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In the wake of the massive and horrific natural disasters in Myanmar and China, it is important to examine how the provision of humanitarian relief relates to issues of voice and accountability. In a general sense, communication should be an absolutely vital element of any relief effort. Broadcasting or otherwise circulating crucial information about unsafe areas, survivor resources, and important health and public safety issues can help prevent further outbreaks of disease and post-disaster traumas. Apart from providing humanitarian information, an independent media sector (in tandem with civil society) can ensure that rebuilding efforts are consultative, transparent and accountable. Over the long term, humanitarian communication efforts can eventually stimulate the development of a healthy public sphere, even where none has existed before.
This is not to say that public sphere issues are always emphasized in humanitarian assistance. Often, the "information and communication" aspect of humanitarian relief becomes compressed in the face of what are seen to be more pressing immediate needs. Moreover, in many countries around the world, governments clamp down on information in the wake of natural disasters or other incidents, particularly under circumstances in which they feel any "leak" might be harmful to the country's image, or when they feel the freer circulation of information may lead to unacceptable social and political consequences for the government in question. In these situations, an already difficult situation for the survivors becomes even worse: people are cut off from each other and from the outside world, with rumor displacing reliable information as the basis for life-and-death decisions.
This blog "Burning Bridge", written by a colleague with direct experience in these situations, contains an excellent discussion of these issues, including the idea of treating information and communications infrastructure/access not just as an political right, but as a key element in development and public safety policies.
Photo Credit: Flickruser Sarvodaya.org
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Blogs About Reading
Sound It Out
Dr. Joanne Meier
Along with her background as a professor, researcher, writer, and teacher, Joanne Meier is a mom. Join Joanne every week as she shares her experiences raising her own young readers, and guides parents and teachers on the best practices in reading.
Preparing for a big family trip
We're heading off to Germany for some apple strudel, German soccer, apple strudel, and tours of castles and salt mines (and apple strudel). This is a big adventure for our family, and we've been prepping for weeks! It's been so fun for the girls to be involved in the planning and the excitement. I thought I'd share a few of the things we've done to get ready — most of these ideas could be adapted for a trip anywhere.
- We posted a big map on the kitchen wall. We've got push pins for our destinations, and the girls have measured the distance in kilometers and then converted that to miles.
- We've developed Questions & Answers. As questions have come up, we write them down on strips of paper. When someone has time, they research the answer and "present" their findings. The girls have compiled some of their answers into a very flashy PowerPoint presentation.
- We've tracked reservations and events on a handmade calendar we keep in the kitchen. It's fun to look at the days ahead with such anticipation.
- We've learned a bit of German! Besides taking a language and culture class here in our community, we watched some Girls4Teaching German lessons. My girls liked that the "instructor" was a young girl. The overall session length was just about right for them.
- We've tried every German restaurant in our area. This wasn't hard — there's just three. But we learned that the girls love pumpernickel bread and hate boiled cabbage.
- We checked out a lot of books on Germany from the library. This has helped build a lot of background knowledge about the castles we'll be touring and the history of the salt mines in Salzburg.
- We've added some apps and podcasts to our i-products. Earworms helped us learned numbers, days and time using music-based training. Currency+ helps us track the Euro-to-dollar conversion. Free podcasts from Rick Steves will help us with a walking tour.
There's still packing and to-do lists a mile long, but hopefully at least one of the ideas I shared sounds like something you'd like to try with your family. Auf Wiedersehen! (goodbye for now!)
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A study from Vanderbilt University has found physical changes in the brains of Ecstasy users that suggest that their brains are not functioning as efficiently as they once did. These changes did not disappear after a year of abstinence from Ecstasy.
Ecstasy use is associated with a loss of serotonin signaling, which leads to hyper-excitability in the brain.
This comes on the heels of another study published in March that found a definite brain drain in ten long-time Ecstasy users: their hippocampus measured, on average, more than 10% smaller than that of non-users. That study was published in the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry.
Ecstasy or MDMA (3-4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine), is a man-made drug. It is used as a recreational drug and known as a club drug because of its amphetamine-like and hallucinogenic properties. It is classified as a stimulant. Ecstasy produces changes in brain chemistry. But these may not be the type of changes its users are after.
Dr. Ronald Cowan, who headed the Vanderbilt study, is concerned about some recent media coverage of Ecstasy — pieces reporting on possible therapeutic uses of Ecstasy in PTSD sufferers that suggest that some of Ecstasy's negative effects have been overstated.
"There's tension in the fields of psychiatry and psychotherapy between those who think Ecstasy could be a valuable therapeutic that's not being tested because of overblown fears, and those who are concerned about the drug's potentially harmful effects," Cowan said in a university press release.
Dr. Cowan thinks that the most relevant question is whether or not Ecstasy use causes long-term brain damage.
In discussing the Vanderbilt study, Cowan says that its results are what were expected, based on previous animal studies: Ecstasy use is associated with a loss of serotonin signaling, which leads to hyper-excitability in the brain.
The scans showed a direct, linear relationship between lifetime Ecstasy use and activation in all three brain regions — the more Ecstasy a subject had taken during their life, the greater was the activation seen in all three brain regions. The heaviest Ecstasy users also showed a greater spatial extent of activation (more of the region was active) in BA 17 and BA 18.
Dr. Cowan interprets this increased activation as a sign of a less functional brain.
Cowan points out that this pattern of hyper-excitability is similar to that seen in studies of individuals at risk for or with early Alzheimer's disease. He says this does not mean that Ecstasy users are at risk of dementia, but that there's a loss of brain efficiency in both Ecstasy users and early Alzheimer's patients.
"We think this shift in cortical excitability may be chronic, long-lasting, and even permanent, which is a real worry," Cowan said.
Ronald L. Cowan, M.D., Ph.D. is an assistant professor of psychiatry in the Division of Adult Psychiatry at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.
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Sales of drones—small flying machines equipped with cameras—are soaring. But new research by a Johns Hopkins computer security team has raised concerns about how easily hackers could cause these robotic devices to ignore their human controllers and land or, more drastically, crash.
Five graduate students and their professor discovered three different ways to send rogue commands from a computer laptop to interfere with an airborne hobby drone’s normal operation and land it or send it plummeting.
The finding is important because drones, also called unmanned aerial vehicles, have become so popular that they are, pardon the expression, flying off the shelves. A recent article in Fortune, referring to the 12-month period ending in April, trumpeted that Drone Sales Have Tripled in the Last Year. And the devices are not cheap. The article stated that the average cost of a drone was more than $550, though prices vary widely depending on the sophistication of the device. A recent Federal Aviation Administration report predicted that 2.5 million hobby-type and commercial drones would be sold in 2016.
Hobby drones are flown largely for recreation and aerial photography or videography. But more advanced commercial drones can handle more demanding tasks. Farmers have begun using drones with specialized cameras to survey their fields and help determine when and where water and fertilizer should be applied. Advanced commercial drones can also help in search and rescue missions located in challenging terrain. Some businesses, such as Amazon, are exploring the use of drones to deliver merchandise to their customers.
But in their haste to satisfy consumer demands, drone makers may have left a few digital doors unlocked. “You see it with a lot of new technology,” said. Lanier A. Watkins, who supervised the recent drone research at Johns Hopkins’ Homewood campus. “Security is often an afterthought. The value of our work is in showing that the technology in these drones is highly vulnerable to hackers.”
Watkins is a senior cyber security research scientist in the university’s Whiting School of Engineering, Department of Computer Science. He also holds appointments with the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and the Johns Hopkins Information Security Institute.
During the past school year, Watkins’ master’s degree students were required to apply what they’d learned about information security by completing a capstone project. Watkins suggested they do wireless network penetration testing on a popular hobby drone and develop “exploits” from the vulnerabilities found to disrupt the process that enables a drone’s operator on the ground to manage its flight.
An “exploit,” explained Michael Hooper, one of the student researchers, “is a piece of software typically directed at a computer program or device to take advantage of a programming error or flaw in that device.”
In the team’s first successful exploit, the students bombarded a drone with about 1,000 wireless connection requests in rapid succession, each asking for control of the airborne device. This digital deluge overloaded the aircraft’s central processing unit, causing it to shut down. That sent the drone into what the team referred to as “an uncontrolled landing.”
In the second successful hack, the team sent the drone an exceptionally large data packet, exceeding the capacity of a buffer in the aircraft’s flight application. Again, this caused the drone to crash.
For the third exploit, the researchers repeatedly sent a fake digital packet from their laptop to the drone’s controller, telling it that the packet’s sender was the drone itself. Eventually, the researchers said, the drone’s controller started to “believe” that the packet sender was indeed the aircraft itself. It severed its own contact with the drone, which eventually led to the drone making an emergency landing.
“We found three points that were actually vulnerable, and they were vulnerable in a way that we could actually build exploits for,” Watkins said. “We demonstrated here that not only could someone remotely force the drone to land, but they could also remotely crash it in their yard and just take it.”
In accordance with university policy, the researchers described their drone exploit findings in a Vulnerability Disclosure Package and sent it early this year to the maker of the drone that was tested. By the end of May, the company had not responded to the findings. More recently, the researchers have begun testing higher-priced drone models to see if these devices are similarly vulnerable to hacking.
Watkins said he hopes the studies serve as a wake-up call so that future drones for recreation, aerial photography, package deliveries and other commercial and public safety tasks will leave the factories with enhanced security features already on board, instead of relying on later “bug fix” updates, when it may be too late.
The other four Johns Hopkins grad students who participated in this research with Watkins were Yifan Tian, Runzuan Zhou, Bin Cao and Wlajimir Alexis.
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Disclaimer: EssayStudio is a custom writing service that provides online on-demand written work for assistance purposes. All the work should be used in accordance. A good art history essay comprises a strong central thesis supported by. At Essay Writing Service UK we can assign to you a professional art historian who. The Origins of Writing. See works of art. 1988.433.1. 1988.433.3. 1985.143. Works of Art (4) Essay Ira. “The Origins of Writing.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of. Free Art dissertation articles for writing dissertations on topics of art history Questions About Writing an Essay. who are coming to ask "write my essay for. Art History Essay Help Thank you for. Thesis For Art History Paper I need some help with a thesis statement for an art history paper?Writing an Art History Paper. Art History Writing Guidelines. Most art history research papers will require that you consult primary and secondary. Essay in exhibition catalogue or.
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Author: Nollaig Frost
Publisher: Open University Press/McGraw-Hill Education
Price: £70.00 and £26.99
ISBN 9780335241507, 41514 and 41521 (e-book)
A text on research methods seldom makes an exciting read. The contributors to this volume, however, draw on interesting examples and make the process relatively appealing. The focus of the book's first part is on four qualitative approaches: grounded theory, interpretative phenomenological analysis, discourse analysis and narrative analysis. The authors provide a good overview of the history, development and applications of each tradition.
In part two, the book explores pluralistic approaches, guiding the reader through ways of combining different methods of qualitative research. Each stage is systematically unpacked: from choosing an appropriate mixed-methods approach, to implementing it and writing it up. The researcher is urged to assess each method closely and carefully, and consider critically how they may complement each other. The volume shows clearly how different methodological and analytical styles can generate distinct interpretations of the data.
Nevertheless, I have a couple of caveats. In part one, issues (regarding ethics, recruitment and data management, for example) arising from the use of one approach may also be relevant to others, and this is not always flagged up. This is potentially problematic given that most students, I suspect, will simply dip in and out of the book in an effort to expand their knowledge of particular areas. Getting the right balance between the general and the specific in a textbook is always tricky, but in this case readers are likely to require some prior knowledge of qualitative research if they are to avoid confusion and potential misinterpretation.
More generally, although Qualitative Research Methods in Psychology reads well on the whole, it occasionally employs terms that may be unfamiliar to undergraduate students (such as ethnography, hermeneutics and ontology). Researchers must become familiar with these concepts, but some further introduction and elucidation is perhaps warranted. That said, the concise glossary is helpful.
This text will be useful to psychology students, but more experienced researchers will also gain from its in-depth examination of qualitative methodologies - in particular, those who wish to undertake a pluralistic approach.
For complete novices, something a little more general might be appropriate before moving on to this more complex text.
Who is it for? Psychology students with some prior knowledge of qualitative research methods.
Presentation: Clear and consistent.
Would you recommend it? Yes; to students wanting to further their knowledge of qualitative research methods, particularly with regard to pluralistic approaches.
Positive Psychology: Theory, Research and Applications
Authors: Kate Hefferon and Ilona Boniwell
Publisher: Open University Press/McGraw-Hill
Introduction to Applied Psychology
Author: Graham Davey
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
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In the early 2000s, Alan Greenspan was worried about deflation. So he hired Ben Bernanke, the self-proclaimed expert on the Great Depression from Princeton. The idea was that with Bernanke as his right hand man, Greenspan could put off deflation from hitting the US. Indeed, one of Bernanke’s first speeches was titled “Deflation: Making Sure It Doesn’t Happen Here”
The US did briefly experience a bout of deflation from late 2007 to early 2009. To combat this, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke unleashed an unprecedented amount of Fed money. Remember, Bernanke claims to be an expert on the Great Depression, and his entire focus was to insure that the US didn’t repeat the era of the ‘30s again.
Yellen and Bernanke Are the Same
Current Fed Chair Janet Yellen is cut of the same cloth as Bernanke. And her efforts (along with Bernanke’s) aided and abetted by the most fiscally irresponsible Congress in history, have recreated an environment almost identical to that of the 1920s.
Let’s take a quick walk down history lane.
In the 1920s, most of Europe was bankrupt due to after effects of WWI. Germany in particular was completely insolvent due to the war and due to the war reparations foisted upon it by the Treaty of Versailles. Remember, at this time Germany was the second largest economy in the world (the US was the largest, then Germany, then the UK).
Germany attempted to deal with the economic implosion created by WWI by increasing social spending: social spending per resident grew from 20.5 Deutsche Marks in 1913 to 65 Deutsche Marks in 1929.
Since the country was broke, incomes and taxes remained low, forcing Germany to run massive deficits. As its debt loads swelled, the county cut interest rates and began to print money, hoping to inflate away its debs.
When the country lurched towards default, US and other banks loaned it money, doing anything they could to keep the country from defaulting on its debt. As a result of this and the US’s relative economic strength compared to most of Europe, capital flew from Europe to the US.
How the 1929 Crash Happened
This created a MASSIVE stock market bubble, arguably the second largest in history. From its bottom in 1921 to its peak in 1929, stocks rose over 400%. Things were so out of control that the Fed actually raised interest rates hoping to curb speculation.
The bubble burst as all bubbles do and stocks lost 90% of their value in a mere two years. This was the dreaded 1929 Crash.
Today, the environment is almost identical but for different reasons. The ECB first cut interest rates to negative in June 2014. Since that time capital has fled Europe and moved into the US because 1) interest rates here are still positive, albeit marginally, and 2) the US continues to be perceived as a safe-haven due to its allegedly strong economy.
This process has accelerated in 2015.
- Globally, there have been over 20 interest rate cuts since the years started a mere 10 months ago.
- Interest rates are now at record lows in Australia, Canada, Switzerland, Russia and India.
- Many of these rates cuts have resulted in actual negative interest rates, particularly in Europe (Denmark, Sweden, and Switzerland).
- Both the ECB and the Bank of Japan are actively engaging in QE programs forcing rates even lower.
- All told, SEVEN of the 10 largest economies in the world are currently easing.
Because the US is neutral, money has been flowing into the country by the billions. A lot of it is moving into luxury real estate (particularly in LA and York), but a substantial amount has moved into stocks as well as the US Dollar.
Stocks Are Almost As Rich As They Were Before the 1929 Crash
As a result of this, the US stock market is trading at 1929-bubblesque valuations, with a CAPE of 27.34 (the 1929 CAPE was only slightly higher at 30. And when that bubble burst, stocks lost over 90% of their value in the span of 24 months.
Another Crash is coming… and smart investors would do well to prepare now before it hits.
If you’ve yet to take action to prepare for this, we offer a FREE investment report called the Financial Crisis “Round Two” Survival Guide that outlines simple, easy to follow strategies you can use to not only protect your portfolio from it, but actually produce profits.
We made 1,000 copies available for FREE the general public.
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Phoenix Capital Research
Our FREE daily e-letter: http://gainspainscapital.com/
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THE HANDBOOK OF ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION
|Author(s)||Marnie Reed, John M. Levis|
|D O W N L O A D|
The present handbook is an excellent collection of twenty-eight chapters showing different approaches to the pronunciation. The authors of this volume have aimed it mainly for teachers of English language as well as for the linguists; however, this book can also be used for the self-study, i.e. by all people willing to improve their pronunciation and to understand the meanings and forms of it.
Note that the book also includes some chapters considered important in understanding the whole role of correct pronunciation in the analysis and description of the language. The handbook is very timely and useful, taking into account that the pronunciation is something that will never go away and something that influences the spoken language directly. A proper knowledge of English pronunciation is critically important.
Of course, getting to the native-like accent is next to impossible for most adult learners, but still the pronunciation is some sort of gateway to spoken intelligibility, as it is so closely tied to social meanings and helps distinguish the language dialects, informal and formal speech registers etc. Well, we cannot say that this book is an easy-reading, but would still recommend it to the learners of English who really need to significantly improve the pronunciation skills.
The "Read Later" function allows you to add material to this block with just one click. Just click on the icon and read the articles that interest you at any convenient time.
The link is broken
Would you pls fixed th...
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1902 – Flatiron Building, New York
The Flatiron Building, or Fuller Building as it was originally called, is considered to be one of the first skyscrapers ever built. The neighborhood around the building is called the Flatiron District after its signature building, which has become an icon of New York. It was designed by Chicago’s Daniel Burnham as a vertical Renaissance palazzo with Beaux-Arts styling – the Flatiron Building epitomizes the Chicago school – its facade of limestone at the bottom changing to glazed terra-cotta is divided into a base, shaft and capital.
Early sketches by Daniel Burnham show a design with an unexecuted clockface and a far more elaborate crown than in the actual building. At the vertex, the triangular tower is only 6.5 feet wide; viewed from above, this “˜pointy’ end of the structure describes an acute angle of about 25 degrees.
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Imitating Someone's Accent
In conversation, we often imitate each other's speech style and may even change our accent to fit that of the person we're talking to. A recent study in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, suggests that imitating someone who speaks with a regional or foreign accent may actually help you understand them better.
"If people are talking to each other, they tend to sort of move their speech toward each other," says Patti Adank, of the University of Manchester, who cowrote the study with Peter Hagoort and Harold Bekkering from Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands. People don't only do this with speech, she says. "People have a tendency to imitate each other in body posture, for instance in the way they cross their arms." She and her colleagues devised an experiment to test the effect of imitating and accent on subsequent comprehension of sentences spoken in that accent.
In the experiment, Dutch volunteers were first tested on how well they understood sentences spoken in an unfamiliar accent of Dutch. To make sure that all listeners were unfamiliar, a new accent was invented for the study, in which all the vowels were swapped (for instance 'ball' would become 'bale'). Next, each participant listened to 100 sentences in the unfamiliar accent. But first, they were given different instructions on how to respond to the sentences. Some were told to repeat the sentence, imitating the accent. Others were told either only to listen, to repeat the sentences in their own accent, or to transcribe the accented sentences as they had heard them, complete with strange vowels. Finally, the participants were tested again on how well they could understand sentences spoken in the unfamiliar accent.
People who had imitated the accent did much better at understanding the sentences than the other people. "When listening to someone who has a really strong accent, if you talked to them in their accent, you would understand better," Adank says. Of course, she says, "it's obvious that you can't really do that." If you put on, say, a fake Southern accent when talking to someone from Georgia, they might not think your intention is friendly. But when your brain subtly and unconsciously shifts your voice to sound more like theirs, it may be deploying a useful strategy.
Posted by: Nora Source
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- What are the benefits of following ADDIE or any other ID model?
- Is there room for an instructional designer’s creativity and free thought when using an ID model?
- What role should ID models and instructional theory play in the daily work of an instructional designer?
What are the benefits of following ADDIE or any other ID model?
I find ADDIE and other ID models most useful for framing the multitude of tasks involved in an instructional project, especially when working with people who lack a clear understanding of instructional design and the role of an ID. Outlining the main tenets of a model helps to clarify the overarching purpose and importance of instructional design, and introducing more specific detail as the project evolves demonstrates the validity and distinct function of instructional design.
Is there room for an instructional designer’s creativity when using an ID model?
There is if the designer has the motivation, skill, and confidence to take responsibility. Ultimately, it is incumbent on the instructional designer to ensure the fit between the instruction and the learners. “The professional challenge lies in the selection of the appropriate model or portions thereof that will be the best fit for the trainer, the training environment, the audience, and the content to be delivered,” (Cowell, Hopkins, McWhorter, & Jorden, 2006). In much the same way, physicians and other healthcare providers apply a standardized protocol to every patient contact, but the specific actions they select within that protocol are based on their determination of the best course of action, considering the interrelationship between the patient, the provider, the circumstance, the environment, and other relevant factors.
What role should ID models and instructional theory play in the daily work
of an instructional designer?
They should inform the designer’s approach to a project and facilitate the designer’s efforts to deliver the “right” instruction for the unique interrelationship between the learner, the environment, and the instructional objectives. “The professional trainer has the opportunity and the responsibility to select a model appropriate to the organization and learning needs of the audience for which the program is directed. In doing this it is common for professional trainers to select and meld those portions of various models that best fit their situations,” (Cowell, Hopkins, McWhorter, & Jorden, 2006).
One of the most important things I have learned as an ID is that models and theories are meant to be tools; the instructional designer is the artisan. The minute a designer surrenders control to their tools, the project begins to fail. I agree with Gordon & Zemke (2000) that “the harder you try to specify exactly what the designer must do in order to be ‘doing ISD’ the further into the wilderness you wander. That way lies madness.”
Cowell, C., Hopkins, P.C., McWhorter, R., & Jorden, D.L. (2006). Alternative training models. Advances in Developing Human Resources, 8(4), 460-475.
Gordon, J., & Zemke, R. (2000). The attack on ISD. Training, 37(4), 42-53
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- Lifespan: 12-14 years
- Physique: Curved body, huge ears
- Temperament: Households with children, singles with other pets
The Cornish Rex breed originated from a litter of five kittens born in Bodmin Moor, Cornwall, England in 1950. One of the males, later named Kallibunker, looked like a little red and white lamb. He was covered in rows of tight curls. As he grew, he took on all the characteristics of the Cornish Rex breed. With his fine-boned, slender body, long legs, and huge ears, Kallibunker was a true mutation. He was bred back to his mother, a tortoiseshell named Serena, a pairing that produced three offspring. Two were males with curly coats. One, Poldhu, survived to adulthood. Kallibunker and Poldhu were then bred to Siamese, Burmese, and British domestic shorthairs. This gave the Cornish Rex breed a strong genetic base in which to cultivate the recessive gene for the distinctive appearance and curly coat. Unfortunately, the breed almost went extinct in Great Britain until one of Kallibunker’s great-great-great grandsons was imported to Canada in 1965 and a North American line was established.
The Cornish Rex is very much a people cat.
The Cornish Rex is very much a people cat. They may look elegant, even aloof and dignified, but in reality they are active and affectionate. Throughout its life, a Cornish Rex will engage in kitten-like antics and is always up for games of fetch and even catch. Their paws are extremely agile, and the breed is known for picking up and tossing small objects. The Cornish Rex is a great addition to the family, and happily puts itself right in the middle of whatever is going on, but they are not great talkers.
The Cornish Rex has a lovely, curved profile reminiscent of a Whippet. The distinctive head is egg-like in shape, with prominent, high cheekbones, which gives the face an “otherworldly” look. The cheeks are hollow, and the nose is strongly bridged between large, high-set ears. Although this cat has a long, narrow body, the Rex is also barrel chested, narrowing significantly at the waist. The legs are long and fine. The seemingly delicate appearance of the Rex does not betray just how muscular these animals really are, or how well nature has designed them for the high jumps and quick turns for which they are known. The Rex has a tight, curly coat lying close against the body. It falls into wavy rows and is sumptuously soft to the touch.
The Rex has a short, tight coat that is fine in texture, but they do shed (minimally), and they are not hypoallergenic cats. They have no special grooming requirements, and rarely require bathing. Because they are social and outgoing, they do enjoy being brushed, and they don’t object to the process. Care should be taken to make sure their large ears remain clean and free of debris.
Photo credit: Eric Isselee/Shutterstock
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News Article | April 26, 2017
A young man pays his respects to his ancestors at a cemetery in Shanghai (AFP Photo/Johannes EISELE) Vienna (AFP) - It's not only in life that humans leave their mark on Nature. In death, our decomposing corpses alter the chemistry of precious soil, scientists warned on Wednesday. Whether our bodies are buried or cremated, they leach iron, zinc, sulphur, calcium and phosphorus into ground that may later be used as farms, forests or parks. They are essential nutrients, but human funerary practices mean they are being concentrated in cemeteries instead of being dispersed evenly throughout nature, according to new research. This means that in some places the nutrients may be over-concentrated for optimal absorption by plants and creatures, while lacking in others. Furthermore, human bodies also contain more sinister elements, such as mercury from dental fillings. "Chemical traces of decomposed bodies can frequently be very well distinguished in soil," said Ladislav Smejda of the Czech University of Life Sciences in Prague, who took part in the unusual probe. "These traces persist for a very long time, for centuries to millennia." The effects will become more pronounced as more and more dead bodies are laid to rest, Smejda said in Vienna, where he unveiled the research at a meeting of the European Geosciences Union. "What we do today with our dead will affect the environment for a very, very long time," he said. "Maybe it is not such a problem in our current perspective but with an increasing population globally it might become a pressing problem in the future." Smejda and a team used X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy to analyse soil chemicals in graves and ash "scattering gardens". Using animal carcasses, they also measured the theoretical impact of an ancient practice called "excarnation", whereby the dead are left out in the open for nature to take its course. In all three cases, the ground contained "significantly" higher concentrations of chemicals compared to the surrounds, Smejda said. If there had been no cemeteries, human remains, like those of animals, would be distributed randomly for the nutrients they release to be reused "again and again, everywhere," the researcher told AFP. But concentrating them in certain places "is something that can be regarded as not natural. It's a human impact, we are changing natural levels," he said. Now the question is: "Can we come up with a better idea (of) how to distribute these necessary elements across wider landscapes?" Smejda added. "Certainly there is a potential to invent, to develop and to put into practice... new ways of human burial or new treatments that could be more environmentally friendly, more ecological." He conceded this was a "taboo" topic for many, with funerary customs deeply rooted in culture and religion. "It's a very complex matter and we are just at the start of this discussion, I think." For more news videos visit Yahoo View, available now on iOS and Android.
News Article | April 26, 2017
Burying people in cemeteries is just another way humans are messing with the environment. Agence France-Presse reported bodies buried whole or cremated “leach iron, zinc, sulfur, calcium and phosphorus into the ground that may later be used as farms, forests or parks.” Putting them all in one place deprives soils in other areas of certain nutrients while giving them all to the flora at burial sites. Read: These Medieval Villagers Mutilated the Dead Because Zombies Those chemicals could last for hundreds, or even thousands, of years and can only increase along with population growth. “If there had been no cemeteries, human remains, like those of animals, would be distributed randomly for the nutrients they release to be reused,” AFP said. Putting them all into graveyards “is something that can be regarded as not natural,” researcher Ladislav Smejda of the Czech University of Life Sciences in Prague told the news service. “It’s a human impact. We are changing natural levels.” After a person dies, the long and complicated process of decomposition — in which those nutrients are released into surrounding soil — begins. “Cells become deprived of oxygen, and their acidity increases as the toxic by-products of chemical reactions begin to accumulate inside them,” the Guardian reported. “Enzymes start to digest cell membranes and then leak out as the cells break down.” Among the many other physical changes decomposition entails, microbes living in the body will begin to digest the organs and other tissues. “A rotting corpse is teeming with life,” the Guardian observed. How Do You Know if Someone Is Really Dead?
Agency: European Commission | Branch: H2020 | Program: RIA | Phase: INFRADEV-02-2016 | Award Amount: 1.96M | Year: 2017
The general objective of PRO-METROFOOD is to bring the emerging METROFOOD-RI ESFRI project to the level of maturity required for entering in the active project list, strengthening the Consortium and planning the future phases. The specific objectives have been set up in close relationship with the ESFRI SWG & IG Recommendation. 4 specific objectives have been identified: OBJ1 design strategies on the medium and long terms; OBJ2 provide the organizational framework of METROFOOD-RI; OBJ3 demonstrate the capability of METROFOOD-RI to supply scientific services and prepare the chart of services; OBJ4 establish plans to coherently integrate METROFOOD-RI into the European landscape, realising coordination with EU and National initiatives and positioning at a global level. The strategic Plan will be tailored to the Pan European Infrastructure current and envisaged capabilities, market opportunities and business needs. It will be developed by involving funding agencies, relevant authorities supporting METROFOOD-RI and other stakeholders. A management conceptual model will be developed and the framework will be designed under operational, strategic and institutional aspects. Management procedures suitable for the different phases will set up, so to cover short and long-term goals. A Quality Documentation System (QDS) will be developed and a data management plan (DMP) will be defined. In order to demonstrate the capability of PRO-METROFOOD to supply services and to test its inter-operability, pilot services will be performed. In strict accordance with the METROFOOD-RI strategies, plans to coherently integrate METROFOOD-RI into the European landscape will be developed. A Communication plan and education and training programmes will be developed for the different phases of METROFOOD-RI realization (earl, preparatory, implementation and operational phases). For each phase the main coordinator, the target group and the main training subject areas will be specified.
Agency: European Commission | Branch: FP7 | Program: CP-TP | Phase: KBBE.2012.1.2-03 | Award Amount: 7.69M | Year: 2012
BIOFECTOR is an integrated project that develops alternative fertilisation strategies by the use of various bio-effectors (BEs, plant growth promoting microorganisms and natural extraction products). BEs stimulate root growth, solubilise and mineralise sparingly available nutrients, or protect plants from abiotic and biotic stresses. Novel BEs will be isolated, characterized and applied in strategic combination with alternative fertilisation strategies that include organic and low-input farming, use of waste recycling fertilizers, and fertiliser-placement technologies. Bio-effectors addressed comprise fungal strains of Trichoderma, Penicillium and Sebacinales, as well as bacterial strains of Bacillus and Pseudomonades with well-characterized root growth promoting and nutrient solubilising potential. Natural extraction products of seaweed, compost and plant extracts, as well as their purified active compounds are also tested in various combinations. Maize, wheat and tomato are chosen as representative crops. Laboratory and European-wide field experiments assure product adaptation to divers geo-climatic conditions. Viable alternatives to the conventional practice of mineral fertilisation are developed, towards environmental friendly agricultural practice with reduced agrochemical input.
Agency: European Commission | Branch: H2020 | Program: CSA | Phase: SFS-06-2014 | Award Amount: 1.78M | Year: 2015
PROIntensAfrica intends to develop a proposal for a long term research and innovation partnership between Europe and Africa, focusing on the improvement of the food and nutrition security and the livelihoods of African farmers by exploring and exploiting the diversity of pathways to sustainable intensification of African agro-food systems. The exploration will include environmental, economic and social externalities along the whole value chains. PROIntensAfrica has the ambition to formulate a research and innovation agenda, identifying the domains in need for further research to realize the potential of African food systems. In addition, PROIntensAfrica will suggest governance mechanisms that are effective in supporting the partnership. Key is the perception that pooling resources is the best way to align existing and initiate new research. This perception follows the policy of the EC, where instruments of joint programming like ERA-NET, JPI and article 185 aim to accomplish synergy and increase the effectiveness of resources. Pooling resources goes beyond the scientific domain and reaches into the policy domain. Consequently, besides being rooted in sound and challenging research, a partnership proposal needs to meet national and international policies to fly. Therefore PROIntensAfrica pay specific attention to engage with the policy domain, as exemplified by the intended creation of a policy support group. The rationale of the project is that a variety of pathways leads to sustainable intensification of African food systems. Different pathways are advocated in literature. High-input farming systems, for example, contrast with organic farming systems, each with their own supporters and criticasters. It is the conviction of the PROIntensAfrica consortium that moving beyond that debate will open exciting new pathways, and that combining elements of different systems will yield innovative systems that are optimally adapted to specific contexts.
Agency: European Commission | Branch: H2020 | Program: MSCA-ITN-ETN | Phase: MSCA-ITN-2014-ETN | Award Amount: 3.75M | Year: 2015
Data on seawater composition since the start of the Phanerozoic eon ~540 million years ago provide essential information for understanding long-term chemical processes of socio-economic dimension like the evolution of life, land-ocean interaction, atmospheric chemistry, ecosystem adaptation to climate change, oceanic trace metal cycling, and for applied geological processes like the formation of submarine energy resources. Although partly known this knowledge is still limited pending new methodical prospects and innovative analytical techniques. Following this approach, the proposed ETN BASE-LiNE Earth will train early stage researchers (ESRs) who will extend the knowledge of the complex and long-term Phanerozoic seawater history by the determination of original proxy information preserved in reliable ancient geological archives using cutting edge technologies and experimental approaches. In order to amplify this process the ESRs will be exposed to academic and non-academic high-tech institutions linking biogeochemical research and training in biology, ecology, geochemistry as well as chemical analytics to engineering and cutting edge analytical instrumentation. Multi- and interdisciplinary environments will expose our ESRs to highly demanded transferable skills increasing their employability when it comes to job application. BASE-LiNE Earth will offer societally important deliverables like time series of past trace element and isotope cycling and models about ocean material fluxes in and out of the Phanerozoic Ocean. This will be shared in publications, reports and exhibitions. Interactive lecturing material will be offered for education in general and specifically for high school teachers. Through collaboration with high-tech companies the ETN will contribute to establish both, new approaches for the exploration of hydrocarbon reservoirs and innovative and sophisticated analytical instrumentation for trace element and isotope measurements.
Vymazal J.,Czech University of Life Sciences
Hydrobiologia | Year: 2011
The presence of macrophytes is one of the most conspicuous features of wetlands and their presence distinguishes constructed wetlands from unplanted soil filters or lagoons. The macrophytes growing in constructed wetlands have several properties in relation to the treatment process that make them an essential component of the design. However, only several roles of macrophytes apply to constructed wetlands with horizontal subsurface flow (HF CWs). The plants used in HF CWs designed for wastewater treatment should therefore: (1) be tolerant of high organic and nutrient loadings, (2) have rich belowground organs (i.e. roots and rhizomes) in order to provide substrate for attached bacteria and oxygenation (even very limited) of areas adjacent to roots and rhizomes and (3) have high aboveground biomass for winter insulation in cold and temperate regions and for nutrient removal via harvesting. The comparison of treatment efficiency of vegetated HF CWs and unplanted filters is not unanimous but most studies have shown that systems with plants achieve higher treatment efficiency. The vegetation has mostly a positive effect, i.e. supports higher treatment efficiency, for organics and nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus. By far the most frequently used plant around the globe is Phragmites australis (Common reed). Species of the genera Typha (latifolia, angustifolia, domingensis, orientalis and glauca) and Scirpus (e.g. lacustris, validus, californicus and acutus) spp. are other commonly used species. In many countries, and especially in the tropics and subtropics, local plants including ornamental species are used for HF CWs. © 2011 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.
Vymazal J.,Czech University of Life Sciences
Ecological Engineering | Year: 2014
Constructed wetlands have been used for wastewater treatment for more than fifty years. Most applications have been designed to treat municipal or domestic wastewater but at present, constructed wetlands are successfully applied to many types of wastewater. The early constructed wetlands applied to industrial wastewaters included those for wastewaters from petrochemical, abattoir, meat processing, dairy and pulp and paper industries. During the 1990s constructed wetlands were also used to treat effluents from textile and wine industries or water from recirculating fish and shrimp aquacultures. The most recent applications include those for brewery or tannery wastewaters as well as olive mills effluents. The survey revealed that both subsurface and surface flow constructed wetlands have been used for treatment of industrial wastewaters. Within subsurface flow constructed wetlands both horizontal and vertical flow systems have been designed. Also, the use of various hybrid constructed wetlands for industrial effluent treatment has been reported in the literature recently. The survey also revealed that industrial wastewaters are treated in constructed wetlands in all continents and this paper includes the information from 138 constructed wetlands in 33 countries worldwide. © 2014 Elsevier B.V.
Vymazal J.,Czech University of Life Sciences
Water Research | Year: 2013
The hybrid systems were developed in the 1960s but their use increased only during the late 1990s and in the 2000s mostly because of more stringent discharge limits for nitrogen and also more complex wastewaters treated in constructed wetlands (CWs). The early hybrid CWs consisted of several stages of vertical flow (VF) followed by several stages of horizontal flow (HF) beds. During the 1990s, HF-VF and VF-HF hybrid systems were introduced. However, to achieve higher removal of total nitrogen or to treat more complex industrial and agricultural wastewaters other types of hybrid constructed wetlands including free water surface (FWS) CWs and multistage CWs have recently been used as well. The survey of 60 hybrid constructed wetlands from 24 countries reported after 2003 revealed that hybrid constructed wetlands are primarily used on Europe and in Asia while in other continents their use is limited. The most commonly used hybrid system is a VF-HF constructed wetland which has been used for treatment of both sewage and industrial wastewaters. On the other hand, the use of a HF-VF system has been reported only for treatment of municipal sewage. Out of 60 surveyed hybrid systems, 38 have been designed to treat municipal sewage while 22 hybrid systems were designed to treat various industrial and agricultural wastewaters. The more detailed analysis revealed that VF-HF hybrid constructed wetlands are slightly more efficient in ammonia removal than hybrid systems with FWS CWs, HF-VF systems or multistage VF and HF hybrid CWs. All types of hybrid CWs are comparable with single VF CWs in terms of NH4-N removal rates. On the other hand, CWs with FWS units remove substantially more total nitrogen as compared to other types of hybrid constructed wetlands. However, all types of hybrid constructed wetlands are more efficient in total nitrogen removal than single HF or VF constructed wetlands. © 2013 Elsevier Ltd.
Vymazal J.,Czech University of Life Sciences
Ecological Engineering | Year: 2013
Constructed wetlands with free water surface (FWS CWs) have been used for many purposes worldwide. Emergent macrophytes play important roles in FWS CWs; they reduce wind speed and thus support sedimentation and prevent re-suspension, provide substrate for periphyton and bacteria, take up nutrients and in carbon-limited systems provide carbon for denitrification during biomass decomposition. It has been reported that treatment performance of planted FWS CWs is superior to unvegetated lagoons. However, treatment performance of FWS CWs could be affected by plant species used. The literature survey of 643 FWS CWs from 43 countries recorded 150 plant species and revealed that the most commonly used macrophyte genera were Typha, Scirpus (Schoenoplectus), Phragmites, Juncus and Eleocharis. In terms of species, most frequently used species were Typha latifolia, Phragmites australis, Typha angustifolia, Juncus effusus, Scirpus lacustris, Scirpus californicus and Phalaris arundinacea. In terms of continents, P. australis is the most frequent species in Europe and Asia, T. latifolia in North America, Cyperus papyrus in Africa, P. australis and Typha domingensis in Central/South Americas and Scirpus validus (S. tabernaemontani) in Oceania. © 2013 Elsevier B.V.
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An economic impact analysis (EIA) measures changes in business revenue, business profits, personal wages, and/or jobs. The economic event analyzed can include implementation of a new policy or project, or may simply be the presence of a business or organization. Participants will gain a general understanding of an economic impact analysis’ core terms and techniques, why and when it should be performed, and how findings should be explained and criticisms addressed.
What you will take away from this course:
- What is an “economic impact”?
- Why and when an economic impact analysis should be performed?
- What are core terms and techniques?
- Project applications and examples
Click here to go the Planetizen website to sign up and view this course.
Todd Poole is president, founder, and managing principal of 4ward Planning Inc., with more than 20 years of economic development experience, both as a private sector consultant and a public sector practitioner. On a national level, Todd has assisted cities, transit agencies, counties, nonprofit groups, and developers in crafting sustainable land-use strategies founded on key social, environmental, fiscal, and economic trends insights.
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Direction (Q. Nos. 1-10): Study the situation given below to answer these questions.
Although he was born in a little village near the coast and had gone to school in the nearest seaside town. Mr. Smith was not a lover of the sea; even when walking along the sands, he was always afraid of being cut off by the tide. He was not a very good swimmer, so perhaps this accounts for it.
After working for some years in London he was transferred to a coast resort, and of ourse, the family outings were often made to the beach. One day his children pleaded to go out into the bay in a boat. The sun shone brightly, there was little wind and the water was calm. So Mr. Smith hired a boat and with his two children rowed out into the bay. Of course they were tempted to go farther than they had intended, past the protecting cliffs and out to the open sea. At first all went well,but when they decided to turn back they encountered difficulties. A strong breeze had sprung up and the currents here were rather treacherous.
Mr. Smith rowed hard, but it seemed they were making little progress. The children, were waving to attract the attention
of the people on the beach. Just then a motor boat appeared from the direction of the bay. Their plight had been noticed and the boat had come to their rescue.
A line was soon attached and they were towed back round the cliff to the shore. Mr. Smith's dislike of the sea was not diminished by this experience.
1.Mr. Smith was nervous of walking along the sands because
(a) he had no love for the sea
(b) there the sea was infested with deadly monsters
(c) he feared that the tide may cut him off from the land
(d) the sea was too deep even near the coast
2.What accounted for his dislike of the sea?
(a) He was not a good swimmer, he feared that he might get drowned in the sea
(b) The protruding cliffs made navigation dangerous
(c) He was accustomed to comfortable city life
(d) Many a tragedy had occurred in the past near the sea coast
3.What did the children plead for?
(a) Climb the cliff to have better view of the bay
(b) Go to a coast resort
(c) Taken for a picnic on the beach
(d) Go out into the bay in a boat
4.Mr. Smith was tempted to go farther away from land than he had intended because
(a) he enjoyed rowing in the bright sunshine
(b) the sea was calm, there being little wind
(c) his children wanted to go far out in the sea
(d) he encountered no danger while rowing the boat
5.Wha difficulties did they encounter when returning to the shore?
(a) The boat they were rowing in suddenly developed a leak
(b) Sea monsters surrounded the boat
(c) Treacherous currents developed as a result of strong winds
(d) The engine of the boat stopped functioning
6.Why did the children wave?
(a) They were bidding good bye to the people on the shore
(b) To attract the attention of the people on the bank to their plight
(c) They had a joyous ride in the boat
(d) Their boat was sinking
7.Why did the motor boat appear?
(a) It was on patrol duty
(b) It happened to be out fishing in the sea
(c) It came out of the bay to join its mother ship anchored in the deep sea
(d) The crew of the boat having noticed the plight of the Smiths, came to rescue them
8.How did Mr. Smith and children get back to the shore?
(a) The crew of the motor boat helped them to mend the leak in their boat
(b) With the help of a line they were transferred to the motor boat
(c) By attaching a line to their boat, the motorboat towed them back to the shore
(d) A few men from the motorboat joined the Smiths in their boat which they quickly rowed to the shore
9.How many children were with Mr. Smith?
10.A suitable title for the above situation is
(a) The Smith family
(b) Mr. Smith and the sea
(c) An enjoyable trip to the sea
(d) Dangers of the sea
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110 Delgado Street Suite D, Santa Fe NM 87501
Freedom from racism and social injustice through the practice of meditation.
To eliminate the fear, ignorance and conditioning that fuel racism and social injustice within the individual as well as in relationships, families, communities, and the world at large.
Deep inquiry into ourselves to illuminate and heal the root beliefs that lead to racist behavior and social injustice; practice of various meditation techniques to learn to cultivate an awareness and compassion to support such internal change.
1- The Way In – Meditation
Life continually presents us with the challenges of change. The flow of life can seem difficult because even when living a mindful life, we may still have fears, such as that we will age and we will die. If we have not developed the skills to bring mind and body into harmony, it can feel impossible to see the way out of the difficulties created by life's transitions. Meditation can provide the way in, to a place of deep balance within ourselves that can support us in such challenging times.
For thousands of years meditation has helped people reduce stress and anxiety, manage anger, and mitigate physical pain. In recent years, controlled scientific studies have documented the benefits of meditation as a means to improve the quality of our lives by reducing stress and promoting healing. Meditation also helps us gain self-awareness and insight in very direct and powerful ways. Although meditation has been a part of many religious and spiritual traditions, its benefits have not generally been made readily available to certain segments of the population, such as people of color, substance abusers, and single parents. Our Institute is committed to making the benefits of meditation easily and widely accessible to people from such under-served populations.
2- The Way Through – Accepting and Loving Ourselves
Meditation practice helps us cultivate the kind of concentration and tranquility that can lead to greater insight. For example, as we develop clearer perspectives on habitual patterns that do not serve us, we also gain compassionate understanding of such behaviors, many of which are typically rooted in childhood development, family dynamics, and cultural influences. In this way, we begin to understand how we unintentionally perpetuate suffering and become motivated to change. The practice of meditation thus provides the way through and beyond our often-limited view of ourselves, allowing us to accept and love ourselves more deeply.
To encourage this process, our meditation retreats offer teachings in a supportive environment of kindness. Through practice and deep inquiry, participants gain valuable skills for processing and releasing life's difficulties. These include problem solving skills, positive parenting skills, and the ability to break addictions and reduce criminal behaviors. In this way, we work toward healing ourselves from the inside out.
3 - The Way Out – Accepting and Loving Others
Through cultivating a mindful awareness we are able to access deeper levels of wisdom and compassion. From such clarity we begin to appreciate our unity with all other beings, inspiring us to extend our compassion out toward others. This practice helps us to understand and heal the seeds of prejudice within ourselves, thereby contributing to the healing of racism and social injustice in our society. Meditation thus helps provide a way out of both personal suffering and suffering on community and global levels. As skilled meditation practitioners, we begin to exemplify the practice through our daily life, such as becoming models of wise reflection. For instance, we may recognize certain injustices and be able to consider a skillful response. A further benefit arises from our practice as feelings of joy, tranquility, and compassion begin to emanate from our character and affect those around us. The practice of meditation becomes a transformative process for self and others, one that motivates us to continue a daily practice on the path toward freedom.
"The truth is we are not yet free; we have merely achieved the freedom to be free".
— Nelson Mandela
Life Transition Meditation Center
110 Delgado Street Suite D, Santa Fe NM 87501 US, +1.5059824183
Copyright © Life Transition Meditation Center. All rights reserved.
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Welcome back to a new Technique Tuesday post! This week we’re going to be discussing something called linear perspective, also known as the Unsung Hero of Realism. Truly, this is one of the most important techniques ever to be developed in art history. It changed the game completely, but we’re really so used to seeing it these days that we don’t think about it much! So let’s take a look:
What is it?
The term “perspective” in art generally refers to the manipulation of the image so that it appears to have the depth that we can perceive with our eyes. We talked once about atmospheric perspective on this blog series, and the way that blues and cool tones in the background help to give the illusion of far distances and vast spaces. Linear perspective refers to the use of what are called “vanishing points” and the way that everything in view relates to those vanishing points, which will depend on how far those things are supposed to be from the viewer’s vantage point. Don’t worry, I’m going to use pictures soon to help explain.
Examples from art history:
Before the Renaissance–which I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned before, but it was a pretty important time for art history– (<–kidding, I bring it up in nearly every post) artists used something known as oblique perspective, which is a fancy way of saying lack of perspective, really. Think about the drawings that little kids make, especially if there are a lot of people in them or houses or trees in the far background. Instead of figuring out precisely how all these objects relate to one another geometrically (because they are children and they’re just having awesome fun drawing), the kids just kind of spread everything in the picture around on the piece of paper, usually putting something that in reality is further “back” simply closer to the “top” of the page. For a very long time, this was the way even seasoned artists rendered their works. Let’s take a look at some pre-Renaissance works of art which, while gorgeous, are definitely before the discovery of linear perspective:
Even if you don’t know about geometry or linear perspective, these images would likely still look “off” in some way to you. It wasn’t really until the Renaissance, when super genius Filippo Brunelleschi made a nifty hole-in-a-mirror device, and then some subsequent paintings and drawings to prove his point, that artists began to understand linear perspective, and the very important notion it brings with it: foreshortening.
Foreshortening involves the visual effect that objects in our line of sight will appear differently depending on the viewer’s perspective. For an example, think about preparing dinner on your perfectly circular dinner plate, and then sitting down to eat and placing that plate in front of you. As you sit there looking at the plate, you no longer see a perfect circle (even though the plate is perfectly circular!), because of your perspective. Depending on how something is angled toward you the viewer, parts of that building or person or object will appear shorter or smaller than they really are. In the example above and on the left, even a road which is the same width down its entire length will appear to get smaller as its distance from the viewer increases.
As I mentioned, this was a game changer for artists in the Renaissance. Many of the early examples from the Renaissance showing successful use of linear perspective focus on one-point perspective, viewed straight on, but artists later expanded this knowledge to work with multiple vanishing points, and higher and lower viewer angles, as we can see here:
Examples from Principle Gallery:
Again, linear perspective, while crucially important, might not be the first thing you think of when admiring a work of art. We tend to take it for granted now that centuries of art teachers have passed the concept along, but it’s still so important to creating an effectively realistic scene. Because it is critically important in any work of art that involves things with straight lines like building and architecture, Geoffrey Johnson‘s solo exhibition (open now!) gives us a perfect segue to taking a look at the beautiful effect made when an artist accurately uses linear perspective. Let’s take a look at a few examples from the current show:
To view the entirety of this absolutely spectacular and unique exhibition, stop by the gallery through the end of May, or check out Geoffrey’s page on our website by clicking here!
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Vaccines and antibiotics may someday join caloric restriction or bariatric surgery as a way to regulate weight gain, according to a new study focused on the interactions between diet, the bacteria that live in the bowel, and the immune system.
Bacteria in the intestine play a crucial role in digestion. They provide enzymes necessary for the uptake of many nutrients, synthesize certain vitamins and boost absorption of energy from food. Fifty years ago, farmers learned that by tweaking the microbial mix in their livestock with low-dose oral antibiotics, they could accelerate weight gain. More recently, scientists found that mice raised in a germ-free environment, and thus lacking gut microbes, do not put on extra weight, even on a high-fat diet.
In a study, published Aug. 26 in the journal Nature Immunology, a research team based at the University of Chicago was able to unravel some of the mechanisms that regulate this weight gain. They focused on the relationship between the immune system, gut bacteria, digestion and obesity. They showed how weight gain requires not just caloric overload but also a delicate, adjustable—and transmissible—interplay between intestinal microbes and the immune response.
"Diet-induced obesity depends not just on calories ingested but also on the host's microbiome," said the study's senior author Yang-Xin Fu, MD, PhD, professor of pathology at the University of Chicago Medicine. For most people, he said, "host digestion is not completely efficient, but changes in the gut flora can raise or lower digestive efficiency."
So the old adage "you are what you eat" needs to be modified, Fu suggested, to include, "as processed by the microbial community of the distal gut and as regulated by the immune system."
To measure the effects of microbes and immunity, the researchers compared normal mice with mice that have a genetic defect that renders them unable to produce lymphotoxin, a molecule that helps to regulate interactions between the immune system and bacteria in the bowel. Mice lacking lymphotoxin, they found, do not gain extra weight, even after prolonged consumption of a high-fat diet.
On a standard diet, both groups of mice maintained a steady weight. But after nine weeks on a high-fat diet, the normal mice increased their weight by one-third, most of it fat. Mice lacking lymphotoxin ate just as much, but did not gain weight.
The high-fat diet triggered changes in gut microbes for both groups. The normal mice had a substantial increase in a class of bacteria (Erysopelotrichi) previously associated with obesity and related health problems. Mice that lacked lymphotoxin were unable to clear segmented filamentous bacteria, which has previously been found to induce certain immune responses in the gut.
The role of gut microbes was confirmed when the researchers transplanted bowel contents from the study mice to normal mice raised in a germ-free environment—and thus lacking their own microbiome. Mice who received commensal bacteria from donors that made lymphotoxin gained weight rapidly. Those that got the bacteria from mice lacking lymphotoxin gained much less weight for about three weeks, until their own intact immune system began to normalize their bacterial mix.
When housed together, the mice performed their own microbial transplants. Mice are coprophagic; they eat each other's droppings. In this way, the authors note, mice housed together "colonize one another with their own microbial communities." After weeks together, even mice with the immune defect began to gain weight. They also were able to reduce the presence of segmented filamentous bacteria in their stool.
Moving from normal chow to the high-fat diet initiated a series of related changes, the authors found. First, it altered the balance of microbes in the digestive system. These changes in the microbiome altered the immune response, which then introduced further changes to the intestinal microbial community.
These changes "provide inertia for the obese state," the authors said, facilitating more efficient use of scarce food resources.
"Our results suggest that it may be possible to learn how to regulate these microbes in ways that could help prevent diseases associated with obesity," said Vaibhav Upadhyay, first author of the study and an MD/PhD student working in Fu's laboratory. "We now think we could inhibit the negative side effects of obesity by regulating the microbiota and perhaps manipulating the immune response."
Or, 20 years from now, "when there are 10 billion people living on earth and competing for food, we may want to tilt digestive efficiency in the other direction," Fu added.
The authors cautioned, however, that with more than 500 different strains of bacteria present in the gut, "the precise microbes that promote such weight gain and the specific host responses that foster their growth need to be better established."
Explore further: Gut organisms could be clue in controlling obesity risk
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According to Medical Base, calcified hematoma refers to the condition wherein calcium and different salts are deposited in a hematoma. Commonly called a bruise, a hematoma is the collection of blood in a specific part of the body because of an injury. When a person suffers from injury, blood vessels may be damaged, and blood may leak into the surrounding tissues.Continue Reading
Medical Base states that a calcified hematoma can be treated by applying ice packs to the affected area, cutting down on calcium intake, increasing water intake and administering cortisone injections, especially for severe cases. Application of ice packs to the painful areas with calcium deposits is an effective way to boost the recovery process. In addition to limiting the amount of calcium in meals, people with a calcified hematoma must also avoid calcium supplements.
According to Medical Base, sufferers must drink plenty of water to flush the excess salts and calcium from the body. Homeopathic medicines, such as Bryonia alba, Rhuta, and Rhus tox, are also effective in the prevention of calcification of hematoma and speeding up the rate by which extravasated blood gets reabsorbed. Engaging in exercise can also lessen joint stiffening, improve mobility and reduce calcium deposits.Learn more about Conditions & Diseases
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One quote I liked in particular from The Shallows was from page 63: “The natural state of the human brain, like that of the brains of most of our relatives in the animal kingdom, is one of distractedness.” A few sentences before this quote Carr wrote about how “readers didn’t just become more efficient [over time]. They also became more attentive.” The second quote acknowledges how the human brain is evolving overtime to accommodate the complex activity of reading. The first six chapters of The Shallows roughly outline a brief timeline of the human brain: distracted and scattered in the time of ancient civilizations and cavemen, more developed and focused at the dawn of the invention of writing, and then rapidly becoming more sophisticated and complex as reading and writing became a necessary element to everyday human life. This has been proven true on many accounts, looking back on how the works produced by humans over the years and how they have been getting more complex and sophisticated. With the emergence of modern day technology, humans have evolved more than ever. Our brains have rewired over the decades to adapt to constantly reading in small snippets, very quickly. Our intake of information has dramatically increased due to the greater ease of access to information on countless different topics, aiding to monumental research and general public knowledge. Almost 24/7 we are gathering and processing new information in our brains from all the screens and various signs we read, so of course our brains had to adapt to this new lifestyle that technology has led us to.
This constant intake of information in small bursts has, in a way, brought our brains back to the very distractedness that is mentioned in the quotes. Before the Internet gave us the ability to find new material to read and things to learn, humans had to go to libraries and to research in physical books, sitting in front of books for hours at a time. In order to extract information and learn things from text, readers had to immerse themselves in what they were reading. Today, the opposite is true. If we see an article online of more than a few paragraphs in length, we generally tend to try and find a shorter article on the same topic. Since the emergence of the Internet, we have become accustomed to finding what we need in a few paragraphs or less. This has lead us to become more distracted when presented with a “lengthy” piece of text. Even modern day research suggests ways to cope with the distractedness of our brains while studying (bullet 2, 4, and 7).
While modern technology and the Internet did bring positive monumental change to the world, and our way of living, it has taken a toll on our brains in the form of distractedness and the high demand for quick intake of information. The benefits of this technology does far outweigh the costs, but this proves to show that nothing comes without consequence.
After reading up to chapter seven in Nicholas Carr’s “The Shallows”, I am intrigued by and have begun to ponder several of his arguments regarding how the internet is changing the way that we think. In general, Carr claims that throughout oral and written history, the human brain has changed in accordance with the dominant means of communication in a given time period. Most importantly, our brains are doing the same thing now as we begin to make the internet our primary medium for reading and communicating. However, when it comes to the internet, Carr doesn’t think that the brain’s inclination towards plasticity has had a positive impact on us. Instead, he feels that the brain’s acclimation to the digital age has had a detrimental effect on our attention spans. From the outset of the book, he makes this point clear, stating “And what the net is doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation” (Carr 6). Moreover, Carr feels that this same phenomenon has affected others in his generation as well as those who have grown up with the internet. Referring to the latter age cohort, Joe O’Shea, cited in the book, states “They don’t necessarily read a page from left to right and top to bottom. They might instead skip around, scanning for pertinent information of interest” (Carr 9).
I was specifically struck by the claim that many people my age read differently, and in a sense, incompletely. This is not something I had ever thought about or dwelled on until reading “The Shallows”. As someone who is forced to utilize both printed and online resources for school, it is important that I am able to absorb and retain information regardless of where it’s located. On the one hand, I understand where Carr is coming from because when I am reading news articles online, I occasionally tend to skip around the article to get to the main point that the headline was referring to. However, I usually do this skimming or skipping intentionally. Furthermore, when it comes to articles or important reading material for school, whether it is printed on paper or online, I take great care to read closely and make sure I am receptive to the information presented to me. I will say, though, there are times where I have trouble concentrating on what I read in a textbook for class, regardless of attempting to do a close read. I usually attribute this lack of concentration to the material, however, and not to any cognitive inability.
This topic has sparked much debate in the psychology and education fields. In this article from The Guardian, author Duncan Jeffries also uses Carr’s argument to investigate how others feel regarding the web and its impacts on concentration. I was surprised to read that a Pew Research survey found that while 77% of teachers feel that the internet has positive effects on students’ overall research, 87% of those same teachers feel that the internet is leading to shortened attention spans. In this sense, there is mixed opinion as to whether the internet has a positive or negative influence on our brains.
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- Think about what you want to do, and how you want to do it, before starting coding.
- Build up a program in small steps. Write a bit of code, test it to see if it works, then write the next bit. If you write a large chunks of code, it may well have several mistakes in, and the combination of mistakes will be very difficult to find and correct. If using a feature that you haven't tried before, then write a small webpage to try it out first, before adding it to your main code. If you put it in a complicated program straight away and it doesn't work (which is quite likely), then you won't know if it's a simple typing error or that you've misunderstood how the code works.
- Use copy-and-paste whenever you can. Mistakes can creep in whenever you type something, and it can be difficult to remember all the brackets and quotes. Copy something that you know works already and change it to do what you want.
- Be careful of quotes. Make sure that you remember both the start and end quotes. If you have quotes inside quotes, they must be of different types (i.e. single and double quotes) although it doesn't matter which comes first.
- Alert boxes are useful for debugging a program (trying to find out why it doesn't work). You can put one in at any point in the program to print out anything you want, to see if it is what it should be. In extreme cases, you can find out if you even get to that point of the program!
- Define all your variables, and make them global unless they are strictly temporary.
- Lay out your code to make it easy to read. Use spaces, blank lines and new lines so the underlying logic is plain, and the blocks of code easy to distinguish.
- Use comments especially at the start of functions, to explain what they do. Even if you've used a sensible function name, and even though you are convinced that the function is obvious, you'll probably forget all about it quite quickly, and will be thankfully for any hint you've left yourself. You might want to change the code some time in the future, for example. I've had to rewrite whole webpages because I couldn't figure out what I'd done in an old one!
- Be careful of infinite loops. Make sure the conditions of your loops will terminate. Don't forget to increment your counters!
- Have a rest if your mind is getting fogged up. It's well known that computers give off magical rays which inhibit thinking! Well, perhaps not. But it's amazing what walking away from the computer for a bit will do. And there's something called fresh air...
- Keep It Simple, Stupid (otherwise known as the KISS principle). If there is a simple way of doing things, and a complicated way of doing things, choose the simple way. Why make life harder than it is already?
© Jo Edkins 2005
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It is often said that American kids are not as well educated as our kids were in the past. From both sides of the political aisle we are told that the modern educational system is failing us. There is broad disagreement on how to improve the situation. While some say we need to spend more money others say we are spending too much money. Money aside could there be another side to what is happening today?
Indeed there are studies that indicate that American students receive lower average test scores than do students in some other countries. These studies imply that today’s American children are not receiving as good an education as they did in the past. Some say that today’s student is “Dumber” than in the past. Others argue that while many kids do get it, many of them are too distracted by their I=pods, cell phones and whatever else is out there.
While one may find it difficult to argue with these studies there is another side that we need to examine. The reality is that kids today are wiser and more sophisticated than ever before and here are several reasons why.
Not too far in the past, students in kindergarten used to learn counting numbers and the alphabet but did not learn how to apply operations to the numbers or how to read words and sentences. The students learned how to count things and how to write their own name but math operations and reading were not taught until they were in the first grade.
In most schools today our kindergarten students are taught these first grade skills. They are taught how to add numbers together and are provided with games and other tools that teach them how to solve simple math problems. It seems amazing that tiny and adorable kindergartners are developing math skills that students in the past were not taught until a year later.
The same thing is happening with written language skills. Today’s kindergartners are not only taught how to write their own name but also how to write and read simple words. Further, the kindergartners are taught how to put together simple sentences, and as a fun project they learn to draw pictures, write sentences about their pictures, and put them together in a book form to take home to their amazed parents.
One of the tools used by kindergartners to learn simple math and word skills is the computer. The young students make regular trips to the school’s computer lab where they sign on to the computer with their name and a password and then navigate to a fun math program or an equally fun language program. The students are thrilled because the programs are presented in the form of games. The students think they are just playing games but really they are learning sophisticated math and language skills that students in the past did not learn until a later age.
Further, students in past generations learned fundamental math and language skills through rote memorization and recitation. Today’s young students learn the skills through the more sophisticated method of applying critical thinking and problem solving, which makes them much wiser and more sophisticated than students of a similar age in past generations.
Not only is the Elementary School curriculum today pushed to a younger student but the same is happening at the Middle School level and at the High School level. Students in past generations used to graduate from sixth grade to attend Junior High School as seventh, eighth, and ninth graders. In many schools today Middle School now encompasses sixth, seventh, and eighth grades. Where students in the past would step up to the more sophisticated world of High School in the tenth grade. Now students in the ninth grade join the faster paced High School environment and curriculum.
For these reasons I disagree that our educational system is the failure that many would have us believe. I further disagree with placing labels such as “Dumber” on today’s students. Today’s student does go about learning things differently. In many ways they are actually becoming wiser and more sophisticated at a younger age than did students in past generations. Everyday living requires more wisdom and sophistication today than in the past and the educational system has changed to meet the needs of today’s students. Perhaps a better way to classify students would be the motivated and the lazy!
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This post is a part of the series An Acre of Sunshine.
Every time I pass in or out of our property I have to open and close two cattle gates as our small one lane road passes through a neighbor's pasture. If our little road saw any more traffic than it does, the road would need to be fenced out of the grassy areas beside them, but for now we often have to slow down and honk to get the cattle to shuffle off to the side of the road. You really get to know the cows when you have to shoo them out of the way on a regular basis.
In the area immediately surrounding our property most of the agriculture consists of raising beef cattle, as well as some draft horses. The soil is too rocky and the hills too steep to allow our area to be economically competitive in growing row crops, but the sloping fields grow grass just fine. The fields on our own farm have been used primarily to support cattle for about the last 50 years. Before that there was a wider variety of agriculture, but these others were mostly abandoned as cattle became the mainstay of the local farms.
For these operations, the farmers are in the grass business every bit as much as the cattle business. Grasses only grow from the spring through the fall, but since cows need to eat during the winter also, farmers must harvest enough grasses to provide for the snowy months. During the summer, technically May to November, cattle are brought to the grasses, to feed on pasture. This reduces the work of the farmer tremendously, as the cows harvest their own food. The farmer does have to fence off the paddocks, ensure water supplies, and move cattle between the fields, but this is less intensive than preparing for the winter months. To provide for the winter food needs, the farmer needs to maintain other grass fields for hay, cutting and baling the growth and setting it aside to be doled out as needed to keep the animals well-fed. The same fields can be used for both haying and pasture, but can only primarily provide for one of these in a given year.
It doesn't seem like that much would be required to grow grass, just to cut down any trees, and then let the cattle come through to eat as they would. But in actuality good pasture is a crop like any other, just that it is a perennial crop that only needs to be replanted every 20 or 30 years, rather than each spring. The usual way of establishing pastures is quite similar to planting row crops. One plows up a field to prepare the soil and kill off competing plants, and then the seeds of a variety of grasses and forbs are planted, with names like alfalfa, orchard grass, Timothy, fescue, and clover. These fields often are helped by the addition of trace nutrients as well as fertilizers. Once the fields grow in, they can be maintained for many years. The degradation of pastures and hayfields can be from nutrient depletion or changes in the species composition of the grasses present. When cows are allowed a lot of space, they work through and eat only the choicest morsels, leaving all of the less desirable plants standing. Over time, these undesirable plants can come to dominate the entire fields, to such an extent that the fields must be plowed and replanted.
Once the growing of the grasses is accounted for, one has to look at the business of actually raising beef cattle. Every year there is a seasonal ebb and flow that takes advantage of the natural cycles of the region. During the winter, the herds are almost completely made up of pregnant females, with just a few bulls that are only there to sire the next generation. In the spring all of the cute little calves are born, drinking only milk for their first weeks of life, transitioning over the summer months to the adult diet of grasses. As soon as the fields are showing good signs of growth, the herd is released out to pasture for the summer. The calves put on an amazing amount of growth throughout their first year of life. In the late fall, at around the same time as the pastures go dormant for the winter, the vast majority of the calves are sold off, most often to a feedlot where the calves will continue to put on weight for up to another year before becoming someone's dinner. The calves that are kept by the local farmers are generally the best females, which become the next generation of mothers. These cows, known as heifers, can be bred when they are as young as 15 months.
The cycle actually begins again during the early summer, as cows have a gestation period of about 280 days. This means that in order for a cow to have one calf each spring, it needs to be bred the prior summer, when the prior calf is only 2-3 months old. This also means that all cows should be pregnant in the fall when the calves are sold off, and very often those cows that didn't conceive are sold at the same time. It turns out that roughly 15% of cows don't get pregnant in a given year, which can be due to age, illness, or just random chance in whether the bull did his job. Cows may continue to breed for 10 years or more before age catches up with them.
Putting all of this together, one needs to grow enough pasture and cut enough hay to maintain a mother cow for the entire year to produce an 8 month old calf for sale. Those calves sold and destined to become beef will be fed mostly grain, including a lot of corn, for the rest of their lives. We won't include this feedlot part of cattle production in our calculations here, though I'll try to return to it at a later time in another post. So how much cow does an acre support?
Estimate #1. First principles
As discussed in 'Energy capture, conversion, and storage, a good first rule of thumb is to assume that each time a new level of an ecosystem consumes energy, that only 10% of that energy goes into the next level. We already made an estimate of the total amount of energy captured by photosynthesis, which in this case would be by the grasses. This energy is then used for metabolism, growth, reproduction, etc., of the plants, and only roughly 10% would of that energy would be available to the cows in the form of leaves and stems. Then the cows of course have their own metabolism and growth to deal with, meaning that only about 10% of the energy that the cows consume will end up in the form of cow flesh, which is what the farmer is most interested in.
35788 kWh/acre/year of photosynthesis * .1 for leaves and stems eaten by cows * .1 for efficiency of cows in turning food into weight gain = 358 kWh/acre/year of cow produced
Estimate #2 Going on available data for actual production
We can also look at typical agricultural yields, and see how much food a pasture typically produces, as well as the data on how efficient cows actually are in their growth and reproduction. I wasn't able to easily track down data for western Quebec, but did find what should be roughly comparable data, from the Manitoba Forage Council. This data shows that pasture produces from 2000 to 4000 pounds of forage per year, depending on plant species, fertilization, and water availability. Lets call it 3000 pounds of dry matter, as it is called, for the sake of calculation. Hay contains roughly 800 Calories per pound, so...
3000 lbs/acre/year * 800 Calories/pound * 1 kWh/860 Calories = 2790 kWh/acre/year of grasses
Further, a cow (pregnant and/or milk producing) requires roughly 30 pounds of food a day, or 10950 pounds through a year. In that same year, the calf will grow from an embryo up to roughly 500 pounds by the time of sale in late fall. The calf primarily drinks milk for the first couple of months, transitioning to the adult diet of grazing over the summer. All told, that calf will consume perhaps 1500 pounds of forage on top of the mother's intake over the summer and fall. Put together, it then takes...
10950 lbs forage (for cow) + 1500 lbs forage (for calf) * 800 Calories/lb * 1 kWh/860 Calories = 11580 kWh to maintain a cow for a year and to produce a 500 pound calf.
Finally, how much energy is harvested out of this system in a year? It is of course all of the calf, but it also ends up being the mother cow, around 15% of the time. As mentioned above, the cows generally aren't kept another year if they do not get pregnant over the summer. These cows average about 1200 pounds. When butchered, about 50% of a cow is meat, distributed over lean and fatty cuts. Some rough estimates suggest that this meat averages around 800 Calories per pound. It was difficult to find data on the embodied energy in the rest of the cow, including entrails, bones, skin, etc., so I will assume that these other parts have the same energy density as the meat. Put together, this means that...
(500 lbs (calf) + 1200 lbs (cow)*.15 (harvest rate of female cows)) * 800 Calories/pound * 1 kWh/860 Calories = 633 kWh of energy per year from raising a cow/calf pair.
The last step is to level out this amount of energy from a cow/calf pair back to a single acre:
2790 kWh/acre/year * 1 cow calf pair/ 11950 kWh * 633 kWh/ 1 cow calf pair = 148 kWh of energy in the form of cow harvested from one acre in a year.
Estimate #3 Actual production from our farm
Finally, we can make an estimate of the productivity of our farm from the actual production that we have observed over the last few years. We have 18 acres of pasture, and have used these fields both as pasture and hayfields over the last five years. In the first couple of years after the purchase of our property, we had one of the farmer neighbors put cow/calf pairs out to pasture on our farm. Since then, another local farmer has cut hay off of the same fields.
When we had cattle on our property, this was a herd of 20 cow/calf pairs which were rotated between our property and another nearby, such that the herd was on our property half of the time. This effectively makes 10 cow/calf pairs for the six month growing season. The calculations from estimate #2 can be adapted, as we know that each cow/calf pair needs 11580 kWh per year:
11580 kWh of forage /cow calf pair * 20 pairs/18 acres * 1/2 of the year * 1/2 of the time = 3217 kWh/acre of forage produced in a year.
In the years since we switched to haying, there has been quite a bit of variability in the weather, including both one very wet as well as one very dry summer. The summer of 2016 was a more average year, and in this year the property produced 50 large round bales of hay from a cut in mid-summer. In many climates farmers can get multiple cuttings of hay from a single field in a year, but with the relatively poor soils and shorter growing season, most of the local fields are cut only once. This does mean that the late summer and early fall growth aren't available for cattle unless the cattle are allowed to graze through later in the season. Below is the calculation for the amount of energy found in those bales, with weight and Calorie estimates for the hay drawn from here and here.
50 bales/18 acres * 1000 lbs/bale * 800 Calories/pound * 1 kWh/860 Calories = 2580 kWh/acre/year of grasses
These two estimates, that our fields produce between 3217 and 2580 kWh, are very much in line with Estimate # 2 so going forward we will go with that the final figure estimated there, of 148 kWh/acre/year of cow being harvested per year from grassy fields.
Visualizing this growth
As discussed above, before getting to cattle one has to have grasses. Below is a picture of a big round haybale, weighing around 1000 pounds. Each acre of our fields can produce about 3 of these per year. Averaged out over the entire year, each acre is growing 7 pounds of grass per day, a big handful.
Round haybale with author and son for scale
In the picture below, the calf is approaching that 500 pound size, typical for when they are sold off in the fall. The mother is still over twice that weight, around 1200 pounds, and stands around 5' tall. To support that mother and calf for the year, it requires about 4 acres of hayfield and pasture.
Growing other animal species, or for other products
The above discussion was all about cow and calf cattle farming, the mostly small scale operations feeding their animals on pastured grass. I didn't address the 'finishing' process for beef cattle, where the calves live in a more constrained environment eating more grains as they put on additional weight and size. Nor did I discuss growing other animals for food, or such products as the milk or eggs that can be obtained from those animals. In terms of the amount of energy that can be converted from sunlight to the end agricultural product, growing beef cattle is one of the least efficient. The adult cows must be maintained for many years, and they usually have only a single calf per year. Further, cows are somewhat less efficient than some other types of animals at converting feed into weight gain. And just look at other examples like chickens or pigs. Each of these produces many more young in any given year, as well as those animals reaching market size much more quickly. The takeaway is that these other types of animal husbandry can produce significantly higher yields per acre. The upside of beef cattle is that they take much less effort on the part of the farmer, they can be raised on land of marginal quality, and there is high demand and therefore a good price for beef. Needless to say, I may try to make a more quantitative comparison in a future post.
Estimate for total cow production: 148 kWh/acre/year
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The Holy Eucharist is
unique among the sacraments. Even the variety of names by which it is called
emphasizes the central position which it occupies in Catholic Christianity. It
is the Blessed Sacrament, the Lords Supper, the Holy of Holies, the Table of
the Lord, the Body and Blood of Christ, the Sacrifice of the Mass, Holy
Communion, the Sacrament of the Altar, Viaticum, and the Real Presence to
mention only a few of the titles by which the Church has identified this
central Mystery of Faith.
Yet among the names that have come down to us, the most
favored is the Eucharist, from the Greek word Eucharistia,
which means Thanksgiving. It appears already in the writings of St. Ignatius
of Antioch (died 107 A.D.) and St. Justin, Martyr (died 165 A.D.).
We may say there are three cardinal mysteries of the
Christian religion, namely, the Trinity, the Incarnation, and the Eucharist.
Among these the Eucharist implies the other two, since without the Trinity
there would have been no Incarnation, and without the Incarnation there would
have been no Eucharist.
Our purpose here is mainly to consider the Eucharist as a
sacrament that is a visible sign instituted by Christ, which effectively
produces the grace it signifies. Yet in reflecting on the Eucharist as a
sacrament, we must keep in mind what Pope John Paul II said in the first
encyclical he wrote as Bishop of Rome.
The Church lives by the Eucharist,
by the fullness of this sacrament, the stupendous content and meaning of which
have often been expressed in the Churchs magisterium from the most distant
times down to our own days
Indeed, the Eucharist is the
ineffable sacrament! The essential commitment and, above all, the visible grace
and source of supernatural strength for the Church as the People of God is to
persevere and advance constantly in Eucharistic life and Eucharistic piety, and
to develop spiritually in the climate of the Eucharist
With all the greater reason, then,
it is not permissible for us, in thought, life, or action to take away from
this truly most Holy Sacrament its full magnitude and its essential meaning
It is at one and the same time a
sacrifice-sacrament, a communion-sacrament, and a Presence-sacrament (The Redeemer of Man, IV, 20).
Consequently, although the Eucharist is one sacrament, it is
a sacrament in three distinctive ways as sacrifice, communion, and Presence. We
shall examine each of these in sequence, while seeing how each one relates to
the other two.
Eucharist as Sacrifice Sacrament
The most serious challenge to the Catholic faith in the
Eucharist was the claim that the Mass is not a real but merely a symbolic
To defend this basic Eucharistic mystery, the Council of
Trent made a series of definitions. Originally drafted as negative anathemas,
they may be reduced to the following positive affirmation of faith.
- The Mass is a true and proper sacrifice which is offered to God.
- By the words, Do this in commemoration of me (Luke 22:19; I
Corinthians 11:24), Christ made the apostles priests. Moreover, He decreed that
they and other priests should offer His Body and Blood.
- The Sacrifice of the Mass is not merely an offering of praise and
thanksgiving, or simply a memorial of the sacrifice on the Cross. It is a propitiatory
sacrifice which is offered for the living and dead, for the remission of sins
and punishment due to sin, as satisfaction for sin and for other necessities.
- The Sacrifice of the Mass in no way detracts from the sacrifice which
Christ offered on the Cross (Council of Trent, Session XXII, September 17,
Volumes of teaching by the Churchs magisterium have been
written since the Council of Trent. There has also been a remarkable
development of doctrine in a deeper understanding of the Mass. For our purpose,
there are especially two questions that need to be briefly answered: 1) How is
the Sacrifice of the Mass related to the sacrifice of the Cross? 2) How is the
Mass a true sacrifice?
Relation of the Mass to Calvary. In order to
see how the Mass is related to Calvary, we must immediately
distinguish between the actual Redemption of the world and the communication of
Christs redemptive graces to a sinful human race.
On the Cross, Christ really redeemed the human family. He is
the one true Mediator between God and an estranged humanity. On the Cross, He
merited all the graces that the world would need to be reconciled with an
When He died, the separation of His blood from His body
caused the separation of His human soul from the body, which caused His death.
He willed to die in the deepest sense of the word. He chose to die. In His own
words, He laid down His life for the salvation of a sinful mankind.
But His physical death on Calvary was not to be an automatic
redemption of a sin-laden world. It would not exclude the need for us to
appropriate the merits He gained on the Cross; nor would it exclude the need
for our voluntary cooperation with the graces merited by the Saviors shedding
of His blood.
The key to seeing the relation between Calvary and the Mass
is the fact that the same identical Jesus Christ now glorified is present on
the altar at Mass as He was present in His mortal humanity on the Cross.
Since it is the same Jesus, we must say He continues in the
Mass what He did on Calvary except that now in the Mass, He is no longer mortal
or capable of suffering in His physical person. On Calvary He was, by His own
choice, capable of suffering and dying. What He did then was to gain the
blessings of our redemption. What He does now in the Mass is apply these
blessings to the constant spiritual needs of a sinful, suffering humanity.
Before we look more closely at the Mass as a sacrifice of
propitiation and petition, we should make plain that it is first and foremost,
a sacrifice of praise (adoration) and thanksgiving. No less than He did on
Calvary, in the Mass Jesus continues to offer Himself to the heavenly Father.
Since the highest form of honor to God is sacrifice, the Mass is a continuation
of Christs sacrifice of praise and gratitude to God the Father. But, whereas
on Calvary, this sacrificial adoration was bloody, causing Christs physical
death by crucifixion, in the Mass the same Jesus is now sacrificing Himself in
an unbloody manner because He is now glorified, immortal, and incapable of
suffering or dying in His own physical person.
We now turn from the Mass as a sacrifice of adoration and
thanks (referring to God), to the Mass as a sacrifice of propitiation and
petition (referring to us).
Notice we use two words, propitiation
and petition. They are not the same.
- The Mass is the most powerful means we have to obtain
propitiation for sin. This occurs in different ways.
- Through the Mass, Gods mercy makes reparation for the want of divine love that we
have shown by committing sin.
- Through the Mass, Gods mercy removes the guilt of repented venial sins and moves
the sinner estranged from Him to return to God.
- Through the Mass, Gods mercy remits more or less of the punishment still due on
earth to forgiven sins.
- Through the Mass, Gods mercy also remits more or less of the punishment which the
souls in purgatory have to undergo before entering heaven.
- The Mass is a powerful means of petition to God for the graces
that we and others need in our pilgrimage through life.
- Graces are necessary for the mind to know what is Gods will and how it should be
- Graces are necessary for the will to
desire what pleases God, to choose what He wants us to do, and to sustain
our choice by loving Him above all things.
In both ways, as a means of propitiation and petition, the
Mass is a sacrament. It confers the graces needed from Gods mercy to expiate
the sins of the past and the graces needed from Gods bounty to obtain His
blessings for the future.
The Mass a True Sacrifice. Since the first century of her
existence, the Church has considered the
Mass a sacrifice. The earliest manual of the liturgy (before 90 A.D.) has this
directive for the attendance of Sunday Mass.
On the Lords own day, assemble in
common to break bread and offer thanks. But first confess your sins so that
your sacrifice may be pure. However, no one quarreling with his brother may
join your meeting until they are reconciled; your sacrifice must not be defiled
(Teaching of the Twelve Apostles, 14).
Why is the Mass a true sacrifice? Because in the Mass the
same Jesus Christ who offered Himself on Calvary now offers Himself on the
altar. The Priest is the same, the Victim is the same, and the end or purpose
is the same.
The Priest is the same Jesus Christ whose sacred person the
ordained priest represents and in whose Name he offers the Eucharistic
The Victim is the same, namely the Savior in His human
nature, with His true Body and Blood, and His human free will. Only the manner
of offering is different. On the Cross, the sacrifice was bloody; in the Mass
it is unbloody because Christ is now in His glorified state. But the heart of
sacrifice is the voluntary, total offering of oneself to God. Christ makes this
voluntary offering in every Mass, signified by the separate consecration of the
bread and wine into the Body and Blood of the Redeemer.
The end or purpose is the same, namely to give glory to God,
to thank Him, to obtain His mercy, and to ask Him for our needs. But, as we have
seen, whereas on Calvary Christ merited our salvation, it is mainly through the
Mass that He now dispenses the riches of His saving grace.
Eucharist as Communion Sacrament
The biblical foundation for Holy Communion is what Christ
Himself did at the Last Supper. As narrated by St. Matthew, Jesus first offered
the apostles what He was about to change, then changed the bread and wine, and
then gave them Communion.
And while they were at supper, Jesus took bread and blessed and broke and gave it
to His disciples and said, Take you and eat, this is my Body. And taking the
chalice He gave thanks and gave it to them saying, Drink you all of this. For
this is my Blood of the New Testament which shall be shed for many unto
remission of sins (Matthew 26:26-28).
St. John, who does not give us the narrative of the
institution of the Eucharist, devotes a whole chapter to Christs promise of
giving His followers His own flesh to eat and His own blood to drink. What
Christ emphasizes is the absolute necessity of being nourished by His Body and
Blood if the supernatural life received at Baptism is to be sustained.
I tell you most solemnly, if you do not eat the flesh of the
Son of Man and drink His blood, you will not have life in you. Anyone who does
eat my flesh and drink my blood has eternal life and I shall raise him up on
the last day. For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. He who eats
my flesh and drinks my blood lives in me and I live in Him. As I, who am sent
by the living Father, myself draw life from the Father, so whoever eats me will
draw life from me. This is the bread
come down from heaven; not like the bread our ancestors ate. They are dead, but
anyone who eats this bread will live forever (John 6: 53-58).
Throughout the gospels and
St. Paul, Christ uses words like take, eat, drink, always clearly
indicating that the Eucharist is to be taken into the mouth and consumed. No
less, and far more, than material food and drink are necessary to sustain the
natural life of the body, so Holy Communion must be received to support and
nourish the supernatural life of the soul.
Effects of Holy Communion. Since the earliest times, the benefits of receiving
the Body and Blood of Christ were spelled out to encourage frequent, even
daily, Holy Communion.
Thus, St. Cyril of
Jerusalem (died 387) said that reception of the Eucharist makes the Christian a
Christbearer and one body and one blood with Him (Catecheses, 4,3). St. John Chrysostom (died 407)
speaks of a mixing of the Body of Christ with our body,
in order to show the
great love that He has for us. He mixed Himself with us, and joined His Body
with us, so that we might become one like a bread connected with the body (Homily 46,3). These and other comparisons of how
Communion unites the recipient with Christ are based on Christs own teaching,
and St. Pauls statement that, the bread which we break, is it not the
partaking of the Body of the Lord? For we, being many, are one bread, all that
partake of this bread (I Corinthians 10:16-17).
So, too, the Church
officially teaches that Every effect which bodily food and bodily drink
produce in our corporeal life, by preserving this life, increasing this life,
healing this life, and satisfying this life is also produced by this Sacrament
in the spiritual life (Council of Florence, November 22, 1439). Thus:
- Holy Communion preserves the supernatural
life of the soul by giving the communicant supernatural strength to resist
temptation, and by weakening the power of concupiscence. It reinforces the
ability of our free will to withstand the assaults of the devil. In a formal
definition, the Church calls Holy Communion an antidote by which we are
preserved from grievous sins (Council of Trent, October 11, 1551).
- Holy Communion increases the life of grace
already present by vitalizing our supernatural life and strengthening the
virtues and gifts of the Holy Spirit we possess. To be emphasized, however, is
that the main effect of Communion is not to remit sin. In fact, a person in
conscious mortal sin commits a sacrilege by going to Communion.
- Holy Communion cures the spiritual diseases
of the soul by cleansing it of venial sins and the temporal punishment due to
sin. No less than serving as an antidote to protect the soul from mortal sins,
Communion is an antidote by which we are freed from our daily venial sins
(Council of Trent, October 11, 1551). The remission of venial sins and of the
temporal sufferings due to sin takes place immediately by reason of the acts of
perfect love of God, which are awakened by the reception of the Eucharist. The
extent of this remission depends on the intensity of our charity when receiving
- Holy Communion gives us a spiritual joy in
the service of Christ, in defending His cause, in performing the duties of our
state of life, and in making the sacrifices required of us in imitating the
life of our Savior.
On Christs own
promise, Holy Communion is a pledge of heavenly glory and of our bodily
resurrection from the dead (John 6:55). St. Irenaeus (died 202) simply declared
that, when our bodies partake of the Eucharist, they are no longer corruptible
as they have the hope of eternal resurrection (Against the Heresies, IV, 18,5).
Reception of the Eucharist. We may
distinguish four stages in the Churchs history on the frequency of receiving
Holy Communion. In the early centuries, the Eucharist was received often, even
daily. By the early Middle Ages, neglect of the Sacrament caused a general
council of the Church to pass a law that is still in effect. The Fourth Lateran
Council in 1215 A.D. decreed that on reaching the age of discretion, every
Catholic should receive Holy Communion after having gone to the Sacrament of
In the sixteenth
century, the Council of Trent repeated the foregoing decree and condemned
anyone who denies that each and every one of Christs faithful of both sexes
is bound, when he reaches the age of reason, to receive Communion at least
every year during the Paschal season according to the command of holy Mother
Church (October 11, 1551).
With the rise of
Jansenism in the seventeenth century, reception of Communion reached an all
time low. One result was that people were known not to make their First
Communion until they were dying. All the while, however, zealous apostles of
the Eucharist, like Saints Ignatius Loyola, Vincent de Paul and Alphonsus
Liguori, were urging the faithful to receive as often as possible. In his Spiritual Exercises, St. Ignatius says, we should
praise the reception of the Most Holy Sacrament once a year, and what is much
better once a month, and much better still every eight days, always with the
requisite and due dispositions (Rules for Thinking
with the Church, 3).
Finally in 1905, Pope
St. Pius X issued his famous decree on frequent communion, and it has made
Eucharistic history. The pope said:
Frequent and daily Communion, as a thing most earnestly desired by Christ our Lord and
by the Catholic Church, should be open to all the faithful of whatever rank and
condition of life; so that no one who is in the state of grace, and who
approaches the holy table with a right and devout intention, can lawfully be
hindered from receiving
A right intention consists in this: that he who approaches the holy table should
do so, not out of routine or vainglory or human respect, but for the purpose of
pleasing God, of being more closely united with Him by charity, and of seeking
this divine remedy for his weaknesses and defects (December 20, 1905).
The new Code of Canon
Law builds on this legislation of St. Pius X and even permits reception twice a
day. According to the Code, A person who has received the Most Holy Eucharist
may receive it again on the same day only within a Eucharistic celebration in
which that person participates (Canon 917).
Eucharist as Presence Sacrament
Although we have
reserved our reflections on the Real presence for the end, we could just as
well have begun with the Eucharist as Presence-Sacrament. The reason is that
logically, the Mass and Holy Communion derive all their meaning from the Real
Presence of Jesus Christ in the Blessed Sacrament.
As we did before, so
here again we shall draw on the irreversible teaching of the Council of Trent
about the Real Presence. The original doctrine is worded in the form of
anathemas. What follows is a summary list of these dogmas expressed in positive
- The Body and Blood of Christ together with
the soul and divinity of Christ and therefore the whole Christ, is truly,
really, and substantially contained in the sacrament of the most Holy
- By that wonderful and extraordinary change,
called transubstantiation, the whole substance of the bread is changed into
Christs Body, and the whole substance of the wine is changed into His blood,
so that only the species properties of bread and wine remain.
- In the venerable sacrament of the
Eucharist, the whole Christ is contained under each species, and under each and
every portion of either species when it is divided up.
- After the consecration, the Body and Blood
of our Lord Jesus Christ are present in the marvelous sacrament of the
Eucharist. They are present not only in the use of the sacrament while it is
being received, but also before and after. Consequently, the true Body and Blood
of the Lord remain in the consecrated hosts or particles that are kept or left
over after Communion.
- Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, is to
be adored in the holy sacrament of the Eucharist with the worship due to God
and including external worship. The Blessed Sacrament is therefore to be
honored with extraordinary festive celebrations, solemnly carried from place to
place in processions, and is to be publicly exposed for the peoples adoration.
- The Holy
Eucharist is to be kept in a sacred place (Council of Trent, October 11, 1551).
It is impossible to
exaggerate the importance of the foregoing definitions of the Catholic Church
on the Real Presence. No doubt, their doctrinal substance had been part of the
Churchs faith since the time of Christ. But the clear and simple expression of
this faith in the sixteenth century marked a turning point in Catholic
devotions to Jesus Christ, now present on earth no less than He was visibly
present in first-century Palestine.
Transubstantiation. To identify what takes place
in the consecration at Mass, the Church has come to employ the term
transubstantiation (trans = change, substantiation = of substance). Because of its
importance for understanding the Real Presence, this term deserves some
There are two kinds of
changes which things can naturally undergo. They are called accidental and
substantial changes. In an accidental change, something remains substantially
the same, but its accidental or non-essential properties are transformed. Thus
when a block of marble is carved into a statue, the marble remains marble, but
its shape and form are changed.
In a substantial
change, the former substance ceases to exist and becomes something else. Thus,
when food is eaten, its substance is changed; it becomes part of the organism
which consumes the food.
there is a unique substantial change. The essence or substance of bread and
wine ceases to exist, while the accidents or sensibly perceptible properties of
bread and wine remain. This kind of change has
no counterpart in nature; it belongs to the supernatural order.
What actually occurs?
The substance of what was bread and wine
is replaced by the living Christ. Although the external qualities of
bread and wine remain, their substance is no longer on the altar. It is now the
whole Christ, divinity and humanity, soul and body, and all the bodily
qualities that make Christ, Christ.
In his historic
encyclical The Mystery of Faith, Paul VI
goes into great detail to show that transubstantiation produces a unique
presence of Jesus Christ on earth. The pope analyzes six ways in which the
Savior is present and active in the world of human beings, but they are not the
Real Presence. The Real Presence is unique because it contains Christ
Himself. Moreover, this presence is called Real
because it is the presence by which Christ, the God-Man is wholly and entirely
present (Mysterium Fidei, September 3,
Worship of the Holy Eucharist. There has
been a remarkable development of doctrine on the Real Presence. Already in the
infant Church, the faithful did not doubt that by the words of consecration by
the priest, what had been bread is now the living Christ. However, as certain
theories began to emerge that called the Real Presence into question, two
things happened. The Churchs magisterium began to express her Eucharistic
faith in even sharper and clearer terms; and the Churchs saints began to
foster devotion to the living Christ who is present in our midst in the Blessed
The classic expression of faith in the Real Presence was
drafted by Pope Gregory VII in a Eucharistic Creed that leaves no room for
I believe in my heart and openly
profess that the bread and wine placed upon the altar are, by the mystery of
the sacred prayer and the words of the Redeemer, substantially changed into the
true and life-giving flesh and blood of Jesus Christ our Lord, and that after
the consecration there is present the true body of Christ which was born of the
Virgin and offered up for the salvation of the world, being hung on the cross
and now sits at the right hand of the Father, and there is present the true
blood of Christ which flowed from His side. They are present not only by means
of a sign and of the efficacy of the sacrament, but also in the very reality
and truth of their nature and substance (Council of Rome, February 11, 1079).
Long before this famous profession of faith, the Holy
Eucharist had been worshipped by the faithful. But the adoration of the Real
Presence for prolonged periods of time did not become widespread until about
the beginning of the thirteenth century. The immediate occasion for this
practice was the great devotion to the Blessed Sacrament of the Belgian
Augustinian nun, St. Juliana of Mont Cornillon (1193-1258).
St. Juliana urged the bishop of Liege to institute a feast
in honor of the Real Presence. The bishop ordered such a feast for his diocese
in 1246. On September 8, 1264, the Belgian Pope, Urban IV, established the
feast of Corpus Christi and ordered St. Thomas Aquinas to compose its Divine
Office. Three of our best known Eucharistic hymns are part of this Divine
Office, namely Pange Lingua, which closes
with the two verses of Tantum Ergo; Sacris Solemniis, which closes with the two verses
of Panis Angelicus; and Verbum Supernum, which closes with the two verses
of O Salutaris Hostia.
No less than eleven canons of the new Code of Canon Law deal
with the Reservation and Veneration of the Most Holy Eucharist. They cover
every significant aspect of Catholic veneration of the Holy Eucharist.
- The Sacrament is to be reserved in every cathedral, parish
church and church or oratory of a religious institute or society of apostolic
life (Canon 934).
- The church should be open to the faithful, at least some hours
each day so that they are able to spend some time in prayer before the Most
Blessed Sacrament (Canon 937).
- The tabernacle in which the Most Holy Eucharist is reserved
should be situated in a distinguished place in the church or oratory, a place
which is conspicuous, suitably adorned, and conducive to prayer (Canon 938).
In one country after another, adoration of the Holy
Eucharist has developed beyond anything seen in previous generations. Groups
have been formed among the laity for this purpose. Some are local organizations
associated with a single parish church or public oratory. Others reach out
across the nation and even to other countries. Their common denominator is an
intense desire to profess ones faith in Christs Real Presence in the
Eucharist, and to pray for the desperate help that people need in todays
Modern popes have not only supported this renewed devotion
to the Eucharist, but have done all they could to set the example for bishops
to follow. Thus Pope John Paul II established the daily exposition of the
Blessed Sacrament in St. Peters Basilica. Every day, Monday through Friday,
the Blessed Sacrament has been exposed all day, from Latin Mass in the morning
until Italian Vespers in the evening. Two Sisters are in adoration in the
Blessed Sacrament Chapel in St. Peters. Pilgrims to Rome join in their prayers
before the Holy Eucharist.
When the Perpetual Eucharistic Exposition opened, Pope John
Paul II composed a prayer of which the following are significant quotations.
Lord, stay with us.
These words were spoken for the
first time by the disciples at Emmaus. In the course of the centuries, they
have been spoken infinite times, by the lips of so many of your disciples and
confessors, O Christ.
As Bishop of Rome and first servant
of this temple, which stands on the place of St. Peters martyrdom, I speak the
same words today.
Stay! That we may meet you in
prayer of adoration and thanksgiving, in prayer of expiation and petition, to
which all those who visit this basilica are invited.
Stay! You who are at one and the
same time veiled in the Eucharistic mystery of faith, and also revealed under
the species of bread and wine, which you have assumed in this Sacrament.
The Eucharist is at the same time a
constant announcement of your second coming and the sign of the final Advent,
and also of the expectation of the whole Church.
Every day and every hour we wish to
adore you, veiled under the species of bread and wine, to renew hope of the
call to glory which you began with your glorified body at the Fathers right
May the unworthy successor of Peter
in the Roman See and all those who take part in the adoration of your
Eucharistic Presence attest with every visit of theirs, and make ring out
again the truth contained in the apostles words: Lord, you know everything;
you know that I love you. Amen.
In one diocese after another, bishops have encouraged the
adoration of Jesus Christ in the Blessed Sacrament by the faithful. In a world
that is groping in darkness, the Church is telling people that Christ, the
light of the world and the power of salvation is on earth to teach us and
strengthen us on the road to heaven. All we need is to believe that He is
here and ready to provide us with what we need.
Copyright © 2002 Inter Mirifica
Pocket Catholic Catechism
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Texas wild rice, a little-known cousin of the widely eaten wild rice from the cooler climes of the upper Midwest, didn`t attract much attention when it began disappearing from the earth.
And that`s unfortunate, says Donald Falk of the Center for Plant Conservation in Boston.
Texas wild rice can survive hotter and drier weather than its northern cousin, and that property may be transferable to a number of widely cultivated crops. Human beings haven`t yet learned what other secrets the plant may hold.
Many plants have been found to have important scientific properties. That`s why botanists sought out the last wild population of the plant and brought back enough seed to begin growing it in a greenhouse. Eventually they hope to have a strong enough ``captive`` population to begin re-establishing the crop in its natural range.
It`s a story that Falk, his associates at the center and the people at 19 botanical gardens and arboretums around the country hope to reproduce many times. About 5,000 times, in fact.
The center, in Boston`s Arnold Arboretum, is the heart of a network dedicated to saving the approximately 5,000 endangered plant species found only in the United States.
So far, 221 species from the center`s 118-page list of endangered U.S. plants have been taken into protective custody by members of the network, becoming part of its National Collection of Endangered Plants. They hope to add about 100 more to the collection this year.
The reasons for their effort go well beyond scientific curiosity.
BENEFITS TO AGRICULTURE
When a plant species disappears, a region loses some of its complexity-its ability to bounce back from disturbances like drought, disease or fire, and the planet`s gene pool is diminished, Falk says. Advances in biotechnology mean that the special genetic qualities of a given plant might be used in science or transferred to other plants for the benefit of agriculture or the $7-billion-a-year horticulture industry.
Rare plants can also help unlock the mysteries of plant biology and ecology, and many are worth saving because their beauty is part of the nation`s heritage, Falk says.
But they are disappearing faster than ever, as human populations claim more once-wild areas for agriculture, recreation and housing developments, or as we subject the indigenous plant populations to pollution.
Many plants on the endangered list are relatives of plants that have proven economic value or have qualities such as the ability to grow in marginal areas or tolerate frost, dryness or salt.
Until 1984, there was no organized effort to identify and save them. The center got its start that year when Falk and cofounder Frank Thibodeau, who both studied environmental policy and conservation strategy at Tufts University in Medford, Mass., got to worrying about how, in Falk`s words,
``plants don`t get their due when it comes to conservation.``
Public attention is captivated by such endangered animals as the panda and the California condor, but there are far more endangered plants than animals, Falk says.
So the pair went to Peter Ashton, then director of the Arnold Arboretum, with their idea for a national network. They focused on local arboretums and botanical gardens for the network, Falk says: ``They`re the experts at growing local plants, understanding their biology and educating the public.``
Ashton gave Falk and Thibodeau a home on the top floor of the arboretum`s visitor center and the names of a few contacts, and they went to work.
PROPOSALS FOR PROTECTION
The 19 members of the network divide the U.S., including Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, into 14 zones determined by weather patterns and plant species. Each year, all members submit proposals to the center outlining which species they`d like to focus protection efforts on. The center`s scientific advisory council decides which will be selected.
John Fay, chairman of the advisory council and a botanist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service`s Division of Endangered Species and Habitat Conservation in Washington, draws a parallel between the center`s network and zoos, saying that both act as modern Noah`s arks for endangered species. That function also makes them catalysts in the conservation movement, he says.
But he adds that harboring near-extinct plant species in protected gardens is not a panacea. ``You can`t capture all the (genetic) diversity of a wild population in a garden population. It`s not the same as having a large population in the wild.``
Once a plant is approved for protection, local botanists secure the permits needed to collect an endangered species, talk to local
conservationists about where to find the plant and when it is producing seeds, then embark on field trips to collect seeds or cuttings from as many plants as possible to preserve genetic diversity.
Seeds, cuttings and pollen are stored in facilities specially built for the purpose, usually regional facilities of the U.S. Department of
Agriculture. Some seeds and cuttings are used to propagate about 50 plants in a greenhouse, and when they are hearty enough, they are transplanted outdoors. The eventual goal, though the program is too young to have done this yet, is reintroduction of the plant in the wild.
The center has a staff of eight and an annual budget of $600,000, about three-fourths of it foundation grants and the rest from private, group and corporate donations. Individuals, garden clubs or others can ``adopt`` one protected species for a $5,000 donation, which covers the expense of propagating and caring for a plant once it is selected for protection, Falk says.
The center has about 900 plants on its ``most endangered`` list. Plants on that list are known to exist at fewer than six sites in the wild or to have fewer than 1,000 specimens left. -
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Guest Author - Jeanetta Polenske
It is estimated that Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (EDS) affects about 1 in 5,000 persons worldwide. This inherited disorder results in the abnormal development of collagen that affects the joints and skin in varying degrees that range from mild symptoms to critical complications.
Mutations in the genes prevent collagen from forming property. The production or processing of collagen is changed so that the structure of connective tissue is not developed completely. The result is that skin, bones and organs do not have the strength and elasticity provided by this essential substance.
There are six classified types of the syndrome with other variations occurring in rarely documented cases. All affect joint movement and may involve weak muscle tone often resulting in dislocation of the joints, chronic pain and arthritis. The kyphoscoliosis type causes severe curvature of the spine.
Skin structure is also affected. Those with EDS have very soft, elastic skin that is easily damaged and slow to heal. The surface of the eye may be impaired, leading to possible blindness or rupture of the cornea.
The most severe form of the syndrome is the vascular type. In this case, the vascular walls are compromised and can result in the rupture of blood vessels, uterus and bowels leading to internal bleeding or stroke.
EDS may be diagnosed in infancy and is seen as loose joints, dislocations and motor skill delays due to weak muscle tone. Tests can be performed to diagnose the syndrome including collagen typing, collagen gene mutation testing, echocardiogram and lysyl hydroxylase or oxidase activity.
There is no cure, but those diagnosed with the syndrome can expect to have a normal life span. Symptoms are cared for on an individual basis and may include pain medications, physical therapy and rehabilitative care. Those with the vascular type will be closely monitored as their risk is potentially life threatening.
For more information and support, please contact the Ehlers-Danlos National Foundation at 1760 Old Meadow Road, Suite 500, McLean, Virginia 22102.
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Had a question come up today about a US Southern Family living in Mississippi, “When and from where did my family come from when first arriving in America?” WikiTree G2G
The pattern of Immigration to the North American Continent in the early days of colonization was to the absolute East Coast. From Nova Scotia to Saint Augustine to New Orleans. When our ancestors arrived they settled pretty close to the coast. It was the safest place because there were few other colonists and staying together was the obvious thing to do for safety.
As populations grew, the oldest son(s) would inherit the land and the younger children would migrate to other areas. From the north to the south and west. In what is now Canada settlers followed the St. Lawrence River inland. As each of the major canals were constructed easier travel afforded more opportunity to the west. In the US the old Indian trails heading south and west were followed and land opened up. Covered Wagons and then the Rail systems, criss-crossing the continent opened even wider expanses of land for migrants to settle.
In my own Gaulden (Gaulding, Goulding, Gauldin) family we started in VA (one theory is that my Gaulden’s started in England traveled to Bermuda, went through Eleuthra, Bahama, to Massachusetts then to Virginia). From Virginia we traveled through NC for a bit, then on to Sumter, South Carolina. The John Gaulden Family of Sumter, SC, had it’s younger Children migrate to York County, SC, to Georgia, and even to Western MS/Eastern LA.
My Templeton family arrived from Ireland, landed in Charleston and settled in Laurens County, SC. From South Carolina, portions of the family migrated to Indiana. When more land opened up to the west they moved on westward. The Templeton DNA Study and One Name Study has worked to identify far flung family groups by migration patterns. We can infer which of the 8 Templeton gateway Ancestors someone is from and identify new people to add to the Templeton Gene Pool with DNA testing.
The Hunt line started out in Bedford County, Virginia. Thomas Hunt had 14 children who migrated to all parts of the continent. My particular Hunt, Esli, Sr., moved with a couple of brothers to Western North Carolina (the State Of Franklin now Tennessee). Then, after traveling around SC during the revolution took his land grant on what was to be the line between Greenville and Pickens Counties, SC. From there Esli Sr.’s family spread out over Cherokee lands and westward.
The Dillard’s migrated with other family groups from Virgina to Western NC, then on to Rabun County, Georgia. The Lords started in Connecticut and ended up in Jackson County, Georgia. The McElmoyle’s are a bit harder to trace to one individual, but different groups of McElmoyle’s landed in Charleston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, New York (straight to Ontario for some) and Boston and spread from those locations to points south and west.
Knowing that Upstate South Carolina was a resort destination for those to escape the coastal heat and malaria for cool summers in the mountains, helps to understand why some Charleston families have deep ties to Greenville, SC. There is even a Charletson McElmoyle family who are split between a cemetery in Clemson, SC and a cemetery in Charleston (with tombstones in both) because of the civil war.
So ask your local historical society where the people came from and why they settled your area of the world. You may find a veritable road-map to your ancestors origins.
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Last summer, after more than a year of searching, a single piece of debris from Malaysia Airline’s MH370 aircraft was finally located on the coast of Madagascar. That flaperon was all we’ve found since MH370 vanished — until now.
Mozambique officials have confirmed that they found a piece of aircraft skin believed to have come from the horizontal stabilizer. The object has the words “NO STEP” written on it, and experts who have viewed the wreckage claim a high possibility that it’s from a Boeing 777. Mozambique officials have cautioned against confirmation until the part is positively identified, but Boeing tracks every single part of every single 777 it builds and there’s no known cases of a 777 shedding hardware in this area. If the part is confirmed to be from a Boeing 777, it’s almost certainly from MH370.
Where did all the debris go?
One persistent question that pops up whenever MH370 is discussed is why we can’t find the plane. The Australians and Malaysians have searched for nearly two years without success, while an enormous flotilla of ships assisted in the initial recovery effort. No debris was found, while in other cases, rescuers have found thousands of pieces of debris floating on the surface after a crash.
The answer may depend on the angle at which MH370 entered the water. Last year, a math professor at Texas A&M proposed that the aircraft could have survived a water landing (mostly) in one piece if it entered the water in a nose dive. The wings (and the horizontal stabilizers) would still have broken up, but the fuselage contains the cargo, humans, seats, cushions, and other objects that would have floated to the surface and alerted humans to the wreck. If the aircraft sank in one piece, very little of this material would escape the plane.
Most planes don’t hit the water in a nose dive, but impact at a steep angle. This creates what Professor Chen characterized as a “bending moment,” as the nose of the fuselage encounters sudden resistance. Such an impact would snap the fuselage into at least two pieces, and leave an enormous floating debris field.
The wings break off in either scenario, but in the nosedive scenario they’re more likely to shear off and remain mostly intact. In this scenario we would still expect to find some floating debris, but not the enormous cloud of it that previous aircraft crashes have generated.
As for how likely a nose-dive scenario is in the real world, I don’t honestly know. The current theory is that the aircraft flew, possibly on autopilot, until running out of fuel. Main power would have failed at that point, though an emergency generator is thought to have kicked on long enough for the aircraft to briefly communicate with orbiting satellites.
It’s not clear if the autopilot on a Boeing 777 can resume control of the plane once emergency power is restored, or if the hardware is programmed to attempt to control the aircraft in emergency situations. If the autopilot could hold the nose of the plane up as it descended, the vertical entry theory seems less plausible. If, on the other hand, the autopilot either wasn’t engaged or couldn’t respond in this scenario, a vertical dive seems much more likely.
Either way, we now (probably) have two pieces of debris washed ashore in the same part of the world. The Paluma Sandbank and Reunion Island are roughly 1,400 miles (2,400km) apart from each other, but both artifacts could possibly have been delivered by the currents of the Indian ocean.
It’s not clear if the horizontal stabilizer will help us solve the puzzle of what happened to MH370, but the more wreckage we locate, the greater the chance of uncovering clues to the plane’s current location and how it was destroyed.
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Why do some people get sick while others stay healthy? Since space shuttle Discovery launched into orbit Feb. 24, 2011, it has brought NASA scientists one step closer to helping astronauts and the public discover ways to battle and prevent serious illness and infection.
Discovery carried a six-member astronaut crew, critical spare parts, and 16 mice that are playing an important role in immune system research during its final flight and mission to the International Space Station.
“The goal of our experiment is to discover what triggers and leads to an increased susceptibility to an infection,” said Roberto Garofalo, principal investigator of the Mouse Immunology-2 (MI2) experiment and a professor in the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston. “We can use our findings to help treat and prevent future astronauts from getting sick, as well as protect people with more vulnerable immune systems here on Earth, such as the elderly or young children.”
Research has shown that the body’s immune system is compromised during and after spaceflight. In order to better understand why the body’s mechanisms to fight off infection are weakened, scientists flew 16 mice into space for Discovery’s mission. After the mice return to Earth and pass a medical examination, scientists will expose them to a respiratory syncytial virus (RSV). Worldwide, the virus is a leading lower respiratory tract illness in infants and children and also is now recognized as a significant cause of respiratory illness in older adults. Most people, who are otherwise healthy, recover from an RSV infection in a couple weeks, while young children, the elderly, and those with compromised immune systems, could have severe symptoms that require hospitalization and treatment.
At various times after exposure to the virus, Garofalo’s team will collect cells from the mice’s lung and nasal tissues and study the cells’ genes and proteins to learn how the animals’ bodies responded to the virus. Tissues from the mice that flew in space will be compared with the tissues of mice that never left Earth, but also were exposed to the virus.
In the weeks leading up to launch, project teams from NASA’s Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif., and the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston prepared the MI2 experiment for flight at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, Florida. A few hours before launch, the mice will be placed into the Ames-developed Animal Enclosure Modules, habitats located in the shuttle’s middeck lockers, where they will remain during flight.
“Once in orbit, astronauts will perform daily checks on the health and well-being of the mice,” said Nicki Rayl, project manager for the MI2 experiment at Ames. “STS-133 is the 25th flight of this unique hardware, which was designed to provide them with plenty of food and water, and keep them healthy during launch, flight and return to Earth.”
The Mouse Immunology-2 experiment is managed by the International Space Station Research Project Office at Ames, along with Garofolo’s team at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston. The Ames Flight Systems Implementation Branch and Space Biosciences Division developed and implemented the MI2 payload, which was funded by the Advanced Capabilities Division in the Exploration Systems Mission Directorate at NASA’s Headquarters, Washington.
The first Mouse Immunology experiment flew aboard STS-131 in April 2010 to study the influence of microgravity on mouse immune systems. The experiment’s principal investigator, Millie Hughes-Fulford, former NASA astronaut and professor in the Departments of Medicine and Urology at the University of California, San Francisco, studied the immune system’s response to a new infection or re-infection during spaceflight. Garofalo’s experiment is complementary to the STS-131 immunology experiment, but will focus specifically on how the immune system responds to an infection following spaceflight.
For more information about science on the International Space Station, visit:http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/science
For more information about the Space Shuttle Program, visit:http://www.nasa.gov/shuttle
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Trappe in Talbot County, Maryland — The American Northeast (Mid-Atlantic)
Soldier from Trappe
Hopkins also helped establish an Emancipation Day celebration in Talbot County to commemorate the adoption by popular vote of the new state constitution on November 1, 1864. The new constitution abolished slavery in Maryland, making it the first slave state to voluntarily free its slaves by popular vote. This was different from President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation which only freed slaves in rebelling states by declaring "... all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thence forward, and forever free..."
Trappe's Emancipation Day celebration began as a parade with local residents but later included participants from Delaware and New Jersey. The festivities came to include church services, speakers, food, games, music, and, of course, the parade led by Hopkins. He dressed in full U. S. Army uniform,
(Sidebar, on right): Like much of Maryland's Eastern Shore, the citizens of Talbot County were divided in their loyalties during the Civil War. Some white men from the Eastern Shore served in the Union Army while others joined the Confederate Army. On May 22, 1863, the Union's War Department issued General Orders 143 which stated, "A Bureau is established in the Adjutant General's Office for the record of all matters relating to the organization of Colored Troops...Colored troops may be accepted by companies, to be afterward consolidated in battalions and regiments. ... They will be designated: _________ Regiment of the U. S. Colored Troops." Throughout the rest of the war, both enslaved African Americans and freedmen from the Eastern Shore joined these regiments and served with honor and distinction.
Erected by Maryland Civil War Trails.
Marker series. Maryland Civil War Trails marker series.
Location. 38° 39.136′ N, 76° 3.438′ W. Marker is in Trappe, Maryland, in Talbot County. Marker is at the intersection of Main Street (Maryland Route 565) and Barber Road, on the right when traveling south on Main Street. Touch for map. Marker is in this post office area: Trappe MD 21673, United States of America.
Other nearby markers. At least 8 other markers are within 4 miles of this marker, measured as the crow flies. Nathaniel (Nace) Hopkins (within shouting distance of this marker); “Compton” (within shouting distance of this marker); Site of Trappe High School (approx. 0.3 miles away); Home Run Baker Park (approx. 0.9 miles away); “Hole-in-the-Wall” (approx. 3 miles away); Old White Marsh Episcopal Church (approx. 3.1 miles away); Robert Morris, Sr. (approx. 3.1 miles away); “The Wilderness” (approx. 4 miles away). Touch for a list and map of all markers in Trappe.
1. Emancipation Celebration - How the Eastern Shore Honors "Uncle Nace"
Since 1867, the small town of Trappe (population 1,146), located in Talbot County, midway between Easton and Cambridge, has hosted the longest continuously running celebration on the Eastern Shore. The
Uncle Nace’s Day is a unique commemoration of Maryland Emancipation Day, November 1, 1864, when Maryland adopted a new state constitution that abolished slavery and made it the first slave state to voluntarily free its slaves by popular vote (Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 had only freed slaves in states of rebellion, of which Maryland was not one).
For 139 years, the Hopkins family and the Trappe community have kept the observance alive. In Trappe: The Story of an Old Fashioned Town, Dickson Preston writes that “in Trappe, alone of all places on the southern-oriented Eastern Shore, the Negro community was given the freedom of the town each year to celebrate the end of slavery. That didn’t happen anywhere else in Maryland. It didn’t happen many places in all of America. The fact that it did happen in Trappe…is something of which blacks and whites alike can be proud.”
For many years, the celebration continued to be held on November 1st (since amended to a Saturday in October). It was a holiday when schools closed and people spent the day in celebration and reflection. For the first 30 years, Uncle Nace himself led the parade, resplendent in full U.S. Army uniform—complete with gold epaulets, a silk sash around his waist, and gleaming sword (the same one still carried by his descendents in the parade today)—followed by bands, singing groups, horseback riders, children, and decorated wagons and carts.
Large numbers of spectators attended, and there were horse races, games, feasting, and dances in the evening. At a grandstand erected near the church, orators from as far away as Baltimore delivered speeches, often with a political bent because of the event’s proximity to Election Day. Regardless of any political undertones, though, the celebration is generally recalled as a semi-religious time, where those who had known slavery expressed gratitude for freedom.
Nace Hopkins, a large man with strong features and piercing eyes, was far more than just a colorful local character who liked to dress up and lead parades, however. Hopkins was known and respected as being industrious, a good churchman, and an advocate for children and the book-learning he had been denied under slavery. (The recently-established Nace Hopkins Scholarship Fund carries on this advocacy by helping local youth seek higher education.)
In October 1871, Hopkins was one of a group of black residents who met to incorporate their former “African church,” which eventually became Scotts United Methodist Church. He was also instrumental in building Trappe’s first so-called “colored schoolhouse” on a site near the church. Children revered his name, and letters still prized by his descendants testify to the respect both whites and blacks had for him.
Nace Hopkins died February 22, 1900, and was buried in the Old Paradise Cemetery at what is now the corner of U.S. Route 50 and Barber Road. After his death, others carried on for him, but the celebration continued to be called “Uncle Nace’s Day.”
Despite lack of funds, waning interest, and racial tensions that have threatened its demise, the celebration has withstood the test of time. In 1976, when the town of Trappe planned its bicentennial celebration, one of the chosen goals of the event committee was to help raise funds to revitalize Nace’s Day.
“We thought it was important to recognize and revive the celebration,” says Hilda Jane Groves, who chaired the committee. “The community was really behind it: The town commissioners, fire department, school, and citizens wanted to keep it alive.”
Funds raised by the committee helped purchase a new headstone for Nathaniel Hopkins’ gravesite. Today, Hopkins’ great-great-grandson Dale Brown leads a visit to the grave as part of the Nace’s Day celebration. Brown is president of the Eastern Shore Buffalo Soldiers Motorcycle Club, one of the centerpieces of the modern parades. The club takes its name from black members of the U.S. Army—the Buffalo Soldiers—who helped blaze the treacherous trails of the Westward Movement.
From a Maryland Life Magazine article published in 2006.
— Submitted November 5, 2007, by Kevin W. of Stafford, Virginia.
Categories. • Abolition & Underground RR • African Americans • Education • Military • Notable Events • Notable Persons • War, US Civil •
Credits. This page was last revised on June 16, 2016. This page originally submitted on November 5, 2007, by Bill Pfingsten of Bel Air, Maryland. This page has been viewed 2,757 times since then and 57 times this year. Photos: 1, 2. submitted on November 5, 2007, by Bill Pfingsten of Bel Air, Maryland. 3. submitted on November 30, 2007, by F. Robby of Baltimore, Maryland. 4. submitted on November 5, 2007, by Bill Pfingsten of Bel Air, Maryland.
Editor’s want-list for this marker. Pictures of Uncle Nace's Day celebration. • Can you help?
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Maria: It all seems unrealistic. I can't imagine that markets work in this smooth fashion.
McCloskey: real markets work more or less in accordance with the laws of demand and supply and the equilibrating system as described here.
Maria: Even if you're right, I still think that markets are terrible things. They make poor people poorer.
McCloskey: Many people think so. But they are wrong: markets in fact make poor people better off. They have in the past and they will in the future.
Maria: How can you think so?
McCloskey: A very relevant question, Maria. Back in Chapter 1 we noted that an argument in support of a claim is called a "warrant." I want to persuade you that markets are good for society, so I have to give warrants. That's what an argument is. Let me give three. (There are many more warrants I could give, but these are quite important ones.)
1.) Markets are voluntary: so in a market you make a deal you think is OK
McCloskey: Nobody puts a gun to your head to make you give up something you own---a $10 bill, say---in exchange for something else---a pizza, say. You can leave one job and take another or get out of the job market completely. Since you enter a market voluntarily, it must make you better off. If you hadn't gained something, you wouldn't have entered into it.
Maria: But I could be forced to buy something. How about when I desperately need a medicine to save the life of my child? I need to buy it and the pharmacist knows that so he can charge me an outrageous price. That is unfair.
McCloskey: You're extending the word "forced." "Force" refers to physical violence. The principle stands. You gave a lot of money, you saved your child.
In short, you need never enter a market if you don't want to. Before you shake hands or sign a contract, you can walk out the door. If you stay, you are saying in effect that you are willing to enter the deal.
2.) Markets pop up anyway: seems that people think they are OK
Markets pop up when something is scarce. Think what happens in a prisoner-of-war camp when a shipment of chocolate arrives from the Red Cross. Who gets the chocolate? It goes first to those prisoners who have received packages from their loved ones. Then what Adam Smith called "trucking and bartering" sets in ("trucking" is an old word for making deals). Prisoners who like cigarettes more than chocolate will start trading their chocolate with prisoners who like chocolate more than cigarettes. The chocolate changes hands by way of the market.
Is there any alternative? Instead of offering cigarettes for chocolate, the strongest prisoner might "offer" to break your arm for what he wants. Or the prison authorities may decide to confiscate the chocolate and allocate it by status, with the officers getting a lot, the enlisted men little. Or they might allocate according to which prisoners are willing to waste the most time standing in line. In countries that do not allow markets to allocate chocolate, or vodka, or potatoes, the lines are long and the amount of time wasted is staggering.
So any attempt to interfere with supply and demand changes the nature of the competition but does not eliminate it. Scarcity makes competing for things inevitable. The question is not whether we need to have a method to allocate goods among people, but which method is best. In markets people bid up against each other with pieces of paper called "money." In the lines of the former Soviet Union-or nowadays, in the lines of singers hopeful for an audition with American Idol-people who were willing to wait the longest win.
Maria: That sounds fair.
McCloskey: So it's fair that people with the most time on their hands win?
Maria: But they are the poor people.
McCloskey: So poor people should always win? And how about the rich, idle person with plenty of time on her hands? And what about the rich person who hires a poor person to stand in line for her? But wait: the most characteristic argument an economist makes against line-standing is that it wastes a scarce thing to bid for another scarce thing.
Maria: Huh? So what? Money is scarce too, isn't it?
McCloskey: No, not in the sense that time standing in lines is. Time is a real resource. Money is just a paper claim to purchases. A dollar bill costs to make only a few cents of real resources (remember: not only natural resources, but also labor and machines). The economist points out that it's crazy to throw away real resources to compete for goods when there's a price system available that uses almost costless dollar bills.
Maria: I don't get the difference. I have to work hard for my money.
McCloskey: Keep thinking about it. If there is a method for dividing up goods that is reasonably fair and costs very little to administer, isn't it better than a method that is doubtfully fair and costs gigantic amounts to administer?
Maria: Well. . . sure. So?
McCloskey: I'm claiming that the first method, fair and efficient, is called . . . the price system! The others are called violence or superior social status or standing in lines.
For example, what happens when the government decides the price of gasoline is too high and imposes a price ceiling? Consumers who felt the equilibrium price was too high will now begin to buy, and consumers who were already buying step up their purchases. Great! Stick it to the greedy suppliers---who are profiting too much anyway! Help the people! Constrain the landlords, bankers, and oil companies! Right?
Wrong. The result of a price ceiling is a perpetual market imbalance. At the government controlled low price, more gasoline is demanded than is supplied. The excess demand leads to long lines at gasoline stations, back-up of traffic on adjoining roads, angry drivers, and "Sold Out" signs posted at 3:00 p.m. Why? Because there's another group involved, too: the suppliers. The quantity supplied at the controlled price will be low. The result is the waste of a precious resource - namely, the time of all the people who are standing in lines. Or worse: violence, bribery of police, midnight raids on the gasoline station with guns in hand.
Figure 3.9 Price ceilings prevent markets from eliminating shortages
The price ceiling sets the maximum price sellers of gasoline are allowed to charge. In reality queues would form at gasoline stations and consumers would compete with each other by trying to outlast everyone else in line. The wasted resources are just enough to make the full price---money plus wasted time---equal to the high price at which the (too low) supplied amount would be bid for by the demanders.
McCloskey: Markets are like the referee of a competition, deciding who gets how much of a scarce resource.
Ziliak: But what are the "initial conditions" of the market? How have property rights been assigned and by whom, from what did current income and ownership derive, and what are the market rules?
Ziliak: In an athletic event the referee carries out the rules of a game agreed upon in advance by equals, whether one speaks of commissioners or coaches or players. The wealth and race of the Chicago Bulls team, circa 1991-the "initial conditions" of the Bulls-was not supposed to affect the rules of the game. But the wealth of Enron the oil company or Eli Lilly the drug manufacturer certainly does affect the rules and outcomes of the market game.
McCloskey: How's that?
Ziliak: Political influence bought with their wealth.
McCloskey: Well, yes. We Good Old Chicago School economists agree with Adam Smith and with our friends on the left that a big threat to liberty---and the good functioning of markets---is political influence on the rules of the game.
Ziliak: Likewise, poverty and race matter to market exchange and outcomes. This is the philosopher John Rawls' point about "initial conditions" and "justice as fairness" (A Theory of Justice: Harvard University Press, 1971).
McCloskey: But markets erode the advantages of race and riches. It is in a competitive market that a poor man's dollar is just as powerful as a rich man's.
Ziliak: True enough, but not in Congress.
McCloskey: I told you I agreed with that point, and worry about it.
|Heterodox Box: Ethics in Economics|
When Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations in 1776, he gave birth, we have said, to modern economics. Surprisingly, Smith had been from 1752 to 1763 a professor of moral philosophy. . . not of economics. Until the late 19th century it was rather common in Europe and the United States for economics courses to be taught in departments of philosophy or theology. Smith himself published in 1759 The Theory of Moral Sentiments, the last of the great treatises on "virtue ethics" until the revival of the approach in departments of philosophy two centuries later. Most economists have never heard of Smith's book on ethics---his first book (his second and last was The Wealth of Nations) and his favorite one.
After Smith economists tried more and more to separate facts from values. It was part of the 19th-century idea of a "science," even a science about such a field as the economy, that it should stick to the facts, and leave ethical assessment to preachers. The wholesale separation of economics from ethics, gathering special force after the 1930s, was probably not such a good idea.
Many heterodox economists agree. The Marxist tradition in some of its recent versions has taken up ethical themes---though on the whole the Marxists have shared with their neoclassical and Samuelsonian colleagues a disdain for questions of good and bad in the economy. Other small groups of heterodox economists---the Catholic economists, for example, espousing what they call "social economics"---advocate bringing the price system and ethics together. The Association for Social Economics, established in the United States 1941, describes itself as "formed to advance scholarly research and writing about the great questions of economics, human dignity, ethics, and philosophy." This is not the sort of language you will find in the modern version of the American Economic Association. Ethics is out. At its founding in 1885, though, the Association foreshadowed American insitutionalism, one of the heterodox schools; and many of its early members, such as its founding secretary and later president Richard T. Ely of Johns Hopkins and the University of Wisconsin, would have agreed on many points---Christian socialism, for example---with the Association for Social Economics. Recently even the heirs of economics, such as Amartya Sen and Robert Frank, have wrestled with ethical issues at a deeper level than the Samuelsonian "more is better."
3. ) Markets promote economic growth and thus reduce poverty in the long run: capitalism is the world's best program against poverty.
The big story in the world economy over the past two centuries is that average annual income per person has increased by a factor of eight even though the population of the world has increased by a factor of six. In other words, the world since 1800 or 1820 has moved from the living standards of today's Bangladesh to those of today's Mexico - from the level of desperation to the level of hope. And these gains are largely attributable to the spread of free markets. Down to 1992 the story. according to the economic historian Angus Maddison, was as in Figure 3.10. Since then Maddison has extended and revised his remarks, to the same effect.
Figure 3.10 Increase in world living standards, 1820-1992
|Year||Annual GDP per person (1990$)|| Comparable country today|| World population (M)|
|1820 ||$651 ||Bangladesh || 1.07|
|1870 ||$895 || - || 1.26|
|1913 ||$1539 || Pakistan || 1.77|
|1950 ||$2138 ||Philippines || 2.51|
|1992 ||$5145 ||Mexico || 5.44|
Source: Angus Maddison, Monitoring the World Economy 1920-1992, OECD, Column 2:228; Column 3: 194-206; Column 4: 226.
The story of the United States is even more remarkable. Using Maddison's 1992 tables we can see that real annual income per head in the United States increased from 1820 to 1992 not by 10 percent or even 100 percent but 1,600 percent. In 1820 the average American, free and slave, earned $1,290 (as measured in 1990 constant dollars: see Chapter 23), about the level of present-day India. Now the average American earns about $35,000. It's pretty much the same story for every now-rich nation from Britain to Japan.
It's not heaven on earth. Rich countries are imperfect. But this 1,600 percent is giving hundreds of millions of people a scope of life denied to their great-great-great-grandparents. It is arguably the most important event in world economic history, and ought to be near the top of any list of "most important events" in human history.
Caption: Modern Tokyo, at dusk.
Just try to imagine how your great-great-great-grandparents lived, all 32 of them. Rural paradise? Happy small town life? Satisfied craftspeople? Hardly: not on the U.S. income of $3200 a year in 1880, and much, much less if they were then living in Sicily or Shanghai. It's hard for us to imagine what it means to have one dress for Sunday, to spend 40 hours a week as a woman on food preparation alone, or to be pleased if you learn to sign your name, though you still can't read much. But that's what it means to live a rural life with few markets and little specialization.
Such riches are spreading to the entire world. Economies that have adopted markets---so-called "Communist" China and so-called "License-Raj" India, for example---have grown recently at astonishing rates. That's the third and perhaps the best warrant for liking markets---the deliver the goods, and massively to the poor.
Caption: 19th Century New York, at dusk. In the late 19th century, the journalist Jacob Riis photo-documented a variety of America's urban poor. As here, circa 1889, in a filthy flophouse in New York City. Courtesy: History Matters Project, George Mason University.
Doubts about the free-market vision
Rodney:I'm still not buying it. You make it seem like markets are always good for the little guy. But big companies have all the power over workers and consumers. I don't think it's a fair system.
Klamer: You make a good point, which we'll talk more about in Chapter 4.
McCloskey: But you're missing the main point. Modern economic growth has done more for the poor workers of the world, that is, the ordinary consumers, than any form of socialism or government intervention. As we speak it's bringing Thai, Indonesian, and Mexican workers into a world economy where they can earn incomes that permit adequate nutrition, smaller families, expanded education, and all the other increases in human scope that modern economic growth has brought to, say, South Korea. I know it may seem unjust that the stockholders of global corporations earn profits in the process. Yet their profits are helping the world to become richer. That's the capitalist deal: Let me make profits and I'll make you rich.
Rodney: That's what they say. But they always give workers as little as possible.
McCloskey: I didn't like capitalism either when I was your age, so I appreciate your worries. But let me suggest that you re-read those numbers we just gave you in Figure 3.10. If you're serious about wanting to help people escape poverty, markets really are the best way - in fact, the only real way - to get it done.
Klamer: I think you're missing Rodney's point. He's suggesting that our free market optimism ignores the darker side of economics, like power differences, conflicts between employers and workers, human interactions. It is for good reasons we do not subject everything we do to the regime of the market. Families, for example, keep the market out, and so do companies in their internal operations.
McCloskey: It's a question of focus. As a free-market economist, I focus on the potential gains to all parties from increased specialization and trade, and above all free invention and innovation, rather than antagonisms of class, nationality, race, caste, and the like. I don't deny their existence. But if we're going to talk seriously about how to alleviate global poverty I think markets are historically, theoretically, and ethically more important.
Ziliak: I too like free markets. But the "free market" as you're using it is misleading to Rodney and other readers. As Arjo pointed out, every nation's economy contains a mixture of market and non-market institutions---family, governments such as the New England town meetings, nonprofit NGOs such as churches, and many others. And the non-market stuff isn't just a barrier or distraction to getting to the market system. In many ways they enable or complement markets, and vice versa.
Klamer: Precisely. I speak of the three spheres, the market, the home, and politics---in their Greek names, the agora, the oikos---remember, the very word from which "economics" comes!---and the polis. It's crucial to bear them in mind, and not collapse the whole economy into the agora, the marketplace.
Ziliak: But even if we agree that a "market economy" is best (we do), there are many ways to do it, depending on the legal, cultural, and political systems in which markets operate. The real question is not markets vs. government or capitalism vs. socialism or Adam Smith vs. Karl Marx. The real question is, what kind of market economy do we want to have?
McCloskey: Fair enough. Just as self-interest is only one part of being human (and not necessarily the best part), markets are only one part of our economy (though an indispensably important one).
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Are you designing an artwork in Photoshop that is intended as a printing material? Are your Photoshop images printing out blurry and of poor quality?
Web, web, web but what about Print Media?
We live such a digital world that we forget that print design still a huge part of the design industry and is everywhere we look at. We are so used to see it everyday; on newspapers, advertisement, brochures, business cards, T-shirt designs, posters, etc. So how do you make sure that you leave a good impression on people holding your print design in their hands? This is where experience and advanced print design skills come into play.
New designers fail to understand the difference between designing graphics for strict digital use (web) and designing print media. Web graphics commonly consist of banners, logos, web templates, icons etc. that will never see a paper. Print media on the other hand should be designed specifically for high quality printing.
Why we need all those numbers? DPI or Resolution
DPI = Dots Per Inch (commonly known as resolution)
Failing to set the correct DPI, before you start working on your design is one of the most common mistake. When you open up a new canvas in Photoshop by going to File > New, the first window that pops up has a field for resolution, which is usually set by default to 72 pixels/inch. This value is telling us that there will be 72 dots for every square inch of the document. 72 dpi is ideal when viewing graphics on a computer screen, however when you are printing a design out on stock, 72 dots per inch is not enough, and will usually result in your graphic looking blurry and pixelated. As you’ve probably already figured, increasing the dpi will result in a higher quality image. For most printing purposes you will want to set the dpi to 300 pixels/inch to obtain a good quality print.
The downside? That X by Y dimensions image that you just entered into your document that took up say 80% of the canvas, will now only take up say 20% of it. Why? This is because you have set the document to contain more pixels for square inch, that X by Y image is still X by Y in dimensions, but now has a much lower resolution compared to your high resolution document thus ends occupying only a smaller space.
This is shown the images below. The same stock images is placed in a 5” x 5” canvas. The first one is at 72 dpi while the other one is at 300 dpi. Notice also that the one at 300 dpi has a much larger file size.
As you are starting to realize, to obtain high quality prints, the images you use have to be of high resolution, translating directly to higher dimension pictures. For example that 300 x 300 px image you pulled of a Google search will end up being a tiny little spec on your 300 dpi canvas. Sure you can expand the image, but you will just end up degrading its quality. The solution is to find larger images. For example, if you obtain an image off Google that is 2000 x 2000 px, it will take up more space and you most likely wont have to stretch it out. Google image search actually has a built in filter that will let you search specifically for larger files.
When making graphics for web, you usually set the dimensions in pixels. For print media however, you will want to set the dimensions based on the physical stock you will be printing to. So if your flyer is 6” x 4” you will want to set your canvas’s dimension to 6 x 4 in inches (plus the bleed margin which we will explain in the next section), not pixels. This is because after setting a higher DPI, the notion of pixels becomes irrelevant to document size, especially when you are printing it out. If you set the DPI to 300 as opposed to the default 72, your document will now have more pixels per square inch. Thus a 6” x 4” document at 300 dpi will have a larger dimension in pixels as opposed to a 6” x 4” document at 72 dpi which would have a much smaller dimension in pixels.
Bleed=printing term that refers to printing that goes beyond the edge of the sheet after trimming.
No printer, ever, will print your design to the exact dimensions you specify. More than likely, you will lose some data at the edges of your document. This is compensated for by over printing and then cutting to the required dimensions.
To recognize the bleed margin there are two margins you will want to set up. The first margin is the cut line, which is the exact dimension of your media, and as the name suggests, is where the stock will be cut. The other margin is the safety line which is an eight inch in of the cut line. All important data such as text should be inside the safety line.
Your Photoshop canvas will end up being an extra eight inch off the cut line, you will always add a quarter inch (0.25”) to the height and width of your canvas.
Lets take a standard business card which is 3.5” x 2”.
Canvas size: 3.75” x 2.25” (the dimensions to use when you create a new document in Photoshop)
Cut Line: 3.5” x 2”
Safety Line: 3.25” x 1.75”
To help you visualize all this while you are designing, you can set up rulers in Photoshop.
- Create a new document, and add 0.25” to the exact dimensions.
- Go to View > Rulers to turn on the ruler. You will want to insure that it is set on inches (unless you are accustomed to mm) by hitting Ctrl + K to open up the Photoshop Preferences window, selecting Units & Rulers and insuring the units is set to inches.
3. Click within the ruler area and drag out the rulers as shown:
Colors, colors and more colors!
Advice, the colors you see on your computer screen will most likely not be the exact same colors you see on paper. This is for several reasons, and may even depend on what stock you choose to print it on. This is especially problematic for dark designs which may be viewable on a computer screen but will barely show on paper. Also, some printers may not pick up on lines in your design that are too thin. As a rule of thumb, always print out a sample prior to printing out large quantities.
The best color profile for printing is CMYK and should be set in the New window settings.
CMYK=Short for Cyan-Magenta-Yellow-Black, is a color model in which all colors are described as a mixture of these four process colors. CMYK is the standard color model used in offset printing for full-color documents.
So many acronyms and I still don’t know how to export it
Although you have several file formats to choose from when it comes to exporting your design, the easiest format to go with is an Photoshop PDF. The problem with choosing an image format such as jpeg is that it is measured in pixels and as we explained earlier, depending on what resolution you choose the pixel dimensions will vary. That means, whoever is printing your image will not know exactly what physical dimensions you designed for. A PDF however will fix the physical dimensions to match what you defined earlier in Photoshop. With a PDF, pixels will not come into play. To save a PDF, simply go
- File > Save as > and select Photoshop PDF in the drop down menu.
What techniques you use for your printing material? What else should we have in consideration we creating that awesome printed design?
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Mainline Customer Mike Cottee sent us a photo of a Maronite Monk that he took whilst walking the Lebanon Mountain Trail.
The Maronites are a Syriac-Christian ethnoreligious group in the Levant region. They are said to derive their name from the Syriac Aramean saint Mar Maron (Mar, the Syriac title for a Master, is used in reference to saints) whose followers moved to Mount Lebanon from northern Syria establishing the Maronite Church.
Maronites were able to maintain an independent status in Mount Lebanon and its coastline after the Arab Islamic conquest, maintaining their religion and language there until the 13th century. Remnants of their language exist in Cyprus and formerly in some secluded mountain villages, which have since adopted Arabic due to government standardization.
The (LMT) is the first long-distance hiking trail in Lebanon. It extends from Al-Qbaiyat in the north of Lebanon to Marjaayoun in the south, a 440-km (275 miles) path that transects more than 75 towns and villages at altitude ranging from 600 meters to 2,000 meters (about 1,800-6,000 feet) above sea level. The LMT showcases the natural beauty and cultural wealth of Lebanon’s mountains and demonstrates the determination of the people of Lebanon to conserve this unique heritage. The trail brings communities closer together and expands economic opportunities in rural areas through environmentally and socially responsible tourism.
http://www.lebanontrail.org/ for more information on the Lebanon Mountain Trail
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Garuḍa Purāṇa 3
Kṛṣṇa now proceeds to elucidate on atonement of sins committed either consciously or unconsciously. As an immediate remedy one should take ten types of baths at least for a period of six years. Ten types of bath include early morning bath to taking bath in the holy river Ganges. Generally taking bath before sunrise is advocated. Gifting cow, earth, gingelly seeds (til seeds) and other grains, gold, silver, ghee, new clothes, sugar and salt are the ten of gifts one has to give for atoning sins. These gifts should be given only to those persons who are present at the time of performing atonement ceremonies. Various guidelines are prescribed for receiving gifts. If sins committed are enormous, these baths and gifts have no significance. Such sinners have to cross a river in the hell known as Vaitaraṇi, which is full of pus and blood. In order to cross this river with a little comfort, one has to donate a black cow along with its calf. Vaitaraṇi river is a mythical river flowing from earth to the hell and a soul after death has to cross this mythical river to reach the gates of the lord of death, Yama, who decides the destiny of the soul depending on the soul’s karmic account. Soul here means both the subtle and causal bodies with the Brahman within. Afflictions caused to these bodies do not affect the Brahman and He always stand as a witness.
When a person is dying, he should give the following eight as gifts gingelly seeds, iron, gold cotton, salt, seven grains, earth and cow. Either the person who is dying can give these gifts of any of his representatives approved by him can also give these gifts. These gifts should be given only to those who know Vedas and lead a life as prescribed by śāstra-s. Apart from this, one has also to gift umbrella, footwear, clothes, ring, gourd, wooden plank to sit, vessels and food. These gifts are intended for use by the soul during its journey from the earth to the other worlds like heaven or hell as the case may be. It is said that she-buffalo, a hand fan and cloths should also be given to Vedic scholars. It is also said that these gifts should be given as much as possible. If any of these gifts are given at the time of his death, his soul does not reach the hell. Amongst all these gifts, a person gifting a vessel filled with gingelly seeds or clarified butter (ghee) or the gift of a bed with accessories will never go to hell, says Garuḍa Purāṇa. Gifting of salt is also considered as sacred. It is said that if one gifts salt, the gates of heaven is open for his soul to take a sojourn there. Gifts given by a person during his life time are more favorable to his soul than gifts given by his sons during his last rites.
Gifting of cow and calf makes his soul as immortal. If one gives the eight gifts described above, he reaches the world of Gandharva-s, a type of demigods, who are fond of pleasure and enjoyment. They are capable of astral travel and can travel from higher planes to lower planes and vice-versa. If one gifts an umbrella, his soul takes rest under the shade when Yama, the god of death roasts the souls of sinners in the hell called Raudra. If food and a wooden plank are offered as gifts, the soul is able to sit and take its food comfortably on the way to the hell. If he has gifted footwear, his soul is taken on the back of a horse. The one who has given clothes as gifts, his soul is not tortured by the servants of Yama.
If a vessel filled with gingelly seeds, is gifted the sins accrued on account of his body, mind and speech are destroyed. Sins or bad karmas are accrued only due to these three instruments. Out of the three, mind is capable of causing worst sins and is the cause for all bad karmas and body is capable of causing least sins. If a vessel containing ghee is given as gift, he is taken to Rudraloka after his death and he stays there. If he gifts a bed along with its accessories, he is taken to Indra loka and stays there for a long time and enjoys all the pleasures associated with Indra loka. Once his sojourn is over in Indra loka, he is again born in the earth as a king. It is said that benefits accruing on account of gifts primarily depends upon according the intention with which the gift is given. If one gives food as charity with a pure heart, his soul never feels the hunger. If death takes place in a sacred place, he attains liberation without further transmigration. If one enters into sannyāsa (renouncing worldly life) as prescribed by śāstra-s, he is bound to attain liberation. If one dies by undertaking fast unto death, he also attains liberation. With this Kṛṣṇa concludes His sayings on the necessity of giving dāna or gifts.
Then Kṛṣṇa proceeds to talk about funeral rites.
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Although its exotic name may puzzle some consumers, agar-agar has long been known in Japan where consumption and use of algae for culinary purposes goes back centuries. The gelling substance was discovered by accident in 1658. A cook at an inn discarded some left-over gelidium seaweed soup served at dinner. It froze, thawed and dried during adverse weather before finally being found by its creator. He then boiled and cooled the residue and discovered that the resulting jelly had enhanced culinary properties.
It is still possible to find hand-made agar-agar. Although the current manufacturing process still uses the same basic steps (boiling, freezing, thawing, drying), it has however been adapted to modern industrial methods, which obtain a more stable and safer product through effective extraction methods. But the raw material remains the same as when agar-agar was first discovered: Rhodophyceae, red algae, including several genera other than gelidium are now harvested (gracilaria, pterocladia, gellidiella).
In the industry, algae are first washed and then treated with an acid or an alkali to facilitate extraction or to increase the final product’s gelling capacity. The plants are then boiled under pressure, filtered and cooled. Next, two methods are used to extract water from the product: either a freezing and thawing process or mechanical pressure is applied to the gel formed upon boiling. Finally, the plant gum obtained is dried and then ground according to the desired form: powder, flakes, bars or threads.
The advantage of this polysaccharide for the food industry and cooking lies in its ability to form a reversible gel which, unlike a gelatin-based gel, requires a low concentration and allows greater flexibility in the temperature at which it can be used. In fact, agar-agar gel only melts at a temperature of around 194°F (90°C) and congeals faster once boiled, as soon as its temperature drops to about 104°F (40°C). When mixed with cold water, agar-agar is insoluble. When it is boiled in water, its polysaccharide linear structure curls and forms helices that then join a more complex arrangement, trapping the water upon cooling.
The result is a brittle, cloudy gel, which allows cooks to sculpt delicious liquid mixtures in many unusual forms such as spaghetti, beads, or thin, tasty sheets that can be rolled. Agar-agar also offers the advantage of not requiring the addition of molecules or other ingredients besides water, since agar-agar molecules bind together due to the hydrogen ions already present in water. In addition, this hydrocolloid can be used with various sugars, proteins and more acidic foods such as fruit. It is worth noting that the addition of large amounts of sugar, up to 60% of the solution, will further strengthen the gel. The use of agar-agar is definitely flexible, but you have to be careful: tannic acid found in squash, apples or plums may hinder the formation of the gel if they are used in large quantities in the gel preparation.
Did you know?
AGAR-AGAR effectively replaces animal gelatin in a vegetarian diet and has virtually no taste or color.
AGAR-AGAR is used in microbiology as a culture medium for bacteria, cells, yeasts and molds.
agar-agar healthy diet
AGAR-AGAR is included in some slimming diets due to its high-fiber, low calorie satiating effect.
AGAR-AGAR is used as a stabilizer, emulsifier, and gelling and thickening agent in the food processing industry, which accounts for 90% of its total production.
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Pluto (minor-planet designation: 134340 Pluto) is a dwarf planet in the Kuiper belt, a ring of bodies beyond Neptune. It was the first Kuiper belt object to be discovered by humans. It is the largest and second-most-massive known dwarf planet in the Solar System and the ninth-largest and tenth-most-massive known object directly orbiting the Sun. It is the largest known trans-Neptunian object by volume but is less massive than Eris, a dwarf planet in the scattered disc. Like other Kuiper belt objects, Pluto is primarily made of ice and rock and is relatively small — about one-sixth the mass of the Moon and one-third its volume. It has a moderately eccentric and inclined orbit during which it ranges from 30 to 49 astronomical units (4.4–7.3 billion km) from the Sun. This means that Pluto periodically comes closer to the Sun than Neptune, but a stable orbital resonance with Neptune prevents them from colliding. In 2014, Pluto was 32.6 AU from the Sun. Light from the Sun takes about 5.5 hours to reach Pluto at its average distance (39.4 AU).
For many years, Pluto was classified as the ninth planet of the Solar System. However, it was reclassified in 2006 when it was discovered to be just one of several dwarf planets in the system. Some scientists continue to argue Pluto should be designated a full planet.
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Thursday, 20 September 2007
One of the many colour phases of Syntherata janetta (White) (Saturniidae)
“Australia has somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 species of moths (a number comparable to the number of flowering plants)….” A quote from the recent book by Zborowski & Edwards (2007). So it’s not too bold to suggest that there might be 1,000 species living in the rainforests and associated woodlands around Kuranda. In fact, there may be many more than that! I have been collecting moths for the Australian National Insect Collection, CSIRO, Canberra, every night for more than 4 years and not a night goes by that I don’t find one or more species that I had not seen before. They are so diverse in size, colour pattern, habitus and behaviour that one local artist has adopted them as an artform. His mothology site mothology is well worth a look. All the moths he uses in his art are from the Kuranda environs. Remarkable!
This is the first in a series of blogs on the moths of Kuranda.
The majority of moths are active at night. You see very few of them during the day. Most of the moths I find I have never seen in nature-only at the light sheet. Their diurnal activities, if any, are not known. It is assumed that most sit motionless to avoid predation. The wide range of colour patterns suggests a variety of strategies. Brightly coloured, often reddish or orange, moths are usually distasteful to birds and lizards. That this advertising strategy works is seen each morning on the light sheet. The moths are often the only ones that birds and lizards have left there.
The larvae (caterpillars) of most moths have not been seen. Some of the more prominent species Hawk and Silk Moths have large and obvious caterpillars and they are common if you find the appropriate host plants. But the great majority of caterpillars are hidden and have never been seen.
Some moths are seasonal, others can be found at most times of the year. And there are some that are vagrants. That is they are just flying through and are attracted by the light. The group of moths above illustrates what one might expect on a night in the rainy season. They are mostly noctuids feeding on fruit in the bird feeder. The largest moth is Ischyja neocherina, one of the fruit moths that causes damage in orchrds due ot its feeding activities which allow fungi to damage the developing fruit.
Zborowski, P., Edwards, E. D. 2007. A Guide To Australian Moths. CSIRO Publishing, Melbourne.
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Interior design course
Home furnishing is the art of making an environment more comfortable through furniture, light and the organisation of space.
The history of home furnishings is associated with the entire history of human beings. It is humans who create the environment and provide meaning and functionality to spaces, on the basis of their own needs. Space and its designs, objects and furniture tell us about us and about our history: they belong directly to our cultural, spiritual and social heritage.
- Historical introduction to design and its evolution
- Techniques of graphic representation
- Characteristics and properties of materials
- Geometric design and graphical representation lessons.
- Design analysis elements
- Final paper: choice of a subject: creation and graphic and technical representation.
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for National Geographic News
A toxic chemical has been mostly removed from cottonseeds, potentially turning an underused agricultural product into a food source for hundreds of millions of people, according to a new study.
"The world grows cotton for fiber not for seed," said Keerti Rathore, a researcher at Texas A&M University in College Station who helped spearhead the work.
"Few realize, however, that for every pound [0.45 kilogram] of cotton fiber, the cotton plant produces 1.65 pounds [0.75 kilogram] of seeds that contain 21 percent oil and 23 percent of a relatively good quality protein."
Some 48.5 million tons (44 million metric tons) of cottonseed are produced annually, much of it by 20 million farmers in Asian and African countries with high rates of malnutrition and starvation, the study authors write (see a cotton-picking photo).
But nutrient-rich cottonseeds are unfit for human consumption because of a noxious chemical called gossypol, a toxin with properties that keep bugs at bay and cause health problems in humans and many animals.
Currently cottonseeds are used to make feed for cows, which can handle gossypol, thanks to special microbes in their stomachs.
But now the research team has found a way to genetically engineer cottonseeds that barely produce gossypol, possibly making the seeds fit for human menus.
"Global cottonseed production can potentially provide the protein requirements for half a billion people per year," the team reported in tomorrow's issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
It's a Knockout
Researchers have long wrestled with the problem of cottonseed toxicity, says Danny Llewellyn, an Australian expert in cotton genetics who was not involved in the study.
Initial efforts were aimed at creating toxin-free seeds by crossing cultivated cotton with wild cotton plants that produce more gossypol in their leaves and less in their seeds.
But those tactics failed, because the genomes of wild and domestic cottons are too different.
SOURCES AND RELATED WEB SITES
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Browse by Medical Category
Slipped Capital Femoral Epiphysis is a condition of the hip that usually affects adolescents, where the growth plate of the thighbone becomes separated from the rest of the bone.
Slipped Capital Femoral Epiphysis (SCFE) is a condition of the hip that usually affects adolescents, in which the epiphysis (growth plate) of the femur (thighbone) becomes separated from the rest of the bone. The epiphysis or growth plate is located at the top of the femur, and the femoral head will usually slip backward and inward in SCFE. A slip occurs when the shearing stress exerted on the femoral head is greater than the resistance provided by the mechanical stability of the growth plate (physis). Slipped capital femoral epiphysis is the most common orthopaedic hip condition affecting adolescents.
What causes Slipped Capital Femoral Epiphysis?There are many theories as to the cause of SCFE, however it is believed be caused by both mechanical as well as constitutional factors. Most likely, SCFE is caused by multiple factors (multifactorial) including local trauma, obesity overcoming the physeal plate (growth plate), inflammatory factors, and possible endocrine abnormalities (increased incidence seen in hypothyroidism, panhypopituitaryism, renal osteodystrophy). Obesity seems to be the strongest risk factor for SCFE, and it is believed that the child’s increased weight causes excessive mechanical stress on the physis (growth plate). Many studies have shown that SCFE tends to occur during an adolescents’ rapid growth spurt, as the growth plate appears to be most vulnerable to shear stress and injury at this time. Slipped capital femoral epiphysis NEVER occurs once the growth plate has closed.
The diagnosis of SCFE is made based on your child's symptoms, physical examination, as well as radiographs (x-rays) of the pelvis. Typically, a child with a stable slipped capital femoral epiphysis has a history of intermittent limp and pain of several weeks duration that is often poorly localized to the thigh, the groin, and often the knee. Frequently, a vague history of antecedent trauma calls attention to the limp and pain. As the epiphysis continues to slip, there may be decreased range of motion and a limping gait. There may also be automatic external rotation of the lower extremity with flexion of the hip. Patients with unstable acute slipped capital femoral epiphysis usually have an acute onset of severe pain, often after a sports-related trauma or fall. They will be unable to bear weight on the affected leg. Although the diagnosis is often made with plain x-rays, further radiographical studies such as an MRI may be necessary.
A SCFE will be classified as acute, chronic, or acute on chronic. The slip is classified as chronic if symptoms have been present for more than three weeks with gradual onset and progression. Acute slips present with a history of sudden onset of severe pain and disability. The slip is also classified as stable or unstable. Patients with a stable slip are able to bear weight on the affected leg, whereas unstable slips will cause severe pain and inability to bear weight. A slipped capital femoral epiphysis is also classified radiographically based on the degree of slip or displacement seen on x-rays. Type I: <33% slip of epiphysis, Type II: 33-50% slip of epiphysis, and Type III: > 50% slip of epiphysis.
It is important to prevent the femoral head (top of the thigh bone) from further slippage. Early diagnosis of SCFE provides the best chance to achieve the treatment goal of stabilizing the hip. The standard treatment for SCFE is to place a single screw across the growth plate through a very small incision on the thigh. This procedure is commonly referred to as a percutaneous pinning. However, if the slip is severe, a more involved procedure or corrective surgery may be necessary.
The goal of treatment is to prevent increasing deformity of the hip or increased slipping of the epiphysis. Therefore, the goal of surgery is to stop slipping while the growth plate is still open. Once the growth plate has closed, no further slipping can occur.
Your child will be admitted to the pediatric orthopaedic service and taken to the Operating Room for the percutaneous pinning. He/She will likely be in the hospital for 24-48 hours after the surgery. With the exception of severe or unstable slips, the patient will start partial weight bearing (toe-touch) weight bearing for approximately 4-6 weeks post-operatively. He/She will then return to regular activities gradually as tolerated. There may be some restriction of contact sports to minimize the chance of complication. A short course of physical therapy may be needed.
The majority of patients with stable slips that have undergone percutaneous pinning do not have any complications. With early recognition and timely treatment, the long-term prognosis is excellent for patients with a stable SCFE. However, there are several potential complications associated with a slipped capital femoral epiphysis (SCFE). The most common are avascular necrosis (AVN) of the femoral head (top of the thigh bone) and chondrolysis. Avascular necrosis is loss of blood supply to the head of the femur, causing death of the bone. This condition is much more likely if the slip is severe or unstable. Patients with avascular necrosis will often have early onset arthritis of the hip. Chondrolysis or loss of articular cartilage of the hip joint is another potential complication of SCFE. This may cause a loss of hip motion, flexion contracture, and pain. This is a relatively rare complication that again is seen more frequently in patients with a severe or unstable slip. The orthopaedic surgeon will see the patient in follow-up visits, and x-rays will be obtained to evaluate for these potential complications.
The majority of patients with a slipped capital femoral epiphysis will be able to return to most sports and activities at approximately 3-6 months post-operatively. Removing the hardware is not necessary unless the patient develops pain or there is a problem with the screw itself. Because removal of the hardware requires another operation under general anesthesia, it is not recommended unless it becomes necessary due to pain or hardware failure. Because of the high association of bilaterality seen in SCFE (approx 25-40%), patients will need to be closely monitored to ensure that the contralateral hip does not slip. If the patient is to develop any hip, groin, or knee pain in the other leg (especially in the first 6-12 months after surgery), he/she should be evaluated by the orthopaedic surgeon as soon as possible.
Content prepared by Erin Hart, RN, MS, CPNP, Maurice Albright, MD and Brian Grottkau, MD
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Who was Plato?
September 2016 - Plato was born about 429 BC, close to the time when Pericles died, and he died in 347 BC, just after the birth of Alexander the Great. Plato was born in Athens, to a very rich and powerful family. Many of his relatives were involved with Athenian politics, though Plato himself was not. Athens was in the middle of fighting the Peloponnesian War, and Plato fought for several years as a soldier.
When Plato was a young man, during and after the war, he went to listen to Socrates, and learned a lot from Socrates about how to think, and what sort of questions to think about. When Socrates was killed in 399 BC, Plato was very upset (He was 30 years old when Socrates died) . Plato began to write down some of the conversations he had heard Socrates have. Practically everything we know about Socrates comes from what Plato wrote down.
After a while, though, Plato began to write down his own ideas about philosophy instead of just writing down Socrates' ideas. One of Plato's earlier works is the Republic. The Republic describes what Plato thought would be a better form of government than the government of Athens. Plato thought that most people were pretty stupid, and so they should not be voting about what to do. Instead, the best people should be chosen to be the Guardians of the rest. (Remember Plato was from a very rich family so he probably thought he was one of the best people!).
Plato also thought a lot about the natural world and how it works. He thought that everything had a sort of ideal form, like the idea of a chair, and then an actual chair was a sort of poor imitation of the ideal chair that exists only in your mind. One of the ways Plato tried to explain his ideas was with the famous metaphor of the cave. He said, Suppose there is a cave, and inside the cave there are some men chained up to a wall, so that they can only see the back wall of the cave and nothing else. These men can't see anything outside of the cave, or even see each other clearly, but they can see shadows of what is going on outside the cave. Wouldn't these prisoners come to think that the shadows were real, and that was what things really looked like?
A video about Plato's Cave
Suppose now that one of the men escaped, and got out of the cave, and saw what real people looked like, and real trees and grass. If he went back to the cave and told the other men what he had seen, would they believe him, or would they think he was crazy?
Plato says that we are like those men sitting in the cave: we think we understand the real world, but because we are trapped in our bodies we can see only the shadows on the wall. One of his goals is to help us understand the real world better, by finding ways to predict or understand the real world even without being able to see it. Today we might call that real world the world of pure mathematics or physics.
It's possible that Plato's ideas about the difference between reality and the illusion we perceive are related to Hindu and Buddhist ideas about nirvana, which were forming in India about the same time. You could also compare the parable of the cave to the Indian story of the Blind Men and the Elephant, which was written around the same time.
Learn by doing: compare Plato's ideas with Buddhism
More about Plato
Socratic Dialogues (Penguin Classics), by Plato, translated by Trevor
Saunders (1987). This is, according to Plato, what Socrates said.
The Republic (Dover Thrift Editions), by Plato. Translated by Benjamin Jowett. A very very cheap edition of Plato's Republic, in his own words (translated into English).
Philosophy and Science in Ancient Greece: The Pursuit of Knowledge, by Don Nardo (2004). For teenagers. Don Nardo has written many books for young people about the ancient Greeks.
The Cambridge Companion to Greek and Roman Philosophy, edited by David Sedley (1997).
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Or: microaggression, and Microgramma.
At about the 3-second mark in the following video, we see an EMU police officer turn away from a black organizer and spit into the crosswalk. A moment later the camera moves past the word POLICE emblazoned on the side of a law enforcement vehicle.
A white person spitting in the presence of a black person is what may be called a microaggression. Harvard psychiatrist Chester Pierce coined the word in 1970 to describe denigrations that non-black Americans inflict on African Americans.
Perhaps as familiar as the microaggression of white spitting is Microgramma, the 1952 typeface we now know as Eurostile, whose bold capitals are used to set the words POLICE and SHERIFF on many law enforcement vehicles in Washtenaw County.
This symbolic act of spitting, and the particular styling of these typographic symbols, are linked as visual displays of hierarchy. In the first, a white subject communicates the disgust intrinsic to his sense of supremacy; while these thick, rigid capital letters of squadcar design are repeatedly deployed because they have become a trademark of superiority.
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Space has become an extension of the capitalist project. Not that it should surprise anybody. The market, when allowed, has a tendency to be all-consuming, and allowing the Russians the sole means of supplying the international space station was not a situation those at NASA would have tolerated indefinitely. In 2006, NASA announced it would supply two industry partners with half a billion dollars to develop appropriate transportation services to the ISS.
Only the previous year, the agency was given the go ahead through the NASA Authorisation Act to advance the cause of space commerce. The Commercial Orbital Transportation Program (COTS) marked, in the words of Alan Lindenmoyer, manager of the Commercial Crew and Cargo Program Office at NASA, ‘a significant NASA activity to implement the commercialisation portion of US space policy’.
One of those to first receive assistance from NASA was the US company SpaceX, an example of how the US hopes to catch up with Japan, Russia and Europe in being able to supply the ISS. The situation became more acute once the shuttle program was retired in 2011. Uncle Sam was falling behind.
SpaceX is owned by the modern, mercantile South African Elon Musk, PayPal’s co-founder, a billionaire who fancies himself as something of a modern Vasco da Gama, or, more likely, the brigand-like qualities of a Francis Drake. The modern comparison has been to the fictional stinking rich character Iron Man, whom he is said to have inspired. ‘We are really at the dawn of a new era of space exploration, one where there is a much bigger role for commercial space companies.’
That commerce is receiving funding from Washington in what are bound to be examples of space mercantilism. SpaceX itself has a $1.6 billion contract, Orbital Sciences somewhere in the order of $1.9 billion. As NASA administrator Charles Bolden explained, NASA’s interests are elsewhere – ‘exploring even deeper into our solar system, with missions to an asteroid and Mars on the horizon’. The drudgery of transport was best left to the ‘private sector’.
Bolden’s own historical frame of reference is smaller. ‘The Internet was created as a government endeavour but then the introduction of commercial companies really accelerated the growth of the Internet and made it accessible to the mainstream.’ He might well go back to the European courts of the fifteenth century, when aggressive colonial forces were unleased upon much of the world, courtesy of government trading companies. An empire on earth can well move to one in space. Indeed, Michael Milstein, writing for Popular Mechanics (Oct 1, 2009), did not shy away from the words ‘solar-system conquest’.
The Dragon space capsule, attached to the SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, is a versatile beast, able to carry both crew members (up to seven) and cargo. And it will have few rivals. The reality remains that space travel is a frightfully expensive business. The only individuals who tend to go into extra terrestrial orbit, leaving aside astronauts, are rather wealthy earth gazers with a fetish. Till a formula is found to bring down costs and build cheaper equipment, space will, thankfully, be a less crowded place. We might even claim it will be a less imperial place. NASA is determined to change that.
Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: firstname.lastname@example.org
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WASHINGTON — Economists dismayed by the debt-ceiling pyrotechnics on Capitol Hill and at the White House say that political leaders' failure to deal with the short-term crisis bodes poorly for their ability to confront another looming fiscal disaster.
And the problem is compounded, many economists say, by how the United States calculates its debt.
In trying to understand the debt ceiling — a subject many people had never considered before this summer — it helps to know a few things about the layers that make up the United States' $14.34 trillion mountain of debt.
The U.S. blends two kinds of debt, and some economists say that makes little sense. Moreover, we don't even have a good way of paying back one of those types of debt. More on that later.
The first type of debt is what the government owes to outside bondholders: individuals, pension funds, other groups and foreign governments. The second type is a sizable amount of intra-governmental debt, or obligations of the Treasury Department to various trust funds — basically what we owe ourselves.
Alex Brill, an economist with the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative research center in Washington, said that counting external and internal debt together didn't make economic sense and blurred the real fiscal situation the U.S. faces.
"Not all of the debt is the same, and it doesn't all matter the same," Brill said. "What really matters is debt held by the public."
Those are the outside bondholders, and they take up about two-thirds of the total U.S. debt. As of Monday, the most recent date for which the Treasury Department provided figures, the U.S. owed $9.75 trillion to them.
Almost one-third of the U.S. debt — $4.59 trillion — is in the form of IOUs dedicated to programs such as Social Security, Medicare and the pension plans for federal workers and military personnel. That's what the United States owes its citizens.
As an analogy, Brill suggests thinking of a family that's facing medical bills now and college bills in the future. Say the family has set aside $3,000 for college costs, encounters a $13,000 medical bill, pays $10,000 of it with a credit card and uses the college savings to pay the rest.
That family's real debt is $10,000, but the Treasury Department's method of calculation would place it at $13,000.
While the family does need to replenish the college savings, the movement of money within its personal accounts doesn't affect its credit score.
"When you blend this real debt with the kind of accounting debt where the left hand borrows from the right hand, you end up with something that's completely meaningless in economic terms," Brill said.
This practice enables some lawmakers to exaggerate the severity of the problem that underlies the debt-limit impasse.
For example, Sen. Jeff Sessions, an Alabama Republican, told Fox News earlier this month: "The debt as it exists today — 95 percent of GDP — is so high, economists tell us it's dragging down (economic) growth at least 1 percent."
But considering only the $9.75 trillion that's owed to bondholders, the U.S. debt is 65 percent of the GDP; still worrisome, but nowhere near the 140 percent level that's fueling the Greek debt crisis or the 100 percent-plus levels of other troubled European governments.
This kind of distinction, though, provides little solace in the face of the coming entitlement crisis just a few years down the road.
President Barack Obama and lawmakers are struggling to agree on a debt-ceiling hike before next Tuesday, which would allow the government to borrow more money in order to fund a more than $1 trillion budget deficit.
As they wrangle, they're only tenuously offering solutions to entitlement obligations that are many orders of magnitudes more. Those obligations eventually will total at least $60 trillion.
"This huge debt burden won't bankrupt the country on Aug. 3, but it does demonstrate that there is an enormous and growing problem that gets much harder to deal with the longer it is left unaddressed," said Christopher Frenze, a former staff director of the American Action Forum, a conservative policy institute in Washington.
That coming threat stems from another issue, the IOUs to ourselves.
For years, increased spending has forced the government to raid federal trust funds. It takes payroll tax revenues earmarked for Social Security or Medicare, for instance, and uses them to cover unrelated expenses. But it doesn't have a way to pay back the money.
It would be as if a family kept a budget on paper that put aside set sums each month for defined needs, but it spent all that money and more in its daily activities.
Kenneth Rogoff, a Harvard economist who's advised U.S. government leaders, views the debt-limit crisis as concealing a deeper dilemma: Americans expect federal benefits they're not willing to pay for.
"We're on a completely unsustainable path," Rogoff said. "People are just convinced the government doesn't need any money. They're mad at all the borrowing, but they get even madder when taxes go up or they don't get the programs they like."
ON THE WEB
MORE FROM MCCLATCHY
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Are we in the midst of a new golden age of capitalism or the biggest asset bubble in history?
Frankly, nobody can tell for sure. All we can realistically do is to assign probabilities to the two outcomes. Or, perhaps not even that. In its new annual report published on 27 June, the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) admitted as much. “Our understanding of economic processes may be even less today than it was in the past,” said the BIS. And: “We face a fundamentally uncertain world—one in which probabilities cannot be calculated—rather than simply a risky one.”
So, it is not surprising that there are smart men and women on both sides of the fence, arguing the bull and bear cases with equal conviction. But this week marks the 10th anniversary of the start of the Asian financial crisis—an earthquake that ripped through economies across the region. So, despite the ambiguities of the current situation, it is still worth trying to figure out whether the world is close to another big financial blowout.
Most of the debates are focused on the macro-fundamentals—exchange rates, current account balances and interest rates, for example. These are not unimportant. But there is another set of parameters that deserve equal attention—the balance sheets of companies, banks and investment bodies. Remember: while currency speculators fanned the fires of the Asian financial crisis, these fires were originally lit by weak balance sheets of banks and companies in the region.
The work of American economist Hyman Minsky gives us a useful framework to examine this issue. Minsky developed a theory of financial fragility that is stunning in its originality, and which tried to show that periodic financial crises are part of the logic of the economy rather than the result of external shocks. In other words, he said financial crises are endogenous rather than exogenous.
Minsky said balance sheets and cash flows go through three stages, which he termed hedged finance, speculative finance and ponzi finance. In the first stage, hedge finance, the cash flows generated from operations are enough to meet all financial obligations of a company. But as an economy grows, companies tend to take more risks. They move to the second stage—speculative finance. Here, their cash flow is enough to cover only debt payments; the actual debt is rolled over rather than repaid. Then there is the final stage of ponzi finance, when the cash generated from operations is not even enough to cover interest payments. The company either has to borrow more or sell off its assets to service its debt.
Ponzi finance is the last stage before a financial crisis and, after the crisis, companies go back to the first stage of hedge finance. And then the process starts all over again. Minsky has in recent years developed a following in the investment community, especially among the “world is a bubble” crowd.
Minsky’s analysis assumed a closed economy, without capital flows and volatile exchange rates. Some of his prescriptions, too, were controversial. He argued, for example, that the job of a central bank is not to control money supply but to stabilize the financial system. Yet, the broad three-stage classification he proposed is a good framework to understand the times we live in.
Now, look around. You’ll see leveraged buyouts, hedge funds and private equity funds making the headlines. They all have one thing in common—they constitute an arbitrage between the credit markets and other asset markets. In other words, these entities are borrowing at very low interest rates in one market and using the money to buy in another market (be it a company or any other asset class). A lot of the risk has been parcelled out and sold to investors across the world through synthetic securities. This looks a lot like what Minsky called ponzi finance.
On the other hand, the balance sheets of non-financial companies are in good shape, with low debt and high levels of cash. The question, then, is whether the power of ponzi finance is strong enough to topple the global economy in the coming years, despite strong economic and business fundamentals.
“I have proposed a ‘Minskian’ evolution from Money Manager Capitalism to Financial Arbitrage Capitalism. Command over the credit system —hence the capitalist economy—has shifted away from corporate boardrooms and institutional investors to investment bankers, derivative players, and the leveraged speculating community. Moreover—and in a momentous departure from Minsky’s era—the consumer loan has become the locus for system credit creation, supplanting business borrowing to finance capital investment,” wrote money manager Doug Noland in June 2005.
He was writing about the US. But these are words worth heeding for the rest of us as well.
Your comments are welcome at firstname.lastname@example.org
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With this method they were able to gauge the power, temperature and duration of the ablation, and to monitor the development of lesions and other potential complications that may result from ablation. The study, involving 152 patients who underwent left atrial ablation for AF, is the first to identify the esophagus and monitor lesions, known as atrio-esophageal fistulas, on the posterior wall of the heart's left atrium with ICE.
"ICE imaging could be a valuable tool to protect patients from esophageal injury and help physicians do no harm," says Francis Marchlinski, M.D., director of the University of Pennsylvania's electrophysiology program and an author of the study. "Although this complication is rare, it results in high mortality."
In an accompanying editorial, Hugh Calkins, M.D., professor of medicine and director of the electrophysiology lab at Johns Hopkins Hospital, writes "There is no question that those involved with catheter ablation of AF urgently need a method to protect the esophagus and prevent further atrio-esophageal fistulas. And based on the results of this study, it appears that ICE may have promise in this regard."
Dr. Calkins writes that development of these lesions on the esophagus is "Perhaps the most feared, and most lethal of the many complications that have been associated with this procedure with mortality in excess of 75 percent."
AF is the most common sustained heart rhythm disorder, affecting more than two million people in the United States. AF has been shown to increase significantly the risk for congestive heart failure and stroke.
MEDICA.de; Source: Heart Rhythm Society
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We all would like to loose a few unwanted pounds this month. With the fad diets out there we think we know what will help us lose weight but then we gain it all back again. Why do those pounds come back?
In our culture we are faced with the ease of fast food in our busy on-the-go lifestyle. Why not, it’s easier, right? It can be difficult to know what foods are healthy and which foods you should be avoiding. Here are my top 5 foods that you should avoid and why.
1. Processed Foods
Many years ago there were no processed foods. Everyone ate whole natural foods that they grew in their garden, made in their kitchen, or hunted. Today, most foods are processed and packaged. Families don’t sit down and enjoy home-cooked meals anymore but they give in to the convenient fast food diner. The main problem with these processed foods is that they are chemically processed and are made using refined ingredients and artificial flavors.
Processed foods are typically high and sugar leading to obesity and diabetes. These types of foods are usually loaded with artificial ingredients that you can’t even pronounce. Junk food causes a chemical reaction in the brain called dopamine, which causes a food addiction. These types of foods are typically high in refined carbohydrates, which spike your blood sugar and can lead to several types of chronic disease. Lastly, processed foods have no nutrients in them, which makes them unhealthy. The bottom line is to avoid processed foods as much as possible. Instead eat whole natural foods
2. Soy Products
Many people are lead to believe that soy products are a healthy alternative. This is not true. Most soybeans grown in the United States are genetically modified (GMO). GMO soybeans mean they are able to withstand very harmful amounts of herbicide. One of the active ingredients in this herbicide is called, glyphosate, which is responsible for disrupting female hormones. This can lead to problems with fertility, menstrual cycle, and many other issues. The only soy products that are safe are organic which does not contain harmful pesticides. If you do consume soy make sure it is organic to avoid the harmful chemicals.
3. Artificial Sweeteners
Processed sugars like aspartame is probably one of the most harmful foods you can eat. And it’s in everything, from soda to your favorite crackers. These sugars have the ability to lower your immune system, cause hyperactivity in children and adults, cause obesity, diabetes, cancer, and heart disease. Sugar can also change your cholesterol levels by increasing the triglycerides. This can lead to cardiovascular issues if not addressed. So, next time look at the ingredients of what you are eating.
4. Vegetable Oils
Our culture has been made to believe that butter is bad and vegetable oils are good. However, this is not true. Vegetable oils are highly processed which changes the natural compound of the product. When choosing oil you must use one that can withstand the chemical changes of cooking. One way this harmful oil harms your body is by changing your good cholesterol into bad cholesterol by oxidizing it. By cooking with canola, corn, and/or soy oils you are oxidizing the oil. This oxidation leads to rancid oil, which is a trans fat, the worst type of fat that leads to cardiovascular disease and cancers. Next time skip the vegetable oils and choose butter or coconut oil.
I know this seems a little strange but if you think about it the types of breads we eat today are nothing like grandma made in the kitchen. Today the ingredients in bread are processed, chemical-laden, and a serious tummy ache later. Many people today are gluten intolerant but aside from that the added chemicals in bread-like foods are unhealthy and harmful to our health. Several studies have been found that gluten causes gastrointestinal issues like bloating, gas, constipation, and diarrhea. Its no wonder people are having these symptoms after consuming these types of products, it’s loaded with chemicals instead of good whole natural ingredients. My advice is to stay clear of most gluten containing foods.
It’s important to watch what you are putting inside your body. Go for whole natural ingredients instead of processed, chemical added, sugary foods. I promise you will thank me later.
If you want to know more about which foods to avoid contact me at Health With Erin.
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The Civil Rights Act 1964
On May 2, 1963, many Americans watched in horror as live news televised images of white officials attacking hundreds of African American marchers with dogs, nightsticks, and fire hoses. After seeing the violent tactics used against mostly peaceful demonstrators, the public demanded action. That summer, almost a quarter of a million people marched on Washington in support of civil rights. President Kennedy decided to risk political fallout by pursuing a civil rights bill. He was assassinated in November.
President Lyndon B. Johnson announced his determination to pass the bill in honor of the fallen President. Less than one year later, he signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law.
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Thanks to the constant snowfall this winter, kids have been unsupervised in their own homes quite often. If you have seen Home Alone, you know that danger lurks inside the home for unsupervised adolescents. General home safety concerns for kids are similar to those for the rest of the family.
Here are some guidelines:
1. According to the Red Cross, 65 percent of home fires occur in homes with no working smoke alarms. Make sure there is a smoke detector and carbon monoxide (CO) detector on every level of your home and outside of every sleep area.
2. Replace alkaline batteries in detectors every 6 months and replace detectors every 10 years.
3. Keep a fire extinguisher in your home and make sure your teen knows how to use it.
1. Post emergency phone numbers and information about how to locate your home (e.g., address, nearby landmarks) near each telephone. Include the following numbers:
Poison control, Pediatrician, Police/Fire department, Ambulance service and Trusted neighbor or nearby friend.
2. Teach your teens how to safely operate any appliance before allowing them to use it independently (Adolescents under the age of 16 should not operate riding lawnmowers).
*Chart courtesy of the University of Louisiana at Monroe
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In The Power Of Peak State, one concept that I describe is the idea of self-actualization. If you are familiar with psychology or self-help literature, you may have heard this term before, but if you have not, it is an important concept to grasp in order to understand peak state.
The term “self-actualization” originated with Humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow. Maslow is renowned for his hierarchy of needs, an outline of the needs by which people are motivated, depicted in a pyramid. At the base of the pyramid, there are the basic biological needs we all have, such as food, water, shelter, and sleep. Next, there are the needs related to safety — protection from the elements, stability, freedom from fear, and more. Third on the pyramid is our needs related to belonging — the need for friendship, for affection, for intimacy. Next are our esteem needs, meaning our need to achieve, be independent, to have a certain status, and to gain the respect of ourselves and others. Finally, the peak of the pyramid is self-actualization.
Self-actualization is the achievement of your full potential. Self-actualization is growing towards total self-fulfillment. When you reach peak state, where you are at the pinnacle of performance, you are self-actualized. If you are wondering what self-actualization looks like, there are several characteristics Maslow describes that are shared by self-actualized people:
- They are realistic and tolerant of the unknown.
Self-actualized people are capable of accepting reality for what it is, and are not afraid of what they do not know. They may even be attracted to the mysteries of life, instead of experiencing fear about them.
- They accept themselves and others for who they are.
They have a realistic perception of themselves and others, and therefore, do not need to pretend to be anyone but themselves.
- They are spontaneous.
Self-actualized people enjoy the present moment more than other people. They have the ability to be spontaneous and truly enjoy life. They respond organically to the world around them, so they are more open with themselves.
- They help others and are not self-obsessed.
Self-actualized people want to help their fellow man, and are motivated by a responsibility to the external world and not just themselves.
- They have a sense of humor.
They are able to laugh at themselves and observe the humor in daily life, but do not feel the need to mock other people.
- They are very creative.
They do not merely survive, they create. They are passionate about contributing to the larger world around them.
- They have deep, intimate relationships.
Self-actualized people are able to form deep bonds with a few people. While they show kindness to strangers and feel a connection with the world as a whole, they have just a few truly deep bonds in their life.
- They appreciate solitude.
Self-actualized people value alone time because it gives them time to explore themselves. While they enjoy the company of others, they are not uncomfortable being alone, and actively seek privacy.
- They have peak experiences.
Self-actualized people experience transformative moments of wonder, joy, and awe.
For more information on self-actualization and how to achieve it, read The Power Of Peak State.
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Learning English can be fun and also done in your home. The web is filled with "English as a Second Language" (ESL) educational sites. Many of these sites help students to learn through activities, games, songs, quizzes, puzzles and other similar types of learning tools. Variety and fun can really help to keep both a student's interest and attention. Although many websites may be geared more toward adults or children, they are often able to be used by both depending on the learning level of the student (beginner, intermediate or advanced). Thanks to the internet everything you desire to learn about ESL can be done right from the comfort of your own home.
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The reciprocal meter is the standard unit of wave number for electromagnetic field s (EM fields). In terms of International Units ( SI ), the reciprocal meter is equal to m -1 . The wave number is the number of complete wave cycles that exist in a linear span of 1 meter (m).
At the speed of light in free space, 2.99792 x 10 8 m/s, the frequency f in hertz ( Hz ) is related to the wave number y in reciprocal meters (m -1 ) according to the following formula:
y = f / (2.99792 x 10 8 )
To cite a few examples, an EM wave at 300 megahertz (MHz) in free space has a wave number of almost exactly 1 m -1 . If the frequency is doubled to 600 MHz, the wave number also doubles, to 2 m -1 . If the frequency becomes 1/10 as great, that is, it is decreased to 30 MHz, then the wave number is reduced to 0.1 m -1 . As a point of reference, it is easy to remember that the wave number of a 300-MHz signal in free space is very close to 1 m -1 .
In general, if the speed of propagation in meters per second for a specific medium is given by c , then:
y = f / c
where y is in reciprocal meters, and f is in hertz.
In radio-frequency ( RF ) transmission lines such as coaxial cable s and waveguide s, the speed of propagation is less than 2.99792 x 10 8 m/s. This increases the wave number, although it has no effect on the frequency.
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More on global warming
From CNN today:
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Melting of glaciers in the Patagonian ice fields of southern
Argentina and Chile has doubled in recent years, caused by higher temperatures,
lower snowfall and a more rapid breaking of icebergs, a study suggests.
. . . .
The researchers concluded that the Patagonia ice is melting faster now due to
warmer air temperatures, a decrease in precipitation and a more rapid breaking
of pieces of icebergs into the ocean, known as calving.
The study was conducted by Eric Rignot of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in
Pasadena, California; Andres Rivera of the University of Chile in Santiago,
and Gino Casassa of the Center of Scientific Studies in Valdivia, Chile.
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NITROGENNitrogen is instrumental in increase leaf and stem growth, as well as the plant's dark green color. Nitrogen also influences the crispness and quality of leaves as well as quick early growth in the spring.
NITROGEN--DEFICIENCYDeficiency symptoms include a yellowing of foliage or a light green-yellow overall color. Plant growth is reduced and/or stunted.
| Gardening Books
Please read the Copyright Information.
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Bacon's Castle (1676-1677) - A house seized and fortified by rebels in 1676 during Bacon's Rebellion in present day Surry County, Virginia. Recaptured later in 1676 by U.S. Sailors and abandoned as a fortification early in 1677.
Bacon's Castle History
Rebels under Nathaniel Bacon seized and fortified the house of Major Arthur Allen II in September 1676. Nathaniel Bacon himself never occupied the house and he died in October 1676 of dysentery. The house remained under rebel control until it was recaptured by loyal sailors 29 Dec 1676. The house continued to have a military role through January 1677. Without Nathaniel Bacon the rebellion fell apart and the house was returned to the family.
Acquired by Preservation Virginia in the 1970s, restored and now operated as a historic site and museum in Surry County, Virginia. Open to the public on specific days and limited hours but open for exterior self guided tours most days.
Visited: 16 May 2013
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In order to achieve effective observation, these are the guidelines which need to be followed:
- The objective/focus of your observation is to get as much detail (thick description) as possible.
- Avoid making a summary/evaluation when observing.
- Record what you see and what you hear – focus on the events/activities, people, & place. Should you have any comments/opinion etc., note that as observer’s comment.
- However, this protocol is only a guide. You must give allowance for emerging issues/events/ideas.
- You are also encouraged to write question/s that you want to ask in your interview. Questions that will provide you with more detail/clarification on your observation.
The work given as practiced is to observe this video (see below) and to describe as much as possible according to these aspects: place/facilities, people (primary and secondary) / events / activities.
After watching it, came up with this description:
Primary participant: The mother
Secondary participant: the three sons and daughter
The teenage son came back from school. He entered the living room. The mother was reading magazine.
He was happily texting messages.
He sat in the living room.
The mother saw the son and she asked him how was school. The son replied that what happen at school was all-right.The mother wanted to share something which happened to her on that day.
When the mother was sharing, the son was very much focusing happily on texting messages.
The mother noticed that. So, the mother questioned the son whether was he actually listening to her.
The son replied with an annoying yes and continued with his texting.
The mother was annoyed and walked out of the living room. She decided to find someone who would listen to her.
The daughter’s bedroom
The mother went to the daughter and asked her (daughter) if she has a minute to spare. The daughter share a different relationship with the mother compared to the son. The daughter found that the mother was not happy with her brother’s attitude and decided to make her mother happy by offering to listen to the mother’s explanation. After a while of long sharing, the daughter attention shifted to her handphone. The mother was speechless and angry. Her anger could be seen when she banged the door closed.
The dining room:
All four children were busy texting messages with their handphones. The mother was annoyed as no one paid any attention to her request until she had to make some noises with the glass to get their attention. At that point, the mother’s anger got the children’s attention. Her raised voice and stern look plus her threat to throw the handphone into the garbage made the children felt scared. After getting the children’s attention, she continued with how her day was. Her talk was abruptly interrupted with the ringing tones from the children’s handphones. She felt disappointed. This is reflected from her voice and sad look. Then she made an announcement that no one is allowed to have their handphones in the house. Her announcement made the children not happy. Seconds later, the mother’s handphone rang. She flipped open her handphone and found a message was sent to her saying “she was the greatest mum ever.” That made her very happy as she read the message out loud to her children. It was assumed the message was sent by her children. The children felt happy to see their mother not angry anymore as later, all the children joined the mother for a jig.
The son bedroom and the living room
The son was doing his homework on the bed and called out the mother as he wanted the mother to help with the homework. The son called the mother three times. The son was not really happy when there was no reply from the mother. Since he did not received any reply from the mother, he went out from his bedroom to search for her.
The son went out to the living room and saw the mother texting on her handphone. The son asked the mother to help him with the homework. The mother looked up. With a blank look on her face, she told the son she did not catch what did the son said. Then she continued the texting activity on her handphone.
Hmm…I wonder how is this for thick description.
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Most Americans support government action to combat the effects of global warming and will likely vote for candidates who put forth a promising stance on environmental issues, a new poll has found.
The telephone poll — conducted by The New York Times, Stanford University and the nonpartisan environmental research group Resources for the Future — surveyed 1,006 adults across the nation from Jan. 7 to 22. Participants were asked questions such as whether they think climate change is human-caused, if global warming is perceived as a serious threat and if they have strong opinions on the matter. Respondents were also probed about government-related issues, including whether they think the government should limit greenhouse gases and how a candidate’s opinion on climate change affects their vote.
The poll found that eight in 10 Americans think that climate change is human-caused, including 88 percent of Democrats, 83 percent of Independents and 71 percent of Republicans. Roughly two-thirds of Americans also said a candidate’s stance on global warming influences how they vote, which has implications for the 2016 presidential campaigns. The findings suggest a growing concern nationwide, as the public worries about the effects of greenhouse gas emissions. [The Reality of Climate Change: 10 Myths Busted]
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CC-MAIN-2017-26
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Ten student interns at the Long Beach Unified School District’s California Academy for Mathematics and Science, (CAMS) High School will be building prototypes of the 2020 Mars Rover with STEAM++ director Bob Barboza and physicists, John Davis. This is part of the Occupy Mars Learning Adventure project-based learning and distance learning programs. www.KidsTalkRadioScience.com.
New Mars 2020 rover will be able to ‘hear’ the Red Planet
- The new Mars rover will have new sound and image capabilities
- It will also contain new instruments that aim to study the Martian surface
- What we learn from these instruments could help the human mission to Mars
(CNN)When the newly developed Mars 2020 rover lands on the Red Planet in February 2021 after embarking on a seven-month cruise through space, we will be able to hear sounds of the landing and the Martian surface for the first time, according to NASA.
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Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter to peer into history
BY CRAIG COVAULT
Posted: May 21, 2009
Factors of time and distance have obscured from view the winners and losers that remain across one of the great battlegrounds of the Cold War - the Moon.
Those interfering veils are about to be lifted by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), set for liftoff June 17 on the most ambitious lunar mission since Apollo 17 in 1972.
LRO is a science mission with tremendous implications for future manned and unmanned missions to the Moon.
But LRO will also provide an exciting new window on the past, says Craig Tooley, LRO project manager at the Goddard Space Flight Center which heads the project.
The LRO team has been developing a computerized target list "with coordinates on about 50 high priority locations that involve all six Apollo landing sites and dozens of U. S. and Soviet robotic spacecraft touchdown points," says Benjamin J. Neumann director for advanced capabilities at NASA Œs Exploration Mission Directorate.
"We will be in a polar orbit that will overfly everything that has ever landed on the Moon at only 50 km. (31 mi.) altitude," says Cathy Peddie the LRO deputy project manager at Goddard.
Importantly this will help provide the geologic context that has been lacking for especially the robotic missions that succeeded, says Tooley.
Key targets involve:
The LRO mission is launching just as the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11's first manned lunar landing approaches on July 20.
Whether images of the Sea of Tranquility site explored by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin in 1969 will be taken by then, will depend on many LRO mission timing events yet to be determined. But the Goddard team is going to try to obtain such imagery in time for the Apollo 11 anniversary if that can be done without disrupting primary LRO mission operations.
The images may also show what ever happened to the U. S. Surveyor 4 lander that in July 1967 stopped transmitting just before landing and presumably crashed-but nobody knows.
And LRO may show what happened to the Soviet unmanned lunar sample return spacecraft that crashed in mid July 1969 trying to beat Apollo 11 with the return to Earth of at least robotically obtained Moon dust.
If the Apollo 14 astronauts scuffed up the soil enough, LRO may also show how close Alan Shepard and Ed Mitchell got to the rim of Cone Crater. Exhausted they were forced to turn back only an estimated 100 ft. from what would have been one of the great scenes of Apollo, but invisible to them due to the looming drop-off.
LRO's even greater imaging capability and modern computer capabilities should provide precise new detail on the amount of meteorite and micrometeorite cratering that has occurred over the last 40 years.
Although just a split second in geologic time, science managers like Mark Robinson, principal investigator for the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera developed at Arizona State University, believe the data can show changes like additional roughness that may have occurred in the Apollo areas.
"It may not look like much difference now, but it could be very important for the long term habitability and survivability of crews based later in lunar outposts. Wargo says.
Also of geologic interest will be the craters left by impacts of discarded Lunar Module ascent stages and S-4B Saturn upper stages deliberately targeted to hit the Moon to cause moonquakes that would be detected by seismometers left by the crews.
The general public will be asked to submit more target ideas to the LRO project website.
The geologic areas surrounding the Soviet Luna 16, Luna 20 and Luna 24 sample return spacecraft will also be imaged to perhaps see the descent stages in the midst of the surface terrain. All three returned small lunar soil samples to Earth.
The tracks made by the Lunokhod 1 rover during 6.5 mi. of driving in the Sea of Rains and Lunokhod 2's remarkable 23 miles of roving in hilly regions of the crater Le Monnier will also attempt to be imaged.
Although success will depend on lighting conditions says Robinson at Arizona State. He noted that "this would be more likely under high Sun angles since the tracks will have disturbed the regolith and have a different reflective character."
The launch itself on an Atlas V will be one of ironies from the cold war.
The Atlas V will be powered by a 1 million lb. thrust RD-180 Russian rocket engine produced in the Energomash rocket plant targeted for U. S. destruction had the Cold War gone hot.
Russian rocket scientists at the Cape will be in a room walled off for commercial, not military security, to monitor their engine's performance.
It will be the first time that a Russian rocket engine has propelled anything toward the Moon in 33 years-and it will be from Cape Canaveral instead of the Baikonur Cosmodrome where virtually all Russian robotic missions to the Moon were launched.
LRO has nine instruments, the cameras being key to the location of human made artifacts.
The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) is designed to address two of the prime LRO measurement requirements: 1) Assess meter scale features to facilitate selection of future landing sites on the Moon. 2) Acquire images of the poles every orbit to characterize the polar illumination environment (100 meter scale), identifying regions of permanent shadow and permanent or near-permanent illumination over a full lunar year.
In addition to these two main objectives, the LROC team plans to conduct meter-scale mapping of polar regions, 3-dimensional observations to enable derivation of meter-scale surface features, global multi-spectral imaging, and produce a global landform map.
LROC consists of two Narrow Angle Cameras (NACs) to provide 0.5 meter-scale panchromatic images over a 5 km swath, a Wide Angle Camera (WAC) to provide images at a scale of 100 meters/pixel in seven color bands over a 60 km swath, and a Sequence and Compressor System (SCS) supporting data acquisition for both cameras.
The system is a modified version of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiters ConTeXt Camera (CTX) and MARs Color Imager (MARCI) provided by Malin Space Science Systems (MSSS) in San Diego, CA.
How much detail the cameras will provide on the condition of the Grumman Apollo Lunar Module Descent Stages and Boeing lunar rover cars will depend on lighting conditions, look angles and LRO's 18 in highest resolution capability.
Robinson notes that in some cases it will be the shadows of the object that will show up better than the spacecraft themselves.
The Apollo descent stage decks should be somewhat visible as they are 8x8 pixels wide with a deck size of 4.3 meters. The imager can see down to 0.5m/pixels.
The tracks of astronauts will be impossible to see, but if the ground was highly scuffed over large areas like around parked rovers, that perhaps could be seen as should be surface scouring by the Lunar Module descent engine during landing.
LRO will search for, and likely find the historic 1 ton eight wheeled Lunokhod 1 rover that has been lost in the Sea of Rains since driving for 6.5 miles over 322 earth days in 1970-71.
When it failed the spacecraft's laser retroreflector was not accurately pointed, so while the USSR knew approximately where it was, the specific location where it died remains unknown.
The renowned Lavochkin design bureau built the Lunokhod rovers , the Soviet Luna sample return spacecraft and other historic Soviet planetary spacecraft.
Lunokhod 2 will be imaged and is of special interest to International Space Station Soyuz mission space tourist astronaut Richard Garriott, the son of NASA Skylab and shuttle astronaut Owen Garriott.
An internet millionaire, Richard Garriott bought Lunokhod 2 rover from Lavochkin for $68,500 at a Sotheby's auction in New York in December 1993.
All of the Lavochkin spacecraft that remain on the moon, including Luna 9 - history's first soft lander - apparently remain the properly of Lavochkin.
Luna 9 with its ball shape and fold down petals revealing a camera mast will be a high priority LRO target because of its place in history.
This is like the Soviet history that surrounds the Lunokhod rovers with their ramped descent stages and the sample return spheres that made a successful 500,000 mi. roundtrip between Earth and the Moon.
In Moscow, Lavochkin maintains one of the great space museums of the world, earlier available for viewing only by advance appointment.
On my visit there I was shown around by the same Lavochkin employee who had strapped cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin into his Vostok 1 spacecraft for the first human flight into space.
I was awed by just that. Then he topped it by handing me a black basketball sized sphere. It was the return capsule for Luna 24, the final robotic sample return from the lunar surface.
"Its been on the Moon," he said with appropriate reverence. Have you ever touched anything that has been on the Moon before?"
I almost did not have the heart to answer him. "Yes," I said, "Neil Armstrong."
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“Every year, 1.3 billion tons of food is lost or wasted by consumers and retailers around the world. This is more than the net total food production of Sub-Saharan Africa, and enough to feed the estimated 900 million people hungry in the world, according to the Food and Agricultural Organization. In the U.S. alone, about 40 percent of all edible food goes to waste, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council, a figure made all the more ominous when considering the 50 million Americans currently classified as food insecure.
It’s safe say that the world has a food waste problem. Luckily, many groups, individuals and movements are stepping up with both large and small-scale efforts to fight food waste worldwide.”
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In late 2015, the world first met Homo naledi, a newly discovered human-like species that was found deep within a South African cave.
On Tuesday, a follow-up study dating the bones was published in eLIFE, and the results were nothing short of astounding. Dating showed that the fossils were in fact much more recent than previously estimated. At between 236,000 and 335,000 years old, these primitive looking hominins would have coexisted with modern humans in Africa, complicating the story of who we are and where we came from.
Homo naledi attracted attention because it had some ape-like aspects combined with more human features. The species had a small brain, flat midface, and curved fingers — like a chimpanzee — but also teeth, thumbs, wrists, and feet that look very much like our own.
But, judging by their age, these were not some halfway point in evolutionary history between apes and modern humans. Instead, they must have co-existed with our ancestors in Africa for a long time. Previously it was assumed that modern humans emerged and quickly replaced closely related species on the continent. If that’s not true, then a lot of what we thought we knew about hominins in Africa at that time is in question.
“We can no longer assume that we know which species made which tools, or even assume that it was modern humans that were the innovators of some of these critical technological and behavioural breakthroughs in the archaeological record of Africa,” says Lee Berger of the University of the Witwatersrand, who led the research. “If there is one other species out there that shared the world with modern humans in Africa, it is very likely there are others. We just need to find them.”
The scientists suspect that Homo naledi — small brains notwithstanding — buried their dead, a trait thought to have been exclusive to humans. There’s no better explanation for why fossils from so many individuals would be found in a cave with openings well under a foot to squeeze through. A second cave in the area has also been discovered with the exact same pattern — remains of multiple individuals in a tight spot.
If there’s anything that Homo naledi teaches us, it’s not to assume that the story of humans will fit neatly with the available evidence. We should not be surprised when a new fossil discovery blows open all expectations of what came before, rather than filling in a known gap in understanding.
How much evidence is still out there — and what we could learn from it — is an open question. And it’s one that can only be answered by going out and exploring.
Photos via University of the Witwatersrand, Cicero Moraes / Wikimedia
New ages for flowstone, sediments and fossil bones from the Dinaledi Chamber are presented. We combined optically stimulated luminescence dating of sediments with U-Th and palaeomagnetic analyses of flowstones to establish that all sediments containing Homo naledi fossils can be allocated to a single stratigraphic entity (sub-unit 3b), interpreted to be deposited between 236 ka and 414 ka. This result has been confirmed independently by dating three H. naledi teeth with combined U-series and electron spin resonance (US-ESR) dating. Two dating scenarios for the fossils were tested by varying the assumed levels of 222Rn loss in the encasing sediments: a maximum age scenario provides an average age for the two least altered fossil teeth of 253 +82/–70 ka, whilst a minimum age scenario yields an average age of 200 +70/–61 ka. We consider the maximum age scenario to more closely reflect conditions in the cave, and therefore, the true age of the fossils. By combining the US-ESR maximum age estimate obtained from the teeth, with the U-Th age for the oldest flowstone overlying Homo naledi fossils, we have constrained the depositional age of Homo naledi to a period between 236 ka and 335 ka. These age results demonstrate that a morphologically primitive hominin, Homo naledi, survived into the later parts of the Pleistocene in Africa, and indicate a much younger age for the Homo naledi fossils than have previously been hypothesized based on their morphology.
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- Maths Questions in UGC-NET/JRF 2017 exam
- Data Interpretation in UGC NET exam: How to prepare?
- RC Passage: literature, partition and great war
- In NET exam, UGC asks hardly 1 or 2 MCQs from basic maths. [and 6 from DI, 6 from RC and ~10 from reasoning]
- Unlike other competitive exams, in UGC you don’t have to prepare entire maths but only following topics:
- Linear equation (coin problems, age problems etc.) usually in two variables (x,y). only this year, UGC asked linear equation in three variables (x,y,z). but quite easy calculation as you can see below.
- Percentages, Profit-loss, Discount, product consistency rule.
- Averages: Both simple and weighed average. (But ignore alligiations- it’s not asked).
- Pipes and cisterns. (only occasionally asked)
- How to prepare Mathematics for future exams? If you’re already preparing for exams such as UPSC, SSC or Banking then no separate preparation required here. Same books / material will suffice. If you’ve no book, then I would recommend FastTrack to objective arithmetic by Rajesh Verma
Anyways, let’s solve the MCQ asked in Jan’17 paper:
Q1. Imtiyaz Ali buys a glass, a pencil box and a cup and pays ₹ 21 to to the shopkeeper. Rakesh Roshan buys a cup, two pencil boxes and a glass and pays ₹ 28 to the shopkeeper. Preeti Zinta buys two glass, a cup and two pencil boxes and pays ₹ 35 to the shopkeeper. the cost of 10 cups will be?
Rakesh minus Ali =>p=7; substitute values
Preeti minus Rakesh=> g=7.
Substitute these values in Ali’s equation, you get c=7.
Therefore, cost of 7 cups will be 7 x 10 = 70 rupees.
|UGC Trend 3 years ago||Nowadays|
|One set with 6 MCQs.|
|quick and simple pie charts and single digit divisions|
- People who take exam casually, rely on following strategy: RC+DI = 6+6=12 Qs तो मैं पक्का करके आऊंगा.. But due to lack of practice, and lengthiness of the sets, they waste 40 minutes on 12 Questions only.
How to prepare Data Interpretation for future UGC-NET exams?
- As such no special book required. The level of these RC and DI are a bit higher than SSC and a notch lower than Banking exams.
- So just solve previous papers of UGC-NET/JRF, SSC and Bank exams, and you’d have sufficient skill over these two segments.
Anyways, let’s solve two data sets theyasked in January 2017’s NET exam
A University professor maintains data on MCA students tabulated by performance and gender of the students. The data is kept on a computer had disk, but accidentally some of it lost because of a computer virus. Only the following could be recovered:
Panic buttons were pressed but to no avail. An expert committee was formed, which decided that the following facts were self-evident:
- Half the students were either excellent or good.
- 40% of the students were females
- One-third of the male students were average
Filling the missing values
Before we can solve the questions, we’ve to fillup the missing values in above table, using “self-evident” facts, we know that:
|Male||M ÷ 3||10||M (60% of total)|
|Female||32(40% of total)|
Fact-B: Since 40% of students are females; so male are 60%: 60/40=m/32=>m=48. update the table
|Male||48 ÷ 3=16||10||48|
Fact-A: Half the students were either excellent or good.
Since total students are 80, so 40 are (either excellent or good.) and within them 30 are good. So no. of excellent students are 40-30=10. only. Now fillup the missing values in the cells.
Now our table is complete, so let’s solve the questions
Q1: How many female students are excellent?
Answer: ZERO female students are excellent!! Where are thehindu columnists to criticize this misogynistic / “trump-waadi” mindset walla examiner? Had UGC asked any question about Cow, then indeed these columnists have jumped into their britches to critisise the saffornization of higher education!
Q2. What proportion of female students are good?
8 good females ÷ 32 Total females = 8/32=0.25
Q3. Approximately, what proportion of good students are male?
22 good males ÷ total 30 good students= 0.73
The table below embodies data on the sales revenue (in lakh) generated by a publishing house during the years 2012-15 while selling books, magazines and journals as three categories of items. Answer the questions based on the data contained in the table.
Q1). The number of years in which there was an increase in revenue from at least two categories of items, is
This happens only twice
- 2013 (over 2012) : sales of all items increased
- 2014 (over 2013): sales of only two items increased
- 2015 (over 2014): journals declined, magazines increased and books stagnant.
So only in two years (2013 and 2014), we see increase in the revenue from at least two categories.
Q2). If the year 2016 were to show the same growth in terms of total sales revenue as the year 2015 over the year 2014, then the revenue in the year 2016 must be approximately :
- 194 lakh
- 187 lakh
- 172 lakh
- 177 lakh
Let’s update the table:
Let “A” be the total sales in 2016.
IF % wise the growth is same for 2014-15 and 2015-16 then, the ratio should also be same. i.e.
Sales of [2014 ÷ 2015]= sales of [2015 ÷ 2016] (169 ÷ 173)=(173 ÷ A)
A=(173*173) ÷ 169
In calculator or mobile, we can easily solve this but in actual exam, both are prohibited! So how to proceed?
You should know that square of 13=169. therefore,
Only once you do manual two digit division and it turns out 173/13=13.3
A=13.3 x 13.3
Q3). In 2015, approximately what percent of total revenue came from books ?
From previous question, we know the total sales in 2015 are 173.
So, out of them books are %=(78/173) x 100
Again, we can’t use calculator or mobile in real exam, so how to do a three digit division by hand!?
You know that 173<180.
So when we are dividing a number with them as denominators: a/173 > a/180
now let’s try guestimation:
|This will be bigger||This will be smaller|
|(13 x 6) x 100 / (6 x 3 x 10)|
|From the options, the nearest big amount than 43% is 45%. |
Hence our answer is 1)
Cross check from calculation: (78/173) x 100=45.08% so our answer is correct.
- In January 2017 UGC-NET/JRF paper, they asked single passage with 6 MCQs
- For convenience in referencing, I’ve given bullet numbers to the statements.
Read the passage carefully and answer following questions
- The last Great War, which nearly shook the foundations of the modern world had little impact on Indian Literature
- beyond aggravating the popular revulsions against violence and
- adding to growing disillusionment with the ‘humane pretensions’ of the Western World.
- This was eloquently voiced in Tagore’s poems and his last testament, ‘Crisis in Civilization’.
- The Indian intelligentsia was in a state of moral dilemma.
- On the one hand, it could not help but sympathize with
- the England’s dogged courage in the hour of peril,
- with the Russians fighting with their backs on the wall against ruthless Nazi hordes, and
- with the China groaning under the heel of Japanese militarism;
- on the other hand their own country was practically under the military occupation of their own soil and the Indian army under Subhas Bose was trying from the opposite camp to liberate their country.
- On the one hand, it could not help but sympathize with
- No creative impulse could issue from such confusion of loyalties.
- One would imagine that the achievement of Indian independence in 1947, which came in the wake of the Allies victory and was followed by collapse of colonialism in the neighboring countries of South East Asia, would have released an upsurge of the creative energy.
- No doubt it did, but it was soon submerged in the great agony of partition with
- the inhuman slaughter of innocents and the uprooting of the millions of the people from their homeland
- followed by the martyrdom of Mahatma Gandhi.
- These tragedies along with Pakistan’s Invasion of Kashmir and its later atrocities in Bangladesh, did indeed provoke a pregnant writing,
- particularly in the languages of the regions most affected Bengali, Hindi, Kashmiri, Punjabi, Sindhi and Urdu.
- Both poignant or passionate writing does not by itself make great literature.
- What reserves of enthusiasm and confidence served these disasters have been mainly absorbed in the task of national reconstruction and economic development.
- Great literature has always emerged out of chains of convulsions. Indian literature is richer today in terms of volume, range and variety than it ever was in past.
Q1) What was the impact of the last great war on Indian literature?
- It had no impact
- It aggravated popular revulsion against violence
- It shook the foundations of literature
- It offered eloquent support to the Western World
Read passage sentence no. 1/A. hence answer is B.
Q2) What did Tagore articulate in his last testament?
- Offered support to Subhas Bose
- Exposed the humane pretensions of the Western World
- Expressed loyalty to England
- Encouraged the liberation of countries
Read passage sentence no. 1/b and 1/c. hence answer is B.
Q3) What was the stance of Indian intelligentsia during the period of great war?
- Indifference to Russia’s plight
- They favored Japanese militarism
- They prompted creativity out of confused loyalties
- They expressed sympathy for England’s dogged courage.
We’ve to go by elimination. Read passage sentence no. 2 and 3 and accordingly answer choice 1 to 3 are eliminated.
We are left with answer D.
Q4) Identify the factor responsible for the submergence creative energy in India literature.
- Military occupation of one’s own soil
- Resistance to colonial occupation
- Great agony of partition
- Victory of Allies
Read passage statement 5. hence answer is C.
Q5) What was the aftermath that survived tragedies in Kashmir and Bangladesh?
- Suspicion of other countries
- Continuance of rivalry
- Menace of war
- National reconstruction
Read passage sentence no.8. hence answer is D.
Q6) The passage has the message that
- Disasters are inevitable
- Great literature emerges out of chains of convulsions
- Indian literature does not have a marked landscape
- Literature has no relation with war and independence.
Read passage sentence no. 9. hence answer is B.
Any corrections in the Answerkey? Do post in the comments but with authentic reference and explanations.
Visit Mrunal.org/UGC for more study material and solved papers for UGC-NET / JRF exam.
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ATLANTA, June 15, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- The first day of summer brings warmer temperatures and more time outdoors; unfortunately, that also means you are more likely to get stung by fire ants, bees and wasps and bitten by mosquitoes. As you barbecue with friends or work in your garden, watch out for the following insects that can spoil your outdoor fun.
"While fire ants, bees and wasps are dangerous because of their stings, the number one pest to look out for this summer is the mosquito," said Jim Warneke, Orkin's Southeast division technical services manager. "They can carry serious diseases, some of which are fatal."
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), some mosquitoes can transmit West Nile Virus, malaria, dengue fever and the virus that causes encephalitis, or swelling of the brain.
"The CDC reported 712 cases of West Nile virus in 2011, and dengue fever rarely occurs in the United States," said Warneke. "Prime mosquito-biting times are dusk and dawn, so be sure to take the proper precautions and spray an EPA-approved insect repellent on exposed skin, and wear long sleeves and socks if possible."
Mosquitoes only need a few ounces of water to breed and survive, making them very hard to control, so Warneke suggests removing any standing water from gutters, birdbaths or flower pots.
Fire ants are reddish-brown and sting when they are disturbed or feel threatened. They attach themselves with their mandibles to people or animals and inject venom through their stingers. Fire ant stings are very painful and can be fatal, but most victims experience painful red bumps.
Fire ants prefer warm and dry, sunny weather and avoid shady areas. Mounds can grow up to 24 inches in diameter and 18 inches high. They are most common throughout the southern U.S. but have been found as far west as California and as far north as Maryland.
Bees, Wasps, Hornets and Yellow Jackets
Flying, stinging insects like bees, wasps, hornets and yellow jackets are found all across the country, and they like to build their nests in inconspicuous places.
"Yellow jackets tend to build their nests in the ground, and paper wasps are notorious for building their nests under a building's eaves and soffits," said Warneke. "They also tend to build nests in ornamental plants and hedges. Bees, on the other hand, will build their nests in many different locations, from inverted, unused flower pots and barbecue grills to inside the walls of homes and buildings. They spend their time around flowering plants, so be careful when you are pruning your roses or other annual flowers."
Bee, wasp, hornet and yellow jacket stings are painful and can cause symptoms ranging from headaches, fever and fatigue to vomiting and convulsions. Stings can also be deadly to those who are allergic to their venom. According to the American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology, bee, wasp, hornet, yellow jacket and fire ant stings are the cause of about 500,000 allergy-related emergency room visits each year and at least 40 deaths in the United States from anaphylaxis, a serious allergic reaction.
Africanized honey bees, also known as killer bees, are typical throughout the southeastern U.S., but can be found throughout the country. They, too, are opportunistic when it comes to building nests and will make their home just about anywhere, warns Warneke.
"It is best to stay away from all bees because they are difficult to identify," said Warneke. "All honey bees have a pheromone in their stingers that will attract other honey bees, and that could lead to additional stings."
Warneke recommends the following tips to help prevent flying, stinging insects from being attracted to your home:
- Remove all unnecessary food and water sources.
- Seal cracks and crevices around doors and windows.
- Clean up spilled food and drinks immediately, and keep drinks covered.
- Keep gutters clear, and direct water from downspouts away from your home.
- Thin vegetation and do not pile mulch or allow soil to accumulate against your home's siding. This could provide a breeding ground for mosquitoes and access for ants to enter your home.
About Orkin, LLC
Founded in 1901, Atlanta-based Orkin is an industry leader in essential pest control services and protection against termite damage, rodents and insects in the United States, Canada, Europe, Central America, the Middle East, the Caribbean, Asia, the Mediterranean, Africa and Mexico. With more than 400 locations, Orkin's almost 8,000 employees serve approximately 1.7 million customers. The company serves homeowners and numerous industries, including food and beverage processing, foodservice, hospitality, healthcare, retail, warehousing, property/facilities management, schools and institutions. Orkin is proud to be recognized by the National Pest Management Association as a QualityPro and GreenPro-certified company, addressing not only our customer's pest control needs, but also their concern for protecting the environment. Learn more about Orkin at http://orkin.com. Orkin is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Rollins Inc. (NYSE: ROL).
SOURCE Orkin, LLC
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How polar bears got their white coat remains a scientific mystery, but newly published research suggests a way they could turn brown again.
One of the study’s authors says that’s what might eventually happen to some groups of modern bears as climate change alters their habitat.
“It’s not something that happened in the past and might happen in the future — it’s happening today,” said Beth Shapiro, one of the authors of the study published in the journal PLOS Genetics.
Shapiro and her colleagues were looking for insight into the evolutionary past of bears. The researchers were trying to understand when black, brown and polar bears diverged from each other and developed their modern appearance.
Scientists still don’t know when polar bears acquired their distinctive coat. The oldest remains only date from about 110,000 years ago, by which time the species was already well-developed.
“This 110,000-year-old bone probably isn’t the earliest polar bear,” said Shapiro. “We have no idea how early polar bears diverged from brown bears.”
But there is one group of brown bears that has shown signs of mixed heritage — the so-called ABC bears on the Admiralty, Baranof and Chichagof Islands off the coast of Alaska. Previous studies of some of their DNA have shown the ABC bears are more closely related to polar bears than they are to other browns.
Shapiro and her team decided to look more closely at the ABC bruins. They employed sophisticated DNA analysis to look deeply into their past.
What they found is that ABC bears are genetically close to polar bears because that’s what they used to be.
Shapiro’s paper suggests that the ABC bears are a remnant of an ancient population of polar bears that lived in the area during the last Ice Age. As that period ended and the ice slowly retreated, the ABC population got cut off from other polar bears.
“They couldn’t mate with any more polar bears,” Shapiro said.
“As the weather started to get warmer and warmer, brown bears — males, as it turns out — could swim across the channel that separated the ABC islands from the Alaskan mainland and colonize these islands. There they ran into this isolated, trapped population of polar bears and they started hybridizing with them.”
That scenario conforms to modern bear behaviour, in which it is the young males that set out from their birth range in search of new territory. It’s also borne out in the DNA evidence. The team found the greatest percentage of polar bear genetic material in the female X chromosomes of the ABC bears.
“All of the DNA that’s shared between mom and dad has about 1 to 4 per cent polar bear remaining in it,” Shapiro said. “The X chromosomes have a lot more — up to around 15 per cent.”
That isn’t enough for the ABC bears to have maintained their original genetic identity, she said.
“In that particular location, they were converted into brown bears.”
Shapiro said something similar is happening today as climate change reduces sea ice and changes the habitat of some polar bears to look more like that of their southern cousins.
“We’ve seen that polar bears are hybridizing with brown bears now, at the edge of their range in Canada.
“I guess it means if we destroy all their habitat, and the only habitat that’s left for polar bears looks like brown bear habitat, then they’re just going to hybridize with brown bears and turn into brown bears.”
If that were to happen, it would take thousands of years, Shapiro hastened to add. But it does prove how adaptable polar bears can be — to the point of adapting themselves out of existence.
“Because they still retain the ability to hybridize with brown bears, they’re still pretty environmentally adaptable, which is kind of a shame for polar bears.”
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- freely available
J. Clin. Med. 2014, 3(1), 167-175; doi:10.3390/jcm3010167
Abstract: It has now been over 50 years since it was discovered that Down syndrome is caused by an extra chromosome 21, i.e., trisomy 21. In the interim, it has become clear that in the majority of cases, the extra chromosome is inherited from the mother, and there is, in this respect, a strong maternal age effect. Numerous investigations have been devoted to clarifying the underlying mechanism, most recently suggesting that this situation is exceedingly complex, involving both biological and environmental factors. On the other hand, it has also been proposed that germinal trisomy 21 mosaicism, arising during the very early stages of maternal oogenesis with accumulation of trisomy 21 germ cells during subsequent development, may be the main predisposing factor. We present data here on the incidence of trisomy 21 mosaicism in a cohort of normal fetal ovarian samples, indicating that an accumulation of trisomy 21 germ cells does indeed take place during fetal oogenesis, i.e., from the first to the second trimester of pregnancy. We presume that this accumulation of trisomy 21 (T21) cells is caused by their delay in maturation and lagging behind the normal cells. We further presume that this trend continues during the third trimester of pregnancy and postnatally, up until ovulation, thereby explaining the maternal age effect in Down syndrome.
It is well known that aneuploidy is common in humans, leading to reproductive failure, intrauterine deaths and live born offspring affected by congenital defects and learning disabilities. We have focused our attention on trisomy 21 Down syndrome, this being the most common aneuploidy condition in the live born human population. It is clear that the majority of trisomy 21 (T21) conceptions are caused by a segregation error in maternal oocytes with an increasing risk dependent on maternal age. However, in spite of numerous investigations to this effect, the exact mechanism underlying this meiotic segregation error has not been clarified. Instead, it has become generally accepted that many different biological and environmental factors may be involved in giving rise to aneuploidy (reviewed in [1,2,3,4,5]). In contrast, we have recently proposed that in any one woman, the most likely precursor is the degree of T21 mosaicism that originally existed in her ovaries during her own fetal development . In other words, we advocate that the crucial predisposing factor may be the proportion of immature oocytes with three rather than two chromosomes 21 that are available in the ovarian cortex to undergo the first meiotic division, taking place just before ovulation. Following on from Zheng and Byers , we have further proposed that the so-called maternal age effect is due to an accumulation of T21 oocytes during prenatal and postnatal development . In other words, we advocate that the crucial predisposing factor may be the age-related proportion of oocytes with three rather than two chromosomes 21 that are available in the ovarian cortex to undergo the first meiotic division, taking place just before ovulation. The net effect of these two mechanisms is that even a low percentage of trisomic cells present in gonadal tissue or germinal cells significantly increases the risk of aneuploidy in the offspring .
In a previous study, using fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH), we identified the occurrence of T21 germ cells in eight fetal ovaries, obtained following social termination of pregnancy (TOP) in the second trimester . This study has now been extended to include 12 additional fetal ovaries, where TOP was performed during the first trimester of pregnancy. We show that in these cases, where TOP has taken place at an earlier gestational age, the incidence of T21 mosaicism is significantly lower. Thus, in accordance with our hypothesis, there is an apparent accumulation in the degree of T21 mosaicism during normal fetal oogenesis.
We have used FISH with two chromosome 21-specific probes, labelled in different colors (red and green) in order to assess the incidence of T21 in fetal ovaries obtained following TOP for a social reason at the clinical gestational age of 9–11 weeks.
In this new series, we have recorded the incidence of T21 cell nuclei in 12 fetal ovarian samples, obtained during the first trimester of pregnancy. Examples of cell nuclei with T21 in comparison to the normal diploid are given in Figure 1. We identified a mean number of only 0.066% cell nuclei, showing T21 with a range of 0.00%–0.14% and an standard deviation (SD) of 0.045% in a total cell population of 27,042 (Table 1). This result is highly statistically significantly different (p < 0.0001) from the results (average, 0.54%; range, 0.20%–0.88%; SD, 0.23) obtained in our previous investigation of eight cases, ascertained after TOP in the second trimester (Figure 2 in ).
|ID Number||Gestational Age (weeks)||Number of Signals Red/Green *||Number of Analyzed Cells|
|2 Red/2 Green||3 Red/3 Green||1 Red/1 Green||1 Red/2 Green||3 Red/2 Green|
* The cell nuclei scored as having 2 red/2 green have been recorded as likely to be normal disomic, but may include some nuclei having 3 green or 1 green, considered most likely to be false positive or false negative green.
The cell nuclei scored as having a 1 red/1 green signal were recorded as either false negative monosomy 21 (due to the pairing of the two chromosomes 21) or true monosomy 21 [10,11] and those with 1 red/2 green and 3 red/2 green as likely false negative or false positive signals.
It should be added that in obtaining the estimate of T21 mosaicism, we have excluded cell nuclei showing deviations from the ones with three red together with three green signals, as these might be artifactual (Table 1). We also used a complementary chromosome 18-specific probe to differentiate between true T21 cell nuclei in relation to the potential occurrence of dual trisomy/triploidy. No such nuclei were identified in this series of fetal ovarian cells.
Ideally, any hypothesis on the origin of trisomy 21 Down syndrome should address and seek to explain the following issues.
3.1. The Preponderance of Maternal Origin
We suggest that the reason for the preponderance of the maternal origin is the substantial sex difference in degree of T21 germinal mosaicism with a much higher incidence in fetal ovaries than testes . To our knowledge, there are no explicit hypotheses in the literature, as regards this question, other than the suggestion that maternal meiotic chromosome mal-segregation is more common than paternal and that the mechanisms of origin may therefore be different.
3.2. The Changes in Maternal Recombination Patterns
In our view, the changes in maternal recombination patterns, as seen by family linkage analysis, are most readily explained by the expected patterns in a T21 oocyte in relation to that in a normal disomy oocyte [6,8]. These maternal recombination patterns are firmly laid down in her fetal oocytes and cannot be altered by any factors later during development. This also includes the meiotic divisions, taking place just before ovulation and after fertilization. In our view, it is therefore unlikely that any factors, such as cohesion deficiency (further discussed below), may play a causative role in the mal-segregation process.
3.3. The Increased Recurrence Risk in Younger Women
We have suggested that the increased recurrence risk in younger women is likely to be caused by a higher incidence of fetal oogonial/oocyte T21 mosaicism ; reviewed in . It has been previously documented that such women may show somatic T21 mosaicism, as well . On the basis of cytogenetic/molecular data and also maternal and grandmaternal ages in Down syndrome families, Kovaleva suggests that the normal grandmothers were older and proposed that they conceived offspring that were trisomic, but these conceptions subsequently became mosaics by so-called post-zygotic rescue. To date, it is not clear, however, to what extent such generalized trisomy 21, involving both germinal and somatic cell populations, may, in fact, explain an increased recurrence risk in younger mothers.
3.4. The Maternal Age Effect
In order to explain the so-called maternal age effect, we have proposed that there is an accumulation of T21 cells at prenatal and postnatal oocyte development, leading to a higher proportion at later maternal ages . We have here shown that such an accumulation does indeed occur from the first to the second trimester of pregnancy in a sample of ovaries from fetuses with a normal mitotic karyotype (Figure 2). It remains to be investigated whether or not any additional accumulation may take place during postnatal development. As of yet, we have not been able to obtain the relevant cellular samples for this type of study, i.e., primary oocytes in ovaries from women at different biological ages.
The occurrence of maternal germinal mosaicism as a predisposing factor has previously been implicated in a number of T21 (and other aneuploidy) cases through studies of oocytes and polar bodies, obtained for research in connection with in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatment [9,15]. It is noteworthy, though, that recent studies on human oocytes, retrieved in relation to IVF treatment, indicate that the types and frequency of maternal meiotic segregation errors differ substantially from those occurring in natural conception .
Much of the work, aiming to explain the mechanism(s) underlying the origin of aneuploidy with special reference to T21 Down syndrome, has been performed on other mammalian species, in particular using mouse models (reviewed in [16,17]). Special attention has been paid to the possibility that the maternal age effect is caused by an age-related deficiency in the cohesion complex, normally holding chromatids of the meiotic bivalents together until the first meiotic anaphase (see, e.g., [18,19]). No such age-related cohesion deficiency has, however, been noticed in the only study performed so far on human oocytes .
4. Materials and Methods
Human fetal ovarian samples were obtained from the Medical Research Council (MRC)/Wellcome Trust funded Human Developmental Biology Resource (HDBR, London, UK) with appropriate maternal written consent and approval from the local National Health Service (NHS) Health Authority Ethics Committee.
The samples were transported from the clinic to the HDBR resource and were staged, dissected and the tissue frozen on dry ice and stored at −80 °C following a minimum time delay, usually within 2 h of the termination of pregnancy. The age of the fetal samples was estimated following the staging guidelines of Hern . A snip of tissue from the sample was taken prior to freezing to perform cytogenetic analysis to determine the mitotic karyotype. All the samples had a normal female karyotype (including Case 11 with the variant 46,XX,inv(9)(p11q12)).
The frozen samples were transported to our laboratory on dry ice and stored at −80 °C until analysis. Microscopy slides were prepared according to the technology described by Papadogiannakis et al. .
Microscopy slides for FISH analysis were fixed in 70% ethanol for 30 min and treated with pepsin (0.1 mg/mL) in 0.01 M HCl for 2 min at 37 °C. After additional washing in phosphate-buffered saline (PBS), paraformaldehyde (1%) fixation and dehydration through a series of alcohol, the slides were left to air-dry at room temperature.
Hybridization was performed according to the manufacturer’s instructions with two DNA probes positioned near the end of the long arm of chromosome 21 and labelled in SpectrumOrange and SpectrumGreen, respectively (Catalogue No. 32-190002, Abbot Molecular Inc., Des Plaines, IL, USA, and Cytocell, Catalogue No. LPT21QG/R, Cytocell Technologies Ltd., Cambridge, UK). A chromosome 18 centromeric probe labelled in SpectrumAqua was added to be able to differentiate between trisomy and triploidy (Catalogue No. 32-131018, CEP 18 (D18Z1) SpectrumAqua Probe). The DNA probes were mixed and added to the slides followed by denaturation, hybridization and post-hybridization washing. After dehydration, slides were mounted in glycerol containing 2.3% DABCO (1,4-diazabicyclo-(2,2,2) octane), as antifade and DAPI (4,6-diamino-2-phenyl-indole) 0.5 mg/mL for nuclear counterstaining. The cells selected for scoring were defined by the morphology of the nuclei, those being the only ones having large round or roundish nuclei .
Microscopy analysis was performed on a Zeiss Axioplan 2 microscope. Large cell nuclei, isolated from each other, were initially screened using the spectrum red light filter (Rhodamine). Images were captured and processed using the computer program, AxioVision. If an abnormal number of signals were detected using the red light filter, the spectrum green light filter (FITC) was switched on. Cell nuclei showing a dual red plus a green signal were scored as normal disomy 21, while those showing three dual signals were scored as T21, provided that the cell did not contain three chromosome 18 signals, which could be due to dual trisomy/triploidy. Any other combination of signals was considered likely to be artifactual and excluded. A minimum of 2000 cells per slide was analyzed.
In conclusion, it may seem unlikely that we will get to grips with the true origin of T21 Down syndrome, including, in particular, the maternal age effect, until such time as direct investigation on primary oocytes in the ovarian cortex may be performed. We would suggest that one possible way to obtain further information in this regard would be to record the incidence of T21 mosaicism in primary oocytes of the ovarian cortex, following oophorectomy in women at different biological ages. According to our own hypothesis , we would then expect to find an accumulation of T21 oocytes related to the increasing biological age of these women. Finally, it should be added that Rowsey et al. stress that the type of technology that we have used for the counts of chromosome copy number is not applicable to cells at the pachytene stage of meiosis when homologues are synapsed. Further work is required to resolve this question.
The project was conceived of by Maj A. Hultén, who also wrote the first versions of the manuscript. All authors have seen and agreed to the final version. The preparation of the microscopy slides, as well as the microscopy analysis was undertaken by Linn Öijerstedt and the statistical analysis of the data performed by Jon Jonasson.
The human fetal ovarian material was provided by the Joint MRC (grant G0700089)/Wellcome Trust (grant GR082557) Human Developmental Biology Resource (http://hdbr.org).
Conflicts of Interest
All authors declare no conflict of interest.
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© 2014 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/).
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The California Crop Weather report from the National Agricultural Statistics Service’s Sacramento Field Office released June 25, 2012.
The week of June 18 began with near to above normal temperatures statewide under the influence of high pressure.
A long-lived, low-pressure trough pattern developed for Northern and Central California as a Gulf of Alaska low pressure disturbance moved into Northern California’s coastal areas. This system brought sharply cooler temperatures and breezy conditions by the middle and latter part of the period with high temperatures in the Central Valley in the 70’s to lower 80’s.
Precipitation with this system was mainly light for interior portions of Northern California but the Northwest Coast had rainfall totals exceed an inch around Eureka and Crescent City.
Meanwhile, the Southland had dry conditions with a somewhat cooler onshore pattern which developed late in the period.
The desert areas experienced triple-digit high temperatures throughout the period.
Nearly two-thirds of the California wheat crop was harvested by week’s end.
Alfalfa was cut, raked, and baled.
Cooler temperatures throughout the week temporarily slowed the pace of cotton development. More than a third of the cotton crop was squared by week’s end. The crop was monitored for pests since gusty winds aided insect movement across fields.
Nearly all planted rice fields have emerged.
The cotton and rice crops were rated mostly good to excellent.
Plum, prune, peach, apricot, and nectarine fruit developed. Harvests continued for plums, plumcots, peaches, apricots, and nectarines in the San Joaquin Valley. In the Sacramento Valley, the harvests picked up for stone fruits.
The cherry harvest was winding down across the state. Apple fruit developed. Kiwi flowered. Figs leafed out and set fruit. Jujubes bloomed.
Table grapes in the Coachella Valley were harvested. Other grapes developed fruit. Vineyards were sprayed for weeds and powdery mildew.
The pomegranate bloom was finishing and fruit developed. The olive crop progressed well. Blueberries and strawberries were picked and packed.
The harvests of Valencia oranges and lemons continued. The late Navel orange harvest was wrapping up.
Almond nuts developed as hull split approached.
Coddling moth sprays in walnuts were complete for the first generation as growers waited for the second flight to start.
Pistachio shells hardened.
Kern County reported carrot, organic vegetable, and watermelon harvests.
In Tulare County, early-season vegetables including eggplant, squash, and cucumbers were harvested while other vegetable varieties grew well.
Fresno County reported carrot, onion, and garlic irrigation and fertilization while dehydrator onions were prepared for harvest.
In Stanislaus County, eggplant, cabbage, broccoli, greenhouse tomatoes, garlic, onions, herbs, and squash were harvested. Tomatoes, peppers, cantaloupes, and honeydews grew well in the heat.
In San Joaquin County, onions were harvested along with early varieties of watermelon.
Sutter County reported fresh melon crop emergence and tomato transplants grew well, while the garbanzo bean and onion harvests were ongoing.
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¿Qué puedo hacer?
tipo de documento Francés-Lengua extranjera - Secuencia didáctica
Acerca de este recurso...
To learn about the physical characteristics of this vast geographical area.
KNOWLEDGE TYPE: declarative, procedural
LEARNING OBJECTIVES:to learn about and understand the physical characteristics of America as a continent and as one of the world's vast geographical areas
PRIOR KNOWLEDGE:prior knowledge of the physical and hydrographical geography of the American continent is required. Students will presumably have done classwork with their respective teacher
The use of these contents is universal, free of charge and open, as long as it is for educational, non-commercial purposes. The actions, products and utilities derived from its use may not, as a result, generate any kind of profit. Likewise, it is mandatory to cite the source.
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Fecha publicaci?n: 29.3.2015
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BALI – This month’s international meeting in Bali will set a framework that will attempt to prevent the impending disaster of global warming/climate change. There is now little doubt that greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, are leading to significant changes in climate. Nor is there doubt that these changes will impose huge costs. The question is no longer whether we can afford to do something, but rather how to control emissions in an equitable and effective way.
The Kyoto Protocol was a major achievement, yet it left out 75% of the sources of emissions: the US, the largest polluter, refused to sign. (With Australia’s new government now having signed the Protocol, America is now the sole holdout among the advanced industrial countries.) No requirements were put on developing countries, yet within the not-too-distant future, they will contribute half or more of emissions. And nothing was done about deforestation, which is contributing almost as much to increases in greenhouse gas concentrations as the US.
The US and China are in a race to be the world’s worst polluter; America has long won the contest, but in the next few years, China will claim that dubious honor. But Indonesia is number three, owing to its rapid deforestation.
One concrete action that should be taken at Bali is support for the initiative of the Rainforest Coalition, a group of developing countries that want help to maintain their forests. These countries are providing environmental services for which they have not been compensated. They need the resources, and the incentives, to maintain their forests. The global benefits of supporting them far outweigh the costs.
The timing of the conference is not propitious. George W. Bush, long a skeptic about global warming, and long committed to undermining multilateralism, remains America’s president. His close connections with the oil industry make him loathe to force it to pay for its pollution.
Still, the Bali meeting’s participants can agree on a few principles to guide future negotiations. These include, first, that solutions to global warming require the participation of all countries. Second, there can be no free riders, so trade sanctions – the only effective sanctions that the international community currently has – can and should be imposed on those not going along. Third, the problem of global warming is so vast that every instrument must be employed.
Better incentives must be part of the solution. But there is a raging controversy over whether the Kyoto protocol’s cap-and-trade system or taxes work better. The problem with the Kyoto system is assigning caps that will be acceptable to developed and developing countries. Giving emission allowances is like giving away money – potentially hundreds of billions of dollars.
Kyoto’s underlying principle – that countries that emitted more in 1990 are allowed to emit more in the future – is unacceptable to developing countries, as is granting greater emission rights to countries with a higher GDP. The only principle that has some ethical basis is equal emission rights per capita (with some adjustments – for instance, the US has already used up its share of the global atmosphere, so it should have fewer emission allowances). But adopting this principle would entail such huge payments from developed countries to developing countries, that, regrettably, the former are unlikely to accept it.
Economic efficiency requires that those who generate emissions pay the cost, and the simplest way of forcing them to do so is through a carbon tax. There could be an international agreement that every country would impose a carbon tax at an agreed rate (reflecting the global social cost). Indeed, it makes far more sense to tax bad things, like pollution, than to tax good things like work and savings. Such a tax would increase global efficiency.
Of course, polluting industries like the cap-and-trade system. While it provides them an incentive not to pollute, emission allowances offset much of what they would have to pay under a tax system. Some firms can even make money off the deal. Moreover, Europe has grown used to the concept of cap-and-trade, and many are loathe to try an alternative. Yet, no one has proposed an acceptable set of principles for assigning emission rights.
For some, this is not a concern. With developing countries standing to lose even more than developed countries if nothing is done about global warming, many believe they can be cajoled, threatened, or induced to be part of a global agreement. Developed countries need only figure out the minimum price they have to pay developing countries to go along.
But developing countries worry that a new global agreement on emissions, like so many other international agreements, will leave them in a disadvantageous position.
In the end, Realpolitik may rule. But the world today is different from the world of 25 years ago, or even 10 years ago. Flourishing democracies in many developing countries mean that their citizens demand fair treatment.
Principles do matter. The Bali meeting’s participants should bear this in mind: global warming is too important to be held hostage to another attempt at squeezing the poor.
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Strategic management is a critical factor in lifting organisational performance – the way we lead operate and make decisions. By effectively managing risk, utilising data and making well-informed and intentional resourcing decisions you can enhance the delivery and impact of your school strategic plan.
This course is comprised of nine discrete modules which are delivered in association with other branches and divisions within the Department.
These modules support the Department’s commitment to the public sector values of integrity, accountability, respect, leadership, impartiality and responsiveness across the organisation.
These modules are suitable for substantive and acting principals, assistant principals and school leaders with management responsibilities across the module areas.
Modules offered throughout the year include:
Module 1 –
Introduction to Strategic Management
Managed by Bastow, this one-day module provides you with an opportunity to reflect on how strategic decisions can help you achieve your school vision encapsulated in your school strategic plan, and provides an overview of the other modules in the program.
Module 2 –
Law and Order
Developed and delivered by lawyers from the Legal Division, the module uses engaging and relevant case studies and provides plenty of opportunity for interaction and questions with the managers of the Children, Families and Education Law and Workplace, Discrimination and Disputes Units.
The aim of the module is to ensure that principals and acting principals are able to manage legal risks in schools and understand key legal concepts and obligations.
Module 3 –
Bricks and Mortar (PDF - 343 Kb)
Developed by the Infrastructure and Sustainability Division, the Bricks and Mortar module provides technical leadership and training in the area of school asset management, including planned and reactive maintenance, compliance and safety requirements, and school capital works procedures.
Module 4 –
Developed by the Schools Resource Allocation Branch, Finance Matters builds your technical capabilities in financial management. It equips you with the knowledge and skills to effectively manage school finances, based on the Department policy and best practice.
Module 5 –
Developed by the Improvement and Accountability Branch, in collaboration with independent provider Silent Partners Learning Services, Data Literacy aims to improve your capacity to use the wide range of data sets available to schools to improve educational outcomes for students. The module focuses on the importance of evidence-based decision-making and the development of specific data literacy skills needed to analyse and effectively interpret currently available data.
Module 6 –
Developed by the Human Resources Division, this module focuses on practical solutions to managing your workforce successfully by developing a culture of high expectations, moving from vision to successful accountability using effective feedback processes and decision-making strategies.
Module 7 –
Safety Management for School Leaders
Developed by the Employee Safety and Wellbeing Branch, this module provides an overview of effective safety management within the school environment. Through presentations, discussions, case studies and group activities, the one-day program provides you with knowledge and skills to effectively manage safety and wellbeing.
Module 8 –
Developed and delivered by the Human Resources Division, this one-day module builds the knowledge and skills necessary to create an effective workforce plan. You develop a step-by-step overview of the workforce planning process and identify and consider a range of data and materials that enable you to build an in-depth knowledge and understanding of your workforce needs.
Module 9 –
Managed by Bastow, this module is designed for principals (or aspiring principals) who wish to develop their understanding and skills in their role as Executive Officer of School Council. It therefore has a different focus to the Improving School Governance program that is currently available to school councils. You will learn to respond strategically to changing demands and challenges, and gain skills in handling both the technical and relationship management aspects of the role.
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see also: social entrepreneurship
A social enterprise is essentially an organisation that trades in the market, but aims to do more than make a financial profit; instead, it devotes the profit it makes towards a social objective.
The search for an "original" definition
As the term 'social enterprise' has become fashionable, a number of claims as to its origin have been made. Professor Jacques Defourny of the University of Liège and the EMES network traces it to Harvard University and the Ashoka Foundation, established in 1980 to support social entrepreneurship. Others say that it was first developed by Freer Spreckley in 1978 and promoted in a publication called Social Audit – A Management Tool for Co-operative Working published in 1981 by Beechwood College in Leeds, UK. In the original publication the term social enterprise was developed as a general description to cover a range of democratically owned and run organisations that use Social Audit as a way of measuring their non-commercial actions in conjunction with a financial audit to measure their financial actions. Freer went on to describe a social enterprise as:
- "An enterprise that is owned by those who work in it and/or reside in a given locality, is governed by registered social as well as commercial aims and objectives and run co-operatively may be termed a social enterprise. Traditionally, ‘capital hires labour’ with the overriding emphasis on making a ‘profit’ over and above any benefit either to the business itself or the workforce. Contrasted to this is the social enterprise where ‘labour hires capital’ with the emphasis on personal, environmental and social benefit." (For a copy of the original pamphlet that first described social enterprise please go to http://www.locallivelihoods.com Publications and download a PDF copy of the Social Audit - A Management Tool for Co-operative Working 1981 copy.)
This definition combines those of the workers' co-operative and neighbourhood co-operative, at that time promoted by ICOM, the Industrial Common Ownership Movement (now merged into Co-operatives UK).
Definitions still vary, and if anything the term is being interpreted more and more broadly. The best established European research network in the field, EMES http://www.emes.net, gives the following general definition:
- Social enterprises can be defined as organisations with an explicit aim to benefit the community, initiated by a group of citizens and in which the material interest of capital investors is subject to limits. They place a high value on their independence and on economic risk-taking related to ongoing socio-economic activity.
This is an encapsulsation of its more complex Weberian 'ideal type', which sets out nine fuzzy criteria:
Despite, and sometimes in contradiction to, such academic work, the term "social enterprise" is being picked up and used in different ways in various European countries.
1. continuous activity of the production and/or sale of goods and services (rather than predominantly advisory or grant-giving functions).
2. a high level of autonomy: social enterprises are created voluntarily by groups of citizens and are managed by them, and not directly or indirectly by public authorities or private companies, even if they may benefit from grants and donations. Their shareholders have the right to participate (‘voice’) and to leave the organisation (‘exit’).
3. a significant economic risk: the financial viability of social enterprises depends on the efforts of their members, who have the responsibility of ensuring adequate financial resources, unlike most public institutions.
4. social enterprises’ activities require a minimum number of paid workers, although, like traditional non-profit organisations, social enterprises may combine financial and non-financial resources, voluntary and paid work.
5. an explicit aim of community benefit: one of the principal aims of social enterprises is to serve the community or a specific group of people. To the same end, they also promote a sense of social responsibility at local level.
6. citizen initiative: social enterprises are the result of collective dynamics involving people belonging to a community or to a group that shares a certain need or aim. They must maintain this dimension in one form or another.
7. decision making not based on capital ownership: this generally means the principle of ‘one member, one vote’, or at least a voting power not based on capital shares. Although capital owners in social enterprises play an important role, decision-making rights are shared with other shareholders.
8. participatory character, involving those affected by the activity: the users of social enterprises’ services are represented and participate in their structures. In many cases one of the objectives is to strengthen democracy at local level through economic activity.
9. limited distribution of profit: social enterprises include organisations that totally prohibit profit distribution as well as organisations such as co-operatives, which may distribute their profit only to a limited degree, thus avoiding profit maximising behaviour.
Ongoing research work characterises social enterprises as often having multiple objectives, multiple stakeholders and multiple sources of funding.
See presentation by Marthe Nyssens, lead author of the most recent EMES study, Social Enterprise - At the crossroads of market, public policies and civil society (Routledge, 2006): http://katarsis.ncl.ac.uk/ws/ws3/Presentations/WP1-1-socialenterprise-nyssens.pdf
Their objectives tend to fall into three categories:
- integration of disadvantaged people through work (work integration social enterprises or WISEs)
- provision of social, community and environmental services
- ethical trading such as fair trade
- In Finland a law was passed in 2004 that defines a social enterprise (sosiaalinen yritys) as being any sort of enterprise that is entered on the relevant register and at least 30% of whose employees are disabled or long-term unemployed. As of April 2008, some 160 such enterprises had been registered, the largest with 50 employees. (In the UK the more specific term 'social firm' is used to distinguish such integration enterprises);
Finland used the EQUAL initiative to explore broader conceptions of social enterprise (see 2005 conference report). In 2009 the Ministry of Employment and the Economy (TEM) launched the two-year Hyvä (‘Good’) project to improve the productivity of health and care service, including by introducing a purchaser-provider split. Wishing to learn from the British experience, the project commissioned a report from Jonathan Bland, former CEO of the Social Enterprise Coalition in the UK. The report, Social Enterprise Solutions for 21st Century Challenges – the UK Model of Social Enterprise and Experience, clarifies the role of social enterprise in the delivery of services other than work integration:
- There is already some social enterprise activity in Finland; the associations that have set up new companies to deliver care services, a wave of new co-operatives established over the past 20 years and according to a survey there are businesses that have social aims….
- The Finnish government is committed to finding new models to renew the production of public services, particularly in the field of health and care. There is agreement at national level, from then municipalities, private business and the NGO sector that the system must be renewed. Social enterprises offer a model that can achieve consensus support across the political spectrum and from wider society to reform service delivery.
As a result, we may see the growth of a sizeable sector of social enterprises in the health and care sector. To avoid ambiguity, the term yhteiskunallisten yritysten has now been invented to refer to this broader conception of social enterprise.
- Italy passed a law in 2005 on imprese sociali, which the government gave form and definition by decree in 2008.
- In the UK, the government has adopted a very loose definition, focusing on non-proft distribution rather than ownership or participation: social enterprises are “businesses with primarily social objectives whose surpluses are principally reinvested for that purpose in the business or community, rather than being driven by the need to maximise profit for shareholders and owners” .
- However organisations of social enterprises themselves often use more elaborated definitions.
Social Enterprise London
The UK's first substantial promoting body in the 1990s used three criteria:
- Enterprise orientation: They are directly involved in producing goods or providing services to a market. They seek to be viable trading organisations, with an operating surplus.
- Social Aims: They have explicit social aims such as job creation, training or the provision of local services. They have ethical values including a commitment to local capacity building, and they are accountable to their members and the wider community for their social environmental and economic impact.
- Social ownership: They are autonomous organisations with governance and ownership structures based on participation by stakeholder groups (users or clients, local community groups etc.) or by trustees. Profits are distributed as profit sharing to stakeholders or used for the benefit of the community.
Social Enterprise Coalition
The UK's national apex organisation for social enterprises describes social enterprise as follows:
- Social enterprises are profit-making businesses set up to tackle a social or environmental need.
- Many commercial businesses would consider themselves to have social objectives, but social enterprises are distinctive because their social or environmental purpose is central to what they do. Rather than maximising shareholder value their main aim is to generate profit to further their social and environmental goals.
- Well-known examples of social enterprises include Jamie Oliver's restaurant Fifteen, The Big Issue, the Eden Project, the Co-op Bank and fair-trade coffee company Cafédirect.
- Recent government data suggest that there are more than 55,000 social enterprises in the UK with a combined turnover of £27bn. Social enterprises account for 5% of all businesses with employees, and contribute £8.4 billion per year to the UK economy.
- The social enterprise movement is inclusive and extremely diverse, encompassing organisations such as development trusts, community enterprises, co-operatives, housing associations, 'social firms' and leisure trusts, among others. These businesses are operating across an incredibly wide range of industries and sectors from health and social care, to renewable energy, recycling and fair trade.
- Social enterprise is a business model which offers the prospect of a greater equity of economic power and a more sustainable society - by combining market efficiency with social and environmental justice.
- We believe social enterprise is the business model for the 21st century.
Carlo Borzaga and Jacques Defourny (eds), The Emergence of Social Enterprise, Routledge, London and New York, 2001. ISBN 0 415 33921 9
Marthe Nyssens (ed), Social Enterprise - At the Crossroads of market, public policies and civil society, Routledge, Abingdon and New York, 2001. ISBN 0 415 37878 8
- ↑ http://www.tem.fi/files/26787/TEM_22_2010_netti.pdf. English language version available but not online
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We’ve a new study this week, appearing in the American Heart Association’s journal Circulation that looks at the survivability of OHCA (Out of Hospital Cardiac Arrests) with non-shockable rhythms utilizing the new CPR guidelines that stress chest compressions.
Non-shockable cardiac arrest arrhythmias are asystole (flat line) and PEA (Pulseless Electrical Activity) – what we used to call back in the stone age of EMS, electromechanical dissociation.
Neither of which respond to defibrillation.
Thirty-five years ago, most cardiac arrests started out with either pulseless ventricular tachycardia or (worse) ventricular fibrillation (both shockable rhythms) - that if not corrected - rapidly progressed to PEA or Asystole and ultimately death.
Which is why EMS put such emphasis on getting paramedics equipped with defibrillators and cardiac meds onto ambulances starting in the early 1970s.
But in recent years – for reasons that are not altogether understood – the number of shockable cardiac arrests is on the decline, while incidence of PEA and asystole are rising (see JEMS article “Where Has V Fib Gone: Why today’s EMS crews see less ventricular fibrillation in the field.”)
Some researchers propose that better detection and earlier treatment of coronary artery disease may be responsible for this pendulum swing.
But with these gains come questions over whether the new standards for CPR – first unveiled in 2005 - work as well for non-shockable cardiac arrests.
Which brings us to the study, published earlier this week in the journal Circulation. You’ll find excerpts from the abstract below, but follow the link to read it (or the entire study) in its entirety.
Peter J. Kudenchuk1; Jeffrey D. Redshaw; Benjamin A. Stubbs; Carol E. Fahrenbruch; Florence Dumas; Randi Phelps; Jennifer Blackwood; Thomas D. Rea; Mickey S. Eisenberg
Background—Out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) claims millions of lives worldwide each year. OHCA survival from shockable arrhythmias (ventricular fibrillation/tachycardia) improved in several communities after implementing American Heart Association resuscitation guidelines that eliminated "stacked" shocks and emphasized chest compressions. "Non-shockable" rhythms are now the predominant presentation of OHCA, upon which the benefit of such treatments is uncertain.
Conclusions—Outcomes from OHCA due to non-shockable rhythms, though poor by comparison with shockable rhythm presentations, improved significantly after implementing resuscitation guideline changes, suggesting their potential to benefit all presentations of OHCA.
For more on all of this, we have the press release from the American Heart Association.
April 02, 2012
- CPR can save someone with cardiac arrest even if they don’t respond to a defibrillator.
- People with non-shockable cardiac arrest are more likely to live if they receive CPR based on recent guidelines emphasizing chest compressions.
- The American Heart Association’s CPR guidelines emphasizing chest compressions are saving more lives, according to a new study.
DALLAS, April 2, 2012 — People who have a cardiac arrest that can’t be helped by a defibrillator shock are more likely to survive if given CPR based on updated guidelines that emphasize chest compressions, according to research reported in the American Heart Association journal, Circulation.
“By any measure — such as the return of pulse and circulation or improved brain recovery — we found that implementing the new guidelines in these patients resulted in better outcomes from cardiac arrest,” said Peter J. Kudenchuk, M.D., lead author of the study and professor of medicine at the University of Washington in Seattle, Wash.
The American Heart Association changed its CPR guidelines in 2005 to recommend more chest compressions with fewer interruptions. The emphasis on chest compressions continued in the 2010 guidelines update.
All of which illustrates the importance of learning how to do effective CPR.
Luckily, today CPR is easier to do than ever.
Compression-only CPR is now the standard for laypeople, and so you don’t have to worry about doing mouth-to-mouth.
While it won’t take the place of an actual class, you can watch how it is done on in this brief instructional video from the American Heart Association.
A CPR class only takes a few hours, and it could end up helping you save the life of someone you love.
For more on the recent changes to bystander CPR, you may wish to visit these recent blogs.
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If you're looking to photograph a polar bear hopping sea ice floes on your next summer cruise, you better hurry because in 30 years, the Arctic Ocean could be free of ice.
Simulating the climate with computer models, researchers analyzed how global warming could affect sea-ice in the future.
The results, published in the Dec. 12 issue of Geophysical Research Letters, indicate that if greenhouse gases continue being released at their current rate, most of the Arctic basin will be ice-free in September by 2040.
Additionally, winter ice, now about 12 feet thick, will become less than 3 feet thick.
One previous study predicted that the region will have no summer ice by 2060; another study forecasts that the Arctic will be icy up until 2105.
The rapid meltdown, result of a warming globe, will itself accelerate the heating of the oceans, according to the latest study.
• Click here to visit FOXNews.com's Natural Science Center.
"As the ice retreats, the ocean transports more heat to the Arctic and the open water absorbs more sunlight, further accelerating the rate of warming and leading to the loss of more ice," said study lead author Marika Holland, a scientists from the National Center for Atmospheric Research. "This is a positive feedback loop with dramatic implications for the entire Arctic region."
Additionally, ocean circulations — affected by global warming — are driving warm ocean currents into the Arctic.
"We have already witnessed major losses in sea ice, but our research suggests that the decrease over the next few decades could be far more dramatic than anything that has happened so far," Holland said. "These changes are surprisingly rapid."
However, the future of the Arctic doesn't have to be so grim: When running simulations projecting lesser amounts of greenhouse gases, the researchers found that the summer sea ice melted at a much slower rate.
"Our research indicates that society can still minimize the impacts on Arctic ice," Holland said.
Copyright © 2006 Imaginova Corp. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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Remote-controlled quadrotor robots have been around for some time, but in the following video just released by a research team at the University of Pennsylvania's General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception (GRASP) Lab, science fiction edges much closer to science fact as a swarm of the Nano Quadrotors perform some astounding maneuvers.
Admittedly, use of the term "nano" may be stretching things a bit, but even so, the capable little robots provide an interesting glimpse into what the future may hold for surveillance, search and rescue, light construction and warfare.
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GRASP robotics researchers Alex Kushleyev, Daniel Mellinger and Vijay Kumar teamed up with developer KMel Robotics to program teams of up to twenty agile-flight-capable quadrotors to fly in various complex formations. As the video shows, the quad squadron can fly in linear arrays, navigate around obstacles and otherwise exhibit what the GRASP team dubs complex autonomous swarm behavior.
A European team recently demonstrated similar "swarm" capabilities by using quadrotors to build a 6 meter (19.7 ft) polystyrene tower.
Watch the GRASP video below to see how real-world development in this area is no longer just a flight of fancy.
View gallery - 3 images
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Recently in the news, an incident made headlines when a mother sent home an official itemized bill to the family of a child who missed her child’s party. Apparently, the family failed to notify the hosts that their plans had changed and their son would be missing the party. Granted, there was a lot of miscommunication involved, which spurred this party blunder to go viral. It now is a blame game and neither group is without fault.
This case goes beyond party etiquette, it raises the important topic about ways technology can help us in our daily lives.
Technology And It’s Benefits
Technology sometimes has a bad reputation for leading people down scary paths of sexting, identity theft, and introducing predators into their lives. However, technology can streamline schedules, simplify work and home businesses, coordinate activities, and much more.
Ultimately, technology can offer families a wide array of tools that can prevent blunders like the infamous birthday party snafu.
Here are 10 ways parents can use technology positively:
● Online calendars help coordinate everyone’s schedules and can be accessed by a variety of devices. Google Calendar is a great one to try.
● Cell phones allow families to text updates on activities, practices, and even grocery lists. Do you remember how hard it was to organize schedules without cell phones?
● Busy parents are able to pay bills and bank online. You can conveniently pay the electric bill at 11:30 while watching Jimmy Fallon.
● Doctors are now accepting Skype or using messaging services to chat with parents and patients. This can save a trip to the waiting room full of contagious germs.
● It is easy to check the weather and stay updated on severe or threatening situations. Keeping your family safe has never been easier.
● Monitor a child’s Internet activity with an app. Keep worries at bay and be involved in what your child is viewing, texting, or messaging online.
● Get homework help or locate answers to difficult questions like “what happens to atoms when you cut paper or cloth?” by Googling or seeking educational websites.
● Clean out the family entertainment center and go digital. Use movie or television services that don’t require bulky boxes, movie cases, or tons of cords.
● Forget making scrapbooks with paper and craft scissors. Use online photo sites to store, print, and create photo books.
Focusing On The Important Things
Remember the bickering party families that are now in a bitter feud over a child’s birthday party?
Both groups could have reached out to each other by using technology. They could have easily located misplaced phone numbers, messaged the host, or sent private emails asking for compensation. The ill feelings and media storm could have easily been solved early on- instead they chose to demand and threaten legal action.
In today’s world, families are pulled in different directions far too often. It is important for parents to seek out ways to enrich bonds and relationships instead of everyone going their separate ways. Technology has the ability to be used to lessen stress and time consuming tasks that steal precious moments away from the family.
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On 13th April 2010, Maryland’s Governor Martin O’Malley signed into law, Senate Bill 690, making Maryland the first US state to legally recognise a new corporate entity, the ‘Benefit Corporation’. While traditional corporation’s primary purpose is dictated by its fiduciary duty to shareholders, which means maximising shareholder profit, benefit corporations have a wider business mandate for social and environmental benefit.
The terms ‘Benefit Corporation’ and ‘B-Corp’ are not interchangeable. While both seek to benefit society and the environment, the Benefit Corporation legal entity is completely separate and distinct from B-Corp certification.
As of mid 2015, there are 28 states that have followed Maryland’s lead in enacting Benefit Corporation legislation, with over 1550 registered Benefit Corporations in the USA, of which 81 are situated in Maryland and 14 other states are looking at implementation.
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(PhysOrg.com) -- The world's most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), could be used to test the principles behind hyperdrive, a possible future form of spacecraft propulsion that could drive spacecraft at a good fraction of the speed of light.
The idea of a hyperdrive propulsion system arises from the work of an influential German mathematician, David Hilbert, in the 1920s. Hilbert studied the interactions between a stationary mass and a relativistic particle moving away from it. He calculated that if the particle was moving faster than around half the speed of lightm an inertial, distant observer would see the particle as being repelled by the mass.
Now a physicist in the U.S., Franklin Felber, has taken Hilbert's almost forgotten proposal and reversed it, calculating the repulsion should be mutual, with relativistic particles also repelling the stationary mass. Felber suggests this hypervelocity propulsion could be used to propel a stationary mass to a sizeable proportion of the speed of light.
Felber likens the idea to an elastic collision between two objects of very different mass. If a heavy mass collides with a light stationary mass, the lighter mass rebounds at around twice the speed of the larger mass. In the hypervelocity propulsion drive a relativistic particle would repel a stationary mass at a speed greater than its own.
Felber has also suggested his theory could be tested in the LHC, since it will be able to accelerate particles sufficiently to generate the repulsive force. Felber wants to install a resonant test mass beside the particle beam line inside the LHC and measure the tiny forces produced in it by the accelerated particles passing by. The mass would not interfere with the beam, and hence would not disrupt the LHC's normal operations.
The LHC, near Geneva in Switzerland, is the largest and highest energy particle accelerator in the world. It is built in a three-meter-wide circular tunnel 50-175 meters underground and 27 kilometers in diameter. It is designed to accelerate particles and smash them together to help scientists test the predictions of particle physics. It can send a particle through the 27 km ring at 99.99% of the speed of light.
If the LHC cannot be used, Felber suggests the idea could be tested at the Tevatron particle accelerator at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois. Until the LHC resumes operation, this is still the highest energy particle accelerator in operation, but since the energy is smaller than at LHC, the forces produced would also be smaller.
More information: Test of relativistic gravity for propulsion at the Large Hadron Collider, Franklin Felber, arXiv:0910.1084v1 [physics.gen-ph]
© 2009 PhysOrg.com
Explore further: Web site offers Large Hadron Collider info
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If you're hiking around Cincinnati on a warm sunny day and spot a lizard scurrying over rock walls or rocky slopes, it's likely to be the non-native European wall lizard (Podarcis muralis). However, if you ask a Cincinnatian to identify the lizard, they will most likely call it the "Lazarus lizard."
This is one of the lizards capable of detaching their tail to survive a predator's attack; a defense mechanism known as autotomy. However, the local common name "Lazarus" has nothing to do with dropping a tail to rise again. It's associated with the Lazarus family best known in Ohio for their connections with department stores.
In 1951, 10-year-old George Rau Jr., step-son of Fred Lazarus III, came across European wall lizards scurrying across rocky slopes while on a family vacation to Lake Garda in northern Italy located about 30 miles east of Milan. George smuggled a few (6 to 10 depending on the reference source) through customs to release them at his family's home on Torrence Court in the suburb of Hyde Park just east of Cincinnati.
The climate in Milan is almost identical to Cincinnati and there are plenty of rocky habitats in southwest Ohio to accommodate the lizard's needs. The European wall lizards thrived and became so numerous that Torrence Court is still sometimes referred to as "Lizard Hill." The burgeoning Italian expats were locally renamed "Lazarus lizards" in misplaced recognition of their perceived patrons. Of course, they should have been named "George's Lizards."
While the lizard story may seem like local lore, George Rau wrote a letter in 1989 to herpetologists at the Cincinnati Museum of Natural History detailing his role as the lizard trailblazer. He also repeated his story in several interviews with the news media. Research conducted by Cassandra Homan for her M.S. Thesis ("Bottlenecks and Microhabitat Preference in Invasive Wall Lizard, Podarcis muralis." University of Cincinnati, 2013) added credibility to Rau's claim. She compared genetic samples collected from the Cincinnati lizards and from the source population in Europe and confirmed a substantial loss of genetic diversity indicating a genetic bottleneck. Her computer simulations suggested the bottleneck was likely associated with only three individuals serving as the founders of the Cincinnati populations.
The European wall lizards mostly feed on insects which mean they no doubt compete with one or more of our four lizard and skink species (order Squamata, suborder Lacertilia) native to Ohio. The non-native lizards are now found in pockets throughout much of Cincinnati and parts of the adjoining states of Kentucky and Indiana. Although their spread has been patchy owing to their requirement of rocky terrain or stone walls on south-facing slopes in order to survive winters, localized population densities may be as high as 1,500 per acre.
Indeed, the species has been so successful in colonizing southwest Ohio, it is now included in the Ohio Revised Code. You will find "European wall lizard (Podarcis muralis)" listed among the names of native reptiles protected by law (Chapter 1531: Division of Wildlife; 1531.01 Division of wildlife definitions). A rare achievement for a non-native animal.
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Newswise — During the past decade, the gut has experienced a renaissance as investigations focus on the role of the microbiome on human health. While most studies have focused on bacteria, the dominant microbial inhabitants in the gut, scientists at University of Utah Health Sciences used mouse studies to show the role of yeast in aggravating the symptoms of Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD). Their work suggests that allopurinol, a generic drug already on the market, could offer some relief. The results of the study will be published online in March 8 issue of Science Translational Medicine.
IBD is an autoimmune disease characterized by chronic inflammation of the gastrointestinal tract that produces severe diarrhea, pain, fatigue and weight loss. For several decades, doctors have used the presence of yeast antibodies, specifically antibodies to the cell wall of the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, to differentiate between Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, two variations of IBD. But it was unclear the role that yeast played in relation to IBD.
“To me this was a huge hole in our understanding of the role of yeast in IBD and our health,” begins June Round, Ph.D. associate professor in pathology at the University of Utah School of Medicine.
Broad surveys of yeast in the human gastrointestinal system are just now being published, but the research team chose two types of yeast that are common in the gut microbiota of healthy and IBD patients.
Saccharomyces cerevisiae, also called Baker’s yeast, is a prominent organism in our environment and our food. Rhodotorula aurantiaca is commonly found in our environment, as well as milk and fruit juice.
In this study, the scientists gave each type of yeast to mice that had been treated with chemicals to induce IBD-like symptoms. The symptoms increased in mice fed S. cerevisiae, but not in those fed R aurantiaca. “The mice fed S. cerevisiae experienced significant weight loss, diarrhea, bloody stool, just like a person with IBD,” said Tyson Chiaro, graduate student in Round’s lab.
The researchers were curious as to why.
They looked at mouse intestinal compounds to decipher this mystery. Mice fed S. cerevisiae had a higher concentration of nitrogen-rich compounds, called purines, than mice fed R. aurantiaca.
Unlike other yeast varieties, S. cerevisiae cannot break down purines that accumulate in the intestinal tract and transition to another compound called uric acid. Uric acid exacerbates inflammation, which may worsen IBD symptoms.
In addition to the mouse study, the scientists examined serum samples from normal adults. “We found that every human serum sample with high S. cerevisiae antibodies also had high uric acid levels,” she said. While only a subset of patients with IBD are colonized by S. cerevisiae, the findings of this study support the idea that yeast exacerbates the illness in those individuals, and that relief may be within reach.
To test the idea, the scientists treated mice with a generic drug, allopurinol, used to prevent production of uric acid in patients with gout. The drug significantly reduced intestinal inflammation in these mice.
“Our work suggests that if we can block the mechanism leading to the production of uric acid, perhaps with allopurinol, IBD patients with a high concentration of S. cerevisiae antibodies may have a new treatment option to reduce inflammation, which could allow the intestine time to heal,” said Round.
Clinical trials will need to be done determine whether yeast exacerbates IBD in people as it does in mice.
Round wants to expand this work by investigating how bacteria and yeast interact with one another in the gut. “Yeast and bacteria might influence the biology of one another within our gut. Yet, we have no idea how that interaction effects human disease.” said Round. “Our research will continue to explore the role intestinal micro-organisms play in our health with the hopes of identifying microbiota-based therapies to treat different diseases.”
Round and Chiaro collaborated with colleagues from University of Utah School of Medicine and ARUP Laboratories, Salt Lake City.
The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health New Innovator Award, Edward Mallinckrodt J. Foundation, Pew Scholars Program, NSF Career award, Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering.
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The New Jersey State Bar Foundation has created a series of interactive anti-bias workshops called Why We Bully. Each workshop helps educators better understand the bias behind bias-based bullying incidents.
All Why We Bully training participants will be provided relevant materials to incorporate into their schools.
This program is FREE for educators. All trainings are from 9am-3pm. Participants who attend the full training will receive 5.5 professional development credits.
Please click on the buttons below to register for a specific training. All trainings max out at 30 participants. To be put on a wait list for the training, please email Elissa Zylbershlag at [email protected] with the following information: name; school name; date of the training you would like to attend; email address; and phone number.
Registration links will be released two months prior to training dates. To be the first to learn about upcoming trainings, sign up for our educator email list here.
Fall Dates: Understanding HIB Characteristics – October 27, 2017; Unconscious Bias – November 3, 2017; Talking About Race – December 14, 2017
The Unconscious Bias training will introduce participants to the concept of unconscious (or implicit) bias in themselves and in others. This training will demonstrate to participants the many ways that unconscious bias manifests itself. It will also identify strategies to address unconscious bias in ourselves and in our school population.
Friday, August 25, 2017
This training was designed to analyze the definition of HIB in the Anti-Bullying Bill of Rights (ABR) that NJ schools use to identify Harassment, Intimidation and Bullying incidents. The training takes a cultural look at the specific characteristics listed in the definition of HIB and helps educators understand them more clearly. This makes it easier for educators to properly identify HIB incidents.
Tuesday, August 22, 2017
Issues of race and ethnicity have been coming to the forefront more recently in schools. Educators may have felt lost in how to talk about race with their students. This training will give educators a clearer idea of the difference between race and ethnicity. It will also teach about significant moments in our history pertaining to race, address the idea of privilege and help educators examine their own privilege. The training also gives educators the opportunity to practice responding to issues of race in their schools. Educators will leave knowing that it is NOT their responsibility to solve the race issues in our country, but it is their responsibility to create an open forum for students to express their feelings, frustrations and fears.
Wednesday, August 16, 2017
NJSBF “NO SHOW” POLICY
If you register for and do not show up at a workshop, we will notify you that you have been placed on our “No Show” list. Should this occur two times, you will be removed from our email list.
We understand that things happen that might prevent you from attending a workshop for which you are registered. You may cancel your registration at any time up to the morning of the training by simply emailing [email protected] or by calling 732-937-7523 in order to prevent being placed on the “No Show” list.
The New Jersey State Bar Foundation is a nonprofit philanthropic and educational organization. Funding is furnished by the IOLTA Fund of the Bar of New Jersey and limited to providing education to the public. The Foundation is dedicated to fulfilling its mission despite limited funding that is significantly impacted by market interest rates. Your cooperation in honoring your registration at our free workshops is essential.
What attendees had to say….
“This workshop was enlightening and important for anyone working with students and families, especially in diverse settings. I highly recommend it.”Noreen Potterton
“Great workshop. I learned so much. I need to go home and process all this information. The world around us influences our bias so much – unbelievable!”Anonymous
“Thank you for making tough topics easily understood. My staff and students will be better served and educated going forward. TIME TO TURNKEY!!”Lou Waibel
“Extremely comprehensive. This training covers background knowledge to make sure you will get the most out of this training. The activities and discussions challenge you to confront your own prejudices in a safe and accepting environment. Highly recommend.”Joseph Lee
“This was one of the best workshops that I’ve ever been to. It is so refreshing to have an open conversation about issues of race with educators and mental health professionals focused on making systemic change.”Inessa Vaccaro
“In the decade I have attended trainings, this ‘Why We Bully’ series has been the best. They have been informative, well organized, thought provoking, engaging and REAL. The presenters did an EXTRAORDINARY job. I would recommend them to all my colleagues.”Eridania Towns
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Sukkot (Hebrew: סוכות), meaning Tabernacles, is the autumnal 'foot festival' in which the Jews are commanded to leave their permanent houses and to dwell in booths for seven days. The idea behind this is to remember that the Israelites lived in booths in the Wilderness for forty years. Additionally, when the Temple stood in Jerusalem, this was a pilgrimage holiday to celebrate the harvest.
Tabernacles are typically built out of wood, sheets and have a roof of a natural product, such as leaves, palm branches, through which the stars can be seen at night. The Succah must be built of certain dimensions (not too low or too high) and should have three or four walls.
On Succot, it is customary for Jewish men buy a set of the four kinds/species comprising a lulav (a palm branch), an etrog (a citron), hadassim (myrtle) and aravot (willows).
Sukkot Facts & Quotes
- Sukkot is also a harvest festival, and is sometimes referred to as Chag Ha-Asif, the Festival of Ingathering. No work is permitted on the first day, but some work is allowed on the intermediate days which are known as Chol Hamoed.
- Each day of Succot is associated with Ushpezin (visitors), one of seven Succah visitors. Each day has its visitor, starting with Abraham. The other visitors are: Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Aaron, David and Solomon.
- The book of Ecclesiastes is typically read in Synagogues. This book relates to the futility of man under the sun, but concludes optimistically with the notion that we should just do our thing and serve God.
- There is a special Priest's (Cohen's) blessing performed at the Western Wall during Succot. The Western Wall is the last surviving wall of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem at the side of the Temple Mount. Thousands of Priests, who are believed to be descendants of the original priests, assemble at the Western Wall and perform blessings.
- In the days of Nehemiah, an original Bible was found with the passages relating to the building of a Succah.
All the people came together as one in the square before the Water Gate. They told Ezra the teacher of the Law to bring out the Book of the Law of Moses, which the Lord had commanded for Israel (Nehemiah 8:1).
They found written in the Law, which the Lord had commanded through Moses, that the Israelites were to live in temporary shelters during the festival of the seventh month (Nehemiah 8:14).
Sukkot Top Events and Things to Do
- Purchase or make your own Sukkah. They are typically designed to be assembled and disassembled quickly - in less than two hours by two people.
- One can buy the four kinds (of material used to build Sukkot as per the Torah) or order them from Israel. The four kinds include palm branches, an Etrog (citron), three willow branches and two myrtle branches. The palm, myrtle and willow are bound together in a palm holder.
- See the movie Ushpezim with English subtitles. It which relates to the four kinds and a couple's efforts to buy a most beautiful four species set, despite their poor economic situation. Ushpizin can be viewed on YouTube.
- Read the book of Ecclesiastes or watch a lecture about it. It was written by King Solomon. It relates to the futility of life, apart from basic belief and being righteous.
- Attend a local Succot fair.
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Newswise — NASHVILLE, Tenn. – Mosquitos are involuntary bioterrorists. For many years scientists thought that mosquitoes provided the disease organisms which they spread with a relatively free ride because the insects didn’t have much in the way of natural defenses to fight off these microscopic stowaways.
Recent research, however, has revealed that mosquitoes have surprisingly sophisticated immune systems. Unlike humans and most other animals, mosquitoes do not generate antibodies that identify and attack specific infectious agents. However, they have developed alternative methods for destroying various pathogens, including parasites that cause malaria.
In the latest study of the mosquito’s immune system – published online on Nov. 29 in the journal PLOS Pathogens – a pair of Vanderbilt biologists have discovered mosquitoes possess a previously unknown mechanism for destroying pathogens that takes advantage of the peculiarities of the insect’s circulatory system to increase its effectiveness.
Studies of this sort are providing the information needed to manipulate the mosquito immune system to block malaria parasites more effectively and to develop other novel disease control strategies.
“It may come as a surprise to many people, but mosquitoes get sick too and they need to protect themselves,” said Julián Hillyer, assistant professor of biological sciences, who conducted the research with graduate student Jonas King.
“The mosquito’s immune system isn’t as complex as ours. About 350 of its 12,500 genes have immune functions,” Hillyer said. “But it is remarkably effective. The vast majority of the malaria parasites that infect a mosquito die before they can get into the salivary glands where they can infect vertebrate prey, such as humans.”
“Pathogens like those that cause malaria, dengue and yellow fevers come from the female’s blood meal and end up in the mosquito’s gut,” Hillyer said. “They then leave the gut and enter the mosquito’s main body cavity, and from there they have to make their way to its salivary glands.”
Inside the body cavity, pathogens have to fight two main forces: the swift circulation of the mosquito’s own blood, and attacks from the mosquito’s immune system.
The mosquito’s circulatory system is dramatically different from that of mammals and humans. A long tube extends from the insect’s head to tail and is hung just under the cuticle shell that forms the mosquito’s back. The heart makes up the rear two-thirds of the tube and consists of a series of valves within the tube and helical coils of muscle that surround the tube. These muscles cause the tube to expand and contract, producing a worm-like peristaltic pumping action.
Most of the time, the heart pumps the mosquito’s blood—a clear liquid called hemolymph—toward the mosquito’s head, but occasionally it reverses direction. The mosquito doesn’t have arteries and veins like mammals. Instead, the blood flows from the heart into the abdominal cavity and eventually cycles back through the heart. “The mosquito’s heart works something like the pump in a garden fountain,” Hillyer said.
In order to make it to their goal, pathogens must pass through one of the heart valves. As a result, the valves act as physical bottlenecks during the migration of viruses and malaria parasites.
Cells called hemocytes are an important element in the mosquito’s defense system. These are special immune cells carried in the hemolymph that play a role analogous to white blood cells in humans. They circulate around the body with the hemolyph and attack foreign cells and viruses when they contact them.
What Hillyer and King discovered was that when a mosquito becomes infected with bacteria or malaria parasites, a population of hemocytes is recruited to the valves of the heart, where they capture and destroy invading pathogens. These new mosquito immune cells, which they have named periostial hemocytes, substantially increase their odds of encountering and destroying invaders by congregating in areas of high hemolymph flow.
“What happens to these pathogens while they are carried inside the mosquito’s body is a critical part of the infection cycle that we are just beginning to understand,” said Hillyer.
This research was funded by the National Science Foundation grant number IOS-1051636.
Visit Research News @ Vanderbilt for more research news from Vanderbilt. [Media Note: Vanderbilt has a 24/7 TV and radio studio with a dedicated fiber optic line and ISDN line. Use of the TV studio with Vanderbilt experts is free, except for reserving fiber time.]-VU-
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At the early time when radios used antennas to transmiss as well as receive signals, it's probably not common to see such gadgets in use. In the era of internet, mainstream technology offers us real-time options to communicate with one another on computers via the internet as well as enjoy listening to news and music streamed into media players. However, nothing beats the rasp and crackle on the conventional radio as a means to connect into the unknown.
A radio antenna's main function is to convert radio frequency signals picked up from the air by its receivers, into electrical signals to produce audible sound. If the radio is also meant for transmission, it then converts electrical signals, which represent a human's voice or a song, into radio frequency signals and emit them. Since these signals travel through the air, there is always a great chance of signal loss depending on its surroundings. Any electrical device radiating some form of frequency can affect the radio's transmission and reception. An antenna constructed of incorrect height and material is also subject to further interference.
Radio stations sport giant antennas to ensure strong signal transmission to its listeners. Hence, radio antennas attached to the device itself are quite sufficient to pick up these strong signals without having the need for secondary antennas. The trick, however, is to adjust the antenna to pick up the best reception possible. Since radio signals travel as waves, the antenna height plays an important role. Simply extending it to its fullest doesn't automatically ensure good reception.
If you are staying in the outback away from civilization, an outdoor antenna may be required to pick up and transmit stronger signals. Ensure you place it in a clear area on high ground for maximum effect. Within city limits, an indoor antenna is a good alternative to avoid a sore thumb in your garden. Normally attached to the highest part of the house, insulated wire is run from the antenna to the radio. There is no hard and fast rule on which antenna heights work best. It all comes down to testing and tuning for what best suits your environment.
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"We owe a lot to the Indians, who taught us how to count, without which no worthwhile scientific discovery could have been made."—Albert Einstein
"India is the cradle of the human race, the birthplace of human speech, the mother of history, the grandmother of legend, and the great grand mother of tradition. Our most valuable and most instructive materials in the history of man are treasured up in India only."—Mark Twain
A really long story made short - The world's largest and most complex democracy. Also birthplace of Indus, one of the five earliest civilizations in the world which together formed the foundation of human culture, along with Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, and Mesoamerica.
Arguably, the concept of India as a whole begins in 4th century BCE, when most of the subcontinent came under the Maurya Empire, ruled by King Chandragupta Maurya with his adviser, Chanakya. The empire was formed, uniting the many fragments of the subcontinent, presumably as a defense against the Greek invasion led by Alexander the Great. This theory is given credence because Chanakya, the architect of Chandragupta's rise to power, viewed the Greek conquest as an invasion on Indus culture. Chanakya is today regarded as one of the greatest War Strategists of all time, and the tale of his cunning tactics and ploys against the Greeks (both Alexander and his successors) have grown into legend.
Chanakya's manipulations struck several blows to the invading Macedonian army, not the least of which was Alexander almost getting killed, twice, during and after the Battle Of Hydaspes, which is a story unto itself (see the Maurya Empire article for more). As a result, India went almost completely unaffected by the Macedonian Conquests.
Although the Empire went into decline after the deaths of Chandragupta and Chanakya, and soon broke up into what would later be termed the Middle kingdoms of India, most of the kingdoms co-existed in peace, and trade routes started by Maurya flourished over the next 1,500 years. This classical period is known as the Golden Age of the country, during which India became the wealthiest economy in the world. It is estimated that almost one-third of the entire world's wealth was under India's control at the dawn of the 18th century, when the Europeans, most importantly the British, came calling.
Under British Colonial Rule, first under the East India Company and then directly under the Crown, two hundred and fifty years of rapid economic decline followed. Britain created a modern, united, well-developed system of rule, with railways, telegraph and court systems - but the entire infrastructure was specifically designed to exploit the resources of the country, with no regard as to the consequences for the Indian people. The two and a half centuries of brutal, plundering Colonial Rule gave birth to one of the poorest, most struggling economies in the world, with frequent famines, stalled industrial development, poverty and widespread illiteracy. This is known as "The Drain" in Indian history, when the near entirety of India's wealth and resources were annexed and pillaged by the British. Britain then proceeded to popularize this image of the 'Poor India' around the world, emphasizing that such a country of "savages" was unfit to rule itself.
Obtaining total Independence from Britain on August 15th, 1947, India was divided into what is now modern India, Pakistan, Portugese occupied Goa (which was later conquered and integrated into India--not that most Goans had any problem with it), Bangladesh (which broke off from Pakistan in '71 with India's help), Bhutan (which remains independent), and Sikkim (which was an Indian protectorate from independence to 1975, at which point it was admitted as a state). A much-overlooked fact is that because of the structure of the British Raj, India had to fight for considerable swaths of its own territory (Kashmir aside): while the parts of the subcontinent under direct British rule immediately became part of the Union of India (as it was called before it became a republic in 1950), the Princely States, which Britain theoretically governed indirectly through traditional Indian monarchs, now had the option of joining India, joining Pakistan, or remaining independent. Majority-Muslim states on the border with Pakistan tended to join Pakistan without controversy, while most others chose to join India. However, several princely states refused to follow the obvious patterns, the most notable of which are Kashmir, Junagadh, and Hyderabad, all instances where the ruling elite was a different religion from the majority of the population in the state. Kashmir, where the ruler was Hindu and the people Muslim, is quite possibly the biggest political can of worms in the world today besides the Arab-Israeli Conflict and (historically, perhaps) The Troubles. The other two major instances involved a Muslim ruler over a majority-Hindu state: Junagadh's Muslim prince decided to join Pakistan despite not bordering it at all, leading India to essentially lay siege to the territory, and eventually the prince fled. Hyderabad's Muslim ruler decided he didn't much care to be part of India or Pakistan, and Hyderabad had to be integrated by force of arms.
A lot of the problems the British left behind are still there now, most notably a high rate of illiteracy in the more rural areas, which both the government and private organizations are fighting to change. Sixty years of quick, accelerated development later, India today is the world's largest democracy, maintaining the second largest military in the world, a nuclear superpower, and the only nation that has U.N permission to trade in nuclear fuel without having signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
For a country that has only had six decades of actual modern development, it says a lot about how fast the nation is moving forward, especially when Americans today are concerned that Indians are surpassing them in the IT sector. Poverty is extremely widespread still, with 41% of the nation falling below the poverty line (and an equal percentage of malnourished children), and the nation containing a third of the world's poor. It is trying to deal with these problems, but it will be a slow climb.
(Note: A lot of the pages below are unfinished, so just go ahead and create/expand them if you think you can.)
- Indus Valley Civilization: One of the most ancient civilizations in the world.
- The Vedic Age: Indo-Aryan tribes moved into the Indus valley, and then, all of northern India. They brought the Sanskrit language, which is comparable to Latin in Europe in terms of the influence it had on India. It also is a distant relative of English.
- The Mauryan Empire - Macedonian Invasion, The Battle Of Hydaspes, Unity under Mauryan Rule, decline into the Middle Kingdoms
- The Middle Kingdoms - Growth of Economy, The Mughal Expansion, Prithviraj Chauhan, Discovery by Vasco Da Gamma, Arrival of the British
- Formation Of The Raj - Annexation by East India Company, Rule until 1857, The Sepoy Mutiny (India's First War For Independence)
- The Raj - The Colonial Rule, Popularization of the "Savage" India through British Media, The JWB Massacre, The World Wars, Bhagath Singh, Mahatma Gandhi
- The Largest Democracy - Indpendence in 1947, The Partition into India and Pakistan, Important events from 1948 - present
- Hindu Mythology - The truth about it, not the unresearched crap you see in movies
- Indian Languages - 22 officially recognized languages, 250+ minor languages, 4000+ variations and dialects...
- Bollywood - The
IndianHindi Film Industry, nicknamed after its U.S counterpart.
- The Otherwoods - Because not all Indian movies are Bollywood.
- Filmi Music - Ever wonder why Indian movies have so many songs and musical numbers?
- Cricket Rules - Cricket, Cricket, Cricket. What is it?
- Type Caste - And just like everywhere else, Indians have their own type of racism. The one particular aspect of the nation's history people want to forget, but can't.
- Mad Dogs And Englishmen - India's climate
- Sim Sim Salabim - What does India looks like? It's full of snake charmers and flying carpets, of course!
- Indian Accents - You are to be teaching me very good English, Masterji!
- Bollywood Nerd - All Indians are absolute geniuses!
- Operator From India - No, wait, all Indians work in Call Centers!
- Kali Is The Goddess Of Death - Apparently, Indians worship death and want to destroy the world.
- South Indian Food - Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and other Southern States
- North Indian Food - Punjab, Kashmir, Rajasthan, etc.
- Other Cuisines Of India - Eastern, Western, and North Eastern India
- Indians With Iglas - The Indian Military
- Indian Laws - The Police, The Court System, And other organizations.
- The Common Law - India's colonial legal heritage. Everything but family/personal law falls under this tradition.
- The Kashmir Question - If you hear about problems between India and Pakistan, some of them are over Kashmir.
- Indian Railways - The Railway department of the government holds the Guinness Book distinction of being the world's largest commercial or utility employer.
- Indian Roads - Ah, the roadways of India. Or, alternately, your worst nightmare.
- Unity In Diversity - Hundreds of religions and languages, how do they coexist?
- Indian Accents
- Type Caste
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Charles II, James II and the Revolution of 1688-9
When the Convention Parliament met in March 1660 there was still some doubt about what action it would take to settle the country, and what influence the army under General Monck would have. It quickly decided, though, that the government of the country should be by ‘king, Lords and Commons’. Despite attempts by prominent Presbyterians, it failed to demand limitations on royal powers of the kind which had been discussed between Parliament and Charles I in the late 1640s. The pressure to achieve a rapid settlement was too great, and by the end of May Charles II had returned to London.
He secured the support of many key political figures who had been influential in the Commonwealth and Interregnum by giving them significant roles in his government. Over the next few months the Convention Parliament achieved the disbandment of most of the army, removing a potential threat to royal government, and had settled substantial revenues on the king. But the Convention was dominated by Presbyterians, and, worried about its attitudes to the religious question, and, hoping that new elections would produce an ultra royalist assembly, Charles dissolved it in December 1660.
The Cavalier Parliament was initially marked by enthusiastic royalism. It voted additional revenues for the crown, and completed to the political settlement by repealing the legislation which had removed bishops from the House of Lords, and which had required a fresh Parliament to be elected every three years. It endorsed (though by quite narrow majorities) the reimposition of religious uniformity. Political faction, the conspicuous expenditure of Charles II and his courtiers, two unsuccessful wars with the Netherlands in 1665-7 and 1672-7 all took their toll, however, on royalist enthusiasm and contributed to the growth of ‘country party’ opposition. Even more significant were the increasing conflicts over religion, and the signs of Catholic influence at court – confirmed by the conversion of the king’s brother, James, duke of York, in 1668 or 1669. (For more information, see 'Religion and Politics, 1660-1690')
Parliament became a much less easily manageable body, rejecting the king’s Declaration of Indulgence – a use of the royal prerogative to dispense with the statutes against worship outside the Church of England – in 1673. During the 1670s the earl of Danby attempted to secure a more manageable Parliament through an alliance with the Church of England and its supporters, and distributing offices and pensions to Members of Parliament and peers. Opposition to Danby grew intense after the revelations of the ‘Popish Plot’ in 1678: he was forced out of office and impeached.
The political crisis of 1678-81 – the ‘Exclusion crisis’ – eventually focused on demands that James be excluded from the throne, although others offered alternative solutions to the prospect of a Catholic succeeding as king, including formal restrictions on the king’s powers. It created a clear division in politics, between supporters of the exclusion proposal, often associated with religious dissent – the ‘Whigs’ – and its opponents, closely associated with the Church of England – the ‘Tories’. Charles at some points seemed likely to accept a bill to exclude his brother, but in the end held firm: after 1681 he called no more Parliaments, and instead encouraged a Tory reaction, in which many Whigs were removed from positions of local and national authority.
As a result, James II’s accession in 1685 was unopposed and Tory support was confirmed by the rebellion of Charles’s illegitimate son, the duke of Monmouth, in the west country and the duke of Argyll in Scotland. But the king’s failure to obtain support for his project to remove the religious and civil disabilities against Roman Catholics resulted in his prorogation and later dissolution of Parliament, and his attempt to secure an alliance with dissenters. He attracted very few converts, and opposition grew from Tories and the Church of England. The invasion of William, Prince of Orange in November 1688, attracted considerable support in England. In February 1689, after James’s escape to France and his extremely controversial formal deposition by the Convention Parliament, William and his wife Mary accepted the offer of the crown.
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Ali Usman Qasmi
On May 28, 2010, in Lahore, Pakistan, armed men opened indiscriminate fire at worshippers offering Friday prayers. They killed about 100 people. After media outlets broke the news of this gruesome act of violence against ‘Muslims’ offering namaz in a ‘mosque,’ an outpouring of grief and condemnation followed.
But as more details of the brutal attack became available, viewers learned that the ‘Muslims’ were Ahmadis—a persecuted religious minority. (Pakistan’s constitution declares Ahmadis to be non-Muslims; laws passed in 1984 make it a criminal offense for Ahmadis to “pose” as Muslims or to refer to their religious gathering sites as mosques.) The media reporting on the Lahore massacre immediately fine-tuned the contents of its reports to describe it as an attack not against Muslims but against Ahmadis who had gathered in their place of worship to participate in religious rituals.
Why, in spite of their numerical insignificance (about 3 million out of a total of 180 million Pakistanis), are the Ahmadis widely despised in Pakistan?
Ahmadis are followers of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (1835-1908); they believe him to be the promised messiah and a Prophet in some sense of the term. The claim by Ahmadis that a Prophet—of whatever status or category—came after Prophet Muhammad, who is believed by Muslims to be the last and best of all Prophets, is considered sacrilegious and is highly offensive to a majority of Muslims.
Born in Qadian (hence the pejorative term Qadianis and Mirzais for his followers), Mirza Ghulam Ahmad was a reader at the Deputy Commissioner’s office in Sialkot during the early part of his career. Sialkot was at the heart of Christian missionary activity at the time. This introduced Ahmad to Christian literature and led to his lifelong interest in the Bible and the life of Jesus Christ.
Ahmad started his religious career as a polemicist who was widely respected in Muslim circles for his spirited defense of Islam against Christian missionaries and Hindu extremists. In this regard his book, Barahin-i-Ahmadiyyah, is considered his magnum opus. Ahmad’s transition from a widely respected scholar, polemicist and defender of traditional Islam to a controversial figure was gradual. Initially, Ahmad considered himself a mujaddid (renewer of the Islamic faith) but eventually he claimed to be the Mehdi (guided one) and the Messiah (see Hussain in Resources).
Mainstream Islamic belief holds that Jesus went to Heaven from which he will return near the end-times to cleanse the world of infidels, with the support of Mehdi, and establish the superiority of Islam through the power of the sword. Ahmad, however, claimed Jesus had survived crucifixion and that, to escape persecution, he journeyed to India where he died and was buried in Kashmir.
The second coming of Jesus and the appearance of Mehdi foretold in Islamic sources, Ahmad argued, were actually prophecies about his (Ahmad’s) advent. With these messianic claims, he ascribed to himself some degree of Prophethood.
In a series of densely worded, complex works, Ahmad critiqued the concept of Prophethood prevalent among the majority of Sunni Muslims as inherently contradictory. Though Muslims believe that the Prophet Muhammad was the last Prophet, he pointed out, they were also waiting for Jesus Christ to descend from Heaven and return to earth as a Prophet. The term Khatim-ul-Nabiyyin—in Ahmad's nuanced interpretation—does not denote the finality of Prophethood in a numerical sense. Rather, he argued, it merely denotes that the Prophet Muhammad is the owner of the ‘seal of Prophethood.’
While Prophet Muhammad was the last and greatest of the law-bearing Prophets and the owner of the seal of Prophethood, there could be non-legislative prophets among his followers whom he considered the best embodiment of his virtues and teachings. In this sense, Ahmad claimed his Prophethood to be a zilli (reflective) and buruzi (manifestational)—one approved by the seal of Prophet Muhammad based on his (Ahmad’s) spiritual eminence and services to Islam.
However, a number of Ahmadis continued to believe that Ahmad was referring to himself as a Prophet in a metaphorical sense. This, among other factors, caused a split in the Ahmadi community soon after Ahmad's first successor, Hakim Nur ud Din, died in 1914. The breakaway faction called the Lahori Jamat believed that Mirza Ghulam Ahmad was a great mujaddid of Islam, while the Qadiyani group led by his son and second head of the Ahmadiyyah community, Mirza Bashir-ud-Din Mehmud (1889-1965), believed in his prophetic status as well.
The Ahmadis faced fierce opposition especially from the 1920s onwards as they, under the leadership of Mehmud, became increasingly involved in proselytizing missions in India and abroad, and well-placed contributors to public life. Mehmud’s rather careless use of the term kafir for non-Ahmadis—primarily understood among Muslim masses as someone who does not accept Islam—was employed by Muslim scholars to play up religious passions against the Ahmadis.
In 1952, various religio-political organizations assembled under the banner of tehrik-i-khatam-i-nabuwwat (movement for the protection of the finality of Prophethood [of Muhammad]) to campaign for the declaration of Ahmadis as non-Muslims and for the removal of Ahmadis from key civil and military posts. The demands came as Pakistan was still working out the finer details of an Islamic constitution. When the Assembly decided to insert language into the constitution specifying that the head of state must be a Muslim, tehrik insisted that Ahmadis be declared non-Muslims to make sure that only a Muslim could become the head of state.
The tehrik also reflected the growing sense of frustration, mostly faced by those struggling to rebuild their lives. While they had been uprooted from India to newly-created Pakistan as a result of partition in 1947, the Ahmadis, because of their organizational cohesion and relative affluence and education, were making substantial economic gains in the new state. The movement was also suspected of receiving covert support from the chief minister of Punjab who hoped to topple the central government.
Tehrik’s activism reached its peak in March 1953 when it sparked widespread violence resulting in loss of life, especially in the city of Lahore where Martial Law had to be imposed to control the situation. The state, however, rather than acquiescing to the demands of the tehrik protestors, stood its ground and clamped down with the use of force in the name of establishing the writ of law of the state.
A similar movement coalesced in 1974 when the elected government of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, perhaps anticipating that anti-Ahmadi protestors might turn more violent or in order to score political points, surrendered to the demand of religio-political parties. The Ahmadi issue was discussed in closed sessions of Parliament during August 1974. A unanimous vote by Parliament on September 7, 1974, passed the second constitutional amendment targeting Ahmadis, categorizing them as non-Muslims.
Speaking on the occasion, Prime Minister Bhutto triumphantly declared it as "the final solution" of the "90-year old problem.” Astute as he was in his reading and grasp of history, it is hard to believe that Bhutto did not know what he was implying. Whether it was a Freudian slip or Bhutto’s expression of guilt for what was going to happen to Ahmadis in Pakistan, the Ahmadis live under constant threat of violence.
Under some sections of the blasphemy law, Ahmadis are denied their fundamental right to practice their religion even though they consider themselves legitimate Muslims. Because of these draconian laws, and because of deeply embedded social hatred and widespread daily persecution of Ahmadis, a significant segment of the community—especially those who were highly educated and affluent—left the country in the 1980s.
The head of the Ahmadi community, Mirza Tahir Ahmad, moved to London in 1984. The move proved to be beneficial from an administrative point of view since several hundred thousand Ahmadis living in Western Europe and North America can now contribute more generously to community coffers used to setup and finance proselytizing missions all over the world.
The Ahmadi missions, competing with Christians for converts in Western Africa, have been particularly active and successful. The emergence of an Ahmadi diaspora has changed the outlook of the community since it is no longer confined to a small section of Punjabi converts. While the head of the community still dresses in traditional Punjabi attire with a turban and delivers his Friday sermon in Urdu, the second and third generation of Ahmadis growing up abroad are keen on becoming a global community, rather than simply a Pakistani one.
As a result, there is now, in addition to the English-speaking diaspora of Ahmadis and converts in North America and Western Europe, a sizeable community of French- and Swahili-speaking Ahmadis in parts of Africa. Meanwhile, those left behind in Pakistan, still the largest number of Ahmadis in the world, continue to suffer not merely because of their relative poverty, but due to the atmosphere of fear and religious oppression in Pakistani society, which has led to their ghettoization.
The suffering and persecution of Ahmadis in Pakistan strengthens and motivates members of the diaspora in their global missions, but it does not guarantee a secure future for Ahmadis in Pakistan. Nor does it secure their fundamental human right to practice their religion unmolested.
The gradual transformation of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad’s thought has been brilliantly sketched out in Adil Hussain’s From Sufism to Ahmadiyya. A Muslim Minority Movement in South Asia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015).
Yohanan Friedman's The Prophecy Continuous: Aspects of Ahmadi Religious Thought and its Medieval Background (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003) gives a thorough background of Islamic theology and Sufi thought with regard to the concepts of Prophethood and Eschatology.
Image: An unidentified man points to bullet holes and shrapnel marks inside the Garhi Shahu mosque after an attack on two mosques in Lahore packed with hundreds of Ahmadi worshippers on Friday, May 28, 2010. The attackers held hostages and battled police, officials and witnesses said. Scores of people died, and dozens were wounded in the worst attack ever against Ahmadis. (AP Photo/K.M. Chaudary)
Author, Ali Usman Qasmi, (Ph.D. South Asia Institute, Heidelberg University) is Assistant Professor of South Asian History at the Lahore University of Management Sciences. He is also a visiting research fellow in History at the Royal Holloway College, University of London. He has published extensively in journals such as Modern Asian Studies, Muslim World, and Oxford Journal of Islamic Studies. His recent monograph is The Ahmadis and the Politics of Religious Exclusion in Pakistan (London: Anthem Press, 2014). @AU_Qasmi
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Monday, November 1, 2010
Lesser Rattlesnake Orchis (Goodyera repens)
The Lesser Rattlesnake Orchis, Goodyera repens does not grow in Washington, but in the northwest reaches the southern limit of its range in British Columbia. Further east it grows as far south as the Appalachian Mountains, and is widespread, growing in Europe and Asia as well.
We see its cousin, the Giant Rattlesnake Orchis (giant only in comparison) on almost every hike, and we've seen this also on our numerous trips to the Canadian Rockies, but never in bloom. This year we were late enough to see it in bloom for the first time at Mount Robson Provincial Park.
It has a tiny rosette of about half a dozen leaves, beautifully reticulated in the plants we saw, but often hidden in the moss in which it grows. The flower spikes were 30 cm or less on the plants we saw and carried several dozen 2 cm crystalline white flowers, with a hairy exterior.
We thought it daintier and more attractive than its larger cousin, but that may only have been because we were seeing it for the first time. We found it all along the trail at all elevations and always in relatively protected and shady locations, even in some cases in a layer of moss on the rocks.
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Lester Flatt Bluegrass & White County Heritage Museum
An amazing trove of local history including a special section for the granddaddy of bluegrass, Lester Flatt. Learn about the Revolutionary War Soldier, surveyor, and frontiersman, John White, whom the county is named for. See artifacts from the many water-wheel powered mills that once operated in the area. Discover the areas involvement in the Civil War from the many gun powder producing salt-peter mines, to the battle of Dug Hill, and the home place of notorious guerrilla Champ Ferguson who became the model character for the movie “The Outlaw Josey Wales.” From 1806 to present, this museum houses many memories of our local heritage.
Rock House Historic Shrine & Old Stage Rd Museum
Imagine a time when it took four days to travel by stagecoach from Nashville to Sparta. A serpentine dirt road was the major artery from east to west and there were only a handful of “inns” along the route. One of the last original stagecoach stops in America still stands in White County, just outside of Sparta. Built to protect the wealthy from highwaymen and other looters, the accommodations were “Spartan” at best. You will particularly enjoy seeing how the building transitioned to a fortress at night. Known to have housed Andrew Jackson, James K. Polk, and Sam Houston over the years, the building is well preserved. Over 90% of the roof is still crowned by the original hand-wrought cedar shingles which are approaching two centuries old. Step back in time.
Bon Air Coal Mine Museum
Long before refined petroleum, hydroelectric or nuclear power, the nation ran off of black gold – – coal. The Cumberland Plateau was rich with bituminous coal and a black gold rush was on. To siphon the mineral, railroads were built, shafts were sunk, and a decades-long industry was established. This museum not only reflects the wealth that was created, but it also celebrates the meager existence of the families who moved to the area to mine the coal; some from as far away as Czechoslovakia. At the time, Czechoslovakia was buried in famine and dozens of Czech families moved here to improve their standard of living by spending their days in dark, dangerous mines. This museum also celebrates Earl Webb, the Wrigley won pro baseball player who dug his way out of coal mining to become a pro baseball star. The museum is housed in the last remaining railroad section house on the Cumberland Plateau.
American Legion Veteran’s Museum
Rotary Veteran’s Park
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Published Online: July 29, 2013
Numerous studies showed that number of siblings are a protective factor for allergy. Over the years, many potential causal factors, underlying this so-called “sibling effect,” have been presented ranging from in utero programming to childhood infections. In a recent article published in The Journal of Allergy & Clinical Immunology (JACI), Penders et al demonstrate, for the first time, that the bacterial composition found in the human digestive system might be determined by this sibling effect. Within a randomized placebo-controlled trial on the prevention of atopic dermatitis (AD) by oral supplementation of a bacterial lysate in infancy, the authors examined the establishment of the gut microbiota and its role in the development of AD. Next to birth mode and breastfeeding, birth order appeared to have a strong impact on the infant bacterial composition. In particular, colonization rates of clostridia, a common bacterial group or bacterial genus, at 5 and 13 weeks postpartum, decreased with increasing numbers of older siblings. Colonization with clostridia at these ages was also associated with an increased risk of subsequently developing AD. The authors demonstrated that the bacterial composition is likely to be one of the underlying mechanisms explaining the birth order effect causing allergies.These results strengthen the evidence for a causal pathway and provide new leads for the primary prevention of allergies by modulating the gut bacteria.
The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology (JACI) is an official scientific journal of the AAAAI, and is the most-cited journal in the field of allergy and clinical immunology.
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Southern exposures feature direct sunlight for most of the day. This intense exposure creates a microclimate that requires gardeners to select flowers tolerant of the heat associated with direct sun. These full-sun locations often feature very few wind blocks. Flowers for southern exposures need to be tough. Provide plenty of water and organic material in the soil to help these plants thrive in a harsh environment.
The daylily offers a tough perennial plant for the southern exposure site. This plant prefers full-sun exposure to produce trumpet-shaped blooms in early summer. Daylilies grow in a mounded form of thin foliage blades that arches outward like an umbrella. Flowers form on tall reed-like stems that shoot upward from the foliage mound. Daylilies come in a variety of colors ranging from the basic orange and yellow cultivars to intricate reds and deep purple. Despite the daylily's tolerance to poor soils, add organic material to improve plant health and flower production. Daylilies spread readily to fill a difficult planting site within a few years. This plant looks beautiful when different cultivars in the same southern garden. Plant daylilies in USDA Hardiness Zones 3 to 10.
This plant resembles a daisy in growth habit and flower shape. It produces multicolored red, orange and yellow flowers. Flowers exhibit a banding pattern on the petals with red centers and yellow edges. Blanket flower spreads readily and grows best in the full sun location. This plant won't tolerate soggy soils. Plant it in USDA Hardiness Zones 2 to 10 in southern exposures to benefit from the long blooming period of the blanket flower. Prune spent flowers to encourage further blooming. Blanket flower reaches up to 24 inches at maturity.
The annual zinnia produces strong foliage, stems and flowers in a southern exposure. Zinnia produces a tightly woven flower featuring multiple layers of petals. Typical flower colors include white, purple, pink, orange and yellow. Plant zinnias with plenty of organic material in a location that features excellent drainage. Mature plants reach height of 6 to 36 inches, depending on the cultivar. This plant produces abundant blooms with regular pruning of spent flowers. Keep zinnia soil moist but not soggy to promote good blooming.
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It’s official: New York City is stuck for the next decade with the U.S. Census Bureau’s population count of fewer than 8.2 million, now that the bureau has rejected Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s appeal asserting that enumerators had missed at least 50,000 New Yorkers.
Bloomberg submitted the appeal last August, and his administration had fought hard to adjust the Census count upward – in part because each head counted translates into more federal aid for the city.
But how much more, and for what? In today’s Daily Q we ask: How exactly does undercounting of New York City’s population affect federal aid?
If you have information or insight to share, write us, tweet @thenyworld or comment below.
What we found
Undercounting could cost the City more than $100 million in federal funds.
According to a Government Accountability Office report in 2007 on the importance of the 2010 Census data, official population figures “play a key role in the allocation of many grant programs” totalling billions of dollars each year to state and local governments.
A Brookings Institution study, showed that 215 federal programs distributed almost $447 billion in fiscal 2008 based on the census data collected in 2000. More than 80 percent of that money was split up among states and the nation’s capital, and mostly funded Medicaid payments, and highway planning and construction programs.
Programs employ formulas that depend on census data — including total population, individuals in poverty, lagging population growth, households in overcrowded homes etc. — to calculate each state’s aid allocation. The GAO found in a study that the accuracy of state and local population estimates “may have an effect, though modest, on the allocation of grant funds among the states,” and that at “a given level of appropriation, any changes in the state’s population relative to other states’ changes would have a proportional impact on the allocation of funds to the state.”
The Brookings Institute, a Washington-based liberal think tank, also showed that in the fiscal year 2008, Washington, D.C., received the most aid per capita at $4,656, followed by Vermont, Alaska, New York and Massachusetts. (The lowest amount went to Nevada, at just $742 per person.)
Due to the complexity and variety of program formulas used to bang out aid numbers, it is near impossible to pin down the exact amount New York City is losing to undercounting its population. If, however, we were to use New York’s federal aid of $2,301.14 per resident in 2008, those 50,000 and more New Yorkers that Bloomberg is saying the Census Bureau left out could have brought at least an estimated $105 million more in federal dollars.
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Ferrochromium, also known as Ferrochrome, is an alloy of iron and chromium containing 50 to 70% of chromium. It is produced by electric arc melting of chromium ore and chromite. Ferrochromium is consumed extensively in the manufacturing of steel to achieve the qualities such as corrosion resistance, tensile strength, heat resistance and yield strength. The global ferrochromium market is anticipated to be in deficit to cater the increasing global steel market in near future. Ferrochromium is mostly produced in India, China, South Africa and Kazakhstan because of large chromite resources found in these countries. The global ferrochromium market is witnessing a modest single digit CAGR growth up till now and is expected to continue in future.
Ferrochromium is having its maximum share of consumption in steel industry and due to the ever increasing construction and demand of steel the global ferrochromium market is forecasted to flourish. In order to get a continuous supply of raw material for ferrochrome, China has established its operations in the countries like Turkey, South Africa, Philippines and Zimbabwe which would boost the global ferrochromium market in future. Due to the favourable conditions like lower electricity price and lower labour cost in upcoming markets like China, the production cost reduces comparatively. This will boost the production of ferrochrome to suffice its increasing demand and will contribute in global ferrochromium market.
The global ferrochromium market can get hampered because of the increase in the export tax and fixed export quotas imposed by South Africa on chrome ore, owing to the concern of losing ferrochromium market to China. South Africa is having a significant market share in global ferrochromium market but there are concerns of power supply and higher production cost which would lead to the closure of small competitors and is estimated to slowdown the global ferrochromium market.
Based on the carbon percentage, the global ferrochromium market is segmented as -
Based in the available form, the global ferrochromium market is segmented as –
Based on the application, the global ferrochromium market is segmented as –
The global ferrochromium market can be divided into five regions, namely North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and Middle East and Africa. Asia Pacific is having the maximum market share in global ferrochromium market, China and India are the countries having an excellent steel market, so these countries are significant in the consumption of ferrochrome. China is expanding its capacity to import chrome ore for the production of ferrochrome from the countries like South Africa, Turkey, Zimbabwe. Middle East and Africa are also marking a significant growth in the global ferrochromium market, Especially South Africa is having plenty of chromite resources for the production of ferrochrome. Europe is an emerging market in the field of ferrochrome and is anticipated to have a considerable market in future due to the flourishing automobile sector in the region. North America and Latin America is at a nascent stage in the global ferrochromium market.
Some of the key players in global ferrochromium market are, Nava Bharat Ventures Limited, VISA STEEL, Balasore Alloys Limited, Aarti Steels Ltd, SR Group, Vyankatesh Metals & Alloys Pvt. Ltd
The report covers exhaustive analysis on:
Regional analysis for Ferrochromium Market includes
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Denisovans were a now extinct species of humans that were contemporaries of Neanderthal and that lived in a range from Siberia to Southeast Asia. Their genome has now been completely sequenced and, among other things, reveals that they had brown hair, brown eyes and dark skin. It also reveals that they interbred with Neanderthal and us. Per the article:
In addition, more Denisovan genetic variants were found in Asia and South America than in European populations. However, this likely reflects interbreeding between modern humans and the Denisovans' close relatives, the Neanderthals, rather than direct interbreeding with the Denisovans, researchers said....These current Denisovan findings have allowed the researchers to re-evaluate past analysis of the Neanderthal genome. They discovered modern humans in the eastern parts of Eurasia and Native Americans actually carry more Neanderthal genetic material than people in Europe, "even though the Neanderthals mostly lived in Europe, which is really, really interesting," Reich said....Comparing the Denisovan genome with ours confirmed past research suggesting the extinct lineage once interbred with ours and lived in a vast range from Siberia to Southeast Asia. The Denisovans share more genes with people from Papua New Guinea than any other modern population studied.
Wait, if Neanderthals and modern human interbred, wouldn't their offspring be infertile like a Liger? I thought that hybrids were always infertile, or am I just mistaken?
The offspring are not always infertile. Certainly significantly different species of dogs when interbred can produce fertile offspring. I suppose it depends on how different the species are. Per the article below:
....A small amount of that genetic mingling survives in "non-Africans" today: Neanderthals didn't live in Africa, which is why sub-Saharan African populations have no trace of Neanderthal DNA....
Well, I guess if the two species are closely related enough, such as when they're insame genus and share a very recent common ancestry (as in Homo Sapiens and Homo Neanderthalensis), than hybrids of the two specie could be fertile. But back to the above article, where does this place the Denisovans on the human family tree? Are they an entirely new species or rather a subspecies of an existing one, such as Neanderthals
My understanding is that they are supposed to be a distinct species but closely related to Neanderthal. My understanding is that they were more closely related to Neanderthal than to us. However, some of their genes are supposed to exist in some of us and so it seems that they were closely related enough to us to interbreed with us.
It could very well be true that female Neanderthals had difficulty passing their X chromosomes to hybrid offspring involving modern partners because, according to the article of this discussion, Denisovans (which were closely related to Neanderthals) produced a disproportionately low X chromosome gene pool in our population. Per the article:
Intriguingly, comparing the X chromosome, which is passed down by females, to the rest of the genome, which is passed down equally in males and females, revealed "there is substantially less Denisovan genetic material in New Guinea on the X chromosome than there is on the rest of the genome,"researcher David Reich at Harvard Medical School in Boston told LiveScience. One possible explanation "is that the Denisovan gene flow into modern humans was mediated primarily by male Denisovans mixing with female modern humans," Reich said. "Another possible explanation is that actually there was natural selection to remove genetic material on the X chromosome that came from Denisovans once that entered the modern human population, perhaps because it caused problems for the people who carried it."
I have read that when considering extinct races it is difficult to set a clear demarcation on whether they are a distinctly different species or not. If humans and Neanderthals interbred it suggests that differences between the two involved a genetic distance that while noticeable was not insurmountable.
Regarding skin colour, I have read that some researchers think that fair skin, hair and eye colour evolved fairly recently, say in the last 30,000 years or less. This paper argues that variations in hair and eye colour among Europeans were mainly due to sexual selection, as people with say blonde hair and green or blue eyes had a distinctive appearance that made them particularly attractive.
This might be true because native Asians of Northern Siberia nonetheless have dark hair and eyes. That is, the cold climate there did not induce lighter hair and eyes. However, people with lighter hair and eyes do have the advantage in a cold climate of getting more Vitamin D from the sun. Therefore, this might also have had something to do with its occurrence in Northern Europe. However, again this did not induce lighter hair and eyes in Northern Siberia.
Yeah, that's what people don't understand, when they only learned about Evolution from their fundamentalist preachers who have an agenda to keep them ignorant. The same gene that saves your life in one climate will kill you in another climate. There are very few variances in the human genome that are 'better' in every situation.
Dark skin decreases your chances of skin cancer, in a more equatorial climate. Pale skin decreases your chances of dying of rickets, in a more polar climate.
This is a very interesting topic. Let me first say I am not aware enough of the science to venture on using the correct terms. I probably understand them, but won't risk using them, as a layman.
However, when you consider the visual differences between the present "races" and the fact that this means very little at all, if anything at all, to the viability of our off-spring, and then you consider what we know about the visual differences of Neanderthals and Cro-magnons, it makes one wonder where exactly you can draw a iine between populations that were contemporary.
If they could breed together, could they be considered separate species at all?. Are they not just one species wildly variant in superficial ways?. It is interesting, and I wish I had more time to learn about it in depth.
I don't know that much about it either. I suppose they should be considered different breeds (for lack of any other term that comes to mind) of the same species just as there are different breeds of dogs that can produce hybrid offspring. I agree that an interesting question is that of how far back in archaic human examples one can go and still find some that could have interbred with us. Thinking out of the box a little (or a lot) I think eventually, and probably illicitly, archaic human examples will be cloned and then, for whatever the reasons, will be desired by modern humans as marital partners.
Yup. One thing you learn when you mix with any of the humans, is that they have a roving eye like mice have a cheese fetish.
*70 000 year old grandmama by way of what might even be another species*
"Why, helloooo there Nanna . . . wanna bump uglies?".
( sorry. lol )
Looks are almost not an issue with people, of course. Some of us find it more compelling than otherwise, a large difference in superficial appearence. I guess we will never know just how far back we were "human" enough that someone from then could make humans with someone from now.
Exactly so. If they ever shared a cave I am thinking they would first have to have considered each other somehow "people".
Stranger things have happened of course. One thing I know as a life long fisherman, is you can meet up with someone else who is fishing, and you don't need language, or anything like a common culture for the other parts of your life, you have an instant kinship of fishing.
With hand signals and smiles you can swap ideas of surprising complexity about the sport, with someone who you could not even find out where in the world they are from with words.
I remember meeting two blokes from one of the French speaking parts of Africa, we couldn't do more than swap names, verbally. Yet we fished together side by side for a morning, laughing, joking and trying to interact and showing one another our tackle :P and in the end I would have let them come back to my campsite for sure, even if we had been different flavours of caveman.
I think probably the C.Manon and Neanderthals had a lot more in common than they did different.
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Selective Listening Explainedposted by Anna Mar, May 30, 2013
What is it?Conventional wisdom says that the goal of listening is to fully understand what someone is saying.
In practice, people don't always fully listen.
People make choices when listening. They apply filters. They half-listen to get a general impression of what's said.
Selective Listening ExplainedSelective listening is like a student with a highlighter.
When students study for a test they commonly use a highlighter to focus on key ideas in a textbook. They might skim over text that doesn't seem critical but focus on text that gets to the point.
The following are common features of selective listening:
Giving listening less than full attention. For example, planning what you're going to say while someone is talking.
Deciding when to retain important information and when to ignore non-critical information.
Focusing on high priority information (e.g. when your boss speaks).
Developing a general impression of what is said rather than memorizing an accurate account.
Is Selective Listening A Bad Habit?Selective listening has a reputation as being a bad habit.
It's certainly a bad way to build rapport. People tend to know if you're fully listening to them. They tend to feel insulted if they catch you drifting off when they're talking.
Selective listening isn't as accurate as devoting your fully attention to everything that's said.
Despite these disadvantages, it's widely practiced.
It does have potential advantages. Selective listening allows you to filter and summarize information while multitasking.
Change management training comes in many shapes and forms ...|
If you've ever seen an action movie this decision making dilemma will be familiar.|
The philosophers of Ancient Greece and politicians of Ancient Rome elevated public speaking to fine art.|
From Napoleon to Steve Jobs, the many definitions of leadership.|
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Joel Chandler Harris’s Reading of Uncle Tom’s Cabin”
by Robin Bernstein
This essay is adapted from Robin Bernstein, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (New York University Press, 2011)
Joel Chandler Harris, one of slavery’s most effective and influential apologists,
seems to have been engaging in wishful thinking when he called Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin a “wonderful a defense of slavery.” Harris registered this judgment in his 1880 introduction to his first book, Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings, which would launch a series of volumes featuring an elderly African American named “Uncle Remus” who cuddles a white, unnamed Little Boy while telling folkloristic stories of Brer Rabbit. Harris’s Uncle Remus books would become bestsellers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, influencing writers from Mark Twain to Rudyard Kipling to Beatrix Potter, and ultimately serving as the basis for Walt Disney’s Song of the South. Harris used Stowe to introduce, frame, and thus define his first book, which he described as a “supplement” to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Harris understood that Stowe intended to “attack” the system of slavery, but in his interpretation, “her genius took possession of her and compelled her, in spite of her avowed purpose, to give a very fair picture of the institution she had intended to condemn.”
Harris did not simplistically misunderstand Stowe, nor did he merely impose or project his own proslavery politics onto her abolitionist novel. Rather, Harris read Stowe with a warped genius for selectivity, and he crystallized his selective reading in the fictional relationship between Uncle Remus and the Little Boy. Joel Chandler Harris told the story of what could have happened if Uncle Tom had never left Kentucky.
Stowe inadvertently made herself vulnerable to selective readings when she employed the twin literary strategies of irony and vivid visual description. Stowe described these intertwined strategies in an 1851 letter to Gamaliel Bailey, editor of the National Era. Stowe wrote to Bailey, “My vocation is simply that of a painter, and my object will be to hold up in the most lifelike and graphic manner possible Slavery, its reverses, [and] changes [that is, its ironies] . . . There is no arguing with pictures, and everyone is impressed by them, whether they mean to be or not.” These strategies of irony and painterly description supported each other: for example, Stowe’s descriptions enabled her vividly to render the interior of Uncle Tom’s cabin, which made the reader all the more emotionally “impressed” with Tom’s loss of that cabin—that is, the ironic reversal of Tom’s fortune. Even as the intersecting strategies buttressed the novel, however, they simultaneously rendered it vulnerable to selective readings. The painterly descriptions vivified some scenes, characters, and plot elements but dimmed others, and the ironic reversals cleaved the novel into discrete, contrasting units that could be individually spotlighted or ignored. Stowe claimed optimistically that “There is no arguing with pictures, and everyone is impressed by them.” Joel Chandler Harris echoed and affirmed part of this statement in 1883 when he commented that Stowe’s novel, which he had read twenty years earlier, “made a more vivid impression upon my mind than anything I have ever read since.” Stowe, then, wanted her readers to be “impressed,” and Harris said the novel did make an impression upon his mind. His actions, however, unraveled the other part of Stowe’s claim, that “there is no arguing with pictures.” Harris did indeed argue with her word-pictures—not by criticizing or contradicting them, but by selectively reading, appropriating, and re-staging them in a new context. Uncle Remus’s cabin is an “impression” of the cabin of Uncle Tom—that is, a negative like a woodcut that retains and reproduces the outline of a picture by reversing its foreground and background. Harris’s structuring device of Remus and the Little Boy cuddling in Remus’s cabin retains and reproduces some structuring elements of Stowe’s novel so as to reverse Stowe’s abolitionism.
The story of Stowe’s eponymous character begins and ends in the eponymous built environment—a cabin. Stowe introduces Tom and his cabin in her fourth chapter, where the reader encounters a happy, intact family and later, a Christian community, all thriving under slavery. The vividly-drawn cabin, filled with piety and ideal domesticity, shimmers ironically against the rest of the novel, which details the destruction of Tom’s and other families. Tom’s life ends in Simon Legree’s shed—an emptied-out inversion of the cabin Tom once shared with Chloe and their children. What unites Tom’s two cabins and bridges the ironic reversal is the presence of the young George Shelby. In chapter four, George Shelby, still childish at thirteen, visits Tom and Chloe in their cabin, where he enjoys Chloe’s cooking, teaches Tom to write, and participates in a Christian revival meeting. In Tom’s final scene five years later, George, now eighteen and the master of his estate, reunites with the dying Tom in a shed. The opening and closing scenes of Tom’s life thus triangulate the figures of Tom, George Shelby, and the cabin itself. Harris reproduced this triangle in his narrative device of Uncle Remus and the Little Boy cuddling in Remus’s cabin as Remus tells the Boy stories of Brer Rabbit (this device is commonly called Harris’s “frame”). Even as Harris’s impression of Uncle Tom’s Cabin retained and reproduced Stowe’s triangle, however, he obliterated her irony by restaging Stowe’s first Tom-George-Cabin scene, but ignoring the ironic echo in Stowe’s second Tom-George-Cabin scene. Harris’s Remus and Boy stay stuck in the cabin forever, replaying over and over the same scene of tender nighttime cuddling and storytelling. Each Brer Rabbit story that Remus tells us unique, but the frame, the scene of storytelling, repeats endlessly, comfortingly, with only minor variations, like multiple strikes of a woodcut. Remus and the Boy play out a fantasy of Stowe’s fourth chapter, and the happy slavery it depicts, never ending.
Stowe inadvertently facilitated this selective reading by titling the fourth chapter “An Evening in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” The title of this chapter, unlike any other, replicates and encloses the title of the novel. No other chapter contains the novel’s title; in fact, no other chapter title includes the word “uncle” or “cabin”). The chapter’s title suggests—falsely, pointedly falsely—that the entirety of the novel can be found microcosmically within this chapter; thus Stowe impresses the reader with a vivid and apparently whole story. This vivid wholeness could have the effect of making its twin scene—ironic echo of Tom’s death in another cabin—all the more devastating. Or it could overpower the ironic echo, and ultimately muffle it.
Stowe’s fourth chapter title gave Harris even more fodder by preceding and framing the novel’s title with the phrase, “An Evening In.” “An Evening in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” The word “in” is crucial: Stowe opens her chapter with a one-paragraph description of the cabin’s exterior, and then leads her second paragraph with the sentence, “Let us enter the dwelling” (17). Thus Stowe ushers the reader into the cabin, into intimate space lit warmly against the evening sky. But the chapter title’s use of the word “in” also produces a pun. The “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” in the chapter title refers both to the character’s home and to the novel itself. So with the addition of the word “in,” the chapter title means, “The Characters are Spending an Evening inside Uncle Tom’s Dwelling” and “The Reader is Spending an Evening Reading the Novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” The word “in” refers to both physical enclosure in a cabin and mental interiority created by the act of novel-reading.
Stowe’s first Tom-George-cabin scene, hinged to the final Tom-George-cabin scene, is devastating; but that first scene, impressed upon a reader’s mind and severed from its ironic echo, constructs enslavement and slaveholding as beautiful, tender, and innocent. In a 1904 article in The Saturday Evening Post, Harris described Stowe’s novel—or at least the parts of it that impressed themselves into his mind—in exactly these terms:
Uncle Tom . . . the beloved Master, and the rest—are products of the system the text of the book is all the time condemning. . . .The real moral that Mrs. Stowe’s book teaches is that the . . . realities [of slavery], under the best and happiest conditions, possess a romantic beauty and a tenderness all their own; and it has so happened in the course of time that this romantic feature . . . has become the essence, and almost the substance, of the old plantation as we remember it.
Through Remus, Harris restaged Stowe’s “old plantation” as he remembered it. In Henry James’s word, Tom “flew” into Harris’s fiction, and like Dorothy, he brought his dwelling and his little friend, too. Harris opened his first book with a chapter titled “Uncle Remus Initiates the Little Boy.” This chapter title, like Stowe’s fourth, is the only one to include the word “Uncle,” the first word in the book’s respective titles. Where Stowe’s chapter title names Uncle Tom and his cabin but not George Shelby, Harris names Uncle Remus and the Little Boy but not the cabin. However, the cabin, for Harris, is as important as George Shelby is for Stowe. Harris’s first chapter “initiates” the Little Boy, and the reader, with the vision of a cabin lit warmly against the night sky. This is the opening to Harris’s first book:
One evening recently, the lady whom Uncle Remus calls “Miss Sally” missed her little seven-year-old. Making search for him through the house and through the yard, she heard the sound of voices in the old man’s cabin, and, looking through the window, saw the boy sitting by Uncle Remus. His head rested against the old man’s arm, and he was gazing with an expression of the most intense interest into the rough, weather-beaten face, that beamed so kindly upon him.
Harris ushers the reader into his narrative “frame” through the eyes of Miss Sally, who looks through the cabin window to witness the tender intimacy between the man and the boy. The characters, as Sally sees them, are motionless, a tableau of idealized servitude. The window frames the scene, simultaneously boxing the characters and opening them to visual inspection. Harris’s night-lit cabin, his restaging of the Tom-George-cabin triangle, is a diorama that invites appreciation, a tenderly-sensed interiority, and above all, noninterference. Stowe, in her antebellum context, vivified scenes of slavery to incite abolitionist action, but Harris, writing immediately after the end of Reconstruction in 1877, restaged slavery as a unique and romantic institution—a Lost Cause.
Harris retained and reproduced Stowe’s triangle of “Uncle”-boy-cabin; he set that triangle, as did Stowe, against the beautiful evening sky. But he reversed Stowe’s abolition along the axis of that little word, “in.” Stowe implicated her reader politically when she titled her chapter “An Evening in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” The reader who accepts Stowe’s invitation to “enter the dwelling” spends an evening “in” Uncle Tom’s cabin when he or she spends an evening reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin. By being “in” the novel—that is, by reading it—the reader enters the cabin—that is, not only Tom’s freestanding dwelling, but also the full panorama of linked pictures, of subsequent cabins. That is, when Stowe ushers the reader into “An Evening in Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” she locates the reader in the far-reaching system of slavery. Stowe’s punning title says to the reader, “You are in (reading) my novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. You are in (reading the scene set in) Uncle Tom’s dwelling. You are in (implicated in) the political system I condemn.”
The title of Harris’s parallel chapter, “Uncle Remus Initiates the Little Boy,” inverts Stowe. Whereas Stowe draws her readers into the cabin for the purpose of implicating them, spurring them to moral action, Uncle Remus initiates the Little Boy, draws him into Remus’s cabin for the purpose of escaping into fantastical tales of Brer Rabbit’s amoral mayhem, framed by Remus’s unchanging tenderness. Harris took the Brer Rabbit tales from African American folklore, and he took his narrative “frame” from Stowe. But it was Stowe’s strategies of irony and vivid description that, ironically, enabled Harris to re-deploy Tom, George, and the cabin in defense of slavery.
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Simple Machine Timeline
Transcript of Simple Machine Timeline
Fixed or class 1 pulley has a fixed axle. That is, the axle is "fixed" or anchored in place. A fixed pulley is used to change the direction of the force on a rope (called a belt). A fixed pulley has a mechanical advantage of 1. A mechanical advantage of one means that the force is equal on both sides of the pulley and there is no multiplication of force.
Movable or class 2 pulley has a free axle. That is, the axle is "free" to move in space. A movable pulley is used to multiply forces. A movable pulley has a mechanical advantage of 2. That is, if one end of the rope is anchored, pulling on the other end of the rope will apply a doubled force to the object attached to the pulley. The pulley is a simple machine. The purpose of a pulley system is to be able to move a heavy object with less effort. It is made up of a rope or belt that is wrapped around wheels. The wheels are attached to brackets on the sides so that they can turn freely. The brackets are attached to fixed points, such as a ceiling, or in some cases to the object being lifted. The rope is pulled from one end and makes its way through the pulley, while the object is lifted on the other end. The more pulleys that are used, the less effort is needed to lift the object. However, if more pulleys are used, then more rope must be pulled to move the object as far.
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Lava that is almost as free-flowing as water and, when it cools down, as pale as limestone: the Ol Doinyo Lengai in northern Tanzania is the only active volcano in the world that produces so-called carbonatite lava. Unlike conventional lava, the majority of this lava consists not of molten silicates but of molten carbonates. Volcanoes of this kind are found along rift valleys where the continental plates gradually break apart and new oceans are formed.
Diamond from lime and iron
These carbonate melts, among other things, form when limestones enter the Earth’s mantle. This occurs as a result of subduction, when old oceanic crust plunges down below an adjoining crustal plate. By means of high-pressure experiments in the laboratory, postdoc Arno Rohrbach and ETH Zurich Professor Max Schmidt from the Institute of Geochemistry and Petrology of ETH Zurich studied how the oxidised carbon contained in the carbonates behaves in the Earth’s mantle, and in so doing they made an exciting discovery: at a depth of more than 200 kilometres, the submerged carbonates of the oceanic crust reach their melting point, which is 300 to 400 degrees lower than that of silicates. A carbonatite melt is formed and migrates from the subducted oceanic crust into the surrounding mantle, where it causes partial melting therein. However, because the Earth’s mantle is strongly chemically reducing and contains elemental metallic iron, the CO2 in the carbonatite melt reacts with the elemental iron. This causes diamonds to form.
Earlier studies have already shown that carbonates in the Earth’s mantle cause the surrounding mantle to melt at relatively lower temperatures at pressure in excess of 2.5 gigapascals, but these studies focused exclusively on the oxidised state of the carbonates. However, the ETH Zurich researchers write in their study, which was recently published on-line in “Nature”, that in order to understand what happens in the significantly reduced deeper mantle of the Earth it is necessary to consider the redox equilibrium between oxidised carbonates and the reduced metal-containing deeper mantle.
“Minerals in the Earth’s mantle such as garnet and perovskite preferentially incorporate trivalent iron during their formation”, says Max Schmidt. Part of the otherwise doubly positively charged iron is oxidised for this purpose, while another part that is half the amount of the trivalent iron is simultaneously reduced to elemental iron. Because metallic iron and carbon dioxide are incompatible, the iron metal is oxidised and the carbon dioxide is reduced to pure carbon. Thus, diamonds crystallise out of the carbonate melt at a pressure of more than 10 gigapascals and temperatures of 1400 to 1700 degrees Celsius, consequently the carbonate melt solidifies. Thereafter only triply and doubly positively charged iron together with the diamonds remain in these mantle domains in the transition zone between the upper and lower mantle at a depth between about 410 and 660 kilometres.
The carbon cycle in the Earth’s interior is more complex
However, as a result of convection in the Earth’s mantle over hundreds of millions of years, the “agglomerates” of diamonds, which cover a distance of between one and ten centimetres per year, can be transported into the lower mantle down to a depth well in excess of 2000 kilometres, and can rise up again from there. During the uprise, the diamonds remain stable until they pass back through the transition zone from the lower to the upper mantle of the Earth, in which both the chemical equilibrium and the pressure and temperature conditions change again: here the minerals containing trivalent iron – perovskite and garnet – become unstable and release trivalent iron which then reacts with the diamonds. The carbon is re-oxidised in this process, the diamonds are destroyed and the trivalent iron is reduced to divalent iron. Carbonate melts can form again due to the presence of carbon dioxide, and the divalent iron is incorporated into the minerals olivine and pyroxene, which make up the majority of the upper mantle.
This enabled the researchers to show not only how and where carbonatite melts are formed in the Earth’s mantle. They also demonstrated how the carbon cycle from the Earth’s surface down to its interior functions: from carbon dioxide transported with carbonates into the interior, reduced to pure carbon and finally oxidised back to carbon dioxide as it rises. The resulting carbonatite melt, most of which is normally dissolved in a silicate melt at crustal pressures, ultimately brings the carbon dioxide back to the surface of the Earth through active volcanoes such as the Ol Doinyo Lengai.
Rohrbach A &Schmidt M: Redox freezing and melting in the Earth’s deep mantle, Nature (2011), DOI:10.1038/nature09899, published online 23 March 2011
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Originally posted on Brain Pickings.
At Christmas time in 1944, more than a decade after the resounding success of Brave New World Aldous Huxley (July, 26 1894–November 22, 1963) penned his one and only children’s book, The Crows of Pearblossom (public library) — the story of Mr. and Mrs. Crow, whose eggs never hatch because the Rattlesnake living at the base of their tree keeps eating them. After the 297th eaten egg, the hopeful parents set out to kill the snake and enlist the help of their friend, Mr. Owl, who bakes mud into two stone eggs and paints them to resemble the Crows’ eggs. Upon eating them, the Rattlesnake is in so much pain that he beings to thrash about, tying himself in knots around the branches. Mrs. Crow goes merrily on to hatch “four families of 17 children each,” using the snake “as a clothesline on which…
View original post 61 more words
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One of the principles behind St. Ann Elementary School’s success is letting students take the lead. When framing the school’s strategy, Principal Theresa Tillinger is careful to articulate what the school avoids doing. They do not over-structure, over-guide, or over-prescribe. In fact, Tillinger describes the teacher’s role as providing a vision and a nudge but then remembering to “get out of the way” so that students can take responsibility. St. Ann School shows that when students feel ownership over what they’re learning and doing in school, they learn passionately. Give them an opportunity to apply their talents in the real world, and they’ll still light up when they describe it months later. Encourage and reward empathy – for fellow students as well as for people halfway around the world – and empathy will thrive.
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Canada, the United States and Mexico are adjacent coastal nations where the impact of significantly increased human activity in the coastal zone by the year 2050 will be potentially catastrophic. Integrated Coastal Management (ICM) may well have a role to play within and between all three countries to help ameliorate this situation. This paper looks at the challenges facing sub-continental ICM, from institutional foundations to large-scale environmental management practices that cross political and cultural boundaries. To assist in this discussion, we have analyzed the overlapping sets of political-administrative units within terrestrial ecosystems, especially those with complex landscape attributes, to arrive at a series of issues that help identify areas of convergence and joint action as well as barriers to action. Finally, we look at landscape attributes on a regional scale to show that joint institutional initiatives that recognize existing ecological, socio-economic, and political-administrative differences between Canada, the United States and Mexico need to be built.
Cuauhtemoc Leon, Boris Graizbord, Richard K. Paisley, Eugene C. Bricklemyer, Jr. & Juan J. del Toro,
Challenges For Managing The North American Coastal Zone,
Ocean & Coastal L.J.
Available at: http://digitalcommons.mainelaw.maine.edu/oclj/vol9/iss2/7
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Protein is one of the main ingredients in dog food, such as chicken, fish and beef, and provides amino acids essential for proper growth and development. As dogs age, their protein needs change. Your veterinarian is important when determining what level of protein is necessary for each stage of your dog’s life.
Puppies are constantly growing and generally require a food with higher protein than older dogs. The recommended amount of protein for puppies is between 22 and 29 percent, which should provide 20 to 25 percent of their daily calories. Large-breed puppies require less protein for proper growth and development than other breeds. The dog breed info website recommends feeding puppies three to four times a day until they reach 8 weeks old. At this time, start feeding them twice a day.
Adult dogs who have a normal level of daily activity generally require between 16 and 18 percent of protein in their diet. Active dogs, such as hunting or racing dogs, may require up to 40 percent protein, based on their activity levels, according to the Sport Dog website. Your veterinarian has the best recommendations for your healthy dog's protein needs. Adult dogs should have their recommended daily feeding broken down into two, equal feedings per day.
Surprisingly, as a dog ages his protein requirements do not change, according to the Healthy Pets website. The feeding regimen for your senior dog should be based on his weight, health and level of activity. Your veterinarian can perform an assessment yearly to help you determine if your senior dog may require a change in his diet. Feeding him twice a day is recommended during this time.
In addition to food, water is essential for your dog since it accounts for 60 to 70 percent of his weight. Fats, like omega-6 and omega-3, are important since they are necessary for cell growth and hormone production. Carbohydrates your dog gets through his balanced diet help with digestion and provide energy for his tissue. Vitamins and minerals, such as calcium and vitamin A, found in his food also help with body functions and ensure your dog has healthy teeth and bones.
- Newman Veterinary: Large Breed Puppies. What is an Appropriate Diet?
- Virginia-Maryland Regional College of Veterinary Medicine: Nutrition for the Growing Puppy
- Dog Breed Info: Basic Feeding Guide: Puppies and Adult Dogs
- Healthy Pets: Why 84% of Pet Owners Don’t Know What to Feed Their Aging Pet
- Sport Dog: Straight Talk for Protein for Hunting Dogs
- Adam Pretty/Getty Images News/Getty Images
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