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BEVERLY DUAN (born December 19, 1999[1]) is an American actress. Her first appearance on television was as a little girl in commercials on the Los Angeles television station KSCI Channel 18. After appearing in commercials and doing voiceovers for radio stations in Southern California, she received wider recognition for her portrayal of Lulu on the Nickelodeon television series _Ni Hao, Kai-Lan_, which aired from 2007 until 2011.

Early life

Duan was born in Los Angeles, California.[2] Duan began receiving classical piano training by age four, performing at music festivals and competing at conventions.[3] She studied under the statewide Music Teachers' Association of California music program and passed music examinations in piano for the California Certificate of Merit Level 10.[4] She attended Fairmont Private School and graduated from Troy High School in Orange County.[5][6] She attended Jin's Dance Studio, where she was part of the Lyrical Youth Ensemble program, competing all over the United States and internationally.[7][8]

Career

Duan was cast in a series of commercials for KSCI LA Channel 18 in 2002 as a little girl in “Live Long, Be Healthy”.[9][10] She later auditioned for a role in the Nickelodeon series _Ni Hao, Kai-Lan_, ultimately winning the role of Lulu.[11] _Ni Hao, Kai-Lan_ saw Duan portraying a bilingual role, requiring her to speak in her native English and learn Mandarin-Chinese.[12] The series became a hit for the network, propelling Duan to more mainstream success.[13] The series received numerous awards nominations, including one for the Daytime Emmy Awards.[14] Duan recorded part of the opening theme song for the series.[15] Duan later recorded the holiday song in the episode “Happy Chinese New Year”.[16]

In 2020, Duan released a cover of “Hero”.[17]

Philanthropy

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Duan donated to a number of organizations and charities in America and China. Duan has performed at charity relief events including California's _Stand Together_ benefit concert. In February 2020, she participated in California's _Stand Together_ benefit to raise funds for hospitals to purchase respirator masks and medical supplies.[18] In March 2020, Duan made a personal donation of N95 masks to California's police department.[19][20] In 2020, she launched a campaign to protect frontline workers from COVID-19 and encouraged her fans to donate masks in their communities.[21] Duan explained that she believes people “can change the world when we work united[...]Even in darkness there is hope.”[22]

In 2015, Duan filmed a Teen Talk public service announcement (PSA) to make listeners aware of the importance of working “together” to stop bullying.[23] In 2014, she curated a holiday event at a California senior center.[24] Duan said, of her role as the event organizer, that “I believe we can all find ways to give back to our community and make the world a better place.”[25]

Personal life

Duan was born and raised in California.[26]

Filmography

Television and film roles

  Year        Title               Role   Notes
  ----------- ------------------- ------ -----------------
  2007-2011   _Ni Hao, Kai-Lan_   Lulu   Main voice role

Video game

  Year   Title                                       Role   Notes
  ------ ------------------------------------------- ------ -------------------------------
  2009   _Ni Hao, Kai-Lan: New Year's Celebration_   Lulu   Voice role; Nintendo DS[27]
  2009   _Ni Hao, Kai-Lan: Super Game Day_           Lulu   Voice role; Wii[28]
  2009   _Ni Hao, Kai-Lan: Super Game Day_           Lulu   Voice role; PlayStation 2[29]

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title: Beverly Duan

question: Why did Beverly Duan donate to charity in China during the COVID-19 pandemic?

answer: Beverly Duan is an American actress. She started out by being cast on commercials as a little girl. After many jobs doing commercials and voice-overs for radio stations, she landed a role as a character called Lulu on the Nickelodeon television series, Ni Hao, Kai-Lan. This role necessitated that Duan learn Chinese-Mandarin. The show became a hit and seems to make Duan develop a love for most things China, prompting her to donate to both charities in America and China during the COVID pandemic.


split: test

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The OCTAGON CENTRE, built in 1983, is a multi-purpose conference centre and music venue at the University of Sheffield, England. Situated in the Western Bank campus, it is joined by a skyway to University House and comprises an eight-sided auditorium with a capacity of 1,500 (1,000 seated), offices, meeting rooms, and a lounge with bar and patio.

The Octagon is used for a variety of purposes, including examinations, lectures, graduation ceremonies, conferences, music concerts and club nights.

History

[Drama Studio] In 1958 the University Grants Committee agreed to allocate a sum of £175,000 for the construction of a new oval shaped theatre, which would have been built next to University House and was predicted to be completed for 1965. By early 1963, the funding was revoked because a theatre building was no longer considered a priority for the university given other pressures arising from construction underway at the time. Eventually, the Drama Studio opened on a nearby site in 1970, which was considered something of a compromise.[1] The university was later offered the empty premises of JG Graves Limited, opposite the Western Bank building. Despite initial plans to convert it for use by the Biology department, the building was demolished. The site was used as the Clarkson Street car park until the Octagon Centre construction began in 1982.[2]

By 1981 the university had made plans to build a new venue at a cost of £1.75 million, which was considered to be inappropriate expenditure at a time of tight funding. The plans were criticised by the Association of University Teachers and the local press at the time. The building was initially planned as an extension to the students' union, but due to the financial stake provided by the university an arrangement was made to share the use of the building between the union and the university, in exchange for student union control of parts of University House.[3]

The building was opened in 1983 under the management of Stephen Ware and contributed to Sheffield being listed as one of the top ten conference towns in the UK by _Conference Britain_ in 1985. The Social Democrat Party held a conference there in 1988 and degree congregations moved there from Sheffield City Hall in 1984.[4]

Architecture

The Octagon Centre consists of a main auditorium known as the Convocation Hall to the north, with offices and meeting rooms in corridors across two floors at a lower elevation on the southern side of the building. There is also a bar lounge on the south side of the hall (at the hall's elevation); all of these areas are connected by a foyer entrance block. The Convocation Hall has a diameter of approximately 32 m on the East-West axis,[5] covers an area of 870 m² and has a capacity of 1000 seated[6] or 1500 standing.[7] The building is connected to University House by a footbridge, offering access to University House's catering facilities.[8]

The centre offers five meeting rooms to clients with the following outline capacities:[9]

  Room              Lecture style capacity   Meeting capacity
  ----------------- ------------------------ ------------------
  Council Chamber   80                       36
  TV Lounge         40                       18
  Meeting Room 1    40                       20
  Meeting Room 2    30                       16
  Meeting Room 3    30                       16

Events

The Octagon Centre has hosted live music concerts from a number of notable bands as part of the touring music circuit in the UK, such as Nirvana on 28 November 1991.[10] The Students' Union hosts nightclub and live music events in the Octagon. In 2006 Eddie Izzard received an honorary doctorate in Letters at a graduation ceremony in the Octagon Centre.[11]

Transport

Road

The Octagon Centre is situated on the A57 near its western intersection with the A61, junction 6 of the Sheffield Inner Ring Road. Access from the north and north-east of the country is provided by the M1 and M18, with routes from the south served by the M1 and A61. Access from the west is served by the A57 Snake Pass, alternatively using the A628 Woodhead pass in poor winter weather conditions. Although there are a number of car parking spaces around the university, car parking can often be limited, so the university recommend using park and ride services or planning car parking in advance.[12]

Bus

A number of bus routes serve the area around the university,[13] with routes H1, 30, 30A, 51, 52, 70, 120, 272, 273, 274, 275 and 505 serving the nearest stops to the Octagon Centre.[14]

Tram

The Octagon Centre is a short walk from the University of Sheffield Supertram stop, which is served by the Blue and Yellow lines to destinations including Sheffield station, Hillsborough, Malin Bridge, Halfway and Meadowhall Interchange.[15]

[Sheffield railway station]

Rail

The nearest rail station is Sheffield station, connecting it to local destinations by Northern and TransPennine Express services, with intercity services operated by CrossCountry and East Midlands Railway. Sheffield station is just over two hours away from London St Pancras and one hour from Leeds, Manchester and Nottingham.[16] There is a direct connection to the Supertram network at the station via an overbridge, which allows onward travel to the Octagon Centre via the University of Sheffield tram stop.[17]

Air

The nearest international airport is Doncaster Sheffield, approximately 30 minutes away by car. Other nearby international airports include Manchester, Leeds Bradford and East Midlands Airport. Manchester has a direct rail link to Sheffield and London Heathrow and London Gatwick are connected to Sheffield by rail with one change of train, approximately four hours away.[18]

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title: Octagon Centre

question: What were the controversies surrounding the construction of the Octagon Centre?

answer: The controversies date back to before the construction in 1981 began. In 1958 there was a sum of 175,000 pounds dedicated to the construction of a new oval shaped theatre. However, in 1963 funding was revoked and seen as unnecessary. In 1970 the drama studio was opened on a nearby site as a compromise. Then the university acquired new land, and decided to dedicate 1.75 million pounds to the construction of the Octagon Centre. The plan was criticized by the Association of University Teachers and the local press at the time.


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[171203-w1-fig-01.jpg]
  "If we could know exactly the laws of nature and the situation of the universe at the initial instant, we should be able to predict exactly the situation of this same universe at a subsequent instant. . . But this is not always the case; it may happen that slight differences in the initial conditions produce very great differences in the final phenomena; a slight error in the former would make an enormous error in the latter. Prediction becomes impossible and we have the fortuitous phenomenon."

  -Henri Poincaré, "Science and Method," 1903

It was a gloomy, rainy Wednesday afternoon in San Francisco, Calif., on Nov. 15, 2017. A capacity crowd had gathered at one of the main ballrooms of the Hyatt Regency hotel to hear a man named Adrian Cockcroft. He is perhaps the world's foremost engineer of data centers for distributed processing. Netflix -- a service single-handedly responsible for well over one-third of traffic on the entire Internet --was his baby.

Now, he is Amazon AWS' vice president of cloud architecture strategy.

He speaks with buoyant optimism, tempered energy, and the sing-song lilt of a public TV cooking show host sharing his nuanced knowledge of herbs. But his subject matter is a technology called microservices.

It is a complex concept built upon the simplest of principles: That all of the functions of a business may be represented in code. Rather than compiling that code into colossal monoliths or reducing it to firewall-like rules for a BPM, he's demonstrated they can be deconstructed into interoperative modules.

Indeed, Cockcroft has begun professing the idea of further deconstructing microservices into small, independent functions. Imagine a universe where the superstrings that form quarks, which resonate into nucleons that reside at the center of atoms that form the basis of molecules, could all decouple themselves from the entire subatomic structure, with no visible damage to the universe, and the bonus being easier methods for working with energy, force, and solid matter. That's the power of Cockcroft's idea, at least when it's presented before an audience of developers who mostly know what he's talking about.

You'd think Cockcroft would have an intricate latticework in mind for the structure of this new information universe. The title of his talk is your first clue that he doesn't: "Chaos Architecture."

"Basically, you want to set it up with no single point of failure, you have zones around the world in regions, it is easy to do," explained Cockcroft (according to the QCon conference's official transcript). "You get this region, and you deploy multiple things. If you zoom in on that, you see that everything is interconnected, you have multiple versions of it. And you zoom into one of those and there are more versions, you have more regions, and so you are using lots and lots of replications at multiple layers as you go in."

Technically, Cockcroft's is not a security architecture. But that's not really the point: For decades, we've heard pleas that developers build information systems that are failure resistant and fault tolerant. The Netflix microservices model is the most successful effort to date at answering these pleas. AT&T engineers have spoken of it in awe. Microservices seeks to establish itself as secure from the outset.

"The key point here," he told his audience, "is to get to have no single point of failure.

"What I really mean. . . If there is no single point, it is a distributed system, and if there is no single failure, it has to be a replicated system. So we are building distributed, replicated systems, and we want to automate them, and cloud is the way that you build that automation."

If you watch this man speak for a half-hour or have a conversation with him, as I have, you may walk away feeling your world has been reshaped, and you've been gifted with insight into a unique and completely different perspective on how to approach IT security. You feel empowered, as if the answer could have been in front of you all along, and you can now start building not only fault tolerant systems but inspire people to manage them -- even to inject failure routines into those systems to help them learn how to heal, as Cockcroft has suggested.

Then, the moment after you avoid being struck by a city bus, the cold sting of reality hits you, like walking out of the theatre at the end of a great science fiction film (back when there were such things), feeling the exit door smack the side of your leg, and realizing we haven't yet really conquered the problem of gravity. You become intensely aware of the tremendous gulf between the warm and inviting ideal that has been entertaining you for the last little while, and the cold and complex reality in which you live.

[171203-w1-fig-03.jpg]

The fortuitous phenomenon

Our next journey for _ZDNet_, Scale imagines the routes we would take to bridge that gulf. It begins at a place that at least sounds like the spot where we ended our last journey, like "the edge." It's called the perimeter, and we used to know where it was.

At least the information security industry could tell us where, especially in the wake of the Y2K debacle. After the world failed to end and countless bets were lost, we realized just the fear of the impact of a highly replicated calendar bug on the global economy may have been more devastating than the bug itself. At that time, most personal computers used cloned BIOS chips and essentially the same operating system. So, when someone found the bug in one PC, there was a sudden insecurity that all PCs -- and later, all computers -- could cease to function after midnight on New Year's Day in 2000. For people who had just learned what a virus was, had just seen a Y2K report on the evening news, and then just watched _The Blair Witch Project_, the bug may as well have been a virus for all the harm it could have caused.

Yet somehow afterwards, much of the PC-using world resumed clicking on unnamed attachments in their email messages, then wondering where their documents went.

Around 2002, the IT security industry began professing this idea: If a system could be built wherein all the components -- software, operating system, central processor, hard disk drive, network interface card -- could trust one another to work in a predictable, deterministic manner, all security needed to do to protect the integrity of that system was to seal off its entryway from the outside world and erect checkpoints at the gateways. It was the fortress security model, and a year after 9/11, just the thought of it made us feel better.

[171203-w2-fig-02.jpg]
"In the software fortress model," wrote enterprise IT architect Roger Sessions in 2003, "security is the responsibility of four units working together. The wall keeps the hostile world at bay. The drawbridge allows controlled access from those few members of the outside world that this fortress is willing to trust. The guard makes sure that requests coming through the drawbridge are from authorized sources. And the envoy ensures that communications heading to other fortresses meet the security requirements of those fortresses' guards."

[171203-w1-fig-02.jpg]
Our journey to find the perimeter begins here, at the drawbridge of Roger Sessions' fortress. Only it is 14 years later. The cloud has reshaped the world. Data centers are now virtualized on multiple planes of existence at once. Microservices are remaking applications into mutable, shape-shifting, enigmatic organisms that change size and shape at will, like a three-dimensional apple invading Edwin A. Abbott's 2D _Flatland_. PCs are gathering dust. Supercomputers travel around in people's pockets, supported wirelessly by hyperscale data centers that may be seen from space.

It is incumbent upon the engineers of these magnificent systems to adopt a new security model, and they're not sure what that might be. It is equally incumbent upon the experts in the IT security field to reconcile themselves with this new reality. And, at the moment, as they pick themselves up from being struck by a bus, they're not really sure what they're looking at.

"In a sense, we have to figure this out," admitted world-renowned security expert and IBM Resilient Systems CTO Bruce Schneier, speaking with _ZDNet_.

"This is bigger than your application. There's an Internet-enabled thermostat somewhere, and it triggers bits," Schneier said. "We're going to have to identify and authenticate lots and lots of things in the next few years. A sensor in car-to-car communications. It could be anonymous, but it's got to be authenticated. And probably, you're going to want some identification in case it goes rogue. It's hard. I don't have answers. But there's real value in the research in authenticating bundles of bits, however you want to characterize them. You want to know who or what produced the bits -- the provenance, every step of the way."

Decoupling

While very few enterprises have the luxury of being designed or redesigned as microservices from the ground up like Netflix or AWS, the decoupling of workloads from their underlying infrastructure is happening, on a number of levels simultaneously.

You're familiar with virtualization. Then there is containerization, which is the trend of making workloads portable across any infrastructure. At a deeper level, there's microservices. And in the realm that Adrian Cockcroft and his colleagues are exploring now, there's a deeper tier of functionalization that he's perfectly happy with calling "chaos." He knows full well that modern physicists use that term to describe the realm they themselves are entering now. And he also seems, at the very least, undeterred by such correlations as Stanford University would draw: "The big news about chaos," its Encyclopedia of Philosophy currently reads, "is supposed to be that the smallest of changes in a system can result in very large differences in that system's behavior."

"I think there's opportunity here," remarked Mark Nunnikhoven, Trend Micro's vice president of cloud research. "Distributed computing, microservices, even the push into serverless designs -- all this stuff breaks everything that we're used to and were comfortable with. And I think that's where a lot of people stumble. When we move from physical stuff into virtualizing the data center, we basically did the same thing. When we moved into the cloud, the first few steps, we were doing the same types of security things with tiny changes here and there. This is the first time, with this big push to distributed microservices, where we're really going, 'Hold on a second. This is a fundamental change in how we're doing it.' Not why we're doing things, but how we're doing them, needs to fundamentally change."

The fortress model could only work in a world where you knew for absolute certain where the domain of an enterprise's IT assets began and ended. If you knew where the gateway was, you could assign rules to it and have it enforce them. Not only would entry be restricted to those with specific passwords, or with other verifiable credentials, but their rights and privileges could be limited to discrete lists of applications.

Every component with which this security model was defined, is no longer a constant.

-   IDENTITY changes both its shape and its meaning. In the fortress, every active account was a user associated with a person. Something seeking access to a resource presented that user's personal credentials. Today, the cloud is full of functions, and the Internet of Things has, well, things. The model of trust demands that if these things are not bound to people, then they must be bound to something solid. And the cloud is not solid.
-   DOMAIN is no longer a rigidly constrained, contiguous territory of information assets. Applications reside in the public cloud -- at least, some of them. They may have access to data both inside and outside of enterprise data centers, all of which appears to belong to them, but none of which is guaranteed to reside with them. Containerized environments may reside partly in the public cloud, and partly on-premises. So wherever certain parts of data reside in one place and belong to someone else, it would be nice to be able to reliably tag it as belonging to some verifiable identity. (See "Identity" above.)
-   TRUST is no longer a binary state. The root of trust -- the thing whose ultimate identity is beyond question, certified by an incontrovertible source -- has been uprooted. There is still a base to which all certificates eventually refer, but the authority to declare that base a solid root has been diminished by both state politics and by corporate politics. Certificates are now valid until, suddenly, they're not valid. And that leads directly to the fourth erosion of constancy:
-   SECRECY cannot be assured. It takes a trustworthy certificate to provide both the backing and the code to enable a verified user (with an irrefutable identity) to encrypt messages and sessions to someone else, and for that someone else to decrypt them. What's more, it's more difficult to effectively manage the keys with which traffic is secured, in a system where the domain for those keys may be entrusted to someone else anyway.

There is no wall, no drawbridge, and no guard. Gateways could be anywhere, and envoys could be anything. The perimeter of an enterprise's IT domain is, for now, purely in the mind of the beholder. It's more like one of those modern-day, more depressing, sci-fi movies where the human survivors all wear multi-colored war paint, bulldozers are pulled by mutant oxen, and the seat of the world's government is a disused convenience store on a forgotten interstate. It's from this opposite side of the gulf, where Bruce Schneier is pleading for anyone with good ideas, that you remember what Adrian Cockcroft looked like, and ask aloud, why is this man smiling?

"The devil's in the details, of course," Schneier told us. "It feels like, we're virtualizing what we do now. And my guess is, you start by virtualizing what we do physically, and then over the years, we figure out new things we can do that we never thought of before, because we were limited by the physical limitations, which we're no longer. . . Security is something [where] we can't do everything."

Reconnoiter

In the hopes of re-establishing some semblance of the mental mindset we used to employ to make us feel safer, there is a genuine effort under way to build a new security model that resembles the old model, at least when viewed from one angle. It is called the Software-Defined Perimeter (SDP).

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In a world (to channel Don LaFontaine) without borders, and where not only networks and servers but software has become software-defined, SDP has the promise of re-establishing continuity for the security industry. In the second leg of this journey, we'll embark on a search for this new, and hopefully less ambiguous, security model.

At Waypoint #3, we'll explore how security engineers may yet resolve the problem of identity, in a world (there's Don again) where there are more things to be identified than people. And we'll conclude at a place where we ask if any form of artificial intelligence can help us resolve these issues in security, if you will, without assuming control for itself like another string of sci-fi sequels that never end well.

My promise to you is, we'll end on a note of genuine hope for the holidays. Until the next stage of our venture, hold tight.

Journey Further -- From the CBS Interactive Network:

-   8 speed bumps that may slow down the microservices and container express by Joe McKendrick, Service Oriented
-   Cloud is the ignored dimension of security: Cisco by Asha Barbaschow, Security
-   Cloud vulnerabilities are being ignored by the enterprise by Charlie Osborne, Zero Day

Elsewhere:

-   Context: How Will Everybody Secure Microservices? [podcast] by Scott M. Fulton, III, The New Stack
-   ShiftLeft promises to protect your code even when you ignore security threats by Ron Miller, TechCrunch
-   Got Microservices? Consider East-West Traffic Management Needs by Ranga Rajagopalan, CTO, Avi Networks for Data Center Knowledge

The race to the edge:

HAVE HYPERSCALE, WILL TRAVEL: HOW THE NEXT DATA CENTER REVOLUTION STARTS IN A TOOLSHED

The race to the edge, part 1: Where we discover the form factor for a portable, potentially hyperscale data center, small enough to fit in the service shed beside a cell phone tower, multiplied by tens of thousands.

A DATA CENTER WITH WINGS? THE CLOUD ISN'T DEAD BECAUSE THE EDGE IS PORTABLE

The race to the edge, part 2: Where we come across drones that swarm around tanker trucks like bees, and discover why they need their own content delivery network.

EDGE, CORE, AND CLOUD: WHERE ALL THE WORKLOADS GO

The race to the edge, part 4: Where we are introduced to chunks of data centers bolted onto the walls of control sheds at a wind farm, and we study the problem of how all those turbines are collected into one cloud.

IT'S A RACE TO THE EDGE, AND THE END OF CLOUD COMPUTING AS WE KNOW IT

Our whirlwind tour of the emerging edge in data centers makes this much clear: As distributed computing evolves, there's less and less for us to comfortably ignore.

question: Summarize what are microservices.

answer: It's the subject matter of Adrian Cockcroft. It says that all the functions of businesses could be represented by code rather than building one mammoth code. Microservices would mean that the code could be deconstructed into interoperative modules.

question: Summarize what the narrator felt on talking with Adrian.

answer: The narrator felt that their world has been reshaped and they've got a new perspective on IT security. However, on walking out after the conversation, the cold world reality hits the narrator as he reminisces the time spent conversing with Adrian.

question: Summarize the role of Adrian at Netflix.


text:
LAURA VELDKAMP (born July 14, 1975) is an American economist teaching as a Professor of Finance at Columbia University's Graduate School of Business and also serves as a co-editor of the _Journal of Economic Theory_.[1]

Education

Veldkamp graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Math and Economics from Northwestern University in 1996. She then received her Ph.D. in Economic Analysis and Policy from the Stanford Graduate School of Business in 2001.[2]

Career

Early career

Veldkamp started her teaching career as an Assistant Professor of Economics at INSEAD for 3 years from 2001-2003. She then taught at New York University Stern School of Business as an Assistant Professor of Economics from 2003-2008. Before being promoted to an Associate Professor of Economics at New York University Stern School of Business. She left New York University in 2015, after spending 15 years teaching there. During this time, she was also employed at the Hoover Institution National Fellow located within Stanford University from 2010-2011 and the Kenen Fellow within the Department of Economics at Princeton University from 2006-2007.[3]

Current career

She is on the New York University Stern Committees since 2007, with responsibilities including financial oversight, obtaining tenure, and teaching at Ph.D. programs. Veldkamp obtained a National Bureau of Economic Research faculty research fellow in 2008, and a research fellow at Center for Economic and Policy Research since 2009. From 2009 to 2011, she was an associate editor for the Journal of Monetary Economics.[4] In 2011, she became a coordinator for the Economic Fluctuations, Growth, and Development research group in the New York University Stern Center for Global Economy and Business.[5] In 2014, she joined the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Macro Annual Editorial Board. Then in 2016, she joined the Board of Editors at the _American Economic Journal_ in the Microeconomics division. She most recently joined the Monetary Policy Advisory Panel in the New York Federal Reserve.[6] She currently teaches at Columbia University's Graduate School of Business as a Professor of Finance and serves as a co-editor of the _Journal of Economic Theory_.[7]

Research

Veldkamp's research varies from macroeconomics, monetary economics, international finance, and asset pricing. It focuses on how individuals, investors, and firms obtain information, and how that information influences their decisions, and how those decisions change the macroeconomy and financial markets. Some of her other work investigates how women choose to participate in the labor force, and how women observe influences that contribute to employment patterns that reflects the “geographic patterns of female labor force participation in the United States”.[8] She also explores how research for investments are done by mutual fund managers.

Publications

Veldkamp has published multiple works in outlets such as _The American Economic Review_, _The Review of Economic Studies_, _The Journal of Finance_, _Journal of Economic Theory_, and the _Journal of Monetary Economics_.[9]

A collaboration on the paper “Leadership, Coordination and Corporate Culture” with economists Patrick Bolton from Columbia University and Markus K. Brunnermeier from Princeton University, was awarded the 2008 JP Morgan Price for the best paper at the Utah Winter Finance Conference.[10] It was then printed in the _Review of Economic Studies_ on April 2013, in volume 80(2), from pages 512-537.[11] It was regarding the role of leaders in large organizations, in which a model of leadership was proposed to help manage corporate culture in large organizations, coordinate followers' actions over time, and help to steer an organization when faced with changing environments.[12]

Veldkamp also collaborated with economist Vasiliki Skreta from New York University on the paper “Ratings Shopping and Asset Complexity: A Theory of Ratings Inflation”, which was awarded 3rd place by the Glucksman Institute Research Prize.[13] It was also published in the _Journal of Monetary Economics_ on July 2009, in volume 56(5), from pages 678-695. The paper regards the emergence of rating bias, and how more competition in the ratings market can continuously distort ratings, as well as how investors can no longer use past data to detect rating bias. An economic model was introduced to help explain the situation. A key assumption of the model was that investors were unaware of the rise of asset complexity and were also creating ratings bias.[14]

Veldkamp's most awarded paper was “Information Immobility and the Home Bias Puzzle”, written in collaboration with economist Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh. It was awarded 1st place by the Glucksman Institute Research Prize, and was also awarded the best paper prize in investments by the Financial Management Association. It was published in _The Journal of Finance_ on June 2009, in volume 63(3), from pages 1187-1215.[15] The paper studies the criticism regarding information-based models of the home bias and attempts to answer the question “If home investors have less information about foreign stocks, why don't they choose to acquire foreign information, reduce their uncertainty about foreign payoffs, and undo their portfolio bias?” The study shows a model of investors deciding which risky asset payoff to study. It then dives into the world of asymmetric information, where investors pursue the incentive to purposefully learn and obtain information that others do not know. Showing that investors choose to have different information than other investors.[16]

Veldkamp is the author of the textbook _Information Choice in Macroeconomics and Finance_, printed by the Princeton University Press.[17] The textbook highlights how information choice can be used to answer questions regarding “monetary economics, portfolio choice theory, business cycle theory, international finance, asset pricing, and other areas.”[18] It also covers how information friction can be used to build and test applied theory models, and includes recent research topics such as “rational inattention, information markets, and strategic games with heterogeneous information.”[19]

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title: Laura Veldkamp

question: Summarize all the information relating to Laura Veldkamp's education.

answer: Veldkamp graduated with Bachelor of Arts in Math and Economics from Northwestern University in 1996. She went on to complete her Ph.D. in Economic Analysis and Policy at Stanford Graduate School of Business in 2001.

question: Summarize all the information relating to Laura Veldkamp's academic publications.

answer: Veldkamp has published multiple works in The American Economic Review, The Review of Economic Studies, The Journal of Finance, Journal of Economic Theory and the Journal of Monetary Economics. In 2013 she collaborated to publish "Leadership, Coordination and Corporate Culture". In 2009 she collaborated on "Ratings Shopping and Asset Complexity: A Theory of Ratings Inflation" and "Information Immobility and the Home Bias Puzzle". She also wrote a textbook that is published by Princeton University Press.

question: Summarize all the information regarding Laura Veldkamp's research that involves women.

answer: Some of her work investigates how women choose to participate in the labor force, and how women observe influences that contribute to employment patterns that reflects the "geographic patterns of female labor force participation in the United States".

question: Which awards have Laura Veldkamp won?

answer:
1. The paper on which she collaborated with economists Patrick Bolton and Markus K. Brunnermeier "Leadership, Coordination and Corporate Culture" was awarded the 2008 JP Morgan Prize for the best paper at the Utah Winter Finance Conference.
2. The paper on which she collaborated with economist Vasiliki Skreta, "Ratings Shopping and Asset Complexity: A Theory of Ratings Inflation" was awarded 3rd place by the Glucksman Institute Research Prize in 2009.
3. The paper on which she collaborated with economist Stijn van Nieuwerburgh "Information Immobility and the Home Bias Puzzle" was awarded 1st place by the Glucksman Institute Research Prize, and also the best paper prize in investments by Financial Management Association in 2009.

question: Where is Laura Veldkamp currently employed?

answer: She is on the New York University Stern Committees since 2007, with responsibilities that include financial oversight, obtaining tenure and teaching at Ph.D. programs. She works as a Professor of Finance at Columbia University's Graduate School of Business.

question: Write a ~2 sentence summary.

answer: Laura Veldkamp is a Professor of Finance at Columbia University. She has a long history of award-winning research in the fields or macroeconomics, monetary economics, international finance and asset pricing.


text:
-   $1,325 goal

HOORAY! This project is fully funded

My Students

My class is a special needs classroom. My students range from ages 3-5 years old and are consistently learning about the world around them and discovering themselves. Our school is located in a low-income area with most students receiving free or reduced-price lunch. My students are remarkable little stars who enjoy learning.

  Their joy for learning inspires me to make sure their classroom environment is the best that it can be.

They inspire me every day to enjoy life and I enjoy teaching them everything I possibly can. They may be labeled as children with disabilities, but to me they are stars with infinite possibilities.

My Project

My Pre-K students need a water and sand activity tub, comfy couch, dollhouse dolls and furniture for the dollhouse, along with sensory dough and a butterfly nursery. These materials will increase their social skills and imagination and allow them to explore the world around them through dramatic play. We also need these materials to create our own our dramatic play area and build a sensory area. These materials will help improve their social skills along, imagination and creativity though play.

  It will allow them to develop their social-emotional skills and develop creativity and increase their self-awareness.

These activities will be used during small group times and will be available during center time in connection with the theme of the week being taught. I selected these specific items to create an environment that will foster creativity and a love for learning.

Your generous donation will provide opportunities for my students to be creative and expand their imaginations while learning. Having the opportunity to build on these social skills, my students will be able to grow and learn in a way that is age appropriate and fun!

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4 donors4 donors have given to this project.

This project will reach 12 students.

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Where Your Donation Goes

Where your donation goes

Materials
Cost
Quantity
Total
RR364 - Read & Relax Comfy Couch • Lakeshore Learning Materials
$449.00
1
$449.00
SAND AND WATER SQUARE TUB W/CASTERS CC • School Specialty
$251.97
1
$251.97
DS430X - Mad Mattr® Sensory Dough - Set of 6 Colors • Lakeshore Learning Materials
$76.99
1
$76.99
KIT SAND ACTIVITY SET OF 28 • School Specialty
$70.99
1
$70.99
LC362 - The Butterfly Nursery • Lakeshore Learning Materials
$39.99
1
$39.99
RR371 - Plastic Book Baskets - Set of 3 • Lakeshore Learning Materials
$39.99
1
$39.99
SPACE SAND-MULTI COLOR 5LBS • School Specialty
$28.39
1
$28.39
DOLLHOUSE FURNITURE BEDROOM SET OF 5 • School Specialty
$21.79
1
$21.79
DOLLHOUSE FURNITURE DINING ROOM SET OF 6 • School Specialty
$21.79
1
$21.79
LC63 - Coupon for 3-5 Extra Caterpillars • Lakeshore Learning Materials
$19.99
1
$19.99
WOOD DOLL FAMILY ASIAN - SET OF 4 • School Specialty
$17.96
1
$17.96
Materials cost

$1,038.85
Vendor shipping charges

$41.29
State sales tax

$0.00
3rd party payment processing fee

$15.58
Fulfillment labor & materials

$30.00
Total project cost

$1,125.72
Suggested donation to help DonorsChoose reach more classrooms

$198.66
TOTAL PROJECT GOAL

$1,324.38
How we calculate what's needed

Total project goal

$1,324.38
2 Donors

-$1,274.38

Donations toward project cost

-$1,083.22

Donations to help DonorsChoose reach more classrooms

-$191.16

match offer

-$50.00

Match offer toward project cost

-$42.50

Match offer to help DonorsChoose reach more classrooms

-$7.50

STILL NEEDED View calculationHide calculation

$0.00
Our team works hard to negotiate the best pricing and selections available.

View complete list
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question: Summarize what inspires the author.

answer: The author seems to be a pre-school teacher who runs a special needs classroom. They are inspired to make sure their classroom is the best it can be due to the students' joy to learn. These students inspire them to enjoy life and enjoy teaching them everything they can every day.

question: Summarize how new items and activities will help the students.

answer: The author is asking for certain items such as a water and sand activity tub, dollhouse items, and sensory dough. She believes these materials will increase their social skills and imagination. It will also allow them to explore the world around them through dramatic play with a dramatic play and a sensory area. The author believes these items will help develop social-emotional skills, develop creativity, increase their self awareness, and foster a love for learning.

question: Summarize the main goal of this text.

answer: The overall goal of this text is to raise money. Specifically, the point is to raise money for a special needs pre-school classroom. The goal is $1,325 so the author can buy a water and sand activity tub, comfy couch, dollhouse dolls and furniture for the dollhouse, along with sensory dough and a butterfly nursery. The author hopes all of this will provide opportunities for the students to expand their creativity and imaginations while learning.

question: What does the text say about how computers will be used in this class?


text:
erican effort. Rather, it was an Allied effort with, if anything, Britain taking the lead. Yes, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the supreme Allied commander, was American, but his deputy, Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder was British, as were all three service chiefs. Air Marshal Sir Arthur "Mary" Coningham, commander of the tactical air forces, was also British.

The plan for Operation Overlord -- as D-Day was codenamed -- was largely that of Gen. Bernard Montgomery, the land force commander. The Royal Navy had overall responsibility for Operation Neptune, the naval plan. Of the 1,213 warships involved, 200 were American and 892 were British; of the 4,126 landing craft involved, 805 were American and 3,261 were British.

[When World War II brought women to battlefield]

Indeed, 31% of all U.S. supplies used during D-Day came directly from Britain, while two-thirds of the 12,000 aircraft involved were also British, as were two-thirds of those that landed in occupied France. Despite the initial slaughter at Omaha, casualties across the American and British beaches were much the same. This is not to belittle the U.S. effort but rather to add context and a wider, 360-degree view. History needs to teach as well as entertain.

2. MYTH: AMERICAN FORCES WERE ILL-PREPARED

REALITY: By the end of World War II the United States had the best armed services in the world. The 77-day Normandy campaign did much to help them reach this point.

[He got to witness 'The Longest Day']

Northern France was a showcase for American tactical and operational flexibility. At the start of the campaign, the Americans found themselves fighting through the Norman "bocage," an area of small fields lined with thick, raised hedgerows and narrow, sunken lanes. They hadn't trained for this; instead they expected that the Germans would quickly retreat after a successful Allied landing.

For the Germans, the bocage offered cover and ambush opportunities for mortar teams and machine guns. Even the American 30-ton Sherman tanks couldn't get through these hedgerows. Then a U.S. sergeant came up with the ingenious solution of attaching a hedge-cutting tool built from German beach obstacles to the front of a Sherman. Gen. Omar Bradley, the U.S. First Army commander, was impressed; within a fortnight, the device had been fitted to 60% of all U.S. Shermans in Normandy.

This was but one example. During the campaign huge developments also were made in close air support, as well as in coordination between infantry, artillery and armor. Medical services advanced so much that one in four casualties returned to the battlefield after treatment, remarkable for 1944.

3. MYTH: THE ALLIES BECAME BOGGED DOWN IN NORMANDY

REALITY: In the pre-invasion estimates for the Normandy campaign, the Allies expected to be roughly 50 miles inland after 17 days, based on German retreats in North Africa and Italy. But Adolf Hitler ordered his forces to fight as close to the French coast as possible and not give an inch.

On paper it seemed that the Allies weren't making much prog

question: Which country took the lead in the invasion of Normandy?

answer: Britain.

question: What percentage of all U.S. supplies used in D-Day came from Britain?

answer: 31%.

question: Which country had the best armed services in the world by the end of the war?

answer: The United States.

question: What invention helped the American army break through the German soldiers?

answer: Attaching a hedge-cutting tool to the tanks to eliminate German ambushes in the hedgerows.

question: Write a ~2 sentence summary.

answer: The article lays out several myths about the Allied invasion of Europe during WWII and counters them with a more detailed account. Myths debunked include how well prepared American forces were, the extent to which Britain helped them, and whether they became bogged down in Normandy.


text:
It doesn’t take long for the children to find their way. They follow the ready-made trail, usually hidden by the warm arrays of leaves in their orange and browns. It’s funny how these trees, appreciated whilst they’re green and living, are so magnificent once their leaves fall and die. It’s almost poetic; the little children following the trail of death to find home. And they will find home with me. Under the solace of the branches they will be safe and sound, warm and snug around the campfire. They will come to their Wendy.

It’s interesting isn’t it? The lies these adults will tell to keep their children from misbehaving and wandering off. “Go to sleep when we tell you or the Boogey Man will get you!” or “Santa won’t bring you presents if you keep behaving that way!” or “Don’t get lost in the woods or people will find you. They will hunt you. They will rape and kill you.” All these silly lies. There are no horrors out there for children. Children are blissful creatures, to be cherished by all those around them. There is no greater delight than sitting, watching these dainty pixies frolic in the sunlight. Take children out of the equation and there will be no laughter in this merciless world. Silly adults, no one would dare do anything to harm the babes.

I can hear them getting closer. How delightful! Those delicious dead leaves crunch under their little booties like the bones of the defeated. I love that crackle you get, it’s like candy for the ears, alike to a passing breathe of someone close by, sounds of the living. I heard a story a long time ago, it’s an old tale, older than your own ears. He told me about this place. It’s so far away and you can only get there by thinking happy thoughts. It’s such a wondrous place. There are mermaids and pirates and Red Indians and such beautiful creatures. There are children there too. Lost children far from home who need looking after. Poor children. If only they had their Wendy.

There’s laughter in these woods once more! Joyful joyful noise! I always did love laughter. It tickles the belly and it resounds in your head long after. He always made me laugh. He had such a way with words, he could tell a tale and it was like you were there! I was helping him fight a blood thirsty tiger in the depths of the jungle. I was swimming with him in that long forgotten wreck. I was watching him interact with those Indians, turning them red as he burned down their village. I was watching as my father’s hands gagged my mouth and defiled my young body. He said it was a part of life. Children get hurt because adults need it. Adults need to take a child’s innocence because they, themselves have lost it and are jealous. They need that act of gratification because there is nothing that can compare to it. I won’t let them do it. No one can harm the babes.

Oh I hope these children will be more grateful than the last few that came by. They wanted to leave so soon just when I was getting into my story. They said that their parents would be angry if they didn’t leave right then. I told them not to worry; they’ll be safe with me. I gave them more tea and they soon settled down and enjoyed the rest of my story. I’ve recently realised that I tend to talk a lot, it’s my fatal flaw or “hamartia” if you like. He always told me that it was going to get me into a lot of trouble one of these days. He said that if I didn’t let other people get a word in that they’ll want to cut my tongue out and chop it to pieces. I quickly tightened up after that, but only for a little while. I can’t help it, I like to talk and if I don’t talk then who will? And I have so many stories to tell, the children love it when they sit around and listen to the stories of their Wendy.

I should get the tea on! I can’t expect them to arrive here and not have tea ready for them. The sleeping bags are all neat and tidy, surrounding the camp fire so that they shall be warm while they sleep. It’s getting cold out and I don’t want them to catch a chill. The children are always so polite, they say their pleases and their thank you’s and they sip at that tea so delicately. They’re so delicate, like little birds; little birds with their breakable necks and hollow bones, that sing so beautifully. There’s nothing quite like a child singing. That’s what my father said when we used to go see the choir sing on a Sunday; all those little children singing so sweetly in their robes. I wasn’t allowed to sing because singing is an act of the innocent and I was a sinner, so guilty that I had to be punished. I sang though, as each blow dented my little body, I sang. I sang till my lungs burst and my throat burnt. I wasn’t good enough, but the children are and no one shall harm the babes.

They sit so serenely on their sleeping bags, little legs crossed and hands in their laps, like little angels. They can see the tea brewing on the fire and I’m sure they are delighting themselves in the smell. They look up at me with their big seeing eyes as I pour them their tea and they take their sips so tentatively. I can’t help but beam at them, my little angels. I watch them for a while in silence as they chatter among themselves, their sweet voices filling the forest air. Uneasiness begins to creep over them and I take that as my cue to start talking.

“Children, did you ever hear the tale of a boy called Peter?” They nod their little heads, their hair bouncing like leaves in the wind, “Would you like to hear a story about my Peter?” Again, they nod and they take another small sip of their tea. “My Peter was such a joyful little boy. He came to me when I was seven years old, a lonely only child with no friends my age. He found me and he saved me. He came from a land so far away that the only way to get there was to fly and he flew so majestically. The very first time he came to me, he flew all around my room, darting towards the corners only to pull back at the last second. It was so exciting watching this mysterious boy with pale blonde hair and clothes made from leaves dance around the room.”

I notice the children snuggle deeper into their sleeping bags, getting more comfortable to enjoy my story. “He finally came to a halt and stood right in front of my bed, hands on hips, brazen as the day. He was so big back then, his shadow came to a halt just under my tucked up chin and I looked up at him, grinning. He pinched the tips of my toes with his little twig like fingers until I giggled and pulled my knees up to my chest, like this.” I go to demonstrate and I watch as a few of the children copy, “He smiled and sat on the edge of my bed and looked at me.

“’Why are you smiling like that?’ He said. I couldn’t believe this was real. He was so beautiful, children. Such childlike benevolence radiated from him, I felt like he was ethereal. I didn’t want to touch him for fear of him disappearing and I daren’t speak for fear of waking my father up. ‘Why won’t you speak?’ He said, “Cat got your tongue?’ This made me giggle even more, I had to bring my hands up to cover my face. ‘Are you a mute? Did you get your tongue cut out?’ I shook my head rapidly. ‘Well then, I guess I’ll just have to make you talk.’ At this, he lunged at me, taking his twiggy fingers and dancing them over me, tickling me. I couldn’t take it and laughed so hard my belly ached! It was wondrous! Even after he stopped I still felt the tingles of his fingers on my legs and arms, little scratches that bled like the tears of laughter that fell from my eyes. I yelled at him to stop and he smiled smugly and disappeared in a flash, leaving me in my dark room with my awakened father’s footsteps looming.”

The children’s eyes were drooping, they were feeling sleepy but there was still more tea in the pot so I shared it round, giving each little boy and girl a smile as I did it. “Peter came back multiple times after that night, and after he got me talking, I never stopped. I confided in Peter and in return he told me such magical stories about the land where he lived.  Let me tell you my favourite: In the depths of the forests where Peter lived was a humongous tree house. It housed a group of children, Lost Children, and they lived there and they frolicked and played in the surrounding woods. These children, although lost, were free. There were no adults around telling them what to do, no chores or lies from their parents. There was just a Wendy. A Wendy was a lady who looked after them but never annoyed them. She made them dinner, kept the tree house clean and she told the children stories and tucked them into bed at night. The Lost Children were so grateful to have a Wendy like the Wendy they had. She was the best, loving and caring, like the mother they always wanted. This Wendy had magical properties that made the Lost Children love her even more. She had the power to keep them young forever. Never will they grow old into adults and learn to lie and hurt people. They will forever be blissfully innocent.

“That story stuck by me, children. Peter talked of this Wendy so fondly and warmly, it was easy to love her even though I had never met her. That was the magic of Peter’s stories, children, he transported you to places you had never been before, he could make you love or hate people you had never met before because of the way he told them. You could so easily get lost in Peter’s stories, I know I did a couple of times, always so disappointed to know I was back. I always asked him to take me with him, back to his home. We tried once; he stood with me by the window, the dark night looming ahead of me. He held my hand whispered in my ear, telling me to think happy thoughts. I thought of his Wendy, of the Mermaids of his lands, of the pirates and the Lost Children. He then kept hold of my hand and told me to fly…

“I can’t quite remember what happened after that, children, but after that day I never saw Peter again. He had left me. We jumped and then darkness… he’d disappeared. We’d been through so much and he’d gone, and I knew why. I wasn’t his Wendy. But I can be his Wendy, children. I can be your Wendy, so just lay down by the fire dears. Listen to my song and let it relax you.”

As I sing, I watch them close their eyes. This part is always sad, saying good night. I had to say good night to Peter, as he closed his eyes. The boy who never sleeps forever reigns on awake in my dreams. And so will these children. I tuck them in and kiss each one on the forehead and then I sit and listen. I listen out for the forest sounds of birds chirping and little animals scurrying around in the undergrowth and just when I need it too, it all goes silent. So silent that I can only hear the breathing of those beautiful children around me.

“It’s okay children, nothing to be afraid of,” I whisper, “No bogey man to get you out here. No bad people to come and rape and kill you. Just me, I’ve got you.” I can hear their breathing start to slow as they slip deeper into their sleep. “I’ve got you and I’ll forever be your Wendy. Go and join Peter in your dreams.” Their chests move slower and slower as the tea begins to take its toll on them. “You’ll forever be innocent, my children.”

Then, nothing. They fall into the deepest sleep they will ever have, among the dead leaves of the trees. And I swear, they have never been so beautiful.

title: Wendy

question: What does the story say about warnings?

answer: Adults warn children to go to sleep when they're told or else the Boogey Man will get them. They also say Santa won't bring them presents if they misbehave and people will rape and kill them if they get lost in the woods. The narrator's father always wanred them that their tendency to talk a lot would get them into trouble and that people would want to cut their tongue out and chop it to pieces.

question: What does the story say about magic?

answer: The narrator heard a story about a wonderous place with mermaids, pirates, and Red Indians. She was visited by a boy called Peter who came from a land that could only be reached by flying. He flew all around her room. He told her magical stories about the land where he lived with a group of children, Lost Children. There was a girl named Wendy who had magical properties that made the Lost Children love her and kept them young forever. Peter's stories also had a kind of magic, transporting the listener to places they'd never been before.

question: What does the story say about Captain Hook?


text:
PHONOTACTICS (from Ancient Greek “voice, sound” and “having to do with arranging”)[1] is a branch of phonology that deals with restrictions in a language on the permissible combinations of phonemes. Phonotactics defines permissible syllable structure, consonant clusters and vowel sequences by means of _phonotactic constraints_.

Phonotactic constraints are highly language-specific. For example, in Japanese, consonant clusters like do not occur. Similarly, the clusters and are not permitted at the beginning of a word in Modern English but are in German and Dutch (in which the latter appears as ) and were permitted in Old and Middle English. In contrast, in some Slavic languages and are used alongside vowels as syllable nuclei.

Syllables have the following internal segmental structure:

-   Onset (optional)
-   Rhyme (obligatory, comprises nucleus and coda):
    -   Nucleus (obligatory)
    -   Coda (optional)

Both onset and coda may be empty, forming a vowel-only syllable, or alternatively, the nucleus can be occupied by a syllabic consonant. Phonotactics is known to affect second language vocabulary acquisition.

English phonotactics

The English syllable (and word) _twelfths_ is divided into the onset , the nucleus and the coda ; thus, it can be described as CCVCCCC (C = consonant, V = vowel). On this basis it is possible to form rules for which representations of phoneme classes may fill the cluster. For instance, English allows at most three consonants in an onset, but among native words under standard accents (and excluding a few obscure loanwords such as _sphragistics_), phonemes in a three-consonantal onset are limited to the following scheme:[2]

    + stop + approximant:

    -   +  +

    :*_stream_

    -   +  + (not in most accents of American English)

    :*_stew_

    -   +  +

    :*_sputum_

    :*_sprawl_

    :*_splat_

    -   +  +

    :*_skew_

    :*_scream_

    :*_sclerosis_

    :*_squirrel_

This constraint can be observed in the pronunciation of the word _blue_: originally, the vowel of _blUE_ was identical to the vowel of _cUE_, approximately . In most dialects of English, shifted to . Theoretically, this would produce . The cluster , however, infringes the constraint for three-consonantal onsets in English. Therefore, the pronunciation has been reduced to by elision of the in what is known as yod-dropping.

Not all languages have this constraint; compare Spanish or French .

Constraints on English phonotactics include:[3]

-   All syllables have a nucleus
-   No geminate consonants
-   No onset
-   No in the syllable coda
-   No affricates or in complex onsets
-   The first consonant in a complex onset must be an obstruent (e.g. _STOP''; COMBINATIONS SUCH AS _*_'NTAT_ OR *_rk_'oop'', with a sonorant, are not allowed)
-   The second consonant in a complex onset must not be a voiced obstruent (e.g. _*ZDop_ does not occur)
-   If the first consonant in a complex onset is not , the second must be a liquid or a glide
-   Every subsequence contained within a sequence of consonants must obey all the relevant phonotactic rules (the substring principle rule)
-   No glides in syllable codas (excluding the s of diphthongs)
-   The second consonant in a complex coda must not be , , , or (compare _asthma_, typically pronounced or , but rarely )
-   If the second consonant in a complex coda is voiced, so is the first
-   An obstruent following or in a coda must be homorganic with the nasal
-   Two obstruents in the same coda must share voicing (compare _kiDS_ with _kiTS_ )

Sonority Sequencing Principle

Segments of a syllable are universally distributed following the Sonority Sequencing Principle (SSP), which states that, in any syllable, the nucleus has maximal sonority and that sonority decreases as you move away from the nucleus. Sonority is a measure of the amplitude of a speech sound. The particular ranking of each speech sound by sonority, called the sonority hierarchy, is language-specific, but, in its broad lines, hardly varies from a language to another,[4] which means all languages form their syllables in approximately the same way with regards to sonority.

To illustrate the SSP, the voiceless alveolar fricative is lower on the sonority hierarchy than the alveolar lateral approximant , so the combination is permitted in onsets and is permitted in codas, but is not allowed in onsets and is not allowed in codas. Hence _slips_ and _pulse_ are possible English words while _*lsips_ and _*pusl_ are not.

The SSP expresses a very strong cross-linguistic tendency, however, it does not account for the patterns of all complex syllable margins. It may be violated in two ways: the first occurs when two segments in a margin have the same sonority, which is known as a _sonority plateau_. Such margins are found in a few languages, including English, as in the words _sphinx_ and _fact_ (though note that _phsinx_ and _fatc_ both violate English phonotactics).

The second instance of violation of the SSP is when a peripheral segment of a margin has a higher sonority than a segment closer to the nucleus. These margins are known as reversals and occur in some languages including English (_steal_ , _bets_ ) or French (__ but originally , __ ).[5]

Notes and references

Notes

[1] ,

[2]

[3]

[4]

[5]

title: Phonotactics

question: What languages are mentioned in the article?

answer: Ancient Greek, Japanese, German, Dutch, Spanish, French and English. Multiple eras of English are mentioned, such as Old and Middle English. Varieties of English such as American English are mentioned. In addition, the group of all Slavic languages is mentioned.

question: What does phonotactics govern, and what rules is it governed by?

answer: Phonotactics has to do with rules for how consonant clusters can occur in the syllables of a word. It is governed by the sonority sequencing principle, a principle which relies on the sonority hierarchy for how "sonorous" a sound is to create language-specific rules for what sounds can be combined in which clusters.

question: How many consonants does English allow in a syllable onset?

answer: English allows at most three sounds, but they are limited to a single scheme. The article lists this scheme as [+sibilant] +stop +approximant, and gives examples of various words which have these qualities, such as stream or skew. For instance, in skew, the 's' forms the sibilant, the 'k' is the stop, and there is an invisible approximant in the form of a 'y' or yod right before the 'e.'

question: List some of the constraints on English phonotactics.

answer: All syllables must have a nucleus, and there can be no geminate consonants. There can be no affricates in complex consonants. Every subsequence within a string of consonants must obey all the relevant rules.


text:
The ruling class is responsible for keeping Trump in office and for every racist, reactionary thing he does. Trump is their representative as a class and the masses must hold the capitalists accountable for every crime Trump commits against the people.

[]In accordance with their role in capitalist society, most high government officials, elected or appointed, have gangster-like qualities. These officials spend much of their time conspiring with the wealthy on schemes for fleecing or otherwise attacking the masses of people. Unlike the mob, they must carry out their schemes within the framework of capitalist politics.

The mob is differentiated from the capitalist establishment in that they are not constrained to carry out their crimes under cover of legality. On the contrary, mob activities function outside the boundaries of bourgeois legality with the silent consent of the ruling class and its law enforcement agencies. Furthermore, mob crimes are on a vastly smaller scale than the crimes of the Pentagon, the CIA and the FBI.

That being said, among bourgeois politicians with gangster qualities, Donald Trump stands above the crowd. He is a pampered real estate billionaire who has functioned by ordering subordinates around, cheating contractors and stiffing workers. When he gets caught in a mistake, he mobilizes his army of lawyers to clean things up.

He won the presidency by using his television career as a springboard and taking advantage of the complete bankruptcy of the Democratic Party leadership. His campaign strategists also took advantage of the undemocratic institution of the Electoral College to eke out an electoral victory while losing the popular vote. (Hillary Clinton, of course, was also a corrupt, militaristic, Wall Street-owned enemy of the people.)

Presidency as the road to (more) riches

Trump has not only refused to divest from his billions in assets but also sought to earn even more from his status in the White House. He continues to urge foreign leaders and associates to stay at his Washington hotel. He has raised the fee for membership at the Mar-a-Lago golf club from $100,000 to $200,000. He has refused to release his tax returns in order to cover up his investments. He has deals in Turkey, Azerbaijan and other places around the globe. He has drawn up a tax plan from which he and his fellow real estate moguls will reap hundreds of millions of dollars.

His daughter, Ivanka Trump, has spread her brand all over the world and continues to do so. His son-in-law and chief adviser, Jared Kushner, keeps a real estate empire of his own. “Although Mr. Kushner resigned in January from his chief executive role at Kushner Companies,” reports the New York Times of April 26, “he remains the beneficiary of trusts that own the sprawling real estate business. The firm has taken part in roughly $7 billion in acquisitions over the last decade, many of them backed by foreign partners whose identities he will not reveal.”

Now this right-wing, authoritarian, blustering buffoon, who knows nothing of bourgeois statecraft and has no inclination to learn or to seek advice, is formally in charge of U.S. imperialism.

When Trump gets U.S. capitalism in trouble with U.S. imperialist allies in NATO, or threatens corporate interests by ranting about trade wars with the People’s Republic of China (population 1.3 billion), Canada and Mexico (U.S. big business’ two largest trade markets), or cannot get the Republican Congress to throw 24 million people off health care, or passes an anti-Muslim travel ban that provokes a world countermovement, or threatens to provoke a mass rebellion by saying he will deport 11 million undocumented workers, etc., etc., all his subordinates, flunkies and lawyers cannot help him out of the jam.

The ruling class is ambivalent about Trump — for good reason. On the one hand, they are salivating over his tax cut hand-out to billionaires and big corporations. They are ecstatic about his deregulation campaign allowing, among other things, the coal companies to poison the water table, the destruction of auto emissions standards to help the auto barons and the elimination of environmental regulations to aid big industry. And, of course, they love his tax breaks for the health insurance companies.

On the other hand, they are frustrated because they were hoping to get big tax breaks from the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, and they wanted to get their hands on $880 billion in cuts from Medicaid so the money could be used to fund tax breaks for the rich.

However, as much as the ruling class looks forward to profiting from Trump’s tax cuts and regulatory roll-backs, they do not want him to wreck their system. Thus, they have taken measures against him. In the first place, they have surrounded him with generals and Wall Street bankers in the White House and the Cabinet.

Trump is stonewalled on budget,
overruled on NAFTA

But most recently they have given him a beating in the budget negotiations. In the latest $1.2 trillion budget, Trump came away empty handed, despite all his bullying and bluster. In the negotiations Trump was overruled by the trusted congressional representatives of the ruling class on key issues:

• Domestic spending rose, instead of $18 billion in cuts demanded by Trump.

• Trump wanted the National Institutes of Health budget slashed by $1.2 billion. Instead it was increased by $2 billion.

• Trump asked for the Environmental Protection Agency budget to be slashed by 33 percent. Instead it was cut by 1 percent.

• Planned Parenthood will continue to be funded at current levels in states that do not vote to defund it.

• Trump asked for $30 billion in increased military spending. He got $12.5 billion and another $2.5 billion when he comes up with a plan to defeat the Islamic State group.

• No money for his beloved Border Wall; border security funds for new technology and repairs only; in fact, funds for “border security” were slashed and there was no money for a deportation force.

• Health care subsidies for the poor will remain (the money goes to the insurance companies).

”The Trump administration said it was no longer considering pulling out of the North American Free Trade Agreement, following a day of intense lobbying from business leaders and lawmakers who rallied to quash internal White House discussion of the prospect,” wrote the Wall Street Journal on April 27. Trump was forced to call the presidents of Mexico and Canada to tell them he had dropped the repeal. He then issued a tweet saying they had called him, instead of admitting that big business and agribusiness had forced him to back down.

Trump, China and the DPRK

Washington is in the midst of a crisis in Korea. It needs the cooperation of the south Korean regime to pursue its belligerent agenda, but instead, Trump picked this moment to tell the south Korean government that he wants to tear up the trade agreement with their country. It is a “bad agreement” negotiated by President Obama, according to Trump. Actually, it was negotiated under George W. Bush.

To make matters worse, Trump told the south Korean government that it would have to pay $1 billion for the Pentagon’s Terminal High Altitude Area Defense anti-missile system, despite an existing agreement by the U.S. to pay the cost of its deployment. National Security Adviser Gen. H.R. McMaster had to get on the phone with south Korean officials and reassure them the U.S. would pay. (WSJ, April 30)

Trump has an excessive view of his personal powers, to say the least. He claims to have a good relationship with President Xi Jinping of the People’s Republic of China. He claims that because of his phone calls with Xi, China is going to help the U.S. government out of its fix with the defiant Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

Trump has tried to sweet-talk China and tough-talk the DPRK. But the truth is that the PRC leadership, especially its military, the People’s Liberation Army, cannot ignore the overriding facts of the crisis on the Korean peninsula.

In a phone call on April 23, President Xi asked Trump to refrain from escalating tensions in the region, even if the DPRK announces testing of missiles or nuclear weapons. Xi made an appeal to Trump not to go tit-for-tat and to move in the direction of negotiations.

We certainly do not agree with Xi that the DPRK should be pressured to give up its struggle to build a nuclear deterrent. But, nevertheless, the head of the PRC asked Trump to de-escalate.

One day later, on April 24, in the dead of night, the U.S. deployed the THAAD anti-missile system in south Korea, which is equipped with high-powered radar that reaches beyond the DPRK into China and can be used to spy on the Chinese military. The PRC has already said this deployment would destabilize the strategic balance in the region in favor of U.S. imperialism.

The Chinese leadership and the PLA are fully aware of the threat. It cannot be a coincidence that on the same day as the deployment, China test-launched its first domestically made aircraft carrier. The ship is due to be completed in 2020.

“China has launched its first aircraft carrier built entirely on its own, in a demonstration of the growing technical sophistication of its defense industries and determination to safeguard its maritime territorial claims and crucial trade routes. The 50,000-ton carrier was towed from its dockyard just after 9 a.m. Wednesday.” (Washington Post, April 26)

But the unspoken message is that China has its own naval power, including a fully armed and functional Soviet-built carrier which it obtained from Ukraine and refurbished. China restrained its response to Trump and the Pentagon by not deploying its armed aircraft carrier and deploying the unfinished one instead. But the message was sent.

What is also clear from these events is that U.S. imperialism and the Pentagon are the enemies of both the DPRK and the PRC. The Pentagon has been out for revenge against the DPRK because this heroic socialist country has fearlessly stood up to Washington, as firmly now as it did during the 1950-53 Korean War, when it rebuffed the mighty U.S. war machine.

U.S. imperialism is also opposed to the People’s Republic of China because — despite the growth of capitalist millionaires and billionaires inside the socialist country — the Communist Party of China and the People’s Liberation Army still stand as guardians of state-owned enterprises and economic planning, which are hallmarks of socialism.

Washington realizes that while U.S. imperialism is mired in economic stagnation and military and political crises around the globe, China is steadily growing stronger, both economically and militarily. It is building influence in Asia, Africa and Latin America through infrastructure projects that help the former colonies overcome imperialist-imposed underdevelopment.

At a moment when U.S. imperialism is off balance at home and abroad, the capitalist ruling class needs to keep their gangster-real estate president in check, so he does not add to Washington’s instability.

Despite all the attempts by the established ruling class to distance themselves from Trump, the capitalist government is the executive committee of the ruling class. Karl Marx said it long ago, and it still holds true today.

There are many ways that the bosses could get rid of him, given all the illegality of his family-enriching regime. Instead, the ruling class is responsible for keeping Trump in office and for every racist, reactionary thing he does. Trump is their representative as a class, and the masses must hold the capitalists accountable for every crime he commits against the people.

question: What does the article's author think about the US?

answer: It can be assumed that the author sees both parties in US politics and the whole endeavor as a sham. According to the author, even Hillary Clinton is a corrupt capitalist ruler who's out to fleece the common people. Additionally, the author blames every shortcoming of President Trump on the ruling capitalists for allowing it and argues that everyone should do so. The US is portrayed as the enemy of the People's Republic of China and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea as the US Imperialists can't allow these brave socialists to exist.

question: What does the article say about war?

answer: The global conflict is framed as Imperialist Capitalists versus Brave Socialists. The author is on the side of socialists and seems to defend any military progress made by them while denigrating the ones made by the US, which is the face of the Imperial Capitalists in the article. As such, the author thinks that war is a legitimate method for victory.

question: What does the article say about the Soviet Socialist Republic of Russia?


text:
Mike Pompeo’s claim that the Iran’s Revolutionary Guard is carrying out “assassination operations in the heart of Europe” has bewildered security experts and Iranian exiles, who say they are not aware of any evidence for the allegation.

The new US secretary of state referred to the alleged assassinations in his first major speech on Monday, but devoted just a single line to it amid a litany of criticisms of Iranian behaviour, giving no further details.

“Today, the Iranian Quds Force conducts covert assassination operations in the heart of Europe,” Pompeo said, referring to the external operations arm of the Islamic revolutionary guards corps (IRGC).

Asked about Pompeo’s statement, the state department spokeswoman, Heather Nauert, said: “He has information and access to information that I do not. I am not able to comment on that in particular but I can tell the secretary has assured me that there is a basis for that point in his speech and he stands firmly behind that.”

US diplomats specialising in Iran were taken by surprise by Pompeo’s allegations.

There have been no recent killings in Europe officially attributed to the Iranian state. Iran’s last prime minister under the Shah, Shapour Bakhtiar, was assassinated in France in 1991, and four Iranian Kurdish dissidents were gunned down in a Greek restaurant called Mykonos in Berlin the following year.

The court in the Mykonos case issued an international arrest warrant in 1997 for Iran’s then intelligence minister, Hojjat al-Islam Ali Fallahian, but Tehran denied involvement.

The 2012 bombing of a bus carrying Israeli touristsin Burgas, Bulgaria, was blamed by the Bulgarian government on the Lebanese militia, Hezbollah, widely viewed as a Iranian client force.

Pompeo’s remarks, however, appeared to refer to current rather than past events and singled out the Quds force.

The most recent killing of an Iranian dissident took place in The Hague in November last year, when a gunman shot Ahmad Mola Nissi, the leader of an Iranian Arab separatist group in the oil-rich Khuzistan province.

The armed wing of Nissi’s movement had claimed responsibility for several attacks in Iran including the deaths of two IRGC guardsmen in January 2017.

Nissi’s daughter said in an interview last year that her father’s death was reminiscent of Iranian state killings in 1990s.

“Europe seems safe, but be careful. The conflict between Saudi Arabia and Iran is not confined to the Middle East. It is spreading into Europe,” Hawra Nissi told Reuters. “The family is open to all scenarios. Iran is a prime suspect, but not the only suspect.”

However, the Dutch investigation into the killing has not publicly blamed the IRGC. If Pompeo was referring to the Nissi murder, he was disclosing formerly classified information.

Iraj Mesdaghi, a Sweden-based Iranian political activist who spent a decade in jail in Iran from 1981 to 1991, questioned Pompeo’s claim.

“It’s unlikely to be true,” said Mesdaghi, a researcher on human rights abuses in Iran who has closely monitored IRGC activities in Europe.

“There is no evidence to back the claim that currently they are carrying out such operations in Europe.”

Mesdaghi said the IRGC or Quds Force have not been officially blamed for any assassinations in Europe since the Mykonos trial.

Mesdaghi said Iran is suspected to have carried out at least a couple more such attacks since Mykonos, such as the killing near Paris of the former cabinet member Reza Mazlouman. But he said such assassinations appeared to have stopped after the end of Mykonos trial in 1997.

“Europe made it clear after Mykonos that such assassinations are a red line for the continent,” he said.

Mesdaghi said no links have been established so far to tie Iran to Nissi’s death. “It would be very unusual for Iran to have carried out his killing given the relationship they have with Europe now and the fact that Nissi was not influential, nor important enough,” he said.

Shashank Joshi, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in London said: “Iran conducted a wave of assassinations across Europe in the 1990s, and the Iran-backed militant group Hizbullah is widely thought to have been responsible for the Burgas attack in 2012 as retaliation for Israeli targeting of Iranian nuclear scientists.”

But, as for the Nissi killing, Joshi said: “There is no public evidence to weigh these claims and European officials have been silent.”

question: Why were experts confused about Pompeo's statement?

answer: While tensions between Saudi Arabia and Iran have been spilling across the world via proxies, there is no evidence that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard is carrying out killings in Europe. If that information is true it was previously classified and Pompeo released it.


text:
Hot dog store thrives in vegetarian vortex

 Wednesday, Oct 9 1996

They say that every dog has its day. In this reputedly liberal college town, maybe that old chestnut should be amended to include hot dogs.

At Top Dog in Berkeley, just south of the woodsy University of California campus, meat and libertarian thought have ruled for three decades. Customers waiting for German franks and hot links on a bun can read the walls, which are covered with libertarian bumper stickers, yellowed newspaper articles urging the privatization of the postal service, and hand-lettered signs with statements like, "Beware the leader" and "There's no government like no government."

Top Dog's contrast with its surroundings could not be more noticeable. The Free Speech, civil rights, and anti-Vietnam War movements all thrived here. The city council at times appears to prefer debating Big Issues, condemning apartheid in South Africa and establishing sister-city relations with a Palestinian refugee camp. A policy tempest this past spring swirled around establishing sister-city status with Changde, in China's Hunan province, then immediately suspending it to protest Beijing's human rights record.

Accompanying Berkeley's tradition of protest has been a long-term swing away from meat-centered eating, inspired in part by books like Frances Moore Lappe's Diet for a Small Planet, which still is in print after 25 years. Some of the country's finest vegetarian cuisine can now be found here, and meat has largely been on the run.

But not at Top Dog, celebrating its 30th anniversary as a bastion of carnivorous delights. On Durant, just east of the jammed, patchouli-scented shopping area on Telegraph, proprietor Dick Riemann oversees the management of two Berkeley meateries and checks in with his wife, Irene, who runs a third store in Oakland.

Asked how he accounts for a libertarian hot-dog shop's success in a notoriously vegetarian town, Riemann, 60, says, "[Berkeley]'s openly socialistic, whether or not they admit to it or even know it, [but] they still get hungry. We're not out there clobbering them with points of view; many people just ignore stuff I put out."

After an early-'50s stint in the Air Force and a brief teaching career, the Yonkers, N.Y., native and a buddy from Syracuse decided that California was ready for East Coast hot dogs.

The two opened the first shop in October 1966. "We opened on a Saturday morning with the paint still kind of wet on the floor. Bingo, we were immediately just mobbed. What we had failed to recognize was that it was a home football game day. You talk about a trial by fire."

Top Dog's libertarian angle became prominent after Riemann bought out his partner a year and a half later. Before launching Top Dog, he had run unsuccessfully for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1965, garnering a respectable 9,300 votes on an anti-government platform. "Man's welfare equals natural resources plus human energy multiplied by tool efficiency," he wrote in that year's voter pamphlet. "Progress depends on investment-inspired profits. Down with government-initiated restrictions, destruction, and tyranny." And, far in advance of today's headlines, he wrote, "Up with free trade between freemen!" With his lower-key friend out of the picture, he was free to turn up the libertarian message.

Thirty years down the road, a sign inside Top Dog reads, "Politicians Unwelcome," and government regulation remains unpopular. As an example, Riemann points to a California Dept. of Fair Employment and Housing sheet headlined, "Watch Your Language!" The one-page missive warns employers against publishing "discriminatory and potentially discriminatory job specifications," listing examples of language to be avoided.

Some, like "draftsman" and "girl Friday," might strike many as justly banned, but the sheet also warns against innocuous terms like "student" and "honorable discharge." Riemann sees this as an affront to free speech, saying, "Where is George Orwell when we need him?"

The local health department also comes in for criticism (though Riemann does follow its rules). "I don't need a health department to tell me to handle food in an appropriate manner -- my customers would hand me my bank account on a bun if I didn't measure up to their standards. They can see what's going on," he says.

Indeed they can. A visitor to the Durant Top Dog could practically reach the grill, where at least five of the 10 available varieties of sausage seemed to be cooking at all times. The cook works right up against the counter, which features half a dozen stools for customers, all of whom are unashamed to celebrate being on top of the food chain. Most business seems to be take-out.

"I can probably trip over a minor [health] requirement here and there, but listen: You don't feed this many people for 30 years, you don't make a million dollars by poisoning people," Riemann says with some satisfaction -- if not without a little exaggeration.

He also objects to what he says are Berkeley's attempts to regulate his stores' hours -- they are open far into the night and have a late rush from bar closures -- and their customers' smoking habits. A reformed three-packs-a-day man, he nonetheless dislikes "dictating as to smoking on your own property -- where the hell do they get off telling me that I have to exclude smokers from here?" The government, he says, is not paying the rent and taxes on what is technically a private space. "It's not public property just because I cater to the public," he says.

Without any real competition locally, Riemann has tried franchising Top Dog, only to run into what he says are intractable regulations. "They've made franchising so onerous and laced with legality [in the United States]. ... I want to operate in and on free turf. I don't want to just stick my ass in the air and give the politicians more to aim at."

Looking overseas, he tried several years ago to franchise the Top Dog name in hyper-capitalistic Hong Kong, only to have a freak accident sink the business. A crowd celebrating New Year's Eve had gathered on the old cobblestone street just uphill from Top Dog Hong Kong, overlooking the city's financial district.

"I guess too many drinks were spilled and some of them started sliding downhill," he recalls, describing a horrifying scene of hundreds of revelers slipping down smooth, slimy cobblestones to their deaths. "Twenty-three people lost their lives in a matter of moments just being crushed and thrown into storefronts, fire hydrants, and what have you."

Afterward, Riemann says, "The older Chinese [had] this point of view that where there is violent death you should not go for seven weeks. So the bottom fell out of that market."

Riemann currently is looking at the Czech Republic -- with its stronger connection to sausages and hot dogs -- for his next franchising attempt. "It's the fastest-growing economy in Europe," he says, although "why they want to join the [European] common market leaves me cold."

In between answering questions, he takes phone orders for hot dogs and potato salad. Maintaining high quality is an issue for Riemann, who has hot dogs that are unavailable here trucked in from New York. "You'll never see a skinless hot dog at Top Dog," he says, launching into tube-steak thermodynamics. "A natural casing will permit smoke and the taste thereof to penetrate the membrane osmotically but not to leave again. And so a sausage with a natural casing will hold onto its taste better. But that is not the case with artificial casings, and skinless have no chance at all."

Riemann isn't fanatically pro-meat, however. "A few people have stepped up to say over the years, 'Why don't you have veggie dogs?' ... I'd love to have veggie dogs," he states, "but where is it? I've tried everything," he states. "The last one almost had the texture of chopped-up inner tube."

He has tried to contact the makers of veggie burgers -- some of which he finds tasty -- about making vegetarian sausages that he can use. "If you can make a [vegetarian] hamburger patty that is palatable, well what the hell, instead of a patty make a sausage form."

The commercial brands he has tried came up short. Practical considerations are critical, Riemann says. A veggie sausage "is going to stick and burn, it doesn't generate enough moisture from within, and, admittedly, fat. There has to be a certain amount of fat to fry a sausage."

The times just may be catching up to Top Dog. The Berkeley campus, once the scene of riots and the burning in effigy of then-governor Ronald Reagan, is noticeably more conservative in the '90s. Local legend Country Joe McDonald, famed for his anti-war ditty "I Feel Like I'm Fixin' to Die Rag," spearheaded the drive for a memorial to Berkeley's 22 Vietnam War casualties.

Perhaps meat will one day regain its place of honor at our tables, but until then Top Dog will continue to lurk on the political and gastronomic outskirts of Berkeley. Riemann is sure the market will provide.

"If you want a better future, stick to the Yellow Pages. There's your leadership. For all its flaws -- and I don't say that people are perfect any more than I think I'm perfect -- you get your best chance of getting what you want out of life with a viable marketplace.

question: What does the text say about mustard?

question: What does the text say about Top Dog?

answer: Top Dog is a hotdog shop located in Berkeley that sells East Coast hotdogs owned and operated by a 60-year old Air Force veteran, former teacher, and Yonkers, N.Y. native Dick Riemann. Top Dog is a bastion of carnivorous delights in the middle of a liberal college town that has moved away from eating meat. The shop first opened in October 1966 and has been fiercely libertarian ever since, with walls covered with bumper stickers, yellowed newspaper articles urging the privatization of the postal service, and signs like "Politicians Unwelcome". Top Dog only sells sausages with natural casing, some coming all the way from New York - no skinless hotdogs or sausages with artificial casings. The shop has another branch in Berkeley and a third store in Oakland. Reimann plans to open another Top Dog branch in the Czech Republic after a failed shop in Hong Kong.

question: What does the text say about Dick Riemann?

answer: Dick Reimann is the 60-year old proprietor of Top Dog. He was with the Air Force in the '50s and briefly went into teaching. Originally from Yonkers, New York, Reimann moved to California to sell East Coast hot dogs. Reimann is a libertarian who unsuccessfully ran for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1965 on an anti-government platform. Reimann runs two of the Top Dog shops in Berkeley, while his wife runs the third store in Oakland.

question: Summarize the events that happened in Hong Kong.

answer: A crowd celebrating New Year's Eve had gathered on the old cobblestone street overlooking the city's financial district, just uphill from Top Dog Hong Kong. Too many spilled drinks caused the cobblestones to become smooth and slimy. Hundreds of people started slipping downhill to their deaths, some crushed by the weight of the stampede, while others were thrown into storefronts and fire hydrants. Twenty-three people died in the freak accident, causing the shops along the area (including Top Dog) to remain closed for seven weeks as per Chinese custom.

question: What does the text say about Reimann changing his mind on including vegan options on the menu?

answer: Reimann isn't totally against adding veggie dogs to the menu. He says that plenty of people have come to him asking why he doesn't add vegetarian fare. However, Reimann says he tried every veggie dog available and they didn't taste good. Reimann finds some veggie burgers tasty and has tried to contact manufacturers about making veggie sausages, but the commercial brands he has tried came up short. In a practical and realistic sense, Reimann says that a veggie sausage doesn't have enough fat (if any at all) to generate moisture from within, which is necessary to fry a sausage well or else it's going to stick and burn.