Sunday, November 30, 2014

The Faculty Lounge: Should Your Law Review Article Have an Abstract and a Table of Contents?

The Faculty Lounge: Should Your Law Review Article Have an Abstract and a Table of Contents?:

 "Should Your Law Review Article Have an Abstract and a Table of Contents?
Yes, say the authors of this article that surveys citation rates. 

The stronger impact on citation levels comes from having an abstract, but tables of contents also contribute, and the two together generate citation rates 70% higher than articles without either.

Their theory is that abstracts and tables of contents reduce cognitive burdens on other researchers, which makes sense."



'via Blog this'

GCaptain: E-charts failed Team Vestas Wind when she struck reef

Cargados Carajos Shoals

Volvo Ocean Race: Team Vestas Wind Abandoned on Reef After Grounding - gCaptain Maritime & Offshore News: 

"Charles Caudrelier, skipper of Team Dongfeng notes in comment,

“We are offshore in the middle of nowhere, and on the chart, if you don’t go on the maximum zoom you can’t see anything.”
The Volvo Ocean Race skippers are relying on electronic charts to make their way around the world and in this case, the limitations of such charts appear to have let them down.

“When I was looking at the navigation a few days ago, checking these things, it took a long time for me to find them,” adds Caudrelier.

His team narrowly missed the rocks thanks to a last-minute gybe."




'via Blog this'

Vestas Wind wrecked on a reef in Indian Ocean - Volvo Ocean race

The crew of Volvo Ocean Race team Vestas Wind has abandoned ship after striking a reef in the Cargados Carajos Shoals, some 200nm northeast of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean.The Danish crew was evacuated by a local Coast Guard rib.
Things got worse - the keel bulb snapped off and the boat tilted more. With the stern section breaking off and the deck folding they took to the life rafts!
How could it happen?  Well, apparently they are invisible at night and the navigable software is not that good according to this report from Scuttlebutt.

“Vestas Wind navigator Wouter Verbraak is one of the best, and firmly falls into the category of a superb yachtsman and navigator. He is one who understands the strengths and limitations of digital tools more than most will ever do. And one of the nicest guys in the sport to boot.

“Mistakes happen. Just glad they are all safe and uninjured.”


High and Dry on the reef.
high and dry


Saturday, November 29, 2014

Loïck Peyron wins Route du Rhum in Record Time — America's Cup Experience

Loïck Peyron single-handing the monster trimaran Banque Populaire VII              PHOTO:  THIERRY MARTINEZ

Loïck Peyron wins Route du Rhum in Record Time — America's Cup Experience: "On 9 November 2014, Loïck Peyron crossed the finish line in Guadeloupe, 7 days and 15 hours after departing Saint Malo in Brittany. The maxi trimaran is longer, wider and has a taller mast than an AC72 catamaran and was originally built for a crew of 10.

Loïck is a member of the design team for Artemis Racing in their challenge for the 2017 America's Cup."



'via Blog this'

Tuesday, November 25, 2014

World's fastest sailboat - L'Hydroptere video

 L'Hydroptere - 56 knots

Friday, November 21, 2014

Van Shuler - 108 - Oldest Known Returned Peace Corps Volunteer Dies

Van & Gard Shuler - 1968 -
on a bullock cart in Maharashtra
Van at 100 - oldest
known returned Volunteer
Vasai Fort
Bassein fort and fishing boat
I had the good fortune to know Evangeline "Van" Shuler and her husband Gard. They were retired teachers who in 1967 at age 62 joined the Peace Corps.  We were in the same group of ten married couples - all but them young - who went to Maharashtra, India.  They lived in an unelectrified village on the Deccan plateau.  I couldn't handle that and the Peace Corps managers wisely sent us to Bassein - a fishing village and fringe commuter town 30 miles north of central Bombay.   Margo and I spent two years there.  I was assigned to a Catholic! fisherman's co-op and spent some days at sea with men who hauled nets hand over hand.  The shifts were determined by the tides and we slept on deck (crew of 7 + the boy cook).  Margo focused on elementary school children who got a share of the fish caught by the UNICEF funded Danish marine engines on my hosts boats.

Tragically Gard Shuler, a handsome and able man died of viral meningitis in 1968.  Van carried on in Maharashtra - completing her twenty seven month service (we left at 24 months for me to start grad school at Boston University under the historian Howard Zinn to whom I applied with a letter that was pretty silly looking back at it.  I took the LSAT in Bombay because I couldn't see myself writing a doctoral dissertation - unlike Margo who got her PhD at Rutgers and has long taught American history at University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee,

It was a different world.  The fastest way to communicate with home was by aerogramme letter.  To call home (we did twice) we had to go to Bombay to the central post office.  We got our news by shortwave radio - VOA, All India Radio, Radio Moscow, and Radio Peking (which relentlessly denounced "the Soviet renegade revisionist clique" ten years before such a `clique' actually triumphed in China itself).

Van, who died August 17, 2014 at her Florida home, is remembered in this piece on the occasion of her 100th birthday.
- gwc

Oldest Known Returned Peace Corps Volunteer Turns 100 | Peace Corps
"WASHINGTON, D.C., June 2, 2006 When Evangeline Shuler, born in 1906 and who served as a volunteer in the 1960s, arrived at a recent 45th anniversary event for the Peace Corps, it seemed almost everyone in the room wanted to hear her stories.

Shuler, of Seattle, turns 100 on June 4, and while the Peace Corps does not uniformly collect statistics on volunteers once they leave service, she is the oldest known returned Peace Corps volunteer alive today."

'via Blog this'

Thursday, November 20, 2014

Seven feet of snow

Buffalo, November 18-19, 2014

Tuesday, November 18, 2014

GWB in the fog

Sunday, November 16, 2014

Friday, November 14, 2014

Fordham Sailing Breaks Top 10 in Rankings



Fordham Notes: Fordham Sailing Breaks Top 10 in Rankings

"Just as the football team was taking the Patriot League Title and the women’s basketball is gearing up for what is sure to be yet another winning season, the Fordham Rams Sailing Team was ranked among the top 10 in a coaches' poll taken by Sailing World Magazine.

With little of the fanfare rightfully accorded to the University’s varsity teams, Fordham Sailing is a club team that has quietly been improving since it was reintroduced to the University after a 27-year hiatus. 


Breaking the Top 10 ranking of the Intercollegiate Sailing Association of North America (ICSA) is a first for the team. It's No. 7 position of the ICSA's 230 varsity and club coed teams is made all the sweeter in that it also makes Fordham the No. 1 ranking among the 194 club teams. In addition, the team bested several nautical colleges, including U.S. Naval Academy, SUNY Maritime, and the U.S. Coast Guard Academy."



'via Blog this'

Sunday, November 9, 2014

Back River - Veterans Day weekend 2014







Jesus and the Modern Man - James Carroll - NYTimes.com

Reading the Gospels with fresh eyes - to reject the anti-Jewish vision of Jesus who taught no such thing.  - gwc

Jesus and the Modern Man - NYTimes.com

by James Carroll
[I]n addition to intellectual barriers, there are moral obstacles to faith in Jesus, too — not just the blatant sins of the church like sex abuse or misogyny, but also sacrosanct core traditions of Christianity that turn out to be grotesque distortions of who Jesus was.
Chief among these is the way in which the full and permanent Jewishness of Jesus was forgotten, so much so that his story is told in the Gospels themselves as a story of Jesus against the Jews, as if he were not one of them. Against the way Christians often remember it, Jesus did not proclaim a New Testament God of love against an Old Testament God of judgment (which girds the anti-Jewish bipolarity of grace versus law; generosity versus greed; mercy versus revenge). Rather, as a Shema-reciting son of Israel, he proclaimed the one God, whose judgment comes as love.
Imagined as a zealot who attacked the Temple, Jesus, on the contrary, surely revered the Temple, along with his fellow Jews. If, as scholars assume, he caused a disturbance there, it was almost certainly in defense of the place, not in opposition to it. The narrative denouement of this conflicted misremembering occurred in the 20th century, when the anti-Semitism of Nazism laid bare the ultimate meaning of the church’s religious anti-Judaism.
The horrified reckoning after the Holocaust was the beginning of the Christian reform that remains the church’s unfinished moral imperative to this day.
Most emphatically, that reform must be centered in a critical rereading of the Gospel texts, so that the misremembered anti-Jewish Jesus can give way to the man as he was, and to the God whom he makes present in the lives of all who cannot stop seeing more than is before their eyes.
Such retrieval of the centrality of Jesus can restore a long-lost simplicity of faith, which makes Catholic identity — or the faith of any other church — only a means to a larger communion not just with fellow Jesus people, but with humans everywhere. All dogmas, ordinances and accretions of tradition must be measured against the example of the man who, acting wholly as a son of Israel, eschewed power, exuded kindness, pointed to one whom he called Father, and invited those bent over in the shadowy back to come forward to his table.
It was the table, I suddenly recall, that brought me here in the first place. The lights come up, the people arrive, and I stand.


'via Blog this'

Denver to Durango - Jim, Barbara, and Bono on the Denver Trail

Jim, Barbara, and Irish rocker Bono's 4-legged namesake hiked the Denver Trail - 485 miles from Denver to Durango this past summer.  Below are a few shots.  HERE is the album.
12,050 approaching the end of the high ground.
It was downhill from here
Because it's there I guess




Sunday, November 2, 2014

Best Of Colorado - James Cunningham - Picasa Web Albums

Our neighbors Jim and Barbara did a couple of months hiking in the Rockies.  Here's a taste of canyons and mountains. - gwc

Best Of CO - James Cunningham - Picasa Web Albums





'via Blog this'