Answer the Call’s 36th Annual Game and Family Day a Success

On June 23, 2021, Answer the Call-New York Police and Fire’s Widow’s and Children’s Benefit Fund held the 36th Annual Game and Family Day at the New York Mets’ Citi Field park. The annual event brings together beneficiaries of the Widow’s and Children’s Benefit Fund, facilitating communal sharing and engagement. The beneficiaries include families of police officers, firefighters, EMS personnel, and other first responders who died in the line of duty.

The 2021 event coincided with a game between the New York Mets and the Atlanta Braves. The event kicked off at the Bullpen Plaza, where the fund’s beneficiaries received Mets jerseys and hats. Afterward, they enjoyed a pre-game celebration that included food, snacks, drinks, and family activities. Families took photos together at a booth, and children received balloon creations. Some even tried their luck at a raffle and won amazing prizes, including Barbie dolls and a bat autographed by Michael Conforto.

Top officials from the New York Police Department (NYPD) also attended the event. They included NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea and 1st Deputy Commissioner Benjamin Tucker. Widow’s and Children’s Benefit Fund board members Larry Schloss and Stephen Dannhauser also attended.

After the pre-game family dinner, guests proceeded to the Home Plate for a special award ceremony. Fund representatives awarded the 2021 Spirit Award to Amazon for its support of beneficiaries during the COVID-19 pandemic. Two Amazon employees, Connor Ginley and Nicole Demby received the award on behalf of the company. Both employees are children of fallen NYPD officers.

Then came the big game. Three children of fallen NYPD officers made the first pitch of the game. They were Robert Cardona, Trevor McDonnell, and Elina Murray. After the first pitch, Mathew Ferrugia, son of New York City Fire Department fallen hero Joseph Ferrugia, sang the national anthem. The game started afterward and ended with the Mets winning 7-3.

The annual Game and Family Day has a long history that dates back to 1985 when Daniel J. “Rusty” Staub organized the first picnic and day of baseball for families of fallen NYPD heroes at Shea Stadium, then home to the Mets. Rusty played professional baseball for the Mets, Detroit Tigers, Houston Astros, Montreal Expos, and Texas Rangers. He is a member of the Mets’, Rangers’, and Astros’ Halls of Fame and even had his jersey with the Expos retired.

A renowned philanthropist outside the field, Rusty was eager to support families of fallen police officers, having seen firsthand how the death of his uncle, a police officer, devastated his extended family emotionally and financially. He organized the first picnic for the widows, widowers, and children of fallen officers in 1985. After that first event, he held others every year with the help of supporters, reminding the families of fallen heroes that the community remembered the sacrifices of their loved ones.

The annual picnic grew into Game and Family Day, while Rusty’s vision grew to become Answer the Call-New York Police and Fire’s Widow’s and Children’s Benefit Fund. The fund organizes the annual Game and Family Day and other events for families of fallen heroes to socialize and build friendly communities. The fund also raises funds from generous supporters and distributes these to the families of fallen heroes.

When a first responder dies, the fund gives $25,000 to support the family of the deceased and, afterward, gives an annual stipend to the widow or widower of the deceased for the remainder of their lives. Persons interested in donating to the fund can find details on how to do it through its donate page (https://www.answerthecall.org/get-involved/donate/).

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What Is GitHub and How Does It Work?

Founded in 2008, GitHub is an open-source website and cloud-based service that takes a lot of the complexity out of coding. It allows teams of developers and coding experts to share ideas and processes to create innovative software. Developers can store and manage codes on the GitHub website and track changes made by others; additionally, users can merge projects with coding created by other developers and receive feedback on bugs and new features via pull requests and built-in code reviews. More than 73 million developers from in excess of 4 million organizations have used GitHub to create and maintain their proprietary software.

To fully understand exactly what GitHub is and how it works, it’s important to know the principles of version control and Git.

In essence, version control allows developers to safely work on aspects of a code base without altering the official source code. This is performed via branching and merging. The former refers to the duplication of a specific part of the source code, known as the repository. Once the appropriate changes are made and the code functions as intended, developers can merge the altered code back into the source code.

Git, meanwhile, is one of many types of open-source version control systems. Linus Torvalds created the system in 2005 to facilitate easier branching and merging functions for developers. Git predecessors like Subversion and CVS only allowed developers to make changes directly to the central repository. Through Git, developers copy this repository to their own system, make alterations on their local copy, and then upload those changes to the central server.

GitHub, then, is a repository hosting service exclusive to Git that promotes collaboration and community as well as automation and security. The website offers access control in addition to collaborative features including basic task management tools for user projects.

GitHub’s primarily functionality is forking, which is the term given to the copying of a repository from one account to another. Pull requests are notifications that allow developers to share changes they made to another developer’s code. The original developer can then merge those changes with the simple click of a button. Once a pull request is submitted, the developer of the original code can access the profile of the user who made changes and review their credentials and prior work.

Other notable features include GitHub Actions, which allow developers to enhance DevOps, optimize workflows, and set up CI/CD, among other actions, via automated events such as push, release, and issue creation. There are more than 5,000 automated actions on the website for developers to implement in their projects. Developers can also write and submit their own automation actions in GitHub’s world-class editor.

Microsoft purchased GitHub for $7.5 billion in 2018 in one of Silicon Valley’s largest strategic value deals. Two years prior, Microsoft had acquired LinkedIn for $26 billion, or 7.2 times its annual recurring revenue at the time; its acquisition of GitHub was for nearly 30 times the company’s revenue. GitLab, a competitor that provides similar services, was worth $16.5 billion when it debuted on the Nasdaq in October 2021.

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James Naismith and the Beginnings of Basketball

Basketball is one of the world’s most popular sports, having reached all parts of the globe since its creation in 1891. There are dozens of professional leagues spanning six continents, while the National Basketball Association (NBA) is a multibillion-dollar industry wherein the average team is valued at nearly $2.5 billion. The New York Knicks, at $5.8 billion, are the most valuable of the league’s 30 franchises. However, in the early 1890s, the sport was no more than a fun gym class activity at Springfield College.

Football players at Springfield College, then known as the International YMCA Training School, were required to participate in indoor recreational activities during the winter of 1891-92 under the instruction of James Naismith, who led the school’s gym class. However, the students found programming like apparatus work, marching, and calisthenics to be less enjoyable than warm-weather sports like football and lacrosse.

Naismith, a second-year graduate student recently named to the physical education teaching faculty, was motivated to create an indoor game that would keep the students entertained and engaged. After much consideration, he devised a game that combined elements of popular sports at the time such as lacrosse, soccer, and rugby, as well as a childhood game he played in his native Canada that he called “duck on a rock.”

Naismith intended to use two 18-inch square boxes as goals for the game, but instead settled on a pair of peach baskets given to him by the school janitor. He nailed the baskets to each end of the gymnasium balcony and subsequently created the original 13 rules for the game, dictating how the ball would be moved and what would be considered a foul.

The first-ever basketball game played in Naismith’s class was split into two 15-minute halves and featured nine players per side: three guards, three forwards, and three centers. Nobody had the idea to cut holes in the bottom of the peach baskets, so somebody had to be stationed near the balcony to collect the ball from the basket after each successful shot. The sport quickly reached other YMCAs and expanded to other countries because of Springfield College’s diverse international student body.

Naismith, a standout multi-sport athlete at McGill University in Montreal before arriving at Springfield College, maintained involvement with basketball in subsequent years. After graduating from Colorado University’s Gross Medical School in 1898, he joined the University of Kansas as associate professor of physical culture and chapel director. He founded the school’s men’s basketball program that year and coached the team until 1907.

Following several years of service as chaplain with the Kansas Army National Guard’s First Kansas Infantry and YMCA during the First World War, Naismith returned to the University of Kansas and spent nearly two decades as its campus physician and director of athletics. Basketball was an Olympic sport by the time of his death in 1939.

Coincidentally, the Knicks and the Toronto Huskies played the first-ever NBA game seven years later in Naismith’s home country of Canada. A hall of fame for the sport was created in his honor in 1959. Today, the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Massachusetts, is a 40,000-square-foot facility that preserves and celebrates the sport across all levels.

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