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It continues to divide investors today, with the rise of so-called ethical investment funds, which aim to make money without causing social or environmental harm.

Ethical funds typically shun businesses that fall short of their moral criteria, such as environmentally damaging oil and mining firms, weapons manufacturers, tobacco companies and those involved in animal testing.

Some actively seek out businesses that aim to do good, such as renewable energy firms.

Socially Responsible Investing, as it is also known, has struggled to convince investors, who assume they pay a price in the shape of fund underperformance.

However, new figures suggest ethical funds have done far better than sceptics believe.

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CLEAN AND MEAN

The average ethical fund has returned 16.81 per cent over the last year, slightly ahead of the 15.20 per cent average return for non-ethical funds, according to new figures from MoneyFacts.co.uk.

Top was the EdenTree Amity European Fund, up 33.4 per cent, while Unicorn UK Ethical Income and Standard Life Investments UK Ethical also returned more than 30 per cent.

Ethical funds also outperformed over three years, but really excelled over five years, returning 76.1 per cent against just 64.1 per cent for non-ethical rivals.

EdenTree Amity European, Liontrust Sustainable Future Absolute Growth and Henderson Global Care Growth would have more than doubled your money over that period.

Richard Eagling, head of pensions and investments at MoneyFacts, says the traditional view that ethical investing requires a financial sacrifice now looks outdated: Ethical funds have more than held their own recently, performance-wise.

He suggests that sustainable practices and good governance may give companies a competitive advantage.

MORAL MAZE

Investors must approach these figures with caution, says Jason Hollands, managing director of wealth advisers Tilney Investment Services: Over time, ethical funds can lurch significantly between outperformance or underperformance.

One reason performance looks so good right now is that the oil and gas sector, which many ethical funds shun on environmental grounds, has endured a rocky few years.

Over 10 years non-ethical funds came out on top. He adds: If oil and gas recover ethical funds could find themselves back in the relative doldrums.

Hollands says ethically-minded investors must understand that performance can deviate significantly from the wider stock market, but adds this will not worry those who put morality before money: Tobacco companies can offer great returns, but that will not sway somebody who does not want to invest their cash in cigarettes.

He tips Kames Ethical Equity, Standard Life UK Ethical and F&C Responsible Global Equity.

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1. Don't put all your eggs in one basket: Protect portfolios from unforeseen events by making sure investments are not focused in just one or two areas.

THINK SMALL

Another problem is that ethical funds tend to focus on just a handful of sectors that meet their criteria.

MoneyToTheMasses.com founder Damien Fahy says: This leaves you exposed to a relatively small investment universe, notably technology and financial stocks.

Ethical funds are heavily weighted towards smaller firms rather than those with a dirty global footprint. F

und managers also have different views of what makes an ethical company, and this may not match your own.

Investing ethically is a minefield. I have seen funds invest in oil stocks that have engaged in Arctic drilling or banks accused of rate rigging and money-laundering, says Fahy.

His preferred ethical funds are Liontrust Sustainable Future UK Growth, EdenTree Amity European and Royal London Sustainable World Trust.

Eagling says investors are likely to remain sceptical despite recent successes: More than 30 years after the first ethical fund was launched the sector accounts for just 1.2 per cent of investment under management.

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THINK SMALL

Another problem is that ethical funds tend to focus on just a handful of sectors that meet their criteria.

MoneyToTheMasses.com founder Damien Fahy says: This leaves you exposed to a relatively small investment universe, notably technology and financial stocks.

Ethical funds are heavily weighted towards smaller firms rather than those with a dirty global footprint.

Fund managers also have different views of what makes an ethical company, and this may not match your own.

Investing ethically is a minefield. I have seen funds invest in oil stocks that have engaged in Arctic drilling or banks accused of rate rigging and money-laundering, says Fahy.

His preferred ethical funds are Liontrust Sustainable Future UK Growth, EdenTree Amity European and Royal London Sustainable World Trust.

Eagling says investors are likely to remain sceptical despite recent successes: More than 30 years after the first ethical fund was launched the sector accounts for just 1.2 per cent of investment under management.

Original post:
Ethical investment funds: Five-minute guide to moral money management - Express.co.uk

A special performance and some good sports.

SPECIAL SHOW: St Joseph's students attended the performance of Saltbush at Bathurst Memorial Entertainment Centre.

THE students and staff thoroughly enjoyed the Saltbush performance which took place at the Bathurst Memorial Entertainment Centre.

It was a very personal Aboriginal performance that took us all on a special journey through years gone by and years to come.

All of the students were involved and displayed the utmost respect. Thank you to Mrs McKean for organising this wonderful experience.

CONGRATULATIONS to our students who were invited to attend the principals morning tea earlier in the month. The students, along with their parents, enjoyed morning tea to celebrate receiving fiveCARE awards for their efforts and hard work in term two.

CONGRATULATIONS to Skye Ryan-Long, Maddie Gibbs, Zac Sheehy, Riley Murphy, Grace ONeill, Neive Hogan and Ella Mangan who represented St Josephs at the Diocesan Carnival in Dubbo.

It was agreat effort by our students to make it to this level.

Excerpt from:
News from St Joseph's School - Oberon Review

"Tiffany and her husband are amazing coaches, and amazing people! Very knowledgeable, supportive, energetic, and passionate about helping others become the best versions of themselves that they can be. Tiffany is also fantastic with both hair and makeup! I would highly recommend them for anyone looking to become healthier and fit, regardless of your level of athleticism!" - Heather Dufresne

"Thank you both for being such a huge part in my second WBFF experience!!! I wouldn't have made it without you guys. Your training plan was wonderful! I appreciate the thoroughness of the meal plan - down to the time and servings of everything. That was such a big help and made it easier with prepping. My first time training, my trainer gave me a basic outline which didn't help as much because it didn't give me a good breakdown of everything. I loved having the detailed workouts with each exercise and how to pair up supersets or monster sets, as well as, being given the number of reps and adjustments for pyramid sets or drop sets. I had to look up a few things o YouTube, as was suggested, but the workouts were great. I'll still be adding them into my routine! Pro-Status hair and make-up was phenomenal! As organized as you guys were prepared to be, you did an excellent job adjusting and fitting people in as needed. The crew was awesome. I loved the outcome of my gait and make-up. I felt like a beautifully fit princess! 😉 A friend said I looked like a Disney princess. I will totally accept that compliment! 🙂 The availability of you both to talk to and ask questions, or for advice or just for a pep, was so helpful and I appreciated all of it!I felt my experience with Personal Performance LLC was wonderful and I would absolutely do it all over. I loved the preparation, the coaches, the girls on my team. It was overall an excellent experience and I couldn't thank you more." - Melissa Sholomicky

"Tiffany and Sean, I can't thank you two enough. My experience with personal performance was life changing. I have no complaints nor would I change anything about this program. You two taught me how to workout and more important how to eat. Since the show I added eggs in, I keep my carbs in my 3 early meals, and veg and protein at night. I feel really good when I eat this way, which is why I'm going to continue! You guys are just perfect together, you make such a power team and I'm grateful to have been apart of it! I can't wait for my next prep with personal performance! Thank you again!" -Nicole Nicolosi

"I don't even know how to describe my experience with Personal Performance besides that it was probably the most amazing/rewarding experience in my life! Although it was quite a battle sometimes it was definitely worth it! The encouragement and support from you guys and the team was WAYY more than what I had expected. The training kicked my ass everyday, there wasn't a day where I didn't feel like I didn't work out, lol. The diet did wonders to my body, and to think that I was scared of eating carbs in the past! Psh, smh.Can't wait to prep with you guys for my next show!! Love you guys!" - Jessica Rivas

"I cannot thank you both enough for helping me become a healthier, happier Nicole! lol. I cannot see my life changing from what it has become. Sometimes I think back about how I used to eat and workout and I am SO grateful you both are so amazing and helpful because it was rather unhealthy. I only want to improve myself and you both have opened my eyes on how to do that! I can't thank you both enough!" - Nicole Patruno

"I've struggled with my weight for over 20 years now and I have finally found a perfect program for me. This is a lifestyle change and I'm finally understanding that." -Raida

"For once in my life I can finally say I can't wait to wear shorts or go bikini shopping, I mean never in a million years would I ever lol, I mean that in the most humble way possible btw!" -Ashley D.

"I just want to thank you and and Sean for all that you have done and how you been there for me! You guys know how incredibly hard this prep was for me mentally with everything going on. I just want you to know how much it means to me how genuinely caring you guys are. You are two of the most amazing people I know! So thank you for all that you do! I love you guys!!" -Megan T.

"I don't even know where to start. I think I'm still in shock from these before and afters. I can't explain how blessed and grateful I am for you guys. I was at a point in my life where I needed to make a good change mentally and physically! And a change for good! I love how real you guys are and how understanding of what truly is an active and healthy lifestyle! It didn't happen over night but dedication and patience was key. This is definitely not over for me.This is just a start and you guys are absolutely the best. Thank you for all your help and guidance. You'll be hearing from me very soon." -Liz C.

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Programs/Services PERSONAL PERFORMANCE Customized Online ...

Curtis Schieber For The Columbus Dispatch

Lucinda Williamss songs are so incisive and well-crafted they nearly sing themselves, reaching emotional undercurrents apart from their delivery. As her set in the Valley Dale Ballroom on Tuesday night illustrated, though, the most moving these days are those with specific personal connections. When she appeared to relish reaching into those memories, she elevated an evening filled with terrific songs to one punctuated by magic moments.

Lake Charles was one of those, a song about a deceased former lover that nonetheless gained weight from a story Williams told about her dad meeting Hank Williams Sr. Apparently, Hank told scholarly poet Miller Williams he had a beer drinking soul.

On her 2014 album, Down Where The Spirit Meets The Bone, Williams turned one of her fathers poems into the song Compassion, using one of its lines for the albums title. Tuesday nights concert opened with Protection, from that collection and killer lines such as, Livin in a world full of endless troubles/Livin in a world where darkness doubles.

When the singer revisited the highway that drew a line through her early years with her newest release, last years The Ghosts Of Highway 20, the results were stark, vivid, and sometimes bluntly honest. Her delivery of the title track last night was not as desolate but at least as personal. Even before she followed it with the story about her dad and Hank Williams, it was clear that it was informed by her family history.

The singers set drew heavily from her 1998 album Car Wheels On A Gravel Road, a high-water mark in her songwriting that drew more on her own experiences than her later focus on family.

Though Lake Charles comes from that collection, it was framed differently Tuesday night. Songs such as Right In Time and Drunken Angel were welcome old friends but seemed to ride on their own merits, Williams delivering them with her trademark, deceptive slackness but adding little special emotion.

Williams was backed by Buick 6, a bluesy trio that supported subtly when needed but stepped out enough to make the audience wonder who they were. They are drummer Butch Norton, guitarist Stuart Mathis and bassist David Sutton.

Angela Perley & The Howlin Moons opened with a smoking set of countrified rock.

View post:
Concert review | Lucinda Williams: Singer-songwriter weaves ... - The Columbus Dispatch

Virtualization helped drastically consolidate servers, as organizations spun up VMs rather than purchasing additional...

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hardware. The next wave of consolidation stemmed from strides in storage and server performance. Solid-state drives now match or surpass hard disk drive capacities and are much faster, while CPU core counts are soaring and dynamic RAM capacity is going through the roof.

For virtualized server farms, the prospect of much more horsepower allows the total count of servers needed for a given workload to shrink substantially. Alternatively, very powerful virtual instances can be assembled to either change how workloads are processed, such as totally in-memory platforms, or allow new workloads, such as compute/memory-intensive scientific apps, to be moved into the virtual space.

Not long ago, in order to get adequate performance, a server needed at least six Serial-Attached SCSI drives. Today, a pair of NVM Express drives does the same job, with better data integrity. We see the same reduction in networked storage, with performance met by solid-state drives (SSDs) and cold secondary storage supplied by large Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) hard drives. The writing is on the wall for these SATA hard disk drives (HDDs), with 30 TB 2.5-inch SSDs announced.

SSDs affect more than just capacity, though. SSDs use much less power than HDDs and typically adhere to the 2.5-inch form factor. The M.2 size -- formerly known as the Next Generation Form Factor -- is typically as small as 22 mm x 30 mm, continuing to minimize the space needed for the drive pool. Taken together, the drive space in servers and storage appliances could drop by as much as 70% from the designs common today.

We'll see a reduction in drive count and form factor with consequent overall space saving just from the adoption of SSDs, but other factors are affecting the space needed to store data. Data compression is radically reducing the raw drive capacity needed to store a given amount of data. Space savings vary widely -- some data sets, such as photos, are unreducible -- but other data can be greatly compressed, resulting in five times the usable storage capacity.

Deduplication of files also achieves good savings though, again, it is use case-dependent. Applying dedupe to virtual desktops can achieve common file set reductions of 100 times or more, with user file reductions as much as five times. Applying both deduplication and compression can really reduce the raw capacity needed for storage, leading to yet more shrinkage in data center footprint.

The server side is also evolving rapidly. Thanks to SSDs, CPU improvements are now reflecting a similar -- or better -- rate of server-level performance boosting.

That's not all. Memory expansion has led to feasible in-memory databases, which really boost performance in a virtual server cluster. Oracle reports as much as a 100x increase in performance, which either translates into fewer servers needed or a much faster runtime. Either way, organizations will consolidate servers as a result.

In practical terms, organizations are replacing RAID storage arrays with compact storage appliances. These, in turn, are seeing strong competition from combined server/storage hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) appliances, and it's likely, given the fact that these appliances are close in hardware design to servers, that this is the future of both storage and servers.

HCI aligns well with software-defined infrastructure, which takes advantage of the underlying virtual server structures created by hypervisors to separate control-plane data service software from storage, network and server hardware platforms. With the ability to service many more instances, the next generation of servers will create more room for microservices with all the flexibility that that approach implies.

With a small footprint for these appliances -- think of them as Lego blocks -- and with all of the factors above pressing on the issue, the future server farm will shrink physically by quite an amount. However, another major factor is in play that takes the shrinkage even further.

The cloud is outsourcing whole workloads from the data center. Many IT operations put web serving into the public cloud, and most backup/archiving work has moved there, too. The obsolescence of large tape libraries and the removal of racks of 1U servers will contribute yet another burst of footprint reduction.

Servers are moving toward a model with much lower power in the CPU-memory complex, which should allow for a major motherboard shrink and, consequently, a move to smaller servers.

Another factor in our equations has to be the effect of containers. Though just entering the mainstream, containers will likely supplant hypervisors. From a server perspective, they will increase instance density by around three to five times per server. Even though the demand for containers will grow substantially compared with present VM levels, it will still help to consolidate servers.

To counter all of this reduction, the industry is looking to big data to increase compute demand, but it isn't clear that this will stem the tide. Much big data has huge spikes in creation rates -- just think of retail as an example. These spikes might best be handled using public cloud space rather than in house.

Future products in storage and servers will accelerate the downsizing trend. SSDs above 30 TB in capacity are being announced -- that's a 3x increase over the largest HDD and comes in a 2.5-inch form factor to boot. We can expect 50 TB and 100 TB drives in 2018.

Servers are moving toward a model with much lower power in the CPU-memory complex, which should allow for a major motherboard shrink and, consequently, a move to smaller servers. Flash and Optane -- nonvolatile dual in-line memory module technology -- will boost system performance substantially, while CPU core counts will increase into the 20 core/CPU range. GPUs will, in certain use cases, boost in-memory operation even further, while much faster remote direct memory access will speed up both drives and data sharing between servers in a cluster.

Overall, we are entering a time when servers both increase substantially in performance and shrink in size. All of these system level boosts will consolidate servers for any given workload. It's clear that we have already passed "max data center" in terms of size, suggesting that some footprint planning would be a good idea.

Map server virtualization infrastructure

Improve SSD performance in your data center

Master virtualization performance management

Go here to read the rest:
Consolidate servers with these performance enhancements - TechTarget

4:51 PM ET

Bob PockrassNASCAR

BROOKLYN, Mich. -- Kevin Harvick said it was nothing personal against Dale Earnhardt Jr. when he said on his radio show Tuesday that Earnhardt had stunted the growth of NASCAR because he is the most popular driver but not the most successful.

Earnhardt said Thursday that the comments were "hurtful" and that he disagreed with that theory.

Harvick, speaking as he walked from his hauler to his motorhome after practice Friday at Michigan International Speedway, said he meant nothing personal by the comments. A fan question prompted the discussion on Harvick's weekly SiriusXM NASCAR show, and Harvick encouraged people to find a replay of the show and listen to the entire exchange.

"The whole question started with what do you think about Dale Jr.'s performance," Harvick said. "And we answered them honestly, and we answered the questions that they had, and it expanded into a conversation of the opinions and the things that I talked about. It wasn't anything personal."

Harvick said drivers vary in their opinions, specifically mentioning that Earnhardt said last week that veterans are being replaced by younger drivers because younger drivers are willing to accept less pay.

"He had his opinions the week before on driver salaries and driver ages and those things, and I don't know that anybody in the garage agreed with those, either," Harvick said. "There's definitely opinions on a lot of things, but it's nothing personal. And I didn't take anything that he said the week before personal, either."

Earnhardt said Friday that his comments on driver salaries "definitely probably upset some of the veteran guys" and that he would like to sit down and talk to Harvick.

"It would be great to sit down and just discuss what he said, what he meant, and we can even talk about my conversation from The Glen [on salaries] that he didn't like and just sort of find some common ground," Earnhardt said. "That would be great."

On his show, Harvick said other sports are successful because their most popular athletes are also among the most successful.

"For me, I believe that Dale Jr. has had a big part in kind of stunting the growth of NASCAR because he's got these legions of fans and this huge outreach of being able to reach different places that none of us have the possibility to reach, but he's won nine races in 10 years at Hendrick Motorsports and hasn't been able to reach outside of that," he said.

"I know those aren't the most popular comments, but those are real-life facts that you look up and see on the stat sheet. Imagine how popular he would have been if he won two or three championships?"

Earnhardt has won 26 races, including two Daytona 500s. The 2017 season will be his final one in Cup, and he sits 23rd in the standings, winless this year.

"I have an incredible amount of respect for him," Earnhardt said Thursday about Harvick. "I found some of those comments hurtful. I still respect him as a champion and ambassador for the sport.

"That's just the way it is, I guess. I hate that's how he feels."

Read the original here:
Kevin Harvick says Dale Earnhardt Jr. comments on his radio show Tuesday were not personal - ESPN

The Preatures have never really seemed of this time. Their 2014 debut Blue Planet Eyes was steeped in 80s new wave sounds that earned them comparisons to The Pretenders and John Hughes movie soundtracks. Three years later, this follow-up finds them in much the same place.

Thats not to say the Australian four-piece havent had any new ideas in the intervening years. Girlhood sparkles with creativity, from climactic ambient motifs to riffs that sound like theyve been discovered in a long-forgotten record collection. Mess It Up rides on a funky bassline, frontwoman Izzi Manfredi grooving out her woes like a star. First Night ends with soft ripples that sound like youre swimming underwater on the moon, while Yanada opens with a brief burst of sci-fi tinged needling before seamlessly veering into INXS territory.

The record, the band say, is about the contradictions of being a modern woman. The title track addresses that theme right at the albums start, Izzi explaining: Fantasy rules and its there in my room / Yeah I tear myself apart for kicks for you / Whatever makes me a modern girl. Jack Moffitts guitar lines jitter quickly beneath, reinforcing a sense of uncertainty and urgency. On Lip Balm, a jangly pop treasure, Izzi delves into the personal performance of getting made up. I know that you dont wear it for me / That its only for when you wear your picture, she sings, mimicking the role of a partners understanding disapproval.

Originally, The Preatures only intended to spend a month writing and recording their second album, keen to keep the momentum from their acclaimed debut growing. That that month soon stretched into a year and a half can only have been a good thing. Without time and patience, Girlhood might not have sounded quite as accomplished as it does.

Read more here:
The Preatures - Girlhood - DIY Magazine

Microprocessor giant Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) recently reported its financial results for the second quarter of the year. The company's business performed well, helped along by better-than-expected results in its personal computer processor business.

Intel's personal computer processor business sells chips for both desktop computers as well as notebook computers. It was sales into the latter that helped boost Intel's overall personal computer processor business, with platform unit shipments up 14% and average selling prices up 6% year over year.

Desktop revenue was down 3% year over year, due to a combination of year-over-year unit shipment declines compounded by a slight average selling price decline.

In a recent column, I argued that Intel could improve the performance of its desktop chip business by building more compelling, targeted products for the segment.

In this column, I'd like to go over three specific things I'd like to see from the company's Ice Lake architecture-based desktop personal computer chips, which should arrive in late 2018 or early 2019.

More cores

Intel's mainstream desktop personal computer processors topped out at four physical processor cores since the launch of the Core 2 Quad processor family back in 2007. Over time, those cores have gotten faster, and Intel has integrated more non-processor components into the chips (e.g., graphics/media), but the per-core performance gains that Intel has been delivering generation over generation for the last half-decade have been rather modest.

With the Ice Lake family of processors -- which will likely be marketed as the company's ninth-generation Core processors -- I would like to see an increase in processor core counts to at least eight.

Remember: Ice Lake will be manufactured on Intel's 10-nanometer chip manufacturing technology, which Intel says delivers a more than doubling of logic density over its 14-nanometer technology. Given this dramatic increase in technology density, packing in additional processor cores could be a great way to translate improved manufacturing technology into value for consumers.

Smarter cores

Although "more cores" is generally a compelling selling point, those cores need to deliver performance improvements over what came before them, particularly as most consumer-grade software is still highly sensitive to per-core performance.

With Ice Lake, Intel is expected to deliver an enhanced processor core relative to the core found in the sixth-, seventh-, and upcoming eighth-generation Core families of chips.

Intel has historically delivered a roughly 5% improvement in performance-per-clock in the generation immediately following a new core architecture (known as a "tick" in Intel's now-defunct "tick-tock" development model), and then a 10% improvement in performance-per-clock in moving to a new core architecture (known as a "tock").

The Ice Lake core represents the next "tock" in Intel's processor core development process, so I would expect to see at least a 15% improvement in performance-per-clock over the processor core used in Intel's currently shipping products.

More graphics, too

One area that Intel has worked to improve on has been the integrated graphics processors inside of its chips. Today, Intel's graphics processors are adequate for non-gaming tasks (e.g., web surfing, video playback, etc.), but they're still not suitable for playing some of the most popular games out there today.

Intel's goal shouldn't, realistically, be to displace graphics processors for the high-end gaming market; that's simply not going to happen with a solution integrated into the processor for cost, power, and form factor reasons.

What Intel's goal should be, though, is to build graphics processors into each one of its chips that can handle the major eSports titles, like Overwatch, at fluid frame rates and reasonable quality settings.

Intel is expected to deliver a new graphics architecture with its Ice Lake family of processors that, like its processor cores, should be two architectural generations over what's shipping in Intel's chips today. However, a new architecture alone isn't enough -- Intel will need to cram more of those updated graphics cores into its mainstream desktop chips than it does today to deliver higher performance.

If Intel can offer credible integrated graphics capabilities for mainstream gamers, that could help bolster the value proposition of its latest chips and help its desktop personal computer chip sales and average selling prices.

10 stocks we like better than Intel

When investing geniuses David and Tom Gardner have a stock tip, it can pay to listen. After all, the newsletter they have run for over a decade, Motley Fool Stock Advisor, has tripled the market.*

David and Tom just revealed what they believe are the 10 best stocks for investors to buy right now... and Intel wasn't one of them! That's right -- they think these 10 stocks are even better buys.

*Stock Advisor returns as of August 1, 2017

Excerpt from:
3 Things Intel Needs to Deliver With Its Ice Lake Desktop Processor Family - Madison.com

Don't Miss Upcoming Chapter Events

Needs Assessment: Getting What You Really Want

Presented by:Ryan Watkins

The earliest decisions that lead to projects or programs are among the most critical in determining long-term success. This phase of project development transforms exciting ideas into project proposals, thereby setting the stage for a variety of actions that will eventually lead (if all goes well) to desirable results. Decisions ranging from a propose a sanitation project in South Asia or North Florida to selecting approaches that strengthen school management in South America or Eastern Kentucky, are the early decisions that form the starting place of evaluation results.Needs assessments support this earliest phase of project development with proven approaches to gathering information and making justifiable decisions.

This event will take place at:

Mary D. Pretlow Anchor Branch Library,

111 West Ocean View Avenue, Norfolk, VA 23503

Light Refreshments and networking from 6:45- 7:00

Program from 7:00 - 8:30

Members attend for free. Guests are welcome; suggested donation is $10.

REMINDER: September is annual membership renewal month. Membership fees will be accepted at the meeting.

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Home | International Society for Performance Improvement

Good morning, Broncos Country.

A few days ago, Denver Broncos Head Coach Vance Joseph named Trevor Siemian the starting quarterback for their first preseason game against the Chicago Bears on Thursday night. He also mentioned that second-year pro Paxton Lynch would receive the start the following week against the San Francisco 49ers.

Despite camp reports and a flurry of Tweets from the local media, if you think that the Broncos quarterback position is settled its not. Far from it and the upcoming preseason games will undoubtedly have the biggest impact on the teams decision for naming a starter for the 2017 season. Coach Joseph addressed the media yesterday and spoke about the playing time Siemian and Lynch will receive against the Bears.

Were going to play those guys, the quarterbacks, probably a quarter or a quarter and a half, max. Each get a quarter and a halfno more than a quarter and a halfprobably a quarter, stated Joseph. It depends on how the game is going. The average plays per quarters in preseason are 15-16 plays. We want to get those guys probably a little bit more than that so we can have a fair evaluation there.

And though Lynch will be coming off the bench to see his first playing action of the preseason, he is excited to take charge of the offense and show the coaches how much he has grown from his first season, additionally that he can lead an offense with efficacy and move the chains and put points up on the board.

Ive always expected the games to kind of be the opportunity to show what youve learned out here in practice, said Lynch. Also, I think itll be good for our group as a wholethe offenseto go out there against somebody other than our defense that weve been going up against every day. I think everybody is excited about it and ready to go, Lynch added.

However, it isnt his own personal performance that matters most. Lynch wants to see the entire group he is on the field with succeeding and performing at an acceptable level for the coaching staff, who will undoubtedly be watching closely and scrutinizing every move that is made in order to evaluate the roster with diligence.

The big thing for me is just moving the ball up and down the field when Im in, executing the plays and not just worrying about myself doing good but as an offense, working good as a group, mentioned Lynch.

Its that sort of team first mentality that shows maturity and poise as he prepares for Thursdays game. Rather than making it about himself and worrying solely about his performance, Lynch wants to do whatever its possible to ensure the players he is paired with succeed.

I dont want to make it about me going out there making sure I play good and thats all Im worried about. Im more worried about the offense going out there and succeeding as a group.

Heres to hoping that all the players succeed and perform well tomorrow evening against the Bears, and if you are interested, that we see an explosive offensive attack compared to last seasons, regardless of who is lined up behind the center.

As always, thank you for reading and here is todays offering of Horse Tracks.

Denver Broncos' rookie class has started to assert itselfThe Broncos' rookies aren't backing down in training camp, and several have a chance to start when the regular season opens.

Look fast, you might see Broncos' Von Miller do special (team) thingsNot content to simply work at his own position, All-Pro Von Miller joins drills with Denver's special teams to keep busy during practice.

'Games matter' for QB candidates Trevor Siemian, Paxton LynchBroncos coach Vance Joseph will weigh Thursday's game against the Bears heavily in deciding between Trevor Siemian or Paxton Lynch as the starting QB.

Kansas City Chiefs RB Kareem Hunt standing out for receiving skillsKareem Hunt was known more as a runner than a receiver in college, but the Chiefs rookie has worked hard to add pass-catching to his repertoire.

Karl Joseph gets ball, attention from Marshawn LynchThe Raiders could have something in Karl Joseph if the former first-round pick can become more vocal and stay healthy.

Gase: Jay Cutler remembers 'everything' with offenseAdam Gase was pleased with Jay Cutler's first practice with the Miami Dolphins. Gase believes Cutler will be effective once the veteran QB has more experience playing with his new teammates.

Improved Nelson Agholor leading to Eagles' optimismEarly word out of Philadelphia Eagles' camp is that Nelson Agholor is much improved. Could his improvement mean big things for an Eagles' offense that struggled at the receiver spot in 2016?

Green Bay Packers release veteran DT Letroy GuionLetroy Guion's nearly four-year run in Green Bay is over. The Green Bay Packers released the veteran defensive tackle, general manager Ted Thompson announced Tuesday.

Chicago Bears GM on Mitchell Trubisky: We don't have to force itBears general manager Ryan Pace remains excited about the three quarterbacks he selected to lead the Bears this season and beyond.

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Horse Tracks: Paxton Lynch ready to get the offense rolling against Chicago Bears - Mile High Report (blog)