Tuesday, December 29, 2009

Biographies “Verizon Operations Center in Basking Ridge, N.J., Earns Prestigious ... - Yahoo Finance” plus 3 more

Biographies “Verizon Operations Center in Basking Ridge, N.J., Earns Prestigious ... - Yahoo Finance” plus 3 more

Verizon Operations Center in Basking Ridge, N.J., Earns Prestigious ... - Yahoo Finance

Posted: 29 Dec 2009 05:01 AM PST

NEW YORK, Dec. 29 /PRNewswire/ -- Verizon's operations center in Basking Ridge, N.J., has earned the U.S. Green Building Council's LEED® Silver certification for the center's environmentally friendly design and energy efficiency.  

About 3,000 employees, including the leadership teams of Verizon's two business groups, work at the center, which is situated in northern New Jersey's Somerset County.

To make the 1.4 million-square-foot facility more energy efficient, Verizon uses temperature sensors and energy-management systems to monitor heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems. The company also controls the facility's lighting schedules; tracks maintenance and service requirements; uses air handlers with variable frequency drives for energy-efficient heating and cooling; and has installed energy-efficient light-emitting diode and fluorescent T-5 lights.  

"The efficient management of the Verizon operations center is an extension of the company's commitment to the environment, but it's also an example of our focus on implementing sensible business practices and reducing energy consumption," said Tanya Penny, vice president of real estate for Verizon.

Rick Fedrizzi, president, CEO and founding chair of the U.S. Green Building Council, said: "Verizon's LEED certification demonstrates tremendous green building leadership. As the newest member of the LEED family of green buildings, the Verizon operations center is an important addition to the growing strength of the green building movement."

The Verizon Operation Center's LEED (Leadership In Energy and Environmental Design) certification comes just months after the center earned the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's prestigious Energy Star rating, the national symbol for superior energy efficiency and environmental protection.

To qualify for the Energy Star rating, the center had to place among the top 25 percent of the most energy-efficient facilities in the U.S.  Commercial buildings that earn the Energy Star rating use an average of 40 percent less energy than typical buildings and release 35 percent less CO2. Verizon operates 46 Energy Star-rated facilities, including many retail stores across the country.

Verizon Commitment to the Environment

Overall, Verizon's carbon intensity is approximately nine times below the U.S. average, as reported by the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Verizon's rate of 64 metric tons of CO2 emissions per million dollars in revenue represents a year-over-year improvement of 3 percent.

The company remains committed to finding practical and innovative ways to increase energy efficiency and bolster conservation efforts. For example, Verizon operates the largest fuel cell site of its kind in the nation. Using seven fuel cells, the company's Energy Star Award-winning facility in Garden City, N.Y., can generate enough electrical power per hour to meet the energy needs of 400 single-family homes.

Other Verizon initiatives include:  

  • Creating an industry standard – Verizon was the first telecommunications company to require that the network equipment it purchases be 20 percent more energy efficient.
  • Employees have reduced engine idling, which has cut fuel consumption by more than 2 million gallons (equivalent to taking some 3,400 cars off the road for a year).
  • Electronically delivering approximately 100 million bills to customers.


For more information on Verizon's commitment to the environment, visit the company's Green Press Kit at http://newscenter.verizon.com/kit/green-press-kit/.        

Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE: VZ), headquartered in New York, is a global leader in delivering broadband and other wireless and wireline communications services to mass market, business, government and wholesale customers.  Verizon Wireless operates America's most reliable wireless network, serving more than 89 million customers nationwide.  Verizon also provides converged communications, information and entertainment services over America's most advanced fiber-optic network, and delivers innovative, seamless business solutions to customers around the world.  A Dow 30 company, Verizon employs a diverse workforce of more than 230,000 and last year generated consolidated revenues of more than $97 billion.  For more information, visit www.verizon.com.  

VERIZON'S ONLINE NEWS CENTER: Verizon news releases, executive speeches and biographies, media contacts, high-quality video and images, and other information are available at Verizon's News Center on the World Wide Web at www.verizon.com/news.  To receive news releases by e-mail, visit the News Center and register for customized automatic delivery of Verizon news releases.

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Fred Fox, 63: Collected biographies and baseballs - Atlanta Journal Constitution

Posted: 24 Dec 2009 08:20 AM PST

By Rick Badie

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Fred Fox collected biographies and baseballs.

He had about 100 biographies. He liked to read about presidents, industrialists and baseball players. He also fancied biographies related to World War II, which his late father, Aron Fox,  served in with the U.S. Army.

"He enjoyed the facts, learning about how they became who they were, what their strategies were," said friend Marianne Stubbs of Marietta. "He especially liked the biographies of John Adams, Alexander Hamilton and Mark Twain. Another was Andrew Jackson."

His collection of baseballs topped 30.  All were signed by the players.

An only child, Mr. Fox was born and raised in Cookeville, Tenn. He played football and baseball for the local high school. Though a lover of the written word, Mr. Fox was a chemistry major in college. He graduated with a bachelor's degree from Lipscomb University, a liberal arts college in Nashville.

After college, he taught high school chemistry in Clayton County for five years before he tired of the profession. So he tried insurance and found a niche. He became an inspector/salesman for Hartford Steam Boiler.  It marked the start of a career in insurance that spanned decades.

For the past six years, Mr. Fox worked at Southern States Insurance in Marietta. John Schubert, the company president, said Mr. Fox knew the trade.

"He was high energy," said Mr. Schubert of Johns Creek. "He was as devoted to his customers as anyone and treated them all as very good friends. He was a very knowledgeable insurance man."

In August, Mr. Fox was hospitalized for anemia. After many tests and many specialists, an oncologist diagnosed kidney cancer. Mr. Fox died Dec. 17 from complications of the disease at Wellstar Kennestone Hospital in Marietta. He was 63. A party to celebrate his life will be held at a later date.

Mr. Fox enjoyed sports, particularly University of Tennessee football and the Atlanta Braves. From 1988 to 1998, he served as an official with the Atlanta Area Basketball Officials Association. He also officiated sporting events at the Atlanta Jewish Community Center.

In 1978, Mr. Fox left Hartford Steam Boiler to become an independent insurance agent.  At the time of  his death, he was employed at Southern States, where he'd worked alongside Ms. Stubbs.

"He was very good at insurance," she said. "He could read people and he knew how to read people's personalities. He knew what they needed and people trusted him. Clients became his friends, so it was a wonderful relationship that lasted."

Mr. Fox didn't wanted a funeral. He wanted his friends to throw a party.

And early next year, that's what his friends plan to do.

"He told me many times that he wanted people to get together to have a good time," Ms. Stubbs said. "Those were his wishes."

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The Nation: Misterioso (Thelonious Monk) - Democratic Underground.com

Posted: 29 Dec 2009 04:25 AM PST

Misterioso
By David Yaffe

December 22, 2009


"You know people have tried to put me off as being crazy," said Thelonious Sphere Monk. "Sometimes it's to your advantage for people to think you're crazy." He ought to have known. Monk was one of only a few jazz musicians to appear on the cover of Time magazine (others include Louis Armstrong, Dave Brubeck, Duke Ellington and Wynton Marsalis) and was celebrated as a genius by everyone who mattered. Bud Powell, John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins could not have imagined (or transmuted) the language of jazz without him. Yet the pianist was also constantly underpaid and underappreciated, rejected as too weird on his way up and dismissed as old hat once he made his improbable climb. Performer and composer, eccentric and original, Monk was shrouded in mystery throughout his life. Not an especially loquacious artist (at least with journalists), he left most of his expression in his inimitable work, as stunning and unique as anyone's in jazz--second only to Duke Ellington's and perched alongside Charles Mingus's.

He did leave a paper trail, though, and Robin D.G. Kelley's exhaustive, necessary and, as of now, definitive Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original offers a Baedeker of sorts. Jazz may be filled with fascinating characters, but it has inspired relatively few exemplary full-length biographies. (Among the exceptions are David Hajdu's Lush Life: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn; John Chilton's Sidney Bechet: The Wizard of Jazz; Linda Kuehl's unfinished With Billie, assembled by Julia Blackburn after Kuehl's death; and John Szwed's So What: The Life of Miles Davis.) Kelley is, in many ways, a rarity. While many music journalists write amateur history, Kelley is an eminent historian at the University of Southern California. Rarer still, though his earlier books (including Race Rebels and Yo' Mama's DisFunktional!) examine race from a neo-Marxist perspective, his thinking took an apparent turn during the fourteen years he spent on the Monk project. While discussions of race and racism are recurrent--how could they not be in a biography of a mentally ill black genius in the middle of the twentieth century?--Kelley shows admirable restraint by never addressing politics beyond their appropriate role or treating Monk's life as a political fable. Monk, a black man from humble origins, succeeded at becoming a bourgeois artist with a wealthy, devoted patron, and he is never criticized for it. Unlike Max Roach, Charles Mingus, Nina Simone and many others, Monk did not enlist in the struggles for freedom or power. Music and daily life proved to be difficult enough.

Kelley has created a lush portrait of the private, off-camera Monk, one it would have been difficult to paint without the unprecedented access he had to the Monk family, including Nellie, Monk's widow, who provided substantial information before her death in 2002, and their son, Toot (otherwise known as TS), who opened up the archives once trust had been established. Kelley shows us the man who, when he wasn't getting work in the early 1950s, played Mr. Mom. He shows us the musician who, when he wasn't at home, needed some sort of neighborhood watch to make sure he didn't drift in the wrong direction. It took a village. He had a family who tolerated his eccentricities and never pressured him to take a day job. Mingus had to work at the post office when freelance work was hard to come by; no matter how lean things got, Monk was able to work at the eighty-eight keys in his living room. ............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100111/yaffe


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Biographies shed light on music greats - Edmonton Journal

Posted: 20 Dec 2009 03:56 PM PST

Looking for gifts for the music fans on your Christmas list? Several recent biographies offer some intriguing insights on the musician's life.

- -English drummer Bill Bruford has penned his own unique story. Bill Bruford: The Autobiography (Jawbone, 352 pages) offers the rare angle of a top musician who has worked in several very different musical contexts, from rock to jazz to pure percussion, over 40 years.

Bruford grew up with a fascination for jazz and improvisation. It was only after he had become known for bringing innovative work to art-rock groups like Yes and King Crimson that he finally formed his jazz band, Earthworks, in 1986. All that sets up the book for a series of contrasts.

Recording an album with a major rock band typically takes months in the studio, while many jazz groups can pull off an album in a few days. Then there's the touring. After doing international tours with a gargantuan travelling entourage, performing for stadium-sized audiences with rock bands like Yes, it was a vastly different experience for the drummer as his jazz group worked in the relative intimacy of clubs and concert halls. (Earthworks played the jazz festival here in 1988.)

Bruford spends considerable time on the group chemistry and methodology of both rock and jazz, but less time on the personalities than some fans might like. One exception is King Crimson's inscrutable leader Robert Fripp, who was clearly a source of frustration for Bruford even as the band's experimental ethic repeatedly drew the drummer back to the fold.

- -Journalist David Sheppard's book On Some Faraway Beach/The Life And Times of Brian Eno (Orion Books, 480 pages) is the most entertaining, best-written book considered here.

Born in 1948, Eno has become a legend in his own time for his innovations in turning the recording studio into an experimental realm. Somewhere between his beginnings as an art college nerd with no formal musical training and his current role in semi-retirement toying with "quiet-room" installations and lecturing, he's become an intriguing philosopher of the postmodern era.

The genre-crossing breadth of his own creations runs from innovative pop to the invention of ambient music and the groundbreaking use of sampling found sounds in My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1980). But Eno is probably best known as a Svengali-like force who has helped shape some of the most significant recordings by a long string of artists and groups starting with Roxy Music, David Bowie, Talking Heads and U2.

With access to Eno, his friends, family and musical collaborators, Sheppard fashions an amazingly detailed story, creating a vivid picture of the musical and social trends that surrounded him, putting punk, new wave, pop and electronica in perspective.

Far from a work of worship, the book offers a balanced critique of Eno's accomplishments and considers views that he's something of a dilettante. But even Eno's biggest critics grudgingly admit the man's gifts as a creative facilitator who thrives in a friction of creative personalities.

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