a life on slavery's frontier by lea vandervelde

Who was Mrs. Dred Scott, wife of the slave whose claim for freedom was denied by the U. S. Supreme Court in 1857? According to Lea Vandervelde in her new book Mrs. Dred Scott: A Life on Slavery's Frontier, Harriet Robinson was a black woman born in Virginia around 1818 and taken to the Northwest Territory in 1835, where she met and married Etheldred Scott, a slave at Fort Snelling. Not much verifiable personal information about Harriet is really known. As a woman, a servant, and the member of an enslaved race, she was unnoticed by diarists and journalists of her time and historians subsequently. VanderVelde, however, has found enough documentary evidence (tax, census, and court records) to place Harriet at the scene of many momentous events both in territorial Minnesota and later in St. Louis. Most importantly, she was a party to the famous case that further divided an already fractured nation.What many readers may not know before reading this history is that many slaves had successfully sued for freedom before the Dred and Harriet Scott case. These slaves had been taken into and resided in free states and territries north of the Mason-Dixon Line. Juries had consistently ruled in favor to release them for having been in states where slavery was illegal. Why the Scotts did not gain their freedom is a "one-thing-after-another" story worthy of satirical novels. In their eleven year legal quest, they went through six lawyers of varying talent, two of which died on them. They were at one point denied freedom because they could not prove who owned them. In the end, the dirt poor couple were opposed by some of the richest people in the country.As a detailed history, Mrs. Dred Scott will please committed history readers. Most pleasure readers will not make the effort. There is, however, a lot of potential for a novelist to come along and rework the content into historical fiction. ...

LIP CARE

Lips are the sensory organ of the mouth. Lips are considered as a representation for sensuality. To highlight the lips, and to make it more attractive, here are some useful tips.Lip shape tricks:If lips are thick then don’t use bright colors. Use the soft color and avoid lip liner. If lips are too thin then use dark colors to highlight it.Never draw lips exterior from the normal to make it false thicker. If you have curved lips then softly use your lip liner to smooth them. Lip carePut the powder on the lips stick to stay it longer. Use moisturizer on lips in winter to assure smooth and soft lips. To get rid of flakes from dried lips, lightly brush on it.If you desire various colors from one lipstick color, apply various quantity of toner, until you get the preferred color. To avoid lips from chapping at the time to use dry lip sticks, apply a light layer of Vaseline.Avoid licking the lips; take a lot of water to avoid dryness, and use lip balm before sleep for the nourishment of your lips even in your slumber. Apply a sunburn cream on your lips when you get outside. To get an ideal lip line, dip your pencil in the water for couple of minutes (with the cap on), then use it normally. This makes your pencil firmer and deeper. Lip ExerciseHere is a work out that will smoothen up your lips. You can do it while sitting up or lying down. Clasp your lips jointly, devoid of compressing your teeth. positioned the tip of your index finger just in the middle of upper and lower lips. Compress lips jointly and in this position slowly, drag out your finger from the lips. Beat your finger up and down rapidly for a count up of 30. Note Work out this exercise twice daily to make the lips fleshy. Lip color depends on your skin tone as well as your clothing colors:For fair skin: light colors For medium skin: slight deeper shadesFor olive and yellow skin: light brown and light pink For dark skin: deep shades, like: red, chocolate brown or blackish brown

around the traps

G20 death: Met police officer may face manslaughter charge UK news The Guardian Aeroplane art NEWS.com.au / High Quality Furniture Using Vintage Airplane Parts Motoart World’s Top 10 Fastest Electric Cars : Gas 2.0 Gameboy Timeline / journal / hicksdesign Upcoming Changes Weewar blog - Weewar is adding bridges to maps; and they're running a half price subscription offer until May 15th. English Russia English Russia No U-Turn. Now that's road rule enforcement. 'What, did you think we were ASKING?' English Russia Camaro Mod (Mad Max style) English Russia Rocket Key (literally) English Russia Smartest Dogs: Moscow Stray Dogs. Apparently they've learned to scare people so they drop takeaway food (or scam food from girls by looking cute); and they've learned how to travel by train. Although at least one dog didn't quite get the idea about escalators at first. English Russia The Story of the Blind Artist Dark Roasted Blend Crazy wine glass design Art for a Dollar (laser etched stacks of dollar bills) record-breaking jet sleds and rooftops Laptop (R)Evolution: Where size does matter… A whole lot! Geek With Laptop Cut wood fallen tree artwork

The Future of the News

Ellen Hume predicts a “good news conversation” with her MIT Museum crowd about the future of news, but all participants end up working very hard to find a silver lining in the dire situation facing newspapers and other traditional forms of journalism. The business model, Hume explains, is deeply broken for newspapers, big and small, and other mainstream media that people count on. Advertising -- the very idea of the classifieds -- is going extinct, vanquished by sites like Craigslist and Cars.com. The important work that journalists do, collecting, analyzing, contextualizing and disseminating information, and providing common frames of reference, has begun to migrate to the web and elsewhere. This isn’t all bad, believes Hume, because instead of relying on experts who deliver information in a “top-down form,” we get participatory journalism, where users can respond to and exchange information. This “changes power relationships.” Agency has shifted from elites who create the flow of information, to citizen journalists. Users stirred by a news story have opportunities to react via social networks, videos, blogs, “creating a sense of community.” This, says Hume, enables “a new sense of public space.” But there are dangers in relying exclusively on these new sources of information. Not all citizens have the expertise of a professional journalist, who’s spent years learning about subjects and sources. “We may lose verification....context….transparency….a sense of independence…and the big megaphone of mainstream media.” Yet we may also gain some things: authenticity, from eyewitnesses; continuity of attention to a story; and verification, via crowd sourcing. Hume thinks it’s possible to replace some of the functions of traditional journalism with the resources of new media, which can build massive online archives, collect from continuously expanding sources, visualize data in arresting ways, and engage its users. Web journalists must accept the responsibility of “separating wheat from chaff, paying enough attention to know if something’s credible or not, when it’s awfully hard to tell.” It’s going to be essential, Hume says, to “figure out how to build media literacy skills into all curricula.” At the same time, there may be some hope for newspapers: Hume cites website Spot.Us that permits people to make micropayments to cover worthy community stories; ProPublica, a consortium of heavy-hitting print journalists funded by philanthropy; and The New York Times multimedia venture. Ultimately, we may have to pay a premium for a good newspaper, on or off the web, while “the dynamic and exciting future of news…moves to the internet, cellphones and mobile devices.”

I Need Somewhere to Write

My thinking was that my blog would end the day after election day, and so I stopped blogging.I went through withdrawal for a while, but eventually got used to keeping my observations to myself.But things are just so odd lately, so I've returned to MyBO.com to once again give my observations.Some odds and ends...1- It's a dog, people! Wolf Blitzer had the "Dog Whisperer" on TV, CNN had a special graphic, can't the Obama's have their dog without the entire press corps following them? Or will we have to wait for "Bo's first dump"?2- To all the GOP idiots who are organizing tomorrow's tea-thing-or-whatever-it-is: I've got a great idea! Anyone who feels that they need to protest the direction of taxpayer dollars, just refuse to pay your taxes! It'll make both sides happy: You'll get your protest, and we'll get to remove you from society when you're arrested on tax evasion charges. Then, the rest of us can go forward with transforming the country without you.3- Way to go John McCain to tell it like it is by snubbing Palin on late night. Palin is an embarassment to the GOP, and to the country. Actually, the longer Palin is in the forefront, the worse off the GOP is, so keep it coming.4- Hey Minnesota, don't drag the rest of the country down with you! Give us our 59th Democratic Senator already! 5- FauxNews is still on this trip about if we should have antagonized the pirates in Somalia, by killing three of them. Some times I want to ask them what color the sky is over there. Hey FauxNews, substitute the word 'pirate' with 'terrorist', then tell us what your problem is.Ok, that's a good start. I feel better now.

EGG

Sorry

Mendel's Garden

Hello and welcome to the 28th edition of the genetics blog carnival known as Mendel's Garden, where we celebrate blogging on topics related to anything touching on what Mendel discovered (or thought he discovered). While reading these interesting and informative pieces, please think about work that should be featured in a future edition and/or blogs (like yours) that would serve well as future hosts.So do tomato seeds get you excited? No? Oh. Well, they should, if you're at all interested in evolutionary genetics. Michael White at Adaptive Complexity explores some new findings in which evolutionary changes in seed size in tomatoes are explained to a large extent by variation in a single gene, pinpointed through the use of standard genetic crosses. He summarizes the work as "a clear case of natural genetic variation controlling the size of seeds, variation for evolution (or plant breeders) to work on when larger or smaller seed sizes are needed to adapt to a new environment." Not peas, but close. Mendel would be proud."Mendel would be proud" happens to be the title of a post by Michael at Ricochet Science, pointing to a new educational site which he hopes will help students and laypersons learn genetics.Ouroboros describes experiments on an interesting DNA repair enzyme called Ercc1. One might think that deletion of the gene encoding this protein (it controls nucleotide excision repair) would be a Bad Thing, but in fact mice that have been so altered are strikingly cancer-resistant. And there's more, but you'll have to check out the excellent Ouroboros blog (focused on aging and related biology) yourself.At the Spittoon, Erin introduces her post entitled "Miss Con-GENE-iality" with this teaser: "If Facebook is starting to take over your life, maybe your genes are partly to blame." The subject is heritability of various aspects of social connectedness, and instead of whining "I could quit Facebook anytime I want" just go read about these new genetic analyses of our social behavior.On a more serious note, Razib at Gene Expression explores the genetics that might underlie the interesting case of Sandra Laing, a woman born to apparently white parents but who appeared to be "of a different race." And in South Africa.For more on the genetics of human appearance, see the Eye on DNA interview with Dr. Tzung-Fu Hsieh, developer of a test for the red hair gene.Oh, and before you give your credit card number to a personal genomics outfit, spend some time at Genetic Future – Daniel notes when a company is charging too much, and comments on some recent remarks by Francis Collins on the future of "consumer genetics."Organic transgenic food might sound like an oxymoron, but Anastasia at Genetic Maize explains why it's not and introduces the new word for such methods: orgenic.Jonathan Eisen at The Tree of Life is recruiting people to help with analysis of metagenomic data. Go there to learn more. I forgot to inquire about salary and benefits.Back to evolutionary genetics: Todd at Evolutionary Novelties reports on an extraordinary example of evolutionary convergence, involving proteins called opsins which are best known for their roles in vision.Need more evolution (with genetics)? Go read about pink iguanas at Nothing's Shocking. This should get you thinking about speciation, and that means it's time to read about "speciation genes" at Evolving Thoughts. John's not crazy about the term. What a grouch.And here's a new twist on the whole "species boundary" concept: Ed at Not Exactly Rocket Science writes about a single gene in glowing bacteria that accounts for the ability of the same bacterial species to colonize (in a mutualistic relationship) two completely different organisms (pinecone fish with glowing "headlights" and squid with a luminous "cloaking device"). Now that's cool.Let's give the Digital Cuttlefish the last word, at least because the blogosphere recently treated us to intensely disturbing images of cuttlefish meeting violent ends. At that little piece of blogospheric heaven, the Digital Cuttlefish reports on the cuttlefish genome project. It's not what you think – it's better.Thanks for reading, and look for the next edition of Mendel's Garden the first Sunday in March at Biofortified.

2008 Sports Word of the Year

Following right along on 2007's coattails, the American Dialect again chose it's word of the year from the numerous overused utterances regarding the economic downturn. After choosing "subprime" in 2007, the 2008 word of the year is "bailout." I'm happy to say that in a previous debate with my wife, I called this one above other strong entries like "plumber," "credit crunch," "hope," "change," "maverick," and "pwned." For the record, I still have no idea why youthful hipsters are such fans of "pwned," but I guess at age 31, it's time to stop trying.Anyway, more to the point, today we wanted to start up our own little contest for the 2008 sports word of the year. At this point, we'll throw a few out of our own, but more importantly, we would like to ask for your nominations. Assuming we actually get some, we'll open it up for voting on Friday of this week (that means get those nominations in by Thursday) and determine the 2008 Sports Word of the Year.Here's a few of our nominees:1) Wildcat2) Gold3) Penetration4) Gunslinger5) Bissinger6) Character7) Dagger8) Safety (as in gun)9) Bolt10) SwaggerSubscribe to us

Chinese unemployment

This year alone, more than 6m new graduates are knocking at the doorTHE lecture theatre at the Beijing Institute of Technology is full to overflowing, obliging unfortunate latecomers to hover by the nearby lavatories. Graduation is three months away and students are desperate to compete for the posts on offer at a job fair. After listening to introductory speeches they surge to place their CVs next to company nametags. One rapidly growing pile is for a telemarketing job paying less than a third of the citys average wage. The aspirants are software engineers.The global financial crisis could hardly have struck Chinas university campuses at a worse time. Even before economic growth began slowing last year, graduates had been having a tough time getting jobs thanks to a surge in college enrolment. This year 6.1m students will graduate from Chinese universities, nearly six times as many as in 2000. Next year the figure is expected to rise to about 7m. In 2011 it will reach a peak of nearly 7.6m according to Beijing Evening News, a state-owned newspaper. ...

Dave Richards

Being a Governmental agency, everything that we do is about record retention and long term storage. Citizens can request email messages at any time and we have to provide them in a format that can opened without cost based software. In other words, if someone wants email from 10 years ago we can't just simply give them a binary backup of the Groupwise 4.1 post office and expect them to get it loaded on SCO Unix and working. For ease of retention, we keep email messages in PDF format in project folders. More so in Evolution 2.6, but even in Evolution 2.24 there are a few steps and a requirement that users know how to navigate to the right folders in order to write out PDFs. In order to make this easier, I starting poking at some ideas. I noted that currently Evolution drops and drags messages in mbox format only. I had some IRC conversations on #evolution with mbarnes, mcrha, chen and xkahn and created a scope of work and placed it on BGO here. Pierre-Eric (pepp_) was interested in the project and we agreed on the scope of work and we allocated some bounty money. An initial patch has landed. Default behavior of course will be to continue to write out mbox files, but with a gconf key change Evolution will now write out PDFs into Nautilus from a drop and drag.I was only able to fund the areas required for our needs. I'm hopeful that in the future this functionality is expanded and moved into the UI of the Preferences screen.This one small change will save our users countless hours of time (and frustration) in the future.Obligatory screenshot

Open source Sockso streams your tunes anywhere

Web services Maybe Last.Fm has backed off charging some of us a subscription fee for now, but that's no reason to avoid making back up plans. You've likely got a massive library of tunes on one of your computers by now - why not roll-you-own web-based streaming service? Sockso makes the process about as simple as it can get. Download and extract the zip file, open the necessary port on your router (assuming you have one), scan your collection, and you're ready to rock - anywhere! Apart from being wonderfully simple to get running, Sockso is also cross-platform and open source. The web-based GUI is totally skinnable and the built-in player supports MP3, WMA, OGG, and FLAC files. Users can also generate .M3U and .PLS files on-the-fly for playback on their favorite audio app.You can also set up user accounts and give your friends access, and Sockso also supports SSL connections should you want a little added security. Apart from listening to your tunes, they'll also be able to download and upload tracks (provided you enable the option to do so). The server also maintains playback statistics and detailed logs so you can keep tabs on popular tracks and see who's listening to what. [via Instant Fundas]Open source Sockso streams your tunes anywhere via the web originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 13 Apr 2009 11:00:00 EST.

The war on Pakistan's Taliban

Stalking Baitullah MehsudIT WAS a rare success for Pakistans police. At dawn on March 30th, a group of grenade-hurling, Kalashnikov-wielding terrorists, some in police uniform, stormed a police training centre in a rural suburb of Lahore, seizing the compound with over 800 cadets. By 4pm, it was all over. Four terrorists were killed or blew themselves up. Three were captured. The police fired wildly in the air before cameras as the captives were whisked away.Less than a month before, a similar group had brazenly attacked a bus carrying the Sri Lankan national cricket team in Lahore. After that bloody episode, in which all the terrorists escaped leaving eight policemen dead and a couple of cricketers wounded, many pointed the finger of blame at India, with which Pakistan has been locked in conflict since 1947. This time, the de facto interior minister, Rehman Malik, looked elsewhere. Their footprints lead to Waziristan, he saidreferring to Baitullah Mehsud, a jihadist warlord who maintains a fief in that north-western region on the border with Afghanistan.

Buy vs. Build

I was talking to a potential client the other day and the question of “buy vs. build” came up. I have been saying for several years now that software (all software) will eventually become either open source or a commodity product. The days of expensive “enterprise” software will be over, perhaps not tomorrow, but within the next ten years. But the “buy vs. build” decision won’t go away. Organizations will still have to decide if they want to try and purchase the software to solve a particular problem (the commodity side) or do they want to build their own solution (using open source). In the past, “build” meant to build the system from scratch and “buy” included taking off-the-shelf software and configuring it to work in the environment. With the increased popularity and power of open source software, it has become a whole lot easier to build a solution in house (since one doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel), and with the availability of broadband networks, the buy solution now includes outsourcing the whole thing to another vendor. So I’m talking with this client and it was really hard to determine if OpenNMS would be a good fit. Since we are a services company, going through our sales process is a bit different than with buying software. If you buy a piece of software and it doesn’t meet your needs, the vendor still profits, as does the salesperson, so they have the incentive to sell as many licenses as they can to anyone they can. With our business model, if we try to put OpenNMS into a place where it doesn’t belong, we just end up doing tons of support. Compared to a situation where OpenNMS is a good fit, these clients would end up costing us money. While we like money and money is good, it is not worth forcing OpenNMS to fit where it doesn’t. There are several factors that go in to the buy vs. build decision for a management solution, and often it is not possible to determine them on a phone call. Size plays a big role, as a small organization, especially one without a technical focus, is much better off either outsourcing the whole thing or buying a basic solution like WhatsUp Gold. Larger institutions should opt for something like Solarwind’s Orion or if they are heavily Windows focused, Nimsoft’s Nimbus. But for many larger organizations and especially those at the carrier level, the business network is so unique that no off-the-shelf product can be made to scale or to fit their business processes. For them there really isn’t a “buy” solution, although in the past the enterprise software vendors have tried to sell one. But size isn’t the only factor, nor is it even the main one. The true measure of a buy vs. build decision comes down to your people. I’m not sure when “people” became a bad word, but as far back as I can remember companies have been trying to reduce the number of people in their IT departments. Perhaps it was because they had a roomful of “screen monkeys“, or perhaps it was because, especially during the bubble, anyone in the industry was very expensive. But in my experience having a few good IT folks coupled with the right tools is the best way to manage your information infrastructure. But how to do you ask that on a conference call? How do you ask “Hey, do you have anyone on your staff who really enjoys solving problems with technology and they have the skills to take something like OpenNMS and run with it?” If you read our Order of the Blue Polo testimonials (keep ‘em coming) you’ll see some that praise the “ease of use” of OpenNMS. While I find OpenNMS extremely easy to use, our biggest criticism is the learning curve. Yet there are people talking about how easy it was to get running. The only conclusion I can come to is that OpenNMS users are just smarter, more hard working, witty, and physically attractive than your average IT person (grin). Those organizations that choose “build” and have the staff to pull it off will be the big winners. I saw a great post yesterday on The True Cost of Migrating to Open Source. Mark Taylor presents a solid argument that the cost to migrate to a free and open solution (as opposed to a shareware, open core, neo-proprietary, or “commercial” open source solution) is the same as migrating to another proprietary product, yet the long term cost savings are great. While I’m sure this will get him labeled as some hippy purist, it is hard to argue with his conclusions. I just wish the buy vs. build conclusion was as easy to reach.