom, or a new prison, but the ramifications of that freedom are unimagined as anything other than a superficially uplifting punchline. Villeneuve is a near-visionary who can't break free of formula.

The image's blacks and browns are rich and varied, and the silvery autumnal tones that dominate Arrival are sharp. Details are appropriately subtle for a film that's so occupied with tactile textures. Minute facial specifics are detectable (one can make out the nearly colorless hair high on characters' cheeks), and grace notes abound, such as the interplay of the various shades of white light in the alien fog. The soundtracks, particularly the English 7.1 DTS-HD Master Audio, offer plenty of requisite genre-movie bombast (like the bass-y approach of the spaceships) while preserving the fragile intricacy of the flutes and wood instruments that bolster the sonic bridging and rhyming of the score and sound editing. A gorgeous and attentive transfer.

The extrashereare strikingly sincere, offering an earnest portrait of gifted artists seeking to carve out their own niche in the speculative science-fiction genre. Five featurettes cover a variety of topics: the film's inception, the sound design, the score, the editing, and a brief overview of the principles of time, memory, and language that drive the narrative. There are particularly choice bits with composer Jhann Jhannsson recording and manipulating choral voices, while claiming that he wanted to use vocals in the score to bridge the music with the film's thematic emphasis on communication. The editor, Joe Walker, discusses the film's tricky editing rhythms, particularly the honing required to coherently land that third-act twist. Ted Chiang, the author of Arrival's source material, "The Story of Your Life," discusses the concept of linearity, and the idea that the past, present, and future all already exist. Correspondingly, Chiang discusses the impetus of his story and his drive to explore the question of what a human would do if they knew their future and couldn't change it due to the potential laws of physics. (This is a nuance that's regrettably marginalized in Arrival, which implies that the heroine's refusal to alter her life is a conscious, life-affirming act of bravery.) Like everyone else interviewed here, Chiang is passionate and erudite, offering thoughts that expand our understanding of the intentions driving Arrival.

Denis Villeneuve's moving yet disappointingly cautious mind-bender is accorded a robustly beautiful transfer and surprisingly thoughtful supplements.

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Arrival - slantmagazine

Why sports industry sides with transgenders – WND.com

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Alas, we cant even go to the bathroom in peace. The Texas Legislature is considering a law similar to the so-called bathroom bill of North Carolina, mandating that people use bathrooms and locker rooms matching their biological gender. While it is astonishing that we even need such a law, nevertheless, similar to the North Carolina boycott, the NFL is threatening to block future Super Bowl games from being held in Texas if the Lone Star State goes through with such legislation.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is having none of this nonsense, tweeting in Trump-like fashion: NFL decision makers also benched Tom Brady last season. It ended with NFL handing the Super Bowl trophy to Brady. In other words, there are forces here at play that are a lot bigger than you, NFL commissioner.

And Abbott has a point; Why would the NFL care what Texas does with its bathrooms? And why would the NFL take up a cause that has nothing to do with its customer base, the vast majority of which come from the Midwest and South who could care less about transgender politics?

One would think the NFL would have learned from their drop in ratings due to Colin Kaepernick and the national anthem controversy. There is, however, a rather clear rationale for why the NFL and other sports leagues are insisting on a corporate solidarity with transgenders, and it finds its origins in globalization and sports journalism.

Considered the defining trait of modernity, globalization involves what is in effect a worldwide transnational economic system held together by telecommunications and technology. What is crucial for us to observe is that globalization involves a social dynamic known as disembedding, which is a propelling of social and economic factors away from localized control toward more transnational processes. For example, think of your local mall: In one sense, the mass shopping complex is in fact local in terms of its proximity to consumers; but notice that the retail outlets that comprise the various stores at a mall are not local but rather national and international chains and brand names. This is especially the case with the latest releases at the movie theater or the offerings at the food court.

However, it is not merely economic processes that are arrested from provincial control; such dislodging also involves localized customs, traditions, languages and religions. Whereas premodern societies are characterized generally by provincial beliefs and practices considered sacred and absolute, globalized societies offer a range of consumer-based options that call into question the sanctity of local beliefs and practices, relativizing them to a global food court of many other creedal alternatives.

This social order of consumer-based options tends to forge a new conception of the human person as a sovereign individual who exercises control over his or her own life circumstances. Again, traditional social structures and arrangements are generally fixed in terms of key identity markers such as gender, sexual orientation and religious affiliation. But globalized societies, because of the wide array of options, see this fixedness as restrictive. And so traditional morals and customs tend to give way to what we called lifestyle values. Lifestyle values operate according to a plurality of what sociologist Peter Berger defines as life-worlds, wherein each individual practices whatever belief system he or she deems most plausible. These belief systems include everything from religious identity to gender identity.

Thus, lifestyle values and identities are defined and determined by consumerist tendencies and norms. Commercial advertising is not merely central to economic growth, it is also of central influence to inventing the self through offering variant lifestyle features and choices. I would therefore argue that corporations such as the NFL promising to boycott Texas are not so much for LGBT rights as they are against arbitrarily restricting lifestyle options, since such limitations are deemed inconsistent with a society that includes consumer-based self-expression.

Along with globalization is the pressure from sports journalists, who are notoriously liberal. This comes largely from journalisms secular turn at the beginning of the 20th century, when they adopted scientific rationalism as a method for so-called objective reporting, that is, one based on verified facts and data irrespective of the journalists personal biases and preconceptions.

However, scientific rationalism erects new boundaries of knowledge that effectively censor religions, traditions, customs and cultures from the realm of what can be known. Indeed, scientific facts are considered objective precisely because they transcend the biases and prejudices innate to cultural values and norms. And so what emerges from this pre-commitment to scientific rationalism is what has been called a fact/value dichotomy: Facts are objective while values are subjective, facts apply to all while values apply only to some. Thus, as the journalist transforms into an impartial observer of economic, political and social events, he or she begins to view moral and religious sensibilities in terms of you guessed it! personal lifestyle values that are relative to individuals or cultures. Today, virtually every media outlet features prominently a Lifestyles section where we can learn about everything from the sex habits of entertainers to our horoscopes.

And so, globalization and liberal sports journalism together reimagine sports as an expression of consumer-based lifestyle values. Under their auspice, the human person has been redefined as a mere consumer, a chooser of lifestyle identities, and nothing more. In this sense, the transgender community has more in common with the dominant beliefs of the NFL than do traditionalists.

Its time for sports fans to realize that the NFL couldnt care less about their traditional values and customs, but have rather embraced, along with so many of its reporters, economic- and media-based biases that are thoroughly anti-traditional and anti-cultural.

Perhaps the real boycott is about to begin.

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Why sports industry sides with transgenders - WND.com

Canadian architecture firm discusses design in the Midwest – Iowa State Daily

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Sasa Radulovic and Johanna Hurme from 5468796 Architecture discuss previous projects they have worked on during their lecture Feb. 15. They highlighted the struggle of being creative while operating within the margins. Alex Kelly/Iowa State Daily

The status quo is never easy to change.

Johanna Hurme and Sasa Radulovic discussed Wednesday about how to go about changing the status quo in regard to architecture at Iowa State.

The two are the founders of an architecture firm, 5468796 Architecture, which began in 2007 Winnipeg, Canada. Their discussion focused on a single theme: they believe students and future architects can shape design.

Hurme began the talk by comparing the similarities of Winnipeg to cities in the Midwest.

One of their main points was to show how in many of their designs, they have tried to cut down on interior space in order to expand exterior space.

Its about the stuff that happens between buildings, Hurme said.

The firm believes by doing this, it can offset a trend in much of the United States in the design of apartment and condo buildings, where the living space is cramped, leaving little room for social gatherings.

There is this Finnish word, 'piha,' which sort of means collective outdoor space, and as kids we would say we were from the piha, not the building, and we wanted to impose that onto people, Hurme, who is from Helsinki, Finland, said.

A theme that Hurme and Radulovic also discussed was the idea of hyper-rationalism in architecture.

We often get accused of doing things for the sake of their aesthetic, but often that way is the best way to do it and [it] becomes necessary, Hurme said.

Radulovic presented a project they worked on that exemplified this thought. Their firm designed an elevated, circular condo building, with two stories of living space. Hurme mentioned that while building an elevated condo may seem irrational, it ended up being the most efficient way for the building to come to existence.

The architects also spent time discussing the business side of their firm and architecture in general.

Its our [architects'] responsibility to know our value, so that we know when we should work for free, or when we should be paid, and how much, Hurme said.

Hurme advised students to avoid putting themselves into the two common boxes the corporate architect and the struggling designer architect and to be successful in whatever way they are able to.

This facet of the discussion is what stood out to senior architecture student Amanda Hoefling.

A lot of the architects that come talk about their projects, but fail to talk about the business side, so I absolutely love how they mentioned that, because thats real life, Hoefling said.

One of the most important topics Hurme and Radulovic talked about was the ability for anyone to make an impact, even in smaller areas such as Winnipeg, or even Ames and Des Moines.

Radulovic said they believe many of their designs have had impacts in their community on social, environmental and economic levels. They have been able to be who they want to be and have success.

One thing that comes from the reality of living in a city with a smaller population is that the feedback you receive from users and people familiar with your project is very quick and direct, Radulovic said.

Throughout the lecture, the pair of architects stressed the importance of staying true to oneself and the ability each design student in the room had to impact the world. It was their belief as well, that the opportunity for impact was greatest by practicing architecture in second and third cities.

Dont abandon the place, make something out of it, Hurme said.

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Canadian architecture firm discusses design in the Midwest - Iowa State Daily

Barnaby Joyce condemns WA Liberals’ preference deal with One Nation – Western Advocate

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13 Feb 2017, 1:04 p.m.

Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce has condemned the Western Australian Liberal Party's unprecedented decision to preference One Nation ahead of the Nationals at the upcoming state election, a deal that has been defended by Mr Joyce's federal Liberal partners.

Prime Minister and Liberal leader Malcolm Turnbull with Nationals leader and Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce and deputy Liberal leader Julie Bishop. Photo: Andrew Meares

Trade Minister Steven Ciobo has defended One Nation's record defending the government, while Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce has warned the deal could cost the Liberal Party government in WA. Photo: Andrew Meares

Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce has condemned the Western Australian Liberal Party's unprecedented decision to preference One Nation ahead of the Nationals at the upcoming state election, a deal that is splitting opinion in the federal Coalition ranks.

Striking a different note to Liberal colleagues, former prime minister Tony Abbott agreed with the argument that One Nation leader Pauline Hanson was a "better person" today than when she was previously in Parliament but said the Nationals should be preferenced above all other parties.

While Mr Joyce described the deal as "disappointing", cabinet colleague and Trade Minister Steve Ciobosaidthe Liberal Party should put itself in the best position to govern and talked up Ms Hanson's right-wing populist party as displaying a "certain amount of economic rationalism" and support for government policy.

Mr Joyce said the conclusion "that the next best people to govern Western Australia after the Liberal Party are One Nation" needed to be reconsideredand the most successful governments in Australia were ones based on partnerships between the Liberals and Nationals.

"When you step away from that, there's one thing you can absolutely be assured of is that we are going to be in opposition," he told reporterson Monday morning.

"[WA Premier] Colin Barnett has been around thepoliticalgame a long while and he should seriously consider whether he thinks that this is a good idea or whether he's flirting with a concept that would put his own side and Liberal colleagues in opposition."

The deal will see Liberals preference One Nation above the Nationals in the upper house country regions in return for the party's support in all lower house seats at the March 11 election.

The alliance between the more independent WA branch of the Nationals and the Liberals is reportedly at breaking point over the deal, which could cost the smaller rural party a handful of seats.

"Pauline Hanson is a different and, I would say, better person today than she was 20 years ago. Certainly she's got a more, I think, nuanced approach to politics today," Mr Abbott told Sydney radio station 2GB.

"It's not up to me to decide where preference should go but, if it was, I'd certainly be putting One Nation ahead of Labor and I'd be putting the National Party ahead of everyone. Because the National Party are our Coalition partnersin Canberra and in most states and they are our alliance partners in Western Australia."

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull declined to criticise the deal, stating that preference deals in the state election were a matter for the relevant division who "have got make their judgment based on their assessment of their electoral priorities".

Mr Ciobo joined the Prime Minister and other federal Liberal colleagues in defending the WA division's right to make its own decisions.

"What we've got to do is make decisions that put us in the best possible position to govern," he told ABC radio of the motivations of his own branch in Queensland.

After Industry Minister Arthur Sinodinos called the modern One Nation more "sophisticated" now, Mr Ciobo also praised the resurgent party.

"If you look at, for example, how Pauline Hanson's gone about putting her support in the Senate, you'll see that she's often voting in favour of government legislation.There's a certain amount of economic rationalism, a certain amount of approach that's reflective of what it is we are trying to do to govern Australia in a fiscally responsible way.One Nation has certainly signed up to that much more than Labor."

When in government, former Liberal prime minister John Howard declared that One Nation would always be put last on how-to-vote cards.

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The story Barnaby Joyce condemns WA Liberals' preference deal with One Nation first appeared on The Sydney Morning Herald.

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Barnaby Joyce condemns WA Liberals' preference deal with One Nation - Western Advocate

Announcing My New Book – Patheos (blog)

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Announcing My New Book: The Essentials of Christian Thought: Seeing Reality through the Biblical Story by Roger E. Olson (Zondervan)

Today I received in the mail two advance copies of my latest book entitled The Essentials of Christian Thought: Seeing Reality through the Biblical Story (Zondervan, 2017). Here is what theologian Alister E. McGrath of Oxford University says about it: Olson offers his readers a timely and powerful defense of a distinctively Christian metaphysics and teases out its implications for theology, apologetics, and cultural dialogue. It is a rich and rewarding read and will do much to reassure its readers of the intellectual credentials of the Christian faith. Here is what theologian Stanley Hauerwas of Duke University says about it: Just as war is too important to be left to generals, so philosophy is too important to be left to philosophers. At least philosophy in the hands of a theologian like Roger Olson is too important to be left to philosophers. Though my understanding of philosophy is not the same as Olsons, I learned much from his stimulating account.

*Sidebar: The opinions expressed here are my own (or those of the guest writer); I do not speak for any other person, group or organization; nor do I imply that the opinions expressed here reflect those of any other person, group or organization unless I say so specifically. Before commenting read the entire post and the Note to commenters at its end.*

This book was born out of this blog! Zondervan editor Madison Trammel read something I wrote here about faith learning integration and contacted me about writing a book based on what I wrote. I decided this was my opportunity to do several things I had long thought about. I had long wanted to write a book about the faith part of faith-learning integration, a much misunderstood project that is common to most explicitly Christian institutions of higher learning. I had also long wanted to explore, and then write about, the concept of a biblical metaphysics. During the 1950s and 1960s several Jewish and Christian theologians published articles and a few books about that concept but it never really caught on. Most people have assumed that biblical and metaphysics cannot be combined and that biblical metaphysic is an oxymoron.

My original title for this work was Narrative Biblical Metaphysics. Then, I suggested that as its subtitle. Neither idea flew with the publisher. (Who would buy a book with metaphysics in the title or subtitle?) Fine. Im not a marketer. They know best and I do want the book to sell! So the publisher titled the book The Essentials of Christian Thought with the hope, I suppose, that it will be adopted as a textbook by professors of courses in basic Christian thought. I hope so, too.

But I do want to say that this book is not just a generic exposition of traditional Christian thought. Some of the ideas I explore and promote in it are far from traditional. In my opinion, we, Christians, need a back to the Bible project that strips away the layered accretions of philosophical theology, much of it borrowed by the church fathers and medieval theologians from Greek thought, and uncovers the implicit metaphysical vision of the Bible itself. In my opinion, as I explain in this book, the Bible is literature; it is primarily narrative. But it contains a kind of hidden (in the sense of assumed) metaphysic that is not the same at every point with classical Christian theism.

Here is the table of contents: Preface and Introduction, Chapter 1: Knowing Christianly: Seeing Reality through the Biblical Story, Interlude 1, Chapter 2: Ultimate Reality is Supernatural and Personal (But Not Human), Interlude 2, Chapter 3: The Biblical Vision of Ultimate Reality Retrieved, Interlude 3, Chapter 4: Non-Biblical, Non-Christian Views of Reality, Interlude 4, Chapter 5: The Biblical-Christian View of Ultimately Reality: God, Interlude 5, Chapter 6: The Biblical-Christian Perspective on the World, Interlude 6, Chapter 7: BiblicalChristian Humanism, Interlude 7, Appendix: A Model for the Integration of Faith and Learning.

This book is not written for scholars, although I hope many will appreciate and enjoy it. Some may even learn something from it (as Hauerwas says he did!). This book is written for inquiring Christian minds who are concerned that they may have missed something in their Christian formation or that their (or other Christians) thinking about ultimate, final reality may be infected by non-biblical, non-Christian influences that are antithetical to the Bibles implicit vision of ultimate reality.

Underlying this books surface, its barely stated purpose, is to correct widespread Christian syncretism of thought and belief. Many, many Christians thoughts about reality are simply a confused mixture of incompatible beliefs drawn from popular culture, folk religion and poor preaching. This book is intended to be a guide for perplexed Christianseven ones who do not know they are perplexed!

*Note to commenters: This blog is not a discussion board; please respond with a question or comment solely to me. If you do not share my evangelical Christian perspective (very broadly defined), feel free to ask a question for clarification, but know that this is not a space for debating incommensurate perspectives/worldviews. In any case, know that there is no guarantee that your question or comment will be posted by the moderator or answered by the writer. If you hope for your question or comment to appear here and be answered or responded to, make sure it is civil, respectful, and on topic. Do not comment if you have not read the entire post and do not misrepresent what it says. Keep any comment (including questions) to minimal length; do not post essays, sermons or testimonies here. Do not post links to internet sites here. This is a space for expressions of the bloggers (or guest writers) opinions and constructive dialogue among evangelical Christians (very broadly defined).

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Announcing My New Book - Patheos (blog)

Brazil judge overturns ‘censorship’ of newspaper – Yahoo – Yahoo News

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Folha de Sao Paulo and Globo, the country's two biggest dailies, were forced to halt publication online and in print of reports giving details of the attempted extortion last year by a man convicted of hacking Marcela Temer's cellphone (AFP Photo/Miguel Schincariol)

Rio de Janeiro (AFP) - A Brazilian judge on Wednesday overturned a ruling that barred leading newspapers from publishing reports on an extortion attempt against President Michel Temer's wife.

Folha de Sao Paulo and Globo, the country's two biggest dailies, were forced to halt publication online and in print of reports giving details of the attempted extortion last year by a man convicted of hacking Marcela Temer's cellphone.

The reports reproduced chat messages between the first lady and the blackmailer who, at one point, referred to a video he said he had hacked that "drags the name of your husband in the mud."

On Monday, the newspapers removed reports which the judge had ruled harmed "the inviolability of the privacy" of the hacking victim.

Folha reported that another judge has now overturned the ruling.

In his ruling, which was posted on the Folha website, Judge Arnoldo Camanho de Assis said that the publishing ban was "apparently unconstitutional" as "it violates the freedom which is a true pillar of the democratic rule of law."

"There is no indication... that the journalistic activity on the part of (Folha) was meant to follow an irresponsible or abusive editorial line," he wrote.

Folha and Globo argued that the details they wished to publish regarding Temer's wife had already become available in court documents and that their suppression in the newspapers amounted to censorship.

"Those who inform have to be accountable for the relevance of what they publish. Those who feel harmed have every right to appeal to the courts," Folha said. "What is not reasonable is to censor before publication, something that should be consigned to the memory of authoritarian regimes."

The hacker, Silvonei Jose de Jesus Souza, was sentenced in October of last year to five years and 11 months in prison after being convicted of trying to extort $96,000 from Marcela Temer in exchange for not publishing audio and images on her phone.

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Brazil judge overturns 'censorship' of newspaper - Yahoo - Yahoo News

Polish Second World War Museum Director Vows to Fight Government Censorship – Newsweek

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The director of a major new war museum in Poland has vowed to fight against government censorship and try to bring his collection to the public.

The Museum of the Second World War in Gdask is almost ready to open after eight years of preparation.

But a bitter legal battle has delayed its launch: the government has sought to gain control over the institution, which the ruling Law and Justice party fears will present an insufficiently nationalist view of Polands wartime experience.

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Writing in the design journal Disegno, the museums director Pawe Machcewicz said a final decision is due on the dispute in March or April. He said that before that, we will feverishly attempt to use this time to open the museum to the public before it is too late.

Machcewicz and his team want the museum to focuson the everyday experiences of millions of ordinary people, with a permanent collection centered around approximately 2,000 historical artefacts, many of them family relics donated by individuals.

But the government, he said, condemned our museum as too pacifistic, humanistic, universal, multinational, and not sufficiently Polish.

While the museum aims to make the Polish history a part of the European and world history, the government wants it instead to focus on presenting exclusively Polish sufferings and heroism, Machcewicz said.

In order to get its way, the government wants to merge the museum with an as-yet unbuilt institution, the Museum of Westerplatte and the War of 1939, a plan first announced in 2015.

This move would allow the government to appoint a new director, and gain influence over the tone and direction of the new, merged museum. But the museum has challenged the plan in the courts. Machcewicz said that the court had suspended progress on the merger. One ruling in the Supreme Administrative Court in January found in favor of the government. But the final decision is expected in the coming weeks.

Plans for the Museum of the Second World War were first announced in 2007 under the government of former Prime Minister Donald Tusk, now the President of the European Council.

The Second World War was different from all earlier conflicts because it touched civilian populations the most, Machcewicz said, As we developed the main concepts for the museum, we decided that the human dimension of the conflict is the most important to us.

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Polish Second World War Museum Director Vows to Fight Government Censorship - Newsweek

Fake News, Censorship & the Third-Person Effect: You Can’t Fool Me, Only Others! – Huffington Post

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Clay Calvert Professor and Brechner Eminent Scholar in Mass Communication, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL This post is hosted on the Huffington Post's Contributor platform. Contributors control their own work and post freely to our site. If you need to flag this entry as abusive, send us an email.

The aftermath of Donald J. Trumps stunning victory over Hillary Clinton brought with it much handwringing in news media circles and on social media platforms about the dangers of fake news. Some blame fake news for causing Clintons defeat, with the erstwhile candidate herself calling it an epidemic.

But theres a major paradox when it comes to peoples beliefs about fake news.

Specifically, many of us tend to believe that we can spot fake news we wont be fooled by it but others out there, who are more naive and less media savvy than us, surely will be duped.

For instance, a December 2016 survey conducted by the Pew Research Center found that most Americans

Yet despite the fact that some 84% of those surveyed were either very or somewhat confident in their own ability to spot fake news, 64% of the same people say fabricated news stories cause a great deal of confusion about the basic facts of current issues and events. This sense is shared widely across incomes, education levels, partisan affiliations and most other demographic characteristics.

In other words, Im no fool, but others are!

If thats truly the case, then why are we so worried about fake news? A few high-profile incidents like the Pizzagate shooting perhaps have caused undue panic.

The notion that Im no fool, but others are is, in fact, consistent with what communication scholars call the third-person effect. As W. Phillips Davison, the theorys founder, summed it up in a 1983 article

The danger here, as I explain in a new article published in the Wake Forest Law Review Online, is that individuals who exhibit signs of the third-person effect are also prone to call for censorship of media content in the name of protecting others. This, of course, raises serious First Amendment concerns regarding free speech. In other words, the third-person effect has both a perceptual aspect (what we believe about the influence of messages) and a behavioral component (censorship).

For example, a scholarly study on support for censorship of rap music found that those surveyed

Ultimately, consideration of the third-person effect might help to tamp down some of the rampant frets and fears about fake news. And if it does something more than that, as I argue in my article, the third-person effect should give lawmakers serious reason to take a thoughtful and deliberate pause before proposing any bills aimed at the censorship of fake news.

Remedies of educating people about how to spot fake news and publicly shaming fake news websites are far better alternatives than governmental censorship.

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Fake News, Censorship & the Third-Person Effect: You Can't Fool Me, Only Others! - Huffington Post

Viewpoints: Err on the side of freedom, rather than censorship – The Daily Tar Heel

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Jonathan Nez | Published 18 hours ago

THE ISSUE: The UC Berkeley College Republicans invited Milo Yiannopoulos to speak on campus. Protests erupted in response, leading to the event being canceled. The violent protest came from a non-student organization, but the event inspired substantial debate over free speech on campus. You can read the other sidehere.

Our disagreement is really about what free speech is and what its limits are. On one side, you have an alt-right figure whose views are pretty extreme. He has called feminism toxic, attacked transgenderism and labeled campus rape culture a myth. His views should never be normalized because they enable hate. On the other side, you have a liberal university culture. To these students, Milos words are emotionally traumatic, and by extension, they serve as an assault on their person in a way that warrantsbanishment.

While I am aware of my privilege and empathetic to those Milo belittles, violence is still not justified. No one has the right to live free of content that offends them. The victim card is not one that supersedes someone elses right to speak. What you do have a right to do is use your freedom of speech to fight back. You can organize a peaceful protest, engage in discourse with those you disagree with and publicly condemn organizations that support speakers whose beliefs you find repugnant. Attacking others and causing over $100,000 in property damage are not included in those rights.

People often conflate my support of Milos right to speak with support for his views; this is not the case. I disagree with all of his views, with the exception of those on free speech. Taking away freedoms sets a dangerous precedent that can be hard to undo. When you allow people to believe opposing views violate a nonexistent right, they will believe that censorship is not only justified, but also the only solution to the disagreement. Creating such an unhealthy culture of discourse with suppression is precariously fascist, which is why I believe we should err on the side of freedom. Milo sucks, but censorship is worse.

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Viewpoints: Err on the side of freedom, rather than censorship - The Daily Tar Heel