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Kym Grime has joined SKILSKIN as director of payee services. Grime is a certified public accountant and has more than 20 years of experience in finance, accounting and audits. Grime was an audit manager with Ernst & Young for sixyears.

Steele Fitzloff has passed the Washington Landscape Architect Registration Examination to become a licensed landscape architect. Fitzloff is with Bernardo|Wills Architects where he has been a landscape designer since2013.

Cheri Belsaas and Tim Mead have joined the Spokane office of Hill International

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Have an item for Business Beat? Send it to businessbeat@spokesman.com.

Kym Grime has joined SKILSKIN as director of payee services. Grime is a certified public accountant and has more than 20 years of experience in finance, accounting and audits. Grime was an audit manager with Ernst & Young for sixyears.

Steele Fitzloff has passed the Washington Landscape Architect Registration Examination to become a licensed landscape architect. Fitzloff is with Bernardo|Wills Architects where he has been a landscape designer since2013.

Cheri Belsaas and Tim Mead have joined the Spokane office of Hill International. Belsaas is a project controls coordinator with more than 25 years of experience in the construction industry. Mead has more than 30 years of experience in the construction industry and was previously a senior project manager at McCarthy Construction, where he worked on three hospitalprojects.

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Business beat - Sun, 20 Jul 2014 PST

By Cris Tiller

Reporter-Herald Sports Writer

Crystal Landscape coach Bruce Kelly looks thoughtfully into the distance at a now empty baseball field and struggles to come up with any words.

How can he possibly explain what his team accomplished over the past month? He's tried, but words alone hardly seem to do it justice.

His focus drifts downward.

"The word is goosebumps, look," he says pointing to the hair on his arm still standing on end despite the roasting 90 degree heat. "These guys just ... I'm speechless. I don't even know what to say. After a while you run out of stuff to say about how amazing these guys came together."

Thompson Valley's top summer team stormed through the Legion B District Tournament a tournament they wouldn't even have been in if for not being the host capping off a tremendous month of baseball with a 9-3 victory over Fort Morgan in the championship game Saturday at Constantz Field.

The Eagles did it exactly the way they've been doing it ever since a road trip to Nebraska changed everything with team baseball. And it started on the bump.

Josh Lewis gave his team a gem from the mound tossing five innings, surrendering just two hits and giving up one run (that wasn't even earned) to set the table for his team.

The signs of a near-flawless outing were evident from pre-game warm-ups, the key Lewis said to any day on the mound.

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Thompson Valley baseball takes a spot at the table

Philip Johnson's influence on architecture during the 20th century is impossible to overstate. He brought Ludwig Mies van der Rohe into the American consciousness, he became one of the most famous practitioners of the International Style (then angered and confused critics with an abrupt mid-career shift into Post-Modernism), and he created one of the best-known private homes in the last 100 years. His brand of glass-and-steel architectureand his bespectacled appearanceare familiar to anyone with even a passing interest in buildings and the people who design them.

Still, even given his great fame and exhaustively documented life, it might be surprising to learn that the designer of the Glass House and Manhattan's AT&T Building considered himself an architect of the landscape as well as one of glass cathedrals and columned performance spaces, once stating that for him, architecture and landscape architecture were "one art.

For an architect like Frank Lloyd Wright, whose philosophy of organic architecture led him to build some of his most famous designs literally into the landscape, that kind of statement would make sense as a logical extension of his famous quote on the relationship between a house and its land: "No house should ever be on a hill or on anything. It should be of the hill. Belonging to it. Hill and house should live together each the happier for the other."

For someone like Johnson, though, with his Modernist background, iconoclastic bent, and love of glass-and-steel construction, the sentiment either reflects an unexpected facet of the architect's sensibility, a deliberate provocation, or both.

Photo via The Glass House

Johnson surely was somewhat influenced by the rural Ohio landscapes of his youth, but beyond that there's little to suggest a deep-seated love of nature seeking expression in landscape architecture. The fact that he did not start his architectural career until well into his 30s, combined with his wide-ranging lifelong interests in philosophy, music, and the visual arts, seem the hallmarks of a young man who struggled to find an appropriate outlet for his restless, energetic intellect (a search that perhaps led tobut does not excusehis troubling involvement with Nazism), and who gratefully threw himself into his avocation as soon as he stumbled upon it. It would seem that he'd have little energy left to devote to the landscape as a design form.

But if the man himself believed he was a landscape architect, then maybe it's best to take him at his word. After all, under the broad Wikipedia definition of the discipline, which states that "landscape architecture is the design of outdoor public areas, landmarks, and structures to achieve environmental, social-behavioral, or aesthetic outcomes," he does squeak in. So perhaps the question that should be asked is not "Was he a landscape architect" but rather "Did he have any aptitude at all for it?"

To answer that question, it's probably best to start with a look at what is inarguably his most successful created landscape, the Glass House in New Canaan, Conn.

Glass House site plan via The Glass House

Constructed in 1949, the heavily Mies-influenced Glass House was designed to serve as Johnson's personal residence and, just as importantly, as a way of trolling the traditionalists like Wright, who, upon entering the house for the first time, sniped, "Here I am, Philip, am I indoors or am I out? Do I take my hat off or keep it on?" Sited on what was then a lot of five acres, amid the ruins of old farmhouses, the home and its glass walls would come to preside over the many changes Johnson swept over the landscape as the estate expanded to 47 acres and 14 buildings over the years.

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Outdoors Week 2014: Philip Johnson's Other Career: Landscape Architecture?

11 hours ago Jul. 16, 2014 - 11:15 AM PDT

Sometimes it seems as though the future of online media is a fairly bleak one: an ocean of clickbait and shallow pageview-driven articles, all of them chasing the dwindling juice that social-network algorithms provide, with scattered chunks of longform journalism drifting aimlessly, unable to get the attention they deserve. But is that a realistic picture of where we are? Betaworks CEO John Borthwick says it isnt and says he has the data from services like Chartbeat and Instapaper to prove that things arent as bad as they seem.

As Borthwick notes in a post on Medium, the most recent debate on this topic flared up a couple of months ago, sparked by a post from Facebook product manager Mike Hudack that lamented the state of online media, and how much of the content that was being produced even by serious media outlets was shallow clickbait:

Personally I hoped that we would find a new home for serious journalism in a format that felt Internet-native and natural to people who grew up interacting with screens instead of just watching them from couches with bags of popcorn and a beer to keep their hands busy. And instead they write stupid stories about how you should wash your jeans instead of freezing them. Its hard to tell whos to blame. But someone should fix this shit.

In the hue-and-cry that followed, a number of journalists, bloggers and others (including our founder Om and me) noted that Facebook was part of the problem that Hudack was complaining about, since its algorithm has become one of the central points of control that determine what kinds of news people see online. And for all of the effort that the giant social network has put into trying to focus on promoting high quality content, the reality is that much of what people like to share just happens to be shallow, click-driven content.

In his post, Borthwick who has been involved in tracking the social web and online media world from a variety of perspectives, by investing in or starting services like Bitly, Chartbeat, News.me and Digg described one recent cautionary tale: the story about how a piece of software had beaten the legendary Turing test, by pretending to be a 14-year-old boy. As it turned out, the story was fatally flawed to the point where it was essentially not true, but by the time anyone pointed this out it had been shared and tweeted and linked to hundreds of thousands of times.

As the Betaworks CEO notes (and as Om and I have pointed out a number of times), the social-distribution system that has been built up around the news a system that is now arguably as important or even more important than search favors shareability, not analysis. Thats why Om has argued that we all need to be aware of what we share, and take the time to think about whether it deserves our attention or not. Chartbeat CEO Tony Haile has pointed out that his data shows that much of what people share is content that they havent even read. As Borthwick notes:

We have a dominant social distribution system that favors sharablility it is biased towards speed, and that bias is short circuiting fact checkingas the Turing example shows. And in the case of Facebook its mediated by algorithms that arent transparent. Algorithmically created news stories, mediated by algorithms, shared by people, people who are barely reading these posts. If we can all just get services like Socialflow to do our sharingwe humans can completely quit this loop.

Algorithmically created news stories thanks to services like Narrative Science and Automated Insights, which AP is now using for earnings stories mediated by the black-box algorithms of networks like Twitter and Facebook, shared as quickly as possible by people who havent even read them. It may not be Orwells boot stamping on a human face forever, but thats a pretty bleak vision. But Borthwick argues there is still some reason for optimism about media.

According to a chart from Upworthy, which tracks a metric it calls attention minutes, there is a significant burst of sharing that comes from people who have barely read a piece of content behavior that is likely driven by short-term effects such as a clickbait headline, catchy video clip or GIF, etc. Then there is a low point where many people dont make it all the way through a piece, and dont really share it much either. But there is also a large upswing on both reader attention (or time spent) and sharing that occurs at the far end of the graph, something Borthwick calls the hill of Wow, as opposed to the valley of Meh.

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The news about reader attention and the evolution of media isnt all bad theres the hill of Wow

Park City, UT (SportsNetwork.com) - With changes still coming across the NCAA landscape, Big Sky commissioner Doug Fullerton banks on the fact that he believes his conference is positioned as strong as it's ever been.

One of the ways to make the Big Sky's flagship sport - football - even stronger is for some of the struggling programs to finally become consistent winners - although the likes of perennial powers Eastern Washington, Montana and Montana State will be pushing back.

North Dakota, Sacramento State and Weber State hope to be headed into that direction after changing head coaches in the offseason.

They hope to be the surprise that Southern Utah was a year ago after the release of two preseason polls Tuesday at Big Sky Kickoff festivities. Sacramento State, under interim head coach Jody Sears, was picked to finish seventh in the head coaches poll and ninth in the media poll of the 13-team conference, North Dakota and coach Kyle "Bubba" Schweigert were picked 10th and 11th, and Weber State and Jay Hill were 11th and 12th.

Eastern Washington (12-3, 8-0 last season) was picked as a heavy favorite in both polls to capture a third straight Big Sky title.

Sacramento State, UND and Weber State have floundered in the Big Sky in recent seasons - with some high moments as well - and were in need of jump-starts under the hood. Sacramento State has had success beating FBS competition but not necessarily its Big Sky rivals, finishing 5-7 overall and 4-4 in the conference last year. Weber State was 2-10 and 1-7, and North Dakota 3-8 and 2-6 in just its second season of Big Sky competition.

The scenario involving Sears in the Big Sky is a bit weird. He was named Weber State's defensive coordinator in 2012 only to be elevated to interim head coach a few months later following John L. Smith's departure. But Sears was fired after a 4-19 record over two seasons, only to be selected defensive coordinator at Sacramento State in January. Sure enough, three months later, head coach Marshall Sperbeck resigned and Sears was elevated to interim head coach.

"Yeah, run to Vegas. I have no clue," on the odds, Sears laughs.

With the fresh start, Sears will look to restructure a defense that struggled last season while his staff also relies on the dynamic Garrett Safron-to- DeAndre Carter passing combination and an 18-member senior class.

Said Sears, who also has Big Sky experience at Eastern Washington from 2000-07, including the 2003-07 seasons as defensive coordinator: "We started to identify some principles that you're going to cling to, continue to develop the team culture and let the seniors know that this is their team and we were going to go as they go. So, really, the leadership has been good. We'll see how it plays out in the fall."

Link:
In the FCS Huddle: New energy felt across Big Sky

MPs call for farm income inquiry

Updated 1:50pm Tuesday 15th July 2014 in News By Allan Tunningley

A CROSS-party group of rural MPs is calling on Defra to set up an inquiry into hill farmers incomes amid uncertainty over the future effect of CAP reform.

They have tabled an Early Day Motion (EDM) in the House of Commons which claims that many upland farmers are existing on less than the minimum wage.

Westmorland and Lonsdale MP Tim Farron, chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Hill Farming Group, said the recent CAP reforms had led to increased uncertainty over the future level of marginal farm incomes.

Average farm incomes are around 12,000 and thats often the income for an entire family.

Because upland farmers are self-employed, the minimum wage doesnt apply. Such a situation wouldnt be tolerated if they worked for someone else.

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Mr Farron said while CAP reform had led to some subsidies being diverted from lowland farms to hill and moor-land farms, the changes had left the future unclear.

Although upland farm incomes have risen since 2009, when they were around 5,000, they are still very low. We need Defra to launch a full review of the situation to see how we can help these farmers.

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MPs call for farm income inquiry

LAKE COUNTY, Calif. Our county's striking gems, the Lake County diamonds, however unique, are not true diamonds but semi-precious stones.

Lake County diamonds have a rating of 7.8 to 8 on the Moh's Scale of Hardness. Real diamonds rate a 10 on the scale.

Our diamonds are really a type of quartz, comprised of silicon dioxide, and some other trace elements.

Geologists state that quartz, a common mineral which occurs in nature, grows at its own particular rate.

This quartz-growth occurs according to the temperatures in the earth.

Our quartz specimens in Lake County, known as Lake County diamonds, formed in very specific, high temperatures, in lava flows which are thought to have reached about 1,112 degrees Fahrenheit.

The distinctive way in which our Lake County jewels formed make them one-of-a-kind, to be found only in Lake County.

Clear Lake's sentinel, the 4,305 foot Mount Konocti actually a dormant volcano was once a teeming, erupting and violent volcano.

The portion of Mount Konocti that we now see is thought to be what is left of 350,000 year-old or older pyroclastic flows.

During this time of very high temperatures our particular quartz specimens formed luxurious, lustrous crystals. (It's all in the location, location, location!)

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The Living Landscape: The story of Lake County diamonds

LONG HILL TWP. Landscapes are a part of our lives some leave impressions, some dont.

The ones that move us repeat in our memories but eventually will fade with time, and if not for artists, the beauty or mood would never transcend.

Prof. Hsu Dan, a long-time resident of Long Hill, has been capturing landscapes in and around Long Hill and before that in his native China practically all his life. His water color painting, Long Hill Vista and Great Swamp Scene, is on permanent display in the lobby of the Long Hill Municipal Building on Valley Road. Also on display through the summer are Hsu family photographs, Chinese painting tools, and artifacts

In May, the acclaimed international artist and architect hosted a talk and painting demonstration for members of the Long Hill Historical Society, which was organized by Jane Rocca Hecht, a family friend, Hsus student, and resident of Long Hill.

During the meeting and in a separate interview, Hecht provided insight into Hsu Dans spontaneous, tonal painting style.

A neighbor introduced me to Prof. Hsu in 2003, Hecht recalled. We sought his advice in importing from China an exhibit of Suzhou silk embroidery. In 2005 the exhibit, which I helped organize, opened at The Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum in Atlanta, Ga.

The exhibit honored the 1979 Cultural Agreement signed by President (Jimmy) Carter and Vice Premier Deng Xiaoping of the Peoples Republic of China and it celebrated the embroidered art work presented on this occasion.

Shortly after meeting the artist, Hecht said she agreed to teach him English and he agreed to teach me to paint. His daughter, Ming, was our translator. Through her he retold his life experiences during the turbulent years in Chinas history, from 1932 to 1986.

Being a natural story teller, Hsu Dan brought to life how his traditional aristocratic upbringing and lifestyle under Maos reign melded a bygone era with the modernization of China, Hecht said. In similar fashion, she said, Prof. Hsus spontaneous free-style paintings meld a thousand year tradition with modern art.

While it is the professors belief that change and innovation maintain a traditions relevancy, she said, his free-style modern paintings nonetheless are firmly grounded in traditional Chinese painting and calligraphy.Hecht, an artist in Hsu Dans style, whose own paintings are fluid recreations of landscape, said that while it was early autumn when Hsu Dan, and his daughter, Ming, and Hecht, toured Long Hill Township in preparation for his painting, Long Hill Vista & Great Swamp Scene, the first painting was done with green foliage and the second in fall colors.

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Chinese artist spends a life in landscapes

Solar farm the size of 40 rugby pitches planned for North Nibley

Updated 3:10pm Thursday 10th July 2014 in News

SR_159_001 Angry residents on Stinchcombe Hill overlooking the possible site of a solar farm (8003054)

OVER 72,000 solar panels could be built on fields below Stinchcombe Hill if a planning application is approved but residents fear it will be a blot on the landscape.

Around 40 hectares of fields by Manor Farm in Upper Wick could be used for the massive solar farm, potentially producing up to 18megawatts, enough to power 2,000 homes.

On behalf of Upper Wick Solar Farm Ltd, planning consultants Maddox and Associates have submitted the application for the panels, which will reach 2.2metres in height and cover an area the size of almost 40 international rugby pitches.

A brief consultation was held on April 29 at North Nibley Village Hall but only received 29 visitors, with 21 rejecting the plan.

In response to the consultation, the three most easterly fields of the initial proposal have been removed, reducing the site size by 14.6 per cent.

No permanently switched on lighting is proposed and the solar farm will operate for 30 years before being dismantled and removed.

Sue Devine and her husband Iain have lived on Church Lane in North Nibley for 35 years and are adamant it is the wrong place for such a large-scale construction.

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Solar farm the size of 40 rugby pitches planned for North Nibley

Posted: 9:28 a.m. Wednesday, July 9, 2014

By Emily Farlow

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Chapel Hill Elementary School, in DeKalb County, is looking for volunteers to help give the school a makeover.

Georgia United Credit Union chose Chapel Hill from among 752 nominations for its School Crashers makeover, which brings community volunteers together to improve the school.

Georgia United and Chapel Hill are looking for volunteers to help paint and landscape, or donate supplies such as paint and plants, or money for extra school improvements such as benches and stage curtains.

The School Crashers event is scheduled for July 25-26, and those interested in volunteering can visit the School Crashers web page.

Updated every Friday, Mark Arum tells us where we can find construction, events and anything else to slow us down on the roads this weekend.

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Help give Chapel Hill Elementary a makeover