WHITEWATER --?Alex Edmunds may have missed the first 16 games of the season, but he was right where he needed to be Friday night.
Edmunds, who was academically ineligible for the first half of the season, scored a season-high 16 points as UW-Whitewater bested Wheaton College (Ill.) 67-56 in the Sweet 16 round of the NCAA Divison III tournament.
The Warhawks (26-4) will host Virginia Wesleyan at 7 p.m. Saturday in the Elite Eight, a place Whitewater hasn?t been since its national championship season of 1989.
Virginia Wesleyan (27-3) defeated Whitworth (Wash.) 74-71 in overtime behind 27 points from Chris Teasley, including?two free throws with 21 seconds left in regulation to knot the game at 61 and send the game into overtime.
?I?ve been slowly trying to get my way back in and pick my spots,? said Edmunds, a senior from Cedarburg. ?Tonight I was just trying to play big when we needed it.?
After Wheaton cut what was once a 16-point lead to 59-54 with 1:57 left, Edmunds blew by his man into the lane and converted a swooping lay-in to give the Warhawks a 61-54 lead and enough room to keep their hopes of a Final Four appearance alive.
?That basket really stopped what we had going there,? Wheaton coach Mike Schauer said of Edmunds? drive. ?We?d been focusing on Davis after his first half and Edmunds just took over.?
Whitewater blitzed the Thunder (23-7) in the first half thanks to former Madison East athlete Chris Davis? eight points and a 15-4 run over 10 minutes that was punctuated by a two-handed slam courtesy of Edmunds with just a minute left before halftime.
?After that first half I just made sure I was getting all of our rebounds,? said Davis, who grabbed 10 boards. ?I didn?t worry about scoring down the stretch, Edmunds was making big buckets.?
But the second half was another story. Wheaton?s Jeremy Pflederer scored eight points during a 15-6 run over the first 5 minutes of the second.
?We lapsed a bit in the opening of the second half,? Whitewater coach Pat Miller said. ?But we picked it up defensively and we were able to get stops when we needed to beat a great team.?
For more details on this game, check out our live blog.?
[unable to retrieve full-text content]We love to plan and prepare for the major events in our lives; graduations, weddings, births, anniversaries, reunions, but when it comes to planning our death ? that seems to flummox us like nothing else. Yet, it is a major life event, and it does need our attention and planning. Maybe now more ... Family history ? they continue to go to the funeral home the family has always used. Personal recommendations ? these are based on suggestions from friends and family.
What would happen to New York City if its power grid was hit by an all-out cyberattack during a summer heat wave?
A group of senators found out Wednesday evening during a White House simulation intended to convince Congress to give the government more control over critical privately owned computer systems' cybersecurity standards.
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According to the White House, the scenario was classified, so we don't know exactly how bad the results would be. But at least one senator, Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va), said the simulation was "convincing."
"[The simulation] illustrated just how dangerous inaction on cybersecurity legislation can be,? said Rockefeller. ?I think several of my colleagues were convinced that immediate action is required."
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All 100 senators were invited to the event, but only about about a quarter of them showed up, according to a Senate aide's comments to The Hill.
"The classified scenario was intended to provide all Senators with an appreciation for new legislative authorities that could help the U.S. Government prevent and more quickly respond to cyber attacks," said Caitlin Hayden, a spokeswoman for the White House National Security Council.
During President Obama's most recent State of the Union address, he called for Congress to pass legislation "that will secure our country from the growing danger of cyber threats.?
The Senate is currently belaboring two competing cybersecurity bills: one that gives the federal government the authority to regulate cybersecurity standards for private companies, and another that does not. Both bills would encourage information-sharing between business and government and require the government to beef up their own cyberdefense.
SEE ALSO: Republican Senators: Keep Government Out of Cybersecurity
What might a cyberattack-caused blackout in New York City look like?
In 2003, a widespread power outage effected a great deal of Canada and the northeastern U.S., Manhattan included. Approximately 14.3 million New Yorkers lost power. Two died of carbon monoxide poisoning and another two perished in fires caused by candles. One died after falling from a roof while attempting to loot a shop and another succumbed to a heart attack after climbing 17 stories to a neighbor's apartment. Forty thousand New York Police Department officers and all of the 15,000-strong New York Fire Department were called in to assist.
Would the results of a cyberattack on the city's power grid be similar? Hopefully, we'll never have to find out.
Do you think New York City is prepared for an all-out cyberattack? Sound off in the comments below.
As word spread that beloved Latin American author Isabel Allende would be speaking at FIU, the phones lit up in the English Department. Emails streamed in to Marta Lee, who was taking RSVPS for the Creative Writing Program.
Person after person said the same thing: I am Isabel Allende?s most ardent fan. I am her biggest admirer. I LOVE Isabel Allende.
That?s how it is with some rare artists, Creative Writing professor Debra Dean said as she introduced Allende on March 5 to a crowd of more than 500 in the BBC Ballroom.
Isabel Allende signed copies of her books for hundreds of people following her talk at the Biscayne Bay Campus.
?They reveal themselves to us so open heartedly that we come to think of them as intimates,? Dean said. ?We have shared moments of joy and moments of sorrow with them and they have told us all their secrets. Isabel is such a writer?As a consequence, the world is full of her friends and readers.?
In a candid and funny hour-long chat with Dean on stage, Allende revealed even more to her fans. She spoke of how her feminism was born of rage. She shared the story of how, after her daughter Paula died, a visit to India motivated her to establish a foundation in Paula?s honor to protect women and children. There was talk of writing and sex and regrets and loss.
?The person I am is the summary of everything else that has happened, the good and the bad,? Allende said. ?Now that I?m 70 years old, I look back and say, ?What would I change?? I don?t think I would change anything. Of course, I?d want my daughter to be alive but I am very happy she lived 28 years?The joyful moments don?t teach you anything. It?s the suffering, the stress, the losses that make you the person you are.?
And regrets? ?I regret the men I didn?t sleep with out of virtue,? Allende said to raucous laughter and applause. ?Virtue is a stupid thing.?
Allende came to FIU to be honored with the Creative Writing Program?s Lawrence Sanders Award, which recognizes fiction writers whose work combines literary excellence with popular appeal. Past recipients are bestselling writers Scott Turow and Pat Conroy.
The award aligns with the Creative Writing program?s emphasis on helping writers connect with the audience they want to reach.
?As I often remind my students, the only place people read books they are not interested in is in college,? said Creative Writing Director Les Standiford during the award presentation. ?Given her stellar critical reputation and her enormous world wide appeal Ms. Allende is the very model of the writer we had in mind when this award was conceived.?
The Chilean author?s 19 books ? fiction, nonfiction, memoir ? have sold more than 57 million copies. Writing memoirs gets her into trouble with her family, Allende said.
?I like to write fiction better than nonfiction because I am a born liar,? she said. ?Whatever I write as a memoir is packed with lies. I?m not even aware they are lies. Really I am not. If you think of memory and what you remember, are you sure it happened that way? Memory is very similar to fiction. You highlight certain things. You keep other things in the darkness.?
She writes all her novels in Spanish and has them professionally translated. Dean, whose bestselling novel The?Madonnas of Leningrad bears a glowing blurb from Allende, talked with her about translations.
?I?m sadly monolingual and I always have this paranoid assumption that my books in translation are just really, really dreadful,? Dean said.
?Let go of that,? Allende advised. ?Because they are awful. And it doesn?t matter. You can?t read them. It?s a blessing. I get copies of my books in languages I didn?t know existed from continents I didn?t know existed.?
So when I read your books in translation, Dean asked, what am I missing?
?Language is like blood. It?s very personal,? Allende said. ?More than the language, it?s the culture. When Pablo Neruda writes a poem, An Ode to Bread, it?s untranslatable. Bread in some cultures is life; it?s what gives life. Here it?s white bead. It doesn?t have the same meaning.?
Plot and characters can be translated, Allende said, ?But there is always something that is different. I don?t think it?s missed. It?s just different.?
The authors spoke of how writing requires time and private space to create. Allende writes in a pool house in the back of her garden, disconnected from her phone and email. She starts all of her books on January 8. ?People think it?s just superstition. It is, partly,? she said. ?But it is also discipline.?
The research required before writing can take more time than the actual writing, she explained. Her novel Island beneath the Sea, set in colonial Haiti, took four years to research. ?I always think of research as foreplay,? Allende said. ?Writing the novel won?t take that long. It?s like intercourse, 11 minutes.?
Without missing a beat, Dean quipped, ?I love researching.?
Both Allende and Dean are married to writers. However, Allende pointed out, Dean?s husband Clifford Paul Fetters was a poet when they met. Allende?s husband, William Gordon, was not.
?When I met my husband he was a lawyer. And then he retires and decides to write books to compete with me? What he is thinking?? she said. ?I said ?When I retire I will be a lawyer.? Now he is writing these shitty novels and getting a lot of good reviews and he?s selling them. I?m really angry at him.?
Allende said they don?t edit each other?s books, largely because hers are in Spanish and his are in English. They do, however, talk about their stories.
?He wrote his first novel when he retired, and it was just awful. It was the story of an oversexed dwarf,? Allende said. ?I said, ?Willy, this is politically incorrect. Who is going to publish this book? Why don?t you start writing what you know about? That is mysteries. Because you?ve been a lawyer, you know about crime, you?re almost a criminal.? ?
Allende spoke of how her life has been dedicated to empowering women. ?I have been a feminist since before the word was invented,? she said. ?Chile in the ?40s was the most conservative, most Catholic, patriarchal, authoritarian society and family in which you could ever be born. ?
Even as a child, she knew something was wrong. ?Why was it my mother was a victim and the men around me had all the power? I was enraged very young and nobody knew what the heck was wrong with me. They took me to the doctors to see if they could give me some pills to calm me down. But it didn?t calm me down. By age 15, I was a raging feminist, but before feminism reached Chile.?
Being feminist, she added, does not mean she doesn?t like men.??I love men,? she said. ?Men have been very, very clever to make feminists look like hairy bitches. Very clever. Let me tell you ladies, there is nothing more sexy than being a feminist.?
After Allende?s daughter Paula died in 1992, she published Paula, a memoir that she began as a letter to her daughter. The book was a critically acclaimed bestseller. Allende wasn?t sure what to do with the proceeds from the book so she set them aside. ?I didn?t want to touch that money,? she said. ?It wasn?t the idea to make money on something like that.?
She took a trip to India with her husband and a friend. In Rajasthan, their car overheated. Allende and her friend took a walk and approached a group of Indian women. ?We didn?t share a language but we could still touch. We had bought bracelets in the market and gave the bracelets to the women. It was just lovely.?
As Allende was leaving, one of the women handed her a bundle of rags. ?I opened the rags and there was a newborn baby. I blessed the baby and tried to give it back and she backed off.?
Allende?s driver handed the infant back to the mother. She asked him, Why would she give me her baby?
The driver told her: ?It was a girl. Who wants a girl??
That was the moment, Allende said, when she knew that she would use the proceeds from Paula to establish a foundation to protect women and girls.
?That sentence was everything I tried to say all my life ? I have tried to say how we don?t value the feminine, how we don?t value women, the violence against women, the exploitation, the abuse,? she said. ?I couldn?t save that little girl but at least I could help some others girls.?
Chronic back pain frequently results from a variety of common health disorders. These include herniated or bulging discs, sciatica, posterior facet disease, and long term degenerative disc disorders. Many of these problems share one common source. The common source is compressed vertebral discs. These discs supply a much-needed protection between the spinal vertebrae. As they get weakened and swollen, the condition can easily develop into chronic pain that does not go away.
The primary and most common method of treatment is to just use medications to help with the pain. The drawback with these prescriptions is the fact that the pain relief they supply is only short-lived. Eventually, patients develop a tolerance to these types of pills and therefore have to use larger and larger doses of ever more potent pain medications. These kinds of remedies do not actually heal the actual underlying problem. They only cover up the symptoms.
Many people with low back pain try spinal surgery. Some even get worse from the surgery. Some people simply recover better than others, and others never recover from this kind of operation. There can be no guarantee that this surgery will be effective at all. There is also some risk involved in going through it. For some patients, the pain will get more intense just from the surgery as opposed to no surgery.
Many people who have low back and neck pain come to think that they will experience the pain forever. They give up on doctors and surgeons, and basically try to just live with it. Doing so is really a big trigger for emotional problems. Some people experience anxiety and depression. This can affect your relationships and family members.
Recent years have seen the development of a new health-related technology capable of healing many cases of spinal compression disorder in many patients with back pain. It is referred to as non-surgical spinal decompression therapy. This is accomplished via the use of unique spinal decompression machines, which includes different decompression machines such as the DRX9000, ABS, Triton and more. Treatment with spinal decompression equipment can usually bring rapid relief of chronic back and neck pain without all the risks associated with surgery and medication.
Many people with back pain experience a much faster recovery from their pain from spinal decompression technology. It can be very helpful and the chiropractors at New Century Spine Centers in San Diego have been helping many. A normal course of non-invasive spinal decompression therapy will last a few months. This is an extremely encouraging medical technology used by some orthopedists and chiropractors. Spinal decompression treatment offers a major improvement in the treatment of chronic back pain.
Want to discover more information about back pain, then New Century Spine Centers site on how to choose the best chiropractor for your needs.
One of the very best communication classes I ever took in college was with an instructor that had a good academic background from Stanford, but more important, he was one of Dale Carnegie?s initial cohort of trainers.
A member of and past president of Toastmasters International, Sheldon Hayden loved to speak, and I?m sure he was most gratified by the adoration he received from pleased-as-punch audiences.
One of the secrets to his success as a speech teacher was the fact that at each class, every student had to deliver at least one brief talk. Add those one-minute chats to the formal speeches which we also had to deliver, and this meant during a semester we would be giving somewhere around twenty-five speeches.
That is a lot of experience ?Popping off on your hind feet,? as he used to colloquially call it. With all of those successes under one?s belt, how could a student NOT improve?
Frankly, that was impossible. Failure wasn?t an option, because if you speak enough, you?ll become competent. Speak more, and you?ll grow adept. And outdo that level of performance, and you?ll excel, and probably learn to enjoy it, immensely, as I did.
I have come to embrace and apply this principle, also known as The Law of Large Numbers, to nearly every endeavor. If you?re a salesperson, make more contacts, and they?ll turn into more prospects and they will become more sales.
If you are a writer, do a lot of it, more than you ever thought you could.
Sooner or later, you?ll feel capable of writing anything, any time.
Someone once defined ?luck? as preparation meeting opportunity.
I look at it this way. Prepare a lot, and you?ll meet even more opportunities than you ever imagined, creating your own luck along the way.
Watching Mr. Hayden leave our class, hopping into his silver blue Cadillac convertible with white leather interior, navy blazer set off by his shock of white hair, always gave me the impression he was very lucky, indeed, as were those of us that studied with him and emulated his example.
