Trusted Roofing Contractor in Wheat Ridge, CO

Work requests in Wheat Ridge, CO

Yesterday's hailstorm damaged our skylight and a kitchen "greenhouse style" window. We also would like to get our concrete tile roof inspected.

Vicinity of Garland St.in Wheat Ridge

Would like to replace roof and gutters on house, and repair some water damage to front and rear porches.

Vicinity of Garland St.in Wheat Ridge

Would like to replace roof and gutters on house, and repair some water damage to front and rear porches.

Reviews from our customers in Wheat Ridge, CO

5.0/5Jordan F.Jay St

They made it to be a painless process in the middle of a storm and Jan was very helpful after the storm for emergency repairs.

5.0/5Laura S.Ames St

Just wanted to say thank you! I am very happy with your service- from Jan being extremely responsive and willing to answer all our questions to a great looking final product. Please don't hesitate using me as a reference!

5.0/5Susan C.S. York St.

4.8/5Kelly G.Willow St.

5.0/5Kim K.Monroe St

5.0/5Carla B.S Lincoln Ave.

5.0/5Melissa N.Glencoe St

I was most pleased with the constant communication and reassuring team. I didn't have to worry about anything. Jan O. was VERY prompt in all communication. When an issue occurred he immediately responded and addressed it. I did not have to worry about a single thing while working with Jan. Much appreciated!

If your home has a damaged, outdated roof or drafty, inefficient windows, then not only will you have lowered energy efficiency and comfort, but its overall curb appeal will also be impacted. That is why Exceptional Exteriors LLC offers reliable roof repairs, roof replacements, replacement windows, and commercial roofing services!

We have been improving Wheat Ridge properties since 1999 and have earned a trusted reputation. Not only are we an A+ rated Better Bussiness Bureau contractor but we are also a Platinum Preferred roofer with Owens Corning. So, don't trust something as important as your home's security, comfort, and value with an inexperienced contractor.

We offer free estimates for all of our services – click below to schedule yours today!

Roof repair experts

No one wants a leaky, drafty, and worn looking home. That is why regular roof repairs are absolutely necessary to assure maximum home comfort, security, and energy efficiency.

No matter if you need emergency roof repairs or a minor roof leak repaired, we have seen it all and offer solutions for these issues and more!

Our roof repair services:

Roof leaks

Wind, storm, & hail damage

Broken shingles

Emergency roof repairs

Ice dam repair

Repairs from fallen tree limbs

And more!

Want to ensure that the structural integrity of your roof is intact? We provide thorough roof inspections and certifications in Wheat Ridge, CO. Schedule a free roof repair estimate to learn more!

Long-lasting roof replacement services

No homeowner wants to replace their roof before it is absolutely necessary. Luckily, Exceptional Exteriors LLC offers comprehensive roof inspections that will help us determine if repair or replacement would better suit your home.

So, regardless of whether your roof is old, past warranty, or has been severely damaged, we provide roof replacements that will beautify your home, maximize its security, and last for years to come!

Trusted commercial roofing repair, replacement, & more

An energy efficient, comfortable, and fully protected building starts with a quality roof. If your commercial property has a damaged, outdated roof, Exceptional Exteriors LLC can help. We have been providing commercial roof repairs, replacements, maintenance, and more since 1999!

Our commercial roofing services:

Commercial roof inspections

Commercial roof repairs

Commercial roof replacements

Commercial roof maintenance

Commercial roof treatments

And more!

Energy-efficient replacement window options

If your home has windows that are drafty, damaged, hard to operate, or look worn, then it is time to replacement them with Exceptional Exteriors LLC. We offer a variety of replacement windows that will suit your home's needs, style, and budget!

Our replacement windows:

If you're tired of your property's leaky roof, high energy costs, or uncomfortable temperatures, Exceptional Exteriors LLC can help. We provide roof repairs, roof replacements, replacement windows, and other services that will help you with these issues and more.

We offer free estimates on all of our roofing services. Click below to schedule yours today!

The light shingle on this roof didn't accent the home well. We tore off the old shingles and added a double layer of felt and Impact Resistant Shingles to protect this low pitch roof. The new darker color in Estate Gray really defines this classic home.

Work Requests From Wheat Ridge, CO

Vicinity of Vivian Courtin Wheat Ridge

Yesterday's hailstorm damaged our skylight and a kitchen "greenhouse style" window. We also would like to get our concrete tile roof inspected.

Vicinity of Garland St.in Wheat Ridge

Would like to replace roof and gutters on house, and repair some water damage to front and rear porches.

Vicinity of Garland St.in Wheat Ridge

Would like to replace roof and gutters on house, and repair some water damage to front and rear porches.


Scientists working with CSIRO's Australia Telescope Compact Array have found a new kind of black hole that would make Goldilocks quite happy: By not being too big, nor too small, it falls within a new class of "middleweight" black holes. The discovery indicates that black holes can take on a larger variety of sizes than previously assumed — and that they might be the younger version of something bigger yet to come.

Prior to the discovery, we believed that black holes only came in two major varieties. Supermassive black holes are typically be found in the center of galaxies and have a million to a billion times the mass of our sun. And then there are stellar mass black holes, which are anywhere from three to 30 times our sun's mass.

But by observing distant outbursts of super-hot gas, astronomers believe they have stumbled upon a black hole that's anywhere from 20,000 to 90,000 times the mass of our sun — placing it squarely within an intermediate class of black holes.

Called HLX-1 ("hyper-luminous X-ray source 1"), the black hole is about 300 million light-years away. The object was discovered by Natalie Webb from Université de Toulouse and her research team, which included astronomers from France, Australia, the UK and the USA.

The object is described as being "hyper-luminous" because it is giving off a tremendous amount of X-rays. Astronomers theorize that the black hole is consuming either a gas cloud or an entire star — and when black holes suck up all this energy it is heated to extreme temperatures causing it to shine bright in X-rays.

It was this exact observation that led Farrell and his team to conclude that there must be a black hole responsible for the hyper luminosity. But at 10 times the brightness of other similar objects, the team concluded that a very special kind of black hole must be responsible — one that's about 3,000 times bigger than regular stellar black holes.

The researchers suspect that a star is responsible for the X-ray bursts. Because the X-ray flashes happen at fairly regular intervals, about once every day or so, they theorize that the black hole is in the process of consuming an orbiting companion sun.

The researchers are particularly excited by the discovery of this new black hole because it could explain where supermassive black holes come from. They're positing the idea that middleweight black holes eventually graduate to supermassive class given the right circumstances.

Since this is the first black hole discovered of its kind, the astronomers are hoping to find more, and this is where they will focus their future research.

You can check out the entire paper in Science.

All images via CSIRO.


This iteration still hasn't fixed the one problem that's been plaguing the series since its inception: snooze-inducing level design. Another decent entry in the series, but nothing more. [June 2004, p.73]

Put simply, the games are beginning to wear thin. If youd dont have any of the previous editions of Mega Man Battle Network, this is a good one to buy and enjoy. For returning players, hold off purchasing and demand that Capcom do a little bit more next time.

I prefer this one over the other version but not by much the game doesn't change much but it is good. The series is starting to get stall. SoI prefer this one over the other version but not by much the game doesn't change much but it is good. The series is starting to get stall. So hope for the best!…Full Review »

Sorry but this game is AWFUL!!! I had such high hopes back in the day when I played these on GBA but alas I was disappointed. No storyline,Sorry but this game is AWFUL!!! I had such high hopes back in the day when I played these on GBA but alas I was disappointed. No storyline, you have to complete the game three times, craptastic chibi graphics, and childish crisis scenarios. Capcom truly trolled us with this release. If you want to play Battle Network the way it was meant to be played play 2 or 3....hell even 1 was DECENT. This game is awful.…Full Review »

TroyV.

Apr 26, 2007

9

I like this game. It was kind of hard but I solved all of it. It was kind of easy too. That is why I rated it good. That is all, see you next fall.


589 So.2d 1030 (1991)
SEMINOLE TRIBE OF FLORIDA, Petitioner,
v.
Carole Francis HOUGHTALING, Respondent.
No. 91-01508.
District Court of Appeal of Florida, Second District.
December 4, 1991.
*1031 W. Douglas Berry and Melinda J. Brazel of Butler, Burnette & Pappas, Tampa, for petitioner.
H. Irene Higginbotham and Mary E. Mann of Acosta & Mann, St. Petersburg, for respondent.

ON MOTION FOR REHEARING
It appearing that the decision in Southwest Forest Industries v. Hupa (Hoopa) Timber Corp., 151 Cal. App.3d 239, 198 Cal. Rptr. 690 (1984), cited at p. 3 of this court's opinion of October 4, 1991, has been "ordered not published" pursuant to Rule 976, Cal.Rules of Court, upon consideration it is ordered that the opinion of October 4, 1991, is hereby withdrawn and the attached opinion substituted in its place.
Respondent having filed a motion for rehearing and motion for rehearing en banc, upon consideration it is ordered that the motions are hereby denied.
Respondent having filed an "alternative suggestion of certification," which this court treats as a motion for certification of question of great public importance, upon consideration it is ordered that the motion is hereby granted and the attached opinion is further revised to include the certified question as modified by this court.
No additional motions for rehearing will be entertained by this court.
PER CURIAM.
The Seminole Tribe of Florida petitions this court for a writ of certiorari to review an order of the circuit court which denied, on the basis of subject matter jurisdiction, the Tribe's motion to dismiss a negligence action brought against it by respondent Carole Houghtaling. We grant the petition on the authority of Seminole Police Dept. v. Casadella, 478 So.2d 470 (Fla. 4th DCA 1985).
Houghtaling's complaint followed an injury she sustained while a customer at the bingo hall operated by the Tribe on Orient Road, Tampa. The Tribe raised the lack of subject matter jurisdiction based on the defense of sovereign immunity. The numerous Indian tribes historically have been viewed as possessing the common law immunity from suit enjoyed by sovereign powers. See, e.g., Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez, 436 U.S. 49, 98 S.Ct. 1670, 56 L.Ed.2d 106 (1978); Bryan v. Itasca County, Minnesota, 426 U.S. 373, 96 S.Ct. 2102, 48 L.Ed.2d 710 (1976); Williams v. Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe of Pyramid Lake Reservation, 625 F. Supp. 1457 (D.Nev. 1986); Askew v. Seminole Tribe of Florida, Inc., 474 So.2d 877 (Fla. 4th DCA 1985).
This grant of immunity has been the subject of criticism, particularly when a tribe invokes its immunity after engaging in commercial activity with non-Indians. See, e.g., Dry Creek Lodge, Inc. v. Arapahoe and Shoshone Tribes, 623 F.2d 682 (10th Cir.1980), cert. denied, 449 U.S. 1118, 101 S.Ct. 931, 66 L.Ed.2d 847 (1981). Other authorities have viewed such a policy, which prevents dissipation of tribal assets through litigation, as entirely consistent with the continuing need to insure tribal autonomy. See Note, In Defense of Tribal Sovereign Immunity, 95 Harvard L.R. 1058 (1982). Perhaps the most thorough judicial exploration of this issue was undertaken by the Supreme Court of Alaska in Atkinson v. Haldane, 569 P.2d 151 (Alaska 1977).
The Alaska court drew a distinction between "governmental" and "commercial" tribal entities, each deriving from a different section of the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, 25 U.S.C. § 476. Section 16 of the Act was intended to facilitate the tribal organization of Indians residing on reservations, while section 17 authorized charters of business incorporation to enable the tribes to conduct business. Unless *1032 expressly waiving immunity in its charter,[1] the section 16 tribal government enjoys full immunity from suit to the extent not abrogated by Congress; most but not all section 17 corporations will have a "sue-and-be-sued" clause in the corporate charter. Dixon v. Picopa Construction Co., 160 Ariz. 251, 772 P.2d 1104 (1989). Apart from this distinction, however, it has generally been regarded as immaterial that an Indian tribe was engaged in "an enterprise private or commercial in character, rather than governmental." Maryland Casualty Co. v. Citizens First National Bank of West Hollywood, 361 F.2d 517, 521 (5th Cir.), cert. denied sub nom. Maryland Casualty Co. v. The Seminole Tribe of Florida, Inc., 385 U.S. 918, 87 S.Ct. 227, 17 L.Ed.2d 143 (1966).[2]
The Tribe's petition includes the uncontroverted assertion that the bingo establishment is owned and operated by a section 16 tribal government. Assuming the Atkinson analysis is correct, the Tribe is therefore immune from suit despite its involvement in a commercial enterprise, unless its charter contains an explicit and unequivocal waiver of immunity. We note that the Seminole corporation involved in Maryland Casualty, presumably a different entity from the petitioner, was incorporated pursuant to section 17 of the Indian Reorganization Act, depriving it of immunity under the Atkinson analysis. However, as noted in Atkinson, 569 P.2d at 174, the Fifth Circuit in Maryland Casualty refused to make the governmental/proprietary distinction based on the two subsections of the Act, being "even more receptive to recognition of immunity" than the Alaska court. The record before us lacks adequate evidentiary development of either of these questions. Accordingly, our decision is without prejudice to Houghtaling to demonstrate, after remand, that the Tribe is not a section 16 corporation or that it has within its charter expressly consented to suit.
In her response to the petition Houghtaling suggests a different approach to the jurisdictional question. In 1953 Congress enacted Public Law 280 (28 U.S.C. § 1360), which authorized state civil jurisdiction in actions to which Indians are parties. Five states, later amended to add Alaska, were identified specifically and the provisions of the law made mandatory as to them. As to all other states having Indian populations, including Florida, "the consent of the United States" was given for those states to enact similar provisions. When, in 1968, Public Law 280 was repealed by Congress, the repeal provision specifically excluded those states that had assumed civil jurisdiction. Florida had done so in 1961. § 285.16, Fla. Stat. (1989).
The Florida statute reads as follows:
(1) The State of Florida hereby assumes jurisdiction over criminal offenses committed by or against Indians or other persons within Indian reservations and over civil causes of actions between Indians or other persons or to which Indians or other persons are parties rising within Indian reservations.
(2) The civil and criminal laws of Florida shall obtain on all Indian reservations in this state and shall be enforced in the same manner as elsewhere throughout the state.
The Tribe, however, would draw a distinction between individual Indians  who *1033 may sue or be sued in state court  and Indian tribes who generally may not be sued there. The Tribe's interpretation is bolstered by Bryan v. Itasca County, wherein the Supreme Court found an absence of Congressional intent to confer civil jurisdiction over tribes, but instead viewed Public Law 280 as "intended to redress the lack of adequate Indian forums for resolving private legal disputes between reservation Indians, and between Indians and other private citizens." See also, Long v. Chemehuevi Indian Reservation, 115 Cal. App.3d 853, 171 Cal. Rptr. 733, cert. denied, 454 U.S. 831, 102 S.Ct. 129, 70 L.Ed.2d 109 (1981). At least one Florida court has taken this same position. Seminole Police Dept. v. Casadella.
We are persuaded that the Tribe's analysis that Public Law 280 and section 285.16, Florida Statutes (1989), did not confer civil jurisdiction over Indian tribes is correct. However, we do agree that this case presents an issue of great public importance and so certify to the Florida Supreme Court the following question:
DOES SECTION 285.16, FLORIDA STATUTES (1989), PROVIDE FLORIDA COURTS WITH JURISDICTION TO RESOLVE CIVIL SUITS BROUGHT AGAINST THE SEMINOLE TRIBE?
The petition for writ of certiorari is granted, the order of the circuit court denying the Tribe's motion to dismiss is quashed, and this case is remanded for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.
CAMPBELL, A.C.J., and PATTERSON, J., concur.
ALTENBERND, J., concurs specially.
ALTENBERND, Judge, concurring.
Despite its name, "Seminole Bingo of Tampa" is not a part of Tampa or Florida. It advertises in the Tampa telephone book and along Florida's highways, but it is a separate nation. If you are injured or die on the property of Seminole Bingo of Tampa because of its negligence, you cannot sue in a Florida court and your constitutional rights to due process and access to courts will not help you. If you win the bingo jackpot and Seminole Bingo of Tampa does not choose to pay, apparently you must turn to the tribal council to make your claim against the tribe. Whether that system is fair or unfair, you will have no appeal to this court.
As a good business practice, Seminole Bingo of Tampa could voluntarily agree to be sued in Florida courts. Apparently, it will not. It has competitors who can be sued in Florida. Its Floridian competitors are governed by Florida law and will soon be carefully regulated. See Ch. 91-206, Laws of Fla.; cf. 25 U.S.C.A. §§ 2701-2721 (Supp. 1991). Hopefully, the public will be informed that, when it comes to bingo, "tourist trap" may have a new definition.
NOTES
[1]  It is widely recognized that an Indian tribe can consent to be sued. See, e.g., Merrion v. Jicarilla Apache Tribe, 617 F.2d 537 (10th Cir.1980), aff'd, 455 U.S. 130, 102 S.Ct. 894, 71 L.Ed.2d 21 (1982); Namekagon Development Co. v. Bois Forte Reservation Housing Authority, 517 F.2d 508 (8th Cir.1975); Martinez v. Southern Ute Tribe, 150 Colo. 504, 374 P.2d 691 (1962). While most authorities have looked to the tribal charter for expressions of consent; e.g., Fontenelle v. Omaha Tribe of Nebraska, 430 F.2d 143 (8th Cir.1970); others appear to have inferred such consent from the conduct of the tribe. See, e.g., United States v. State of Oregon, 657 F.2d 1009 (9th Cir.1982) (intervention in lawsuit).
[2]  In Padilla v. Pueblo of Acoma, 107 N.M. 174, 754 P.2d 845 (1988), cert. denied, 490 U.S. 1029, 109 S.Ct. 1767, 104 L.Ed.2d 202 (1989), the court flatly stated that no immunity existed when the tribe engaged in off-reservation activities, regardless whether the tribe had executed a formal waiver of immunity. But see North Sea Products, Ltd. v. Clipper Seafoods Co., 92 Wash.2d 236, 595 P.2d 938 (1979).


Dean Dimebag Dime Slime ML

Dean Guitars introduce the new Dean Dimebag Dime Slime ML. The original Dime Slime ML came out in 2014 in the USA line and Dean got a lot of requests to make a more affordable version. The 2017 version is made in China to the same Dimebag Darrell specs as the US-made model apart from the Floyd Rose bridge and the pickups..

The Dean Dimebag Dime Slime ML is all-Mahogany (body & neck) with a Flame Maple top in a special Dime Slime burst finish. It’s armed with a versatile and powerful combination of DMT Design and Seymour Duncan SH13 Dimebucker pickups. The 2014 US-made version had the Original Floyd Rose (German Schaller-made) bridge – the 2017 Dime Slime ML has the Floyd Rose Special tremolo bridge with locking nut – designed to cover any tremolo or dive-bombing effects you care to make. The neck has a comfortable V profile along with a Rosewood fretboard and abalone dot inlays.


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$650/br Apartment with wood floor, high floor for rent in Screc Tower in Dist 3

Type of Property: Apartment, Pro. Code: 53, Bedroom: 2, Bathroom: 2

Usable area: 81 m2, Furnished: Yes, Rental/m: 650 USD

More description:

Srec Tower is located in the center of district 3, Ho Chi Minh City with many strong points about convenience and advantage in order to meet demands of many people about owing an apartment in a location near center city with a not big investment.


Q:

Using Oraclize to assign value to another contracts variable

I'm using oraclize to get the price feed using this code:
import "oraclizeAPI.sol";

contract PriceFeed is usingOraclize{
  uint public BTCUSD;

  function PriceFeed(){
    oraclize_setProof(proofType_TLSNotary | proofStorage_IPFS);
    update(0); // first check at contract creation
  }

  function __callback(bytes32 myid, string result, bytes proof) {
    if (msg.sender != oraclize_cbAddress()) throw;
    BTCUSD = parseInt(result, 2); // save it as $ cents
    // The following line is what I do which ends up with the error message
   //MyContract.BTCUSD = BTCUSD;

    update(360); // schedule another check in 60 seconds
  }

  function update(uint delay){
    oraclize_query(delay, "URL",
      "json(https://min-api.cryptocompare.com/data/price?fsym=BTC&tsyms=USD).USD");
  }
}

Now I have the second contract in the same file that has a variable called BTCUSD. I need to update that variable when I get callback from oraclize. I've tried multiple methods, writing a setter/getter method on both contracts, using MyContract.BTCUSD = BTCUSD style assignments but I get errors.
contract MyContract {
  uint public BTCUSD;
}

I'm using linter on atom and these are the errors I get depending on how I try to assign the value:

Member "BTCUSD" not found or not visible after argument-dependent lookup in type(contract MyContract)

A:

As @Thomas Bertani mentions in the comment, Oraclize can be used directly in MyContract.  If you need to use 2 contracts, expanding on his comment, then you need to create a setter, and invoke the setter on a specific instance of MyContract.  Example:
contract MyContract {
  uint public BTCUSD;

  function set(uint val) {
      BTCUSD = val;
  }
}

contract PriceFeed {
    function setVal(address addr) {
        MyContract(addr).set(2);
    }
}


T cell homeostasis is the maintenance of peripheral T cells at a relatively constant level. When total T cell numbers are reduced, the remaining T cells proliferate to restore the normal T cell number. Similarly, naive T cells proliferate when a small number is transferred into lymphopenic hosts such as mice deficient in recombination activating gene-1 (RAG1-/-). The homeostatic T cell proliferation requires the recognition of cognate self-peptide/MHC (pepMHC) complexes by T cell receptor (TCR) and a lymphopenic condition, or "space." Recent studies have further shown that as naive CD8 T cells proliferate in lymphopenic hosts, they progressively acquire cell surface markers and functional properties of antigen-induced memory CD8 T cells. The long-term goal of the proposed studies is to understand molecular mechanisms that promote T cell proliferation and differentiation in lymphopenic hosts. Findings from the proposed studies may help to better understand T cell homeostasis and mechanisms underlying the increased incidence of autoimmune diseases in lymphopenic individuals, as in those with AIDS and in patients given radiation, or chemotherapy and bone marrow transplants. Specific aim #1 will identify the molecular basis of "space" for homeostatic T cell proliferation. Using a novel T cell-dendritic cell (T-DC) cocuture system in which T cell proliferation mimics homeostatic proliferation in mice, dendritic cells were found to produce soluble factors that stimulate T cell proliferation. The stimulatory factors secreted by dendritic cells will be identified by screening candidate factors and by biochemical purification. Once they are identified, their role in homeostatic T cell proliferation in mice will be evaluated. In addition, whether "space" involves relief of inhibitory signals among T cells or stimulatory cell-cell contacts mediated by receptors other than TCR will be investigated m the T-DC coculture system. Specific aim #2 will characterize a fraction of polyclonal CD4 and CD8 T cells that undergo exceptionally rapid proliferation in syngeneic lymphopenic hosts. The activation status, repertoire diversity and the ability to respond to environmental antigens by the rapidly proliferating T cells will be analyzed. Specific aim #3 will investigate the role of cell proliferation in homeostasis-driven differentiation and maintenance of memory-like T cells. Naive TCR transgenic T cells expressing the Coxsackie and adenovirus receptor (CAR) will be infected with adenovirus expressing a cyclin dependent kinase inhibitor gene to evaluate the effects of inhibiting cell division on homeostasis-driven differentiation of memory-like cells. Proliferation of homeostatic memory CD8 T cells will be similarly inhibited to evaluate the effects on the maintenance of their surface phenotype and functional characteristics. In addition, the role of cell division in facilitating changes in chromatin structure at the IFN-g locus will be investigated by measuring the extent of DNA methylation, histone acetylation and factor binding.


"Detroit 1-8-7" stars James McDaniel — an outspoken advocate of Detroit — and Natalie Martinez were not available for comment. However, actress Erin Cummings, who portrayed medical examiner Dr. Abby Ward, spoke during a telephone interview from Los Angeles last week.

Cummings, who recently moved out of her Royal Oak residence, was not surprised to hear "Detroit 1-8-7" was cancelled.

"Look at it from the perspective of the network: If you have a show that’s on the bubble anyway, there's already a show that may not gain in viewership and then you're looking at the possibility of the budget doubling for next season, that's a no-brainer. From a financial standpoint, I would've cancelled the show, too," she explained.

Cummings believed that it perhaps could have been saved if the someone in the state government would've spoken out and made a case for the show, as well as proposed an exception that it be filmed with the 40-42 percent tax rebate that is currently being debated, and perhaps cut, by the Snyder Administration, maybe "Detroit 1-8-7" would’ve been back for a second season of at least 13 episodes.

Mittens for Detroit is happy to announce that we will soon be able to accept donations through the www.MittensforDetroit.org website, BUT this feature is currently under construction and is not able to accept donations at this time. PLEASE be advised not to donate to anyone claiming to collect funds on behalf of MFD. Thank you for your on-going support!!

The actress said she plans to frequently return to the Motor City to help promote her charity, "Mittens for Detroit."

"This means I'll be coming back once a month," said Cummings.

Thanks to the help of several local businesses, the actress collected over 10,000 gloves and mittens for Detroit children and adults this past winter.

Cummings said the charity will be bigger and better this winter. She has set up a goal of collecting and distributing 20,000 mittens and gloves for next winter.

"On Friday, we signed an agreement with the North Woodward Community Foundation who will be our fiscal sponsor meaning we are now officially a non-profit and can accept financial donations," said Cummings.

Cummings said increasing partnerships with the Detroit Tigers, ACO Hardware, Quicken Loans and other local businesses will help the charity prosper further.

Just before Erin Cummings was to testify before a state Senate hearing on the Michigan film industry, she got a message from her fan site.

"Then I saw it was posted by my fan site, and they are very reliable. So, I learned right there, it was very hard not to cry," says Cummings.

The series actor tells WWJ that it's been rumored for months that the crime drama filmed in Detroit would be canceled.

Cummings says she can't help but think that the cutbacks in the Michigan film incentives had a role in the canceling of the Detroit based crime drama.

Cummings says she will continue to come back to Detroit having fallen in love with the city and to work on the charity she begin while working on "Detroit 187".

"I had made a commitment to come back once a month because I'm the founder of 'Mittens For Detroit' a charity, (and) we just now became a 501c3 so we'll be able to start taking financial donations and doing a lot more good for Detroit," says Cummings.

"I saw it coming," said Erin Cummings, who played Dr. Abbey Ward. "The writing had been on the wall for a while. It's just devastating for the people here on the crew. Jobs are not plentiful here and that's what we need to change."

She said that shows like 1-8-7 that have a soul and stories need time to grow, but "we weren't given that time." Cummings believes that if the show had been given a second season, then it would have gone on to air for 10 years.

"Detroit 1-8-7 changed my life because it introduced me to Michigan," Cummings said. "I am going to miss the people of Detroit, the small town camaraderie with the big city opportunities."

Friday the 13th turned out to be doomsday for Brothers & Sisters and V: ABC has axed both series. The Alphabet net also pulled the plug on rookie series No Ordinary Family, Off the Map, Detroit 187 and Mr. Sunshine.


Ecopornography, slow violence and the deep, slow art of place

Are Ansel Adam photographic works ecopornographic? Do similar works obscure ecocidal, slow violence? Image remixed from Creative Commons image by Hermes

Please note: a revised and extended new version of this article will be published in the EarthLines March 2014 magazine .

“Nature photographs have become something of a problem’, Joy Williams, quoted by Bart Welling in Ecoporn: on the limits of visualising the nonhuman, 2009.

“The representational challenges are acute, requiring creative ways of drawing public attention to catastrophic acts that are low in spectacle but high in long term effects…In an age of degraded attention spans it becomes doubly difficult yet increasingly urgent that we focus on the toll exacted, over time, by the slow violence of ecological degradation…” Rob Nixon, Rachel Carson Professor, 2011, p.10-13. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor

In my work in proposing and characterising the ecocidal, anthropocentric (human-centered) gaze in cinema, I have long been interested as a cultural practitioner myself, in how visual representations of the natural world may in fact obscure and most worryingly, perpetuate the violence inflicted upon it. In recent ecocritical analysis of visual imagery and academic texts I have come across ideas like “ecopornography” and the “slow violence” of environmental destruction. These new ideas would appear to be important and bring much-needed attention to the politics inherent in the representations we create about the physical and living communities that surround us. In particular I am interested that how in our heavily mediated lives where we have so much access to nature imagery, that ecological destruction has in fact vastly accelerated in recent decades, where many planetary boundaries, the ‘safe operating limits’ for life on earth are now being clearly exceeded.

In thinking about how cultural works may be working in this regard, I went back to a key text in Visual Culture, John Berger‘s acclaimed 1972 book Ways of Seeing. Added to this I also remembered that considerable work has been undertaken in ecofeminism since the 1970s that has shown the strong parallels in how women and nature are similarly exploited and how such ideas are reflected in, and perpetuated by, cultural works. In Ways of Seeing, Berger

Mr and Mrs Andrews, Gainsborough, 1750. Image: Wikipedia commons

successfully unpacks the politics and power inherent in visual culture that supports dominant ideologies of violence and exploitation. In European art to present day photography, Berger drew attention to the fact that women were often portrayed in cultural works as “the surveyed”, as property; that there is a clear power relationship in how women are represented and how men treat (exploit) women (this perspective was later developed further in feminist theory as the “male gaze”). Berger writes that such works are significantly about possession. Berger concentrates on images of women and non-European peoples depicted in paintings and in contemporary photographic media and only briefly examines nature images but he does mention that the first landscapes that appeared in the Netherlands in the 17th century. These he suggests show “nature-as-a whole” and he comments that most of these early painted land-water-sky-scapes generally did not convey ideas of land ownership and possession. Yet by the mid-18th century he notes that possession and displays of land ownership are growing themes evident in English painters work’s. He describes how in Gainsborough’s painting of Mr and Mrs Andrews (1750), the wealthy and powerful husband and wife, have themselves depicted proudly in front of the large estate they own. Such images painted over the realities of most of the inhabitants on these same estates – local peoples caught hunting for food were sentenced for deportation.

Depictions of land increasingly reflect the status and power of their owners and this type of imagery develops further in later centuries with the rise and power of the dominant Western industrial societies as they colonised new lands. This is particularly apparent in the celebrated 19th century landscape paintings of the new American continent. American art historian Professor Albert Biome in his 1991 book The Magisterial Gaze convincingly shows that early to mid-19th century American landscape paintings are not solely works about a sublime and transcendent ‘virgin’ nature, but clearly articulated and helped perpetuate exploitation of the new continent.

Such cultural works, though accurate in depicting the beauty of these new lands, presented a sanitised view of the colonisers westward march — as what is missing from such paintings are the indigenous peoples, much of the wildlife and the violence of their eradication and extermination. Also common to such works are the elevated god-like perspective created for the viewer.

The Magisterial Gaze by Albert Biome

In compelling visual terms such works replicate and reinforces the God-given “manifest destiny” of the invading Europeans with their Christian inspired ideological narrative of human “progress”, to multiply in, civilize and “develop, this “empty” new land (Christianity itself evolved these perspectives from the earliest Mesopotamian civilizations). Ideas from the Enlightenment too, with its emphasis on humanism and the negation of sentience in other living beings, the cornerstone ideas that are even more entrenched in our current scientific and technological age, helped to further separate humanity from recognising any ethical necessity in relating to these new environments and their living communities. Berger in a later text, About Looking, writes that ‘the 19th century, in western Europe and North America, saw the beginning of a process, today being completed by 20th century corporate capitalism, by which every tradition which has previously mediated between man and nature was broken. Before this rupture, animals constituted the first circle of what surrounded man. Perhaps that already suggests too great a distance. They were with man at the centre of his world (Berger, 1980, p. 3).

In newer visual media of photography and cinema, these legacies of limiting ideologies and perspectives are dominant in many cultural works that represent the natural world. Now when humans have altered over 40 per cent of the Earth and exponential rates of degradation are accelerating, particularly in the decades since WWII, it appears that we are often consume or create artworks that do not match the earth’s present reality and its degradation. For example, one might argue this occurs even in the celebrated visual imagery of pristine, unpeopled wilderness scenes, as created by photographer Ansel Adams.

While aesthetically arresting nature images in this style may seem a very necessary cultural tool of the environmental movement, providing a sense of the value of untainted wild lands, many similar images when critically examined show that they simultaneously mask and abstract the violence of eradication of peoples and species by keeping unpleasant eco-social realities “out of the frame”.

Additionally, depictions of beautiful, yet empty, apparently untouched landscapes often reinforce misguided ideas of conservation management/national park schemes, that often very effectively divorce humans entirely from their supporting natural environments. If we examine the context of the lands in Adam’s photographs we find they were previously managed sustainably for millenia by natives people for instance. Additionally Berger reminds us when he cites Susan Sontag’s view ‘that a capitalist society requires a culture based on images. It needs to furnish vast amounts of entertainment in order to stimulate buying and anaesthetise the injuries of class, race and sex. And it needs to gather unlimited amounts of information, the better to exploit the natural resources, increase productivity, keep order, make war, give jobs to bureaucrats. The camera’s twin capacities, to subjectivise reality and to objectify it, ideally serve these needs and strengthen them. Cameras define reality in the two ways essential to the workings of an advanced industrial society: as a spectacle (for masses) and as an object of surveillance (for rulers). The production of images also furnishes a ruling ideology (Berger, 1980, p.59). The philosopher John Gray of the London School of Economics agrees, industrial society has moved from economies of industrialied production to economies of mass visual culture that has as its aims to ‘entertain and distract populations’ (Gray, 2002, p.160).

Thinking about this increasing alienation from the natural world, ‘ecopornography’, is a concept that has been re-visited in recent ecocritical analysis of visual imagery and would appear to be both useful and bring much needed attention to the politics of contemporary nature representations.

Welling who has written in detail about “Ecoporn” (2009), would argue that conventions of nature visual culture are often pornographic as they are seductive and distracting, and grossly mask our ecocidal behaviour to the material and more-than-human world.

Welling argues that ecopornography is not simply, “just like porn but is pornographic for three reasons”; firstly it “traffics” in visual culture the same “land-as-woman tropes” that have done much “to authorize the genocidal oppression of native peoples and the colonization of their lands by European settlers and the eradication of nonhuman animals, plants etc”. Welling cites Mitman’s account of wildlife films of Africa in the 1960s that depicted an untouched paradise as paving the way for displacement of indigenous peoples for the sole benefit of wealthy overseas tourists (many images of exotic locations for tourism work on similar premises where the eco-social realities are kept well out of the frame). Secondly ecoporn places the viewer in the role of the “male surveyor”…and so “denies agency to nonhuman life forms”. Thirdly ecoporn in recent years has become more disturbing in its portrayal of explicit sexuality and violent death in TV “animal snuff documentaries” that are often branded as “educational” and acceptable for general audiences

Many of us could agree with Weller that many images of nature (‘nature’ here defined simply if erroneously as anything that is non-human; that is part of the human’s environment) are pornographic: such works do seduce, objectify and commodify their subjects, they alternate in assisting in the denial and amnesia of ecocide and display our deepest fantasies of unsullied environments that point to our future exploitative desires. When I have mentioned the term ‘ecopornography’, the response is quick, perhaps as growing awareness of the extent of biosphere degradation is increasingly visible now and so at odds with many of the nature images that surround us. Writer, radical ecophilospher, Derrick Jensen has written at length in many books on our industrial society’s ‘culture of make believe’ that denies and silences ecocide. In his writing about pornography he reminds us that pornography abstracts and denies ‘not only relationality but memory and imagination’ (Jensen, 2006, p.211). He describes, that

‘through training and habit, objectification insinuates itself into what might have otherwise been relationships, and into those encounters that we call relationships… having inured ourselves to the routine objectification of those around us, having long lost touch with the particular (any particular), when we encounter another, be it tree, woman, black man, or anything else under the sun, we too easily lose sight of that other, too easily lose hold on the slender slip of possibility of actual encounter instead little save our preconceptions, our projections already formed in a culture based on domination’ (Jensen, 2006, p.223).

Such thoughts equally apply to the workings of ecopornography and the ecocide it hides, how it obscures the relationality towards other species and many indigenous cultures, how it ultimately perpetuates our industrial culture’s great ecological forgetting. I like Jensen’s reminder too, that to ‘objectify another is to only partially exist’, to me this means that we lose something of our humanity when we ignore relations with earth’s fellow inhabitants.

Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor by Rob Nixon, 2011

However there are also strong contrasting views about not using and attaching the word ‘pornography’ to cultural works. In detailed work reviewing perspectives from leading war and natural disaster photojournalists, photographer and media theorist, David Campbell notes real difficulties when work is too quickly and easily labelled as ‘disaster porn’ or ‘war porn’. He strongly argues that the term and concept of ‘pornography’ shuts down legitimate and important in-depth discourse of larger socio-political issues that photographers are trying to raise. It seems to be a very complex area and worthy of more consideration. However, in some ways as there is so little attention in mainstream media and educational institutions in regards to cultural works of the natural world and ecocide, there maybe some merit in the considered use of the term ecopornography in this instance.

In thinking about cinematic material, media and public relations analyst Jerry Mander was an early critic several decades ago about how TV flattens and narrows our perception of the physical world. He argues that qualities of TV (this could apply to all audiovisual works) also cut and disorient our perceptions while affecting almost total passivity in its audiences. He noted too that subtle long-time changes of the natural world are not well suited to such media, that eco-social-political realities are often left out of the frame of TV and nature documentaries. These ideas are much expanded upon in Rob Nixon’s new book on Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (2011). Drawing on the work of Rachel Carson, Edward Said and Ramachandra Guha, Nixon argues that we need to account for a different type of violence, the ‘slow violence’ of man-made ecocide and that we also ‘need to engage the representational, narrative, and strategic challenges posed by the relative invisibility of slow violence’. ‘Slow violence, Nixon identifies as temporal and spatial forms of ecological violence, often disproportionately affecting the global, invisible poor and their environments and it is ultimately ‘under-represented in strategic planning as well as in human memory’. He reveals that slow violence is not a singular spectacular event that our mass media of today relishes to retain its over-saturated audiences, but attritional, often exponential, proliferating long-term conflicts and ongoing ecological degradation (Nixon, p. 2-3). Nixon also points out the enormous challenge too in our ‘turbo-speed’ mediated lives where ‘partial attention’ is the norm, where partial attention, generally just on our own species activities, has almost completely eclipsed the earth and the necessity of having healthy ecosystems. An important and detailed book combining perspectives outside of western discourse, Nixon gives much account detailing slow violence and then concentrates on examples of writer-activists who are attempting to engage in new cultural works to respond to these concerns. Interestingly, and he doesn’t expand on this, he does note the primacy of the visual perception in environmental discourse and asks ‘how do we both make slow violence visible yet also challenge the privileging of the visible? (p.14-15).

The Ethics of Earth Art by Amanda Boetzkes, 2011

From my own questions and observation of how visual art practices may respond to such challenges, I see committed engagement from practitioners on the edges of contemporary cultural practice, which has built on the early work of land artists. Early Land Artists in the late 1960s took their practices and work outside of galleries, and engaged with their physical environments across a variety of visual, sculptural and textual media, concentrating on process and projects rather than singular works, often over extended time periods. While many Land Artists, Robert Smithson for example has a significant legacy in this respect, have been described as having their focus both on challenging the primacy of art institutions to present and acknowledge what constitutes art and to investigate the unexplored formal potentials of natural materials, recent theory suggests that such artists have long also being displaying a developing ethics to the Earth, as detailed in Amanda Boetzkes The Ethics of Earth Art (2010). I was fortunate recently to observe recent developments in this still but growing field at the international The Home and the World summit in the UK held in June 2012 (I have previously surveyed the many online networks that make visible the activities in this area here). To me what is quietly striking about these small but growing number of artists working now, engaging with these almost inconceivably gloomy eco-social realities, realities that still remain for the large part outside of mainstream art education and international art events, is an inherent desire to counter our ever consuming, culture-on-speed. There is a persistence by many of these arts practitioners to create long-term, deep engagements with specific places and their nonhuman and human communities. These are slow art practices, sensitive and personal, with differing mixes of the social, ecological and or political, providing layers of multifaceted cultural perspectives and responses.

Many of the writers I have mentioned previously, from Berger, to Jensen and Nixon (and there are growing numbers of others, see in particular the work of Val Plumwood and others in the field of ecofeminism and environmental literary theory), talk of the ultimate necessity of urgently and deeply engaging with our place, our land-bases, if all living communities, are to thrive and survive. Berger on the topic of visual culture and photography in particular, has written some decades ago how photographic images have ‘died’, as they have long being ‘torn from their contexts’ by the consumerism and speed of the mass media. Yet he was hopeful that photography could regain an important societal function. While he was talking about the efficacy of photography in reflecting on war, his words could be applied to thinking about cultural works that seek to incorporate responses to ecological concerns too – he writes, ‘a radial system has to be constructed around the photograph (read now as any cultural form), so that it may be seen in terms which are simultaneously personal, political, economic, dramatic, everyday and historic (Berger, 1980, p.67).

Yet even with clearer, broader looking, one must reflect too that it is impossible that any cultural works can reverse the momentum of the ecocidal juggernaut that industrial civilization has unleashed. Even though still not readily acknowledged in mainstream media, the disturbing number of exceeded global earth indices already overwhelm any piecemeal political or economic developments that may attempt to reverse the situation. However if we can find a quiet space at the edge of the shallow rapids of our saturated mediated lives and go deeper, we may find lodged against the flow, small signs of creative perspectives and practices that may serve us and our ecological kin well. Slow art practices comprising of durational, diverse and multifaceted forms that run counter to our destructively limited narratives of unremitting growth and our species blind self interest. Perspectives and practices that can give sound, sights, textures, perhaps even smells of the earth and attend carefully to all the complex eco-social, political and historical aspects of the human and non-human communities that place entails. Work that can seem new but which draws on ancient wisdom that always foregrounded respectful relationality between all species needs: it is what must lie at the heart of our stories of sustainability.

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Note: publications and filmed events from the 2012 The Home and The World international summit will be available on their site in coming months. I have previously surveyed the many online networks that make visible similar activities in this area in an article ‘networking the arts to save the earth’ here.

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14 thoughts on “Ecopornography, slow violence and the deep, slow art of place”

Pictures/photos/movies are meant to support reality; in fact they create reality: very clearly in the missile videos at Gulf War I and II or 1992 in Bosnia. Things going further: The success of modern neurologic science is the success of pretty pictures. Colourful witnesses of (apparently)brain activity makes the money flow: more funding because of overwhelming pictures and a new reception of free will. Even better: The Dead Atlantic Salmon Phenomen (http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/09/fmrisalmon/ and the problem of interpretation and calibration.

All these phenomena are within the system and therefor hard to analyse for us, who went through a “humanistic” education. Example: environmentalists feel themselves as the “stewart” (John Gray) of the planet, helping our plant- and animal-neighbours to survive our destruction; not seeing, that homo sapiens sapiens is in the very urge for help.

In my opinion the same problem have artists: art as a vehicle for political, philosophical or even social-psychological reasons are highly suspect: we stay within our (self constructed) system; a prison of pride and arrogance with bars called Hobbes, Kant and Descartes. I appreciate that you mention land art: compare Michael Heizer’s “Double Negative” with “Leviated Mass”, what I would call pornographic art, dictated by health&safety issues and a perversion of his own history, striped from his early ideas of leaving the contextual compulsion of art industry and going out there ploughing the sand.

Pictures revolve ideas. Pictures create believes. How’s about a dialog with blind people about these subjects?

Your article is impressive in its deepness and richness of information; I read it with pleasure and especially the twist from Berger and Gray: I never thought about. But I don’t share your half hidden optimism, something could stop the turning wheel, because it is revolving in our heads.

Many thanks for your taking the time to share your thoughts, much appreciated.

Not sure if I understood all your references but I would agree, that many early contemporary earth artists such at Michael Heiser, did not have an ethical stance to the materials or the environments they used. In fact for many years I would pick up books on earth artists works, and there are few enough of them, to despair at how they treated their environments. However in regards to Heiser’s work I do recognise his intentions were never claimed to have an ecological aspect. It is only in very, very recent years knowledge and discourse about ecological realities are taught in art education. I know this is the case here. For that matter, in Ireland we have no journalist for the environment in our public press, (a journalist who does write occasional reports for the Irish Times here recently reviewed how little ecological discourse is in the general public here in Ireland http://www.thinkorswim.ie/index.php/an-interview-with-irishenvironment-com/) so its little wonder, how poor the ecoliteracy is in the arts, amongst educators and students alike. Many artists who have an interest in nature also often seem reluctant to engage with the wider sociopolitical or scientific aspects of our gravely accelerating ecological realities. In this respect I think great work was achieved in recent years by the RSA Art & Ecology programme to expand our ideas of what can be achieved in this area, in many diverse ways http://www.artsandecology.org.uk/

Personally, I have been much more inspired by the likes of Helen & Newton Harrison, Joseph Beuys (his 10 000 oaks project), Agnes Denes, (writer Suzi Gablik) for their wide geographical, long term projects that tranverse and form new conversations across disciplines, politics, science and social realms etc. Perhaps for artists responding to ecological concerns that is the arts great ability – to cross and connect cultural activity from diverse disciplines.

Thank you for this, it made me think and look at my own art again. I am familiar with the work of John Gray and he does influence my work on the land. Your post made me look again at his book and how i use it in my work.
My last blog tells some more and i gave a link to your blog, i hope you don’t mind.

Looking forwards to see more of your work and perhaps one day you can come to the land to film the wind.

as with many aspects of our ongoing ecocide we seem to be in a bit of a knotted-bind, if we model slowing down to reason-able speeds we will inevitably miss some time limited interventions after which much, if not all, is lost, but if we try and match the hyped up speeds of our wired age we will likely just be adding to the sound and fury, it’s a bummer.

means we need to do all we can to name and understand ecocide and recognise our ‘civilization -and our modern culture that hides and so perpetuates ecocide’ is incompatible with a living healthy planet

Hollywood Topics | Click to see more

I explore new ideas and practices for eco-social well being by bringing art and non-art practices together in my creative practice. I also offer Ecoliteracy learning for the arts at www.haumea.site
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Through my practice and an art practice-theory PhD "The Ecological Turn", I have developed a guiding theory-method framework to articulate the context and workings of long-term eco-social art practices. These vital practices activate ecoliteracy and agency for environmental change in communities. Much of my PhD drew on my experiences and challenges, and the review of others' pioneering creative practices' that are responding to ecological concerns. My own transversal practice reflects on the transformation of the small conifer plantation that I live with, Hollywood forest, toward new-to-Ireland, Close-to-Nature forestry. I bring previous experience in biological science research and interests in environmental philosophy, policy development and ecocide-Rights of Nature law developments into the mix.
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Somehow an eco-social art practice allows me to connect and move across these various strands of interest to create a new agency for myself and the human and non-human neighbours I depend on and live with.
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Hollywood forest is the smallest Close-to-Nature forest in Ireland; its growing happily near Mt Leinster and the Blackstairs mountains in South East Ireland.


1. Patrick Henry High School, MinneapolisAwarded a grant from the Choi-Chiu and King-Wo Lam Family Fund for students from its Chinese class to attend the Beijing Opera and Kun Qu Opera performancesby members of the National Academy of Chinese Theater Arts from China at the Ted Mann Concert Hall on November 18. Some of the students were able to join the performers on stage during one of the demonstration workshops.

Browse photos taken by Donna Kelly

2. Minhua Chorus, St. PaulAwarded a grant for its annual concert, Rainbow Across Pacific. It is a joint concert by Minhua Chorus and the Minnesota Center Chorale. This purpose of this concert is to mingle Chinese vocal arts with American vocal arts. The concert also will feature some of the top Chinese singers from Minnesota and China. The main objective of this project is to help the Chinese community to appreciate American music and culture, on the other hand also help American people to appreciate Chinese music and culture.

3. Minnesota Center Chorale, St. CloudAwarded a grant for the presentation of its May 2009 concert, Returning Home. The concert will include a collaboration with Gao Hong (Chinese pipa and composer) and the Twin Cities' Minhua Chorus with conductor Li Lei. The Minhua Chorus and a pipa player will join Chorale in a performance of Gao Hong's work, Coming of Spring for chorus and pipa. The work will be sung in Chinese.

The Chorale wishes to respond to the increase in cultural diversity in Central Minnesota, and the opportunity and challenge to build bridges and increase understanding among cultures. Director J. Michele Edwards and the Chorale Board plans to focus their concert season on the meaning of home to the many cultures, including Chinese, that have settled in Minnesota. The focus will include musical collaborations with groups such as Minhua Chorus; targeted publicity to diverse cultural groups, contact with nonprofit organizations working with families and children, and area schools. There will be educational program notes at the concert, and a reception afterwards that will feature area organizations working on housing and cultural issues.

4. Arts MidwestAwarded a grant for its World Fest Program, presenting Beauty & Melody in a residency in Alexandria, MN. Beauty & Melody consists of group of fifteen talented young women from the Sichuan Province of China. They are all graduates of conservatories and are professional musical instrument players as well as singers and dancers. The ensemble has concentrated on studying the thousand-year Chinese musical culture, adapting and composing classical music, and exploring the modernization and globalization of China's folk music. The group innovatively adds China's classical and folk dance in the playing of traditional musical instruments. Such combination of music and dance will unfold a new dimension of China's rich cultural contents to the audience.

The purpose of the Arts Midwest World Fest is to provide inspiring arts experiences while instilling appreciation for diversity and acceptance of others and their cultures. The residency of Beauty & Melody in Alexandria will include low-cost public concerts; free school concerts; workshops with elementary-, middle-, and high-school students; and community outreach activities such as family workshops in public libraries, master classes with local musicians, and community-hosted dinners with the ensembles. The program is also supported by online education materials specific to the Chinese culture.


Deceased tissue donor serology and molecular testing for HIV, hepatitis B and hepatitis C viruses: a lack of cadaveric validated tests.
Vital to patient safety is the accurate assessment and minimization of risk for human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), Hepatitis C (HCV), and Hepatitis B (HBV) virus transmission by deceased donor organ and tissue transplantation. The pathogens are tested by serological kits based on enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA), chemiluminescence (CLIA) and eletrochemiluminescence (ECLIA) immunoassays. Organ transplantation is a highly successful life-saving treatment in Brazil, but the Brazilian Health Surveillance Agency currently mandates that all deceased organ donors are screened for HIV, HCV and HBV following living donor policies. In this review, six ELISA (Wama®, Bio-Rad®, Biomerieux®, DiaSorin®, Acon Biotech® and Biokit®), three CLIA (Abbott®, Siemens®, Diasorin®) and one ECLIA (Roche®) were utilized for evaluating the effectiveness of those serological tests for deceased donors in Brazil according to manufacturer's guidelines. NAT for HIV, HCV and HBV can assist with detection of pre-seroconversion for those infections, and only Cobas® TaqScreen MPX® test, the Tigris System® Procleix Ultrio Assay® and the Bio-Manguinhos® HIV/HCV/HBV NAT are commercially available. Between all the tests, only the manufacturer Abbott® and Cobas® TaqScreen MPX® test are currently validated for cadaver samples.


The purpose of this study is to determine normative ultrasound measurements for women age 35-84 using the QUS-2 ultrasonometer (MetraBiosystems; Mountainview, CA).


Multiple effects of chitosan on plant systems: solid science or hype.
Chitosan, a naturally occurring polymer, became available in the 1980s in industrial quantities enabling it to be tested as an agricultural chemical. A usual procedure for developing agricultural chemicals starts by testing a number of different chemically synthesized molecules on a targeted biological system. Alternately, chitosan has been investigated as a single natural molecule assayed with numerous biological systems. This report describes the unique properties of the molecule and its oligomers, primarily in plant defense, additionally in yield increase, induction of cell death and stomatal closing. The plant plasma membrane and nuclear chromatin have been proposed as targets, though chitosan oligomers enter most regions of the cell. Subsequent changes occur in: cell membranes, chromatin, DNA, calcium, MAP kinase, oxidative burst, reactive oxygen species (ROS), callose, pathogenesis related (PR) genes/proteins, and phytoalexins. Chitosan oligomer mode(s) of action are proposed for different plant systems. Chitosan efficacy was based on documentation from published data. Attention was given to how chitosan, either applied externally or released by fungal inoculum, is transferred into plant cells and its subsequent action upon membrane and/or chromatin components. Within is a proposed scheme describing chitosan generation, signaling routes and mechanisms of defense gene activation. Examples of beneficial chitosan applications to major crop/food plants were included.


Q:

Use of HttpListener

I have the following HTTP listener method, greatly inspired by MSDN's example use of the HttpListener class. I'm fairly new to programming and I'm not sure where to go from here to initialize it from my Main(). Any suggestions?
 public static void HttpListener(string[] prefixes)
    {
        if (prefixes == null || prefixes.Length == 0)
            throw new ArgumentException("Prefixes needed");

        HttpListener listener = new HttpListener();

        foreach (string s in prefixes)
        {
            listener.Prefixes.Add(s);
        }
        listener.Start();
        Console.WriteLine("Listening..");

        HttpListenerContext context = listener.GetContext();
        HttpListenerRequest request = context.Request;
        HttpListenerResponse response = context.Response;

        string responseString = "<HTML><BODY> Test </BODY></HTML>";
        byte[] buffer = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(responseString);

        response.ContentLength64 = buffer.Length;
        Stream output = response.OutputStream;
        output.Write(buffer, 0, buffer.Length);

        output.Close();
        listener.Stop();
    }

A:

You seem to have removed the comments that are mentioned on the MSDN HttpListener Class page:

// URI prefixes are required, for example "http://contoso.com:8080/index/".

So just call it like that:
public static void Main(string[] args)
{
    HttpListener(new[] { "http://localhost/" });
}

But please note this example will handle only one request and then exit. If your follow-up question is then "How can I make it handle multiple requests?", see Handling multiple requests with C# HttpListener.

A:

you can do something like this :
   public void ListenTraces()
    {
        httpListener.Prefixes.Add(PORT_HOST);
        try
        {
            httpListener.Start();
        }
        catch (HttpListenerException hlex)
        {
            log.Warn("Can't start the agent to listen transaction" + hlex);
            return;
        }
        log.Info("Now ready to receive traces...");
        while (true)
        {
            var context = httpListener.GetContext(); // get te context

            log.Info("New trace connexion incoming");
           Console.WriteLine(context.SomethingYouWant);
        }
    }


Reiteration Of Our Investment Approach

{ Euclidean Q3 2010 Letter }

Recently, one of our new investors asked if we would be willing to summarize our investment philosophy in a future letter. As we have not tackled this since our 2008 year-end communication, we thought now was a good time to reiterate the essence of our investment approach.

After all, a big part of our vision is to have a core of informed and like-minded partners with whom we grow a preeminent firm over time. We want you to feel very connected to and comfortable with how we are managing your hard-earned capital.

So, in this letter, we begin with some comments specific to the third quarter and then attempt to satisfy our new investor’s request.

The Third Quarter 2010

“… our best years are likely to result from the most uncomfortable and volatile market environments. … we anticipate that our short-term results will look the most dismal at the exact moments we are making our best investments.”

It is easy to make this kind of statement from the comfortable perch of outsized returns. Comments about markets ignoring companies’ intrinsic values come across as thoughtful when shared by an investor who has delivered strong recent results. Those same comments, however, sound like “excuse-making” when made in context of poor performance. As we have just completed our first period of market-lagging returns, we are happy we wrote our last letter when we did!

Kidding aside, we do strongly believe in the sentiment repeated above. The very human oscillation between fear and excitement is reflected in the markets and often causes assets to be priced too low or too high for long periods. Even in the context of a company whose intrinsic value is already under-appreciated, there is no reason to expect that the market may not first become even more pessimistic about the firm’s prospects and push its stock price down further before the levity of strong operating results pulls its stock price back up.

During the quarter, the levity of strong operating results seemed at times to be exerting a weaker pull than the force of 'macro' fears (e.g., solvency of European banks, deficit concerns, unemployment). The Wall Street Journal recently published an article titled 'Macro Forces Stump Stock Pickers.' The article's premise was that market participants have been making top-down decisions, moving money in and out of the stock market as they rapidly vacillate between 'risk-on' and 'risk-off strategies. In this context, the article explained, there has been a historically high correlation between the price movements of individual securities as the relative differences in companies' operating results have been somewhat ignored.

Euclidean on Market Value

Euclidean's strategy -- which focuses on investing in under-valued and under-appreciated firms -- is unlikely to deliver strong relative performance so long as these historically high correlations persist. However, we believe that a company's evolving fundamentals will dictate its market value over the long-term. Thus, an environment where the market is making little differentiation between companies is one where we anticipate mispricings will emerge and grow. To be excited about this kind of environment (as we have been), you need to accept three things.

First, you must embrace the idea that a company's operating results will dictate its market value over the long-term. Put another way, you need to believe that the strength of a company's business model, the consistency of its execution, and its ability to serve customer needs better than competitors, will ultimately determine what the company is worth.

Second, you must view the market's daily up-and-downs as little more than a reflection of the very human, emotional ride across fear, apathy, and exuberance. By accepting the market for what it is, you would avoid the temptation to become anxious or excited by short-term market moves.

Third, you would sense opportunity when the market temporarily ignores the evolving, relative differences in companies' results. You would anticipate that high market volatility and correlation between share prices would present opportunities to acquire shares in certain companies at very low prices and, over time, sell them at a fair value.

To us, these seem like simple concepts. Yet, most market participants' frenetic, 'risk-on risk-off', behavior shows they do not accept them. Maybe their investment horizons are so short as to force a constant effort to avoid monthly or quarterly drawdowns. Or, perhaps they fear we face era of macroeconomic and political upheaval that is so unprecedented as to make historically sound investing principles irrelevant. Either way, as you form your own views, we thought we would share another perspective for you to consider:

"We will continue to ignore political and economic forecasts, which are an expensive distraction for many investors and businessmen. Thirty years ago, no one could have foreseen the huge expansion of the Vietnam War, wage and price controls, two oil shocks, the resignation of a president, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, a one-day drop in the Dow of 508 points, or Treasury bill yields fluctuating between 2.8% and 17.4%.... But, surprise - none of these blockbuster events made the slightest dent in Ben Graham's investment principles. Nor did they render unsound the negotiated purchases of fine businesses at sensible prices. Imagine the cost to us, then, if we had let a fear of unknowns cause us to defer or alter the deployment of capital. Indeed, we have usually made our best purchases when apprehensions about some macro event were at a peak. Fear is the foe of the faddist, but the friend of the fundamentalist... A different set of major shocks is sure to occur in the next 30 years. We will neither try to predict these nor to profit from them. If we can identify businesses similar to those we have purchased in the past, external surprises will have little effect on our long-term results."

Our Approach

As you know, our mission is to bring a quantitatively rigorous and systematic approach to long-term investing. We pursued this mission because we had our own money to invest and were not comfortable with the short-term focus, risks of leverage, misaligned incentives, and reliance on qualitative analysis that in various combinations characterize today’s asset management options.

Our approach involved exploring the record of public companies' operating histories. We hoped that, by digesting the quantifiable experience one could have obtained by investing in public companies over the past 40 years, we might we able to identify a promising, repeatable method for evaluating individual companies as potential investments.

After several years of developing our learning technologies and taking an unbiased look at the historical record, we found a strong validation of some very common sense concepts. Specifically, we found the ‘highest batting average’ style of equity investment comes via companies with:

High and persistent returns on capital.

Long and consistent operating histories.

Conservative balance sheets.

Market capitalizations that are very low relative to their demonstrated ability to generate cash.

Certainly, we are not the first people to make note of these qualities. In fact, if you had 20 professional investors in a room, they might all agree that these are important concepts. To understand what makes Euclidean different, please consider the following:

If you asked those 20 investors the best way to measure those concepts and express them mathematically, you would very likely get 20 different answers. The investors’ different answers would be shaped by each one’s ability to distill the right lessons from his/her own unique experiences investing in companies, sitting on boards, building businesses, and reading about others’ investing successes and failures.

If you asked those investors how they would balance those concepts – perhaps, “How much would you flex on the conservative balance sheet requirement if a company was pristine in every other way?” – you would, again, be likely to get 20 different answers for the same reason described above.

Euclidean has made an effort to digest the available, quantifiable experience one could have obtained by investing in public companies across the past 40 years. This effort has allowed us to search for effective and persistent methods for using a company’s operating history and current valuation to evaluate it as a potential investment.

Euclidean applies our findings in a systematic, non-emotional manner. That is, we adhere to the lessons we have been able to derive from history, with no modification based on the macro fear or thrill of the day.

Given our reliance on distilling lessons from the past, one question we often get focuses on risks we would face if the future proves to be materially unlike anything we have ever seen. We reply that it aligns with our experience (and common sense) that:

Strong returns on capital are better than weak returns on capital.

Strong balance sheets are better than weak balance sheets.

Consistent operations are better than erratic operations.

Companies generally perform better as investments when they are purchased at discounted – instead of premium – prices.

We believe these statements were true 40 years ago, are true today, and will be true in the future.

But, can it really be possible to profit by simply adhering to these common sense principles? We think the opportunity for profit exists because most market participants spend so much energy trying to predict the unpredictable. As they rapidly bid up and sell off shares to reflect their evolving sense of how developments in technology, regulation, interest rates, and other exogenous factors are going to impact their portfolios, Euclidean simply lays in wait. We make no effort to time our purchases or predict the future. We simply wait for historically good companies to be offered at very low prices, and then we get to work.

Therefore, and this should now be obvious, Euclidean does not pay heed to prognostications that seem popular with highly paid market analysts, CNBC reporters, and stock newsletter writers. Euclidean also does not attempt to make detailed forecasts of interest rates, the GDP, or the fortunes and misfortunes of economic sectors. We avoid these things because we believe that a company’s ability to efficiently generate cash and above-average shareholder returns is better understood by appropriately examining its operating history. In our minds, almost all other information is at best a distraction and at worst misleading.

After enduring this part of the Euclidean story a third time, a good friend said, “But macro developments, while perhaps unpredictable, will still impact companies’ operating results and, hence, their long term values!” There is no question that he is right. But, this does not mean that investing energy in trying to know the unknowable is helpful. Rather, it means that you might prepare for an unknowable future by purchasing historically sound companies at very low prices such that negative future scenarios are already largely baked into their valuations.

Thus, if the market proves to be right in foreseeing some negative future development, then your downside may be somewhat limited. On the other hand, if the market’s prediction turns out to be wrong or if the market anticipated something more severe than what ultimately transpires, you might have a real opportunity for gains.

One benefit to this approach (one that prepares for, but does not attempt to predict, the future) is that it allows us to invest in a systematic and non-emotional way, proceeding with informed conviction on individual investment decisions even when the market consensus points in a different direction. Another benefit is that, with a systematic approach, we can simulate how our investment process might have performed at different times in the past.

These simulations gave us confidence to invest all of our energies in building Euclidean and to do three things that we hope you care a lot about.

To invest the majority of our liquid net-worth alongside you in the fund.

To refuse to leverage the fund’s capital. We are not comfortable taking unnecessary risks to goose returns or to smooth the volatility that is a natural part of generating attractive long-term returns.

To take performance allocations only in years where you receive positive net returns that meet or exceed the total returns of the S&P 500.

*****

We believe our approach is a winning one, and we look forward to continuing to show this with strong performance during the decades ahead.

THE INFORMATION ON THIS WEB SITE IS NOT AN OFFER TO SELL OR SOLICITATION OF AN OFFER TO BUY AN INTEREST IN ANY INVESTMENT FUND OR FOR THE PROVISION OF ANY INVESTMENT MANAGEMENT OR ADVISORY SERVICES. ANY SUCH OFFER OR SOLICITATION WILL BE MADE ONLY BY MEANS OF DELIVERY OF A CONFIDENTIAL PRIVATE OFFERING MEMORANDUM RELATING TO A PARTICULAR FUND OR INVESTMENT MANAGEMENT CONTRACT TO QUALIFIED INVESTORS IN THOSE JURISDICTIONS WHERE PERMITTED BY LAW. EUCLIDEAN TECHNOLOGIES MANAGEMENT, LLC IS A REGISTERED INVESTMENT ADVISER. MORE INFORMATION ABOUT THE FIRM IS AVAILABLE IN PART 2 OF ITS FORM ADV, WHICH CAN OBTAINED BY CONTACTING THE FIRM AT INFO@EUCLIDEAN.COM.

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NOT NECESSARILY INDICATIVE OF FUTURE RETURNS. ANY INFORMATION YOU RECEIVE FROM EUCLIDEAN TECHNOLOGIES MANAGEMENT, LLC IS BELIEVED TO BE RELIABLE. NEVERTHELESS, NEITHER EUCLIDEAN TECHNOLOGIES MANAGEMENT, LLC, NOR ITS AGENTS ARE LIABLE FOR ANY DEFICIENCIES IN THE ACCURACY, COMPLETENESS, AVAILABILITY OR TIMELINESS OF SUCH INFORMATION. THE INFORMATION PROVIDED ON THIS WEB SITE DOES NOT NECESSARILY REFLECT THE MOST UP TO DATE OR CURRENT INFORMATION AVAILABLE ON THE PRODUCT OR SERVICE. THE INFORMATION CONTAINED HEREIN IS PROVIDED WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY OF ANY KIND.


Inflammatory cells in duct-ligated salivary glands of the cat: a histochemical study.
Inflammatory cells were studied in submandibular, sublingual and parotid glands of cat following ductal ligation. Macrophages were seen within the parenchyma and associated with extravasated mucin, and were possibly of importance in removing secretory material. Neutrophils were seen interstitially and within the parenchyma. Eosinophils were involved in an initial inflammatory response in interstitial tissue. Fibrous connective tissue was more apparent.


Intermediate lymphocytic lymphoma massively involving the gastrointestinal tract.
A case is presented of intermediate lymphocytic lymphoma seen in a 53 year old male, which extensively infiltrated systemic organs, including the entire digestive tract from the esophagus to the rectum. Peyer's patch invasion was evident. Multiple intestinal perforations caused death 5 months later. Surface marker studies suggested the marginal zone origin for this CD20+ B cell malignancy.


Spring babies face anorexia risk

Embargoed until 28 April 2011

Anorexia nervosa is more common among people born in the spring,
according to
new study published in the May issue of the British Journal
of Psychiatry. The researchers say their study – which is the
largest to date – provides “clear evidence” of a season of birth
effect in anorexia.

The research team, led by Dr Lahiru
Handunnetthi, of the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics at
the University of Oxford, examined the birth dates of 1,293
patients with anorexia and compared their distribution to the
general population using the Walter and Elwood seasonality test and
Chi Square test. They found an excess of anorexia births between
March and June, and a deficit from September to October.

Although some previous studies have suggested
a link between season of birth and eating disorders, these involved
much smaller numbers of patients and did not reach statistical
significance.

Dr Handunnetthi said: “We meta-analysed four
cohorts of anorexia nervosa patients from the UK, making this the
largest ever study to assess the presence of a season of birth
effect in anorexia. We found that susceptibility to anorexia
nervosa is significantly influenced by a person’s season of birth,
being higher in those people born in the spring and lower in those
born in the autumn.

Dr Handunnetthi said: “A number of previous
studies have found that mental illnesses such as schizophrenia,
bipolar disorder and major depression are more common among those
born in the spring – so this finding in anorexia is perhaps not
surprising. However, our study only provides evidence of an
association. Now we need more research to identify which factors
are putting people at particular risk.”

The researchers believe that environmental
factors around the time of conception or when the baby is
developing in the womb may be responsible. Dr Handunnetthi said:
“Seasonal changes in temperature, sunlight exposure and vitamin D
levels, maternal nutrition and exposure to infections are all
possible risk factors. Identifying these risk factors is important
in helping us understand and maybe even prevent illness in
future.”


Martin Shaw – what “human element” means

Feb 13 2020

Tanker companies which embrace the “human element” appreciate people’s role as successful goalkeepers (rather than someone to blame), acknowledge the limits of procedures, manage onboard complexity, are careful about how we introduce automation, and reduce major risks like enclosed space deaths, said tanker technical expert Martin Shaw.

There is still too much misuse of the term “human error”. It is used after nearly any incident, and there are many debates about the percentage of incidents that are due to human error, Mr Shaw said.

In fact, virtually all incidents are born of “human error”, but an error made at some point in the regulation, design, build, operate, maintain cycle, he said. But the culture of shipping only considers errors by seafarers.

This focus on the seafarer means the main “tool in the toolbox” to improve safety is changing procedures to prevent the incident from re-occurring, he said.

But it might be better if energies were spent looking at what is behind this seafarer error, and finding better ways to ensure the seafarer feels supported by everyone around, he said.

Martin Shaw’s background is in tanker operations, originally working as an engineer at sea, and then running a ship vetting organization for an oil company, and then managing an oil company fleet. He has been consulting for the past 8-10 years and becoming “more and more interested in the human element”.

Types of human error

One of the world experts on human error, James Reason, has said that human errors can be categorized as “skill-based errors, mistakes and violations.”

A violation is defined as someone deliberately doing something wrong. But seafarers’ mistakes might be viewed too often as “violations”. Normally people don’t deliberately set out to make mistakes, Mr Shaw said. This view links to the increased criminalization of seafarers. Normally someone would need to have deliberately done something wrong for it to be considered a crime. After a major incident, often “the first thing that happens is that seafarers are locked up.”

It would be better if there was more willingness to accept that seafarers might make unintended mistakes – and look at whether the environment they work in can be changed to make them less likely.

In a 1991 book “Human Error”, James Reason differentiated two different drivers for unsafe acts – local workplace factors (including technical factors), and organizational factors.

Mr Shaw presented this quote from the book. “Rather than being the main instigators of an accident, operators tend to be the inheritors of system defects created by poor design, incorrect installation and bad management decisions. Their part is usually that of adding the final garnish to a lethal brew whose ingredients have been long in the cooking.”

But in the shipping industry, the attitude too often is still, “it’s the seafarer’s fault, how did he make that stupid mistake.”

The seafarers should be supported by their shore-based management, regulators, and other recognized organisations. Other relevant parties are the equipment designers, system designers, programmers, port operators, terminal operators, charterers, vetting organisations, industry bodies.

As a seafarer, Mr Shaw recalls making some mistakes at sea which caused shipboard electricity supply to trip. As a fleet manager, “I made some quite huge mistakes”.

“We’re all prone to human error. We get ourselves hung up that the only person who makes errors in the shipping business is the seafarer, because we view the seafarer as a hazard.”

“We make the assumption that all ships are correctly designed, all the procedures around that are fine, the only thing that’s wrong is those damn fool seafarers who keep making mistakes. We make the assumption that if you focus on those mistakes you prevent accidents – monitor them more and pushing them more. That’s what’s called ‘work as imagined,’” Mr Shaw said.

But in the real world, management systems are not perfect, things go wrong all the time.

“The only reason things don’t go wrong is that seafarers make them operate. They are the glue that make things keep running.”

“What would happen if you focus on the other 99 per cent of the operation and the things that went right?”

Seafarers as goalkeepers

Mr Shaw sees seafarers like goalkeepers, the people who prevent problems from becoming big problems.

“If you are manager of a [football] team, the team loses five nil, do you sack the goalkeeper? Maybe you should. But what if he saved 50 goals? That means 55 times the ball is kicked to the net. What about the other 10 people – what were they doing? How do you stop the ball getting close to the net? You need to do a lot more work on that one. At present the seafarer may feel alone on the pitch with an angry opposition bearing down on them.”

In 2008 James Reason wrote ‘the Human Contribution, where instead of focusing on human error, he wanted to focus on the human contribution, the good things people have done.

So if you tell the story of the Titanic, you could focus on the Carpathia, the ship which rescued the survivors, including preparing for them to come onboard, recording their names, and informing their relatives.

The limits of procedures?

Efforts to improve safety have been through a number of waves. The first stage was improving the hardware, the machinery itself. The second stage was to focus heavily on competence.

The third stage, starting about 1990, was to focus on improving procedures and management systems. In the tanker business the owner and flag took responsibility for compliance with these. Vetting organisations provided a further layer which could be described as ‘enforcement’ as well as generating best practice.

Shipowners developed continuous improvement systems, identifying what they thought they could improve, and then doing it. “They improved things dramatically.” They basically removed all the systemic problems from the system.

This focus was successful at improving the safety record. Data of tanker industry casualties shows a steady decline in accidents, measured by casualties and pollution incidents. The introduction of double hull tankers during the same period also helps.

But in the past decade, the accident trend goes up slightly, partly due to the increased number of tankers following the Chinese boom, and partly because of some things going wrong, including more groundings which may have been caused by problems introducing ECDIS, Mr Shaw said.

So it may be fair to argue that a limit was reached of what could be achieved with procedures and what can be achieved with simpler accident investigation models which stop at what happened aboard ship.

Ultimately, if people are given more to do with more complex systems the potential for error rises, he said.

Procedures are an important part of how you run ships – you can’t not have them. But they need to be useful, not a stick to beat people with.

“In many cases the last people who read procedures are the lawyers, to see if there’s any liability in there, not to see how easy they are to follow,” he said.

Complexity onboard

Today’s seafarers have security and environmental requirements in addition to safety requirements. There can be 5 or 6 things they need to assimilate in their heads and connect to make decisions, and sometimes people need to decide what gets priority.

“You reach this horrible phase called complexity,” he said.

To understand where the complexity comes from, we can break down what work is like on a ship.

The core of the work is “relatively straightforward” tasks, like navigating, loading and discharging cargo. You have engineering systems to support you. Behind that, you have a lot of processes to assist, including procedures, checklists and forms.

Then there is a large amount of communications which need to be done during port calls. “Someone comes onboard asking for the captain’s time. They’ve got statutory powers behind them. ‘We are here, and you’ll do what we tell you to do.’”

This is where it starts to get complex. “The captain gets tied up. The terminal is desperate to get you in and out as quickly as possible. You may well have port state inspections, charterers inspections, maintenance.”

There are people who can help you with maintenance, such as “riding squads” (crews which stay on the vessel for a short time for a certain task). But operations generally rely only on those onboard.

Behind that, are a number of maintenance processes and planned maintenance systems, class requirements, and stores and spares to manage.

You have a shipowner making sure everything works correctly, and a regulator making sure the shipowner is making sure.

Regulators ‘not in touch’

The problems arise because these people making regulations are not in touch with how people currently work onboard ships. They believe that ships work the way they did when they were seafarers themselves, 30 years earlier, he said.

The way the industry is meant to work is with a ship interacting with ports, a shipowner interacting with the ship, the shipowner being in charge of how ships are designed, operated and maintained, and national regulatory bodies – and the IMO – making regulations.

But there are now about 170 different flag state regulatory bodies, over 30 classification societies, and thousands of owners and ships, all working in different ways.

In the 1990s, there were a number of tanker incidents leading to oil on people’s shorelines, leading to a call for a new sort of locally controlled regulatory body, known as port state control. “Coastal states wanted to have some sort of leverage on the ships coming in and out of ports.”

The port states influence flag states and class by creating black lists of bad flags, so vessels with these flags were subject to more port state inspection. “Nobody wanted to have a flag that meant they would be targeted by port states, and so the black listed flags had to improve and quickly.

Then you have the vetting organisations, working on behalf of oil companies – the charterers – whose big concern was that they would be the ‘deep pockets’ for a major pollution incident.

So there are multiple organisations with slightly different goals and requirements. “There are all sorts of systems that people have got to understand, all sorts of communications that people are having to deal with. They are all sitting on top of the poor chap in the middle as he tries to make sense of it.”

Increasing automation

We also have increasing use of automation, but no opportunity to practice running without it, he said.

“In my days [at sea] automation was nice to have – but when automation went wrong, you knew roughly what to do.

“If the main interface is the computer systems, then you need to understand the logic of the control system as well as that of the system it is controlling.”

Today, we hear stories about systems affecting each other which should not have any connection, such as an alarm system which would somehow cause the ship to turn to starboard when it was tested, he said.

Enclosed space deaths

Investigation into accidents such as enclosed space deaths, the second largest killer on ships, often ends up saying that the individual did not follow procedures. “It doesn’t look at what is behind that.”

For example, time pressure might be an indirect cause. Time pressure can be explicit – if you are asked to do something quickly. But can also be implicit, when someone does something because they feel under pressure.

If someone senior believes they are under time pressure, that is pushed onto everyone beneath them.

There can be systemic pressures – where a system is designed to function quickly, for example a system designed for fast loading of car carriers.

In the tanker sector, a terminal operator may need to make a choice between building a new jetty, so there is ample space, or just trying to increase the throughput to get more tankers in and out more quickly.

You have charterers who expect “utmost dispatch” and owners who want to maximise their earnings.

Usually, there will be enough people in the management structure who are aware of the dangers of putting crew under time pressure. But there are also situations where commercial management is handled by brokers, manning is handled by manning managers, ship management is handled by technical managers, and the captain sits in the middle.

Time pressure is not something which can be removed completely, the question is making sure people are able to say when it is too much. “That to me is the difficult bit. You’ve got to create armour for the captain. The shipowner has got to make it explicitly clear, If the captain feels under pressure, he has a right to say no.”

Another way to reduce enclosed deaths could be to try to reduce the problem. While we can’t prevent seafarers from having to enter enclosed spaces at all, we can try to reduce the number of times they have to do it. There can be better arrangements for ventilation. A current method is to use a thick pipe to pump air into the space, which also blocks the same hole which is needed for someone to exit.

The industry takes a bias towards trying to solve problems with administrative methods, and “that’s where we get into problems”.

It shouldn’t be necessary for someone to enter a tank with breathing apparatus, except in an extreme emergency to rescue someone else.


Johan Charl Walters

Vice-Admiral Johan Charl Walters  (19191993) was a former Chief of the South African Navy.

Early life
He was born on 9 January 1919 in Moorreesburg and was christened on 2 March 1919.

Naval career

He was trained at the General Botha Training college from 1934 to 1935 and joined the Ellerman Hall Line after leaving General Botha.

He served in World War II on a number of ships:
 19411941 - Sub Lt.
 19411942  in command as a Sub Lieutenant
 1943
 1944 Lt
 19441945
 1946 , , ,
 1947  19471954
 Lt Cdr
 1955 ,
 1956
 October 1957 to 1963 LCDR/CDR/CAPT  He was promoted to Commander in December 1960.
 19641974 Commodore and Hydrographer of the Navy
 19751976 Rear Admiral Chief of Naval Staff Logistics
 1 October 197730 January 1980 Vice Admiral Chief of Navy

Awards and Decorations

References

Category:1919 births
Category:1993 deaths
Category:People from Moorreesburg
Category:White South African people
Category:South African military personnel of World War II
Category:Chiefs of the South African Navy