PAKET UMROH BULAN FEBRUARI MARET APRIL MEI 2018

saco-indonesia.com, Kawanan perampok bergolok telah menggasak isi toko bahan bangunan T.B Borneo di Jalan Siliwangi, Kampung Ongkrak Batas Kabupaten Sukabumi. Mereka telah menyekap keluarga pemilik toko lalu menguras isi toko. Akibatnya, pemilik toko telah rugi ratusan jutaan rupiah.

Perampokan telah terjadi sekitar pukul 03.00 dinihari WIB ketika keluarga pemilik toko tertidur pulas. Penjahat yang diperkirakan 10 orang tersebut telah membuat korban tak bisa berkutik apalagi ketika ditodong dengan golok. Mereka lantas disekap di ruangan dengan mulut dan tangan terikat.

“Sambil ditodong senjata kami dipaksa perampok untuk menunjukan barang-barang berharga. Perampok lalu telah membawa sejumlah perhiasan bernilai ratusan juta dan uang,” kata anak pemilik toko, MR kepada wartawan.

Mereka hanya bisa pasrah melihat kawanan perampok menggasak sejumlah barang berharga.Korban baru bisa terbebas dari ikatan pada pukul 07.00 pagi WIB setelah sejumlah karyawannya datang. “Kami baru bisa lepas dari ikatan setelah karyawan masuk kerja. Kami langsung melaporkan kejadian ini ke Polsek Cibadak,” ungkapnya.

Polsek Cibadak belum bisa dimintai keterangan terkait aksi perampokan ini. Kapolsek Kompol Undang Deddy belum bisa dihubungi melalui telepon selulernya. Kabarnya, Deddy tengah tugas di Bandung.

Editor : Dian Sukmawati

Athiyya Laila , istri Anas Urbaningrum, tersangka dalam kasus dugaan penerimaan gratifikasi terkait dalam proyek pembangunan sport center di Bukit Hambalang, Bogor, Jawa Barat, dan pencucian uang, kembali menjenguk suaminya yang kini telah mendekam di Rutan KPK.

Saat tiba di Gedung KPK, Kamis (13/3/2014) pagi, Athiyya tampak membawa sebuah map warna merah. Seperti biasanya, perempuan berhijab ini tidak mengeluarkan pernyataan dari mulutnya.

Bahkan, ketika disinggung ihwal kasus pencucian uang dan aset suaminya yang telah disita KPK, tetap menutup rapat mulutnya dan hanya melontarkan senyum.

Sekedar diketahui, sejumlah aset yang telah disita KPK, diantaranya merupakan aset yang diatasnamakan ayah Athiyya, Attabik Ali. Dalam perkara yang ditangani KPK telah menetapkan Anas bukan hanya dalam kasus penerimaan gratifikasi, tetapi ia juga ditetapkan sebagai tersangka pencucian uang.

Aset milik mantan Ketua Umum Partai Demokrat itu, beberapa diantaranya telah disita oleh KPK, yakni dua bidang tanah di Kelurahan Mantrirejo, Yogyakarta dengan luas 7.670 M2 dan 200 M2 atas nama Attabik Ali.

Kemudian, tanah dan bangunan di Jalan Selat Makasar C9/22 di Duren Sawit, Jakarta Timur,  serta tiga bidang tanah di Desa Panggungharjo, Bantul atas nama Dina Az, anak Attabik Ali.

saco-indonesia.com, Maineli yang berusia (50) tahun seorang Ibu Rumah Tangga warga Padang Panjang, Sumatera Barat bersama anaknya Faiza Kurniawan yang masih berusia 2 tahun ikut tewas saat mobil travel yang telah ditumpanginya masuk ke jurang Sungai Kampar. Mobil tersebut tenggelam di Sungai Kampar, tepatnya di Desa Merangin, Kecamatan Kuok, Kabupaten Kampar.

Kabid Humas Polda Riau, AKBP Guntur Aryo Tejo SIK, juga mengatakan, saat ini sudah ada 3 orang korban yang tewas akibat Lakalantas tunggal (out of control) Travel isuzu Panther dengan Nomor Polisi BA 1921 ZU di jalan lintas Riau, Sumatera Barat KM 78/79.

"Akibat dari kecelakaan tersebut 3 penumpang meninggal dunia di lokasi kejadian," kata Guntur.

Ketiga penumpang yang meninggal dunia dalam lakalantas tersebut antara lain, Syukur (68) seorang pekerja swasta, warga Padang Panjang, Sumbar. Maineli (50) seorang Ibu Rumah Tangga warga Padang Panjang, Sumatera Barat bersama anaknya Faiza Kurniawan yang masih berusia 2 tahun (sebelumnya ditulis 3 tahun).

"Korban ketiga ini (Faiza Kurniawan) pada saat kejadian kecelakaan hanyut ke sungai Kampar dan baru bisa ditemukan 12 jam kemudian setelah dilakukan pencarian oleh Kepolisian bersama Tim SAR, BPBD Kampar dibantu oleh warga masyarakat, korban telah ditemukan di desa Sawah kecamatan Kampar Utara setelah hanyut sekitar 20 Kilometer dari TKP," terang Guntur.

Sedangkan 2 penumpang lainnya yang telah mengalami luka ringan dan 1 lainnya luka berat. Saat ini ketiga penumpang selamat tersebut dirawat di Puskesmas Kuok Kampar.

"Sedangkan sopir yang belum dapat diketahui identitasnya telah melarikan diri dari TKP," kata Guntur.

Kronologis kejadian lakalantas tunggal Delta Travel dengan Nomor Polisi BA 1921 ZU jurusan Padang (Sumbar), Pekanbaru (Riau) yang telah mengangkut enam penumpang ini melaju dengan kecepatan tinggi, Rabu (25/12) malam sekitar pukul 20.00 wib.

"Sesampainya di Kilometer 78/79 desa Merangin, jalan yang banyak tikungan dan jurang yang dekat dengan sungai kampar, saat itu travel kehilangan kendali dan mengarah ke jurang menuju Sungai Kampar hingga menyebabkan 3 korban tewas dan 3 lainnya luka," jelas Guntur.

Saat ini mobil travel jenis Isuzu Panther tersebut telah berhasil dikeluarkan dari jurang dan dibawa ke Polres Kampar, "Sedangkan supir telah ditetapkan sebagai tersangka, dan tengah dilakukan pengejaran," pungkas Guntur.

Editor : Dian Sukmawati

 TRANSFORMASI OLAH DATA ORDINAL MENJADI INTERVAL
Data yang dikumpulkan mahasiwa ketika akan membuat tugas akhir, selain data sekunder diantaranya adalah data primer. Data sekunder adalah data yang diperoleh dari catatan-catatan atau informasi tertulis dari perusahaan, serta data-data lain yang terdokumentasi dengan baik dan valid. Sedangkan data primer adalah data yang direspon langsung oleh responden berdasarkan wawancara ataupun daftar pertanyaan yang dirancang, disusun, dan disajikan dalam bentuk skala, baik nominal, ordinal, interval maupun ratio oleh mahasiswa ketika membutuhkan data demi kepentingan penelitian.

Teknik pengumpulan data seperti ini lazim digunakan karena selain bisa langsung menentukan skala pengukuranya, akan tetapi juga bisa melengkapi hasil wawancara yang dilakukan dengan responden.

Skala pengukuran yang dibuat oleh mahasiswa sebaiknya dibuat sedemikian rupa, mengikuti kaidah, sehingga akan memudahkan pemilihan teknik analisis yang akan digunakan ketika pengumpulan datanya sudah selesai.

Catatan: Artikel ini membahas bagaimana transformasi dari data ordinal ke interval, sedangkan untuk transformasi data dalam keperluan untuk memenuhi asumsi klasik, baca artikel kami yang berjudul "Transformasi Data"

Dalam studi empiris, misalnya saja mahasiswa ingin menggunakan statistika parametrik dengan analisis regresi untuk menganalisis dan mengkaji masalah-masalah penelitian. Pemilihan analisis model ini ini hanya lazim digunakan bila skala pengukuran yang yang dilakukan adalah minimal interval. Sedangkan teknik pengumpulan data yang dilakukan oleh mahasiswa sudah dilakukan dengan menggunakan skala pengukuran nominal (atau ordinal).

Menghadapi situasi demikian, salah satu cara yang dilakukan adalah menaikkan tingkat pengukuran skalanya dari ordinal menjadi interval. Melakukan manipulasi data dengan cara menaikkan skala dari ordinal menjadi interval ini, selain bertujuan untuk tidak melanggar kelaziman, juga untuk mengubah agar syarat distribusi normal bisa dipenuhi ketika menggunakan statistika parametrik.

Menurut Sambas Ali Muhidin dan Maman Abdurahman, “salah satu metode transformasi yang sering digunakan adalah metode succesive interval (MSI)”. Meskipun banyak perdebatan tentang metode ini, diharapkan pemikiran ini bisa melengkapi wacana mahasiswa ketika akan melakukan analisis data berkenaan dengan tugas-tugas kuliah.

Sebelum melanjutkan pembahasan tentang bagaimana transformasi data ordinal dilakukan, tulisan ini sedikit membahas tentang dua perbedaan pendapat tentang bagimana skor-skor yang diberikan terhadap alternatif jawaban pada skala pengukuran Likert yang sudah kita kenal. Pendapat pertama mengatakan bahwa skor 1, 2, 3, 4, dan 5 adalah data interval. Sedangkan pendapat yang kedua, menyatakan bahwa jenis skala pengukuran Likert adalah ordinal. Alasannya skala Likert merupakan Skala Interval adalah karena skala sikap merupakan dan menempatkan kedudukan sikap seseorang pada kesatuan perasaan kontinum yang berkisar dari sikap “sangat positif”, artinya mendukung terhadap suatu objek psikologis terhadap objek penelitian, dan sikap “sangat negatif”, yang tidak mendukung sama sekali terhadap objek psikologis terhadap objek penelitian.

Berkenaan dengan perbedaan pendapat terhadap skor-skor yang diberikan dalam alternatif jawaban dalam skala Likert itu, apakah termasuk dalam skala pengukuran ordinal atau data interval, berikut ini kami mneyampaikan pemikiran yang bisa dijadikan pertimbangan: Ciri spesifik yang dimiliki oleh data yang diperoleh dengan skala pengukuran ordinal, adalah bahwa, data ordinal merupakan jenis data kualitatif, bukan numerik, berupa kata-kata atau kalimat, seperti misalnya sangat setuju, kurang setuju, dan tidak setuju, jika pertanyaannya ditujukan terhadap persetujuan tentang suatu event. Atau bisa juga respon terhadap keberadaan suatu Bank “PQR” dalam suatu daerah yang bisa dimulai dari sangat tidak setuju, tidak setuju, ragu-ragu, Setuju, dan sangat setuju.

Sementara data interval adalah termasuk data kuantitatif, berbentuk numerik, berupa angka, bukan terdiri dari kata-kata, atau kalimat. Mahasiswa yang melakukan penelitian dengan menggunakan pendekatan kuantitatif, termasuk di dalamnya adalah data interval, data yang diperoleh dari hasil pengumpulan data bisa langsung diolah dengan menggunakan model statistika. Akan tetapi data yang diperoleh dengan pengukuran skala ordinal, berbentuk kata-kata, kalimat, penyataan, sebelum diolah, perlu memberikan kode numerik, atau simbol berupa angka dalam setiap jawaban.

Misalnya saja alternatif jawaban pada skala Likert, alternatif jawaban “sangat tidak setuju” diberi skor 1; “ tidak setuju diberi skor 2; “ragu-ragu” diberi skor 3; “setuju” diberi kode 4; dan “sangat setuju” diberi skor 5. angka-angka (numerik) inilah yang kemudian diolah, sehingga menghasilkan skor tertentu. Tetapi, sesuai dengan sifat dan cirinya, angka 1, 2, 3, 4, dan 5 atau skor yang sudah diperoleh tidak memberikan arti apa-apa terhadap objek yang diukur. Dengan kata lain, skor yang lebih tinggi lebih tidak berarti lebih baik dari skor yang lebih rendah. Skor 1 hanya menunjukkan sikap “sangat tidak setuju”, skor 2 menunjukkan sikap “tidak setuju, skor 3 menunjukkan sikap “ragu-ragu’, skor 4 menunjukkan sikap “setuju”, dan skor 5 menunjukkan sikap “sangat setuju”. Kita tidak bisa mengatakan bahwa skor 4 atau “setuju” dua kali lebih baik dari skor 2 atau “tidak setuju”.

Fenomena ini berbeda sekali dengan sifat/ciri yang dimiliki oleh data interval, dimana angka-angka atau skor-skor numerik yang diperoleh dari hasil pengukuran data langsung dapat dibandingkan antara satu dengan lainnya, dikurangkan, dijumlahkan, dibagi dan dikalikan. Misalnya saja penelitian yang dilakukan mahasiswa tentang suhu udara beberapa kelas, dan diperoleh data misalnya suhu ruangan kelas A 15 derajat Cls, suhu ruang kelas B 20 derajat Cls, dan suhu ruang kelas C 25 derajat Cls. Berarti bahwa suhu ruang kelas A adalah 75 % lebih dingin dari suhu ruang kelas B. Suhu ruang kelas A 60 % lebih dingin dari suhu ruang kelas C. Suhu ruang kelas A lebih dingin dari suhu ruang kelas B dan C. Atau suhu ruangan kelas B lebih panas dari suhu ruang kelas A, tetapi lebih dingin dibandingkan dengan suhu ruangan kelas C. Contoh lain misalnya prestasi mahasiswa yang diukur dengan skala indek prestasi mahasiswa.

antar jemput bandara telah merupakan suatu pelayanan khusus bagi para kustomer yang ingin di jemput atau diantar melalui bandara di jakarta. jika anda sibuk dan tidak bisa mengantar keluarga anda, atau menjemput rekan bisnis anda di bandara kamilah solusi anda. antar jemput bandara telah memberikan kemudahan, kenyamanan dan keamanan bagi mereka yang membutuhkan jasa antar jemput baik dari luar kota, luar negri dll. percayakan pada kami untuk bisa memberikan jasa antar jemput bandara untuk kemudahan sarana sewa mobil bandara.

kami terbiasa untuk menangani jemputan bagi para turis asing atau kolega asing untuk jemputan bandara yang menginginkan armada sewa mobil yang terawat serta driver yang tidak merokok, sopan dan berpengalaman untuk jasa jemputan bandara.

Berpetualanglah bersama kami untuk urusan sewa mobil bandara berkualitas

y NEIL GENZLINGER

Frontline

Frontline An installment of this PBS program looks at the effects of Ebola on Liberia and other countries, as well as the origins of the outbreak.

The program traces the outbreak to its origin, thought to be a tree full of bats in Guinea.

Mr. Napoleon was a self-taught musician whose career began in earnest with the orchestra led by Chico Marx of the Marx Brothers.

Mr. Alger, who served five terms from Texas, led Republican women in a confrontation with Lyndon B. Johnson that may have cost Richard M. Nixon the 1960 presidential election.

Fullmer, who reigned when fight clubs abounded and Friday night fights were a television staple, was known for his title bouts with Sugar Ray Robinson and Carmen Basilio.

Under Mr. Michelin’s leadership, which ended when he left the company in 2002, the Michelin Group became the world’s biggest tire maker, establishing a big presence in the United States and other major markets overseas.

Photo

 

KATHMANDU, Nepal — When the dense pillar of smoke from cremations by the Bagmati River was thinning late last week, the bodies were all coming from Gongabu, a common stopover for Nepali migrant workers headed overseas, and they were all of young men.

Hindu custom dictates that funeral pyres should be lighted by the oldest son of the deceased, but these men were too young to have sons, so they were burned by their brothers or fathers. Sukla Lal, a maize farmer, made a 14-hour journey by bus to retrieve the body of his 19-year-old son, who had been on his way to the Persian Gulf to work as a laborer.

“He wanted to live in the countryside, but he was compelled to leave by poverty,” Mr. Lal said, gazing ahead steadily as his son’s remains smoldered. “He told me, ‘You can live on your land, and I will come up with money, and we will have a happy family.’ ”

Weeks will pass before the authorities can give a complete accounting of who died in the April 25 earthquake, but it is already clear that Nepal cannot afford the losses. The countryside was largely stripped of its healthy young men even before the quake, as they migrated in great waves — 1,500 a day by some estimates — to work as laborers in India, Malaysia or one of the gulf nations, leaving many small communities populated only by elderly parents, women and children. Economists say that at some times of the year, one-quarter of Nepal’s population is working outside the country.

Though Robin and Joan Rolfs owned two rare talking dolls manufactured by Thomas Edison’s phonograph company in 1890, they did not dare play the wax cylinder records tucked inside each one.

The Rolfses, longtime collectors of Edison phonographs, knew that if they turned the cranks on the dolls’ backs, the steel phonograph needle might damage or destroy the grooves of the hollow, ring-shaped cylinder. And so for years, the dolls sat side by side inside a display cabinet, bearers of a message from the dawn of sound recording that nobody could hear.

In 1890, Edison’s dolls were a flop; production lasted only six weeks. Children found them difficult to operate and more scary than cuddly. The recordings inside, which featured snippets of nursery rhymes, wore out quickly.

Yet sound historians say the cylinders were the first entertainment records ever made, and the young girls hired to recite the rhymes were the world’s first recording artists.

Year after year, the Rolfses asked experts if there might be a safe way to play the recordings. Then a government laboratory developed a method to play fragile records without touching them.

The technique relies on a microscope to create images of the grooves in exquisite detail. A computer approximates — with great accuracy — the sounds that would have been created by a needle moving through those grooves.

In 2014, the technology was made available for the first time outside the laboratory.

“The fear all along is that we don’t want to damage these records. We don’t want to put a stylus on them,” said Jerry Fabris, the curator of the Thomas Edison Historical Park in West Orange, N.J. “Now we have the technology to play them safely.”

Last month, the Historical Park posted online three never-before-heard Edison doll recordings, including the two from the Rolfses’ collection. “There are probably more out there, and we’re hoping people will now get them digitized,” Mr. Fabris said.

The technology, which is known as Irene (Image, Reconstruct, Erase Noise, Etc.), was developed by the particle physicist Carl Haber and the engineer Earl Cornell at Lawrence Berkeley. Irene extracts sound from cylinder and disk records. It can also reconstruct audio from recordings so badly damaged they were deemed unplayable.

“We are now hearing sounds from history that I did not expect to hear in my lifetime,” Mr. Fabris said.

The Rolfses said they were not sure what to expect in August when they carefully packed their two Edison doll cylinders, still attached to their motors, and drove from their home in Hortonville, Wis., to the National Document Conservation Center in Andover, Mass. The center had recently acquired Irene technology.

Cylinders carry sound in a spiral groove cut by a phonograph recording needle that vibrates up and down, creating a surface made of tiny hills and valleys. In the Irene set-up, a microscope perched above the shaft takes thousands of high-resolution images of small sections of the grooves.

Stitched together, the images provide a topographic map of the cylinder’s surface, charting changes in depth as small as one five-hundredth the thickness of a human hair. Pitch, volume and timbre are all encoded in the hills and valleys and the speed at which the record is played.

At the conservation center, the preservation specialist Mason Vander Lugt attached one of the cylinders to the end of a rotating shaft. Huddled around a computer screen, the Rolfses first saw the wiggly waveform generated by Irene. Then came the digital audio. The words were at first indistinct, but as Mr. Lugt filtered out more of the noise, the rhyme became clearer.

“That was the Eureka moment,” Mr. Rolfs said.

In 1890, a girl in Edison’s laboratory had recited:

There was a little girl,

And she had a little curl

Right in the middle of her forehead.

When she was good,

She was very, very good.

But when she was bad, she was horrid.

Recently, the conservation center turned up another surprise.

In 2010, the Woody Guthrie Foundation received 18 oversize phonograph disks from an anonymous donor. No one knew if any of the dirt-stained recordings featured Guthrie, but Tiffany Colannino, then the foundation’s archivist, had stored them unplayed until she heard about Irene.

Last fall, the center extracted audio from one of the records, labeled “Jam Session 9” and emailed the digital file to Ms. Colannino.

“I was just sitting in my dining room, and the next thing I know, I’m hearing Woody,” she said. In between solo performances of “Ladies Auxiliary,” “Jesus Christ,” and “Dead or Alive,” Guthrie tells jokes, offers some back story, and makes the audience laugh. “It is quintessential Guthrie,” Ms. Colannino said.

The Rolfses’ dolls are back in the display cabinet in Wisconsin. But with audio stored on several computers, they now have a permanent voice.

Public perceptions of race relations in America have grown substantially more negative in the aftermath of the death of a young black man who was injured while in police custody in Baltimore and the subsequent unrest, far eclipsing the sentiment recorded in the wake of turmoil in Ferguson, Mo., last summer.

Americans are also increasingly likely to say that the police are more apt to use deadly force against a black person, the latest New York Times/CBS News poll finds.

The poll findings highlight the challenges for local leaders and police officials in trying to maintain order while sustaining faith in the criminal justice system in a racially polarized nation.

Sixty-one percent of Americans now say race relations in this country are generally bad. That figure is up sharply from 44 percent after the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown and the unrest that followed in Ferguson in August, and 43 percent in December. In a CBS News poll just two months ago, 38 percent said race relations were generally bad. Current views are by far the worst of Barack Obama’s presidency.

The negative sentiment is echoed by broad majorities of blacks and whites alike, a stark change from earlier this year, when 58 percent of blacks thought race relations were bad, but just 35 percent of whites agreed. In August, 48 percent of blacks and 41 percent of whites said they felt that way.

Looking ahead, 44 percent of Americans think race relations are worsening, up from 36 percent in December. Forty-one percent of blacks and 46 percent of whites think so. Pessimism among whites has increased 10 points since December.

Continue reading the main story

Do you think race relations in the United States are generally good or generally bad?

60

40

20

0

White

Black

May '14

May '15

Generally bad

 

 

Continue reading the main story

Do you think race relations in the United States are getting better, getting worse or staying about the same?

Getting worse

Staying the same

Getting better

Don't know/No answer

All adults

Whites

Blacks

44%

37

17

46

36

16

41

42

15

 

 

The poll finds that profound racial divisions in views of how the police use deadly force remain. Blacks are more than twice as likely to say police in most communities are more apt to use deadly force against a black person — 79 percent of blacks say so compared with 37 percent of whites. A slim majority of whites say race is not a factor in a police officer’s decision to use deadly force.

Overall, 44 percent of Americans say deadly force is more likely to be used against a black person, up from 37 percent in August and 40 percent in December.

Blacks also remain far more likely than whites to say they feel mostly anxious about the police in their community. Forty-two percent say so, while 51 percent feel mostly safe. Among whites, 8 in 10 feel mostly safe.

One proposal to address the matter — having on-duty police officers wear body cameras — receives overwhelming support. More than 9 in 10 whites and blacks alike favor it.

Continue reading the main story

How would you describe your feelings about the police in your community? Would you say they make you feel mostly safe or mostly anxious?

Mostly safe

Mostly anxious

Don't know/No answer

All adults

Whites

Blacks

75%

21

3

81

16

3

51

42

7

 

 

Continue reading the main story

In general, do you think the police in most communities are more likely to use deadly force against a black person, or more likely to use it against a white person, or don’t you think race affects police use of deadly force?

Police more likely to use deadly force against a black person

Police more likely to use deadly force against a white person

Race DOES NOT affect police use of deadly force

Don't know/No answer

All adults

Whites

Blacks

44%

37%

79%

2%

2%

1%

46%

53%

16%

9%

8%

4%

 

 

Continue reading the main story

Do you favor or oppose on-duty police officers wearing video cameras that would record events and actions as they occur?

Favor

Oppose

Don't know/No answer

All adults

Whites

Blacks

92%

93%

93%

6%

5%

5%

2%

2%

2%

 

 

Asked specifically about the situation in Baltimore, most Americans expressed at least some confidence that the investigation by local authorities would be conducted fairly. But while nearly two-thirds of whites think so, fewer than half of blacks agree. Still, more blacks are confident now than were in August regarding the investigation in Ferguson. On Friday, six members of the police force involved in the arrest of Mr. Gray were charged with serious offenses, including manslaughter. The poll was conducted Thursday through Sunday; results from before charges were announced are similar to those from after.

Reaction to the recent turmoil in Baltimore, however, is similar among blacks and whites. Most Americans, 61 percent, say the unrest after Mr. Gray’s death was not justified. That includes 64 percent of whites and 57 percent of blacks.

Continue reading the main story

As you may know, a Baltimore man, Freddie Gray, recently died after being in the custody of the Baltimore police. How much confidence do you have that the investigation by local authorities into this matter will be conducted fairly?

A lot

Some

Not much

None at all

Don't know/No answer

All adults

Whites

Blacks

29%

31

22

14

5

31

33

20

11

5

20

26

30

22

 

 

In general, do you think the unrest in Baltimore after the death of Freddie Gray was justified, or do you think the unrest was not justified?

Justified

Not justified

Don't know/No answer

All adults

Whites

Blacks

28%

61

11

26

64

11

37

57

6

 

 

Ms. Pryor, who served more than two decades in the State Department, was the author of well-regarded biographies of the founder of the American Red Cross and the Confederate commander.

BEIJING (AP) — The head of Taiwan's Nationalists reaffirmed the party's support for eventual unification with the mainland when he met Monday with Chinese President Xi Jinping as part of continuing rapprochement between the former bitter enemies.

Nationalist Party Chairman Eric Chu, a likely presidential candidate next year, also affirmed Taiwan's desire to join the proposed Chinese-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank during the meeting in Beijing. China claims Taiwan as its own territory and doesn't want the island to join using a name that might imply it is an independent country.

Chu's comments during his meeting with Xi were carried live on Hong Kong-based broadcaster Phoenix Television.

The Nationalists were driven to Taiwan by Mao Zedong's Communists during the Chinese civil war in 1949, leading to decades of hostility between the sides. Chu, who took over as party leader in January, is the third Nationalist chairman to visit the mainland and the first since 2009.

Relations between the communist-ruled mainland and the self-governing democratic island of Taiwan began to warm in the 1990s, partly out of their common opposition to Taiwan's formal independence from China, a position advocated by the island's Democratic Progressive Party.

Despite increasingly close economic ties, the prospect of political unification has grown increasingly unpopular on Taiwan, especially with younger voters. Opposition to the Nationalists' pro-China policies was seen as a driver behind heavy local electoral defeats for the party last year that led to Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou resigning as party chairman.

Imagine an elite professional services firm with a high-performing, workaholic culture. Everyone is expected to turn on a dime to serve a client, travel at a moment’s notice, and be available pretty much every evening and weekend. It can make for a grueling work life, but at the highest levels of accounting, law, investment banking and consulting firms, it is just the way things are.

Except for one dirty little secret: Some of the people ostensibly turning in those 80- or 90-hour workweeks, particularly men, may just be faking it.

Many of them were, at least, at one elite consulting firm studied by Erin Reid, a professor at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business. It’s impossible to know if what she learned at that unidentified consulting firm applies across the world of work more broadly. But her research, published in the academic journal Organization Science, offers a way to understand how the professional world differs between men and women, and some of the ways a hard-charging culture that emphasizes long hours above all can make some companies worse off.

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Ms. Reid interviewed more than 100 people in the American offices of a global consulting firm and had access to performance reviews and internal human resources documents. At the firm there was a strong culture around long hours and responding to clients promptly.

“When the client needs me to be somewhere, I just have to be there,” said one of the consultants Ms. Reid interviewed. “And if you can’t be there, it’s probably because you’ve got another client meeting at the same time. You know it’s tough to say I can’t be there because my son had a Cub Scout meeting.”

Some people fully embraced this culture and put in the long hours, and they tended to be top performers. Others openly pushed back against it, insisting upon lighter and more flexible work hours, or less travel; they were punished in their performance reviews.

The third group is most interesting. Some 31 percent of the men and 11 percent of the women whose records Ms. Reid examined managed to achieve the benefits of a more moderate work schedule without explicitly asking for it.

They made an effort to line up clients who were local, reducing the need for travel. When they skipped work to spend time with their children or spouse, they didn’t call attention to it. One team on which several members had small children agreed among themselves to cover for one another so that everyone could have more flexible hours.

A male junior manager described working to have repeat consulting engagements with a company near enough to his home that he could take care of it with day trips. “I try to head out by 5, get home at 5:30, have dinner, play with my daughter,” he said, adding that he generally kept weekend work down to two hours of catching up on email.

Despite the limited hours, he said: “I know what clients are expecting. So I deliver above that.” He received a high performance review and a promotion.

What is fascinating about the firm Ms. Reid studied is that these people, who in her terminology were “passing” as workaholics, received performance reviews that were as strong as their hyper-ambitious colleagues. For people who were good at faking it, there was no real damage done by their lighter workloads.

It calls to mind the episode of “Seinfeld” in which George Costanza leaves his car in the parking lot at Yankee Stadium, where he works, and gets a promotion because his boss sees the car and thinks he is getting to work earlier and staying later than anyone else. (The strategy goes awry for him, and is not recommended for any aspiring partners in a consulting firm.)

A second finding is that women, particularly those with young children, were much more likely to request greater flexibility through more formal means, such as returning from maternity leave with an explicitly reduced schedule. Men who requested a paternity leave seemed to be punished come review time, and so may have felt more need to take time to spend with their families through those unofficial methods.

The result of this is easy to see: Those specifically requesting a lighter workload, who were disproportionately women, suffered in their performance reviews; those who took a lighter workload more discreetly didn’t suffer. The maxim of “ask forgiveness, not permission” seemed to apply.

It would be dangerous to extrapolate too much from a study at one firm, but Ms. Reid said in an interview that since publishing a summary of her research in Harvard Business Review she has heard from people in a variety of industries describing the same dynamic.

High-octane professional service firms are that way for a reason, and no one would doubt that insane hours and lots of travel can be necessary if you’re a lawyer on the verge of a big trial, an accountant right before tax day or an investment banker advising on a huge merger.

But the fact that the consultants who quietly lightened their workload did just as well in their performance reviews as those who were truly working 80 or more hours a week suggests that in normal times, heavy workloads may be more about signaling devotion to a firm than really being more productive. The person working 80 hours isn’t necessarily serving clients any better than the person working 50.

In other words, maybe the real problem isn’t men faking greater devotion to their jobs. Maybe it’s that too many companies reward the wrong things, favoring the illusion of extraordinary effort over actual productivity.

The career criminals in genre novels don’t have money problems. If they need some, they just go out and steal it. But such financial transactions can backfire, which is what happened back in 2004 when the Texas gang in Michael

Over the last five years or so, it seemed there was little that Dean G. Skelos, the majority leader of the New York Senate, would not do for his son.

He pressed a powerful real estate executive to provide commissions to his son, a 32-year-old title insurance salesman, according to a federal criminal complaint. He helped get him a job at an environmental company and employed his influence to help the company get government work. He used his office to push natural gas drilling regulations that would have increased his son’s commissions.

He even tried to direct part of a $5.4 billion state budget windfall to fund government contracts that the company was seeking. And when the company was close to securing a storm-water contract from Nassau County, the senator, through an intermediary, pressured the company to pay his son more — or risk having the senator subvert the bid.

The criminal complaint, unsealed on Monday, lays out corruption charges against Senator Skelos and his son, Adam B. Skelos, the latest scandal to seize Albany, and potentially alter its power structure.

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The repeated and diverse efforts by Senator Skelos, a Long Island Republican, to use what prosecutors said was his political influence to find work, or at least income, for his son could send both men to federal prison. If they are convicted of all six charges against them, they face up to 20 years in prison for each of four of the six counts and up to 10 years for the remaining two.

Senator Kenneth P. LaValle, of Long Island, who serves as chairman of the Republican conference, emerged from a closed-door meeting Monday night to say that conference members agreed that Mr. Skelos should be benefited the “presumption of innocence,” and would stay in his leadership role.

“The leader has indicated he would like to remain as leader,” said Mr. LaValle, “and he has the support of the conference.” The case against Mr. Skelos and his son grew out of a broader inquiry into political corruption by the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, Preet Bharara, that has already changed the face of the state capital. It is based in part, according to the six-count complaint, on conversations secretly recorded by one of two cooperating witnesses, and wiretaps on the cellphones of the senator and his son. Those recordings revealed that both men were concerned about electronic surveillance, and illustrated the son’s unsuccessful efforts to thwart it.

Adam Skelos took to using a “burner” phone, the complaint says, and told his father he wanted them to speak through a FaceTime video call in an apparent effort to avoid detection. They also used coded language at times.

At one point, Adam Skelos was recorded telling a Senate staff member of his frustration in not being able to speak openly to his father on the phone, noting that he could not “just send smoke signals or a little pigeon” carrying a message.

The 43-page complaint, sworn out by Paul M. Takla, a special agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, outlines a five-year scheme to “monetize” the senator’s official position; it also lays bare the extent to which a father sought to use his position to help his son.

The charges accuse the two men of extorting payments through a real estate developer, Glenwood Management, based on Long Island, and the environmental company, AbTech Industries, in Scottsdale, Ariz., with the expectation that the money paid to Adam Skelos — nearly $220,000 in total — would influence his father’s actions.

Glenwood, one of the state’s most prolific campaign donors, had ties to AbTech through investments in the environmental firm’s parent company by Glenwood’s founding family and a senior executive.

The accusations in the complaint portray Senator Skelos as a man who, when it came to his son, was not shy about twisting arms, even in situations that might give other arm-twisters pause.

Seeking to help his son, Senator Skelos turned to the executive at Glenwood, which develops rental apartments in New York City and has much at stake when it comes to real estate legislation in Albany. The senator urged him to direct business to his son, who sold title insurance.

After much prodding, the executive, Charles C. Dorego, engineered a $20,000 payment to Adam Skelos from a title insurance company even though he did no work for the money. But far more lucrative was a consultant position that Mr. Dorego arranged for Adam Skelos at AbTech, which seeks government contracts to treat storm water. (Mr. Dorego is not identified by name in the complaint, but referred to only as CW-1, for Cooperating Witness 1.)

Senator Skelos appeared to take an active interest in his son’s new line of work. Adam Skelos sent him several drafts of his consulting agreement with AbTech, the complaint says, as well as the final deal that was struck.

“Mazel tov,” his father replied.

Senator Skelos sent relevant news articles to his son, including one about a sewage leak near Albany. When AbTech wanted to seek government contracts after Hurricane Sandy, the senator got on a conference call with his son and an AbTech executive, Bjornulf White, and offered advice. (Like Mr. Dorego, Mr. White is not named in the complaint, but referred to as CW-2.)

The assistance paid off: With the senator’s help, AbTech secured a contract worth up to $12 million from Nassau County, a big break for a struggling small business.

But the money was slow to materialize. The senator expressed impatience with county officials.

Adam Skelos, in a phone call with Mr. White in late December, suggested that his father would seek to punish the county. “I tell you this, the state is not going to do a [expletive] thing for the county,” he said.

Three days later, Senator Skelos pressed his case with the Nassau County executive, Edward P. Mangano, a fellow Republican. “Somebody feels like they’re just getting jerked around the last two years,” the senator said, referring to his son in what the complaint described as “coded language.”

The next day, the senator pursued the matter, as he and Mr. Mangano attended a wake for a slain New York City police officer. Senator Skelos then reassured his son, who called him while he was still at the wake. “All claims that are in will be taken care of,” the senator said.

AbTech’s fortunes appeared to weigh on his son. At one point in January, Adam Skelos told his father that if the company did not succeed, he would “lose the ability to pay for things.”

Making matters worse, in recent months, Senator Skelos and his son appeared to grow wary about who was watching them. In addition to making calls on the burner phone, Adam Skelos said he used the FaceTime video calling “because that doesn’t show up on the phone bill,” as he told Mr. White.

In late February, Adam Skelos arranged a pair of meetings between Mr. White and state senators; AbTech needed to win state legislation that would allow its contract to move beyond its initial stages. But Senator Skelos deemed the plan too risky and caused one of the meetings to be canceled.

In another recorded call, Adam Skelos, promising to be “very, very vague” on the phone, urged his father to allow the meeting. The senator offered a warning. “Right now we are in dangerous times, Adam,” he told him.

A month later, in another phone call that was recorded by the authorities, Adam Skelos complained that his father could not give him “real advice” about AbTech while the two men were speaking over the telephone.

“You can’t talk normally,” he told his father, “because it’s like [expletive] Preet Bharara is listening to every [expletive] phone call. It’s just [expletive] frustrating.”

“It is,” his father agreed.

Mr. Tepper was not a musical child and had no formal training, but he grew up to write both lyrics and tunes, trading off duties with the other member of the team, Roy C. Bennett.

Late in April, after Native American actors walked off in disgust from the set of Adam Sandler’s latest film, a western sendup that its distributor, Netflix, has defended as being equally offensive to all, a glow of pride spread through several Native American communities.

Tantoo Cardinal, a Canadian indigenous actress who played Black Shawl in “Dances With Wolves,” recalled thinking to herself, “It’s come.” Larry Sellers, who starred as Cloud Dancing in the 1990s television show “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman,” thought, “It’s about time.” Jesse Wente, who is Ojibwe and directs film programming at the TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto, found himself encouraged and surprised. There are so few film roles for indigenous actors, he said, that walking off the set of a major production showed real mettle.

But what didn’t surprise Mr. Wente was the content of the script. According to the actors who walked off the set, the film, titled “The Ridiculous Six,” included a Native American woman who passes out and is revived after white men douse her with alcohol, and another woman squatting to urinate while lighting a peace pipe. “There’s enough history at this point to have set some expectations around these sort of Hollywood depictions,” Mr. Wente said.

The walkout prompted a rhetorical “What do you expect from an Adam Sandler film?,” and a Netflix spokesman said that in the movie, blacks, Mexicans and whites were lampooned as well. But Native American actors and critics said a broader issue was at stake. While mainstream portrayals of native peoples have, Mr. Wente said, become “incrementally better” over the decades, he and others say, they remain far from accurate and reflect a lack of opportunities for Native American performers. What’s more, as Native Americans hunger for representation on screen, critics say the absence of three-dimensional portrayals has very real off-screen consequences.

“Our people are still healing from historical trauma,” said Loren Anthony, one of the actors who walked out. “Our youth are still trying to figure out who they are, where they fit in this society. Kids are killing themselves. They’re not proud of who they are.” They also don’t, he added, see themselves on prime time television or the big screen. Netflix noted while about five people walked off the “The Ridiculous Six” set, 100 or so Native American actors and extras stayed.

But in interviews, nearly a dozen Native American actors and film industry experts said that Mr. Sandler’s humor perpetuated decades-old negative stereotypes. Mr. Anthony said such depictions helped feed the despondency many Native Americans feel, with deadly results: Native Americans have the highest suicide rate out of all the country’s ethnicities.

The on-screen problem is twofold, Mr. Anthony and others said: There’s a paucity of roles for Native Americans — according to the Screen Actors Guild in 2008 they accounted for 0.3 percent of all on-screen parts (those figures have yet to be updated), compared to about 2 percent of the general population — and Native American actors are often perceived in a narrow way.

In his Peabody Award-winning documentary “Reel Injun,” the Cree filmmaker Neil Diamond explored Hollywood depictions of Native Americans over the years, and found they fell into a few stereotypical categories: the Noble Savage, the Drunk Indian, the Mystic, the Indian Princess, the backward tribal people futilely fighting John Wayne and manifest destiny. While the 1990 film “Dances With Wolves” won praise for depicting Native Americans as fully fleshed out human beings, not all indigenous people embraced it. It was still told, critics said, from the colonialists’ point of view. In an interview, John Trudell, a Santee Sioux writer, actor (“Thunderheart”) and the former chairman of the American Indian Movement, described the film as “a story of two white people.”

“God bless ‘Dances with Wolves,’ ” Michael Horse, who played Deputy Hawk in “Twin Peaks,” said sarcastically. “Even ‘Avatar.’ Someone’s got to come save the tribal people.”

Dan Spilo, a partner at Industry Entertainment who represents Adam Beach, one of today’s most prominent Native American actors, said while typecasting dogs many minorities, it is especially intractable when it comes to Native Americans. Casting directors, he said, rarely cast them as police officers, doctors or lawyers. “There’s the belief that the Native American character should be on reservations or riding a horse,” he said.

“We don’t see ourselves,” Mr. Horse said. “We’re still an antiquated culture to them, and to the rest of the world.”

Ms. Cardinal said she was once turned down for the role of the wife of a child-abusing cop because the filmmakers felt that casting her would somehow be “too political.”

Another sore point is the long run of white actors playing American Indians, among them Burt Lancaster, Rock Hudson, Audrey Hepburn and, more recently, Johnny Depp, whose depiction of Tonto in the 2013 film “Lone Ranger,” was viewed as racist by detractors. There are, of course, exceptions. The former A&E series “Longmire,” which, as it happens, will now be on Netflix, was roundly praised for its depiction of life on a Northern Cheyenne reservation, with Lou Diamond Phillips, who is of Cherokee descent, playing a Northern Cheyenne man.

Others also point to the success of Mr. Beach, who played a Mohawk detective in “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” and landed a starring role in the forthcoming D C Comics picture “Suicide Squad.” Mr. Beach said he had come across insulting scripts backed by people who don’t see anything wrong with them.

“I’d rather starve than do something that is offensive to my ancestral roots,” Mr. Beach said. “But I think there will always be attempts to drawn on the weakness of native people’s struggles. The savage Indian will always be the savage Indian. The white man will always be smarter and more cunning. The cavalry will always win.”

The solution, Mr. Wente, Mr. Trudell and others said, lies in getting more stories written by and starring Native Americans. But Mr. Wente noted that while independent indigenous film has blossomed in the last two decades, mainstream depictions have yet to catch up. “You have to stop expecting for Hollywood to correct it, because there seems to be no ability or desire to correct it,” Mr. Wente said.

There have been calls to boycott Netflix but, writing for Indian Country Today Media Network, which first broke news of the walk off, the filmmaker Brian Young noted that the distributor also offered a number of films by or about Native Americans.

The furor around “The Ridiculous Six” may drive more people to see it. Then one of the questions that Mr. Trudell, echoing others, had about the film will be answered: “Who the hell laughs at this stuff?”