By Giana Magnoli, Noozhawk Staff Writer | @magnoli | Published on 08.02.2013 2:42 p.m.
Santa Barbara City Councilman Frank Hotchkiss was thrown off his horse in the staging ground for the Old Spanish Days Historical Parade on Friday, and was taken to the hospital for treatment of his injuries, according to the Santa Barbara City Fire Department.
Firefighters and paramedics responded to the call at about 11:45 a.m., and took Hotchkiss to Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital as a precaution, since head and neck injuries are a big concern when falling from that height, fire Battalion Chief Robert Mercado said.
?It?s a big distance,? he noted.
Hotchkiss, reached by telephone Friday afternoon, said most of his lower left back was very sore, and hospital staff were checking to make sure nothing was broken, but he hopes to be up and about in a day or two.
?I was at Pershing Park before the parade,? he said. ?It?s a good thing, too; all of a sudden my horse shied and bucked me kind of straight up in the air. I landed flat on my back on the grass.?
He has ridden horses many times before, but had never been on that particular horse, he said.
The animal apparently was spooked when Hotchkiss pulled off his hat to wave to someone.
The Historical Parade is one of the largest equestrian parades in the country, and has hundreds of riders on horseback making their way up State Street every year for Old Spanish Days.
City firefighters also responded to an incident involving a fall from a horse near the end of the parade on Micheltorena Street, Mercado said. A man and woman were riding the same horse and it's unclear whether the horse tripped or was spooked, but both people ended up on the ground, according to City Fire.?
Both people were taken to the hospital on backboards, as a cervical spine precaution. They complained of back and neck pain, responding firefighters said. It's normal for City Fire to respond to a few incidents at the parade every year, though the riders who come out for Fiesta are usually very experienced, they noted.?
? Noozhawk staff writer Giana Magnoli can be reached at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook.
Noozhawk's comments are moderated, but by posting here you accept your responsibility to follow our rules as part of Noozhawk's shared online community. Please keep your comments civil and helpful. Don't attack other readers personally, and do not use vulgar, abusive or discriminatory language. Use the "Report Abuse" link if a comment violates these standards or our Terms of Use
Ryan Hunter-Reay takes a corner during practice for the IndyCar auto race at Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course in Lexington, Ohio, Friday, Aug. 2, 2013. (AP Photo/Tom E. Puskar)
LEXINGTON, Ohio (AP) ? Defending IndyCar Series champion Ryan Hunter-Reay knows it?s time to make inroads on points leader Helio Castroneves.
Hunter-Reay put himself in perfect position to do it this weekend at Mid-Ohio. Hunter-Reay captured the pole for Sunday?s Indy 200, turning the second-fastest lap in track history to edge Will Power for the top spot. It will be the third time this season and the fourth time in his career that Hunter-Reay will start from the front.
Scott Dixon, who has won three straight races to move into second in the points race, will start third. Marco Andretti qualified fourth, followed by Charlie Kimball and Dario Franchitti.
Castroneves will start 15th. The Brazilian leads Dixon by 24 points and Hunter-Reay by 69 as he searches for his first series title.
Tags: Automobile racing, By WILL GRAVES, IndyCar, North America, Ohio, Sports, United States
This entry was posted on August 3, 2013, 1:28 pm and is filed under Sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through RSS 2.0.
Both comments and pings are currently closed.
In 2004, a high school friend named Benjamin showed up to homeroom wearing a pair of Nike shoes with the words ?DJ Wangsta? embossed on them. The shoes were a horrendous baby blue and sunshine yellow, and Benjamin -- who was not a disc jockey, nor had he ever been called ?Wangsta? or ?DJ Wangsta,? that I knew of-- had ordered the garish shoes online, custom-made to his specifications and tastes.
He wanted his shoes to stand out, to be so can-you-believe-this-jackass stupid that everyone around him would have no choice but to acknowledge them, and him. From my memory, it worked: He strutted down the halls of our high school, with all eyes on his appalling kicks. From that day forward, everyone knew about Benjamin and his hideous DJ Wangsta shoes. It became his thing; he went from being ?that tall kid with the twin? to ?that kid with the dumb shoes.? He became an overnight celebrity, just by opting for footwear that he got to choose the looks of.
Nine years later Motorola is letting phone buyers do with their smartphones what Benjamin had done with his Nikes. With the Moto X, announced Thursday at a press event in New York City, shoppers will be able to log onto a website and customize their smartphones, with different color combinations and embossed messages on the back of the phone. On the Moto Maker website, you will be able to mock up your phone with one of 18 different colors (including hot pink, cherry red, and -- yes -- sunshine yellow); a choice of shades for the accent (which will tinge the volume and power buttons, and the metal rim surrounding the camera lens); and whatever words you choose on the back of the phone (a Motorola exec suggested printing your email address in case you lose the phone, though one imagines you could also opt for ?DJ Wangsta?).
Perhaps my opinion is skewed by memories of Benjamin?s sudden post-Nike boom in popularity, but this, to me, seems like a most appealing differentiator for a smartphone. Don?t tell shoppers what you are doing to be different; let them differentiate it themselves.
In a market where you are essentially trying to separate your product from the iPhone, or stand out from it, what else can you do? Samsung has found monster success with gee-whiz software tricks and an aggressive, on-the-offensive ad campaign; HTC has found critical, if not modest consumer, success with its wondrous hardware architecture; and the Nexus 4 has its own hardcore fans with its unadorned, quick-updating Android software. Nokia, LG, Motorola and Sony are still searching for effective, profitable answers.
If Motorola can effectively get the word out-- and, like other iPhone competitors, this phone will live or die on the effectiveness of the advertising push -- it should at least have a modest hit. Adventurous iPhone owners have long sought to establish their personalities by buying various wild cases to costume their phones, but Motorola takes this to the next level with its Moto X: It is an opportunity to declare your individuality on the phone itself, by inventing your own highly-visible color scheme and catchphrase. If the iPhone really has become boring, as many pundits insist, then a Motorola phone that you can festoon with the hues of your nation?s flag, or the colors your favorite college football team, may really appeal to some jaded shoppers. Perhaps Google could throw in a free ringtone of your choosing to really personalize this thing.
If some of the Moto X?s on display at Thursday?s event are evidence, these user-made cases are going to be nothing if not eye-catching (either pleasingly or, uh, DJ Wangsta-ly). The next step, clearly, will be to allow customers to choose any colors or photographs to print on the backs of their phones, and not just the 18 pre-approved ones that Motorola?s Maker tool allows you to select from. Perhaps that will be an option on the Moto X2 (Moto XI?) in 2014.
For now, though, Motorola is making the most easily customizable, micro-targeted phone on the planet, the only smartphone I know of that is makes it this simple to express yourself at the checkout counter. Whether it works is, again, contingent on the advertising -- let?s hope Motorola takes advantage of Google?s marketing team, and not whoever it was using -- and whether the DJ Wangsta?s of the world are as enthusiastic about decorating their smartphones as they are their shoes.
We close the current theme (fundraising) with a look at community foundations and the value propositions that drive their ability to operate and raise funds. Lori Larson, senior director of GuideStar DonorEdge, a technology and knowledge platform that enables community foundations to encourage increased charitable giving and to promote awareness of local needs and issues to donors and the community.
?
Community foundations play a unique, critical role in the progress of social change. They are place-based, public charities and are approaching their 100th sector anniversary in 2014. There are about 700 community foundations in the U.S. and according to the Council on Foundations, the community foundation sector manages almost $50 billion of charitable assets and serves an estimated 86& of the U.S. population.
These organizations are unique in their opportunity to:
Invest charitable dollars for a return on investment to increase philanthropy and grantmaking in their communities;
Provide local nonprofit information to enable smarter decisions and more effective philanthropy; and
Convene diverse groups of people to solve social problems, build infrastructure, and community investment.
Because community foundations are public charities, they must receive most of their support from the general public and must pass the IRS public support test. As such, they are held to strict standards of financial management, stewardship, and practices. No other organizations exist with this unique responsibility and opportunity for social change.
Historically, community foundations focused on managing and investing tax-deductible dollars from individuals. In the early 1990s, commercial financial institutions started offering the same types of charitable giving funds as community foundations. This new competition was only the beginning of market disruptions for these organizations. Many entrepreneurial and visionary community foundation leaders recognized that significant changes to their strategies and business models were needed. GuideStar?s DonorEdge partners, collectively known as the DonorEdge Learning Community (DELC), exemplify this creative leadership in how they have transformed their organizations and embarked on a new goal to become their community?s essential source of philanthropy and nonprofit information. The DELC connects people with charitable causes with which they care about, and organize and present information in a meaningful way for action and impact. This work exemplifies how community foundation are operationalizing new initiatives and research, such as Money For Good, Markets for Good, Information for Impact: Liberating Nonprofit Sector Data, and The Overhead Myth campaign.
Sustainability, resilience, impact, risk, and uncertainty are not new problems but continue to pose paralyzing challenges, especially to the social sector. As a result, the sector is witnessing a slowly emerging, positive shift in helping to communicate and create knowledge about the good, effective work of nonprofits through information design and education about how nonprofits achieve their mission. At the 2012 COF Fall Conference for Community Foundations, John Kania and Grant Oliphant presented CFInsight?s donor-advised fund study, ?Do More than Grow? and ?Designing What?s Next,? respectively, about reimagining multiple designs of sustainable business models for community foundations. Both presentations emphasized the critical need for community foundations to design their own future and purpose based on the people and communities they serve. The message included bridging the gap between community foundation aspirations and practices, and realizing that sustainable value requires a full spectrum of innovation that goes well beyond ?fixing? traditional revenue models.
In a recent Markets for Good blog post, Bahia Ramos discusses how community foundations can engage new donors via ?giving days.? Along those lines and also aligned with themes from Knight Foundation?s Media Learning Seminar 2013, the community foundations in GuideStar?s DELC have invested further and beyond giving events to:
Engage their communities and move donors along the continuum of charitable giving and inspiring philanthropy;
Provide nonprofits an opportunity to showcase their critical contribution to community and society; and
Empower donors to make informed decisions about their charitable giving.
Similar to Knight Foundation?s community foundations program, the community foundation sector is beginning to recognize that:
Community foundations are uniquely positioned to become civic leaders and distribute community information, and facilitate and support positive social change.
Collecting data for clarity of community needs and issues can be transformative for effective decision making and positive social change.
Social change will not occur without experimentation and managing risk through a non-traditional lens.
Positive social change cannot be accomplished without relationship building and community engagement of the broader community.
Community foundations must overcome traditional barriers and attitudes in strategies, collaborations, and partnerships.
Digital media is the entryway for broad distribution and engagement.
The learning community, DELC,? is transforming philanthropy in their communities through new strategies, nontraditional collaborations, and a culture of willingness to experiment. In many of these efforts, the DELC uses GuideStar DonorEdge nonprofit profile data internally for improved grantmaking and organizational efficiency, shares the data with community funders and stakeholders, and presents the knowledge from DonorEdge data with donors and the community at large to increase community philanthropy and affect positive social change.
The evolution of social change: community foundations play a critical role
Note: GuideStar powers DonorEdge, a technology and knowledge platform for community foundations to encourage increased charitable giving and promote awareness of local needs and issues to donors and the community. Beyond technology, GuideStar is a partner with the DELC, a group of innovative community foundations that use DonorEdge in their work. The vision of our partnership is a long-term commitment to inspire philanthropy, innovation, sustainability, and nonprofit sector building. We are a model of collaborative knowledge exchange at all position levels, from the executive suites to the project teams.
?
What do you think? Are community foundations in a good position to drive positive change at the local level? (If you think so, slide the Swipp slider to +5 for a a strong ?Yes,? or to -5 for a strong ?No.?
[unable to retrieve full-text content]Scientists have identified an 'on/off' switch in a type of cancer which typically occurs in the testes and ovaries called 'malignant germ cell tumors.'
[unable to retrieve full-text content]Using advanced analysis of DNA from Y chromosomes from men all over the world, scientists have shed new light on the mystery of when and how a few early human ancestors started to give rise to the incredible diversity of today?s population.
WASHINGTON (AP) ? The Obama administration is declassifying documents about its telephone spying program to try to tamp down congressional opposition to domestic surveillance.
The documents will provide little solace, however, to Americans hoping to understand the legal analysis that underpinned the widespread surveillance.
And the redacted documents show only in broad strokes how National Security Agency officials use the data.
One particular type of analysis, called "hop analysis" is hinted at but never fully discussed. That allows to the government to search the phone records of not only suspected terrorists, but everyone who called them, everyone who called those people, and others who called them, as well.
With that authority, the government can search the records of millions of people in an investigation of one person.
We close the current theme (fundraising) with a look at community foundations and the value propositions that drive their ability to operate and raise funds. Lori Larson, senior director of GuideStar DonorEdge, a technology and knowledge platform that enables community foundations to encourage increased charitable giving and to promote awareness of local needs and issues to donors and the community.
