More concretely: While a defeat for Obamacare in the Court would be nice, the defeat of President Obama at the polls on November 6 is crucial. If electoral victory is achieved, Obamacare can and will be repealed?—?and more judges of a constitutionalist persuasion will be appointed by the next president. Indeed, one could almost say that a bad Court decision later this month would be a salutary reminder that here the people rule, and that persuading the people is the key task. As Lincoln put it in his first debate with Stephen Douglas, “In this and like communities, public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it, nothing can succeed. Consequently he who molds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions.”

Which brings us to Mitt Romney. He’s had a good beginning to his general election campaign. But he could do more, it seems to us, to help mold public sentiment?—?to explain, to quote Lincoln again, “where we are, and whither we are tending,” so as to help us “better judge what to do, and how to do it.” He could do more to put his particular criticisms of the Obama administration in a broader context, and to frame his own proposals in a more comprehensive narrative. After all, Romney has to convince the American public that they need to do something they’re not usually inclined to do?—?replace a sitting president with a challenger. And unlike in 1980 and 1992, when the public was persuaded to do just that, the incumbent president has not been weakened by a primary opponent.

The burden for making this argument can’t be all Romney’s. It’s up to the entire conservative movement to make this case, and many are doing their part. But the presidential candidate can help. Why him? Why now? The answer has to be more than “gotcha” critiques of individual parts of the Obama record.

Conservatives were pleased by the tactical agility and rhetorical toughness of the Romney campaign last week, when he appeared before the shuttered Solyndra plant and called attention to that waste of hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars. But Democrats spent much of 1983 and 1984 chortling about the fraud, waste, and abuse that allegedly marked Ronald Reagan’s defense buildup (remember $600 toilet seats in military airplanes?). The citizens were willing to tolerate the waste because they judged Reagan’s defense buildup, and his foreign policy in general, a good idea. The task for Romney is to tie the particular abuses and errors of the Obama administration to its governing bad ideas. And then, and just as important, to lay out his better path forward.

Republican strategist David Winston asked an interesting question in a recent survey of 1,000 registered voters: “In thinking more specifically about how the economy is doing, which comes closer to your view?” Twenty-six percent chose “The economy is getting better, and the rate of progress is acceptable.” Thirty-two percent agreed with “The economy is not getting better at all.” A plurality, 40 percent, chose “The economy is getting better, but the rate of progress is still unacceptable.”

Which brings us back to the Bulls. Would they be willing to trade Deng for that #8 pick, with back-up guard Jerryd Bayless possibly thrown in as a sweetener to fill in for Rose while he rehabs from knee surgery? The Bulls then could use the pick to grab one of the best college shooters available, like Florida’s Bradley Beal, UConn’s Jeremy Lamb or Duke’s Austin Rivers.

Okay, I know what you’re asking, why would the Bulls trade an All-Star like Deng for a back-up point guard and a raw rookie? It all goes back to their salary cap situation. Just bringing back last year’s starting line-up would mean $61 million dollars in salary commitments, which already puts them over the cap for next season. And, when you add in the contracts of Taj Gibson, Jimmy Butler and a likely $4-5 million offer sheet for Omer Asik, the Bulls are already up against the $70 million luxury tax threshold with only eight players on the roster. If Bulls’ management has resigned themselves to not being able to contend with a rehabbing Rose, maybe now is the perfect time to start re-tooling the roster, and getting the cap situation in a better place.

Right now, it looks like the Bulls will decline team options on the contracts of Kyle Korver, Ronnie Brewer and C.J. Watson for next season because of cap reasons. Getting the chance to replace two of them with 1st round draft picks would save the team a bundle of money, and possibly open up a mid-level exception deal to add a free agent for the bench.

If the Bulls don’t trade one of their core players this summer, they’ll probably try to find a short-term replacement for Rose by offering the mini mid-level of $2.5 million dollars to a veteran like Kirk Hinrich, Andre Miller or Jason Kidd or possibly go after a young player who doesn’t get a big offer in free agency like Raymond Felton, Jonny Flynn or the aforementioned Bayless (RFA).

Then, the major roster changes would likely wait until after the 2013-14 season when Deng’s contract expires, the amnesty provision could be used on the final year of Boozer’s contract, and the Bulls will probably be able to bring prospect Nikola Mirotic over from Europe. With only Rose and Noah on the books at that time with big money contracts, the Bulls would be a player for a major free agent in the summer of 2014 when several stars, including LeBron James could be available.

So, the choice for John Paxson and Gar Forman basically is this: Do you wait for Rose to rehab his knee and hope to make a late season run with the current roster? Or, do you see the possibility of several up-and-coming teams passing you buy while you’re locked in with a maxed out roster, and make the decision to try to move a big contract (Deng or Noah) to get the salary cap situation in a better place.

But it’s his foot speed, not just his girth, that allowed Brown to become one of the most hotly recruited Defensive Tackles in the country over the last two years. Strong off the snap, Brown’s quickness gives opposing offensive lineman a different test than they might be used to against most defensive middle-men who generally rely on their strength or weight to occupy blockers up the middle. With Brown, Longhorn fans hope that prominence can be returned to the position for Texas not seen since Shaun Rogers.

It’s no overstatement to suggest that the 2012 recruiting class is vital for the near future of Texas football, as the program looks to rebound from a few difficult seasons of lost expectations. But it was the familial feel of the UT, not just the question of football prestige, that was critical in Malcom Brown’s decision.

”We made the decision together.” Brown told the Austin-American Statesman in January, referring to fellow Brenham product and UT recruit Tim Cole. ”We both felt at home at Texas.”

Brown fancies himself in the mold of Ndamokung Suh, would like to break the Texas sack record, and, like many Longhorns before him and surely after, has faced a litany of criticism for his choice of Texas over Texas A&M from Aggies fans. These things, of course, are all very common characteristics of an athlete; particularly one with high aspirations. But Brown is different in one particular way from many of his football peers, in that he doesn’t follow or invest himself much in sports outside of his own career.

”Outside of football, I really don’t get into football too much. I don’t want to be obsessed with it.” he told ESPN last week.

Interest in football outside of himself or not, Longhorns football fans will be interested in seeing Brown for the next several seasons in burnt orange and white. That intrigue may have to wait another year though, as Brown has been given the option of whether or not to red-shirt. With so much depth up the middle defensively, he may choose to develop his skills for a year on the Texas sidelines.

Either way, it’s an exciting time if you’re a fan of defense. As Malcom Brown enters his first year as a college athlete, he knows much of that excitement is because of him, and is eager to once again have something to prove. For a team looking for play makers, those are the magic words.

On Thursday, she pressed her concerns about the millions of Myanmar migrants living in Thailand in a meeting with the country’s deputy prime minister. And for a second straight day, she addressed throngs of migrants in Mahachai, a town southwest of Bangkok that hosts more migrants from Myanmar than any other place in Thailand.

”She can’t force the Thai government to do anything, but she can speak on our behalf better than anybody else,” said Win Aung, who lost his hand in an accident at a Thai-run shoe factory and is still fighting to obtain employer compensation for it a year and a half later.

”She’s the best hope we have for things to change,” the 31-year-old said.

Myanmar’s sputtering economy, in ruins after half a century of military rule and years of harsh Western sanctions, has forced millions of people to seek jobs abroad. Many crossed the borders illegally to work low-skilled jobs for long hours at pay below their Thai counterparts. They typically lack health and social security benefits, too, and complain of not being paid on public holidays.

Still, many make more than they would back home, and despite the hardships are keen to be employed. Jobs are severely lacking in Myanmar, which lags far behind the rest of bustling Asia.

Thailand alone hosts around 2.5 million migrant workers from Myanmar, and they are believed to make up between 5 and 10 percent of the Thai work force. Most of whom work in industries like fisheries or construction, or in garment factories or as domestic servants. Up to a million of them lack work permits.

Win Aung said he came to Thailand illegally, hoping he’d earn enough money to send proceeds to his family. But after six years, part of it spent at a shrimp processing plant, he has sent barely any.

And now, after his hand got crushed in a machine that molds rubber shoes, his prospects are exceptionally bleak.

”Nobody will hire you if you are disabled,” he said, adding that he had no idea what he’d do next. ”It isn’t much better back home.”

A local migrant workers rights group is now helping Win Aung win financial compensation from his Thai employer — $3,300 dollars. The employer has paid half and promised the rest in six months.

On Thursday, Suu Kyi called on Deputy Prime Minister Chalerm Yubumrung to ensure that Thai businessmen do not exploit her countrymen. She recounted familiar stories of abuse, saying employers confiscate passports and other documents illegally to prevent workers from quitting for better-paid jobs. She also complained of the inadequate treatment they receive when injured at work.

What’s most interesting about Maker Faire is the enabling technologies and the organisations . There’s something about the democratisation of sophisticated tooling through places like TechShop that’s liberating ideas and innovation in ways that we really couldn’t imagine. Instead of having to invest in tooling, engineers and designers are able to use the shared tooling to collaborate on prototypes for hardware – a process used by the designers of the Square credit card reader that was everywhere at the Faire.

Sign up for TechShop, and you get access to everything from sewing machines to laser cutters. It’s a time-shared machine shop, that offers machine tooling using the same utility model as cloud computing. You’ll get training and support, as well as access to new tools as they arrive. Showing what could be done, GE, TechShop and Quirky had set up a workshop at Maker Faire where Quirky engineers and designers were collaborating with the wider Internet to design a better milk jug, opening up the design process to interested bystanders – as well as demonstrating the capabilities of modern computer controlled machine tooling.

If we’re to encourage an innovation culture in the UK we need to encourage the creation of organisations like TechShop, giving hardware designers the support that we give software. Engineering is a powerful discipline, and it’s important that we give as many people access to the tools they need as we can. Hardware hacking like that on show at Maker Faire gives us new ideas and new approaches, freeing people to try new ideas and new technologies.

One of the surprises of this year’s Maker Faire was catching up with some of the UK companies on site. It’s a long way from the East End to San Mateo, but the UK’s hardware hackers were there in force, demonstrating conductive paints and multi-coloured self-curing rubber pastes – all building on work done at the Royal College of Art. I picked up a sample pack of the Sugru rubber paste, as my laptop had lost a foot.

Sugru’s slogan is ”hack things better”, so I did. A pinch or two of what felt just like plasticene and I’d quickly molded a replacement foot that stuck to the metal and plastic of my laptop, rebalancing it nicely. I left it curing in a motel room for a day, and the resulting replacement foot has stopped my laptop from over-balancing. There was some left over, and I used it to replace a bumper on an external battery.

It’s good to see UK companies getting attention in the US, and Sugru is a prime example of hardware hacking and the Maker ethos in action. But if you weren’t at Maker Faire you probably won’t have heard of it, or tried it out. We need more companies like that, more companies with access to the tools and technologies needed to turn their ideas into products. Raspberry Pi is only part of the process of revitalizing UK innovation, and we need to encourage more companies like Sugru to stake their futures on engineering and science – and on art and inspiration.

And that’s why we need a UK TechShop-like organization. The capital cost of setting up a shared-workshop is high, but membership fees can help recoup those costs – and the resulting benefit to the UK of new companies and new technologies is incalculable, and key to the country’s economic success.

I’m told that among my many charming personal traits there runs a strong general resistance to change. I’m told this mostly by my wife, whose opinions I trust. She’s not wrong. In general, once I’ve acclimated myself to a routine and to the things and/or people in that routine, I’m loathe to upset the order I’ve worked to establish. Even the word I used in that sentence, “upset,” shows I view doing so in a negative fashion, where someone else might be excited at the prospect for finding new means of accomplishing their day-to-day tasks.

This came to a head this week when our esteemed Associate Editor Giorgio Mustica and our second-newest intern Jonny Cohn (did we add his name to the staff box yet? We should get on that) both laughed at my continued usage of the Mozilla Firefox web browser. I believe Giorgio’s comment was, “What is this, 2006?” and it was met with much laughter from Young Jonny.

I thought about it for a while and, feeling old and realizing that maybe they were right and there was a better option available—namely Google Chrome, which my wife also uses and readily advocates—decided I’d give it a shot. It was all well and good until, while tooling around as I often am in the back end of a WordPress site, I tried to click an image and scale the size. In Firefox, this is as simple as clicking and dragging the corner.

In Chrome, when I clicked, the image was selected, but I could not move the corner or do anything else with it. I tried clicking shift, and option, and whatever else—even just now, I went back and opened Chrome and tried again—still no luck. So it was either resize every image beforehand in Photoshop, do the math on the proportions for every photo I want to scale and adjust it in the HTML code for the photo embed—both processes a substantial pain in the ass—or switch back to Firefox.

The decision was easy. I went back to what I was used to, and remembered afterwards that in fact this wasn’t the first time I’d tried Chrome and encountered that same issue with WordPress, which accounts for a substantial portion of my general internet usage.

So while it’s not every case in my life I can stand on solid ground and say I have a legitimate cause to be resistant to change—there’s probably no reason I couldn’t store my iced tea on the right side of the fridge instead of the left, but I’ll be damned if I’m moving it—this time I have some substance to back up my stubbornness. And, well, it feels good.

Because in this day and age where technology gets by on marketing itself on moving faster than the speed of human comprehension—please, someone fucking call me when we’re off the combustion engine and our cellphones can teleport us to a kickass weekend in London—it’s nice to remember every now and again that, as Tolkien said, not all that glitters is gold. Just because something is new doesn’t automatically mean it’s going to meet your needs as well as what’s already there, though it may or may not be worth giving it a try, and sometimes, it’s not the worst thing in the world to be set in your ways if your ways actually work. Victories are few and far between, these days. I’ll take what I can get.

And Giorgio, say what you want about 2006—it may have been the bottom of the pit of George W. Bush-led hopelessness—but screw it, at least people still sent in CDs for review instead of download links, making me pretend like someone’s doing me a favor by sending me something that, if I was even vaguely interested in it, I’d have already stolen by now. The future in which we live continues to be a ripoff.

That last one is what you could call a prank: Dumb, largely harmless, meant to be funny. Even in a world that celebrates potentially damaging idiocy on shows like Jackass, a deliberate and dangerous act is not a prank.

What a contrast there is in the story of what happened to a teenager out for a run Sunday night on Tampa’s Bayshore Boulevard. Here was a kid motivated to do 9 miles with his brother and buddies, a top cross-country runner at Robinson High, a young man with his sights set on the Marine Corps.

Then you had three other teenagers tooling around in an SUV, armed with a few dozen eggs and looking for a target. Police say they found one, that they felled 17-year-old Noah Grant, fracturing bone and seriously damaging his right eye. And maybe his Marine Corps plans along with it.

While he was on the ground, witnesses said the SUV circled back and someone hurled another egg. A ”prank”?

An egg might seem a delicate and fragile thing, harmless as a whipped cream pie in the face, until one is hurled at you at great speed and you suddenly understand an egg can also be a missile.

Once my husband and I were sitting outside at a Hyde Park restaurant near where Grant was hit. Here came kids in a truck, an arm out the window. The egg hit our table and bounced up to catch my husband just next to his eye, cutting him slightly, so loud and violent I thought it was a gunshot. They were gone.

Ask people who regularly use Bayshore, a picturesque ribbon of concrete for walking, running, biking and skating through South Tampa along the water, more a linear park than a sidewalk. You will hear stories of beer can throwers, deliberate swervers, even paintball gunners and assorted other idiots. Eggshells are not an unfamiliar sight.

What was also striking about this story was Grant’s grace afterward even with the fate of his eye uncertain, praising police for a fast arrest. ”I couldn’t be happier to know that Bayshore is safe again,” he told the Times.

You hope the three arrestees — Patrick Wasp and Tyler Metzger, both 16, and Daniel Borgeson, 17 — had no real idea of the amount of damage stupid can do. I know plenty of Florida kids who threw grapefruit at cars for fun. How scary is that?

Years ago, a group of teenagers on an Interstate 75 overpass threw rocks at cars and finally a chunk of concrete that killed a woman driving below. She was a college professor. She had a life, a family. ”I never thought about how (the drivers) would feel,” one of the young men said before he was sentenced to life in prison.

You hope a kid who was just out for a run will heal and move on with his plans. And you hope three young men look back and see a turning point, a moment when they learned the real cost of stupid.

Before mad scientists got the chance to perform a Dolly-the-Sheep experiment with the 40th president, the seller succumbed to criticism and decided to donate the blood to the Reagan foundation. But this should only encourage the cloning speculation because the Gipper’s DNA is now in the hands of those who would most like to reproduce him: Republicans.

Party officials have been making the pilgrimage to the Reagan Library this year to express their wish to recreate the great man. ”I believe boldness and clarity of the kind that Ronald Reagan displayed in 1980 offer us the greatest opportunity to create a winning coalition in 2012,” vice presidential aspirant Paul Ryan said at the library last week.

Also making the trip were VP hopefuls Marco Rubio and Chris Christie. ”Like Ronald Reagan, I believe in what this country and its citizens can accomplish,” the latter declared. ”The America I speak of is the America Ronald Reagan challenged us to be.”

The man they hope to join on the ticket, Mitt Romney, once boasted that he was ”not trying to return to Reagan-Bush.” Now he says the party’s standard-bearer should be in ”the same mold as Ronald Reagan.”

But before they go filling that mold by mapping the Reagan genome, Republicans may wish to consider some genetic flaws that party scientists should repair in the cloning process. To make the Reagan clone more compatible with today’s Republican Party, a bit of genetic engineering may be in order:

Reagan’s AFL-1 gene, on the labor chromosome, has a mutation that made him susceptible to worker rights. He said of unions: ”There are few finer examples of participatory democracy.” He said the right to join a union is ”one of the most elemental human rights.” And he said collective bargaining ”played a major role in America’s economic miracle.”

Reagan’s EPA-4 gene, on the regulatory chromosome, has a protein that can summon anti-industry sympathies. He signed a law establishing efficiency standards for electric appliances, and an update to the Safe Drinking Water Act punishing states that didn’t meet clean-water standards.

These related genes, on the long arm of the retirement chromosome, are problematic. Reagan expanded Social Security in 1983 and imposed taxes on wealthy recipients. He also signed what was at the time the largest expansion of Medicare in its history.

A trio of abnormalities on the fiscal chromosome caused Reagan to increase taxes several times after his initial tax cut, to embrace much higher taxes on investments than current rates, and to sign 18 increases in the federal debt limit.

These Reagan mutations, in the same sector as the debt mutations, created a genetic predisposition to expand the federal government. Reagan grew the federal workforce and the federal budget, added the Department of Veterans Affairs (one of the largest Cabinet agencies), and pursued a military buildup that would be impossible under spending limits proposed by congressional Republicans.

For all his talk about welfare queens, Reagan had a gene on the compassion chromosome that led him to champion the Earned Income Tax Credit, a program for the working poor that takes more children out of poverty than any other program. Budgets proposed by today’s Republicans would cut or eliminate the credit. A related abnormality caused Reagan to say that bus drivers should not pay a higher proportion of their income in taxes than millionaires — one of President Obama’s tax proposals opposed by current Republicans.

The DEAL-4 and related genes on Reagan’s strategy chromosome are probably the most troubling for modern conservatives. These abnormalities led Reagan to compromise routinely on arms control, the size of government, taxes and other matters of principle. In his autobiography, he criticized ”radical conservatives” for whom ”‘compromise’ was a dirty word.” He continued: ”They wanted all or nothing and they wanted it all at once. … I’d learned while negotiating union contracts that you seldom got everything you asked for.”

Come to think of it, Republicans would need a whole lot of new genetic material to repair Reagan’s defects. Maybe they should instead put the blood in a vault and accept that they don’t want to clone Reagan but to replace him with a fantasy. Modern Republican ideas simply aren’t in their revered leader’s DNA.

In six north central Iowa counties, a quick call to SERVPRO of Fort Dodge is often the first step toward getting a bad situation under control and the journey back to normal life under way.

Founded in 1967, SERVPRO has more than 1,600 franchise outlets in 48 states. These locally owned and operated companies provide an array of services including fire and water cleanup and restoration, as well as mold mitigation and remediation.

Jerry McMahon, a 1983 graduate of Fort Dodge Senior High, acquired the SERVPRO franchise for Calhoun, Hamilton, Humboldt, Pocahontas, Webster and Wright counties in October 2010. Before becoming the SERVPRO representative locally, he had two decades of carpet cleaning experience as the owner of Hawkeye Carpet Care. While the disaster recovery focus of SERVPRO is now his main concern, he said he continues to offer carpet cleaning to a wide array of clients, some of whom he has been serving for two decades. He estimated that 15 to 20 percent of his business is cleaning carpets for homeowners and businesses.

The primary mission of SERVPRO of Fort Dodge is easy to state, but requires a team of experts to execute.

”It’s all about helping people through disasters,” McMahon said. ”Nobody plans on a disaster. When it happens, it gives us a good feeling to give them peace of mind. To let them know that we’re going to help them through this.”

A key part of accomplishing this goal is fast response when an incident occurs. McMahon stressed that at SERVPRO help is a phone call away 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

”We will call the homeowner back within one hour,” he said. ”We will be on the job site within four.”

McMahon stressed that the victim’s insurance company will receive an initial reading on the situation within eight hours. He also emphasized that his team is often able to respond even faster than the guaranteed response times.

”Those are our guarantees,” McMahon said, noting that his personnel typically do even better. ”On average, the homeowner’s getting a call within five or 10 minutes and we’re on the job site usually within an hour.”

He explained that it is important to get on top of a bad situation as fast as possible to prevent it from becoming worse than necessary.

”A lot of damage that occurs is what we call secondary damage,” McMahon said. ”It’s very important that we get there quickly.”

The decision to broaden the scope of his business well beyond carpet cleaning is one McMahon said has proved a good one for him, both personally and professionally.

”Cleaning carpets is not quite as satisfying as when you are able to help some people who are really down on their luck,” he said. ”Disaster work can be really tedious because some people are a nervous wreck and they can get frustrated when things don’t go quite as quickly they want. It’s also satisfying at the end, when it’s all cleaned up and their house looks like it used to. … I had a choice. I was really happy cleaning carpets. We started getting into restoration and I enjoyed it and really haven’t looked back.”

Helping people understand what can be repaired or salvaged is part of the service SERVPRO personnel provide. McMahon said recovering and restoring treasured possessions is an especially rewarding aspect of the work, noting that people are often surprised by what is possible. He said members of his staff have been trained to handle many types of repair and restoration. The company also has links to just about any type of specialized personnel that might be needed.

”There are special companies,” McMahon explained. ”We have a really big company in Chicago that deals with all the art. … It really depends on the severity and what type of material it is whether it goes to a special company or not.”

The message for people in need of disaster recovery capabilities is quite straightforward.

”We’re going to make it look like it never even happened,” McMahon said. ”I would want them to have a peace of mind, knowing that they can trust us to take care of their precious home valuables and getting this disaster cleaned up in a timely manner.”

SERVPRO’s recovery and restoration services can address fire, smoke and soot; water removal and dehumidification; and mold mitigation and remediation. Its professionals are adept at coping with damage to electronics and assorted equipment as well as document drying and preservation, according to McMahon.

An array of cleaning services are available. In addition to carpet cleaning, duct cleaning is an important and popular service. So too is mold removal.

”Probably just as much mold work as we do water damage,” McMahon said. ”It can be very nasty for some people. … In an indoor environment, it’s just not a good thing.”

However, the economy is failing to significantly move from stabilisation to remarkable growth. To shed light on how the economy is expected to perform in the next four years, a discussion of macroeconomic fundamentals like income per capita, current account, foreign direct investments, national debt, general performance of selected sectors of the economic and infrastructure will be reviewed.

Income per capita is average household income. Capita income is often used as a measure of the wealth of the nation’s households of a nation. It can be used to compare nations’ well-being.

Income per capita fell drastically as a result of pervasive economic collapse. Income per capita fell from around US$900 in 2001 to around US$400 in 2008. Although it began to peak up from 2009 it is growing at a sluggish rate. For the next four years, income per capita is expected to reach US$700 in 2016.

Low incomes can have two-pronged effect on the local industry. Firstly, because incomes are low, there is naturally low demand and companies’ sales are low. Secondly, low incomes results in low and transitory savings which makes it difficult for local banks to give local industry long term loans.

As a result of low incomes coupled with liquidity challenges have made it virtually almost impossible for local companies to raise production capacities to competitive levels. On average capacity utilisation is in the neighbourhood of 47 percent.

Zimbabwe companies cannot compete with foreign companies. As a result, Zimbabwe has become a retail economy.

Regional comparison reveals that Zimbabwe compares well with Malawi, Madagascar and Mozambique. Income per capita is far below its major trading partners like South Africa and Botswana by more than 10 times such. Its northern trading partner, Zambia, is favourably doing well.

An economy with weak incomes will certainly see its households consuming more of basic commodities at the expense of other commodities due to constrained optimisation. Because of low capacity utilisation, Zimbabwean products have been uncompetitive in the regional markets. Local companies as a result cannot therefore exploit market access created through trade liberalisation. And, there is no sign that this can be reversed!

Current account is the sum of the balance of trade that is exports minus imports. A current account surplus increases a country’s net foreign assets by the corresponding amount. On the other hand, current account deficit decreases the country’s net foreign assets by the same amount.

Since independence in 1980, Zimbabwe’s trade performance was poor as exhibited by current account deficit which dominated the period under review. Zimbabwe managed to register positive current account in 1988, 1997, 1998 and 1999 only. Going forward, the future is very bleak as the country is expected to realise a continuous increase in current account deficits up to 2016 unless there is a positive shock in the economy. According to the World Bank, Zimbabwe is number 133 in world rankings Current Account Balance (US Dollars) performance in year 2010.

The development of the negative current account is worrisome for a country which virtually imports 100 percent of its fuel, 40 percent electricity, essential drugs and equipment for industrial re-tooling.

Zimbabwe thus remains susceptible to the vagaries of the adverse external macroeconomic environment, particularly within the aegis of the multiple currency system which is typified by limited macroeconomic policy instruments.

Because of the multi-currency system, the country has virtually lost monetary policy autonomy, making it difficult for the country to intervene with appropriate stimulus packages in the event of exogenous shocks. As a result of the absence of adequate foreign exchange reserve buffers to respond to exogenous shocks due to negative current account, the economy is in a bad state.

The Silver Award is the highest award a Girl Scout can earn as a cadette, which includes grades sixth through eighth.

The requirements for this project include completing a service project with a minimum of 50 hours of service that leaves a lasting impact on the community served.

Anissa Jackson from Troop 5140 planned and held a series of workshops for local Brownie Girl Scouts to help them earn badges. Jackson taught them about manners and games during several workshops held during August and September.

Mary Mell from Troop 5140 planned and held a class about camping for children at Helping Hands.

Abigail Miller from Troop 5140 worked with the Girl Scout Council to create PowerPoint presentations for Girl Scout trainers to use for Bronze, Silver and Gold Award trainings throughout her local Girl Scout Council.

Alex Hurd from Troop 5225 helped teach preschool students at First Presbyterian Preschool to read and write.

Kira Brown and Marissa Lee from Troop 5225 ran a summer-long school supply drive to benefit local students.

Gretchan Hawken from Troop 5225 created ceramic angels that she sent to soldiers overseas. Hawken created the angels herself, filling the molds, baking them, painting them and then firing them in the garage.

Brianna Peters and Katie Rogers from Troop 5245 made 30 ”Comfort Kits for Kids” filled with handmade fleece blankets, stuffed animals and small toys. They donated the kits to the American Red Cross Aiken County Chapter to be delivered to children who have been affected by house fires or natural disasters.

Aubry Melvin from Troop 5245 created 20 different ”Fascinators,” fancy hair bows, for the girls at Children’s Place for her project, ”Fascinators, Tea, and Fun.” She gave each girl a Fascinator and taught the girls how to make one for a friend at the tea party she held for the girls.

Kaylee Crenshaw and Makenzie Stahura from Troop 5245 made Advent calendars with Bible verses attached for each day of Advent. They delivered the Advent calendars and hot meals to residents on several routes of the Meals on Wheels program in late November so the residents would be able to enjoy the calendars throughout the Advent season.

There were 141 girls that earned Silver Awards and 46 girls that earned Gold Awards in the Girl Scouts of South Carolina – Mountains to Midlands council between April 2011 and March.

“During Nurses Week, we celebrate the compassion and dedication of the exceptional nursing staff here at Community Hospital,” said Don Fesko, Community Hospital CEO.”We’re proud of the efforts of all of our nurses and caregivers who make a difference in the lives of our patients. We thank them for all that they do.”

Schassburger and Ross were nominated by their peers at the hospital for going above and beyond in their respective patient care areas.

To meet the criteria for the Patient Caregiver Excellence award, the staff member must demonstrate excellence in the areas of Dignity, Compassionate Care, Community, Quality and Stewardship. These standards and values set the foundation for the hospital’s mission to bring quality care to everyone in need.

Schassburger, a Highland resident, has worked at Community Hospital for two years. According to her nominations, “Ashley is a joy to work with and an excellent team player. She is always willing to assist the nurses with procedures and assume tasks that involve other patients not on her ‘team.’ Ashley never leaves any of her work undone at the end of her shift. When needed, Ashley has volunteered to pick up extra shifts which is difficult to do while going through nursing school at the same time.”

Ross has been working at Community Hospital for more than 5 years. A Portage resident, she said that she knew that nursing would be her career after her father suffered a myocardial infarction (heart attack). She saw the nurses and caregivers offering such wonderful, compassionate care that made a difference in his recovery and she wanted to be able to be part of that and pay it forward.

Excerpts from Ross’ Nursing Excellence Award nominations state, “She is an amazing nurse. Every single time she comes to work, she does it with a smile and is willing to help everyone. She is an amazing charge nurse who literally knows all her policies and procedures. She is a great preceptor who molds the minds of many new nurses, guiding them into becoming an excellence nurse who advocates for their patients. She helps everyone wholeheartedly. She always has a positive attitude and goes above and beyond not only for her patients, but for her co-workers as well.

“I am proud of all the dedicated nurses, certified nursing assistants, patient care technicians and nurse externs who work at Community Hospital,” said Chief Nursing Officer Ronda McKay, R.N., MSN, CNS. “Ashley and Stacy are two wonderful examples of an entire staff that provides compassionate care to our patients, day in and day out.”

From the very beginning Comau teams worked to optimize all of the system’s components. This led to the inception of the new spot welding gun, with a total weight of 40% less than previous models. It features a compact welding gun equipped with an improved transformer, which is rotated 90° to further decrease the dimensions of the body and shift the center of gravity closer to the robot’s wrist.

Rendered unnecessary, the pneumatic cylinder for balancing the welding gun has been eliminated and, now, the fieldbus module and the flexion of the gun arms are controlled through the robot’s software.

The cooling pipes and cables are housed within a protective cover that guarantees maximum safeguard from wear. Its defined layout allows positioning repeatability even after maintenance services and interventions.

This welding gun marks a new standard that can be installed and used with all robots, even as a retro-fit.

Along with the welding gun, the latest generation of robots has been developed. The result is a compact, lightweight robot that has maintained the same functional range of the arm by optimizing the dimensions of each individual component, such as the engines.

One key point, with respect to the spot welding machine’s accuracy, is the complete integration of the cables and pipes running to the welding gun inside the robot arm.

The system has been improved from every perspective – refining the algorithms and the logic of movements, so that it is now free of redundancies.

Together, the robot and welding gun symbolize the hinge of the Comau new spot welding machines, which will open the door to a new paradigm in welding.

Thanks to its reduced weight and dimensions, today it is possible to create new welding cells and islands that are highly dense, in order to increase the number of robots simultaneously in action. Greater density translates to greater energy efficiency, reduced operating costs and lower cycle times.

This welding machine can also be installed on the ceiling. The free space on the ground guarantees greater control of the production line and grants operators easier access for maintenance and re-tooling jobs.

Developed this way, the cell can be transported and installed whole throughout the world, achieving optimal modularity and standardization of operational processes on a global level.

Developing highly efficient solutions that have a positive effect on operating costs means developing integrated systems that are characterized by increased component reliability. From this perspective, it is clear how this spot welding machine is a great representation of Comau technological vision – to introduce a convergent evolution to the world of industrial technology.

Auto purchases have exceeded a 14 million annual rate in each month this year, the strongest performance since early 2008, according to Ward’s Automotive Group. Government data show motor-vehicle output contributed half of the first quarter’s 2.2 percent economic growth.

General Motors, the world’s largest automaker last year, boosted its 2012 industry-sales forecast, Ford will add factory shifts and Chrysler Group is stepping up hiring as demand rises. The resurgence – from assembly lines and dealerships to steelmakers, freight lines and loan providers – signals the United States is headed for lasting, robust growth, says Joseph Carson, director of global economic research at AllianceBernstein in New York.

“We’re starting to see the spark in the auto sector that was missing initially” during the recovery from the recession, said Carson, a former GM economist. “It tells you there’s a certain momentum. A whole host of areas could see the multiplier effect. We’re at the beginning of a very long and durable cycle.”

Rising employment, an improvement in consumer confidence and a thaw in lending are facilitating the revival in sales of cars and light-duty trucks. Chad Moutray, chief economist at the National Association of Manufacturers in Washington, estimates each dollar spent in the industry triggers an additional $2.02 of output in the economy.

Apex Tool & Manufacturing Inc. is benefiting from the trickle-down, as the maker of tooling, fixtures and gauges to manufacture glass and other products has seen an increase in auto-related sales since the last quarter of 2011.

Glass for vehicles “is the one part of our business that’s on the rise,” said Terry A. Babb, president of Apex.

”Ah,” owner Denis Michel might say after serving you the dish, ”you will not be hungry after this, no?”

No. The flammekueche is a dish best shared. But if that isn’t an option, Michel will give you instructions on how to prepare the leftovers (one minute at 350 degrees).

Michel, who owns La Petite France with wife and chef Catherine, moved to the Valley in 2006 from their hometown of Strasbourg, the capital of Alsace, located close to German border, where the couple operated several restaurants for more than 20 years. Leaving their laid-back, scenic homeland — with its lazy canals, houses of gray-tiled roofs and cross-beamed facades, and ancient stone churches — the Michels moved to Phoenix to be closer to their daughter. In 2010, they opened their French bistro, serving breakfast, lunch, and dinner, in the Scottsdale Seville Shopping Center and called it La Petite France, named after a district in Strasbourg.

Their menu of reasonably priced regional specialties includes scrumptious dishes of German-influenced Alsatian cuisine, and the unpresumptuous La Petite seems to have gathered all the charms of their native land into a single neighborhood bistro. You can taste it in each complimentary amuse bouche, see it in the dainty cake molds hung over a doorway, and hear it with every warm greeting upon entering. And the bistro’s French unhurried approach (or simply slow, depending on your perspective) means meals are served up nice and leisurely, so make time to enjoy.

For starters or light meals to share with friends over glasses from La Petite’s (unfortunately) small selection of wine, there’s the famous flammekueche; bountiful cheese and country platters of pate, salami, prosciutto, nuts, and fruits arranged so beautifully you can’t help staring if one is carried by your table; and three kinds of dreamy cheese fondues. The best, Michel will tell you, is the fondue Savoyarde, from France’s Savoie region at the heart of the French Alps. La Petite’s rich, creamy blend of Gruyere and comte cheeses and white wine (served with baguette croutons and ham) may be far removed from the region’s ski-resort clientele, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t consume it with the same apres-ski voracity.

Of course, there are crepes. Lots of them. And they are a lovely lot — savory for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and sweet for dessert. The lunch and dinner versions arrive like soft, unfolded wrapping paper, with a gift of flavorful fillings in the center and accompanied by a side salad. The Provencale was my favorite, more filling than I’d expected, with tasty assorted vegetables, goat cheese, creme fraiche, mushrooms, and herbs topped with a fried egg.

When it comes to the more typical night-out dining experience, you might expect the prices of a French restaurant in an upscale Scottsdale shopping center to match the address, but La Petite offers two- and three-course meals at $24.99 (appetizer and entree) and $29.99 (appetizer, entree, and dessert), with several options to choose from. And with deals like these, why opt for a la carte?

If there is a standout among the appetizers, it is La Petite’s homemade French pate assortment, in which three stellar selections (enough to feed two people) surround a colorful salad of mixed greens dressed with champagne vinaigrette.

Although well prepared, a dish featuring skewered scallops, shrimp, and pineapples in a lemongrass sauce wasn’t nearly as interesting in flavor (save for thick slices of warm, skin-on banana whose sweetness and soft texture I simply couldn’t get enough of) as the beef carpaccio appetizer. Appearing like a kaleidoscope, the thinly sliced beef was hidden under a rich and creamy tuna sauce, topped with a pinwheel of French pickles. Bordered by balsamic-spotted cucumber slices, its taste-bud trade-off between beef and tuna with highlights of sweetness was certainly curious, but pleasingly so.

If La Petite has not run out of the entree choucroute royale — which it sometimes does — it is a must-try. This is the essence of Alsatian cuisine, featuring sauerkraut, sausages, and potatoes (it’s what happens when traditional German foods meet up with French flair), and La Petite’s version is comfort-food fantastic. Featuring homemade, Riesling-braised sauerkraut surrounded by a meaty medley of sausages, ham, and cuts of pork, topped with a teetering, steamed half-potato, the dish’s sauerkraut is less tart than its German counterpart, and the flavor balances beautifully with the fat from the meats.

I discovered John via his wife, Lynn, who I often cross paths with during her plein air painting stints in Central Park. I went to an open house at the McRae Art Studios space just off Webster Avenue and have been delighting in John’s creations since.

You grow older and often develop a greater appreciation of your own perspective. I don’t think that was necessary for John, or artists like him. They’re there to inspire the rest of us.

John, who just recently brought home Best of Show honors from the New Orleans Jazz Festival, describes his work as “assemblage style sculpture,” noting the limits of mixed media. “I try to keep the widest, broadest terminology because I don’t know from time to time (what I’ll be doing),” he said. For me his work is imagination on a slide beneath the microscope, equal pieces Albin Polasek, Jackson Pollock and Dr. Frankenstein, with some of History Channel’s “American Pickers” thrown in. He captivates and treats, and might just awake your inner child.

He says much of his current style began with “art cars” and the circus-inspired creation he made for an old Cadillac. He was given a woodcarving tool by his parents, which led to making a circus-looking figure that he used as a hood ornament, which dictated the fate of the rest of the car, eventually including wings.

“I made this little weird guy, really crude,” he explained. He continued on securing it to the vehicle, “As soon as you take that first empowered move of drilling a hole in your car, here we go… I bolted him on there and you could see people were like ‘What the hell has he got on that car?’”

Around this same time, Lynn was attending craft shows, including a large one in Baltimore each year. The show didn’t include paintings, which had been John’s primary focus. “So, I’m thinking that I’m already making these weird little objects, already spending the money to go up there, so the next year I just made up these little sculptures and did well with them.”

John’s attitude strikes me as one of a motivational speaker, explaining, “I think that you should be open to things. You have to allow yourself to be pretty bad at something for a while to get good at it.”

He’s recently acquired a welder and has begun making molds. With it brings talks of “another ball you throw into the juggling mix,” and “the excitement of learning something new and playing with a new medium. I want to be open to the possibilities.”

John, his wife and mother, primarily a jewelry maker, are now spread across five studio spaces at McRae. The room where all his materials are kept has a frosted glass window that reads “Surgery,” and it seems apropos. Inside the space are stacks, drawers and shelves of vintage items waiting for their next incarnation, from doll heads to machine parts, some with parts of items already used. He holds up a hockey mask that now has wheels attached and looks like a chariot. He talks of “launching points” with pieces and refers fondly to a piece I’d seen previously, which was a large metal architectural remnant or tool that had one of his delightfully peculiar wooden figures atop, perched and waiting to perform a belly flop into a pool below.

“My problem really is that I like to work out of the chaos,” he says. “It’s probably not the most efficient way to work but I see the need to have a lot of things going on simultaneously to get into the flow. Do I prefer it that way? I don’t know. But it seems like once I have five, six, seven, eight pieces going I can go to one, work on it. I’m seamless then. If I have just one piece going I don’t work well. Just a byproduct of how my brain works.”

“Artists want to hide behind their work, they want their work to speak for them,” Morhous said.

As such, she’s hesitant to sit down for an interview, even though once you get her started talking about art, she speaks enthusiastically and passionately and could go on forever.

“I get rather excited when talking about art,” Morhous said. “Creating for me is my whole essence.”

A member of the San Diego Museum of Art’s Artist Guild board, Morhous was also recently inducted into the National Association of Women Artists and will have a show of her work in New York in September.

A few years back, Morhous began a program called “Art for Us” as a way to use her artwork to give back. She’s donated pieces to Scripps Foundation (her work is on display at the Carmel Valley clinic), Rady’s Children’s Hospital and The Alzheimer’s Foundation. She picks organizations and places where her art can be enjoyed by the community, not hidden on an office shelf somewhere.

Her next “Art for Us” pieces carry a very emotional meaning, reflecting Morhous’ time in Japan last March during the earthquake and tsunami.

She was in the middle of Sendai, Japan, when the earthquake hit and watched the tsunami from their hotel room TV. They were unable to fly out for three weeks.

She is currently working with a representative to find placement in Sendai for the three sculptures she’s created by March 2013.

The first piece, “Mamoru,” portrays a woman running with a look of terror on her face.

“I would see these photos of women clutching their children and running,” Morhous said. “It was pretty devastating.”

The second, “Sendai,” is a figure crumpled on the ground with water rushing over it, representing how the city felt completely overwhelmed by the tsunami.

“Fukkou,” the last piece, represents resurgence, that the city’s residents will resurrect their lives and persevere. The figure in the sculpture is pushing itself up and rising from the water.

“The Japanese people are phenomenal,” said Morhous. “I dedicated these sculptures to the people of Sendai, so future generations and visitors alike will not forget the devastation the community endured.”

Morhous became interested in creating art at a young age. Her mother was an artist and would always have craft projects for her to do and she got used to making three-dimensional art. Art wasn’t something she necessarily picked or started to do, it was just something in her.

“To me, life is creativity,” Morhous said. “I can’t imagine being in any other field

Morhous received her masters of fine art in sculpture and printmaking, drawn to the challenge of the printmaking technique.

“I thought for sure I would get a job teaching at the college level, but at the time there were no jobs in California,” Morhous said.

With no teaching gigs available she moved directly into a job as a professional printmaker, represented by an international gallery in Beverly Hills that bought every thing she did. She was commissioned for print works, as well, through the gallery.

“I got burned out because with commissions you’re not doing what you want to do,” Morhous said. “I’m an artist’s artist. I want to do what I want to do, I don’t want to do something just to sell work.”

In time, life took over — she got married and had two children, which took her away from her art a little bit, but for the last 10 years she has been seriously devoted to sculpture.

Along with her husband, she’s a world traveler, finding inspiration for her art in different places and cultures.

In addition to sculpture, Morhous also enjoys photography and plays the cello.

“The arts to me are everything,” she said of her dabbling in the different art forms. “It’s just a high, it’s exciting.”

Morhous’ studio in her home is a small space that comes with an ocean view.

She creates all her work in clay and then they go through the lost-wax casting process before they are bronzed. She has a foundry that does all the molds and pouring.

Morhous has to be meticulous about crafting the texture of her clay sculptures because the bronze will pick up any crinkle.

“It’s not the ideas as much as the technique,” said Morhous of what takes the longest.

Most of her subjects are human as she is drawn to the “sensuous curves of the human form.” Her favorite piece is always the last piece she’s done and, these days, Morhous is trying to be more abstract in her work.

She typically spends about a month or two on individual pieces, usually having one or two in play at the same time, stepping back and making sure the sculpture is just right or good enough to be cast and bronzed. Some don’t make it past the clay stage.

Her artwork is in both private and public collections nationally and internationally, and Morhous hopes her fall show in New York is a step toward establishing herself more on the East Coast.

Diamonds and glamour: Marilyn Monroe and Chopard were destined to cross paths, and this encounter has given rise to a new vision of the star and of the diamonds she might have worn.

25 unpublished images of the amazing Marilyn: this presentation of photos of the star, exhibited during the 2012 Cannes Film Festival, once again testifies to Chopard’s powerful and enduring ties with the world of film-making. They were taken by fashion photographer Milton Greene, whose friendship with the star was legendary. 25 portraits that tell the story of the grace, the mystery and the diaphanous vulnerability of an exceptionally photogenic star with a thousand different facets. This exhibition will be previewed throughout the Cannes Festival, before touring the world during the rest of the year.

More than anyone else, she embodies the archetype of the ultimate star. Considered one of the greatest actresses of all time, she is above all an iconic figure. Already adulated during her lifetime, her career, her personality and the fantasies that she enshrined have endowed her with a mythical dimension that has been consistently enriched over the years.

Born Norma Jean Baker, she earned huge fame in Hollywood after starting her career as a fashion model. Her great beauty led her to be singled out in 1944 at the age of 18, while working in a factory at the time. Her exceptionally photogenic nature soon drew the attention of 20th Century Fox. After modest beginnings in the world of films, she soon became a screen goddess. In the 1950s, she starred in films by the greatest directors of the era – including Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, John Huston and many others – and became the ultimate glamour icon. She nonetheless felt herself to be held captive by the popular dream view of her as the absolute sex symbol. Her intelligence and her sensitivity were battered, and she constantly fought to break the molds in which people tried to imprison her. The dramatic intensity with which she lived her life made it a theatre in which any event achieved legendary status.

This New York born portrait specialist and fashion photographer worked for prestigious magazines including Life, Look, Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue. He set the stage for and immortalised all the great names of the artistic scene in the 1950s and 1960s: Grace Kelly, Marlene Dietrich, Audrey Hepburn, Cary Grant, Sofia Loren, Ava Gardner, Romy Schneider, Steve McQueen… Among all these icons, it was Marilyn Monroe who treated him to the most powerful aesthetic experience. Their sense of professional kinship was enriched by a profound friendship. The sensitive touch radiating from these pictures testifies to this intensely special relationship.

Marilyn once told him “You made me interesting”. Above all, she loved his vision that represented a clean break from the stereotypes imposed on her by Hollywood. Sometimes, after the official photo sessions for magazines, once the team had left the set, he took more intimate and free-spirited pictures of her. They first met in 1953, in a period when Marilyn was eager to play more dramatic roles. Their cooperation tells the story of this lesser known side of Marilyn’s life: her years in New York, during which she was seeking to regain control of her career. With this in mind, she took classes at the Actors Studio with Lee Strasberg. In front of Milton H. Greene’s lens, she could give free rein to other types of emotions and images than those bound up with her public persona.

Jackson’s purpose in this book, besides just plain celebrating a favorite part of the world, is to understand how it came to be what it is today. His focus is the stretch of coast between Fort Morgan and Panama City, and the cast of characters includes “mice and men, turtles and tourists, rednecks and real estate tycoons.” Many of the highlights will be familiar to longtime residents — hurricanes like Opal and Frederic and Ivan, the Alabama beach mouse, real-estate flipping, Seaside, Joe Francis’ 2003 “Girls Gone Wild” invasion of Panama City and, of course, the BP oil spill. His sources include lots of newspapers like the Destin Log, the Walton Sun, and the Press-Register; books; personal interviews, including a moving one with a paramedic about the unglamorous consequences of binge drinking — “I’ve seen them dead; I’ve seen them maimed for life”; a bikini poster promoting spring break in Panama City; and even a Girls Gone Wild video or three.

To anyone tooling along the coast today, hemmed by multistory condos along the Gulf side and garish strip developments and acres of tacky on the other, it’s difficult to imagine how recent all of this is. Before World War II, the central Gulf Coast was lightly built, and small villages of fishermen, oyster shuckers and small merchants greeted the sun each day. There weren’t a lot of vacationers, and those who did come found shelter in small, family-owned motels or scantling-board shacks perched on pilings. The fishing was fantastic, especially at Destin, “The Luckiest Little Fishing Village in the World,” situated hard by the 100-fathom curve, a deep-water drop-off that is a sportsman’s paradise. Change came, of course, gradually and then ever faster, with broader economic perks, especially during the Reagan years.

Down at Gulf Shores, things remained pretty basic until Hurricane Frederic in 1979, when a new breed of people — “raffish Rotarians, pirates with cash register eyeballs, and hard-handed matrons” — realized there were heady profits to be made. Hard as it is to believe, before Frederic there was only one condo in Gulf Shores. Today, there are over a hundred complexes, some of them with hundreds of units. Gone are the mom-and-pop motels like the old Lighthouse, and the funky beach houses that remain become steadily crowded by bigger developments.

Jackson reserves his lustiest prose for the Flora-Bama, easily the Redneck Riviera’s most distinctive, definitive and beloved landmark. He details the origins of the Mullet Toss and even how much beer is consumed that weekend (let’s just say the figure is prodigious). There are strict rules to the contest — stay in the circle, don’t throw out of bounds, the fish has to be slick, and you can kiss the fish, but you can’t pour beer into it.

It doesn’t sound like the inspiration for an art show. But that’s if you haven’t met Alyssa Hagstrom, the defiantly effervescent 8 year old who’s lived with the condition all her short live, or Jennifer Kaczmarek, the fine arts documentary photographer who’s been recording Alyssa’s life since she met her shortly after her fifth birthday in stills that give the lie to the notion of a disorder. Whether Alyssa is sitting up with an oxygen mask on, basking in the languor of a rising or setting sun in her wheelchair, sitting in the throne-like arms of her slightly older sister Alexxis or balancing on father Duane’s shoulders, she is all movement and life. Even in one of the most arresting big photographs of Alyssa, where only her shins and feet appear, dangling from above in a bathroom, the suggestion is of a child taking flight, not being held down.

What disorder there may be is in the stillness around Alyssa, or the silence: she abides neither.

“She’s amazing. She really is,” Kaczmarek says. “Her personality is so full of life. You would never evenen known that she was handicapped if you didn’t see her, if you were just talking to her. You would never know. She is just a real social butterfly.”

That’s what Kaczmarek’s work captures, with never a hint of condescension. Kaczmarek, who’s been photographing her own three young children almost uninterruptedly since her 9-year-old daughter Bella was 1, isn’t talking down to the child—many of the pictures are at eye level or below, making Alyssa dominant—but letting her talk through these big, almost oversize color prints, which form “Love for Alyssa,” the latest show at Hollingsworth Gallery, opening Saturday evening with a reception at 6 p.m., and with Alyssa present.

“I just want people to have a glimpse into her world,” Kaczmarek says.

Kaczmarek is asking you for one thing: donate money. “Love for Alyssa” isn’t just a photography exhibit. It’s a fund-raiser that takes its name from the non-profit Kaczmarek established in January 2011 for Alyssa’s sake, to raise money and help with expenses from Alyssa’s care, expenses not covered by other means. At this moment she needs a costly lift, because she is getting heavy.  Kaczmarek has raised $2,300 since. The prints will be priced in the high three figures, but Kaczmarek expects to raise most of the money through the show by way of outright donations: checks in whatever amounts patrons would contribute, along with small contributions for children’s art work that fills a large wall of the gallery. Students who take art classes at Hollingsworth, along with children from Bella’s Girl Scout troupe and from children at Trinity Presbyterian Church, have painted or drawn works inspired by Alyssa, and that may sell for a few dollars.

“Really, besides even just helping her financially, whatever I could do,” Kaczmarek says, “I had other motives for doing this. And it was really because how awesome her spirit is. I was hoping this would be something she could carry with her when she got older, because the only thing I always think about with her is I think about the future. I think about her sister, and now with her brothers, and how everybody is going to go off, they’re going to be with their friends, they’re going to have their lives. It’s different now that she’s little. And things will hit her when they don’t, now. I thought this would be something positive for her.”

For Hollingsworth Gallery, the show is and isn’t a departure. Friends and patrons of owner JJ Graham’s gallery are now used to always being surprised there. The intimate realism of Kaczmarek’s invitation to share in Alyssa’s disorder is the gallery’s latest way of inviting you on a limb, daring you to be charmed by what you would, in more conventional circumstances, look away from. Graham only makes molds to break them, and with Mercedes McCartney, his companion and a photographer who recently curated Hollingsworth’s “7 Cameras” show (which featured Kaczmarek’s work), the exhibit is in line with the gallery’s broader emphasis on  photography, though in this case Graham is foregoing any of the proceeds to Kaczmarek’s cause.

The temptation is strong to just let this one go.  But it’s actually a perfect example of where Romney is, um, challenged, and why my enthusiasm for him remains tepid.  The short version of my point is that the president has no business restructuring auto companies and trying to guide them through “recovery.”  He is not empowered by any part of the US Constitution to do this, and it’s a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad idea in any case.

If I want the services of someone who’s good at reorganizing auto companies, I’ll invest money in a private business.  That’s not what we elect a president for.  The president of the United States, our highest elected public official, needs to keep his paws off the management of private companies.  When he doesn’t, the window is flung open to cronyism, graft, bad business decisions, and distorted, uneconomic incentives.

The US auto industry keeps snuffling up to the public trough – has been doing so for 30 years now – because it is required by the government to operate under unprofitable conditions.  It is tended by the federal government as an interest of politically connected constituencies.  It has been artificially constrained and incentivized for so many years now that to say it has “recovered” is a wholly political statement, bearing no useful relation to the Big Three’s actual profit-loss or earnings picture, stock price, or any other measure of business health.

In fact, Chrysler’s much-touted “payback” of its taxpayer bailout turned out to involve a shell game in which the US Department of Energy is lending Fiat $3.5 billion so that Fiat can pay off its US Treasury loan and pump Chrysler with cash by exercising an option to buy Chrysler stock.  The Washington Times describes the transaction as follows:That’s government management in a nutshell.  Romney can’t manage the auto industry better – not from the Oval Office.  No one can.  If he wants to run auto companies, he needs to see if Ford, GM, or Chrysler is hiring.  If he wants to guide them through bankruptcy, he can become a federal regulator or get himself appointed as a bankruptcy judge – and in either case, follow the law on the matter as written by Congress, rather than getting creative and exercising powers the Constitution doesn’t give him.

When Romney speaks of the US auto industry recovering, he is speaking in the language of big, dirigiste government, accepting at face value the short-term effect of a bailout process that has served mainly to perpetuate unprofitable but politically entrenched conditions.  It guarantees that more subsidies will be needed down the road.  The taxpayer had to be billed for getting the Chevy Volt built and maintaining the political sway of the UAW, because those are special-interest mandates that no one would pay for voluntarily.  The bailout under Obama has simply been a pretext for expanding the unprofitable conditions that make the US auto industry unable to truly “recover,” in the sense of not continuing to need bailouts.

A president who doesn’t see this is hard to get excited about.  There is no point in claiming that Romney does see it, when he never speaks as if he does.  About the auto industry bailout, what he ought to say is that it was improperly handled by Obama through executive actions that must not serve as precedents; that it hasn’t turned out to be a good deal for the taxpayer; and that due-process bankruptcy without presidential intervention would have been the right way to proceed and should have been defaulted to.

Gone are the catchy names like Top Kill, Junk Shot, Top Hat. Instead, BP’s system is called the Global Deepwater Well Cap and Tooling Package.

And oh what a package. The entire system weighs 500 metric tons, the cornerstone of which is the 40-foot-tall, 99-ton well cap that in the case of a blowout would be lowered into the murky depths and installed upon the well head.

The capping stack is designed to fasten around a gushing well pipe and gradually shut in the well by closing big gate valves. It can also contain the flow of oil and direct it up a flexible pipeline to be captured on the surface — like what was done with the Macondo flow until final killing by the relief well.

BP has its capping packaged staged and ready to be deployed. The equipment sits in a giant cathedral-ceilinged warehouse in the dusty, sprawling port of Houston.

“Everything is functioning and ready to go,” said Richard Morrison, v.p. of BP’s global spill response group, during a press tour last week. “We hope we never have to ship this system. Still, it has to be ready.”

Morrison explained that what sets BP’s package apart from others developed by industry consortia like the Marine Well Containment Company and the U.K.’s Oil Spill Prevention and Response Advisory Group, is that theirs can be broken apart and air-lifted to any deepwater project in the world. “We used currently available equipment that could be configured in an air-deployable package,” said Geir Karlsen, head of BP’s containment response system group.

Much of the equipment and tools were on display inside their custom travel packages, including stainless steel boxes, 20-foot cargo containers and wooden crates. Moving the whole caboodle would require 35 trailers to get it to Houston’s Bush Intercontinental Airport. It would then fill seven cargo planes, like the Antonov AN-124 or Boeing 747. BP has already choreographed the logistics of getting the package off those planes and to their destination, everywhere they operate around the world.

Included in the package is a massive set of pipe shears (think of a cigar cutter the size of a pickup truck) that can cut through as much as 60 inches of steel.

Morrison says the system cost $50 million to develop and was manufactured by BP and Cameron International. That’s a cheap insurance policy considering BP’s stated plans to keep investing more than $4 billion a year into the Gulf of Mexico. Though the company is divesting non-core Gulf fields, it still operates some of the deepest and largest, like Atlantis, Thunder Horse, Mad Dog and Tiber. BP currently has five rigs operating in the Gulf, with three more on the way, set to drill wells in the Kaskida, Moccasin, Freedom and Na Kika fields.

As BP goes ever deeper and farther out, however, it will need an even bigger, tougher capping stack. This one can be effective on well pressures as high as 15,000 psi. BP’s big goal, as highlighted at last weeks Offshore Technology Conference, is to make it routine to operate with pressures of 20,000 psi. “BP has never been more committed to deepwater,” says Morrison.

Only a few things remain on the racks now. Signs posted in the shop’s windows that promise deals to passing shoppers have done their work. These final items hanging from the racks are reminders that this shop offered something different from what most department stores do these days.

The tags are one clue. Then there’s a wooden mannequin of a woman with a 1920s hairstyle.

Wright’s Quality Shop was opened in 1920 by two sisters, Bertie and Zuella Wright, and has passed down through two more generations of the Hunter family.

Bertie and Zuella were born in the 1880s. Their father was a local preacher, N.G. ”Uncle Bud” Wright. They were raised in Belton, and for most of their lives, they lived in a house near where the Belton Town Hall is now.

Neither of them ever married. When they reached their mid-30s, they became businesswomen instead.

”Bertie and Zuella, they were prim and proper,” said W. Clifton Hunter, the third generation of Hunters to own the shop. ”They were so meticulous. Their home was always immaculately clean. And they loved fashion.”

Zuella Wright had studied how to make hats, and the shop was a place to sell them, he said. Some of the hat molds she used still sit on a large shelf behind the store’s checkout counter.

”At that time, millinery was a big deal,” Clifton Hunter said. ”When mother took over the shop, hats were a large portion of what she did.”

The shop also sold scarves, jewelry, blouses, dresses, women’s hosiery, lingerie and, eventually, women’s slacks. Most of what women found here was made in America — often in their home state.

The Wrights and the Hunters led the business to success as the town boomed with textile mills and nearly a half dozen women’s clothing stores. One of the Wright sisters’ old cash registers with its metal keys is still here.

As the sisters reached their 60s, they decided it was time to turn the store keys over to someone else.

The perfect candidate: Azilee Fagg Hunter, their second cousin, and veteran of the local fashion industry.

Azilee, also a Belton native, had worked for the Myers Arnold department store in Greenville and Gene Anderson’s in downtown Anderson. Like Bertie and Zuella, she had an eye for fashion.

A black-and-white photograph shows her in the store wearing an elegant dark dress that falls just at the knee. She has on heels and a long necklace.

”They knew she would be a good fit,” Clifton Hunter said. ”And at that time, it was just thriving here. Belton had so many textile mills. All of the shops on the square were very busy. That was before the days of the malls.”

Azilee was a natural at running the shop. Clifton Hunter still has index cards on file on which she described fashion shows she’d hold to promote the store’s latest line of merchandise.

Clifton’s wife, Connie, said that her mother-in-law had an eye for fashion that a lot of the ladies in town came to rely on.

”She loved this shop,” Connie said. ”She put together an outfit that was an ensemble. She just had a knack for coordinating things.”

Clifton was 8 years old when his mother, divorced by then, took over the shop. For a while, he would go by the shop and help with chores until it was time for his mother to lock up for the day. Sometimes he had the chance, once he finished building hat boxes, to slip next door to the movie theater.

”Edith Robinson, who worked the ticket counter, would let me go in and watch whatever movie was showing until mom was ready to go home,” Clifton said. ”I would always sit in the very back row so mom could find me. That was so much fun.”

A picture of Roy Rogers and his horse, Trigger, that once hung in that theater now hangs in his office. Clifton also kept many of his mother’s things from when she ran the place.

A small sign that she kept in the store read, ”The bitterness of poor quality remains long after the sweetness of low price is forgotten.”

”That was mom’s,” Clifton said. ”And she really believed that. We’ve just tried to keep that going.”

That’s why most of the products sold in this store have always been made in America. One of the labels they still carry is Vinci Clothiers, a family-owned clothing operation based in McBee, S.C.

Ninety percent of the store’s goods were made in America during the 1970s, Clifton said.

”We earned a gold-star label because so much of our clothing was made in America,” he said.

That era is now over. And after 92 years, as mill after mill has shut down, the doors to Wright’s Quality Shop are closing for good.

One of the few sounds left in this place is the whir of a sewing machine. One of the store’s longtime employees, Frances Holliday, is busy making alterations to the last few pairs of slacks that will be sold from their racks.

It all stems from that cloud trend, and from the other big elephant in the room – IT consumerisation. How do we manage devices we don’t control, and in fact that we can’t control, in a world where information flows from device to device, from server to server, and between data centres and the cloud? It’s a complex world that is getting more and more complex every day, one where organisations are managing not just their hundreds and thousands of servers and desktops, but adding in tens of thousands of devices offering mobile computing and storage.

It’s a nightmare for traditional IT. Managing servers, desktops and applications just doesn’t scale – and users don’t take to IT departments applying the management techniques they’ve always used to their personal devices. Everything we know about it IT management has turned out to be wrong.

The answer turns out to be quite simple. Instead of managing applications and devices, with a metaphor-based on mediaeval fortifications, we start thinking about managing users and information.

That’s a significant change, but one that makes a lot of sense when we look at the architectural changes that IT departments are already having to implement. Some of it is already starting to be put in place especially around information-centric security, which is an essential requirement for compliance with many aspects of the modern regulatory environment. If you’re having to handle financial data or health data you’re already starting to put in place information security that uses access controls to determine who can see what – and where they can use the data.

Tooling built into the current generation of operating systems and storage platforms makes it easy to start implementing information-centric security, while existing directory services mean you’re not that far from implementing effective user-centric management. It’s all just a matter of going that little bit further. Instead of using directory services to log users on, and to provision basic access rights on desktops, use them as the basis for rich access control lists on your servers, and in your applications. The rules don’t need to be complex – just pragmatic.

By ”pragmatic” I mean extensive use of rule-based whitelists. And by that I mean very simple access rules for files that indicate who has the rights to view, or to edit, or to copy. Rules are constructed to give explicit rights – there’s no open access with blacklists for specific groups that leave holes big enough to drive a bus through. Instead it’s all simple constructs of the form ”USER 1 gets access to FILE 1 if member of GROUP A or of ROLE B” or at a higher level, ”GROUP A can see DIRECTORY 2″. It’s the type of construct that makes it important to have appropriate tools for defining user groups and roles, and for both provisioning and deprovisioning users. But when done right it means less work for IT departments – as the user role assignment process can be automated as part of standard HR operations, with file rules coming from where they’re stored, or what they contain. Rules can even be specifically assigned on a case-by-case basis, granting access to specific users for a specific file for a specific reason (and for a specific period of time).

The tooling is starting to arrive. BYOD deployments based on BlackBerry can use BlackBerry Balance to manage some of this, and Windows admins can take advantage of the tooling built into System Center 2012 to start the move to both information- and user-centric ways of working.

One aspect of the shift to both information- and user-centric management could appear somewhat ironic. As DRM disappears from entertainment content, it’s starting to appear in work data. If you’re using Microsoft’s Information Rights Management platform to control user access to data, you’re using a DRM system. It’s a technology that gets more important when Windows Server 2012 arrives, as its Dynamic Access Control technology uses IRM to control access to automatically classified information – with user information in Active Directory managing the roles and groups of users used to control just who has access to that information.

With information protected at rest with strong cryptosystems, you don’t need to rely on firewalls and security appliances. User accounts contain the tools needed to decrypt information, and contextual models control how and when that information can be accessed. If you don’t have rights, you can’t decrypt and use the data. If you’re accessing the network from a device that doesn’t support user log-ons, you can’t even see that there is data…

After several months of searching, Engineering Manager, Blake Peterson was recruited to help lead Rentapen’s team to create superior weld fixtures and to help transition Rentapen from a company that designs weld fixtures to one that designs and builds fixtures. Blake has brought new project and team management skills to the company. Blake is continuing his education by working toward a degree in Business Management.

Bethany Kratz brought enthusiasm and a passion for learning the newest technology and social media marketing techniques to Rentapen. Bethany is the “Duchess of Cost Reductions” and is constantly working to keep abreast of opportunities to inform manufacturers about Rentapen’s weld fixture design and build cost savings.

Peter Christiansen, the IT programmer, came to Rentapen as an intern in August. His first major project was to take 3D models of Rentapen’s RAPid Tooling Components and make them easy to download from Rentapen’s web site. This new download service was launched in March 2012. Peter has a background in quality in the castings industry that taught him attention to detail and gave him a background in manufacturing. Since Peter came right from the learning environment at school, he easily takes on new learning challenges as they present themselves.

Kory Maier, CAD Drafter, also came to Rentapen as an intern. Quickly he picked up speed and ability as a CAD Drafter. Right after he graduated from school, Rentapen sent him to learn their new Feature CAM software so that he could do both CAD and CAM. His passion for learning and ability to quickly learn new skills allows Rentapen to improve and expand quickly.

Ed Murphy, the Shop Maintenance Associate, has a background in machine maintenance while in the construction industry. Shortly after starting at Rentapen he began to learn how to operate and maintain the laser used to cut shims. He fit in immediately to the Rentapen culture which emphasizes customer service, a passion for learning, and integrity.

“All of Rentapen’s employees are in the business of satisfying our customers’ need to reduce costs. It is only with the dedication to efficiency, excellence, and customer service by every team member can we retain our customers and fulfill our mission, “ said Susan Straley.

Rentapen’s mission is to provide jobs, training and opportunities for people who work together to help manufacturers reduce costs of tooling to make their products.

Since April 2011, Rentapen has also revamped their website. Rentapen’s new website clearly focuses on their niche as weld fixture specialists. Rentapen’s products and services focus on reducing costs in weld fixture design and build.

“Our objective with the redesign of the website is to more clearly state to our potential customers what we can do for them,” said Straley.

“We help manufacturers by providing excellence in weld fixture design and build, RAPid Tooling Components, and standard and custom shims,” said Blake Peterson.

Since April 2011, Straley began blogging about weld fixture design. The blog is called Weld Fixture Design 101. The Weld Fixture Design blog informs the students and others interested in machine design, first how to design a simple weld fixture. Then Straley’s future posts go further into the design details and more complex issues.

The latest addition to the web site is the ability to order free 3D CAD models of Rentapen’s RAPid Tooling Components. The 3D Models are the new American standard for the Machine Designing Industry. Rentapen’s new 3D models will change how Machine Design Engineers and CAD Drafters design their weld fixtures for the better. The 3D Models will reduce machine design time as users become familiar with how and when to use the blocks, plates, and clamp risers.