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According to the U.S. EPA, an estimated 93 percent of the 33 million real Christmas trees sold in North America each year get recycled. Instead of being buried in landfills, recycled Christmas trees can become mulch, help increase wetlands and support our wildlife habitat. So how do you make sure you are not part of the negligent non-recycling 7 percent of the population and how do you prepare your tree for recycling?
Recycling Your Tree
You can start by finding a Christmas tree recycling program in your area with Earth911.com[o1] .‘s handy list. Then you’ll want to check up on the program and make sure to follow its rules. Remember the following:
• Just because your waste company offers curbside recycling and curbside tree pickup doesn’t necessarily mean it offers curbside tree recycling. So you’ll want to find out where your tree is going to end up.
• Most programs end sometime in January, so don’t wait too long to recycle your tree. Curbside tree pickup often requires extra trucks and yard waste drop-off sites don’t get much other business in the winter. As a result they are typically staffed for a limited time only.
• Check the rules for tree prep. Generally you will need to dispose of the tree in the same condition you found it: ornament, light and tinsel free. And if you need another reason to convince someone not to “flock” your tree with white fake snow, just keep in mind that most recycling programs don’t accept flocked trees.
• You’ll want to stay on your garbage collector’s nice list. Since the trash removal company is most likely using different trucks and crews for the Christmas tree removal you don’t want it blocking the rest of your trash or recycling bins. You might also want to consider cutting large trees in half to make it easier for them to be hauled away.
• Another option is to recycle your Christmas tree yourself. You can chop the tree into mulch or firewood, assuming you have an energy-efficient wood-burning stove or fireplace (and heed local wood-burning restrictions). You can also use it as wood chips in a playground, and it’s a great source of oxygen for fish in a backyard pond.
Other Christmas Tree Uses
The most common uses for recycled Christmas trees are:
• Trees are chipped into mulch and used as protective groundcover. The city of Denver mulches the Christmas trees they collect and offer it to its residents for their own use through its Treecycle program. In other areas, the mulch is primarily used in public parks.
• Another solution is to chop trees into varying size pieces for walkways, playground surfaces and other areas.
• In coastal areas, recycled Christmas trees are important for their role in erosion control and shoreline maintenance and restoration. Christmas tree recycling is being encouraged by the State Department of Natural Resources as being crucial in the restoration of the quickly depleting wetlands of Southern Louisiana, where the depletion contributed to the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
The National Christmas Tree Association also lists the following more unusual uses for recycling your used Christmas tree:
• The New Hampshire Fish and Game Department deposits their Christmas trees in lakes around the state to restore fish habitats.
• A Wisconsin cardboard manufacturer uses recycled Christmas trees as boiler fuel.
• In Vermont, trees are burned as biomass and then the energy gets converted into home electricity.
And in terms of a direct benefit of Christmas tree recycling with a direct benefit for people everywhere, Environment Wire Canada informs that Pharmaceutical companies in Ontario extract acid from the needles of recycled Christmas trees for flu vaccines. | <urn:uuid:d4483c3b-f414-49f7-9c10-301a9afee9fe> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.networx.com/article/how-to-dispose-of-an-x-mas-tree | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397695.90/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00114-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.927061 | 766 | 2.8125 | 3 |
While there are many forms of eyelid cysts, most consist of a localized swelling of the eyelid. Some eyelid cysts are caused by an infection, and these can be painful and can even alter a person’s appearance.
If the infection is left untreated long enough, it can affect your vision. Most types of eyelid cysts go away on their own, but others need to be treated with antibiotics or surgery. Only your eye doctor can properly diagnose your cyst and determine the appropriate treatment.
Eyelid Cyst Symptoms
- Lumps on eyelids or around eyes
- Eyelid swelling
- Eye crusting
- Discomfort when blinking
Many people can feel an eyelid cyst forming, but others have no idea when one is developing. If you have any of the symptoms listed above, try your best not to touch or rub your eyes, and make an appointment with your eye doctor.
What Causes Eyelid Cysts to Develop?
The transfer of dirt, debris, and bacteria into or around your eyes can lead to the formation of these unsightly lumps or cysts. The most common causes of eyelid cysts are:
- Staph bacteria
- Eye duct/gland blockage
- Poor hygiene
- Dirty contact lenses
- Chronic blepharitis
- Leaving make-up on overnight
- Touching or rubbing eyes, especially with unwashed hands
What Are the Risk Factors for Eyelid Cysts?
Certain risk factors can increase your chances of developing an eyelid cyst. These include:
- History of cysts
- Chronic blepharitis
- Poor personal hygiene
- Chronic skin problems
- Problems with oil gland secretion in eyelids (Meibomian Gland Dysfunction)
How Many Types of Eyelid Cysts Are There?
There are many different types of eyelid cysts, including:
- Stye (also known as a hordeolum): A stye is an abscess in the oil glands, and is one of the most common forms of eyelid cysts. A stye is an acute infection that causes the cyst to become red, swollen, and tender to touch. If a stye lasts longer than two days you should schedule an appointment with your optometrist or ophthalmologist.
- Chalazia (also known as meibomian cysts): A chalazion is a lump on the eyelid that is commonly the result of an untreated stye. If a stye (infection) is not treated, the bacteria and debris can become a hard ball under the lid called a chalazion. Chalazia are non-infectious, chronic, and can last eight to sixteen weeks. Typically chalazia are not painful or tender, but they may need surgical removal if they do not resolve on their own. This surgery is performed by an ophthalmologist, and it entails cutting the cyst open and removing it.
- Sweat Gland Cysts: These cysts tend to be round, shiny, transparent lumps that appear near the tear ducts. This kind of cyst should be examined by your eye doctor to ensure that it is not something more dangerous, such as a squamous or basal cell carcinoma.
- Keratosis: These cysts are a combination of keratin and tissue and are found in various forms. There are three types of keratosis cysts: actinic, seborrheic, and keratosis pilaris.
- Inclusion Cysts: These cysts are white, filled with fluid, and cause a painless swelling of the eyelid. Although they are generally considered to be harmless, they should be examined by an eye care professional.
Should I See an Eye Doctor for an Eyelid Cyst?
If symptoms of an eyelid cyst develop, you should visit an eye doctor who can diagnose the type of cyst you have and determine the cause. Most eyelid cysts can be diagnosed with a complete eye exam.
The eyelids and eyelashes will be examined closely, and your eye doctor will check your eyelid structure, skin, and eyelash appearance. Once a proper diagnosis is made an appropriate treatment plan can be created.
How Are Eyelid Cysts Treated?
If you have a cyst on your eyelid, the best treatment starts with better personal hygiene. Keep your hands and fingers and the area around your eyes clean at all times. Try your best not to touch or rub your eyes.
This can help prevent bacteria from spreading. If you use cosmetics, throw them away and buy new ones after the cyst is gone. This will prevent the spread of bacteria that could be infecting your eye make-up. Avoid sharing your eye make-up, even with those closest to you.
If your eyelid cyst is painful, becoming larger in size, or has lasted a long time, seek medical attention from an optometrist or ophthalmologist.
Your eye doctor will determine the appropriate treatment plan. Common methods of treatment include antibiotics and surgical removal. Your doctor can also show you what steps to take to prevent the cyst from recurring.
A common way to relieve discomfort from a cyst on the eyelid is to apply warm compresses. Hold the compress to the eyelid for five to ten minutes several times a day. Wash your eyelids with baby shampoo diluted with water, or use a commercial product designed to wash eyelids.
Cysts are usually only removed for cosmetic reasons. Rarely do they pose a significant threat to anyone’s overall eye health or vision. Most eyelid cysts do not obstruct vision or pose an immediate problem for the eye. Talk with your eye care provider about possible treatment options for a cyst on the eyelid.
What Is the Prognosis for Eyelid Cysts?
In many cases, the eyelid cyst will go away on its own within a few weeks. On rare occasions, the cyst will enlarge and symptoms will worsen. Cysts can usually be treated effectively, but they may recur in people who are at higher risk.
What Can I Do to Prevent Eyelid Cysts?
Most types of eyelid cysts can be prevented by maintaining basic hygiene habits and by avoiding sharing certain items with others (e.g., towels, make-up, and eye drops). Keeping your hands clean can prevent bacteria from being transferred when you touch your eyes.
If you are prone to a certain type of eyelid cyst, such as chalazia, ask your eye doctor about additional prevention steps.
Talking to Your Eye Doctor
- What can I do to prevent eyelid cysts from recurring?
- Are there any over-the-counter products available to help reduce symptoms?
- What is causing cysts to develop on my eyelids?
- Which type of cyst do I have? Can you tell me a little more about this particular type of cyst?
- Based on the type of cyst I have, what are my treatment options?
- Will I need to see a specialist to have my eyelid cyst removed?
- S. Moore, MD; S. Yoder, MD “Complete Guide to Symptoms, Illness & Surgery” (The Berkeley Publishing Group, 2006) 218; 622
- Frank Meronk, MD, Benign Eyelid Lumps and Bumps, http://www.dr.meronk.com/eyelid/bumps.html
- American Optometric Association, Chalazion, http://www.aoa.org/x9762.xml | <urn:uuid:f59d3c7c-dc36-4309-aa2a-8092cc35999e> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.eyehealthweb.com/eyelid-cyst/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783393146.70/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154953-00090-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.931722 | 1,599 | 2.90625 | 3 |
Our brains have an extraordinary ability to monitor time. A driver can judge just how much time is left to run a yellow light; a dancer can keep a beat down to the millisecond. But exactly how the brain tracks time is still a mystery. Researchers have defined the brain areas involved in movement, memory, color vision, and other functions, but not the ones that monitor time. Indeed, our neural timekeeper has proved so elusive that most scientists assume this mechanism is distributed throughout the brain, with different regions using different monitors to keep track of time according to their needs.
Over the last few years, a handful of researchers have compiled growing evidence that the same cells that monitor an individual’s location in space also mark the passage of time. This suggests that two brain regions—the hippocampus and the entorhinal cortex, both famous for their role in memory and navigation—can also act as a sort of timer.
In research published in November, Howard Eichenbaum, a neuroscientist at Boston University, and collaborators showed that cells in rats that form the brain’s internal GPS system, known as grid cells, are more malleable than had been anticipated. Typically these cells act like a dead-reckoning system, with certain neurons firing when an animal is in a specific place. (The researchers who discovered this shared the Nobel Prize in 2014.) Eichenbaum found that when an animal is kept in place—such as when it runs on a treadmill—the cells keep track of both distance and time. The work suggests that the brain’s sense of space and time are intertwined.
The findings help to broaden our understanding of how the brain’s memory and navigation systems work. Perhaps both grid cells and other GPS-like cells aren’t tuned only to space but are capable of encoding any relevant property: time, smell, or even taste. “It probably points to a broad thing the hippocampus does,” said Loren Frank, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco, who studies memory and the hippocampus. “It figures out the relevant axis for encoding experiences and then uses the cells to map those experiences.”
These maps in turn construct a framework for memory, providing an organizing system for our never-ending series of past experiences. “The hippocampus is this grand organizer of memories in space and time,” Eichenbaum said. “It provides a spatiotemporal framework onto which other events are applied.”
* * *
To study how the hippocampus monitors time, scientists train rats to run on a wheel or tiny treadmill. This setup holds the animal’s location and behavior constant, so that researchers can focus on the neural signals linked to time. (Rats are too fidgety to sit still, so running helps standardize their normally twitchy behavior.) Electrodes implanted deep in the brain record when different cells fire.
In Eichenbaum’s experiments, a rat runs on the treadmill for a set period—say, 15 seconds—and then gets a reward. As the animal repeats the cycle over and over, its brain learns to track that 15-second interval. Some neurons fire at one second, others at two seconds, and so forth, until the 15 seconds have elapsed. “Each cell will fire at a different moment in time until they fill out the entire time interval,” Eichenbaum said. The code is so accurate that researchers can predict how long an animal has been on the treadmill just by observing which cells are active. Eichenbaum’s team has also repeated the experiment, varying the treadmill’s speed, to make sure the cells aren’t simply marking distance. (Some of the cells do track distance, but some seem linked solely to time.)
Although these neurons, dubbed “time cells,” are clearly capable of marking time, it’s still not clear how they do it. The cells behave rather like a stopwatch— the same pattern of neural activity repeats every time you start the clock. But they are more adaptable than a stopwatch. When researchers change the conditions of the experiment, for instance by extending the running duration from 15 to 30 seconds, cells in the hippocampus create a new firing pattern to span the new interval. It’s like programming the stopwatch to follow a different time scale altogether.
Moreover, time cells rely on context; they only mark time when the animal is put into a situation in which time is what matters most. When other variables come into play, the same cells behave differently. Allow a rat to explore a new environment, for example, and these same cells will map themselves to space; a particular cell will fire every time the animal is in a specific location rather than doing so at a certain time.
* * *
Eichenbaum’s work dovetails with a 15-year trend in neuroscience research that suggests the hippocampus is more flexible than scientists expected. Researchers traditionally thought of it as a mapmaker—place-encoding cells were discovered 40 years ago—but growing evidence suggests it can encode other types of information as well. According to the newest picture, place cells can map not just space but other relevant variables. Time is one of them, but others are possible. For example, “a wine taster might have a space of wine tastes and smells,” Frank said.
But many scientists still view the hippocampus as a largely spatial structure. According to their argument, neural circuitry evolved to keep track of location, and everything else is just recorded on top of it. “The hippocampus provides a code that is fundamentally spatial in nature,” said Bruce McNaughton, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Irvine.
Eichenbaum’s findings challenge this viewpoint, but they don’t bury it. “What’s definitely clear is that place cells can represent information beyond place,” said David Foster, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University. “But what’s less clear is whether they can code for the pure passage of time.”
In the timed treadmill experiments, the rats appear to be doing something very much like counting. But are these cells marking the passage of time itself, or are they responding to something else that merely looks like time? “We don’t know the driving principle that tells cells to fire at a specific point, but I don’t think it’s time,” said Eva Pastalkova, a neuroscientist at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Research Campus in Ashburn, Virginia. “It’s not precise enough; they are not like ticking clocks.”
György Buzsáki, a neuroscientist at New York University’s Neuroscience Institute whose lab did some of the first experiments exploring how the hippocampus tracks time, proposes that rather than monitoring time itself, these cells are doing something else—remembering a path through a maze or plotting the animal’s next move. Both memories and future plans unfold in time, so time cells may simply reflect this mental activity.
“That’s the number-one problem for me: Are there dedicated neurons in the brain doing nothing else but keeping track of time?” Buzsáki said. “Or do all neurons have functions that happen in sequential order, which for the experimenter can be translated into time?”
Buzsáki points out that it may not even make sense to think of hippocampal cells as independently coding for space or time. The human brain often considers time and distance interchangeably. “If one asks how far New York is from L.A., the answers you get vary: 3,000 miles, six hours by flight,” he said. “In older language, distances were typically given by time—the days it takes to go from one valley to another—since it was not distance but the number of sunsets that was easy to calculate.”
For Buzsáki, the issue goes beyond neuroscience and reaches into physics. Physicists consider space-time as a cohesive, four-dimensional entity, a fabric upon which the objects and events of the universe are embedded. “Neuroscience must converge back to the old problem of physics: Are there place and time cells? Or is there only a single time-space-continuum representation in the brain?” Buzsáki said.
* * *
Eichenbaum is less concerned with these abstract questions. His goal is to unpack the role time plays in forming memories. “When you recall what you did this morning, you remember events in the order in which they occurred,” he said. “How does the hippocampus organize memories in time?”
People with damage to the hippocampus often can’t make new memories — the famous patient H.M., who had a lobotomy to remove much of that part of the brain, introduced himself to his doctor over and over again each day. But these patients also have trouble remembering the sequence of words or objects presented in an experiment. “How does the hippocampus support the ability to remember the temporal order of a sequence of events?” Eichenbaum said.
Eichenbaum envisions time cells as providing a timeline onto which sequential events are attached to represent an experience. If memories are a movie, he said, time cells are what puts the individual frames in order. His team is planning experiments that will intersperse time delays with different events, to see how time cells modify their code to remember the order in which the events occurred. “I don’t think the hippocampus is a clock,” he said. “But it’s using a clock to map out when things happened in a memory to keep them in order.”
This post appears courtesy of Quanta Magazine. | <urn:uuid:ab9433de-b0b2-4afa-85df-a032f141b3ca> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/01/brain-map-time-space/431643/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783393997.50/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154953-00076-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946264 | 2,056 | 3.890625 | 4 |
Abnormally low blood pressure.
- Toxic shock syndrome can present with hypotension, erythema, fever and multisystem dysfunction.
- Another condition seen in pregnant women is hypotension or abnormally low blood pressure.
- Adverse events include a risk of respiratory arrest, hypotension, and impaired consciousness.
Words that rhyme with hypotensionabstention, apprehension, ascension, attention, circumvention, comprehension, condescension, contention, contravention, convention, declension, detention, dimension, dissension, extension, gentian, hypertension, intention, intervention, invention, mention, misapprehension, obtention, pension, prehension, prevention, recension, retention, subvention, supervention, suspension, tension
For editors and proofreaders
Definition of hypotension in:
What do you find interesting about this word or phrase?
Comments that don't adhere to our Community Guidelines may be moderated or removed. | <urn:uuid:e904cb67-0bcc-47e7-bd91-4b1ef839db3c> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/hypotension | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783395613.65/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154955-00155-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.839559 | 200 | 2.578125 | 3 |
A lot of people are concerned about the amount of calories in fast food. This is because they can’t help enjoying meals with high saturated fats, yet feel guilty due to the amount of bad press received by these types of restaurants. It is true that shops like McDonalds, Burger King and KFC produce food that is particularly unhealthy when eaten in large quantities. The oil used to fry the food is partially responsible for how many calories in a McDonalds cheeseburger are shown on the packages. The high calories are also largely due to the amount of trans fat contained in the cooking oil used to deep fry the meat and chips. Trans fat is especially unhealthy, as it both increases the bad cholesterol levels, and decreases the good cholesterol levels. This creates a double-barrelled injection of harmful ingredients.
If you are wondering how many calories in a McDonalds cheeseburger there are, the accepted value is approximately 295kcal per serving. This may not sound like much, yet if one considers the weight of this relatively light burger – which is conveniently not indicated on the package – then this is quite a high calorie dish. In addition, one cheeseburger contains 12g of fat, 31g of carbohydrates and 1.5g of salt, and is definitely one of the foods high in cholesterol. It should be noted that the latter is 30% of the daily-recommended salt dose. If fact, some nutrition experts claim that this exceptionally high salt content is one of the unhealthiest aspects of this type of junk food.
As with any diet, it is important to make decisions about which foods to consume, based on a daily allowance. Therefore, the calories in a McDonalds cheeseburger may seem high relative to other foods, yet when consumed in the context of an otherwise balanced diet it can be acceptable. However, keep in mind that some of the chemical ingredients used in the production of junk foods render the substances physically addictive. This means that it may be quite difficult to control hunger once the body is used to receiving this type of nutrition. | <urn:uuid:9c53da7d-85fa-405c-97fb-bf0042c4f1e1> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://fatlossschool.com/category/nutrition/page/2/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783393332.57/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154953-00058-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946903 | 418 | 2.8125 | 3 |
You’re part of an LGBT family, and that creates some sticky issues. Whom do you tell and what’s safe to say? How do you protect your children? You may get a little guidance on that by reading Family Pride by Michael Shelton.
The only difference between you and the other families in your neighborhood is that you’re gay. You’re also in good company: a third of lesbians and one out of five gay men are parents. Unfortunately, almost half of your neighbors think they have nothing in common with you.
Pop culture, don’t-tell behavior and mythology are partly to blame for that: it’s widely (and erroneously) believed, for example, that most LGBT households are affluent, white, highly-educated and only found in urban areas. Lesbian single mothers often keep their lives hidden to protect their children. Rural and small-town LGBT families are thought not to exist.
The general truth is that what researchers know about same-sex parents is “not necessarily accurate.” This is exacerbated by what Shelton says is “passing,” or telling a white lie or a lie of omission in order to maintain discretion within the community. “Passing,” therefore, avoids full disclosure, which may be undesirable for reasons of discrimination, bullying or downright danger.
Children are affected by “passing.” Shelton argues that children in an LGBT family can’t be raised like every other kid because they’re not like other kids. Still, they should know the truth about their parents, they can be taught the fine art of discretion without lying, and they should be taught that straight people are not the enemy.
I struggled a lot with what’s inside Family Pride.
I liked that LGBT parents will find a lot of information in this book: information on diversity, studies, challenges and services that can help to meet those challenges. Shelton includes case studies and first-person accounts to support his facts, and they’re quite interesting to read.
Readers may find, however, that much of the information is old news. Anyone living as a gay man or a lesbian is likely already aware of laws, services and harassment. They know how and where to seek help. They don’t need a book to tell them the statistics.
Overall, the audience for this book lies in newly-created LGBT families or allies wishing to understand or lend a hand. Family Pride will be helpful for them, but established LGBT families probably needn’t bother. | <urn:uuid:ebd95cf4-ff55-40f0-9f2d-0391b3e2bfe2> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.gomag.com/articleprint.php?id=1996 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783395620.56/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154955-00066-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96866 | 534 | 2.59375 | 3 |
3.1 Basic Array Operations
Now on to more interesting things, but with a little tip from me first. Try running this:
You'll notice that the output,
[2, 3, 4, 5, 6] is the result of applying the code inside the curly brace to
every single element in the array. The result is an entirely new array containing the results.
In Ruby, the method
map is used to transform the contents of an array according to a specified set of rules
defined inside the code block.
Go on, you try it. Multiply every element in the array below by 3 to get
[3, 6 .. 15].
Ruby aliases the method
Array#collect; they can be used interchangeably. The
Class#method syntax is the standard way of referring to Ruby methods and you will see it a lot in this book.
Filtering elements of an Array
Filtering elements in a collection according to a boolean expression is a very common operation in day-to-day programming.
Ruby provides the rather handy
select method to make this easy.
is the standard Ruby idiom for filtering elements.
In the following code, try extracting the strings that are longer than five characters.
One of the reasons Ruby is so popular with developers is the intuitiveness of the API.
Most of the time you can guess the method name which will perform the task you have in your mind.
Try guessing the method you need to use to delete the element '5' from the array given below:
I guess that was easy. What if you want to delete all the elements less than 4 from the given array.
The example below does just that:
You'll notice that Ruby methods with multiple words are separated by underscores (_). This convention is called "snake_casing" because
Okay! Hands-on time. Delete all the even numbers from the array given below. | <urn:uuid:9e507118-1113-4930-926a-13f394d00550> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://rubymonk.com/learning/books/1-ruby-primer/chapters/1-arrays/lessons/34-arrays-the-basics | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397213.30/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00161-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.906654 | 398 | 3.625 | 4 |
February 11, 2005
For Immediate Release
Download the Report PDF
Contact: Kalanit Grill-Spector
Right before Your Eyes:
Visual Recognition Begins with Categorization
Take a moment and look at a picture near you. What did you see? How long did it take you to understand what was in the image, meaning how long did it take you to realize the green blob was a tree? Or that the orange circle was a piece of fruit? Most likely you assume that it took you no time at all, you just knew.
Psychologists who study how we perceive images used to think that, before the process of object recognition and categorization could begin, the brain must first separate the figure in the image—such as a tree, or a piece of fruit—from its background. However, new research shows we actually categorize objects before we identify them. It means that, by the time your brain even realizes you are looking at something, you already know what that thing is.
The new research was conducted by Kalanit Grill-Spector of Stanford University and Nancy Kanwisher of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Their article, "Visual Recognition: As Soon as You Know It's There, You Know What It Is," will appear in the February 2005 issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the American Psychological Society.
In their research, Grill-Spector and Kanwisher tested three types of visual recognition by quickly flashing images before the eyes of research participants. The first type, object detection, was tested by showing images that may or may not have contained figures. Participants had to quickly judge whether or not there was a figure present against the background. The second grouping tested categorization, where participants were shown images of figures and had to state what type of figure they saw, such as bird, car, or food. In the last section of the test, more specific images were shown in order to test identification. Participants had to identify the figures within categories such as parrot or pigeon, versus just the category of "bird." It turned out the participants were as fast and accurate in saying what category an object belonged to as they were at saying whether or not they had seen an object at all. The ability for the subjects to process the images in such a short time proved that by the time they knew an image contained some sort of object, they already knew its general category.
"There are two main processing stages in object recognition: categorization and identification, with identification following categorization," the authors wrote. "Overall, these findings provide important constraints for theories of object recognition."
This built-in human process of rapid categorization before identification restricts the brain's search for a match between the visual input (the picture you looked at) and an internal representation to category-relevant representations (stored images of other objects you have seen and identified prior to today).
"Future research building on these psychophysical techniques and multimodal imaging techniques will enhance our knowledge about the processes and representations that enable rapid and efficient visual perception," Grill-Spector said. "Rapid categorization obviously facilitates our survival and interaction with the environment on an everyday level."
Psychological Science is ranked among the top 10 general psychology journals for impact by the Institute for Scientific Information. The American Psychological Society represents psychologists advocating science-based research in the public's interest. | <urn:uuid:63affd3e-7e9d-465f-a9de-e33e25e752c3> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.psychologicalscience.org/media/releases/2005/pr050211.cfm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783395160.19/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154955-00019-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.961376 | 686 | 3.28125 | 3 |
Thanks to a rapid rebound in recent months, global sea ice levels now equal those seen 29 years ago, when the year 1979 also drew to a close.
Ice levels had been tracking lower throughout much of 2008, but rapidly recovered in the last quarter. In fact, the rate of increase from September onward is the fastest rate of change on record, either upwards or downwards.
The data is being reported by the University of Illinois's Arctic Climate Research Center, and is derived from satellite observations of the Northern and Southern hemisphere polar regions.
Not that such facts will affect the climate change faithful, of course.
(Hat tip to KauaiMark.) | <urn:uuid:e6c81a03-3dea-49d6-aa5c-6a5913ac6529> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://rightontheleftcoast.blogspot.com/2009/01/wheres-sea-ice-going.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783398516.82/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154958-00084-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.950954 | 131 | 2.8125 | 3 |
Mars Exploration Rovers Update: Opportunity Emerges from Crater and Onto the Shoreline of What Once Was a Salty Sea
Posted by A.J.S. Rayl
23-03-2004 11:00 CST
After nearly two months of study, Opportunity has emerged from her landing crater at Meridiani Planum and onto "the shoreline of what was once a salty sea suitable for life," scientists announced at a special press conference held at NASA headquarters in Washington D.C., yesterday.
"This was a habitable environment on Mars . . . a shallow sea . . . very suitable for life," said Mars Exploration Rover principal investigator Steve Squyres, of Cornell University.
The news built on and added to the discovery announced three weeks ago that Meridiani Planum had been "drenched" with water at some point in the distant past, perhaps as long as 4 billion years ago. That announcement was based on the first in situ evidence of chemicals and minerals that indicate water once flowed on the Red Planet. The science team members said then that they did not know whether the water was pooling above the surface in a lake, sea, or ocean, or flowing from reservoirs beneath the surface.
But the chemical and visual clues streaming into the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) were revealing signatures of salt water and distinctive layering patterns in rocks that indicated they were generated by slow-moving water in a body of water on the surface. Despite those clues -- and their own inklings -- that the water at Meridiani was probably present in the form of a salty sea, team members decided to secure peer review on their evidence and hypothesis before making the announcement of their latest discovery.
"Three weeks ago, we provided evidence that the rocks at Meridiani Planum once had water seep slowly through them, changing their chemistry, changing their texture in distinctive ways we could look at. What's happened since then is we have found what I believe is strong evidence that the rocks themselves are sediment that was laid down in liquid water," said Squyres. "It's a fundamental distinction. It's like the difference between water you can draw from a well and water you can swim in."
Sedimentologist Dave Rubin, of the U.S. Geological Survey at the Pacific Science Center in Santa Cruz, California, who led the independent peer review panel of six scientists, supported the team's hypothesis. "The best explanation for those rocks is their explanation -- sedimentary structures being deposited by water," he said.
Although the water evaporated millennia ago, scientific evidence that Mars once boasted watery environments will forever change the image of this now cold and desolate planet -- and it will change the way young readers take in science fiction classics, like Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, by offering up the Red Planet in a new, reality-based, context to consider amidst the fantasy.
While the latest discovery adds knowledge to the water story at Meridiani Planum, many unknowns remain. The MER team does not yet know, for example, exactly how long ago the sea existed or for how long, how deep it was, or whether life ever evolved there.
Still, water is the elixir of life and where there is water, science tells us, life evolves. The question of whether life could have evolved on another planet, of course, has always been the big question, the Holy Grail for astrobiologists and planetary scientists alike. The notion that life may have evolved on Mars -- the only other planet in our solar system in the so-called 'zone of habitability' -- is particularly intriguing, and will spark, no doubt, many thought-provoking conversations around the world even though evidence for such life has yet to emerge.
"We don't know that life was there, but we have an environment that was suitable for life to form," Squyres said. If life did evolve at Meridiani Planum, it is possible though that fossils might be preserved in the rocks there, he added. "If you have liquid water, and you precipitate minerals from that liquid water, the process of precipitation can actually trap inside the crystals, inside the minerals grains that are grown whatever is in the water chemically, biochemically or biologically, and that is evidence that can be trapped and can be preserved over long periods of time."
At this point, the general consensus is that any such fossils found in outcrop rocks at Meridiani Planum would be microscopic and undetectable with Opportunity's toolkit. But the search has only just begun. Opportunity is heading now for the much larger Endurance Crater, a little less than a half-mile [about 750 meters] away, which appears, in images taken by the Mars Orbital Camera (MOC) onboard Mars Global Surveyor (MGS), to feature extensive layering formations that will allow the science team to "look farther into the history of Mars," as Squyres put it. Meanwhile other missions to Mars are in the development stages.
Even without having all of the pieces to the puzzle, the findings are undeniably significant because the discovery does indicate, for the first time, that a planet other than Earth once had a habitable environment for life to have formed, and because the current environment holds the potential for the preservation of evidence of that life. The discovery, said Ed Weiler, an associate administrator at NASA headquarters, "has profound implications for astrobiology."
On a personal front, the MER team's findings "the stuff of dreams, geologically and scientifically," according to Jim Garvin, lead scientist for Mars and lunar exploration at NASA Headquarters. "We're seeing the kinds of things that as geologists many of us have lived to see."
The team ultimately drew its conclusion that Opportunity is now roving along what was once an ancient seabed from two kinds of evidence -- chemical, and visual identification of morphological characteristics of water laid sediments.
When Opportunity measured the chemical composition of various rocks in the outcrop bordering the inside rim of Eagle Crater, where she fortuitously landed January 24, the robot geologist found both chlorine and bromine. Those findings immediately suggested a salt-water environment to the science team members, and also bolstered the idea that rock-forming particles precipitated from surface water as salt concentrations climbed past saturation while the water was evaporating.
"When we looked with our alpha particle x-ray spectrometer (APXS) at the composition of the rock in this outcrop, we found the amount of the element bromine present varied tremendously from one place to another within the rocks," said Squyres. "The proportion of bromine to other chemically similar elements, like chlorine, varied by a factor of 10 from place to place. That sounds a little obscure, but that's a fairly fundamental finding towards this characteristic of what you see in rocks on Earth that were formed by evaporation of seawater." In other words, this was a chemical clue that some kind of evaporative process had been responsible for forming the drops.
The chemical evidence alone, however, was not enough for the team to conclude "with great confidence" that the sediments were deposited in liquid in water," Squyres said. "So we decided to go looking for more evidence."
The additional evidence they were seeking would be in striations or layering characteristic of sediments formed in moving water, what geologists call crossbedding. Certain detectable patterns would be preserved in the rocks if, in fact, they had been formed in moving water. "With our panorama camera (PanCam), we looked off in distance and saw rocks that looked like they had these distinctive forms," recounted Squyres.
The resolution of the PanCam, even from a range of only a few meters away, though, was not good enough to be certain, so they set out to look at targeted rocks in more detail. "It took a lot of work . . . many Martian days to do this, said Squyres, acknowledging science team member John Grotzinger for the plan that guided the team.
"We weren't sure as we got closer if this crossbedding would still be there, but it turned out indeed we were able to demonstrate that [it was]," Grotzinger added, picking up the story. "Some patterns seen in the outcrop that Opportunity has been examining might have resulted from wind, but others are reliable evidence of water flow," he continued.
To the trained eye, patterns formed by wind and patterns formed by water are distinctive.
The layers in rocks formed by wind-blown sediments are, for the most part, flat and uniform, informed Grotzinger, a sedimentary geologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). "If you just get grains that settle out under the influence of gravity, you're going to get flat layers on a flat surface. If you then make a cross-section and look at these flat layers, you see parallel lines [that] are non-unique. They don't give us a fix on what the general environment looks like," he explained.
"But when these grains start to move in the presence of a current, they organize in a way that forms small little mounds that migrate downstream in the current," Grotzinger continued. "As they migrate downstream, they sort of avalanche -- the grains overtake each other, and that avalanching then produces layering at an angle to the surface that they're moving on. This is crossbedding."
Grotzinger's plan to confirm the existence of crossbedding involved sending Opportunity to the rocks named Last Chance and Upper Dells to study their textures up close and in exacting detail. Beginning at Last Chance, the rover snapped a series of 152 microscopic images -- "each image just the size of a postage stamp," noted Squyres. Then, they mosaiced them together to create "one super image," as Grotzinger described it. Then, the team repeated the process at Upper Dells.
"It's a real testimony to the hardware built and especially the operators, the people who figured out how to move arm to take those incredible mosaics -- it really is a fantastic piece of work by the engineers at JPL, Squyres added.
The effort paid off. There, in the specially created, very high-resolution, close-up images, the MER team members what they were looking for, the inclined layers or crossbedding features needed to support their hypothesis that the rocks Opportunity had been studying had been formed in a water environment.
"The crossbedding patterns in these finely layered rocks indicate the sand-sized grains of sediment that eventually bonded together were shaped into ripples by water," Grotzinger said. "We can actually see lamination -- fine-layering -- about a millimeter-scale thick. The grains that make up this lamination are discrete and they line up next to each other and they're up to about a millimeter in diameter and they get about as fine as 0.1 millimeters."
Along with the crossbedding features, the team also found signs of festooning, small smile-shaped curves produced by currents of water shifting the sediments beneath the surface. "This is the key attribute of that highly sinuous crest line that characterizes the types of ripples that form in water," Grotzinger said. "You can see these expressions [in the images] these smiles opening upwards, these open concave geometries."
"These are the hints, the textures that we see in cross-section, that we then infer a three-dimensional geometry from, and, through the experiments that have been done here on Earth and the natural environments that we can observe on Earth, we feel very confident that this adds up to a story about ripples moving in water, rather than in wind, at least 2 inches [5 centimeters] deep, possibly much deeper, and flowing at velocities of 4 to 20 inches [10 to 15 centimeters] per second, maybe a mile an hour, gentle flows moving by," he concluded.
At the time the rocks were forming, the environment at Meridiani Planum could have been a salt flat, or playa, sometimes covered by shallow water and sometimes dry, Grotzinger said. Such transient environments on Earth, either at the edge of oceans or in desert basins, can have currents of water that produce the type of ripples seen in the Mars rocks. "By comparison to analogues on Earth, these bodies of water move around and are small and are susceptible to climate change," Rubin added.
An Earth analogue for that kind of Martian environment that the scientists believe existed long ago at Meridiani Planum, Rubin suggested, would be the Qaidam Basin, a sunken valley topped with a crust of salt, and dotted with dunes, on the northern part of the Tibetan Plateau, surrounded by the Altun Mountains to the north and the Kunlun Mountains to the south.
"It's a very dry place," said Rubin. "It might get an inch of rain a year. But, if you dig down under the surface in places, there is soft, wet, sandy, salty sediment -- and the particles in the dunes are not a usual sand, but little pellets of clay cemented together by salt that the wind picked up from these flat salty basins and piled up. It doesn't have any water standing there now, because most of the time it's dry at the surface. But this is the kind of transitional environment that I would imagine those kinds of rocks formed in."
When he first received the various images of Last Chance and Upper Dells to review, Rubin said he was "astonished" to see sedimentary structures on Mars just like those on Earth. "You can go out to your nearest beach or creek and take a shovel and dig in and see some of these same kinds of structures," he said, presenting an image of ripples from the Colorado River on Earth, showing same cross-lamination found on Mars and being describing as 'smiles.' "You don't have to have a river as big as the Colorado River to make these -- they can form in a little creek, and it doesn't have to take a long time, but it does require flowing water," he added.
As he considered the MER science team's hypothesis, Rubin said he pondered all the possibilities. "If I was going to try and come up with a counter example -- and I looked through my whole slide collection -- probably the best I could come up with it isn't very good. But it would involve very small, wind-blown bedforms and probably the best way to keep wind-blown bedforms small would be to have water just beneath the surface. So, even in the best counter examples I could come up with, there would probably be water at the surface, if not above the surface. In any case, I think their interpretation is the best explanation."
The unequivocal evidence needed to answer the big question, of course, would be fossils. In the Earth-analogue environments, there could be some kind of microscopic fossils, such as massive algae, according to Rubin. "And maybe some of the rocks that have these same kind of environments also have dinosaur footprints," he added. "But there's no reason to thing there'd be anything like that here."
"If there were dinosaur footprints at Meridiani, we would see dinosaur footprints and if there were giraffes on the horizon we'd see them," Squyres chuckled, then added: "These are the kinds of rocks that are exceptionally good at preserving evidence of microbial life and it could be preserved within the salt crystals that are deposited. This rock is shot through with these lovely hematite concretions -- the things that we call 'blueberries,' the little spherical objects -- concretions are marvelous at preserving fossils, but all of those are at micro-scales. The payload on this rover was designed to seek evidence of former habitable environments. It's done that exceptionally well. We have found the right stuff on Mars to go to and study in depth with a payload like the one that Mars Science Laboratory [tentatively slated for launch in 2009] will have, and with the kind of capabilities that exist in terrestrial laboratories when we bring the stuff back. So, I don't expect to find microbial fossils, because they're too small, or and I certainly don't expect to find dinosaur tracks."
Miles to go . . .
As exciting and Mars-changing as these discoveries are, many unknowns remain and the whole water story on the Red Planet will not be written for some time.
If Meridiani did once boast a salty sea -- transitional or not -- there is no visible remnant of a rim of any kind, no demarcation from the vast flat plains that Opportunity is exploring, described by so many team members as a 'parking lot.' At the moment, however, that lack of a defined outline isn't something that's really raining on anyone's parade.
"Even though it's flat and doesn't have a clear rim around it, things can erode away and the topography can change over time," Squyres responded. "Piecing together the total geographic puzzle is going to be something that [will] keep us occupied for a good long time. What we see on the surface is what we see on the surface -- and it cries out to be explained. Now with respect to whether we are talking about water that was up to your neck ,or your ankles with briny pools or a deep sea, we'll have a better handle on that once we've explored this region over a larger area."
How, then, do they theorize, then, that Opportunity is parked on the shoreline?
"The reason I feel good saying that is, in a situation like this, where you have evaporation taking place, all you have to do is sit in one place long enough and the water will come through," Squyres maintained. "In other words, the shoreline might be there and you're in deep water, but then it gets shallower and shallower and whoosh it goes by and you're sitting on dry stuff. And then it builds up with more water and the process repeats. We're talking about water that comes and goes and so the location of the shoreline will move with time." Therefore, he rationalizes, "at some point in time, it is likely that there was a shoreline here."
The rationale, of course, doesn't preclude the search. "We've done all of this on the basis of an outcrop that is literally no bigger than this stage," Squyres reminded pointing to the small dais on which he was sitting.
Although the team members do not yet have "a good handle" on the extent of the water at Meridiani Planum, Squyres said he is confident that one day they will. "I think via a combination of going to other places within Meridiani and looking at deposits there, and then taking data from spacecraft [to launch in the future] like Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), and also MGS already up [in orbit] there, and tying it into the regional picture, we'll get a better handle on that story."
One thing is certain: Mars is clearly a different place now. "If you dumped a big pool of water on the surface of Mars right now, it would freeze pretty quickly," Squyres pointed out. "You would have some very rapid evaporation initially, because the atmospheric pressure is so low, and then you would form a cover of ice that would gradually, progressively freeze and get thicker and thicker until eventually it froze solid. Over time, it might sublimate and evaporate away and the ice would eventually end up at the coldest places on Mars, the poles."
That raises another piece of the puzzle that begs for solution -- what was the weather, the climate like at Meridiani Planum when the rocks were forming? When asked what the team might be able to infer about the weather at Meridiani when the rocks were forming, Squyres said the discoveries Opportunity had made in the little outcrop at Eagle Crater really can't offer much insight about what the climate might be."
At the same time, he noted, deposits like those found by Opportunity could, theoretically, form under a cover of ice. "One way you can make these evaporitic salts is by evaporating the water away and concentrating the brine until the salts fall out," Squyres elaborated.
"Another way you could do it, I think, would be if you had a cover of ice that gets thicker and thicker -- and ice that freezes out tends to be much more pure than the water -- so you can concentrate brine simply by freezing ice," he continued. "If you go to the Arctic and you go snowmobiling on the sea ice, you could actually take that sea ice, which is frozen from seawater, and you could melt it and drink it, because there's no salt in it. You're concentrating the brine beneath it and so you can make rocks like this simply by freezing an ice cover. That's a possibility and you certainly could have currents flowing beneath the ice. I'm really reluctant to draw broad conclusions about changes in the Martian climate from a little tiny outcrop," he said.
"There is still a lot we don't know -- yes, we believe Opportunity is parked on what was once the shoreline of a salty sea, but we don't know how laterally extensive this water was," Squyres admitted. "We don't know how long it was there. We don't know how common this is in other places on Mars. But the neat thing is we have the capability in the future to find out. But we'll be able to take a first shot at it."
Now that Opportunity has rolled up and out of the little crater she's been in, the team is directing the robot field geologist to traverse across the plains, some 700-650 meters, to Endurance Crater [where] they expect to be able -- courtesy MGS, as mentioned above -- to find exposures of many meters of the same kind of rock the rover spent the last two months studying in the Eagle Crater outcrop. "That enables you to look farther and farther into the Martian past, and look at greater slice of Martian history," Squyres pointed out.
"Any geologist will tell you way that the way you draw inferences over what happened over geologic time is to is looking at bigger stack of rocks, farther into the past and that's what we hope to do at Endurance Crater -- to get a glimpse much further back into Martian time. The other thing that can happen -- if you look to the future, 2005 and beyond -- NASA is going to fly [other missions to Mars] so we have the capability to really chase this problem in the future."
For this year, though the Mars Exploration Rovers will continue to command the spotlight. And while Opportunity seems to be stealing the show, it hasn't happened without a fair amount of luck and Spirit, Squyres contended, still holds much promise. "At Meridiani Planum, we were incredibly fortunate to just roll into this little crater -- this tiny little hole in the ground -- 20 meters in diameter -- and then flat plains for as far as the eye can see," he said. "We just managed to have the good luck to fall into that little hole where the outcrop is exposed. Everywhere else for almost as far as you can see, there's nothing like this so we got very lucky."
At Gusev, "we weren't that lucky," Squyres continued. "We came down on flat plain that's littered with boulders that we now know are volcanic in origin. We think the sediments that were laid down in the crater at Gusev may be deep below those." Although Bonneville Crater refused to give up any Martian secrets, the best chance to get down deeper in the geologic history lies, they believe, in the Columbia Hills."The Columbia Hills are 2.5 kilometers away [about1.5 miles] -- a very long distance for this rover," Squyres acknowledged. " But the rovers are behaving so well -- the power systems, the thermal systems are performing so beautifully we think they may actually have a fighting chance of going three, four, five, six times farther than they were designed to go. And maybe, over a period of several months, we can [get] to the Columbia Hills where we have some hope we might be able to find some stuff that's very different from where we're parked right now. Gusev is making us work for it, but I've still got a lot of hope and interest in what Spirit may find." | <urn:uuid:8e2b5e97-e8da-4f97-9e5c-f60a797d7a49> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.planetary.org/explore/space-topics/space-missions/mer-updates/2004/03-23-mer-update.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397842.93/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00124-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972554 | 5,107 | 2.671875 | 3 |
The standing orders provide two alternative methods for the introduction of a bill and for the treatment of a bill received from the House of Representatives. There is a traditional deliberate method, and a method whereby bills may be taken expeditiously to the stage of the second reading being moved.
Under the deliberate method, a bill may be initiated in the Senate by:
- (a) a motion moved on notice granting leave to a senator to bring in the bill
- (b) a motion moved on notice forming a committee of senators to prepare and bring in a bill, in accordance with any instructions given to the committee
- (c) an order of the Senate, agreed to by a motion on notice, that a specified bill be brought in.5
Procedures (b) and (c) are designed to allow the Senate to direct the introduction of bill without relying on an individual senator taking the initiative to introduce a bill, but in practice are now not used.
A senator authorised to bring in a bill under procedure (a) may present it immediately, or at a subsequent stage in the proceedings when there is no other business before the chair. The bill as presented must conform with the title of the bill as specified in the motion authorising the senator to introduce it, and a bill which is contrary to that requirement is out of order.6 There is usually no ground for this rule to be invoked, and the Senate would not be aware of any irregularity in a bill until there had been opportunity to examine it.
A bill originating in the House of Representatives is received from that House with a message requesting the Senate's concurrence with the bill. The President reports the message when there is no other business before the Senate, and the bill is then dealt with in the same way as a bill introduced by a senator.7 The President is required to report a message from the House of Representatives "as early as convenient".8 In practice a message forwarding a bill is reported when the minister in the Senate representing the minister responsible for the bill in the House indicates that the government is ready to proceed with the bill.9
The expeditious method of dealing with a bill provides a procedure whereby a bill, whether introduced by a senator or received from the House of Representatives, may proceed at once to the stage of the motion for the second reading being moved, and whereby a number of bills may be taken together.
A senator may present a bill or two or more bills together after the passage of a motion, moved on notice, that the bill or bills be introduced. After the presentation of the bill or bills, or after receipt of a message from the House of Representatives, a motion may be moved without notice containing any of the following provisions:
- (a) that the bill or bills may proceed without formalities (this has the effect of suspending the requirements, otherwise imposed by the standing orders, for stages of the passage of the bill or bills to take place on different days, for notice of motions for such stages, and for the printing and certification of the bill or bills during passage)
- (b) in respect of two or more bills, that the bills may be taken together (this has the effect of allowing the questions for the several stages of the passage of the bills (or any of them) to be put in one motion at each stage, and the consideration of the bills (or any of them) together in committee of the whole (at each reading only the short titles of bills taken together are read))
- (c) that the bill, or, where the provision referred to in paragraph (b) is agreed to, the bills, be now read a first time.10
The Senate may reject any of the motions which may be moved under this procedure, and at the request of any senator the motions are put separately, so that senators are able to vote for or against any of the motions.11 If the Senate were to reject the motion moved under paragraph (a), this would have the effect of imposing on the passage of a bill the delays provided by the standing orders for a bill proceeded with by the traditional method.12 If the Senate were to reject the motion moved under paragraph (b), two or more bills introduced together would have to proceed separately after that stage.13 It is also possible for the Senate to reject the motion for the first reading of a bill under this procedure.14
The composite motion may be moved only immediately after the receipt or introduction of bills; leave or a suspension of standing orders is required to move it at any other stage.15
The first two elements of the composite motion under standing order 113(2), to provide that a bill may proceed without formalities and that bills may be taken together, are regarded as procedural motions, and, therefore, if they are debated, there is no right of reply.
Bills are frequently taken together, particularly in related "packages" of bills, but at the request of any senator the question for the passage of any stage of such bills is divided and put separately in respect of the separate bills.16 A senator may move at any time that bills which are being taken together be separated.17 The basis of this is that the order is that the bills may be taken together, and the Senate may decide that they should proceed separately. Bills may be separated by adjournment at different stages.18
If bills are not taken together on introduction, however, a special order, moved on notice or by leave, is required to take them together subsequently.19 Bills at different stages have been taken together by this means.20. Bills not yet received from the House may be put together with bills already in the Senate in anticipation of their receipt.21
When bills or packages of bills are ordered to be taken together other than under standing order 113(2)(b), at the second or third reading stages, a senator who has spoken in the debate on one of the bills or packages but not the other may speak again when debate is resumed after the passage of the order.22 This rule is necessary to preserve the right of each senator to speak to all of the bills. This right would also be exercisable when bills which have reached different stages are ordered to be taken together, and are brought to the same stage before proceeding together.
When there are amendments to be moved to bills taken together, the bills are usually considered separately in committee of the whole.
Bills which are not taken together are sometimes debated together at the second reading stage by leave. This is known as a "cognate debate". | <urn:uuid:1aebda9a-2322-4271-9ca5-62cb093d995e> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Senate/Powers_practice_n_procedures/odgers13?file=chapter12§ion=03&fullscreen=1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783399425.79/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154959-00072-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960151 | 1,332 | 2.703125 | 3 |
Health officials say flu is more widespread across the nation, but the number of hard-hit states has declined.
Flu season started early this winter, and includes a strain that tends to make people more sick.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Friday said flu was widespread in 47 states last week, up from 41 the week before. But many cases may be mild.
The only states without widespread flu are California, Mississippi and Hawaii. The hardest hit states dropped to 24 from 29.
So far, 20 children have died from the flu. There is no running tally of adult deaths, but the CDC estimates that the flu kills about 24,000 people in an average year.
Experts say it's too early to say if this is a bad year for flu.
In Alabama, State Health Office Don Williamson says flu season started earlier than a year ago and there are more cases. But he said it's not out of line with some of the busiest years during the last decade.
Williamson said at a news conference Friday that Alabama's flu season took off in November and the most common type has been influenza A, which is covered by this season's flu shot.
State health department officials can't say how many cases have been reported, but Williamson said 12 percent of the visits to Alabama doctors' offices in late December were for flu-like symptoms. That's nearly double the highest point a year ago.
Rosemary Blackmon of the Alabama Hospital Association said emergency rooms around the state have been full, but have handled it. | <urn:uuid:e1d287c9-9b09-4ce2-9241-d89ac713f1f0> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.wtok.com/news/mississippi/headlines/Flu-more-widespread-in-US-eases-off-in-some-areas-186488891.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783403826.29/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155003-00057-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.98074 | 313 | 2.796875 | 3 |
Also found in: Thesaurus, Medical, Legal, Financial, Acronyms, Encyclopedia, Wikipedia.
An assignment is a task that someone is given to do, usually as part of their job.
An assignment is also a piece of academic work given to students.
In American English, an assignment is also a piece of work given to students to do at home.
Work given to schoolchildren to do at home is also called homework.
Homework is an uncountable noun. You do not talk about 'homeworks' or 'a homework'. Note that you do not say 'I have made my homework'. You say 'I have done my homework'.
|Noun||1.||assignment - a duty that you are assigned to perform (especially in the armed forces); "hazardous duty"|
duty - work that you are obliged to perform for moral or legal reasons; "the duties of the job"
guard duty, sentry duty, sentry go, guard - the duty of serving as a sentry; "he was on guard that night"
fatigue duty, fatigue - labor of a nonmilitary kind done by soldiers (cleaning or digging or draining or so on); "the soldiers were put on fatigue to teach them a lesson"; "they were assigned to kitchen fatigues"
mission, charge, commission - a special assignment that is given to a person or group; "a confidential mission to London"; "his charge was deliver a message"
reassignment - assignment to a different duty
shore duty - naval service at land bases
|2.||assignment - the instrument by which a claim or right or interest or property is transferred from one person to another|
legal document, legal instrument, official document, instrument - (law) a document that states some contractual relationship or grants some right
|3.||assignment - the act of distributing something to designated places or persons; "the first task is the assignment of an address to each datum"|
storage allocation, allocation - (computer science) the assignment of particular areas of a magnetic disk to particular data or instructions
distribution - the act of distributing or spreading or apportioning
|4.||assignment - (law) a transfer of property by deed of conveyance|
law, jurisprudence - the collection of rules imposed by authority; "civilization presupposes respect for the law"; "the great problem for jurisprudence to allow freedom while enforcing order"
apanage, appanage - a grant (by a sovereign or a legislative body) of resources to maintain a dependent member of a ruling family; "bishoprics were received as appanages for the younger sons of great families"
land grant - a grant of public land (as to a railway or college)
|5.||assignment - an undertaking that you have been assigned to do (as by an instructor)|
project, task, undertaking, labor - any piece of work that is undertaken or attempted; "he prepared for great undertakings"
|6.||assignment - the act of putting a person into a non-elective position; "the appointment had to be approved by the whole committee"|
decision, determination, conclusion - the act of making up your mind about something; "the burden of decision was his"; "he drew his conclusions quickly"
nomination - the act of officially naming a candidate; "the Republican nomination for Governor"
delegacy - the appointment of a delegate
ordinance, ordination - the act of ordaining; the act of conferring (or receiving) holy orders; "the rabbi's family was present for his ordination"
recognition - designation by the chair granting a person the right to speak in a deliberative body; "he was unable to make his motion because he couldn't get recognition by the chairman" | <urn:uuid:b9867cd9-0833-46ee-a0e5-9c32c0afb7d9> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.thefreedictionary.com/assignment | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783394987.40/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154954-00010-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.950193 | 805 | 3.0625 | 3 |
4 Things to Know About Negative Calorie Diets 4 Things to Know About Negative Calorie Diets
Negative calorie food is a popular diet term and the claims can be convincing. When marketers say a food has negative calories, they are claiming that the body burns more calories digesting the food than the food contains. Here are a few things you should know about these claims.
Negative calorie diet claims do not have scientific support.If people lose weight using what they term a negative calorie diet, it is likely due to decreasing total calorie intake by replacing high-calorie foods with low-calorie foods.
These claims are based on the thermic effect of food. The thermic effect of food is the energy used during digestion. According to the Mayo Clinic, this accounts for just 5 to 10% of total calories eaten. On a 1,500 calorie diet, up to 150 calories are necessary for digestion. Even if the negative calorie theory were true, the impact on weight loss would be minimal.
Most foods on the negative calorie list are healthy. Celery, carrots, lettuce, broccoli, onions, and cabbage contain nutrients and fiber. Include these foods as part of a balanced diet, but include them for their nutritional content and not because they are reported to magically boost calorie burn.
Avoid the temptation to believe in quick fixes and magical solutions. It is much more effective to reduce calories eaten and increase calories burned than to limit yourself to a select number of vegetables. | <urn:uuid:30a21a3e-e5bd-4bbb-a8f0-3c3a09f39e5e> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://myfooddiary.com/blog/archive/2012/11/12/4-things-to-know-about-negative-calorie-diets | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396027.60/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00017-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.933156 | 299 | 2.75 | 3 |
X E R what does this notation mean is it that all the positive and negative numbers are included????
means that is a real number... the real numbers basically consists of all numbers (positive, negative and zero, including integers, rational numbers and a multitude of other kinds of numbers) that you can think of, except complex numbers (which you probably won't have encountered yet if you're asking this question).
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Registered Office: International House, Queens Road, Brighton, BN1 3XE | <urn:uuid:3582fa3b-0d49-42b5-b3a4-b73fdfd999ed> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.thestudentroom.co.uk/showthread.php?t=1151980 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783394987.40/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154954-00056-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.908689 | 202 | 3.421875 | 3 |
Low income mothers of overweight children had personal and environmental challenges in preventing and managing obesity
QUESTIONS: What are the perceptions of low income mothers about their overweight preschool children? What barriers exist to the prevention or management of childhood obesity?
Qualitative study using focus groups.
Clinic of the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) in Cincinnati, Ohio, USA.
18 mothers (mean age 25 y, 72% black) of preschool children (mean age 44 mo, 61% girls) were enrolled in a nutrition clinic for women and their children living in low income households. 12 of the mothers (67%) were obese (body mass index [BMI] ≥30 kg/m2, 4 were overweight (BMI ≥25 kg/m2), and 2 were neither overweight nor obese. All of the children had a weight for height percentile (WHP) ≥50th percentile; 15 (83%) met the WIC definition of overweight (WHP ≥90th percentile).
Mothers participated in a 1 hour focus group (6 women per group). Open … | <urn:uuid:bb0b27aa-0c4b-4d77-b988-f19ed65433bc> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://ebn.bmj.com/content/5/1/27.extract?cited-by=yes&legid=ebnurs;5/1/27 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397695.90/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00006-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.944245 | 226 | 2.765625 | 3 |
A sound system that lets bats see
A team of researchers has found that bats adjust the frequency of their signals and the openings of their mouths to come up with the same beam width for their echolocation calls, around 37 degrees,no matter what the animal’s size is, writes Alla Katsnelson
Human eyes, set as they are in front-facing sockets, give us a limited angle of view: We see what is directly in front of us, with only a few degrees of peripheral vision. But bats can broaden and narrow their “visual field” by modulating the frequency of the squeaks they use to navigate and find prey, researchers in Denmark suggest in Nature.
Bats find their way through the night by emitting sonar signals and using the echoes that return to them to create a map of their surroundings— a process called echolocation.
Researchers have long known that small bats emit higher-frequency squeaks than larger bats, and most assumed that the difference arises because the smaller animals must catch smaller insects, from which low-frequency sound waves with long wavelengths do not reflect well.
That didn’t sound right to Annemarie Surlykke, a neurobiologist who studies bat echolocation at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense. “When you look at the actual frequencies, small bats would be able to detect even the smallest prey they take with a much lower frequency,” she says. “So there must be another reason.”
Surlykke and her colleagues decided to test the hypothesis by studying six related species of bats that varied in size. They captured the animals in the wild and set them loose in a flight room — a pitch-dark netted corridor 2.5 metres high, 4.8 metres wide and seven metres long, rigged on all sides with microphones and infrared cameras. “It’s a pretty confined space, so this corresponds to flying close to vegetation,” says Surlykke.
By measuring the time it took for a bat’s echolocation signals to hit different microphones, Surlykke’s team could pinpoint the exact location of the animals in flight. They could then analyse the intensity of each signal, as well as the size of each animal’s mouth, to reconstruct the width of the sound beam.
Under the specific conditions of the flight room, the researchers found, the animals adjusted the frequency of their signals and the openings of their mouths to come up with the same beam width for their echolocation calls — around 37 degrees, no matter the animal’s size.
In past studies, two species tested in the field used different beam widths depending on whether they were scanning for prey from on high or about to dive in for the capture. “That means that the small bats, we think now, are not forced to use the high frequency to detect their prey, but to keep the beam narrow,” says Surlykke.
A lower-frequency vocalisation would broaden the beam, making it hit more objects and increase the noise in the signal, which would make echolocation more difficult. So small species need to use high frequencies simply because their mouths are petite.
Out and about
Hans-Ulrich Schnitzler, who studies echolocation at the University of Tubingen in Germany, lauds the finding for bringing a previously unconsidered parameter to the discipline. “I really think it opens up a new field,” he says. However, he thinks that the group’s conclusion is not yet definitive.
“It now has to be documented for other species and for flying out in nature — in the open, in the forest, in different habitats,” says Schnitzler. Surlykke notes that her group examined only bats that echolocate using their mouths. “One of the intriguing questions is how this works in nose-emitting bats,” she says.
The study raises the question of how bats perceive their environment, says Surlykke, and her group plans to look at this too. “The fact that the beam is constant means the important thing is in the bat’s head – and not in the environment,” says James Simmons, a neurobiologist at Brown University in Providence, RI. “Ultimately,” he says, “it’s a psychological problem.”
HEARING IS BELIEVING
* Researchers have long known that small bats emit higher-frequency squeaks than larger bats.
* Most of them assumed that the difference arises because the smaller animals must catch smaller insects, from which low-frequency sound waves with long wavelengths do not reflect well.
* The new study raises the question of how bats perceive their environment. | <urn:uuid:d399e116-dcdb-49a5-a119-407ed39d5880> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.deccanherald.com/content/297652/a-sound-system-lets-bats.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783395546.12/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154955-00186-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952464 | 1,004 | 4.03125 | 4 |
A page in the history of recorded knowledge has been turned. But that page is going to be digital if it's in the venerable Encyclopedia Britannica, which announced Wednesday it will stop publishing its printed version.
The decision to go all-digital comes for Britannica after 244 years of hardcover editions, and means that countless bookshelves are weighted with the last of their kind -- the expensive, 32-volume set of Encyclopedia Britannica.
First published in 1768 in Edinburgh, Scotland, the Encyclopedia has been published every year since, and became the gold standard of encyclopedias.
'Latest Step in Our Evolution'
Britannica has been hinting for some years that this day would come, sooner or later. In recent times, the home page of the company's Web site has been showing a family looking up on a laptop, a tablet or a smartphone.
The Chicago-based company said in a statement that the Encyclopedia has been mostly an online product for nearly two decades, and that it will be fully digital once the current stock of printed books runs out.
Jorge Cauz, president of Encyclopedia Britannica, said in a statement that "the end of the print set is something we've foreseen for some time." He added that the move to all digital is the "latest step in our evolution from the print publisher we were."
That digital evolution began in the 1970s, when the first digital edition of Britannica was created for LexisNexis users, which the company said may have been the first digital encyclopedia in history. It published the first multimedia encyclopedia on CD-ROM in 1989, and, in 1994, the first Internet-based encyclopedia.
As print possibilities began to dwindle, the company used its expertise and brand to expand beyond reference and into the school curriculum and digital learning markets. The new products included digital instructional programs, and e-books for math, science and the humanities.
No Longer Under 'P'
The digital versions offer numerous advantages for knowledge-lovers everywhere. There are multiple versions, which are widely available at prices dramatically less than the book version, they are constantly updated, and contain substantially more content than the printed books.
More than 100 million users worldwide tap into the digital Britannica, and apps are available for the iPad, iPod Touch and iPhone. Community features have also been added, allowing teachers to share lesson plans, and, for the Britannica subsidiary Merriam-Webster dictionary, users can exchange comments on word usage.
And, in a feature that could jolt those who remember the sacrosanct, thin Encyclopedia Britannica pages that held the last word on virtually everything, online users can also make suggested revisions to subject entries. If, after a review by editors, the entry is a valid correction, an appropriate revision is made.
Brad Shimmin, who remembers the ultimate authority and physical weight of the printed edition, said this announcement is part of the evolution of information flow, where printed books led to knowledge, which led to power. Now, access is replacing books.
He also noted that it represents a fundamental shift in how knowledge is packaged. "People don't really think these days that you can find out about 'pirates' by looking under 'P,' " Shimmin said.
As a farewell gift from the departing printed edition, the company is making the entire contents of the Britannica Web site available for free for one week, beginning Wednesday.
Posted: 2012-03-15 @ 1:59am PT
This clearly shows us the trend of how the world is shifiting towards online tv and digital content. Keeping with this trend of digital content in recent times, a new company called MyCube has emerged which seems very interesting. It allows users to post and view content and also get rewarded for it. | <urn:uuid:ca11cffd-54d7-4fb1-810f-4c21cacb189f> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.sci-tech-today.com/story.xhtml?story_id=03300417TEE9 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397565.80/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00110-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945729 | 781 | 2.78125 | 3 |
Marty is correct.
WebMD has useful information about the multiple causes as well.
How Is Biology Related to Depression?
Researchers have noted differences in the brains of people who are depressed as compared to people who are not. For instance, the hippocampus, a small part of the brain that is vital to the storage of memories, appears to be smaller in people with a history of depression than in those who've never been depressed. A smaller hippocampus has fewer serotonin receptors. Serotonin is a calming brain chemical known as a neurotransmitter that allows communication between nerves in the brain and the body. It's also thought that the neurotransmitter norepinephrine may be involved in depression.
Scientists do not know why the hippocampus is smaller in those with depression. Some researchers have found that the stress hormone cortisol is produced in excess in depressed people. These investigators believe that cortisol has a toxic or poisonous effect on the hippocampus. Some experts theorize that depressed people are simply born with a smaller hippocampus and are therefore inclined to suffer from depression.
One thing is certain -- depression is a complex illness with many contributing factors. The latest scans and studies of brain chemistry that show the effects of antidepressants help broaden our understanding of the biochemical processes involved in depression. As scientists gain a better understanding of the cause(s) of depression, health professionals will be able to make better "tailored" diagnoses and, in turn, prescribe more effective treatment plans.
How Is Genetics Linked to the Risk of Depression?
We know that depression seems to run in families. This suggests that there's a genetic link to depression. Children, siblings, and parents of people with severe depression are much more likely to suffer from depression than are members of the general population. Multiple genes interacting with one another in special ways probably contribute to the various types of depression that run in families. Yet despite all the evidence of a family link to depression, scientists still have not been able to identify a "depression" gene.
- 4/19/2011 9:44:02 AM | <urn:uuid:5ab68e4c-8e4c-4991-beef-9334ec2e8157> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://sparkpeople.com/resource/article_comments.asp?id=791&type=1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396100.16/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00055-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.951791 | 412 | 3.203125 | 3 |
You're running out of time to see one of nature's most spectacular sites, writes Tom Philpott in Mother Jones. American Samoa is just one of the locations affected by a massive coral bleaching event. [more inside]
Hundreds of New Reef Creatures Found in Australia. Hundreds of new marine creatures have been discovered in three Australian reefs by CReefs, a census of coral reefs which is part of the Census of Marine Life, a ten-year initiative to assess global ocean diversity.
British artist Jason de Caires Taylor creates an underwater sculpture park in the West Indies, not only to "explore the boundaries between art and the environment" but also to portray a beautiful process that happens to be doing nice things for the ecosystem. You can see a video of the sculptures on YouTube.
Coral Reefs Doomed Well, overfishing has destroyed the Grand Banks and now according to studies, it is "dooming" the coral reefs as well. When will learn? That being said, can anyone actually see the world's governments agreeing on doing anything to stop it? | <urn:uuid:166ae7f1-2516-4261-a906-cf9010d0b310> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.metafilter.com/tags/coralreefs | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397865.91/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00095-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.942306 | 220 | 2.5625 | 3 |
Speculators play an important role, taking on risks that others do not want. They anticipate fundamental factors and multiple costs of processing, as well as unpredictable risks across the political, economic, weather and technological spheres.
Speculators are an essential component of all markets, and are crucial to producers, manufacturers, distributors and end-users. Unfortunately, this activity and role is sometimes misunderstood. As two University of Illinois professors wrote in the New York Times, “…speculators are a convenient scapegoat for the public’s frustration with rising prices. That’s unfortunate because curbing speculation — and hobbling the ability of businesses that rely on futures markets to reduce their risk — is counterproductive.”
There is little evidence to suggest that speculation creates price changes. The CFTC, as well as the European Central Bank share this view. One leading academic says that despite the popularity of such views, they are unfounded. “As yet there is no serious theory, and certainly no serious evidence that speculators have distorted commodity prices.”
Back to top | <urn:uuid:2d4f94bb-239a-4bfb-8a14-3eacb6803f99> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.commodityfact.org/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397748.48/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00024-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956143 | 219 | 3.015625 | 3 |
North American NA-73
By Joe Baugher
The P-51 Mustang is perhaps the most famous fighter of World War II and, many would agree, the best all-round piston-engined fighter produced by any of the combatants during that conflict. Total production of all Mustangs numbered 15,575 in the USA and 100 in Australia, ranking only behind the P-47 Thunderbolt in being the fighter manufactured in greatest numbers for the USAAF. Mustangs accounted for 4,950 of the 10,720 air combat victories claimed by the AAF in Europe, and 4,131 of the 8,160 strafing claims made there, accounting for 48.9% of total losses inflicted on the enemy. They shot down more than 230 V-1 "buzz bombs," and even managed to score some kills against Luftwaffe jet fighters.
North American Aviation Inc (NAA) was formed on Dec 6, 1928 as a holding company with interests in a long list of prominent aircraft companiesCurtiss Aeroplane and Motor Co, Curtiss-Robertson, Curtiss-Caproni, Wright Aeronautical, Travel Air, North Aircraft, and Keystone. The prime mover behind that company was Clement M Keys, publisher of the Wall Street Journal.
In 1929 Keys merged the two old rivals, Curtiss and Wright, to form the Curtiss-Wright Corp. All of those various companies managed to retain their own separate identities and continued to function as more-or-less independent entities while Keys continued to expand his empire, acquiring Pitcairn, Transcontinental & Western Air (TWA today), Berliner-Joyce, and others faltering in the Great Depression.
In 1933 General Motors Corp bought a sizeable interest in North American Aviation Inc. It also acquired General Aviation Corp (which had taken over Fokker Aircraft) and Dayton-Wright. GMC's Ernest R Breech was appointed as president of North American Aviation, and the companies were grouped into two large conglomeratesGeneral Aviation Mfg Corp (comprised of Berliner-Joyce, General Aviation, and Curtiss-Caproni) and the Sperry Corp (Sperry Gyroscope, Ford Instrument, Curtiss-Wright, and Intercontinent Aviation). Sperry was disposed of a few months later, and the Air Mail Act of 1934 made it illegal for aircraft manufacturing industries to have controlling interests in airlines, so North American Aviation was forced to divest itself of its shares in Eastern and TWA.
At that time Breech handed over management of the company to James H "Dutch" Kindelberger, who had an extensive background in aviation both as a pilot and aeronautical engineer. He accepted the job on the condition that friend and colleague, John Leland "Lee" Atwood, could join him as vice-president. Under their leadership, North American Aviation Inc became a "real" aircraft manufacturing concern rather than just a holding company, with General Aviation becoming the manufacturing arm with factories at Dundalk MD and another factory being opened in Jan 1936 at Inglewood, near Mines Field (now part of LAX).
As early as 1938 Kindelberger had made numerous trips to Europe seeking orders for his company, and he had the opportunity to see up close some of the airplanes that would be in combat in the war that almost everyone believed would soon be coming. Once hostilities broke out, Kindelberger eagerly sought out combat reports from both sides and developed some ideas of his own.
Although Kindelberger had no experience with fighters, he collaborated with Atwood to formulate an outline for a fighter project. A project team was formed at NAA, made up of such people as Raymond H Rice, Edgar Schmued, Larry Waite, and Ed Horkey. (A sort-of urban legend had grown up about Edgar Schmued that claimed he had once worked for Willy Messerschmitt, and that the Mustang was heavily influenced by the Bf.109.)
Following the outbreak of war in Europe, the British Purchasing Commission, headed by Sir Henry Self, was posted to New York to determine if American combat aircraft could be of any use to the Royal Air Force. Bell P-39s and Curtiss P-40s were ordered in substantial numbers even though they were not up to the performance standards of the latest British and German fighters.
One of the corporations that Self had contacted was NAA, who had already been building NA-16 trainers for the RAF as the Harvard. In April of 1940 Kindelberger was requested to manufacture Curtiss P-40Ds under license for the RAF. He responded that NAA could do that, but countered that his company could build a better fighter than the P-40 and that they could design a REAL fighter in the same time that it would take to put the P-40 into production. The British commission felt that they could take Kindelberger at his word and, on Apr 10, 1940, accepted his proposal on the condition that the first prototype be ready in 120 days. The design was assigned the company project name of Model NA-73.
At that time, the USAAC reserved for itself the right to block any foreign aircraft sales that it regarded as not in the Army's interest for whatever reason. On May 4, 1940, the US Army reluctantly agreed not to block the British sale, but added a conditiontwo examples of the initial British NA-73 lot were to be transferred to the AAC for testing. free of charge.
The NA-73X prototype contract was signed on May 23, 1940. The British insisted that a heavy eight-gun armament be fitted. NAA had actually been quietly working on such a fighter project since the summer of 1939 and had already completed much of the detail design. On May 29 a provisional RAF procurement was issued for 320 aircraft, contingent on satisfactory testing of the prototype. NAA agreed to start deliveries in January 1941. RAF s/ns were issued [AG345/664] and the aircraft given the name Mustang I for RAF service.
Another urban legend surrounding the Mustang is that it owed a great deal to the Curtiss XP-46 and, in fact, stole numerous design features from that fighter. It is true that the British had insisted that since NAA had no fighter experience they should secure all current data from Curtiss about both the P-40 and XP-46. Although NAA did pay $56,000 to Curtiss for technical aerodynamic data for the XP-46, there was only a very broad resemblance between it and the NA-73X. The Curtiss shared only a similar radiator/oil-cooler configuration and did not have laminar-flow wings. In fact, development of XP-46 lagged behind that of NA-73X, with prototypes not ready for flight until Feb 1941.
As well, preliminary design of the NA-73X was completed before NAA gained access to the Curtiss material. It could even be argued that the XP-46 data was most useful to NAA in guiding them in what not to do. The NA-73X appears to owe virtually nothing to any previous fighter design. Nevertheless, despite convincing denials from both Edgar Schmued and aerodynamicist Horkey, the full magnitude of the contribution of Curtiss to the NA-73X design remains controversial to this day.
The NA-73 featured an all-metal stressed-skin structure, with a wing having a sheet-web main spar and an almost equally strong rear spar to carry the ailerons and the flaps. Special attention was paid to features which would make the aircraft simple and inexpensive to manufacture. The two wing spars had to be far enough apart to accommodate the length of a .50 machine gun, with only the barrel protruding ahead of the main spar. Most previous NAA aircraft had left and right wings bolted to a horizontal center section, but the Mustang had the wings meeting on the centerline, with dihedral emanating from that line.
A special NACA laminar-flow wing profile was adopted for the Mustang. This was an aerofoil which had a thickness that kept on increasing far beyond the usual location, as a 50% chord rather than the usual 20%. Those profiles had little camber, the undersurface being almost a mirror image of the upper. The wing was much more "slippery" than the old profiles, and provided lesser aerodynamic drag at high speeds than did more conventional aerofoils. However, it also had less lift at low speeds, so the NA-73X had to have large and powerful flaps to keep landing speeds from being impractically high.
Wing structure was designed to be as simple and easy to construct as possible. Leading and trailing edges were straight lines to the extent possible, and the underlying structure was simple to manufacture, being left and right halves joined at the centerline.
Main landing gear members had a track of almost 12 feet, which made landing much easier than in such fighters as Spitfire and Bf.109. Wheels retracted inward into wells in the wing forward of leading edges being kinked forward at the fuselage join to provide sufficent room. Retracted wheels were covered by doors hinged near the aircraft centerline and were closed again by their own jacks when the gear was fully extended. The tailwheel, steerable and inked to the rudder, was fully retractable into a compartment with twin doors.
The British had also specified that a liquid-cooled inline engine be used, and the 12-cylinder Allison V-1710 was the only American-built engine that fit the bill. It was a little bigger and lighter than the Merlin and similar in power at low altitudes; however, at higher altitudes it suffered from a rapid drop in power than the Merlin. NAA briefly considered using a turbo-supercharger to improve high-altitude performance, but ruled against it in light of a tight schedule.
The Allison had a downdraft carburetor, so the ram inlet of the NA-73X was located above the cowling. Radiators for cooling the ethlyene glycol and lubricating oil were located in a single heat-exchanger installed under the rear fuselage in a streamlined duct. The duct actually contributed some propulsive thrust by adding heat energy to the incoming air and expelling it out the back at a higher velocity. Drawbacks of such a cooling arrangement were extra weight and added combat vulnerability of the long pipes that led to and from the engine.
Fuel was in two self-sealing tanks housed in the wing spars, one in each inboard wing. Total capacity was 180 gallons, almost twice that of a Spitfire.
At British insistence, armament was somewhat heavier than American standards of the day. Two .50 Browning M2 machine guns were installed in the underside of the nose beside the engine crankcase, synchronized to fire through the propeller arc. The left gun was staggered ahead of the right in order that the magazines could lie one behind the other. Two .50s were mounted upright inside the wings, outboard of the landing gears. Four .30 Brownings were mounted further outboard on the wing, with each inboard gun mounted lower so that its muzzle was below the leading edge. Ammunition for all the wing guns was in three long spanwise boxes outboard of the guns.
Final assembly and engine installation began on Sep 9, 1940. As agreed, the fourth and tenth production NA-73s would be diverted to the Army, where their designation XP-51 was to be assigned. On September 24, 1940, the RAF increased their Mustang I order to 620 planes.
The NA-73X prototype emerged from Inglewood plant in only 102 days, meeting the 120-day deadline with time to spare, although the airplane rolled out of the factory without an engine, which had been delayed at the Allison factory. In the absence of the new disk brakes, the aircraft rolled on wheels borrowed from an AT-6 trainer. It was completely unpainted except for six aperture shapes painted on the wing leading edges to show where the guns would be installed. Those markings were retouched out in photos of the aircraft, and only later was the civil registration [NX19998] applied and the engine hood ahead of the cockpit painted anti-glare black.
The reason for delay in engine delivery was because it was "government-supplied equipment" furnished on an as-available basis. Since the NA-73X was a private venture, it was not allocated a very high priority in comparison with P-40s then rolling off production lines. The engine eventually installed was a non-supercharged 1100hp V-1710-F3R. Test pilot Vance Breese flew the NA-73X for its first time on Oct 26, 1940. It was a clear 25 mph faster than the P-40, despite being powered by the same engine.
Following tests there were several changes in the geometry of the ventral ducting and controllable flaps. By the time that the NA-73 had been cleared for production, the duct had had its inlet moved downward so that its upper lip was lower than the underside of the wing, thus avoiding the ingestion of a turbulent boundary layer of air into the radiator cooler.
On Nov 20, 1940, while on its fifth flight, test pilot Paul Balfour forgot to change fuel tanks, ran out of gas, and NA-73X suffered a forced landing, ending up on its back in a farm field. While the mishap put it out of action for several months, since the accident was not the fault of the aircraft itself, it did not unduly delay the program. The NA-73X resumed flying on Jan 11, 1941 and continued in the initial development program until being retired on July 15, 1941.
In Dec 1940 the RAF ordered 300 more Mustangs [AL958/AL999, AM100/AM257, AP164/AP263], designated NA-83 by the factory, differing from NA-73s only in having broad fishtail ejector exhausts.
Continue to the P-51 Mustang series.
-- United States Military Aircraft Since 1909, Gordon Swanborough and Peter Bowers (Smithsonian Press 1989)
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Definition of Genetic counseling
Genetic counseling: An educational counseling process for individuals and families who have a genetic disease or may be at risk for a disease to facilitate informed decision-making.Source: MedTerms™ Medical Dictionary
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Wilma Mankiller, the Inspiring First Woman Cherokee ChiefNovember 20, 2013
In 1993, AAUW gave our highest honor, the Achievement Award, to Wilma Mankiller. Mankiller, the first woman chief of the Cherokee Nation, was recognized for her contributions toward improving the lives of the Cherokee people.
Mankiller was born November 18, 1945, in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. Her family was moved to San Francisco as part of the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs’ program designed to relocate and urbanize Native Americans. This was quite a transition in her life, as she went from living without running water in rural Oklahoma to living in a major American city. In 1967, Mankiller participated in a protest with Native American activists who took over the vacant prison at Alcatraz Island. While in California, she also married, had two daughters, and began attending college classes, but eventually returned to her native Oklahoma.
In Oklahoma, Mankiller became involved with the government of the Cherokee Nation, beginning as director of community development. She rose through the ranks, and in 1983 she was chosen by Principal Chief Ross Swimmer to serve as deputy chief. When Swimmer left mid-term to head the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington, D.C., Mankiller took over as principal chief. She was the first woman ever to hold the position. She won the principal chief election in 1987 and was reelected for a second term in 1991 by a landslide margin of 85 percent. Her term ended in 1995.
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During her tenure, Mankiller worked to improve the lives of the Cherokee people. She created a job center, increased the number of tribal health clinics, and brought jobs and businesses to the Cherokee jurisdiction. Summer programs for young people and adult literacy were added. At this point, Mankiller was visible on the national scene; then-President Bill Clinton appointed her to be an adviser to the federal government on tribal affairs. Later, Clinton would grant her the 1998 Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Mankiller was also named an AAUW Woman of Distinction at the 1990 National Conference for College Women Student Leaders. But awards aren’t her only connection with AAUW. The AAUW Tahlequah (OK) Branch and Susan Frusher received a 1991–92 Community Action Grant to establish a mentoring program for girls at Sequoyah High School, a boarding school for Native American children. Girls were matched with career mentors whom they then shadowed throughout the program. Mankiller assisted in the process of locating Cherokee mentors for the girls. Designed to bolster self-confidence and opportunities for Native American girls, the program was a success. In a letter found in AAUW’s archives, Mankiller expresses her thanks to AAUW for funding the successful mentoring project.
I am saddened to read of the many difficulties Wilma Mankiller faced throughout her life, including life-threatening illnesses, accidents, and opposition from the same Cherokee people who would come to adore her. But her ability to overcome these obstacles is inspirational to all. She passed away in 2010 after a battle with pancreatic cancer. In the spring 1993 issue of the AAUW Journal, Mankiller spoke about herself as a role model: “Suddenly you hear young Cherokee girls talking about becoming leaders. And in Cherokee families, [now] there is more encouragement of girls.” Mankiller might have been the first female chief of a major tribe, but she certainly was not the last. | <urn:uuid:13a9eb34-2559-4f26-94a1-833bac36515d> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.aauw.org/2013/11/20/wilma-mankiller/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397695.90/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00129-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.975178 | 741 | 3.03125 | 3 |
Veterinary Information On Dog Whipworm (Trichuris vulpis).
The dog whipworm (Trichuris vulpis) is a species of worm parasite (nematode) whose adultstage infests the large intestine (colon, rectum) of dogs and, rarely, cats. Dog whipworm is not generally considered to be of high importance to human health (it is rarely infective to people), however, there are casesin the medical literature whereby humans have become infested with Trichuris vulpis resultingin disease symptoms.
Low burdens of dog whipworms generally produce little to no symptoms of disease in their host. The dog owner can often be completely unaware that their animal even carries the parasite. In large numbers, however, canine whipworms can produce severe disease symptoms including: abdominal pain, diarrhea, blood in the droppings, apparent 'straining to defecate' and, on rare occasions, a potentially life-threatening imbalance of the potassium and sodium salts in the body, termed "Pseudo-Addisons disease".
This dog whipworm page contains detailed, but simple-to-understand information on thecanine whipworm parasite: Trichuris vulpis
. The page contains photos of dog whipworms as well asa dog whipworm life cycle diagram for ease of understanding. Explanation of the dog whipworm life cycle is included, along with information on symptoms, diagnosis, treatment and prevention of whipwormin dog populations. Dog Whipworm - Contents:1) What does dog whipworm look like?Contains photos of adult whipworms and whipworm eggs.2) The dog whipworm life cycle diagram.3) Symptoms of whipworm infestation in dogs.4) How is canine whipworm infection diagnosed?Contains information on: fecal flotation of whipworm eggs; misdiagnosis of canine whipworm eggs (e.g.worm eggs that look similar to dog whipworm eggs) and how to interpret a positive result (i.e. what the significance of finding whipworm eggs on a fecal float is). 5) Treatment and prevention of whipworm infestations in definitive host dogs.5a) All-wormer products that kill dog whipworms and how often to use them.
5b) Dealing with canine whipworm contaminated environments.
5c) Prevention of whipworms in large dog populations (e.g. boarding kennels, shelters, dog breeding facilities).
5d) Drug resistance - when the wormers are not removing the dog whipworms and treating the symptoms. 6) Can dog whipworms infest humans?
This section includes info on human whipworm infestation with the non-canine species: Trichuris trichiura1) What Does Dog Whipworm Look Like?
It is very rare for pet owners to ever see dog whipworms. They are extremely small (a few centimeters at most), white wormswith incredibly thin bodies that are seldom ever noticed if they die and appear in the faeces oftheir canine host. The only reason I managed to get pictures of the worms that appearin the photos below was because I diagnosed whipworm eggs on a fecal float, wormed the affectedanimal and then (oh yuck) sifted through the feces passed the next day until I found them. Even knowing in advance that the dead whipworms would be present within the feces did not make them easy to find. The things a vet will do to get you the photos!
Adult whipworms are called whipworms because they have a broad posterior (rear) segment that is connected toa disproportionately long, fine, narrow, 'whip-like' anterior (head) segment. This gives the worms the physical appearance of a 'long whip with a short, fat handle'. The very thin anterior segment of the worm ("the whip") is the part that the worm uses to hold on to the large intestinal wall of the host dog(it sucks blood to survive). The fatter posterior end of the dog whipworm ("the handle") containsthe reproductive organs that the worm uses to produce fertile eggs.
Dog whipworm picture 1: The first picture contains an image of three adult dog whipworms. You can see that one end of each worm is wider and fatter (rear or posterior end) and that the other end is very long and fine (anterior or head end). The long, fine head end is the 'whip'.
Dog whipworm photo 2: This is an image of the same three dog whipworms when comparedto the size of an Australian 10-cent piece. The coin is only 23mm wide. This shows you just how small the whipworms are.
It is very rare to make a diagnosis of canine whipworm infestation by visual examination of a hostdog's faeces. Adult whipworms are rarely voided spontaneously in a dog's feces (unless the dog has been recentlydewormed) and, as mentioned above, even when they are voided, adult whipworms are extremely trickyto find. They are not like roundworms and tapeworms, which are very large and obvious in the pet's droppings. Most veterinarians diagnose dog whipworm infestations by performing a fecal float test on the hostdog's stools and looking for the distinctive eggs that the adult whipworm sheds into the host animal's feces.
Dog whipworm image 3: This is a close up, full colour, view of a canine whipworm egg as seen on afecal float. The egg is oval-shaped and yellowish-brown in colour with an obvious 'plug' at eachend, each of which is termed a 'polar bleb'.
You'll notice that the walls of the dog whipworm egg are very thick. This feature makes dogwhipworm eggs very resistant to heat and dessication (drying) and freezing and, as a result, they can survive for many years (up to 7 years) in the outdoors environment.
Note - some texts suggest that very hot, drying conditions will kill off Trichuris eggs in the environment. Thus, even though you should consider any egg-contaminated soil and/or vegetation to pose some risk of dog whipworm infestation for your pet dog or kennel population, cool, moist, well-shaded soils and vegetation should be considered the highest risk for long-term, infective whipworm egg survival.
Important author's note: Dog whipworm eggs are not infective to other dogs as soon as they arevoided in the feces. When a dog whipworm egg comes out in the droppings of a whipworm-infected dog, that egg contains only a single cell. If it is immediately eaten by another dog, such an egg will not hatch, but willonly pass through the animal's gut and out into the environment again. In order for a dog whipwormegg to be infective to other dogs it must contain a first-stage (L1 stage) worm larva. It takes the singlecell contained within a whipworm egg at the time of voiding about 1 month to multiply and develop into an infective L1 larva. Only when the whipworm egg contains a fully-realised larvalworm will it be infective to the next dog that comes along and consumes the egg.
Because the eggs take so long to become infective (1 month), it is unlikely for a dog to be infected through the consumption of feces. Dogs are generally infected with dog whipworm eggs by consumingcontaminated soil or grass that carries the long-lived eggs.
2) The Dog Whipworm Life Cycle Diagram.
Dog Whipworm Life Cycle Diagram: This is a diagram of the life cycle of the Trichuris vulpis dog whipworm.
The diagram shows the complete cycle of a canine whipworm's existence - from egg to adult whipworm to egg again (with the next generation of whipworm eggs) - within the body of a single host animal species: the dog (rarely, the cat).
The life cycle of the dog whipworm is very simple and involves only the one animal host.We term this a 'direct life cycle'.
Infective dog whipworm eggs (i.e. eggs that have been in the outdoors environmentfor at least 1 month, such that they have had sufficient time to 'embryonate' and develop an infectivefirst stage, L1, worm larva inside of them) are ingested by the definitive host dog. Upon ingestion, these eggshatch, releasing the L1 larvae into the dog's intestinal tract. These larvae migrate to the liningof the intestinal tract where they undergo a series of developmental molts (L1 moults to become an L2 larva, L2 moults to become an L3 larva and so on) to become adult whipworms.
Author's note: Because whipworm eggs take so long to become infective (1 month), it is unlikely for a dog to be infected with whipworm through the consumption of feces (faeces typically break down within a week or so). Dogs are generally infected with dog whipworm eggs by consumingcontaminated soil or grass that carries the long-lived eggs.
The adult whipworms hang freely within the large intestine. They are attached to the large intestinalwall by a single attachment - their mouth - which is located at the tip of their long, thin, whiplike,anterior segment. Soon after adulthood has been attained, the dog whipworms start breedingand releasing fertilised eggs into the host animal's colon. These eggs enter the faeces of the host animal and are consequently released into the host animal's outdoor environment when the hostanimal defecates.
These eggs, newly released, will take a month to become infective to the next dog that comes alongand eats them. Thus the dog whipworm life cycle continues ...
Author's note: From the time the dog first eats the infective whipworm eggs from the environment, it takes around 6-12 weeks (just under 3 months) for the L1 larvae contained inthose eggs to mature into egg-shedding adult worms. This period of time is termed theprepatent period.
3) Symptoms of whipworm infestation in dogs.
Dogs with low levels of whipworm infestation may show absolutely no symptoms at all. In these cases,the canine whipworms may go undiagnosed or the eggs might be found by accident during a routinefecal flotation examination.
Symptomatic dog whipworm infestations tend to present as signs of colitis. Colitis refersto irritation and inflammation of the large intestine (caecum, colon and rectum), which makes sense since dog whipworms happento preferentially reside inside of the large intestinal tract. Symptoms suggestive of large intestinal inflammationor 'colitis' include:
Pseudo-Addison's (Pseudoaddison's) disease:
- 1) mucus-containing, jelly-like, slimy feces;
- 2) watery diarrhea (often containing lots of mucus);
- 3) blood stained or blood tinged feces or diarrhoea (the blood is usually red and fresh looking);
- 4) frequent defecation (the animal squats to pass faeces very often, often passing little to no faeces in the effort);
- 5) straining to defecate (the animal can look like it is having 'trouble' defecating because it appears to 'try' so often);
- 6) vomiting (a rarer sign, animals with severe large bowel inflammation may vomit);
- 7) dehydration;
- 8) abdominal pain and cramping (the animal may adopt a 'praying position' or stand very tense and still);
- 9) restlessness (animals may pace a lot and refuse to settle for long due to cramping and colic);
- 10) flatulence (frequent passage of gasses);
- 11) anemia (low red blood cell count) - not common, but some animals can lose so much blood as a result of heavy whipworm burdens that they become pale and weak and collapsed (some can even die);
- 12) bloating (swelling of the abdomen);
- 13) rectal prolapse (animals with severe, frequent straining can prolapse the lining of the rectum through the anus).
Dogs with canine whipworm infestation can sometimes develop a condition called Pseudo-Addison's disease. The conditionis so-named because animals affected with it will develop symptoms and blood-test results that closely mimic those ofthe endocrine disease: Addisons Disease
(the medical term for Addison's Disease is hypoadrenocorticism
These animals will usually tend to show the above symptoms of colitis (with or without vomiting) and will often develop suchsevere dehydration and marked imbalances in their blood electrolytes - potassium and sodium (the potassium will be high andthe sodium will be low) - that they will present to the vet clinic collapsed and in a severe state of shock (signs of shock include: low blood pressure, low oxygenation of the tissues, pale gums, cold extremities, low body temperature).
Without urgent veterinary treatment, these animals may die from shock or from associated complicationslike heart arrhythmias (a critically low heart rate caused by high potassium levels), renal failure and sepsis.Author's note:
Once the patient has been stabilized and is no longer in shock, a simple fecal float is often enoughto diagnose the dog whipworm infestation (which is the 'preferred' diagnosis - whipworm disease is far easierto treat and cure than true Addison's Disease, which is often a costly, lifelong condition). 4) How is canine whipworm infection diagnosed?
Dog whipworm infestation is generally diagnosed using a diagnostic test called fecal flotation. This is a testthat your veterinarian can often perform in-house (i.e. in the laboratory at the vet clinic)using a fresh sample of feces from your dog (or cat).Note:
For a complete guide to how fecal flotation is performed, see our excellent, photographic fecal flotation page.
For photographs of other parasite eggs and oocysts that can be found on fecal floatation testing, visit our parasite egg gallery.
Important author's note: dog whipworm eggs are considered to be quite dense and 'heavy' as far asparasite eggs go and many texts suggest that canine whipworm eggs can be quite difficult tofind on fecal flotation tests that employ the most-commonly-used fecal flotation solution: sodium nitrate. The reason the eggs may not be found using this fecal float solution is simply due to the fact that the heavyeggs may not 'float' in it (thus they won't be picked up on the cover-slip). Many texts suggest that, if whipworms are suspected, it is best to use a denser (higher specific gravity) fecal flotation solution like Sheather's sugar solution, zinc sulfate solution or a solution of potassium iodide at 50% saturation to get a more accurate result (i.e. have a better chance of finding them).
Combining fecal flotation (especially zinc sulfate or Sheather's sugar flotation) with centrifugation (i.e. using a centrifuge to help assist egg floatation) can further enhance the likelihood of detectingdog whipworm ova.
this author has not had any trouble finding dog whipworm eggs using simple sodium nitratefecal flotation techniques (the image on the right shows some whipworm eggs that Ifound using sodium nitrate flotation medium), however, improved accuracy of detection would beexpected using centrifugation and denser flotation solutions. Important author's note:
Whipworm females do not produce and shed eggs constantly. They will often shed their eggs out into the environment intermittently. This means thata fecal float that is negative for dog whipworm eggs on one occasion may turn up a positiveresult on another occasion. A single fecal float that is negative for dog whipworm eggsshould, thus, not be considered to 100% rule out the possibility of whipworms beingpresent. Repeated fecal floats may be needed to say for sure whether or not a dog truly doesor does not have dog whipworms. Important author's note:
Animals with significant whipworm burdens can show symptoms of whipworm-related disease BEFORE eggs appear in the host's feces. Dog whipworms take 3 months to reach their adult, egg-producing stage in the canine intestinal tract. Thus, the worms have a window of 3 months in which to cause intestinal injury andsymptoms of disease before any eggs appear, making diagnosis of early dog whipworm infestation potentially tricky. Worms whose eggs mimic those of dog whipworms:
When diagnosing whipworm eggs on fecal flotation, it is important to rememberthat there are some other parasite eggs out there whose appearance strongly mimics those ofTrichuris vulpis
on a fecal float and whose disease significance is different to that of dog whipworm.
For example, Capillaria
eggs can occasionally be found in the faeces of dogs that are infested with Capillaria
worms (see the Capillaria
eggimages below - these worm eggs look very similar to those of dog whipworm). Various Capillaria
worm species inhabit a range of different sites within the animal body including: the respiratory tract, gut and bladder, wherethey generally produce little to no symptom of disease (they are generally considered to be minimally pathogenic to dogs
). Note that certain species of Capillaria
can cause severe disease signs in other non-canine hosts, including birds (e.g. gizzard Capillaria
of birds) and rodents (e.g. liver worms of rats).
As a side note, it should be mentioned that the name Capillaria
is now defunct. The Genus Capillaria
used to be a huge Genus made up of many individual types of worms. After much study, the worm species contained within the collective Genus name Capillaria
have since been found tobe different enough that they have been ascribed new and different Genus names including: Eucoleus
(rat liver worm), Hepaticola
, which they are now officially known as. I will elect touse the term Capillaria
to describe all these closely-related worms with the whipworm-like eggs, since this is the Genus name that is the more well-known in the literature. Just remember, however, that when I call a worm Capillaria
, I am really referring to a worm species that is most likely to now be termed Eucoleus
or some other Genus name.Whipworm eggs and whipworm-like eggs can appear in the feces of dogs who eat the feces of other animals. Capillaria
eggs may also appear (on a fecal float) in the feces of a dog that has been consuming the droppings of other, Capillaria
-infested animals.For example, a dog who had eaten some Capillaria
-infested bird droppings might have bird Capillaria
eggs appearing in the fecal float. Capillaria
eggs can travel through a dog's intestinal tract unchanged and appear in its faeces. These Capillaria
eggs need to be differentiated from those of true dog whipworm.
Similarly, true whipworm
eggs may also appear in the feces of a dog that has been consuming the droppings of other, whipworm-infested animals (for example, a dog who had eaten some Trichuris ovis
-infested sheep droppings might have sheep whipworm eggs appearing in its feces on fecal float). Species of whipworms (whose eggs look very similar tothose of dog whipworm) do infest other types of animal hosts including: cattle (infected with Trichuris discolor
),sheep (infected with Trichuris ovis
), pigs (infected with Trichuris suis
) and humans(infected with Trichuris trichiura
). Dogs may ingest these 'other' kinds of whipworm eggs through the consumption of feces passed by infested host animals or humans. These 'other' whipworm eggs will travel through the dog's intestinal tract unchanged and appear in the dog's faeces. Theywill not tend to hatch out in the dog's gut and so do not pose a risk of infestation for the dog.
As a final note, it should be remembered that dogs who consume the fresh, whipworm-egg-bearing feces of other dogs will show up positive for dog whipworm eggs on a fecal float. The dog whipwormeggs contained in the fresh droppings will travel through the consumer-dog's intestinal tract unchanged and appear in that dog's faeces. The reason those whipworm eggs do not hatch and infest the fecal-consuming animal, even though the consuming animal is the correct species for them, is because the freshly-passed whipworm eggs have not yet developed an infective L1 larva. Dog whipworm eggs need to sit in the environmentfor 1 month before becoming infective to a new canine host (by this stage, any fecal matter will have broken down). Bird Capillaria egg pictures:
This is a close-up microscope picture of a fecal float test performed on a Currawong bird with weight loss and diarrhea. Several Capillaria
eggs are visible in these parasite pictures. The Capillaria
eggs are the yellow-brown, oval-shaped (rugby-ball shaped) structures seen in the three images. They have thick walls and a pale cap-like structure on each pole ("bipolar blebs"). They look very similar in appearanceto canine whipworm eggs (Trichuris
I personally think that the caps (blebs) of whipworm and Capillaria
eggs look different. Confirming that eggs seen are dog whipworm eggs:
If eggs found on a fecal flotation test are thought to be dog whipworm eggs, this canbe confirmed by deworming the animal with an "All-wormer" tablet and looking for the adult whipworms in the feces(wear gloves if handling feces) over next 12-36 hours. Finding the characteristic "whip-like" worms is proof that the eggs seen were dog whipworm eggs and not Capillaria
ova or eggs from a non-canine speciesof whipworm (i.e. eggs just passing through as a result of fecal consumption by the dog). The significance of a 'positive' fecal float:
If dog whipworm eggs are found on a fecal float, this does not
automatically mean thatthey are responsible for causing a dog's clinical signs, even if those clinical signs do seem to 'fit'with a diagnosis of canine whipworm infestation (e.g. diarrhea, fresh, red blood in the stools). Whipwormsin low numbers often cause no clinical symptoms in dogs and eggs can often be found co-incidentallyon a fecal float test in these animals. A dog with inflammatory bowel disease (an immune-mediated bowel allergydisorder, which can be characterized by colitis and diarrhea signs) who happens to have a small burden of whipworms may be mistakenly diagnosed as a 'whipworm case' on a fecal float when the trueproblem is an allergic bowel disorder (IBD).
A good way to determine the disease significance of any whipworm burden present is to dewormthe dog (with an "All-wormer" product) and see what happens. If symptoms attributed to the parasite's presence(e.g. diarrhea, colitis-signs) resolve after worming, this is often a pretty good clue thatthe parasites probably played a role in causing the disease symptoms seen in the patient. Dog whipworms can also be found by colonoscopy:
Sometimes whipworm eggs are not found on routine fecal flotation testing and the vet doesnot diagnose the canine whipworm infestation. Should the vet end up performing a colonoscopy on the caninepatient, the worms will often be clearly visible hanging from the walls of the large intestinal tract (the wormsare easily spotted on colonoscopy).
A colonoscopy is a procedure whereby the veterinarian anesthetises the animal and insertsa tiny video-camera (called an endoscope or colonoscope) up the animal's anus and intothe large intestinal tract. This allows the veterinarian to visually examine the lining ofthe animal's rectum and colon (large intestine) for signs of disease.5) Treatment and prevention of canine whipworm infestations in definitive host dogs.5a) Killing whipworms with antihelmintic medications or "All-wormers"
All-wormer products that kill dog whipworms and how often to use them.
Adult dog whipworms can be eliminated from the host canine's intestines using a range of anti-nematodal medications including: febantel
, milbemycin oxime
, pyrantel, ivermectin, oxantel
among others. These drugs are usually contained alone or in combination in deworming tablets called "All-wormers", many of which can be purchased from your vet or even from the local supermarket. IMPORTANT author's note:
Be careful in your interpretation of the term "All-wormer." You'd think from this term that the product bearing the label kills ALL WORMS. It doesn't. "All-wormers" generally only kill all parasitic worms that invade the intestinal tract
of the intended host animal. Worms that invade other regions of the body (e.g. the heart in the case of heart worm and the lung in the case of lungworm) often are not killed by routine "All-Wormer" tablets. Author's Tip:
It is easy to tell if a worming tablet kills whipworms. Just look on the back of the pack! The names of the worms killed by the tablet are usually listed. Just look for the common name: "whipworm" or the scientific name: "Trichuris vulpis
" to see if the wormer you've chosen will be appropriate.
Most drugs used to kill whipworms in the canine gut are pretty safe for your dog, even if given at doses above the recommended rate.
When an adequate dose
of anti-nematodal drug is administered to the definitive host animal, the whipworms usually die and are voided in the host animal's feces (as mentioned previously, it is rare for pet owners to actually spot these tiny worms in their animal's feces). This single treatment can often be curative, however, several doses may be needed to completely rid an animal of a large whipworm burden, particularly if a range of whipworm age groups (ranging from L2 to adult stage) is present. Some texts suggest that younger worms may not be as susceptible to antihelmintic drugs as adult worms and that these worms may need to grow to their mature adult stage before the wormers will clear them. It is therefore recommended that appropriate doses of an appropriate all-wormer drug be given at monthly intervalsover three months to clear all whipworms present (this is because young worms take about 3 months to reach adulthood).
Most deworming medications do not
generally last very long in a treated-animal's system. When an all-wormer medicine is given to a pet, the drugs generally work rapidly, killing off the adult worm parasites in one hit, before quickly disappearing from the animal's system. The implication of this is that the de-worming drugs do not hang around to protect the pet against subsequent worm infestations
. Should that pet continue to consume dog whipworm eggs from contaminated grass and soil in the days followinga deworming treatment, it will most likely become rapidly re-infested with adult whipworms, starting theproblems and the symptoms of whipworm disease all over again. It is thus important to reduce a pet's exposure towhipworm infested environments (see next section 5b) to help prevent future dog whipworm burdens from forming.
Following the ingestion of a mature, infective, L1-larvae-bearing whipworm egg (i.e. an egg that has beensitting in the pet's environment for at least 1 month), a definitive host dog (or cat) can have a reproductively-mature, egg-shedding adult whipworm inside of its large intestinal tract within 3 months. In situations where loads of long-lasting whipworm eggs have contaminated the pet's environment,a pet owner will need to repeat worm his dog (or cat) every 2-3 months to keep the adult whipworm numbers under control!Dog whipworm treatment:
This is a photo of the back of the box of an All-Wormer product calledMilbemax. The box states that it kills whipworms and has both the common name (whipworm) and thescientific name (Trichuris vulpis
) listed. I have underlined these in pink.5b) Dealing with canine whipworm contaminated environments.
Most deworming medications do not
generally last very long in a treated-animal's system. When an all-wormer medicine is given to a pet, the drugs generally work rapidly, killing off the adult worm parasites in one hit, before quickly disappearing from the animal's system. The implication of this is that the de-worming drugs do not hang around to protect the pet against subsequent worm infestations
. Should that pet continue to consume dog whipworm eggs from contaminated grass and soil in the days followinga deworming treatment, it will most likely become rapidly re-infested with adult whipworms, starting theproblems and the symptoms of canine whipworm disease all over again.
Following the ingestion of a mature, infective, L1-larvae-bearing whipworm egg (i.e. an egg that has beensitting in the pet's environment for at least 1 month), a definitive host dog (or cat) can have a reproductively-mature, egg-shedding adult whipworm inside of its large intestinal tract within 3 months. In situations where loads of long-lasting dog whipworm eggs have contaminated the pet's environment,a pet owner will need to repeat worm his dog (or cat) every 2-3 months to keep the adult whipworm numbers under control!
Because dog whipworm eggs can last so long in a pet's environment (eggs have been known to last up to 7 yearsin a contaminated environment), it follows that, so long as an animal remains situated in an environmentwhere lots of whipworm eggs can be found, that animal WILL very likely become reinfected with whipworms the second thatmedicated worm prevention (worming) is allowed to lapse (i.e. if the owner forgets to give the de-wormingtablets for a couple of months, the animal will surely become reinfested again). It is thereforehelpful if a pet can be removed from a whipworm-infested site. A pet housed in an area thathas not had whipworm contamination before is unlikely to get the parasite. What is a whipworm infested site?
A whipworm infested site is any site that has been exposed to dog feces bearingdog whipworm eggs (i.e. a site that a whipworm-infested dog has had access to) AND whichhas not been adequately cleaned enough to remove them (i.e. letting them remain in the environment).
The second part is important. A dog with whipworms can defecate in a steel vet clinic cage, exposing that cageto whipworm, but the site is unlikely to become 'whipworm infested' nor pose a risk to future dogsentering the cage because vet clinic cages are extremely easy to clean. An attendant can cleanthe steel cage well, removing it of the whipworm eggs quite easily. This is one reason (ease of cleaning and disease control) that vet clinics keep animals in smooth steel housing.
In contrast, it is difficult to clear whipworm eggs out of moist soil, sand, lawn and vegetation. Once the feces carrying the dog whipworm eggs break apart, the eggs trickle deeply into the soil and lawn bed where they can not be removed (not without digging up the lawn or the soilanyway). Those eggs then sit in these sites for a month and become L1-bearing and hence infective. The eggscan then persist for years in this infective state.Author's note:
It is very important for attendants to pick up and dispose of all dog feces the moment the dog passes them. If feces are not given the chance to break down on lawns or soil, they will release fewer eggs into the environment. What if you can not remove the animal from a whipworm-contaminated site?
It is all very well to say "move the dog away from the site containing the whipworm eggs", but someof us can't do that. We have one yard or one breeding or boarding kennel facility and thatis all we have to work with, even if it becomes infested with dog whipworm eggs. If this is the case,you have several solutions:1) De-worm regularly
- every animal on the premises should be wormed with an appropriate doseof an all-wormer drug every 2-3 months (you can even do it monthly if you like). 2) Same-day worming
- every animal on the premises should be wormed on the same day.3) Weigh before worming
- every animal to be wormed must be weighed so that the correct dose of wormer is given.4) Rotate all-wormers
- see section 5d on prevention of whipworm drug resistance.5) Change wormers if the one you are using does not seem to be working
- 5d.6) Pick up and remove all feces from the yard the second the dog passes them
- if the feces are passed ontolawn or soil, some people will use a shovel and remove the section of dirt or lawn that the fecesmade contact with (just to be extra sure of removing all of the fecal matter).7) House animals on sand, concrete or gravel
- These surfaces, particularly concrete, are easier to disinfectthan soil or lawn and they tend to become very hot if exposed to direct sunlight (direct sun and intense heat maykill whipworm eggs, rendering them non-infective to pets). 8) Bleaching and steam-cleaning
- Surfaces like gravel and concrete can be regularly bleached and steam-cleaned.Steam-cleaning in particular is non-harmful to staff and animals and can be quite beneficial in killing environmentally resilient eggs and oocysts like those of dog whipworms, roundworms and coccidia. 9) If soil or lawn is the chosen surface for housing dogs, regularly replacing the soil or lawn every 3-6 months should reduce whipworm egg burdens
. If you replace the soil or lawn with non-contaminated soil or lawn and then thoroughlydeworm all the dogs (three doses each given 1 month apart) before re-introducing them to the clean surfaces, you should not need to replace the soil and lawn anywhere near as often (particularly if you remain vigilant about not letting untreated dogs access the sites and if you maintain strict monthly worming protocols with the dogs already there). 10) Remember that moist, cool, shaded soils, mud and lawns are the worst for harbouring viable whipworm eggs
- you might wantto consider housing pets on concrete or gravel if you come from a site with cool to warm climate, dense shade and high humidity and rainfall.5c) Prevention of whipworms in large dog populations (e.g. boarding kennels, dog breeding facilities).
Dog whipworm burdens tend to become most problematic in environments where many dogs are housed close together, sharingsome communal areas (e.g. walking areas, exercise yards, training yards) and alternating through otherareas (e.g. kennels and housing yards). Facilities such as: boarding kennels, breeding facilities, animal shelters (particularly thosewith "long-stay" policies), pounds and places that keep large numbers of working dogs (e.g. farms, police dog units, army dogs units, rescue dog units) are particularly at risk. Over time, resistant eggs build up in the environment, posing a risk ofinfestation to the dog populations that actually dwell there and to those dogs that just pass through.
There are many ways to help reduce whipworm build-up and spread in these multi-dog facilities. Many of thesehave been touched on in the above section (2b), but I have also listed some additional tips and hintsto help keep dog whipworms under control. De-worming of current animal populations:
Every animal on the premises should be wormed with an appropriate dose of all-wormer drug every 2-3 months. If dog whipworm is a particular problem, monthly de-worming can be scheduled as part of the kennel worming protocol.
Every animal on the premises should be wormed on the same day.
Every animal on the premises should be weighed before worming. This is to ensure that the correct dose of wormer is given. This is particularlyimportant in puppies whose weight can change radically from month to month. IMPORTANT
- All-wormers should be 'rotated' to help prevent the onset of whipworm drug resistance in a facility (see section 5d). Basically, all this meansis that, every time the animals in the kennel facility are de-wormed, an all-wormer product with a different active ingredient isselected (this changing of drugs should kill off any 'resistant' worms that might have survived the previousall-wormer drug given). Quarantine and de-worming of incoming animal populations:
Kennel facilities accepting new dogs should ideally have a set of easy-to-disinfect and steam (concrete, steel or gravel flooring) dog runs located well away from the main dog population (this is called a quarantine zone
). New dogs entering the premises should be placedin these quarantine runs for around 6-8 weeks or more and repeatedly de-wormed with all-wormer. Ideally it is recommended that 3 doses of all-wormer be given at monthly intervals, necessitating a 12 week stay in quarantine. Certainly, if dog whipworm is a major issue in your region, this is advisable. 12 weeks may, however, be overkill and giving at least 2 doses, a month apart, before letting the animalinto the general population may be sufficient (the animal will still receive the third dose a month later).
How long an animal stays in quarantine really depends on all of the diseases and parasites likely to be found in the particular population and on the animal intake rate and space availability and funds of the premises (for example, high-intake shelters may not have the luxury of long-term quarantining of animals). The general rule, however, is that the longer an introduced animal stays in quarantine the better forthe premises as a whole.
Animals can be screened for dog whipworm eggs using fecal flotation tests prior to introducing them to the generalpopulation. This screening can be a useful way of detecting active whipworm shedders prior to theirentry into the main populace. If eggs are found, the animal should stay in quarantine for further de-worming untileggs are no longer being discovered.
Note that incoming animals can be fully wormed (12 weeks worth) prior to their arrival on your site. Not having to keep animals in quarantinepurely for the purposes of complete worming could well help to reduce the length of time the incoming animals remainin the quarantine runs. Strict removal of all dog faeces:
All feces that a dog passes should be cleaned up from exercise yards and kennels the second they are noticed. This will preventdog whipworm eggs from entering the environment, giving them no chance to develop larvae (L1s) and become infective.If feces are passed onto soil or grass, it is a good idea to use a shovel and remove the section of dirt or lawn that the fecesmade contact with (just to be extra sure of removing all of the fecal matter).Choose flooring that will not hold and harbour whipworm eggs and which is easy to disinfect and steam-clean:
Keeping dogs in kennels with smooth, hard, easily-bleached, easily-steamed flooring (e.g. tiles, lino, concrete, gravel, stone) is a greatway of keeping all manner of disease nasties under control in big animal populations, not just canine whipworms (e.g. parvo, coccidia, hookworms). Such surfaces, particularly concrete, are easier to disinfect than soil or lawn and tend to become quite hot if exposed to direct sunlight (direct sun and intense heat may kill whipworm eggs, rendering them non-infective to pets). Note that such surfacesshould be shaded to prevent foot-burns in animals.
Surfaces like gravel and concrete should be regularly bleached and steam-cleaned.Steam-cleaning in particular is non-harmful to staff and animals and can be quite beneficial in killing environmentally resilient eggs and oocysts like those of dog whipworms, roundworms and coccidia.
If soil or lawn is the chosen surface for housing dogs (and, let's face it, it looks and feels better), regularly replacing the soil or lawn every 3-6 months should reduce whipworm egg burdens significantly (albeit at significant cost). If you replace the soil or lawn with non-contaminated soil or lawn and then thoroughly deworm all the dogs (three doses 1 month apart) before re-introducing them to the clean surfaces, you should not need to replace the soil and lawn anywhere near as often (particularly if you remain vigilant about not letting untreated dogs access the sites and if you maintain strict monthly worming protocols with the dogs already there).
Remember that moist, cool soils, mud and lawns are the worst for harbouring viable whipworm eggs, parvovirus and hookworms. You should consider housing pets on concrete or gravel if you come from a site with cool to warm climate and high humidity and rainfall. If you do this, however, do make sure that the flooring is well-drained and not prone to forming puddles. Animals that are forcedto stand around on hard, abrasive surfaces in wet conditions will often get sores and nasty infectionson their feet similar to those moisture-associated bacterial and fungal conditions seen in poultry and livestock (e.g. bumblefoot, greasy heel, thrush). Rotate wormers and periodically 'rest' dog pens:
As mentioned above, all-wormers should be 'rotated' to help prevent the onset of dog whipworm drug resistance in a facility (see section 5d). Basically, all this means is that, every time the animals in the kennel facility are de-wormed, an all-wormer product with a different active ingredient isselected (this changing of drugs should kill off any 'resistant' worms that might have survived the previous all-wormer drug given).
Similarly, it can also be helpful to periodically 'rest' each block of dog kennels or cages, leaving themfree of dogs for a couple of months at a time. Resting blocks of kennels for a good few months, the moment a block is free ofdogs (e.g. after all the animals in the block have been sold or weaned or moved to other kennel locations) allowsthat block to be fully cleaned out, scrubbed, bleached, steamed and opened up to the sun for a couple of months, therebyrendering the region clear of infective organisms and parasites (i.e. nice and ready for the next intake of dogs). Runs with soil or grasscan be resurfaced with new soil or lawn in that time.
Note that rotating and resting dog kennels, pens or runs does require that a premises (e.g. shelter, boarding facility, breeding kennels)be only kept at about 80% of its full carrying capacity. This may not be financially feasible for some premises. Periodically screen dog feces samples for worms:
In order to tell how effective your worm control protocols are being, you can periodically collect and screen dog feces for evidence of worms. Performing fecal flotation tests on fecalsamples from across the dog population will not only tell you if your overall worming protocol is effective, it will help you to trouble-shoot problem areas (maybe worms are turning up in only one block ofcages, telling you that there is an issue with cage-cleaning going on there or a staff-member who is notgiving the de-worming medications). 5d) Drug resistance - when the wormers are not removing the dog whipworms and treating the symptoms.
Sometimes owners of domestic pets and managers of large multi-dog kennel facilities appear to do all the right things and worm all of their animals regularly only to find that symptoms ofdog whipworm disease continue to persist in their population. They start to ponder if they have a 'drug resistant' dog whipworm population and wonder what they can do about it.
There are two aspects that should be considered when looking at the issue of de-worming failure:
1) Is the problem at hand truly drug resistance (as in: the worms are actually immune to the antihelmintic drugs being given) or is there some other simple failure of worm control going on?
2) Are the symptoms of disease being seen actually the result of dog whipworm infestation?1) Is the problem at hand truly drug resistance (as in - the worms are truly immune to the antihelmintic drugs being given) or is there some other simple failure of worm control going on?
Drug resistance in whipworm populations:
A Pubmed and Google search of drug resistance in Trichuris vulpis parasite populations failed to turn up any results so, as it currently stands, this author is not sure if dog whipworms have started truly becoming resistant to the various antihelmintic medications that are in common use. If any reader has a reference for drug resistant dog whipworm parasites, I would be most interested.
The issue of drug resistance in parasitic worms is, however, currently being experienced in sheep and cattle production systems, where worm resistance has resulted in certain de-worming medications essentially becoming useless. This drug resistance does extend to whipworm specieswith moxidectin and ivermectin resistant strains of Trichuris discolor (cattle whipworm)being found in Brazilian cattle and albendazole and mebendazole resistant strains of Trichuris trichiura(human whipworm) being found in people. It is certainly feasible that such drug resistance could occur in the worm populations of domestic pets, particularly in situations where large, static populations of dogs (e.g. breeding kennels, boarding facilities) containinglarge burdens of worms are being given the same kinds of all-wormer products for years on end.
Specific lab studies need to be conducted if a dog whipworm population, thought to be trulydrug resistant, is to be proven as such.
If drug resistant parasites are thought to be a problem in an animal facility, the solutionis two-fold. The first thing to do is to change the All-wormer product you are using over to a new one. This new product must not only have a different name to the first product you were using, but, mostimportantly, it MUST have different active ingredients (preferably active ingredients from a completelydifferent drug class). After you have changed de-wormer type, you must also take steps to remedy the housing and management conditions of the animals to those conditions that do notfavour ongoing dog whipworm spread and persistence in the environment (e.g. better hygiene, better flooring and so on). Failure to improve conditions and reduce dog whipworm spread and survivalin the environment will result in an overdependence on All-wormer medications, resulting in ongoing drug resistance in the future.
Prevention of drug resistance in dog whipworm populations is important because these wormscan have negative impacts on dog health and productivity. All-wormers should be 'rotated' to help prevent the onset of dog whipworm drug resistance in a facility. All this means is that, every time the animals in the kennel facility are de-wormed, an all-wormer product with a different active ingredient is selected (changing drug types should kill off any 'resistant' worms that survived the previous dose of all-wormer drug given). Additionally, you must also take steps to remedy the housing and management conditions of the animals to those conditions that do not favour ongoing dog whipworm spread and persistence in the environment (e.g. better hygiene, better flooring and so on). Improved hygiene and flooring will reduce the overall numbersof dog whipworm eggs (including drug-resistant strains) that survive in the environmentand can be passed on to other animals.
Other causes of de-worming failure aside from drug resistance:
Sometimes a de-worming treatment may appear to fail or 'not work' for reasons otherthan true drug resistance. These reasons can revolve around how the treatment wasadministered or stored or they can relate to how rapidly the host animals (dogs) in questionare able to become reinfested with parasites.
Things to rule out first if drug resistance is suspected:
- Are the animals actually being wormed - maybe the person responsible is not doing their job or is unable to medicate certain individuals for certain reasons;
- Are all of the animals being wormed - failure to worm individuals in a population can result in the entire population rapidly becoming reinfested;
- Are animals being weighed before worming - all-wormers need to be dosed correctly to be of value;
- Is the drug in date - out-of-date drugs can cease to work, resulting in worming failure;
- Is the drug being stored properly - exposing drugs to intense heat or sunlight can render them rapidly useless;
- Are reinfection rates high - animals kept in conditions (e.g. mud, dirt, grass) with high rates of dog whipworm egg ingestion are likely to become rapidly reinfested.
2) Are the symptoms seen actually the result of dog whipworm infestation?
There are many disease conditions out there whose symptoms mimic those of dog whipworm infestation(i.e. there are many disease conditions that cause 'colitis' signs). These range fromthe infectious (e.g. coccidiosis, campylobacteriosis, clostridiosis, histiocytic colitis of boxers) to the immune-mediated (e.g. IBD or inflammatory bowel disease, eosinophilic colitis) to the cancerous(colorectal neoplasia, intestinal lymphoma, anal sac cancer) to the bizarre and accidental (ileocaecalintussusception, vascular embolism, colon or rectum foreign bodies).
A dog might happen to have a couple of whipworms just 'hanging out' in its colon, causing no harm, when it happensto develop one of these other concurrent conditions (e.g. the dog develops IBD). That dog will, as a result of the secondary disease (IBD), develop signs of colitis similar to those seenwith dog whipworm infestation. As part of the routine diagnostic process, the clever vet will performa fecal flotation and ... Lo and Behold! ... some dog whipworm eggs will be found.
... Except that it isn't. The vet will recommend treatment for the dog whipworm disease that s/he thinksis causing the colitis signs only to find that the colitis signs fail to resolve. Why? Becausethe whipworm is NOT causing the disease signs (the inflammatory bowel condition is). The vet might thensuppose that the dog whipworm population is 'resistant' to the drugs that were given.
Now, this is not a failure of medication or a sign of 'drug resistance'. This is just a caseof failed diagnostics. The dog whipworm eggs were found incidentally, but the worms were notthe cause of the issue.
Author's note: The kind of scenario described above can become even more complicated if the dog in question is found to be consuming feces that carry whipworm or whipworm-like eggs(e.g. a farm dog that regularly eats cattle, sheep or pig feces). In these situations, the dog will keep on showing whipworm eggs on the fecal float, making the vet thinkthat the animal truly is infested with 'drug resistant' whipworms. Such a situation mayrequire a colonoscopy to determine a diagnosis one way or the other.
6) Can dog whipworms infest humans?
The answer is yes, however, it is considered moderately uncommon. Dog whipworms (Trichuris vulpis species) and pig whipworms (Trichuris suis species)have been discovered in the intestinal tracts of humans, sometimes producing severe signs of intestinal diseaseand diarrhoea.
Now, it could be expected that humans infested with these 'animal-specific' whipworms would be immune suppressed (e.g. being treated with chemotherapy or carrying HIV) and that some form of immune incompetency might be required for these 'atypical' worm species to parasitize them and, certainly, this is the situationin some individual cases. Underlying immune suppression is not, however, always a predisposing factor. Although pig and dog whipworms will not generally invade 'normal' human intestinal tracts (the human immune system is usually pretty good at rejecting them), there are many cases in the literaturewhereby completely healthy people have developed significant infestations with these atypical whipwormspecies (e.g. people on farms, children of animal owners, people in institutions and so on).
More commonly, humans found with whipworm infestations are carrying a species of whipwormthat has become specifically adapted to the human large intestinal tract: Trichuris trichiura (the 'human whipworm'). It is a different species to the canine form (T. vulpis) of whipworm, but its basic features: whiplike-appearance,polarised-egg-shape, lower intestinal location and single-host direct life cycle (with an egg that takes about 3 weeks to become infective in the environment) are pretty much the same as that already described for the dog whipworm.
Human infestation with Trichuris trichiura occurs worldwide, but is particularly prevalentin regions of the world where the quality of sanitation is low; climate tends towards being warm to cool with high humidity and rainfall and the local soils are moisture-retaining and well-shaded.Transmission is enhanced when local people grow their crops (e.g. low-growing vegetables and root-crops) in whipworm-egg affected soils (e.g. soils fertilised with human excrement) and consume them without washing or cooking them properly. In some cultures, people practice soil-eating and thistoo can enhance the risk of human whipworm uptake. Outbreaks of trichuriasis
Adult whipworms can live in the human intestinal tract for many years (female worms can produce up to 20,000 eggs each day)and humans in endemic locations can build up extremely large burdens of worms. This can be enough to cause significantanaemia, dysentery, stunting (growth retardation, mental retardation, finger-clubbing), debility and even death in the affected human population(children are particularly likely to suffer from severe, life-threatening complications of whipworm). It is thought that a combination of geneticsand immune-system competency plays some role in determining the size of the Trichuris trichiurawhipworm burden that an individual person is likely to get. Some people are prone to harbouringvery large numbers of whipworms, whereas other people may only get one or two wormsand then become seemingly 'immune' to contracting more. People in third world countries seemparticularly prone to large worm burdens, both because of a lack of sanitation (high consumptionof eggs from a feces-laden environment) and because poor nutrition and stressful living and, sometimes, the presenceof concurrent diseases (e.g. the presence of other parasites, viruses, HIV and so on) reduces the ability of the immune system to fight off the invading whipworm populations.
Treatment and prevention of trichuriasis in humans is similar to that described above in dogs. Treatment of human whipworm requires the administration of anthelminthec drugs (albendazole and mebendazole seemto be commonly used in humans), which can be given orally or by enema (anthelminthec enemas can be very usefulsince the worms live in the large bowel, where the enema will be delivered directly). Preventionof human whipworm infestation requires the human to take steps to avoid ingesting whipworm eggs.Simple steps like: not eating soil; washing hands thoroughly after handling soil or veggies grown insoil; washing and cooking all vegetables prior to consumption; not letting human wastecontaminate soil and waterways used for food production and not letting human wastecontaminate drinking water can all help to reduce the chances of a person picking up whipworms.
A very nice article on human trichuriasis and Trichuris species (T. vulpis and T. suis)that can be transmitted from animals to man.
Your dog whipworm links:
To go from this canine whipworm page to the Pet Informed Home Page, click here.
Ignore the fact that this paper has been written by a drug company. It containsa nice illustration of how to perform a fecal float with centrifugation.
A very nice article on human trichuriasis and Trichuris species (T. vulpis and T. suis)that can be transmitted from animals to man.
Dog Whipworm Life Cycle References and Suggested Readings:
1) Helminths. In Bowman DD, Lynn RC, Eberhard ML editors: Parasitology for Veterinarians, USA, 2003, Elsevier Science.
2) Phylum Nemathelminthes. In Hobbs RP, Thompson ARC, Lymbery AJ: Parasitology, Perth, 1999, Murdoch University.
3) Nematodes: Trichurida and Dioctophymatida, Enoplean Parasites. In Schmidt GD, Roberts LS: Foundations of Parasitology, 6th ed., Singapore, 2000, McGraw-Hill Higher Education.
5) Condi GK, Soutello RG, Amarante AF, Moxidectin-resistant nematodes in cattle in Brazil., Vet Parasitol. 2009 May 12;161(3-4):213-7.
6) Lopes WD, et al. Anthelmintic efficacy of oral trichlorfon solution against ivermectin resistant nematode strains in cattle.Vet Parasitol. 2009 Dec 3;166(1-2):98-102.
7) Keiser J, Utzinger J. Efficacy of current drugs against soil-transmitted helminth infections: systematic review and meta-analysis.JAMA. 2008 Apr 23;299(16):1937-48.
8) Kagei N, Hayashi S, Kato K. Human cases of infection with canine whipworms, Trichuris vulpis (Froelich, 1789), in Japan.Jpn J Med Sci Biol. 1986 Aug;39(4):177-84.
Pet Informed is not in any way affiliated with any of the companies whose productsappear in images or information contained within this dog whipworm article or our related articles. Any images or mentions, made by Pet Informed, are only used in order to illustrate certain points being made in the article. Pet Informed receives no commercial or reputational benefit from any companiesfor mentioning their products and can not make any guarantees or claims, either positive or negative, about these companies' products, customer service or business practices. Pet Informed can not and will not take any responsibility for any death, damage, illness, injury or loss of reputation and businessor for any environmental damage that occurs should you choose to use one of the mentioned products on your pets, poultry or livestock (commercial or otherwise) or indoors or outdoors environments. Do your homework and research all whipworm products carefully before using any whipworm treatment products on your animals or their environments.
Dog whipworm copyright December 11, 2010, Dr. O'Meara BVSc (Hon), www.pet-informed-veterinary-advice-online.com.All images, both photographic and drawn, contained on this site are the property of Dr. O'Meara and are protected under copyright. They can not be used or reproduced without my written permission.
Milbemax is a registered trademark of Novartis Animal Health Australasia Pty Ltd.
Please note: the aforementioned dog whipworm prevention, control and treatment guidelines and information on the dog whipworm life cycle are general information and recommendations only. The information provided is based on published information and on relevant veterinary literature and publications and my own experience as a practicing veterinarian.The advice given is appropriate to the vast majority of pet owners, however, giventhe large range of dog whipworm medication types and dog whipworm prevention and control protocols now available, owners should take it upon themselves to ask their own veterinarian what treatment and dog whipworm prevention schedules s/he is using so as to be certain what to do. Owners with specific circumstances (e.g. high and repeated dog whipworm infestation burdens in their pet/s; pregnant bitches and queens; very young puppies and kittens;livestock producers; multiple-dog and cat environments; commercial animal breeders;boarding kennel owners; animals on immune-suppressant medicines; animals with immunosuppressant diseases or conditions; owners of sick and debilitated animals; public health workers etc. etc.) should ask their vet what the safest and most effective dog whipworm control protocol is for their situation.
Please note: the scientific tapeworm names mentioned in this dog whipworm life cycle article are only current asof the date of this dog whipworm web-page's copyright date and the dates of my references. Parasite scientific names are constantly being reviewed and changed as new scientific information becomes available and names that are current now may alter in the future. | <urn:uuid:f4e6d80b-3567-4dda-a81e-d5cb49c83f13> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.pet-informed-veterinary-advice-online.com/dog-whipworm.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783403825.35/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155003-00058-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.92481 | 13,157 | 3.28125 | 3 |
Methods | Statistics | Clinical | Educational | Industrial | Professional items | World psychology |
The Wide Range Assessment of Memory and Learning, Second Edition (WRAML2) is a standardized test that measures an individual's memory functioning. It evaluates both immediate and delayed memory ability along with the acquisition of new learning. The WRAML2 is normed for individuals ages 5–90 years.
The WRAML2 is composed of two verbal, two visual, and two attention-concentration subtests, yielding a Verbal Memory Index, a Visual Memory Index, and an Attention-Concentration Index. Together, these subtests yield the General Memory Index. The Working Memory Index consists of the Symbolic Working Memory and Verbal Working Memory subtests. In addition, there are four recognition subtests.
The WRAML2 is published by and available from Psychological Assessment Resources, Inc.. A scoring program also is available. | <urn:uuid:eaa08098-6e35-46b4-ad7e-e2f03039edca> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://psychology.wikia.com/wiki/WRAML2 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783395679.92/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154955-00149-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.884056 | 189 | 3.109375 | 3 |
by Gregory McNamee
Anxiety. It’s a constant of modern life. It yields all sorts of side effects, from suicidal ideation to spasms of violence, from gnawing worry to an impressive arsenal of tools for self-medication: In 2010, the American Psychological Association estimates, Americans spent $11 billion on antidepressant drugs,to which add another $50 billion spent on alcohol and untold billions spent for other world-shielding technologies and commodities.
There’s plenty to be anxious about, of course, from the loss of health and livelihood to the threat of planetary catastrophe—and zombie apocalypse too, for that matter. But what, apart from being turned into étouffée, does a crayfish have to worry about? Plenty, it seems, for, according to a recent paper in the journal Science, they seem to exhibit signs of anxiety—an adaptation, if perhaps not always desirable, that suggest that their mental and emotional lives are more complicated than we give them credit for. Crayfish, as one researcher noted, have been around for hundreds of millions of years and have had plenty of time to develop such complexity. Still, it has to be admitted that the tests involving the evocation of this behavior involved electrical charges, which might make any sentient being more than a touch wary.
* * *
Get zapped by a sufficiently strong electrical current, and you, gentle human, will feel pain. Feel pain, and you may wish you had a marine cone snail handy. The venom secreted by these small creatures can be fatal to their small prey, but to big creatures such as us the effect can be analgesic, even soothing. According to a recently published article in the Journal of General Physiology, peptides called conotoxins act as natural painkillers in mammals. Given the dangers attendant in other forms of analgesics such as opioids, the identification of these conotoxins could usefully help develop a new class of drugs.
* * *
Ants are capable of inflicting a great deal of pain on an unwary human. They are also capable of solving some rather vexing problems that involve locating food and getting it safely back to the burrow. To a casual observer, ants may appear to wander about at random on this quest. In their randomness, however, lies an odd order, one that resolves itself much as a worried mind eventually finds calmness—or so we hope. The mathematical model that emerges from this resolution, as reported by scholars writing in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is fascinating, and it affords an unconventional glimpse of the problem of, well, solving problems among nonhuman thinkers.
* * *
Speaking of order and chaos, venom and anxiety: Orb spiders, famously, build webs erratically when disturbed. When left to their own devices, though, they make pretty neat work of the task. Have a look at this visualization, courtesy of the aesthetic philosophers at the always rewarding website Notcot.org. Is the weaver’s path random, or is it thought through in advance? Genetically programmed or a matter of accident? Those are questions that might trouble the sleep of a harried researcher, but let’s contemplate them with clear and unworried minds. | <urn:uuid:378f324f-9549-44cb-a1a6-b087a32be3e0> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://advocacy.britannica.com/blog/advocacy/2014/07/animals-in-the-news-242/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783392159.3/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154952-00063-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958491 | 671 | 2.625 | 3 |
Report on Exemplary and Best Practices in
Preparedness and Emergency Response
For People with Disabilities
White, Principal Investigator
H. Fox, Co-Investigator
Rooney, Project Coordinator
and Training Center on Independent Living
University of Kansas
March 15, 2007
Nobody Left Behind (NLB): Disaster Preparedness for
Persons with Mobility Impairments research study determined the readiness of emergency management sites across the United States
to assist persons with mobility impairments during disasters.
This research was under the direction of Glen W. White, Principle
Investigator, and Michael H. Fox,
Co-Investigator, at the University of Kansas,
Research and Training
Center on Independent
Living (RTC/IL). Thirty randomly selected sites that had experienced a Federal
Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) declared disaster during 1998-2003 were the focus
of the research. Emergency managers at each site were surveyed by telephone and
their local emergency plans were reviewed. Experts in disaster preparedness and
response and/or people with
disabilities assisted in the project as advisors.
component of the NLB project was to identify exemplary polices, practices, and
programs in emergency management designed to assist persons with mobility
limitations. The identified exemplary situations are the basis of this white
paper. With the support of policy
makers in emergency management and disabilities, these practices can serve as
catalysts for change, which may be emulated
by other counties, cities, parishes, or
Emergency Management Practices
with the emergency managers helped determine whether guidelines were in local
emergency plans to assist persons with mobility impairments. Six
sites out of 30 self identified that their local emergency management plan
included such guidelines. Among these 6
sites, there was a 50/50 split between urban and rural locations. Two of these
6 sites included a nuclear facility plant in their jurisdiction which indicates
additional responsibilities as well as financial resources to address these
distinguishes these six sites as exceptional compared to the other sites in the
study is the cumulative effect of policies and practices that they employed. Thus,
these sites took a comprehensive approach to addressing the needs of persons
with disabilities, including mobility impairments.
1 illustrates the six emergency management practices that the sites identified
to assist persons with disabilities, including mobility impairments. These management
practices included having guidelines and the inclusion of the disability
community in planning. Each of the sites
had at least three out of six emergency management practices, making for a more
extensive approach to assisting persons with disabilities than the other sites.
Emergency Management Practices Including
the Needs of Persons
with Mobility Impairments and the
Corresponding Number and
Percentage of the Six Exemplary Sites
with these Practices
Emergency Management Practices
Number of the 6 Sites with Practice
Guidelines to assist persons with mobility
Surveillance identification of persons with mobility
Consumer outreach for
persons with mobility impairments.
Customer service delivery in transportation,
sheltering, problem solving, etc. as related to the needs of persons with
Education and training about the disability community
and their needs in disaster preparedness and response.
Inclusion of persons with
the local planning process, and/or
in training drills of responders.
Specific consumer services delivery
Administering and maintaining a surveillance system, usually a
self-identified registry system of
persons needing assistance during a disaster or
accessible transportation vehicles
and guidelines to evacuate persons with disabilities needing assistance;
3. Establishing a so called special medical
needs shelter; and
4. Conducting training and exercises on
evacuation of persons with disabilities.
the sites that did not consider their plan as having guidelines to assist
persons with mobility impairments, several also administered registries,
identified accessible transportation,
evacuated persons with disabilities, established shelters, or conducted training and/or
exercises on evacuation of persons with disabilities. Yet,
the norm was to have a few policies aimed
at addressing one specific disability and issue. For
example, it was common to have policies on communication or
warning alternatives for the hearing
impaired. However, the remaining assistance needs of persons with disabilities,
including persons with mobility impairments, were missing from the plans or practices.
of Persons with Disabilities
figures on Table 1 on page 4 show that only half of the exemplary sites reported having training in assistance needs of persons
with disabilities. These findings support
previous NLB recommendations on the need for
better educated emergency management personnel regarding disabilities and
It is a must that active representation across disabilities
be included at the planning table, not just service providers or advocates for
the elderly. Persons with disabilities have much to contribute
to emergency management efforts, as
shown by the preparedness tip sheets developed for
and by persons with mobility impairments in Attachments 1 and 2. From personal
experiences, these preparedness tips were formulated
from responses to an online survey conducted by the NLB project. Inclusion of persons with disabilities in
emergency management can lead to more
effective preparedness for
individuals and the community.
resource to assist managers in this area is a white paper commissioned by the
NLB study called, “Why and How to Include
People with Disabilities in Your Emergency Planning Process,” by June I.
Kailes. This paper
can be found on the www.nobodyleftbehind2.org
website under findings.
and organizations that could help
get emergency managers in touch with qualified persons with disabilities to
serve on planning committees are Governor’s
Offices on Disabilities, the Statewide Independent Living Council (SILC), and local
or regional centers for independent living (CILs). Resource directories for
the SILC and CILs by state can be found on http://www.ilru.org/html/publications/directory/index.html.
30 sites randomly selected for the
NLB project and other sites, as recommended by advisors
and consultants, were investigated by the researchers with an eye for exemplary policies, practices, or programs to assist persons with mobility
impairments. Four such cases were
identified. Two exemplary practices were
from sites that had also self-identified in the NLB study as having guidelines in
their local plans to assist persons with mobility impairments. The researchers termed these exemplary policies,
practices, and programs as “emerging best practices.”
emerging best practices are in: 1) comprehensive planning for persons with disabilities in the local emergency
management plan 2) comprehensive planning tool using surveillance and consumer
education; and 3) day to day surveillance and consumer education outreach.
Comprehensive planning in local emergency management plans. The
optimal approach to comprehensive planning is an extensive set of guidelines in
the local emergency plan to address the needs of persons with disabilities. One site did just this by creating an “Appendix
on Persons with Disabilities” to the Annex on Direction and Control in their
local emergency management plan. Attachment
3 of this report is that Appendix
with slight modifications in formatting
and to remove the identity of the site. Attachment 4 is the corresponding self-registry form
for persons with disabilities.
provisions of the Appendix take a multi-disability approach (sensory, physical, and emotional/mental), set minimum
training and reception care requirements, seek inclusion of persons with
disabilities, and place responsibilities on persons with disabilities and other
responders in participation with preparedness and the plan. Attachment 4 is the
self registry form that corresponds with the first directive that persons
with disabilities make their needs known and prepare themselves for potential emergencies. The Appendix on Persons
with Disabilities can be used as a model with minor
adjustments to fit many local systems.
It is an excellent starting point to bridge gaps in assistance measures
for persons with disabilities, while
providing for more knowledgeable and confident emergency management
teams to address these needs.
component of this Appendix is it utilizing persons with disabilities in the
training exercise. For those
managers considering providing training and exercises that include persons with
disabilities an excellent resource is: Incorporating Special Needs Populations into Emergency
Planning and Exercises" by E. Davis
and J. Mincin (2005, June). This
paper can be found on www.noodyleftbehind2.org
Comprehensive planning tool using surveillance and
the NLB study, it was discovered that one site was utilizing a best practice,
field-developed, surveillance and consumer education model. It brings the
health field and emergency management together to map the assistance needs of a
community to best design non-medical and medical assistance. This planning tool
relies on consumer education and participation. Survey questionnaires are
included in the consumer education packet or
online at a website. The questionnaires allow for
the intake of assistance information
such as physical location, medical needs, medication, mobility, and medical
history. The consumer packets are
distributed by mail, Meals on Wheels, Area Agencies on Aging, and home health
agencies in this Texas
model. Recently, distribution has occurred through churches
utilizing the Faith-Based nursing program (Parish Nurses). Using the provided database
software to map the various types of assistance needs and locations, planners
can determine the placement of shelters, staffing, and medical equipment and
Moss, RN, MSN, at the Lamar University Department of Nursing created this tool
for local adoption and it is called “The
Disaster Preparedness Planning for
the Special Needs Population." (See Attachment 5 for
website to obtain the database software, special needs assessment survey,
survey questionnaires, and consumer education packet.) Existing shelters
developed through this model were tested under the conditions of Florida
hurricanes and Hurricane Rita. This tool is being used by several
emergency managers in Texas, Louisiana,
In 2006, the State of Texas went live with a
modified version of this database model, through the 2-1-1 program, in order
to establish the State of Texas
consumer and surveillance outreach. One site in
the NLB study stood out with its “accumulative effect of several policies and
practices” aimed at meeting the needs of specific individuals with
disabilities. Good management, a workable
self-identifying registry, consumer education, and adequate resources were a part
of the success of this operation as well.
The emergency manager took the consumer and surveillance outreach
program designed for the part of the
county that encompassed a 10 mile radius of the nuclear power plant and
expanded it to cover the entire county. The
end result translated into excellence in meeting the individual assistance
needs of persons with various disabilities across this rural county.
Some 20 years ago, the emergency
management and nuclear industry used a calendar as a means to provide the
public with safety and evacuation routes in case of a nuclear power or other emergency. This site has found that
changing the theme of the calendar with local attractions, photos or other points of interest each year on the
calendar has kept the attention of the public.
It has become the best tool to have safety information
readily available to the public. Along with the calendar, each household in the
county gets a postage paid registration card. This card is to be filled out if
anyone in the household requires assistance during disasters. Knowing these
individual needs and residencies helped the emergency manager create an
environment to meet those needs. For
example, when the emergency management office was relocating, it built in the
capacity to serve as a special medical needs shelter and the entrance and
bathrooms of the building were made accessible.
emergency manager also has built upon small community scale of knowing one
another and responding. For example, volunteers have been recruited from the
county road and bridge staff to go to the homes of persons in the rural countryside
who need assistance with evacuation or
to receive warnings.
office also has adequate staffing and financial support
due to the tax revenue generated from the local nuclear power plant. Otherwise, the staff for
an office that size would have been a part-time manager rather than three
full-time staff persons. The nuclear
power plant money pays for the
calendars, inserts, and mailings, The county pays for
the registry, and this information
is shared with 911. One staff person maintains the registry and interagency
exchange of information.
Resources for Guidelines
emergency managers in the NLB study who did not include people with
disabilities in their local emergency management plan said to create such
guidelines, such as the Appendix on Person with Disabilities ( Attachment 3), requires
one or more
Table 2 illustrates the resources
identified by the emergency managers as needed to develop guidelines to assist
persons with disabilities. A majority
required additional funding while other resources included trained personnel, a
mandate, and additional public education efforts.
Resources Needed to Develop
Guidelines in Local Emergency
Management Plans on the
Needs of Persons with Disabilities and
the Percentage of these Managers
Needing Specific Resources
____________________________ ______ ________________
Resources Needed to Percentage of Managers Needing
Guidelines Resource to Develop Guidelines__
and Trained Personnel
FEMA, State, or County Mandate 25%
Public Education Efforts 17% ____________________________ _____
More attention is required in local emergency
management systems to effectively address the needs of persons with mobility
impairments and other disabilities. An emerging best practice is to create an
extensive approach to addressing the needs of persons with disabilities by developing
an Appendix on Persons with Disabilities in the local emergency management plan
(see Attachment 3 for Appendix
example). Another emerging best practice is a workable
database design for mapping local
and state consumer medical and non-medical assistance needs for the planning of special medical needs shelters. (See
Attachment 5 for this model.) Other
factors that contributed to best
practices included proactive management, effective consumer education, and
adequate resources. Each of the exemplary and best practices scenarios can be
used as models and, with minor
adjustments, fit many local systems. Their scopes can also be expanded to
address other gaps in services or
policies. Regardless of which direction an emergency management offices takes,
it is important to encourage the
inclusion of persons with disabilities. A majority of the emergency managers without guidelines
stated they required additional funding, trained personnel, a mandate, and
additional public education efforts.
changes are also needed to get emergency management and response
personnel educated in
disability sensitivity and specific disability related needs that encompass the
broad spectrum of disabilities (sensory,
physical and emotional/ cognitive). Prevention saves lives, so additional
emphasis and resources need to go towards distribution of existing disability
related preparedness information to
the disability community as well as the creation of new materials.
infrastructure of local emergency management offices needs to be strengthened.
This may include the resources for
emergency managers to receive and offer training dealing with persons with
disabilities and their emergency management needs, create surveillance
resources for identification of
persons with disabilities, offer outreach materials for
preparedness for persons with
disabilities, and seek their input into the emergency management process.
Previous NLB research findings indicated there is limited attention by
emergency managers on taking courses regarding persons with disabilities. This
may be in part due to past policy decisions, particularly within FEMA, to focus
the original required training and
operational structure of emergency planning and response on the needs of the
general population. Thus, learning about and planning for
the needs of the so called “special needs populations,” which includes persons
with disabilities, becomes optional. Given this mind set, it is evident from
the interviews of the emergency managers that the managers are interested and
committed to providing quality services to all constituents in their service
areas. It is recommended that persons with disabilities be taken out of the
category of special needs populations. By doing this, persons with disabilities
would automatically be included in the overall training components for emergency management. However, additional
continuing training options should be encouraged and promoted by policy makers as
no one course to date is a true model training program.
resource on the topic of appropriate terminology in the field is from a white
paper commission by the NLB project: Disaster Services and “Special Needs”: Term
of Art or Meaningless Term?”
by June I. Kailes. This paper can be found on www.noodyleftbehind2.org under
the purposes of developing a full scale resource guide, the size of the NLB
sample was too small to obtain more
than a few examples of exemplary and emerging best practices. Another approach designed specifically to
collect and systematically review possible best practices is recommended. In addition, very few local emergency
management plans were submitted to the researchers for
review since the documents were frequently revised, security reasons, and
because of the hassle of reproducing the document. Thus, the researchers had to rely on the self
identification from the managers about having guidelines to meet persons with
mobility impairments. It became evident during
the interviews that some type of checklist on possible policies and practices
constituting assisting persons with mobility impairments would be helpful.
Without this list, emergency managers had to decide on their own what
constitutes addressing needs. So, what one manager thought was not a specific
policy or practice another might
have thought it was such as special medical needs shelters.
media coverage of the plight of the disabled, elderly, and poor from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans is making
policy makers’ examine the system that failed. Attention is now being given to
the assistance required of special needs populations which currently encompasses
disabilities. The time is right to
re-examine the mind set of the past and to address shortcoming
in the field as a whole.
Who best can direct the changes other then
emergency managers with exemplary practices.
Taking research and placing it into practice is the next challenge to
advance practices in the field. As the
saying goes “An ounce of prevention is worth
a pound of cure.” Each of the emerging
best practices presented in this white paper are a separate ounce of
prevention. They can be modified to meet specific local needs and be
implemented with support from policy
makers in emergency management and disabilities community.
This report was created by the Research and Training Center
on Independent Living and does not necessarily reflect the views of the funder or the University
of Kansas. Any use of the
contents of this report should be
followed by this citation: The Research
and Training Center on Independent Living, The University of Kansas (2007,
March), Nobody Left Behind: Briefing
Paper: Objective Three, Part 2 Focus Area: Report
on Exemplary and Best Practices in Disaster Preparedness and Response for People with Disabilities. Lawrence, KS:
Nobody Left Behind staff. For more
information, refer to www.nobodyleftbehind2.org
and Best Practices
Planning in Local Emergency
Appendix on Persons with
I. The following considerations must be addressed in order to integrate matters relating to persons with
disabilities into all planning and procedural activities.
Active participation by persons with disabilities
in the identification process is required in order
to provide effective assistance.
Persons with disabilities must take responsibility
for registering with emergency
response agencies, making their needs known, and preparing themselves for potential emergencies to the maximum extent
possible within their means.
B. Systems to provide alert or
warning include, but are not limited to:
2.Commercial radio Emergency Alert System
3.Media Alert through Department of Public
4.Telecommunication devices for hearing/speech impaired persons (TT).
5.Standard warning systems such as sirens,
klaxons, and public address loudspeaker systems.
6.House-to-house notification by law enforcement, fire, or
other emergency response personnel.
8.Basic emergency sign language for persons who are deaf or
C. Training and exercises involving
evacuation of persons with disabilities should emphasize:
How to address and relate to persons with
How to guide persons with visual impairments.
Emergency sign language and finger spelling.
How to handle mentally impaired individuals in an
The use of specialized mobility equipment.
Moving individuals who use a breathing apparatus or other life-sustaining equipment.
How to move/transfer the bedridden and frail elderly.
8. Safe handling procedures for individuals who use a wheelchair or other
9. The importance of taking medications and other items along
with the evacuee.
10. Characteristics of an emergency call from
persons with disabilities.
11. How to rescue persons with disabilities from
para-transit vans and buses.
D. Reception and care centers for use by persons with disabilities must be
identified as such.
The unique requirements of
such facilities include:
Accessible rest rooms with 60" x 60" or larger stalls.
Emergency electric generator
and other equipment.
6. Facilities for
accommodating service animals for
persons with disabilities.
E. Specific Tasks
County Department of Emergency Management
a. Assist agencies without emergency plans to
develop such plans.
b. Conduct or
participate in seminars or workshops for
staffs of agencies that serve persons with disabilities to provide information relating to emergency response alerts,
warnings, sheltering, evacuation procedures, and other related matters.
c. Install a TT device for speech/hearing impaired persons in the EOC
and train the staff in its use.
Participate in emergency preparedness planning, as
required, for agencies representing or providing services to persons with disabilities.
Assist in the notification, warning, and evacuation
of persons with disabilities.
Communicate with hearing impaired individuals at
the Sheriff's communications center.
American Red Cross Chapter
Identify and designate reception and care
facilities capable of accommodating persons with disabilities.
Provide emergency vehicles and drivers to transport disabled evacuees to reception and care centers.
Persons with Disabilities
Be aware of individual warning, evacuation, and
Register with the local emergency services organization if special warning procedures,
evacuation assistance, and/or
special shelter facilities are needed (See Appendix 2 of this report).
Maintain stocks of supplies, equipment, and
medications which may be required for
a minimum of three days in a shelter.
d. Be aware of county warning procedures, evacuation
plans, and shelter.
Self-Registry Form that
Corresponds with Attachment
of this form is voluntary.
requested on this form is needed to
assist emergency response agencies and their personnel in the event of an
emergency to locate, warn and, if necessary, evacuate persons with
will be held in strict confidence and will be disclosed only to authorized members of the (name of the city or town goes here) emergency response organization as described in the (name of the
city or town goes here)
Emergency Operations Plan.
When the form
is completed, mail it to the (name of the city or
town goes here) or phone (name
of the city or town phone number
goes here) and a member of the (city or
town) emergency response organization
will pick it up at your residence.
Date of Birth
Flashing Light or
Other Visual Method
who can provide assistance:______________________________
Type of Disability
and Best Practices
Planning Tool uses Surveillance
Preparedness Planning for
the Special Needs
This planning and
educational tool is provided by Patti Moss, Lamar University,
Department of Nursing and retired Sgt. Robert Smith,
police department and emergency management. It can be found at www.disaster-research.us
and the website contains:
(also available on CD).
3. Survey questionnaires.
a. Non-medical for
b. Special needs evacuation form
to gather planning information.
4. Consumer education packet.
PowerPoint on background and use of the tool. | <urn:uuid:9354a5e0-b365-42da-8b49-0e913d6281bf> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www2.ku.edu/~rrtcpbs/findings/finalreport_best_0307.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783391766.5/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154951-00190-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.919591 | 5,121 | 2.625 | 3 |
Science & Mathematics
The Museum's collections hold thousands of objects related to chemistry, biology, physics, astronomy, and other sciences. Instruments range from early American telescopes to lasers. Rare glassware and other artifacts from the laboratory of Joseph Priestley, the discoverer of oxygen, are among the scientific treasures here. A Gilbert chemistry set of about 1937 and other objects testify to the pleasures of amateur science. Artifacts also help illuminate the social and political history of biology and the roles of women and minorities in science.
The mathematics collection holds artifacts from slide rules and flash cards to code-breaking equipment. More than 1,000 models demonstrate some of the problems and principles of mathematics, and 80 abstract paintings by illustrator and cartoonist Crockett Johnson show his visual interpretations of mathematical theorems.
"Science & Mathematics - Overview" showing 1 items.
- This 72-page salmon-colored paperback book was received with 1981.0933.03 and 1981.0933.05. Its citation information is: William Cox, The Mannheim (Polyphase) and the Duplex (Polyphase-Duplex) Slide Rules Complete Manual (New York: Keuffel & Esser Co., 1920). It sold for 50 cents. William Cox helped introduce the Mannheim slide rule to the United States, invented the duplex slide rule, and served as a mathematical consultant to Keuffel & Esser Company of New York, thus launching that firm into pioneering the American manufacture of slide rules. He first wrote this manual in 1891 and revised it in 1917, adding instructions for K&E's Polyphase Duplex slide rule (model 4088-3).
- A notice inside the front cover explained how K&E had updated the Mannheim line (models 4031–4056) since Cox first wrote the manual. Cox thoroughly described the characteristics, operations, and scales of Mannheim and Polyphase (which was especially useful for problems involving powers or roots) slide rules. He provided a lengthy table of equivalents for the base scales, C and D, as well as methods for working out mechanical and other formulas. He then went through a similar discussion for the eight-inch Duplex rule (model 4065) and for the ten-inch Polyphase-Duplex rule (model 4088). A supplement by J. M. Willard of the State College of Pennsylvania addressed the solution of problems in plane trigonometry. Finally, there are advertisements for K&E's general and specialty slide rules, the frameless indicator patented in 1915, a magnifier, and surveying equipment.
- References: William Cox, "Engineer's Slide-Rule" (U.S. Patent 460,930 issued October 6, 1891); Florian Cajori, A History of the Logarithmic Slide Rule and Allied Instruments (New York: Engineering News Publishing Company, 1909); Dieter von Jezierski, Slide Rules: A Journey Through Three Centuries, trans. Rodger Shepherd (Mendham, N.J.: Astragal Press, 2000), 14, 35; Clark McCoy, ed., "K&E Slide Rule Manuals," http://www.mccoys-kecatalogs.com/KEManuals/manuals.htm.
- Currently not on view
- date made
- Cox, William
- ID Number
- accession number
- catalog number
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center | <urn:uuid:26a0459e-da7b-49e2-8899-9f9e7fd55786> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/subjects/science-mathematics?edan_start=0&edan_fq=name%3A%22Cox%2C+William%22&edan_fq=object_type%3A%22Books%22 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783392069.78/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154952-00071-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.872624 | 720 | 3.53125 | 4 |
Topic: Plasma polymerization to demold carbon-fiber composites without using release agents.
High-tech for bicycle racing, environmentally responsible production: carbon-fibre composites removed from moulds without use of release agents
Use of carbon-fibre composites makes high-performance bicycles extremely light and strong. To reduce wind resistance, shapes must be designed to be absolutely aerodynamic. Bicycle frames are manufactured in a multi-layering process and then thermally cured in an autoclave.
Release agents are required to then remove these complex individual parts from the moulds. Residues of these release agents remain on the surface after demoulding and then must be removed in an elaborate process.
Environmentally responsible demolding in modern bicycle production
Openair® Plasma combined with PlasmaPlus® is used to replace these release agents with a plasma polymer nano-coating that securely adheres to the mould. This means that no unwanted release agent remains on the surface when parts are removed from the mould.
a subsequent step, the finished frames are completely scanned using a
robot system and optimally
prepared with RD1004 rotating plasma jets for the painting that
follows. This also means that environmentally responsible,
water-based paint systems can be used without any difficulty.
back to main topic Two-wheelers/Motorcycles | <urn:uuid:e92a191a-e397-483e-82ef-7a44e6ebb1a5> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.plasmatreat.co.uk/industrial-applications/transportation/two-wheelers-motorcycles/plasma-polymerization-to-demold-carbon-fiber-composites.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396875.58/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00106-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.914548 | 278 | 2.671875 | 3 |
second day of the month of October presents yet another occasion to a grateful
Nation to recall the teachings of the Father of the Nation, Mahatma Gandhi. The
advent of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi on the Indian
political horizon posed enough reasons to excite as well as attract hundreds of
Indians towards him and – more towards his ideology, which later came to be
called the Gandhian Philosophy. It is indeed amazing that the personality of Gandhiji gripped the imagination of millions of his
countrymen and in later stage an overwhelming number the world over.
was to his unique credit that in a world marred by violence and man-made
hatred, Mahatma Gandhi stands firm as a man of universal goodwill and a
protagonist of peace. What is more striking is that Gandhiji
emerged during his life time as a torchbearer of peace, even today he continues
to surprise mankind with his non-violent methods of resolving conflicts. To
many, it is not merely a strange phenomenon that a Nation subjected to colonial
rule put up a strong resistance against the British hegemony with non-violence
as a principal tool under a frail looking leader like Gandhiji.
What is stranger still is the magic spell of success his methodology continues
there be any denying the fact that ‘non-violence’ and the message of peace is
still a familiar catchword among the world leaders to settle any international
or bilateral dispute? It goes without saying that it is never possible to
evaluate how much India
and the world owes to Mahatma Gandhi, the holy mascot of peace.
peace – however with a difference! This is what the protagonist was himself to
say: “I am a man of peace. But I do not want peace at any price. I do not want
the peace that you find in grave”. This is precisely an element that gives a
suitable clause about Gandhi as a ‘man of peace’. This is only to underline
that despite being a crusader of peace, Mahatma Gandhi was not just cut out to
be someone who would or could accept anything or everything in the name of a
Gandhiji’s definition of peace was not without struggle. In fact, he had led brilliantly in fight
against apartheid in white-ruled South Africa. Consequently on his
return back home in 1915, Gandhiji took on the mantle
as a social reformer with campaign against untouchability
and other social vices. Later he extended this yardstick to political sphere
and in the long run took his message of love, peace and mutual adjustment to
the cause of Hindu-Muslim harmony.
‘Ram dhun’, the popular devotion number, ‘Ishwar Allah tera naam’ is still the nation’s best hymn for Hindu-Muslim
peace. This brings us into debate what was then ‘peace’ to Gandhiji.
Well, one can say that the highly upheld ‘Peace’ was not an end by itself to
him. Rather it was only a sort of a means to ensure better welfare for the
Gandhi in real sense was a harbinger of truth. In fact, he even had said that
‘Truthfulness is more important than peacefulness’. In this context, the
following words of the Mahatma, as quoted from ‘Young India’ newspaper are
quite relevant. Mahatma Gandhi wrote, “Though we sing – all glory to God on
high and on the earth be peace — there seems to be
today neither glory to God nor Peace on earth”. Mahatma Gandhi wrote these words in December
1931. He died 17 years later in January 1948 to an assassin’s bullets. It
indeed was tragic that a saint of universal peace and non-violence fell a victim to violence and hatred. But even today in the
circa 2010, Mahatma Gandhi’s words of 1931 holds true.
world is today faced with plethora of conflicts – of all types. Therefore, we
see Gandhi’s emphasis on universal brotherhood and peaceful co-existence has
all time relevance. His teachings are therefore the most upheld principles of
patriotism as also on ways and means to end various global conflicts. In fact, a true testimony of Gandhij’s teaching lies in the fact that mere “good ends”
do not justify ‘bad’ means. The world over therefore, today the emphasis is on
human dignity and upholding the values of natural justice.
is obvious that in today’s world, nothing seems to be permanent except the
‘crisis of peace’ – and nothing would be a better tribute to this man than to
re-dedicate ourselves towards the cause of ‘peace’ and mutual tolerance. Here
lies the relevance of Gandhism. (PIB Features)
Representative with ‘The Statesman’ in New
Disclaimer : The views expressed by the author in this feature are entirely
his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of PIB. | <urn:uuid:0f77dc50-7e06-48e1-9d9e-c5bc7850d97c> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.pib.nic.in/newsite/efeatures.aspx?relid=66068 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783403502.46/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155003-00003-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95187 | 1,086 | 2.75 | 3 |
The Challenge - Biomass Cooking Exacerbates Global Warming
Economic conditions force billions of people to burn biomass such as wood, charcoal, and dung to cook their food. These fires emit black carbon (a major component of soot), ozone- producing gases, methane and numerous other gases and particles that pollute indoor air. The soot from indoor smoke ultimately escapes to the outdoors and combines with other outdoor air pollution (fossil fuel combustion) to form atmospheric brown clouds (ABCs). ABCs contain sulfates, nitrates, soot and fly ash among many other pollutants. Soot and other particles in ABCs lead to a large reduction of sunlight at the ground and in addition lead to large atmospheric solar heating. The atmospheric solar heating by soot, next to carbon dioxide (CO2), is the major contributor to global warming.
Biomass burning is also an important source of carbon monoxide (CO) and methane (CH4), two precursors for tropospheric, or ground-level ozone (O3). Ground-level ozone (unlike the "good ozone" in the upper atmosphere that shields us from the sun's rays) is a regional air pollutant than not only affects health but also significantly reduces. The interaction of the biofuel emissions with (NOx) and other emissions from India's power plants and growing transport fleet is leading to an increasing ozone burden in the region.
Ozone's damaging effects on respiratory and cardiovascular health are well-established. It also exacerbates the symptoms of asthma. The pollutant is the trigger for Los Angeles' infamous "smog alerts." Ozone also has a significant effect on crop yields, especially for staple crops that India relies on. It is a powerful antioxidant, affecting plant cells as well as interfering with photosynthesis.
Conservative estimates for the yield loss for wheat, for example, are 7-12%, 6-16% for soybean, 3-4% for rice, and 3-5% for maize (Dingenen et al, 2009). The portion of yield lost to ozone will increase over the coming decades unless mitigation measures are taken. Globally, the damages to crop yields were estimated at a staggering $14-26 billion for the year 2000.
Moreover, since wood is one of the primary fuels used in burning of these fires, biomass cooking also leads to deforestation. Since trees store carbon, such deforestation in turn leads to greater atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2).
Surya targets cooking with solid biomass fuels in rural India to reduce black carbon and ozone-precursor emissions, and can begin doing so almost immediately upon its launch.
Next: Water / Food Security | <urn:uuid:09e7652b-b617-46b2-ab14-339eacb790e6> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.projectsurya.org/global-warming/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783395613.65/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154955-00010-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.927639 | 548 | 3.578125 | 4 |
CHAPEL HILL, N.C. - "However, easing the rules could cripple the impact of the law upon reducing children's exposure to tobacco advertising," said Kurt Ribisl, PhD, associate professor of health behavior and health education at UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health and one of the authors of the paper. "Children and adolescents are very susceptible to cigarette ads."
A 2008 National Cancer Institute report, "The Role of the Media in Promoting and Reducing Tobacco Use," concluded that tobacco advertising implies tobacco use is safe, healthful and a widely practiced behavior, and it falsely associates tobacco use with youth, energy and sex appeal.
"These themes and images resonate with youth," said Ribisl, who is also a member of the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center. "Limiting youth exposure to outdoor tobacco ads is critical to protecting their health. The regulations should not be weakened because the tobacco companies are fighting to place cigarette ads closer to schools."
Tobacco industry representatives argue that retailers who sell cigarettes would be hurt by a cigarette-ad-free buffer zone around schools.
"It is critical to point out one subtle but important difference between the analysis that the tobacco industry conducted and the analysis presented here," commented lead investigator Douglas A. Luke, PhD, professor at the Center for Tobacco Policy Research at Washington University in St. Louis.
"Their analyses focused on the percentage of land area off-limits to tobacco advertising. In this study, the number and proportion of retailers affected were calculated, not the land percentage. The number of retailers affected, not the land area, is the more appropriate metric to use when making policy decisions," Luke said.
"First, the 'real-world' regulatory impact is felt by people and businesses, not by land. Second, tobacco retailers are clustered in commercial zones, and showing that a high percentage of all land is unavailable for advertising under outdoor advertising bans overstates the impact of the policy. A key question is not what percentage of land is off-limits under an advertising ban, but rather, what is the additional or incremental impact of an advertising ban, given existing zoning regulations."
Using geographical information system (GIS) spatial analysis for the states of Missouri and New York, along with more detailed analyses of the urban areas of St. Louis and New York City, investigators located all tobacco retailers falling within 350-, 500- and 1000-foot buffer zones around all schools and parks. They determined that 22 percent of retailers in Missouri and 51 percent in New York fall within 1,000-foot buffers around schools. In urban settings, more retailers are affected - 29 percent in St. Louis and 79 percent in New York City. Sensitivity analyses demonstrate that smaller buffers decrease the proportion of affected retailers. For instance, 350-foot buffers affect only 6.7 percent of retailers in St. Louis and 29 percent in New York City.
Therefore, in Missouri and New York, outdoor tobacco advertising would still be permitted in many locations even if such advertising was prohibited in a 1,000-foot buffer zone around schools and parks. Much smaller buffer zones of 350 feet may result in almost no reduction of outdoor advertising in many parts of the country. The FDA is still deciding the distance from schools at which they will ban outdoor tobacco advertising. Given the lack of impact of a 350-foot ban, the authors urge the FDA to reject that as an option and implement a distance that is more effective at reducing outdoor advertising where children routinely will be exposed to it. If the 1,000-foot buffer zone were implemented, the authors estimate that up to 1.5 million pieces of outdoor tobacco advertising would be removed across the country.
Buffer zones where no outdoor advertisements are allowed have been proposed by the FDA and public comment has been solicited. The tobacco industry contends that a 1000-foot buffer zone in urban areas would be equivalent to a total ban and therefore unconstitutional on First Amendment grounds.
"Tobacco advertising reaches children and adolescents in a variety of ways," the study concludes. "Given the effectiveness of tobacco advertising, efforts to restrict the exposure of young people to tobacco advertising is an important health policy goal. The current health policy analyses suggest that weakening of outdoor advertising policies may result in phantom policies that do little to reduce youth exposure to tobacco product advertising."
The article, "Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act: Banning Outdoor Tobacco Advertising Near Schools and Playgrounds," by Luke, Ribisl, Carson Smith, BA; and Amy A Sorg, MPH, appears in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, Volume 40, Issue 3 (March 2011).
For more information, visit www.ajpm-online.net/content/video_pubcasts_collection .
UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health contact:
Ramona DuBose , Director of Communications, 919-966-7467 | <urn:uuid:1efb41c8-0bc1-42d2-a2a4-4ff8c700fcf3> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://unclineberger.org/news/2011-news/fda-restrictions-on-outdoor-cigarette-ads-near-schools-may-hurt-business-less-than-industry-says | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783408840.13/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155008-00124-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945379 | 989 | 2.828125 | 3 |
At present, Pakistan has two nuclear power plants – Chashma 1 and 2 – each with a capacity of 320MW and built with Chinese assistance. Work on Chashma 3 and 4 power plants is also under way.
The government is also in contact with China to purchase two nuclear power plants with a combined capacity of 2,000MW, which will be utilised for setting up Karachi Nuclear Power Plant-2 (Kanupp-2) and Kanupp-3 to tackle the energy crisis.
In an attempt to increase power generation, Pakistan is turning attention to producing nuclear energy on a relatively bigger scale. According to the Energy Security Action Plan, the share of nuclear power will be increased in electricity production by installing 8,800MW nuclear power plants by 2030.
If you liked this article, please give it a quick review on ycombinator or StumbleUpon. Thanks | <urn:uuid:44923f52-7334-4f2b-b632-1e58a9fcb425> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://nextbigfuture.com/2013/06/pakistan-moving-to-start-construction.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397636.15/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00123-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.926045 | 180 | 2.625 | 3 |
Moving a bad-tempered animal that weighs up to 1400 kg is no easy feat. Moving 19 of them 1500 kilometres is pretty damn remarkable. Managing the black rhino populations in Africa has become a serious concern for conservationists, as poaching has seriously affected their numbers in and around Southern Africa. The WWF Black Rhino Range Expansion Project aims to help with conserving these endangered animals, but this most recent part of the project was incredibly difficult, especially because of the long distances involved.
Think of the rhino as the Mr. T of the animal kingdom – if you’re going to move it anywhere, it needs to be sedated, and heavily. Tranquillizing rhinos normally means that there’s a possibility they’ll fall asleep in a remote or inaccessible area, but if they’re being airlifted over short distances to waiting vehicles, that’s no longer a problem. This minimises the amount of time that the animal has to be kept sedated, and avoids the need for travel over rough tracks. Happy rhinos!
Africa has some of the most spectacular game parks in the world, and the more that we do to help these animals, the more we’ll be able to enjoy them. So hug a rhino today. (Just make sure it’s sedated first!) | <urn:uuid:241e9933-df78-4dc8-99f8-4628c3e343b1> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.onthegotours.com/blog/2011/11/video-of-the-week-flying-rhinos/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783393997.50/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154953-00101-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941141 | 275 | 2.765625 | 3 |
By Patrick J. Buchanan
Sunday was the first anniversary of the 9.0 earthquake off the east coast of Japan that produced the 45-foot-high tidal wave that hit Fukushima Prefecture.
Twenty thousand perished. Hundreds of thousands were driven from their homes when a nuclear plant swept by the tsunami exploded, spewing radiation for miles.
Only two of Japan’s 54 nuclear plants are now operating. The rest have shut down for inspections. Many may never start up again.
In loss of life, that earthquake-tsunami was seven times as lethal as 9/11. But recovery from that greatest disaster in decades is not the gravest problem facing Japan.
The gravest problem facing the Land of the Rising Sun is that it is dying. The sun that set on the Japanese Empire in 1945 has begun to set on the Japanese nation.
A week before the anniversary of 3/11, buried in a story about Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda’s effort to rally support for a doubling of the 5 percent consumption tax, to preserve Japan’s social security system, was this startling statement:
“We’re faced with an aging society and a declining birth rate unprecedented in the history of mankind.”
What makes this admission remarkable is that the Japanese are not given to hyperbole, and the prime minister’s statement is rooted in numbers that may fairly be called a demography of death.
Deep inside the story on the Noda tax proposal was this item: “By 2055, according to government data, 40 percent of the country’s population will be 65 or older. Just 8 percent will be younger than 15.”
If accurate, these numbers reveal a deepening of the crisis of demography facing Japan since the population projections of the United Nations came out in 2008.
According to those U.N. figures, where Japan’s population would reach 127 million in 2010, the number of Japanese will shrink to just above 101 million by 2050. Every year between now and 2050, the number of deaths over births in Japan will average two-thirds of a million, with the population shrinkage accelerating each decade.
The median age of a Japanese, 22 years old in 1950, reached 45 in 2010 and will exceed 55 by midcentury. The oldest people on the planet are getting older.
What kind of future can there be for a nation, even one with the high quality human capital of Japan, when there are two Japanese 65 years old or older for every Japanese 24 years of age or younger?
When Japan became the world’s No. 2 economy in 1960, seizing the crown from Germany to hold for 40 years, Japanese 24 years old and younger outnumbered the population 65 or older eight to one.
Japan’s fertility rate, the number of births per woman, has been below zero population growth for 40 years and has plunged to where Japanese woman are having only two-thirds of the children needed to replace the present population.
Not only has the birth rate per woman fallen, the percentage of Japanese women aged 15-49 — 56 percent in the 1960s — is expected to plunge to 31 by midcentury.
Every new Japanese generation is one-third to one-half smaller than the one that came before. Japan’s high school graduation class has fallen by more than one-third in just 30 years.
Nippon seems to be collectively committing national hara-kiri.
How did this come about? The means are not in dispute.
When millions of Japanese soldiers returned from their dead empire to start families, there was a population explosion. Under the U.S. occupation, Tokyo swiftly legalized abortion, and the nation embraced birth control. Japan did so before Europe, but Europe followed. Now all face demographic death, with Japan leading the way.
This has already begun to affect her national economy.
Japan’s growth rate in the 1960s was 10 percent a year. In the 1970s, it was 5 percent a year. In the 1980s, it was 4 percent — still a healthy growth rate for a mature economy.
But in the 1990s, the “lost decade,” Japan’s growth fell to 1.8 percent a year, and that anemic rate has continued into this century.
Japan’s expenditures during the lost decade to reignite the fire sent the national debt soaring above 200 percent of gross domestic product, eclipsing the debt-to-GDP ratios of Greece and Italy today.
In 2011, for the first time in 30 years, Japan ran a trade deficit. January’s figure, $19 billion for the month, was a record.
The abandonment of nuclear power has forced Japan to substitute imported coal and liquified natural gas to produce her energy.
During the decade of “Japan, Inc.,” in 1988, Nippon boasted of being home to eight of the world’s top 20 corporations in terms of capital investment. Now she is home to none, and only six of the top 100.
Yet when Prime Minister Noda said what was happening in Japan was “unprecedented in the history of mankind,” he was mistaken.
This also happened to the greatest empire of them all long ago. | <urn:uuid:f195b7e1-a4e0-4dac-b99c-cd0c262f2153> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://buchanan.org/blog/land-of-the-setting-sun-5038 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783391634.7/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154951-00187-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959837 | 1,091 | 2.859375 | 3 |
Regular Languages and Finite Automata
Principal lecturer: Prof Andrew Pitts
Taken by: Part IA CST
- Lecture notes and slides [pdf].
- Past exam questions: recent ones (1993-2009) are
older ones (1988-92) are available here,
courtesy of David Allsopp (dra27 at cantab.net).
- Feedback: Please proved feedback through the
course feedback form.
- Further resources:
- Alley Stoughton's
Forlan tools for
experimenting with formal languages within Standard ML.
- Russ Cox's article
Matching Can Be Simple And Fast (but is slow in Java, Perl, PHP,
Python, Ruby, ...). (Summary: "Regular expression matching can be
simple and fast, using finite automata-based techniques that have been
known for decades. In contrast, Perl, PCRE, Python, Ruby, Java, and
many other languages have regular expression implementations based on
recursive backtracking that are simple but can be excruciatingly
slow. With the exception of backreferences, the features provided by
the slow backtracking implementations can be provided by the
automata-based implementations at dramatically faster, more consistent | <urn:uuid:b1046cd6-cd55-48c9-9d14-2fca011563bd> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/0910/RLFA/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783393518.22/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154953-00094-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.758206 | 257 | 2.59375 | 3 |
Forth Rail Bridge facts
constructed ... 1882 - 1890
overall length ... 2,465m
maximum span ... 521m
height of towers ... 104m
height above river (high tide) ... 46m
steel in superstructure ... 50,000 tons
number of rivets ... 6,500,000
maximum workforce ... 4,600
cost ... £2.5m
The Forth Rail Bridge
by Mark Whitby with Scott Lomax
reproduced with permission from The Seventy Architectural Wonders of Our World
ed. Neil Parkyn, Thames & Hudson, London 2002
Great monument of the 19th century
The Firth of Forth bridge is one of the great monuments of 19th century British engineering. Before the bridge was proposed, however, the problems of developing a reliable and secure method of crossing the Forth had exercised the minds of some of the greatest names in engineering.
A re-design of the ferry system and proposals for tunnels were produced by John Smeaton
(1772), Hugh Baird (1807), John Rennie (1809), Robert Stevenson (1817) and Thomas Telford
(1828), among others.
By the early 1800s, bridge design was considered the solution by forward-thinking minds. Various schemes were considered and rejected before Parliament intervened in 1865 and authorized the North British Railway and its engineer Thomas Bouch to construct a crossing over the Forth.
Bouch, also the designer of the Tay Bridge, proposed a suspension bridge with twin spans of 488m. Construction began on the scheme in 1878 but was halted following the Tay Bridge disaster of 28 December 1879, in which 75 railway passengers were swept to their deaths when the central span collapsed in a gale.
A year later, Bouch's Forth Bridge design was rejected ..... more > | <urn:uuid:226408db-e7b7-482a-ad3c-2dadeb238d34> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.engineering-timelines.com/why/forthRailBridge/forthRailBridge_01.asp | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396106.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00082-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954068 | 378 | 3.359375 | 3 |
Print Your Own Revolutionary War Boat, In 3-D
Wednesday, November 13, 2013
Have you ever wanted to see a woolly mammoth skeleton? How about Amelia Earhart's flight suit (one worn before her fateful last flight, mind you)?
To see them in person, you can visit the Smithsonian's Natural History and Postal museums, respectively, in Washington, D.C. But now you can take a closer look -- in 3-D -- on the Smithsonian website, too. The institution has made 20 digitized objects from among its vast holdings available online to the public for viewing from every possible angle.
The Smithsonian gets more than 30 million visitors each year to its 19 museums, Gunter Waibel, the Smithsonian's digitization director who is heading up the X 3D project, tells All Things Considered's Robert Siegel. "That sounds like a really big number, but that also leaves out a lot of people."
And with only 1 percent of the institution's 137 million objects actually on display to the public at any given time, even museum visitors barely scratch the surface of the fossils, weapons, artworks, textiles and even historic furniture within the institutions' collections.
Digitizing its holdings -- and making them available to anyone to view from any angle with its 3-D Explorer viewer -- is "our way of ... letting you into the storeroom -- letting you really explore parts of the Smithsonian you really wouldn't otherwise get to see," Waibel says.
Take the Gunboat Philadelphia, on display in the National Museum of American History. A floating gun platform built to keep the British at bay in New York's Lake Champlain during the Revolutionary War, it was sunk by a British cannon in 1776, where it was perfectly preserved on the frigid lake floor.
Even in the museum, there's insufficient space for in-person visitors to walk around the entire boat. "So now, by making the 3-D model available, we can actually look at angles that visitors haven't seen ever since ... the object has been placed in the museum" in the 1950s, Waibel explains.
Examining and flipping the objects in the viewer is engrossing, but they're not just for looking. The Smithsonian has also made the data for each of its 20 currently digitized objects also available for free 3-D printing.
"We really wanted to take people's experience from ... interacting and seeing to an experience where they could actually get creative and really work with the data," Waibel says.
With such a vast collection of items across the Smithsonian collections, the institution doesn't plan on digitizing everything, explains spokeswoman Sarah Taylor Sulick. The scanning process for three-dimensional images is time-consuming and expensive, Sulick says. (Much of the current effort has been supported by in-kind technology and equipment.)
"So what we're trying to do with this program is digitize the kinds of objects that help us tell their stories in new and interesting ways," she says.
And don't go printing a 3-D model of that gunboat to sell on eBay -- the data, Waibel says, are only for educational and noncommercial use.
Copyright 2013 NPR. To see more, visit www.npr.org.
Please stay on topic and be as concise as possible. Leaving a comment means you agree to our Community Discussion Rules. We like civilized discourse. We don't like spam, lying, profanity, harassment or personal attacks. | <urn:uuid:d6fe6573-fbfa-4dc4-b8c4-7ca77723d97a> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.kpbs.org/news/2013/nov/13/print-your-own-revolutionary-war-boat-in-3-d/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396459.32/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00113-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958337 | 715 | 2.796875 | 3 |
Celebrating Black History Month with our research fellows
Students in NSF's Graduate Research Fellowship Program tell their stories
Every February, Black History Month provides the scientific community with an opportunity to commemorate the countless contributions made by generations of African American scientists and engineers -- and to celebrate the work of black researchers making the discoveries today that will help shape the future.
Since 1952, the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) has recognized and supported outstanding early career graduate students. This month, we're sharing their stories. More than 50 fellows provided NSF with photos of their work in the lab and in the field. They provided insight into what they're researching, why they chose a science career and why they're proud of their work.
We'll be talking about these accomplished researchers through social media. Check out NSF's Twitter and Facebook feeds for updates, and see all the fellows' stories collected in a series of posts to the NSF Tumblr site. Links to the Tumblr posts will go live when they're published:
Feb 3 -- Celebrating Black History Month with our graduate fellows | <urn:uuid:935afba6-63f8-46a3-a89f-13f70cb330b2> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.nsf.gov/discoveries/disc_summ.jsp?cntn_id=137630&WT.mc_id=USNSF_51&WT.mc_ev=click | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783395546.12/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154955-00103-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.94455 | 226 | 2.8125 | 3 |
|FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
August 8, 2012
|Contact: Mary MacCaffrie
Public Education Administrator
State Fire Marshal J. William Degnan
N.H. State Fire Marshal's Office
9 Volt Batteries a Fire Hazard
New Hampshire State Fire Marshal's Office encourages you to locate your extra batteries and learn how to store them properly.
In July, a fire broke out in a kitchen "junk" drawer which the resident stated she had just cleaned and organized. The fire produced smoke throughout the first floor of the home. In the drawer were spare keys, a cigarette lighter, paper clips, eye glass cleaner, and some batteries in a baggie along with everything else that you find in a "junk" drawer.
The local fire department determined the cause of the fire to be from a 9 volt battery stored in the same baggie with other batteries. The 9 volt battery rubbed against another battery and ignited the fire. In the homeowner's words, "We were fortunate not have been away for the weekend!"
A 9 volt battery is a fire hazard because the positive and negative posts are on top, right next to one another. If the ends come in contact with anything metal i.e. aluminum foil, steel wool, paper clip, other batteries, etc. this will create the object to heat up and ignite a fire.
To store, keep in original packaging or keep ends covered. For disposal, make sure that the positive and negative posts are safely wrapped in electrical tape.
Remember to check your smoke alarms each month to ensure your family has the early warning to get out safely if a fire should occur in your home. | <urn:uuid:18531cbb-6a3e-4b50-af3e-549323fdb360> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.nh.gov/safety/divisions/firesafety/news/20120808-9-volt-batteries.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397695.90/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00126-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.931303 | 341 | 2.96875 | 3 |
April 4, 2006: Thirty-plus years ago on the moon, Apollo astronauts made an important discovery: Moondust can be a major nuisance. The fine powdery grit was everywhere and had a curious way of getting into things. Moondust plugged bolt holes, fouled tools, coated astronauts' visors and abraded their gloves. Very often while working on the surface, they had to stop what they were doing to clean their cameras and equipment using large--and mostly ineffective--brushes.
Dealing with "the dust problem" is going to be a priority for the next generation of NASA explorers. But how? Professor Larry Taylor, director of the Planetary Geosciences Institute at the University of Tennessee, believes he has an answer: "Magnets."
The idea came to him in the year 2000. Taylor was in his lab studying a moondust sample from the Apollo 17 mission and, curious to see what would happen, he ran a magnet through the dust. To his surprise, "all of the little grains jumped up and stuck to the magnet."
"I didn't appreciate what I had discovered," recalls Taylor, "until I was explaining it to Apollo 17 astronaut Jack Schmitt one day in my office, and he said, 'Gads, just think what we could have done with a brush with a magnet attached!'"
"Only the finest grains (< 20 microns) respond completely to the magnet," notes Taylor, but that's okay because the finest dust was often the most troublesome. Fine grains were more likely to penetrate seals at the joints of spacesuits and around the lids of "pristine" sample containers. And when astronauts tramped into the Lunar Module wearing their dusty boots, the finest grains billowed into the air where they could be inhaled. This gave at least one astronaut (Schmitt) a case of "moondust hay fever."
Taylor has since designed a prototype air filter with permanent magnets inside. "When the filter gets dirty, you pull the magnets out, and the dust falls into a box." A later design with electromagnets works more efficiently: "You pull the plug on the electromagnet, tap it, and the dust rains down into a container." He's now working on a prototype design for a "dust brush" using permanent magnets.
Earth dust is not magnetic, so why should moondust be?
"Moondust is strange stuff," explains Taylor. "Each little grain of moondust is coated with a layer of glass only a few hundred nanometers thick (1/100th the diameter of a human hair)." Taylor and colleagues have examined the coating through a microscope and found "millions of tiny specks of iron suspended in the glass like stars in the sky." Those iron specks are the source of the magnetism.
Right: A microscopic image of the iron-specked glass which coats moondust. Credit: Keller et al, 1999. [More]
Researchers believe the glass is a by-product of bombardment. Tiny micrometeorites hit the surface of the moon, generating temperatures hotter than 2,000°C, literally the surface temperature of red stars. Such extreme heat vaporizes molecules in the melted soil. "The vapors consist of compounds such as FeO and SiO2," says Taylor. If the temperature is high enough, the molecules split into their atomic components: Si, Fe, O and so on. Later, when the vapors cool, the atoms recombine and condense on grains of moondust, depositing a layer of silicon dioxide (SiO2) glass peppered with tiny nuggets of pure iron (Fe).
A thin coating of iron isn't enough to make sand- or gravel-sized particles noticeably magnetic, any more than spraying a thin coating of iron on a heavy basketball would make it stick to a magnet, says Taylor. But a thin coating is plenty for particles smaller than about 20 microns. They have so little mass compared to their surface area, they're easily lifted by Taylor's magnets.
Magnets aren't the only way to deal with moondust. NASA is considering a whole suite of options from airlocks to vacuum cleaners. But, if Taylor is right, magnets will prove important, and astronauts won't find moondust so troublesome the next time around.
The Lunar Dust Problem: A Possible Remedy -- a paper presented to the Space Resources Roundtable II (2000) by Lawrence A. Taylor, Planetary Geosciences Institute, University of Tennessee, TN 37996
Magnetic Properties of Apollo 17 Soil Sample 70051 -- by Yang Liu, James R. Thompson, Lawrence A. Taylor and Jaesung Park1, Lunar and Planetary Science XXXVII (2006)
Right: Moondust gets its glassy coating via a process of impact vaporization and condensation. [More]
The Mysterious Smell of Moondust -- (Science@NASA)
Lunar Lawn Mower -- (Science@NASA)
Don't Breath the Moondust -- (Science@NASA)
Mining the Moon, Mars, and Asteroids -- this article includes a discussion of moondust magnetism. | <urn:uuid:d045902d-adde-4978-98af-699c479bc5dd> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://science1.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2006/04apr_magneticmoondust/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783395546.12/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154955-00037-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.935914 | 1,066 | 3.59375 | 4 |
Flu Season Is Here Residents are Encouraged to Get Vaccinated
(1/10/2013) The 2012-2013 flu season is off to an early start. In the last 2-4 weeks there has been an early and comparatively higher peak in the number of cases in Connecticut when compared to previous years. This is not indicative that an elevated number will remain—or further increase—throughout the season, but it is indeed a cause of concern about a potentially bad season.
A flu surveillance system in CT is based on estimates from the percent of total visits to the emergency department for “fever/flu” syndrome (10.4% statewide). Hospitals in the New Haven area are showing the same percentage of flu cases as the entire state.
According to the CDC, everyone who is at least 6 months of age should get the flu vaccine. It is especially important for certain groups of people to get vaccinated. Those people include the following:
• People who are at high risk of developing serious complications like pneumonia if they get sick with the flu. This includes: people who have certain medical conditions (including asthma, diabetes, and chronic lung disease); pregnant women; and people 65 years and older.
• People who live with or care for others who are at high risk of developing serious complications. This includes household contacts and caregivers of people with certain medical conditions including asthma, diabetes, and chronic lung disease.
There are some people who should not get a flu vaccine without first consulting a doctor. These include:
•People who have a severe allergy to chicken eggs.
•People who have had a severe reaction to an influenza vaccination.
•Children younger than 6 months of age (influenza vaccine is not approved for this age group).
•People who have a moderate-to-severe illness with a fever (wait until they recover to get vaccinated).
•People with a history of Guillain–Barré Syndrome that occurred after receiving influenza vaccine and who are not at risk for severe illness from influenza should generally not receive vaccine. Tell your doctor if you ever had Guillain-Barré Syndrome. Your doctor will help you decide whether the vaccine is recommended for you.
In Connecticut, all pre-K students must have received the flu vaccine by the beginning of the year or be excluded from school. Additionally, all children ages 6-59 months attending a child day care center, group day care home or family day care home are required to receive the flu vaccine.
Flu vaccine is available from providers in the area including most of the pharmacies. Residents are encouraged to contact their doctor to get more information and receive the flu vaccine.
Contact Name: Anna Mariotti
Contact Email: email@example.com
Contact Phone: 203-946-7660 | <urn:uuid:31b3f1ec-d89c-414d-bed9-7d052196649c> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.cityofnewhaven.com/Mayor/ReadMore.asp?ID=%7B86E6AD9B-1246-45EB-939E-0E9A05DA4F7E%7D | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783395039.24/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154955-00180-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95534 | 577 | 2.84375 | 3 |
I've been getting lots of emails and tweets about a young man named Jacob Barnett, a 12-year-old who is apparently a math genius. He's been getting a lot of press lately because he's tackling some pretty heavy problems in astrophysics, including relativity.
I want to be clear that from the videos on YouTube and such, he does appear to have an extremely advanced grasp of math and science. I also think he has a lot of promise! However, science is more than just learning the equations. It takes insight that generally comes with time. Happily, Mr. Barnett has that time, and has a big head start with the basics.
Steve Novella tackles that issue very well at Neurologica, and I don't necessarily disagree with anything he wrote there.
But I do want to talk briefly about the way Barnett's story has been told by some media. I first saw it at Time magazine's site, with the headline "12-Year-Old Genius Expands Einstein's Theory of Relativity, Thinks He Can Prove It Wrong".
Barnett may very well be a genius, and may very well rewrite a lot of physics... as, no doubt, future generations of genius scientists will. But one thing they won't do is prove relativity wrong.
Bold statement? Not really. We know relativity is right. It may be incomplete, but it's not wrong.
What I mean by this isn't too hard to understand. In science (ideally, if you'll pardon the pun), an idea becomes a hypothesis, a testable statement. If it passes the test, it can be expanded upon, broadened, tested and retested. Eventually, as it grows and becomes more solid, it becomes a theory -- I know, in the general jargon that word means "guess", but to a scientist a theory is an explanation of phenomena so profoundly certain that a layperson would call it a law.
Relativity is just such a theory. It has passed essentially every single test to which it has been put for the past century. It is literally tested millions of times a day in particle accelerators, for example.
As I wrote in a post on relativity and geocentrism:
Relativity is one of the most well-tested and thoroughly solid ideas in all of science for all time. It is literally tested millions of times a day in particle accelerators. We see it in every cosmological observation, every star that explodes in the sky, every time a nuclear power plant generates even an iota of energy. Heck, without relativity your GPS wouldn’t work.
Relativity is so solid, in fact, that anyone who denies it outright at this point can be charitably called a kook.
So I don't think anyone, young Jacob Barnett or otherwise, will ever prove relativity to be wrong. What they might do, what I think and hope someone eventually will do, is show how it's incomplete.
Put it this way: Isaac Newton formulated his Universal Law of Gravitation, and it revolutionized physics and astronomy, allowing us to apply math to the thorny issue of gravity. Newton's Law is still valid today, four centuries later. However, it's limited to a regime where masses are small and velocities low. If you want to calculate the Moon's effect on Earth, Newton is the way to go. We still use his basic equations to plot the trajectories of our spacecraft, and they ply the solar system's gravitational pathways with incredible precision.
But when you start to approach the speed of light, or deal with masses that are very large, Newton's math breaks down. It doesn't work.
Einstein fixed that. His Theory of Relativity uses far more complex math that can deal with these large velocities and masses, and get you the correct answers. When you look at Einstein's equations for low velocities and small masses, they simplify right down to what Newton wrote. Newton wasn't wrong, he was incomplete.
Einstein added to Newton, made the math more accurate. The thing is, we know relativity is incomplete right now. In the realm of the very, very small, relativity has some issues with quantum mechanics. QM is just as solid as relativity as theories go. Atomic bombs make that clear, as well as digital camera, electronics in general, and on and on. Obviously, one or both of QM and relativity are incomplete.
Again, we know they are not wrong -- not like creationism is wrong, or astrology and Geocentrism are wrong, in that they don't explain anything and all the evidence is against them -- but just that we don't know everything about them yet. There may be some bigger idea, some broader concept that unifies them, and reduces to either one if you use the right conditions, just as relativity reduces to Newton's law in certain circumstances.
I am very much looking forward to seeing what Barnett can do in the next few years. If he can garner the insight and the imagination needed to marry QM and relativity, to unite these two seemingly immiscible fields, then I will happily cheer him on as he accepts his Nobel Prize. But that's a whole different ballgame than proving it wrong. | <urn:uuid:feb31fb4-83eb-4590-af0d-c72eb068b67f> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2011/04/08/a_very_smart_kid_and_a_solid_theory.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783391519.2/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154951-00171-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97171 | 1,080 | 2.609375 | 3 |
A Clean Pair of Hands
Dialogue that bounces between characters like real-life conversation pulls readers into the heart of the action in this allegorical historical novel.
A Clean Pair of Hands is Oscar Reynard’s cautionary novel about how societal ills can have massive consequences on individual lives. The novel is based on the premise of the French people’s individualism and distrust of the government, and the government’s lack of transparency with the people. Chapter titles, including thematic titles and the year(s) of the story, showcase the epic scope of the novel—spanning from the 1950s to 2014, from Paris to Haiti, from family to greed to consequences.
Protagonist Michel Bodin lives a comfortable life with his wife, Charlotte, but his thirst for pleasure and adventure takes him far from home and has disastrous consequences for his family. The themes of distrust and suppressing the truth are mirrored in the Bodins’ marriage and the relationship between the French people and their government. Reynard sets the stage for these parallels in the foreword and uses dialogue from various characters to show how they see the government and Michel’s actions.
While the book’s intent is to be the story of a couple on the backdrop of historical and cultural mores, occasionally, history and culture come to the forefront, overshadowing the personal events. At these times, the book feels more like a fable than a novel, using a specific narrative to make a broad point.
The pace varies, going quickly over minor plot points and slowing at key moments—the date ranges in the chapter titles help readers see the shifting pace at a glance.
The preface begins in a journalistic third-person perspective, recounting events of a robbery at the Bodins’ house in Paris—a critical turning point in their marriage. When the dialogue begins, the story becomes more urgent and engaging. This is consistent with the strengths and weaknesses of the book as a whole: the strongest moments of novelistic narration—which put readers in the heart of the action, seeing things on the human rather than omniscient level—are driven by strong dialogue with realistic wording and cadence that bounces between characters like typical conversation.
The novel’s weakest points are when it takes the view of a journalist or historian, telling great swaths of emotional events in fact-driven sentences. These passages are particularly detrimental to the flow of the book when they occur at the beginning of chapters—a chapter switch breaks the action, and the distant narration slows readers rather than plunging them into the forward motion of the plot.
It’s tough for eyes to choose a focal point on the cover. The image is a familiar painting of the French Revolution, and while the book is set in France and explores the French ideals that emerged from the Revolution, readers expecting the book to be about this period will be disappointed that it takes place in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The title type doesn’t stand out well from the image, and the back panel type is very light.
Along with the other characters who surround the Bodins, readers will wonder about Michel’s motives and choices: “Do you really think he gave up his family completely to disappear into some obscure hiding place, never to emerge?” Reynard’s motives are much more transparent; his aim is to show the consequences of choices forged by distrust and self-gratification. This book will resonate well with cynical Francophiles and those who see clearly the moral ill woven into modern society.
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The author of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have his/her book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Review make no guarantee that the author will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255. | <urn:uuid:7ccdad94-4271-4607-9585-72111efc7efc> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | https://www.forewordreviews.com/reviews/a-clean-pair-of-hands/?page=3 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783392099.27/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154952-00182-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.94837 | 817 | 2.71875 | 3 |
Seal Persecution in Scotland
Under Part 6 of the Marine (Scotland) Act 2010 The Scottish Government issues licences to shoot around 1000 seals a year in Scotland. The figure of circa 1000 is gauged not to have a detrimental effect on the overall seal population. In 2014 licences were issued allowing the killing of 765 Grey Seals and 240 Common Seals. Despite this there is no seal cull in Scotland. In Scotland we don’t cull seals we “manage” them.
The people who are given licences to manage seals are salmon netsmen, salmon farmers and salmon angling organisations. Spot the running theme here? Humans persecute seals for eating salmon, one of their natural food sources. A salmon netter, salmon farmer or salmon river board requesting a license to shoot seals will not be visited by any Government official to see if they are using other methods to deter seals. They will not be monitored at any time when they are shooting seals. No-one will check on the accuracy of the number of seals they report as having shot.
Salmon are just one species of fish eaten by seals. Seals also eat eels, flounders and other fish which in turn would predate on salmon and salmon eggs. Nature has a knack of finding and maintaining a balance. Seals and salmon have co-existed successfully for hundreds of thousands of years.
Why do salmon farmers shoot seals? Wearing my Animal Concern hat I lobbied hard to have farmed fish recognised as sentient creatures under the Animal Health & Welfare (Scotland) Act 2006. Fish are now protected under that Act and fish farmers have a legal duty to protect their stock from the attention of predators. This does not simply mean that farmers must stop predators attacking their fish they must stop predators getting close enough to cause their stock fear, alarm and stress. To do this you need to erect high strength, high tension predator exclusion nets far enough away from the cage nets holding the salmon to make sure seals do not get within sight of the fish.
The problem is that predator exclusion nets are expensive to buy and you have to employ divers to install them and regularly clean, re-tension and fully maintain them. You would think that the Scottish Government would welcome this increase in rural employment and insist that marine salmon farms fit and maintain humane predator exclusion nets. Sadly instead of doing the right thing the Scottish Government opted to do the wrong thing and issued licenses allowing salmon farmers to shoot seals.
This is of course much cheaper than using predator exclusion nets but it has a major flaw – it doesn’t work. To meet their legal obligation to keep predators away from their salmon the farmers would have to have someone on site 24/7 shooting any seal that came near the salmon cage nets. It is impossible to spot and shoot seals in the dead of night, during storms or in fog. The Scottish Government ignore those simple facts in their all too close relationship with the fish farming industry.
Scottish Government Ministers, including our current First Minister and our Minister for the Environment, act as international fishmongers hard-selling Scottish farmed salmon to China and the USA. This is despite the fact that Norwegian companies own 66 % of the floating factory fish farms which pollute our seas with chemicals, fish faeces and plagues of sealice. Our politicians regularly refer to salmon farming as “sustainable” despite the fact that it takes up to four tonnes of wild fish to produce the food pellets needed to feed one tonne of farmed salmon. We are in the ludicrous situation where imports of factory farmed salmon from Norway to Scotland have grown tenfold while Scottish produced salmon is sold to the USA and China.
Salmon netsmen intercept salmon and seatrout as the fish approach their home rivers. They catch and kill thousands of wild salmon every year, stopping them getting back upstream to breed. Some salmon netters are trialling the use of special nets and acoustic scarers to stop seals pinching salmon out of their nets. Again the Government should intervene here. Wild salmon and seatrout are becoming scarce and the best way to help these species would be to close down the netting stations thus allowing many more fish to return to breed. Instead of doing this the Government give salmon netsmen licences to kill hundreds of seals every year.
Some salmon angling organisations also obtain Government licences to shoot seals (and sawbill ducks). You would think that sports fishermen who catch fish for fun would be sporting enough to recognise that seals kill fish for food and should have first choice instead of being persecuted and killed for doing what they do naturally to survive. I reckon most do. They probably also know that seals at river mouths are just as likely to be eating eels and other fish which predate on salmon eggs, ova and parr.
It’s mainly the landowners and owners of the fishing rights who get licenses to kill seals. Every salmon and seatrout caught on “their” stretch of river helps increase the financial value of the fishing rights. If the Government has any sense they will stop issuing seal shooting licences to salmon river boards and bring in a national catch and release law limiting the number of fish anglers can kill.
Another aspect of seal shooting which the Government ignore but are well aware of is the adverse effect this has on tourism. A few years ago the Government brought, at great expense, a Scottish scientist working in Australia to give a short presentation to a seal management conference in Inverness. His Government sponsored advice was along the lines of “shoot the seals when there are few people around and get the bodies off the beach before anyone sees them”. The shooters are not always good at this. In 2012 I was contacted by two sets of holidaymakers who independently had witnessed seal shooting incidents at salmon nets in Gamrie Bay on the Moray Firth. One couple cut their holiday short by four days and went home. Both vowed never to holiday in the area again.
On the West Coast wildlife tour boat operators have monitored dwindling numbers of seals in areas with fish farms. For several days one skipper had to explain to his customers that the injured seal hauled out on the rocks had not been fighting with other seals. It had been shot in the head by a fish farmer and was slowly bleeding to death.
To sum up. There is no seal cull in Scotland. There is no seal hunt in Scotland. Instead salmon farmers, salmon netters and salmon angling authorities “manage” seals by using high powered rifles to shoot and kill them. There’s not even a close season. Heavily pregnant seals have been seen to abort their pups after being shot. Lactating mothers can be shot, leaving their pups to suffer a slow and lingering death from starvation.
In reality what we have in Scotland is a Government sanctioned unmonitored, unregulated and unnecessary slaughter of seals. When you buy Scottish wild or factory farmed salmon, including RSPCA Freedom Food endorsed farmed salmon, you are literally paying for bullets to kill seals.
John F. Robins, Secretary to the Save Our Seals Fund and Animal Concern. April 2014. | <urn:uuid:7f393339-4bc9-47ec-a1b6-f33dc43814db> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.saveoursealsfund.org/article-1.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396875.58/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00058-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965214 | 1,460 | 2.75 | 3 |
If you do not know what the MD5 algorithm is or what it is used for then look up RFC 1321 or visit the "unofficial" MD5 homepage where it is described succinctly as follows:
"The MD5 algorithm takes as input a message of arbitrary length and produces as output a 128-bit "fingerprint" or "message digest" of the input. It is conjectured that it is computationally infeasible to produce two messages having the same message digest, or to produce any message having a given prespecified target message digest. The MD5 algorithm is intended for digital signature applications, where a large file must be "compressed" in a secure manner before being encrypted with a private (secret) key under a public-key cryptosystem such as RSA."
"In essence, MD5 is a way to verify data integrity, and is much more reliable than checksum and many other commonly used methods."
- Initial release | <urn:uuid:5e5d6e9b-725d-4f0e-beb5-21a34b171d8a> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://keir.net/md5file.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783395613.65/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154955-00003-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.903247 | 195 | 3.234375 | 3 |
There are three 7-headed, 10-horned beasts mentioned in the book of Revelation (Rev. 12:3; 13:1; 17:3). Additionally, the 7th chapter of Daniel speaks of four beasts rising up from the ocean. Are these beasts all the same, or are they different? Is it possible for us to identify who or what these beasts represent? In this article, we are going to examine these beasts and attempt to identify them in order to better understand end-time prophecies.
Let's start by looking at the 7-headed, 10-horned dragon spoken of in Revelation 12:
REVELATION 12:3 Then another sign appeared in heaven: an enormous red dragon with seven heads and ten horns and seven crowns on his heads. 4 His tail swept a third of the stars out of the sky and flung them to the earth. The dragon stood in front of the woman who was about to give birth, so that he might devour her child the moment it was born. 5 She gave birth to a son, a male child, who will rule all the nations with an iron scepter. And her child was snatched up to God and to his throne. 6 The woman fled into the desert to a place prepared for her by God, where she might be taken care of for 1,260 days. 7 And there was war in heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the dragon, and the dragon and his angels fought back. 8 But he was not strong enough, and they lost their place in heaven. 9 The great dragon was hurled down that ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray. He was hurled to the earth, and his angels with him. (NIV)
This great red dragon with 7 heads, 10 horns and 7 crowns is plainly identified in this passage as Satan, the devil (v. 9). The reference to "his angels" clearly is speaking of the fallen angels who followed his example of disobedience. Notice that this 7-headed representation of Satan has 7 crowns on its heads. The significance of this will become more evident as we progress in our study.
Now let's look at the beast in Revelation 17 to see if it also symbolizes Satan, or if it represents someone or something else:
REVELATION 17:1 Then one of the seven angels who had the seven bowls came and spoke with me, saying, "Come here, I will show you the judgment of the great harlot who sits on many waters, 2 with whom the kings of the earth committed acts of immorality, and those who dwell on the earth were made drunk with the wine of her immorality." 3 And he carried me away in the Spirit into a wilderness; and I saw a woman sitting on a scarlet beast, full of blasphemous names, having seven heads and ten horns. 4 The woman was clothed in purple and scarlet, and adorned with gold and precious stones and pearls, having in her hand a gold cup full of abominations and of the unclean things of her immorality, 5 and on her forehead a name was written, a mystery, "BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND OF THE ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH." 6 And I saw the woman drunk with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the witnesses of Jesus. When I saw her, I wondered greatly. 7 And the angel said to me, "Why do you wonder? I will tell you the mystery of the woman and of the beast that carries her, which has the seven heads and the ten horns. 8 The beast that you saw was, and is not [ouk estin], and is about to come up out of the Abyss and go to destruction. And those who dwell on the earth, whose name has not been written in the book of life from the foundation of the world, will wonder when they see the beast, that he was and is not and will come. (NASU)
In Revelation 17:8, the angel tells John that the "beast" he saw "WAS and IS NOT and WILL COME." The language used by the angel definitely implies a time element. Most scholars date this prophecy recorded by John to approximately the year 95 CE. The angel clearly tells John that, at that point in time, the beast "is not." The Greek phrase ouk estin is in the PRESENT tense. Yet the angel says that the beast "was" in the past, and he also says that the beast "will come up out of the Abyss" in the future. What does this mysterious statement mean?
First, let's see what this statement does NOT mean. Many Bible scholars and commentators teach that this beast represents a revival of the Roman empire and that the great harlot is the Roman Catholic Church. However, the time element shown here doesn't fit with this identification. At the time John received the vision, Rome was still the dominant power in the world. The angel could not have truthfully said Rome "is not" at the time this prophecy was given.
So who is this beast? To interpret this symbol correctly, it's first vital that we understand the identity of the one who comes "up out of the Abyss." Only when this is comprehended can the prophecy be correctly interpreted. Therefore, we have to start by determining what the Abyss is.
A passage from Luke helps set the context for the understanding the Abyss:
LUKE 8:26 Then they sailed to the country of the Gadarenes, which is opposite Galilee. 27 And when he stepped out on the land, there met him a certain man from the city who had demons for a long time. And he wore no clothes, nor did he live in a house but in the tombs. 28 When he saw Jesus, he cried out, fell down before him, and with a loud voice said, "What have I to do with you, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I beg you, do not torment me!" 29 For he had commanded the unclean spirit to come out of the man. For it had often seized him, and he was kept under guard, bound with chains and shackles; and he broke the bonds and was driven by the demon into the wilderness. 30 Jesus asked him, saying, "What is your name?" And he said, "Legion," because many demons had entered him. 31 And they begged him that he would not command them to go out into the Abyss. 32 Now a herd of many swine was feeding there on the mountain. So they begged him that he would permit them to enter them. And he permitted them. 33 Then the demons went out of the man and entered the swine, and the herd ran violently down the steep place into the lake and drowned. (NKJV)
Here we see that the demons possessing this man were terrified of being confined to the Abyss. As other Scriptures indicate, the Abyss is a spiritual prison where some fallen angels and demons are currently being restrained.
The Bible teaches that there are at least two different groups of fallen angels and demons:
(1) Those who can move around freely, and
(2) those who are now locked up in "chains of darkness."
Several passages of Scripture speak of the Abyss and those spirit beings currently locked up there:
JUDE 6 And the angels who did not keep their own position, but left their proper dwelling, he has kept in eternal chains in deepest darkness for the judgment of the great Day. (NRSV)
II PETER 2:4 For if God did not spare the angels when they sinned, but condemned them to the chains of Tartarus and handed them over to be kept for judgment; (NAB)
I PETER 3:19 . . . He went and preached to the spirits in prison, 20 who formerly were disobedient, when once the Divine longsuffering waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was being prepared, in which a few, that is, eight souls, were saved through water. (NKJV)
At the sounding of the 5th trumpet, this prison will be opened and the evil spirit inmates chained there freed:
REVELATION 9:1 Then the fifth angel blew his trumpet, and I saw a star that had fallen from heaven onto the earth, and the angel was given the key to the shaft leading down to the Abyss. 2 When he unlocked the shaft of the Abyss, smoke rose out of the Abyss like the smoke from a huge furnace so that the sun and the sky were darkened by the smoke from the Abyss, 3 and out of the smoke dropped locusts onto the earth: they were given the powers that scorpions have on the earth: 4 they were forbidden to harm any fields or crops or trees and told to attack only those people who were without God's seal on their foreheads. 5 They were not to kill them, but to give them anguish for five months, and the anguish was to be the anguish of a scorpion's sting. 6 When this happens, people will long for death and not find it anywhere; they will want to die and death will evade them. 7 These locusts looked like horses armoured for battle; they had what looked like gold crowns on their heads, and their faces looked human, 8 and their hair was like women's hair, and teeth like lion's teeth. 9 They had body-armour like iron breastplates, and the noise of their wings sounded like the racket of chariots with many horses charging. 10 Their tails were like scorpions' tails, with stings, and with their tails they were able to torture people for five months. (NJB)
The king or ruler over these released evil spirits is known as Abaddon/Apollyon (Rev. 9:11); both these names mean "Destroyer." For additional information on this powerful angel and his activities in the end-time, see my article "Who Is The 'Destroyer'?."
This takes us back to Revelation 17:8 once more:
REVELATION 17:8 The beast, which you saw, once was, now is not, and will come up out of the Abyss and go to his destruction. The inhabitants of the earth whose names have not been written in the book of life from the creation of the world will be astonished when they see the beast, because he once was, now is not, and yet will come. (NIV)
Abaddon, the angelic king, "was" free on the earth at some time in the past. Yet because of his wickedness and sins, God saw that it was necessary to imprison him in the Abyss. At the time John received his vision, Abaddon "was not" because he was locked in the Abyss. However, as the angel makes clear, this "beast" will one day soon be freed from his confinement and "will come up out of the Abyss."
Why is Abaddon described as having the same form as Satan (7 heads, 10 horns)? Remember, Satan is the great deceiver (Rev. 12:9), a master counterfeiter. In the end time, he and his chosen one (Abaddon, commonly known as the Antichrist) will seek to replace God the Father and His Son, Yeshua. Just as Yeshua told his disciples that "he who has seen me has seen the Father" (John 14:9), the one who sees the Antichrist will have, in effect, seen his spiritual father, Satan the devil.
Now let's go back to the passage in Revelation 17 for an interpretation of what the 7 heads represent:
REVELATION 17:9 Here is the mind which has wisdom. The seven heads are seven mountains on which the woman sits, 10 and they are seven kings; five have fallen, one is, the other has not yet come; and when he comes, he must remain a little while. 11 The beast which was and is not, is himself also an eighth and is one of the seven, and he goes to destruction. (NASU)
In the Bible, a mountain figuratively represents a kingdom or the ruler of that kingdom. The 7 mountains and the 7 kings referred to in Revelation 17:9-10 are one and the same. This beast is in the same form as Satan; the heads represent earthly kingdoms that Satan has (or will) rule over.
At the time John was receiving this vision (c. 95 CE), the angel tells him that 5 of the kingdoms represented by the heads of the beast had fallen, one head currently existed, and the other had not yet appeared. The angel is giving John (and us) a time sensitive clue. Five of the symbolic heads of the beast had already lost the power they once possessed. Those 5 were:
(4) Medo-Persia, and
Rome was the 6th kingdom, the one in power at the time the Apocalypse was written. Therefore, there remains only one more kingdom, the 7th, left to come.
The beast which arises from the Abyss is said to actually be the 8th, but he's of the 7 already mentioned. We will analyze the meaning of this mysterious statement in detail a little later when we examine Daniel 7.
The dream recorded in Daniel 2 which was given by the Eternal to Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar helps us to put the pieces of this puzzle together. This dream deals with the last five of the seven heads of the beast:
DANIEL 2:28 "But there is a God in heaven who reveals secrets, and He has made known to King Nebuchadnezzar what will be in the latter days. Your dream, and the visions of your head upon your bed, were these: 29 As for you, O king, thoughts came to your mind while on your bed, about what would come to pass after this; and He who reveals secrets has made known to you what will be. 30 But as for me, this secret has not been revealed to me because I have more wisdom than anyone living, but for our sakes who make known the interpretation to the king, and that you may know the thoughts of your heart. 31 You, O king, were watching; and behold, a great image! This great image, whose splendor was excellent, stood before you; and its form was awesome. 32 "This image's 1head was of fine gold, its 2chest and arms of silver, its 3belly and thighs of bronze, 33 its 4legs of iron, its 5feet partly of iron and partly of clay." (NKJV)
If we look at this description objectively, it's clear that we have 5 kingdoms described here, not the 4 usually identified by Bible scholars. Plainly the feet composed of an iron/clay mixture represent a different kingdom than the one symbolized by the legs of iron.
DANIEL 2:34 "You watched while a stone was cut out without hands, which struck the image on its feet of iron and clay, and broke them in pieces. 35 Then the iron, the clay, the bronze, the silver, and the gold were crushed together, and became like chaff from the summer threshing floors; the wind carried them away so that no trace of them was found. And the stone that struck the image became a great mountain and filled the whole earth. 36 This is the dream. Now we will tell the interpretation of it before the king." (NKJV)
Who or what does this "stone cut out without hands" represent? Clearly this is symbolic of the Messiah and his inauguration of the Kingdom of God at his second coming. Notice that the stone strikes the statue on its feet. This obviously indicates that the kingdom represented by the feet of this image will exist at the end of this age when Yeshua returns to the earth.
The prophets Isaiah (Isa. 2:2-4) and Micah (Mic. 4:1-4) both speak of the time when this stone will become a great mountain and fill the entire earth:
MICAH 4:1 Now it shall come to pass in the latter days that the mountain of the LORD's house shall be established on the top of the mountains, and shall be exalted above the hills; and peoples shall flow to it. 2 Many nations shall come and say, "Come, and let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, to the house of the God of Jacob; He will teach us His ways, and we shall walk in His paths." For out of Zion the law shall go forth, and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem. 3 He shall judge between many peoples, and rebuke strong nations afar off; they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. 4 But everyone shall sit under his vine and under his fig tree, and no one shall make them afraid; for the mouth of the LORD of hosts has spoken. (NKJV)
Now let's begin to identify the 5 kingdoms represented by the different parts of the image:
DANIEL 2:37 "You, O king, are a king of kings. For the God of heaven has given you a kingdom, power, strength, and glory; 38 and wherever the children of men dwell, or the beasts of the field and the birds of the heaven, He has given them into your hand, and has made you ruler over them all you are this head of gold." (NKJV)
We are clearly told that the head of gold on this statue is Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon. Remember, a king represents his kingdom in the Bible. What does the total image represent? Because we are given the starting point (Nebuchadnezzar's Babylonian empire) and the ending point (the commingled empire represented by the feet and toes which is defeated by Messiah at his return), we can deduce that this image represents 5 of the 7 heads that John saw on the beast of Revelation 17. The 1st and 2nd satanic kingdoms (Egypt and Assyria) had already fallen at the time of Nebuchadnezzar's dream. Therefore, they were excluded from the image.
DANIEL 2:39 "But after you shall arise another kingdom inferior to yours; then another, a third kingdom of bronze, which shall rule over all the earth." (NKJV)
Just as Daniel foretold, Nebuchadnezzar's Babylon was followed by the Medo-Persian empire. The Medo-Persian empire was conquered by Alexander the Great's Greek empire, which at its peak stretched from India to Europe.
DANIEL 2:40 "And the fourth kingdom shall be as strong as iron, inasmuch as iron breaks in pieces and shatters everything; and like iron that crushes, that kingdom will break in pieces and crush all the others." (NKJV)
Although it had been around for several centuries, the Roman empire rose to prominence and great power on the world scene in the 1st century BCE. With their compelling military might, Rome crushed the remnants of the other kingdoms that had come before them. Just as the image had two iron legs, the Roman empire in its latter days was divided into the Eastern empire based out of Constantinople and the Western empire headquartered in Rome.
DANIEL 2:41 "Whereas you saw the feet and toes, partly of potter's clay and partly of iron, the kingdom shall be divided; yet the strength of the iron shall be in it, just as you saw the iron mixed with ceramic clay. 42 And as the toes of the feet were partly of iron and partly of clay, so the kingdom shall be partly strong and partly fragile. 43 As you saw iron mixed with ceramic clay, they will mingle with the seed of men; but they will not adhere to one another, just as iron does not mix with clay." (NKJV)
This 5th kingdom, although composed partly of iron, is not part of the Roman empire any more than the Roman empire before it was part of the Greek empire. These kingdoms are grouped together because they are all earthly kingdoms that Satan has been (or will be) allowed to rule. This final, end-time empire will be a mixture of spirit beings (iron) and human (clay). This is the meaning of the mysterious statement "they will mingle with the seed of men" found in Daniel 2:43. At the end of this age, Revelation 9 shows that the sons of God (fallen angels) and their hybrid offspring will once again roam free on the earth, just as they did before the Flood.
The one overriding principle about the Bible is that it was written about and for the people of God. Daniel's interpretation helps us to correctly identify the kingdoms represented by the seven heads of the beast in Revelation 17. We can know that the kingdoms listed above are correct, because each of those seven has or will exercise authority and rule over God's chosen people Israel. That's the common denominator that ties these seven satanic human empires together and makes them representative of all the kingdoms of this world ruled by Satan.
DANIEL 2:44 And in the days of these kings the God of heaven will set up a kingdom which shall never be destroyed; and the kingdom shall not be left to other people; it shall break in pieces and consume all these kingdoms, and it shall stand forever. 45 Inasmuch as you saw that the stone was cut out of the mountain without hands, and that it broke in pieces the 1iron, the 2bronze, the 3clay, the 4silver, and the 5gold the great God has made known to the king what will come to pass after this. The dream is certain, and its interpretation is sure." (NKJV)
Once again, we see that 5 are indicated here, not the 4 normally identified. In verse 44, the phrase "in the days of these kings" refers to the ten kings represented by the toes of the statue. We know from Daniel 7:24 and Revelation 17:12 that these ten kings appear in the end-time and give their power to the Antichrist. This identifies the time period of the kingdom represented by the feet or iron and clay. The Messiah will destroy this entire satanic system, which has ruled the earth since the fall in the Garden, at his coming.
Now let's go back to Revelation 17 for confirmation of what we've just reviewed:
REVELATION 17:12 The ten horns which you saw are ten kings who have not yet received a kingdom, but they receive authority as kings with the beast for one hour. 13 These have one purpose, and they give their power and authority to the beast. 14 These will wage war against the Lamb, and the Lamb will overcome them, because He is Lord of lords and King of kings, and those who are with Him are the called and chosen and faithful." 15 And he said to me, "The waters which you saw where the harlot sits, are peoples and multitudes and nations and tongues. 16 And the ten horns which you saw, and the beast, these will hate the harlot and will make her desolate and naked, and will eat her flesh and will burn her up with fire. 17 For God has put it in their hearts to execute His purpose by having a common purpose, and by giving their kingdom to the beast, until the words of God will be fulfilled. 18 The woman whom you saw is the great city, which reigns over the kings of the earth." (NASU)
Plainly we are told that the woman riding the beast represents the great city which rules over the kings of the earth. In Scripture, two spiritual cities are discussed:
(1) Jerusalem above (Gal. 4:26), and
(2) Babylon the Great.
This woman, a harlot because of her spiritual adulteries, represents Satan's entire religious-economic system, called "Babylon the Great." It is patterned after the Babel founded by the antetype of the Antichrist, Nimrod. It is called "Babylon the Great" because it is the culmination of the global government which was first attempted under Nimrod at the Tower of Babel. This system is supported and promoted by the earthly kingdoms Satan has been allowed to rule, represented by the beast with 7 heads.
Now let's look at the 3rd 7-headed, 10-horned beast mentioned in Revelation:
REVELATION 13:1 . . . And I saw a beast coming out of the sea. He had ten horns and seven heads, with ten crowns on his horns, and on each head a blasphemous name. 2 The beast I saw resembled a leopard, but had feet like those of a bear and a mouth like that of a lion. The dragon gave the beast his power and his throne and great authority. (NIV)
This beast is said to come up out of the sea. In Scripture, the sea often symbolically represents the nations of the world. However, the sea can also represent the Abyss. In Jewish thought, the Abyss was associated with the ocean depths. Speaking of the Septuagint, which was the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures in use at the time of Christ, The New Unger's Bible Dictionary says: "The LXX renders Heb. tehom, 'the primeval ocean' (Gen. 1:2; Ps. 24:2; etc.) as 'abyss.'" (Abyss, p. 18). So while this aspect of the vision represents the rise of the beast from among the nations, it is likely dual in that it also represents the rise of Abaddon from the depths of the Abyss after his release at the 5th trumpet.
Verse 1 also tells us that each of the 10 horns has a crown, representing rulership and authority. In verse 2, we see that this beast has parts from a leopard, a bear, and a lion. This seems to tie the identification of the beast here with the 4 beasts Daniel saw in his vision recorded in Daniel 7. Let's now examine that prophecy in more detail, for it will help enlighten us on the meaning of Revelation 13.
DANIEL 7:1 In the first year of Belshazzar king of Babylon, Daniel had a dream and visions of his head as he lay in his bed. Then he wrote down the dream, and told the sum of the matter. 2 Daniel said, "I saw in my vision by night, and behold, the four winds of heaven were stirring up the great sea. 3 And four great beasts came up out of the sea, different from one another. 4 The first was like a lion and had eagles' wings. Then as I looked its wings were plucked off, and it was lifted up from the ground and made to stand upon two feet like a man; and the mind of a man was given to it. 5 And behold, another beast, a second one, like a bear. It was raised up on one side; it had three ribs in its mouth between its teeth; and it was told, 'Arise, devour much flesh.' 6 After this I looked, and lo, another, like a leopard, with four wings of a bird on its back; and the beast had four heads; and dominion was given to it. 7 After this I saw in the night visions, and behold, a fourth beast, terrible and dreadful and exceedingly strong; and it had great iron teeth; it devoured and broke in pieces, and stamped the residue with its feet. It was different from all the beasts that were before it; and it had ten horns. (RSV)
Here we have the 4 beasts Daniel saw in his vision described. The 1st beast is a composite of two animals, a lion and an eagle. The 2nd beast was a bear, the 3rd a four-headed leopard, and the 4th an unnamed, terrifying beast with 10 horns. Most biblical scholars teach that these 4 beasts are the same 4 kingdoms identified in Daniel 2 (Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece, Rome). The 4 beasts of Daniel 7 do correspond to these kingdoms in a way sometimes seen in the Scriptures, but they are not the same.
In this vision, Daniel sees the 4 beasts rise up from the sea, which symbolically shows that these kingdoms would arise to world power from among the nations of the world. However, Babylon had already risen up from the "sea" many years before "the first year of Belshazzar king of Babylon" (Dan. 7:1). Indeed, the Babylonian empire only had a few years of existence left when Daniel received this vision. While Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece, and Rome were certainly types of the 4 symbolic beasts, logically we must look elsewhere for the final fulfillment of this prophecy.
Before we identify the earthly kingdoms represented by the 4 beasts of Daniel 7, we need to understand the governing premise behind this matter. King Solomon gives us the guiding principle in the beginning of the book of Ecclesiastes:
ECCLESIASTES 1:9 That which has been is what will be, that which is done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun. 10 Is there anything of which it may be said, "See, this is new"? It has already been in ancient times before us. (NKJV)
Remember, as noted earlier, the Bible was written for and about God's people. With this principle and Solomon's admonition directing our understanding, the specific identification of these beasts becomes more certain.
Let's look at the first 4 kingdoms represented in Daniel 2 and establish the pattern presented there. The kingdoms started with Babylon and ran consecutively to Rome. When we look at the situation of the House of Judah at the beginning and end of the period when these 4 kingdoms ruled over the Holy Land compared to the situation of Judah during the reign of the 4 beasts of Daniel 7, a fascinating "mirror image" of events becomes evident.
Judah was an independent nation when Babylon (the head of gold) rose to power. Although the fortunes of the Jews changed several times during the intervening centuries, by the time Rome (the legs of iron) fell, the Jews had been scattered throughout the world by the Romans in what came to be known as "the Diaspora." Each of the 4 kingdoms of Daniel 2 (Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece, and Rome) played a large part (both negative and positive) in what happened to the Jews during this time period.
As we examine the identity of the 4 beasts of Daniel 7, you'll see how this pattern of events is reversed during the time of these 4 kingdoms at the end of the age of mankind. When the 1st beast rises up, Judah is still scattered in the Diaspora. After the 4th beast has arisen, Judah once again becomes an independent nation. By relating the beasts to the animals representing them and end-time events affecting Judah, we can identify who these entities represent.
The 1st beast, like a lion with the wings of an eagle, represents Great Britain and her offspring, the United States. The lion has long been the national symbol of Great Britain, and the eagle is the national symbol of the USA. The plucking of the eagle's wings from this beast represents the separation of the American colonies from Great Britain in 1776. With that event, the character of the British empire was changed, as the prophecy shows. Along with the eagle's wings, it lost the heart of a lion, and that heart was replaced by the heart of a man. No longer did Great Britain inspire terror in the world, as the brute power of a lion does. Instead, it used human cunning to hold onto power and territory. Since then, Britain has gradually lost its colonies and its might.
Being the 1st beast mentioned, Great Britain begins the story of the rebirth of the modern nation of Judah called "Israel." It was Great Britain that initiated the return of Jews to the Holy Land through the issuance of the Balfour Declaration in November 1917. This declaration, from British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour to Lord Rothschild, head of the Zionist Federation in Great Britain, was written to show Rothschild that the British government supported the objective of a homeland for the Jews in the Holy Land. The British hoped to realize further Jewish support for the Allies in WWI. The Balfour Declaration became the cornerstone of international support for the founding of the modern state of Israel.
Five short weeks after the Balfour Declaration was published, British General Allenby captured Jerusalem from the Axis Turkish forces defending it. By December 9, 1917, the Turkish army had fled the city. On December 11, General Allenby entered Jerusalem on foot through the Jaffa Gate.
The bear is the national symbol of Russia. This 2nd beast that rises up has three ribs in its mouth, and these ribs tell the bear to "arise and devour much flesh" (Dan. 7:5). In Hebrew, the word for "rib" literally means "side" and can be used to refer to that which supports something. In Russia, the Marxist doctrines of the founders of modern communism, Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, and Vladimir Lenin have supported the aims and actions of Russia. All of these men promoted the worldwide spread of communist rule through force or violence. In their Manifesto of the Communist Party, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels wrote: "The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win" ("Position of the Communists in Relation to the Various Existing Opposition Parties"). Hence the ribs' announcement to "devour much flesh." This Russia has done; since its founding in 1917, communist Russia has been responsible for tens of millions of deaths, many of them her own people.
Russia's part in the rebirth of Judah is much more negative than Britain's, but just as effective. Several pogroms (mob attacks condoned or encouraged by the czarist Russian authorities) had taken place against the Jews in Russia in the decades before the 1917 revolution, forcing about 2 million Jews to flee to the United States and Europe. Because of the oppressiveness of the czarist forces, most Russian Jews supported the Bolshevik revolutionaries.
However, both the Bolshevik Red Army and the counter-revolutionary White Army were guilty of mistreating and massacring Jews after the start of the revolution. After the victory of the communist forces, the Soviet regime came to regard assimilation and consolidation as the only solution to Russia's Jewish problem. In the face of Zionist calls for a Jewish homeland, Lenin declared that "there is no basis for a separate Jewish nation," and regarding a "national Jewish culture - the slogan of the rabbis and the bourgeoisie - this is the slogan of our enemies."
The Soviet government caused the financial ruin of most Russian Jews through the termination of private commerce and the seizure of property and goods. Hundreds of thousands of Jewish families lost their means of making a living. These policies caused about 300,000 Jews to leave the Soviet-controlled territories for the Baltic states, Poland, and Rumania.
Russia's new atheistic communist government also waged a fierce battle against Russian Judaism and its leaders. Heavy taxes were imposed on the rabbis and other religious officials to try and force them to leave their positions. A campaign was also initiated against the Hebrew language. The study of Hebrew was prohibited, and books could not be published in the language. These actions continued through World War II and were the motivation for many religious Jews to flee to the Holy Land after the War.
The 3rd beast, the leopard with four heads and four bird's wings on its back, is somewhat more difficult to identify. However, the characteristics of the leopard help us to recognize the entity it represents in this prophecy. Leopards are known for their swift and lethal attack. In a mechanical emulation of the fleet assault of a leopard, Adolf Hitler's Germany waged blitzkrieg ("lightning war") against its enemies using Panzer forces during World War II. These cat-quick attacks disorganized enemy forces through the use of speed, surprise, and superior firepower and led to the Third Reich's conquest of mainland Europe during the early years of the war.
Interestingly, another name for the leopard is "panther." The big cats - the lion, tiger, leopard, jaguar, and others - belong to the genus Panthera. Not coincidentally, the Germans have long displayed an affinity for the big cats. In fact, Germany's two main Panzer battle tanks in WWII were named the Tiger and the Panther. Now the Leopard tank is the backbone of Germany's armored forces.
While the symbolism of the wings is far from certain, we can draw a clue from the pair of eagle's wings on the first beast. Just as that pair of wings represented a nation (the United States), so also the two pairs of wings on the back of the leopard could represent the Axis nations which aligned themselves with Germany in WWII (Italy and Japan).
The four heads of the leopard represent the division of Germany into four regions after its defeat in WWII. The eastern half was controlled by Russia, while the western half was split between Great Britain, the United States, and France. Later these western sections were joined into what became West Germany.
History confirms that Hitler's Third Reich provided a great impetus for the formation of an independent Jewish nation. The death of approximately six million Jews in the Nazi Holocaust, while tragic beyond words, was not in vain. Once WWII ended and the scope of the Nazi plan to exterminate the Jews was grasped, there was much international sympathy for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in the land commonly known as "Palestine."
The 4th beast takes us to the point of the rebirth of the Jewish nation. This beast reverses the cycle originated at the time of Nebuchadnezzar's Babylon. The 4th beast seen by Daniel, which appeared to be horrible, strong, and unlike any of the others, has to represent the entity which played the greatest role in the formation of modern Israel. This 4th beast represents the fledgling global government of the United Nations.
The following historical information comes from the United Nation's web site:
The name "United Nations" was devised by United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt and was first used in the "Declaration by United Nations" of 1 January 1942, during the Second World War, when representatives of 26 nations pledged their Governments to continue fighting together against the Axis Powers.
The United Nations Charter was drawn up by the representatives of 50 countries at the United Nations Conference on International Organization, which met at San Francisco from 25 April to 26 June 1945. Those delegates deliberated on the basis of proposals worked out by the representatives of China, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and the United States at Dumbarton Oaks in August-October 1944. The Charter was signed on 26 June 1945 by the representatives of the 50 countries. Poland, which was not represented at the Conference, signed it later and became one of the original 51 Member States.
The United Nations officially came into existence on 24 October 1945, when the Charter had been ratified by China, France, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, the United States and by a majority of other signatories. United Nations Day is celebrated on 24 October each year. (History of the UN)
From the very beginning, the United Nations has had a great interest in the Holy Land, particularly Jerusalem. General Assembly Resolution 181, issued by the United Nations on November 29, 1947, outlined the formation of Jewish and Arab states in Palestine. Additionally, it called for Jerusalem to become an international city under the control of the UN:
The City of Jerusalem shall be established as a corpus separatum under a special international regime and shall be administered by the United Nations. The Trusteeship Council shall be designated to discharge the responsibilities of the Administering Authority on behalf of the United Nations. (A/RES/181(II) (A+B), Part III-City of Jerusalem, Section A-Special Regime)
The Jews accepted the UN partition of Palestine, eager to have a homeland of their own. However, the Palestinian Arabs rejected the planned division of the land; with the help of the surrounding Arab nations, the Palestinians sought to destroy the Jews and the hope of a Zionist state.
This Jewish/Arab conflict led to the declaration of the state of Israel on May 14, 1948, and the ensuing Jewish war for independence. Despite overwhelming odds, the Jews were able to defeat the superior forces of the invading Arab nations through the intervention of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Due to the Jewish victory over the Arabs, the resulting Jewish state ended up being larger than that planned by the UN.
From the beginning of the Jewish state, the United Nations as a whole has displayed an antagonistic attitude toward Israel. Israel became a member of the UN on May 11, 1949; however, Israel is the only member-state in the UN that has been prevented from belonging to a regional group. For this reason, Israel cannot be elected as a non-permanent member of the Security Council. This situation has also prevented Israel from participating in much of the standard work of the UN. Israel cannot vote for or be elected to many of the UN's central organizations. This condition violates Article 2 of the UN Charter, which outlines the principle of the "sovereign equality of all Member states."
Following the Six-Day War of June 1967, the Middle East situation was discussed by the UN General Assembly, which directed the issue to the Security Council. After lengthy discussion, a final draft for a Security Council resolution was introduced by the British Ambassador, Lord Caradon, on November 22, 1967; it was adopted on the same day.
Resolution 242, as it was known, established provisions and principles which were supposed to lead to a solution of the Arab-Israeli conflict. One of the provisions in this Resolution indirectly dealt with the city of Jerusalem. The Resolution stated that the acquisition of territory by war was inadmissible; therefore, the UN required withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from the territories it occupied in the conflict. Of course, this included the eastern part of the city of Jerusalem, which had been under Jordanian control.
From that point forward, Resolution 242 became the cornerstone of diplomatic efforts in the Middle East. Despite the fact that Jerusalem had been the ancient capital of Israel, and despite that fact that Israel was not the aggressor in the Six-Day War, the United Nations voted that Israel must return the territory it had taken while defending itself against the Arab invasion.
In the 1973 Yom Kippur War, after Israel had fended off the Syrian attack on the Golan Heights and established a bridgehead on the Egyptian side of the Suez Canal, international efforts to stop the fighting intensified. US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger flew to Moscow on October 20, 1973. Jointly with the Soviet Union, the US submitted a cease-fire resolution to the UN Security Council. The Council met on October 21 at the urging of both the US and the USSR, and by 14 votes to none, adopted Resolution 338.
This Resolution called upon the warring parties to immediately halt all military activities, and to start implementing all parts of Security Council Resolution 242 promptly after the cease-fire. Once again, even though Israel had been the victim of an attack designed to destroy them, the United Nations said they had to return the land they had acquired while defending themselves.
Resolutions 242 and 338 have been the foundation of all UN relations with Israel in the past three decades. Since the Oslo Accord peace talks began in 1993, Israeli leaders have done much to try and appease the Palestinian Arabs and the UN. The Arab people in general, and the Palestinians in particular, continue to assert a claim on Jerusalem. They maintain that the eastern half of the modern city, which includes the old city and the Temple Mount, is theirs. The UN agrees that Jerusalem is not the property of Israel.
On December 1, 1999, the UN General Assembly, by a vote of 139 to 1 (Israel), with 3 abstentions (Swaziland, Uzbekistan and US), held that Israel's imposition of its own laws, jurisdiction and administration on the Holy City of Jerusalem is illegal, null and void. Three thousand years of history apparently doesn't carry much weight with the United Nations. It won't be long before the armies of this dreadful beast encircle Jerusalem to enforce its mandates (Luke 21:20-24), just as the Roman army did in the 1st century.
The United Nations, the "terrible" 4th beast of Daniel 7, will soon supplant the governments of the other beasts (the United States, Great Britain, Russia, Germany, and the rest of the world) and will begin to rule the earth in their place. The United Nations reportedly has the world divided into 10 administrative regions. When the United Nations government begins ruling the world after the destruction unleashed by the opening of the 4th seal (Rev. 6:7-8), these areas will be headed by the 10 horns of the beast. These 10 kings (represented by the 10 horns on the 4th beast and the 10 toes on the statue of Daniel 2) will rule over these administrative regions.
DANIEL 7:8 I considered the horns, and behold, there came up among them another horn, a little one, before which three of the first horns were plucked up by the roots; and behold, in this horn were eyes like the eyes of a man, and a mouth speaking great things. (RSV)
The 10 horns we see in this prophecy correspond to the 10 horns we saw earlier in Revelation 13:1 and 17:3; additionally, they are the same as the 10 toes we see on the statue in Daniel 2. From these parallel prophesies, we know that the 10 represent end-time rulers of the "New World Order" which will arise under the framework of the United Nations. The little horn that ascends among them is commonly understood to be the Antichrist. We now know him also as Abaddon/Apollyon, angelic king of the Abyss (Rev. 9:11).
DANIEL 7:9 As I looked, thrones were placed and one that was ancient of days took his seat; his raiment was white as snow, and the hair of his head like pure wool; his throne was fiery flames, its wheels were burning fire. 10 A stream of fire issued and came forth from before him; a thousand thousands served him, and ten thousand times ten thousand stood before him; the court sat in judgment, and the books were opened. (RSV)
Here we see a picture of God the Father on His throne in heaven. From what we are told, we can see that judgment is about to take place.
DANIEL 7:11 I looked then because of the sound of the great words which the horn was speaking. And as I looked, the beast was slain, and its body destroyed and given over to be burned with fire. 12 As for the rest of the beasts, their dominion was taken away, but their lives were prolonged for a season and a time. (RSV)
The Antichrist, who was blaspheming the Eternal, is judged worthy of death and is destroyed, along with his kingdom. Interestingly, however, the other beasts which came up out of the sea before him were not totally destroyed. Instead, they had their power taken away from them, but they continued to exist as identifiable entities. Verse 12 clearly tells us that the first 3 beasts, or human kingdoms, will exist after the return of Messiah. Clearly the kingdoms of Babylon, Medo-Persia, and Greece no longer exist and have not existed for many centuries. The first 3 beasts therefore cannot be Babylon, Medo-Persia, and Greece.
DANIEL 7:13 I saw in the night visions, and behold, with the clouds of heaven there came one like a son of man, and he came to the Ancient of Days and was presented before him. 14 And to him was given dominion and glory and kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him; his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom one that shall not be destroyed. (RSV)
Now the vision shows the Eternal giving all the kingdoms of the world to His son, the Messiah.
DANIEL 7:15 "As for me, Daniel, my spirit within me was anxious and the visions of my head alarmed me. 16 I approached one of those who stood there and asked him the truth concerning all this. So he told me, and made known to me the interpretation of the things. (RSV)
Daniel didn't understand the vision, so he approached one of the angels standing nearby and asked him to interpret it. The rest of the chapter is the interpretation given by God through the angel:
DANIEL 7:17 'These four great beasts are four kings who shall arise out of the earth. 18 But the saints of the Most High shall receive the kingdom, and possess the kingdom for ever, for ever and ever.' (RSV)
Here we are plainly told that these beasts represent 4 human kingdoms that will arise. But the final outcome will be that the kingdoms of the world will be given to Yeshua the Messiah and his co-heirs, the saints.
DANIEL 7:19 Then I desired to know the truth concerning the fourth beast, which was different from all the rest, exceedingly terrible, with its teeth of iron and claws of bronze; and which devoured and broke in pieces, and stamped the residue with its feet; 20 and concerning the ten horns that were on its head, and the other horn which came up and before which three of them fell, the horn which had eyes and a mouth that spoke great things, and which seemed greater than its fellows. 21 As I looked, this horn made war with the saints, and prevailed over them, 22 until the Ancient of Days came, and judgment was given for the saints of the Most High, and the time came when the saints received the kingdom. (RSV)
Daniel was so upset by the 4th of these 4 beasts that he skipped the first 3 and asked the angel to explain it, as well as the 10 horns on its head and the other horn that arose among the 10. This other horn is said to have made war against the saints and defeated them until God the Father pronounced judgment in the favor of the saints.
DANIEL 7:23 "Thus he said: 'As for the fourth beast, there shall be a fourth kingdom on earth, which shall be different from all the kingdoms, and it shall devour the whole earth, and trample it down, and break it to pieces.' (RSV)
This 4th beast, which is different from the first 3, consumes the whole world through violence.
DANIEL 7:24 'As for the ten horns, out of this kingdom ten kings shall arise, and another shall arise after them; he shall be different from the former ones, and shall put down three kings.' (RSV)
The 10 horns are shown to be 10 kings that arise as a result of the ascendance of this 4th, global ruling kingdom. We are told the "other horn" arises after these 10 kings, and uproots 3 of the kings. It's clear that these 10 kings who rule the earth through the coming global government (the United Nations) will exist simultaneously. Clearly the Antichrist is different from them; whereas they are human rulers, he is an angelic king. He will put down 3 of the rulers of this global kingdom in his bid for power.
DANIEL 7:25 'He shall speak words against the Most High, and shall wear out the saints of the Most High, and shall think to change the times and the law; and they shall be given into his hand for a time, two times, and half a time.' (RSV)
A "time" in the Bible is generally a year (cf. Dan. 4:16, 23, 25, 32). The Antichrist will blaspheme God and will be given authority over the saints for 3½ years (Rev. 13:5).
DANIEL 7:26 'But the court shall sit in judgment, and his dominion shall be taken away, to be consumed and destroyed to the end. 27 And the kingdom and the dominion and the greatness of the kingdoms under the whole heaven shall be given to the people of the saints of the Most High; their kingdom shall be an everlasting kingdom, and all dominions shall serve and obey them.' 28 "Here is the end of the matter. As for me, Daniel, my thoughts greatly alarmed me, and my color changed; but I kept the matter in my mind." (RSV)
In the end, the Antichrist will be defeated, his kingdom destroyed, and the kingdoms of the world given to Yeshua the Messiah and the saints.
Now that we've looked in depth at Daniel 7, let's go back to Revelation 13 and use what we've found to better understand the beast described there.
REVELATION 13:1 Then I saw a beast come out of the sea with ten horns and seven heads; on its horns were ten diadems, and on its heads blasphemous name(s). 2 The beast I saw was like a leopard, but it had feet like a bear's, and its mouth was like the mouth of a lion. To it the dragon gave its own power and throne, along with great authority. (NAB)
We see from Revelation 13:1 that this beast has 7 heads. If we count the total number of heads on the 4 beasts seen by Daniel, they add up to 7 also. Revelation 13:2 describes the 7-headed beast as a composite of the 4 beasts Daniel saw. The beast in Revelation 13 is the 4th beast Daniel saw (the United Nations), viewed by John after it had subdued and absorbed the first 3 beasts. Just as with Daniel's beasts, this one rises from the sea. This kingdom is given power, rulership, and authority by Satan.
If you will notice, the dominant characteristic of this beast is that of the 3rd kingdom Daniel saw, the German nation and its WWII conquerors, the United States, Russia, Britain, and France. It's said to be "like a leopard," and four of the seven heads are the heads of the leopard. Clearly these nations will have a large impact on the shaping of the "New World Order."
REVELATION 13:3 I saw that one of its heads seemed to have been mortally wounded, but this mortal wound was healed. Fascinated, the whole world followed after the beast. (NAB)
Notice that one of the heads seemed to have been mortally wounded. Which head was it, and what was this apparently deadly injury that the beast suffered?
The deadly wound will seem to be inflicted on the head of Daniel's 4th beast when the 3 horns (kings) are uprooting by Abaddon, the little horn from Daniel's vision. This global empire, the United Nations, which will ultimately take over the entire world, will in turn be conquered by Abaddon, the king of the Abyss. But instead of totally destroying this satanic organization, Abaddon will appropriate it for himself and use it to rule over the earth. Remember, a king is synonymous with his kingdom in the Bible. That's why both Abaddon and his kingdom are called "the beast." The power of Satan will be granted to this evil angelic king and his kingdom, and his sudden rise to power will amaze and impress the whole world.
REVELATION 13:4 They worshiped the dragon because it gave its authority to the beast; they also worshiped the beast and said, "Who can compare with the beast or who can fight against it?" (NAB)
The whole world will worship the dragon because of the power he gave to the beast. They will also worship Abaddon himself. Due to Abaddon's demonstrated power in taking control of the United Nations, the world will think nothing or no one can defeat this "Beast."
REVELATION 13:5 The beast was given a mouth uttering proud boasts and blasphemies, and it was given authority to act for forty-two months. 6 It opened its mouth to utter blasphemies against God, blaspheming his name and his dwelling and those who dwell in heaven. 7 It was also allowed to wage war against the holy ones and conquer them, and it was granted authority over every tribe, people, tongue, and nation. 8 All the inhabitants of the earth will worship it, all whose names were not written from the foundation of the world in the book of life, which belongs to the Lamb who was slain. (NAB)
This passage clearly ties the "beast" back to the little horn spoken of in Daniel chapter seven. Daniel 7:8, 11, 20, 25 mention the arrogant, blasphemous words spoken by the little horn, and Daniel 7:25 tells us that the little horn is given power over the saints "for a time and times and half a time." This is a year, two years, and a half year, which equals 3½ years, or 42 months.
It is evident that the beast of Revelation 13 is a world-ruling, satanically-inspired government which rises up in the end time. This government, the United Nations, will be dealt an apparently lethal blow by the appearance of Abaddon and the destruction he brings when released from the Abyss. However, this seemingly fatal wound will be healed when Abaddon commandeers the United Nations and begins to rule using its governmental structure.
There are a few other passages of Scripture which are relevant to this topic. Leviathan, a 7-headed beast from the sea, is a type of the beast discussed in several Old Testament Scriptures.
First, to get a little background on Leviathan, let's examine what some biblical scholars have to say about this sea monster. The New Unger's Bible Dictionary states:
Since the discovery of the Ras Shamra religious texts in Syria on the site of ancient Ugarit, it has become evident that there is a parallel between the seven-headed Canaanite monster Lotan of prevailing mythology, 1700-1400 B.C., and the biblical leviathan. Isaiah seems to employ this ancient mythological idea of the destroyed leviathan poetically (Isa. 27:1) to symbolize the Judgment Day when God will triumph over the threatening evil of this world system. (p. 73, "Animal Kingdom")
The Oxford Companion to the Bible records this of Leviathan:
A mythological sea monster who is one of the primeval adversaries of the storm god. In the Ugaritic texts, Baal defeats Lothan (ltn, a linguistic variant of Leviathan), described as a seven-headed serpent, apparently identified with Baal's adversary Prince Sea. . . . In Job 41, Leviathan is described as fully under God's control, a divine pet (vv. 4-5; cf. Ps. 104.26). Many commentators have equated the Leviathan of Job 41 with the crocodile, and some elements of the description seem to fit this identification. But others, like his breathing fire (vv. 19-21), do not . . ." (pp. 433-434, "Leviathan")
The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia has this to say about Leviathan:
Lotan (or Litan . . .), the adversary of Baal and Anath in the Ugaritic myths, has long been recognized as the equivalent of OT Leviathan . . . Among the several references to Lotan in the Ugaritic literature . . . is one especially impressive parallel to Isa. 27:1 (UT, 67:I:1-3): "When you smote Lotan the fleeing serpent, you made an end of the twisting serpent, the mighty one of seven heads" (cf. also Ps. 74:14). (p. 109, vol. 3, "Leviathan")
Now that we have a little background on the ancient understanding of Leviathan, let's examine the description of him from the book of Job. We're going to read this Scripture from an English translation of the Septuagint Greek translation of the Tanakh. This Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures was widely used at the time of Yeshua.
JOB 40:20 "But wilt thou catch the serpent with a hook, and put a halter about his nose? 21 Or wilt thou fasten a ring in his nostril, and bore his lip with a clasp? 22 Will he address thee with a petition? softly with the voice of a suppliant? 23 And will he make a covenant with thee? and wilt thou take him for a perpetual servant? 24 And wilt thou play with him as with a bird? or bind him as a sparrow for a child? 25 And do the nations feed upon him, and the nations of the Phoenicians share him? 26 And all the ships come together would not be able to bear the mere skin of his tail; neither shall they carry his head in fishing-vessels. 27 But thou shalt lay thy hand upon him once; remembering the war that is waged by his mouth; and let it not be done any more. Hast thou not seen him? and hast thou not wondered of the things said of him? 41:1 Does thou not fear because preparation has been made by me? for who is there who resists me? 2 Or who will resist me, and abide, since the whole world under heaven is mine? 3 I will not be silent because of him: though because of his power one shall pity his antagonist. 4 Who will open the face of his garment? and who can enter within the fold of his breastplate? 5 Who will open the doors of his face? terror is round about his teeth. 6 His inwards are as brazen plates, and the texture of his skin as a smyrite stone. 7 One part cleaves fast to another, and the air cannot come between them. 8 They remain united each to the other: they are closely joined, and cannot be separated. 9 At his sneezing a light shines, and his eyes are as the appearance of the morning star. 10 Out of his mouth proceed as it were burning lamps, and as it were hearths of fire are cast abroad. 11 Out of his nostrils proceeds smoke of a furnace burning with fire of coals. 12 His breath is as live coals, and a flame goes out of his mouth. 13 And power is lodged in his neck, before him destruction runs. 14 The flesh also of his body is joined together: if one pours violence upon him, he shall not be moved. 15 His heart is firm as a stone, and it stands like an unyielding anvil. 16 And when he turns, he is a terror to the four-footed wild beasts which leap upon the earth. 17 If spears should come against him, men will effect nothing, either with the spear or the breast-plate. 18 For he considers iron as chaff, and brass as rotten wood. 19 The bow of brass shall not wound him, he deems a slinger as grass. 20 Mauls are counted as stubble; and he laughs to scorn the waving of the firebrand. 21 His lair is formed of sharp points; and all the gold of the sea under him is as an immense quantity of clay. 22 He makes the deep [abusson, "Abyss"] boil like a brazen cauldron; and he regards the sea as a pot of ointment, 23 and the lowest part of the deep [abussou, "Abyss"] as a captive: he reckons the deep [abusson, "Abyss"] as his range. 24 There is nothing upon the earth like to him, formed to be sported with [marginal rendering "mocked"] by my angels. 25 He beholds every high thing: and he is king of all that are in the waters." (Brenton's LXX)
The Hebrew Masoretic text renders the final verse above in this way:
JOB 41:34 He beholds everything that is high; he is king over all the sons of pride." (RSV)
Clearly this beast is not simply a crocodile. Because of the identification of this creature with the Abyss, and his title as king of "all the sons of pride," we can determine who Leviathan represents. He is no other than Abaddon/Apollyon, the angelic king who will rise from the Abyss at the sounding of the 5h trumpet. A couple of other passages speak of him also:
PSALM 74:12 Yet God is my king from of old, who works deeds of deliverance in the midst of the earth. 13 You divided the sea by Your strength; You broke the heads of the sea monsters in the waters. 14 You crushed the heads of Leviathan; You gave him as food for the creatures of the wilderness. 15 You broke open springs and torrents; You dried up ever-flowing streams. 16 Yours is the day, Yours also is the night; You have prepared the light and the sun. 17 You have established all the boundaries of the earth; You have made summer and winter. (NASU)
The Oxford Companion to the Bible says of this passage:
In the Bible Leviathan is also identified with the Sea (Job 3.8) and has many heads (Ps. 74.14), and his defeat by God is a prelude to creation (Ps. 74.15-17). According to apocalyptic literature, that battle will be rejoined in the end time when the evil Leviathan will be finally defeated (Isa. 27.1; Rev. 12.3; 17.1-14; 19.20; 21.1), and, according to later tradition, given along with Behemoth as food to the elect (2 Esd. 6.49-52), another recalling of creation (Ps. 74.14). . . . (pp. 433-434, "Leviathan")
Let's look at one last passage about Leviathan in Isaiah, which definitely places him in an end-time context:
ISAIAH 26:21 See, the LORD is coming out of his dwelling to punish the people of the earth for their sins. The earth will disclose the blood shed upon her; she will conceal her slain no longer. 27:1 In that day, the LORD will punish with his sword, his fierce, great and powerful sword, Leviathan the gliding serpent, Leviathan the coiling serpent; he will slay the monster of the sea. (NIV)
Regarding this passage about Leviathan, The Eerdmans Bible Dictionary states:
Isa. 27:1 looks forward to the subjection of Leviathan, a figure for the future day when Yahweh will end the chaos of this present age (cf. 2 Bar[uch] 29:4, where Behemoth and Leviathan are to be destroyed after they have been temporarily released.)" (p. 652, "Leviathan")
As Revelation 19:20 shows, the beast (Abaddon/Apollyon/Leviathan) will be cast into the lake of fire only short time after his release from the Abyss. His armies will suffer defeat at the hands of the returning Messiah and the host of angels accompanying him:
REVELATION 19:20 And the beast [Abaddon] was seized, and with him the false prophet who performed the signs in his presence, by which he deceived those who had received the mark of the beast and those who worshiped his image; these two were thrown alive into the lake of fire which burns with brimstone. (NASU)
As this study has shown, we are rapidly approaching the fulfillment of many of the end-time prophecies of the Bible. In Revelation, we see several 7-headed, 10-horned beasts pictured. One of them, a great red dragon, is clearly identified as Satan the devil (Rev. 12). The other "beast" pictured is an end-time, world-ruling empire that is eventually ruled by Abaddon the Antichrist (Rev. 13, 17). His father, Satan, will give him great power and authority. The formation of this world-ruling empire is documented in the 7th chapter of Daniel. While some of the end-time prophecies of Daniel remain sealed, the Eternal is opening the eyes of the wise to see what is to soon come upon an unsuspecting world. May He have mercy upon us and help us to prepare spiritually for the tribulation that lies just ahead.
Bryan T. Huie
May 30, 1999 | <urn:uuid:f31fc50b-d299-4b77-9575-9d8ec3de1fff> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.herealittletherealittle.net/index.cfm?page_name=Beast-in-Revelation | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783395679.92/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154955-00070-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.973687 | 14,327 | 2.59375 | 3 |
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There’s a new epidemic in this country, and it’s one that many people can prevent by making simple lifestyle changes. Type 2 diabetes, the most common type of diabetes, once thought of as a disease of older adults, now strikes people in early adulthood – and even childhood. Why is this a problem? Type 2 diabetes damages every organ in your body over time and can lead to heart disease, kidney disease and premature death. Fortunately, there are simple steps you can take to lower your risk for developing this common condition. Here are five positive lifestyle changes you can make to ward off type 2 diabetes.
Shed the Extra Pounds
Carrying around excess body fat, especially around the waist and abdominal region is a major risk factor for type 2 diabetes. In fact, experts say the increase in cases of type 2 diabetes parallels the rise in obesity. Excess body weight increases the risk for metabolic syndrome, a condition that’s a precursor to type 2 diabetes – but losing weight can help. Shedding extra body fat helps insulin function more efficiently so your risk for metabolic syndrome and type 2 diabetes is lower. Losing weight if you’re overweight is one of the best things you can do to reduce your risk for type 2 diabetes and other health conditions as well.
Exercise improves the ability of cells to use insulin. This means your pancreas doesn’t have to produce as much. That’s a good thing when it comes to lowering your risk for diabetes. Plus, it helps with weight control. What kind of exercise is best? Research shows that both aerobic exercise and strength training is effective. Simply walking at least 30 minutes 5 days a week offers benefits, but you’ll get more protection if you pick up the pace and stride briskly enough to work up a sweat.
Change What You Drink
Are you a soft drink junkie? Time to kick the habit. According to a large study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, if you drink even one soft drink sweetened with sugar a day you’ll double your risk for type 2 diabetes. But coffee may be your ally in the fight against type 2 diabetes. Research shows that drinking 4 or more cups a day reduces the risk of type 2 diabetes by about 50%. Thirsty? make a trip to Starbucks, but order plain coffee. The sugar in all of those frou-frou drinks isn’t any better than a soft drink.
Change Your Diet
One of the best ways to lower your risk of type 2 diabetes is to change the composition of your diet. Processed carbohydrates in packaged foods and foods sweetened with sugar causes rapid rises in blood sugar and insulin levels. These fluctuations cause cells to become resistant to insulin over time. This leads to metabolic syndrome, a precursor to type 2 diabetes. The solution? Replace processed carbs and rapidly absorbed carbs like white bread, white potatoes and white rice with whole grains and vegetables. This will help to stabilize your blood sugar levels and keep your pancreas from working too hard. Research also shows that a high-fiber diet lowers the risk of type 2 diabetes – and veggies and whole grains are good sources. | <urn:uuid:8d96359c-795a-4ec0-8346-1080fdab6876> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.for-diabetes.com/5-ways-to-reduce-your-risk-for-diabetes | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396224.52/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00074-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.917403 | 670 | 2.765625 | 3 |
"Norumbega Reconsidered explores the questions, controversies, and uncertainties about the ethnic identity and historical significance of the Wawenoc Indians of the central Maine coast, their residency in the Norumbega bioregion and their participation in the Native American trading confederacy of Mawooshen. This study asks and attempts to answer the following questions. Who were the Wawenocs? Where did they live, and why did they disappear from our landscape and our history books?" -from the Introduction. Written by H.G. Brack, with a guest essay by Kerry Hardy. Contains maps and an annotated bibliography. | <urn:uuid:5d1d39cb-cfa1-4c41-8b02-4b19748cf400> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://mainehistorical.stores.yahoo.net/noremaandwad.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783398209.20/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154958-00105-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948813 | 133 | 2.65625 | 3 |
Facts about delamination
Laminated wood such as OSB, particleboard and plywood is made by uniting more layers or pieces of wood together and gluing them using heat, pressure and a special adhesive. Laminated products are very durable and strong, but not unbreakable. If the adhesive that unites the wood layers together breakdown, delamination occurs.
One of the most evident sign of delamination is the presence of a bump on the surface of the laminated sheet material. Any expansion along the border of the sheets is also a sign of this process. When the wood layers or pieces that make up the sheet become loose, they swollen and pull away from each other. This way the sheet is forced to expand. Delamination can occur in roofs, sub floors, exterior siding and any furniture made of laminated materials.
A low delamination will not affect the properties of the material. Because manufacturers know that in time a minimal delamination may occur, they provide 1/8 inch distance between plywood sheets when sheathing on the roof, for example.
On the other hand, medium and high delamination request the replacement of the damaged wood.
The main cause of delamination is the combination of heat and dampness. For example, the roof decking in an attic without windows or an air conditioner system can be seriously damages by the mixture of the fuggy air and moist.
If water reaches to the laminated subfloor through the wall studs and soak a small part of it, delamination will appear.
To prevent delamination it is necessary to keep all laminated products indoors and away from excessive moisture and heat. However, if this process occurs and the wood becomes soft and springy, it needs replacement. This means that you have to cut out the damaged area and replace it with an equal piece.
|causes of delamination, delamination, high delamination, how to prevent delamination, laminated products, laminated subfloof, laminated wood, low delamination, particleboard, plywood, signs of delamination, where can the delamination process occur| | <urn:uuid:d8975297-1e49-4038-bc01-f8016a81e870> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.diystart.com/do-it-yourself/facts-about-delamination | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783403825.35/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155003-00011-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.920213 | 435 | 3.265625 | 3 |
Roundworm research provides diabetes insight
Updated 10:26 pm, Friday, January 3, 2014
SAN ANTONIO — Research on roundworms may hold tantalizing clues for combating diabetes in humans, according to a recent study co-authored by a University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio associate professor.
People with diabetes have high levels of blood sugar, or glucose, because their bodies do not make or effectively use the hormone insulin, which helps the body use glucose for energy, according to the National Institutes of Health.
Obese people tend to have increased levels of an amino acid called tyrosine in their blood. Higher tyrosine levels correlate to a greater risk of developing diabetes, said Dr. Alfred Fisher of UTHSCSA, senior author of the study published last month in the Public Library of Science Genetics journal.
But researchers hadn't been sure if those tyrosine levels could cause diabetes or if there were additional factors involved, such as eating a certain unhealthy food or not eating certain healthier foods, he said.
So scientists began studying elevated tyrosine levels in roundworms so they could remove diet and environment from the equation, Fisher said.
Adult roundworms are about the size of a grain of rice, he said. Unlike studying monkeys, which may live 50 years, or mice, which live for about three years, roundworms typically live about three weeks, so researchers can collect data much faster, he added.
Fisher said his study “demonstrates the utility for some of these simpler animals as models to help us understand.”
In roundworms, Fisher and his fellow researchers found that high levels of tyrosine also inhibit an insulin-like signaling pathway, which affects the worm's metabolism and development.
“The key point of the paper was this provided evidence that this link between tyrosine levels in people and risk of diabetes may actually be a causal link,” Fisher said. “We also found that a key variable in controlling tyrosine levels, at least in (roundworms), is the expression of this particular enzyme and the regulation of it is very complex ... and involves hormones and diet and environment.”
Fisher, who has been studying tyrosine in roundworms since 2005, said one of his next steps may include experimenting to see whether mice that are given tyrosine exhibit changes in insulin sensitivity.
He also may launch a small clinical trial with 15 to 20 non-diabetic people later this year. He said the goal of the study would be to give people a tyrosine supplement “to see if you take this for a short period of time, do you show changes in insulin signaling.”
More than one in seven San Antonio residents have been diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes, a chronic disease that damages the kidneys, nerves and eyes, according to the San Antonio Metropolitan Health District.
Research elsewhere has found that the enzyme that removes tyrosine from the body also prevents liver cancer from developing in humans, though the mechanism at work is not yet understood, he said. | <urn:uuid:233f13a6-05ac-402d-9e8a-4cad9766d272> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/education/article/Roundworm-research-provides-diabetes-insight-5112218.php | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783398516.82/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154958-00134-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95503 | 627 | 3.1875 | 3 |
The term "subluxation" is used by doctors of chiropractic to depict the altered position of the vertebra and subsequent functional loss, which determines the location for the spinal manipulation. "Subluxation" has been defined medically as "...a partial abnormal separation of the articular surfaces of a joint."1
Chiropractors have described the term to include a complex of functions (i.e., the subluxation complex) as "…an alteration of the biomechanical and physiological dynamics of contiguous structures which can cause neural disturbances."
Chiropractic Viewpoint on Subluxation
Chiropractors view subluxation as a process rather than a static condition during which the tissues undergo constant changes, including:
- Hyperemia.2 Referring to an excess of blood in a specific area of the body, hyperemia may develop when there is an obstruction preventing the blood from flowing normally.
- Congestion.2 Joint dysfunction affects the muscles in different ways, with some muscles developing trigger points, or areas of congestion, where toxins develop, irritate the nerve endings within the muscle, and produce pain.
- Edema.2 When the body’s tiny blood vessels (capillaries) are damaged or pressurized, excess fluid may leak from them and build up in the tissues, leading to a swelling known as edema.
- Minute hemorrhages.2 Referring to a small amount of bleeding or an abnormal flow of blood, minute hemorrhages may develop within the body’s blood vessels as a result of certain triggers, underlying conditions and other risk factors.
- Fibrosis.2 Detailing the replacement of normal tissue with scar tissue, fibrosis commonly occurs in people dealing with recurrent back pain.
- Local ischemia.2 A very specific type of muscle pain, ischemia refers to a lack of blood flow in the muscle (often from a muscle spasm), leaving the muscle very painful to touch.
- Atrophy.2 With muscle atrophy, the muscle shrinks and may partially or completely waste away as a result of inactivity or various diseases and conditions.
- Tissue rigidity.2 Eventual rigidity and adhesions form not only in joint capsules, but also in ligaments, tendons and muscles themselves.
Spinal Subluxation in Chiropractic
The Houston Conference Classification categorizes spinal subluxation as follows:
Static Intersegmental Subluxation
- Flexion malposition
- Extension malposition
- Lateral flexion malposition
- Rotation malposition
- Altered Interosseous Spacing (increased or decreased)
- Osseous Foraminal encroachment
Kinetic Intersegmental Subluxation
- Hypomobility (fixation subluxation)
- Hypermobility (unstable subluxation)
- Aberrant motion (paradoxical motion)
- Scoliosis and/or alteration of curves secondary to muscle imbalance
- Scoliosis and/or alteration of curves secondary to structural asymmetries
- Decompensation of adaptational curves
- Abnormalities of motion
- Costovertebral or costotransverse disrelationships
- Sacroiliac subluxation
Research and locate chiropractors in your area that can help alleviate your back and neck pain.
- Mosby’s Medical Dictionary. Mosby-Year book, Inc, Version 1.5, 1995.
- Jaskoviac PA, Schafer RC. Applied Physiotherapy: Practical Clinical Applications with Emphasis on the Management of Pain and Related Syndromes. ACA Press, Arlington, Virginia, 1986. | <urn:uuid:c42fa416-713e-4e9c-980c-9c8c2a00d57f> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.spine-health.com/treatment/chiropractic/subluxation-and-chiropractic | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396147.66/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00097-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.866048 | 769 | 3.328125 | 3 |
- Genus Helichrysum, family Compositae.
- Olive trees planted in full sun look their best surrounded by scented herbs and silver-grey Mediterranean plants: helichrysum, lavender and rosemary.
- These helichrysums are grown for their soft decorative foliage and produce masses of the stuff within weeks of being planted out.
- All the plants are new with the exception of a helichrysum which has made it through two winters with only a little frost damage to the ends of its long stems.
Latin, from Greek helikhrusos, from helix 'spiral' + khrusos 'gold'. It originally denoted a yellow-flowered plant, possibly Helichrysum stoechas.
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Definition of helichrysum in:
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Comments that don't adhere to our Community Guidelines may be moderated or removed. | <urn:uuid:6c3ea2b7-1795-45b1-81b4-6226794c5ec9> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/helichrysum | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783393442.26/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154953-00196-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.906068 | 203 | 3.125 | 3 |
Concussion awareness is a point of emphasis for US Lacrosse and the OHSLA. With the passing of SB 721 (Jenna's Law) into law, parents and players must be made aware of the symptoms, causes, and treatment of concussions. The OHSLA is requiring that teams ensure that parents and players have read the following three CDC documents:
These documents focus on the steps to be taken to identify symptoms and then clear a player for returning to the field. It is important to note that recent studies have shown that mental stress post concussion can exacerbate concussion symptoms, so players should avoid texting, TV, video games, reading and other activities that will tax their brains as pointed out in this CDC Concussion Recovery paper.
- CDC Sports Concussion page
- The Center on Brain Injury Research & Training: FAQ's from Parents
- Acute Concussion Evaluation Care Plan - School Version which discusses recommendations for daily, school, and physical activity after a concussion diagnosis.
- ImPACT testing, creating a baseline of an athletes cognitive function every two years enables professionals to more accurately gauge the severity of the concussion.
- OSAA Concussion Sideline Guide for coaches to use on the sideline.
- OSAA Concussion Return to Participation form, which details steps to be taken before returning a player to the field.
- Concussion Management Implementation Guide from the OHSU Concussion Awareness & Management Program (OCAMP).
MedStar Sports Medicine Research Center, Baltimore, Md, analyzed video of 518 boys lacrosse games played by 25 different public high schools during the 2008 and 2009 seasons. Video of concussion incidents was examined to identify game characteristics and injury mechanisms using a lacrosse-specific coding instrument. A total of 34 concussion incidents were caught on video. This has been named the Fairfax Study and was referenced in the 2014 OHSLA Coaches meeting Rules presentation. The Fairfax Study has enlightening information that may surprise coaches as to when concussions occur in a game, including the observation that ~70% of the concussion events did not result in a penalty.
Video from 2012 Meeting: The link below is to a video that features Dr. Andrea Herzka, a specialist in Sports Medicine and Arthroscopy at OHSU's Department of Orthopedic Surgery. Andrea, along with her colleague, Dr. James Chesnutt, are among the nations leading experts in Sports Medicine and concussions. This presentation and discussion was part of the 2012 OHSLA All Coaches Meeting, presented on January 7, 2012. This is a great video to watch for both parents and coaches regarding the recognition, on field treatment and recovery of concussions.
Video from 2011 Meeting: This is a link to a video that features OES Athletic Trainer Joel Gray giving his concussion management presentation that was presented at the OHSLA All Coaches meeting held on January 14, 2011. In this video Joel explains the symptoms, recommended on field first aid, and recovery schedule of concusions. With the occurance of concussions increasing in all contact sports, this is an important video for all coaches and parents to watch.
ACL Injury Prevention
Other Injury Prevention | <urn:uuid:a75982c0-02e6-435f-9ff0-8e438c72d02d> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://ohsla.net/Info/injuries.asp | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783398516.82/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154958-00178-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.949891 | 642 | 3 | 3 |
Scientists have long wondered why women, on average, live longer than men.
Some have speculated that elevated levels of testosterone drive men to live fast and die young. But a new study points to a very different type of culprit – mitochondria – and an odd quirk in the way genes are passed down from one generation to the next.
Mitochondria are essentially tiny power plants that operate in each cell of the body. They convert oxygen, fats and sugars into usable energy.
The new research suggests mitochondria harbour genetic mutations that are potentially harmful to males, but not females. In particular, these mutations speed up the aging process, which can lead to early death for some men.
For the study, published in the journal Current Biology, the scientists focused on the genomes, or genetic blueprints, of mitochondria in fruit flies.
Their analysis revealed “there are a lot of male-harming mutations within the mitochondrial genome that are actually affecting the way in which male fruit flies age while having no negative effects on female aging,” said the lead researcher, Damian Dowling, an evolutionary biologist at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.
“This is very likely to be a general pattern that extends throughout the animal kingdom, including our own species,” he added.
So what could be producing these genetic mutations that have very different effects on males and females?
Dr. Dowling points to a “loophole” in natural selection. While we are born with two copies of each gene – one from each parent, mitochondria genes are passed down only through females.
“So all daughters and all sons get 100 per cent of their set of mitochondrial genes from their mum,” Dr. Dowling said.
“This means that evolution’s quality control process, known as natural selection, only screens for quality of mitochondrial genes in mothers,” he explained.
If mitochondrial genes were inherited from both the mother and the father, mutations that are deleterious to males would be less likely to pass from one generation to the next.
Because mitochondrial genes come from only the female line, however, a mutation that harms fathers but has no effect on mothers won’t be easily eliminated from the genetic pool.
“Over thousands of generations, many such mutations have accumulated that harm only males, while leaving females unscathed.”
Dr. Dowling says more research will be needed to identify the specific mutations that are contributing to a shorter life span in human males. This work, he added, could uncover ways of counteracting the harmful mutations so men can remain healthy longer.Report Typo/Error
Follow us on Twitter: | <urn:uuid:4bf09c33-b0b5-499d-8e39-d11aa2ae9efd> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/health-and-fitness/health/study-suggests-genetic-clue-to-why-women-live-longer/article4458783/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783393442.26/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154953-00045-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.938774 | 550 | 3.484375 | 3 |
Sir John Popham (1531?-1607), Reports and Cases Collected by the Learned, Sir John Popham, Knight, Late Lord Chief-Justice of England (London, 1656).
Popham’s Reports is but one of “the flying squadrons of thin reports” published in the mid- to late 17th century, and exemplifies their shortcomings. Popham himself can’t be blamed because he died a half-century before their publication, and probably never intended for them to be published. They were taken from a manuscript of unknown quality, and supplemented with a number of later cases. They were among many case reports translated (often badly) into English following the Commonwealth’s ban on the use of Law French in the courts. Many judges rejected them as having no authority, and banned their citation in court.
Sir John Popham was one of the most colorful of the law reporters, if the stories about him can be believed. As a child he was supposedly kidnapped and raised by gypsies, and worked his way through law studies at the Middle Temple as a petty thief. As a barrister, however, Popham rose through the ranks. By 1581 he was speaker of the House of Commons and Attorney General, and in 1592 he was made Chief Justice of King’s Bench. He was known as a strict but fair judge, and presided over the trials of the Earl of Essex, Sir Walter Raleigh, and the Gunpowder Plot conspirators. He was also one of the promoters of the Jamestown colony in Virginia.
“A multitude of flying reports (whose Authors are as uncertain as the times when taken, and the causes and reasons of the Judgements as obscure, as by whom judged) have of late surreptitiously crept forth; whereby … we have been entertained with barren & unwarranted Products … which not only tends to the depraving of the first grounds & reason of our Students at the Common Law, & the young practitioners thereof, who by such false Lights are misled, … but also to the contempt of our Common Law itselfe, and of divers of our former grave and learned Justices and professors thereof, whose honored and revered names have in some of said Books been abused and invocated to patronize the indigested crudities of those plagiaries.” – Sir Harbottle Grimston, preface to The Reports of Sir George Croke (1657)
“See the inconveniences of these scambling reports, they will make us to appear to posterity for a parcel of blockheads.” – Holt C.J., Slater v. May, 2 Raymond 1072 (1704)
Rare Book Librarian
“Landmarks of Law Reporting” is on display April through October 2009 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School. | <urn:uuid:6cc970d4-f41d-491f-ad9e-6e762a92db4f> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://library.law.yale.edu/blogs/rare-books?page=47 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783404382.73/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155004-00091-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.976732 | 605 | 2.5625 | 3 |
Opportunities for Primary Schools (K-12)
UT's Confucius Institute offers opportunities for primary schools to learn about the Chinese cultural and build their language skills
The Chinese Bridge Summer Camp is designed to promote communication between Chinese and American young people,deepen the understanding of Chinese language & culture among U.S. high school students and stimulate their enthusiasm for learning Chinese.
Schools can enter into a partnership with the Confucius Institute to teach Chinese language classes in the schools. CI provides the school with a teacher, help to develop the curriculum, identify text book and offer additional recommendations | <urn:uuid:5aec47c0-3e36-4131-8e49-7e08a248ada5> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | https://www.utoledo.edu/cisp/Confucius_Institute/primaryschools.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783395560.69/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154955-00126-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.949769 | 121 | 2.734375 | 3 |
Leopard frogs from different geographic populations of the Rana pipiens complex
a. are members of a single species because they look very similar to one another.
b. are different species shown to have pre- and postzygotic isolating mechanisms.
c. frequently interbreed to produce viable hybrids.
d. are genetically identical due to effective reproductive isolation. | <urn:uuid:d937a765-a680-431c-abfe-b2ae07694b0b> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.chegg.com/homework-help/biology-9th-edition-chapter-22-solutions-9780077350024 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783402746.23/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155002-00028-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.9247 | 76 | 3.484375 | 3 |
Curious about the NASA Asteroid Grand Challenge to “discover all asteroids that could threaten human populations and find out how to deal with them”? NASA is sponsoring a series of virtual seminars on the properties of Near Earth Asteroids (NEAs) and what is being done to learn more about the hazards and the opportunities they may pose for us here on Earth. The purpose is to inform interested astronomers (both amateur and professional), students, teachers, and others who are potentially interested in contributing to studies of NEAs. Each seminar will focus on some aspect of the asteroid population, how we discover and track NEAs, and what we need to know about them if we are ever required to change the orbit of a NEA that is an impact threat.
The seminar format will be a 40-minute talk by an asteroid expert followed by 20 minutes for questions from the audience. They will be broadcast over the Internet. The audience will watch, listen and post questions by Adobe Connect using an Internet connection and a web browser.
Daniel Britt is a Professor of Astronomy and Planetary Sciences at the Department of Physics, University of Central Florida (UCF). He was educated at the University of Washington and Brown University, receiving a Ph.D. in Geology from Brown in 1991. He has had a varied career including service in the US Air Force as an ICBM missile launch officer and an economist before going into geology and planetary sciences. He has served on the science teams of two NASA missions, Mars Pathfinder and Deep Space 1. He was the project manager for the camera on Mars Pathfinder and has built hardware for all the NASA Mars landers. He currently does research on asteroids, comets, Mars, and climate change under several NASA grants. Honors include 5 NASA Achievement Awards, election as a Fellow of the Meteoritical Society, and an asteroid; 4395 DanBritt. He has recently served as President of the Division for Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society and is currently the Director of the Center for Lunar and Asteroid Surface Science based at UCF.
Title: Physical Properties of Near Earth Asteroids (NEAs)
Abstract: What we know about the physical properties of NEAs depends not only on observations of these objects, but also the study of meteorites and meteors. Taken together, these sources are telling us a story of how NEAs formed, how they evolved over the age of the solar system, and what their current state and structure may be as we continue robotic, and potentially human, exploration of these objects. Asteroids in general and NEAs in particular, have turned out to be far more complex and interesting then the cold lumps of rock that many of us originally expected. These objects have complex collisional histories, varied structures, and a surprising range of physical properties that provide data about the early solar system as well as insight into the hazards of asteroid impacts and the challenges we will face during exploration. I will review what is known from our varied sources and paint a picture about what to expect in future asteroid encounters. | <urn:uuid:9104125f-8eb6-4f96-b847-6d5ce3f4c211> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://sservi.nasa.gov/event/nasa-asteroid-grand-challenge-seminar-dan-britt/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783392069.78/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154952-00137-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958569 | 619 | 3.015625 | 3 |
Number the points on the string from 1 to . Let's say the distance from the left end of the string to point i is .
Define three by matrices L, M, and R as follows:
... the length of the left end of the string if points i and j are chosen
... the length of the middle segment
... the length of the right end of the string
Given a value , compute
if or or , 0 otherwise.
Then, assuming all pairs of points (i,j) are equally likely to be chosen, the probability of occurrence of is . | <urn:uuid:6c8bc853-c640-4681-97ab-ee5e999809bc> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://mathhelpforum.com/advanced-statistics/100679-probability-randomly-selected-line-segment-longer-line-being-x-metres.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783402479.21/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155002-00017-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.822565 | 121 | 3.90625 | 4 |
February 26, 2001
Many kids at risk in the family car
from Washington State Traffic Commission
Most drivers wear seat belts in Washington, and even more use infant and child car seats, but new research shows that over 50 percent of all kids ages four to eight years old are using seat belts too early. According to traffic safety experts, children up to age eight or 80 pounds need to be in booster seats. New research shows that only 19 percent of kids in that age range are using booster seats in Washington.
That's one finding of a new seat belt, car seat and booster seat use-survey unveiled by the Washington Traffic Safety Commission.
The survey, the first of its kind in the United States, surveyed the child car seat patterns of 2,200 people in 36 counties in Washington state.
According to the research:
Only 19 percent of children 40 to 80 pounds were observed using a booster seat.
Fifty-four percent of children between the ages of four and eight were riding in seat belts when they should have been in booster seats.
And, 13 percent of children between 40 and 80 pounds were unrestrained.
While traffic collisions are the leading cause of childhood fatalities and serious injuries for children under age 14, many of these tragedies are preventable when child safety restraint systems are used properly.
The problem, safety officials say, is the lack of awareness.
The study indicates that while most parents are making an effort to protect children riding in the family car, most don't use booster seats, unaware of the risks facing kids in adult lap and shoulder belts too soon.
Studies show that without a booster seat, children wearing adult seat belts risk serious neck and abdominal injuries in traffic crashes. In fact, the chances of surviving a crash are 36 percent better when a child is in a booster seat.
"As children grow out of their car seats, too many are being moved directly into adult seat belts, bypassing the booster seat stage altogether," said John Moffat, director of the state's Traffic Safety Commission.
"Many parents mistakenly assume their kids are safe when, in fact, most children under eight simply aren't big enough to use adult-size lap and shoulder belts without a booster seat," Moffat said. "It's a tragic assumption."
Different Seats for Growing Kids
Rear-facing infant seats are designed for newborns and babies until they reach at least one year of age and 20 pounds. Forward facing and convertible child car seats protect toddlers up to about 40 pounds - which for most kids means their fourth birthday. Booster seats are specifically designed for children who weigh between 40 and 80 pounds, usually between four and eight years old. The booster seats raise the child up and position them in the car so that the regular lap and shoulder belts fit him or her properly.
State and Local Action
The survey's findings come as a surprise to many parents. Yet they confirm a problem child and safety advocates have been concerned about for some time.
State legislators last year passed the nation's first mandatory booster seat law, adding to the existing seatbelt and car seat requirements. An 18-month public education campaign is underway to educate parents and promote booster seat use, well before the new law takes effect in July 2002.
Local traffic safety coalitions are active statewide, arranging car seat check-up events, helping parents make sure their kids are safe and properly protected.
"We don't want to send mixed signals, or discourage parents from using safety belts in the family car," said Moffat. "But if most children ages four to eight aren't using booster seats - the safe transition between car seats and adult seat belts - we need to redefine our 'buckle-up' message.
"The news media is key to getting the word out," said Moffat. "Publicity raises awareness, and better awareness in this case will result in safety improvements for children." | <urn:uuid:c844236b-fa4a-4a51-8c6a-57b4f6925c1c> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.nwnews.com/old/editions/2001/20010226/feature3.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396959.83/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00012-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967603 | 795 | 2.765625 | 3 |
Relationships between latitude and environmental conditions and the species richness, abundance and composition of tropical fish assemblages over soft substrata
Travers, M.J., Potter, I.C., Clarke, K.R. and Newman, S.J. (2012) Relationships between latitude and environmental conditions and the species richness, abundance and composition of tropical fish assemblages over soft substrata. Marine Ecology Progress Series, 446 . pp. 221-241.
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Large-scale studies are required to elucidate the environmental factors that structure faunal communities. The relationships between the characteristics of the coastal ichthyofaunas over the soft substrata of tropical north-western Australia and both latitude and environmental factors were thus explored by analysing trawl data obtained for deep and shallow inshore waters at 7 regularly spaced locations along this 1500 km coast during both the dry and wet seasons. In the dry season, species richness and density were greater in the Kimberley and Pilbara bioregions than in the intervening Canning bioregion, where, in contrast to particularly the Kimberley, rivers and mangroves are largely absent. Species richness and density were greatest in the most northern bioregion (Kimberley) during the wet season, when nutrient input from rivers and water temperatures were highest. The high species richness and density at 1 Canning location during the wet season was presumably related to increased productivity brought about by local cyclonic events. Ichthyofaunal compositions in the Kimberley differed markedly from those in the Canning and Pilbara, where tidal range was less and water clarity greater due, in particular, to far greater densities of leiognathids and terapontids. Compositions at all locations in the dry season differed from those in the wet, when chlorophyll a concentrations and/or water temperatures were greatest and large numbers of certain species were recruited. Ichthyofaunal composition at each location almost invariably differed markedly between water depths, reflecting, inter alia, the tendency for some species to use nearshore waters as nursery areas and for others to occupy particular habitats.
|Publication Type:||Journal Article|
|Murdoch Affiliation:||Centre for Fish and Fisheries Research
School of Biological Sciences and Biotechnology
|Copyright:||© 2012 Inter-Research|
|Item Control Page|
Downloads per month over past year | <urn:uuid:77e07212-ced0-4f7f-924e-030af03c3de3> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://researchrepository.murdoch.edu.au/7338/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783398628.62/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154958-00035-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.911962 | 499 | 2.5625 | 3 |
Implanted microchips, when combined with visible ID tags on a pet’s collar, have proved to be the most reliable system for the recovery of lost or stray companion animals. The International Standards Organization (ISO) has issued specifications for a standardized microchip for animal identification. While most of the world has accepted these standards, North America has not. The primary problem is a competitive, technological one involving the compatibility of the microchips and the readers that are used by shelters and veterinary clinics.
The ASPCA supports microchip identification of companion animals. The ASPCA also supports the development of a coordinated effort to transition the United States to an ISO-compliant system. There will be some obstacles to overcome during the transition period if we are to ensure that no animals already implanted with non-ISO microchips are “orphaned.” A coordinated effort that includes manufacturers and distributors of microchips, animal shelters, the veterinary community and the pet trades can overcome these difficulties. In those areas where a coordinated system has been actively supported by animal shelters and the veterinary community, pets, pet guardians and the shelters themselves have benefited. | <urn:uuid:c9bdc560-5d60-4622-8d7f-1c3310a8b0f2> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.aspca.org/about-us/aspca-policy-and-position-statements/microchips | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783399428.8/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154959-00054-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.931513 | 231 | 3.25 | 3 |
The basic technique for transcranial Doppler examination consists of insonating the basal
portions of the major cerebral arteries (around the circle of Willis) through different
"windows" found at various locations in the skull. The smallness and specific localization of these "windows" has resulted in a restricted variability of the angle of insonation found upon sampling the cerebral blood vessels. This close spatial relationship between the position of the artery and the "window" which allows its insonation has also been of considerable importance for the proper identification of the different vessels based on relatively specific criteria. These standard criteria of identification result in highly reproducible findings and comparable inter-laboratory
results. They include the following parameters:
The windows that are commonly used for transcranial Doppler examination include areas where the skull bones are relatively thin or where the naturally occurring forage allow proper
penetration of the ultrasound beam. The need for adequate ultrasonic window utilization cannot be overemphasized since recent intraoperative recordings have documented that, in the best of cases, only approximately 6% of the intensity of the ultrasound used reaches the brain substance. The windows commonly utilized are:
- The window through which the vessel is being insonated.
- The angle of the transducer during insonation.
- The depth of the sample volume position.
- The direction of the flow with respect to the transducer and the spectral distribution.
- The response of the signal to vibration or compression maneuvers of proximal feeding vessels.
- TRANSCRANIAL (TRANSTEMPORAL) WINDOW: The vessels of the circle of Willis are insonated through the thinnest portion of the squamous component of the temporal bone.
- THE TRANSORBITAL WINDOW: The carotid siphon and the ophthalmic artery can be directly insonated by having the ultrasound beam cross the contents of the orbit. In some cases, cross-insonation of the contralateral half of the circle of Willis is also possible.
- THE SUB-OCCIPITAL OR TRANSFORAMINAL WINDOW: Insonation of the vertebral and the basilar arteries can be accomplished by taking advantage of the space between the atlas and the base of the skull, as well as passing the ultrasound beam through the foramen magnum.
"Static" Transcranial Doppler Examination
A comprehensive approach to the concepts which were outlined above results in the incorporation of different technical strategies and multiple sampling to obtain a large body of information. The spatial and temporal correlation of the findings from all the vessels studied will then provide an overall picture of the hemodynamic status of the major intracranial blood vessels. The vessels that can be examined through the various windows and the most common finds obtained after their evaluation will serve as the basis for our comparison when we later describe the dynamic variations of transcranial Doppler examination techniques.
The Transtemporal Window
The insonation of the basal cerebral arteries and the circle of Willis itself was made possible by having the ultrasonic beam cross the thinnest portion of the squamous part of the temporal bone. Since the passage of ultrasound through the bone will depend upon the thickness of this, a certain degree of variability exists from patient to patient and is relative to age. In children and young adults it is particularly easy to obtain good signals from almost any of the vessels desired. On the other hand, it is not unusual in certain elderly individuals to barely be able to obtain adequate signals. Harvey (personal communication) has seen this difficulty in up to 20% of the patients studied. Our experience, however, is approximately 5-10%. Racial and gender differences have also been noted, with black women apparently having the thickest temporal bones and hence the smallest windows. As it has been previously described, the temporal window can be localized quite anteriorly (close to the vertical portion of the zygomatic bone) or, more frequently, posteriorly (close to the pinna of the ear). The vessels that can be examined through this window include the terminal portion of the internal carotid artery, its bifurcation into the middle and the anterior cerebral arteries, and the posterior cerebral artery. The communicating arteries (either anterior or posterior) can be at times sampled, but they are more dependent upon the hemodynamic variability of the circle of Willis.
The Transorbital Window
The use of this approach requires that the power output of the Doppler instrument is decreased (to 10-20%) to reduce the ultrasonic exposure of the eye. This "window" allows the direct insonation of the carotid siphon ipsilateral to the orbit selected and of one of its collateral, the Ophthalmic artery. The importance of the utilization of this approach for the identification of extracranial and intracranial collateral circulation through the latter vessel cannot be underscored. Additionally, in cases where it has been impossible to insonate the middle and anterior cerebral arteries through the transtemporal window, it is also possible to use the transorbital approach to sample these vessels contralaterally. The technique for the performance of this cross examination has been described previously and it is based upon repositioning the transducer in a rather lateral fashion, directing the beam of ultrasound medially and changing from sampling volume depth to 80mm.
The Suboccipital (Transforaminal) Window
The ability to introduce a beam of ultrasound in between the atlas and the base of the skull,
and through the foramen magnum allows the sampling of the vertebral arteries (segments V3 and V4) as well as the basilar artery, from its origin often up to the level of its bifurcation into the posterior cerebral arteries. In addition to this, it is also possible to sample some of the other branches of the posterior circulation (e.g. posterior inferior cerebellar artery).
Transcranial spectral analysis is a non-invasive technique by which the basal cerebral arteries may be investigated to detect abnormal flow velocity (stenosis, vasospasm, etc.).
The following items will be used in the examination:
- Examining Table/Bed
- Acoustic Coupling Gel
- Neurovision 500M Transcranial Doppler System with 2 MHz Pulsed Doppler
- Hard Copy Device (Printer, Video Recorder, etc.)
The patient is placed on the examining table/bed in a supine position and acoustic coupling gel
is applied to the temporal area. The pulsed Doppler is positioned at approximately 55mm depth, placed on the temporal area and moved over the area until the middle cerebral artery is located (anterior, posterior, or medial windows). Once an adequate signal is obtained at that depth, the pulser and receiver power is adjusted to optimize visual display. The pulsed Doppler sample is then moved shallower in 1 mm depth increments until the middle cerebral artery can no longer be followed. This permits confirmation of actually being in the middle cerebral artery. Common carotid compression by a physician on the ipsilateral side is sometimes performed to ascertain correct anatomical positioning and/or autoregulatory response. Mean flow velocity is determined at each site and a hard copy produced. The Doppler sample volume is then returned to the 55mm depth and gradually increased until a bidirectional display (mirror-like) is located. This is the bifurcation of the middle cerebral and anterior cerebral arteries and is usually found between 60 and 70mm depth. A hard copy picture is also taken of this area. The depth is then slowly increased insonating either the anterior or posterior cerebral arteries. An optimal signal is obtained in both of these vessels, mean flow velocity is determined, and a hard copy produced. Flow in the anterior cerebral artery should be away from the probe and flow in the posterior cerebral artery should be toward the probe. Usually, the anterior cerebral artery anatomical position is slightly superior and anterior, and the posterior cerebral artery is inferior and slightly posterior. These vessels should also be followed to the anterior and posterior communicating arteries to determine their presence.
The sample volume is then returned to the bifurcation and the probe shifted interiorly until the terminal internal carotid artery signal is detected. This signal normally has much lower velocity due to the angle of insonation. The Doppler sample volume may then be moved deeper and the probe adjusted for maximum signal strength. Mean flow velocity and hard copy results are also obtained over this vessel.
The patient is asked to remove any contact lenses prior to examination and is instructed to
close their eyes. Acoustic coupling gel is applied over the eyelid. The probe is then placed over the eye, sample depth set in the 40-50mm range and the ophthalmic artery (low diastolic flow, high resistance vessel) signal obtained and optimized. Power output level should be adjusted to the minimum level for adequate visualization. Mean flow velocity and hard copy of the ophthalmic artery are then taken. The sample volume depth is then moved deeper to 55-70mm where the genu, paracellar, and the superclinoid can be insonated. These vessels are then followed with hard copy results taken and mean flow velocities determined as in the temporal approach.
The patient is placed in the prone position (or sitting) and acoustic coupling gel applied to
the suboccipital area (sometimes it is necessary to have the patient place their chin upon their chest to open the window slightly). The vertebral arteries are first insonated by moving the probe laterally or medially to a depth of approximately 60-70mm. Flow of these vessels (depending on probe angle) is generally away from the probe. Once these vessels are insonated the bifurcational signal is obtained. The depth is then increased (normally between 80 and 100mm depth) until the basilar artery is insonated. Mean flow velocities and hard copy results are done in 5mm increments as in other vessels. In any areas of significant mean flow velocity changes or abnormalities, hard copy results and mean flow velocities are obtained more frequently.
This completes the examination.
MULTIGON would like to thank Mr. Robert McGrath and the Vascular Department of the University of Tennessee for their contribution to this guide. MULTIGON recommends accredited clinical training courses for all clinicians performing TCD exams. | <urn:uuid:17ebcd4e-51c8-4230-909c-cc5ab9ea76f0> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.multigon.com/howtof.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783395548.53/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154955-00177-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.918915 | 2,160 | 3.1875 | 3 |
March 27, 2011, by David Schwartz
s the world’s appetite for the lean protein of fish grows, so does the demand for alternatives to traditional fishmeal, the blends of small fish species—including herring, capeli and menhaden—that are being fed to fish in aquaculture farms, where nearly half of the fish we eat originates.
Fishmeal is a major source of protein and oil in the fish diet, and is also used heavily in pet foods, as well as for swine and poultry feed. Looking to address the impending shortage of fishmeal, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Agricultural Research Service (ARS) has been working to develop fish feeds that minimize or don’t include fishmeal, in order to support sustainable aquaculture.
ARS fish physiologist Dr. Rick Barrows and his team of scientists are investigating ingredients for fishmeal replacement that include plants, animal processing products, and single-cell organisms like yeast, bacteria, and algae.
Dr. Barrows, who received his Masters and PhD in animal nutrition from Iowa State University (“My Masters work was with poultry, but my PhD was with fish,” he says.) spent 15 years with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, developing diets for a variety of species and overseeing different feed manufacturing techniques. He joined the USDA team in Hagerman, Idaho, in 2004, as a nutritionist to develop alternative diets for trout and other species.
We spoke with Rick recently about the intersection between the aquaculture and algal industries.
Can you give us some basic understanding of fish feed—what is desirable, what is to be avoided?
Since the beginning of aquaculture farms, fishmeal—wild, harvested fish—has been the main feed ingredient, comprising up to 60 percent of the diet. Fishmeal is a highly digestible ingredient that’s very palatable, so it’s easy to formulate a diet with a lot of fishmeal in it. Forty years ago there was a lot of fishmeal around and not that much demand.
As aquaculture has grown and as the poultry and swine industries have grown, so has the demand for fishmeal. But when people started to reduce the percentage of fishmeal in aquaculture and animal diets, and substitute other ingredients, some difficulties developed.
So that’s the reason for the ARS Project that we’re working on. It’s part of our role at the USDA to work with industry to the benefit of the American consumer, and to try to commercialize new products and increase the efficiency of the aquaculture industry.
What is the Alternative Feeds Initiative?
In November of 2007 the USDA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) launched the Alternative Feeds Initiative to accelerate development of other feeds for aquaculture. The initiative’s purpose is “to identify alternative dietary ingredients that will reduce the amount of fishmeal and fish oil contained in aquaculture feeds, while maintaining the important human health benefits of farmed seafood.”
The project was designed to take input from the public—from both pro and anti-aquaculture people—of what they felt was wrong with the aquaculture industry and feeds, in particular, and try to figure out a way forward.
Prior to that there is a group called Plant Products and Aquafeeds, or PPA, a group of scientists that got together with pretty much the same objective, to find alternatives to fishmeal.
Tell us about your spirulina research with respect to fish feed.
I’ve been putting spirulina in fish diets for close to thirty years. I’ve usually used it as a pigment source, or a chelated trace mineral source, with inclusion levels of 2-3% of the diet. But in the last couple years working with Carbon Capture Corporation, when they had large quantities available, we started investigating it as a protein source, with much higher inclusion levels.
How do you determine its value as an ingredient?
We’ve got a 5-step process in evaluating all ingredients. First, we look at the compositional analysis. That is, the level of nutrients and anti-nutrients—if they’re known—in that particular ingredient. The second step is to test palatability, or the effect of that ingredient on feed intake. We don’t want to do a growth study only to find out they won’t eat that new ingredient.
Each of these steps can result in a go, no go, situation. Compositional analysis sometimes can throw an ingredient out. Palatability can also throw it out.
The third step is digestibility. That’s where we determine the percentage of essential nutrients that are available in that ingredient. And this is not a go or no-go situation, but it gives us the information to formulate diets effectively for the growth study. For example, fishmeal has very high protein digestibility, about 95%. And an ingredient that has a protein digestibility of 85% is still good; we just need to put in a little more of that ingredient to get the same amount of protein as the higher digestible source. So it becomes more of a price point issue than a formulation issue.
The fourth step is again a go, no-go situation for industry, which is the effect of that ingredient on the feed pellet quality itself, and on the extrusion process during feed manufacturing. It’s very important for feed pellets to have high durability so they don’t break down during shipping and result in pellets that are uneaten, and thus have low feed conversion ratios and increased costs. Also, the amount of oil that the pellet can absorb is very important. The pellet needs to expand and have equal pore size within the pellet. We call that the functionality of the ingredient.
The fifth stage is of course to do the feeding study and formulate diets where we replace some or all ingredients with a test ingredient and look at growth rate, feed efficiency, and the effect of the new ingredient on organoleptics, or the sensory characteristics, of the final product. That is, does this new ingredient make it taste bad?
And how does spirulina test out?
With spirulina, we’ve looked at digestibility in four species now: rainbow trout, Atlantic salmon, pompano and hybrid bass. We’ve got the Atlantic salmon and the rainbow trout information back. We’re waiting for the other two species. We find good digestibility for all nutrients, which is important. As for palatability, it’s actually a palatability enhancer. I didn’t believe you could do it, but it actually makes rainbow trout eat more. They really like it.
We’ve also seen feed intake increase in the marine species such as white sea bass and yellowtail. When we added the spirulina to a fishmeal-free diet we got growth rates higher than the fishmeal control and the commercial reference diet. So we believe there is some nutrient in spirulina—and we’re not quite sure yet what it is—that is giving fish not only an enhanced growth effect, but also an increase in survival.
How does it compare to other options in price and results?
It’s not competitive at this point, but if the industry can start producing quantities of many tons and get it to a competitive price point, it will be readily accepted into the fish feed world, I believe. It’s going to come down to a cost per protein unit basis.
It’s a nice ingredient. I’ve seen products between 62% and 72% protein, and being that high in protein adds a lot of flexibility to diet formulation.
What other alga are showing promising results?
I haven’t seen any other alga in this kind of quantity. That’s what I really like about Carbon Capture. A lot of algae people call up and say they’ve got algae and we say okay, we need twenty kilos to get started, and they say they have a hundred grams now and can get us a hundred grams next month. That’s not a large enough quantity. If I need five hundred pounds from Carbon Capture, they get it. And you really need to be on at least that scale to get the evaluation done.
The biggest holdup with new ingredients for the fish feed industry is they are concerned about a steady supply of ingredient. They don’t want to work a new ingredient into the formulation and then not be able to get it. So that’s a lot of the concern with algae, until the industry gets big enough to prove that it can support a consistent supply.
I’m looking for ingredients wherever I can find them. At the World Aquaculture Society meeting two weeks ago, in New Orleans, I met three other algae companies who said they had large quantities of products, and we’re going to evaluate those.
What is the aquaculture industry looking for with respect to fish and animal feeds from algae? Are they interested more in the whole biomass, or the residual after the algae is processed for something else, like fuel?
I think there’s interest in whatever product becomes available. Whether it’s a co-product, or a bi-product, or the primary product depends on the person who’s growing it. But if you look at the economics—the oil is the one that always gets me. It hurts when the goal is to have a price point of a dollar a gallon for biodiesel, or oil derivatives, when we’re paying $4.50 to $5 a gallon for fish oil. And if the algae producers could produce an oil that has as much EPA and DHA as fish oil, it would be worth $4 or more per gallon. Why burn it as fuel if you can get that kind of price?
The protein is valuable, too, but there are a lot of other sources for protein. The trouble, though, with the omega-3’s—the long-chain fatty acids—is that right now their only real source is fish oil. Future sources are either going to be algae or genetically modified terrestrial plants, and I think algae will be more readily accepted than the GM oils.
So, if they produced algae that had 30% high omega-3 oils in it, and they expeller pressed it and took 20% away so the resulting biomass had 10% omega-3, with high protein, that would be a wonderful product.
Really what the animal feed industry would like from algae is different products. A liquid oil product would be one. A higher lipid protein product would be another. Or maybe just a high protein low lipid product that would give the feed manufacturers the capability to mix and match different algal sources for different feeding situations.
That’s really the difference in aquaculture versus terrestrial animals. There are over two hundred different aquaculture species being fed. And to come up with one ingredient or one diet for all of them is never going to work.
Anything else that algae producers need to consider in approaching the fish feed market as one of the options for their biomass?
I’ve seen a problem with several ingredient suppliers. Feed manufacturers have their mills set up to handle certain types of products and, for example, a wet product would be very difficult for a standard mill.
The ingredient needs to be flowable. Some ingredients are so flowable—such as spray-dried ingredients—that they’re difficult to handle in bulk. Solar-dried spirulina has a very good consistency. It’s easy to move around without dusting up too much, where the spray-dried spirulina, if you pump that into a giant silo that had a small hole in it, you’d walk into the mill the next day and be knee-deep in ingredient that came out of that small hole. So you want it flowable, but not too flowable.
How does the FDA fit into the future of this and what kind of regulations are you expecting?
The FDA has to approve all new ingredients for animal feeds. The ingredient suppliers need to talk with the FDA and make sure that the ingredient is approved to be fed, or those fish that have consumed it will not be able to be sold. You have to approach the FDA for each species of algae. Dr. John Machado with FDA is the one who is handling ingredients for the aqua feed industry.
In a perfect world scenario, how do you see the growth of aquaculture?
It’s clear that the growth of the aquaculture industry could be hampered by lack of available ingredients, because it has relied so heavily on fishmeal and fish oil. Those supplies are static. We need to find new sources, particularly for fish oil. And I think algal oils and algal proteins are perfectly situated to fill that need to supply the expanding aquaculture industry.
Aquaculture is growing at somewhere between 7% and 9% per year. It’s the fastest growing segment of agriculture. And as other countries become more affluent and buy higher proteins foods, the industry will continue to grow. | <urn:uuid:6c0eb51f-fdb7-44ec-b918-2601d39dfae8> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.algaeindustrymagazine.com/a-i-m-interview-usdas-dr-rick-barrows/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783402746.23/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155002-00053-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.951362 | 2,774 | 2.75 | 3 |
With the passage of the Goals 2000: Educate America Act, the commitment to improve the education of all students has become a national priority. Yet preparing students for the challenges of the future is not the responsibility of schools alone. Discussions on how to improve the quality of education in America have focused attention on the roles of family and community, and research supports the belief that high-quality education cannot be successfully accomplished without the active involvement of parents. Studies have shown that parent involvement in children's learning can have a positive effect on students' achievement and reduce the school dropout rate (U.S. Department of Education 1994). In an effort to encourage and increase the participation of parents in their children's schooling, Congress added an eighth goal to the National Education Goals that calls on schools to adopt policies and practices that actively engage parents and families in partnerships to support the academic work of children at home and shared educational decisionmaking at school.
In response to the Goals Panel's recognition of the role that parents can have in children's learning and school performance, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) and the National Institute on the Education of At-Risk Students (NIEARS) in the U.S. Department of Education, and the National Education Goals Panel requested this survey. The study was designed to provide information on the ways that schools are engaging parents in their children's education and the extent to which parents are responding to the opportunities for involvement that schools provide. The study was also intended to provide data that could be compared with data on the same topic collected from parents in the National Household Education Survey (NHES) in 1996, as well as those collected in the Prospects study, 1 initiated in 1991 to monitor trends in parent involvement in children's education.
This report presents the findings from the Survey on Family and School Partnerships in Public Schools, K-8 conducted for NCES by Westat, a research firm in Rockville, Maryland. The survey was conducted through the NCES Fast Response Survey System (FRSS) during spring 1996. FRSS is a survey system designed to collect small amounts of issue-oriented data with minimal burden on respondents and within a relatively short time frame. Short questionnaires were sent to a nationally representative sample of 900 public schools enrolling kindergarten through eighth grade students. Principals were asked to either complete the survey or assign its completion to the person most knowledgeable about parent involvement programs and activities at the school. Data have been weighted to national estimates of all public schools serving grades K- 8. Appendix A provides a detailed discussion of the sample and survey methodology. A table of standard errors for the figures in this report appears in appendix B, and the survey questionnaire is reproduced in appendix C.
The Survey on Family and School Partnerships in Public Schools, K- 8 addressed the following issues:
Other factors that influence school efforts to increase parent involvement in their children's education. Survey findings are presented for all public schools serving grades K- 8, and by the following school characteristics (defined in the Glossary of Terms in appendix A):
It should be noted here that characteristics of schools are often interrelated. For example, in this study the poverty concentration in a school and its minority composition were highly related, with 87 percent of schools with a high minority enrollment also identified as having a high concentration of poverty (see Table A-1 in appendix A).
City schools also were more likely to have a high concentration of poverty. Minority enrollment was correlated with both urbanicity and school size (Table A-2 in appendix A). However, because of the relatively small sample size used in this study, it is difficult to separate the independent effects of these variables.
All comparative statements made in this report have been tested for statistical significance through chi-square tests or t-tests adjusted for multiple comparisons using the Bonferroni adjustment and are significant at the 0.05 level or better. However, not all statistically significant comparisons have been presented, since some were not of substantive importance.
1 "Prospects: The Congressionally-Mandated Study of Educational Growth and Opportunity (1991-1994)." | <urn:uuid:d75e0014-bc0c-42d6-933a-a4f99f89f3cd> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/frss/publications/98032/index.asp?sectionid=2 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396875.58/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00106-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968992 | 835 | 2.75 | 3 |
Reduce the Number of Unwanted Animals
In FY 2011 the Montgomery County Humane Society (taypayer-funded
county shelter took in 8,685 animals. Of those, 2,811 were adopted and 1,163 were reunited with their owners (Source: MCHS
Annual Report for 2011). The shelter did not publish euthanasia
statistics, but the different between intakes and adopted/reunited
was 4,711. Despite improvements in adoption outreach, too many
animals are being killed.
Nationwide, an estimated 8 million to 12 million companion
animals enter animal shelters every year, and approximately 5
million to 9 million are killed.
Only 10 percent of the animals received by shelters have been
spayed or neutered.
Seventy percent of cats in shelters (7 out of 10) are killed
because there is no one to adopt them.
The pet overpopulation epidemic is so staggering that for every
animal born in the United States to have a home each and every human
would have to own 6 dogs and 9 cats -- i.e., a family of four would
have to own 24 dogs and 36 cats.
It costs U.S. taxpayers an estimated 2 billion dollars each year
to round up, house, kill and dispose of homeless animals.**
Think you'll find homes for your cat's kittens? People often say
they'll adopt and then back out. Even if they do adopt, that's a
home that could have gone to a cat or kitten on death row at a
Improve Your Pet's Health and | <urn:uuid:dd8c140a-f9fb-4ea1-bc5b-9d33570a5154> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.mcspca.org/catsnip.asp | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397695.90/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00054-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960079 | 330 | 2.734375 | 3 |
Skeptical School founded by Pyrrho of Elis (about 365-275 BCE). Pyrrho's immediate disciple was Timon.
Related categories 2
Ancient Greek Skepticism
An article on skepticism in Ancient Greece from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, by Harald Thorsrud of Temple University.
From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, by Leo Groarke. Article on the two movements in ancient philosophy, Pyrrhonism, and Academic Skepticism.
Classical Skepticism: Issues and Problems
By Peter Suber of Earlham College
Other languages 1
Last update:September 13, 2014 at 6:45:06 UTC | <urn:uuid:5b82196a-3eb6-4a95-8cb6-86529a0a3dc0> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.dmoz.org/Society/Philosophy/History_of_Philosophy/Ancient/Skepticism/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783395679.92/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154955-00097-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.766052 | 137 | 2.75 | 3 |
A series of tests conducted in conjunction with Vodafone exposed a set of aircraft avionic systems to simulated mobile phone transmissions.
They revealed various adverse effects on the equipment's performance.
Although the equipment allowed a margin above the "original certification criteria for interference susceptibility", the margin was not sufficient to protect against potential mobile phone interference under worst-case conditions, the authority said.
By submitting your email address, you agree to receive emails regarding relevant topic offers from TechTarget and its partners. You can withdraw your consent at any time. Contact TechTarget at 275 Grove Street, Newton, MA.
The study could be a blow to some airlines, such as Scandinavian Airlines System (SAS), which hoped to offer passengers the opportunity to use their mobile phones in the air as they do on the ground.
Mobile phone use has long been banned on flights, while the use of many other electrical devices, such as notebook computers, are banned on take-off and final approach.
But passengers, particularly business people, are interested in using their phones on planes to keep in touch with their offices and customers.
In the US, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) bans the use of mobile phones on flights because, like the CAA, it too is concerned about wireless calls interfering with a plane's navigation system.
From March 1996 to December 2002, CAA recorded 35 aircraft safety-related incidents that were linked to mobile phones.
The reported interference incidents included interrupted communications because of noise in the flight crew's headphones.
CAA recommends a continued ban on mobile phone use by passengers in aircraft and urges airlines to introduce safety procedures that ensure phones are switched off.
Whether the CAA study will encourage airlines to prohibit the use of mobile phones with flight-safe features remains to be seen.
Last week, SAS announced a policy for allowing passengers to use all mobile phone functions, such as calendars, address books and reading e-mail, that require no signal transmission.
To do so, passengers would require phones equipped with a flight-safe mode, which prevents a handset from sending or receiving signals required to make phone calls.
Nokia's 9210i Communicator and Sony Ericsson's P800 smart phone are among the first handsets with the flight-safe feature.
"We continue to recommend to our customers that they should turn off their mobile phones when inside aircraft and should only turn them back on if equipped with the flight-safe mode," said Nokia spokesman Damian Stathonikos. "But we understand that some airlines prefer passengers not to use their mobile phones at all." | <urn:uuid:0029f1ee-1c9a-4818-a9ef-0041bd677e8c> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240050663/CAA-study-Mobile-phones-still-threat-in-aircraft | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396027.60/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00198-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.951112 | 526 | 2.828125 | 3 |
The body has evolved ways to get rid of faulty stem cells. A University of Colorado Cancer Center study published today in the journal Stem Cells shows that one of these ways is a “program” that makes stem cells damaged by radiation differentiate into other cells that can no longer survive forever. Radiation makes a stem cell lose its “stemness.” That makes sense: you don’t want damaged stem cells sticking around to crank out damaged cells.
The study also shows that this same safeguard of “programmed mediocrity” that weeds out stem cells damaged by radiation allows blood cancers to grow in cases when the full body is irradiated. And by reprogramming this safeguard, we may be able to prevent cancer in the aftermath of full body radiation.
“The body didn’t evolve to deal with leaking nuclear reactors and CT scans. It evolved to deal with only a few cells at a time receiving dangerous doses of radiation or other insults to their DNA,” says James DeGregori, PhD, investigator at the CU Cancer Center, professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics at the CU School of Medicine, and the paper’s senior author.
DeGregori, doctoral student Courtney Fleenor, and colleagues explored the effects of full body radiation on the blood stem cells of mice. In this case, radiation increased the probability that cells in the hematopoietic stem cell system would differentiate. Only, while most followed this instruction, a few did not. Stem cells with a very specific mutation were able to disobey the instruction to differentiate and retain their “stemness”. Genetic inhibition of the gene C/EBPA allowed a few stem cells to keep the ability to act as stem cells. With competition from other, healthy stem cells removed, the stem cells with reduced C/EBPA were able to dominate the blood cell production system. In this way, the blood system transitioned from C/EBPA+ cells to primarily C/EBPA- cells.
Mutations and other genetic alterations resulting in inhibition of the C/EBPA gene are associated with acute myeloid leukemia in humans. Thus, it’s not mutations caused by radiation but a blood system reengineered by faulty stem cells that creates cancer risk in people who have experienced radiation.
“It’s about evolution driven by natural selection,” DeGregori says. “In a healthy blood system, healthy stem cells out-compete stem cells that happen to have the C/EBPA mutation. But when radiation reduces the heath and robustness (what we call ‘fitness’) of the stem cell population, the mutated cells that have been there all along are suddenly given the opportunity to take over.”
Think about it in terms of chipmunks and squirrels: reducing an ecosystem’s population of chipmunks may allow squirrels to flourish – especially if the way in which chipmunks are reduced changes the ecosystem to favor squirrels, similar to how radiation changes the body in a way that favors C/EBPA-mutant stem cells).
These studies don’t just tell us why radiation makes hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) differentiate; they also show that by activating a stem cell maintenance pathway, we can keep it from happening. Even months after irradiation, artificially activating the NOTCH signaling pathway of irradiated HSCs lets them act “stemmy” again – restarting the blood cell assembly line in these HSCs that would have otherwise differentiated in response to radiation.
When DeGregori, Fleenor and colleagues activated NOTCH in previously irradiated HSCs, it kept the population of dangerous, C/EBPA cells at bay. Competition from non-C/EBPA-mutant stem cells, with their fitness restored by NOTCH activation, meant that there was no evolutionary space for C/EBPA-mutant stem cells.
“If I were working in a situation in which I was likely to experience full-body radiation, I would freeze a bunch of my HSCs,” DeGregori says, explaining that an infusion of healthy HSCs after radiation exposure would likely allow the healthy blood system to out-compete the radiation-exposed HSC with their “programmed mediocrity” (increased differentiation) and even HSC with cancer-causing mutations. “But there’s also hope that in the future, we could offer drugs that would restore the fitness of stem cells left over after radiation.” | <urn:uuid:8bfb6d62-a93c-4279-a68b-b5129e7faac6> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.coloradocancerblogs.org/reprogramming-stem-cells-may-prevent-cancer-radiation/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397696.49/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00178-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953684 | 951 | 3.71875 | 4 |
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1 Answer | Add Yours
A secant is a straight line connecting two points on a curve; therefore, the first thing we need to do is solve for the y values at the two given values of x:
-2log(1)+3 = 3
-2log(1.5)+3 = 2.65
Therefore, the two points are (1,3) and (1.5,2.65).
Slope = rise/run:
Therefore, the slope of the secant line through the points on the curve at x=1 and x=2 is -0.7.
We’ve answered 327,591 questions. We can answer yours, too.Ask a question | <urn:uuid:4676f8fd-dd78-445a-9a48-6107d54b5a29> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.enotes.com/homework-help/what-answer-question-4-b-http-postimg-org-image-434805 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783394605.61/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154954-00076-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.793424 | 153 | 3.328125 | 3 |
Since the first outbreak of Ebola virus in 1976, the frequency and scale of the deadly disease’s outbreaks have increased. The 2014-2015 outbreak in West Africa caused 11,000 deaths, precipitated panic at airports and emergency rooms worldwide, and renewed the urgency to find cures.
Kartik Chandran’s group has zeroed in on what they believe to be one of the most vulnerable areas for drug targeting—viral entry into the host cell.
“We’re really interested in the initial step of Ebola virus infection—from the virus sticking to the surface of the cell all the way to entering the cytoplasm of the cell where all the goodies are that viruses need to replicate themselves,” says Chandran, a virologist at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in Bronx, New York.
Like other viruses in the Filoviridae family (filoviruses), Ebola virus is an enveloped RNA virus that uses a glycoprotein ‘spike’ molecule (GP) to navigate its way into host cells. The virus attaches to a cell and then coaxes the cell to engulf it and deliver it to a membrane compartment called the endosome, the first of a series of compartments that lead to lysosomes, the recycling yards of the cell.
Once there, GP binds to host cellular factors to bring the endosomal membrane and viral membranes close enough to meld together, ultimately dumping the virus’ RNA genome into the cell’s cytoplasm where it can replicate. However, exactly how GP and its host partners cause the energetically unfavorable proccess of fusion to occur is unclear.
“All filoviruses, including Sudan and Marburg viruses, exploit the same host factors [to get inside the cell],” explains Chandran. “If we can block those interfaces, we might be able to develop a treatment that works against all of these viruses.”
He and his team, led by postdoctoral fellow and virologist Jennifer Spence, set out to clarify how GP works with cellular factors to initiate and complete fusion. They published their findings this week in mBio. “We wanted to visualize the entire process in live cells—from single virus particles binding to cells, to their being trafficked inside the cell and fusing inside endosomes,” says Spence.
To do so, the team engineered the relatively benign vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV) to carry the Ebola GP protein, and labeled the viral membranes with a lipophilic, self-quenching dye. When the virus was mixed with human cells in a lab dish, Spence could follow fusion events in real time under the microscope. As viral membranes initially fused with the cell’s unlabeled endosomal membrane, the dye’s local concentration dropped and it de-quenched, emitting a flash of fluorescence.
As Spence explains, researchers already knew that Ebola virus GP first has to be cleaved by cellular proteases called cathepsins, and then must bind to a cellular protein called NPC1 for infection to occur. “But we didn’t know the precise role of GP-NPC1 binding in the Ebola entry process.”
The first thing Spence did was show that even the initial step of fusion, lipid mixing, could not take place if the human cells she used did not contain the NPC1 protein. It also wouldn’t work if the Ebola GP molecule had three mutations in it that blocked its ability to bind NPC1. This meant that the GP-NPC1 binding step is necessary for Ebola fusion to be triggered. Importantly, the team also demonstrated that the ZMapp™ antibody cocktail used to treat some Ebola survivors last year was indeed working by blocking GP’s role in fusion.
Next, Spence also looked at mutations in the domain of GP that mediates fusion, showing that one mutation allowed lipid mixing, but not full fusion, and another prevented lipids from mixing at all.
Finally, the team showed that even after the initial lipid mixing stage, the host cathepsin proteases were still needed for full fusion and viral infection to occur. Chandran speculates that these enzymes’ actions are needed again for the most energetically costly step when GP “jackknifes on itself” smushing and holding the cellular and viral membranes together to form a stable fusion pore that is big enough for infection to happen (see animation).
By watching individual virus particles fusing in real-time, Spence and Chandran also learned that very few particles actually make it all the way to the infection stage to deliver viral genes to the cell’s innards. “The propensity for viruses to fuse is pretty low,” says Chandran. “About only 5-10% of particles actually initiate fusion and only 1-2% of them are going to infect the cell.”
Ultimately, Chandran and Spence would like to rebuild the entire Ebola virus entry process from start to finish in their real-time laboratory system. “This is a very useful system for understanding the role of cellular factors during viral fusion, and for testing antiviral drugs and antibodies,” says Chandran.
He notes that drug or vaccine developers could then focus on disrupting those interactions between cellular and viral components: “Preventing the virus from binding NPC1 would be a great way to block Ebola virus infection.”
For more on the Ebola research in Chandran’s laboratory, see this movie made by Albert Einstein College of Medicine.
How the Ebola virus glycoprotein is thought to mediate fusion between cellular and viral membranes. Animation provided by Erica Ollman Saphire's group at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. | <urn:uuid:36056021-7a9f-48ec-bb69-52a3a174bdab> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://mbioblog.asm.org/mbiosphere/2016/02/catching-ebola-virus-in-the-act-of-fusion.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783395620.56/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154955-00012-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946578 | 1,216 | 3.25 | 3 |
Builders of Wooden Railway Cars ... and some of other stuff
Canada Car & Manufacturing Company
Toronto Steel, Iron & Railway Works Company, Ltd
The Canada Car & Manufacturing Company was given birth by the Toronto Steel, Iron & Railway Works Company, Ltd. The latter was founded in the mid 1860s by two Toronto stock brokers and financial agents, John L. Blaikie and William Alexander. It produced mainly signals and track appliances. One piece of its stationary steam engines was manufactured by William Hamilton & Sons’ St. Lawrence Foundry.
Through the years Blaikie invented a number of articles and processes useful to the railway industry, but by the early 1870s the company’s revenues were declining and they were looking for other fields of opportunity.
In 1872, Blaikie and Alexander were approached by a group interested in establishing a railway car factory using their works as a basis. Blaikie and Alexander would receive stock in the new enterprise in exchange for title to their factory. There was just one little problem. Their factory had been built on five acres of military reserve land, and their lease would expire in just eight years. A longer lease would have to be negotiated if the deal was to be worthwhile. And the negotiations would be complicated by the fact that in 1870, the Province of Ontario had purchased the reserve from the Dominion with the intent of building a new Central Prison. Car factory or prison, which was it to be?
In the usual manner of business and political negotiations (and Ashdown goes through all the details), the car factory needed the facilities, and the authorities needed an activity for their convicts. After long and sometimes contentious negotiations, the final agreement was that —
1. the car company would employ as many prisoners as the prison could provide, up to a maximum of 260. 2. the car company would provide training in the various trades required. 3.
the car company could use the manufacturing facilities being constructed as part of the prison.
4. the government would provide heat, light, power, water, tracks and offices at the prison. 5. the government would build stipulated iron-mongering equipment and facilities at the prison. 6. the car company might utilize prison space for storing lumber and other material. 7. the car company was not limited to the construction of railway cars.
It was 1871 before agreement was reached, and construction of the prison commenced, and October of 1873 before it was finished and the workshops turned over to the car company. During this time a great deal of renegotiation was carried on, and the car company ended up building and installing much of the track and machinery promised by the government.
Since the prison workshops would be connected to the car factory by only a road and a railroad track, the general plan was for the prisoners to build the trucks and woodwork for the cars at the prison and for the final assembly to be done in the car factory itself. The factory was thus set up to be primarily an assembly and finishing area.
Work continued during this time on the car factory itself, and was largely completed by the summer of 1873. It formally opened in February 1874 as the Canada Car & Manufacturing Company, Ltd. Unfortunately, during the several years of construction, and with the prisoner labor not yet available, the company lost several large orders for cars. It opened, however, with a substantial order for platform cars (flat cars) for the Great Western Railway and promise of a substantial order for trucks from the Intercolonial Railway, which was about to change its tracks from broad gauge to standard. It would be June, however, before prison labor would be available.
For much greater detail about this fascinating endeavor, see —
Ashdown, Dana William. Iron & Steam; A History of the Locomotive and Railway Car Builders of Toronto. Toronto, ON: Robin Brass Studio, 1999.
09 April 2006 | <urn:uuid:c33ebda8-4eae-49b5-a67b-0e8092c11a22> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.midcontinent.org/rollingstock/builders/canada_car.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397565.80/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00120-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.981846 | 798 | 2.734375 | 3 |
This section features the nutrition education curriculum developed by the Cristine M. Trahms Program for Phenylketonuria. We have used the activities to help children with PKU develop the skills needed to manage PKU. The activities have been tested by Clinic participants.
The curriculum is arranged by age group: preschool, school-age, and teen. It is divided into 14 modules that incorporate acceptance, knowledge and skill development. The activities are used for groups of children with PKU and can been adapted for use with individual children. Each activity includes a list of objectives, lesson plan, and an activity or worksheet that can be reproduced.
Please credit the Cristine M. Trahms Program for Phenylketonuria when making copies of activities.
Most of the books used in the activities can be found at public libraries or book stores. Ordering information is provided for books that might be difficult to locate.
Information developed for the parents of children with PKU can be found here. | <urn:uuid:138d411d-633c-4f3b-92e2-c41a86efade6> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://depts.washington.edu/pku/management/curriculum/index.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783403508.34/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155003-00022-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.938595 | 203 | 2.859375 | 3 |
The act and the dwellings.
Considering how many interests were affected by the Birmingham Improvement Scheme and the adoption of the Artisans’ Dwellings Act, it may be doubted if the scheme would have passed as it did had its full purport and meaning been fully considered and understood. Some persons saw that they would be grievously injured, and they offered strenuous opposition, but there were many others who only found out when it was too late what extreme and arbitrary power was conferred upon the authorities who put the Act into operation.
Of course the scheme was laid before the rate-payers in the usual manner, but few realised the importance of studying it well, or grasped the far-reaching character of its operations till too late.
Let me explain more especially what is meant by this. When it was decided to adopt Mr. Chamberlain’s scheme and make the new fine street, land was cleared and was let on leases by the Corporation. In letting this land, agreements were made that the new buildings, when consisting of shops, offices, &c., should be so many storeys high, the object, of course, being to make the properties, which would in due course revert to the city, the more valuable. When, however, these tall buildings were erected, adjacent premises were robbed of light and air, and when the owners or tenants of these injured premises asked for compensation they found out, at least in some cases, that the authorities were not liable. I believe I am right in saying that the powers conferred by the Act absolved them from indictments on the part of those whose property was damaged by diminished air or light. The result was that certain sufferers found to their mortification that they had no redress, but must raise their chimneys at their own cost, if necessary, and in other cases endure the inconvenience of a decreased supply of light. This was an unpleasant revelation that caused much gnashing of teeth among the owners of, and the dwellers in, the properties surrounding the tall buildings erected by the leaseholders of the Corporation.
As for those whose property was required and taken under the Act, it was all very well for owners and for those who had leases: they could not be molested without fair and proper payment. Shopkeepers and others, however, who were only annual tenants, had, I fear in many cases, to go empty away. Some of these had good, old-established businesses that had for years become identified with certain premises. It was nothing short of ruin to them to move, but they had to take up their goods and walk. This is the way that authorities often have to deal with the more or less helpless in view of what they consider to be the greatest good of the greatest number.
It will, of course, be said that some of these traders were extremely short-sighted not to have had leases of premises that were so all-important to them. In many cases, however, they were unable to obtain such agreements, the landlords being unwilling or unable to grant them. The result was that many a prosperous tradesman had his successful career cut short and passed into a retirement he did not desire, probably with a few warm curses upon the Town Council, the Improvement Scheme, and the schemers. | <urn:uuid:1203963a-6d4d-4dea-835a-95456a67790d> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.bookrags.com/ebooks/11356/7.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396875.58/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00191-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.993391 | 660 | 2.53125 | 3 |
In his classic 1872 book, The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals, Darwin wrestled with the challenges associated with interpreting animal behavior. Can we use psychological attributes to refer to animals in the same way we use them to describe other humans? When Darwin argued that emotions exist in both human and nonhuman animals, his work was branded as anthropomorphic, inappropriately projecting human characteristics onto animals. Ever since, many scientists have been reluctant to attribute mental states to animals, a trend that was exacerbated by the rise of behaviorism with its emphasis on external, directly observable behavior. Consequently, the specter of anthropomorphism continues to haunt attempts to study emotions, personality, and other social phenomena in non-human animals.
Of course, it is proper to exercise caution in interpreting animal behavior. However, a rigid refusal to acknowledge the possibility of emotions and personality in animals may itself be scientifically myopic and ultimately incur its own costs (Hebb, 1946). Most scientists unquestionably accept that the anatomy and physiology of humans has similarities with other animals. If there is cross-species continuity for morphological traits, shouldn’t there also be at least some level of continuity for psychological traits? The question that remains is the degree to which the continuities extend to psychological features; how many of the apparent similarities between humans and non-human animals reflect real similarities, and how many are merely anthropomorphic projections?
Animal studies have always played a central role in psychology. Starting with Pavlov’s classic work on conditioning in dogs, and including such landmark studies as Thorndike’s puzzling of cats and Skinner’s operant conditioning of rats, animal studies have long contributed to learning and other areas of psychology. Can animal studies also be harnessed to examine basic questions in social and personality psychology? The potential benefits of such work would seem to be enormous, contributing to such topics as the effect of animal companions on human behavior and its relation to mental health, as well as providing insight into basic social psychological processes. However, before such benefits can be realized, it is essential to determine the degree to which anthropomorphism obscures human judgments of animals.
With a little imagination, research methods from social psychology and cultural psychology can be mobilized to study anthropomorphism empirically. I have teamed up with Sam Gosling, University of Texas at Austin, and Oliver John, University of California, Berkeley, to address this central issue in animal research. To determine whether the charge of anthropomorphism in animal perception is warranted, we have adopted a comparative approach, comparing side-by-side perceptions of humans and dogs. In one comparative study of interpersonal perception using both dogs and humans as targets of perception, we have examined whether perceptions of animals are susceptible to inappropriate projections. Specifically, we have compared human-to-animal projections (i.e., anthropomorphism) with human-to-human projections (i.e., assumed similarity). Our findings so far suggest that animal caretakers do not project their self-views or their views of other people onto animals any more than they do to other humans. Indeed, projection seems to be a greater problem in judgments of humans than in judgments of animals.
Our research suggests that the idea of emotions and personality in animals cannot easily be dismissed as mere anthropomorphism. Instead, we argue that animal models may have much to contribute to social and personality psychology, just as they have done in other areas of psychology. Yet, very few animal studies appear in contemporary journals or books in social psychology. This has not always been the case. In the 1935 Handbook of Social Psychology edited by Carl Murchison, more than a quarter of the 23 chapters discussed social psychological issues within the context of nonhuman populations. Thus, we are arguing here not so much for a new idea but for the return to a set of ideas that once pervaded the field. We show how modern conceptual and analytical tools can be used to exorcise the ghosts of anthropomorphism, clearing the way for animal studies to make empirical contributions to basic research questions in social and personality psychology.
Leave a comment below and continue the conversation. | <urn:uuid:18722ef2-5dbc-493e-9e62-46bc098fdeba> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/uncategorized/our-beastly-selves-exorcising-the-ghosts-of-anthropomorphism.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396887.54/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00145-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.943656 | 836 | 3.34375 | 3 |
Mankind is decades away from taking to the skies in an Iron Man-like suit, but now that researchers at the University of Maryland have cracked the secret to building robot birds that can dive and swoop like the real thing, maybe those crazy human wing designs of yesteryear are worth trying again?
Research on what is now called the Robo Raven has been going on for eight years, and back in 2007 the creation had its first marginally successful test flights. But it was no where near as agile and deft as the real thing, so the research on the Robo Raven was shelved until last year when a radically new design was implemented, thanks to research students joining the project.
Each wing on the Robo Raven is powered and controlled by two independent actuators allowing it to move, flap, and even deform in a similar manner to an actual bird's wing. And it was this development, along with software breakthroughs that accurately recreated the motions of a wing, that lets the robot perform its impressive feats of flight. Of course those extra actuators and requisite batteries also added more weight, so the Robo Raven was put on a strict diet courtesy of custom 3D-printed and laser-cut polymer parts.
So its lightweight fuselage all but dashes our hopes for this technology leading to a set of human-sized wings letting us all fly. At least for the time being. As this research advances, let's just maintain hope that a Birdman-like reality is still in our future. [Pursuit of Unorthodox Ideas via Automaton] | <urn:uuid:0381d46e-8ed9-4975-b4ad-195d3f1fb779> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://gizmodo.com/weve-figured-out-how-to-make-robot-birds-fly-up-next-489481200 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783395560.14/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154955-00196-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.973886 | 314 | 2.9375 | 3 |
Current reclamation efforts fail to replace valuable carbon-storing landscapes, study finds.
Oil sands near Fort McMurray, Alberta. Photo: David Dodge, the Pembina Institute.
Contrary to industry and government views, the oil sands industry won't be able to restore valuable wetlands or replace their multi-billion dollar biological services, according to a new study by some of Canada's foremost scientists.
Drawing from environmental reports filed by 10 oil sands mining companies, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences study found that 64 per cent of the mineable landscape, an area the size of Rhode Island, currently supports peatlands.
These valuable and rare landscapes, which take thousands of years to form, filter water, feed caribou (an endangered species in the region), store carbon, concentrate mercury, recharge groundwater, protect biological diversity and act as flood protection.
But data filed by companies now digging up 167,044 hectares of the forest show that industry won't be replacing much of these services after they've mined it.
In particular, reclamation plans from four of 10 mining projects in the region show that industry will replace largely low boreal wetlands with dry man-made highlands. Instead of bogs and fens, the industry will build hills topped by plantation forests and fill large man-made lakes with toxic waste bordered by shrubs and salty marshes.
"It's a completely different landscape," says study co-author Suzanne Bayley, one of Canada's top wetland ecologists and a University of Alberta professor.
The original boreal vegetation will change from tamarack, spruce, sedges and Labrador tea to planted aspen, jack pine, blueberry and low-bush cranberry. The shift to a drier landscape also means more fire hazards.
Reclamation claims 'greenwashing': co-author
The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP), the industry's big lobby group, recently claimed on its website that oil sands companies will "return the land including reclaiming tailings ponds--to a sustainable landscape that is equal to or better than how we found it."
"But that's not possible and it's greenwashing and the company data prove it," adds Bayley. "CAPP changed their website yesterday," she claims.
Natural Resources Canada has made similar statements but hasn't yet removed them.
A 2011 brochure (titled Oil Sands: A Strategic Resource for Canada, North American and the Global Market) says industry will "remediate and reclaim 100 per cent of the land after the oil sands have been extracted so the area can sustain vegetation and wildlife such as that which existed before its development."
The wetlands study, co-authored by Canada's foremost water scientist David Schindler, says that the carbon storing services provided by peatlands will be destroyed forever and not replaced. This loss of carbon storage represents a debt of nearly $2.5 billion.
The study found that carbon released by the destruction of the peatlands could top 174 million tonnes and equal "seven years worth of mining and upgrading emissions at 2010 production levels." (The project, Canada's fastest growing source of atmospheric pollution, now emits 46 million tonnes of greenhouse gases a year or nearly as much as the entire nation of Norway.)
"A Shell television ad infers they are creating good native habitat," adds Bayley. "They are putting in seedlings, no peatlands, poor quality marshes, invasive species and lots of channels to send run-off to these end-pit lakes."
An end-pit lake is an old mining hole filled with acidic waste and then capped with freshwater. It is an untested toxic water disposal scheme.
"They have not been proven as fish replacement habitat," adds study co-author Schindler.
"Despite that, the Alberta government has shamelessly approved 27 without proof they will support fish or other organisms," he told The Tyee.
No compensation policy
Under Alberta law, oil sand companies only have to replace mined out boreal wetlands with something called "equivalent land capability." It has no legal definition.
Unlike most developed countries, Alberta does not require mining companies to pay for the wetlands they destroy by contributing to a special bank that funds wetland restoration somewhere else.
"That's what Exxon Mobile has to do in the United States," says Bayley, who has studied wetlands across the province and in the oil sands. "They have to compensate right there and pay into a fund and not wait for 40 years for something to happen."
Alberta, which has lost 60 per cent of its wetlands in the southern half of the province (that's analogous to an individual losing 60 per cent of their kidney function, says Bayley), currently has no provincial wetland policy. Nor does it have a proper inventory. As a consequence, there is no program to compensate for wetland losses in the oil sands.
"If we sacrifice all the peatlands for revenue and jobs, then the public should know what they are losing," adds Rebecca Rooney, a 28-year-old wetland ecologist who spent weeks trying to find data for the study in government basements. "The public shouldn't be told that there will be no environmental damage."
To date, 104 hectares have been officially reclaimed in the region at a cost greater than $100,000 a hectare. That site, an old soil dump, is not representative of the difficulties associated with reclaiming millions of tonnes of petroleum coke, quicksand-like clays, tailing ponds or billions of barrels of toxic mine waste.
The government's reclamation fund holds a billion dollars. Yet the Pembina Institute, an environmental watchdog and industry consultant service, estimated that it would cost more than $15 billion to reclaim just 68,674 hectares of disturbed land in 2010.
For years, the oil patch and the Alberta Chamber of Resources has fought any wetland policy that would require industry to replace every hectare of wetland lost in oil sands by paying for reclamation elsewhere.
A 2008 letter by CAPP to the Alberta Water Council calculated that restoring wetlands equal to 800 square kilometres to 2,500 km worth of peatlands destroyed by oil sands mining "would exceed billions of dollars."
The CAPP letter also admits that "it is impossible to replace peatlands with peatlands, as these wetland ecosystems depend on slow-growing plant species."
Bayley says that the Alberta government to date has no pilot projects on how to build high-quality marshes to replace peatlands. Because companies don't start reclaiming until they've mined for 40 years, industry is building a "large reclamation debt" and won't be able to tell if their efforts will be successful 50 to 100 years down the road.
Both Rooney and Bayley called for an effective wetland compensation and policy, as well as a better reclamation program based on standardized facts and accurate evaluation of costs and benefits.
"I acknowledge there will be oil sands development," says Bayley. "But if we are going to do it, we should have the best and fastest reclamation efforts."
[Tags: Energy, Environment.] | <urn:uuid:ee3aa632-4cba-4beb-be07-9e39c81907a2> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://thetyee.ca/News/2012/03/14/Wetlands-Damage/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783404405.88/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155004-00029-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953676 | 1,471 | 2.921875 | 3 |
|Publication number||US4632690 A|
|Application number||US 06/741,246|
|Publication date||Dec 30, 1986|
|Filing date||Jun 4, 1985|
|Priority date||Jun 4, 1985|
|Publication number||06741246, 741246, US 4632690 A, US 4632690A, US-A-4632690, US4632690 A, US4632690A|
|Inventors||Robert E. Colwell, Jr., Glenn L. Shira|
|Original Assignee||Colwell Jr Robert E, Shira Glenn L|
|Export Citation||BiBTeX, EndNote, RefMan|
|Patent Citations (11), Referenced by (26), Classifications (31), Legal Events (7)|
|External Links: USPTO, USPTO Assignment, Espacenet|
The instant invention relates to a process and structure for destroying hazardous and toxic chemical wastes. In the context of the subject disclosure, the present invention shall be referred to as the Pyrolytic and Combustion Destruct System (PCDS).
Toxic chemical wastes in the environment represent one of the most serious problems facing society today the world over. Ever increasing quantities of these toxic residues have overburdened the receiving environment (air, water, and land) and in many cases it can no longer handle the increasing rate of industrial waste generation and disposal. Today, the greatest percentage of hazardous waste is managed by landfilling, however, current environmental laws strictly limit this method of hazardous waste management. Because of stringent controls placed on hazardous waste management, many industries have been and will continue to be forced to close or restrict operations.
The need for proper disposal and management of hazardous and toxic wastes is an accepted reality. Land disposal has resulted in contamination of rivers, streams, and aquifers. Incineration is an alternative disposal method for destroying organic wastes, however, there has heretofore been no system capable of destroying such waste at commercially practical volumes and without regard to the physical state of the waste. In sharp contrast, the present invention is a significant breakthrough in this field in that it disposes of a large variety of hazardous waste (gases, solids, and liquids) in large quantities, it generates a by-product which is recycled, and it is energy efficient.
Although a large variety of hazardous wastes can be destroyed by incineration, complete destruction of hazardous waste by the incineration processes of the prior art can be quite complex, with the combustion temperatures, dwell time, feed conditions, and the physical and chemical characteristics of the wastes varying widely. For example, in the case of dioxins, these substances may be bound to particulate matter so tightly that they pass undestroyed through typical incineration systems.
Most toxic organic chemicals can be completely destroyed at 1832 degrees F. with a residence time of two seconds. It is believed that polychlorinated biphenyls and dioxins require 2200 degrees F. and two seconds dwell time. However, many wastes are completely destroyed at lower temperatures and shorter dwell times.
By the subject invention, the destruction of these chemicals is accomplished by a combination of pyrolysis and oxidation reactions. Unlike prior waste removal systems, the PCDS provides a system for the destruction of hazardous and toxic organic substances by pyrolysis and/or combustion. As used herein, pyrolysis refers to a chemical change in a substance resulting from heat alone which involves the breaking of stable chemical bonds, often resulting in molecular rearrangement. Similarly, as used herein combustion refers to a chemical reaction which produces light and heat.
The PCDS accommodates solids, sludges, liquids, and/or gaseous organic wastes. If desired, the PCDS can also accommodate inorganic heavy metal wastes, such metals being entrapped in the glass when solidified. The heavy metals cannot be readily released to the environment through the glass and they are not collected in the ash since there is no ash associated with the system.
The PCDS utilizes state-of-the-art methodology similar to the process for the manufacture of glass whereby the finished product is initially in a molten state during the chemical reaction process, and then becomes a solid glass product at ambient temperatures of 2200 degrees F. Temperatures ranging from 2300 to 2900 degrees F. in the molten mass, with flame temperatures exceeding 3000 degrees F. and combustion gas in the 2700 degree F. range, are realized in the glass manufacturing process. The PCDS system has been designed to provide an overall method to handle a large variety of hazardous wastes regardless whether they are liquid, solid, sludge or gaseous. The purpose of the PCDS is not to make glass per se, but to use the molten mass as the media for destruction of the hazardous and toxic substances.
Among the advantages the system has over present hazardous waste removal systems are: (1) it is capable of handling several ton size quantities of waste per hour, (2) an average temperature of 2600 degrees fahrenheit can be achieved and maintained during the reaction process, (3) dwell time for solids and liquids in the molten mass is in hours rather than seconds, (4) gases are in the combustion chamber and regenerator for at least 8 seconds, (5) the PCDS is capable of handling inorganic as well as organix substances, (6) the products can be re-cycled as raw material, and (7) during an emergency shutdown, the destruct process is continued at high temperatures for at least four hours ensuring that hazardous wastes are not vented or otherwise released to the atmosphere.
A basic understanding of the glass making process is helpful in appreciating the subject invention. In this connection, glass is typically produced in a continuous tank wherein the molten glass is maintained at a constant level and raw materials are fed at a rate equal to that at which the finished product is withdrawn. A typical glass furnace consists of a charging chamber called a doghouse wherein raw materials are fed to a melting chamber, a refining chamber which receives heated molten glass from the melting chamber and holds it for a time to achieve a suitable working temperature for withdrawl of the glass as a molten mass, and a space above the molten glass called the combustion chamber which provides combustion space for the flame. Frequently, two regenerator checkers chambers and an exhaust stack each having secondary checkers chambers, and a flue are included to complete the major components of a glass furnace.
The basic raw materials for making glass are composed of three predominate oxides: silica dioxide (sand), sodium oxide or soda ash, and calcium oxide or lime. The composition of glass is often expressed in terms of these oxides. For example, a typical glass product may comprise approximately 75 percent sand, 17.5 percent soda ash, and 7.5 percent lime. The melting of glass is carried out at temperatures ranging from about 2370-2925 degrees F. The heat must be sufficiently intense to bring about the reactions between the ingredients of the raw materials and to dissolve the silica.
With regard to the interior of a typical glass furnace, a regenerative continuous bridge wall tank furnace is often used for the on-going process wherein the glass forms a pool in the heart of the furnace, across which the flames impinge directly upon the molten material and the raw materials.
Heat recovery is commonly utilized whereby heat of combustion is stored by absorbtion from the spent flame gases, and in a succeeding cycle of the operation this heat is used to raise the temperature of incoming combustion air. In such an arrangement, the furnace commonly operates in two cycles which may be understood by following the path of the gases of combustion. The flame gases, having spent their heat on the interior of the furnace, leave the combustion chamber at a temperature only slightly higher than that of the furnace walls and contents, that is about 2730-2920 degrees F. These gases pass through chambers stacked with open brickwork which are herein referred to as regenerators or checker chambers. The outgoing gases yield approximately half of their heat content to the checkers which reach temperatures ranging from about 2370 degrees F. at the top or furnace side to 1200 degrees F. at the bottom or the flue side. At regular intervals of about 20-30 minutes, or when the prescribed temperature rise has taken place in a regenerator, the flow of the air and the fuel gas is reversed. The air now rises through the hot regenerator, becoming preheated. At the top of the regenerator, air and combustion fuel are contacted in a furnace port and produce a flame, the intensity of which is increased by the preheating. Combustion gasses pass through the furnace to a furnace port on the other side of divider structure 24 and enter a duplicate set of regenerator checker chambers completing the second cycle of operations.
A glass furnace often includes a continuous bridge wall tank which is built in two chambers, a melting chamber and a refining chamber, separated by a bridge wall. The bridge wall is usually two-layered, with an air space therebetween for ventilation to cool the blocks and retard corrosion. A passage in the bridge wall called the throat located at or near the bottom of the bridge wall leads the glass from the melting chamber to the refining chamber. A typical melting chamber of a 90 ton per day furnace is 16 feet wide, 24 feet long to the bridge wall, and 3 feet deep. The width gives ample distance for flame travel and the length provides the necessary area under the flame. The tank may be built, for example, of rectangular refractory blocks 12 inches thick and laid close together without mortar or cement. Since the outer surfaces of the blocks are exposed to the air and are relatively cool, the glass cannot penetrate a significant distance between the joints of the blocks without becoming so cold and stiff that it cannot flow out.
The bottom blocks may be of any suitable size to make up the required area of the melting chamber and should preferably extend about 1 foot in each direction from the outside dimension of the melting tank. The bottom blocks may be laid on a series of iron rods, for example, about 3/4 inch in diameter and laid across 6 inch I-beams spaced 18 to 24 inches apart. These are preferably supported on girders of 10 or 12 inch I-beams running longitudinally and resting on brick piers rising from a basement beneath the tank. The basement, which is approximately 15 feet deep, is necessary to provide the required height for the regenerator chambers. The side walls of the chambers may be, for example, 42 inches high and built of refractory blocks 18 to 24 inches wide.
At the back or the charging end of the melting chamber, there is a vestibule known as the doghouse. The doghouse is covered and provides an area wherein the batch is sintered before becoming exposed to the full velocity of the flames. At the front end of the melting chamber there is an opening which may be about 24 inches wide and 12 inches high known as the throat. This is built into the bridge wall with the opening flush with the bottom of the tank. The temperature of the refining chamber is normally about 572 degrees F. lower than that of the melting chamber.
Above the surface of the molten glass in a glass furnace is a combustion chamber commonly referred to as a superstructure for the flame as well as the final covering or crown. The superstructure typically consists of refractory walls called breast walls rising about two feet above the top of the blocks and supporting a crown arch on skew blocks. The breast walls may be offset 12 inches to the outside and are supported on steel members carried on brackets on the vertical buckstays, which brace the entire structure together.
The I-beams carrying the bottom blocks may project about 2 feet on either side; and on their outer ends are bolted heavy angle irons called heel plates, to carry the bottom ends of the buckstays. The buckstays rise above the height of the crown and are fastened together at the tops by tie rods at least 11/2 inch in diameter, and thus carry the horizontal thrust of the crown arch. The tie rods are threaded and provided with nuts which can be adjusted to allow for expansion as the furnace is heated. The crown of the melting chamber is typically an arch with a radius equal to its span. In a 90 ton per day unit this radius could be about 26 feet.
A glass furnace typically includes air ports in the wall through which fire enters the combustion chamber from a checkers chamber. Gas and air meet in the port neck, several feet from the inside of the wall, so that combustion is well under way as the mixture enters the tank. Fuel is fed through nozzles over ports, under ports, or in the sides of the port necks, directed towards the combustion chamber.
These burner nozzles are directed toward the batch of glass and at an angle toward each other so that the streams of gas cut across the stream of air, meeting in front of the port area.
Regenerator checkers chambers often are located behind the charging end of the melting compartment. In the unit described above, these chambers may have dimensions of about 8 feet wide, 14 feet long, and 12 feet high. The chambers are partitioned by a wall of fire and brick. The flues of exhaust stacks are spanned by rider arches to carry the firebrick checkers. The flues are frequently connected to two secondary checkers chambers. These secondary checkers are connected at one end to the stack for releasing the inert gases generated via the detoxication process to the atmosphere, and at the other end to a respective primary checkers chamber.
In addition, between the bridge wall and between the blocks and the buckstays, jack bolts, adjustable by turnbuckles, retain the block walls in position against the thermal expansion of the refractories and against the pressure of the molten glass. A system of wind pipes and nozzles for cooling the outside of the melting chamber walls and the melt line is generally required to retard corrosion.
It is a general object of the present invention to provide a hazardous waste removal system capable of eliminating a relatively large variety of wastes.
It is a particular object of this invention to provide a hazardous waste removal system capable of simultaneously eliminating solid, sludge, liquid and gaseous wastes.
It is another object of this invention to provide a hazardous waste removal system capable of eliminating dioxin and PCB materials.
It is yet another object of this invention to provide a hazardous waste removal system which is energy efficient.
It is a still another object of this invention to provide a hazardous waste removal system capable of eliminating wastes in relatively large quantities.
It is a further object of this invention to provide a process for eliminating a relatively large variety of hazardous wastes.
It is still a further object of this invention to provide a process for eliminating hazardous wastes in relatively large quantities.
It is yet a further object of this invention to provide a process for eliminating hazardous wastes containing dioxins.
It is yet a further object of this invention to provide a process for eliminating hazardous wastes which is energy efficient.
It is still a further object of this invention to provide a process for eliminating hazardous wastes which produces essentially no ash or carbonaceous residue.
It is still a further object of this invention to provide a process for eliminating hazardous wastes whereby some or all of the solid product is recycled as a raw material to the process.
One preferred embodiment of the invention which is intended to accomplish at least some of the foregoing objects comprises a a glass making furnace having a melting chamber for melting and heating materials contained therein, a refining chamber connected to said melting chamber via a ventilated throat in a bridge wall and having a glass exit port, a first doghouse for entering materials into said melting chamber, a burner unit for melting said raw materials into a molten mass and for heating said molten mass, a first and second primary checkers chamber connected to said combustion chamber via a respective air port, a divider structure separating said primary checkers chambers and respective air ports corresponding thereto, at least one secondary checkers chamber coupled to said primary checkers chambers and to at least one stack including a flue for causing circulation of air flow in alternate directions through the combustion chamber, at least one hazardous gas injection port coupling to each said primary checkers chamber for injecting gaseous hazardous waste thereto; and at least one hazardous liquid injection port coupling to said melting chamber for injecting liquid hazardous wastes directly into said melting chamber.
The process for removing hazardous waste in a glass making furnace having a melting chamber, a refining chamber, a checkers chambers, doghouse, and a stack according to a preferred embodiment of the invention comprises the steps of generating an extended flame having a first directed path in a combustion chamber immediately above said melting chamber, said flame directly impinging on a surface of molten mass contained in said melting chamber and said molten mass being largely comprised of raw materials for making glass; injecting into said molten mass in said melting chamber liquid solid or sludge type hazardous or toxic waste material through said doghouse; continuing heating said molten mass by said flame while convection currents are naturally formed to circulate said molten mass in said melting chamber; transferring said molten mass from said melting chamber to said refining chamber upon neutralization of certain hazardous or toxic waste material embodied therein; and pouring resulting glass product from said working chamber.
Other objects and advantages of the present invention will become apparent from the following detailed description of a preferred embodiment taken in conjunction with the accompanying drawings wherein:
FIG. 1A is a top view of a typical glass making furnace.
FIG. 1B is a side view of the glass making furnace shown in FIG. 1A.
FIG. 2A is a top view of the PCDS of the present invention.
FIG. 2B is a side view of the PCDS as shown in FIG. 2A.
FIG. 3A is an illustration of the path of air flow and directed flame in one cycle of operation of the PCDS system.
FIG. 3B is an illustration of the path of air flow and directed flame in another cycle of operation of the PCDS system.
Referring now particularly to FIGS 1A and 1B wherein a conventional regenerator type glass furnace is illustrated respectively in top and side view. A melting chamber 10 is shown holding a volume of molten mass therein and a refining chamber 14 having glass exit ports 11 is shown coupled to the melting chamber 10 via a throat connection 26 which is ventilated by ventilation port 29. Molten glass flows from the melting chamber to the refining chamber and then out through the exit port 11. Reference numeral 24 designates a divider wall separating a dual set of primary checkers chambers 18 which are coupled to a single secondary checkers chamber 32 beneath the stack 22. The stack includes a flue which draws air and creates air flow from one primary checkers chamber to the other through the combustion chamber 16 above the melting chamber 10. Reference numeral 20 designates respective air port openings leading from a primary checkers chamber 18 to the combustion chamber 16. A doghouse 12 located on either side of the melting chamber serves to inject raw materials of glass into the melting chamber. A burner unit 17 is located in said air ports with fuel injection nozzles 17 directed towards the interior of the combustion chamber. The raw materials of glass are heated and churned in the melting chamber until becoming molten glass suitable for removal from the furnace.
In one embodiment, the PCDS apparatus comprises a configuration of an adapted glass furnace for destroying hazardous and toxic waste. In a typical glass-making operation as described above, raw materials are mixed and charged into the melting chamber through the dog house by either a batch or continuous process. In the instant invention, liquid and solid waste materials may be mixed with the raw materials of glass or recycled cullet prior to being charged into the melting chamber. In the melting chamber, the charged materials are heated to temperatures of around 2700 degrees F. Since the temperature is not constant in all horizontal planes in the melting chamber, convection currents are established which serve to thoroughly mix the waste materials and to homogenousely distribute these materials in the molten glass within the melting chamber. Liquid and gaseous waste may also be injected through the side wall or bottom of the chamber. Due to the viscosity of the glass and the convection currents within the chamber, the wastes are thoroughly mixed and converted to non-hazardous products. Should fuel oil be used in the combustion process, liquid waste products can be mixed with the fuel which will serve to destroy this waste material since the flame temperature is in excess of 3000 degrees F. Fuel injection nozzles are preferably located above the molten mass and adjacent one end of the melting chamber, directed towards the surface of molten mass and the other end of the melting chamber to provide an elongated flame. The nozzles operate in alternate succession for coordination with alternating air flow in the combustion chamber. As the fuel is combusted and the flame impinges on the surface of the molten glass it forms gaseous products in excess of 2700 degrees F. Hazardous waste products in the form of gases and particulate may be injected into these extremely hot combustion gases and destroyed prior to removal through the stack.
The present invention preferably utilizes a regenerator type chamber which allows the gas to flow through a primary secondary generator before exiting through the stack. This allows gases to remain in the PCDS chambers at extremely high temperatures for at least 8 seconds, thus insuring complete destruction of hazardous products. During normal operations, air pollution control devices are used on the stack to collect particles. If desired, the particulate gathered during the pollution control process can be recycled with the raw material.
As previously mentioned, silica dioxide (sand), sodium oxide (soda ash), and calcium oxide (lime) are the three major ingredients for making glass. The composition of a typical glass product expressed in percentages of the compounds is approximately 75% sand, 17.5% soda ash, and 7.5% lime. In a 90 ton per day furnace, 3.75 tons (7,500 pounds) of raw material are charged into the melting chamber every hour. Simultaneously, 3.75 tons of molten glass are extracted. The weight of each ingredient of material charged into the furnace each hour is:
Soda ash=17.5%×7,500=1312 lbs.
When a glass batch is mixed, waste glass referred to as cullet is often mixed with the raw materials. The usual proportion of cullet, which has preferably been crushed to a fine mesh, is between one fourth and one-half of the total charge. These raw materials and cullet are typically automatically weighed and mixed.
The mixing is a rotary operation whereby blades, which act as shovels, lift and spread the material effectively. The batch can be made into pellets by wetting the batch with a liquid bonding agent. The mix is then pelletized by a forming machine.
Forming the batch into pellets eliminates the loss and inconvenience of dusting both during the mixing and charging of the batch and during the melting operation. During start up, several batches of raw material are charged into the furnace for the purpose of making cullet. After several batches of glass have been manufactured for this purpose, hazardous waste is then charged to the furnace.
The solid hazardous waste material to be destroyed, for example contaminated soil, will be contained in an enclosed controlled area. In a preferred embodiment, a batch of raw material is weighed and mixed with an amount of solid waste which equates to up to 35% by weight of the raw material. For example, the total weight of each batch is 7,500 pounds, up to 35%, or 2,625 pounds of waste is added to the basic batch. The waste is thoroughly mixed with the raw materials and pellitized through methods well known in the art. These pellets are fed directly to the mechanical feeding device without exposure to the open atmosphere.
A feeding mechanism such as a rotating screw type feeder, which operates in a water cooled cylinder, is preferably sealed in the back wall of a closed dog house to avoid heat loss. The feeding mechanism may be automatically operated to systematically charge the melting chamber with pellets that equates to 7,500 pounds per hour.
Inside the PCDS, glass formation is carried out at a relatively high temperature, for example, at about 2850 degrees F. The PCDS is at full heat when it receives the charge, and in the case where the charge contains hazardous waste, the melting chamber is filled with molten glass. The pellet charge arrives directly upon the molten glass and is immediately exposed to the full heat of the furnace.
Within the melting chamber, currents exist having their origin in the displacement of lighter hot molten glass, by heavier cooler molten glass. In a continuous wall tank of the bridge-wall type at least three principal types of such currents have been identified. Since the center of the tank is hotter than the sides, a pair of elliptical currents are set up passing from the central portion of the surface toward the side walls, down the cool walls and along the bottom to the center, where the molten glass again rises. Since the charging end of the tank and the bridge wall is cooler than the central portion, a flow is set up traveling back from the hot spot on the surface toward the charging end, with a similar surface flow traveling toward the bridge wall. The glass in these currents finds its way down the end walls and along the bottom to rise again under the hot spot. The third type of current is that which flows up to the surface as the glass passes through the throat into the working chamber, down the breast wall, and back along the bottom to the throat. These currents are shown by arrows in FIGS. 2A and 2B which illustrate respectively a top and side view of the PCDS system structure. Advantages of these currents are they help to mix the ingredients of the glass and the hazardous waste making it is homogeneous mix. The convection currents from the hot spot toward the back wall of the tank are a considerable aid to melting operations since they serve to prevent partially melted ingredients from passing rapidly down the tank and being drawn into the refining end. Convection currents are caused by the lower density of glass in the center of the tank and are limited by the rate at which heat can pass down into the mass of glass.
In FIGS. 2A and 2B, like numerals indicate like parts as in FIGS. 1A and 1B which illustrate a conventional regenerator type glass furnace. The particular PCDS system structure shown in FIGS. 2A and 2B has but only one stack, although more may be used as in the structure of FIGS. 1A and 1B.
During the melting process, it is believed that the alkali members of the batch begin almost immediately to fuse and alkali silicates are produced. As silica and other infusible constituents are dissolved, gases are liberated from carbonates and from hydrates, nitrates, and sulfates. The mass is agitated by these escaping gases which aids the mixing process. The cullet entering with the charge also assists in dissolving the less soluble ingredients.
As the batch melts, air trapped between the sand, soda ash, and lime, and the carbon dioxide and other gases set free by chemical reactions, create bubbles. Large bubbles, with a diameter greater than one millimeter escape from the melting glass, however, the time required for a one millimeter bubble to rise one meter in the molten glass is approximately 1.4 hours. The fine bubbles, less than 0.1 millimeter in diameter require a relatively long time to be eliminated simply by rising to the surface. In fact, it is estimated that 140 hours are required for a 0.1 millimeter bubble to rise one meter in the molten glass. Since gases dissolve in liquids, the tiny bubbles which have a large amount of surface for their volume will frequently disappear as the gas diffuses into the glass.
Viscosity is an important property of glass which not only makes possible the glassy state but also controls the rise of bubbles from the melt--the refining process. A high temperature and a resultant lessening of viscosity is necessary in order to clear the glass of bubbles. The viscosity of glass changes more rapidly at low temperatures than it does at the operating temperatures of the melting furnace. When the glass is cooled to about 750 degrees F., the glass becomes practically rigid.
Liquid wastes may be injected into the PCDS system via one of two ways. As shown in FIGS. 2A and 2B, a number of liquid waste injection ports 40 are arranged on the side walls of the melting chamber 10. These ports may also be located at the bottom of the melting chamber; their main purpose is for injecting liquid waste material directly into the molten mass within the melting chamber while the molten mass is in the molten state. Liquid wastes such as PCB may be mixed in appropriate proportions with the injected fuel via a fuel nozzle 17 in this manner, the liquid waste is directly amidst the combustion flames.
A mixture of solid and liquid wastes constituting a sludge type mixture combination may also be injected into the melting chamber via a dog house 12. The dog house is a multipurpose injection port able to inject wastes in generally solid or sludge forms. In a preferred embodiment of the PCDS system, one doghouse is located on each side of the melting chamber across from the divider structure 24.
Gaseous wastes may be injected via injection ports 42 shown in FIGS. 2A and 2B. From there, they are mixed with warm air in a primary checkers chamber 18 and drawn into the combustion chamber 10 via an air port 20 due to air flow action caused by a flue 30 in stack 22. In this manner, gaseous wastes are directly exposed to flames in the combustion chamber. Due to the air flow, flame originating from one burner nozzle extends toward the bridge-wall 28 and around towards the other side of the combustion chamber 16 as shown in double arrows. This elongated flame path enables thorough destruction of the gaseous wastes. A dwell time of eight seconds is preferably achieved for such gaseous wastes in the furnace and checkers chambers to ensure complete destruction of the gaseous wastes.
The stack 22 via its flue structure 30 and a secondary checkers chamber 32 on the base thereof causes alternating air flow from a primary checkers chambers 18 on one side of the combustion chamber 16 to another primary checkers chamber 18 on the other side. This air flow action is illustrated (in double arrows) in FIGS. 3A and 3B. While air flow is as shown in FIG. 3A, the fuel nozzle on side A is operative for supplying combustion flames (in single arrows) to be carried in a counter clock-wise direction. While air flow is as shown in FIG. 3B, the fuel nozzle on side B is operative for supplying combustion flames to be carried in a clock-wise direction. In this manner, injected gaseous wastes are first preheated via temperatures in a checkers chamber 18 and then drafted into a circulating air flow through the combustion chamber 16 to another checkers chamber 18 on the opposing side of divider structure 24. Of course, more than one such stack may be accommodated in parallel, if desired.
The alternating air flow switches in succession every 20-30 minutes. The air temperature at top of the primary checkers chamber is about 2800 degrees F. and 1100 degrees F. at the bottom of the secondary checkers chamber 30. The fire bricks surrounding the checkers chambers absorb and retain heat for lessening heat dissipation. The hot preheated air from the checkers chambers makes the PCDS an efficient system minimizing fuel costs. The air when traveling through the combustion chamber amidst the flames is believed to reach 3000 degrees F. and a dwell time of at least 8 seconds is achieved.
In one embodiment of the invention, the circulated air is vented outdoors via stack 22; however, in another embodiment, the entire PCDS may be a closed system wherein the circulated air from the stack may re-enter the air flow paths via gaseous waste injection ports 42. Furthermore, in another embodiment, if the PCDS is located next to a conventional municipal furnace, the exhaust therefrom may be channeled to the gaseous waste injection ports 42. In the alternative, the PCDS need not be entirely closed, and some air may be recirculated while some released. But in either case, any released air would not contain hazardous or toxic wastes.
The circulated hot air may even be routed to vaporize water in an aqueous sludge of waste material before the material is injected into the melting chamber via the doghouse.
The PCDS system provides many different possibilities for preparing and injecting solid, liquid, gaseous, and sludge type waste material into the melting chamber. One with ordinary skill in the art can recognize many different alternatives not limited to only those specifically discussed herein.
Subsequent to sufficient dwell time in the melting chamber, the molten mass containing destroyed waste materials is guided toward refining chamber 14 via a throat channel 26. A ventilation port 29 envelops the throat for bringing in cool air to lower the temperature of molten mass as it passes through throat 26 into the refining chamber 14 and to retard corosion of the fire brick as is the case in a conventional glass furnace. From the refining chamber the molten glass mass is poured from glass exit ports 11 to be sent to land fills and/or recycled as cullets to be charged into the melting chamber via a doghouse.
Structurally, the apparatus of the present invention employs a furnace similar to the type shown in FIGS. 1A and 1B. The PCDS structure is illustrated respectively in FIGS. 2A and 2B in top and side views. Hazardous gas injection ports 42 are added on both sides of the furnace for connection to the primary checkers chamber, and hazardous liquid injection ports 40 are added on both sides and/or in the bottom of the furnace for direct injection of liquid wastes into the melting chamber. In a preferred embodiment, a doghouse is provided on each side of the adapted furnace structure so that waste materials can be charged into the melting chamber in coordination with the activation of alternate nozzles on either side and alternate direction of air flow in the combustion chamber.
In describing the invention, reference has been made to a preferred embodiment. Those skilled in the art, however, and familiar with the disclosure of the subject invention may recognize additions, deletions, substitutions, modifications and/or other changes, which will fall within the purview of the invention as defined in the following claims.
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|U.S. Classification||588/314, 976/DIG.393, 588/406, 65/335, 422/168, 588/321, 65/136.3, 65/134.8, 501/155, 976/DIG.384, 65/134.5, 65/347, 588/405|
|International Classification||C03B5/04, C03B5/235, B09B3/00, G21F9/14, C03B5/00, G21F9/32|
|Cooperative Classification||B09B3/005, C03B5/235, C03B5/005, G21F9/14, G21F9/32, C03B5/04|
|European Classification||B09B3/00D4M, C03B5/00B, C03B5/04, G21F9/14, G21F9/32, C03B5/235|
|May 18, 1988||AS||Assignment|
Owner name: CAPITAL CREDIT CORPORATION, AS ASSIGNEE OF AMERICA
Free format text: PURSUANT TO JUDGMENT FILED IN COUNTY COURT, FAIRFAX COUNTY, VIRGINIA ON JULY 2, 1987, JUDGE HEREBY ORDERS A LIEN ON SAID PATENT.;ASSIGNOR:COLWELL, ROBERT, JR., DEFENDANT BEFORE THE FAIRFAX COUNTY JUDGE;REEL/FRAME:004856/0119
Effective date: 19870702
|Jul 11, 1989||AS||Assignment|
Owner name: NELSON, RONALD
Free format text: ASSIGNMENT OF ASSIGNORS INTEREST.;ASSIGNOR:CAPITAL CREDIT CORPORATION;REEL/FRAME:005152/0067
Effective date: 19890412
|Feb 5, 1990||FPAY||Fee payment|
Year of fee payment: 4
|Jun 2, 1994||FPAY||Fee payment|
Year of fee payment: 8
|Jul 21, 1998||REMI||Maintenance fee reminder mailed|
|Dec 27, 1998||LAPS||Lapse for failure to pay maintenance fees|
|Mar 9, 1999||FP||Expired due to failure to pay maintenance fee|
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MONDAY, Jan. 24 (HealthDay News) -- Sleeping in on the weekend may help children fight obesity, a new study suggests.
Too little sleep puts kids at risk of obesity and other health conditions, but "catch-up" sleep on weekends and holidays can mitigate the effects of weekday sleep deprivation, researchers say.
"In the United States, the sleep of our children is clearly not enough," said lead researcher Dr. David Gozal, chair of pediatrics at Comer Children's Hospital at the University of Chicago.
Gozal's team monitored the sleep patterns of 308 children for a week and compared their sleep patterns with their body mass index (BMI), which is a measurement that takes into account height and weight. The children, who were 4 to 10 years old, averaged eight hours of sleep a night.
"This is way lower than the recommended amount of sleep that kids should get, which is about 9.5 to 10 hours at this age," Gozal said.
Among the children who got the recommended amount of sleep, the risk of obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular problems was nil, Gozal said.
"But, as the amount of sleep became shorter and the regularity of sleep became less organized, the risk for obesity increased," he said.
"Kids who had the shortest sleep and had a more disorganized sleep schedule had more than a fourfold increase in the risk of being obese," he noted.
These children also had increased risk for cardiovascular problems and pre-diabetes, Gozal said.
However, if these children consistently slept longer on weekends to compensate, the risk for obesity and metabolic problems was reduced to a 2.8-fold increase. "It did not normalize it. It's still a risk but not as much as keeping your crazy short sleep schedule even during weekends," Gozal said.
It is this combination of less sleep and irregular sleep that appears to result in metabolic problems, such as high blood sugar, Gozal said.
The report is published online Jan. 24 in advance of print publication in the February issue of Pediatrics.
Gozal says that other studies have shown that inadequate sleep has biological effects, including high blood sugar and cravings for sweet and high-fat foods. Insufficient sleep also makes it harder to lose weight, he said.
"All this would suggest that sleep is an important regulator of metabolism," Gozal said. "If we abuse our sleep by not sleeping enough, then we are likely to pay the price by being heavy and being at risk for cardiovascular and all the other metabolic complications," he said.
Children are sleeping less for various reasons, Gozal said. Busy family schedules and electronic media -- cell phones, computers and TV -- interfere with healthy bedtime routines. The result is that sleep suffers, he said, noting that while bedtime can be extended, we still have to get up at the same time.
"Children should follow a regular [sleep] schedule," Gozal said. "Follow the rule of sleep and you will be happy," he urged.
Frederick J. Zimmerman, of the department of health services at the University of California Los Angeles, said the study largely confirms earlier research that found inadequate sleep is a risk factor for obesity among children.
The new research offers a "tantalizing suggestion that sleep that is inadequate both in duration and in consistency may have adverse metabolic effects," he added. However, it does not explain why obesity and sleep are related, Zimmerman said.
"It could be that obesity causes disturbed sleep or that inadequate sleep increases the risk of obesity. It could also be that a third factor, such as nighttime television, may lead both to obesity and to poor sleep," he said.
Despite these uncertainties, the consensus is that parents should create an environment in which children can consistently get adequate, restful sleep, Zimmerman said.
"As difficult as it is for parents to consistently enforce early bedtimes, it may still be one of the easiest ways to promote happy, healthy children," he added.
So, watch the clock, these experts say. The study found that parents tend to overestimate the amount of sleep their kids get, usually by 60 to 90 minutes, Gozal said.
For more information on children and sleep, visit the Nemours Foundation.
SOURCES: David Gozal, M.D., Herbert T. Abelson Distinguished Professor and chairman, Pediatrics, Comer Children's Hospital, University of Chicago; Frederick J. Zimmerman, Ph.D., Fred W. and Pamela K. Wasserman Professor and department chair, Health Services, University of California Los Angeles; Jan. 24, 2011, Pediatrics, online
All rights reserved | <urn:uuid:dab9d046-488b-4047-aa1e-cd60f8d3dff6> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.bio-medicine.org/medicine-news-1/Insufficient--Irregular-Sleep-Tied-to-Kids-Obesity-78647-1/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783391766.5/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154951-00122-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974075 | 974 | 3.140625 | 3 |
|4. Statistical Metadata Systems (German Federal Statistical Office)||German Federal Statistical Office||6. Organizational and workplace culture issues (German Federal Statistical Office)|
5.1 IT Architecture
Given that the Verbund - explicitly and implicitly - follows a step by step approach, no single, all-encompassing metadata system exists or will exist in the future. Instead the metadata architecture will consist of different independent systems. Each system will be developed on its own and therefore have its own IT-architecture both in terms of data model and business architecture.
To allow internal and (at a later stage) external users to access the metadata stored in the existing metadata repositories (including various applications that in one way or another store metadata) a web portal will be set up (see 1.2 "metadata portal"). In order to connect to the portal, each of the participating applications will need to have web service functions.
However, when an assessment of prospective underlying systems began, it soon became clear that establishing a technical connection between the systems and the portal was not the decisive issue. Instead it turned out that the systems had different ideas on how to structure metadata. Not only were the formats and data models unique, each system also had its own terminology. Sometimes, the same term could mean different things in different systems. While this was acceptable or even desired with respect to the different tasks of the systems, it surely complicates interaction. Hence, it soon became clear that no meaningful presentation of the content could be given without a shared metadata model and a common terminology to name and identify the metadata.
In order to arrive at such an overarching model several international metadata models were reviewed. However, with the Census 2011 having become the most important issue, the insights gained will first find application in the metadata system for the census. Within step 12 - metadata (see 1.), a possible overarching model as a solution for the interaction of the different systems still has to be discussed. Meanwhile, a first step towards a metadata portal will be to make Statistikdatenbank accessible via web services to internal users of the Verbund.
With respect to the census, the work began with choosing a metadata model that would fit the requirements of the census. The census is based on existing register information that will be combined with multiple surveys for data not covered by the registers. As a result, there are different data sources to be described, which often contain slightly different variables. Therefore, the task of a comprehensive metadata management is to track slight changes - for example in the meaning of terms or in the coding of enumerated variables - while reusing existing information to a large extent.
After reviewing the Neuchâtel-model, the responsible working group decided that the Neuchâtel model was the model that best fitted the requirements. It seems that the object types in the model represent nearly all conceivable meta-information needed to describe data in different settings. The Neuchâtel model therefore offers the possibility to integrate our existing systems (mainly .BASE and GENESIS) as well as systems that are currently being realised (KlassService and Statistikdatenbank). A high level overview exists that explains the conceptual connections between the systems (see below). It is based on the METASTAT@FSO design developed by the Swiss Federal Statistical Office which implements the Neuchâtel terminology to a large extent.
KlassService and Statistikdatenbank are not part of the census funded systems but will play a role in the management of the census metadata and are therefore part of the model. Not represented is a tool for document management that is being developed as part of the census. The centrepiece of the model is a variable server that is currently being drafted (see also 4.1).
5.2 Metadata Management Tools
Links between data and metadata exist in the .BASE-system. As part of this system, there is a tool for defining data editing rules on the basis of pre-defined metadata. These variables and their value domains are stored in a separate repository (survey database). Reuse of metadata is encouraged by allowing users to share their variables. Before a user can delete or change a variable, all other users of this variable are asked to agree.
The GENESIS cube database also features a metadata repository. In contrast to the .BASE-system, GENESIS stores its metadata internally. Before creating a cube, the cube variables first have to be defined. Reuse of existing metadata is facilitated by an editorial team that checks each variable individually. There are currently about 1.300 active cube variables in the system at Destatis (for a total of 180 statistical activities) - a figure that has proven to be manageable.
5.3 Standards and formats
So far, mainly internal and national standards are applied. The .BASE-system runs on several nationally designed XML-formats. DatML/SDF (Survey Definition Format) describes the survey (esp. the variables). DatML/EDT holds the metadata that defines the data editing rules. DatML/ASK is metadata to set up electronic questionnaires.
GENESIS has its own database model, which can be seen as a national standard since most Länder offices either use the GENESIS database or a database based on the model. GENESIS is used to send data and metadata to Eurostat with the SDMX-standard.
The reengineered KlassService will be based on the Neuchâtel model, Part I.
There is no standard format used in the Statistikdatenbank. Nevertheless, the understanding of the term statistical activity ("Statistik" in German) is much the same as in the Neuchâtel model. Therefore, Statistikdatenbank can interact with other systems within a distributed metadata systems that allocates different functions to different systems according to the Neuchâtel model.
5.4 Version control and revisions
In theory, there seem to be two different ways to versionise metadata. One is to attach validity periods (valid from, valid until) to metadata objects. This is done nearly in all databases. The other seems to be to create additional object types for the versions of a metadata object type. In this way, there exists an object type for general information on an object plus another object type that captures a list of versions which record the changes to an instance of the first object type over time.
Validity periods are used in the .BASE-system, for example to identify active surveys. Inactive surveys are disposed of, if not archived (archiving functionality planned).
Instantiations are used in the KlassService where - following the Neuchâtel model - the classification versions are an object type of their own. General information (that does not change over time) about classifications is captured by the object type classification.
Instantiations have also been introduced in the RDC-metadata system where each statistical activity has a list of statistical activity instances capturing the individual features of each successive survey.
5.5 Outsourcing versus in-house development
There is a combination of in-house development, Verbund development and outsourcing (see list below).
- GENESIS has been developed as a Verbund project, with the programming work being shared by several offices.
- The RDC-metadata system and the projected output oriented metadata system are spin-offs from GENESIS.
- .BASE was an outsourced development with substantial input to the business case by Destatis' IT-department.
- KlassService redesign is a Verbund project. It is being developed by the Bavarian State Office for Statistics and Data Processing as was the original KlassService.
- Statistikdatenbank is a Destatis project carried out as an in-house development.
- All metadata systems to be developed for the census will be outsourced under the general rules laid out for the IT-development of the census.
5.6 Sharing software components of tools
A major problem in software sharing is language. In most systems the user interfaces are in German only. Maybe more important, few of our systems allow content to be stored in more than one language. Two exceptions are the redesigned KlassService, which supports n-languages, and GENESIS, which supports English content as well as German.
As of yet, there has not been any case of software sharing between Destatis or the Verbund and any external partner. It is not impossible, however. Most of the IT-systems are either owned by Destatis or the Verbund. Any prospective effort to share IT-technology will have to be reviewed by the responsible committees.
5.7 Additional materials
On request (mostly in German). | <urn:uuid:09722229-89cb-4910-b31c-a13cd02ea4c7> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www1.unece.org/stat/platform/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=78677881 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783402746.23/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155002-00034-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.926974 | 1,796 | 2.671875 | 3 |
Racial minorities waited a lot longer than whites to vote last November.
Lines weren't a big issue for most voters, according to a new study from Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor Charles Stewart III, but they were a huge issue for some - and those people tended to be African-American or Hispanic and live in urban areas.
African Americans waited an average of 23 minutes to vote while Hispanics waited 19 minutes and whites just 12 minutes. Those numbers are startling when you factor in that about two-thirds of all voters waited less than 10 minutes to cast their ballots. That means some people, albeit a small percentage, waited a very long time.
Stewart found that just three percent of voters waited more than an hour, with the average wait time at about 110 minutes. The author of the post you're reading waited nearly three hours in the Columbia Heights neighborhood in Washington, D.C.
Stewart suggests that the time differences "are due to factors associated with where minority voters live, rather than with minority voters as individuals." In other words, poll workers weren't generally discriminating against minority voters on purpose (whites in minority neighborhoods waited just as long as minorities in those neighborhoods). It's just that those minorities may just be more likely to live in areas with outdated voting machines or slow check-in processes.
Density also predictably played a role. People in heavily populated urban areas waited longer in general than more rural places.
Perhaps more concerning is the fact that this isn't a new problem and we don't know exactly how to fix it.
Stewart found that places with long lines -- he names Florida as the worst offender, with wait times averaging nearly 40 minutes -- in 2012 were also the places with long lines in 2008.
The cause of long lines, Stewart writes, "remains unknown."
He said theories have "barely made a dent in the actual practice of election administration," and that anecdotal news accounts present anomalies not the entire picture.
While President Barack Obama has launched a commission designed to improve the voting experience, a number of states have proposed limits to early voting in 2013 that voting rights activists say will create even longer lines and deter people, especially minorities who are less likely to have flexible work schedules and transportation options, from casting ballots.
The bipartisan commission is expected to release a report with suggestions later this year.
The study, Waiting to Vote in 2012, will be published in the Journal of Law and Politics. | <urn:uuid:3a5d5d71-3ce2-40fb-b4dc-5008c5525c06> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.listeditor@abcnews.go.com/ABC_Univision/Politics/minorities-wait-longer-vote/story?id=18913598 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783395546.12/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154955-00125-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.969203 | 497 | 2.546875 | 3 |
Click any word in a definition or example to find the entry for that word
intelligence information from unreliable sources, especially information based on rumours rather than facts
'Ray McGovern, a retired C.I.A. analyst who briefed President Bush's father in the White House in the 1980s, said that people in the agency were now "totally demoralized." He says, and others back him up, that the Pentagon took dubious accounts from émigrés close to Ahmad Chalabi and gave these tales credibility they did not deserve. Intelligence analysts … refer contemptuously to recent work as "rumint", or rumor intelligence.'New York Times 30th May 2003
'Another possible explanation is that the press has come to discount any information from the administration camp as "rumint," a rumor-intelligence cocktail that should be avoided …'slate.msn.com 18th November 2003
Amid speculation that the recent conflict in Iraq was based on unreliable intelligence information, a new term has emerged in the US media during the past year: rumint. In gathering information about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, President Bush and the CIA allegedly became victims of rumint, or 'rumour intelligence', as they accepted the credibility of information from sources surrounding the informant Ahmad Chalabi.
the word rumint has been used on both sides of the Atlantic, regarding the allegedly misguided case for the attack on Iraq
In the aftermath of war, the word rumint has been used on both sides of the Atlantic, thriving amidst ongoing discussion in the online and printed press regarding the allegedly misguided case proposed by the administrations of George W. Bush and Tony Blair for the attack on Iraq. The term is usually used with disparaging overtones and often betrays a sense of opposition to the war and the policies of President Bush.
The noun rumint is short for rumor (UK rumour) intelligence or rumored (UK rumoured) intelligence. It was first coined in 1989 by analogy with intelligence community terms such as HUMINT (human intelligence), EINT (electronic intelligence – information from electronic surveillance), IMINT (imagery intelligence), COMINT (communications intelligence – information from interception of foreign communications), and SIGINT (signal intelligence – intelligence information from wiretaps).
The term rumint is formed by blending contractions of the words rumour and intelligence. The contraction of these words is described by linguists as clipping. Clipped forms rum- and int- are formed by removing the ends of the respective words, an established process in English word formation, which is illustrated by the short form ad or advert for the word advertisement.
In the military context, intelligence itself is often clipped to intel. Occasionally, clipped forms are produced by removing the beginnings of words, e.g. plane from aeroplane/airplane, and sometimes both the beginning and end are removed, e.g. flu from influenza.
This article was first published on 13th September 2004.
A must for anyone with an interest in the changing face of language. The Macmillan Dictionary blog explores English as it is spoken around the world today.global English and language change from our blog | <urn:uuid:6d105f3e-6dff-47ec-935a-096568281291> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.macmillandictionary.com/buzzword/entries/rumint.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396459.32/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00195-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.950918 | 640 | 2.578125 | 3 |
With plenty of early stimulation, most African Greys will start speaking after one year of age. Even if your African Grey only maintains a handful of words in her vocabulary, it's
certain you'll share an entertaining and interactive life with one of these very special members of the parrot family. Described as the perfect combination of brains and beauty, the African Grey is one of the more popular parrots kept by the aviculturist.
The Congo African Grey is referred to as the nominate (most common) sub-species, while the Princeps African Grey is the least common.
The Congo's pale head and gray body is strikingly offset by its brilliant red tail feathers. African Greys are probably best known for their amazing ability to mimic not only the human voice but also an impressive array of environmental sounds.
African Grey, Grey, Red-tailed Grey
Lowland forests of central Africa; Guinea Islands, Kenya, Tanzania
9" (Timneh African Grey) to 14" (Congo African Grey)
Seeds, nuts, fruits, and berries. Supplement with fresh fruits and vegetables.
All 3 species regulated for importation.
Sensitive to dietary calcium/ phosphorus imbalance. High incidence of Psittacine Beak & Feather Disease virus (PBFD) and Psittacine Proventricular Dilatation Syndrome (PPDS - see The Disease That Starves Your Bird).
Extremely intelligent. Require a great deal of attention to satisfy both emotional needs and mental stimulation. | <urn:uuid:252b6d93-1934-4d87-8a1f-9c3605703ebf> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.drsfostersmith.com/PIC/Article.cfm?d=157&category=301&articleid=592 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783400572.45/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155000-00176-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.897325 | 308 | 2.59375 | 3 |
Battles at Folcks Mill and Oldtown
by Gary M. Petrichick
The Battle at Folcks Mill, Monday, August 1, 1864, was celebrated as saving the City of Cumberland from destruction, but it was only a part of a larger scenario involving the Confederacy’s last incursion into the north in a desperate attempt to relieve Gen. Lee’s forces from Grant’s siege of Petersburg and Richmond. Following Gen. Jubal Early’s victory over Gen. George Crook’s Federals at the 2nd Battle of Kernstown on July 24, 1864, the Confederates pursued the retreating Union troops down the Shenandoah Valley. There were skirmishes at Bunker Hill, Martinsburg, and Williamsport on the 25th, with the Union troops crossing the Potomac at Botellers Ford on the 26th to camp near Hagerstown.
While Early concentrated on disabling the B&O Railroad in the lower Shenandoah Valley, his cavalry under Brig. Gens. John McCausland and Bradley Johnson crossed into Maryland at McCoys Ferry on the 29th. After driving a 400- man Union force from Clear Spring, McCausland proceeded to Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, which he put to the torch the following day. From there he headed south to Hancock, and on the morning of the 31st demanded a ransom of $30,000 and cooked rations for his men. Col. Harry Gilmore and Gen. Johnson, both Marylanders, pleaded the case for Hancock and convinced McCausland that the sum was unreasonable considering the size of the town and the fact that many citizens were loyal to the Southern cause. On Johnson’s advice the town fathers collected all they could including a large amount of C&O Canal moneys from Jacob Snively, the C&O Canal Company’s collector at Hancock, but before the moneys could be delivered, Gen. W. W. Averell’s Federal cavalry drove the Confederates from Hancock down the National Road toward Cumberland. At least one canal boat was burned and reportedly all bridges on the pike between Hancock and Flintstone were destroyed.
The citizens of Cumberland upon hearing of the depradations at Chambersburg called a meeting the night of the 31st and organized a militia force of some 200 men to assist Union General Benjamin F. Kelly in the defense of the community. On the morning of August 1, Kelly’s forces consisted of three regiments of Ohio National Guard, four companies of the Eleventh West Virginia Infantry, one company of the Sixth West Virginia Infantry, two sections of Battery L, First Illinois Light Artillery, one section of Battery B, Maryland Light Artillery, and several hundred stragglers from the July 24 battle at Winchester. At midday a troop of Confederate cavalry was reported approaching about twelve miles out on the Baltimore Pike. Gen. Kelly ordered the One Hundred and Fifty-Sixth Ohio National Guard, four companies of West Virginia Infantry, and one section of Battery L to the high ground east of Cumberland where the highway crossed Evitts Creek. The three companies of citizen volunteers under Gen. Charles Thurston, were placed on the right flank of the regulars. Colonel Israel Stough and the One Hundred Fifty-Third Ohio National Guard were sent to Oldtown to prevent a Confederate crossing into West Virginia at that point. The remainder of the Federal troops manned the Cumberland fortifications.
At 3 p.m. an enemy squadron neared Folcks Mill. Union artillery opened fire and a pitched battle ensued. The rebel forces sought cover behind the house, mill, and barn of John Flocks, which, being within range of the Union artillery, all took several exploding shells, the barn being destroyed. The engagement lasted till after dark with both sides holding about the same positions as at the start. Uncertain of the Union strength and aware of Averell’s cavalry at nearby Hancock, Gens. McCausland and Johnson agreed that it would be unwise to continue the attack. Johnson was sent to secure a crossing over the Potomac, but on approaching Oldtown on the morning of July 2, found the Union troops of Col. Stough on the hill between the canal and river and the canal bridges destroyed.
The Twenty-Seventh Virginia Battalion and the Eighth Virginia Regiment attacked the hill while a bridge was built to cross the rest of the troops to flank the Federals. Seeing his position as untenable, Col. Stough pulled his force across the Potomac to Green Spring Depot, West Virginia. About 80 men took shelter in a blockhouse while the others boarded the train that brought them from Cumberland and were removed from the fray. Supporting Stough’s force was an armored train manned by a detachment of Company K, Second Regiment Potomac Home Brigade. The train comprised iron-clad batteries of three guns each and four musket-proof boxcars for riflemen.
Johnson’s Baltimore Light Artillery was deadly that day, disabling the locomotive with its first shot and dismounting one gun with a shot through a porthole with its second. A third shot scattered the Union Infantry behind the railroad embankment and the Potomac Home Guard was forced to take shelter in the woods, leaving Stough in the blockhouse without support. After an hour and a half standoff, Johnson sent a message under a flag of truce demanding a surrender. Stough asked for and received generous terms and surrendered, his command immediately paroled with all personal equipment except weapons. The Confederates destroyed the blockhouse and armored train before moving off toward Romney, West Virginia. They were badly mauled on August 7th by Gen. Averell who had been pursuing them since the Chambersburg raid.
The citizen volunteers were relieved from duty on the 2, and on Friday evening, August 5 Cumberland’s citizens showered Gen.Kelly and his men (with thanks at a town meeting. A grand review was held on August 11 with speeches and a parade which included the citizen soldiers. Gen. Kelly was later breveted a major general for his gallant defense of the city.
Between the Confederate raids and ensuing guerilla activities, there was no through navigation on the canal in the month of August, resulting in tolls of only $398.80. This was the lowest monthly collection since July 1861. It was reported that because of damages to boats and the waterway, over a hundred thousand tons of coal would be kept from the Washington market, and that the coal companies saw little chance that the coal trade could be reopened that season.
Principal sources for this article were The Civil War Battle at Folcks Mill, Harold L. Scott, Sr., The Civil War in Maryland, Daniel Carroll Toomey, and History of the C & O Canal, Harlan D. Unrau.
(This article was published in the September 2008 issue of Along The Towpath, the newsletter of the C&O Canal Association.) | <urn:uuid:c911250b-b947-4892-be12-932b2685c661> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.candocanal.org/articles/civwr6.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396887.54/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00097-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966522 | 1,443 | 2.609375 | 3 |
bowmann glands, smell epithel
ohles000 at mzdmza.zdv.uni-mainz.de
Mon Jun 17 09:14:58 EST 1996
Who could answer some special questions concerning
the mucous membrane of the nose?
Which composition has the slime/phlegm of the
'Bowmann glands' in the human nose?
Is there anything known about viscosity,
substance similarity, ph-Value, el. conductivity,
light-permeability of that slime?
Which material are the 'fibrillate-hairs', and the
'cilia' (which are fixed to the smell-cells) made of?
Where does the yellow colour of the smell epithel
Which function has the cell-process that looks like
a -chemically identical- ganglion process?
We will thank you for hints on further sources of information
(i.e. books, periodicals) concerning that subject.
Should this probably be posted to a different newsgroup?
More information about the Cellbiol | <urn:uuid:4fa6b016-1db8-4521-998e-80d1a466cba1> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.bio.net/bionet/mm/cellbiol/1996-June/004758.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783395346.72/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154955-00200-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.871934 | 228 | 2.53125 | 3 |
Astronauts Capture Aurora Australis South of Australia
This video of the Aurora Australis was created from a sequence of still shots taken by astronauts on board the International Space Station. The images were acquired on September 11, 2011 as the ISS orbit pass descended over eastern Australia, reached the "bottom" of the orbit, then changed direction to an ascending pass just east of New Zealand during the night hours -- in essence describing a wide "U" over the region. Dense cloud cover obscures the land and sea surface during much of the video.
The aurora displays a sinuous green ribbon shape -- with occasional hints of red near the upper extent -- throughout the video. The unique viewing perspective from the ISS cupola allows for a sense of the 3-dimensional nature of the phenomena as it varies in apparent length, width, and thickness as the ISS orbits above it.
Like its northern hemisphere counterpart the Aurora Borealis, the Aurora Australis occurs when ions in the solar wind collide with atoms of oxygen and nitrogen in the upper atmosphere. Atoms excited by these collisions emit light as they return to their original energy level, creating the visible aurora. The most commonly observed color of aurora is green, caused by light emitted by excited oxygen atoms at wavelengths centered at 0.558 micrometers, or millionths of a meter. Red aurora are generated by light emitted at a longer wavelength (0.630 micrometers), and other colors such as blue and purple are also occasionally observed.
Throughout the video the curvature of Earth's surface, or limb, is visible. The thin yellow-gold line above the limb is airglow, caused by the release of energy from atoms and molecules high in the atmosphere that are excited by ultraviolet radiation during the day. The sense of motion of the ISS is accentuated by the changing star field in the background, and the rotation of a station solar panel array across the view at image right. | <urn:uuid:f7ba8a36-f6fe-49d7-bed9-b7bb3adbac15> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/news/AuroraAustralis-Video.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397842.93/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00138-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.94338 | 394 | 3.71875 | 4 |
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This is a lesson about the electromagnetic spectrum. Learners will read two pages of information about the electromagnetic spectrum and answer questions in an accompanying worksheet. This activity is from the Stanford Solar Center's All About the Sun: Sun and Stars activity guide for Grades 5-8 and can also accompany the Stanford Solar Center's Build Your Own Spectroscope activity.
This resource is located on page 30 of the PDF document. | <urn:uuid:531eb1fe-9390-4c63-831f-9b5ffd665d48> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.nasawavelength.org/resource/nw-000-000-001-408/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783393332.57/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154953-00127-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.879279 | 91 | 3.75 | 4 |
Coal, the No. 1 cause of climate change, is dying. Last year saw a record number of coal plant retirements in the United States, and a study last week from Duke University found that since 2008, the coal industry shed nearly 50,000 jobs, while natural gas and renewable energy added four times that number. Even China, which produces and consumes more coal than the rest of the world put together, is expected to hit peak coal use within a decade, in order to meet its promise to President Barack Obama to reduce its carbon emissions starting in 2030.
According to Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), this is all the fault of President Barack Obama's "war on coal"—specifically the administration's new limits for carbon dioxide emissions from power plants, which probably will force many power companies to burn less coal. If there is a war, McConnell has long been the field marshal of the defending army. His latest maneuver came last month when he called on state lawmakers to simply ignore the administration's new rules, in order to resist Obama's "attack on the middle class."
His logic, apparently, is that if Kentucky can stave off Obama long enough, the coal industry still has a glorious future ahead. That logic is fundamentally flawed. While Obama's tenure will probably speed up the country's transition to cleaner energy, the scales had already tipped against coal long before he took office. Kentucky's coal production peaked in 1990, and coal industry employment peaked all the way back in the 1920s. The scales won't tip back after he leaves. The "war on coal" narrative isn't simply misleading, it also distracts from the very real problem of how to prepare coal mining communities and energy consumers (i.e., everyone) for an approaching future in which coal is demoted to a bit role after a century at center stage.
That's the conclusion of a sweeping new account of the coal industry, Coal Wars, authored by leading energy analyst Richard Martin. The book dives deep into a simple truth: As long as we're still burning coal for the majority of our energy, all the solar panels, electric cars, and vegetarian diets in the world won't do a thing to stop global warming. Saving the planet starts with getting off coal.
The good news, Martin reports, is that transition is already underway, regardless of stonewalling by congressional Republicans, and with or without Obama's new regulations. Martin documents evidence of coal's decline from the mountain villages of Kentucky to the open pit mines of Wyoming, and from lavish industry parties in Shanghai to boardrooms in Germany. Everywhere he looks, market forces (for instance, natural gas made cheap by the fracking boom), technological advances, and environmental laws are conspiring to favor cleaner forms of energy over coal. At the same time, Martin writes, more and more financial institutions and private investors are starting to factor climate change into their investment decisions, which "would be a death blow that no EPA regulation could equal."
Whether the transition will happen fast enough to limit the damage of climate change is a different story. China still gets nearly three-quarters of its energy from coal. The United States, while substantially reducing its own coal consumption in recent years, still has huge amounts of coal, especially in the West, that can be profitably mined and shipped overseas. Many billions of dollars have been sunk into mines, power plants, shipping terminals, and other infrastructure that can't simply be shut down overnight, especially when all that stuff forms the backbone of a basic commodity like electricity.
Still, for coal, there is no resurgence on the horizon. "There's no question which way the curve is headed, and it is down," Martin tells Climate Desk.
Much less clear than the fate of coal is what will happen in the countless communities, from the American Southeast to northern China, that have long depended on coal to put food on the table. Martin has managed to locate dozens of compelling personal narratives that show the human face of a debate that is too often reduced—by environmentalists as much as by the coal industry—to numbers and yawn-inducing energy wonkery. These include the head of a small coal mining company in Kentucky who was forced to sell off the business he inherited from his father and lay off workers who were also friends and neighbors. The manager of a coal town coffee shop in Colorado is also facing closure. In China, self-contained cities are built around coal mines, but young people there are unable to get work and have no other employment opportunities.
The environmental imperative to get off coal is obvious, and even if you think climate change is a hoax, basic economics are already driving the coal industry to contract. But so far, according to Martin, the United States has done a terrible job of helping coal industry workers and their families find life after coal.
There are many guilty parties here, including coal barons like Don Blankenship (who is currently facing charges in federal court for flagrant safety violations) and profit-hungry utility company execs who are keen to squash competition from solar and wind energy. But Martin saves his most damning critiques for leaders like McConnell who are hung up on pointless political squabbling rather than finding innovative ways to revitalize former coal economies.
"The presence of the coal industry has kept these communities in a state of dependence, and not allowed them to develop a real economy beyond coal," Martin says. "Whether we pine for the days of these jobs or not, they're not coming back. We have to get beyond this state of dependency." | <urn:uuid:94ca3b17-cc24-4980-90cf-c401012ea7d5> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2015/04/mitch-mcconnell-war-coal | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783403825.35/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155003-00146-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.969132 | 1,124 | 2.640625 | 3 |
This book bridges a long-standing gap between obscure references in tropical botany and the gardener's need for an accurate, practical guide with clear photographs. Incorporating the latest advances in plant taxonomy from the definitive text of Dr. Walter Judd, the book is a rare work of scrupulous research — and magnificent photography — that will be as useful to the gardener as it is to the botanist. Kirsten Llamas exhaustively documents more than 1400 flowering trees, shrubs, vines, and herbaceous plants commonly grown in tropical and subtropical gardens. She provides thorough information on cultivation for each plant, including growth characteristics, light exposure, cold hardiness, invasive tendencies, and unique horticultural features. More than 1500 color photos of magnificent flowering specimens make this book as much a pleasure to browse as it is a resource for research. Sure to appeal to gardeners, landscapers, nurseries, collectors, botany students, florists, and botanical gardens, Tropical Flowering Plants promises to be a staple reference for decades to come.
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Rent Tropical Flowering Plants 1st edition today, or search our site for other textbooks by Kirsten Albrecht Llamas. Every textbook comes with a 21-day "Any Reason" guarantee. Published by Timber Press, Incorporated.
Need help ASAP? We have you covered with 24/7 instant online tutoring. Connect with one of our Plant-Biology tutors now. | <urn:uuid:4769ed0b-7026-4de0-a16a-639d823985f0> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.chegg.com/textbooks/tropical-flowering-plants-1st-edition-9780881925852-0881925853 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783402699.36/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155002-00070-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.900751 | 303 | 2.703125 | 3 |
This was good, easy fun. Since we're working with loopy letters first, I asked the kiddos to use different colored markers and make a series of the cursive letter l across a sheet of plain white paper. Then I asked them to create more lines of loop styles across the page. We used the loopy letters in the works bike, hello, quiz, and fish as guides. Check out our work. Pretty fun, right?
|cursive writing art|
Remember that we're making art, not writing cursive letters, so the experience is fun. The results are super and worthy of displaying. I've found that the skinny Crayola markers work well for this too.
Next we tied in a concept that I wrote about in the last post. The letters in cursive words are connected. We got our yarn out again and matched it up with our loopy art to demonstrate how all these cursive writing loops were connected.
Cursive writing with children doesn't have to be a challenge. It can be a work of art! Please follow my blog by e-mail to catch the next post in this cursive writing series. Hint--it's about cursive, art, and .....fun! | <urn:uuid:4154cd13-c261-44e9-ae24-5713ec1d8d16> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.sweetteaclassroom.com/2012/05/integrate-fun-cursive-writing-and-art.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783393332.57/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154953-00120-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956869 | 253 | 2.75 | 3 |
This post is part of the Science Tuesday feature series on the USDA blog. Check back each week as we showcase stories and news from USDA’s rich science and research portfolio.
Many of our diets aren’t what they should be. Americans eat fewer fruits and vegetables than Federal nutrition guidance recommends, and we over-consume fats, added sugars, and refined grains. Health professionals warn us that the less-healthful food choices are showing up on our waistlines and in our health, contributing to increasing cases of overweight and obesity, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes. Knowing how far we stray from good dietary patterns, and whether the diets of certain segments of the population are more misaligned, can help in designing more effective programs and consumer education.
Along with my colleagues at USDA’s Economic Research Service (ERS), I wanted to see how well the choices people make at the grocery store match Federal dietary recommendations. We looked at grocery store purchases of Nielsen Homescan “panelists” from 1998 to 2006. The Homescan panelists are a nationally-representative sample of U.S. households who are asked to record their food and beverage purchases from all retail stores. We compared these purchases to USDA-recommended food spending guidelines, which indicate how to allocate food budgets on 23 broad categories to meet the Dietary Guidelines for Americans.
Consumer spending came close to matching USDA recommendations for only 1 of the 23 food categories—potatoes—under-spending on the other vegetable categories. For example, households spent an average of only 0.5 percent of their food budgets during 1998-2006 on dark green vegetables compared with the recommended 7 percent. Households also under-spent on whole grains, whole fruit, lower-fat dairy, nuts, poultry, and fish, while they over-spent on other foods including refined grains, fruit juices, regular dairy products, and meats. Refined grains, for example—a category that includes non-whole grain crackers, cookies, breads, and pasta—accounted for 17 percent of the spending; the USDA spending guidelines recommend 5 percent.
There was some improvement between 1998 and 2006 in the healthfulness of the average food shopping basket. Households shifted from refined grains toward whole grains, but allocated less of their food budgets to fruits and vegetables and more to packaged and processed foods and beverages.
Diet quality is a general problem in America that’s not confined to a particular socio-demographic group. There’s room for improvement in food purchases across income levels, regions of the country, and racial groups. More information can be found in our report, Assessing the Healthfulness of Consumers’ Grocery Purchases. | <urn:uuid:bfd96678-fbec-4a12-87e6-2d5627654f44> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://blogs.usda.gov/2012/12/11/u-s-food-shopping-out-of-sync-with-nutritional-advice/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783394937.4/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154954-00090-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.929924 | 551 | 3.28125 | 3 |
View Full Version : advanced csg using stencil buffer
05-27-2004, 09:25 PM
as we kown,in OGL we can get a fake csg by using stencil buffer,but a true boolean operations should produce one true solid after oparetion,what should i do to find the valid point of intersections to construt the true solid.
need your advices or some code should be better,
thanks a lot!
05-28-2004, 02:55 AM
have a look at http://www.opencsg.org , this may be what you're looking for.
Otherwise try a google search on csg + opengl, there are a number of possible implementations.
06-01-2004, 10:09 PM
06-21-2004, 09:46 PM
I have a recent CSG program and website I did for a class project. If anyone is interested I could clean it up and give it out cause it does teach how to do "real" CSG.
06-22-2004, 12:55 AM
hky I'd be interrested in "computational" CSG, ie, real geometry calculation.
06-22-2004, 10:26 PM
Here is a link to the CSG tutorial I am re-writing. It is not complete yet, but should be so in about 24 to 48 hours. Currently, it talks about splitting edges and polygons. By tommorow I will post up doing the set operations and using a binary tree to keep track of all the splits.
If you have specific questions or want me to add or remove something from the tutorial, email me at firstname.lastname@example.org .
Link to CSG tutorial:
PS: I will add sample code in C\C++, Java and Visual Basic once I finish the tutorial.
Powered by vBulletin® Version 4.2.3 Copyright © 2016 vBulletin Solutions, Inc. All rights reserved. | <urn:uuid:3571c24a-d308-41f2-8bf1-f4637e1ac542> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | https://www.opengl.org/discussion_boards/archive/index.php/t-159762.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396887.54/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00102-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.814537 | 424 | 2.671875 | 3 |
Every day, you're at war. The enemy? Bacteria. Viruses. Even cancer cells.
Usually, you're not even aware this battle is taking place. Your immune system carries on the fight without your knowledge. How it works remains a mystery to medical experts, but this much they know:
Your immune system can use a boost. The best way to protect yourself against the most common serious infections is simple—get vaccinated. Vaccines are available against measles, mumps, rubella, diphtheria, polio, smallpox, varicella zoster virus (causes chickenpox and shingles), whooping cough, tetanus, influenza, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, pneumococcal disease, haemophilus influenzae type B, rotavirus, meningitis caused by Neisseria meningitis, human papillomavirus (for women to protect against cervical cancer), and other less common or exotic infections.
Your immune system may benefit from certain vitamins. Medical experts say that B-complex vitamins and antioxidants such as vitamins A, C, and E seem to enhance the immune system. Eat a well-balanced diet and you will probably get sufficient vitamins.
On the average day, you conquer one or two different viruses. Most of the time you're unaware that "fighter" cells are working because most viral infections don't cause symptoms.
Your immune system starts to rid your body of infection even before you see your doctor. The fever you endure with a bacterial infection helps drive away infection.
Gone but not forgotten: Your immune system not only rids the body of "attackers," it also sets up a memory function so that you're less likely to suffer another bout with the same infection.
Your immune system slows down as you age, leaving you more susceptible to the types of infection that rarely cause trouble for a younger person. | <urn:uuid:6ac29643-8e84-4425-84c0-5b9181d005ae> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.stvincent.org/Health-Library/Wellness-Library/Your-Immune-System-s-Constant-Battle.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783400572.45/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155000-00171-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.914478 | 386 | 3.515625 | 4 |
Fractions can be confusing, but with a little practice your child can become a fraction pro. Practice with this second grade fractions worksheet.
Mmm, these cookie fractions are making me hungry! Give your child a head start learning his fractions with a great visual worksheet.
To complete this second grade math worksheet, kids connect divided pizzas to the fractions the pizza slices represent.
Enjoy an out-of-this-world math sheet that combines shapes and fractions! Your child will get to color a fraction of each shape.
Help your child wrap her head around fractions of groups with this worksheet that spells out the idea in clear terms.
Give your child a stellar math mission! This sheet will introduce him to simple fractions in picture form.
The mailman needs help sorting his mail in fractions! Can your child help? She'll color in fractions of the group of envelopes to be sent to the families.
Let's go bowling for fractions! Your child will love math practice as he gets to color his fractions, and figure out how many pins Bobby knocked down.
Give your math whiz a fun fraction challenge! This mail call fraction sheet will help your child visualize fractions with counting and coloring.
Are fractions seeming funky to your child? Give him a helpful visual tool with this fun bowling for fractions sheet! He'll color fractions of bowling pins. | <urn:uuid:e24b19fa-ce6c-4f1e-aeaa-00e3c7fc8669> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.education.com/collection/bkirkwood/fractions/?page=2 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783399117.38/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154959-00009-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.907921 | 279 | 3.796875 | 4 |
Imaging the Radio Universe
Camera Development on the GBT
The NRAO camera development program is a collaboration between the NRAO and more than 20 university, college, and industry groups to design, develop, and build a suite of radio cameras that will increase the GBT’s capabilities dramatically. Three types of instrumentation are planned: conventional feed horn arrays, phased array receivers, and bolometer arrays. The science achievable with these new instruments on the GBT is extraordinary and varied: rapid, sensitive maps of outflows from comets and of molecular clouds in nearby galaxies; studies of pre-biotic molecules and chemical processes throughout the Galaxy; study of hot gas in galaxy clusters to compliment X-ray images and reveal how cosmic structures form and evolve; and uncovering the most distant galaxies from the emission of cold dust and redshifted molecular lines. In addition, the cameras will improve capabilities for pulsar searches and very deep observations of HI that trace past galaxy interactions. The power and flexibility of these instruments will make possible experiments that cannot now be done on any telescope.
Conventional Feed Horn Arrays: Conventional feed horn arrays are built by packing traditional feeds tightly to maximize the number of pixels on the sky per unit area. A typical feed-horn array can achieve a pixel spacing of ~2.5×beamwidth in the focal plane, so multiple pointings of the array are needed to cover an area on the sky completely. At NRAO we are investigating the concept of integrated feedhorn designs. To meet the scientific goals a conventional feed horn array must achieve the following: Low instrumental noise, dual polarization, wide instantaneous bandwidth (10-20 GHz or greater), closely packed feed horns (≤2.5 beam width separation on the sky), stable baselines at the μJy level, and high spectral resolution (≤2 km s-1 at 115 GHz).
Phased Array Receivers: In contrast to the conventional feed arrays, phased array receivers are composed of a number of small elements whose output is added digitally to yield complete sampling over some area of the focal plane. A number of talented groups around the world, notably in Australia, The Netherlands, and Canada, are actively working on instruments, variously referred to as active, phased, beam-forming, or smart arrays to distinguish them from the more conventional independent-pixel feed-horn arrays which sample less than 1/16th of the available sky area within the array's field-of-view. A focal plane phased array feed (PAF) can electronically synthesize multiple, simultaneous beams on the sky for complete coverage of the field of view without loss of sensitivity in each beam. However, a substantial amount of signal processing is required to form each PAF beam and phased arrays need considerably more development work to achieve system temperatures comparable to the best single-beam and conventional horn arrays. For survey and mapping applications the higher system temperature penalty of a non-cryogenically cooled PAF can be compensated by forming more beams and trading off the required increase in integration time for greater sky coverage per pointing, but this makes sense only when post-beam-forming signal processing requirements are relatively light, such as modest bandwidth spectral line observations. In applications where single-beam or horn array systems are already starved for signal processing power and data storage capacity, such as pulsar and transient searches and high-redshift HI surveys, the trade-off of more beams at higher system temperature does not make economic sense.
Bolometer Arrays: A bolometer consists of an "absorber" connected to a heat sink through an insulating link. Any radiation received by the absorber raises its temperature above that of the sink. Like phased array receivers, bolometer arrays can be built to provide complete sampling of the focal plane over a given sky area with a large instantaneous bandwidth. Large format bolometer arrays offer the prospect of revolutionary strides in sensitivity over the next decade so are the focus of extensive development activity throughout the millimeter and submillimeter instrument communities. The ability to implement background photon-noise limited, robustly operable detector arrays will be crucial to the success of future projects such as CCAT and space-borne CMB polarization experiments. Their ability to sensitively map large areas of sky will complement ALMA in defining systematic samples of objects, and extreme instances of them, for further study. The GBT development effort will occur in synergy with these enterprises, and will facilitate testing and refining.
Camera Development Portfolio
- FLAG - Focal Plane L-band Array for the GBT - In research phase
- W-band phased Array Feed - In research phase
- MUSTANG - Released for general use
- MUSTANG2 - In research phase | <urn:uuid:9508a78f-e86d-40cd-a890-f5653d064942> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | https://science.nrao.edu/facilities/gbt/Development/imaging-the-radio-universe | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783396106.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154956-00089-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.905712 | 958 | 2.8125 | 3 |
Important Scientific Discovery Published in Nature Journal
Seattle – Children’s Hospital and Regional Medical Center continues to make strides in pediatric research.
Seattle – Children’s Hospital and Regional Medical Center continues to make strides in pediatric research. In two recently published papers in the May 31, 2001 issue of Nature journal, a team led by Department of Pediatrics investigator Andrew Scharenberg, M.D., fellow Anne-Laure Perraud, and collaborators Reinhold Penner at the University of Hawaii, Maurice Bessman at Johns Hopkins University and Jean-Pierre Kinet at Harvard Medical School, describe new findings that represent an important advance in our understanding of how blood cells regulate the entry of chemical substances such as calcium or sodium (a major component of common table salt).
All cells in the body control how much calcium and sodium they take up since they are very important for normal cell function. Knowing how cell proteins, called ion channels, control uptake of these chemicals are important for understanding the complex processes inside cells. These discoveries may lead to new therapies for diseases involving blood or immune cells. “Our hope is that as we begin to manipulate their function for therapeutic purposes, such as to block or slow the growth of cancer or self-reactive immune cells,” says Dr. Sharenberg, sub-specialist in Pediatric Immunology at Children’s and assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington.
“It is important to realize that such ground breaking scientific discovery provides a foundation for understanding which cells survive and function. Out of such discoveries on basic cell function we begin to clarify the complex networks inside cells which leads us to new prevention strategies and therapies,” says Dr. Craig Rubens, division chief of Infectious Disease, Immunology and Rheumatology at Children’s.
Ion channels, the direct or indirect targets of one third of all present drugs, are proteins that behave like gates to regulate the entry of molecules like sodium and calcium into the body’s cells. While the role of ion channels in brain and cardiovascular function has been intensively studied, the ion channels function in many other types of cells, particularly blood cells, has been less understood.
The two recent papers from Dr. Scharenberg’s lab describe the mechanisms that control the gate-like function of a new family of ion channels. Most proteins in a cell have a single function but these proteins are unique in being both ion channels and enzymes, and are expressed in cells such as blood cells, immune system cells, organ cells and cells which line the inside of blood vessels.
“Dr. Sharenberg’s work underscores the importance of basic research to the mission of Children’s, and its publication in a prestigious journal such as Nature is a fitting tribute to that mission,” says Dr. Rubens. “By supporting top notch basic science researchers like Dr. Scharenberg, we will better understand pediatric diseases which in turn will also have important implications for diseases that affect adults.”
About Seattle Children’s
Consistently ranked as one of the best children’s hospitals in the country by U.S. News & World Report, Seattle Children’s serves as the pediatric and adolescent academic medical referral center for the largest landmass of any children’s hospital in the country (Washington, Alaska, Montana and Idaho). For more than 100 years, Seattle Children’s has been delivering superior patient care while advancing new treatments through pediatric research. Seattle Children’s serves as the primary teaching, clinical and research site for the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Washington School of Medicine. The hospital works in partnership with Seattle Children’s Research Institute and Seattle Children’s Hospital Foundation. For more information, visit www.seattlechildrens.org or follow us on Twitter or Facebook. | <urn:uuid:0c4bd946-39cf-411d-bb47-ccd4d3ae6d59> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.seattlechildrens.org/media/press-release/2001/05/000081/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783397748.48/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00194-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.929403 | 791 | 2.9375 | 3 |
DIRECT EXAMINATION - Building a Dramatic Story
It's been said, "A good lawyer turns evidence into fact and fact into truth." Because they bear the burden of proving the case beyond a reasonable doubt, prosecutors must call witnesses in every trial. Direct examination is the keystone in the prosecution's arch. Direct is also important to the defender who will call witnesses in support of the defensive theory.
Anyone can ask questions. Your job is to use the direct persuasively and in a manner that establishes the foundation for your jury argument. If you want to be a persuasive trial advocate, you must make the facts of your story come alive. Direct examination is the place to fluently communicate the theme of your case and establish the credibility of your witnesses.
What are the purposes of direct examination?
You can use direct examination to present evidence in a form that is (1) legally sufficient to meet the burden of proof, (2) understood and remembered, (3) convincing, (4) able to withstand cross-examination, and (5) anticipatory and contradictory of evidence that the opposition will present. Think of direct examination as your opportunity to construct persuasive arguments. The questions that your ask will subtly convey your argument. Conversely, use the arguments that you want to make at the end of the case to guide you in planning and preparing the questions you will ask on direct.
What approach should you take?
Your questions on direct examination must let the witness recreate an event. The story must be clear.You must tell the story in a way that will hold the jury's attention. How can you do this? Here are a few suggestions:
+ Visualize your case and the story you want to tell. You, as producer, director, and moderator, will use the fact witnesses on direct to paint a series of word pictures of scenes that you want the jurors to visualize. One key to a successful direct is being able to tell you story in a way that enables the jurors to see, in their minds, each relevant prior occurrence that tells your story. Many people, including some jurors, are what we call "visual thinkers." For example, if someone says "purple giraffe," what image flashes into you mind from these words? You see a purple giraffe, don't you? You bet your giraffe, you do! The point is that words prompt most of us visualize an image of a thing or event. We don't visualize the words that describe that image, e.g., you don't visualize the words "purple giraffe." We visualize the thing that the words describe, e.g., a giraffe that is purple. The purple giraffe I visualize will differ from the one you visualize, but you would recognize mine, and I would recognize yours. As the description of the purple giraffe got more explicit, each of our mind's pictures of a purple giraffe would morph into the one being described by words. The mind picture fleshes out as the word description gets more specific. With enough descriptive explanation, each of our mind pictures of the purple giraffe would look quite similar. So it is with the story of your case. The more detailed and similar the word picture you elicit on direct, the more similar the common visualization that your jurors will share.
+ You are not limited to painting word pictures of your story. You can and should involve the jurors by supplementing your witness' word pictures with tangible exhibits. For example, if you have a photo of the item, that photo will be worth a thousand descriptive words. Instead of the leaving it to the jurors to conjure up their own images, you show them an image of the thing, e.g., the real purple giraffe. My discussion on the Exhibits page may help you in telling your story on direct by means of tell and show. You may also find it helpful to read the more detailed and explanatory monograph Introducing Tangible Evidence and Establishing Foundations in Criminal Cases.
+ Think about how you want to tell your story. With your direct examination, you decide what parts of the story to tell, how to tell them, and when to tell them. In making these decisions, you decide what scenes you want the jurors to carry in their memory banks.You must organize each of the discrete scenes of the story. By your questions of witnesses on direct, you decide how to structure the story and what its substance will be. Make each important scene of your story a vivid memory for your jurors. Remember that you know much more about your case than the jury ever will. When the case starts, you are painting on blank canvas. Before it ends, you want all the pictures painted. If you leave parts blank or blurry, the jury will fill them in. Don't assume that the jurors will fill those blank or blurry spots the way you desire. Don't assume anything. If there is a cardinal rule in creating and organizing your story on direct, it is this: Look at the case through your juror's eyes.
+ Introduce your case story in opening statement. Before direct begins, the jurors typically get a bird's eye peek at the skeletal outline of your story of the case in your opening statement. By the time your direct begins, you will have told them about the testimony they will hear and, perhaps, shown them some of the exhibits they will see. You will have revealed the skeletal plot of the story of your case and introduced at least a partial list of the characters. Your jurors certainly have an idea about what you say happened or didn't happen. Though you may not have gotten specific, you should have used your opening to introduce rough sketches of key scenes.
+ Consider the nature of your audience who will hear the direct examination. You are presenting your case to a relatively small group, e.g., 6 to 12 persons. The atmosphere is almost that of an inquisitive conversation, though it is only two-sided in the sense that the jurors (the third party to the conversation) listen silently as you and your witness verbally reconstruct events. The conversation you have with the witness is solely for the benefit of the silent listeners on your jury.
+ The story you tell on direct will often be a different one, in time and space, from the story the opposition will tell. This is particularly true when for defenders who are relying on a so-called "confession and avoidance" defense. In this situation, the defense may be saying, "The prosecution's story is true, as far as it goes, but there is more to this story...." In effect, the defense admits the presence of the elements of the crime but seeks to justify e.g., the defendant intentionally killed in self-defense, or excuse, e.g., the defendant intentionally killed but was insane at the time of the killing, the otherwise criminal conduct.
+ The defense story will be influenced by the presence or absence of testimony from the accused. Will the accused testify? Whether to put your client on the witness stand is always a crucial decision. The client has the last say in this decision, but will usually be guided by your advice. In some cases, e.g., when the accused is the only witness who can provide a defense, it may be essential that the accused testify as a witness in his own behalf. In cases where the accused's testimony is not essential, the risk often outweighs the potential reward. Good lawyers caution against putting the accused on the stand in cases where the defense is "reasonable doubt," i.e., "you can't prove beyond a reasonable doubt that s/he did it." There are many factors to consider in deciding whether the defendant should testify. Will the accused's testimony add to or detract from the reasonable doubt of his guilt? Will the jury follow the law and not draw and adverse inference from the defendant's failure to testify? Is the accused impeachable, e.g., is s/he biased, does s/he have admissible prior convictions, has s/he made admissible prior inconsistent statements, will there be negative evidence of the defendant's bad character for truth-telling? Does the defendant have a pleasant or grating personality? Is the client passive or aggressive? Is the client modest or arrogant?
+ All direct leads to jury argument. Trial is argument. Let your direct contain the necessary details to give you the substance for your jury argument. Use the direct to provide your jurors with the information they will need to decide the case in your favor. You want to be the 13th juror in the case, giving the jurors the useful and favorable information they would seek if allowed to question the witness.
What are the legal requirements for a direct examination?
Competency of your witness - The first legal requirement is that your witness must be competent to testify. To qualify as competent, a witness must have: (1) Understanding of the nature and obligation of the oath or affirmation to tell the truth, (2) Perception (knowledge) of the the relevant event, (3) Recollection (memory) of the relevant event, and (4) Ability to communicate with the fact-finders (the jury or judge in a bench trial) in the common language of the court, i.e., English. There are instances when the competency of a witness may not be apparent. For example, if you call an infant or a mentally infirm person who may not understand the obligation of an oath to tell the truth, you should prepare the witness for a voir dire inquiry into competency. The voir dire inquiry may be posed to the witness either by yourself, the judge, and/or opposing counsel. If your witness does not speak English, the witness will only be competent to testify in the company of an interpreter who can translate the the witness' words into the language of the court. [Note: In cases where interpreters are necessary, as they often are in states along the Mexican border, take care to insure that the translation is correct.]
Since one of the legal requirements for testimony from lay witnesses is personal knowledge, you should ensure that the context of your questioning reveals to the court and the jury that your witness is testifying to facts within that witness' personal knowledge. See Rule 602 FRE and TRE which declares that "A witness may not testify to a matter unless evidence is introduced to support a finding that the witness has personal knowledge of the matter." Relevance of your witness' testimony - The second legal requirement for your direct examination is that your witness' testimony must be relevant. Relevant evidence is evidence that has some (any) tendency, however slight, to make the existence of a fact of consequence to the case more or less probable than it would be without it. Always remember that, even when the witness' direct examination testimony is relevant, the probative value of the witness' evidence must usually not be substantially outweighed by its unfairly prejudicial influence (affect) or by considerations of undue delay or needless presentation of cumulative evidence, See Rule 403 or the FRE and TRE. Authenticity of matters of evidence to show that the item in question is what its proponent claims it is - The third requirement for your direct examination is that matters of evidence must be authenticated. You authenticate an item of evidence by making a prima facie showing that it is genuine. Authentication or identification of the matter in question can be done in number of ways, e.g., by testimony from a witness with knowledge, by voice and handwriting identification, etc. The proponent has the burden of making a prima facie showing that the matter is authentic, i.e., that a reasonable person could believe that the item is genuine. If this showing is made, then the issue of identification or authenticity is left to the jury, the issue then becoming one of weight and not admissibility. See Rule 104 (b) FRE and TRE. Proper evidentiary foundation or predicate for the admissibility of the evidence - Certain items of evidence require special foundations to establish admissibility. For example, if your evidence is hearsay and, thus, presumptively inadmissible under Rule 802 FRE and TRE, you will be required to establish its admissibility under one of the hearsay exceptions listed in Rules 803 and 804 TRE, e.g., present sense impression; excited utterance; statement of then existing mental, emotional, or physical condition; statements for purposes of medical diagnosis or treatment; recorded recollection; record of regularly conducted activity (business records); public records; former testimony; dying declaration; etc. See the predicate questions in the monograph Introducing Tangible Evidence and Establishing Foundations. To properly prepare and conduct a direct examination, you must understand the application of the rules of evidence. That means you have to know the rules, but, more importantly, you have to know how to conform to the rules and play within their confines. You cannot even suit up for the game of trial advocacy without knowing your state's Rules of Evidence! (I've provided my students with a copy of the TRE. How can you play the trial courtroom game without knowing the rules? They are the trial lawyer's Bible. Mastery of them will allow you to part the waters.) For example, if you don't understand what hearsay is, you won't have the foggiest notion of when you are asking your witness to testify to inadmissible hearsay. If your opponent know the rules and objects to the hearsay, you'll be caught flat-footed. Even if you know what hearsay is, you must know all of the exceptions to the general rule of inadmissibility of hearsay. If you don't, you won't be able to craft your questions to conform to a particular exception to the rule against hearsay.
How do you plan and prepare your questions for direct examination?
I urge you to plan and prepare your direct to support your jury argument. In every case that you face, think about what your jury argument will be for each fact that you will ask the jury to find from the evidence. If the evidence is circumstantial and susceptible of differing conclusions, ask yourself what premise you and your opponent will ask the jurors to draw from the same circumstantial evidence. Your argument is the connection between the evidence and the fact that you want the jury to find from that evidence. Direct examination is typically the place where you will prove your factual version of the case. You can use the direct of one witness to buttress the credibility of or authenticate the testimony of one or more of your other witnesses. Direct will also teach and educate the jury, particularly when you use expert witnesses.
Let's consider some factors that you should think about in planning your direct:
+ Topics: Ask yourself, "What topics do I plan to cover in the direct examination of the witness?" In most cases you will start with the general background and then proceed to the the specific point that you want to make. It may help you as you plan your direct to think of each topic (unit) as an inverted triangle in which your inquiries of the witness start with the general and move down to the specific.
+ Sequence (order) of witnesses: Ask yourself,"What sequence (order) of witnesses will I follow?" You must plan the order in which your witnesses will testify. Although witnesses are often called in chronological order, i.e., from the beginning of the story to the end, there are other alternatives. Topical use of witnesses is one alternative; in this variation, you use witnesses to present topics, e.g., discovery of the body, cause of death, DNA evidence, prior relationships between the accused and the victim, the killing, etc., in the order you deem most persuasive. Prosecutors sometimes open their case with a witness, e.g., the detective in charge, who gives the jury a bird's-eye view of the prosecution's case. Should you construct your presentation to use your best witness(es) first, in the middle, or should you save the best witness for last? As story presenter, director, and presenter, it's your choice where to use your power witness(es).
Many considerations can factor into your choices of witness sequence. You may want to separate repetitive witnesses to avoid boredom. You may even consider the time of day in deciding when to call a key witness. Be aware that juror attention is typically on the wane shortly before and after lunch. In cases involving expert witnesses, you may choose to call lay witnesses before you call your expert because you want to have the lay witnesses' factual testimony in front of the jury when you call upon your expert to draw conclusions from such facts.
Will the defendant testify? This is a major decision for the client that deserves separate attention. We are talking here about sequence of witnesses. For purposes of this discussion, I'd like to assume a case where the defense has decided to put the accused on the stand, and consider when the defendant will testify. Obviously,the defendant's testimony will be a focal part of the case, perhaps disproportionately so. The traditional wisdom is that the defendant should be called as the last or close to last witness, although I've seen some defenders call the accused as the first defense witness, risking the hazard that the prosecution may undermine the defendant's testimony by cross-examination of subsequent defense witnesses. If the defendant has elected to testify in his own behalf, you may want to try to follow his testimony with one or more character witnesses who will testify to his good character (in the form of reputation or opinion ) for truthfulness; however, this will be possible only if the prosecution's cross-examination of the defendant sufficiently attacked the defendant's character for truthfulness. See Rule 608 TRE which makes it clear that evidence of the truthful character of a witness is only admissible after the character of the witness for truthfulness has been attacked by opinion or reputation violence or otherwise.
+ What you don't want to ask:. As you construct your questions for direct, think about what you don't want to ask. Generally these will be questions that will blur the mental picture that you want to paint for the jurors. Examples of questions that you might not want to ask might include questions that call for inconsequential detail, facts that can be easily disputed, facts that don't make sense, statements that can be impeached, facts that open the door to inadmissible evidence, etc
+ Background questions: In most cases, prior to any questioning on substantive matters, you will ask your witness some introductory background questions that acquaint the jurors with who the witness is. The goal is to introduce your witness in a way that makes him or her seem credible and trustworthy. Remember that the credibility of each of your witnesses is part of your case. As the old bromide goes, "If you can't trust the messenger, you can't trust the message." It's nice if your witness shares some of the same characteristics as the jurors who will judge his credibility. How do you establish your witness' background? Have the witness tell the jury a bit about himself. You begin with the witness' name. Instead of saying, "State your name, spelling your last name, please.", you might say, "Would you introduce yourself to the jury, sir?" or ""Tell us your name, please." Some of the additional biographical background information can include the witness' occupation, length of employment, length of residence in the county, age (a sensitive subject to some mature adults), education (no sense proving a lack of it), marital status, spouse's occupation, children, and age of children. At some point, background questions, e.g., the make and model of the witness' car, won't be legally relevant. If you try to introduce too much background to bolster or accredit the witness, the opposition will object that it is not relevant and/or is improper character evidence. After introducing a bit of background, you may want to ask your witness if he knows why he has been called to testify. If you've prepared him properly, you're safe in asking him to explain why he has been called.
+ Facts: After establishing your fact witness' background, you will turn to the relevant event about which the witness has knowledge gained by perception. In most cases you will present the witness' testimony in chronological order. This means guiding your witness through a description of the events in the order in which they transpired. The direct examination may focus on a relevant occasion; the direct examination may establish what happened prior to the event in question, what happened during the event, and/or what happened after the event. In some cases the fact witness may be asked how he came to be in court and whether there has been contact with the parties.
+ Exhibits: When displaying documents or other items during direct examination, you may find it useful to use an overhead projector, platform video or evidence camera (Document Camera), or flat panel video monitor/projector, computer and PowerPoint slide that will allow all the jurors to see the item simultaneously. With a laser pointer, the witness can "tell and show" matters of importance in the featured item. Having the witness step down off the witness stand and demonstrate with or without exhibits can spice the action. (1) See Courtroom Technology .
+ Preparing and structuring your questions for direct: Here are some suggestions that you should consider when preparing and organizing your questions for direct examination:
1. Outline. I suggest that you outline your direct examination questions first. Then, when you are happy with the dramatic order, write out each question and each anticipated answer. Your questions should be written in the lingo of the ear, not the eye. In other words, write your questions in plain natural spoken English . Place your written questions of direct examination of each witness in a section of your trial notebook. You are not wedded to your preformed questions. Listen to your witness' answers. Don't let your write out questions control. Be willing to depart from them, particularly when the witness gives an answer that demands a follow-up. Caution: At trial, keep your eyes out of your trial notebook while putting a question to your witness and while your witness is answering the question. Don't feel that you have to ask your questions verbatim as they appear in your trial notebook. Let the words be natural. If you need to consult your trial notebook for guidance in asking a question, look down at the notebook silently. Never read the question. Look up at the witness, and ask the question. Continue looking at your witness while the witness answers. Listen to the answer. Don't dive back into your notebook while the witness is answering. Remember, the jury's focus is supposed to be on your witness. If you don't pay attention to your own witness' answer, why should the jurors feel obliged to do so? 2. Clarify. To make your questions clear, add only one new fact to each question. Compound questions invite objections. So do questions that are vague and ambiguous. 3. Build evidentiary bridges. Weave you story together by having your witnesses identify and refer to one another during direct. Building a bridge from one witness to another is a good way of introducing the players and their roles to your jury. It also smoothes the segue from one witness to another. 4. Employ transitions and signposts. Use transitions and signposts to alert the jurors when you are moving from one unit of direct examination to another or simply to signal the subject of your upcoming questioning. A transition occurs when your questioning moves from one subject to the next . It's easier for the jurors to follow the direct examination if you periodically let them know where you are going with it. Use transitional phrases to herald a change from one topic to another, e.g., "Let's move from (indicate the unit/subject you are leaving ) to (indicate the unit/subject you are entering)." Use signposts to announce a topic, e.g., "I'm going to ask you about (indicate the subject)." . 5. Make repetition persuasive. When repetition is obvious to the jurors, you wind up with the inelegant "Same donkey, different saddle" effect. Repetition must be artful. To artfully use the forensic device of persuasive repetition, learn to loop your witness' favorable answers into later questions. You can do this by incorporating a favorable factual assertion in a prior answer into your next question. Learning to loop will help you avoid obvious repetition of the kind that makes jurors roll their eyes. When you loop,you undercut the opponent's opportunity to object that the question has been "asked and answered." 6. Stretch the important parts. To dramatize a key point in direct, learn how to "stretch-out" your questions. You do this by breaking the factual point you want to into several questions rather than a single cursory inquiry. You will find that this technique will result in a fuller description of the fact. It's analogous to using several detailed brush strokes to paint your fact, rather than a single broad stroke. 7. Learn to mirror. Mirror some of the good characteristics of your witness. Adopting some of the characteristics of your witness, e.g., language, smile, tone of voice, eye-contact, etc. puts you on a better conversational level with your witness. 8. Have your foundations ready. Be prepared to authenticate and lay foundations for any exhibits that you are going to introduce through your witnesses. Your goal is to have a smooth introduction of your tangible exhibits and a persuasive "tell and show" as you use the exhibits to add punch to your story. Tip: Put a Post-It note with the predicate questions for your exhibit on each of your exhibits. If you encounter a temporary case of intestinal gas on the brain, you will have your predicate (foundation) questions well at hand and won't have to fumble for them in your in your trial notebook. 9. Make your witness' personal knowledge clear. Your non-expert witness must speak from personal knowledge. Your lay witness can give lay opinion rationally based on the witness' personal perceptions, e.g., identification of a person based on having seen him. But a lay witness is not allowed to draw conclusions that call for technical, scientific, or other specialized knowledge.You must know when you are asking your witness for admissible lay opinion rather than inadmissible expert opinion. 10. Be extra ready to present your client's testimony. If the defendant, your client, will enter the minefield by testifying in his own behalf, prepare your direct examination by forming a set of questions that will allow the client to express a string of explanatory denials of the allegations. This will help you ask open-ended questions. 11. Deflate the potential cross-examination. Ask yourself, "How can I structure my direct to deflate the probable cross-examination of my witness?" Your direct must anticipate the probable cross-examination that will be conducted by opposing counsel and counter any opposition evidence and/or exhibits that are contradictory or inconsistent with your story of the case. For example, if you are calling a witness who has knowledge of a negative fact that is beyond dispute, don't dispute the fact. Instead, try to use your witness to dispell the negative aspects of the fact so that you can spin it in argument to your advantage. 12. Utilize open-ended questions for the important parts of the story. It's important to recognize the importance of open-ended questions that tell your story: Think about whether it is best to use an open-ended or close-ended (leading) question. Open-ended (non-leading) questions permit your witness to give an open, descriptive answer. They often begin with who, what, when, where, why, or how. Close-ended (leading) questions are controlling in the sense that they restrict the witness' answer and suggest the appropriate answer. As the direct examiner, you are also the director of the examination. That means that you don't go so overboard with open-ended questions that the witness is left to find his own way through the forest. You will need to prepare the witness in advance and guide him to the part of the story where open-ended questions allow him to tell it. 13. Avoid questions that suggest the answer to your witness. Rule 611(c) TRE and FRE state, "Leading Questions. Leading questions should not be used on direct examination except as necessary to develop the witness’s testimony. Ordinarily, the court should allow leading questions:
(1) on cross-examination; and (2) when a party calls a hostile witness, an adverse party, or a witness identified with an adverse party." This requirement of the Rules is designed to help you conduct a persuasive direct. It tells you that generally you are supposed to ask open-ended, non-leading questions on direct. In certain situations, courts will allow you to ask close-ended, leading questions on direct because leading questions are necessary to develop the witness' testimony. Leading questions on direct may be allowed by the judge, for example, to establish an evidentiary foundation, to suggest a new topic with transitional phrases, to refresh the witness' recollection, to establish preliminary matters, to establish inconsequential or undisputed facts, to question those with limited capacity, e.g., a forgetful witness, a child witness, or a mentally disabled witness, and to question an adverse party, one identified with an adverse party, or a hostile witness.
Leading questions on direct are usually not persuasive because they involve the lawyer testifying through close-ended questions and the witness simply parroting "yes" or "no." to the lawyer's suggestive questions. Jurors will be more convinced if the words of the story come from the lips of the witness. My suggestion is that you should generally avoid leading questions on direct when describing the meat of your story. You may need to lead or ask closed-ended questions when suggesting topics, speeding things along, refreshing recollection, covering undisputed facts, laying a foundation, questioning a person of age or infancy, or examining an adverse witness. . Use open-ended questions when you want the juror's to focus on your witness. One of the most important things to recognize in direct-examination is the difference between open-ended and closed-ended questions. Open-ended questions encourage your witnesses to testify in their own words. If they are credible folks, this technique will make them seem more believable than if you questioned them with leading (close-ended) questions. Sometimes you need to use a closed-ended question, as when the witness has forgotten to talk about a very specific and important matter or when you are skirting around sensitive matters and trying to avoid opening the door to certain subjects. In short, you should know the difference between open-ended and close-ended questions, know how to use open questions where appropriate in direct, and always try to use open questions to balance any necessary closed questions. 14. Learn how to ask open-ended, non-leading questions. You will have to train yourself to get into the habit of asking open-ended, non-leading questions during key parts of your direct. It's not normal. Why? Because, if you have learned your case, you already know all the answers.You are anxious to have the jurors know all the answers, so anxious that you literally want to tell them yourself by leading and testifying for your witness. If you have trouble forming open-ended (non-leading) questions, try writing out the answers you would want to receive from your witness; then write the questions that would call for the desired answer. If you do this a few times, it becomes much clearer how you can tell your story through your witness. There's another forensic device that may assist you in forming non-leading questions. Try to begin each key question with a who, what, where, when, why, and how. These six short words are the key components to your story. I've always liked the way the great poet and writer Rudyard Kipling put it:
I kept six honest serving men.
They taught me all I knew.
Their names were what and why and when
and how and where and who.
How do you deal with direct examination of a hostile witness, adverse party, or a person identified with an adverse party?
A hostile witness can be as unpredictable as a wild mustang stallion. If you don't rein him in, he can do more damage than good. A witness will be considered as hostile if s/he is associated with the opposition or if s/he is openly hostile (prejudiced) against you or biased in favor of the other side. Asking "why" and "how" questions is inviting trouble. So, how do you get a lasso over a hostile witness on direct examination? Get permission from the court to lead the witness, i.e., ask closed-ended, leading questions. The rules of evidence indicate that when a party calls a hostile witness, an adverse party, or a witness identified with an adverse party, interrogation may be by leading questions. (See Rule 611 (c) TRE & FRE). In a criminal case ,the key determination for the judge is whether the witness is hostile or is identified with the adverse party. If so, you have a right to lead the witness on direct.
To raise the issue of hostility, go to sidebar before calling the witness and ask the court for permission to lead the witness on the ground that the witness is hostile to your position. Explain why you consider the witness hostile. The judge may accept your representation and grant your request. If not, you will need to make a showing of hostility. Do this by voir dire questioning out of the presence of the jury. You may be able to prove hostility by calling the witness and securing admissions of hostile feelings. You may need to show witness hostility with extrinsic third party evidence. You may have to wait until the witness acts up on direct, e.g., openly evades questions or refuses to cooperate, to obtain a court ruling allowing you to treat the witness as a hostile witness.
The fact that the witness is distant or reluctant won't necessarily make him appear sufficiently hostile in the court's opinion to allow you to lead. If you are in a situation where you have to call a witness who doesn't want to have to come to court, consider him as hostile in your planning, irrespective of whether the court will declare the witness as hostile.
What about adverse parties? The defendant in the opposing party to the prosecution, but the Fifth Amendment privilege prevents the prosecution from calling the defendant as a witness on direct. If you are a defender, the opposing party is the state, commonwealth, people, etc. These are entities and not persons. So, you will have to rely on your right to lead your witness if the witness is identified with the adverse party. Who might qualify as such a witness? The complaining witness? The law enforcement agents who conduct the investigation for the prosecution?
How do you prepare your witness for direct and cross-examination?
It is disastrous on direct examination of a friendly or neutral witness for the examiner to appear to be putting words in the witness' mouth. The way to avoid this potential disaster is to prepare your witness in advance of testimony so you and the witness each know what the other will say. If you do this, you can avoid the disaster of having to testify for your witness simply by asking non-leading questions. Preparation is the key to effective direct examination. Consider the following advice as you prepare your witness for direct and cross-examination:
+ As a general rule, you can assume that a friendly witness wants to help you on direct examination. A neutral witness simply wants to be accurate. A hostile witness wants to wound you.
+ Be extremely wary of putting a witness on the stand if you haven't interviewed him or her. You don't want to find yourself in the position of trying to throttle your own overly talkative witness. When you try to put a lid on the verbiage of your own witness in front of the jury by interrupting the witness' answer, you will appear disingenuous and manipulative. Plus, it's kind of embarrassing when the court sustains opposing counsel's objection to you cutting off your own witness' answers!
+ If possible, prepare the witness in your office. Greet the witness in your reception area and escort the witness to your office or conference room. Offer the witness refreshment. Get it yourself; don't ask someone else to do it.
+ It is your choice whether to prepare the witnesses in groups or individually, and in one or several interviews.
+ Make certain that your witness knows his role in the telling of the story or reconstructing of the event. Explain to the witness where s/he fits in your overall case. Tell the witness why you are calling him.
+ Familiarize your witness with an outline of the questions you will ask him on direct, and brief him on the anticipated cross-examination. The idea is to let the witness know what questions he can expect. Most lay witnesses will be testifying to their observations and perceptions. If the witness is called to venture opinion or reputation testimony concerning character of the defendant, alleged victim or another witness, the character witness needs to know exactly what you are going to be asking. If you are going to put the client on to testify in his own behalf, make clear how you are going to deal with the client's denial of the allegation, e.g., will you have the client deny the allegation at the very outset of the direct before any background questions are asked.
+ Determine what answers your witness will give both to your direct and to the opposition's cross. This typically takes the form of a rehearsal in which you conduct a mock interrogation of the witness. If you are rehearsing with your client, you may want to get another colleague to conduct the mock cross-examination. It may be helpful to videotape the mock interrogation. [Note: If you videotape a non-defendant witness and keep the tape, the opposing side may obtain trial discovery of the tape in Texas under Rule 615(a) & (f) (2) TRE and in federal court under Rule 26.2 F.R.Crim.P., 18 USC Section 3500 (The Jencks Act)]
+ Find out if your witness has prior experience testifying in court. To calm any pretrial jitters, you may want to take your inexperienced witness to the courtroom before trial begins.
+ Advise your witness that it is best to listen to each question on direct and cross and take one or two seconds before answering. Tell the witness that he may answer if the question is clear and you do not lodge an objection. Let the witness know that if he does not understand the question he should say "I'm not sure what you're asking" or "I don't understand the question."
+ The place to deal with possible memory lapses is always in the pretrial preparation process; however, if you are dealing with an essential witness who suffers with a fragile memory, you can tell the witness "If for some reason your mind goes blank or if you freeze up, it's perfectly acceptable to say 'I'm sorry, I'm having a little trouble remembering.' " Tell the forgetful witness that if s/he runs into a memory problem, you may try to refresh his memory about the matter of inquiry
+ One way or another, you need to provide a laundry list of advice to your inexperienced witnesses as to how to handle direct and cross. You may provide a written letter or booklet explaining what witnesses should know about testifying at the courthouse. [Note: If you provide your witness with written instructions and he reads it, the opposition will be able to get trial discovery of the writing under Rule 612 TRE and FRE. If you write such a letter, take into consideration that your opponent may be allowed to introduce your written advice to the witness into evidence. Remember that your goal is to have the witness testify truthfully and be believed.].
+ Let the witness know that you are going to do everything possible to make the witness' appearance as easy and convenient at possible.
Refreshing recollection of your forgetful witness - Using a writing or other item in aid of your witness oral testimony
If you have properly prepared your witness for testimony, it is improbable that you will need to refresh the witness'' recollection while s/he is on the stand. Still, some witnesses are so stressed that they develop a mental block or a blank mind while testifying. We have all suffered from the occasional brain cramp. So what can you show you witness to revive or refresh her/his recollection? The first thing you can try is a leading question. Most judges will allow a leading question when it is apparent that the witness has forgotten. If leading the witness doesn't work, you can refresh the witness' recollection.
You can refresh a witness' memory on the stand with anything, e.g. a phone book, a letter from someone else, a sack of manure, etc. If it is a written document, it does not have to be written by or adopted by the witness. For the purpose of refreshing or reviving a witness' recollection, it does not matter that the written document was authored by someone else. It is not necessary that the document or item be admissible in evidence. You are not introducing the item into evidence. You are just using it to revive a temporarily defunct memory, much as you might use oil to open a rusty lock, except this is brain oil and the rusty lock is the witness' rusty memory. [Note: The cross-examiner is also allowed to refresh a witness' recollection, but inconsistencies in an opposition witness' testimony are customarily used to impeach the witness.]
Note that when you use a writing or other item to refresh a witness' memory, opposing counsel is entitled to inspect the item and introduce relevant portions of it. See Rule 612 FRE and Rule 612 TRE relating to the adverse party's right to have the writing used to refresh the witness memory produced at the trial or hearing, to inspect it, to cross-examine the witness thereon, and to introduce in evidence those portions which relate to the testimony of the witness. So you always want to think cautiously about the contents of any writing you use to refresh or revive recollection of your witness. Note that if opposing counsel does introduce the item that you used to refresh your witness' recollection, it is admissible only on the issue of your witness' credibility and not for the truth of the matter asserted in the item.
What are the steps in refreshing (reviving, restoring) a forgetful witness' recollection (recall, memory) with a written document or other item while the witness is on the stand?
Included below is a list of the sort of questions you can ask your forgetful witness to refresh the witness' memory when you have a document, e.g., the witness' statement, that contains information that will jolt the forgetful witness' memory. Remember though, the item you use to refresh a witness recollection on the the stand does not have to be anything written or adopted by the witness. Here, for example, it could be someone else's statement, maybe one the witness has never seen before, rather than the witness own prior statement. Remember also that you don't have to sweat the usual barriers to use of writings, e.g., authentication, original document (best evidence) rule, hearsay rule. Why? Because you are not going to introduce the writing used solely to refresh/revive the recollection of your witness. The jury doesn't see it.
Q: Did you ever make any notes (or give a written statement) when this was fresh on your mind?
A: Yes, I made some notes at the time (or a signed statement to your investigator).
Q: [Mark the notes or statement and tender them to the opposition for inspection.] Let me show you this document, marked for identification as Defense 1, and ask you to tell me if you recognize it.
A: Yes, I do.
Q: Without telling me what it says, would you tell us what it is?
A: It's my notes (or written statement) of what happened.
Q: Take a moment to look at it. Now, after looking at your notes (or written statement), has your memory been refreshed about (indicate the inquiry, e,g., what happened with regard to the event in question).
Q: Do you remember what happened well enough to put this document aside and testify from your own memory about (indicate the event).
A: Yes [Take the document back. TIP: If your opponent is skilled, s/he will be sure to require you to take the document back before the witness tries to testify from refreshed memory, unless s/he wants to sandbag the witness by taking the document away during cross-examination questioning of the witness to show that the witness' memory was not really refreshed.]
Q: What do you remember about (indicate the event)?
Recorded Recollection (Prior Recollection Recorded) -An exception to the hearsay rule. - What can you do when you have tried unsuccessfully to refresh the witness' recollection with the witness' own statement and the witness still has lack of sufficient present recall (memory) to testify fully and accurately?
On rare occasions, your witness may be faced with a witness who is so forgetful that you fail in refreshing her/his recollection. Sometimes this may be expected, as when a very long list of items is involved. If your witness does not have sufficient memory (recollection) to answer your question fully after you have tried and failed to refresh the witness' present recollection (memory), you may wish to try to establish the admissibility of your witness' prior out of court assertions of fact in the form of a memorandum or record of recollection made or adopted by the witness. Unlike refreshing recollection where you can use any writing to refresh recollection, recorded recollection covers only a prior writing authored or adopted by the witness whose memory has failed. Here you will introduce the witness' prior recorded recollection into evidence. If you are successful, the jury will hear it read to them. This record or memorandum of prior recollection comes into evidence as a recognized exception to the hearsay rule. See Rule 803 (5) FRE, Rule 803(5)TRE. The assertions of fact in the recorded recollection are admitted as probative evidence of the truth of the matters asserted in the recorded recollection. (In effect, they substitute for the the live witness who is incompetent to testify on the matter because of failure of recollection.) Note that the recorded recollection writing can only be read to the jury by the proponent; it cannot be received as an exhibit, unless offered by opposing counsel.
Here's the text of the recorded recollection exception to the hearsay rule from the FRE and TRE.
- Rule 803 (5) FRE states:(5) Recorded Recollection. A record that: (A) is on a matter the witness once knew about but now cannot recall well enough to testify fully and accurately; (B) was made or adopted by the witness when the matter was fresh in the witness’s memory; and (C) accurately reflects the witness’s knowledge. If admitted, the record may be read into evidence but may be received as an exhibit only if offered by an adverse party.
- Rule 803 (5) TRE states: Recorded Recollection. A record that: (A) is on a matter the witness once knew about but now cannot recall well enough to testify fully and accurately; (B) was made or adopted by the witness when the matter was fresh in the witness’s memory; and (C) accurately reflects the witness’s knowledge, unless the circumstances of the record’s preparation cast doubt on its trustworthiness. If admitted, the record may be read into evidence but may be received as an exhibit only if offered by an adverse party. (Note: This limitation is like that imposed on a learned treatise.)
Remember, if you face a situation that permits introduction of a recorded recollection, your witness has ceased to be a witness to the fact in question and serves only as a foundational witness who authenticates his/her previously recorded recollection. What do you need to ask your forgetful witness to introduce his prior statement as recorded recollection? Here are some sample predicate or foundational questions formulated under Rule 803(5) above. :
Q: Did you at one time know what happened with regard to (indicate the event in terms of the time, place, and people involved).
Q: Do you now have present sufficient memory (recollection) to allow you to testify accurately and completely about (indicate the event). [Have the memorandum marked for identification as a court exhibit. Remember, the recorded recollection can't be physically introduced into the hands of the jury. If admissible as an exhibit, it can only be read into evidence to the jury.]
Q: I'm showing you what has been marked for identification as Defendant's Exhibit No.__. I'll ask you to read it silently to yourself. When you've finished reading it, please let me know.
Q: Do you recognize the contents of Exhibit No. __?
Q: Without telling me what it says, will you tell us what the exhibit is?
Q: Who made it?
Q: [Attempt to refresh the witness' recollection.] After looking at Exhibit No. __, has your memory been refreshed about what happened at (indicate the time, place, location, and act, event, or condition)?
A: No. [The foundational answer is "no." If the witness says "yes, " s/he is competent to testify as a fact witness because s/he has present recollection; you don't need to introduce the record of prior recollection of a witness who has full present recollection, and the rules don't allow you to do so. If the witness says "no," indicating a lack of present recollection after you have tried to refresh her recollection, the witness is not competent to testify to the fact because s/he has no present personal knowledge of the fact at issue. If the witness answers "no," you may now proceed to try to establish the other legs of the predicate for introduction of a recorded recollection as an exception to the hearsay rule.]
Q: Do you now remember what happened well enough to allow you to put this document aside and testify from your memory about (indicate the act,event or condition)?
A: No. [Again, the answer has to be "no," indicating that the witness has insufficient present recollection to enable the witness to testify fully and accurately about the matter.]
Q: Did you make (or adopt) Exhibit No. __?
Q: At the time this Exhibit No. __ was made (or adopted) , did you have knowledge of (indicate the act, event, or condition)?
A: Yes. [The foundational answer must be "yes."]
Q: When you made (or adopted) Exhibit No. __ , was (indicate the act, event, or condition) fresh on your mind?
A: Yes [The foundational answer must be "yes." ]
Q: Does Exhibit No. __ correctly reflect your knowledge of (indicate the act, event, or condition) when you made (or adopted) it?
A: Yes [The foundational answer must be "yes."]
Q: [Offer the contents of the exhibit as evidence] Your Honor, the defense offers the contents of Defense Exhibit No. __ in evidence.
The Court: The contents of Defense Exhibit No. __ are received. The item of recorded recollection itself will not become an exhibit, but you may read it or have it read to the jury.
Q: (To the witness) Is Defense Exhibit No.__ a statement concerning (indicate the act, event, or condition you wish to prove or disprove)?
Q: [Have your witness or other person, e.g., the clerk of the court or yourself, read to the jury what the document says about the act, event, or condition at issue. Note: You can't actually introduce the tangible writing into evidence, but its contents can be read into evidence. If opposing counsel offers the actual tangible item of recorded recollection into evidence and the court receives it, the actual item of recorded recollection can go to the jury.] Would you read this record (or memorandum) of your recollection to the jury, please? [TIP: Even though the authenticating witness is not competent to testify as to the matter, s/he is the author of the writing and thus the most logical person to read the document. Just be sure that your witness can read.]
Out-of-Court Statements of Identification by a Witness Admissible in Court on Direct Examination of the Witness and Others Who Heard the Witness' Statement of Identification
Normally a witness is not allowed to bolster his testimony on direct examination by pointing to previous out-of-court statements that are consistent with his in-court testimony. Nor are other witnesses typically allowed to bolster the testimony of a witness by referring to the witness' out-of-court statements that lend credence to what the witness said in court. However, when a witness has made an out-of-court statement of identification, e.g., the witness identifies a suspected criminal at a lineup or showup, the witness and others who heard the identification witness' statement of identification are allowed to testify in court to the out-of-court identification. This statement of identification scenario comes up most commonly when a victim of crime has made a pretrial identification of the defendant as the perpetrator and is called to testify as an ID witness a the defendant's trial. It can also occur when another person who was present at the witness' pretrial identification of the perpetrator, e.g., the cop who conducted the lineup or showup, is called to testify to the witness' pretrial ID of the defendant, either to bolster the ID witness' in-court ID or, if the witness is not able to make an in-court ID of the defendant, to show that the witness made a positive pretrial identification of the defendant.
The admissibility of a witness' prior statement of identification is governed under the FRE and TRE by
- FRE 801(d)(1)(C) which states, "(d) Statements That Are Not Hearsay. A statement that meets the following conditions is not hearsay: (1) A Declarant-Witness’s Prior Statement. The declarant testifies and is subject to cross-examination about a prior statement, and the statement ... (C) identifies a person as someone the declarant perceived earlier."
- TRE 801(e)(1)(C) which also states, "A statement is not hearsay if the declarant testifies at the trial or hearing and is subject to cross-examination concerning the statement, and the statement is one of identification of a person made after perceiving the person."
The admissibility of the witness' out-of-court statement of identification of a person made after perceiving the person hinges on whether the declarant testifies as a witness. If the witness who made the out-of-court ID does not testify, third party witness testimony of the declarant's statement of identification is hearsay and not admissible. If the declarant does testify, he may testify to the out-of- court ID and anyone who heard the out-of-court ID may testify to it. Notice also that the rule declaring statements of identification as non-hearsay does not limit the proof of the declarant's out-of-court statement of identification to situations when the out-of-court statement of identification by the witness is consistent with his in-court ID. The rule refers to "statements of identification." Thus, in the event that an ID witness can swear to his out-of-court identification but is unable to make an in-court ID, a third party who heard the out-of-court ID could testify that that person whom the declarant ID'ed out-of-court is the same person now on trial. Remember that since the out-of-court statement of identification is not hearsay, it comes in as probative evidence for the truth of the matter stated. [Note: The out-of-court testimonial statement of identification by a prosecution witness is not subject to the protection of the Crawford confrontation rule because the person who made the identification must testify as a witness for this exception to the hearsay definition to come into play.The defense may cross-examine the prosecution witness; thus, there can be no denial of confrontation.]
Impeaching Your Own Witness
The common law "voucher rule" has been abolished by TRE and FRE Rule 607 which provides, "Any party, including the party that called the witness, may attack the witness’s credibility." So a witness may be impeached on direct examination, as well as on cross-examination. The direct examiner is not bound by his/her witness' testimony. All forms of impeachment would seem to be available when your witness goes rogue on the witness stand; however, it's usually prior inconsistent statements that are used to impeach the jumper. Note that the absence of a voucher rule does not mean that you can call a witness for the principal purpose of impeaching him/her. TRE and FRE Rule 403 may be employed by opposing counsel to prevent this seemingly devious and unfair tactic (1).
REDIRECT EXAMINATION - Plugging the Holes
+ Purpose of redirect: What can you accomplish with redirect examination? Your questioning can rehabilitate your witness after the witness has been impeached on cross? Cross-examination allows your opponent the opportunity to gain concessions from the witness, to destroy the witness factual version of the case, and to utilize a mode of personal impeachment, e.g. a prior inconsistent statement, a prior conviction, bias, motive, lack of perception/memory, etc., to attack your witness' credibility.
You can use redirect try to show the jury that the opposing counsel's concession-based questions presented a misleading picture of what the witness really conceded.
Concerning the destructive form of cross, you can use redirect to show that your witness got it right on direct examination; that your witness didn't make a mistake regarding his observations or misstate the facts; that your lay or expert witness didn't draw illogical inferences or conclusions; that there are additional facts that support the accuracy of the witness' testimony that was questioned on cross. In Texas (TRE 611(b) and other wide-open cross-examination jurisdictions, you can use redirect to demonstrate that new adverse subjects raised on cross-examination can be reconciled with the witness' previous testimony on direct and that new favorable facts raised on cross-examination actually corroborate and confirm your witness' testimony on direct. Concerning a cross that included impeachment attacks on your witness personal credibility by one or more of the modes of impeachment, e.g., proof of bias, motive, weakness in perception or memory, prior convictions, prior inconsistent statements, (and under FRE 608(b) specific instances of false statement and dishonesty of your witness), you can try to repair the damage, e.g., by showing on redirect that what might appear to be prior inconsistencies in your witness' testimony can be explained, that, in a case where cross-examination has expressly charged or implied that your witness had an improper motive, was improperly influenced, or recently fabricated his story on direct, your witness gave a prior consistent statement before any such motive, influence or alleged recent fabrication occurred (Rule 801(d)(1)(B) FRE and Rule 801(e)(1)(B) TRE)
+ Avoid opening door to recross: If you conduct a redirect, make every effort to avoid establishing a basis for recross. This means not opening up new areas of inquiry. The best way to do this is by conducting a complete direct.
+ Avoid leading on redirect: Even the best lawyers sometimes lead on redirect. Every rookie does it. It's natural to want to lead your witness on redirect when you are trying to repair damage done to your witness on cross. It's often damage that you did not anticipate and prepare the witness to handle. So you inject yourself as a witness to smooth over the bumps. If you lead on key points in redirect, a skilled opponent may object, "Counsel is putting words in his witness' mouth. We object to the leading question." Learn to let your witness do the explaining of vital points on redirect. This is best the way to repair damage done by cross-examination.
+ Brevity: Keep your redirect short.
+ Still sticks to original story on direct : Give your witness the opportunity on redirect to say "No" to the question: "Is there anything you would say to change or add to the substance of what you told us on direct examination?"
+ Proof of Your Witness' Prior Consistent Statement: FRE 801(d)(1)(B) and TRE 801(e)(1)(B) permit proof of your witness' prior out-of-court statement that is consistent with his in-court testimony when the declarant witness testifies at the trial or hearing and is subject to cross-examination concerning the statement and your witness has been expressly or impliedly accused on cross-examination or otherwise of recent fabrication or improper influence or motive. Such a prior consistent statement is not hearsay and is admissible as probative evidence for its truth. Note that it does not have to have been given under oath or at a trial, hearing, deposition or other formal proceeding. For example, a prior consistent statement in an offense report or an investigator's file would qualify. [Note: The out-of-court prior consistent testimonial statement of a prosecution witness is not subject to objection under the protection of the Crawford confrontation rule because the person who made the prior consistent statement must testify as a witness for this exception to the hearsay definition to come into play. The defense could cross-examine the witness; thus, there would be no denial of confrontation.] + A few of tips (1 - 2 pages), (2 - 19 pages of standard fare by a civil lawyer), (3 - 15 pages "Making the Facts Understandable"), (4 - storytelling on direct by a Canadian), (5 - direct exam of an expert) for preparing and conducting a direct examination. Help with preparing a direct examination of a victim of domestic violence. Four pages discussing how to persuade with direct examination. Lawyer-law professor Michael Tigar's article explaining how a law suit is a contest between two stories, Deciders Perceive Whole Stories. + Read the annotated model direct examination of surviving nurse Corazon Amurao by the late Cook County State's Attorney William Martin in the 1967 trial of mass-murderer Richard Speck for the July 14, 1966, killing of eight student nurses living in a Chicago townhouse. It's contained on the Direct Examination portion of the CCJA Criminal Trial Practice DVD and is also reprinted as part of the CCJA web site, See the red button in the masthead above. Bill Martin was a quintessential prosecutor. [Personal Note: Bill conducted the oral examination of my thesis during my LL.M. fellowship at Northwestern Law School. I got the degree, but admired his terrific skill as a questioner long before he grilled me.] He wrote an excellent 462-page book about the Speck case; it's called Crime of the Century: Richard Speck and the Murder of Eight Nurses, ISBN 0553560255; the book is out of print, but you can pick up a paperback version, published by Bantam, from Amazon. + For an example of direct examination of an adverse witness on voir dire, out of the presence of the jury, take a look at Clarence Darrow's direct of Willlian Jennings Bryan (1) in the 1925 Tennessee v. Scopes "Monkey Trial" testing the propriety of teaching evolution in the public schools. | <urn:uuid:e2fb5ab6-d787-456f-8677-b507ddd23d95> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://criminaldefense.homestead.com/Direct.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783404405.88/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624155004-00032-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955345 | 13,191 | 3.0625 | 3 |
Most of the world considers birds colorful, happy creatures of grace and beauty; some regal like eagles for example, and some cheerful, vibrant creatures like the Australian budgerigar, also referred to as budgies. Today budgies are popular among breeders, and they’ve been sought after household pets since the 1800’s. It’s hard to believe that these colorful, tiny birds somehow managed to survive the harsh weather conditions in Australia for millions of years.
Budgerigars in Australia, living in their natural habitat are noticeably smaller than those in captivity. Living in the wild the Australian budgies typically won’t live the entirety of their life span due to the hazards of survival in the outdoors. Raised as pets, budgies can live an average of 10 to 12 years if they receive proper care. They make enjoyable pets that are able to mimic speech, love music and are very playful, basically a complete joy to have around and are affordable pets to care for as well.
Australian Budgerigar that have been bred in captivity come in a variety of colors including blue, gray/green, gray, violet, yellow/blue, white, and even vibrant blotches of color however most found in pet stores are green, blue and yellow. These vibrantly hues birds are also fluorescent under ultraviolet light which may be connected to courtship.
What is the difference between australian budgies and UK budgies
Some of the main difference between the Australian budgies and UK budgies is their size and color varieties. In the UK, “English Budgerigar” have been bred for generations, focusing on show quality and size, weighing in at about 50 grams; around a head taller than the Australian Budgerigar. The English budgie has fuller feathering around their faces as well.
What is a healthy diet for australian budgies?
Typically, when living in the wild, the budgies live on a variety of grasses and greens. Any light green that can be devoured, prodded and pulled apart by this cute Australian bird will likely work as food however they typically stick to Spinifex, Mitchell’s and Tussock grasses; they also tend to enjoy millet and wheat. Budgies can even eat smaller seeds as long as they are soft enough. Australian Budgerigar pet owners can purchase natural greens or grains at most pet stores as well as nutritionally enhanced brands made from the same ingredients if the brand is known for quality budgie food.
Australian budgies need love too
Budgies need love and attention just like we do. If you’re away from home a lot be sure to provide your budgie (budgies) with plenty of toys like ladders, bells, rings, etc. You’ll want to skip mirrors because they’ll end up playing with their image instead of you.
The Australian Budgerigar makes a great pet if you’re ready to take proper care of them both nutritionally and emotionally; if you do you’ll fall in love with these exceptional creatures, their grace, vibrant colors, and cheerful, playful demeanor. Budgies live a long time, they are easy to care for, and they can make great companions if you give them plenty of love and attention.
No related posts. | <urn:uuid:cd8dad84-5421-4536-a927-24ee5541613e> | CC-MAIN-2016-26 | http://www.budgerigarparakeets.com/buy-a-budgerigar-parakeet/the-australian-budgerigar/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-26/segments/1466783391766.5/warc/CC-MAIN-20160624154951-00060-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955475 | 711 | 2.90625 | 3 |
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