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Member's Blog
Blogs
Written by News
Saturday, 17 March 2012 00:19
Can IBM fix Boston’s bad traffic? By Michael B. Farrell, Globe Staff/ Can the data experts at IBM improve Boston’s notoriously bad traffic? That’s the hope when the computer giant lends several engineers to the city for three weeks this summer, to come up with solutions for fixing traffic problems more quickly and ideas for reducing vehicle emissions. Boston is one of 33 cities around the world that will get access to IBM know-how as part of the company’s 2012 Smarter Cities Challenge. The winners of the grants, worth about $400,000 each, were revealed Thursday. “This is another example of how we are piloting innovative work in the city of Boston and sharing it with our colleagues around the world,” said Mayor Thomas M. Menino, in a statement. The city competed with 140 applications from 40 countries in the challenge, which grew out of IBM’s Corporate Service Corps. Since it began in 2008, the program has sent about 1,400 IBM employees on assignments in 24 countries.
Written by News
Sunday, 4 March 2012 16:25
I never hear apologies for the Christians that are being massacred through the world I never hear apologies for the mocking of the Catholic Church or Catholic Leaders in the media or politics I never hear apologies for the Church Burning in Egypt, Lybia, Nigeria and this is just the beginning of atrocities against Christians I never hear apologies for the corruption, waste and deficit that we are facing in USA I never hear apologies for the lack of action against the rise of gaz prices I never hear apologies for the dire economic situation we are facing and all of the unemployments I never hear apologies about the waste we have spent from this recession or taking responsability I never hear apologies for the headache it takes one to file tax return. Can the process be more complicated? I never hear apologies for our Veteran treatment I never hear apologies for our Army and lack of Financial support or death
Written by News
Tuesday, 28 February 2012 20:43
By Melissa Knowles – Mon, Feb 27, 2012UPDATE: According to The Smoking Gun, the restaurant says they found the original merchant copy, and the receipt going around the Web is Photoshopped. You can see our update on the story here. Just when you may have thought the ongoing battle between the 99% and the 1% was dying down, it may have been reignited. A wealthy banker left a $1.33 tip on a $133 lunch at the True Food Kitchen restaurant in Newport Beach, California. To add insult to injury the word "tip" was circled on the receipt, and the banker wrote "get a real job" on the bill. The picture of the receipt was taken and uploaded to the blog Future Ex-Banker by a person who was dining with the anonymous banker. As expected, the blog has received a lot of attention and has now been taken down. The author of the blog wrote, "mention the 99% in my boss' presence and feel his wrath. So proudly does he wear his 1% badge of honor that he tips exactly 1% every time he feels the server doesn't sufficiently bow down to his holiness." People online who had a chance to see the blog post before it went offline and those who have been made aware of it on social media outlets are outraged. One person called the tip a tale of greet and conent and another referred to it as "arrogance." The Web's general reaction to this story is eerily similar to an almost identical 1% vs. 99% scenario that took place last fall. In Washington state, a waitress received a tipof no money and advice scrawled on the receipt that told her she could "stand to lose a few pounds." Our next story is more of a battle between environmentalists and big oil companies. Lucy Lawless, most famous for her leading role in "Xena: Warrior Princess" in the '90s fantasy adventure series, was arrested over the weekend. Lawless had spent four days protesting on board a Shell oil ship with a group of six other environmental activists. The protest, organized by Greenpeace, was staged to raise awareness of oil drilling in the arctic. The global environmental organization opposes the drilling in New Zealand.
Written by News
Tuesday, 28 February 2012 02:37
Editor's Note: Stephen S. Schneck is director of the Institute for Policy Research and Catholic Studies at The Catholic University of America. By Stephen S. Schneck, Special to CNN For years, pollsters and political scientists have been stumped about Catholics. On one hand, it’s been pretty clear that as American Catholics go, so goes the nation. George W. Bush narrowly won the Catholic vote in 2004 and won a second term. Barack Obama narrowly won the Catholic vote in 2008 and, with it, the White House. It’s easy to see why Catholics are sometimes seen as the swing voters whose shifting political preferences swing elections. Nevertheless, the idea of a Catholic bloc is patently ridiculous. As voters, American Catholics mirror the electorate as a whole, divided into Democrats, independents, and Republicans at about the same percentages as all Americans. And it’s hard to trace such political complexity to religious allegiance. One explanation for why is the sheer number of Catholic voters and their now multigenerational assimilation into American society. About 35 million Catholics voted in 2008. That’s about 27% of all voters. In the 19th century and for much of the 20th, Catholics self-consciously occupied a distinctive identity in America. Predominantly blue collar, they often lived in white ethnic neighborhoods, attended their own schools and colleges, established their own hospitals and charities, and experienced some level of discrimination. In those years, Catholics associated overwhelmingly with the Democratic Party, which not only accommodated but promoted policies that advanced ethnic assimilation – everything from minimum wage laws to the GI Bill. But by finally achieving that assimilation, Catholics in the last 50 years have lost much of their sense of special self-identity. For white Catholics, who are about 60% of the Catholic vote, their distinctiveness in class, education, income, and even ethnicity has grown increasingly ambiguous in America’s famous melting pot. The melting pot has even transformed Catholics’ relationship to their church. Polling numbers released Friday by CNN about the White House contraception dust-up illustrate this: Only 11% of Catholics polled said they should always obey official church teachings on moral issues like birth control and abortion.
Written by News
Saturday, 18 February 2012 16:16
Refactoring the new approach to revamp systems and software. Refactoring in my opinion is very powerful concept and instrumental in technology. It is the only way to keep your customers loyal to your technology! It is by doing small updates and not major tweaks without major changes or disruption. Think Facebook, think IBM think twitter, think google, think HP, think apple - All of these innovative companies push tiny updates to the users without disrupting the system. But Notice 1 year ago facebook functionalities look how different it is today - Same for Google - Apple - IBM etc. and they went through small changes! Continuous Small updates to the software and hardware to improve the system is very important. It will not require to make major changes and wait for the next release which can take years. In contrast with continuous tiny updates you as an IT company are keeping up with the speed of change and aligning yourself directly with the user.
Refactoring the process that IBM and major IT companies use to get innovation into the field faster. It refers to making lots of tiny changes to a set of source code that doesn't modify its external function, but improves how that function is delivered. To do this refactoring function, you have to break down code into functional units and iteratively improve them as you can. This sounds dirt simple, and was done by many forward-thinking programmers, but refactoring wasn't really even discussed academically until the early 1990s. The idea is to make many small tweaks that don't disrupt the code, do them quickly and do them often, instead of trying to do a big-bang version upgrade with a feature dump and all of the woes that creates for development and test. The canonical book on refactoring, called Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code, is written by Martin Fowler, Kent Beck, John Brant, William Opdyke, and Don Roberts.In technology and Hardware world refactoring is Making systems more modular so they can be tweaked more frequently instead of being revamped every couple of years.
Written by News
Tuesday, 14 February 2012 01:01
By Eric Platt | Business Inside, As summer analyst recruiting season continues and superdays near, Wall Street has been having a laugh with one New York University applicant who, to say the least, took a surprisingly dogged approach with his cover letter.
Written by News
Sunday, 12 February 2012 22:11
Why a Pennsylvania-born grandson of Italian immigrants who attends Mass in Latin or a recent convert Speaker Gingrich is emerging as the favorite of conservative Protestants. The answers help explain not only the political dynamics of the current race, but point to a generational shift from the 1960 campaign, when John F. Kennedy had to reassure evangelicals like Billy Graham that he wasn't too Catholic to be president. "Now here we are, 50 years later, and evangelicals are not only willing to vote for Roman Catholic candidates but frankly they are flocking to Roman Catholic candidates" like Santorum and Newt Gingrich, said Ralph Reed, head of the Faith and Freedom Coalition and a top evangelical political activist. "This is a big moment in American religious and political history." On Friday, Gingrich secured a major evangelical endorsement when Tim LaHaye, a minister and author of the Left Behind series of novels, threw in his support. Both Reed and Hudson note that Santorum's appeal to conservative Protestants isn't really — or even mainly — a case of mistaken religious identity. Plenty of evangelicals know Santorum is a practicing Catholic; it's just that it doesn't matter the way it once did. What's really important is that Santorum espouses their values, because in a multifront culture war, an "ecumenism of the trenches" prevails over Reformation-era disputes about doctrine. So when Santorum makes full-throated opposition to gay marriage and abortion his signature issues, he is in effect singing from the evangelical hymnal. "Rick Santorum may technically not call himself an evangelical, but he is definitely one when it comes to social issues, so don't get too caught up in the title of 'Roman Catholic,'" David Brody, chief political correspondent for Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network, wrote after the Iowa vote. "Santorum is an evangelical at heart."
Newt Gingrich continuously defends Christian Stands, and the main leader speaking the core Social values and about Christianity injustice.
Please click read more to read the whole artcile
Written by News
Sunday, 12 February 2012 16:09
Couple of Articles that outline the contraception and changes on religious institutions WASHINGTON, DC (Catholic Online) - We present, in its entirety, the first response of the United States Bishop concerning the alleged "compromise" of the Obama Administration to somehow "fix" its unjust and unconstitutional edict. It is taken from the Bishops web site and can be found here. We ask our readers to pray for the our Bishops and stand in solidarity with them. They have shown tremendous courage. We know they will continue to do so going forward. We expect they will speak further as the alleged "compromise" - and its implications - are fully studied.We will continue to follow this vital matter closely. The Catholic bishops have long supported access to life-affirming healthcare for all, and the conscience rights of everyone involved in the complex process of providing that healthcare. That is why we raised two serious objections to the "preventive services" regulation issued by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in August 2011. First, we objected to the rule forcing private health plans - nationwide, by the stroke of a bureaucrat's pen-to cover sterilization and contraception, including drugs that may cause abortion. All the other mandated "preventive services" prevent disease, and pregnancy is not a disease. Moreover, forcing plans to cover abortifacients violates existing federal conscience laws. Therefore, we called for the rescission of the mandate altogether. Second, we explained that the mandate would impose a burden of unprecedented reach and severity on the consciences of those who consider such "services" immoral: insurers forced to write policies including this coverage; employers and schools forced to sponsor and subsidize the coverage; and individual employees and students forced to pay premiums for the coverage. We therefore urged HHS, if it insisted on keeping the mandate, to provide a conscience exemption for all of these stakeholders-not just the extremely small subset of "religious employers" that HHS proposed to exempt initially. Today, the President has done two things. First, he has decided to retain HHS's nationwide mandate of insurance coverage of sterilization and contraception, including some abortifacients. This is both unsupported in the law and remains a grave moral concern. We cannot fail to reiterate this, even as so many would focus exclusively on the question of religious liberty. Second, the President has announced some changes in how that mandate will be administered, which is still unclear in its details. As far as we can tell at this point, the change appears to have the following basic contours: It would still mandate that all insurers must include coverage for the objectionable services in all the policies they would write. At this point, it would appear that self-insuring religious employers, and religious insurance companies, are not exempt from this mandate. It would allow non-profit, religious employers to declare that they do not offer such coverage. But the employee and insurer may separately agree to add that coverage. The employee would not have to pay any additional amount to obtain this coverage, and the coverage would be provided as a part of the employer's policy, not as a separate rider. Finally, we are told that the one-year extension on the effective date (from August 1, 2012 to August 1, 2013) is available to any non-profit religious employer who desires it, without any government application or approval process.
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