text:
Franklin Foer is very concerned about big tech.

“The ascendant monopolies of today aspire to encompass all of existence,” warns Foer, 14-year editor of the New Republic, __ referring to the unbridled power of companies like Facebook, Apple, Google, and Amazon. In his new book, _World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech,_ Foer __ takes a dark look at internet monopolists and oligarchs.

“American democracy was built on richly deserved fear, an anxiety that power might pool in one institution at everyone else’s expense. The tech companies have no such fear,” Foer writes. “The more they can insinuate themselves into our lives the better. There is no limit.”

Just last week, Google courted controversy over the firing of a Google critic from a think tank heavily funded by the company. In June, Barry Lynn, an academic with New America, had persuasively written in favor of the European Union’s antitrust fine against Google, only to find himself ousted from New America several months later.

These kinds of situations, Foer warns, could get worse as big tech increasingly amasses power. Blame also falls on US politicians — including former President Barack Obama — who were and remain unwilling to restrain these corporations.

Foer is a well-respected writer, editor, and political commentator. His work has appeared in Slate and the Atlantic, where he currently writes as a national correspondent. I reached Foer by phone in chilly Kiev, where he was on assignment investigating Trump and his former campaign manager Paul Manafort's troubling ties to Vladimir Putin's regime. We talked about Google and the singularity, Facebook's “phoniness,” Julian Assange, and Obama's big-tech fail.

Alexander Bisley

“Like Donald Trump, Silicon Valley is part of the great American tradition of sham populism.” This is a strong comparison.

Franklin Foer

Before Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post, he spent a lot of time dumping on gatekeepers. He claimed that gatekeepers were the things that prevented people from getting what they really wanted and he postured as the enemy of elitism. And that’s probably true for the tech industry [as a whole]. Despite their millions, they kind of postured as protectors of the people. And you can see that in their faux-egalitarianism with the hoodie and the open office and all their other fairly ridiculous tropes. But really, what they were doing was they were destroying one set of gatekeepers in order to replace them with themselves.

Alexander Bisley

Facebook is a target you strike smartly in _World Without Mind_. “A steady stream of fabricated right-wing conspiracies that boosted Donald Trump’s candidacy. … It’s galling to watch Zuckerberg walk away from the catastrophic collapse of the news business and the degradation of American civic culture, because his site has played such a seminal role in both.” You also describe it as the opposite of a genuine public square, sending users in whatever direction they think will keep them addicted to the platform. Essentially, you’re arguing Facebook is phony?

Franklin Foer

Yeah, Facebook is phony. What makes it so dangerous is that its method of guiding users to information is invisible to most users.

One thing that pisses me off to no end is that Facebook has decided now that video is the thing that its users want. Well, it’s not really the thing that its users want, it’s the thing that they can sell the most expensive advertising off of. And so it’s decided to prioritize the production of video. But when Facebook makes a decision like that for itself, it’s really making a decision on behalf of the entire media industry because the entire industry is so thoroughly dependent on Facebook. So every media organization has now shifted resources into the production of video. While that video can be great, useful, and journalistically important, it’s also coming at the expense of words.

And the thing that Facebook is trying to replicate is binge-watching. What they’re saying is that they want to produce videos that thoroughly addict its users. This model is based on insane mountains of data. So basically, Facebook and Apple and all these companies are trying to thoroughly addict you with the aid of a fairly comprehensive map of your brain. So the likelihood that they can succeed is extremely high.

Once upon a time that prospect would horrify most people, but I think by this stage we’ve become so addicted and acclimated that it doesn’t really cause any alarm bells to ring. Which to me is just depressing to no end.

Alexander Bisley

Do you think Mark Zuckerberg has political aspirations?

Franklin Foer

It sure seems like it. He’s acting like a guy who’s preparing for a presidential campaign. At some point, I’d like to grab him by the lapels and say: “How much power do you really need? You’ve created a system where we’re already your lab rats and you’ve amassed more power in media than anyone in human history. And now you want to control politics as well?”

At some point in the last generation, we’ve just stopped worrying about the accumulation of power. We’ve begun to allow these massive conglomerations of power and asked very few questions of it. And so nobody really seemed to blink when Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post. And maybe if Mark Zuckerberg were to seriously run for president, then people would start to ask some of these searching questions.

Alexander Bisley

You build important criticisms of Google through your book, noting that Google has an oversize lobbying force in Washington. “Obama spent his presidency cheering on the tech companies, even pleading with the Europeans not to collect the taxes owed to them.” This seems like a significant Obama fail.

Franklin Foer

Google made a shrewd calculation, which was that they align themselves politically with the left, because they understood that the most criticism of the company could come from the left. They didn’t have to worry about the right-wing slapping them with regulation. And it worked! Right? Google has escaped the ire of the Federal Trade Commission. While the Europeans have raised all sorts of really important issues with Google, and they’ve applied scrutiny to its policies, we’ve essentially let them skate right on past. And sad to say, I think this was a failing of Obama’s. Now the Democratic Party, after Obama, has begun to turn in a very different sort of direction.

What was telling to me is that Cory Booker, last month, when questioned by Recode on a podcast, said that he thinks that we’re going to have to take the power of Google, Facebook, and Amazon much more seriously. And I think that the default position of the Democratic Party will increasingly be to apply antitrust scrutiny towards these companies.

Alexander Bisley

As you mention, the industrial tax avoidance by big tech is a massive democratic issue too. The EU has made a notable challenge to Apple in this regard. Do you think Apple is going to pay up?

Franklin Foer

No, because the nature of globalization was always that companies were going to transcend the borders of any given company. And that was always true of finance, where money was able to float in some kind of international ether. But I think it’s even more true with these companies, which don’t really need to be based anywhere because of the decentralized nature of the internet.

So much of their value rests in intellectual property, which can be transported anywhere. If there’s one thing that corporations excel at, it’s in evading taxation. Thus the proliferation of all these tax havens around the world and the armies of lawyers and accountants who make a fortune in aiding corporations as they navigate their way towards those tax havens.

It’s a collective action problem. The politicians of the world all need to be acting together to apply scrutiny to actually solve the problem. There’ll always be a Luxembourg, there’ll always be an Ireland or some other country that decides that is going to offer the most favorable tax conditions. So, maybe if the president of the United States decided to make it a big issue, I bet they could find a way to claw back some of that amount of money. And I’m going to die waiting for that to happen.

Alexander Bisley

“There’s technology that my generation knows how to use but doesn’t know what it really means,” Howard Dean told me recently. Given his Recode __ comments you just mentioned, does Cory Booker have more of an idea?

Franklin Foer

Cory Booker is interesting ’cause he’s figured himself a tech guy. He took a lot of money from Facebook when he was mayor of Newark; Facebook promised that it would help him to help reform his city’s schools. His stance is interesting.

Elizabeth Warren has been especially good on the tech companies. She delivered a speech about a year ago about the dangers of monopoly that singled out the tech companies. I don’t think it’s necessarily a generational problem. Although interestingly, Bernie Sanders has had exceedingly little to say about the problems of monopoly. He’s so focused on finance that he’s kind of missed a lot of the rest of the economy in his diagnosis.

The Democratic Party is desperate for its own version of populism to counteract Donald Trump. And by returning to monopoly, which is a venerable part of the American political populist tradition, they’re able to — in an evidence-based, empirically minded way — make an honest populist case.

Alexander Bisley

I liked your analysis of Peter Thiel as the chief representative of Silicon Valley’s view that monopoly is natural and desirable. Interestingly, he’s bought both property and citizenship in my home country New Zealand, which suggests he’s not quite as confident in the tech utopia outcomes in the US as he has sometimes boasted.

Franklin Foer

He invested in Donald Trump. He knew the crazy he was ushering into the United States and probably had the reasons to want to have an escape hatch better than most. I think he shows part of the sham that’s at the heart of Silicon Valley, which is that he masquerades as a libertarian while bankrolling and promoting a candidate who has both authoritarian tendencies and also is a crony capitalist who’s exploited the state throughout his career.

When it comes to Silicon Valley, [Thiel] pretends to celebrate the heroic individual and to celebrate competitive capitalism, yet he’s also helped bring about this world of monopoly, where competition becomes harder and harder.

You see that even Wall Street is starting to have an allergic reaction to Silicon Valley’s lock on the economy, because the nature of these monopolies is that it’s harder to find startups now. You look at the macroeconomic data, we haven’t experienced this boom in productivity that was promised. This great revolution in technology hasn’t unleashed a wave of innovation where people are toiling away in their basements and garages now. Facebook and Google and Apple managed to lock up the best brains, they managed to buy up the most promising competitors.

Alexander Bisley

Julian Assange seems a pungent symbol of tech dystopianism.

Franklin Foer

Right. He claimed to create this world of transparency and openness and ended up a lackey and stooge of Vladimir Putin. That’s a sad tale of how the ideals of tech and the ideals of this information revolution have come crashing down. What I try to argue in the book is that the ideals of tech are beautiful, but they end up becoming captured by really powerful entities. When they end up captured, they become the opposite of what was promised.

So instead of the idea of the network, which is a classic example of an ideal that grew out of the 1960s, which was a vision of the commune where we would all be interconnected and we would achieve a global consciousness — instead of that lyrical vision of interconnection, what we get is monopoly. And instead of the Julian Assange vision of transparency, what we get is fake news, propaganda, and manipulation.

Alexander Bisley

Is your proposal of a Data Protection Authority, designed to protect privacy as the government protects the environment, likely?

Franklin Foer

Not terribly likely, but the point of proposing a Data Protection Authority was to stir the pot. I wanted to make two points. One is that data is not owned by these companies. That we can allow them to exploit the data, but there have to be limits on their exploitation of it. One of the horrifying things about the United States is that there is no comprehensive law protecting the data of users. Effectively, I find that our existing antitrust regime is so inadequate in the face of the challenges that these companies pose.

And so one of the important things is to look holistically at the ways in which the issues of monopoly and the issues of surveillance are so deeply interrelated that these companies are able to maintain their monopolies because they have more data than their competitors. And in order to preserve those monopolies, they have to keep pushing surveillance.

When I proposed the idea of a Data Protection Agency, what I was suggesting is that we basically need a whole new regulatory regime if we’re ever gonna get serious about these companies. Now there’s a lot that you can do short of that, but I was trying to open the Overton window, if you will, to try to get regulators and to get policymakers and wonks to think more broadly about how we deal with this problem.

Alexander Bisley

Ray Kurzweil, Google’s director of engineering, is a Singularitarian, which describes the merging of artificial intelligence and human. But there’s some pushback on these ideas from others within Google.

Franklin Foer

Yes, Google is a massive company and it’s not like you have to belong to the singularity cult in order to work there. But the point that I included in the book is that it is an artificial intelligence company and the vision of artificial intelligence that it’s pursuing traces back to Larry Page, the founder of the company. It is stamped in the Singularitarian mold, that its ambitions for what it wants to do with artificial intelligence, and the way in which it wants to complete the merger of man and machine, are the things that make it a radical company.

The theological pursuit of artificial intelligence within the company means that there’s almost a religious fervor to its work. And some of it is simply idealistic, but I think it’s idealistic about how it can advance human evolution. It regards that task as so urgent and so important that it means that Google sometimes pays little heed to more trivial considerations like the law, like copyright, like ethical considerations. And Google just wants to burst forward at this feverish pace.

The correct response for society is to say: “Whoa, slow down. You’re monkeying around with things that have been essential to the very definition of humanity. And before we go tearing them down and erecting something new, let’s pause and think hard about what we’re doing.”

_Alexander Bisley’s_ _most recent interview is with_ _David Simon__._

------------------------------------------------------------------------

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question: What are the technology companies receiving criticism for?

answer: Creating a monopoly and having too much control.

question: Who encouraged the tech companies previously?

answer: Barack Obama and various figures on the left.

question: Who is being interviewed in the piece?

answer: Franklin Foer

question: Who is the interviewer in the piece?

answer: Alexander Bisley

question: Write a ~2 sentence summary.

answer: Alexander Bisley interviews Franklin Foer about the monopoly that tech companies have on the American economy. They discuss how technology promised to deliver a networked, egalitarian world, but in fact has delivered a totalitarian one.


split: train

text:
The alarm buzzed at exactly 6:04am, just as Chad had it set to, and grown accustomed to over the years.  He hit the snooze and rolled over in his bed and tried to go back to sleep for those precious 5 minutes.  He just started to doze off again when it hit him: THE TORRENT!  He jumped out of bed and rushed to his computer.  He scrolled through a couple dozen files he was seeding and saw the movie he had downloaded was complete.  He now had the Blu-Ray copy of the latest blockbuster that was still in theatres.  His classmates would easily pay ten dollars apiece for copies of this, and with an hour before he left for school, he could have four or five copies done burning by then.  He started the burner and then got ready for the day.

Chad grabbed the discs on the way out the door along with his cell phone and hopped in his car.  He pulled into the school lot a few minutes later and spotted his friends by the school entrance.  He ran over to them, and handed them a disc with the title of the movie crudely written in black Sharpie.  “Whoa!  Where did you find this one?  I have only been able to find the cam recordings so far,” Nathan said as he took the disc and slid it into his binder.

“Benefits of being in a private group.  We get shit before everyone else does.” Chad replied.  He was referring to the private torrent sharing site he had recently joined.  It was actually more of a forum, but membership was quid pro quo.  Chad had to bring something to the table that others wanted in order to maintain membership.

“Dude! For reals!  I have been wanting to see this now for ages!” Alex exclaimed.

“Ages? It’s only been out two weeks.  And we were going to see it tomorrow.” Nathan responded, shoving Alex.  The two of them turned to walk into school when Chad’s phone rang.  Chad pulled his phone out of his front pocket and looked at it.  He phone only showed “11” as the caller’s phone number.  He decided to answer it.

“Is this Chad Reedy?” Said the male voice on the other end.

“Yeah.” Replied Chad.

“Chad Reedy who uses the alias ‘pyr0n1x’ online?”  Chad’s eyes grew wide in surprise and quickly fumbled to hang up the phone.  Thoughts rushed over him like a flood: images of code, programs, scripts, networks, and websites.  What had he been caught doing?  He had been so careful!  As he stood there, watching his friends walk into the school, he heard a stampede of footsteps.  He turned around just in time to see a dozen armed men in fatigues grab him, throw him on the ground, handcuff him, and haul him away.  No one in the school saw it; his friends never even turned around.  It was over as quickly as it began.

title: Zero Day

question: Which movie had Chad downloaded?

answer: This information is not mentioned.

question: Does Chad make any money out of the burned copies?

answer: Chad hopes he could make money from the copies but before he can sell them he is caught and handcuffed by the men in the uniform.

question: Where did Chad get the torrent from?

answer: Chad gets the torrent from a private group. The website is more like a forum where Chad has to get something that others want in order to maintain the membership.

question: What did the man on the call want?

answer: It may be implied that the man on the call was someone belonging to the armed men and he wanted to check if they were about to catch the right person.

question: Write a ~7 sentence summary.

answer:
Chad jumps out of the bed remembering his torrent. He rushes to his computer to find the movie was downloaded, it was a Blu-Ray copy.

Chad quickly decides to burn a few discs to sell them at school.

He reaches school and gives his two friends their copies. Chad explains he got it from a private torrent-sharing website. Just then his phone rings, it's a man asking for him. The minute Chad replies he hears a stampede of footsteps coming towards him, they're armed men who grab him and handcuff him.


text:
The UNIFIED EXTENSIBLE FIRMWARE INTERFACE FORUM or UEFI FORUM is an alliance between several leading technology companies to modernize the booting process. The board of directors includes representatives from thirteen “Promoter” companies: AMD, American Megatrends, ARM, Apple, Dell, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, HP Inc., IBM, Insyde Software, Intel, Lenovo, Microsoft, and Phoenix Technologies.

Overview

The non-profit corporation has assumed responsibility for the management and promotion of the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) specification, a bootloader and runtime interface between platform firmware and an operating system. The original EFI specification was developed by Intel and was used as the starting point from which the UEFI version(s) were developed. The goal of the organization is to replace the aging PC BIOS.

In addition to the UEFI specification, the forum is responsible for a UEFI Platform Initialization (PI) specification, which addresses the firmware internal architecture as well as firmware-to-hardware interfaces. The forum also is responsible for Self-Certification Test suites, which defines conformance to the specifications that it defines.

In October 2013, the Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) assets have also been transferred into the forum.[1] The forum is responsible for the management and promotion of future ACPI specifications, which provides static tables at boot time and dynamic control methods as the primary runtime interfaces between the OS and system firmware for system configuration, power management and RAS (Reliability, Availability and Supportability) features. ACPI “Revision 5.0”[2] is used as the starting point from which future ACPI version(s) will be developed.

Published specifications

-   _UEFI Specification version 2.8_, published March, 2019
-   _UEFI Shell Specification version 2.2_, published January 26, 2016
-   _UEFI Platform Initialization Specification version 1.7_, published January, 2019
-   _UEFI Platform Initialization Distribution Packaging Specification version 1.1_, published January, 2016
-   _ACPI Specification version 6.3_, published January 2019

Obsolete specifications

-   _UEFI Specification version 2.0, 2.1, 2.2_
-   _UEFI Platform Initialization Specification version 1.0, 1.1_

[1]

[2]

title: Unified EFI Forum

question: Why was the Unified EFI Forum created?

answer: It was created to modernize the booting process and replace the aging PC BIOS.

question: How does the forum want to replace the PC BIOS?

answer: It seems they will do this by managing and promoting the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface specification, the UEFI Platform Initialization specification, and ACPI specifications. It's assumed this management and promotion will aid in replacing the PC BIOS.

question: Summarize the paragraph about October 2013.

answer: The ACPI assets were transferred into the forum, and the forum being responsible for management and promotion of the ACPI specifications.

question: What would happen if the forum hadn't been created?

answer: It could be assumed that modernizing the booting system would not happen as readily or efficiently.


text:
COAST AND FJORD CENTER () by the 30 kilometer (19 mi) long Randers Fjord in Denmark, Northern Europe, is a coastal nature dissemination and visitors center located in the village Voer by the southern bank of Randers Fjord, 15 kilometers from the fjords outlet into the Kattegat sea between Denmark and Sweden. The Kyst- og Fjordcenter is located in Norddjurs Municipality.

The Center is financed through public funding, donations from foundations, and user payment.[1]

External facilities located in the coastal town Grenå 45 kilometers from Voer, include Grenå Naturskole (Grenå Nature School) Facilities in the coastal resort village Fjellerup are also part of the center.[2]

The Coast and Fjord Center has got a varied range of equipment and gear. Including kajaks, canoes, small motor boats and a fast inflatable boat.[3]

The center includes conference facilities and different types of accommodation. Also primitive centered around campfires.[4] In Voer there are six four-room bedrooms, plus tepee like tents in different seizes with room for between 5 and 25 people sleeping in each tepee. There are also six shelters with room for 6-7 people in each shelter.[5]

[One of the Kyst- og Fjordcenters dinghies on Randers Fjord with a 4 HP, 4-stroke outboard engine.]

Satellite Stations

In summer the center has got satellite stations, manned with nature guides. They are located along the north and east coast of the peninsula Djursland, including in Fjellerup, Bønnerup and Grenå. For example, beachgoers that pass by in Fjellerup can borrow waders, under water binoculars and a fishing net, free of charge and without any formalities. At this station, called, Blue Flag Station Fjellerup, there are also saltwater aquariums, where visitors can release their catch of small fish and other coastal marine life for exhibition.[6]

Target Groups

The primary target groups are schools, businesses (such as teambuilding) and ordinary visitors. The later pay an entrance fee to the center in Voer. According to the Danish homepage, the center can customize stays and courses to individual groups. Sessions may vary in length from hours to days.[7]

Volunteers

Groups of volunteers organized in different guilds are also part of the center. One of the summer activities, that a volunteer guild, The Practitioners, is responsible for, is attending to gillnets in Randers Fjord with the use of small motor boats going out to tend the nets together with visitors. This includes catching fish, typically flounders, followed by outdoor preparation of the fish in different ways. Such as by roasting over open fire or by smoking, after which the participants can eat the prepared fish. In spring large schools of herring migrate up Randers Fjord past the center. This species is also part of the fishing and food preparing activities together with visitors.[8]

[1]

[2]

[3] [Kyst- og Fjordcentret, Homepage]

[4]

[5]

[6] [Visitdjursland.com]

[7]

[8]

title: Coast and Fjord Center

question: Explain the Coast and Fjord center's accommodations.

answer: It has different types, including bedrooms, tepee-like tents, and shelters.

question: How many satellite stations does the Coast and Fjord center have?

answer: The text doesn't explicitly say but at least three.

question: Name one of the sources listed in this text.

answer: Visitdjursland.com

question: What kind of fish is said to migrate up Randers Fjord in Spring?

answer: Herring.

question: Write a ~2 sentence summary.

answer: This text overviews details of the Coast and Fjord center in Voer, Denmark. The Coast and Fjord center is a coastal center that offers a variety of outdoor activities for visitors, including fishing, kayaking, and motor-boating.


text:
Guest post- Christopher NYC

My name is christopher I am 30yrs old and I live  in nyc. My addiction begun as a teenager like most of us,  it started mild and got really bad. Addiction destroyed my life and my family's. I got sober at 28 after a overdose, drugs was the worst relationship I've ever had it takes everything from you, it steals from you, pulls your family apart, destroys your Hopes and dreams and then finally it tried to kill me and it almost did. I thought I had just had bad luck for all those years I was using and that's just plain sick that I actually believed that.

 After my overdose I went away to treatment for 3 months in a great place called St.Christophers upstate Ny. I needed long term treatment to get my head right, I've done other ones in the past and they never worked, not because it couldn't but because I didn't want it. You really have to want it to stay clean. So I followed the suggestions when I left, I went to meetings and most important in my case I stood away from people, places and things. Sounds corny but that's a must.

 Today all my friends are in recovery and I have the best friendships that a man can ask for. No more negative friends. I'm over a year and a half clean and I feel great physically and most important mentally. My family trust me today, I have a relationship with a beautiful girl, my future looks bright. I have hopes and dreams and I actually live myself today. Getting sober was the best thing i've done. I'm grateful every morning I wake up. Anyone can do it. No more jails, institutions or death. It's your choice and you are strong enough. Thank you tracey for asking me to be on your blog. Have a blessed day all.

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Losing control of myself. As a survivor of sexual abuse, I have a rigid system in place for myself mentally and physically. I like to know where I am going at all times. I like the details, I like to know my escape routes. I like to know everything that might happen so I can work out contingencies in my mind. It is nearly impossible for me to relax unless I feel like I have gone through a complete mental list of the details. In the past month, for whatever reason, my brain decided to short circuit. The mental load of having to be in control of everything 24/7 was just too damn much. The end result of this was a series of panic attacks. The perceived threat in daily situations is everything and anything. I have come to the fork in the road where I am just too afraid of daily living to the point my mind said ZAP! This is not easy for me to both admit and to deal with. It is a lot to manage. The rigid system can only exist holding things together for so long before it starts to cra

question: What is the article about?

answer: Apparently, this if a compilation of contributions about various life experiences from people who have been through tough challenges in life.

question: Why do the writers talk about their past?

answer: To provide encouragement to readers -that hardship can be overcome, and for those going through similar situations, that there is always hope.

question: What are the stories in the article?

answer: The experiences of two former drug addicts and one survivor of sexual assault.

question: Who owns the blog that compiles these stories?

answer: Tracey

question: Write a ~3 sentence summary.

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text:
HARRISON TOWNSHIP is an inactive township in Scotland County, in the U.S. state of Missouri.[1]

Harrison Township was erected in 1844, taking its name from President William Henry Harrison.[2]

[1]

[2]

title: Harrison Township, Scotland County, Missouri

question: Where is the Harrison Township located?

answer: In Scotland County, Missouri

question: When was the Harrison Township established?

answer: in 1844

question: Where does the township take its name from?

answer: From President William Henry Harrison.

question: What is the population of Harrison Township?

answer: This information is not found in the article.

question: Write a ~1 sentence summary.

answer: Harrison Township is an inactive township in Scotland County within Missouri erected in 1844.


text:
     I live in a small house, a row home.  It’s not the “nicest” part of town, but I enjoy it.  I spend a lot of time in my room.  It’s in the basement, adjacent to the rear of the house, which lets out to a back alleyway.  I’ve got a nice little set-up, with a door leading into the remainder of the basement and a door leading outside.  I’ve also got a good sized screened window, with a sill, upon which the cats love to perch.  The room is pretty much finished, with carpet and trim, but there is a leak.  I sit at my desk and work and watch and listen to the people walking by.  It’s an entertaining mix.

     My nighttime routine includes brushing, going potty, getting naked, turning off the lights, and opening the curtain, in no particular order - save for concluding with a satisfying climb under the covers.  One evening, as I’m getting near that stage of slight dreaminess, where you nod in and out of consciousness, rain begins to fall.  I didn’t notice at first, but I began to listen as it grew a little louder.  Softly, yet suddenly, I hear a familiar sound; strange though, for a carriage to be anywhere around here.  It had approached so gracefully and quietly that I was not startled at its very rapid arrival.  It was parked right beside the back of the house, and I could see the horse’s head through the window, peering deep inside with his watery black right eye.  The horse itself was also black, as were the reigns, which looked somewhat tattered.

     As soon as I looked in the horse’s eye, a feeling of darkness fell over me, like a tide rolling in.  The eye was a giant black marble, a primordial ocean, violent and deep.  Shadows flickered out from the periphery, waving, darkening the already pitch black coat.  I knew to look away almost instantly, as I would have surely drown in the undertow.  I remained calm, checked my breath, and looked around the eye.  The horse stepped forward and revealed the man holding the reigns, an old man, seemingly crippled, or bent.  It wasn’t really clear what was wrong with him, he just seemed sickly, weak.  He was dressed in black, as was the entire carriage.  The thing looked like it was about to fall apart, and it reeked of evil, of torture and destruction.  The man gave a menacing grin.

     I had had about enough.  I got up, walked to the end of my bed, and picked up my shotgun.  My eyes had well-adjusted to the dim light, and I opened my drawer and pulled out a round of buckshot.  Loading the gun, I looked at the driver.  He shifted nervously, frowning slightly.  I checked the cartridge, snapped the barrel together and aimed at the picture of hell that was now standing before me, aiming back with two barrels of his own.  The barrels shined silver, butted with a deep red colored stock and an intricately decorated firing assembly.  The hammer and chamber glinted in the ambient night light.

     I knew I could not fail as the conviction of love filled me; I cocked my gun and fired into his chest as he was cocking his.  He laughed, and a new wave of putrid hatred swept over me, tossing my sense of self like a tree in a hurricane.  With a scowl and a sharp look from his grey piercing eyes, he informed me that 47 men had already tried tha- but before he could finish, the might of a thousand suns overtook me.  In an instant I tore that gun from his hands and aimed it at his head.  I fired without hesitation, just as he began to pause his sentence.  He dropped, and my ears rang.

     The horse seemed uncomfortable, but did not startle at the shots.  I stepped over the man’s limp body toward the door.  I knew there was still evil lurking, Satan had only been wounded.  I swung the door open and stepped into the cool night air, steady drizzle, new moon.  A foul odor wafted about, like molten rock and bodies.  The horse watched as I moved around him to the door of the carriage.  Without opening it I could see through the open window to the occupants, two small children, a boy and a girl.  Their eyes were black.  Dressed like puritanical dolls and skin like porcelain, they sat holding hands, gazing with a wicked innocence.  The soft creases around their eyes betrayed the sick pleasure they derived from doing very bad things.  They pleaded with me in childish whimpers, begged my mercy for their foulness, cried softly at the impending punishment.  I said nothing as I raised the heavy barrels and lined up the children, being sure to hit both at vital points with the spread.  Lightning struck and thunder clapped as I fired over the teary-eyed pleas of the demons, hit both in the throat: one in the esophagus, one in the artery.  They vanished, evaporated as the force that created them was felled by its own tool.  The carriage, the horse, and the man had all gone out in the blink of an eye.  The rain had dissipated, a slight mist hung in the air.  I looked down at my empty hands, shook my head, and walked back in my room.  Inside, I checked the room for damage, but there was none.  The shotgun was still smoking when I removed the empty shell, put it at the end of the bed, and went to sleep.

title: The Confrontation

question: Why does the man focus so much on the horse?

answer: Unclear.

question: Write a ~2 sentence summary.

answer: The narrator sees a menacing man on a horse. They stare each other down but eventually the narrator is able to kill the man.


text:
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1.  Toronto & GTA
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Jul 30, 2018  •   •  5 minute read

[Toronto Police officer Det.-Const. Melissa Elaschuk poses for a photo at Toronto Police Traffic Services in Toronto, Ont. on Thursday July 26, 2018. Elaschuk was a childhood friend of Nicole Morin who disappeared 33 years ago. Ernest Doroszuk/Toronto Sun/Postmedia]
Toronto Police officer Det.-Const. Melissa Elaschuk poses for a photo at Toronto Police Traffic Services in Toronto, Ont. on Thursday July 26, 2018. Elaschuk was a childhood friend of Nicole Morin who disappeared 33 years ago. Ernest Doroszuk/Toronto Sun/Postmedia Photo by Ernest Doroszuk /Ernest Doroszuk/Toronto Sun/Postmedia

When Toronto Police officer Melissa Elaschuk realized her daughter was turning eight on July 28 — two days shy of when her own childhood best friend Nicole Morin vanished in 1985 at the same age — her heart skipped a beat.

“It’s an investigation the Toronto Police have never given up on,” said Det.-Const. Elaschuk, a Caledon mom of four. “It’s emotional.”

Monday marks the 33rd anniversary of Morin’s disappearance from her apartment at 627 The West Mall in Etobicoke, where the little brunette-haired girl lived with her mom. At 11:30 a.m. on July 30, Morin, 8, left the penthouse condo, heading towards the lobby to meet her friend Jennifer to go swimming and was never seen again. There has been debate whether she was last seen in the hallway or entering the elevator.

Over the past three decades, despite numerous exhaustive searches and tips pouring in from the public, Nicole was never found. Her file is now labelled a cold case, but Elaschuk wants to remind people that it’s in no way closed.

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[Detective Sergeant Madelaine Tretter of 22 Division, with the help of Crime Stoppers release a re-enactment video of the ongoing investigation into the 1985 abduction of Nicole Morin. on Wednesday, July 30, 2014 at a press conference in Toronto. It happened 29 years ago. Veronica Henri/Toronto Sun/QMI Agency]
Detective Sergeant Madelaine Tretter of 22 Division, with the help of Crime Stoppers release a re-enactment video of the ongoing investigation into the 1985 abduction of Nicole Morin. on Wednesday, July 30, 2014 at a press conference in Toronto. (Veronica Henri/Toronto Sun files) Photo by Veronica Henri /Veronica Henri/Toronto Sun/QMI Agency
“I am hopeful that we will eventually get an answer. I’m hoping that we will find out where her body is or we will find out she has been alive this whole time and is living an alternate life somewhere. I do believe it is possible. I do hold out hope there will be answers in my lifetime, for sure,” she said.

Elaschuk, now 40, lived in the same apartment building as Morin, where Morin’s mother would often babysit her brother as she ran a daycare out of her unit. Elaschuk and Morin would walk to school together every day and they’d often go swimming.

Elaschuk was out of the country on a family vacation at the time of Morin’s disappearance.

[**TorSun Photo** Sixteen years ago a little girl vanished after leaving her mother's apartment to meet a playmate in the lobby of the West Mall building in Toronto's Etobicoke area. Nicole Morin, who was eight years old at the time, never met her friend and has not been seen since. Original Filename was girl.jpg Processed: Tuesday, July 24, 2001 2:00:07 PM ORG XMIT: tor-nicole-07250]
A little girl vanished after leaving her mother’s apartment to meet a playmate in the lobby of the West Mall building in Toronto’s Etobicoke area. Nicole Morin, who was eight years old at the time, never met her friend and has not been seen since. (Toronto Sun files) SunMedia
“At that age, I was seven at the time, I don’t think I fully understood or could appreciate the gravity of what had occurred. I think I was afraid, a little confused as to why it had happened. I think I questioned why I couldn’t continue to play with her,” she said.

“We were all very shocked by it. She was like the sister I never had.”

Elaschuk describes Morin as bright and bubbly. She looked up to her, as Morin was a year older and a grade ahead in school.

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“With the passage of time, there are certain things that would stick out. Like when we’d hang out on the grates on the side of the building, we used to stand on top of them, because talking there would affect the sound of our voices and that memory is very vivid for me,” she recalled.

“We just used to love hearing how it modulated the sound of our voices.”

Elaschuk said while she had wanted to become a police officer, regardless of Morin’s cold case, joining Toronto Police would enable her to find out some more information about the investigation or that she might be able to assist with helping out leads. She has not been involved directly with the case because she personally knew Morin, but monitors anything new that comes out of it.

“I try to go by what we know, she was taken and we really don’t know much more than that. I really don’t like to speculate,” she maintains. “Which is what’s so heartbreaking about all of it — is not having any answers.”

[Toronto Police officer Det.-Const. Melissa Elaschuk during an interview at Toronto Police Traffic Services in Toronto, Ont. on Thursday July 26, 2018. Elaschuk was a childhood friend of Nicole Morin who disappeared 33 years ago. Ernest Doroszuk/Toronto Sun/Postmedia]
Toronto Police officer Det.-Const. Melissa Elaschuk during an interview at Toronto Police Traffic Services in Toronto, Ont. on Thursday July 26, 2018. Elaschuk was a childhood friend of Nicole Morin who disappeared 33 years ago. (Ernest Doroszuk/Toronto Sun) Photo by Ernest Doroszuk /Ernest Doroszuk/Toronto Sun/Postmedia
Homicide Cold Case Det.-Sgt. Stacey Gallant said the Morin file remains an open missing persons case.

In 2014, acting on a tip, police investigated a rural area in Barrie, and last year, a search in Springwater Township by the Ontario Provincial Police for leads, but both turned up fruitless.

“We continue to get tips come in on a regular basis in this case, every couple of months,” he said.

  REMEMBER a missing little girl missing (Nicole Morin) and b thankful there remains commitment to finding her alive. pic.twitter.com/LrT8Jr5XOf

  — B Borg Ret. DetSgt (@torontocoldcase) May 23, 2014

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“To date, we’ve not advanced anywhere further in the case. We don’t dismiss tips on their own without having some investigation going into the tip and the history behind the history they provide.”

Gallant said this case has become prolific over time because it’s the epitome of “every parent’s worst fear.”

“A young girl that was going to go swimming and basically, vanished,” he said. “It really gets to people. It puts a real life belief that you have to watch your children at all times. I think it’s a hard thing for anyone to swallow and that there’s no resolution to this.”

[Police officers from Metro Toronto Police and the OPP search a wooded area in Springwater Township, Ont., on Wednesday, Oct. 8, 2014. Dozens of police officers aided by two cadaver dogs scoured a rural area north of Toronto on Wednesday in hopes of solving the abiding mystery of just what happened to a girl last seen in her bathing suit on her way to go swimming with a friend 29 years ago. Police said the search for any sign of Nicole Morin - including possibly her body - is a follow-up to a tip that came after they released a video re-enactment in July of her disappearance as an eight year old. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Peter Redman]
Police officers from Metro Toronto Police and the OPP search a wooded area in Springwater Township, Ont., on Wednesday, Oct. 8, 2014. Dozens of police officers aided by two cadaver dogs scoured a rural area north of Toronto on Wednesday in hopes of solving the abiding mystery of just what happened to a girl last seen in her bathing suit on her way to go swimming with a friend. Police said the search for any sign of Nicole Morin – including possibly her body – is a follow-up to a tip that came after they released a video re-enactment in July of her disappearance as an eight year old. Photo by Peter Redman /THE CANADIAN PRESS
An officer at 22 Division still keeps in touch with the family when new tips come in, Gallant added.

Morin’s mother, Jeannette, died of a heart attack in 2007, while the missing girl’s father, Art, still lives in the same Etobicoke area when she disappeared. When reached by the _Sun_earlier this month, he said after three decades, he’s stopped giving media interviews. He’ll never stop searching, but drudging it up repeatedly is too hard on his heart.

“It’s been a long time, it’s had a lot of publicity, and the police still have Nicole’s case upfront,” he said. “If anything comes up, then it will be time to do something. It’s had enough.”

[Art Morin holds his daughter Nicole Morin in this file photo. Today marks the 20th anniversary of her disappearance.]
Art Morin holds his daughter Nicole Morin in this file photo. Photo by David Lucas /SunMediaArchive
Elaschuk said she hasn’t been in touch with him, because she feels like by doing so, it’s “re-opening a wound.”

“Every time I go back to those memories with her, it does make me sad,” she said. “It makes me sad that we weren’t able to continue our friendship and see each other’s lives now. I feel horribly for her family, her mom that’s passed away and her dad is still here and doesn’t have the answers he deserves.”

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The Traffic Services officer said she wants the public to keep in mind to call in with  information, no matter how minuscule or whether they already think police may have heard it. People tend to talk about things, she said. They talk to their family, their friends, especially when they’re facing their own mortality.

[The poster of Nicole Morin put out by police offering a reward to anybody who can give any information on her whereabouts.]
The poster of Nicole Morin put out by police offering a reward to anybody who can give any information on her whereabouts. n.a.
“You never know what tiny piece of that puzzle could connect all the other pieces together,” she said.

“I’m hoping that the person or persons responsible for her disappearance has reached a point in their life where they want to come clean or they want to tell somebody what happened and find the courage to come forward to us.”

Anyone with information can call Homicide Squad at 416-808-7400 or Crime Stoppers at 416-222-TIPS.

“It provides closure for us and provides hope for other families,” she said.

“We do hear stories about how people are found, after months, after years. So that possibility always exists and part of our humanity is about having faith and hope that one day, we will get answers.”

jyuen@postmedia.com

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question: Who was the friend who disappeared?

answer: Police officer Det.-Const. Melissa Elaschuk's childhood friend named Nicole Morin disappeared in 1985.

question: Where was the friend last seen?

answer: The girl was seen leaving the penthouse condo heading towards the lobby to meet her friend Jennifer to go swimming. There has been a debate on whether she was last seen in the hallway or entering the elevator.

question: Who was Nicole living with?

answer: Nicole was living with her mother.

question: Is Nicole's mom still alive?

answer: No, Nicole's mom died of a heart attack in 2007.

question: Write a ~9 sentence summary.

answer:
Toronto Police officer, Melissa Elaschuk, marks the 33rd anniversary of her childhood friend Nicole Morin's disappearance. Morin vanished on 30th July 1985. She left her penthouse condo and was heading towards the lobby to go swimming and was never seen again. It is a debate whether she was last seen in the hallway or entering the elevator.

Our the past decade, numerous exhaustive searches have been conducted but there is nothing to be found.

Morin's mother passed away from a heart attack in 2007. Her father still lives in the same area she disappeared from.

Homicide cold case Sgt. Stacey Gallant says the case has become prolific because it is the nightmare of every parent.


text:
What do the world’s most popular virtual assistants — Google Assistant, Amazon’s Alexa, Microsoft’s Cortana, and Apple’s Siri — have in common? They perform much of their speech recognition in the cloud, where their natural language models take advantage of powerful servers with nearly limitless processing power. It’s amenable for the most part — typically, processing happens in milliseconds — but poses an obvious problem for users who find themselves without an internet connection.

Luckily, the Alexa Machine Learning team at Amazon recently made headway in bringing voice recognition models offline. They’ve developed navigation, temperature control, and music playback algorithms that can be performed locally, on-device.

The results of their research (“Statistical Model Compression for Small-Footprint Natural Language Understanding“) will be presented at this year’s Interspeech machine learning conference in Hyderabad, India.

It wasn’t easy. As the researchers explained, natural language processing models tend to have significant memory footprints. And the third-party apps that extend Alexa’s functionality — skills — are loaded on-demand, only when needed; storing them in memory adds significant latency to voice recognition.

“Alexa’s natural-language-understanding systems … use several different types of machine-learning (ML) models, but they all share some common traits,” wrote Grant Strimel, a lead author, in the blog post. “One is that they learn to extract ‘features’ — or strings of text with particular predictive value — from input utterances … Another common trait is that each feature has a set of associated ‘weights,’ which determine how large a role it should play in different types of computation. The need to store multiple weights for millions of features is what makes ML models so memory intensive.”

Eventually, they settled on a two-part solution: parameter quantization and perfect feature hashing.

Quantization — the process of converting a continuous range of values into a finite range of discrete values — is a conventional technique in algorithmic model compression. Here, the researchers divvied up the weights into 256 intervals, which allowed them to represent every weight in the model with a single byte of data. They rounded low weights to zero so that they could be discarded.

The researchers’ second technique leveraged hash functions — functions that, as Strimel wrote, “takes arbitrary inputs and scrambles them up … in such a way that the outputs (1) are of fixed size and (2) bear no predictable relationship to the inputs.” For example, if the output size was 16 bits with 65,536 possible hash values, a value of 1 might map to “Weezer,” while a value of 50 might correspond to “Elton John.”

The problem with hash functions, though, is that they tend to result in collisions_,_ or related values (e.g., “Hank Williams, Jr.” and “Hank Williams”) that don’t map to the same coarse location in the list of hashes. The metadata required to distinguish between the values’ weights often requires more space in memory than the data it’s tagging.

To account for collisions, the team used a technique called perfect hashing, which maps a specific number of data items to the same number of memory slots.

“[T]he system can simply hash a string of characters and pull up the corresponding weights — no metadata required,” Strimel wrote.

In the end, the team said, quantization and hash functions resulted in a 14-fold reduction in memory usage compared to the online voice recognition models. And impressively, it didn’t affect accuracy — the offline algorithms performed “almost as well” as the baseline models, with error increases of less than 1 percent.

“We observed the methods sacrifice minimally in terms of model evaluation time and predictive performance for the substantial compression gains observed,” they wrote. “We aim to reduce … memory footprint to enable local voice-assistants and decrease latency of [natural language processing] models in the cloud.”

question: Can virtual assistants perform offline?

answer: It appears Amazon's Alexa made headway with that development.

question: Where do the machine learning models perform their speech?

answer: In the cloud.

question: What is the disadvantage of the Hash function?

answer: They tend to collide.

question: Can the offline models perform as adequately as the baseline models?

answer: Not entirely.

question: Write a ~3 sentence summary.

answer: The world's most popular virtual assistants such as Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cortana, Amazon's Alexa perform their speech recognition in the cloud through powerful servers and almost limitless processing power. Because the natural-language understanding models and third-party apps which extend Alexa's functionality share similar traits, they opted to resolve this by quantization and hash functions. Ultimately, the options proved a viable solution and didn't affect accuracy - meaning that the offline models performed almost as well as the baseline models with minimal errors.


text:
The District of Columbia retains the top spot for fastest wireline internet in the country at 28.1 megabits per second, according to content delivery network Akamai’s latest State of the Internet Report. The fastest state is Delaware with an average speed of 25.2 Mbps. D.C. and Delaware are the only two places in the nation that currently surpass the FCC’s 25 Mbps broadband threshold.

At 18.7 Mbps, nationwide average internet speeds are up 22 percent year over year. The U.S. ranks 10th in wireline internet speeds and 28th in mobile internet speeds.

All the states posted substantial year-over-year gains in internet speed as U.S telecoms roll out faster networks. Ohio’s average speed increased the most at 74 percent while Utah saw the least growth at 4.9 percent.

[States with the fastest internet]
New Mexico and Idaho round off the bottom of the list, with average internet connection speed of 12.4 Mbps and 12.0 Mbps, respectively. That’s less than half the speed of the fastest state on the list, Delaware.

[States with the slowest internet speeds]
Here’s the complete list of U.S. average internet speeds:

[U.S. states’ internet speed]

------------------------------------------------------------------------

_This article originally appeared on Recode.net._

------------------------------------------------------------------------

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question: What is the speed of the wireline Internet in the District of Columbia?

answer: The Internet speed in the District of Columbia is 28.1 megabits per second.

question: What state has the fastest Internet speed?

answer: Delaware has the fastest speed, with an average of 25.2 megabits per second.

question: Where does the US rank globally in Internet speed?

answer: The US ranks 10th in wireline Internet speeds.

question: What states have the slowest Internet speed?

answer: New Mexico and Idaho have the slowest Internet speeds, clocking in at 12.4 and 12.0 megabits per second, respectively.

question: Write a ~2 sentence summary.

answer: This article gives information about the states with the fastest and slowest Internet speeds in the US. The District of Columbia has the fastest speeds, at 28.1 megabits per second, and Delaware is the state with the fastest speed, at 25.2 megabits.


text:
 Allow cookies deposit to access content.

Singles are under more pressure than ever

Fakeness affects all our interactions, including online dating. The rise of “easy to use” dating apps has transformed romance into a game: Catch them all, or play again. Egos are boosted by likes and winks, while profiles are displayed like products in a supermarket. We’re used to binge consumption; now too many of us are binge dating.
No wonder _57% of single women ﬁnd modern dating exhausting*_!
_“58% of single feel there are a lot of people who lie about their intentions or about who they are”_*
_“37% feel there are a lot of people who don’t want to commit”*_

Match is determined to continue to ﬁght for real connections

Many singles are looking for more than a swipe on a picture and “you got a Match” notifications. They’re looking for a deeper connection than just a “hello”.

_“34% of singles want to engage in meaningful relationship”*_

AT MATCH, WE WANT TO HELP SINGLES SHOW THEIR TRUE PERSONALITIES. Not simply through data like their height, hair colour or age, or the boxes they tick. We encourage singles to describe themselves in their own words, showing specific details of their personality. And we know not everyone is a writer! Our coach Lara will give you all the help you need to let your true self shine through your words.

_“70% engage into conversation even if don’t like picture”*_

At Match, we don’t believe singles should tolerate the disrespectful comments and conversations that are far too common online. Instead, we want to promote high quality, friendly connections. Women are empowered to reward singles who show respectful behaviour thanks to the Match Badge, so their profiles rise up the rankings. People with the Match Badge receive, on average, _15% more messages_**.

Like our singles, Match isn’t about playing games. That’s why we created our real-life events where everyone is single, and our hosts make it easy to break the ice. We organize events around music, food, coaching, charity and much more – there’s something for everyone. What’s more, they work: +/- 40% _of attendees tell us they met someone they want to stay in touch with at our Events_ ***

Looking for someone special takes more than swiping random profiles. Singles searching for love need the right tools. Match members can select the people they really want to meet, based on detailed criteria they’ve set up themselves.

But our most important asset is COMMITTED SINGLES READY FOR REAL STORIES.
Match isn’t a free dating service. Our subscription is a commitment in itself. We believe our singles are truly committed to – and involved in – their search for love. They know why they are here.

We know this isn’t news. But we also know that it isn’t fake. And it’s the only way online dating can do its job: helping people meet people to start real stories.

MATCH. START SOMETHING REAL.

*Source LoveConnection Nov. 2018 – Research conducted by Kantar TNS on the behalf of Meetic in Europe among singles aged 18 to 65 yo.

** Internal Data –Meetic Europe 2018

*** Internal survey Jan-December 2018 _37%_ _of_ _participants at Match Events_ _answered yes to“I met someone I want to stay in touch with”_

Related Articles

question: What are some characteristic of Match that make it unique?

answer: Some characteristics of Match that make it unique are that it is determined to continue to fight for real connections. It has created real-life events where everyone is single and the hosts make it easy to break the ice. Their most important asset is committed singles that are ready for real stories.

question: Would Tinder consider Match their competition?


text:
We were enjoying the cool night air. I lit a cigarette and took a quick harsh drag. My friend sat next me, quiet. He wouldn’t admit his thoughts, but I could see them on his face. I sat with the cigarette between fingers, slowly burning down, quickly giving me a buzz, relieving my stress. He was waiting for a text. I was waiting for anything. That night I wore shorts and a sweater: comfortably chilled. I can’t remember, but it is possible that we had been drinking.

From the vantage point of my friend’s porch we could see them approach her building and stand just outside her door. She was anxious. He, as always, was calm and cool.

I turned to my friend, “Do you see this?” I took a drag, eager for what happened next.

They stood there. Talking. His jeans loose, hems on the concrete, striped hoody, and backwards flat-billed baseball cap, all synonymous with his profile. She wore a skirt, netted leggings underneath, large boots coming half way up her calf, a low cut shirt and a half buttoned up purple cardigan sweater, her sunset red hair kept neat under a black beret. These two friends stood talking in the dark of night; thinking that they were alone in this moment. That for a few minutes the world was theirs. I watched on, ignorant to my friend’s presence and text chimes. In my mind I saw and heard their conversation. She was thanking him for being a good guy to walk her home. He said it was nothing and that he was happy to do it; “No problem.” One of them checked their phone, probably he did. He motioned to go. She asked him to wait. She stepped in for a hug and embraced him. He wasn’t reluctant, he didn’t stop to think about the implications, and he did not consider his girlfriend hundreds of miles away. He didn’t think about how much his girlfriend meant to him, and he didn’t consider how much this girl holding him right now wanted to be more than friends. He held her tight in his arms. And he released first. She held a second longer, understanding that now, given the circumstances, and his obligations, that he could not be with her. She turned to unlock her door; she pulled it open and stood there, holding it. One hand on the door, the other hanging at her side. They said goodbye, he turned and walked away. But she didn’t turn in. She stood there.

I was fixated on her. I wanted to walk over to her and tell her I’m sorry it wouldn’t work out with him. I wanted to run after him and tell him what he’s doing to her. But I couldn’t. I watched her. This image is cast in my mind like stone. The yellow lights on the wall above her emitting their soft enveloping glow. The way she held most of her weight on one foot. Her head cocked slightly to one side and inclined towards his fleeting presence. And my friend reclined on next to me. Cigarette smoke drifting before my face in the breeze.

To me this moment only lasted about fifteen seconds. She watched after him. I saw in her body language how she registered the ramifications of their conversation and interactions. Her body slouched. Her hand fell off the door letting it swing in, stopping against her shoulder. She loosened her firm stance and stepped one foot back to turn, but she couldn’t yet. She had to watch him a few seconds longer; she had to hope that he’d changed; that maybe he did feel the same way for her. Hoped that maybe he’d turn back for her. I could only imagine how long this felt for her, the emotions she felt as he went farther away, without looking back: the impact of his words tonight, the realizations within that hug, the disappointment and despondency of that brief moment. She finally turned in—sad, lonely, defeated. I felt sorry for her. I felt guilty that I had intruded on this moment; that I watched something that was supposed to be private and within only her world.

I finished my cigarette, crushed the butt, and threw it away.

title: A Goodbye (ws please)

question: What is the narrator's friend thinking about?

answer: It seems he is thinking about the text he is expecting.

question: Can the narrator hear the two friends' conversation?

answer: He cannot but he imagines their conversation.

question: How does the narrator feel about the couple?

answer: He feels sorry for the girl.

question: What is the relationship between the boy and the girl?

answer: It seems she is in love with him but he is not interested in her.

question: Write a ~8 sentence summary.

answer: The narrator is with his friend and sees the couple approaching the girl's house. The narrator cannot hear their conversation and assumes what they are talking about. She thanks him for walking her home. He moves to leave, but she asks him to wait and hugs him. She wants to be more than friends, but he has a girlfriend who he loves. Eventually, they say goodbye, and he leaves. The girl is standing and watching after him. The narrator feels sorry for the girl.


text:
[NTT DATA Services SAPA Digital Transformation blog]

Digital Transformation: Leaders vs. Laggards

No doubt about it. In today’s digital universe the stakes are high. Leading digital companies generate better gross margins, better earnings and better net income than organizations in the bottom quarter of digital adopters. According to a study reported in Harvard Business School., digital leaders post a three-year average gross margin of 55%, compared to just 37% for digital laggards.

Bain & Company recently surveyed 1,000 companies around the world to gauge their level of digital readiness. According to the study, the payoff from digital transformation can be impressively high. Revenues at digital leaders grew more than twice as fast as those at companies slower with digital adoption. Profit followed a similar pattern—leaders were nearly twice as likely as followers to increase profit. These findings leave little doubt that digital transformation can yield significant results. Regrettably, the study also revealed a high rate of failure for digital projects, with lack of sufficient funding playing a significant role.

According to Gartner's 2017 CEO survey, 42% of CEOs are now taking a digital-first approach to business change or taking digital to the core of their enterprise model. As reported by CIO, IDC estimates that all 40% of all technology spending will go toward digital transformations, with enterprises spending in excess of $2 trillion in 2019.

So, where are digital investments being made? According to IDC, the following three areas are expected to receive the most funding in 2018:

-   $662 billion will go toward technologies that support new or expanded operating models as organizations seek to make their operations more effective and responsive by leveraging digitally connected products/services, assets, people, and trading partners.
-   $326 billion will be spent on technologies supporting omni-experience innovations that transform how customers, partners, employees, and things communicate with each other and the products and services created to meet unique and individualized demand.
-   $240 billion will be spent on information as organizations strive to obtain and leverage information for competitive advantage through better decisions, optimized operations, and new products and services.

Show me the money!

Sustained innovation is by definition, a journey. Corporations must clearly articulate their digital strategy and provide support, both in investment dollars and in human capital, to execute on it. Talk is cheap. Until business leaders take the time to develop a thoughtful strategy backed with meaningful funding, the chances of digital projects bearing fruit will remained limited.

At NTT DATA, we see funding digital transformation as a three-fold challenge: establishing initial funding, planning for perennial or annual funding, and developing and applying principles for administering the digital fund now and moving forward.

Initial funding

Almost every company we deal with has some seed funding available, but it typically isn’t enough to create a complete initial fund. In these situations, NTT DATA works closely with our clients on drawing additional funding from the following five areas:

-   Freeing funds through automation
-   Migrating to an on-demand cloud and reducing total on-premise spend
-   Revisiting reshoring / outsourcing options
-   Eliminating anachronistic/non-critical services better handled by new, digital processes now possible via SAP Leonardo
-   Cost and efficiency savings through enterprise application portfolio rationalization and migrating to S/4HANA

Perennial/Annual funding:

Regardless of where the funding comes from, closely tracking outcomes and reinvesting positive gains is absolutely vital to keeping your digital program on track and moving forward.

On this score, we’ve worked with clients to keep funding for digital projects flowing by reinvesting gains from completed projects -- such as better-than-planned-for savings, labor savings, maintenance savings and a percentage of new revenue.

By approaching transformation in a strategic, incremental manner and ‘paying forward’ measurable gains, confidence grows as positive outcomes mount up and your organizations’ transformation progress never stalls.

5 guiding principles for digital fund allocation:

Once funding is established, clients must decide how best to manage spending and prioritize projects over the short- and long-term. On this score, NTT DATA advises following five guiding principles.

-   Assess and prioritize digital initiatives strictly based on business needs.
-   Adhere to a ‘No-code / Lo-code’ policy – avoid making customizations that make future changes difficult.
-   Ensure easy maintenance by embracing COTS, PaaS, SaaS.
-   Maintain a customer-first/enterprise-wide perspective – all digital initiatives must improve the customer experience and, as a rule, will extend across organizational boundaries.
-   Adopt a cloud-first strategy – put as much as you can as fast as you can in the cloud.

NTT DATA’s comprehensive services portfolio, provides our clients a tailored digital journey, combining industry experience across industry leading platforms and software technologies. Our experience is deep, or methodology is proven and for our SAP clients, the meaningful and measurable results speak for themselves:

-   Yaskawa America Inc. gives employees and suppliers real-time insight into a global supply chain with an innovative portal that connects silos, automates workflows and speeds development by 50%.
-   Greene, Tweed & Co. improves quality by synchronizing inspection data across separate production systems and automating data collection.

Providing the full spectrum of digital services, from strategic guidance, business case development to full scale implementations, NTT DATA is a preferred digital transformation partner.

Contact NTT DATA today learn more how our experts can help you fund your digital program and identify high-value initiatives that deliver outcomes that matter.

POST DATE: 7/9/2018

question: What does the text say about success in digital transformation?

answer: Success in digital transformation can be achieved by approaching transformation in a strategic, incremental manner and "paying forward" measurable gains". This will allow confidence to grow and cause an impressively high payoff with revenue and profit. NTT DATA suggests that they could create success as they are a preferred digital transformation partner.

question: What does the text say about managing spending?

answer: Spending can be managed in both short term and long term ways. The text suggests that digital initiatives should be assessed and prioritized based on business needs. Ensuring easy maintenance, avoiding making customizations that could make future changes difficult, maintaining a customer-first/enterprise-wide perspective, and adopting a cloud-first strategy can all help you to manage spending.

question: Summarize Bain and Company's survey.

answer: Bain and Company surveyed 1000 companies around the world to measure their level of digital readiness. They found that payoff from digital transformation can be impressively high. On the other hand, they found that there was a high rate of failure for digital projects with lack of sufficient funding playing a big role.

question: What does the text have to say about the founders of NTT DATA?


text:
Before you read, I would just like to let it be known that this is a little short story I made for a homework assignment in my English class. Basically, the background of the story is my teacher played us a song in class, and we had to write down how it made us feel, etc. and we had to take the song and kind of make a story for said song to be used as a background. The mood and tone I got from listening to the song is shown in the story. I really enjoyed writing this and hope you enjoy reading this even more!

     It was quite the night on the 23rd of December in the year of 2006. The Christmas lights glimmered in the blankets of white December night snow. You could feel the tension in the air from kids in dire need of Christmas to be here already. Happiness was a smoke that filled the air and contaminated everyone. Laughing from the mouths of children could be heard all around the block, as Christmas trees began to be erected and decorated in the cozy, warm, homes of people. The Christmas lights of one particular small, white, house of a soon to be family of three were flickered on, as Jon had just arrived home from an amazing day at work. He shut the red door behind him and looked at the beautiful scenery outside. The smoke of happiness contaminated the tall, lean figure with short brown hair and green eyes, as he stroked his icy brown-haired beard, smiling at the thought of December 25th, because not only was it Christmas, a time of family and friends, but also the birth of his first son, with his wife of two years, Jane.
    "Jane? I'm home! Where are you?" Called Jon, in search of his wife. Oh where could she be, he thought. Wait, could it be...? Swiftly Jon moved through the house, in search of his wife. "Jane?" He called again, as he went into the kitchen. The answering machine was flashing red - someone had called and left a message. Jon realized. He realized it. His wife was in the hospital, in labor, with his soon to be baby son, and he wasn't even there. She had to be. Jon took a few deep breaths, as nervousness began to flow throughout his body. His finger had come into contact with the inbox button. The sound of his wife's voice was heard through the answering machine.
     "J-Jon, i-it's your wife, J-Jane. I'm at the hospital right now, I went into labor this afternoon. O-our f-family of three won't be here t-tonight. Please come h-here with me w-when you are h-home from w-work. I l-love you-u." Sobs and sobs were repeatedly heard through the answering machine, as the message ended, a beep buzzed through the answering machine, and the message had ended.
     The mind of Jon had become a numb mind. Numb to the message on the answering machine from his wife. Numb to his thoughts to himself. Numb to the laughs of children all around the block as Christmas trees had been erected and decorated, and the Star of the tree was being put up. Numb to the world. Jon walked around trying to figure out what just happened. His finger had come into contact with  the inbox button. The message replayed. Words spoken from his wife filled his mind once again, as his cheeks began to flush, and tears started to create a rainforest in his beard. Jon walked around his house, thinking about life, his wife, and the future. The family of three. The family of three. The family of three was not meant to be. Jon slumped out of the kitchen, head down, tears running down his face. Sob. Jon walked out to the living room, where stood their Christmas tree, and Christmas presents. Some of which were supposed to be for the additional third in that family of three. Jon stared at the presents. A good, long stare. A stare of despair. Jon picked up one of the Christmas presents meant for that additional third, as he wiped tears from his eyes and beard. It read: To Jimmy. From Santa. In it, the box contained a pair of baby shoes. Baby shoes that were never to be worn.

title: Christmas Time

question: Describe how the season plays into the story line.

answer: The seasonal affect is one of comfort, togetherness, and family time. This is an important contrast to the despair Jon will soon feel when he learns there's been an issue with his partner and the unborn child. Jon then goes on to feel numb.

question: What are some reasons Jon might be reacting so quickly to the message Jane has left?

answer: While it is scary that Jane had to go to the hospital, it's unclear what exactly happened, or the level of danger she and/or the baby are facing. Jon might be terrified and numb because she left a message on an actual home answering machine-meaning they do not have cell phone technology, so he can't quickly check in on her or with anyone who might be with her. Maybe the couple knew there would be complications arising in the pregnancy and/or labor so this does not bode well, given the surprising nature of the timing, and the tone of Jane's voice.

question: What message does the text seem to want a reader to take away from this?

answer: It seems the reader is being taken on somewhat of a rollercoaster ride; though the passage is relatively short, it begins with all the details and trimmings of a warm family holiday setting, only to quickly turn into a situation of fear and despair. It seems something the author wants the reader to take away is how quickly things can change. Another feeling one might derive from the text is the discomfort of the contrast between the setting and Jon's inner world.

question: Why does Jon so quickly assume that Jane's being at the hospital is bad news?


text:
Everything was shutting down. The orange glow of the candles and torches flickered and faded. She noticed this. Eric, she called, as I descended into blackness. Eric, she warned, as footsteps approached. I could no longer heed her. I felt overwhelmingly intoxicated, unable to stand, unable to willfully coordinate useful movement.

Her final call was half my name and half violence. Our pursuers had reached us, hushing her with a blow to the windpipe and dragging her away. As I drew in dusty, labored breath and began weeping, pleading with them, they attacked me as well. My ribs, neck and head received a flurry of strikes and a sharp shock to the back told me I had been stabbed. A new taste graced my tongue and spilled to the floor. I sputtered and my breathing seized.

The candle's glow sharpened with a new scream. The last offering from the poor girl. It echoed off cold walls, in my head, my wound, and invaded my blood. Our assailants had left their dagger in me. I painfully stretched and writhed, grasping the blade and freeing it from between my ribs. It was ancient, inscribed with a language unknown to myself on a shining, yet darker than gunmetal blade.

I attempted to stand. Control was coming back, but rising without leaning into the walls would have been impossible. I held the blade tightly and resolved to follow her last cry down the corridor. I shuffled weakly forward, feeling the grit and blood combine with fearful sweat on the dagger's handle. I stumbled through darkness and wondered how far in the ground we - I - was. I couldn't even hear the subways rumble past anymore. The bustle of the thriving city above was mute, seemingly as terrified as I was in the dark. I descended more steps, expecting the flames of hell to greet my soles.

She was forcibly laid on an altar. They did not attempt to bind her. They simply held her, in the interest of time, and completed their sacrament. A pyre's flames began to consume what remained and unleashed an awful stench to go with the ghastly sight. The followers awaited my arrival and tended the flame.

I couldn't pay her any mind. They watched as I staggered into the light. They were not surprised. I was expected. The only words offered were, "It is done," barely audible over the roar of the flame. They offered no fight. It seemed as if they had offered themselves as sacrifices in return for the girl. There was no resistance as the blade I now held sunk deep into their hearts.

I worked quickly, invigorated by this new feeling, the pleasure of murderous revenge. Yet, as they lay writhing on the floor, choking on their final breaths, I felt unsatisfied. And then, panicked.
What had I done? I hadn't known these people, and I hadn't known why they had brought the girl and I down there. I hadn't even known the girl whom I took revenge for. But she had known me, somehow. Fearing repercussion, I felt the need to cover my tracks. The crackling fire, blazing high to the ceiling, offered me a solution. I slowly, laboriously dragged each corpse, and some, soon-to-be corpses, toward the fire, singeing myself as I pushed them into the heat.

In my excitement I forgot about my wound. Something, adrenaline, perhaps? Something covered the pain, despite the massive rush of blood seeping out. With my shirt I attempted to stop it and turned to face the stairs. I began the long journey skyward, accompanied by my footsteps and new memories only.

After what seemed to be hours, I arrived where we began our captive decent. I pushed hard on the metal grate overhead, noticing I had finally stopped leaking blood. Maybe I had run out, I weakly joked to myself. The grate swung open, crashing hard. The sound of the city greeted my ears again, and artificial light, fluorescent, neon, lit the alleyway like daylight. I struggled to lift and close the grate with another slam. I began walking quickly, paranoid for witnesses. I still bore the blade thoughtlessly.

"You look dead," commented a homeless man, crumpled against the wall, arms protecting his drink. I could hardly speak, and became more worried, looking for more viewers. I limped to my apartment as fast as my legs would allow.

I felt like I had conquered easier mountains. The last bit of stairs leading to my apartment tested me more than anything else that day. Several times I collapsed weakly, desiring nothing but rest. Luckily, the common areas of my building were vacant. I wondered how late it at night it had become, how long our ordeal lasted. I shuffled the last few steps to the door, unlocked it, entered and slammed it shut quickly, locking every available lock. I crawled through the kitchen, to the bathroom, leaning on the sink. I turned it on, drinking messily from a cupped hand, before searching for gauze. Too tired to care, I stuffed it in any wound I could muster, and burned the last of my energy crawling to the bed. I slammed face down on my pillow and closed my eyes, instantly asleep.

I found no relief from the terror of yesterday in my unconscious. Events played and replayed, reliving the attack, the pain of the stab, the fear as the girl was dragged away forever. I felt once again the warm fire, the cold stares of my victims. They seemed to stare at me even in death, and beyond the flames' consumption. I saw myself again, from a different point of view, as I stumbled wildly from the alley to my apartment, more ragged and animalistic than I remembered. Like a madman, I saw myself entering the apartment, drinking, bandaging myself, and crashing into my bed. I saw myself lay there for what seemed like hours, even recognizing the light of the sun begin to creep into the windows. I see myself become startled as the sunlight revealed a viewer, seated neatly on an old folding chair.
I "inspect" closely.

In disbelief, I conclude it is the girl.

title: "You look dead." [Go ahead, critique me without mercy! I'll thank you for it.]

question: What does the setting of this story imply?

answer: The setting of this story implies and portrays how intense the alter was and the actions that had taken place there. The altar is like the safe space for the violence that the main character had to face.

question: What does the main character's consciousness be telling her in the story?

answer: The main character's consciousness is telling her to avoid the girl because only bad things will come from being around her.


text:
PATRICK BURNER (born 11 April 1996) is a French professional footballer who plays as full-back for Ligue 1 club Nîmes Olympique.[1]

Club career

Early career

Born in Fort-de-France in 1996, Burner started his football career with OGC Nice's youth teams.[2]

Nice

In 2016, Burner was called up to the OGC Nice first team. On 8 December 2016, the 6th matchday of 2016–17 UEFA Europa League, he made his senior team debut against FC Krasnodar at the Allianz Riviera, playing the full match.[3] On 21 December 2016, Burner made his Ligue 1 debut in a draw against Bordeaux and played the full 90 minutes.[4]

Nîmes

On 25 September 2020, Burner signed a four-year contract with Nîmes Olympique.[5]

Career statistics

Club

[6]

  Club           Season    League       Coupe de France   Coupe de la Ligue   Continental   Total
  -------------- --------- ------------ ----------------- ------------------- ------------- ------- ------ ------- ------ ------- --- ---
  Division       Apps      Goals        Apps              Goals               Apps          Goals
  Nice           2016–17   Ligue 1      4                 0                   1             0
  2017–18        Ligue 1   13           0                 1                   0             2
  2018–19        Ligue 1   18           0                 1                   0             2
  2019–20        Ligue 1   20           1                 1                   0             1
  2020–21        Ligue 1   1            0                 0                   0             —
  Total          56        1            4                 0                   6             0
  Nice B         2017–18   National 2   1                 0                   0             0
  Nîmes          2020–21   Ligue 1      0                 0                   0             0
  Career total   57        1            4                 0                   6             0

  : Appearances and goals by club, season and competition

[1]

[2]

[3]

[4]

[5]

[6]

title: Patrick Burner

question: Where did Patrick Burner start his football career?

answer: Patrick Burner started his football career with OGC Nice's youth teams.

question: When did Patrick Burner start playing football in the OGC Nice first team?

answer: Patrick Burner started playing football in the OGC Nice first team in 2016.

question: Is Patrick Burner married?

answer: It is not stated.

question: Where does Burner play now?

answer: Burner plays now in Nîmes Olympique.

question: Write a ~3 sentence summary.

answer: Patrick Burner is a French professional footballer who plays a full-back for Ligue 1 club Nîmes Olympique. He started his football career with OGC Nice's youth teams and started playing football in the OGC Nice first team in 2016. In 2020, he signed a four-year contract with Nîmes Olympique.


text:
is a former Japanese football player.

Playing career

Arai entered professional football with Albirex Niigata after graduating from Rissho University in 2001 but was unable to hold on to the first team place although he played 20 league games for Albirex Niigata in his first season.[1] He was on loan to Albirex Niigata FC (Singapore) in 2004 and in 2006 he secured a permanent move to Singapore Armed Forces FC.

He is also the second Japanese player, after his Singapore Armed Forces FC teammate Masahiro Fukasawa, to play in the AFC Champions League for a non-Japanese club. On November 2009, Kenji joined SC Goa.[2] He returned to Singapore and joined Sengkang Punggol FC on 2010 and subsequently Home United FC in 2011.

Club statistics

  Club performance   League                      Cup             League Cup     Total
  ------------------ --------------------------- --------------- -------------- ------- ------ ------- ------ ------- ------ -------
  Season             Club                        League          Apps           Goals
  Japan              League                      Emperor's Cup   J.League Cup   Total
  2001               Albirex Niigata             J2 League       20             0
  2002               2                           0               1              0
  2003               4                           0               1              0
  Singapore          League                      Singapore Cup   League Cup     Total
  2004               Albirex Niigata Singapore   S. League       26             3
  2005               25                          3               3              0
  2006               Singapore Armed Forces      S. League       28             3
  2007               30                          4               6              1
  2008               31                          4               5              1
  2009
  Country            Japan                       26              0              4
  Singapore          140                         20              18             2
  Total              166                         20              22             2

Honours

Club

ALBIREX NIIGATA

-   J2 League: 2003

SINGAPORE ARMED FORCES

-   S.League: 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009
-   Singapore Cup: 2007, 2008

Videos

-   youtube.com

[1]

[2] http://www.indianfootball.com/en/news/articleId/2145

title: Kenji Arai

question: Where did Kenji Arai's career begin?

answer: He joined Albirex Niigata in 2001.

question: What club did Arai sign with in 2006?

answer: Arai signed with Singapore Armed Forced FC.

question: What team did Arai sign with in 2011?

answer: He signed with Home United FC.

question: How many goals did Arai score in his career?

answer: He has scored 2 goals.

question: Write a ~2 sentence summary.

answer: Kenji Arai is a former Japanese football player. He has played at clubs in Japan and Singapore.


text:
Today’s client is tomorrow’s reference, is the client for life philosophy that places Jennie among the top in client satisfaction. Jennie brings an incredible level of client-centric energy to each engagement.

Jennie lives, works and raises three children in the community she serves. Following college at the University of Kansas, where she studied business and played in KUs woman’s soccer program, Jennie discovered a need to keep her first child clean and safe when traveling to grocery stores, restaurants, and shopping venues. After seeing the need, Jennie founded her first company that designed and manufactured a high-end children’s accessory line for use in high chairs, strollers, grocery carts, and car seats. Jennie’s new business quickly grew as her line was picked up by several boutiques along with major retailers including Neiman Marcus. Soon after her company was stable, Jennie discovered that she also had a flair for interior design with friends and family continually asking her for design opinions and assistance. Interior design quickly spilled over to real estate and after helping several friends design and locate new homes, Jennie realized she had a passion for real estate. Her entrepreneurial spirit and client service philosophy have well-positioned Jennie for a long career of helping clients find the best real estate solution for their needs.

Since the second grade, Jennie has resided in the North Dallas area. When not working for her clients Jennie spends time with her kids relaxing or attending any number of outdoor or school-related activities. Jennie will tell you that she treats each client like a good friend, and she takes great pride in knowing that many of her current friends started as clients.

question: How many children does Jennie have?

answer: Jennie has three children.

question: Where did Jennie go to college?

answer: Jennie went to college at the University of Kansas.

question: What did Jennie's first company do?

answer: Jennie's first company manufactured high-end children's accessories.

question: How long has Jennie lived in the North Dallas area?

answer: Jennie has lived in the North Dallas area since the second grade.

question: Write a ~2 sentence summary.

answer: Jennie is a real estate agent and entrepreneur that places a high emphasis on client interaction. Jennie talks about her early life and qualifications, as well as her hobbies outside of work.


text:
[Responsive Website Design]

See what an Effective Website can do for Your Business

Your business has to be found online and you have to be able to quickly make an impression on your audience once they find you to gain their conversion. To do this you need a trusted partner to help your business succeed online. VisionFriendly.com has the right team to make your business stand out from other professional websites.

VisionFriendly.com has been building successful websites for over 20 years for businesses in the Chicago area and all over the country. And we still have many of our first customers from 20 years ago. We specialize on all areas of website design and custom web development and effective digital marketing. We create all of our custom web designs with a talented in-house team of marketers, designers and programmers, to get our websites to work exactly the way you need them to.

Stunning Website Designs Focused on Your Message

Our team of web design and marketing experts located in Naperville Illinois is a truly specialize in house team using the latest technology to create eye-catching, professional websites that will keep your customers coming back for more. Add to this a full suite of website marketing services, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), paid search marketing all tied to proven expert marketing advice to convert your traffic into customer. It doesn't get any better than this!

question: What is VisionFriendly.com

answer: It is a business that has been building successful websites for business in the Chicago area and all over the country for over 20 years at the time of this document.

question: What can an effective website do for your business, according to the document?

answer: The document says it can quickly make an impression on its audience that will gain their conversion.

question: What does the website's team of web design and marketing experts specialize in?

answer: It seems they specialize in using the latest technology to create eye-catching, professional websites that will keep customers coming back for more.

question: What is SEO?

answer: The document only says it is Search Engine Optimization, and doesn't explain further.

question: Write a ~1 sentence summary.

answer: This document is an advertisement for VisionFriendly.com, a business that helps build websites for businesses.