Twenty-six-year-old Santiago Perez has been arrested and charged with the murder and robbery of 41-year-old Afzal Muhammad in a wooded part of Brooklyn's Prospect Park late last month, according to the Brooklyn Eagle:

Via Knittinmama, a former student:

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/ottawa/story/2008/08/15/ot-knitting-080815.html

A six-year-old girl says she is disappointed after her knitting group was asked to leave an eastern Ontario library due to a new ban on arts and crafts.

“I really had fun in there in the library, and I’m really sad that they stopped that,” said Kingston Currie, who used to spend two hours a week with the Itch and Stitch Club at the Long Sault Library in Long Sault, Ont., about 95 kilometres southeast of Ottawa.

Pamela Haley, manager of library services for the united counties of Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry, said the ban on crafts was put on place because the municipality is revamping its 18 library branches in an effort to attract more people and needs to be more literacy-focused to achieve that end.

She said the library’s new fall lineup includes teen book clubs and Scrabble nights. The library will also be holding some events not focused on literacy, such as video game nights, to attract a younger crowd.

But under the new plan, there will no longer be a space for Kingston Currie and the other girls, aged six to 10, who used to sit around a table teasing yarn into organized patterns and items with crochet hooks and pairs of needles.

Read the comments as well. It looks like it’s a much more involved story. Folks contacted the library, including this poster: (emphasis mine)

This is the answer I received from Pamela Haley:
A recent article in the Chesterville Record has stirred up a hornet’s nest of controversy surrounding the supposed “expelling” of young knitters from the library while retaining “gaming”. This article and the subsequent CBC report is factually inaccurate and decidedly premature.The Library does not have a problem with artistic expression and creativity. The history of programming in the SDG County Library has been, however, to offer programmes with only the making of a craft as its focus, e.g. build a bird house, make cards, decorate eggs, etc. This has drawn patrons in for the craft, who have left without “experiencing” the Library. What we are striving to do is to enhance that library experience by focusing on literature-based programmes. Preparing for these programmes is based on a widely accepted model that involves selecting a theme, and choosing literature and activities based on the theme, with crafts being the occasional addition to the programme.There was no specific targeting of the “Chix with Sticks” group. Indeed, we had placed a call for programmes in the branches and had not received any indication that there was a continued desire for this programme. Even if we had been notified, we would have asked the group to tweak their programme to fall in line with the new programming guidelines. What we are proposing is a programme called “Chix in Stitches” which is a female book club focusing on humourous “chick lit” that encourages knitting, crocheting, etc. during the discussions and a pot of tea to boot.

Interesting take on “experiencing the library…”

Much has been written about the promise of mashups to become serious business tools — as well as the obstacles and challenges they must overcome along the way. It’s only now, more than six years since the notion of mashups first came to the fore (they acquired the name a little later), that SaaS vendors and integrators are beginning to realize the full potential of the mashup for enterprise applications. As this first wave of commercial enterprise mashups comes to maturity, it is making clear once and for all the mashup’s seminal role as the disruptive motor at the heart of the on-demand model.

As a case in point, take Xactly’s 5-way mashup, announced Monday (image courtesy of Xactly). Using Salesforce.com’s Force.com platform as the foundation, the SaaS vendor has mashed up its own sales compensation application with Amazon.com’s retail catalog, the Paypal payment system and an iGoogle gadget. The mashup creates an enterprise-class incentive rewards management and fulfilment application that at the same time is economical enough to be affordable for smaller businesses — subscriptions will be $10 per user per month, at the end of a 90-day free-of-charge launch window that ends December 1st.

Using the application, an organization can set up award targets to incentivize its sales, marketing or contact center teams, with points instantly convertible to retail purchases from Amazon’s online catalog. The awards are paid for out of a Paypal account, which the organization maintains in credit to match its awards budget. Users can view their incentive targets and tallies from within Salesforce.com, or using the iGoogle gadget.

This five-way mashup is a substantive proof point for applying mashups to enterprise applications. It pools the disruptive economics of at least three separate giants of on-demand: Amazon, PayPal and Salesforce.com. Will any ZDNet reader dare argue with me that you could/should do this in-house and do it better and cheaper? It’s simply not tenable. Nor is it any more practical to think of implementing a similar mashup to Amazon, Paypal and the rest from an on-premise application — leaving each individual customer to negotiate their own gateway access to Amazon, Paypal and the rest, along with the necessary security precautions. It’s a recipe for multiple implementation disasters.

In this respect, the Xactly mashup makes the case for multitenancy more convincingly than any other example I’ve come across. It’s crystal clear that making any one of these five components single-tenant instead of multi-tenant would instantly destroy the economic benefit and immediacy of the one-to-many multi-tenant model. A multi-tenant mashup is a one-to-many instance: it makes all of its service integrations available to any of its clients. In contrast, mashing up single instances one at a time is a laborious, repetitive and economically wasteful activity.

The example makes evident the huge economic leveling effect that comes into play from mashups of multi-tenant services. Xactly has been able to deploy a series of off-the-shelf components that benefit from the economies of scale of market leaders such as Amazon and PayPal, while the low-cost PaaS mashup development approach means that its developers could focus their efforts on the business logic — workflow rules and policies, all managed by the Force.com platform, are at the heart of the application. Using Salesforce.com’s PaaS platform meant Xactly could develop the finished application in two months using just “a couple of developers,” according to Xactly’s VP of marketing Karen Steele. Its marketing costs will also be lower because the prime marketplace will be Salesforce.com’s million-plus subscriber base (although the effective market is narrower as the capabilities used by Xactly Rewards require an enterprise subscription rather than the less costly and more widely used Professional or Team subscriptions).

As an aside, although Salesforce.com benefits from its role as the underlying platform for Xactly’s mashup, it isn’t immune from the economic leveling effects of the multi-tenant mashup. In April, cloud integrator Appirio released its cloud storage product for Salesforce.com, which allows subscribers to bypass the relatively expensive costs of storing documents and other assets on Salesforce.com’s servers, taking advantage of Amazon’s much lower utility storage pricing. Appirio seems to be taking a leading role in enabling such multi-tenant enterprise mashups — it released an interesting business contacts mashup in May and has contributed the iGoogle element of Xactly’s 5-way mashup.

In summary, I think the Xactly mashup is a harbinger of the disruptive effect of multi-tenant enterprise mashups, and of much more interesting developments that are yet to emerge. There’s still a ways to go, though, especially when it comes to matters such as integrated payment and user authorization. Xactly remains wedded to a subscription revenue model but this application is interesting in that it uses a combination of two monetization strategies — as well as the $10 per user per month subscription, Xactly earns what Steele described as “a very modest markup” on each Amazon transaction. It’s designed to cover the transaction handling costs but, if the application became successful enough to generate large volumes of transactions, my guess is that it could potentially begin to offset the subscription fee. However it’s worth bearing in mind that, in order to use the application, subscribers not only have to pay Xactly’s $10 subscription — they must also have an enterprise-level Salesforce.com account. What’s more, those subscriptions have to be purchased separately instead of as a single packaged offering, adding unwanted hindrances to the onboarding process.