Thank you Solomon for that warm welcome. The Atlantic Club is a longtime and valuable partner of the U.S. Embassy here in Bulgaria and I am pleased to join the distinguished list of Ambassadors who have spoken to your audiences.
As many of you know, I arrived in Bulgaria at the end of September. I have spent the past four months meeting with Bulgaria's leaders and with representatives of the opposition, with journalists, with artists, with students, and with representatives of civil society. In short, trying to get a sense of what Bulgarians think is important and especially how you would like to see the relationship with the United States develop.
The United States and Bulgaria already enjoy a productive partnership that encompasses many fields. We work together on security and science, on energy and education, on the arts and archaeology to name a few. In September of this year we will celebrate 110 years of bilateral diplomatic relations. That is over a century of U.S.-Bulgarian friendship.
Roman philosopher and statesman Seneca said that one of the most beautiful qualities of true friendship is to understand and to be understood. That expresses very well an important goal of partnership and of diplomacy in general. We strive to understand and to be understood.
But it is also true that for countries to collaborate they must have mutual interests, and for that collaboration to be sustained, they must have shared values. For the U.S. and Bulgaria these include a commitment to democracy, to a free market economy, and to equal rights for our citizens.
We share a desire for our children to have more than their parents. We value education. We embrace modernity. We have a pride in our countries' national endowments - in the case of Bulgaria the mountains, the seaside, a history as long as that of civilization. Americans are proud of our national endowments as well and, like Bulgarians, are concerned to protect them.
I am one of those who continues to believe that Europe is the United States' most important partner. It is with Europe that we have our largest volume of trade, with which we are partnered in the world's most important military alliance, and with whom we have a shared global perspective.
I hardly need to remind this audience of the value of the transatlantic partnership since the Atlantic Club played such an important role from the beginning.
Together, we are committed to keeping our Alliance strong, to protecting Western Democracies and to securing prosperity for future generations.
It is these common values and common commitments that underpin the relationship between our two countries.Since arriving in Bulgaria, I have been listening to what the people of Bulgaria want from our bilateral relationship in order to make our joint work responsive to our shared needs. As I have met Bulgarian citizens in Sofia and outside the capital, they have shared with me the things they are proud of about Bulgaria, and in moments of candor, the things they want to change, so that their children and grandchildren can inherit a more prosperous, more secure Bulgaria with strong democratic institutions. One of the messages that I hear repeatedly is that they would like more U.S. business cooperation and more collaboration. We, too, would like to make that happen.
Bulgaria is six years into European Union membership, has been a member of the NATO alliance for nine years, and is on the path towards evolution into a mature European democracy. We envisage the role of the United States to be one of a supportive partner enabling Bulgarians to achieve your own aspirations.
Coping with the challenge posed by international terrorism is another shared commitment. Recent events in Algeria, which involved hostages from eight different countries taken by militants of at least four different nationalities claiming to protest events in a neighboring African country, demonstrate the global nature of the threat and the need for collaboration amongst like-minded states, like ourselves, in countering it. The bombing in Burgas was another crime in which innocent people from another country were attacked here in Bulgaria. We are impressed by the professionalism and determination with which Bulgarian security experts have approached the investigation and we await the results.
Beyond the pure economic impact of American investment in Bulgaria is the social impact. American companies have a strong culture of corporate social responsibility. American companies bring this corporate value with them when they go abroad and create lasting and meaningful change in communities they support. Here in Bulgaria, American companies have banded together to create programs such as the American Chamber of Commerce Volunteer Days, when employees go out and work on projects around the country organized by the Bulgarian Charities Aid Foundation.
Going forward, I hope to see many more American companies attracted to Bulgaria by its highly skilled workforce and beneficial tax conditions. For companies to come here and thrive though, we all need to work together to promote an atmosphere of openness, predictability and partnership in which business truly has a voice in the country's economic vision. There are ample opportunities for U.S. investors and exporters to expand in Bulgaria. Part of growing foreign investment will be taking steps to ensure that Bulgaria continues to be seen as an attractive location, where rules are consistent and consistently enforced.
Trade between our two countries amounted to 643.3 million dollars in 2011 and could expand even more with the introduction of better intellectual property rights protection, including of copyrights. Now, I know that my saying this will not be popular with some, but it is just a fact of economic life. One last point on economic cooperation and that is the current discussion of a U.S.-European Free Trade Agreement. As the U.S. Special Trade Representative said this week, President Obama is committed to reaching an agreement to smooth trade with the European Union. Though, all acknowledge that there will be tough hurdles to overcome.
I would like to speak now about perhaps the most challenging and sensitive part of our relationship - our work together to combat organized crime and strengthen the rule of law in Bulgaria. In recent years, we have identified drug trafficking, cybercrime, ATM skimming, and other economic crimes as priority areas for law enforcement cooperation. Collaboration between our respective law enforcement services is excellent in these areas and is producing concrete results. This, in turn, has persuaded the U.S. Government to significantly increase our resources for joint law enforcement activities here in Bulgaria.
Fighting crime is a lot more than just policing. It requires an able and efficientprosecution service as well as a determined and impartial judiciary. Recent events have demonstrated that there is considerable interest in Bulgaria in having a prosecution service and a national judiciary that can truly uphold the rule of law. And there has been progress in that regard. The selection of the Supreme Judicial Council as well as the Prosecutor General involved a serious examination of the credentials of the candidates and were conducted in a more transparent manner than before, though there is still room for improvement. Most important will be whether those selected will institute needed reforms. There is a lot of work to be done. The U.S. is committed to assisting Bulgarian efforts to reform the legal system so that the process of administering justice can be efficient and effective, but ours is a supporting role - the impetus and energy has to come from Bulgarians.
2013年1月31日星期四
Ambassador Ries Speaks at the Atlantic Club Event
Thank you Solomon for that warm welcome. The Atlantic Club is a longtime and valuable partner of the U.S. Embassy here in Bulgaria and I am pleased to join the distinguished list of Ambassadors who have spoken to your audiences.
As many of you know, I arrived in Bulgaria at the end of September. I have spent the past four months meeting with Bulgaria's leaders and with representatives of the opposition, with journalists, with artists, with students, and with representatives of civil society. In short, trying to get a sense of what Bulgarians think is important and especially how you would like to see the relationship with the United States develop.
The United States and Bulgaria already enjoy a productive partnership that encompasses many fields. We work together on security and science, on energy and education, on the arts and archaeology to name a few. In September of this year we will celebrate 110 years of bilateral diplomatic relations. That is over a century of U.S.-Bulgarian friendship.
Roman philosopher and statesman Seneca said that one of the most beautiful qualities of true friendship is to understand and to be understood. That expresses very well an important goal of partnership and of diplomacy in general. We strive to understand and to be understood.
But it is also true that for countries to collaborate they must have mutual interests, and for that collaboration to be sustained, they must have shared values. For the U.S. and Bulgaria these include a commitment to democracy, to a free market economy, and to equal rights for our citizens.
We share a desire for our children to have more than their parents. We value education. We embrace modernity. We have a pride in our countries' national endowments - in the case of Bulgaria the mountains, the seaside, a history as long as that of civilization. Americans are proud of our national endowments as well and, like Bulgarians, are concerned to protect them.
I am one of those who continues to believe that Europe is the United States' most important partner. It is with Europe that we have our largest volume of trade, with which we are partnered in the world's most important military alliance, and with whom we have a shared global perspective.
I hardly need to remind this audience of the value of the transatlantic partnership since the Atlantic Club played such an important role from the beginning.
Together, we are committed to keeping our Alliance strong, to protecting Western Democracies and to securing prosperity for future generations.
It is these common values and common commitments that underpin the relationship between our two countries.Since arriving in Bulgaria, I have been listening to what the people of Bulgaria want from our bilateral relationship in order to make our joint work responsive to our shared needs. As I have met Bulgarian citizens in Sofia and outside the capital, they have shared with me the things they are proud of about Bulgaria, and in moments of candor, the things they want to change, so that their children and grandchildren can inherit a more prosperous, more secure Bulgaria with strong democratic institutions. One of the messages that I hear repeatedly is that they would like more U.S. business cooperation and more collaboration. We, too, would like to make that happen.
Bulgaria is six years into European Union membership, has been a member of the NATO alliance for nine years, and is on the path towards evolution into a mature European democracy. We envisage the role of the United States to be one of a supportive partner enabling Bulgarians to achieve your own aspirations.
Coping with the challenge posed by international terrorism is another shared commitment. Recent events in Algeria, which involved hostages from eight different countries taken by militants of at least four different nationalities claiming to protest events in a neighboring African country, demonstrate the global nature of the threat and the need for collaboration amongst like-minded states, like ourselves, in countering it. The bombing in Burgas was another crime in which innocent people from another country were attacked here in Bulgaria. We are impressed by the professionalism and determination with which Bulgarian security experts have approached the investigation and we await the results.
Beyond the pure economic impact of American investment in Bulgaria is the social impact. American companies have a strong culture of corporate social responsibility. American companies bring this corporate value with them when they go abroad and create lasting and meaningful change in communities they support. Here in Bulgaria, American companies have banded together to create programs such as the American Chamber of Commerce Volunteer Days, when employees go out and work on projects around the country organized by the Bulgarian Charities Aid Foundation.
Going forward, I hope to see many more American companies attracted to Bulgaria by its highly skilled workforce and beneficial tax conditions. For companies to come here and thrive though, we all need to work together to promote an atmosphere of openness, predictability and partnership in which business truly has a voice in the country's economic vision. There are ample opportunities for U.S. investors and exporters to expand in Bulgaria. Part of growing foreign investment will be taking steps to ensure that Bulgaria continues to be seen as an attractive location, where rules are consistent and consistently enforced.
Trade between our two countries amounted to 643.3 million dollars in 2011 and could expand even more with the introduction of better intellectual property rights protection, including of copyrights. Now, I know that my saying this will not be popular with some, but it is just a fact of economic life. One last point on economic cooperation and that is the current discussion of a U.S.-European Free Trade Agreement. As the U.S. Special Trade Representative said this week, President Obama is committed to reaching an agreement to smooth trade with the European Union. Though, all acknowledge that there will be tough hurdles to overcome.
I would like to speak now about perhaps the most challenging and sensitive part of our relationship - our work together to combat organized crime and strengthen the rule of law in Bulgaria. In recent years, we have identified drug trafficking, cybercrime, ATM skimming, and other economic crimes as priority areas for law enforcement cooperation. Collaboration between our respective law enforcement services is excellent in these areas and is producing concrete results. This, in turn, has persuaded the U.S. Government to significantly increase our resources for joint law enforcement activities here in Bulgaria.
Fighting crime is a lot more than just policing. It requires an able and efficientprosecution service as well as a determined and impartial judiciary. Recent events have demonstrated that there is considerable interest in Bulgaria in having a prosecution service and a national judiciary that can truly uphold the rule of law. And there has been progress in that regard. The selection of the Supreme Judicial Council as well as the Prosecutor General involved a serious examination of the credentials of the candidates and were conducted in a more transparent manner than before, though there is still room for improvement. Most important will be whether those selected will institute needed reforms. There is a lot of work to be done. The U.S. is committed to assisting Bulgarian efforts to reform the legal system so that the process of administering justice can be efficient and effective, but ours is a supporting role - the impetus and energy has to come from Bulgarians.
As many of you know, I arrived in Bulgaria at the end of September. I have spent the past four months meeting with Bulgaria's leaders and with representatives of the opposition, with journalists, with artists, with students, and with representatives of civil society. In short, trying to get a sense of what Bulgarians think is important and especially how you would like to see the relationship with the United States develop.
The United States and Bulgaria already enjoy a productive partnership that encompasses many fields. We work together on security and science, on energy and education, on the arts and archaeology to name a few. In September of this year we will celebrate 110 years of bilateral diplomatic relations. That is over a century of U.S.-Bulgarian friendship.
Roman philosopher and statesman Seneca said that one of the most beautiful qualities of true friendship is to understand and to be understood. That expresses very well an important goal of partnership and of diplomacy in general. We strive to understand and to be understood.
But it is also true that for countries to collaborate they must have mutual interests, and for that collaboration to be sustained, they must have shared values. For the U.S. and Bulgaria these include a commitment to democracy, to a free market economy, and to equal rights for our citizens.
We share a desire for our children to have more than their parents. We value education. We embrace modernity. We have a pride in our countries' national endowments - in the case of Bulgaria the mountains, the seaside, a history as long as that of civilization. Americans are proud of our national endowments as well and, like Bulgarians, are concerned to protect them.
I am one of those who continues to believe that Europe is the United States' most important partner. It is with Europe that we have our largest volume of trade, with which we are partnered in the world's most important military alliance, and with whom we have a shared global perspective.
I hardly need to remind this audience of the value of the transatlantic partnership since the Atlantic Club played such an important role from the beginning.
Together, we are committed to keeping our Alliance strong, to protecting Western Democracies and to securing prosperity for future generations.
It is these common values and common commitments that underpin the relationship between our two countries.Since arriving in Bulgaria, I have been listening to what the people of Bulgaria want from our bilateral relationship in order to make our joint work responsive to our shared needs. As I have met Bulgarian citizens in Sofia and outside the capital, they have shared with me the things they are proud of about Bulgaria, and in moments of candor, the things they want to change, so that their children and grandchildren can inherit a more prosperous, more secure Bulgaria with strong democratic institutions. One of the messages that I hear repeatedly is that they would like more U.S. business cooperation and more collaboration. We, too, would like to make that happen.
Bulgaria is six years into European Union membership, has been a member of the NATO alliance for nine years, and is on the path towards evolution into a mature European democracy. We envisage the role of the United States to be one of a supportive partner enabling Bulgarians to achieve your own aspirations.
Coping with the challenge posed by international terrorism is another shared commitment. Recent events in Algeria, which involved hostages from eight different countries taken by militants of at least four different nationalities claiming to protest events in a neighboring African country, demonstrate the global nature of the threat and the need for collaboration amongst like-minded states, like ourselves, in countering it. The bombing in Burgas was another crime in which innocent people from another country were attacked here in Bulgaria. We are impressed by the professionalism and determination with which Bulgarian security experts have approached the investigation and we await the results.
Beyond the pure economic impact of American investment in Bulgaria is the social impact. American companies have a strong culture of corporate social responsibility. American companies bring this corporate value with them when they go abroad and create lasting and meaningful change in communities they support. Here in Bulgaria, American companies have banded together to create programs such as the American Chamber of Commerce Volunteer Days, when employees go out and work on projects around the country organized by the Bulgarian Charities Aid Foundation.
Going forward, I hope to see many more American companies attracted to Bulgaria by its highly skilled workforce and beneficial tax conditions. For companies to come here and thrive though, we all need to work together to promote an atmosphere of openness, predictability and partnership in which business truly has a voice in the country's economic vision. There are ample opportunities for U.S. investors and exporters to expand in Bulgaria. Part of growing foreign investment will be taking steps to ensure that Bulgaria continues to be seen as an attractive location, where rules are consistent and consistently enforced.
Trade between our two countries amounted to 643.3 million dollars in 2011 and could expand even more with the introduction of better intellectual property rights protection, including of copyrights. Now, I know that my saying this will not be popular with some, but it is just a fact of economic life. One last point on economic cooperation and that is the current discussion of a U.S.-European Free Trade Agreement. As the U.S. Special Trade Representative said this week, President Obama is committed to reaching an agreement to smooth trade with the European Union. Though, all acknowledge that there will be tough hurdles to overcome.
I would like to speak now about perhaps the most challenging and sensitive part of our relationship - our work together to combat organized crime and strengthen the rule of law in Bulgaria. In recent years, we have identified drug trafficking, cybercrime, ATM skimming, and other economic crimes as priority areas for law enforcement cooperation. Collaboration between our respective law enforcement services is excellent in these areas and is producing concrete results. This, in turn, has persuaded the U.S. Government to significantly increase our resources for joint law enforcement activities here in Bulgaria.
Fighting crime is a lot more than just policing. It requires an able and efficientprosecution service as well as a determined and impartial judiciary. Recent events have demonstrated that there is considerable interest in Bulgaria in having a prosecution service and a national judiciary that can truly uphold the rule of law. And there has been progress in that regard. The selection of the Supreme Judicial Council as well as the Prosecutor General involved a serious examination of the credentials of the candidates and were conducted in a more transparent manner than before, though there is still room for improvement. Most important will be whether those selected will institute needed reforms. There is a lot of work to be done. The U.S. is committed to assisting Bulgarian efforts to reform the legal system so that the process of administering justice can be efficient and effective, but ours is a supporting role - the impetus and energy has to come from Bulgarians.
Ambassador Ries Speaks at the Atlantic Club Event
Thank you Solomon for that warm welcome. The Atlantic Club is a longtime and valuable partner of the U.S. Embassy here in Bulgaria and I am pleased to join the distinguished list of Ambassadors who have spoken to your audiences.
As many of you know, I arrived in Bulgaria at the end of September. I have spent the past four months meeting with Bulgaria's leaders and with representatives of the opposition, with journalists, with artists, with students, and with representatives of civil society. In short, trying to get a sense of what Bulgarians think is important and especially how you would like to see the relationship with the United States develop.
The United States and Bulgaria already enjoy a productive partnership that encompasses many fields. We work together on security and science, on energy and education, on the arts and archaeology to name a few. In September of this year we will celebrate 110 years of bilateral diplomatic relations. That is over a century of U.S.-Bulgarian friendship.
Roman philosopher and statesman Seneca said that one of the most beautiful qualities of true friendship is to understand and to be understood. That expresses very well an important goal of partnership and of diplomacy in general. We strive to understand and to be understood.
But it is also true that for countries to collaborate they must have mutual interests, and for that collaboration to be sustained, they must have shared values. For the U.S. and Bulgaria these include a commitment to democracy, to a free market economy, and to equal rights for our citizens.
We share a desire for our children to have more than their parents. We value education. We embrace modernity. We have a pride in our countries' national endowments - in the case of Bulgaria the mountains, the seaside, a history as long as that of civilization. Americans are proud of our national endowments as well and, like Bulgarians, are concerned to protect them.
I am one of those who continues to believe that Europe is the United States' most important partner. It is with Europe that we have our largest volume of trade, with which we are partnered in the world's most important military alliance, and with whom we have a shared global perspective.
I hardly need to remind this audience of the value of the transatlantic partnership since the Atlantic Club played such an important role from the beginning.
Together, we are committed to keeping our Alliance strong, to protecting Western Democracies and to securing prosperity for future generations.
It is these common values and common commitments that underpin the relationship between our two countries.Since arriving in Bulgaria, I have been listening to what the people of Bulgaria want from our bilateral relationship in order to make our joint work responsive to our shared needs. As I have met Bulgarian citizens in Sofia and outside the capital, they have shared with me the things they are proud of about Bulgaria, and in moments of candor, the things they want to change, so that their children and grandchildren can inherit a more prosperous, more secure Bulgaria with strong democratic institutions. One of the messages that I hear repeatedly is that they would like more U.S. business cooperation and more collaboration. We, too, would like to make that happen.
Bulgaria is six years into European Union membership, has been a member of the NATO alliance for nine years, and is on the path towards evolution into a mature European democracy. We envisage the role of the United States to be one of a supportive partner enabling Bulgarians to achieve your own aspirations.
Coping with the challenge posed by international terrorism is another shared commitment. Recent events in Algeria, which involved hostages from eight different countries taken by militants of at least four different nationalities claiming to protest events in a neighboring African country, demonstrate the global nature of the threat and the need for collaboration amongst like-minded states, like ourselves, in countering it. The bombing in Burgas was another crime in which innocent people from another country were attacked here in Bulgaria. We are impressed by the professionalism and determination with which Bulgarian security experts have approached the investigation and we await the results.
Beyond the pure economic impact of American investment in Bulgaria is the social impact. American companies have a strong culture of corporate social responsibility. American companies bring this corporate value with them when they go abroad and create lasting and meaningful change in communities they support. Here in Bulgaria, American companies have banded together to create programs such as the American Chamber of Commerce Volunteer Days, when employees go out and work on projects around the country organized by the Bulgarian Charities Aid Foundation.
Going forward, I hope to see many more American companies attracted to Bulgaria by its highly skilled workforce and beneficial tax conditions. For companies to come here and thrive though, we all need to work together to promote an atmosphere of openness, predictability and partnership in which business truly has a voice in the country's economic vision. There are ample opportunities for U.S. investors and exporters to expand in Bulgaria. Part of growing foreign investment will be taking steps to ensure that Bulgaria continues to be seen as an attractive location, where rules are consistent and consistently enforced.
Trade between our two countries amounted to 643.3 million dollars in 2011 and could expand even more with the introduction of better intellectual property rights protection, including of copyrights. Now, I know that my saying this will not be popular with some, but it is just a fact of economic life. One last point on economic cooperation and that is the current discussion of a U.S.-European Free Trade Agreement. As the U.S. Special Trade Representative said this week, President Obama is committed to reaching an agreement to smooth trade with the European Union. Though, all acknowledge that there will be tough hurdles to overcome.
I would like to speak now about perhaps the most challenging and sensitive part of our relationship - our work together to combat organized crime and strengthen the rule of law in Bulgaria. In recent years, we have identified drug trafficking, cybercrime, ATM skimming, and other economic crimes as priority areas for law enforcement cooperation. Collaboration between our respective law enforcement services is excellent in these areas and is producing concrete results. This, in turn, has persuaded the U.S. Government to significantly increase our resources for joint law enforcement activities here in Bulgaria.
Fighting crime is a lot more than just policing. It requires an able and efficientprosecution service as well as a determined and impartial judiciary. Recent events have demonstrated that there is considerable interest in Bulgaria in having a prosecution service and a national judiciary that can truly uphold the rule of law. And there has been progress in that regard. The selection of the Supreme Judicial Council as well as the Prosecutor General involved a serious examination of the credentials of the candidates and were conducted in a more transparent manner than before, though there is still room for improvement. Most important will be whether those selected will institute needed reforms. There is a lot of work to be done. The U.S. is committed to assisting Bulgarian efforts to reform the legal system so that the process of administering justice can be efficient and effective, but ours is a supporting role - the impetus and energy has to come from Bulgarians.
As many of you know, I arrived in Bulgaria at the end of September. I have spent the past four months meeting with Bulgaria's leaders and with representatives of the opposition, with journalists, with artists, with students, and with representatives of civil society. In short, trying to get a sense of what Bulgarians think is important and especially how you would like to see the relationship with the United States develop.
The United States and Bulgaria already enjoy a productive partnership that encompasses many fields. We work together on security and science, on energy and education, on the arts and archaeology to name a few. In September of this year we will celebrate 110 years of bilateral diplomatic relations. That is over a century of U.S.-Bulgarian friendship.
Roman philosopher and statesman Seneca said that one of the most beautiful qualities of true friendship is to understand and to be understood. That expresses very well an important goal of partnership and of diplomacy in general. We strive to understand and to be understood.
But it is also true that for countries to collaborate they must have mutual interests, and for that collaboration to be sustained, they must have shared values. For the U.S. and Bulgaria these include a commitment to democracy, to a free market economy, and to equal rights for our citizens.
We share a desire for our children to have more than their parents. We value education. We embrace modernity. We have a pride in our countries' national endowments - in the case of Bulgaria the mountains, the seaside, a history as long as that of civilization. Americans are proud of our national endowments as well and, like Bulgarians, are concerned to protect them.
I am one of those who continues to believe that Europe is the United States' most important partner. It is with Europe that we have our largest volume of trade, with which we are partnered in the world's most important military alliance, and with whom we have a shared global perspective.
I hardly need to remind this audience of the value of the transatlantic partnership since the Atlantic Club played such an important role from the beginning.
Together, we are committed to keeping our Alliance strong, to protecting Western Democracies and to securing prosperity for future generations.
It is these common values and common commitments that underpin the relationship between our two countries.Since arriving in Bulgaria, I have been listening to what the people of Bulgaria want from our bilateral relationship in order to make our joint work responsive to our shared needs. As I have met Bulgarian citizens in Sofia and outside the capital, they have shared with me the things they are proud of about Bulgaria, and in moments of candor, the things they want to change, so that their children and grandchildren can inherit a more prosperous, more secure Bulgaria with strong democratic institutions. One of the messages that I hear repeatedly is that they would like more U.S. business cooperation and more collaboration. We, too, would like to make that happen.
Bulgaria is six years into European Union membership, has been a member of the NATO alliance for nine years, and is on the path towards evolution into a mature European democracy. We envisage the role of the United States to be one of a supportive partner enabling Bulgarians to achieve your own aspirations.
Coping with the challenge posed by international terrorism is another shared commitment. Recent events in Algeria, which involved hostages from eight different countries taken by militants of at least four different nationalities claiming to protest events in a neighboring African country, demonstrate the global nature of the threat and the need for collaboration amongst like-minded states, like ourselves, in countering it. The bombing in Burgas was another crime in which innocent people from another country were attacked here in Bulgaria. We are impressed by the professionalism and determination with which Bulgarian security experts have approached the investigation and we await the results.
Beyond the pure economic impact of American investment in Bulgaria is the social impact. American companies have a strong culture of corporate social responsibility. American companies bring this corporate value with them when they go abroad and create lasting and meaningful change in communities they support. Here in Bulgaria, American companies have banded together to create programs such as the American Chamber of Commerce Volunteer Days, when employees go out and work on projects around the country organized by the Bulgarian Charities Aid Foundation.
Going forward, I hope to see many more American companies attracted to Bulgaria by its highly skilled workforce and beneficial tax conditions. For companies to come here and thrive though, we all need to work together to promote an atmosphere of openness, predictability and partnership in which business truly has a voice in the country's economic vision. There are ample opportunities for U.S. investors and exporters to expand in Bulgaria. Part of growing foreign investment will be taking steps to ensure that Bulgaria continues to be seen as an attractive location, where rules are consistent and consistently enforced.
Trade between our two countries amounted to 643.3 million dollars in 2011 and could expand even more with the introduction of better intellectual property rights protection, including of copyrights. Now, I know that my saying this will not be popular with some, but it is just a fact of economic life. One last point on economic cooperation and that is the current discussion of a U.S.-European Free Trade Agreement. As the U.S. Special Trade Representative said this week, President Obama is committed to reaching an agreement to smooth trade with the European Union. Though, all acknowledge that there will be tough hurdles to overcome.
I would like to speak now about perhaps the most challenging and sensitive part of our relationship - our work together to combat organized crime and strengthen the rule of law in Bulgaria. In recent years, we have identified drug trafficking, cybercrime, ATM skimming, and other economic crimes as priority areas for law enforcement cooperation. Collaboration between our respective law enforcement services is excellent in these areas and is producing concrete results. This, in turn, has persuaded the U.S. Government to significantly increase our resources for joint law enforcement activities here in Bulgaria.
Fighting crime is a lot more than just policing. It requires an able and efficientprosecution service as well as a determined and impartial judiciary. Recent events have demonstrated that there is considerable interest in Bulgaria in having a prosecution service and a national judiciary that can truly uphold the rule of law. And there has been progress in that regard. The selection of the Supreme Judicial Council as well as the Prosecutor General involved a serious examination of the credentials of the candidates and were conducted in a more transparent manner than before, though there is still room for improvement. Most important will be whether those selected will institute needed reforms. There is a lot of work to be done. The U.S. is committed to assisting Bulgarian efforts to reform the legal system so that the process of administering justice can be efficient and effective, but ours is a supporting role - the impetus and energy has to come from Bulgarians.
CNN’s Vermont rail story went way on the wrong track
Thanks to CNN, Vermont got a journalism lesson this week as the cable network devoted eight minutes and 38 seconds to a special report on the state’s stimulus-funded rail improvement project, one of the regular “keeping them honest” features on the “Anderson Cooper 360” program.
Alas, it was a very bad journalism lesson because it was very bad journalism presented by people apparently unaware of the irony of claiming to be “keeping them honest” dishonestly.
Which is not to say that its point of view was incorrect. Points of view may be wise or unwise, but almost by definition they are not incorrect. The segment’s bias was obvious, but biased journalism can be defended. Its advocates prefer to call it “advocacy journalism,” and there is a place for it.
CNN has not generally been considered one of those places, but that’s the network’s business. If it wants to undertake an ideological crusade – in this case arguing that the $10 billion spent nationally (about $52 million in Vermont) to improve passenger rail service is a boondoggle – more power to it. In this case, a responsible, accurate, honest report might have been persuasive. But a responsible, accurate, honest report was nowhere to be found.
As a public service, then, and because they obviously need it, herewith a basic primer in journalistic practice and ethics for Cooper, investigative reporter Drew Griffin, and their bosses:
Lesson 1 — No cheap shots. Reporting from the Essex Junction Amtrak station, which he called “the busiest station in all of Vermont,” (which it may not be), Griffin noted that “11 people got off (and) no one got on.”
Well of course no one got on. That train just chugs a few miles up to St. Albans where it spends the night. Nobody takes the train from Essex to St. Albans. If Griffin knew that he was being devious. And he had no excuse not knowing it.
In fact, almost nobody takes the train from any Vermont station to another. Vermonters take the train to New York. So Griffin’s “revelation” that the project chopped only 28 minutes off the train’s voyage through the state was another cheap shot. If CNN had chosen to report out the entire story (see below), it would have figured out that the work is likely to save two hours for travelers heading to New York.
Lesson 2 – Don’t be cute. There is Griffin standing on the trainless track. “I could stand here all day long,” he says. “I could jog on the tracks,” and there he is, jogging on the tracks, and standing there as the sun set, still without seeing a train.
Forget for a moment that jogging along the tracks is illegal (criminal trespass) and dangerously stupid, thus prompting Joyce Rose, the president of Operation Lifesaver, to send Griffin a sharply worded letter reminding him that “more people are killed each year trespassing on train tracks than in vehicle-train collisions at crossings.”
More to the point here is that the rail improvement project neither envisioned nor promised oodles of trains. Its purpose was to improve the tracks so both passenger and freight trains could go faster and haul heavier loads.
Lesson 3 – Put all dollar figures in context. Yes, $52 million sounds like a lot of money. The average guy could probably live on it for a year or two. But just providing the figure and leaving it out there is meaningless.
Minimal context would note that the U.S. government spends some $69.5 billion a year on transportation, or more than six times the entire nationwide stimulus-financed rail improvement project, more than 100 times Vermont’s share. More than half of all those federal expenditures, about $41.5 billion, is spent on highways. Does this prove that the $52 million was money well spent? Not at all. But it is essential information.
Lesson 4 – Provide at least a little balance. To answer why this little state got all that federal money, Griffin relied on one authority, policy analyst Randal O’Toole. Properly, Griffin said O’Toole was associated with the “libertarian-leaning Cato Institute.” He did not point out that O’Toole has also been associated with the Thoreau Institute, which has been funded over the years by foundations with close ties to the petroleum industry.
O’Toole began inauspiciously. The Vermont project got the money, he said, because, “the federal government has one criteria when it comes to handing out high speed rail funds. And that was, had states done an environmental impact statement so they were shovel ready.”
There is no such thing as “one criteria.” There can be two criteria or 20 million. One of them is a criterion.
And according to some people, including Vermont Agency of Transportation Secretary Brian Searles, the state had to satisfy several of them before federal authorities approved the grant in an intensely competitive process.
“The real reason that we qualified was that it was one of the eight designated corridors in the country,” Searle said.
It’s entirely possible that O’Toole’s explanation would withstand scrutiny better than Searles’. What real journalists do in these cases, though, is talk to folks on both sides, then apply the scrutiny. It wasn’t as though Searles was unavailable. He said he “had extensive conversations (with CNN staff) over time and on that day. They came here with an agenda to attack the high speed rail program.”
Lesson 5 – Tell the whole story. Had Griffin put Searles on camera, he might have explained that the Vermont work did not stand alone. It was part of a regional project which included rail improvements in Massachusetts and Connecticut. That explains the projected two-hour reduction in the Vermont-to-New York trip.
But this project is not really limited to the U.S. Both the province of Quebec and the Canadian government are improving their rail lines in coordination with the U.S. effort. Both countries believe they have a significant economic interest in better rail links between the Montreal area, home to some 3.9 million people, and U.S. destinations.
Nor is it just passengers. The rail line improvements mean heavier loads can go over the bridges and overpasses. When completed, it will ease freight transportation between Montreal and the Connecticut shipping ports on the north shore of Long Island Sound. The potential economic development impact for the entire region could be substantial.
That’s why New England Central Railroad put up the state’s $18 million match for the project. Griffin did note that a private firm put up the money. He didn’t mention that it had a vested interest in doing so, meaning the possible economic impact here is far greater than cutting a couple of hours off the trip to Penn Station.
Jerry Vest, the vice president for governmental and industrial affairs for the Genesee and Wyoming, Inc., which now owns New England Central, said the rail improvement “will be a big plus for Vermont,” making it easier for the state to attract new business.
“Freight rail is undergoing a renaissance, Vest said, “and companies want to have access to high-quality rail service.”
Does this make the $52 million –plus some $140 million in the other states – worthwhile? Like any public policy decision, that’s open to debate. What is not open to debate is that it all should have been in the story.
In fairness to CNN, Griffin did acknowledge that the Vermont share of the work came in “on time and on budget,” and that it created some jobs. More specifically, Searles said (but CNN did not) it created 246 direct jobs and another 319 “indirect and induced.” Most of them were temporary jobs, but at the peak of the recession, even temporary jobs were useful, both to the people who got them and to the regional economy.
The CNN report did make one good point: at least in New England, these “high speed” rail projects will not bring real high-speed rail as found in Europe and Japan. Vermont’s stations are too close to one another, and the state wants to provide service to all those towns. Even Ross Capon, the head of the National Association of Railroad Passengers, agreed that the Obama administration was guilty of “hyperbole” in selling its program.
But that was the segment’s only valid point, which perhaps explains why Griffin and Cooper, in their post-tape chit-chat, kept belaboring it, thereby violating the immortal advice to writers from professor Lee Youngdahl: “Once something has been said, it no longer has to be said.”
But one more thing has to be said here. Every news story about public funding of transportation should remember – and should explain – that all forms of transportation are and always have been publicly subsidized. The Founders put it right in the Constitution, authorizing Congress to establish a system of “Post roads.” As America gets bigger and richer, more people will be doing more traveling. The alternatives to better rail service are more highways and/or more airports, all of which are expensive and all of which will be subsidized.
Alas, it was a very bad journalism lesson because it was very bad journalism presented by people apparently unaware of the irony of claiming to be “keeping them honest” dishonestly.
Which is not to say that its point of view was incorrect. Points of view may be wise or unwise, but almost by definition they are not incorrect. The segment’s bias was obvious, but biased journalism can be defended. Its advocates prefer to call it “advocacy journalism,” and there is a place for it.
CNN has not generally been considered one of those places, but that’s the network’s business. If it wants to undertake an ideological crusade – in this case arguing that the $10 billion spent nationally (about $52 million in Vermont) to improve passenger rail service is a boondoggle – more power to it. In this case, a responsible, accurate, honest report might have been persuasive. But a responsible, accurate, honest report was nowhere to be found.
As a public service, then, and because they obviously need it, herewith a basic primer in journalistic practice and ethics for Cooper, investigative reporter Drew Griffin, and their bosses:
Lesson 1 — No cheap shots. Reporting from the Essex Junction Amtrak station, which he called “the busiest station in all of Vermont,” (which it may not be), Griffin noted that “11 people got off (and) no one got on.”
Well of course no one got on. That train just chugs a few miles up to St. Albans where it spends the night. Nobody takes the train from Essex to St. Albans. If Griffin knew that he was being devious. And he had no excuse not knowing it.
In fact, almost nobody takes the train from any Vermont station to another. Vermonters take the train to New York. So Griffin’s “revelation” that the project chopped only 28 minutes off the train’s voyage through the state was another cheap shot. If CNN had chosen to report out the entire story (see below), it would have figured out that the work is likely to save two hours for travelers heading to New York.
Lesson 2 – Don’t be cute. There is Griffin standing on the trainless track. “I could stand here all day long,” he says. “I could jog on the tracks,” and there he is, jogging on the tracks, and standing there as the sun set, still without seeing a train.
Forget for a moment that jogging along the tracks is illegal (criminal trespass) and dangerously stupid, thus prompting Joyce Rose, the president of Operation Lifesaver, to send Griffin a sharply worded letter reminding him that “more people are killed each year trespassing on train tracks than in vehicle-train collisions at crossings.”
More to the point here is that the rail improvement project neither envisioned nor promised oodles of trains. Its purpose was to improve the tracks so both passenger and freight trains could go faster and haul heavier loads.
Lesson 3 – Put all dollar figures in context. Yes, $52 million sounds like a lot of money. The average guy could probably live on it for a year or two. But just providing the figure and leaving it out there is meaningless.
Minimal context would note that the U.S. government spends some $69.5 billion a year on transportation, or more than six times the entire nationwide stimulus-financed rail improvement project, more than 100 times Vermont’s share. More than half of all those federal expenditures, about $41.5 billion, is spent on highways. Does this prove that the $52 million was money well spent? Not at all. But it is essential information.
Lesson 4 – Provide at least a little balance. To answer why this little state got all that federal money, Griffin relied on one authority, policy analyst Randal O’Toole. Properly, Griffin said O’Toole was associated with the “libertarian-leaning Cato Institute.” He did not point out that O’Toole has also been associated with the Thoreau Institute, which has been funded over the years by foundations with close ties to the petroleum industry.
O’Toole began inauspiciously. The Vermont project got the money, he said, because, “the federal government has one criteria when it comes to handing out high speed rail funds. And that was, had states done an environmental impact statement so they were shovel ready.”
There is no such thing as “one criteria.” There can be two criteria or 20 million. One of them is a criterion.
And according to some people, including Vermont Agency of Transportation Secretary Brian Searles, the state had to satisfy several of them before federal authorities approved the grant in an intensely competitive process.
“The real reason that we qualified was that it was one of the eight designated corridors in the country,” Searle said.
It’s entirely possible that O’Toole’s explanation would withstand scrutiny better than Searles’. What real journalists do in these cases, though, is talk to folks on both sides, then apply the scrutiny. It wasn’t as though Searles was unavailable. He said he “had extensive conversations (with CNN staff) over time and on that day. They came here with an agenda to attack the high speed rail program.”
Lesson 5 – Tell the whole story. Had Griffin put Searles on camera, he might have explained that the Vermont work did not stand alone. It was part of a regional project which included rail improvements in Massachusetts and Connecticut. That explains the projected two-hour reduction in the Vermont-to-New York trip.
But this project is not really limited to the U.S. Both the province of Quebec and the Canadian government are improving their rail lines in coordination with the U.S. effort. Both countries believe they have a significant economic interest in better rail links between the Montreal area, home to some 3.9 million people, and U.S. destinations.
Nor is it just passengers. The rail line improvements mean heavier loads can go over the bridges and overpasses. When completed, it will ease freight transportation between Montreal and the Connecticut shipping ports on the north shore of Long Island Sound. The potential economic development impact for the entire region could be substantial.
That’s why New England Central Railroad put up the state’s $18 million match for the project. Griffin did note that a private firm put up the money. He didn’t mention that it had a vested interest in doing so, meaning the possible economic impact here is far greater than cutting a couple of hours off the trip to Penn Station.
Jerry Vest, the vice president for governmental and industrial affairs for the Genesee and Wyoming, Inc., which now owns New England Central, said the rail improvement “will be a big plus for Vermont,” making it easier for the state to attract new business.
“Freight rail is undergoing a renaissance, Vest said, “and companies want to have access to high-quality rail service.”
Does this make the $52 million –plus some $140 million in the other states – worthwhile? Like any public policy decision, that’s open to debate. What is not open to debate is that it all should have been in the story.
In fairness to CNN, Griffin did acknowledge that the Vermont share of the work came in “on time and on budget,” and that it created some jobs. More specifically, Searles said (but CNN did not) it created 246 direct jobs and another 319 “indirect and induced.” Most of them were temporary jobs, but at the peak of the recession, even temporary jobs were useful, both to the people who got them and to the regional economy.
The CNN report did make one good point: at least in New England, these “high speed” rail projects will not bring real high-speed rail as found in Europe and Japan. Vermont’s stations are too close to one another, and the state wants to provide service to all those towns. Even Ross Capon, the head of the National Association of Railroad Passengers, agreed that the Obama administration was guilty of “hyperbole” in selling its program.
But that was the segment’s only valid point, which perhaps explains why Griffin and Cooper, in their post-tape chit-chat, kept belaboring it, thereby violating the immortal advice to writers from professor Lee Youngdahl: “Once something has been said, it no longer has to be said.”
But one more thing has to be said here. Every news story about public funding of transportation should remember – and should explain – that all forms of transportation are and always have been publicly subsidized. The Founders put it right in the Constitution, authorizing Congress to establish a system of “Post roads.” As America gets bigger and richer, more people will be doing more traveling. The alternatives to better rail service are more highways and/or more airports, all of which are expensive and all of which will be subsidized.
2013年1月29日星期二
TV and Radio Personality Danny Lipford Discusses
Lipford has been a presence on syndicated television for 15 years, and when asked about its advantages as an advertising medium, he noted that "The numbers that it reaches surprises a lot of people." He explains, "Many cable shows are limited in being able to reach a broader audience; many times it will be in the 200 to 300 thousand household range." "Today's Homeowner with Danny Lipford," which does not have a New York City affiliate, nonetheless exceeds 500,000 households each week, "which translates into over a million (television) viewers per week," he says.
All of Lipford's local affiliates are broadcast stations, he notes. "Today's Homeowner" can also be seen by DirecTV subscribers on Channel 367, World Harvest Television, a Christian network which is based in South Bend, Indiana.
Danny Lipford Media sells advertising on its television, radio, and web platforms. Asked why television is an appealing medium, Lipford explains, "Particularly in the home improvement market, you are able to visually support a product and the solution that it brings to the home." He adds, "When you are trying to make a product come alive, it can be done better on television than any other way."
Asked how television marketing has evolved over the past 15 years, Lipford comments, "In many ways, it has returned back to the origins of television." He compares the prominence of product placement today with Milton Berle, who as host of what was known for most of its history as "Texaco Star Theater" smoked cigarettes and talked about his advertisers during the program.
"If you look at that early part of television, it was 'this hour brought to you by,' and it completely was integrated," Lipford says. "Then, it seemed as if television moved away from that, toward more of the 'separation of church and state,"" he comments. Product placements are once again prominent, but "it is done in a little more of a tasteful, organic fashion than it was in early television."
Integrity in Product Placements: A Slippery Slope
"Being in the position I am in, I do not have to work with anyone I do not want to work with," Lipford says. "I direct my salespeople to go to companies (whom) I am already knowledgeable of, and I believe in their products," he adds. "We turn down advertisers sometimes when I am not comfortable to go out on a limb, and say 'this is the best solution.'"
Lipford has turned down opportunities to be an informercial pitchman. In every single contract with a partner, a clause is included that "my appearances outside the show will not be compromised by any agreement we have," he explains. "There may be situations where I am on some of the national shows, and I will be using some of my competitor's products, if it is needed for the balanced editorial message I am expected to deliver there."
Lipford believes that it is a slippery slope when morning shows host guests in "what appears to be a newsworthy format, but you are seeing products that are clearly tied to that individual." The question is raised, "Is this really clean editorial, or is it being biased by a relationship?"
Lipford explains that when he brings up products of those companies he works or has worked with on air, "I have touched and felt and used their products, and that makes it easy to be confident editorially." He comments, "This is a good solution to that problem."
Danny Lipford has also hosted a syndicated radio show of the same name since 2009. He believes that radio's appeal to an advertiser lies in its instantaneous nature, the fact that it is live. "It is 52 new shows (per year)," he says. "You can talk about exactly what is happening right then," he comments. "If an advertiser has an announcement, and a need for an intense push for a particular week or month-long period, that can be achieved with the radio show much easier," Lipford says. Conversely, "the television show is taped more in advance," he adds.
There has been a consumer shift among homeowners, from a focus on maintaining their home to a focus upon improving them, Lipford says. Many are saying, "If I am going to work on my home, I would rather be improving it than strictly maintaining it," he explains, noting that the consumer can receive "a lot of gratification" from improving his home.
The economy has driven a growth in the "do-it-yourself" segment, Lipford says. "When times were better, people would say 'Call the flooring guys,'" he comments. "Now, they're exploring ways to do-it-yourself," he notes. "Manufacturers are responding with products that are making it a little bit easier to do it on your own," he explains.
Lipford cites the example of the lock manufacturer Schlage, who "has a number of different locks that they have introduced that really have made it very simple for an individual to install a lock on the front door." With Schlage, "You can subscribe to a service online, for $10 per month, and it allows you to control your lock with your smartphone no matter where you are in the world." A starting point for a system like this is now $300, whereas in "years' past, it has been thousands of dollars," he comments. "Then, you can add components to it, as you want them, need them, and can afford them," he explains, noting that for about $100 a video camera can be added to monitor the home. (Schlage is a current partner of Danny Lipford Media).
One trend that continues is "toward energy-efficient, quieter, and easier to maintain homes," Lipford says. Another is toward "the acceptance of synthetic materials," he adds. For example, "PVC (polyvinyl chloride) mouldings will hold up pretty much forever, and they look so much like a good quality wood," he explains.
Synthetic decking materials have also evolved. "It is so hard to tell them apart now," Lipford says, noting that this is "their selling point."
Lipford notes than Broan, an 80-year old American company, has "created fans that are virtually silent" in response to consumer demand for quieter homes. Things like bathroom exhaust fans have traditionally been loud, he says. "In their bathroom models, as well as the kitchen ventilation, they have made them more efficient, and they use a lot less electricity," he explains. (Broan has been a partner of Danny Lipford Media in the past, but is not currently).
With about 30 percent of Americans suffering from some type of allergy, indoor air quality is a major concern for many homeowners. Lipford explains that the filter is the "first line of defense" against allergens. "In years' past, a filter is a filter is a filter," he comments. "The ability to improve that is driving these manufacturers to market these advanced filters," he notes.
"You see many companies, particularly 3M, stepping out with some really advanced filters...at a price point of 13 to 15 dollars apiece," Lipford explains. Honeywell has produced "a new generation of indoor air cleaners, models that sit on a table and...intensify the filtration of the air of a particular room," he notes. (3M was a partner of Lipford's recent Winter Giveaway).
Aggressive marketing can also encourage the do-it-yourselfers to "do projects that maybe they would not have taken on before, particuarly in the flooring industry," Lipford says. When it comes to flooring, "through my media platforms...I am hearing the word empowered a lot from consumers," he explains.
Much more important than in the past to the homebuyer is energy efficiency, Lipford notes. "One of the most practical things people look for is 'How energy-efficient is this home,'" he says, noting that "past power bills and the history of the home's utility usage is something that is more requested now than it has ever been before," he explains.
"With a $1,500 (monthly mortgage) payment on a house, you do not want to be saddled with a $900 (monthly) power bill, when you can buy another home with comfortable appeal," Lipford says. "That has not been a decision-maker for people in the past, but now, real estate agents marketing their homes are marketing those that are more efficient," he adds. "It is not just a matter of more attic insulation...but how efficient is the heating and cooling insulation," he explains.
Right now, housing starts (new construction) in the U.S. are at a five-year high, and inventory is "lower than it has been in quite some time," Lipford says. "With the interest rates being at historic lows, people can afford houses now, younger people and a wider group of people than ever before," he explains.
All of Lipford's local affiliates are broadcast stations, he notes. "Today's Homeowner" can also be seen by DirecTV subscribers on Channel 367, World Harvest Television, a Christian network which is based in South Bend, Indiana.
Danny Lipford Media sells advertising on its television, radio, and web platforms. Asked why television is an appealing medium, Lipford explains, "Particularly in the home improvement market, you are able to visually support a product and the solution that it brings to the home." He adds, "When you are trying to make a product come alive, it can be done better on television than any other way."
Asked how television marketing has evolved over the past 15 years, Lipford comments, "In many ways, it has returned back to the origins of television." He compares the prominence of product placement today with Milton Berle, who as host of what was known for most of its history as "Texaco Star Theater" smoked cigarettes and talked about his advertisers during the program.
"If you look at that early part of television, it was 'this hour brought to you by,' and it completely was integrated," Lipford says. "Then, it seemed as if television moved away from that, toward more of the 'separation of church and state,"" he comments. Product placements are once again prominent, but "it is done in a little more of a tasteful, organic fashion than it was in early television."
Integrity in Product Placements: A Slippery Slope
"Being in the position I am in, I do not have to work with anyone I do not want to work with," Lipford says. "I direct my salespeople to go to companies (whom) I am already knowledgeable of, and I believe in their products," he adds. "We turn down advertisers sometimes when I am not comfortable to go out on a limb, and say 'this is the best solution.'"
Lipford has turned down opportunities to be an informercial pitchman. In every single contract with a partner, a clause is included that "my appearances outside the show will not be compromised by any agreement we have," he explains. "There may be situations where I am on some of the national shows, and I will be using some of my competitor's products, if it is needed for the balanced editorial message I am expected to deliver there."
Lipford believes that it is a slippery slope when morning shows host guests in "what appears to be a newsworthy format, but you are seeing products that are clearly tied to that individual." The question is raised, "Is this really clean editorial, or is it being biased by a relationship?"
Lipford explains that when he brings up products of those companies he works or has worked with on air, "I have touched and felt and used their products, and that makes it easy to be confident editorially." He comments, "This is a good solution to that problem."
Danny Lipford has also hosted a syndicated radio show of the same name since 2009. He believes that radio's appeal to an advertiser lies in its instantaneous nature, the fact that it is live. "It is 52 new shows (per year)," he says. "You can talk about exactly what is happening right then," he comments. "If an advertiser has an announcement, and a need for an intense push for a particular week or month-long period, that can be achieved with the radio show much easier," Lipford says. Conversely, "the television show is taped more in advance," he adds.
There has been a consumer shift among homeowners, from a focus on maintaining their home to a focus upon improving them, Lipford says. Many are saying, "If I am going to work on my home, I would rather be improving it than strictly maintaining it," he explains, noting that the consumer can receive "a lot of gratification" from improving his home.
The economy has driven a growth in the "do-it-yourself" segment, Lipford says. "When times were better, people would say 'Call the flooring guys,'" he comments. "Now, they're exploring ways to do-it-yourself," he notes. "Manufacturers are responding with products that are making it a little bit easier to do it on your own," he explains.
Lipford cites the example of the lock manufacturer Schlage, who "has a number of different locks that they have introduced that really have made it very simple for an individual to install a lock on the front door." With Schlage, "You can subscribe to a service online, for $10 per month, and it allows you to control your lock with your smartphone no matter where you are in the world." A starting point for a system like this is now $300, whereas in "years' past, it has been thousands of dollars," he comments. "Then, you can add components to it, as you want them, need them, and can afford them," he explains, noting that for about $100 a video camera can be added to monitor the home. (Schlage is a current partner of Danny Lipford Media).
One trend that continues is "toward energy-efficient, quieter, and easier to maintain homes," Lipford says. Another is toward "the acceptance of synthetic materials," he adds. For example, "PVC (polyvinyl chloride) mouldings will hold up pretty much forever, and they look so much like a good quality wood," he explains.
Synthetic decking materials have also evolved. "It is so hard to tell them apart now," Lipford says, noting that this is "their selling point."
Lipford notes than Broan, an 80-year old American company, has "created fans that are virtually silent" in response to consumer demand for quieter homes. Things like bathroom exhaust fans have traditionally been loud, he says. "In their bathroom models, as well as the kitchen ventilation, they have made them more efficient, and they use a lot less electricity," he explains. (Broan has been a partner of Danny Lipford Media in the past, but is not currently).
With about 30 percent of Americans suffering from some type of allergy, indoor air quality is a major concern for many homeowners. Lipford explains that the filter is the "first line of defense" against allergens. "In years' past, a filter is a filter is a filter," he comments. "The ability to improve that is driving these manufacturers to market these advanced filters," he notes.
"You see many companies, particularly 3M, stepping out with some really advanced filters...at a price point of 13 to 15 dollars apiece," Lipford explains. Honeywell has produced "a new generation of indoor air cleaners, models that sit on a table and...intensify the filtration of the air of a particular room," he notes. (3M was a partner of Lipford's recent Winter Giveaway).
Aggressive marketing can also encourage the do-it-yourselfers to "do projects that maybe they would not have taken on before, particuarly in the flooring industry," Lipford says. When it comes to flooring, "through my media platforms...I am hearing the word empowered a lot from consumers," he explains.
Much more important than in the past to the homebuyer is energy efficiency, Lipford notes. "One of the most practical things people look for is 'How energy-efficient is this home,'" he says, noting that "past power bills and the history of the home's utility usage is something that is more requested now than it has ever been before," he explains.
"With a $1,500 (monthly mortgage) payment on a house, you do not want to be saddled with a $900 (monthly) power bill, when you can buy another home with comfortable appeal," Lipford says. "That has not been a decision-maker for people in the past, but now, real estate agents marketing their homes are marketing those that are more efficient," he adds. "It is not just a matter of more attic insulation...but how efficient is the heating and cooling insulation," he explains.
Right now, housing starts (new construction) in the U.S. are at a five-year high, and inventory is "lower than it has been in quite some time," Lipford says. "With the interest rates being at historic lows, people can afford houses now, younger people and a wider group of people than ever before," he explains.
Wood-pellet furnace market heats up
When the Sandri Companies won a $3.2 million federal stimulus grant as part of a push by Gov. Deval Patrick’s administration to encourage the renewable energy sector, it was touted not only as a way to get high-efficiency wood pellet boilers into use at Greenfield Community College, the Greenfield Fire Station and businesses around the region, but to give the third-generation petroleum-based business a foothold in an emerging alternative energy sector.
Since then, Sandri, which has also moved to diversify its energy-businesses to include propane, solar power, as well as geothermal and pellet stoves, has installed more than 50 of the Austrian-designed wood-pellet boilers, which unlike regular pellet stoves are sophisticated central heating systems that automatically feed themselves, clean themselves and — most importantly — modulate temperatures according to outdoor temperature and the temperature of heated water returning through the system.
Through the federal stimulus program, the 82-year-old Greenfield company arranged 100 percent funding for installation of low-emission wood pellet boilers at eight institutional or commercial sites, offered dramatic discounts on the boilers to homeowners in Franklin and Hampshire counties; and purchased three $215,000 bulk pellet delivery trucks.
On the lower end of the spectrum is a 68,000 BTU boiler installed by Barry Elbaum at his six-apartment Montague building on Route 63.
By replacing the oil-fired boiler and then weatherizing the building and installing a solar water-heating system between the time he bought it 25 years ago and last year, Elbaum had already cut annual fuel consumption from 5,000 gallons to 1,200 gallons. With the cost of a gallon of oil at nearly $4, he said, “I was looking for a way to control the cost of running a building. I was looking for alternatives, because I was just petrified of oil.”
With natural gas not available and propane seeming “still tied to being exploited,” he’d dismissed pellet boilers as being too exorbitant in cost. And then the stimulus funding underwrote the system’s $40,000 cost down to just $10,000, he said.
“It’s a wonderful thing,” said Elbaum, who figures his payback on this system will be five years. “This wouldn’t be possible without a subsidy. Without a subsidy, I don’t know how anyone could afford to do this. The subsidy’s created an infrastructure for there to be an industry for other than selling wood pellets by the bag.”
He figures that in addition to 300 gallons of oil to back up his water heater, he will burn about six tons of pellets this year, the equivalent of about 720 gallons of oil, at $240 per ton.
“It’s all economics,” he says.
On the other end of the spectrum is Full Bloom Market Garden in Whately, where owner Dewitt Thompson estimates the four boilers he installed to heat more than two acres of greenhouse space is displacing 60,000 gallons of fossil fuel a year for about $125,000 savings.
“It wouldn’t have happened if it hadn’t been for the grant,” said Thompson, adding that his 3.2 million BTU system would have cost $300,000 for the three boilers alone. The boilers’ cost was entirely underwritten by the grant, leaving Thompson with $100,000 in costs for related improvements to accommodate it. “Projects like this will help the boiler companies get things together and hopefully bring down their cost,” he added. “I think they’re expensive for the amount of heat they’re actually producing, as with any kind of newer burning technologies. These are gasification boilers, very efficient, very clean burning, and they produce very little ash or fly ash. This could be the future.”
That’s the hope of Sandri, where the bulk of its energy business is still in gasoline and diesel fuel sold at 105 stations in four states, but where renewable heating technologies now account for about 7 percent of the business in its heating-air condition-ventilation sector. That’s been beefed up with the company’s purchase of Pioneer Valley Cooling and Heating and of New England Pellet LLC’s Propell Energy subsidiary, and this year, it’s on target for its pellet sales to equal 1 million gallons of heating oil, said company spokeswoman Kristin Wedegartner.
“Our bulk wood pellet customer base is growing,” she said, adding that that growth is coming in southeastern Vermont and southwestern New Hampshire, as well as Franklin and Hampshire counties.
Jake Goodyear, Sandri’s vice president of renewable energy, said the stimulus funding helped anchor what may be one of the nation’s largest concentrations of wood-pellet boilers here with the subsidized sale of 20 Austrian-designed boilers at seven or eight commercial sites and half a dozen or so homes from the fall of 2010 through last spring. The business has also been helped by a New Hampshire boiler rebate program that provides homeowners with 30 percent of the total costs of their wood-pellet systems.
Goodyear said the OkoFEN and ACT Bioenergy systems — are about 87 percent efficient, and the cost of delivered wood pellets now is about half that of heating oil, so it makes sense for larger users, even without the federal subsidy.
Since then, Sandri, which has also moved to diversify its energy-businesses to include propane, solar power, as well as geothermal and pellet stoves, has installed more than 50 of the Austrian-designed wood-pellet boilers, which unlike regular pellet stoves are sophisticated central heating systems that automatically feed themselves, clean themselves and — most importantly — modulate temperatures according to outdoor temperature and the temperature of heated water returning through the system.
Through the federal stimulus program, the 82-year-old Greenfield company arranged 100 percent funding for installation of low-emission wood pellet boilers at eight institutional or commercial sites, offered dramatic discounts on the boilers to homeowners in Franklin and Hampshire counties; and purchased three $215,000 bulk pellet delivery trucks.
On the lower end of the spectrum is a 68,000 BTU boiler installed by Barry Elbaum at his six-apartment Montague building on Route 63.
By replacing the oil-fired boiler and then weatherizing the building and installing a solar water-heating system between the time he bought it 25 years ago and last year, Elbaum had already cut annual fuel consumption from 5,000 gallons to 1,200 gallons. With the cost of a gallon of oil at nearly $4, he said, “I was looking for a way to control the cost of running a building. I was looking for alternatives, because I was just petrified of oil.”
With natural gas not available and propane seeming “still tied to being exploited,” he’d dismissed pellet boilers as being too exorbitant in cost. And then the stimulus funding underwrote the system’s $40,000 cost down to just $10,000, he said.
“It’s a wonderful thing,” said Elbaum, who figures his payback on this system will be five years. “This wouldn’t be possible without a subsidy. Without a subsidy, I don’t know how anyone could afford to do this. The subsidy’s created an infrastructure for there to be an industry for other than selling wood pellets by the bag.”
He figures that in addition to 300 gallons of oil to back up his water heater, he will burn about six tons of pellets this year, the equivalent of about 720 gallons of oil, at $240 per ton.
“It’s all economics,” he says.
On the other end of the spectrum is Full Bloom Market Garden in Whately, where owner Dewitt Thompson estimates the four boilers he installed to heat more than two acres of greenhouse space is displacing 60,000 gallons of fossil fuel a year for about $125,000 savings.
“It wouldn’t have happened if it hadn’t been for the grant,” said Thompson, adding that his 3.2 million BTU system would have cost $300,000 for the three boilers alone. The boilers’ cost was entirely underwritten by the grant, leaving Thompson with $100,000 in costs for related improvements to accommodate it. “Projects like this will help the boiler companies get things together and hopefully bring down their cost,” he added. “I think they’re expensive for the amount of heat they’re actually producing, as with any kind of newer burning technologies. These are gasification boilers, very efficient, very clean burning, and they produce very little ash or fly ash. This could be the future.”
That’s the hope of Sandri, where the bulk of its energy business is still in gasoline and diesel fuel sold at 105 stations in four states, but where renewable heating technologies now account for about 7 percent of the business in its heating-air condition-ventilation sector. That’s been beefed up with the company’s purchase of Pioneer Valley Cooling and Heating and of New England Pellet LLC’s Propell Energy subsidiary, and this year, it’s on target for its pellet sales to equal 1 million gallons of heating oil, said company spokeswoman Kristin Wedegartner.
“Our bulk wood pellet customer base is growing,” she said, adding that that growth is coming in southeastern Vermont and southwestern New Hampshire, as well as Franklin and Hampshire counties.
Jake Goodyear, Sandri’s vice president of renewable energy, said the stimulus funding helped anchor what may be one of the nation’s largest concentrations of wood-pellet boilers here with the subsidized sale of 20 Austrian-designed boilers at seven or eight commercial sites and half a dozen or so homes from the fall of 2010 through last spring. The business has also been helped by a New Hampshire boiler rebate program that provides homeowners with 30 percent of the total costs of their wood-pellet systems.
Goodyear said the OkoFEN and ACT Bioenergy systems — are about 87 percent efficient, and the cost of delivered wood pellets now is about half that of heating oil, so it makes sense for larger users, even without the federal subsidy.
2013年1月27日星期日
The new Auris is back with a bang
The previous Auris is/was what I call a 'dutiful servant'. It got on with the job downstairs so you could get on with life upstairs. I don't think I've ever had a complaint from a reader about it – and I get lots of complaints.
By the same token, it was nothing more than effective and dull, with a truly forgettable cabin. All the while more and more competitors were offering service with a lot more of a smile.
The latest generation is no longer dowdy to look at, especially at the front where it has suddenly become one of the sharpest-looking in its class. The rear is more universal hatchback design but brings something to the table for all that. So the servant has changed its attire and now serves in a smart, crisp new outfit. I'm all for that.
Inside Toyota has taken the cabin criticisms on board – mind you, the version I had was a few steps up from basic and had brushed aluminium and nice-feeling plastic and upholstery.
I could, at this stage, throw a strop over something that might appear trivial to you. But I won't. I'll just give out for a minute . . . With all the preparation and work put into taking this several steps up the stairs, how could Toyota let it out with a rear wash wiper no longer than my middle finger. The back window was filthy in no time because I was driving on all sorts of roads and under all sorts of weather conditions. But all I had was an aperture I would consider far too small to peer out of. Strop over.
I had settled so quickly in this. Even though it is lower (and wider and just 30mm longer) I had no problem at all getting in. The seats suited me; I had my best position in 10 seconds and there was nothing too demanding on my fading intellect to find the thingies to work the audio, ventilation etc. The company's Touch system on my Luna version was brilliant. It was a simple, straightforward touchscreen that even I could follow. Oh, how I wish it could be replicated in others!
The 1.4-litre diesel is something of a favourite of mine. Like a good dinner made by a wily old cook, it puts your meat, two veg and nicely mashed potatoes on the plate every time.
To be fair, it could do with a few more horsepower to spruce it up from 90bhp – many of its rivals have (albeit larger) more powerful engines.
That said, this was really frugal (helped a little by a car that's 40kg lighter). Not too long ago, we'd have been flag waving the fact that a diesel engine dipped under the 100g/km and can consume as little as four litres every 100 kilometres (that's 74mpg – I'm afraid I could never get it that low).
On 15-inch wheels the emissions on this are 99g/km – impressive. On the 16-inch wheels that I had, it sneaks over the 100g mark to 103g/km – remember, there is a fine 1.33-litre petrol as well; low-mileage drivers don't need diesels.
But the best bit for me was the virtual lack of road/tyre noise in the cabin and a notable ability to glide over rough and bumpy surfaces. I would say this was the best I've come across for a while.
The revised electric power steering gave much better feedback and the suspension overall had more dynamism to it.
Yes, the Ford Focus has a sharper feel to its handling but the Auris had something rare in a family car – the feeling of being in something made for a more upstairs marque. I would say I felt better in it than I did in the subsequent Mercedes A-Class. Now that is sticking my neck out. Yet that is where this car has gone – from diligent servant to something of a modern-day equal.
True to the tradition of the press, the V was courageous and always sought and stuck to the truth, even risking punishment by lampooning the UST administration. But I think among all campus papers, the V excelled in the literary field. It used to have a separate magazine for literary works. It had literary contests every year for short stories, essays, poetry and plays, which later became the Rector’s Literary Awards, and still later the Gawad Ustetika, which added a “Pilipino” category in the short story, essay, and poetry writing contests.
When I was the V’s literary editor, I launched the Varsitarian Literary Quarterly, which published fiction, poetry, essays and literary criticism by professors, students and alumni. NVM Gonzalez’s “Children of the Ash-Covered Loam” was first published there. The story was later published as a book. Unfortunately, the Varsitarian Literary Quarterly was discontinued after I graduated. I think it should be revived. There is now no outlet for the literary output of Filipino writers, except one or two magazines—I can’t even remember which ones.
As part of the anniversary celebrations of both the V and UST (85 years for the V and 400 years for UST), I propose that they publish a book titled, “The Best of the Varsitarian.” It will be an anthology of the winners in the annual V Literary Contests, the Rector’s Literary Awards, and the Gawad Ustetika. The Palanca Memorial Awards publishes the winners in its annual literary contests, why not UST and the V? Many of the winners in the V Literary Contests have blossomed into the nation’s leading literary lights. (Witness the two National Artists for Literature—Jose and Lumbera. A third National Artist for Literature, NVM Gonzalez, was also a professor on the short story craft in Philets, UST.)
I understand the V Literary Magazine was revived, briefly, and a literary folio of winning entries to the V Literary Contests was published. Why not a more permanent book?
I confess I am biased for the V because I was once its literary editor and because I was able to finish college with the help of the V. I wrote a piece on that for the special edition of the V, which is called “Amihan,” for the anniversary celebration—and I am repeating here some of what I wrote there.
Yes, the V helped me finish a journalism course (Litt. B) at UST. Without it, I probably would have dropped out, as I would not have been able to afford the expense. I was a working student—although I had no regular job yet. I supported myself by freelancing for national magazines.
As a high school student at St. James Academy in Malabon, run by the Maryknoll Sisters, I started writing short stories and poetry. My literature teacher, Sr. Stephen Marie, encouraged me to write. She was the one who encouraged me to take up journalism at UST.
While still in St. James, I wrote a short story on the Hukbalahap rebellion then raging in Central Luzon. It was about a farmer whom the Huks tried to recruit. The farmer refused; he just wanted to be left alone to cultivate his small farm to support his family. The Huks finally shot him in the back while he was plowing his field. The final paragraphs described how he felt, what went through his mind as blood and life ebbed out of him.
I submitted it to the Philippines Free Press while I was still in high school, but I was already a freshman at the UST Faculty of Philosophy and Letters when it was published. For that story, I was paid by the Free Press the handsome amount of P50.
The amount of P50 is almost nothing today (it can hardly pay for one hamburger sandwich at a fast-food chain) but at that time, in the mid-1950s, it was a huge amount. Consider this for comparison: At that time, outstanding painters like Carlos V. Francisco and Vicente Manansala were paid only P50 for painting covers for This Week, Sunday Magazine of the Manila Chronicle. When I interviewed Fernando Amorsolo at his house on Espa?a Extension, Quezon City, he was selling several of his small oil landscape studies for only P50 each, but I could not afford to buy even one. All three painters are now National Artists and their paintings are now worth hundreds of thousands of pesos.
By the same token, it was nothing more than effective and dull, with a truly forgettable cabin. All the while more and more competitors were offering service with a lot more of a smile.
The latest generation is no longer dowdy to look at, especially at the front where it has suddenly become one of the sharpest-looking in its class. The rear is more universal hatchback design but brings something to the table for all that. So the servant has changed its attire and now serves in a smart, crisp new outfit. I'm all for that.
Inside Toyota has taken the cabin criticisms on board – mind you, the version I had was a few steps up from basic and had brushed aluminium and nice-feeling plastic and upholstery.
I could, at this stage, throw a strop over something that might appear trivial to you. But I won't. I'll just give out for a minute . . . With all the preparation and work put into taking this several steps up the stairs, how could Toyota let it out with a rear wash wiper no longer than my middle finger. The back window was filthy in no time because I was driving on all sorts of roads and under all sorts of weather conditions. But all I had was an aperture I would consider far too small to peer out of. Strop over.
I had settled so quickly in this. Even though it is lower (and wider and just 30mm longer) I had no problem at all getting in. The seats suited me; I had my best position in 10 seconds and there was nothing too demanding on my fading intellect to find the thingies to work the audio, ventilation etc. The company's Touch system on my Luna version was brilliant. It was a simple, straightforward touchscreen that even I could follow. Oh, how I wish it could be replicated in others!
The 1.4-litre diesel is something of a favourite of mine. Like a good dinner made by a wily old cook, it puts your meat, two veg and nicely mashed potatoes on the plate every time.
To be fair, it could do with a few more horsepower to spruce it up from 90bhp – many of its rivals have (albeit larger) more powerful engines.
That said, this was really frugal (helped a little by a car that's 40kg lighter). Not too long ago, we'd have been flag waving the fact that a diesel engine dipped under the 100g/km and can consume as little as four litres every 100 kilometres (that's 74mpg – I'm afraid I could never get it that low).
On 15-inch wheels the emissions on this are 99g/km – impressive. On the 16-inch wheels that I had, it sneaks over the 100g mark to 103g/km – remember, there is a fine 1.33-litre petrol as well; low-mileage drivers don't need diesels.
But the best bit for me was the virtual lack of road/tyre noise in the cabin and a notable ability to glide over rough and bumpy surfaces. I would say this was the best I've come across for a while.
The revised electric power steering gave much better feedback and the suspension overall had more dynamism to it.
Yes, the Ford Focus has a sharper feel to its handling but the Auris had something rare in a family car – the feeling of being in something made for a more upstairs marque. I would say I felt better in it than I did in the subsequent Mercedes A-Class. Now that is sticking my neck out. Yet that is where this car has gone – from diligent servant to something of a modern-day equal.
True to the tradition of the press, the V was courageous and always sought and stuck to the truth, even risking punishment by lampooning the UST administration. But I think among all campus papers, the V excelled in the literary field. It used to have a separate magazine for literary works. It had literary contests every year for short stories, essays, poetry and plays, which later became the Rector’s Literary Awards, and still later the Gawad Ustetika, which added a “Pilipino” category in the short story, essay, and poetry writing contests.
When I was the V’s literary editor, I launched the Varsitarian Literary Quarterly, which published fiction, poetry, essays and literary criticism by professors, students and alumni. NVM Gonzalez’s “Children of the Ash-Covered Loam” was first published there. The story was later published as a book. Unfortunately, the Varsitarian Literary Quarterly was discontinued after I graduated. I think it should be revived. There is now no outlet for the literary output of Filipino writers, except one or two magazines—I can’t even remember which ones.
As part of the anniversary celebrations of both the V and UST (85 years for the V and 400 years for UST), I propose that they publish a book titled, “The Best of the Varsitarian.” It will be an anthology of the winners in the annual V Literary Contests, the Rector’s Literary Awards, and the Gawad Ustetika. The Palanca Memorial Awards publishes the winners in its annual literary contests, why not UST and the V? Many of the winners in the V Literary Contests have blossomed into the nation’s leading literary lights. (Witness the two National Artists for Literature—Jose and Lumbera. A third National Artist for Literature, NVM Gonzalez, was also a professor on the short story craft in Philets, UST.)
I understand the V Literary Magazine was revived, briefly, and a literary folio of winning entries to the V Literary Contests was published. Why not a more permanent book?
I confess I am biased for the V because I was once its literary editor and because I was able to finish college with the help of the V. I wrote a piece on that for the special edition of the V, which is called “Amihan,” for the anniversary celebration—and I am repeating here some of what I wrote there.
Yes, the V helped me finish a journalism course (Litt. B) at UST. Without it, I probably would have dropped out, as I would not have been able to afford the expense. I was a working student—although I had no regular job yet. I supported myself by freelancing for national magazines.
As a high school student at St. James Academy in Malabon, run by the Maryknoll Sisters, I started writing short stories and poetry. My literature teacher, Sr. Stephen Marie, encouraged me to write. She was the one who encouraged me to take up journalism at UST.
While still in St. James, I wrote a short story on the Hukbalahap rebellion then raging in Central Luzon. It was about a farmer whom the Huks tried to recruit. The farmer refused; he just wanted to be left alone to cultivate his small farm to support his family. The Huks finally shot him in the back while he was plowing his field. The final paragraphs described how he felt, what went through his mind as blood and life ebbed out of him.
I submitted it to the Philippines Free Press while I was still in high school, but I was already a freshman at the UST Faculty of Philosophy and Letters when it was published. For that story, I was paid by the Free Press the handsome amount of P50.
The amount of P50 is almost nothing today (it can hardly pay for one hamburger sandwich at a fast-food chain) but at that time, in the mid-1950s, it was a huge amount. Consider this for comparison: At that time, outstanding painters like Carlos V. Francisco and Vicente Manansala were paid only P50 for painting covers for This Week, Sunday Magazine of the Manila Chronicle. When I interviewed Fernando Amorsolo at his house on Espa?a Extension, Quezon City, he was selling several of his small oil landscape studies for only P50 each, but I could not afford to buy even one. All three painters are now National Artists and their paintings are now worth hundreds of thousands of pesos.
Cape Charles home achieves highest LEED rating
Since he was a small boy, Luke Kellam has been swinging a hammer. But his building resum??, up until a few years ago, only included some tree forts and a house that he helped a contractor construct in Wyoming, where he once lived and worked as a wilderness instructor.
After the West, and a stint teaching in Northern Virginia, Kellam found himself back on Virginia's Eastern Shore, where he grew up in Belle Haven, itching to - again - pick up that hammer and build.
This time, though, Kellam dove into his new career by working alongside a master builder in Virginia Beach for a few years until he was ready to start his own company.
That road - and opening L.J. Kellam Construction in 2005 - has led Kellam to build a single-family home that has earned the Platinum Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, or LEED, certification by the United States Green Building Council.
Not only is this house the Virginia Eastern Shore's first platinum-certified LEED single-family home, it's where his father and step-mother live.
The Platinum rating is the highest LEED rating a project can achieve.
To be LEED-certified, a home must be "designed and constructed in accordance with the rigorous guidelines of the LEED for Homes green-building certification program," according to the U.S. Green Building Council's website, USGBC.org. "LEED for Homes is a consensus-developed, third party-verified, voluntary rating system which promotes the design and construction of high-performance green homes."
Participation demonstrates leadership, innovation, environmental stewardship and social responsibility, plus, the certified buildings lower operating costs, reduce waste, conserve energy and water, reduce harmful greenhouse gas emissions and provide a healthier environment for residents.
They also qualify for tax rebates, zoning allowances and other incentives in many cities across the country.
Understanding why Luke Kellam's father, Lucius J. Kellam III, decided to put the LEED stamp of approval on his and wife Tata Kellam's home is a history lesson of sorts.
Luke's grandfather, Lucius J. Kellam Jr., spearheaded and oversaw the construction of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, connecting South Hampton Roads with Virginia's Eastern Shore. He served as the Chesapeake Bay Bridge and Tunnel Commission's first chairman until 1993; the bridge-tunnel was named for him in 1987.
Luke's grandmother, Dorothy Douglass Kellam, according to her 2006 obituary, had a passion for "gardening and the beautification of her surroundings."
Their son, Luke's dad, Lucius Kellam III, followed in his parents' footsteps, not only serving as chair of the Bay Bridge and Tunnel Commission, he also became heavily involved in conservation efforts, serving as the first chair of the Virginia Eastern Shore Land Trust to help preserve the Shore's working farms, forests, resources and wildlife habitat, and as a longtime member of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation.
So when it came time to downsize, and build a new home on a 15-acre parcel on Old Plantation Creek just down the road from Cape Charles' historic town center, building an energy-efficient home fit the mindset.
This seemed like a "healthy way to downsize" and a way to serve as "an example of what could be done," Lucius said on a recent tour of his home.
According to Lucius Kellam III, the effort wasn't about being "altruistic,"... "it's just something we wanted to do."
And it's something son Luke Kellam, hammer in hand, fully jumped into.
The air feels like it changes is some inexplicable way after you walk from the outside into the Kellam home.
A lone log blazes away in the heat-efficient fireplace, placed in the center of a large, open room that melds with the kitchen. The oversized windows allow clear views of Old Plantation Creek, which is just stone's throw from where the Chesapeake Bay meets the Atlantic Ocean.
Luke Kellam is there to greet the visitors, shoes off and ready for the tour.
His father finishes some dishes in the kitchen, showing off the only item he said he requested for the house - a faucet that he taps off or on without raising or lowering a handle.
Some of the items that make this house platinum-LEED certified aren't obvious to the untrained eye.
Take the pergolas outside the home - a nice, aesthetic feature, but also a way to shade the house from the sun in the summer, and pick up the heat in the winter with angled blades of wood.
The process, Luke Kellam said, is not necessarily difficult. It's just time-consuming and precise, from making sure most of the building materials came from within a 500-miles radius of the house to hiring a third party to verify that jobs were done according to LEED standards.
Lucius Kellam III purchased the 15-acre property a few years ago with an existing house on the lot. The original plan was to refurbish and add onto that home, but unexpected circumstances called for tearing it down and replacing it.
By putting the new home, at about 4,000 square feet, on the old home's footprint, and by keeping the rustic, oyster-clam-shell-covered driveway, the house earned LEED points.
Other factors are less tangible and come together for the overall look and feel of the home, including a layer of 1-inch rigid foam for added insulation, shredded newspaper insulation in the walls, highly efficient windows, natural ventilation and the orientation of the house on the lot for shading and less direct sun - making for lower energy consumption.
A geo-thermal heat pump was installed to take advantage of the stable temperature of groundwater that is used to heat and cool the house.
In the summer, it uses water in the 50s - instead of air in the 80s - to cool the house, and the excess heat is reused to heat water for showers. Radiant floors allow the thermostat to be set at a lower temperature.
A majority of the lighting is energy-efficient, fluorescent, LED- or Energy Star-certified; the appliances are Energy Star rated. In addition, 24 photovoltaic panels atop the house produce solar energy.
Throughout the house, recycled materials hide in the form of counter tops, flooring and reconstituted roofing material made from steel.
In the master bath, Lucius Kellam III shows off a sparkling counter made of recycled mirrors and cabinets from recycled straw - yes, the kind that horses eat.
In the kitchen, the green-from-afar counter tops look more like shredded currency upon closer examination - but that's only because they are. In the laundry room, recycled drill bits emit a silver sheen from the counters. All earned the house LEED points.
On the floor there's bamboo, cork in the work-out room and a new type of linoleum in the laundry room, all of which provide another avenue to use recycled goods. The exterior is James Hardie siding, which is engineered to protect the house from harsh climate and moisture.
One of the region's leading green-design consultants, Janet Harrison with J. Harrison Architect in Annapolis, Md., designed the home with help from Cox Kliewer and Co. in Virginia Beach. The latter helped with the inside design.
Outside, because the existing footprint of the old home was used, little of the site was disturbed during construction. Where it was disturbed, the site was replanted with native grasses that need no watering.
The few plant beds close to the house are taken care of through a low-drip irrigation system supplied by rainwater - caught from the downspouts in transported to a 10,000-gallon cistern buried underground.
This reduces water use and runoff into the Chesapeake Bay, Luke Kellam said.
The overall impact has also reduced energy costs, according to father Lucius Kellam III. Since the couple moved in about 18 months ago, the cost for heating or air-conditioning and lights has been between $49 and $59 per month.
Although the Kellams would not disclose the cost of the project, "a lot of people assume that green building is prohibitively expensive," Luke Kellam said. "What we learned is that through careful planning and a very knowledgeable project team, it can be accomplished without pushing budgets beyond reach. Also, some of the energy-efficient systems qualify for tax credits."
After the West, and a stint teaching in Northern Virginia, Kellam found himself back on Virginia's Eastern Shore, where he grew up in Belle Haven, itching to - again - pick up that hammer and build.
This time, though, Kellam dove into his new career by working alongside a master builder in Virginia Beach for a few years until he was ready to start his own company.
That road - and opening L.J. Kellam Construction in 2005 - has led Kellam to build a single-family home that has earned the Platinum Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, or LEED, certification by the United States Green Building Council.
Not only is this house the Virginia Eastern Shore's first platinum-certified LEED single-family home, it's where his father and step-mother live.
The Platinum rating is the highest LEED rating a project can achieve.
To be LEED-certified, a home must be "designed and constructed in accordance with the rigorous guidelines of the LEED for Homes green-building certification program," according to the U.S. Green Building Council's website, USGBC.org. "LEED for Homes is a consensus-developed, third party-verified, voluntary rating system which promotes the design and construction of high-performance green homes."
Participation demonstrates leadership, innovation, environmental stewardship and social responsibility, plus, the certified buildings lower operating costs, reduce waste, conserve energy and water, reduce harmful greenhouse gas emissions and provide a healthier environment for residents.
They also qualify for tax rebates, zoning allowances and other incentives in many cities across the country.
Understanding why Luke Kellam's father, Lucius J. Kellam III, decided to put the LEED stamp of approval on his and wife Tata Kellam's home is a history lesson of sorts.
Luke's grandfather, Lucius J. Kellam Jr., spearheaded and oversaw the construction of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, connecting South Hampton Roads with Virginia's Eastern Shore. He served as the Chesapeake Bay Bridge and Tunnel Commission's first chairman until 1993; the bridge-tunnel was named for him in 1987.
Luke's grandmother, Dorothy Douglass Kellam, according to her 2006 obituary, had a passion for "gardening and the beautification of her surroundings."
Their son, Luke's dad, Lucius Kellam III, followed in his parents' footsteps, not only serving as chair of the Bay Bridge and Tunnel Commission, he also became heavily involved in conservation efforts, serving as the first chair of the Virginia Eastern Shore Land Trust to help preserve the Shore's working farms, forests, resources and wildlife habitat, and as a longtime member of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation.
So when it came time to downsize, and build a new home on a 15-acre parcel on Old Plantation Creek just down the road from Cape Charles' historic town center, building an energy-efficient home fit the mindset.
This seemed like a "healthy way to downsize" and a way to serve as "an example of what could be done," Lucius said on a recent tour of his home.
According to Lucius Kellam III, the effort wasn't about being "altruistic,"... "it's just something we wanted to do."
And it's something son Luke Kellam, hammer in hand, fully jumped into.
The air feels like it changes is some inexplicable way after you walk from the outside into the Kellam home.
A lone log blazes away in the heat-efficient fireplace, placed in the center of a large, open room that melds with the kitchen. The oversized windows allow clear views of Old Plantation Creek, which is just stone's throw from where the Chesapeake Bay meets the Atlantic Ocean.
Luke Kellam is there to greet the visitors, shoes off and ready for the tour.
His father finishes some dishes in the kitchen, showing off the only item he said he requested for the house - a faucet that he taps off or on without raising or lowering a handle.
Some of the items that make this house platinum-LEED certified aren't obvious to the untrained eye.
Take the pergolas outside the home - a nice, aesthetic feature, but also a way to shade the house from the sun in the summer, and pick up the heat in the winter with angled blades of wood.
The process, Luke Kellam said, is not necessarily difficult. It's just time-consuming and precise, from making sure most of the building materials came from within a 500-miles radius of the house to hiring a third party to verify that jobs were done according to LEED standards.
Lucius Kellam III purchased the 15-acre property a few years ago with an existing house on the lot. The original plan was to refurbish and add onto that home, but unexpected circumstances called for tearing it down and replacing it.
By putting the new home, at about 4,000 square feet, on the old home's footprint, and by keeping the rustic, oyster-clam-shell-covered driveway, the house earned LEED points.
Other factors are less tangible and come together for the overall look and feel of the home, including a layer of 1-inch rigid foam for added insulation, shredded newspaper insulation in the walls, highly efficient windows, natural ventilation and the orientation of the house on the lot for shading and less direct sun - making for lower energy consumption.
A geo-thermal heat pump was installed to take advantage of the stable temperature of groundwater that is used to heat and cool the house.
In the summer, it uses water in the 50s - instead of air in the 80s - to cool the house, and the excess heat is reused to heat water for showers. Radiant floors allow the thermostat to be set at a lower temperature.
A majority of the lighting is energy-efficient, fluorescent, LED- or Energy Star-certified; the appliances are Energy Star rated. In addition, 24 photovoltaic panels atop the house produce solar energy.
Throughout the house, recycled materials hide in the form of counter tops, flooring and reconstituted roofing material made from steel.
In the master bath, Lucius Kellam III shows off a sparkling counter made of recycled mirrors and cabinets from recycled straw - yes, the kind that horses eat.
In the kitchen, the green-from-afar counter tops look more like shredded currency upon closer examination - but that's only because they are. In the laundry room, recycled drill bits emit a silver sheen from the counters. All earned the house LEED points.
On the floor there's bamboo, cork in the work-out room and a new type of linoleum in the laundry room, all of which provide another avenue to use recycled goods. The exterior is James Hardie siding, which is engineered to protect the house from harsh climate and moisture.
One of the region's leading green-design consultants, Janet Harrison with J. Harrison Architect in Annapolis, Md., designed the home with help from Cox Kliewer and Co. in Virginia Beach. The latter helped with the inside design.
Outside, because the existing footprint of the old home was used, little of the site was disturbed during construction. Where it was disturbed, the site was replanted with native grasses that need no watering.
The few plant beds close to the house are taken care of through a low-drip irrigation system supplied by rainwater - caught from the downspouts in transported to a 10,000-gallon cistern buried underground.
This reduces water use and runoff into the Chesapeake Bay, Luke Kellam said.
The overall impact has also reduced energy costs, according to father Lucius Kellam III. Since the couple moved in about 18 months ago, the cost for heating or air-conditioning and lights has been between $49 and $59 per month.
Although the Kellams would not disclose the cost of the project, "a lot of people assume that green building is prohibitively expensive," Luke Kellam said. "What we learned is that through careful planning and a very knowledgeable project team, it can be accomplished without pushing budgets beyond reach. Also, some of the energy-efficient systems qualify for tax credits."
2013年1月23日星期三
Local volunteers gut a New Jersey
It had been one man's slice of heaven, just a few steps from the water. The beach house on the barrier island of Point Pleasant Beach, NJ, boasted a big deck overlooking the ocean, along with a pool and a hot tub. Then Sandy came to call. She wrecked the place like no high season renters ever could. Besides, this was a family's primary residence, not a rental.
Perhaps, Sandy thought the homeowner would be much happier with his hot tub in the middle of his swimming pool. And inside the house, mildew and mold had overstayed their vacations. Now, they crept over the floors and were creeping up the walls.
This is the way Lend A Hand volunteer Pat Derstler describes it. She and her co-workers representing the Camp Hill-based disaster recovery group had their work cut out.
A combination of elbow grease and liberal use of hammers and chisels removed the mold-encrusted walls. Then they pried up three soggy layers of floorboard, the heavy plywood and particle board now scattered on the lawn.
Bit by bit, the homeowner, who Derstler refers to only as Charlie, began to see his beach house coming back. Still, those first steps are always the hardest. They involve removing all that's ruined. And the homeowner can still remember how things were. Before the storm.
By the end of the day, the homeowner was referring to the Lend A Hand volunteers as Charlie's Angels, Derstler said. The long, hard and emotional day proved a good start toward getting back his slice heaven near the sand. But there's so much more to do.
Derstler said local laws will require Charlie to elevate his house on pillars. Then, its entire interior must be restored. It will be many months and many hours of labor before he and his wife can return here for fun in the sun. Some things will be restored. Others can't be.
"Their precious possessions, many of which can never be replaced, are gone forever," said Derstler of York. "All they have left is memories."
This story is the same for so many here. And no amount of media coverage can do justice to the scale of the disaster, Derstler insists.
"Unless you are here, you cannot imagine the devastation," she said. "We spend a week of our lives giving these people hope and encouragement, but their loss will remain in our hearts forever."
If you grew up in the ’90s, loving Wu-Tang or Cypress Hill or the Beatnuts or the Fugees, you probably had a “wait, what?” moment with Master P. I remember mine vividly: One night in 1997, at the summer camp where I was working, after all the kids had gone down to sleep for the night. One of my co-workers put a VHS of I’m ‘Bout It, the archetypal rapper-made home-movie that helped make P a star. I haven’t rewatched the movie since that night, but I remember being confused as hell that something this sloppy and bloody and plotless could exist. It didn’t seem anything like a real movie, but all the guys I watched it with spent the whole rest of the summer quoting it at every available opportunity.
A couple of months later, I had a second “wait, what” moment while flipping through The Source at a Hallmark newsstand near my house and seeing a big spread on P, showing off his mansion and luxury-car fleet and foyer with floor-tiles in the shape of a dollar sign. And it was like: This is the same guy? Who made that shitty movie? He’s a star somehow? P was still a regional sensation at the time — his solid-gold-bathroom MTV Cribs stage still to come — but during his meteoric rise over the next year, I never quite lost that sense of confusion. P struck me as someone who could barely rap, whose image was so new-money baroque that it looked like parody, whose signature catchphrase was actually more of a grunt. It took a while, but eventually I got sucked in. P’s flow was always rocky and garbled, but he built No Limit Records into a sort of comic-book universe of platinum-plated tanks and insane Pen & Pixel album covers and du-rags worn with spotless white suits.
The music from his Beats By The Pound production crew seemed dizzingly rudimentary at first, but it had its own logic and its own sort of hooks, and soon enough half the stuff on rap radio sounded something like it. P’s No Limit label gave a home to some excellent rappers (Mystikal, Mia X, Fiend, Young Bleed, eventually a very young Curren$y), and it eventually yielded one hell of a double-disc greatest hits album. And now that P has suddenly reemerged from years in the pop-cult wilderness, bringing a mixtape about a million times better than I could’ve expected, I’m realizing how badly I missed the big lug. It’s nice to have him back.
That type of rap — hard, unapologetic music about doing dirt — has largely fallen from grace; most rap up-and-comers are now post-Kanye/Drake emotive-fashion-plate types. Even Rick Ross, the last street-rap star left standing, has a silk-robed good-life persona leagues removed from the grimy gold-teeth swamp-kingpin intensity that P radiated even when he was at his pop peak. And it’s cool to see that he’s lined up just about every artist still making vital, remorseless, snarling street-rap at this late date. P is in the midst of relaunching No Limit, and rather than reuniting any of his old crews, he’s shown a shocking taste level in signing a couple of up-and-comers: D.C.’s Fat Trel and Atlanta’s Alley Boy. These guys were doing just fine on their own, but they sound better as foils to P; they could’ve been standout No Limit Soldiers 15 years ago. Trel is a beast of a rapper, East Coast enough that he pops his plosives with authority but Southern enough that he knows to let his voice sink deep into track. Alley Boy, meanwhile, is permanently hoarse and gnarled, croaking slick threats from the back of his throat.
The guests fit the same increasingly rarefied mold: The Game, Meek Mill, Chief Keef. Considering that Keef is only slightly more than a third P’s age, he sounds remarkably at-home next to the man on “It Don’t Make No Sense.” And Meek’s adrenaline-blasted opening verse on “Paper” has me wanting to turn into Oldboy and hammer-fight a hallway full of dudes. It’s like P looked over the current rap landscape, figured out exactly which lane needed filling, and assembled the cast of characters necessary to do it. “I ain’t fuckin’ J. Cole,” says P on “My Life,” and that might be the mission statement of this whole relaunch.
But the joys of Al Capone aren’t just curatorial; P ain’t fuckin’ A$AP Rocky either. For one thing, there’s his voice, which is just an excellent rap voice. It’s a wizened, guttural moan. P throws Southern-preacher emphases on the ends of his phrases, but he more or less whoops everything with absolute relish. That voice, the way he uses it, isn’t far removed from 2Pac or Scarface, two guys P used to call his contemporaries. And something else: You don’t go on to sell fifty bazillion records if you don’t know how to put a song together, and P knows how to put a song together. His choruses are usually just stray phrases repeated over and over, and they look dumb on paper: “Al Capone Al Capone! / They love Al Capone! / I don’t fuck with no haters, make them bad bitches moan!” But the way he delivers them, they hook their way into your brain and stay there all day.
Perhaps, Sandy thought the homeowner would be much happier with his hot tub in the middle of his swimming pool. And inside the house, mildew and mold had overstayed their vacations. Now, they crept over the floors and were creeping up the walls.
This is the way Lend A Hand volunteer Pat Derstler describes it. She and her co-workers representing the Camp Hill-based disaster recovery group had their work cut out.
A combination of elbow grease and liberal use of hammers and chisels removed the mold-encrusted walls. Then they pried up three soggy layers of floorboard, the heavy plywood and particle board now scattered on the lawn.
Bit by bit, the homeowner, who Derstler refers to only as Charlie, began to see his beach house coming back. Still, those first steps are always the hardest. They involve removing all that's ruined. And the homeowner can still remember how things were. Before the storm.
By the end of the day, the homeowner was referring to the Lend A Hand volunteers as Charlie's Angels, Derstler said. The long, hard and emotional day proved a good start toward getting back his slice heaven near the sand. But there's so much more to do.
Derstler said local laws will require Charlie to elevate his house on pillars. Then, its entire interior must be restored. It will be many months and many hours of labor before he and his wife can return here for fun in the sun. Some things will be restored. Others can't be.
"Their precious possessions, many of which can never be replaced, are gone forever," said Derstler of York. "All they have left is memories."
This story is the same for so many here. And no amount of media coverage can do justice to the scale of the disaster, Derstler insists.
"Unless you are here, you cannot imagine the devastation," she said. "We spend a week of our lives giving these people hope and encouragement, but their loss will remain in our hearts forever."
If you grew up in the ’90s, loving Wu-Tang or Cypress Hill or the Beatnuts or the Fugees, you probably had a “wait, what?” moment with Master P. I remember mine vividly: One night in 1997, at the summer camp where I was working, after all the kids had gone down to sleep for the night. One of my co-workers put a VHS of I’m ‘Bout It, the archetypal rapper-made home-movie that helped make P a star. I haven’t rewatched the movie since that night, but I remember being confused as hell that something this sloppy and bloody and plotless could exist. It didn’t seem anything like a real movie, but all the guys I watched it with spent the whole rest of the summer quoting it at every available opportunity.
A couple of months later, I had a second “wait, what” moment while flipping through The Source at a Hallmark newsstand near my house and seeing a big spread on P, showing off his mansion and luxury-car fleet and foyer with floor-tiles in the shape of a dollar sign. And it was like: This is the same guy? Who made that shitty movie? He’s a star somehow? P was still a regional sensation at the time — his solid-gold-bathroom MTV Cribs stage still to come — but during his meteoric rise over the next year, I never quite lost that sense of confusion. P struck me as someone who could barely rap, whose image was so new-money baroque that it looked like parody, whose signature catchphrase was actually more of a grunt. It took a while, but eventually I got sucked in. P’s flow was always rocky and garbled, but he built No Limit Records into a sort of comic-book universe of platinum-plated tanks and insane Pen & Pixel album covers and du-rags worn with spotless white suits.
The music from his Beats By The Pound production crew seemed dizzingly rudimentary at first, but it had its own logic and its own sort of hooks, and soon enough half the stuff on rap radio sounded something like it. P’s No Limit label gave a home to some excellent rappers (Mystikal, Mia X, Fiend, Young Bleed, eventually a very young Curren$y), and it eventually yielded one hell of a double-disc greatest hits album. And now that P has suddenly reemerged from years in the pop-cult wilderness, bringing a mixtape about a million times better than I could’ve expected, I’m realizing how badly I missed the big lug. It’s nice to have him back.
That type of rap — hard, unapologetic music about doing dirt — has largely fallen from grace; most rap up-and-comers are now post-Kanye/Drake emotive-fashion-plate types. Even Rick Ross, the last street-rap star left standing, has a silk-robed good-life persona leagues removed from the grimy gold-teeth swamp-kingpin intensity that P radiated even when he was at his pop peak. And it’s cool to see that he’s lined up just about every artist still making vital, remorseless, snarling street-rap at this late date. P is in the midst of relaunching No Limit, and rather than reuniting any of his old crews, he’s shown a shocking taste level in signing a couple of up-and-comers: D.C.’s Fat Trel and Atlanta’s Alley Boy. These guys were doing just fine on their own, but they sound better as foils to P; they could’ve been standout No Limit Soldiers 15 years ago. Trel is a beast of a rapper, East Coast enough that he pops his plosives with authority but Southern enough that he knows to let his voice sink deep into track. Alley Boy, meanwhile, is permanently hoarse and gnarled, croaking slick threats from the back of his throat.
The guests fit the same increasingly rarefied mold: The Game, Meek Mill, Chief Keef. Considering that Keef is only slightly more than a third P’s age, he sounds remarkably at-home next to the man on “It Don’t Make No Sense.” And Meek’s adrenaline-blasted opening verse on “Paper” has me wanting to turn into Oldboy and hammer-fight a hallway full of dudes. It’s like P looked over the current rap landscape, figured out exactly which lane needed filling, and assembled the cast of characters necessary to do it. “I ain’t fuckin’ J. Cole,” says P on “My Life,” and that might be the mission statement of this whole relaunch.
But the joys of Al Capone aren’t just curatorial; P ain’t fuckin’ A$AP Rocky either. For one thing, there’s his voice, which is just an excellent rap voice. It’s a wizened, guttural moan. P throws Southern-preacher emphases on the ends of his phrases, but he more or less whoops everything with absolute relish. That voice, the way he uses it, isn’t far removed from 2Pac or Scarface, two guys P used to call his contemporaries. And something else: You don’t go on to sell fifty bazillion records if you don’t know how to put a song together, and P knows how to put a song together. His choruses are usually just stray phrases repeated over and over, and they look dumb on paper: “Al Capone Al Capone! / They love Al Capone! / I don’t fuck with no haters, make them bad bitches moan!” But the way he delivers them, they hook their way into your brain and stay there all day.
West Michigan furniture
JR Automation Technologies’ business grew more than 25 percent in the last two years, thanks in part to West Michigan’s emerging advanced battery industry.
The Holland Township company makes capital machinery for suppliers of advanced energy storage. What began with orders in West Michigan has led to sales across North America.
“It’s a new industry and very chaotic,” said Scot Lindemann, vice president of engineering and operations for JR Automaton Technologies, part of the Huizenga Manufacturing Group.
“It will go through the cycles but in Michigan for sure there are a lot of companies that are in it for the long haul. The ones who are the flash-in-the-pans will come and go. But the long haul investment is real.”
Lindemann was one of more than 60 people from area businesses who attend a luncheon sponsored by Lakeshore Advantage and Grand Valley State University.
They came to hear Dan Radomski, vice president of new market services at NextEnergy, a nonprofit launched by the state a decade ago to help grow Michigan’s energy sector.
NextEnergy provides market research and other intel intended to help companies move into the industry faster and smarter.
“We share our intelligence in the hopes we create a new market for the region, and create jobs and investment,” said Radomski.
Many of the West Michigan office furniture and automotive suppliers have the potential to expand into the advance battery industry.
“One of things we found is what made us big in furniture or automotive is that we owned a big part of that supply chain from materials to sub-components to sub-assembly to the actual final product, and all the design, engineering and tooling in between,” said Radomski. “We only have part of that value chain right now in batteries but we certainly have the right competency.”
The opening of the LG Chem and JCI lithium ion battery plants in Holland has generated a supplier network of 16 companies.
“Today, between LG, JCI and these 16 suppliers, we have 500 employees in industry, up from zero two years ago,” said Randy Thelen, president of Lakeshore Advantage, the economic development agency credited with convincing the companies to build their state-of-the-art plants in Holland.
He sees the potential for the number of battery suppliers in West Michigan to increase by another five to 10 companies but his focus is also on helping the suppliers in the market today grow their sales and reach.
Concerns about technology, bankruptcies and production slowdowns are considered short-term issues by those in the industry.
“This is an emerging technology and an emerging industry breaking into new markets,” said Thelen. “There are growing pains. I think here in West Michigan the strength is that we have two very strong companies with global reach and incredible track records.”
He notes that LG Chem is already one of the world’s biggest lithium ion producer while Johnson Controls is a global leader in battery systems.
The federal government’s $300 million investment in the Holland battery plants has generated a criticism especially during the presidential election.
“It’s a global race of innovation so those production plants are going to happen somewhere in the world and the federal government fought to get them here in the U.S. and the state of Michigan just did a better job of making it best place to come to by matching some of their own incentives with the federal,” Radomski said.
PHS head coach Tim Campbell believes his team is headed in the right direction.
“We are healthy and back to full strength so we have crossed the first obstacle,” said Campbell, whose squad improved to 6-4-1 with a 5-1 win over Wall last Friday at Baker Rink.
“With the postseasons this group of guys has had the last three years, they understand what it takes. They know we are not going to win every game. When you get to this point, you need to learn from your mistakes and learn what it takes to be successful. They are putting those lessons to use. I would rather go through some bumps and bruises in the beginning in order to be playing our best at the end.”
The return of senior star Matt DiTosto from a hand injury puts the Little Tigers in a stronger position.
“Obviously, Matt brings another skill set,” said Campbell of DiTosto, who tallied a goal and an assist in the win over Wall with Connor McCormick scoring two goals.
“It brings a confidence, every player knows that we are at full strength. He is a playmaker, not just a goal scorer. The past is the past, he missed a few weeks. I told him he can still mold his senior year and make it into what he wants it to be.”
The Holland Township company makes capital machinery for suppliers of advanced energy storage. What began with orders in West Michigan has led to sales across North America.
“It’s a new industry and very chaotic,” said Scot Lindemann, vice president of engineering and operations for JR Automaton Technologies, part of the Huizenga Manufacturing Group.
“It will go through the cycles but in Michigan for sure there are a lot of companies that are in it for the long haul. The ones who are the flash-in-the-pans will come and go. But the long haul investment is real.”
Lindemann was one of more than 60 people from area businesses who attend a luncheon sponsored by Lakeshore Advantage and Grand Valley State University.
They came to hear Dan Radomski, vice president of new market services at NextEnergy, a nonprofit launched by the state a decade ago to help grow Michigan’s energy sector.
NextEnergy provides market research and other intel intended to help companies move into the industry faster and smarter.
“We share our intelligence in the hopes we create a new market for the region, and create jobs and investment,” said Radomski.
Many of the West Michigan office furniture and automotive suppliers have the potential to expand into the advance battery industry.
“One of things we found is what made us big in furniture or automotive is that we owned a big part of that supply chain from materials to sub-components to sub-assembly to the actual final product, and all the design, engineering and tooling in between,” said Radomski. “We only have part of that value chain right now in batteries but we certainly have the right competency.”
The opening of the LG Chem and JCI lithium ion battery plants in Holland has generated a supplier network of 16 companies.
“Today, between LG, JCI and these 16 suppliers, we have 500 employees in industry, up from zero two years ago,” said Randy Thelen, president of Lakeshore Advantage, the economic development agency credited with convincing the companies to build their state-of-the-art plants in Holland.
He sees the potential for the number of battery suppliers in West Michigan to increase by another five to 10 companies but his focus is also on helping the suppliers in the market today grow their sales and reach.
Concerns about technology, bankruptcies and production slowdowns are considered short-term issues by those in the industry.
“This is an emerging technology and an emerging industry breaking into new markets,” said Thelen. “There are growing pains. I think here in West Michigan the strength is that we have two very strong companies with global reach and incredible track records.”
He notes that LG Chem is already one of the world’s biggest lithium ion producer while Johnson Controls is a global leader in battery systems.
The federal government’s $300 million investment in the Holland battery plants has generated a criticism especially during the presidential election.
“It’s a global race of innovation so those production plants are going to happen somewhere in the world and the federal government fought to get them here in the U.S. and the state of Michigan just did a better job of making it best place to come to by matching some of their own incentives with the federal,” Radomski said.
PHS head coach Tim Campbell believes his team is headed in the right direction.
“We are healthy and back to full strength so we have crossed the first obstacle,” said Campbell, whose squad improved to 6-4-1 with a 5-1 win over Wall last Friday at Baker Rink.
“With the postseasons this group of guys has had the last three years, they understand what it takes. They know we are not going to win every game. When you get to this point, you need to learn from your mistakes and learn what it takes to be successful. They are putting those lessons to use. I would rather go through some bumps and bruises in the beginning in order to be playing our best at the end.”
The return of senior star Matt DiTosto from a hand injury puts the Little Tigers in a stronger position.
“Obviously, Matt brings another skill set,” said Campbell of DiTosto, who tallied a goal and an assist in the win over Wall with Connor McCormick scoring two goals.
“It brings a confidence, every player knows that we are at full strength. He is a playmaker, not just a goal scorer. The past is the past, he missed a few weeks. I told him he can still mold his senior year and make it into what he wants it to be.”
2013年1月21日星期一
Ducted-fan AirMule to get new blades
Urban Aeronautics has manufactured new propeller blades that will be fitted to its unmanned AirMule ducted fan vertical take-off and landing aircraft.
Using in-house capabilities, the company has manufactured 12 composite rotor blades for the two new six-bladed rotors that it plans to install on the aircraft next month. These will replace the four-bladed rotors that have been used since the beginning of 2010.
Company president Rafi Yoeli says the design of the blades and the construction of their associated tooling, rotor hubs, variable pitch mechanism, retention systems and other associated hardware have been carried out by Urban Aeronautics staff. The blade design complies with the loads specified for the US Federal Aviation Administration's FAR 35 standard for propellers, he adds.
The first test flight of a Turbomeca Arriel 1-engined AirMule equipped with the new rotor blades is scheduled for mid-February.
Meanwhile, Urban Aeronautics is also accelerating the assembly of a second AirMule prototype in preparation for a series of demonstration flights requested by potential customers. The aircraft is intended primarily as a reserve, to ensure uninterrupted flight testing once mission demonstrations to customers are underway: a milestone currently planned for mid-2014.
The first prototype of the AirMule internal rotor vehicle has recently been fitted with a double redundant hydraulic system to enable continued rotor pitch control in case of a failure in one of the pressure supply lines or any hydraulic control system hardware.
The Israeli company is planning to complete an automatic precision landing demonstration in the next few months, with a Controp-produced D-STAMP stabilised eletro-optical payload having already been installed. The sensor forms part of a system that will enable the aircraft to guide itself to touch down over any high contrast marker, or alternatively at a laser spot placed in a combat zone.
The company says the auto-landing feature will be the final step towards enabling fully autonomous take-off to landing flight paths using pre-programmed routes. Accurate positioning will be maintained en-route by an on-board inertial navigation system, used in conjunction with GPS or, alternatively, a Doppler navigation unit.
After Sunday's NFL Conference Championship Games culminated in the "HarBowl", it got me thinking about things from a Bengals perspective. A range of emotions ensued when it came to pass that a divisional rival of the Bengals was once again headed to the Super Bowl, while the orange and black were sitting at home or on the golf course. There's a mixture of two emotions that usually come to the surface when thinking about the Ravens and Steelers: a strong dislike that is brought on mostly by envy.
Bengals fans have to be pleased with what they've seen from their own team over the past five years. They have a division title and two Wild Card berths in that timespan, but unfortunately, the team hasn't achieved any postseason wins. The 2011 rebuilding of the squad seems to be headed in the right direction with 19 wins the past two seasons and the breaking of 30-year-old curse of not making the postseason in back-to-back seasons. Still, it's that lack of postseason success which leaves a sour taste.
Additionally, things look solid again this offseason for Cincinnati. The Bengals were able to retain both of their quality coordinators who had gained interest for head coaching vacancies at various destinations, and they have an extra second round pick to help their roster. If they're able to do some good things in free agency, this team could once again be in the hunt for the playoffs. There's a strong feeling of consistency starting to brew in Cincinnati these days--something that hasn't been around these parts since the 1980s.
I had that familiar envious feeling while on Twitter Sunday night. Aside from hearing that the Harbaugh brothers outscored their opponents 35-0 in the second half in their respective Championship games, I made an observation about the success of the fellow AFC North powerhouses. With the Ravens' upcoming appearance in Super Bowl XLVII, it marks the third time in the last five Super Bowls that either the Ravens or Steelers have or will appear in the game. Those two AFC North teams have also participated in four of the last five AFC Championship games.
You could go back even further in recent history to the Steelers' victory in Super Bowl XL and the Ravens' victory after the 2000 season in Super Bowl XXXV to look deeper at the sustained success that both teams have had over the past decade or so. Sunday's result continued the dominance of the two AFC North bullies. The Ravens are going on 17 years old as a franchise and they are going to try and achieve their second Super Bowl Championship--which would be two more (should they win the big game) than the 44-year-old Bengals franchise has to their name.
Another fascinating aspect differentiating the Bengals from the Ravens and Steelers is the attitude of a "successful" and/or "disappointing season". The Steelers had themselves a "disappointing season" last year, by their own admission, and they were in the playoff hunt until the Week 16, barely missing out on the playoffs at 8-8. A "disappointing season" in Cincinnati is going 4-12 and have your then-franchise quarterback bail on the team.
There's an old adage that says "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery". Marvin Lewis is from the Pittsburgh area and coached in Baltimore--it's safe to say that he understands the culture of those respective franchises. He has preached the need for a strong running game and solid defense in order to win in the brutal AFC North and has been putting the pieces together for a winning formula. Heck, Lewis has come out and said that he wants to build the Bengals in the mold of the Steelers and Ravens. It's a lofty but wise goal.
Using in-house capabilities, the company has manufactured 12 composite rotor blades for the two new six-bladed rotors that it plans to install on the aircraft next month. These will replace the four-bladed rotors that have been used since the beginning of 2010.
Company president Rafi Yoeli says the design of the blades and the construction of their associated tooling, rotor hubs, variable pitch mechanism, retention systems and other associated hardware have been carried out by Urban Aeronautics staff. The blade design complies with the loads specified for the US Federal Aviation Administration's FAR 35 standard for propellers, he adds.
The first test flight of a Turbomeca Arriel 1-engined AirMule equipped with the new rotor blades is scheduled for mid-February.
Meanwhile, Urban Aeronautics is also accelerating the assembly of a second AirMule prototype in preparation for a series of demonstration flights requested by potential customers. The aircraft is intended primarily as a reserve, to ensure uninterrupted flight testing once mission demonstrations to customers are underway: a milestone currently planned for mid-2014.
The first prototype of the AirMule internal rotor vehicle has recently been fitted with a double redundant hydraulic system to enable continued rotor pitch control in case of a failure in one of the pressure supply lines or any hydraulic control system hardware.
The Israeli company is planning to complete an automatic precision landing demonstration in the next few months, with a Controp-produced D-STAMP stabilised eletro-optical payload having already been installed. The sensor forms part of a system that will enable the aircraft to guide itself to touch down over any high contrast marker, or alternatively at a laser spot placed in a combat zone.
The company says the auto-landing feature will be the final step towards enabling fully autonomous take-off to landing flight paths using pre-programmed routes. Accurate positioning will be maintained en-route by an on-board inertial navigation system, used in conjunction with GPS or, alternatively, a Doppler navigation unit.
After Sunday's NFL Conference Championship Games culminated in the "HarBowl", it got me thinking about things from a Bengals perspective. A range of emotions ensued when it came to pass that a divisional rival of the Bengals was once again headed to the Super Bowl, while the orange and black were sitting at home or on the golf course. There's a mixture of two emotions that usually come to the surface when thinking about the Ravens and Steelers: a strong dislike that is brought on mostly by envy.
Bengals fans have to be pleased with what they've seen from their own team over the past five years. They have a division title and two Wild Card berths in that timespan, but unfortunately, the team hasn't achieved any postseason wins. The 2011 rebuilding of the squad seems to be headed in the right direction with 19 wins the past two seasons and the breaking of 30-year-old curse of not making the postseason in back-to-back seasons. Still, it's that lack of postseason success which leaves a sour taste.
Additionally, things look solid again this offseason for Cincinnati. The Bengals were able to retain both of their quality coordinators who had gained interest for head coaching vacancies at various destinations, and they have an extra second round pick to help their roster. If they're able to do some good things in free agency, this team could once again be in the hunt for the playoffs. There's a strong feeling of consistency starting to brew in Cincinnati these days--something that hasn't been around these parts since the 1980s.
I had that familiar envious feeling while on Twitter Sunday night. Aside from hearing that the Harbaugh brothers outscored their opponents 35-0 in the second half in their respective Championship games, I made an observation about the success of the fellow AFC North powerhouses. With the Ravens' upcoming appearance in Super Bowl XLVII, it marks the third time in the last five Super Bowls that either the Ravens or Steelers have or will appear in the game. Those two AFC North teams have also participated in four of the last five AFC Championship games.
You could go back even further in recent history to the Steelers' victory in Super Bowl XL and the Ravens' victory after the 2000 season in Super Bowl XXXV to look deeper at the sustained success that both teams have had over the past decade or so. Sunday's result continued the dominance of the two AFC North bullies. The Ravens are going on 17 years old as a franchise and they are going to try and achieve their second Super Bowl Championship--which would be two more (should they win the big game) than the 44-year-old Bengals franchise has to their name.
Another fascinating aspect differentiating the Bengals from the Ravens and Steelers is the attitude of a "successful" and/or "disappointing season". The Steelers had themselves a "disappointing season" last year, by their own admission, and they were in the playoff hunt until the Week 16, barely missing out on the playoffs at 8-8. A "disappointing season" in Cincinnati is going 4-12 and have your then-franchise quarterback bail on the team.
There's an old adage that says "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery". Marvin Lewis is from the Pittsburgh area and coached in Baltimore--it's safe to say that he understands the culture of those respective franchises. He has preached the need for a strong running game and solid defense in order to win in the brutal AFC North and has been putting the pieces together for a winning formula. Heck, Lewis has come out and said that he wants to build the Bengals in the mold of the Steelers and Ravens. It's a lofty but wise goal.
Commitments and obligations
Conservatives have a legitimate gripe about America's excessive "commitments and obligations" to "unfunded liabilities" but their focus on Medicare and social security misses the larger point: our disastrous commitment to the current national lifestyle, in particular suburban sprawl and everything it entails.
This point came across vividly in a video recently released by the usually level-headed David McAlvaney titled "THE FUSE IS LIT PART 3 — AN AMERICAN RECKONING." In it, the smooth and articulate McAlvaney is shown behind the wheel of his SUV tooling across the picturesque small town in Colorado where he lives inveighing against the public that elects politicians who deliver the voters cash benefits. This dynamic is surely deadly, and implies Democracy's tragic self-limiting nature. But McAlvaney suggests if we could come to grips with the fiscal quandary of "entitlement" spending, American life would just rock on.
This is plainly not so, but it also reveals the tragic shortsightedness of even thoughtful conservatives - and there are some out there, indeed we need them, indeed one of the political tragedies of recent American history is the surrender of conservatism to religious hysterics, professional ignoramuses, military chauvinists, and flat-earthers. A true conservative would recognize the land development pattern of the millennial USA as a consequence of tragic collective choices, a living arrangement with no future, a trap every bit as lethal as Medicare and social security.
The catch is we're not going to unbuild suburbia and all its accessories. There's no way to legislate it away. We're stuck with it. The suburban entitlement will fail even more dramatically than the social entitlements that conservatives grouse about because there's no way to "print" cheap oil or well-paid livelihoods the way you can monetize public debt to support social spending. You can "print" mortgages, of course, for people with little chance of paying them down, but that only leads to the financial hostage racket called too-big-to-fail banking, and we know where that's gotten us.
Around the Internet, in the vale of financial podcasting, you can hear voices cheerleading the "return" of the house-building industry. Is it a good thing that real estate speculators are banging up yet more housing subdivisions in the hills around San Diego? I can tell you why they are doing it: because that is the only way they know how to build anything in California. They're stuck in the habits and practices of the 20th century, building more car dependent stuff for a society that is already dying a slow death from living that way.
In the collapse of all these rackets, bad habits, and brain-dead behaviors that are sure to come, historians will have a hard time sorting out what exactly brought down the empire. The big element that will not be so visible is the poverty of imagination that set the tone for it — especially among public figures and spokespeople who should have seen and articulated these relationships, and extra-especially among self-proclaimed conservatives.
Yesterday happened to be the day when the articulator-in-chief got his official new lease in office. Genial figure that he is, I don't think President Obama has a clue where all this is heading. He argued for stricter gun laws, but that horse is already so far out of the barn it's in the next county. We don't seem to realize that America is now fully armed. Additional firearms are just superfluous at this point. And to some degree the people armed themselves in direct consequence as their government tinkered with due process, and sent drone aircraft into the American skies, and commenced computer hacking operations over every business transaction in the system, and voided the rule-of-law against criminal uber-bankers who creamed off the nation's wealth while holding the economy hostage. Since the armed public is not ready to mount an insurrection against this impudence, the dangerous tension is expressed in morbid and tragic episodes of mass shootings by maniacs against the innocent. What I want to know: where is the lone swindled rancher who waits to bushwhack Jon Corzine of MF Global in the parking lots of Easthampton, since the law won't touch him?
I suppose we'll hear about immigration reform in the coming days. It will surely be some cockamamie proposal to legitimize the "undocumented" by shanghaiing them into the military (think: mercenaries), and otherwise keeping the welcome mat down for more newcomers waiting politely at the front door. This is insane, of course. The USA needs to reduce its population consistent with the tremendous economic contraction underway world-wide. There are too many people for the world to support and shifting them into this country from regions more rapidly affected by contraction is just dumb — but we have our cultural myths to defend ... and voting blocs to appease.
It seems obvious to me that in the, say, four years ahead (one presidential term), we will not come to grips with any of the forces of reality bearing down on us. We will lose control of the money system; we'll go broke trying to keep up our oil supplies; the American public will get more economically desperate and angry; and pretty soon the practical matters of daily life will become rather harsh. And at that point faith in the system finally evaporates and people fight over the table scraps of a failed polity.
Certwood, based in Luton, is a busy trade moulder producing 500,000 components per month for three core sectors; automotive – a tier one supplier of technically complex interior mouldings, stadium seating and its own storage tray system used by schools and laboratories.
All 20 moulding machines at Certwood are equipped with robots to unload mouldings so process automation is second nature to the organisation. The new FANUC M-10iA robots are six axes arms providing increased flexibility over conventional ‘Beam’ three axis robots commonly used by the plastics industry.
Steve Dennis, Managing Director of Certwood, explains, “An automotive customer asked us to look at a process improvement on a current product with a view to introducing it later into a proposed new product. The original process involved manually applying a label to a moulding which we first had to cool down to allow gases to fully disperse. Time taken to accurately position the label and the risk of it bubbling were two key areas to address.
“We worked with plastics automation specialists Hi-Tech Automation to identify solutions and focused on In Mould Labelling (IML) which is more common in the food packaging sector. The process offers a neat solution as the label is positioned in the mould tool and the part is moulded around it making it non removable, an essential requirement for a safety critical component, and the need to cool down the moulding is eliminated.”
The six axes FANUC robot is equipped with end of arm tooling to handle a label, a moulding and a static discharge device. The robot vacuum grips a label from a dispenser cassette and waits for the mould tool to open. When it opens the robot tooling grips the ejected product and moves the label to within 5.0mm of its position on the tool. A static charge is then applied which allows the label to be held accurately in place once the robot has positioned it. The robot moves out of the mould tool and the moulding cycle continues.
Automating the process has provided an aesthetically improved moulding with a more accurately positioned label that cannot be peeled away. Production time has been reduced and storage issues removed with the elimination of the need to cool prior to labelling.
“We met our customer’s request to research improvements in this labelling process delivering both quality and economic advantage,” continued Steve Dennis, “IML is now an established part of our service offering, it illustrates that manufacturing innovation gives added value to our customers and also gives Certwood a process that takes it up a level and supports customer retention.”
This point came across vividly in a video recently released by the usually level-headed David McAlvaney titled "THE FUSE IS LIT PART 3 — AN AMERICAN RECKONING." In it, the smooth and articulate McAlvaney is shown behind the wheel of his SUV tooling across the picturesque small town in Colorado where he lives inveighing against the public that elects politicians who deliver the voters cash benefits. This dynamic is surely deadly, and implies Democracy's tragic self-limiting nature. But McAlvaney suggests if we could come to grips with the fiscal quandary of "entitlement" spending, American life would just rock on.
This is plainly not so, but it also reveals the tragic shortsightedness of even thoughtful conservatives - and there are some out there, indeed we need them, indeed one of the political tragedies of recent American history is the surrender of conservatism to religious hysterics, professional ignoramuses, military chauvinists, and flat-earthers. A true conservative would recognize the land development pattern of the millennial USA as a consequence of tragic collective choices, a living arrangement with no future, a trap every bit as lethal as Medicare and social security.
The catch is we're not going to unbuild suburbia and all its accessories. There's no way to legislate it away. We're stuck with it. The suburban entitlement will fail even more dramatically than the social entitlements that conservatives grouse about because there's no way to "print" cheap oil or well-paid livelihoods the way you can monetize public debt to support social spending. You can "print" mortgages, of course, for people with little chance of paying them down, but that only leads to the financial hostage racket called too-big-to-fail banking, and we know where that's gotten us.
Around the Internet, in the vale of financial podcasting, you can hear voices cheerleading the "return" of the house-building industry. Is it a good thing that real estate speculators are banging up yet more housing subdivisions in the hills around San Diego? I can tell you why they are doing it: because that is the only way they know how to build anything in California. They're stuck in the habits and practices of the 20th century, building more car dependent stuff for a society that is already dying a slow death from living that way.
In the collapse of all these rackets, bad habits, and brain-dead behaviors that are sure to come, historians will have a hard time sorting out what exactly brought down the empire. The big element that will not be so visible is the poverty of imagination that set the tone for it — especially among public figures and spokespeople who should have seen and articulated these relationships, and extra-especially among self-proclaimed conservatives.
Yesterday happened to be the day when the articulator-in-chief got his official new lease in office. Genial figure that he is, I don't think President Obama has a clue where all this is heading. He argued for stricter gun laws, but that horse is already so far out of the barn it's in the next county. We don't seem to realize that America is now fully armed. Additional firearms are just superfluous at this point. And to some degree the people armed themselves in direct consequence as their government tinkered with due process, and sent drone aircraft into the American skies, and commenced computer hacking operations over every business transaction in the system, and voided the rule-of-law against criminal uber-bankers who creamed off the nation's wealth while holding the economy hostage. Since the armed public is not ready to mount an insurrection against this impudence, the dangerous tension is expressed in morbid and tragic episodes of mass shootings by maniacs against the innocent. What I want to know: where is the lone swindled rancher who waits to bushwhack Jon Corzine of MF Global in the parking lots of Easthampton, since the law won't touch him?
I suppose we'll hear about immigration reform in the coming days. It will surely be some cockamamie proposal to legitimize the "undocumented" by shanghaiing them into the military (think: mercenaries), and otherwise keeping the welcome mat down for more newcomers waiting politely at the front door. This is insane, of course. The USA needs to reduce its population consistent with the tremendous economic contraction underway world-wide. There are too many people for the world to support and shifting them into this country from regions more rapidly affected by contraction is just dumb — but we have our cultural myths to defend ... and voting blocs to appease.
It seems obvious to me that in the, say, four years ahead (one presidential term), we will not come to grips with any of the forces of reality bearing down on us. We will lose control of the money system; we'll go broke trying to keep up our oil supplies; the American public will get more economically desperate and angry; and pretty soon the practical matters of daily life will become rather harsh. And at that point faith in the system finally evaporates and people fight over the table scraps of a failed polity.
Certwood, based in Luton, is a busy trade moulder producing 500,000 components per month for three core sectors; automotive – a tier one supplier of technically complex interior mouldings, stadium seating and its own storage tray system used by schools and laboratories.
All 20 moulding machines at Certwood are equipped with robots to unload mouldings so process automation is second nature to the organisation. The new FANUC M-10iA robots are six axes arms providing increased flexibility over conventional ‘Beam’ three axis robots commonly used by the plastics industry.
Steve Dennis, Managing Director of Certwood, explains, “An automotive customer asked us to look at a process improvement on a current product with a view to introducing it later into a proposed new product. The original process involved manually applying a label to a moulding which we first had to cool down to allow gases to fully disperse. Time taken to accurately position the label and the risk of it bubbling were two key areas to address.
“We worked with plastics automation specialists Hi-Tech Automation to identify solutions and focused on In Mould Labelling (IML) which is more common in the food packaging sector. The process offers a neat solution as the label is positioned in the mould tool and the part is moulded around it making it non removable, an essential requirement for a safety critical component, and the need to cool down the moulding is eliminated.”
The six axes FANUC robot is equipped with end of arm tooling to handle a label, a moulding and a static discharge device. The robot vacuum grips a label from a dispenser cassette and waits for the mould tool to open. When it opens the robot tooling grips the ejected product and moves the label to within 5.0mm of its position on the tool. A static charge is then applied which allows the label to be held accurately in place once the robot has positioned it. The robot moves out of the mould tool and the moulding cycle continues.
Automating the process has provided an aesthetically improved moulding with a more accurately positioned label that cannot be peeled away. Production time has been reduced and storage issues removed with the elimination of the need to cool prior to labelling.
“We met our customer’s request to research improvements in this labelling process delivering both quality and economic advantage,” continued Steve Dennis, “IML is now an established part of our service offering, it illustrates that manufacturing innovation gives added value to our customers and also gives Certwood a process that takes it up a level and supports customer retention.”
2013年1月17日星期四
Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize
I knew next to nothing about the desert – nothing about its geology, its geography, the kind of people who lived here. We’d stretched out in bed in Glasgow and you’d said what about the desert and we were here now. You’d said what about the Grand Canyon? That was somewhere around here – that pink and purple vein – and so was the Joshua Tree – that old thing that looked like a pile of hair blowing in the wind. We’d stretched out in bed and you said you wanted to go to Death Canyon – you thought the name was ironic – to keep the tourists away. We drove through the no man’s land, the Mojave Desert, and I knew that name wasn’t ironic. Death Canyon was the opposite of a lush green hill – walking up it, with a picnic. Some egg sandwiches, a nice view – a quick-pick posy of flowers for Aunt Mabel down below watching the bulkier items – the padded cagoules and the flasks – it was none of all that. Death Canyon was the opposite of a lush green hill that moved up gradually with sheep walking up it on their way to heaven.
We could see nothing from our shack – I walked twenty paces and then twenty more. I used my hands as a visor; I used the binoculars. There was nothing: just stuff like salt pressed flat till it looked like a mirror – white salt; pink salt – the sun bounced off it and I lowered my hands. The horizon looked like someone had sprayed mist along it – blue mist – white mist – a mist of tiny salt particles – dust – hanging in the air. Then there was more salt. I walked twenty paces back towards the house. You’d pointed to a spot on the map: let’s go there, you’d said. We were here now… Trying to sharpen cutlery and lift grubs off the carpet with a knife. I tried to remember if sand was really salt – I couldn’t remember. The more I looked at the nothing the more it emptied out my head – scrubbing my memories and filling the space with pink sand – white salt – pink salt – just nothing from here…
On the way here the landlord had nearly choked himself telling us all the good things he had to say about this place: Whelp; population 79 – ‘if you want peace you’ll get peace – you’ll get that here, we can give you that…’ He kept up his enthusiastic talk the whole journey: he changed the air pressure inside the car with it. His big cowboy hat slid around on his head while he steered us through a no man’s land. He was still keeping the talk up when he threw our cases into the dust. Then he drove off. He was like a cheetah then – getting up to about seventy miles per hour in six seconds. We hadn’t even gone four steps up the path – the trail of dirt towards the front door: he was clear out of sight.
Our shack looked like a pile of sticks ready to be set alight – a November bonfire. The outside of the house was five star compared to what was waiting for us on the inside, though. The snake that flew out the fridge wasn’t the biggest surprise next to the beetles that had made a nest – the miniature brown turban that wouldn’t look out of place in a museum for African art. Whelp – what did we know? What kind of people lived here? We had our bonfire and then half a mile up the road there was another one. Then five miles after that there was the living breathing centre of the place called Whelp.
I remembered reading that Robert Duvall lived out here somewhere. A lot of the big actors came out here to get away; they hid behind large sunglasses and cowboy hats and sometimes put on accents – pretended they were from Germany and writing a book – or Scandinavia. They became masseuses; nail therapists; they were ranchers; they were seers. The accents got better – they were perfected. They blended in – they became anything they wanted: the man who raced snails and beetles on a fold down table top, a plumber. Those actors were out here – getting away – escaping. I thought about it – it was possible. That woman the colour of shit and driving the one car that passed us on the way here; that man serving the dismal coffee in Cinderella’s Café on the one toilet stop, his skin falling away in sheets – Woody Harrelson; Rebecca De Mornay.
We stood by the grey patch behind the house. The plan was we would stay in the desert for six months to a year. You thought that maybe we should grow something – onions and cabbages – things we could make soup with, and stews; things that would make us strong and keep us healthy. We stood by the grey patch and weighed up the options: long ragged sweet peas held up by canes; big green cabbage heads and carrots. We looked at the grey flat patch at the back of the shack – the small grey rocks scattered around. I’d read about a man in France who grew the stuff he used to make his champagne in the same row as his soup produce – those big leafy greens and the beans. It was all so good, he said, that sometimes he wasn’t sure if he was drinking a glass of champagne or biting down into a round soft peach. We looked at the grey flat patch behind out shack – weighing up the possibilities – its limitations. It certainly wasn’t your Papa’s ‘tree full of smoke’ – the silver birch with its leaves all off – and his garden with ten types of exotic plant. He was really into the outdoor world, and that stash of books in his front room proved the point even more. I’d picked one up – The Outdoor Plant Expert – I flicked through it. There was a lot to take in: pest damage; well-developed root systems; partial shade. There were tiny diagrams with details of how it’s done. There was layering – protecting – lifting. There was a lot of work involved. We stood back and looked at the grey patch and the scattering of rocks. It was like the moon’s surface. And it wasn’t just the back of our house – the moon’s surface travelled on and on as far as we could see, even with the binoculars. There was no work to do here because there was nothing that could be done – to this patch or any patch. You said, ‘maybe we should grow something?’ but we both knew what you really meant.
The one bus a day took about two hours to travel twenty kilometres; every time it’d started up and got going it stopped again. That one bus: the Magnum ice cream advertisement up as a sun visor and the red faux velvet panelled driver’s cabin and the ruby red rosary beads and the naked woman voodoo doll thing all tangled up. It took us along the one straight road and we could see that there were others living like us – in houses that looked like ice cream parlours or piles of sticks in the middle of nowhere. The bus picked up a little speed then stopped and another old woman wearing a pair of torn canvas shoes shuffled out to meet us, or young men who looked like they were running away from something, every one of them with a tiny rucksack bobbing about on their back like they had a head in it.
We stopped in front of one house that looked like it could be folded away and stored under an aeroplane seat: a house made of flimsy scrap metal – like a cheap ashtray or a soft drink’s can; a box to keep fishing tackle in, or tobacco, or half a chewed cigar. A woman stood outside it wearing a T-shirt that read Electro-Magnet Hair Removal Service. She wasn’t modelling – she had enough hair on her for five people.
The bus’s engine churned horribly as we got started again only to stop about four hundred feet up the road. The engine churned and the driver sat in his seat like there was a rod up the back of him and he held on to the steering wheel which was more like a ball of burst leather. An old woman wearing a pair of crusty sandshoes appeared out of nowhere it seemed, carrying a bag with the world’s oldest leek in it. An orange heap that was a million miles away from the muscle cars I’d heard the desert was full of pushed past us – that family with their bowl-cuts and their hymn bumper stickers and doing forty; ‘praise the Lord,’ they said in unison while they wafted past us.
Whelp came into view like a load of ancient wooden car garages scattered about by a storm. Here was the hub – the miniscule A and P supermarket with its advertisements for twenty kinds of chutney and the Taser gun.
I walked through a dead pigeon or maybe old noodles. I got up to the Hombre café – the French toast slid on to the plate like bread in egg not cooked. There were six other people in there – nearly ten per cent of the population – all eating quietly, dragging spoons. The banana shortbread that came pre-wrapped – put together in a factory far away – had the consistency of a nail disorder. I fingered some powder out and put it on the table. The man two tables away introduced himself as Old Fang Tooth; he said he was going to build an Olympic-sized stadium out here in the middle of the desert. It’d have all the regular stuff plus a track for dirt bike racing and maybe a pool tagged on at the side. He’d been talking with a lawyer already – drawing up the plans – big extensive things that filled the whole table. He’s ambitious – that’s clear – taking on so much at once, and we quietly assumed all this would start only after he’d learned how to change his underpants more than once a month, and bathe.
You flipped over your napkin and there was a big penis drawn on it in red felt pen. We started looking round for culprits. Who could it be: the old woman with the hunchback; the boy with the mange doing the dishes; the old couple eating the pretend sea bream; the man in the T-shirt that read Lost Cause? It could have been any one of them – all of them neatly avoiding your gaze, all of them loving it. I saw peach melba on the menu and imagined what it could be…
Las Vegas was in the north east… Two hundred miles – maybe three – maybe more. It may as well have been forty thousand. That mecca – that tower of lights in the desert. It was approached by car or bus – no trains – no walking; a ring of deadly snakes swarmed in the outskirts of the place attracted by the heat from the lights. If it was the pumping heart of the desert then Whelp was a blotch of blood on an old napkin. The strip – all the light bulbs making it a hundred and twenty degrees even at four in the morning; tutus and headgear; carnival time all year round. The big hotel was called the Mirage.
You wanted a haircut so your hair wasn’t lying across your neck and making you sweat more than you needed to; we couldn’t find a hairdresser but we found a bar. The wicked witch was up at the mirror pushing something against her poisoned warts. It was actually just the barmaid looking at her face for the tenth time that minute – checking she really was as glamorous and good looking as her mother kept telling her; a hunch that mothers were just being mothers, but then again… Those cheekbones… She pronounced them cheekbaones… The man at the end of the bar couldn’t be wrong – he wouldn’t say it as much – all the stuff about her being so gorgeous – modelesque – first rate. Even though he was just a pile of greasy hair – to tell her she was that good looking so many times – it surely wasn’t all lies. Her face worked through a hundred shapes, none of them good ones, wondering…
The barmaid’s brother wasn’t the most handsome man but there was no doubt he was entertaining. He told us he’d never left Whelp even once but it didn’t matter. His eyes were so crossed he looked like he was always staring at a spot on his nose. His talk was good though, and he got us two big margaritas for free. He hadn’t left Whelp, he said, because he looked after his grandmother. She was ancient now – he couldn’t say the exact age – maybe 102 – and she was hanging on and hanging on like a vine tight around a rock. Not much grew out here, he said, but the stuff that did… He looked after her and he didn’t mind because it wasn’t the hardest thing in the world. They had a good relationship, and an understanding. Often he rolled her out to the front of her house where the wind came in the keenest; he’d leave her out there for half an afternoon so that the wind could blow all the old dead skin away. It did a good job of it; by the time he went to get her there was a baby blush to her – that kind of new skin on a baby’s backside and arms and everything else and then he rolled her in for pap out a bowl for lunch stroke dinner and then a fresh drink for himself. It was an easy kind of life; he realised it wasn’t for everyone, but it was an easy kind of life.
We could see nothing from our shack – I walked twenty paces and then twenty more. I used my hands as a visor; I used the binoculars. There was nothing: just stuff like salt pressed flat till it looked like a mirror – white salt; pink salt – the sun bounced off it and I lowered my hands. The horizon looked like someone had sprayed mist along it – blue mist – white mist – a mist of tiny salt particles – dust – hanging in the air. Then there was more salt. I walked twenty paces back towards the house. You’d pointed to a spot on the map: let’s go there, you’d said. We were here now… Trying to sharpen cutlery and lift grubs off the carpet with a knife. I tried to remember if sand was really salt – I couldn’t remember. The more I looked at the nothing the more it emptied out my head – scrubbing my memories and filling the space with pink sand – white salt – pink salt – just nothing from here…
On the way here the landlord had nearly choked himself telling us all the good things he had to say about this place: Whelp; population 79 – ‘if you want peace you’ll get peace – you’ll get that here, we can give you that…’ He kept up his enthusiastic talk the whole journey: he changed the air pressure inside the car with it. His big cowboy hat slid around on his head while he steered us through a no man’s land. He was still keeping the talk up when he threw our cases into the dust. Then he drove off. He was like a cheetah then – getting up to about seventy miles per hour in six seconds. We hadn’t even gone four steps up the path – the trail of dirt towards the front door: he was clear out of sight.
Our shack looked like a pile of sticks ready to be set alight – a November bonfire. The outside of the house was five star compared to what was waiting for us on the inside, though. The snake that flew out the fridge wasn’t the biggest surprise next to the beetles that had made a nest – the miniature brown turban that wouldn’t look out of place in a museum for African art. Whelp – what did we know? What kind of people lived here? We had our bonfire and then half a mile up the road there was another one. Then five miles after that there was the living breathing centre of the place called Whelp.
I remembered reading that Robert Duvall lived out here somewhere. A lot of the big actors came out here to get away; they hid behind large sunglasses and cowboy hats and sometimes put on accents – pretended they were from Germany and writing a book – or Scandinavia. They became masseuses; nail therapists; they were ranchers; they were seers. The accents got better – they were perfected. They blended in – they became anything they wanted: the man who raced snails and beetles on a fold down table top, a plumber. Those actors were out here – getting away – escaping. I thought about it – it was possible. That woman the colour of shit and driving the one car that passed us on the way here; that man serving the dismal coffee in Cinderella’s Café on the one toilet stop, his skin falling away in sheets – Woody Harrelson; Rebecca De Mornay.
We stood by the grey patch behind the house. The plan was we would stay in the desert for six months to a year. You thought that maybe we should grow something – onions and cabbages – things we could make soup with, and stews; things that would make us strong and keep us healthy. We stood by the grey patch and weighed up the options: long ragged sweet peas held up by canes; big green cabbage heads and carrots. We looked at the grey flat patch at the back of the shack – the small grey rocks scattered around. I’d read about a man in France who grew the stuff he used to make his champagne in the same row as his soup produce – those big leafy greens and the beans. It was all so good, he said, that sometimes he wasn’t sure if he was drinking a glass of champagne or biting down into a round soft peach. We looked at the grey flat patch behind out shack – weighing up the possibilities – its limitations. It certainly wasn’t your Papa’s ‘tree full of smoke’ – the silver birch with its leaves all off – and his garden with ten types of exotic plant. He was really into the outdoor world, and that stash of books in his front room proved the point even more. I’d picked one up – The Outdoor Plant Expert – I flicked through it. There was a lot to take in: pest damage; well-developed root systems; partial shade. There were tiny diagrams with details of how it’s done. There was layering – protecting – lifting. There was a lot of work involved. We stood back and looked at the grey patch and the scattering of rocks. It was like the moon’s surface. And it wasn’t just the back of our house – the moon’s surface travelled on and on as far as we could see, even with the binoculars. There was no work to do here because there was nothing that could be done – to this patch or any patch. You said, ‘maybe we should grow something?’ but we both knew what you really meant.
The one bus a day took about two hours to travel twenty kilometres; every time it’d started up and got going it stopped again. That one bus: the Magnum ice cream advertisement up as a sun visor and the red faux velvet panelled driver’s cabin and the ruby red rosary beads and the naked woman voodoo doll thing all tangled up. It took us along the one straight road and we could see that there were others living like us – in houses that looked like ice cream parlours or piles of sticks in the middle of nowhere. The bus picked up a little speed then stopped and another old woman wearing a pair of torn canvas shoes shuffled out to meet us, or young men who looked like they were running away from something, every one of them with a tiny rucksack bobbing about on their back like they had a head in it.
We stopped in front of one house that looked like it could be folded away and stored under an aeroplane seat: a house made of flimsy scrap metal – like a cheap ashtray or a soft drink’s can; a box to keep fishing tackle in, or tobacco, or half a chewed cigar. A woman stood outside it wearing a T-shirt that read Electro-Magnet Hair Removal Service. She wasn’t modelling – she had enough hair on her for five people.
The bus’s engine churned horribly as we got started again only to stop about four hundred feet up the road. The engine churned and the driver sat in his seat like there was a rod up the back of him and he held on to the steering wheel which was more like a ball of burst leather. An old woman wearing a pair of crusty sandshoes appeared out of nowhere it seemed, carrying a bag with the world’s oldest leek in it. An orange heap that was a million miles away from the muscle cars I’d heard the desert was full of pushed past us – that family with their bowl-cuts and their hymn bumper stickers and doing forty; ‘praise the Lord,’ they said in unison while they wafted past us.
Whelp came into view like a load of ancient wooden car garages scattered about by a storm. Here was the hub – the miniscule A and P supermarket with its advertisements for twenty kinds of chutney and the Taser gun.
I walked through a dead pigeon or maybe old noodles. I got up to the Hombre café – the French toast slid on to the plate like bread in egg not cooked. There were six other people in there – nearly ten per cent of the population – all eating quietly, dragging spoons. The banana shortbread that came pre-wrapped – put together in a factory far away – had the consistency of a nail disorder. I fingered some powder out and put it on the table. The man two tables away introduced himself as Old Fang Tooth; he said he was going to build an Olympic-sized stadium out here in the middle of the desert. It’d have all the regular stuff plus a track for dirt bike racing and maybe a pool tagged on at the side. He’d been talking with a lawyer already – drawing up the plans – big extensive things that filled the whole table. He’s ambitious – that’s clear – taking on so much at once, and we quietly assumed all this would start only after he’d learned how to change his underpants more than once a month, and bathe.
You flipped over your napkin and there was a big penis drawn on it in red felt pen. We started looking round for culprits. Who could it be: the old woman with the hunchback; the boy with the mange doing the dishes; the old couple eating the pretend sea bream; the man in the T-shirt that read Lost Cause? It could have been any one of them – all of them neatly avoiding your gaze, all of them loving it. I saw peach melba on the menu and imagined what it could be…
Las Vegas was in the north east… Two hundred miles – maybe three – maybe more. It may as well have been forty thousand. That mecca – that tower of lights in the desert. It was approached by car or bus – no trains – no walking; a ring of deadly snakes swarmed in the outskirts of the place attracted by the heat from the lights. If it was the pumping heart of the desert then Whelp was a blotch of blood on an old napkin. The strip – all the light bulbs making it a hundred and twenty degrees even at four in the morning; tutus and headgear; carnival time all year round. The big hotel was called the Mirage.
You wanted a haircut so your hair wasn’t lying across your neck and making you sweat more than you needed to; we couldn’t find a hairdresser but we found a bar. The wicked witch was up at the mirror pushing something against her poisoned warts. It was actually just the barmaid looking at her face for the tenth time that minute – checking she really was as glamorous and good looking as her mother kept telling her; a hunch that mothers were just being mothers, but then again… Those cheekbones… She pronounced them cheekbaones… The man at the end of the bar couldn’t be wrong – he wouldn’t say it as much – all the stuff about her being so gorgeous – modelesque – first rate. Even though he was just a pile of greasy hair – to tell her she was that good looking so many times – it surely wasn’t all lies. Her face worked through a hundred shapes, none of them good ones, wondering…
The barmaid’s brother wasn’t the most handsome man but there was no doubt he was entertaining. He told us he’d never left Whelp even once but it didn’t matter. His eyes were so crossed he looked like he was always staring at a spot on his nose. His talk was good though, and he got us two big margaritas for free. He hadn’t left Whelp, he said, because he looked after his grandmother. She was ancient now – he couldn’t say the exact age – maybe 102 – and she was hanging on and hanging on like a vine tight around a rock. Not much grew out here, he said, but the stuff that did… He looked after her and he didn’t mind because it wasn’t the hardest thing in the world. They had a good relationship, and an understanding. Often he rolled her out to the front of her house where the wind came in the keenest; he’d leave her out there for half an afternoon so that the wind could blow all the old dead skin away. It did a good job of it; by the time he went to get her there was a baby blush to her – that kind of new skin on a baby’s backside and arms and everything else and then he rolled her in for pap out a bowl for lunch stroke dinner and then a fresh drink for himself. It was an easy kind of life; he realised it wasn’t for everyone, but it was an easy kind of life.
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