Funds will provide $1,000 in prizes for teen readers
Worcester County Library has been selected as a recipient of a $1,000 Beanstack Black Voices Microgrants. We’re excited to share this news and what it means for our community!
As you may know, the library partners with Beanstack to power reading challenges, especially the Summer Reading Program. Beanstack has offered these microgrants to help the library create our own program to promote diverse books and encourage reading among local teens.
The library has created a Teen Reading Challenge on Beanstack and will use the grant money to provide prizes. Participating teens will select books to read by authors from a variety of backgrounds, highlighting the rich diversity of the American experience. Each book they read will earn them a chance to win one of two $500.00 grand prizes! This challenge will last throughout 2021, and the prizes will be awarded at the end of the year.
“The scholar Rudine Sims Bishop famously said that books for young readers should be both mirrors and windows,” says Assistant Director Rachael Stein. “They should reflect the experiences of the reader and also provide a glimpse into unfamiliar cultural worlds. The aim of this project is to offer teens those mirrors and windows, and to encourage them to look into as many new worlds as they can.”
The library will also host a monthly discussion program on Zoom, where teens can meet, share book recommendations, and talk about the books they’re reading.
Interested? Go to www.WorcesterLibrary.org beginning on January 1, 2021, for more information and to register for the program.


Get the Book
“The best way to explore the Puget Sound region is by bike, and this book is a fantastic resource for doing just that!”
—Elizabeth Kiker, Executive Director, Cascade Bicycle Club
Biking Puget Sound: 60 Rides from Olympia to the San Juans – 2nd Edition (from the outdoor enthusiasts at Mountaineers Books) offers the best road cycling in Seattle and the greater Puget Sound area.
Updated, expanded and completely refreshed for 2014, this new 2nd edition of Biking Puget Sound provides endless recreational outings by bike.
Included are 60 scenic, entertaining and challenging rides for cyclists of all levels. The routes, covering nine Western Washington counties, utilize all major regional paved bike trails as well as the best designated street bike lanes, suburban routes and scenic rural roads.
- Each ride includes a map and a turn-by-turn route guide.
- An elevation profile shows an overview of the terrain on each ride.
- An engaging narrative tells readers what to expect on each route.
- A locator map and quick reference guide with difficulty, length and highlights enable readers to quickly choose appropriate rides.
- Camping options help you plan bike overnights and longer self-supported biking vacations.
- New public transit directions and GPS coordinates are given for each ride’s starting point.
- Downloadable cue sheets for each route provide an easy reference to take along on the ride.
The author, Seattle writer and ride leader Bill Thorness, rode thousands of miles over two years to research, plan and update the routes, and added 12 completely new rides to the 2nd edition. Engagement with regional bike clubs and scrutiny of municipal transportation changes ensure that only the safest, most current routes throughout our fast-growing region are included.
“This guide is a great resource.” –University Bookstore Staff Favorites
In Biking Puget Sound, readers will learn the best commuting routes, safest trails for biking with young children and most scenic routes for sightseeing, visiting regional attractions, picnicking and gathering with other cyclists.
- Discover routes that make it possible to bicycle virtually anywhere within the region.
- Find varied terrain and destinations that can be ridden right from home, and other great routes that are within an hour’s drive of Seattle.
- Take in the diverse neighborhoods of Seattle, Tacoma and Olympia, as well as dozens of desirable suburban communities and quaint small towns.
- Enjoy the highlights of our lush countryside, from fertile farmland to saltwater harbors.
Added features to make Biking Puget Sound an indispensable resource for regional cyclists include a five-ride, four-island tour of the San Juan Islands; information on bike commuting and safety gear; and resources for access to regional cycling clubs, advocacy organizations and area bike maps.
“Biking Puget Sound has something for everyone.” –Seattle magazine


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Liz Bowring Books
In the School
Waverley Local History
Our Lady of the Rosary
Kincoppal Rose Bay
ST THERESE MASCOT
St Charles: A Book of Memories 1854-2004
Paddington Public School Celebrating 150 years 1856-2006
Our Lady of the Rosary: We Remember 1907-2007
Kincoppal – Rose Bay: Early Years for the Early Years
Discovering our Past: St Therese Catholic Primary School and Parish Mascot
History written and illustrated with young learners in mind.
Click the image to view.
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Parker J. Palmer is a writer, speaker, and activist who focuses on issues in education, community, leadership, spirituality and social change. His work speaks to people in many walks of life, including public and higher education, healthcare, religion, business, philanthropy, community organizing, and grass-roots social change. He has published a dozen poems, some 200 essays, and nine books, including several best-selling and award-winning titles.
Gifts E6 – The Gift of Temptation
Series: The Gifts of the Dark Wood, Episode: 6, Featured Guest: Parker Palmer, Pneuma Divina Passage: Matthew 4:1-11


Guest Editors: Andrzej Kostrzewski (Poznań, Poland) & Zbigniew Zwoliński (Poznań, Poland)
Landform Analysis, vol. 5, 2007 - Published by the Association of Polish Geomorphologists
Landform Analysis (vol. 5, 2007) is dedicated for the IAG/AIG (International Association of Geomorphologists) Regional Conference on Geomorphology Geodiversity of polar landforms which was held in Longyearbyen (Spitsbergen, Norway) on August 1-5, 2007. Conference was organised on the occasion of the International Polar Year 2007/2008 by the Association of Polish Geomorphologists.
The whole volume of Landform Analysis in PDF format (113 MB).


Inscrit le: 12 Mai 2016
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|Posté le: Jeu 6 Juil - 23:10 (2017) Sujet du message: MiscellaneousAddressesandWritings2CVol8of828ClassicReprin
Excerpt from Miscellaneous Addresses and Writings, Vol. 8 of 8
As far as I am aware, I am, with the exception of my friend and colleague, Prof. G. T. Elliot, M.D., the only one through whom the Nursery and Child's Hospital has had-a chance to appear before the scientific public. I have, while serving the Institution, attempted to let the medical public profit by my opportunities. Occasional ar ticles, by myself and by house physicians, in scientific journals, prove that I was aware of my duties to the pro fession as well as to the Institution. In the eyes of the profession a gentleman connected with a public institution, and not serving the common cause of study and progress, neglects his opportunity to prove his ability for observa tion and teaching, and for serving the patients entrusted to his care. Thus, also, all over the world, the public in stitutions crave clinical instruction as a preference, both managers and patients feeling more confidence in the thoroughness of the medical officers and the completeness of individual observation when the opportunities of teach ing are made available. In accordance with this universal custom and want, I have established at your Institution a clinic accessible to the profession and to the students of all the colleges of the city, both male and female, with the result of invariably punctual attendance by the very same persons. I have further given the Institution the benefit of the results of modern science, the attainments of this country and Europe, and have practised what the good men of the profession all over the world admit as valuable, and what I have been teaching, by writing and lecturing, for, ten years and more.
About the Publisher
Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com
This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
bound: 618 pages
publisher: Forgotten Books (May 2, 2017)
isbn: 133468233X, 978-1334682339,
weight: 1.8 pounds (


The ephemera of war
‘Think before you write.’ That is good advice for anyone committing words to paper or screen. Seventy years ago, however, it had rather more urgency.
Inspired, as predicted, by this wonderful online book art course which I am doing, I began to search the castle the other day for old scraps of paper ephemera. There is plenty of it about. Several members of the family over the past century have left desks here, each with drawers full of letters, photos, bills, diaries and all the odds and ends that we each think we really will get round to sorting out one of these days, only life goes on and more urgent bills arrive and perhaps ill health strikes and so on until, one day, it falls to the children to go through your desk instead. In a house this size, however, the desk can just be left in a spare room and forgotten about; so the contents remain inside, a time capsule of a life busily lived.
The strange thing is that, going through the contents of a desk decades after the death of their owner, one still feels an intruder. Inevitably we put ourselves in the other’s shoes, thinking how indignant we would be if someone else thumbed through our private correspondence. Indignation, however, is a prerogative of the living. It is the descendants we must consider more, I think, in our treatment of the belongings of our ancestors.
When you find something really interesting, however, respect for family privacy conflicts with the historian’s fascination. Thus, when I discovered, under a pile of bank statements from the 1970s, a carefully preserved cache of letters from two brothers serving in the army in World War Two, I could not resist reading some of them. In this week when we have just been commemorating the seventieth anniversary of D-Day, the massive assault which began the liberation of Europe from Nazism, these letters are poignant first-hand accounts of what it was like to live through the war.
I approach these letters, I suppose, in three minds. One is that of the family: this is the correspondence of men who are remembered with affection, whose children and grandchildren are our cousins. I feel that their stories are not mine to publicise. The second is that of the historian: time has rendered these letters historical documents, first-hand accounts of a period which is now studied by my children at school. It is my moral duty to keep these primary sources safe.
The third is that of the paper hoarder, amateur artist/craftswoman and lover of ephemera. And it is in this mind that I wanted to show you one or two details of the letters. Arguably it is the most trivial; but it is a way of sharing my appreciation of them without, I trust, invading the family’s privacy.
What fascinates me as a lover of ephemera is the stamps, franks and other officialdom displayed on these documents. Here are some letters sent by the elder brother, on regulation British Forces aerogrammes. I rather like the way that the king’s profile has been garlanded by the frank on the letter at the top of this first photo.
At least one of these letters was opened by an army censor, who stamped his own rather splendid crowned mark upon it:
One notices the imperious tone of British officialdom at that time: ‘Security: think before you write.’ ‘Air Letter. If anything is enclosed this letter will be sent by ordinary mail.’ It was an attitude which won us the war, so one can’t complain.
The letters from the younger brother are also fascinating. Captured by the Germans in 1940, he spent the next four years kicking his heels in Prisoner of War camps somewhere in northern Europe (I have yet to discover where). His letters home are written on regulation PoW paper. Each postcard or aerogramme is marked Kriegsgefangenenpost, Prisoner of War Post. At least this made them free of charge (gebührenfrei).
On one there is a rather beautiful German stamp: unusual as all the other correspondence from PoW camps was franked rather than stamped (if I have my terminology right).
These letters home from PoW camps are small masterpieces of the unsaid. ‘No letters for ten days or more,’ wrote our officer on a postcard one March. ‘Hope J & C [his siblings] are OK: longing for news of them. Weather foul – snow, sleet, mud. …When the spring comes and the place dries up a bit it will be a good thing.’ You can imagine how dismal it must have been for him to have mentioned it at all to his parents. ‘Got clothes parcel y’day, v. useful’, he wrote in another card in March ’41. I guess that he had been pretty cold. In one letter he was thinking of his good wool coat left behind at his club in England, and asked his mother to put some moth powder on it. How he must have longed for that coat in the endless winters in camp!
Both these brothers, happily, survived the war and went on to marry and have children and grandchildren. The letters have ended up here because they were inherited and treasured by their sister, my husband’s grandmother. Their story is for another to tell, or not: all I can tell you is that, whatever the temptation, these are pieces of ephemera which I will not be cutting up for my art course.
You might enjoy some wartime memories of the castle in Cycling in the ballroom: children’s castle memories.


Here’s my review for the book named Ashvamedha – The Game of Power written by Aparna Sinha and published by Srishti Publishers & Distributors. Actually, the book was recommended by one of my Facebook friends, and got it at a good price from Amazon. (Amazon link at the end of the blog).
The book’s cover is interesting in that is featuring one horse and a knight of chess. On the back, there’s a synopsis of the book and a short introduction by the author. The 214 paged book is a political thriller and the story does complete justice to the title.
Basically, the story of Ashvamedha revolves around a protagonist named Ashwin Jamwal. He is a man with leadership qualities and a willingness to change the country for its betterment but is reluctant to join the political arena. He meets Indra Mohan Raathi in his college days who ask Ashwin to join his newly founded Nationalist Party, which, according to him is aimed to clean politics and to take India on the path of real development. He is not even thinking to accept the call at that time and goes to join the bureaucracy after completing his studies. While fulfilling his duty as a dignified and honest bureaucrat he is squeezed from all areas including political and social. In the end, he gives up his job and decides to join politics as he thinks that the ultimate control is in the hands of politicians and nothing can be changed unless the politics of the nation is forced to change.
The initial part of the Ashvamedha mentions a plane crash, the murder of two characters named Ashish Kumar Nandi and Sumona Thandi but these incidents are not finding proper relevance in the main story. There’s also a conversation between Ashwin and Prateek (who’s Sumona’s brother) but then that is also looking like a short story without much reference to it in the latter part of the book.
The author’s storytelling is fast paced and not at all boring. Besides I.M. Raathi and Ashwin Jamwal, there are characters like Suresh Armugham (secretary of Nationalist Party), Adya (girlfriend of Ashwin), Arun (Ashwin’s best friend), Tahir Naqui (National Security Advisor), etc. These characters are very important in the whole story of how someone becomes the most powerful man on the earth. However, among all these names, one name that appears, again and again, is Hades. Hades is a faceless person.
The story is about the hunger for power and the desire to rule the world. It touches on different parts of human emotions and relations. The author has covered a wide range of aspects of domestic and international politics. It was interesting to read how realistic the storyline was when it comes to terrorism and international commitment to fight against it. Can the powerful nations come to the same page when the question is about saving three fourth of the world’s populations from the biggest terror attack ever? The story is about one man’s desire to be the most powerful person on the earth, but to become so, he has to dethrone someone who’s already so, and to do that he has to make someone the most powerful man. In simple words, it’s a story about creating a power center to occupy it and become powerful. The story is really gripping and makes the read enthralling.
I found only two disappointing things in the Ashvamedha. One of them is, some initial parts of the story are not finding themselves linked in the latter part of the book, or rather they are irrelevant to the main plot. Second, the climax of the story is a bit too unrealistic, even if I consider the book a fiction one. At times the story moves too fast and looks oversimplified considering that the main plot of the book is about politics.
You can read more book reviews by me here.


WELCOME TO GUELPH WELLINGTON
Guelph Wellington is a vibrant and diverse geographic area in southwestern Ontario.
Guelph Wellington has a low cost of living, beautiful surroundings, is one of the safest communities in Canada and enjoys a low unemployment rate. There is easy access to major centres, such as Toronto and London, including to regional and international airports and railway service.
There are many programs and services available to new Immigrants in Guelph and Wellington County. To find an organization or group working on topics you are interested in, search the Community Information Database.
Some of the important things you will have to do when you arrive, are to find a place to live, get your Social Insurance Number, your Permanent Residency Card and to make sure you register for government Health Insurance.
There are many fun, free activities for families in Guelph and Wellington County. The EarlyON Centers are places where parents and caregivers can participate in programs and activities, get information and answers to their questions, all for free! The Public Libraries in Guelph and Wellington also have free programs and activities for children and families. In the Summer the splash pads and wading pools are great places to cool off and meet other families. There are three museums which provide fun for the whole family. In Guelph, you can visit the Civic Museum and McCrae House, and in Wellington County you can check out the Wellington County Museum and Archives.
To learn more about living in Guelph, check out the New Residents Guide


FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Best-Selling Book Offered Free to Military & Military Families
Caruso Leadership offers best-selling Power of Losing Control eBook to Navy and other military organizations in the month of January.
Detroit, MI (January 10, 2012) — Caruso Leadership announced today it will release 10,000 free copies of the bestselling book The Power of Losing Control as an eBook, with priority access given to The United States Navy and other organizations that serve the military.
The book’s continued popularity since its original publication as a hardcover and paperback drove the need to create an eBook version. Previously published in six languages and with a stint on the CEO bestseller list, Caruso Leadership updated the Power of Losing Control to include interactive exercises and free supplemental content available through the CarusoLeadership.com website.
“To further Caruso Leadership’s mission to effectively help others reach their goals, I am pleased to extend the free eBook to 10,000 people who wish to make sense of and find success in this out-of-control world,” said Joe Caruso, author of the book and founder of Caruso Leadership. “I am deeply honored that so many members of the US Navy and their families are already downloading the book. Having worked with a number of Admirals for many years, I am grateful for the military’s commitment to our country and in awe of the sacrifices they and their families make that go largely unseen every day.”
The Power of Losing Control is heralded as a book that “absolutely establishes the basis for individual and organizational transformation” and a “A great read and as important an even better re-read.” It was written as a result of thirty years of studying the greatest thinkers, philosophers, and psychoanalysts, and work with hundreds of organizations globally. Because much of Caruso Leadership’s work with individuals and organizations is private, the book offers a window into the studies, life learning, and simple, common, timeless human truths that have transformed countless lives, both personally and professionally, around the world.
“This extraordinary book speaks to the soul of the human endeavor and from the heart of an extraordinary survivor, human being and friend,” said Michael A. Giorgione, Energy Market Leader, RBF Consulting (RADM, USN, Retired), “We should all learn how to lose control and reap the benefits.”
In addition to the popular Success Strategies and principles such as The Four Rules of Engagement, and The Five Steps to Wisdom, the book offers free companion content, including audio recordings, printable exercises, and videos through the Caruso Leadership website. The free book promotion will run until February 15, 2012, or until 10,000 copies have been downloaded – whichever comes first. Free copies can be found at www.carusoleadership.com/out-of-control-giveaway, and more about the book itself, including free companion content, is available at www.carusoleadership.com/power-of-losing-control.
About Caruso Leadership In 1986, Joe Caruso set out to find the formula required for any business to optimize growth and maximize business profit. After studying and working with thousands of businesses and organizations in dozens of countries around the globe, Caruso Leadership has determined the Quintessential ProcessTM to apply to optimize any business or organization. Today, Caruso Leadership works with companies worldwide to analyze the elements that either create or prevent business breakthroughs by applying these processes through strategic business advisory services, executive development and leadership training, organizational development, and sales training. In addition to working with businesses, CEOs, and Admirals, Joe Caruso is a popular keynote speaker and the author of the CEO-bestseller, The Power of Losing Control. Visit CarusoLeadership.com for more information. Contact Us.


Kharakternik (in Russian and Ukrainian: Характерник) was a half-sorcerer and half warrior Cossack, a soldier, healer and diviner. These Shamanic Cossacks, who were apparently only found among the Zaporozhians, were feared and respected for their practice of magic and esotericism.
In reality, kharakterniks, for the benefit of extrasensory or non-extrasensory abilities, had a real social and, above all, medical function. They treated the wounded on the return of the expeditions, and also cared for the spirits by becoming psychotherapists to cheer up the men. In addition to their spiritual functions, they were guardians of traditions and collective memory.


Writer: Invisible Supreme
Dalek Creator: Terry Nation
Dalek Designer: Raymond Cusick
All rights belong to the BBC.
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
Dalek Unit 8164392 disengaged from his position at the control podium, a hexagonal raised platform positioned at the center of the bridge. The Dalek, encased in advanced Metalert armor, was in charge of operations on the battlecruiser Kai-Saka Mur, an infamous ship with the primary function of hunting down and exterminating insurgence from conquered slave races inside of Mutter's Spiral. Its name translated to "Pursued Victory." Unlike the Imperial Mothership Eret-Mensaika Ska, it was built in a purely functional manor, decades after the Dalek Renaissance on Skaro, and was entirely unaesthetic. As such, it was, like most Dalek battlecruisers of that era, almost entirely silver and featureless, save for weapon protrusions and hexagonal panels scattered around its exterior. However, it was also stained with battlescars, including long streaks of carbon scoring, an indicator of its heavy use in combat, and a potentianl recognition factor. The Dalek Unit 8164392 had not had these removed, as it believed the war marks to affect the fear and emotions of the inferior beings whom were its enemies from birth.
On this occasion, however, it had been tasked with searching for and locating an elusive rogue who was responsible for sabatoging and even destroying several Dalek outposts. The PathWeb provided access to recorded descriptions of the rogue, but he was not known by any name. The former evidence against his crimes proved his efforts against the Daleks were ultimately no match for superior Dalek technology. He had, however escaped each time from nearby Dalek patrols after his acts of terrorism via a stealthy transport shuttle, but the Daleks had been able to track this across space to the planet designated 99-7A32, also known as Arkeron. A barren world, full of jungles; the Daleks had not bothered to colonize it due to its lack of specific resources and importance in space. Patrol ships rarely visited its star system, as no activity of interest had occurred there previously.
"Coordinates locked. We will reach the planet Arkeron in 900 Rels." Said a harsh, monotone voice. The Dalek co-pilot, who, unlike his superior Unit, was not clad in Metalert, but standard polycarbide armor. Most of the Daleks present on the bridge were silver, but the Dalek Commander was the exception. Its casing held a shining blue tint. Its sensor globes were silver, and the slats on its midsection were gold, as was the collar underneath the slats. This clearly indicated it held a position of power among its Dalek brethren, and the will to use it; this would also be noticed by any inferiors fortunate enough to be exterminated by it.
Nothing would stand in the way of its mission. It would accomplish its task. It was a Dalek.
So, everyone, tell me what you think of the above prologue, and I shall continue with the story.


BUTTER (Available NOW wherever books are sold!)
He announces his deadly plan to an army of peers and expects pity, insults or even indifference. Instead, he finds morbid encouragement. When that encouragement tips the scales into popularity, Butter has a reason to live. But if he doesn’t go through with his plan, he’ll lose everything.
"Using current, hot-button topics - cyberbullying, obesity, and teen suicide - the author weaves a compelling tale sure to draw teens in." - School Library Journal (*starred review)
"A strong, gutsy debut." - Booklist
"Engrossing and thought-provoking." - The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books
"Dark, funny, painful, and powerful." - Publishers Weekly
DEAD ENDS (Coming September 3, 2013 from Bloomsbury)
Dane Washington doesn’t think he’s a bully. Some guys just need to be put in their place. But Twain High doesn’t see it that way, and Dane is on the brink of getting kicked out of school – until the boy with Down Syndrome moves in across the street.
Billy D. has the power to keep Dane out of trouble, and he'll do it for a price. Dane has to help Billy D. find his missing dad.
But Billy’s only clue is an atlas full of riddles and towns that don’t appear on most maps. As the boys unravel the clues and get closer to finding Billy’s dad, Dane realizes the biggest riddle of all may be the one Billy D. is keeping to himself.


“Not loneliness, but solitude. Not suffering, but endurance, the discovery of grim kinship with the rocks and sky. And the finding here of a harsh peace that would transcend bodily discomfort, a healing instead of the wounds of the soul.”
– Diana Gabaldon (referring to Jamie Frazer from the Outlander series)
It’s fiction, although, through the character of Jamie Frazer, author Diana Gabaldon challenges us to strength, resilience, and patience in difficult circumstances.
I am not lonely. I am learning solitude.
I am not suffering. I am learning endurance and kinship with creation.
I am not wounded. I am learning a harsh peace that transcends pain and discomfort.
We can label this as way too unreal or romantic, or we can look and learn from countless men and women throughout history who have raised the bar by conquering their circumstances.
Do I need to list their names?
Nothing shakes me out of my self-centeredness, ethnocentrism, and poor-me problems more than reading biographies and fiction about the struggles of passionate men and women in other times and places. The first book that called me out on my bull#h*t was Les Miserables. When I read it many years ago, the plights of Jean Valjean, Fantine, and Cosette, representing the real problems of the time period, shook me hardily out of the illusion of my “difficult life.” Other books followed suit: Roots, Tale of Two Cities, A Good Earth, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Man’s Search for Meaning, The Hiding Place, etc. And, more currently, Jungle of Stone, A Thousand Splendid Suns, Endurance, Pillars of the Earth, Outlander, The Glass Castle, Same Kind of Different as Me, and countless others.
I hope you don’t have the same tendency that I have to become a small-minded cry-baby. But if you ever do, I hope you will let a book rescue you.
Occasionally, someone tells a story that changes your life.
I can’t quit thinking about this book, not only because of the harrowing adventures it took to discover the lost Mayan Civilization and the brave and brilliant Stevens and Catherwood that made it their calling, but because the vastness of a “universe,” I had been only remotely aware of, has expanded my own. Jungle of Stone.
Confronted by these two noble, gifted, driven, and humble explorers, I am inspired and humbled by my lack of knowledge, scope, tenacity, and awareness. Thanks, William Carlsen, for excavating the story for me and forcing me out of my own “backyard.”
Even if you have no interest in ancient history or archeology, the life-stories of John Lloyd Stevens and Frederick Catherwood will enlarge your existence.
There is room for misunderstanding in every story, especially if I just have the headline or, even, the who, what, where, when, and how.
It’s still oh so easy to be self-righteous, insensitive, despairing, or harsh in my conclusions, cheating someone out of the benefit of a doubt that I so cherish myself. The stories I tell myself about others, myself, or God often lack the most important element: the element of the mystery inside the story.
Gene McGuire’s new book Unshackled: From Ruin to Redemption is a great reminder of the remarkable mystery hidden in the story. Gene served thirty-five years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit, yet managed to come out with this big smile and a great future. Now, that is mysterious…and worth an investigation into the other parts of the story!
In Kate Braestrup’s book Here If You Need Me she tells the story of coping with her husband’s premature death through the lens of her work as a Maine Game Warden Chaplain.
I resonated with her description of the “parallel worlds” of light and darkness and the “hinge” of death or tragedy that can swing us suddenly from one into the other.
We can live casually, surrounded by the comfort of things and people we love, but, we must always remember the temporal nature of this state. Things will change; our whole life will swing into uncharted territory. And, I am convinced, along with Kate, that if we want to know where God is in all of the upheaval, we must look for love…
…in whatever world we find ourselves.
I cannot read a book, take time to hear another’s story, or let a movie give me its message, without coming back to my regular life changed. Forrest Gander captured this truth in his intro to the new book of Neruda’s lost poems:
“The truth is that I disappeared from myself. I was concentrated entirely into the durable moment of translation–which begins in humility, a sublimation of the self so extreme that the music of someone else’s mind might be heard. And for a while, no remnant of me existed outside of that moment.” – Forrest Gander (translator of The Lost Neruda Poems)
When my friend gave me this book, I wasn’t very excited about reading obscure love poems, yet the book begin to change me in the prologue when the translator mentioned the same skepticism when asked to translate the work.
Today will change me…if I allow it. It will improve me if I listen to the music of someone else’s mind intently enough to receive the gifts they offer and translate them to my own journey home.
In her book, Thick Face, Black Heart, Asian-American best-selling author Chin-Ning Chu was painfully honest about her life:
“One morning, years ago, I woke up with an overwhelming feeling of aloneness overtaking my soul. I felt as if my spirit were covered by layers of dark clouds. I lived but made no difference to the world… I stood alone in the pit of my soul. I felt the world could do very well without me. I didn’t see any hope, only despair. Then I picked up a book my parents had given me long ago: one I had never read…“
In Soaring, Chu heard the message that saved her life.
The author said, “if one is destined for great accomplishments, the preparation for the journey will be extensive.” She embraced the message, deciding that her pain had not been wasted. I’m glad she did, because I would need her book many years later.
They died broke. Thoreau died in a room with boxes of his unsold books. Poe was disrespected by the literary community. Van Gough couldn’t sell enough art to pay his rent.
When I feel underrated, ignored, undervalued, underpaid, unimpressive, or like I’m expending way too much time and effort without any significant pay off, I remember these men.
I remember to never give up, to be unattached to a particular outcome, to value myself and my work even if I am not sure others will.
Doing what I feel compelled to do may not turn out the way I imagined it would, but I will never have to regret what I become by doing so.
New York Times Bestsellers, Accidental Saints and Pastrix by Nadia Bolz-Weber are refreshingly honest books for anyone who can’t stand pious religious talk. In her brutally honest book about pastoring, she doesn’t just admit her past, she admits her present; the real petty, self-righteous, unloving stuff that most of us try to hide.
And I especially love her willingness to admit she needs forgiveness for being an a**hole;
“‘God please help me not be an asshole’ is about as common a prayer as I pray in my life.”
Good for those of us who have trouble with church but miss community.
Joseph Conrad, author of Heart of Darkness, said that it was not necessary to believe that the world was good in order to be hopeful.
That is critical for me to remember…when the darkness of this world takes me by surprise, chases me into a dark alley of bitterness, or shocks me with its brutality.
Because I can live my life on a sunlit avenue, I can also fool myself into believing that the darkness doesn’t exist.
Then, darkness will intrude like an uninvited stranger.
Or, one day, I may take a new route home, turn the corner, and stumble upon shocking squalor or agony. There, I will collapse (along with my illusion) into a shell of myself, under a heavy blanket of despair…
…unless I prepare for it and bring my own light.


The true story of what happened to the RMS Titanic is as extraordinary as it is emotional, and familiar to most of us through the epic 1997 film. It was on April 15th of 1912 that the British passenger liner sank in the North Atlantic Ocean after hitting an iceberg. The ambitious voyage was only a few days into its journey from Southampton, UK, to New York City.
Real photos of the actual passenger liner, its rooms, and the people on board the ship have been colorized for us to really get a sense of what it was like. Now more than ever, the legendary Titanic has been brought to life through these edits, and the results are more moving than you might expect.


If you could have a super power, what would it be?
The ability to be in more than one place at a time. I would be simultaneously kayaking, bird watching, and snorkeling on the Great Barrier Reef.
What is the best thing about your job?
Helping people with their research questions. I love the combination of detective work needed to find an answer and knowing
I helped the user. Plus I learn about many subjects along the way.
What is the worst?
Being in administration, I wish I had more opportunities to work directly with users on their research needs.
What are you reading now, and what do you think about it?
I am on the Stonewall Book Awards committee so read a lot of gay/lesbian books. Unfortunately I can’t comment on those books
until the awards are announced, but I can comment on a few I enjoyed last year.
Very cool! Tell us more…
One my favorite genres is young adult fiction. I really enjoyed Sparks: The Epic, Completely True Blue, (Almost) Holy Quest of Debbie, by S. J. Adams. I read the book in one day. The fast pace, breathless nature of the writing/story was engaging and reminiscent of the headiness of being in high school, feeling like everything is earth-shattering and must be taken care of NOW. The rush and confusion of first love, the risk-taking, the cliques, the clunker cars with not enough gas or enough money for gas, the realization of religious hypocrisy–it all felt very realistic. I just had to keep reading to find out what happened. I found the plot unpredictable and the characters engaging. I think everything about the book was fun, from the cover art and title, to the writing style and characters.
Art on Fire by Hilary Sloin is a somewhat unusual work of fiction. It is a pseudo-biography, complete with fake footnotes and art reviews, of lesbian artist Francesa desilva. Tomboy Fran lives in the shadow of her genius sister Bella in their otherwise typically dysfunctional family circa late 1970s–early 1980s. Fran meets Lisa, also a genius, at one of her sister’s parties for the socially inept. Thus begins Fran’s only love, an on again-off-again relationship burdened by Lisa’s internalized homophobia, her own familial baggage, and Fran’s belief that she can never really, truly love. Fran runs away from home, begging Lisa to join her. Ultimately, Fran ends up living a life of artistic deprivation. The isolation suits her and, through a serious of coincidences, she becomes a famous artist, eclipsing her sister’s success.
There are several layers of mystery in the story and the reader is invited to read between the lines–and footnotes– looking for the truth but the mystery is only a subtle part of an otherwise tragic story, filled with broken people, thwarted desire, unfilled dreams. I enjoyed the juxtaposition of the scholarly art analysis of Fran’s work with the rest of the story. The reader almost has to laugh at the art reviews, as each attempts to decipher the meaning in Fran’s art within the context of feminism and lesbianism while the reader knows how each piece came about and why. A story of contradictions and sadness.
My TBR pile just grew. Tell us a story about yourself or about a librarian you know that runs counter to the myth of librarians as retiring, spinster-ish, bookworms.
At my last job I was working with a colleague on the reference desk and another librarian came by. We were carrying on some discussion when a patron asked us to be quiet. Clearly we were a chatty bunch, social to a fault—literally. The image of librarians as quiet, etc. has become a trope, media’s code for communicating precisely that someone is quiet, retiring, and book-ish. However the advent of the Internet, e-books, and other technologies in the library has mitigated the image to some extent. Librarians are now portrayed as tech savvy.
Is there a librarian in your past that influenced you?
I don’t recall the names of my local, branch librarian in NJ and my school librarian. I’ve always been drawn to libraries and have a very vivid memory of my first library visit. I had just learned to write my name and my mom took me to the branch library. I was in heaven and asked the librarian how many books I could take home and she said “as many as you can carry.” That response wowed me. Plus, I wanted to play with all the stamps on the librarian’s desk. Alas, by the time I became a librarian stamps were virtually non-existent.
Are there topics you feel writers need to write about more?
There is always more room for stories with characters of diverse ethnic backgrounds. I would like to see a greater variety of religious fiction based on faiths other than Christianity; the latter has pretty much cornered the market. The growing visibility of transgendered individuals indicates the need for more serious fiction featuring transgender individuals and bisexuals could also be included in that category.
What do you have to say to readers?
Read as many books as you carry. Read outside your favorite genres to broaden your horizons.
Great advice! That’s why I belong to a book club. It forces me to read books I never would’ve picked up on my own.
Thank you for stopping by, Ellen. Have fun snorkeling the Great Barrier Reef!


The below is intended to provide inspiration for background reading for the 2017 ICA Preconference on Normative Theories in Communication Research.
It covers some major discussions in political theory and in media/communication research and is primarily centered on notions of democracy and justice.
It reflects my provincial origins. It is presentist, heavily Western-centric, and Anglophone. It also reflects the gender and racial biases of professional social science. I have not included older classics of political theory (pre-20th century) though many of them have much to offer.
Recommendations warmly welcome. I plan to update this on the basis of input from those interested.
For people interested in internal debates in US/UK liberalism and its critics around media and freedom of expression, I recommend Victor Picard’s Democratic Theories of Media syllabus.
What follows is structured in four major sections—
- “Mid-century discussions” focused on material from the 1920s-1960s from the foundational period of modern professional social science including media/communication research.
- “Late twentieth-century discussions” focused on the 1970s-1990s,
- “Contemporary discussions” (2000s-)
- “Recent work on normative theory in journalism studies and political communication research”
Sections (1) and (4) are quite engaged with media/communication research, (2) and (3) more with the field of political theory. It is my impression that normative theory was relatively absent from much media/communication research in the late twentieth century. Perhaps I am wrong.
My observation about the shift from (2) to (3) is that many parts of professional political theory has moved from discussions of competing relatively abstract models (liberal, deliberative etc.) to a focus on specific more concrete issues (diversity, globalization, etc.).
For general background, Held (2006) provides a good general overview over theoretical discussions and Keane (2009) an interesting historical account, particularly noteworthy for breaking down the myth that democracy originates in ancient Greece—he in fact finds older roots from many other parts of the world.
Held, David. 2006. Models of Democracy. 3rd ed. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
Keane, John. 2009. The Life and Death of Democracy. 1st American ed.. New York ; London: WWNorton & Co.
The list is not meant to be exhaustive, but to serve for inspiration.
1) MID-CENTURY DISCUSSIONS (1920s-1960s)
Progressive reformers (for example Addams, Dewey, Park)
Addams, Jane. 2002. The Jane Addams Reader. New York: Basic Books.
Dewey, John. 1991. The Public and Its Problems. Athens, Ohio: Swallow Press/Ohio University Press.
Park, Robert E. 1974. The Collected Papers of Robert Ezra Park. Edited by Hughes Everett C. New York: Arno Press.
Democratic realists (for example Dahl, Lippmann, Lazarsfeld)
Berelson, Bernard, Paul F Lazarsfeld, and William N McPhee. 1954. Voting; a Study of Opinion Formation in a Presidential Campaign. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Dahl, Robert A. 1971. Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition. New Haven ; London: Yale University Press.
Lippmann, Walter. 1997. Public Opinion. New Brunswick, N.J., U.S.A: Transaction Publishers.
Radical critics (for example W.E. Du Bois, C. Wright Mills, early Habermas)
Du Bois, W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt). 2014. W. E. B. Du Bois: Selections from His Writings. Dover Thrift Editions. Mineola, New York: Dover Publications.
Mills, C. Wright. 1959. The Power Elite. Oxford Paperbacks. Oxford University Press: London.
Habermas, Jürgen. 1989. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
2) LATE TWENTIETH-CENTURY DISCUSSIONS (1970s-1990s)
Liberalism (for example Dahl, Rawls, Sen)
Dahl, Robert A. 1998. On Democracy. Yale Nota Bene. New Haven ; London: Yale University Press.
Rawls, John. 1993. Political Liberalism. John Dewey Essays in Philosophy ; No. 4. New York: Columbia University Press.
Sen, Amartya Kumar. 1999. ‘Democracy as a Universal Value’. Journal of Democracy 10 (3): 3–17. doi:10.1353/jod.1999.0055.
Communitarianism (for example Barber, Sandel, Carey)
Barber, Benjamin R. 2003. Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age. 20th anniversary ed. with a new preface. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Carey, James W. 1988. Communication as Culture : Essays on Media and Society. Media and Popular Culture ; 1. New York ; London: Routledge.
Sandel, Michael J. 1996. Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy. Cambridge, Mass ; London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Deliberation (for example Gutmann, Habermas, Fishkin)
Gutmann, Amy, and Dennis Thompson. 2004. Why Deliberative Democracy? Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press.
Fishkin, James S. 1991. Democracy and Deliberation : New Directions for Democratic Reform. New Haven, CT ; London: Yale University Press.
Habermas, Jürgen. 1996. Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
Radical democracy (for example Behabib, Mouffe, Ranciere)
Benhabib, Seyla. 1996. Democracy and Difference : Contesting the Boundaries of the Political. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Mouffe, Chantal. 2000. The Democratic Paradox. Phronesis (London, England). London: Verso.
Rancière, Jacques. 1999. Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
3) CONTEMPORARY DISCUSSIONS (2000s-)
Fraser, Nancy. 2008. Scales of Justice: Reimagining Political Space in a Globalizing World. Cambridge: Polity.
———. 2014. Transnationalizing the Public Sphere. Cambridge: Polity.
O’Neill, Onora. 2016. Justice across Boundaries: Whose Obligations? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Benhabib, Seyla. 2002. The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era. Princeton, N.J. ; Oxford: Princeton University Press.
———. 2004. The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents and Citizens. John Robert Seeley Lectures ; 5. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Honig, Bonnie. 2001. Democracy and the Foreigner. Princeton, N.J. ; Oxford: Princeton University Press.
Tully, James. 1995. Strange Multiplicity : Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity. John Robert Seeley Lectures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Young, Iris Marion. 2000. Inclusion and Democracy. Oxford Political Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Geuss, Raymond. 2008. Philosophy and Real Politics. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Shapiro, Ian. 2003. The State of Democratic Theory. Princeton, NJ; Oxford: Princeton University Press.
Williams, Bernard. 2005. In the Beginning Was the Deed : Realism and Moralism in Political Argument. Princeton, NJ; Oxford: Princeton University Press.
Reclaiming representative democracy
Rosenblum, Nancy L. 2008. On the Side of the Angels: An Appreciation of Parties and Partisanship. Princeton, N.J. ; Oxford: Princeton University Press.
Rosanvallon, Pierre. 2008. Counter-Democracy : Politics in an Age of Distrust. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Urbinati, Nadia. 2006. Representative Democracy : Principles and Genealogy. Chicago, Ill; London: University of Chicago Press.
Participatory/radical democracy and institutional design
Fung, Archon. 2004. Empowered Participation: Reinventing Urban Democracy. Princeton, N.J. : Chichester: Princeton University Press; UPCCP.
Fung, Archon, Erik Olin Wright, and Rebecca Abers, eds. 2003. Deepening Democracy : Institutional Innovations in Empowered Participatory Governance. Real Utopias Project (Series) ; v. 4. London: Verso.
Honneth, Axel. 2015. Freedom’s Right: The Social Foundations of Democratic Life. New Directions in Critical Theory. New York: Columbia University Press.
Santos, Boaventura de Sousa, ed. 2007. Democratizing Democracy. London ; New York: Verso.
Wright, Erik Olin. 2010. Envisioning Real Utopias. London: Verso.
Crouch, Colin. 2004. Post-Democracy. Cambridge: Polity.
Hay, Colin. 2007. Why We Hate Politics. Cambridge: Polity.
4) RECENT WORK ON NORMATIVE THEORY JOURNALISM STUDIES AND POLITICAL COMMUNICATION RESEARCH
Baker, C. 2002. Media, Markets, and Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Benson, Rodney. 2008. ‘Normative Theories of Journalism’. The Blackwell International Encyclopedia of Communication, 2591–2597.
Blumler, Jay G., and Stephen Cushion. 2014. ‘Normative Perspectives on Journalism Studies: Stock-Taking and Future Directions’. Journalism 15 (3): 259–72. doi:10.1177/1464884913498689.
Christians, Clifford G., Theodore L. Glasser, Denis McQuail, Kaarle Nordenstreng, and Robert A. White. 2009. Normative Theories of the Media: Journalism in Democratic Societies. History of Communication. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Coleman, Stephen, and Giles Moss. 2015. ‘Rethinking Election Debates’. The International Journal of Press/Politics 21 (1): 3–24. doi:10.1177/1940161215609732.
Gans, Herbert J. 2003. Democracy and the News. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
George, Cherian. 2013. ‘Diversity around a Democratic Core: The Universal and the Particular in Journalism’. Journalism 14 (4): 490–503. doi:10.1177/1464884912464169.
Josephi, Beate. 2013. ‘How Much Democracy Does Journalism Need?’ Journalism 14 (4): 474–89. doi:10.1177/1464884912464172.
Kreiss, Daniel, and J. Scott Brennan. 2016. ‘Normative Theories of Digital Journalism’. In The SAGE Handbook of Digital Journalism, edited by Tamara Witschge, Chris W. Anderson, David Domingo, and Alfred Hermida, 299–314. Los Angeles: SAGE.
Powers, Matthew. 2016. ‘Beyond Boon or Bane’. Journalism Studies 0 (0): 1–17. doi:10.1080/1461670X.2015.1124733.
Schudson, Michael. 2008. Why Democracies Need an Unlovable Press. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
Strömbäck, Jesper. 2005. ‘In Search of a Standard: Four Models of Democracy and Their Normative Implications for Journalism’. Journalism Studies 6 (3): 331–45. doi:10.1080/14616700500131950.
Zelizer, Barbie. 2013. ‘On the Shelf Life of Democracy in Journalism Scholarship’. Journalism 14 (4): 459–73. doi:10.1177/1464884912464179.
Althaus, Scott L. 2011. ‘What’s Good and Bad in Political Communication Research? Normative Standards for Evaluating Media and Citizen Performance’. In Sage Handbook of Political Communication, edited by Holli A. Semetko and Margaret Scammell. London: SAGE Publications.
Bucy, Erik P., and Paul D’Angelo. 2004. ‘Democratic Realism, Neoconservatism, and the Normative Underpinnings of Political Communication Research’. Mass Communication and Society 7 (1): 3–28. doi:10.1207/s15327825mcs0701_2.
Nielsen, Rasmus Kleis. 2016. ‘Democracy’. In Digital Keywords: A Vocabulary of Information Society and Culture, edited by Benjamin Peters, 81–92. Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/History. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Peters, John. 1989. ‘Democracy and Mass Communication Theory: Dewey, Lippmann, Lazarsfeld’. Communication 11 (3): 199–220.


|Mutant Bacteria and the Failure of Antibiotics|
|The Killers Within: The Deadly Rise of Drug-Resistant Bacteria|
by Michael Shnayerson and Mark J. Plotkin
Posted: April 4, 2003
Michael Shnayerson and Mark J. Plotkin, authors of The Killers Within: The Deadly Rise of Drug-Resistant Bacteria, have now joined the army of alert writers who are concerned about the dangers of antibiotic resistance and its implications for the return of infectious diseases that cannot be effectively treated. The authors argue that today’s hospitals are not only spreading bacteria from patient to patient, but are also harboring a tougher breed of bug—one that is resistant to antibiotics.
Most infections are either bacterial or viral, and bacterial infections are susceptible to antibiotics. These drugs are designed to attach to enzymes on bacterial cell walls, either preventing the microbes from replicating or killing them outright. Unless, that is, the bacteria mutate and change their enzymes, thus preventing the drug from attaching.
Penicillin was greeted as a panacea when it was developed in the early-20th century. In the decades since, the authors claim—as have others before them—that the overuse of antibiotics for every possible illness has “educated” bacteria, creating opportunities for mutations to occur: “If misuse of antibiotics created drug resistance in the first place, poor infection control in hospitals allowed the bugs to spread.”
Bacteria may be small, but these one-celled organisms can divide and reproduce into more daughter cells than the human population of Earth in just fourteen hours.
Plotkin, an ethnobiologist, and Shnayerson, a contributing editor to Vanity Fair, report what they have learned from interviews and the scientific literature about how bacteria develop resistance and the role genes play in this process. They express admiration for bacteria’s clever defense mechanisms, including the evolution of enzymes that attack antibiotics and tiny pumps that vomit the drug out of the cell.
In the first half of this book, the authors try to scare the general public into recognizing the seriousness of the threat (chapter titles include “The Silent War,” “Nightmare Come True,” “Flesheaters”). Yet despite the scare tactics, the authors succeed in creating a suspenseful narrative.
Indeed, their claim that the medical industry has not taken growing drug-resistance seriously enough and has failed to improve antibiotics suggests a fatal conclusion fitting of Stephen King: People are dying of bacterial infections that were treatable a few years ago.
By shadowing scientists around the globe—including the “genetic detectives” and “microbe hunters” who work with the world’s most dangerous pathogens, as well as epidemiologists investigating outbreaks of bacterial infection—the authors craft an informative thriller with vivid descriptions and tales of scientific sleuthing.
The book tells the story, for instance, of William Noble, a microbiologist at St. John's Hospital for Diseases of the Skin in London, who, in the early 1990s, created a strain of Staphylococcus aureus that was resistant to the antibiotic vancomycin by exposing the microbe to another bacterium with resistant genes. A few years later, a vancomycin-resistant S. aureus was isolated from a lung-cancer patient in Japan, suggesting that Noble's laboratory experiment had happened in nature.
Like hospitals, the meat industry is a source of rising drug-resistance. Small doses of antibiotics (called “growth-promoters”) added to animal feed contribute to the development of resistant strains by familiarizing bacteria with the drugs without actually threatening them. The authors argue that substantial research shows that these resistant bacteria are easily transferred to humans eating these animals.
Toward the end of the book, the authors leave behind the horrors of resistant bacteria and begin to describe the search for new antibiotics. Until recently, most natural antibiotics have been found in soil and fungi. Among the scientists trying novel approaches to discovering antibiotics are researchers who collect saliva from lizards in Indonesia and distill sewage water in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia.
These researchers are experimenting with animal peptides and miniscule viruses that act as natural antibiotics. Peptides punch their way through the bacterial cell membrane regardless of these enzymes.
Scientists in Georgia have been using viruses called “phages” for decades to puncture the bacterial membrane but with the purpose of injecting DNA. Phages take over the bacteria’s genetic machinery in order to produce more phages, rather than bacteria. An interesting footnote in this passage is that phages are also the basis of genetic engineering: Geneticists insert certain genes into phages, prompting the bacteria to manufacture those genes.
The subject of resistant bacteria is not breaking news. The problem has been widely discussed in the medical community although the general public may not be as familiar with the issue. While the authors focus on the ignorance and blindness of the medical community towards this problem, they also reveal the obstacles preventing new antibiotics from being developed and problematic behaviors from being changed.
For readers interested in the topic, The Killers Within provides an overview of the biological, medical, policy-oriented and personal perspectives involved. And for those who have the stomach to digest the chilling dangers posed by resistant bacteria, this book will be a thrilling read.
Merete Rietveld is a freelance writer who lives in Palo Alto, California.


The length of the Paper is limited to 6 pages including abstract, references and must confirm to Springer Format. Soft copy (.doc) of the paper should be submitted via easy chair. For Further details kindly visit the conference webpage.
All accepted papers will be considered for publication in SCI/SCOPUS Indexed Journal after peer review by the expert committee. Publication charges if any, are to be paid by the authors only.
*SCI/Scopus Indexed Journal publication charges additional. Selected Papers will be considered for publication in Springer Book series titled “Edge AI : Machine Vision and Intelligence for Industry 4.0 Use Cases”.
Submission of Final Paper
28th February, 2022
Intimation of Acceptance
10th March, 2022
Last Date for Registration
13th March, 2022


Included as part of the proceedings of ICMC 2022
2022 ICMC Paper Presentation
Improvising Avatars: Conceptualizing Game Environments as a New Medium for Procedurally Interactive Computer Music
This is a presentation of research outlining the technical and aesthetic considerations in conceptualizing, constructing a virtual game environment as a new medium for procedurally interactive computer music.er controller.
In an effort to derive novel, electro-acoustic improvisational techniques based on non-linear, procedural human-computer interaction, the virtual player’s gestural options, as well as their discreet and continuous movements, are converted into a stream of running data. By constructing a musical environment in this manner, there exists an inescapable duality between the participating musicians, where the human performer and virtual player’s output greatly influences the decision- making process of the other, and by extension, the processing of the audio and video source material.


Our monthly meetings are held on the 2nd Tuesday of each month from September to June.
The Simcoe County Museum
1151 Highway 26 W, Minesing, ON L9X 0Z7
Except for potluck nights, the program runs from 7:00 pm to 9:30 pm with the ½ hour starting at 6:30 pm set aside for socializing and library check-in/check-out.
*Please note this area is still under development.


Last year I visited the Brooklyn Art Library, home of a brilliant public art project, The Sketchbook Library. Over 41,000 5″x7″ sketchbooks from 130 countries can be viewed in person, on tour and online.
I was inspired to bring home my own sketchbook, which I’ve now completed.
My sketchbook combines pen and watercolour drawings with haiku. It’s an ode to the accidental art, moments of beauty and small dramas that can be found amid the banality of suburbia.
Update: my sketchbook is now in the Brooklyn Art Library and can be viewed online here.


23 Feb Akhand Ramayan at Radha Krishna Temple
Shree Goswami Tulsidas was a 15th century realized soul and saint, poet, often called reformer and philosopher renowned for his devotion to Lord Shree Ram. Tulsidas Maharaj wrote several popular works in Sanskrit and Awadhi, a vernacular dialect of Hindi. He is best known as the author of the epic RamCharitMahans, a retelling of the Sanskrit Ramayan based on the life of Lord Shree Ram in Awadhi. Radha Krishna Temple of Dallas is graciously hosting the recital of Shree RamCharitManas on the 2nd and 3rd of March.
Significance of the Ramayan
परित्राणाय साधूनां विनाशाय च दुष्कृताम् । धर्मसंस्थापनार्थाय सम्भवामि युगे युगे ॥
In the Bhagavad Gita 4.8, Lord Krishna declares “For the up-liftment of the good and virtuous, For the destruction of evil, For the re-establishment of dharma I will come, in every age”.
Out of the many avatars taken by the Lord, His avatar as Lord Shree Ram is one of the most significant! Shree Ram, the poorna avatar of Sriman Narayana, took the human form and came down to the earth and demonstrated to mankind how to live and love. It is said that as long as the mountains stand and rivers flow, the story of Srimad Ramayana would remain eternal in all the worlds.
Why should one should read this epic?
Shree Rama did not show His divinity easily in this avatar. He was born as a human being and had all the feelings of a human being, so why is this epic celebrated so much and translated into so many languages? We all know that understanding Vedas and Shastras is not for the common people. Not only is it difficult, but it is almost impossible for common man! This is reason the Lord has graced us with the story of Srimad Ramayana. It is said that when Shree Ram decided to descend on the Earth, to aid Him in this avatar, the Vedas took birth as Srimad Ramayana. If one wants to know what is said in the Vedas, reading Srimad Ramayana would suffice!
Akhand Ramayan Parayan


Dark Alchemy (HarperCollins, Voyager Impulse, 2015, Dark Alchemy trilogy) by Laura Bickle
Magic on the Hunt, (Roc, 2011, Allie Beckstrom Book 6) by Devon Monk
Magic at the Gate (ROC, 2010, Allie Beckstrom Book 5) by Devon Monk
Magic in the Blood (ROC, May 2010, Allie Beckstrom Book 4) by Devon Monk
Magic in the Shadows (ROC, 2009, Allie Beckstrom Book 3) by Devon Monk
A Promise of Fire (Sourcebooks Casablanca 2017) by Amanda Bouchet
Magic in the Blood (ROC, 2009, Allie Beckstrom Book 2) by Devon Monk
From the jacket: “Allison Beckstrom knows better than most that when magic’s involved, nothing is free. She’s had to pay its price of migraines and forgetfulness while working as a Hound, tracing illegal spells back to their casters. And even though magic has stolen her recent memory—including her history with the man she supposedly fell in love with—Allie isn’t about to give up on Hounding or the city she cares about.
“Then the police’s magic enforcement division asks her to consult on what seems to be a straightforward missing-persons case. But what begins as a way to make rent leads Allie into grave danger when the trail she’s following draws her into the dark underworld of criminals, ghosts, and blood magic. There, Allie discovers it will take more than just magic to survive….”
Magic in the Blood (ROC, 2009) is book 2 of Devon Monk’s urban fantasy series about Hound Allie Beckstrom. It picks up her story not long after the conclusion of book 1. In Monk’s version of Seattle, magic flows through the world in lighting, through the ground, and through the manufactured conduits meant to trap it for use. It’s not necessary to have read book one, as Monk builds her world quickly and incorporates the details of magic into Allie’s everyday life, such as choosing to live in an apartment where the decaying smell of old magic doesn’t seep out of the walls. In this world, magic will bite you in the ass, hard, for using it.
As a Hound, Allie makes her living tracing spells back to find the caster who avoided that consequence by “offloading” it on an innocent. Meanwhile, to do her job, Allie often needs to use magic. She keeps a journal because magic also steals pieces of her memory, on top of the other physical costs. No matter her need, she resists using the abusive Influence she inherited from her bad-ass (now deceased) power-mongering father. Her view of their relationship reveals her character, and is just one of the many reasons I admire her. Her tell-it-like-it-is attitude and down-to-earth nature are two others.
Magic has mixed things up for her because of book one, showing her a side that few know about, and even fewer understand. The one person who might, sexy bodyguard Zayvion Jones (Zay), might once have been her boyfriend, but she doesn’t remember other than what she wrote in her journal, and what he said to her near the end of book one.
The first-person narration drew me in. Allie’s got a no-nonsense attitude, paired with a lone-wolf style of working. I knew she’d get in over her head, and that’s when the story would sizzle.
Monk kept raising the stakes for Allie, pulling in more and more characters from book one. Between an event in the first page of the book and a scene in the second chapter, Monk set the pace fast and kept it driving through the novel. Even when Allie seems to catch a break, I know Monk’s going to make her pay for any moment of happiness, friendship, or even the fine cup of coffee at her favorite place, Get Mugged.
If you’ve read book one, you’ll bring some knowledge to the table that it seems Allie has forgotten, and colors how I’m looking at the magical community. In this book, Monk delivered in spades on it. Since Zay seems like he’ll be a recurring character in the series, it’s possible he’ll have that “forgotten” conversation with her in another book. Then again, since he doesn’t know she’s forgotten it….
Monk plays with that memory loss, sometimes making it fun, and sometimes using it to increase the tension. When Allie’s in trouble, she’s not always sure who she can trust.
As a foil, Zay is great with the magic he brings to the table. I’m still not sure what it costs when he uses magic. I’m hoping Monk will show me in a future book.
If you want a solid urban fantasy, a strong female, pick up book two of the Allie Beckstrom series.


The International Space University Library and the TU Delft Libraries are already working together to provide you with the best services and resources to support your learning and research needs over the SSP.
ISU library has a rich collection of resources covered in priority all aspects of the space sector. Besides printed resources, the catalogue also contains e-resources from the internet, e-books and student reports. Publicly available documents and past Team Projects reports are readily available to you!
ISU Library Portal: https://isulibrary.isunet.edu/
ISU Library Facbeook webpage: http://www.facebook.com/InternationalSpaceUniversityLIBRARY


Researching for the post on the ENIAC, I came across a small paragraph mentioning the women programmers who had programmed the ENIAC, but were totally ignored and forgotten to the extent that they were not mentioned in any of the press releases, they were not invited even for the 50th anniversary of the commissioning of the ENIAC(which happened in the socially aware times of 1996!). There was a story lurking under the surface. I did not expect too much of content to be available on the net. So, I wanted to do a short piece on them. Boy, was I wrong! There were oodles and oodles of content on the net about the ENIAC programmers. I was overwhelmed by the quality and the quantity of the content. I have tried my best to curate as much content as possible.
“For many years in the computing industry, the hardware was it, the software was considered an auxiliary thing.”
– Jean Bartik
This quote from the leader of the group of 6 women who programmed the ENIAC, sounds counter-intuitive in today’s software dominated world, where the hardware has been reduced to commodity status.
According to the article in abcnews.com,
““At 83, Betty Jean Jennings Bartik — a devoted bridge player and grandmother of five — had a secret past that was invisible to many who knew her.
Her grandson Alex knew her story. He stormed out of school one day when his teacher refused to believe his gray-haired granny was a computer pioneer who had calculated firing tables and ballistic trajectories during World War II.
The boy’s parents had to explain to the teacher that Bartik and five other women had, indeed, legally hacked the world’s first programmable computer, converting it into a stored machine and eventually helping to usher in the digital age.
“She was dumbfounded,” said Bartik.
So, too, were the historians, who for a half century never acknowledged the wartime contributions of the six women who programmed the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) and made programming easier and more accessible to those who followed.”
The story of the 6 women programmers is exhilarating and sad at the same time. As World War II was raging around the globe, there was a need to develop quicker ways to calculate artillery firing tables for the United States Army’s Ballistic Research Laboratory. This work was done predominantly by women ‘computers’(so called because they computed the numbers by hand, for various requirements. Computer as a device did not exist then). The ENIAC was built with the express purpose of replacing these ‘computers’ and calculate differential equations in seconds, what took the human computers days to calculate.”
Commissioning of the ENIAC
According to the article in phillyvoice.com,
““These women were hired pretty much to set this machine up, but it turns out that no one knew how to program. There were no ‘programmers’ at that time, and the only thing that existed for this machine were the schematics,” said Mitch Marcus, the RCA Professor of Artificial Intelligence in the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania. “These six women found out what it took to run this computer — and they really did incredible things.”
“So ENIAC, instead of doing five additions a second [like its predecessors], each of its 20 accumulators could do 20,000 additions a second,” said Marcus, who has pursued ENIAC as a side interest for more than two decades. “When it was finished, it could actually compute the trajectory of an artillery shell faster than the artillery shell could travel.”
Not only was ENIAC incredibly powerful in terms of speed, but unlike earlier machines, it wasn’t built for a specific purpose and could tackle a multitude of different problems. Mauchly’s original proposal was to use it for weather forecasting, but the U.S. Army later funded the project for the purpose of automating the calculation of artillery firing tables. Each line of these tables typically took a single person about 40 hours to complete.”
Selection of 6 ‘computers’ to program the ENIAC
I came across this article on Fortune magazine’s website. It contained excerpts of the book “The Innovators” by Walter Isaacson. The excerpts are very interesting and so I have curated some of it in this post. For those of you who want the real McCoy, please click on the book title and buy it.
“The field of computer programming was so new, it seems Herman Goldstine did not know what to ask the girls in the interview. Here is a sample of what he asked and how Jean Jennings was picked for the job.
“When she got to the meeting, Herman Goldstine, Adele’s husband, asked her what she knew about electricity. “I said that I had had a course in physics and knew that E equalled IR,” she recalled, referring to Ohm’s law. “No, no,” Goldstine replied, “I don’t care about that, but are you afraid of it?” The job involved plugging in wires and throwing a lot of switches, he explained. She said that she wasn’t afraid. While she was being interviewed, Adele Goldstine came in, looked at her, and nodded. Jennings was selected.””
According to the excerpts from “The Innovators” by Walter Isaacson in the Fortune website,
“Ever since the days of Charles Babbage, who conceived of a giant mechanical calculator called the Analytical Engine in the 1830s, the engineering of computer hardware has been dominated by men. The pioneers of software, however, were often women, beginning with Babbage’s friend and muse Ada, Countess of Lovelace. Daughter of the Romantic poet Lord Byron and a mother who loved math, Ada combined both fields into what she called “poetical science.”
“…A century later, when the first electronic computers were being invented, the men were still focusing on the hardware, and many women followed in Ada’s footsteps. One was Lt. Grace Hopper, who helped program the Harvard Mark I computer in the early 1940s. Less heralded by history was a group of six women who worked in wartime secrecy at the University of Pennsylvania, where John Mauchly and Presper Eckert led a team that was building ENIAC, the world’s first programmable, all-electronic, general-purpose computer. Here is an excerpt from Walter Isaacson’s The Innovators telling their story:
The tale of Jean Jennings is illustrative of the early women computer programmers. She was born on a farm on the outskirts of Alanthus Grove, Mo. (pop. 104), into a family that had almost no money and deeply valued education. Her father taught in a one-room schoolhouse, where Jean became the star pitcher and lone girl on the softball team. Her mother, though she had dropped out of school in eighth grade, helped tutor algebra and geometry. Jean was the sixth of seven children, all of whom went to college. She attended Northwest Missouri State Teachers College in Maryville, where the tuition was $76 per year. She started out majoring in journalism, but she hated her adviser so switched to math, which she loved.
When she finished in January 1945, her calculus teacher showed her a flier soliciting women mathematicians to work at the University of Pennsylvania, where women were working as “computers”—humans who performed routinized math tasks—mainly calculating artillery trajectory tables for the Army.
Jennings, who had never been out of Missouri, applied. When she received a telegram of acceptance, she boarded the midnight Wabash train heading east and arrived at Penn 40 hours later. “Needless to say, they were shocked that I had gotten there so quickly,” she recalled.
In addition to Jean Jennings (later Bartik), the others were Marlyn Wescoff (later Meltzer), Ruth Lichterman (later Teitelbaum), Betty Snyder (later Holberton), Frances Bilas (later Spence), and Kay McNulty (who later married John Mauchly).
After six weeks of training, the women consigned their boyfriends to memory archives and returned to Penn, where they were given poster-size diagrams and charts describing ENIAC. “Somebody gave us a whole stack of blueprints, and these were the wiring diagrams for all the panels, and they said, ‘Here, figure out how the machine works and then figure out how to program it,’” explained McNulty. That required analyzing the differential equations and then determining how to patch the cables to connect to the correct electronic circuits. “The biggest advantage of learning the ENIAC from the diagrams was that we began to understand what it could and could not do,” said Jennings. “As a result we could diagnose troubles almost down to the individual vacuum tube.” She and Snyder devised a system to figure out which of the 18,000 vacuum tubes had burned out. “Since we knew both the application and the machine, we learned to diagnose troubles as well as, if not better than, the engineers. I tell you, those engineers loved it. They could leave the debugging to us.””
According to the article, Meet the ‘Refrigerator Ladies’ Who Programmed the ENIAC,
““There was no language, no operating system, no anything,” Kleiman says. “The women had to figure out what the computer was, how to interface with it, and then break down a complicated mathematical problem into very small steps that the ENIAC could then perform.” They physically hand-wired the machine, an arduous task using switches, cables, and digit trays to route data and program pulses.
“The ENIAC was a son of a bitch to program,” Jean Jennings has said.”
The unveiling of the ENIAC and the work done by the ‘computers’
According to the excerpts from “The Innovators” by Walter Isaacson in the Fortune website,
““Because it was being used for atom bomb calculations and other classified tasks, ENIAC was kept secret until February 1946, when the Army and Penn scheduled a gala unveiling for the public and the press. Herman Goldstine decided that the centrepiece of the ENIAC presentation would be a demonstration of a missile trajectory calculation. So two weeks in advance, he invited Jean Jennings and Betty Snyder to his apartment and, as Adele served tea, asked them if they could program ENIAC to do this in time. “We sure could,” Jennings pledged. She was excited. It would allow them to get their hands directly on the machine, which was rare. They set to work plugging memory buses into the correct units and setting up program trays.
The night before the demonstration was Valentine’s Day, but despite their normally active social lives, Snyder and Jennings did not celebrate. “Instead, we were holed up with that wonderful machine, the ENIAC, busily making the last corrections and checks on the program,” Jennings recounted. There was one stubborn glitch they couldn’t figure out: The program did a wonderful job spewing out data on the trajectory of artillery shells, but it just didn’t know when to stop. Even after the shell would have hit the ground, the program kept calculating its trajectory, “like a hypothetical shell burrowing through the ground at the same rate it had traveled through the air,” as Jennings described it. “Unless we solved that problem, we knew the demonstration would be a dud, and the ENIAC’s inventors and engineers would be embarrassed.”
Jennings and Snyder worked late into the evening before the press briefing trying to fix it, but they couldn’t. They finally gave up at midnight, when Snyder needed to catch the last train to her suburban apartment. But after she went to bed, Snyder figured it out: “I woke up in the middle of the night thinking what that error was…I came in, made a special trip on the early train that morning to look at a certain wire.” The problem was that there was a setting at the end of a “do loop” that was one digit off. She flipped the requisite switch and the glitch was fixed. “Betty could do more logical reasoning while she was asleep than most people can do awake,” Jennings later marveled. “While she slept, her subconscious untangled the knot that her conscious mind had been unable to.”
The unveiling of ENIAC made the front page of the New York Times under the headline ELECTRONIC COMPUTER FLASHES ANSWERS, MAY SPEED ENGINEERING. The story began, “One of the war’s top secrets, an amazing machine which applies electronic speeds for the first time to mathematical tasks hitherto too difficult and cumbersome for solution, was announced here tonight by the War Department.” The report continued inside the Times for a full page, with pictures of Mauchly, Eckert, and the room-size ENIAC. Mauchly proclaimed that the machine would lead to better weather predictions (his original passion), airplane design, and “projectiles operating at supersonic speeds.”
Of course, there was no mention, even in the passing, to the women programmers who had made the demonstration possible.”
The women were not invited to the dinner following the ENIAC unveiling.
“Jennings had another complaint that was more personal: “Betty and I were ignored and forgotten following the demonstration. We felt as if we had been playing parts in a fascinating movie that suddenly took a bad turn, in which we had worked like dogs for two weeks to produce something really spectacular and then were written out of the script.” That night there was a candlelit dinner at Penn’s venerable Houston Hall. It was filled with scientific luminaries, military brass, and most of the men who had worked on ENIAC. But Jean Jennings and Betty Snyder were not there, nor were any of the other women programmers. “Betty and I weren’t invited,” Jennings said, “so we were sort of horrified.” While the men and various dignitaries celebrated, Jennings and Snyder made their way home alone through a very cold February night.”
The life of women programmers after the ENIAC.
The women programmers were not idle after their path breaking work with the ENIAC. The New York Times, mentions in Jean Jennings’ obituary,
“After the war, Ms. Bartik joined the Eniac designers, John Presper Eckert and John W. Mauchly, in their effort to develop the Univac, an early commercial computer, which was introduced in 1951. While at the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation — acquired by Remington Rand in 1950 — Ms. Bartik worked on hardware and software for both the Binac, a small computer made for Northrop Aircraft, and the general purpose Univac.”
According to the article in dreamhost.com,
“While history was quickly working to forget them, the ENIAC women had continued to press forward with technological advances. Each woman went on to make her own mark in the field: Lichterman stayed with the ENIAC program for two years to train new programmers, while Holbertson and Jennings helped convert the ENIAC into a “stored-program” machine. Holbertson created the first program that allowed for sorting and storing large data files, and members of the team would later work to develop guidelines and standards for a universal programming language. Jennings spent the remainder of her career working to make computers more accessible and easier to use.”
Unearthing of the women’s contribution by Kathy Kleiman and LeAnn Erickson.
The story of the ENIAC women programmers were unearthed by 2 women independently (it seems so from the articles. There seems to be no connection between the 2 women). One was Kathy Kleiman who spent 20 years investigating the stories of the ENIAC women programmers and the other was LeAnn Erickson, who chanced upon the programmers while she was interviewing them for her documentary about women owned real estate agency.
Kathy Kleiman in her website on the ENIAC programmers gives us a detailed account of how she researched, found and redeemed the women.
Discovered by Kathy Kleiman, a young programmer in the mid-1980s, “the ENIAC programmers inspired me to stay in computing at a time when there were few women in my programming classes and every signal was telling me that computing was not a field for women,” she remembers.
The ENIAC programmers’ story was fascinating but lost for more than 50 years. Kathy devoted years to ground-breaking research in the University of Pennsylvania Archives and Library of Congress and recorded extensive broadcast-quality oral histories with four of the original six ENIAC programmers in the late 1990s with senior PBS Producer David Roland. Kathy applied for awards on the behalf of the ENIAC Programmers and joined them at the Computer History Museum, IEEE Computer Society, Women in Technology International and Women in Computing to celebrate their long-delayed recognition!
Jamie Gumbrecht in her article in the cnn.com, explains how LeAnn Erickson came across the ENIAC programmers.
To filmmaker LeAnn Erickson, it was history rediscovered.
It was 2003 and Erickson was interviewing sisters Shirley Blumberg Melvin and Doris Blumberg Polsky for her documentary, “Neighbor Ladies,” about a woman-owned real estate agency that helped to peacefully integrate a Philadelphia neighbourhood. The twins, long-retired by then, reluctantly mentioned a different sort of job they’d held during World War II: Female “computers.”
Computer, at that point, was a job title, not a machine. Long before the sisters were businesswomen, community activists, mothers or grandmothers, they were recruited by the U.S. military to do ballistics research. They worked six days a week, sometimes pulling double or triple shifts, along with dozens of other women.
The weapons trajectories they calculated were passed out to soldiers in the field and bombardiers in the air. Some of her colleagues went on to program the earliest of general-purpose computers, the ENIAC.
It wasn’t factory work, but they were “Rosies” nonetheless, filling jobs that men would’ve taken if they hadn’t been at war or wrapped up in other military research.
“I said ‘What are you talking about?’ ” Erickson recalled. “I’m an amateur women’s historian, but I’d never heard about this — white-collar women who worked doing math and science under the radar? I didn’t know.”
Erickson’s mission to recover the past became “Top Secret Rosies: The Female Computers of World War II,” a documentary. There were lots and lots of women, thousands of women doing this kind of work all across the United States,” Erickson said. “We just don’t know it.”
The documentaries outlining their work.
Both the women mentioned above made documentaries on the ENIAC programmers. This is the story behind their documentaries.
According to Wikipedia,
“Top Secret Rosies: The Female “Computers” of WWII is a 2010 documentary film directed by LeAnn Erickson. The film is focused on recognizing the contributions of women during WWII, serving as human computers and six of whom went on to program one of the earliest computers, the ENIAC. Their work helped the United States improve the accuracy of weaponry as most conducted ballistics analysis. The film officially premiered on November 1 on PBS.
At the time, in the 1940s, when these women were doing this work, it was considered classified, moreover contemporaries considered programming a clerical task. Because of this, and because of their invisibility during the media coverage of ENIAC, the work of these women was largely unrecognized. Herman Goldstine selected the programmers from women who had been calculating ballistics tables with desk calculators and a differential analyzer prior to and during the development of ENIAC. Under Herman and Adele Goldstine’s direction, the programmers studied ENIAC’s blueprints and physical structure to determine how to manipulate its switches and cables, rather than learning a programming language.”
“…The film focuses on the contributions of several women, namely the Blumberg twins, Doris Polsky (née Blumberg) and Shirley Melvin (née Blumberg), Marlyn Meltzer (née Wescoff), Jean Bartik (a.k.a. Billie Jean Jennings). Kathleen Antonelli, is another ENIAC computer programmer recognized in the film. It has been taught widely in schools and universities and is credited for recognizing the little-known contributions of classified women technology workers during World War II and making that history available to public audiences. In the publication for American Association of University Women (AAUW), Erickson stated that the film is held in over 500 libraries worldwide.”
According to the website eniacprogrammers.org,
“In 2013, Kathy teamed up with award-winning documentary producers Jon Palfreman and Kate McMahon of the Palfreman Film Group to tell this incredible story in the stunning documentary short, The Computers. “The Computers documentary is designed to fit into every classroom and every computing club. ENIAC Programming Pioneers Betty Snyder Holberton, Jean Jennings Bartik, Kathleen McNulty Mauchly Antonelli and Marlyn Wescoff Meltzer tell their story—of how they programmed the first all-electronic, programmable computer, ENIAC, without any programming languages, tools or manuals! They were amazing, brilliant, insightful, funny and riveting, and absolutely committed to making programming easier for the rest of us. They are Programming Pioneers to celebrate!” shares Kathy.
“Not only did they program the ENIAC, the first all-electronic, digital computer during WWII without manuals or programming languages, but they dedicated years after the war to making programming easier and more accessible for all of us who followed”, she adds.
The ENIAC Programmers story changes forever how we look at technology and computer history. It inspires young women, and young men, to believe that computing careers lie within their reach.”
Recognition came late for the ENIAC programmers, more than 50 years after their exploits as the first computer programmers in the world.
In a guest post written by Kathy Kleiman, who discovered the ENIAC Programmers 20 years before and founded the ENIAC Programmers Project to record their stories and produce the first feature documentary about their work, in Google’s blog in blogspot, she recounts,
“For more than 50 years, the women of Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer(ENIAC) were forgotten, and their role in programming the first all-electronic programmable computer and creating the software industry lost. But this fall, old met young, and a great computer pioneer met today’s Internet pioneers. It happened in Silicon Valley and it happened at Google.
A little over a month ago, the Computer History Museum (CHM) in Mountain View honoured Jean Bartik with its Fellows Award. This lifetime achievement award recognized her work as a programmer of the ENIAC and leader of the team to convert ENIAC to a stored program machine.
The Fellows Award was a rousing celebration of Bartik, Bob Metcalfe and Linus Torvalds. The next night, Bartik returned to CHM to discuss her life story in An Evening with Jean Jennings Bartik, ENIAC Pioneer. More than 400 people attended. They laughed at Bartik’s descriptions of the ENIAC Programmers’ exploits and enjoyed her stories of “Technical Camelot,” Bartik’s description of her days at Eckert and Mauchly Computer Corporation in the 1950s.”
According to the article in cnn.com,
In 1997, Bartik was inducted into the Women in Technology Hall of Fame, along with her fellow ENIAC programmers, Kathleen McNulty Mauchly Antonelli, Frances Snyder Holberton, Marlyn Wescoff Meltzer, Frances Bilas Spence and Ruth Lichterman Teitelbaum. In 2008, Bartik was one of the Fellow Award honorees at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, along with Robert Metcalfe, an inventor of Ethernet, and Linus Torvalds, who began the development of the Linux kernel.
Back in Missouri, Bartik’s alma mater became the first public U.S. college to install computer terminals, telephones and cable TV in every dorm room. By the late 1980s, more than 6,000 students there were communicating by e-mail and reading stories from the student newspaper on computer screens. History lives on there, too, at the Jean Jennings Bartik Computing Museum.
While the story of the ENIAC programmers is an inspiration to all, ENIAC was not the first fully functional computer. That was Colossus. It was not the first electronic digital computer. That was ABC(The Atanasoff Berry Computer). It was merely the first computer to be unveiled to the world. The founders of ENIAC lost their patent rights to the computer in a long drawn out court battle. We will cover that next week.


Jan Ken Po Gakko Calendar
(usually 2nd Wed of Feb, June, Oct)
Virtual via Zoom
Wednesday, October 21, 2020 (7:00-8:30pm)
Jan Ken Po Gakko Summer Session 2020 – Cancelled
June 29-July 17, 2020
Monday thru Friday (8:45am-12:00pm) note: July 3rd gakko is in session
Registration Information for summer 2020
Jan Ken Po Gakko Summer Session 2021
June 28-July 16, 2021
Monday thru Friday (8:45am-12:00pm)
Openings in 1st and 2nd grades.
All other grades are taking wait lists.


Have you seen this picture book? It’s called Paper Dolls by Julia Donaldson (of Gruffalo fame). I’m pretty sure Rebecca Cobb won an award for the illustrations but can’t think where I read that now (pregnancy brain!). Little Owl loves it. She knows whole sections off by heart. It cleverly intertwines themes of loss and growing up with the everyday simplicity of a child’s experience. It’s a similar story to The Gift by Carol Ann Duffy (illustrations by Rob Ryan) but somehow more profound because of it’s lightness; in the way that children’s books often can be.
It’s funny that it feels a bit strange to mention Julia Donaldson and Carol Ann Duffy in the same sentence. The lack of appreciation of children’s books as ‘serious’ literature, worthy of the same attention given to novels or poetry for adults, is something I’ve read a few children’s authors resignedly complain about. Mem Fox describes the writing of a children’s book as “the perfect placement of syllables.” Julia Donaldson’s perfect placement of syllables and her talent for verse in the Paper Dolls makes the story all the more poignant. It’s a great one for Mother’s Day.
Here are Little Owl’s paper dolls. She’s been carrying them everywhere this week. She gave me the Mother’s Day present she made at nursery on Thursday. It was a lovely little flower-shaped clock she’s painted herself. After allowing me to open it she then decided it was too good to give away and has kept it for herself!
PS On the 11th November Pan Macmillan organised a world record breaking attempt for the longest chain of paper dolls in aid of Save the Children and to celebrate the Paper Dolls picture book. They did it with 45, 282 dolls – pretty impressive eh?


In my point of view, this is a MUST-READ for every presenter, just copy some Amazon users’ comment here.
“Imagine that you are preparing to give the most important presentation of your life. For a week prior to the event you will be sequestered on a desert island then picked up by the cruise ship where you will make your presentation. You are informed about your audience and provided with information on the meeting room environment. However, you may only take one book with you to prepare. I recommend 100 Things Every Presenter Needs to Know About People by Susan M. Weinschenk, Ph.D. This book does an excellent job in delivering a concise, compendium of what you need to know.
As a presentation geek, I have read many of the leading authors, such as Nancy Duarte, Garr Reynolds, Bert Decker and many others. They are all strong in their own right. In comparison, Dr. Weinschenk’s book gets right to the point on each of the 100 things without taking more than two or three pages to get there. It brings together a wide range of material in a small package.
The book is divided into ten sections, ranging from how people learn, getting and keeping people’s attention, motivating action, listening and visual guides, environment concerns, emotion, reaction, decision-making, and crafting your prez and a 90-day improvement plan.
In each of the 100 mini-chapters, you learn how to use psychology to be a better presenter. In a pinch, you could take the handy takeaways included in each chapter as a cheat sheet reminder.
The book consolidates sometimes hard-to-find resources such as those for determining what font size to use, depending on screen size and the distance your viewers will be from the screen. You may learn research about things you thought you knew. Did you know that if your audience reads from left to right, the correct side of the screen to stand on is the left side, that is, your audience’s left? You want to be the first thing your audience sees as they scan the room. Did you know that people use peripheral vision more than central vision to get the gist of your slide? It goes back to our ancestor’s days on the savannah when it was critical to scan for predators.
As though the rich collection of psychological guidance weren’t enough, the next to the last section of the book is a guide to actually crafting your presentation. It helps you analyze your audience, determine where they are, where you want them to be and how to get them there by outlining or storyboarding a meaningful structure.
Think that you wouldn’t be interested in this book if you are not doing a lot of presentations? Many of these principles can be used in situations where you are sitting in a conference room with ten people, across the desk at a job interview or in a virtual meeting. Training developers will also find very helpful information about how adults learn and designing more effective training presentation materials.
Do yourself and your next audience a favor. Buy this book, read it, study it, build your own cheat sheets from it, then enjoy the improved results from your presentations, large or small.”
Buy it here:
or download it here: [showhide more_text=”View Download Link” less_text=”Hide Download Link”]